They were in Toronto for a week. A nice city, Charlie thought: well-run, manageable, with friendly people. As informative and as detached as a veteran tour guide, Janina took him wherever he wanted to go. There were moments when it seemed as if she might believe that the maintenance of her current life depended on her complete resistance to the temptations of reminiscence. One afternoon, at Charlie’s insistence, she met up with a woman – Robin – who had been her best friend when they were teenagers. ‘How was she?’ asked Charlie. ‘She’s well,’ said Janina. ‘She’s fine. It’s been five years. We’ve changed.’ There has been no subsequent mention of Robin.
At lunchtime on the penultimate day, the family reconvened at a restaurant. The children were fractious, Karol drank a full bottle of wine in less than an hour, and Mary told a tortuous story about her sister and her five delightful children. ‘Mom,’ said Janina, ‘the kids were not delightful. They were wild. You always said you came away screaming.’ Mary shook her head and, in replying to her daughter, placed a hand on Charlie’s arm: ‘No, dear. That’s not right. I didn’t say that.’ When the meal was over Janina and her parents stood facing each other in the street for half a minute, before hugging like politicians putting on a show for the cameras. Somewhere over the Atlantic, Janina kissed Charlie and kissed the boys and said: ‘Never again.’ And though the exchanges of cards at Christmas and on birthdays continued, as did the gifts for the grandsons, the messages inside the cards soon dwindled to single sentences, and two decades have passed since Janina and her parents were last in the same room.
E: Doesn’t it occur to you that you’re making things complicated for me? I see Janina every day and this makes it really awkward.
D: There’s nothing here to make you think badly of her.
E: That’s not the point, is it? You’re telling me things that she didn’t even tell Charles at first, so she wouldn’t want you to be telling me, would she?
D: But people talk about other people. That’s all I’m doing. Except I’m writing it instead of saying it.
E: If you were saying it, I’d ask you to stop.
D: But without this you won’t understand. I’m helping you to know Janina better.
E: I know enough. I don’t need to know anything about Janina’s father to know that I like her.
D: OK. I thought you’d be interested.
E: I am interested. I like a gossip as much as the next woman. But that’s not what I’m saying.
D: This isn’t gossip. It’s the bigger picture.
E: Whatever you want to call it. The fact is, I know Janina as well as I need to know her and as well as she wants me to know her.
D: [deflated, with pathos] Point taken. I’ll be more discreet in future.
E: Is that a promise?
D: Maybe. No.
Ellen has had a rancorous conversation with Roy, and has stayed up late, watching TV. I wander into the living room, to announce that I’ll be going for a stroll in about an hour, and she’s welcome to accompany me.
A semi-clear night; the moon in its last quarter; air mild. We creep up the lane, arm in arm; after half an hour we move into the stink of the deer. A dash of torchlight suffices to locate the animal exactly. Nothing much is left of it now: a backbone, a skull, ribs, some fur that looks like a dirty old towel that’s been chucked over the bones. Ellen, retreating, wonders why it is that babies don’t seem to find any smells disgusting; I must find out why this is. Hamming it up, I crouch over the remains to rake it with the torch, like a policeman at the scene of the crime. A thought-bubble hangs over Ellen’s head: ‘This is morbid.’
By way of counterbalance, I insist that we stop on the way home, to observe in silence the beauties of our environment. Mighty convolutions of Prussian blue cloud traipse across the moon; the distant hills are vast heaps of dimly luminous ash. We venture further than I’ve gone before, and pass a pond that gleams like a pool of mercury. Something small shoves its way through the grass behind us; wings clack; we hear a clock strike two o’clock – the nearest house is fifty yards away. Ellen, looking up, shivers. She remembers being a kid, lying in bed after her parents had gone to sleep, looking at the stars through a chink in the curtains, and understanding that we’re nothing more than specks of dust. ‘But we have to forget it, don’t we?’ she says.
Janina, clearly a woman under some stress, comes up to ask me if I might turn the music down, as she needs to get an early night. Leaving, she asks: ‘Don’t you get bored with it? Always the same music every day.’
I point out that it is not always the same music. ‘More than five hundred sonatas here,’ I tell her, whacking the CD box.
‘Yes, but they all sound the same,’ says Janina. She turns to Ellen. ‘Do you like it? I don’t know how you can bear it.’
Ellen answers that she hardly hears it any more. ‘We moved house when I was six or seven,’ she says, ‘and I thought I’d never get used to the noise of the traffic. But after a few months I didn’t notice it. It’s like that.’
‘But do you find it interesting?’ Janina asks her.
‘Sometimes,’ says Ellen. ‘But I can’t say it moves me at all.’
I have to intervene. ‘Nor me,’ I tell them. ‘That’s not the point. It’s not meant to move you. That’s why I like it. It’s just music. It doesn’t mean something else. It doesn’t mean anything.’
My guardians look at me, united in scepticism. ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ says Ellen.
Consider the blackbird singing in the garden, I suggest. ‘What does that mean? It means nothing, but it’s beautiful. It gives pleasure.’
‘It means something to the blackbird, presumably,’ says Ellen. If I could, I’d kiss her.
Cheered by a call from Stephen – he’ll be with us soon. Uplift of mood so conspicuous that Ellen remarks on it. ‘The only true friend I’ve ever had,’ I tell her, with a tragic moan, hands crossed over the heart, buckling under the weight of sadness. Straightening as best I can, I add: ‘Until you came along, that is.’
‘Don’t tease, Daniel,’ she says.
‘I ain’t teasin’,’ I answer. This reply requires an expression (a Brando-ish smoulder is what I have in mind) that the face cannot manage. It would also be better if the mouth could manage the appropriate accent.
I find myself considering the guest list for the funeral: family; Stephen; and who else? Dr Goffman? Zoë, if she can be found? (Zoë and Janina – a combination with potential.) And then Marion comes to mind. I haven’t thought about her for a long time, and haven’t heard a word from her in years.
Ellen, after I’ve told her that I’m going to write about a new character for her, says she had a friend with whom she was so close that she was one of the woman’s bridesmaids; after she got married, Ellen used to ring her once every month or so, but before long the traffic was all one-way, and within three years they were no longer in touch, even though they lived only thirty miles apart. Says Ellen: ‘That’s what it’s like with a lot of people: if they don’t see your face every day, you cease to exist.’
Marion McMordie was the daughter of a woman called Evelyn McMordie, to whom we must apportion some of the blame for my love of Scarlatti. Evelyn McMordie was a solicitor, and she worked for a practice that operated from a building near Waterloo station. I walked past it once, with Marion. From the street one saw only a pale blue ante-room, occupied by four black leather chairs and a fearsomely elegant receptionist, who was seated at a sparsely furnished glass and steel desk (appointments book; phone; one flower in a slender vase). One glance at the receptionist, with her minimalist work station and finely tooled haircut, and you knew that this was an office in which the machinery of the law ran smoothly and expensively. Mrs McMordie herself cultivated a style that looked the part: the jackets were well-cut and invariably black or dark grey, the slacks severely pressed and of matching hue, the briefcase rectilinear and aluminium-trimmed. The wristwatch – a slim and austere Longines – spoke of fussless efficiency and h
igh income. She worked hard: during the week there was rarely an evening when she didn’t put in an extra two or three hours.
And yet, though Mrs McMordie was an industrious and determined and extremely professional woman, she could also give the appearance of being oddly distracted: a smiling vagueness would often come into her eyes, as though she’d suddenly been struck by a pleasant sense of déjà vu, or was receiving sympathetic advice from a voice that only she could hear. I attributed these moments of self-detachment chiefly to the fact that, though she was no more than forty years old when I first met her, she had been a widow for almost five years. Both Marion and her mother were of a deeply unfrivolous cast of mind (there was no TV in the house – proof of their profound aversion to triviality), and I soon came to understand that a permanent seriousness had taken hold with the death of Mr McMordie. Marion very rarely referred to her father, and he was invoked with such tenderness, on those rare occasions, as to make it plain that the enduring pain of bereavement was the reason for her silence. ‘He died a week before Christmas,’ she told me, explaining why she never looked forward to the end of the year. (I assumed, from the word ‘died’, that he’d been ill – it was many months before I learned that he’d been hit by a motorbike on Regent Street.) There was another factor to Mrs McMordie’s episodes of serene detachment, which was her faith. This, like her daughter’s, was intense but unostentatious: I never saw a Bible in the house, nor any crucifix or Christian trinkets, and indeed I was greatly surprised when Marion told me, as we walked back from school one Friday, that her mother was going on a retreat the following week, and that this was an annual event, during which Marion would be left to the care of Aunt Joan and Uncle Gordon. Moments later, Marion asked me: ‘Do you believe, Daniel?’ I told her that I didn’t, which she accepted with absolute neutrality, then stated ‘I do,’ quietly, but in such a way as to imply that her faith was a philosophical position at which she’d arrived after a great deal of thought. I knew Marion well for more than three years (her mother removed her to a private school, whereupon a slow but inexorable separation from me commenced), and in all that time she never attempted to convince me of the error of my world view. Her mother, too, was silent on the matter – with one exception. ‘I’ll pray for you, Daniel,’ she said to me, a day or two before departing on retreat. (My skin had been especially active that year. And here let me record that although Mrs McMordie never touched me, I never felt that she regarded with me with revulsion.)
Marion as a child had been touched by death, and I as a child had been maimed by a genetic mutation at chromosome 17q11.2. This was perhaps the basis of our friendship. To young Marion had been revealed an eternal verity: in the midst of life we are in death. I, likewise, had been brought by disease to a wisdom that many fail to achieve in a lifetime. I knew what was important in life and what was not (having slightly fewer opportunities than your average boy to be diverted by the things that aren’t important, but are nonetheless a lot of fun). I understood the superficiality of externalities, the foolishness of vanity. I knew the truth of my essential self, of the soul that cannot be touched by the decay of the body. I knew that one of the foundations of a valid life is truth to oneself, and I was always true to myself. (Marion did actually say this to me, some time after she’d started at the upper-crust school, and a certain hauteur had begun to colour her style. It would have been nice, I replied, to have had the opportunity of trying to be someone other than Danny the grotesque.) And of course I knew who my real friends were. I recall this being stated with an undertone of satisfaction in her own dependable virtue, but Marion was unquestionably a genuine friend. My outbreaks of rage she absorbed without complaint, many times. Whereas Charlie during this period (and Celia too, for that matter) would tend to take the line that things weren’t as bad as I felt them to be, Marion understood that attempts at persuasion were futile. The solace of the confessional was what Marion provided, and an assurance of constancy. The hours that we spent together were generally spent in companionable silence, and I found few things more pleasurable. Often after school and sometimes at weekends (though on the weekends Marion customarily benefited from her mother’s unwavering attention), we’d hurry to her house (from the age of twelve the capable Marion was entrusted with the run of the place) and install ourselves on the huge sofa of the back room, foot to foot, to read for an hour or two. (Marion never shied from contact.)
I cannot recall a single argument between us. Nonetheless, whenever Marion took it upon herself to remind me of what she perceived to be my sterling qualities of character, I would find myself wishing that she’d shut up, for two reasons: firstly, she was talking nonsense; secondly, and more to the point, she would enumerate these qualities with a directness that was intended to betoken that what she was saying was a matter of objective fact rather than merely personal approbation, but which reinforced one fact above all – that this was a friendship built from more spiritual material than the average adolescent boy-girl bond. This was the cause of some anguish, intermittently, because I quickly came to regard Marion as a very attractive girl. Others, I know, found her too solemn, too solid of limb, too heavy of jaw. To me, though, her aura of self-composure and competence was powerfully sexy. Her relationship with her mother – sealed by the death of Mr McMordie, it had a greater density than any other mother-daughter relationship I knew of – was attractive to me. She had alluring handwriting, as fluid and strong as a printed script. Her hands were beautiful, with extraordinarily long fingers that turned upwards very slightly at the tip. (Her mother had remarkable but unlovely hands: thin, tinged with violet and traversed by jutting veins, they looked twenty years older than her face. However, when I picture Mrs McMordie what I see first is a morpho-blue silk scarf which I saw her wearing only once; it struck me as emblematic of an exuberance that was otherwise submerged – and of course might not have existed.) Marion had a way of tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear that stirred in me an almost unsuppressible tactile impulse. In summer she’d leave the top two buttons of her blouse unfastened, revealing a small portion of breast-slope – a convexity so modest that perhaps only I could have been so excited by it. Most exciting of all, though, was Marion practising the piano. Her teacher told her that she would improve if only she could learn to relax: she was too busy worrying about playing the right notes to let the music sing. She had to be less pedantic, he’d tell her, and he’d make her play the same few bars over and over again until they’d become musical enough to please him – which sometimes they never did. Often she wasn’t certain that she understood what the problem was, because the performances that the teacher praised sounded to her much the same as the performances he had judged to be unacceptable. This, she supposed, simply went to show that fundamentally she wasn’t musical.
‘You’re sure?’ she’d ask, every time I asked her to play something for me. Regarding her as a far better pianist than she believed herself to be, I was beguiled by her modesty. Half a dozen times in succession she’d run through the same Bach prelude, apologising for the misfingerings and hesitancies. The mistakes did not diminish my pleasure – on the contrary, I loved her doggedness, her refusal to be deterred by failure. And I loved the sight of her playing: the way she scowled at the score, as if incredulous at what was being asked of her; the hands rising and falling as if immersed in thick oil; the mouth opened slightly in a silent gasp. That Marion had not considered the possibility that she might have been the object of my desire was proved by the confession of her feelings for a boy called Roger Hartleberry, a dull athletic swot who routinely bore away a tranche of prizes at the end of the school year. Sanctified and invested with wisdom by my burgeoning hideousness (‘I will praise you because you are fearfully and wonderfully made,’ as the psalm almost has it), I could be told things that Marion would disclose to nobody else – that she was worried about her mother’s use of sleeping tablets, for example, or that she’d been having dreams in which she murdered a particular classmate. ‘I think
I might be in love,’ she told me, and I, the eunuch confidant, replied, as though exactitude in the definition of Marion’s emotional condition were my only concern: ‘But you’re not sure?’ She was surprised to find herself admired by the boy; this, in other circumstances, I might have found endearing. ‘No, I’m not sure,’ said Marion. I knew that with Marion there was no question that this would be a passing crush. She and Roger Hartleberry were still together five years later, when I last spoke to her.
I have lost sight of Mrs McMordie and Scarlatti. I’ll be brief. It was a Saturday afternoon, August, nearing the end of the school holiday. Marion and I were outside, reading in the hammocks that were a major attraction of the McMordie garden. Rain commenced abruptly. I dashed indoors; Marion for some reason delayed, and received so thorough a dousing that she had to go upstairs to change. Piano music was playing in the living room. I stood by the closed door, as close as I could. I was amazed by what I heard: a jubilant flow of small and brightly ringing notes, inhuman in their rapidity and clarity. For a minute or two the effusion continued, then there was a short period of silence before Mrs McMordie, having noticed that a downpour was in progress, called out through the window: ‘Marion? Daniel?’ I knocked and went in. She had turned the record over, and the music had started again. I asked her what it was, and in reply she passed the LP sleeve to me. Watched by Mrs McMordie I read the sleeve notes, then I handed it back. ‘Stay, if you’d like,’ she said, gesturing to an armchair, and the gesture, coming from her, had the force of a substantial compliment, and I stayed to listen to the whole second side with Mrs McMordie, even after Marion had come back downstairs. That Christmas, Mrs McMordie bought me a copy of the LP. It’s now so worn that it sounds like a rhino chewing a bale of cellophane.
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