Night Music

by Jojo Moyes

  'You know, I would like my wife back now,' he had said, with Parisian pomposity, one evening after she had railed at him about the unwashed dishes, her lack of freedom, her exhaustion, her disinterest in sex. She had thrown the baby monitor at his head. The next morning, confronted by the chip in the wall, she had known something had to change.

  Laurent had held her. 'I won't think any less of you if you need your music. It was one of the things I loved you for in the first place.' And after she had checked several times that he meant it, that he wouldn't resent her for it, they had found Mary. Isabel had justified leaving her beautiful child by telling herself that everyone was happier.

  Besides, Kitty had been such a good baby. If she had been unhappy with Mary, or unsuited to being with someone other than her mother, wouldn't she have been less smiley? Less placid? There was a price to pay; one of the things she learned fastest about motherhood was that there always was. It was the way Kitty would run first to Mary if hurt, even if Isabel was in the room, and the way that Laurent could talk to the child knowledgeably about her friends, or discuss the special school assembly they had attended. It was, also, in the racking guilt she endured at being in a hotel room several hundred miles from a child she knew to be sick, or in the plaintive notes she found in her suitcase: 'Mummy I love you I miss you when you are gone.' She missed her family too, and ached with remorse. But Laurent and Mary afforded her the freedom to be herself, to pursue the thing she loved to do. And the older she grew, the more mothers she met, Isabel recognised that she was one of the lucky few who were not deprived by marriage and motherhood of their creativity. Or, more importantly, their passion.

  It was not always easy. Laurent still loved her impulsiveness, indulged her wilder moments - the time she had taken the children out of school to go on a balloon ride, or when she threw away the plates because the colour irritated her and forgot to buy new ones - but he could be bad-tempered if he felt he was not foremost in her mind. She came to know the danger signs when he considered she was too immersed in her music. He would be irritable, announcing that he might appreciate his wife's presence occasionally. He could tell when she was mentally rehearsing, even as she pretended to chat about what Kitty had done that day. She was wise enough always to give him what he needed, and ask what passed for pertinent questions about his job at the investment bank, even when she didn't fully comprehend the answers. Laurent's job was a mystery to her. She understood only that he earned enough to pay for everything, and occasionally to take them on holiday, when she would leave the violin behind and for two or three weeks devote herself to her family.

  The greatest crisis had come when she had found herself pregnant with Thierry. Six years after Kitty's birth, she had stared at the blue dot, which, despite the evidence, she had not expected to see, and panicked at what lay ahead. She couldn't have a baby now: she had just secured her position as lead violinist in the City Symphonia; she had tours of Vienna and Florence lined up for the spring. She had proven herself ill-suited to full-time parenthood, even with a child as amenable as Kitty.

  Several times she had considered not telling Laurent.

  He had reacted, as she had suspected he would, with delight, then horror when she told him what she was considering. 'But why?' he demanded. 'You have me and Mary to help. Kitty would love a brother or sister - she has begged us for one so many times.'

  'We agreed, Laurent,' she said. 'We agreed no more children. I couldn't cope with two.'

  'You don't have to cope with one,' he had retorted, 'and I have never minded. But you can't deprive me - deprive us - of this child because it doesn't fit in with your schedule.' His face told her she must concede. He asked for so little.

  She never confessed her dark thoughts as she passed each pregnancy milestone, as birth became an impending date in her diary. And he had been right: when Thierry arrived, his arms out thrust in protest against his delivery, perhaps against his unwanted nascence, she had loved him with the same instinctive passion as she loved Kitty. And felt a deep relief when, three months later, she had been able to return to work.

  Isabel pulled her scarf round her neck, and strode down the path to the woods, the moisture-laden cow parsley and long grass catching at her boots. It was the first time she had been on her own for weeks. She had seen the children off to school two hours earlier, Thierry ducking away from her kiss, shuffling off with his uniform stiff on his shoulders, Kitty setting out with her customary determination.

  She had looked forward to being alone again - God knew she had longed for some time to herself. But she missed them. Without the noise and bustle of the children, the house had seemed too sad, too overwhelming, and within an hour she had realised that if she didn't do something, she would sink into melancholy. She could not face unpacking the remaining boxes, did not feel robust enough to start the Sisyphean exercise which would be cleaning the place, so she had gone for a walk. After all, there was nothing a walk couldn't put right, Mary had told her often enough.

  She had decided to cut through the woods to the village shop. The simple act of buying milk and something for supper would give her a focus. She would make a stew or roast a chicken for the children to come home to.

  Somehow, it was less upsetting to think about Laurent when she was outside. A year on, she found that there were times now when she could think of him in relation to the things she had loved, rather than what she had lost. The sadness never went away, she had been told, but it would became easier to cope with.

  She thrust her hands into her pockets, breathing in the tang of new growth, observing the shoots of bulbs beneath the trees or hinting at where a flowerbed might once have been. Perhaps I'll make him a garden, she thought. But she knew it was unlikely: digging, forking and cutting with shears would be too hard on her hands. Gardening had long been on the unofficial list of things violinists couldn't do.

  She had reached the edge of the woods, and walked their length, the lake to her left, trying to remember where she had noticed a gap. She found it and ducked through. On the other side the ground was even less contained than it was around the house. Briefly, she turned back: its dark-red expanse and haphazard windows stared back at her without warmth or welcome. Not yet hers. Not yet a home.

  You mustn't think like that, she scolded herself. It will be our home if we make it so. They now had hot water, albeit at an exorbitant price, and a vague metallic-scented warmth in some rooms. The plumber had told her the radiators needed bleeding, but he had been so patronising that she hadn't asked him what that meant. As there was a huge crack in the bath, they had to wash in a tin tub, a state of affairs Kitty protested about bitterly every morning.

  She stopped to examine some oversized fungi fanning from a rotten tree-trunk then peered up at the overcast sky, visible in filigree patterns through the twigs and branches. The air was damp and she blew into her scarf, enjoying the warmth that bounced back on to her skin. The woodland smelled of moss, damp wood and healthy decay, so unlike the sinister damp of the house, where she often found herself wondering what might be rotting away around them.

  A twig snapped and she stood very still, her city-bred mind fluttering with images of mad axemen. She held her breath and revolved slowly towards where the sound had come from.

  Some twenty feet away, a huge stag was staring at her, its head lifted, its licheny antlers resembling the unclad branches behind it. Thin streams of vapour puffed from its nostrils, and it blinked several times.

  Isabel was too entranced to be afraid. She stared at it, marvelling that such creatures could still exist in the wild, that in their built-up, overcrowded little country there was still room for such a beast to roam free. 'Oh.' Perhaps that small sound broke the spell, because the stag bounded into the open field and away.

  Isabel watched it go. A snatch of music entered her head: The Transformation of Acteon into a Stag. The animal slowed and hesitated, its head swinging round as her mind filled with the fanfare of arpeggios that opened the symphony
, a symbol of the young men who had come hunting, the gentle flute Adagio that spoke of murmuring streams and breezes.

  Suddenly the silence was broken by a gunshot. The stag took off, stumbling across the claggy soil. Another shot rang out and Isabel, who had initially leaped behind a tree, now raced out into the open after the animal, trying to work out where the shooting was coming from.

  'Stop it!' she yelled, her scarf falling away from her mouth. 'Whoever you are! Stop shooting!' Her heart was racing. She tried to run, but the earth had stuck in huge clods to her feet.

  'Stop!' she shrieked, hoping the unseen hunter could hear her. She tried to push the mud off one boot with the toe of the other. The stag appeared to have got away, but her heart still thumped as she waited for the next shot.

  It was then that she saw the man striding across the field towards her, apparently unhampered by the mud. She saw his rifle, now cocked downwards towards the ground, resting in the crook of his arm.

  She pulled at her scarf, so that her mouth was free.

  'What on earth do you think you're doing?' Shock had made her louder than she had intended.

  The man slowed as he reached her, his own face flushed as if he had not expected to be interrupted. He was probably not much older than her, but his height gave him authority and his dark hair was brutally shorn. His face had the winter colour of one who spent his time outdoors. contours whipped by the wind into precise planes.

  'I'm shooting. What do you think I'm doing?' He seemed shocked to find her there.

  Isabel had managed to free her feet, but adrenalin still washed through her. 'How dare you? What are you - a poacher?'

  'Poacher? Hah!'

  'I'll call the police.'

  'And tell them what? That I was trying to scare away the deer from the new crops?'

  'I'll tell them you're trespassing on my land.'

  'This isn't your land.' His voice held a faint burr.

  'What makes you think that?'

  'It belongs to Matt McCarthy. All the way up to those trees. And I have his permission to clear it of anything I want.'

  As he spoke, it seemed to Isabel that he looked meaningfully at his gun. 'Are you threatening me?' she said.

  He followed her gaze, then glanced up at her, eyebrows raised. 'Threatening you?'

  'I don't want guns so close to my house.'

  'I wasn't pointing it anywhere near your house.'

  'My son comes out here. You could have hit him.'

  The man opened his mouth, then shook his head, turned on his heel and walked back across the field, shoulders hunched. His parting words floated to her: 'Then you're going to have to teach him where the boundaries are, aren't you?'

  It was as she watched him go that she remembered the last part of the von Dittersdorf symphony. The stag was in fact a young prince, who had been transformed into an animal when he had strayed into the wrong part of the woods, then been torn to pieces by his own dogs.

  Asad was checking the eggs, removing one or two from each box and using them to fill others. The organic eggs from the farm down the road were all very well, but they tended to be covered with . . . organic matter, which did not always go down well with ladies of a sensitive disposition. He was cradling the dirty ones in his hands, about to clean them, when the woman came in.

  She stood in the doorway for a moment, casting around her as if she were looking for something. She was wearing a long blue velvet coat, whose hem was splashed liberally with mud. Family resemblance told Asad who she was.

  'Mrs Delancey? Would you excuse me while I put these down?'

  Her eyes widened when she heard her name.

  'Not too many casual passers-by around here,' he explained, wiping his hands as he returned to her. 'And you're very like your daughter.'

  'Oh. Kitty. Of course.'

  He hesitated. 'Are you all right? You seem a little . . . startled.'

  She lifted a hand to her face. Beautiful pale hands, he observed. Long white fingers. She was trembling. 'Tell me,' she said, 'do many people around here own a gun?'

  'A gun?'

  'I've just been threatened . . . well, perhaps not threatened, but confronted by a gun-wielding man on what I thought was private land.'

  'That would be startling . . . yes.'

  'I feel a bit shaken. I'm not used to meeting people with guns. In fact, I don't think I've even seen a gun up close before.'

  'What did he look like?'

  She described him.

  'Sounds like Byron, Mr Pottisworth's land manager. He's doing some work for Matt now. But I believe he only uses an air rifle.'

  'Matt McCarthy.' The woman appeared to mull this over, then deflated.

  'I was about to put the kettle on,' he said. 'I believe a cup of hot sweet tea is very good for shock. Let me introduce myself. My name is Asad Suleyman.'

  She bestowed on him a sad, sweet smile that expressed all manner of gratitude for his offer. She was not conventionally good-looking, thought Asad, but she was undoubtedly beautiful. And her hair, when most people's was neatly cut and coloured, was extraordinary.

  'I suppose it must have been him, which is reassuring. But I hate the thought of someone with guns roaming so close to us. And it's difficult,' she said. 'I don't know where my land ends and Mr McCarthy's begins.'

  Darjeeling. She looked like a Darjeeling woman. Asad put a mug into her hands, and cocked his head to one side. 'Have you not thought of asking your solicitor for the deeds?'

  'Would they show me?'

  'I believe so, yes.'

  'Thank you so much. I'm pretty hopeless at judging these things. I haven't had much experience of . . . land.'

  They sat in companionable silence, sipping their tea. Asad stole surreptitious glances at her, trying to register the details that Henry would demand from him later. Rather exotically dressed - in the muted browns and greens favoured hereabouts. The pale, slender hands. He could easily imagine them on some magical instrument. The long, rather unkempt tangle of dark blonde hair tied back chaotically - the antithesis of her daughter's glossy bob. Eyes that strayed off to the side, their downturned corners perhaps betraying her recent sadness.

  'This isn't what I expected,' she observed.

  'No?'

  'Your shop. It's beautiful. You have things I'd want to eat. Parma ham! Sweet potatoes . . . I thought village shops were all crates of apples and synthetic cheese slices, run by fat, middle-aged women. Not tall . . .' She was suddenly discomfited.

  'Black men,' he finished. 'Actually I'm Somali.'

  'How did you end up here?' She blushed, perhaps conscious that her question might be considered intrusive. 'Sorry. I haven't had much in the way of conversation lately.'

  'Not at all. I came here in the 1960s. I met Henry, my partner, and when we could afford to we decided to escape the city. It's a quiet life here . . . better for my health. Asthmatic,' he explained.

  'It's certainly quiet.'

  'And are you surviving, Mrs Delancey? In the big house?' He reached under the counter and lifted out a tin of biscuits, which he opened and offered to her. She took one.

  'Isabel. We're getting there. Slowly. Hot water and heat are a luxury. We'll have to get lots of work done. I have a little put away, but I didn't realise the scale of what we were taking on. What I was taking on,' she corrected herself. 'It was very different the last time I visited.'

  He wanted to say something then, to warn her that her presence might have upset people other than a land manager, that it might not only be men bearing guns she should beware of. But she seemed so vulnerable that he hadn't the heart to add to her troubles. After all, there was nothing he could say with any certainty.

  'You will always be welcome here, Mrs Delancey - Isabel,' he said. 'Any time you want to stop by, I'll be glad to have a cup of tea with you. You and your family. We want you to feel welcome.'

  'You haven't noticed.'

  Matt lifted his eyes from his pint to meet Theresa's slanting green ones. She wa
s so close that he could smell her perfume, even over the pub food and beer. 'Noticed what?'

  'That there's something different about me.' She leaned back, keeping her hands on the bar, her painted fingernails outspread before him. Behind her, two young men in tracksuits were exclaiming over the fruit machine.

  'You got your nails done?'

  Her eyes flashed. 'No!'

  She was wearing that bra with the purple lace. He caught glimpses of it peeping over her low neckline as she moved. 'Try again,' she commanded.

  He let his gaze wander across her body, as she had known it would. 'You shouldn't have to look that carefully,' she said, mock-offended.

  'What if I like to?' he said quietly.

  'Keep trying,' she said, with an edge, but he knew he had unbalanced her. Theresa was easy to read, always had been.

  'You've lost weight.'

  'Flatterer.'

  'New lipstick?'

  'Nope.'

  He gulped his drink. 'I don't know. I'm no good at games.'

  Their eyes locked. Oh, no? hers said, and he remembered what she had felt like the previous week, writhing beneath him in the bedroom at her low-beamed cottage. He felt his groin tighten, and glanced at his watch. He had told Laura to expect him home at seven thirty.

  'Matt.'

  He spun round to find Byron climbing on to the stool beside him. 'All right there? Pint, is it?'

  Byron nodded, and Matt gestured towards Theresa. 'Stella, please,' he said.

  'Do you give up?' She pouted.

  'Can't a man enjoy a pint in peace?' Matt had turned to Byron. 'All right. I give up. I've forgotten what the question was.'

  'My hair,' she explained, one hand lifted from the pump. 'I've had highlights. Two colours. Look.' She dipped her head as she passed the glass over the counter, fanning out fronds to show them.

  'Lovely,' said Matt, dismissively, and then as she stalked off, he rolled his eyes at Byron, as if they were complicit in the incomprehensible ways of women. 'Everything all right?'