by Roma Tearne
‘Early twentieth-century English composers,’ he mumbled to himself.
And someone else. Messiaen, he thought, shaking his head, amazed. Probably she didn’t even realise it. An extraordinary woman, he thought. So much locked away, undiscovered. What on earth was she ashamed of that she wouldn’t speak to him about it? He wondered how much more she had written, knowing it was too soon to ask. Lost in thought, he began to play once more. Then he reached for the phone. What he really wanted was a second opinion.
Two days later Henry visited Meeka again. He had several plots to thicken. On this occasion he recited poetry to her. Browning and then Tennyson, and after that Yeats. Yeats always came last in his opinion. Meeka flattened her ears as a cat might flatten them when it was confused. Heavens! she thought, remembering her mother had been crazy about Yeats. What would she have said if she heard all this? Henry, observing her reaction, smiled with secret satisfaction. The thaw had settled in nicely. Of late his eyes were the colour of blue lagoons.
‘Oh no!’ said Sally Dance seeing the seriousness of what was happening. ‘I do hope he doesn’t get hurt.’
‘Listen, Henry, don’t keep mentioning your ex,’ urged his lodger. ‘She won’t find it amusing.’
But Henry didn’t seem to hear. He was preoccupied with thoughts of his own and was just off for a swim. At his age, he informed his lodger, he needed to keep himself in trim. Besides, it was time to invite Meeka to his house, for a candlelit supper.
Sally Dance and Pippa offered to bleach his tablecloth and make him a summer pudding.
‘We’ll eat alfresco,’ he declared, ‘beside the fountain and next to the statue of Venus.’
Lavender grew among the rosemary. The scents mingled with the Dijon Rose petals falling softly onto the ground like confetti. Henry placed the speakers outside. They would listen to Bach, he decided. The backdrop was perfect.
Then disaster struck. Just as he was chopping the garlic for the melanzane alla parmigiana, the doorbell rang.
‘Caro Henry. Ciao, caro!’ said a voice.
Shit! thought Henry. Shit, shit! It was Francesca the flautist.
‘Stai bene, Henry?’ she said, slinking in.
Francesca followed him into the kitchen.
‘How sweet, you make-a my favourite dish-a!’And she started nibbling the cheese.
There was nothing for it, Henry gave her a large grappa and lured her into his study upstairs.
‘Now you just stay here, Francesca,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be long, well, not too long. I’m sorry to keep you out of the way like this, but I don’t have much time. It’s just a business meeting, that’s all, you know what these musicians are like…I must go,’ he added, as the doorbell rang. Hastily (he could smell the oven from where they stood), thrusting the bottle of grappa into Francesca’s hand, he rushed downstairs, taking care to close the study door, remembering to check his face for lipstick. He felt unaccountably hot.
It was an uneasy evening. Meeka had brought a dish that was perfumed with almonds and rose water but Henry’s food was burnt and the wine corked. He opened another bottle. Every time he glanced up at the house he could see Francesca prowling around. The light was on. What on earth was she doing? Henry reached for the bottle of newly opened wine, helping himself liberally.
‘My goodness, is that the time?’ he asked, yawning loudly, glancing at his watch.
He had an early start the next day. Meeka agreed; it was time to go home. She had not drunk much but she decided to use the bathroom before she left.
‘No!’ shouted Henry, adding more quietly, ‘It’s just that the bathroom isn’t awfully nice, I mean, the light doesn’t work.’ The bathroom light had just come on; he could hear Francesca flushing the toilet.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Meeka, ‘I don’t mind.’
‘No!’ said Henry, standing up in alarm, barring her way back into the house. ‘No, I mean, why don’t you wait until I take you back? You can’t be that desperate? Can you?’ he pleaded.
Anna-Meeka was looking at him strangely.
‘Henry,’ she said patiently, as though she were speaking to a child, ‘may I use your bathroom please? You needn’t worry, I’m not going to pinch anything.’
Pushing past him she went into the house. Henry watched her go. Francesca, all kitten heels and not much else, watched from above as Meeka went, head down, determinedly up the stairs.
‘You are an idiot, Henry,’ said Pippa, shaking her head at his nerve. Why did he always ruin everything?
Sally Dance couldn’t stop laughing. ‘I could have told you that would happen,’ she said, wiping her eyes. She could hardly speak. ‘Oh, Henry! She must have been livid!’
Henry did not bother to answer her. He was still clearing up the mess. The melanzane was everywhere.
‘I’ve had enough,’ said Dill the lodger. ‘There are too many women in this bloody house.’
Henry said nothing. He would have to repaint the wall.
‘I’ve told you,’ said Isabella down the phone, ‘the man’s a madman! Get rid of him.’ Her mother was hopeless when it came to men. Perhaps she ought to come home and sort it all out. No wonder Grandpa Thornton used to worry about her so much. ‘Get rid of him, do you understand? I’m going to ring you tomorrow to check you have.’
But Isabella had worried too much. She had forgotten how stubborn her mother was. She had forgotten what happened when her mother made up her mind. She had not heard her grandma Savitha on that subject. Anna-Meeka unplugged the telephone. She closed the curtains, and turned out the lights. Then she settled down to wait. Had her father been alive, had her mother been there, had her uncles been around, they would have instantly recognised the look in her eyes.
That October was the best ever. From Broad Street, behind the high blue-crested gates of the college, Michaelmas spread its autumn crocuses. The air thickened with damp bonfires and the beginnings of river mist. The Oxford skyline was tinted once again in gentle late-afternoon light, while the college walls near the Martyrs’ Memorial in St Giles shed their crimson foliage leaving a pencilled scribble of bare branches across the yellowing stone. Bicycles, moving like furious insects, crossed and recrossed cobbled streets, and evensong in the cathedral swelled with its term-time choir. Henry Middleton had had an astonishing summer. When he was not mowing Meeka’s lawn or tying her unruly honeysuckle back, he was playing on her beautiful piano. He took her punting on the river. He poured the finest champagne into his mother’s old crystal glasses and toasted her health. He pedalled across Oxford with flowers for her. He invited her to listen to him conduct Mahler and then he took her to dinner to meet his friends. He watched her smile. And he felt his heart turn over with a long-forgotten emotion. Sally Dance and Pippa were delighted. Like the roses, Henry was flourishing. Isabella watched her mother with amazement; she had never seen her look so happy. She thought Henry was so sweet.
‘Oh Mum, he’s lovely,’ she said in astonishment. ‘He’s such a tease! And crazy about you.’
The house just now was filled with life. Cars parked outside, visitors came and went; Meeka and Henry played duets together on the piano laughing, and arguing with one another.
During the second week of term Henry Middleton took Meeka to a piano recital. In all her years living near Oxford, Meeka had never once ventured inside a college. Henry was delighted to be the one to take her. She had met the concert pianist Carl Schiller at a party with Henry. Now he had come to Oxford. Their footsteps crunched on the gravel. The women all wore black. Pippa Davidson was excited. Sally Dance had come too. She would not have missed tonight for the world. Isabella had come home for the weekend. She and Henry had become the best of friends. Several of Henry’s friends were present, including the music critic Adrian Taylor. Henry introduced Meeka to him. Even Dill the lodger came. He was glad Henry had painted the wall on the landing. It looked as good as new. Only a slight mark remained. Dill fancied that sometimes, depending on the light or the time of day, it gl
owed like an old war wound.
‘Wear one of your saris,’ Henry had said. ‘The blue-and-gold one, the one your aunt Alicia gave you.’
He had been unusually insistent. So Meeka wore the blue-and-gold sari.
The air quivered with a sense of expectancy. Meeka, sipping her wine, watched the audience as they arrived. She noticed Henry looking around the room and wondered when his Venetian friend or his former wife would pop up. But Henry, it was clear, was playing safe tonight. Sally Dance had brought her man with her. He grinned at Meeka.
‘How’re you getting on with Henry then?’ he asked loudly. ‘I hear he’s behaving himself these days!’
‘Shut up, Matthew,’ Sally hissed. When all was said and done, Henry was still her friend, even if he sometimes made mistakes. Besides, she did not want to ruin his big evening.
‘What’s happening?’ asked Matthew, who had no idea why he was here.
‘Shh!’ said Sally Dance. ‘You’ll see in a minute.’
Soon the auditorium began to fill up. Meeka gazed in delight at her surroundings, unaware of Henry’s anxious glances as he introduced her to some of his colleagues, some members from his orchestra, a journalist and a producer from Radio 3. A flash went off nearby and Meeka blinked. Conversation spun in the air. There were so many people who knew Henry. She lost track of how many hands she shook or how many of these women were Henry’s old ‘friends’. She wished she had not worn her sari. She almost wished she had not come.
‘Stop fussing, Mum,’ said Isabella as though she had read her mind.
Suddenly, for no reason, Meeka thought of her grandmother. The sari she was wearing had belonged to her once and she took some small comfort, a feeling of who she was, from the thought. Pippa Davidson, glancing across at Meeka and Isabella, was reminded of the dashing Mr de Silva. The family likeness was very apparent tonight. Sally Dance was busy watching Henry, magnificent in his dinner jacket.
‘He’s as nervous as a cat,’ she whispered to Pippa. Henry was fidgeting.
‘I’m not surprised,’ Pippa whispered back. ‘It’s making me nervous too!’
Sally giggled.
‘Stop it,’ Pippa said. ‘I can’t bear this suspense.’
The last of the audience took their seats. Then suddenly the lights were dimmed. Swiftly, with the speed of tropical darkness, silence descended in tiers around the room. Only a small spotlight illuminated the grand piano. Carl Schiller, fine-boned and delicate as porcelain, came onstage. He bowed once and sat down, pausing, looking down at the keyboard. In the dark his hands glowed white. All around the room the silence was velvet. Meeka felt her hands become moist with sympathy. Was this how her aunt Alicia used to feel when she had played in public?
Carl Schiller began to play. His slender fingers formed a chord, they ran headlong across the keys, clear and unhesitating. The sounds fell into the darkened room, parting the silence as though it were an overgrown path. They cascaded in a waterfall of notes, overlaying each other, dissolving gently, phrase echoing phrase. Fluid, haunting and unending. He played with a piercing yearning, turning inexorably, just as you thought he might pause, into a minor key and then back again, before being lifted by the music somewhere else entirely. The sounds moved across the room, unstoppable now, effortless and breathtakingly lovely.
A soft rustle went through the audience. Whose music was this? How astonishingly beautiful! How it sparked, how it lilted, how it turned on a chord, unpredictable and always with the melody never far away. A distant voice from long ago returning again, when it was least expected, brushing lightly against them.
Here was how it was, the music seemed to say. Of these things were our lives made. Here was the substance of our sorrows and our joy. Exactly like yours. How we laughed, and how we loved, in the place that was once our home. With its coconut palms, its sun-washed beaches, its ancient tea-covered hills. This land of ours where all our earliest desires are housed, and which, however far we may roam, will remain with us forever. For like you, we carry our youth in our hearts.
On and on the music flowed, brimming over in the oak-panelled room, telling of these things; new longings joining the others that the centuries had absorbed. Pressing insistently into the memory of this new space, crossing continents, moving boundaries, connecting. In a language without barriers, in ways that could no longer be denied.
In the darkness, above the familiar sounds, Anna-Meeka looked at Henry Middleton. He sat with her hand tightly in his, watching her, no longer able to hide his tenderness, his pride in her. Wishing that her father, and her mother, and her grandmother, all of them, all those people he had only heard about, could see just how long the journey had been, how far her music had brought her.
And, thought Meeka, looking at him now with eyes that shone, for all his paleness and all his Englishness, still, his ears were not pasted. His lobes hung freely! Happiness welled up in her, rising from a new depth. How pleased her father would have been. For what difference was there in the end? she wondered, smiling at him. There was no difference. People were people. Only their fears had made them struggle. And then, suddenly, she knew. In that moment, as the sounds of her music, submerged for so long, cascaded around her, she knew. With all the clarity that had been missing on the evening in the head teacher’s office so many years ago, she knew what she must do. She needed to see her home once more. She needed to see that long-forgotten place, with its sweet, soft sound of the ocean, its wide sweep of beaches, and its clear tropical skies. That place, lodged forever within her heart, where the heat of the day glistened and trailed far into the night. Where her aunt Frieda waited so patiently with her moth-dusty sorrow for the past to be dispelled. For clearly she saw it, in spite of the shock, she saw that the things that had been mislaid, the history that had been buried and the memories no longer spoken of, all these things, were somehow being given back to her. And she saw too, at last, that here within this remarkable Englishman, with his sense of the ridiculous, his understanding and his love for her, was something of her beloved family. Returning again. Far away in the distance, as a dream realised at last, came the rush of thunderous applause, rising and falling like surf-green waves, crashing against her and catching the dazzling sea light.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my agent Felicity Bryan, for her unfailing encouragement and kindness to me; Kathy van Praag, also, for her endorsement of the book; and of course Clare Smith, my inspired editor at HarperPress.
Thanks to Michele Topham from the Felicity Bryan Agency for her hours of endless discussion; and to Mally Foster and Annabel Wright from HarperPress for their humour and support throughout.
Also to Richard Blackford, who talked to me about musical composition; Maureen Lake, my long-suffering piano teacher; my friends Tessa Farmer and Jane Garnett, who read the manuscript in single, swift sittings; and my brother-in-law Paul, who pleased me by laughing uproariously while reading the manuscript but then informed me it was my spelling that amused him.
I would like to pay special tribute to the rest of my family, to whom this book is dedicated. Like the passengers of a very large and boisterous ocean liner ploughing the seas, it was they who provided the environment in which I could write.
Thank you.
By the Same Author
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Copyright
Bone China
Copyright © 2008 by Roma Tearne.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition ©
JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-1-554-68971-2
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Originally published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2008
‘Love is the Sweetest Thing’ Words and Music by Ray Noble © 1932.
Reproduced by permission of Francis Day & Hunter Ltd, London W8 5SW.
Quotations by E.M. Forster used by kind permission of The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Society of Authors as the Literary Representatives of the Estate of E.M. Forster.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Tearne, Roma
Bone china : a novel / Roma Tearne.
I. Title.
PR6120.E27B65 2009 823’.92 C2008-907961-2
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