More Tomorrow: And Other Stories

by Michael Marshall Smith

  Her mother had a CD player, and classical tastes. Her father had his 45s. And never, it appeared, did the twain meet. She’d always been a little perplexed by that, as it had been her father who had encouraged her to have piano lessons when she was young. Every now and then she caught a glimpse of something irrational between her parents, something made so rigid and obscure by time that even they probably didn’t understand it any more. The still water between them ran very deep, and the smallest coin created huge ripples. She’d give her mother the CD on the quiet.

  Saturday afternoon in Loughton was a time for the big guns of shopping, the DIY mercenaries and the Sainsbury’s SWAT teams. The record shop was almost deserted, and as she headed for the classical CDs she cast a glance at the only other customer. He was in his late forties, and she was a little surprised to notice herself finding him rather attractive. Older men weren’t her thing at all, but there was something about him that kept the eye.

  The classical section of Tony’s was laughably small, market forces evidently having declared proper music played by actual musicians to be a cultural dead end. The single rack of CDs hung like an appendix on the end of the Soul section, and in five years it probably wouldn’t be there at all. But by then Tony’s would have probably folded anyway, and you’d have to go twenty miles to buy music from a hyperstore the size of Denmark. For just a moment, Carol suddenly felt terribly old.

  She spent five minutes flicking irritably through the CDs, trying to find something that wasn’t either music from a TV advert or Nigel bloody Kennedy playing the Four sodding Seasons. She was about to give up when a hand reached from beside her and plucked a double CD case from the ‘B’ section.

  ‘What about this?’

  Startled, Carol turned to see the other customer standing beside her. Now that she could see his face properly she couldn’t imagine how she could have thought him middle-aged. He was no more than early thirties, and had a smile that was younger still.

  ‘Are you buying for yourself,’ he asked, ‘Or someone else?’ His grin was infectious, and Carol found herself returning it.

  ‘For my mother.’

  He nodded, and looked at her for a moment. ‘I think these, then.’

  He handed her the CD, and she turned it over to read the cover. It showed a relatively youthful Paul Tortelier, sternly poised behind a cello.

  ‘Bach Solo Cello Suites,’ she said, looking up at him, I don’t think I know them. Are they nice?’

  He frowned at her. ‘They’re not “nice”, no. To the best of my knowledge they have not helped sell a single brand of car, bank, or nationalised industry.’

  She laughed. ‘Good. They sound perfect.’

  ‘Would you like an ice cream?’

  Carol double-took at the question, but the offer was evidently serious. She shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  As she waited for the teenaged assistant behind the counter to remember that she had a role to play in helping customers make purchases, Carol glanced at the man. He was waiting near the door, and raised his eyebrows at her. She smiled at him, then turned back. For some reason she felt quite excited. From the minute he’d first spoken to her she’d known that he wasn’t trying to pick her up. She’d fielded more than enough charming lechers and drink-buying madmen to be able to tell immediately. He had talked to her because he wanted to, nothing more. And when he’d spoken, he’d spoken to her, to Carol, not just to a pretty girl who might be worth a try.

  It was so unusual it was a bit weird. But nice.

  On the first warm day suburban England goes into Summer mode as if a giant switch has been thrown somewhere. Men walk around with no shirts on while still wearing trousers, every moron with a white car cruises the high street pumping out anonymous dance music, and sure enough, there was an ice cream van only ten yards down the street. The man’s courteousness in ordering their ice creams so blew the frazzled kiosk attendant’s mind that he even got a smile from her. Then he led Carol to the bench that sat beneath the one tree in the high street.

  As she sat and lapped her cone, Carol felt curiously cool and calm, and she turned to look at the man.

  ‘So why that CD?’

  ‘What brought you out to this mayhem this afternoon?’

  ‘I asked first,’ Carol said. As she did so she felt a faint brush of embarrassment, then realised she didn’t really feel embarrassed at all. It was like being with someone back in the days when things were simple, when you didn’t have jealous ex-boyfriends on your back and weren’t talking to someone with a closet full of hang-ups and probably a wife somewhere in the background; when the game had been fun, instead of just a tortuous and repetitive way of ending up with a record collection you didn’t even recognise any more.

  ‘And I shall answer,’ he smiled. ‘Eventually.’

  ‘Well, I came out,’ Carol paused, then decided to go on anyway. ‘I came out because my parents were having a row.’

  ‘Over what?’

  ‘Over nothing. Over everything. I don’t know.’

  He nodded at her, and she noticed that his eyes were very green, with a ring of brown round the irises. They reminded her of leaves, some fallen, some still on the trees, down by a stream in the autumn.

  ‘I’ve never known. They’re both…they’re both so nice. I mean, individually, they’re the two nicest people I know. They must have loved each other once, otherwise they wouldn’t have married each other, but somewhere down the line…’

  She trailed off. Somewhere down the line two people who had loved each other very much had simply drifted off course.

  ‘Maybe something happened, maybe nothing,’ the man said.

  Carol looked up at him, startled but grateful to realise that he’d picked up the train of her thoughts. Then she looked down at her lap again.

  Something had simply gone wrong somewhere, and now her father sat in his study listening to old records that had lost their magic, and her mother grew old in the living room. She found her eyes filling with tears. Although she’d thought about her parents many times, she’d never had the realisation before. This was all they had, it wasn’t working, and they were just waiting for everything to be over.

  Maybe something, maybe nothing. That’s all it had taken.

  It wasn’t fair, wasn’t right that people who had loved each other should end up bound together by their feelings for two people who weren’t there any more, and she suddenly felt very miserable.

  The man turned from looking out across the road, and smiled gently at her. ‘Shall I tell you what I like about that CD?’

  She nodded. She was happy to listen to him talk about anything.

  ‘Bach is very different to any other composer,’ he said. ‘When you listen to Vivaldi, or Handel, you can tell that the music was composed for an audience. It’s like a blockbuster film: it’s good, but it’s good because it’s supposed to be good. It’s been designed that way. When you listen to Bach, it’s different. You’re not being performed to. You’re being allowed to overhear.’

  An open-topped white Golf cruised by, spilling trance jungle garage at a volume that would have had Led Zeppelin shaking their heads in grim disapproval.

  The man smiled. ‘Ten years from now, no-one will be listening to that crap any more, thank Christ. It’s moment music, no more. But it’s the same with the better stuff too. All the old 45s stashed in people’s rooms, they’re like a butterfly collection. They look as if they’re still alive, as if they could fly away, but they’ve been dead for decades. Old feelings and memories pinned to pieces of vinyl. In a hundred years no-one will have associations for those songs any more, and most of them will be dead. But in five hundred years, a thousand years, when people sit in houses on planets we don’t even know exist yet, they’ll still listen to Bach, and they’ll still hear the same things. It’s like listening to a charm. It doesn’t fade.’

  His smile broadened, ridiculing the flamboyance of what he was saying. She smiled back, properly this time. He nodded appro
vingly.

  ‘Better. And there’s something else about that record, too.’ He reached across and took the CD from her. ‘Look. Recorded in 1961. When you listen to it, remember that.’

  Slightly puzzled, she grinned. ‘I will. But you still haven’t answered my question. And I’m intrigued now, I want to go listen to this and it’s not even for me.’

  ‘Well maybe you should.’

  ‘But,’ Carol fought hard, but then said it as simply as she could. ‘It’s nice being with you.’ Great, she thought. You sound, what—about fourteen years old?

  ‘That’s alright,’ the man said. ‘I’ll come with you, if I may.’

  Carol leapt at the chance. Quite apart from anything else, her turning up with a guest might diffuse the atmosphere back at the house. Her parents always liked meeting people she knew.

  ‘Of course, I mean, yes. I’ll say I bumped into a friend by accident.’

  Which wouldn’t, she thought as they headed for his car, feel as if she was straying very far from the truth.

  Carol knew nothing about cars, but there was something undeniably classic about his, a diffident and unassuming open-topped sports car in darkest green. It looked like something from another era that had lasted very well, like the deepest pockets of Epping forest where the trees had never been pollarded, and still looked like trees.

  There was a comprehensive-looking CD player built into the front console, but she couldn’t see any CDs anywhere, and she didn’t want to break the wrapping on the Cello Suites. It was still going to be a present for her mother, though not for her birthday, and it would only take a few minutes to get home.

  When they pulled up in the drive all was quiet, and Carol knew from experience that her father would now be out in the garden, pottering quietly, thinking his own thoughts.

  Her mother looked a little quiet when she opened the door, but brightened considerably on seeing Carol had a guest.

  ‘Hi Ma,’ Carol said, ‘I ran into a friend in town, thought I’d bring him home to meet you.’

  ‘How nice,’ her mother said warmly, reached out her hand.

  Realising too late she didn’t know the man’s name, Carol scrabbled and came up with one that would have to do.

  ‘So, er…Mother—Mark, Mark—Mother.’

  The man accepted this without batting an eyelid, and took her mother’s hand.

  ‘How do you do. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

  ‘Oh I hope not,’ her mother laughed.

  ‘Are you bored with people saying how alike you and Carol look?’ he asked as she led them into the sitting room. Carol blinked: how did he know her name? Had she told him, and forgotten? She must have.

  ‘No, not at all,’ her mother giggled, and Carol stared at her curiously. She didn’t think she’d ever heard her mother giggle before. Certainly not like that.

  Carol felt the house relax about them as mother set about making tea, chatting with the man. She’d never been like this with any of the boyfriends she’d brought home. Polite, yes, friendly in a reserved and parental way, but not like this. ‘Vivacious’ was something she hadn’t realised her mother had in her armoury.

  ‘And that,’ said the man, nodding out at the garden, ‘is presumably your husband, Mrs Peters?’

  Carol steeled herself. It was generally a few hours after an argument before either of them would acknowledge the other’s existence.

  ‘Yes,’ said her mother, ‘that’s John. And call me Gillian.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘Is that your name?’

  Giggling again, her mother punched him lightly on the shoulder and turned to hand Carol her tea.

  ‘Your friend is a twit, Carol,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps I should go introduce myself to your father,’ the man said. His eyes drifted over the small package Carol held in her lap, and she realised that he was giving her a chance to present it to her mother undisturbed.

  ‘Do you want me to…’

  ‘No, I’ll be fine.’

  They watched him go, and then mother and daughter turned to each other.

  ‘Well,’ her mother said after a pause, ‘if you’re not going out with him yet you want to bloody well get a move on.’

  They looked at each other soberly for a moment and then started laughing. When they tailed off, still hiccupping every now and then, Carol felt an enormous wave of relief. Not only had the tension in the house disappeared as it had never existed, but her mother looked so relaxed, so vital.

  ‘I bought you a present,’ she said.

  Her mother hadn’t heard the Suites either, and they decided to give the first one a quick listen. Carol settled back in her chair as her mother set up the CD, realising that was something that she liked about her mother that she’d never noticed before. Most people past a certain age seemed to make a decision to refuse to come to terms with new technology. To give up, and become old. But not her mother: as she wielded the CD remote she looked just like Carol’s flatmate Suz. Or like a capable older sister, the kind who goes off travelling round the world and doesn’t come back with dysentery.

  There was a faint hiss before the music started, and Carol remembered what the man had said.

  ‘Recorded in 1961,’ she observed to her mother, who nodded.

  Then there was the sound of the cello.

  It had something of the austere beauty of an equation, an irreducible expression, but it touched you very deeply: it was like seeing truth with your ears. It was like a charm, she realised, like looking at the inside of a perfect crystal and observing an expression of natural forces which you could appreciate but not understand. That was why, she realised, you could often tell what was coming next when you listen to Bach. Not because it was predictable, but because it was right. When clouds darkened, it was going to rain: when they broke, the sun would shine. Some things happened after something else. That was all there was to it.

  All her favourite songs, the albums in her flat and the battered singles archived in her old bedroom upstairs, they captured moments. This music captured time.

  As they listened she focused on every note as it passed, listening to sounds recorded in 1961: before the Beatles, before the Stones, before the Sixties themselves got into their stride. On the day those notes were recorded the world was a completely different place, yet however you listened to it, in those grooves, in that tape, in those digits, was 1961. Outside the room Tortelier was playing in was another room, where men with Brylcreemed hair ran an old-fashioned recording desk which was state-of-the-art to them. Behind them was a window, and outside the birds were singing. And somewhere out there would be a newspaper seller, and he’d be hawking papers with the date 1961 on them, maybe a Thursday. Perhaps if you listened hard enough you could hear him, and the moment had never really died.

  As the Prélude finished, reducing itself to a broken chord which hung on the air, Carol turned and looked at her mother. She was crying gently, and pressed the STOP button on the handset. Then she looked up at her daughter, and Carol saw that her mother had heard the same things.

  In a different house, on a different planet, it would always be there to be heard.

  Her mother wiped her eyes and smiled with genuine warmth. ‘They’ve been out there a long time.’

  They walked into the kitchen, to look out of the window into the back garden. The man was standing talking to her father, and though you couldn’t hear what they were saying, her father’s laugh when it came drifted through the window to them. Carol glanced at her mother, and held her breath when she saw the expression on her face. There was a faint smile on her lips, and small tears still in her eyes. It was the face of someone who was looking at a photo of a friend who’d died long ago, and finding that the mourning was not over yet.

  When she spoke, her voice was fractured, and hesitant. ‘It’s funny. Standing out there, he looks just like he used to look.’

  As they watched the two men laughed again, and her father ran his hand carelessly back through his
hair. Carol heard the intake of her mother’s breath.

  ‘He always…’ Her mother reached her own hand up, and ran it gently through her own hair, at the side. ‘I loved him for that.’

  The two men burst into a fresh gale of laughter, her father almost doubling up. They looked like two young friends out there, planning old-fashioned devilry, and it would be very easy to love either one of them. Tears ran down her mother’s face.

  ‘Mum—what happened?’

  Her mother looked at her, her face clouded. ‘Nothing,’ she said, shaking her head with puzzled misery, ‘Nothing that I can remember.’

  As they watched the two men looked back towards the house, and then headed towards the back door, still talking.

  ‘They’re coming back,’ her mother said, wiping her face with a tea towel. ‘Is the tea still warm?’

  As Carol poured two cups the back door opened and her father came in, followed by the man. Her father made it halfway across the kitchen, and then stopped, faltering, rubbing his hands nervously on his hips. He looked about sixteen.

  Carol watched her mother. She was looking at her husband, eyes bright and wide, also nervous. They seemed awkward, unsure of themselves, as if meeting for the first time, or after a long time apart.

  Then her father ran his hand unconsciously through his hair, and Carol noticed his grace as he smiled tentatively, a lopsided grin that could break anyone’s heart. Her mother handed him a cup of tea, not taking her eyes off his, head tilted to one side.

  ‘Never mind tea,’ said the man from behind her father. ‘It’s a lovely day. Let’s drive.’

  He led Carol out to his car, and she stood to one side to let her parents climb into the back seat, which they did with an agility Carol doubted she could have mustered. They settled back, and as Carol noticed her father’s hand brush her mother’s, and saw her grab hold of it, her father drawled in a surprisingly good American accent.