She sighed and looked round in annoyance. Why did she have to think about everything? She had broken the spell for herself and now could only gawp, undecided as to whether the garden truly was breathing with some eternal pulse of antiquity, or just resonating emptily with a series of dead echoes, reaching back and back and back. Perhaps, after all, the whole place was just a piece of Edwardian sophistry, a conceit by a man who belonged in an uncomfortable age that was also panicked by technology and as heritage-hungry as this one. Now she could see that among the cypresses and acanthus stood huge, lusty bushes of English sage and lavender. The stone hounds guarding the colonnade were stiff-jawed and German. Standing in among the red-berried berberis was Mozart’s birdcatcher, Papageno, striking a stage pose. The figure of a pudding-fed boy and the façade of the faux-Romanesque cloisters had been designed by an Englishman, Grinling Gibbons. Sara smiled. It was beautiful, certainly, and about as Italian as a Wall’s Cornetto.
A
NDREW WAS
glad, when Sara caught sight of him in the audience, that Valerie was beside him and was at that moment looking in her direction. There could be no mistaking the look of genuine surprise on Sara’s face. It was certainly not the look of a lover catching sight of the beloved, a fact that slightly depressed Andrew at the same time as it pleased him that it would further divert any suspicions of Valerie’s.
The open square of the cloisters had been covered over with a tarpaulin, at Herve’s insistence, to shield the electronic equipment from any sudden rain. Sara sat in the centre, nursing her cello. Behind her stretched lines of cable, amplifiers and speakers, two keyboards and a expanse of percussion kit. There was nothing defensive in her body language, her playing posture was too engrained in her for that, but with a small but intent audience in front and on both sides, and all Petrescu’s ironmongery behind, Andrew thought that something about her seemed to fear encroachment.
The next hour and a half were the longest in Andrew’s life. Within two minutes his mind began to dwell less on what was happening and more on the supper that would be served afterwards down in the main house. After ten minutes he became less preoccupied with food than with the idea of thumping Herve Petrescu. When he had been droning on for about twenty minutes in his irritating accent, Sara had interrupted to break his flow and venture a remark of her own.
‘I think the point you’ve just made is a very interesting one, Herve. Shall we try and illustrate that with an example?’ she said, smiling at him with what seemed unnecessarily intimate warmth. ‘What I understand you’re saying is that a series of different sounds, with no apparent relationship one to another . . .’
Then had followed a few exchanges, interspersed with short bursts of music played on the cello, before Sara had encouraged questions and comments from the audience. The audience took her invitation as an opportunity, en masse, to impersonate rocks. Nobody, not even Cosmo sitting almost hidden at the back, broke the silence. Andrew was surprised, since the one thing Cosmo could do was
talk
about composing, and with as little clarity as Herve. Then, just before it all became too embarrassing, Sara had introduced the ‘work in progress’.
So far, she explained, Petrescu had come up with four ‘notions’ (as he called them) which, following a nod from her, he played with one finger on the electronic keyboard in an unvarying, computerised
wung
. As far as Andrew could tell they were four tunes. Short, incomplete and bad, but tunes. He shifted in his chair with impatience and crossed his arms as if to contain the annoyance that heaved in his chest. Was that what notions were then, bad tunes? He could tell that that was what Sara thought they were too, because when she played through each of them in turn on the cello he could see that she was practically bursting with the effort of imbuing them with some sort of attractiveness, trying to pull out the meagre melodic possibilities of each one.
Then the audience was treated to the sight of the ‘creative partnership’ at work. Petrescu added percussion noises which sounded like crockery being smashed inside a grand piano in a swimming pool, and more synthesiser sounds suggestive of the outbreak of interplanetary war, while Sara battled with her four notions, trying to evoke from the grudging material something more rewarding for her listeners than the sound of sobbing robots. Andrew recalled the treacly, generous, smiling tone of which Sara’s cello was capable when she played it as she wanted to, and felt again like punching Herve on the nose. From time to time Herve stopped with some remark about the cello playing. Once Sara shifted her line up an octave and embellished the last three notes with a little vibrato and an entertaining flourish of her own, but Herve considered the result too redolent of melody, too ‘cadenza-like’. Sara only said meekly that she did feel that the cello was a melodic instrument, before dropping back into the sludge of the lowest register.
At last, when it was over, there was the mingling to be got through. Herve was immediately surrounded by several of the audience, mainly women in dark polo necks and glasses. He, towering above his entourage, moved outside. Others lingered in the garden or wandered over the grass in a languorous procession down to the main house. Adele and Phil were making their way unobtrusively to a bench further down on the path that bordered the top of the rose garden, facing across the valley. Andrew knew that Adele did not always feel comfortable in a crowd. He decided it would not be helpful to follow. Valerie and Helene, with Jim a redundant chaperone, were fluttering around the edge of Herve and his shoal of pilot fish. Andrew saw that Sara had disappeared behind one of the pillars of the cloisters to put her cello away in its case. She re-emerged a moment later, glass of water in hand, and came over almost shyly, smiling at him. With Valerie just yards away, he was able only to smile back and felt he would burst with the effort of not wrapping his arms around her.
‘Well, now, that was . . .
something
. I . . . I don’t know how to put it,’ he blurted desperately.
Sara conveyed with less than a blink of her eyes that she knew what he was saying and would collude. ‘Indeed it was. And neither do I. Thanks for coming tonight—most unexpected, I must say. Oh, look, here’s Valerie.’
Valerie, again in her navy sweater and snug trousers, was making her way over, feeling very Hermès next to Sara’s strangely coloured jersey, which she did not recognise as actually cashmere and by Rebecca Moses. She was prepared to be gracious. Sara Selkirk need not think that she was anything other than completely relaxed about her marriage; consequently her greeting was full of unnecessary, unamused laughter. ‘Hi!
Hi!
Well done,
you
! How
do
you work all your fingers like that? Aren’t you clever!’
Sara played the game back so adeptly that it did not occur to her to feel sickened by Valerie’s encoded hostility. ‘Hi yourself! What’s all this I hear about an opera? Can’t
wait
to see you on the stage! It’s
so
exciting!’
‘Oh I
know
! And I’m actually
secretary
of the thing. For my sins! And thank you for bringing us Cosmo. Herve Petrescu’s protégé! I never imagined we’d be so honoured!’
Sara’s face was conveying nothing. She nodded, allowing Valerie to wade on in the classic manner of the socially uneasy.
‘We feel so lucky. Helene feels that it was somehow meant. I can see her point, can’t you? These things sometimes are, aren’t they.
I
think so, anyway! I mean the coincidence! Cosmo, who happens to be English, studying in Prague with Petrescu just at the very moment when you arrive? And you’re there to ask Petrescu if he can suggest a young up-and-coming composer for our community opera! And Cosmo’s just on the point of returning to London and it just so happens he has space in his diary that coincides with our dates. And the rest, as they say . . .’
‘I’m not sure it was absolutely,
quite
like that,’ Sara said weakly, lapsing into sincerity. ‘I’m afraid I’m not familiar with Cosmo’s work. Do you like it?’ She directed the question to Andrew.
‘We’re not familiar with it either,’ Andrew said roughly, ‘because he hasn’t actually written any yet. That’s partly why we’re here. Helene obviously thinks it’ll stir him up a bit to hear a new piece by the maestro. Can’t see it, myself, but it’s better than another bloody discussion.’
Valerie interposed, levelling and wifely. ‘Cosmo’s an artist. Andrew doesn’t understand artists. And men just don’t have the same sort of feeling for these things as women, do they? I’m always telling him he’s in just the right job, aren’t I, my darling? Nothing artistic about being a detective chief inspector, I’m afraid, just thugs and crooks and too many late shifts, isn’t it, my darling?’
For one appalling moment Sara thought Valerie was actually going to ruffle Andrew’s hair and call him a silly-billy. Andrew shifted his weight away from his wife, and without taking his eyes off Sara said, ‘No, of course not. After all, police work is all about bopping people on the head with truncheons. We don’t have to worry about how people’s
minds
work, do we?’
Valerie squealed and biffed him on the arm. Then she gave a stage shiver and looked up at her husband. ‘Ooh, isn’t it getting autumnal! Let’s all go down to the house.’ She linked both her arms round Andrew’s elbow and held on hard.
They were interrupted by a commotion over by the path above the rose garden. The sound of two or three voices raised in anger or protest was followed by the sound of a sharp slap, a wail and more shouting. Andrew turned in time to see Adele running away from the group round the bench. Helene was now turning her wrath on the slight figure of Phil. Jim was also there, placing an appeasing arm on Helene’s shoulder. His low voice could be heard breaking occasionally through her breathy, high-pitched outbursts. As Andrew, Valerie and Sara watched, Phil turned calmly from Helene’s tirade and simply walked away.
‘Looks as though Helene’s big night out isn’t going altogether swimmingly,’ Andrew said.
‘It’s Adele. A tantrum, I should think,’ Valerie said authoritatively. ‘I’m going to see what’s wrong. Helene probably needs help.’ She detached herself from Andrew and strode off across the grass to where Jim was comforting Helene.
‘That, I take it,’ Sara murmured, her eyes on Valerie’s back, ‘is the opera group. I thought I picked them out in the audience. You have my sympathy.’
For much of the evening, in the longueurs during Herve’s explanations, Sara had been studying her audience, matching people to Andrew’s descriptions of the Circus Opera Group. The young woman who was Adele had been sitting between the good-looking Chinese and her mother Helene. The contrast with the mother was remarkable. The girl was small-boned and seemed slender enough to slip unnoticed out of sight, even out of existence, so little space did she occupy, while the mother was most sculpturally and three-dimensionally present. Oddly, there had been more of a shared atmosphere between Phil and Adele despite the differences in their features and colouring, as if they had both been fashioned in cool porcelain by the same long hands. Helene was more of a large bronze, beaten out in a hot,
fin-de-siècle
foundry. Even Adele’s straight pale hair was somehow slim, while next to her the statuesque woman’s hairdo seemed to be not just waving but shouting. Veering now towards late fifties’ handsomeness rather than beauty, Helene had sat as if someone just out of sight might be painting her. She kept her big features composed, the eyebrows proud and the jaw taut, so as to be looking her best in that eventuality. The bearded, well-preserved man on her other side, who Sara now knew was Jim, had from time to time glanced at her. Perhaps Helene’s state of perpetual readiness with her best face was for him. But Adele had seemed oblivious of anyone around her or of her own smooth-faced beauty, possibly entranced by the music or possibly mentally worlds away. In every sense except the merely physical the girl seemed simply to have been elsewhere.
‘There go Cosmo and Poppy now.’ Andrew nodded towards the two new figures hurrying across the garden to join the party now forming around the gesticulating Helene. ‘Not a lot we can do, I don’t think. They don’t need us.’ He gestured down the garden towards the house. ‘Are you having supper? Shall I walk you down? You must be hungry—it sounded like hard work, all that.’
They stepped out of the light from the cloisters into the softer glow of the fading daylight on the path. Sara said nonchalantly, ‘So you don’t understand how a composer’s mind works? Well, I can’t say I do either, after less than two weeks with Herve. But I can’t come out and say so, you must see that. And I’m still hoping it’ll come right in the end and I’ll get to like it. He is still working on it, after all. I’ve got to stay with it. You do understand, don’t you?’
Just as Andrew was opening his mouth to say that of course he did, they were caught up by a rather breathless Valerie. She seized Andrew by the arm.
‘Adele’s been
smoking
,’ she gasped. ‘Can you believe it? Helene had no idea, apparently. She’s furious. Furious with Phil. They were just sitting there with a cigarette when she found them. She started shouting and Adele went hysterical.’
‘Oh, is that all?’ Andrew asked. ‘Well, I’m glad it wasn’t anything serious.’
‘How can you say that? Of course it’s serious!’
‘But how old is Adele?’ Sara asked. ‘Can’t she smoke if she wants to? It’s her health in the end, she’s an adult, after all.’
Valerie tutted with impatience. ‘That’s not the point, is it? She’s
autistic
. And Helene’s furious because of what it’ll do to her voice. After all Helene’s done to get the opera going, really all for Adele’s sake, and now she’s
smoking
. Honestly, you can see her point, can’t you?’
‘Maybe Adele doesn’t care about the opera,’ Sara ventured quietly, ‘as much as Helene does.’
Valerie did not consider this worth responding to. She turned to Andrew. ‘Anyway, look, she’s gone off somewhere. Her mother slapped her to stop her hysterics and she ran off, nobody saw where to. And it’ll be dark soon. We’ve all got to help look for her.’