Suddenly the door burst open and with a great
waaagh!!
three extremely solid ghosts hurled themselves into the room to give the grown-ups a good haunting. Andrew was saved from further consideration of Sara’s funny feelings by Natalie landing like a bundle of weighted laundry in his lap. They had had enough of their video. Wasn’t it time for the party yet? Wearily, and with a private look to Sara, Andrew agreed that it was.
CHAPTER
30
N
O, IT WASN
’
T
too severe at all, not if she wore the earrings, Valerie thought, turning in front of the bathroom mirror to get the effect of the turban from all angles. Too theatrical and vain? No. In fact, it rather had the effect of ‘hadn’t a minute to do my hair, darling, so I just had to
throw
this on and
fly
.’ She adjusted the black lycra folds so that her earlobes plopped out, and then clamped the two dangling flesh pillows in the bulldog grip of her new clip-on, Indian silver earrings. She gave a trial smile. It was amazing. Even in repose, her face now wore an expression of generous, high-minded serenity. It was amazing what a half-smile and eyebrows stretched a fraction by the tightening of the turban could do. Because it wasn’t, Valerie had long ago worked out, the ‘hands that do dishes’ that took the brunt. It was on the face belonging to the hands that do dishes that the creeping patina of drudgery dulled the skin, where the downturn of expectation tugged the edges of the mouth and paled the eyes. It was the face, even as the hands did the dishes, that grew sadder before it grew older. And although she was aware that there would have to be more complex and profound tools in her resurrection than a new pair of earrings, a touch of highlighter and a turban, Valerie felt that she had suddenly been enrolled in a secret society. She had joined, along with the Faye Dunaways, the Shirley MacLaines and the Elizabeth Taylors, the discreet sisterhood of women who know that an £8.99 turban has much the same effect as a face-lift.
Lost on most of this lot, however, she realised an hour later, sitting in the window seat in Helene’s drawing room. Helene had greeted her, she felt, a little thoughtfully and then turned most of her attention on Herve, who was gracing the rehearsal again. Helene was so pleased that he was now taking such a close interest in their little opera, even though it had to be without the thrill of Adele’s voice. Valerie bridled silently. She was no singer, she knew that, not like Helene or Adele, but she had something. Herve certainly thought so.
Because Valerie had grown not just used to but fond of the sensation of others’ eyes upon her during rehearsals. Herve looked at her too, although usually frowning, concentrating on every note of each rehearsal as if it were the most important music in the world. So it was curious, perhaps, that he and Cosmo still seemed to have so little to say to each other. Cosmo seemed more in awe of him than anybody, even frightened. But then, studying with Herve would be alarming, especially for a man. It took a woman to see what a kitten he was underneath it all.
Valerie sat tight in the window seat. Andrew, coming straight from work, arrived last. He was late, but looking over at her in a not unfriendly way, gave a slow smile and came to join her. They were both wondering what he was going to say about her new look. ‘Nice earrings,’ he managed, before Poppy boomed, ‘Ah, Andrew, at
last
! We’re about to get started, so chop-chop, people! Cosmo’s ready for you.’
‘Anyone know anything about Phil?’ Poppy suddenly asked in a public voice, addressing the room. She had been busy with some dark material at the sewing machine set up in one corner. Heads shook, and people looked round as if he might be hiding somewhere. Poppy tightened her lips as if Phil’s absence and the general ignorance of his whereabouts were deliberate slights. Valerie felt absurdly as if she had somehow let Poppy down.
‘How
annoying
,’ she said, turning back to the machine. ‘I need him for his fitting. How can I fit the sleeves until he’s tried it on? He was supposed to be here early for it. He’s forgotten.’
Poppy was behaving more and more like the producer, not just the costume person, stage manager and general dogsbody. With a sigh of long-suffering, exasperated exhaustion she announced, ‘Oh,
well
. Let’s make a start, anyway. This’ll need shifting for a start.’ Helene’s drawing room had become a little too small for rehearsing, now that they were doing all the moves as well as singing. ‘Right! Come on, people. Er, ’scuse me, you’ll need to shift.’
It was she more than Cosmo who was running rehearsals. Now she was bullying Herve off his chair and in a most inappropriate manner, as if he were an ordinary person, just because she had decided she wanted it moved. At least she wasn’t asking Herve to move it, Valerie noticed, as Jim stepped forward in answer to her bidding.
Three-quarters of an hour into the rehearsal, Helene answered a ring of her door bell which donged through Jim’s rendition of ‘
except they have no shoes!
’ A few minutes later she returned, looking worried, ushering Phil before her. Andrew’s cello continuo halted abruptly, Jim’s voice trembled away into silence, and Cosmo’s jaunty gavotte on the piano lost its trit-trotting jollity and tinkled out after them both. Never one to make an entrance, Phil hesitated in the doorway long enough for everyone to see that he was unusually, noticeably dirty. The blue-black hair had the sticky matte look of a yard broom, his navy sweatshirt was stale and stained. His face, usually so white and smooth, had a greenish pallor and the suggestion of curds forming under the skin. And into the wool carpet and coffee aroma of Helene’s drawing room he brought a pungent, cheaper scent which exuded from every cell, pore and fibre of his hair, skin and clothes: the smell of frying, beer and fags. It was attar of pub, distilled to a strength and purity achieved only by dedicated exposure. He had the puzzled, wrecked demeanour that reminded Andrew of lads arrested outside the clubs late on Saturday nights. He reckoned Phil must have been drinking since mid-morning. But drinking in the student manner—slowly—for he was not drunk, not swayingly, loudly so. Fixing his eyes on his destination, he made his way over the carpet to the other window seat and sank into it as if he had crossed a desert to reach it.
‘You’re late, Phil,’ Poppy said, with her arms folded, ‘very late. I thought it was understood that discipline is part of what this project is all about? Discipline and responsibility.’ Although it was not a question, Poppy clearly expected some answer.
Phil looked up and around, almost insolently unaware of the annoyance he was causing. He looked at Poppy steadily for a moment and raised his hands hopelessly. Then he shook his head and slumped forward again.
‘Listen, Phil, this isn’t good enough,’ she began hotly, but Phil raised his head. This time his face was angry.
‘Okay, okay! You shut your face, okay? You just shut your face!’ He sounded cold sober, his voice louder and steadier than anyone had ever heard it before.
Helene jumped up. ‘Oh now, Phil, that’s not a nice thing to say! Poor Poppy’s been working
so
hard, you know. Now why don’t you come down and help me and—’ Phil was on his feet now, staring round at them all, breathing in and out very fast with the effort of gathering more words.
Cosmo stood up, a frozen look on his face. ‘Phil, I insist you leave this rehearsal. I’m the musical director, and I’m asking you to leave.’
Phil let out a shriek of frustrated rage and continued to stare from one to another, apparently immobilised by his inability to decide which of them to go for first.
‘You all . . . so
stupid
! You all . . . don’t care! Don’t care at all! Hurting Adele and now you don’t care. Using her, just using her! I know! I know what you do! She tell me all—she know things, you think she know nothing, but she know! She know everything, and she tell
me
! Only
me
she can tell, because I understand her, I know all about her. So I know all what you doing, using her, hurting her!’ He was flailing with both arms, accusing the entire room, sobbing wildly. Of them all, only Andrew seemed able to move. He rose and came towards the trembling Phil, who held him off with a shaking arm.
‘No, don’t touch me! I go! I go now! Leave me!’ And he ran from the room, almost knocking over Helene who stood nearest the door. He flung her restraining arm away, struggled noisily with the door handle and escaped into the hall and out through the front door, which banged shut.
In the silence that followed Valerie tightened her lips and looked dignified, which was easier in the turban. ‘Drunk,’ she said primly. ‘How unnecessary.’ Nobody agreed, or at least was not saying so. She looked round at the depressed group. It was obvious that someone was going to have to give a moral lead. ‘We must rise above it, otherwise that kind of thing undermines us all.’
‘He was upset, that’s all,’ Helene said, surprisingly simply. ‘The poor boy, he hasn’t any family here. It must be awful when nobody can make out what you’re trying to say.’
‘But that sort of rudeness is so uncalled-for,’ sniffed Valerie. ‘He was so rude to Poppy.’
‘Oh, that’s just stress. Stress is behind most people’s aggression. When you know that’s where it’s coming from it’s easier to cope with,’ said Poppy, omniscient and all-forgiving. ‘Phil obviously has to come to terms with a lot of anger. Maybe things aren’t going well at college. He needs to relax,’ she added comfortably. ‘Cosmo does as well, don’t you? We’re all under pressure, in one way or another. I think there’s far too much pressure nowadays.’
Andrew noticed that everyone, like sitting ducks, fell hungrily on the uncontroversial mouldy crust that Poppy had just tossed in the water. Cosmo, his stressed condition now out in the open, felt able to leave the piano admitting to tiredness and submit to Poppy’s insistence that he take a Bach flower remedy. Helene judged it the right moment for coffee and commandeered a bewildered, servile Jim to help her. Herve was nodding in understanding; he knew all about stress, possibly aggression too. Valerie stood up, adjusting her god-awful headgear, and was now making her way over to Herve. Brave of her, Andrew thought. A month ago she wouldn’t have done that. And the turban must have taken some guts, too, and it would look wonderful on her if it didn’t err just slightly a fraction too far towards weird.
When the coffee arrived a little later, Andrew wondered if he was the only one who noticed that the task of taking cups round now fell to Jim alone. For the rest of the evening nobody mentioned Phil again, nor did anyone speculate, or at any rate not aloud, about who among them he had been shouting at, nor of what, exactly, he had been accusing them.
CHAPTER
31
S
O, WHAT DID
she feel? Sara wandered away from the window through which she had just watched Andrew’s car as it backed down the drive of Medlar Cottage, turned and disappeared out of sight. From here he hadn’t been able to see her, but she knew he knew she would be at the window. What did she feel? She made her way into the kitchen, switching on lights. It was only a quarter to four, but it got dark so early now. She wasn’t hungry or thirsty, not really; aware of appetite, but for the moment lacking any. She was completely relaxed and simultaneously as wound as a spring. Adele’s mirror-images and opposites came to mind. She felt like that. Happier now than she had felt for years and, conversely, also more anxious. Totally, intensely close to Andrew and at the same time, watching him leave, unutterably abandoned.
It had been, in the end, so easy. No farcical interruptions, rows or misunderstandings. Andrew had arrived for a lesson, walking straight from the door to the music room where he had set out his music on the music stand and turned to open his cello case. Something, although she was sure she had not said anything, had made him look up at her standing in the doorway. The look they then exchanged told them that they both knew precisely what should happen next. Without saying anything she had gone back and locked the door, switched on the answering machine and led him upstairs. Or perhaps he had led her, but it had been if not unhurried, then not frantic. As if they had both decided that now, finally, making love was an imperative that must be given all the time and space it demanded, they had undressed deliberately and in silent agreement, saving their first words—a breathless whispering of names—for the moment when they first touched each other naked. Sara stood in the kitchen and smiled at the memory of it. Now they could never again make love for the first time. Or the second, she reflected, remembering the slow, sweet time later, after they’d lain and talked, stroking and gazing, as the afternoon stretched away in a delusion of timelessness. The surprise was just how shockingly, wonderfully right it felt to make love with Andrew, and how wrong it felt that he was actually someone else’s husband. And there, she recognised, was the anxiety.
She wandered into her music room. It was just as he’d left it, music on the stand, cello case and more music on the floor. She switched on the lamp behind the chair they used for playing on and collapsed on the sofa, determined not to feel lonely yet almost luxuriating in the first minutes of his absence, when she was free to think about him. The place where he could be siting now playing to her was empty. Stupid to switch on the light, it merely emphasised his not being there. Her eyes glanced over to the music on the floor, Strauss’s
Don Quixote,
lying open at Variation 9: The Combat with the Two Magicians. On the music stand was a single sheet of music which, with the light shining through it, she could read from behind. She read music as other people read words; not since she was six or seven had she had to stop to work out a relatively simple line. She could see that the music on the stand, with the light shining through it, was Herve’s four notions. Funny of Andrew to be playing those was her first thought, until she realised that of course he couldn’t be, because nobody but her had ever seen the music. It came straight from Herve’s hands to hers. But of course, as she realised in the next second, she was reading from behind, she was reading it backwards. So she read the notes again, realising that it couldn’t be Herve’s music at all, and indeed the phrasing was all different, the rhythms and note values were altered. Except—sitting up now, she checked again—those intervals between the notes
were
Herve’s. Nobody could know them better than she (she knew them better than she cared to) and there they were: his four blasted notions. She grabbed the music off the stand, turned it over and studied it properly. What she was holding in her hand was Andrew’s cello part for
Nash!
Sara gasped, took the music over to the piano and played it through. Yes, it was the cello music, it was Cosmo’s unconvincing, unreliably melodic drivel all right; she’d played it herself. What she was now hearing, for the first time, was that all it was was Herve’s stuff rearranged and played backwards. Fiddled with somewhat, some notes longer, some rhythmic alterations to fit the words, but Herve’s music all right. She held the page up to the light and played the notes as they appeared from the other side. No doubt about it. The work was Herve’s.
Indignation washed over her. Of course she’d always known Cosmo had no real talent, but for him to be a cheap little plagiarist, to take Helene’s money, to masquerade as a composer, to deceive everyone. For months now he had been deceiving everyone except . . . Oh, Christ, no, please no. All at once, worse thoughts were beginning to crowd in. Conscious that she must slow her mind down, she stood up and, with the music still in her hands, slowly paced the floor.
Adele’s drawings. Every line and feature of Adele’s creations, effortlessly drawn in razor-sharp pencil, was symmetrically perfect. It was as if she had been mesmerised by the notion of equilibrium, or rather comforted by it, in a world she could make little sense of. Adele could not make sense of the world’s garbled, difficult messages about the purpose of objects, the meaning of language, the reasons people had for things and their puzzling demands on her. Perhaps her compulsive systems and ordered behaviours were attempts to hold down the world and get it to wait in line, to stop all the messages banking up, clogging the waves and bombarding her. Within the rectangle of her blank page of drawing paper, using her perfect pencil lines, she could create order, make the world behave predictably. A perfect, glittering chandelier must have been another contained, perfect world; small wonder she had taken such a delight in them. And—Sara stopped pacing and felt her heart begin to pound—Adele, with her perfect pitch and memory for music, did the same thing with the music she heard. The distressingly uneven message when a line of music reached Adele’s ears could be smoothed out and perfected, made sense of, only when she sent it back, the same line inverted, transformed into its mirror-opposite, to finish the message and complete the circle.
Suddenly Sara was back in the walled garden at Iford on a sunny late September evening. Adele sat next to her on the white bench, staring down the path, crooning softly the four atonal, difficult phrases of Herve’s that she had heard Sara play in the performance. Then, a pause, and four new phrases. Four new ones which, Sara now realised, had been Herve’s original four simply sung backwards, as effortlessly as Adele could with a pencil draw a mirror-image, or with her eye spot a misplaced crystal on a chandelier. Four phrases that now formed the entire musical basis for Cosmo Lamb’s ‘opera’. Andrew had said that night at Iford that Cosmo had not written a note. And following that evening he, still bereft of any ideas of his own, had obviously been getting Adele to sing Herve’s notions to him parrot-fashion, then backwards, while he copied it down, messed about with it and passed it off as his own. She now recalled his flubbery, discontented mouth, the bored, shut-down eyes which did not conceal the man’s self-glorious ambition. She sucked in her breath with distaste and wrapped her arms tightly around herself. She still had to face the worst part of the truth.
Poor Adele. Sara now saw her, in her mind’s eye, in her mother’s drawing room, looking from Cosmo to Herve, her finger swinging from one to the other as she declared, ‘Backward! Forward! Backward!’ Sara herself by that point had been sunk in an atrocious temper and had been too sour to pay much attention to the effect this had had on Cosmo, but that must have been the moment at which he had realised the risk represented by Adele. Until that point he would have believed that he would be safe. After all, Adele had very little speech and was ordinarily disinclined to use what little she had. Cosmo had made the plagiarism less blatant by embellishing and manipulating the notes. And when he embarked on his deceit he could not have known that Herve himself would be in regular attendance at rehearsals. But another outburst of that kind from Adele and Herve might twig and Cosmo would be finished. Perhaps it occurred to him only at that point how stupid it had been to pick, of all contemporary composers, Herve Petrescu to steal from. Herve had the reputation, clout and ego to nail Cosmo and his shabby trick in the courts, the music press and the whole, gossipy, international music business. Cosmo would never work again, far less go on to higher things and make any kind of reputation, if Herve caught on to what had happened. So two days later Cosmo had slipped into the workshop, either when Adele was there alone, taking care that Adele did not notice, or later, knowing Jim to be away, and had turned on the gas, knowing exactly what Adele would do the next day. It was no accident. Cosmo had murdered Adele.
T
HERE WAS
no answer at Helene’s door. There were no lights on. Sara walked back from the door to the pavement and looked up, as if contemplating the house from a distance would reveal signs of occupancy. It now seemed to her an added outrage that Cosmo should be out, probably on some banal errand, and thereby avoid her confrontation. At that moment a fizzing noise erupted from somewhere high above her, and she looked up in time to see the orange tail of a rocket shooting through the sky behind the bare branches of the plane trees in the centre of the Circus. Of course, 5 November. Somehow the actual date had been obscured in the huge significance of the day’s other big event and in her angry haste to find Cosmo Lamb. Now she thought of Andrew’s reluctant leave-taking in the coming dark of the late afternoon. He would not go, he said, unless he could see her later. She had shaken her head, knowing that they had managed to stop the clock for a few hours only and now they had to let it start ticking again, with all the arrangements and obligations that took no account of how much they might want to be left alone and together. Andrew must go. Had he forgotten? He had to be with all the other members of the opera group at the Boy Scouts’ bonfire and firework party at Iford. Then he had wanted her to come too, to turn up separately in her own car of course, but she could not face it. It would be too confusing, she told him, to have to make polite conversation with his wife, over a hot dog round the bonfire, so soon after, well . . .
Walking briskly back to her car from Helene’s dark house and looking up from time to time as, from back gardens all over the city, fireworks whooshed up and cracked open the sky above her, Sara thought that confusion of that sort was nothing in comparison to the turmoil she was feeling now. However squeamish she felt about coming face to face with Valerie, her knowledge of Cosmo’s evil act must be conveyed to Andrew. She must go straight out to Iford and find them, explain things to Andrew. Cosmo must be arrested at once.