‘C’mon, Pretzel.’ She patted an empty patch beside her. ‘C’mon up and give Mummy a wee cuddle.’ Pretzel danced half-heartedly on his front paws but did not attempt to jump. He wandered away, head down and sniffing, and wound a straggly course which led him eventually to the tartan dogbed which Sara had bought for him, which was lying under a small, circular dining-table. Pretzel climbed in, circled it twice, lay down and sank his doleful head on to his front paws.
Joyce’s mind was once again drawn away reluctantly from the package in her handbag, and she looked at him with concern. Sighing, she heaved herself to her feet and felt his nose, which was dry but cold. His ears felt cold, too. As she caressed them, he lifted his head, shivered sadly, gave a little whimper and let his head fall again on to his paws. She fetched a sweatshirt from the bedroom and placed it round him, but he still looked at her sadly. Kneeling
beside him, she looked back into his eyes and recognised what she saw reflected in them: humiliation, displacement, the beginnings of bewilderment, the same refugee’s consciousness which she had grown adept at sublimating in herself, chiefly by forgiving herself her trespasses, blaming others and looking on the bright side.
‘This is home now,’ she crooned. ‘For a while, anyway. It’ll be all right when we’ve got all unpacked, won’t it, son? Eh?’ Pretzel, presumably lacking the conviction for a proper tail wag, managed a weak wriggle of his bum. Joyce muttered something, got up and stood with her hands on her hips in front of the row of cardboard boxes. Then she crouched down, rummaged for a few minutes and brought out the Egyptian music box with a show of elation that Pretzel witnessed noncommittally.
‘Here we are! A wee tune’s what you need! Your favourite wee tune, ready?’ She wound the box up and set it down to play. As the familiar, plinky melody started, Pretzel rewarded her with a brief shiver and lift of his ears, the canine equivalent of a brave little smile. Joyce joined him again on the floor.
‘Don’t let me down now, son,’ she whispered, stroking him softly. Pretzel’s body shivered again but he licked her hand, and stirred his tail on the floor. Could he be hungry? She had fed him earlier but perhaps he was unsettled by the move, perhaps an extra meal would be reassuring. Sara had placed the tins of dogfood and various supplies in a cupboard in the neat little kitchen corner arranged with worktop, sink, kettle and microwave. Joyce got up again and tipped the remaining half of the contents of the opened tin into a cereal bowl. As an extra treat she crumbled over the top some of the bread and cheese she
hadn’t eaten at lunchtime (it being so dry without butter) and cracked in an egg. As she put the bowl down Pretzel flumped over, sniffed it and began to eat. Joyce wanted to applaud. There couldn’t be anything seriously wrong with a dog who still wanted to be fed, so it must just be a wee chill. She sank down on to the floor beside him and smiled as he went on eating, feeling herself blessed, granted for once the power to provide good things for the one she loved when countless times before and for others she had loved, it had been denied. And the music box’s enfeebled tune, just one more time before extinction, twanked slowly round their ears as they sat together on the floor, while tears of relief filled Joyce’s eyes and she began to cry.
S
ARA YOWLED TOWARDS
her top C and held it bravely, though it took longer to reach than she had expected and then seemed not to know what to do once it got there. And it was a tad harder to hold on to than real singers seemed to find it, she thought, as she heard herself slipping off it. But it was a forgiving audience (herself) and a kind acoustic (her large bathroom at Medlar Cottage). She was happy: utterly, wondrously alone and making a lot of noise. She sank back in the bathwater, took another deep breath and began
Vissi d’Arte
all over again.
In the mirror at the end of the bath she could just see the head of some mad, damp, naked diva (herself) above the surface of the bubbles, and she thought again what a shame it was that she looked so odd when she sang, adding unfairly to the tragedy of the sound she made. Her forehead puckered, the eyebrows straightened and rose like the two halves of Tower Bridge letting a tanker through, and it was close to obscene what happened to her lips. She sniggered and pulled herself up, sloshing water behind her on to the floor, reached over for the glass of champagne on the chair next to the bath and tipped it down her throat until it was empty. Then she reached further over, picked
up the bottle from the floor and refilled her glass. Freedom. Freedom to sing atrociously. Freedom to drink champagne in the bath. Freedom to have the bath at the time of day when she would be cooking Joyce some nutritious but depressingly plain thing to eat for supper. Dammit, she thought, emptying her glass again, freedom to drink.
It was extraordinary how completely the removal of Joyce to the Sulis had restored Sara’s susceptibility to the charms of her own house. She had spent nearly the whole of the afternoon in her music room working on the Dvořák, taking it apart and putting it all back together again, and by the end managing to play it really, even if she said so herself, much the way she thought it should go. Part of her enjoyment had lain in her renewed confidence in her judgment of the piece. The re-emergence of her disparaging teacher had unsettled her faith in her interpretation. But, as she had concluded as she was putting away the Peresson cello, she was playing it right, whatever Joyce’s curling lips might be telling her. She was making it sound the way she wanted it, her way. And Joyce could go boil her head, lips and all.
Afterwards, with the mood of righteous rebellion still in her and yelling
My Way
above the roar of the vacuum cleaner, Sara had cleaned the house, less to pick up any remaining dog hairs than to expunge memories of her guest. For it was extraordinary how the apparently self-effacing Joyce had managed to exude a silent pessimism about everything, not just Sara’s playing, in a manner so passive and yet so encroaching. It was not the result of anything she actually said or did, nor even the self-loathing in her eyes nor the diminished pride that soured her mouth, it
was more a sort of miserable weather that attached to her and lingered, a dulling micro-climate of failure that hung stubbornly in the corners of Medlar Cottage after she had passed through, almost as if it were a noxious fog rather than a person that had been to stay.
Sara supposed, lying in her bath, that she now finally saw why Andrew had found it intolerable, but she would put everything right. She had not only fallen back in love with Medlar Cottage but with him too, and this evening was going to be wonderful. She had reclaimed the house for them both and filled it with flowers. It would be just the two of them, lots more champagne, amazing food of the kind that Joyce would not have touched, and then—well, not to put too fine a point on it, they would make love. Often, and variously. Or perhaps they would just make love and have the champagne and food later if there was time which, if they started the evening that way round, there almost certainly wouldn’t be. A rush of excitement tumbled through her body and she sank, stretching, under the water. She somehow had to wait another three hours for him, feeling like this; tinglingly aware of every pore and dip and fold of her body was how she described it to herself, quite outrageously randy was what she knew it to be. She surfaced and lay soaking, planning, letting more minutes tick by, her excitement increasing. There was some delicious aromatherapy oil somewhere that she seldom used because it took so long to rub in to her skin and she was usually in a hurry to get dressed, but tonight, slowly and ceremoniously, she would anoint her body like an Old Testament concubine. She would paint her toenails again and wear no shoes, and her clothes
would be soft and easy to shrug off, silk of course, and not too many.
* * *
B
Y ELEVEN
o’clock Sara was still sitting cross-legged on the hearth rug with her empty glass. She had spilled champagne, the last of the bottle, down her dark red silk vest, the fifty or so candles burning in the drawing room were flickering their last, her skin felt unpleasantly slippery and her feet were cold. She had taken the overcooked Thai shrimps out of the oven over an hour ago and they were in the kitchen lying in their dish, curled in yellowing coconut and ginger sauce like dead baby mice awaiting a biology practical.
At five minutes past eleven Sara decided, practising her deep breathing, that she would get up very slowly, go to the telephone and ring Andrew very nicely and just ask, very reasonably, where the bloody hell he was and what the bloody hell he thought he was doing. But the telephone base, when she got to it, was flashing a new message. Knowing exactly what it would be Sara played it. Andrew was terribly sorry. Andrew would do anything to have it otherwise. Andrew couldn’t make it because Valerie had just signed up for a Twelve-Step Women’s Assertiveness Course on Sunday nights. He had to babysit. Valerie was also asserting her right to go for a curry with the girls afterwards so Andrew would have to stay until she chose to get back, which might be very late. Andrew thought that he would go to the flat tonight, remembering how Sara had objected to being disturbed the other day. Andrew hoped Sara would understand. Andrew was dead, Sara added silently as she clicked the machine off, and so was Valerie.
The message had been left hours earlier when she had
been either bawling Sinatra songs to the accompaniment of the Hoover, shouting Puccini in the bath or when her head was underwater, so it wasn’t as if he were letting her down just at the very last minute, but nevertheless disappointment and rage were fighting it out in Sara’s pounding head, and rage won. With a half-drunken shriek she stumbled into the kitchen, opened the back door, picked up the dish of Thai shrimps and hurled it outside where it crashed on to the path. Plates of fragrant rice, scallops, crab cakes, chilli dipping sauce and beansprouts went next. The champagne bottle went last, with the satisfying crump of exploding glass, followed by the startled yowl of a cat. Back in the drawing room she managed with difficulty not to kick over the burning candles and instead went round blowing them all out, noisily and furiously. Shaking, she stood in the dark, light-headed, panting, wondering what on earth she was going to do next. At what point had she conceded to Andrew—
had
she ever actually conceded?—the power to make her feel like this? How
dare
he make her feel like this? Actually, how dare Valerie do this? And the anger that they were making her feel had driven out not just any ability or desire to understand and forgive but also the capacity to think, sleep or eat. She looked round for something to destroy and realised with her last particle of reason that the only way to avoid trashing her own house was to get out of it. She tore upstairs, pulled off her clothes and changed into running gear.
* * *
I
T WAS
a pleasure, although not a soothing one, to drive when she had had too much to drink, in defiance of Andrew and his attitude to such things. It was a pleasure to
know how much he would disapprove of what she was doing, so she resolved, as she drove with the concentrated diligence of a Sunday driver, that she would tell him, in detail, should she ever speak to him again. She parked in the car park of The George at Bathampton Lock. Other things she would tell Andrew, she thought, as she set off at an unwisely fast pace: how dark it was on the towpath, how deserted, how unprotected she was. How guilty he would feel if anything happened to her, because it was his and his ex-wife’s fault that she was so angry and so also his responsibility that she was running off her rage in the dark, alone.
After five minutes Sara began to feel weary, as if she were tramping through water. She ran faster. After ten she was wearier, so she ran faster still. The sensation of running through water had gone; she was now struggling through deep tar which seemed to cling to her legs and would drag her down if she stopped.
The towpath was now darker for she had passed the last of the moored barges and houses of Bathampton long ago and on either side of the canal lay only fields, open to the moonless sky, harbouring silence. Sara felt almost afraid of her own laboured breathing, for although she was still too angry to feel frightened, it was impossible not to realise that somebody very frightened indeed would make a sound exactly like this. And somebody very frightened indeed would also be too short of breath to scream. She ran on.
At the end of half an hour Sara found herself more than three miles beyond Bathampton Lock and at the end of her strength. The champagne-charged rage which had surged through her, curiously like elation in its power to animate,
had vanished, and she realised that she was actually quietly scared out of her wits. Then, just as she was thinking appeasingly that it was not Andrew’s fault that she had failed to pick up his message and that she ought to turn round and go home, she saw the trembling, tiny, burning dot just feet away from her in the dark. It dawned on her. A fatalistic calm was sweeping fear out of her mind, although her body had begun to shake. She had already slowed her pace to a walk and now she stopped, watching the dot as it moved jerkily upwards, glowed brighter, and moved down. It would be no more than she deserved: alone on an empty towpath near midnight, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, undefended unless she could stick her car keys in his eyes. The kind of thing that when you read the Body Found On Towpath story in the paper you think, what did she expect? Yet it seemed a little cruel, she considered oddly without panic, that before she met her fate at the hands of some mad rapist who was just sitting here on a bench in case someone as stupid as she was should happen along, she should have to watch him enjoying a fag while he waited. She fingered the car keys in her pocket and wondered if, should she turn now and run, she would make it more than a hundred yards.
A frightened whimper broke from the direction of the glowing cigarette. A helpless voice in the dark called out, ‘Oh oh, oooh—Ivan? Ivan? I hurt myself.’ Despite the adult, male voice, it was the sound of a child in distress.