The pink suit. That suit. Pink suit, pink suit, oh God it couldn’t be. It couldn’t. Watch, only six bars and I’m in. My God, it is. That pink suit. Two bars. Damn, I haven’t missed it, have I? It is her. Have I? She’s covering her eyes. Oh God, now,
now
… I’ll be late …
* * *
N
OT UNTIL
the Finale did Sara dare to look again. Steeling herself for the sight, she saw that she had been correct. The emaciated creature in the pink suit was Professor Cruikshank, Sara’s cello teacher from the time she had arrived at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music as a student in 1978 until she graduated, with most of the prizes, in 1981. Somehow, in the intervening years, the imperious, gifted and universally respected professor had become a bag lady.
Even in the minutes since Sara had first spotted her and nearly fluffed her entry, Joyce seemed to have liquefied a little. She was standing in the midst of a knot of people near the front, and was now bending unnaturally forward from the waist, like a melting snowman. She seemed to be holding her head up towards the stage at a difficult angle and the mouth was working gently. The large black handbag, surely very heavy, seemed to be pulling her arm almost to the ground. As Sara watched, Joyce dropped out
of the audience altogether, sinking softly and noiselessly out of sight, her small body apparently too weak to withstand gravity any longer. Sara stared in disbelief as the Prommers, instead of going to her aid, created a circle around her and ignored her. Were they just going to leave her on the floor? Surely nobody, least of all the chummy Prommers, would ignore an old lady who had fainted? Sara was on the point of jumping to her feet and stopping the orchestra when the young man who had been standing nearest Joyce turned to his friend, raised one hand curved as if cupped round a glass, and made a swigging gesture. The friend raised his eyes.
So that was it. At the 1999 Henry Wood Promenade Concert given by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Simon Rattle with cellist Sara Selkirk, Professor Joyce Cruikshank was lying unobtrusively pissed on the floor of the Royal Albert Hall. Sara turned her attention back to the music. No point in taking it personally and she had a concerto to finish.
A
LEX
C
OOPER WAS
washing her pants to Dvořák on the radio, sloshing water on the floor, rubbing, wringing and stacking up the multicoloured little twists of cotton around the taps. Nice colours, she decided, more intense when they’re wet and seen against the bright white of the basin. They had lost the dusty look they had sitting on her dry haunches, next to her unloved, waxy skin. Practically the only coloured clothes she had now, they were, and terribly tatty, defeated-looking. Still, what did it matter, she thought forlornly, rubbing a smear of hand soap on an apple green gusset. There was nobody to see her knackered knickers, either on her or anywhere else. And even if (big if)
he
did, he would probably just let his gaze settle on them for the few seconds it took to decide to turn her down, the way he had that time when she had stood at his door wearing the long T-shirt, Calvin Klein’s Obsession and little else. Alex let the water out of the basin and waited for the little coda of misery which always followed thoughts of him to pass.
At least Dvořák seemed to know all about it, she thought. Good cellist playing it. Lived near Bath, Alex knew that. She had passed her in the street once, last winter.
If it hadn’t been her it was someone very like her, slim and strong-looking, with long dark hair and big eyes that seemed to be looking miles beyond you, the sort of person who looks so successful as well as nice that you could just kill them. Alex knew that all she needed was a bit of success with something: work, or a man,
something
, and she could be like that too. Life was unfair.
Alex picked up the radio and wandered out of the bathroom to escape the atmosphere of misery she had filled it with, annoyed with herself for allowing even a knicker-washing session to have led to thoughts of Stephen Golightly and the Sulis Clinic. Again, she told herself that she had her own life to lead. It was a pity that her room confronted her with just how poorly she was leading it.
Not that it was a bad room, but it was small and not really hers. Her own African batik hanging on the wall and funny cactus lamp did not detract sufficiently from the truth that she lived in somebody else’s house, surrounded by somebody else’s misplaced confidence with colour, in this case peach and cobalt blue. At twenty-three Alex felt she deserved to be more than a lodger, living by her landlady’s rules about noise, hot water and the electric fire. She turned up the radio and wondered what Sara Selkirk got paid just for sitting there playing the cello.
Back on the subject of what Alex deserved, she deserved
one
, a decent place to live;
two
, a proper job, and she certainly had
not
deserved what Stephen Golightly had done to her. Or not done. Alex knew—she could
tell—
that he had liked it when she had taken a bit of initiative and shown up in the T-shirt and had liked, too, watching her humiliation as he had feigned flattered surprise and refused to take her up on it. And she definitely had not
misread things the way he later claimed in his patronising, fatherly way. So it was his fault, not hers, that she no longer had items
one
or
two
, because she couldn’t have stayed at the clinic after that, even though the job had been just what she wanted, not with him living right next to her and practically laughing at her with those blue eyes. But nor could she, obviously, let anyone know the real reason for her leaving so suddenly. It was so humiliating. Even now, the huge, massive lie she had told to explain her departure seemed smaller than her own embarrassment at the truth. Alex ran over again in her mind her sudden and emotional exit from the Sulis Clinic and confirmed to herself that she had done what any normal person would have done. You had to survive in this world. They were the weirdos, not her.
But somehow in the muddle of quitting her job and moving out she had still held in her mind, for some point in the future, a picture of Dr Golightly coming to see her and saying something, saying that he had been wrong, he understood and please would she go back,
something
. She had not quite grasped at the time that she would not see him again, ever. Three months later, the bleakness of the idea could make her cry though it was not that, it was the Dvořák, only the Dvořák that was doing it now.
It sometimes comforted Alex to think of herself as offended rather than humiliated, so she now asked herself rhetorically what the hell he thought he had been playing at. And while maybe she shouldn’t have told that lie and said what she said to Ivan on the day she left, it
was
Dr Golightly who was sending out the signals and
she
was the one who had had to give up her job and the little apartment. Her indignation grew as she banged about making
toast in the corner of her room and opening a jar of some snotty stuff to spread on it, so that she was already quite angry when her landlady thumped on her door and told her to turn down the radio and that personal items were not to be left in the bathroom.
I
T WAS SO
awfully hot in there, dear,’ Joyce was saying from the sofa. ‘So silly to faint like that. So sorry. I’ve never cared for the heat.’
Sara raised her eyebrows. Joyce had been flat out and snoring on the green velvet sofa since Sara had had her carted in and put there at the end of the concert. She had done three calls, showered, changed into jeans and a shirt, said her thank-yous and goodbyes to Simon, joined some of the orchestra for a drink and a sandwich in the Artists’ Bar, returned to the dressing room and shaken Joyce awake.
‘You’re not suffering from the heat. You’re drunk,’ Sara said. She pointed to the dressing table where the empty vodka bottle stood. ‘That was in your bag. What’s been happening to you?’
Joyce eased herself into a sitting position. ‘Happened? I just fainted with the heat, dear. You know.’ She turned yellow, watery eyes on Sara. ‘Nothing to do with you, dear. So sorry. I’ll get out of your way now.’ She rose and swayed like someone trying to stand on ice-skates for the first time, and peered at the bottle, no doubt, Sara thought, to check that it really was empty. Then, with a wan little wave of both hands which seemed to mean that
she was finding the presence of the vodka bottle just too mystifying to think about any longer, she declared, ‘Right then, I’ll away home now.’
‘Wait, wait. Where do you live? How are you getting home? You’re probably too late for the tube, you know.’
They looked blankly at each other. Joyce’s mind did not work fast enough to lie about being able to take a taxi, nor could Sara humiliate Professor Cruikshank by giving her the fare.
‘Wait. I’ve got my car. I’ll take you. You can direct me, I guess, can’t you?’
In the car it became clear that she couldn’t. Joyce travelled by tube and had no above-ground homing instincts at all, nor could she focus properly on street names.
‘If you could just get me to the Angel, dear? Northern Line. I’m in Colebrooke Row, just behind.’
‘The Angel, Islington?’ Sara said, trying not to sound weak with dismay. ‘The Angel. Right.’
As they drove, Joyce tried to reassert some professorial authority.
‘A very fair attempt, dear, really quite good in places. But your legato was always a wee chink in your armour, I remember, always a chink. Need to work on upper arm strength and flexibility. So necessary for Dvořák, I remember using those very words to you. Did I not? And was I not right, too?’
In the dark, Sara smiled, glad that at least on some level the intolerable old bitch had not softened. It had been appalling to see and hear Professor Cruikshank so abject. Now, the lips writhing with self-certainty and the old hands gripping the top of the large handbag on her lap had restored the queenly demeanour Sara remembered. Had Joyce at that moment lifted one languid hand and circled her wrist in her
cuff towards the cheering populace it would have seemed natural; certainly her indifference to the extent of the favour Sara was doing her in making at least an hour’s detour from her route to the M4 was regal enough.
Joyce sank down further in her seat and fell asleep, her hands loosening their hold on the handbag. As Sara drove on she began to think that Joyce’s circumstances (starting with the address in Islington) could not really be so very bad. There would be some sensible explanation for the vodka business. And for the pink suit. In fact, she now recalled hearing, a few years after she herself had left, that Joyce had retired a year or two early which surely meant that she had arranged matters comfortably for herself. She would have had a good pension after a lifetime at the Academy. Then there was the grand flat in the red sandstone terrace in Kelvinside, with Art Nouveau glass in its bay windows, brass door plates and skirting boards a foot high. Sara breathed in and suddenly smelled again the mixture of biscuits and beeswax that pervaded the place and saw again the high drawing room where she, marooned on a chair on the Turkish rug in the middle, had had her technique and musicianship subjected to three years of Joyce’s excoriating tutelage.
Nearly twenty years later she could feel almost the same fear creeping into her that had sometimes overwhelmed her then. She had been nervous, conscious of the honour which, she had been given to understand (Professor Cruikshank left one in no doubt), had been accorded only to a few star students over the years. And although it did not feel quite like simple generosity, by summoning Sara to the flat for her lessons in the evening instead of teaching her during the day, Professor Cruikshank was in effect giving her unlimited time. Instead of the Academy’s timetabled
one-hour session, the evening lessons were never less than two and frequently more, and were followed always by Professor Cruikshank’s tea ceremony, its intended message of reward for hard work overshadowed by the gaucherie of its delivery by someone who was not a natural hostess.
While Sara put away her cello Professor Cruikshank would leave the room and return wheeling a trolley covered with a clean and ironed tea towel. Underneath would be the teapot, cups and saucers, plates, milk, a basin of sugar cubes with sugar tongs and a plate of at least two kinds of homemade cake or biscuit, all on a perfect tray cloth. Only her thin smile would betray the pride she took in her baking, for Professor Cruikshank would, with a wriggle of the lips and an inclination of the head towards the trolley, say only ‘almond shortbread’ or ‘Viennese fancies’ or ‘macaroons’. The manner amounted almost to a formal introduction, to which Sara felt the proper response would be to nod to the shortbread and reply ‘Sara Selkirk, how do you do’. But she learned that a long
oh
, carrying an inane degree of surprise, was all that seemed required. Once early on and after a particularly long and fractious session, Sara had tried to duck out of the tea, but Joyce’s ‘You’ll just take a wee cup,’ had been not an offer but a command. So tea was ritually enjoyed, Sara sensing that quiet compliments about the shortbread or the cake were appropriate even though the professor would often dismiss them in a way that also dismissed Sara as a competent judge—‘No, it’s heavy’, or ‘No, needs a drop more almond essence’. Then Sara would set off with her cello strapped on her back, invariably in the dark and most often in the rain, to catch two unreliable buses and an underground back to her own dreadful flat on the other side of the city, a journey about which Joyce knew and cared nothing.
It had never occurred to her at the time but Sara knew now that the arrangement must have been, if not quite a breach of rules, then at least not strictly official. There were rumours in college of the cruel routine kind about Joyce’s sexuality, just the kind of rumours that would circulate among the heartless parochial young of Glasgow about a single, middle-aged, unattractive and aloof woman. Of the substance of these rumours Sara neither experienced nor witnessed the slightest evidence. The discomforts of the lessons at the flat were rather those of finding her efforts perpetually inadequate to Joyce’s demands and the feeling, which in three years never quite left her, of slight embarrassment that she was there at all. Because her teacher’s manner towards her invited no deeper warmth, indeed Joyce seemed quite uninterested in her as a person and never volunteered anything about herself beyond the provenance of some of her recipes (‘Mother’s shortbread called for rice flour’), Sara felt always that in coming to the flat she was straying on to ground where she had no business to be. It was like eating a poke of chips off a high altar.