‘Joyce, that isn’t the point right now—’
‘Reading X-rays is basic. There he goes, pointing away at the kidneys, can’t even tell I’ve only got the one. I had one out in 1937. That was the year of the Abdication you know. Och, ruddy doctors, honest to God—’
‘Joyce!
Listen, Joyce, tell … Yvonne then, tell
anyone—
I think I know what’s wrong with James. I think he might ttch have got er ot poi nin g, it’s a thing you g t tt sksk grai s that makess you chcch—Jo ce, ar yo on a mo ile?’
‘Eh? Oh, uh-uh. Right enough. Uh-uh, I know what it is, I remember now. That’s what the thing was in Egypt, the epidemic. A while ago, mind. Did you know I was tutor to the Egyptian royal family?’
‘Joyce, I have to go. can’t tt sksk chch now but it might well be and you’ve got to find and stop chch tt ssk ssk the br cad and make sure James gets—’
She was interrupted by soft, pitiful wailing. ‘Oh, Pretzel! He’s dead! My wee Pretzel!’ Joyce said something else but Sara was pushing in more coins and she couldn’t hear what.
‘Hello? What? Did you hear me? Are you chtt sts still there? Hello?’ A pile of coins was building up on the counter beside her as Charlie came and went. She pushed in more. ‘Joyce, I can’t ssh chtt chtt you. What’s that noise in the background? Wha ssh chttt chttt are you?’
‘I can’t hear you krr krr chtt I tt you James isn’t here.’
‘Isn’t there? What? Chtt krrkrr you’ve got to tell them it’s ss ch er got ch er ch. Hello?’
‘Nobody’s here. James IS IN THE RUH,’ Joyce shouted.
‘What?’
She was running out of time again. As she
jammed more coins in she screamed, ‘What? Tell
them
, then! Joyce? You need to tell the hospital. Then the Sulis—make sure they know. Can you hear me?’ The line clicked and the dialling tone buzzed in her ear. Charlie stood nearby, concerned.
The members of the orchestra were slowly moving about, picking up their instruments, combing hair, waiting. Two minutes. Frantically, Sara summoned the steward again and together with Charlie she managed to get the number for international directory enquiries. She dialled it, got through at once on a perfect line and after only a few seconds’ wait heard a mechanical voice giving her the number of the Royal United Hospital, Bath.
The agitated concert hall manager was now at her elbow. ‘The audience is seated, Fräulein Selkirk. The orchestra is ready to go on.’
‘Just a minute. I’ll only be a minute.’
‘Fräulein Selkirk, the recording team is ready. And the audience must not be kept waiting—’
She was through, but the line was echoey. The Austrian manager had been joined by the orchestral manager.
‘Eh, Miss Selkirk, is there a problem? Would you get ready to go on stage, please?’
‘RoyalUnitedHospitalhowmayIhelpyou?’ said someone who sounded like a toy, her voice miniaturised by the bad line.
How may they help her? Christ, where would they like her to start? She took a deep breath, raised a finger to indicate one minute to the furious and now sweating concert manager and said, ‘I’m ringing about a friend of mine. I’m ringing from abroad. Can I speak to him? James Ballantyne.’
‘What ward?’
‘I don’t know. The name is James Ballantyne.’
She paused to shove in coins.
‘When was he admitted?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know that.’
‘Miss Selkirk, I really have to ask you—’
‘One moment.’
‘SSH!
I won’t be long, promise. Sorry.’
After eight rings and more coins a female voice said,
‘GeneralEnquiriesvisitorshelplinehowmayIhelpyou?’
‘I want to speak to a patient but I don’t know the ward. James Ballantyne.’
‘Fräulein Selkirk, Sir Simon is asking if all is well and wishes you please to get ready to go on stage at once.’
Sara answered by cramming more coins in the box.
‘Hello? I’m calling from abroad, can you possibly hurry?’
‘Onemomentplease. When was the patient admitted?’
‘I don’t
know
, I already told someone that—’
‘Do you know what the patient was complaining of?’
‘Fräulein, with Sir Simon’s approval I am now sending the orchestra on stage. You must come now.’
‘No, well, I mean, not for sure—that’s why … Look, the name is James Ballantyne.’
‘I don’t need
your
name onemomentplease.’
‘That’s the patient’s name! James Ballantyne!’
‘Onemomentplease trying to connect you.’
More rings, then ‘Ralph Allen Ward Nursing Assistant Harris speaking.’
The last members of the orchestra were now disappearing through the doorway leading to the stage and the last of Sara’s coins was disappearing into the box.
Her voice and hands were now shaking. Trying not to
scream, she asked to speak to James Ballantyne. There was a pause, during which Sara heard the distant applause as the leader took his chair. Tuning started. Simon would be waiting to follow her on, his benign face thunderous.
‘Are you family?’
‘No, I’m a friend. I’m ringing from abroad, so if you could—’ Christ, she must be mad, she couldn’t stand here a moment longer. She had to go and play the Dvořák concerto. Oh God she couldn’t …
‘And the name of the patient again?’
‘James Ballantyne. I’m a close friend.’
‘Pardon me? Oh er, yes. Oh yes, right. Just a minute, I’ll just get Sister to speak to you.’
While Sister was being got, Sara realised that she needed to pee again, and wouldn’t be able to.
‘Hello, Sister Banda speaking.’
‘Hello, look, could I please speak to someone about James Ballantyne—’
‘Oh yes, I’m sorry, you’re a friend, is that right? You haven’t heard, obviously.’
‘Heard what?’
‘I’m very sorry to have to tell you by phone, but I have to give you some bad news. I’m afraid your friend passed away yesterday. There were complications following surgery. And as there don’t appear to be any—’
‘Oh no. No, no no no—’
‘I am sorry, but the end was—’
Sara had dropped the phone so the sister’s careful words, that death when it came had been peaceful, pinked tinnily out of the swinging receiver, unheard.
I
T HAD BEEN
a choice between throwing up on the stage or managing to wait until she got off the platform and back into her dressing room, so Sara retched luxuriantly into her dressing-room loo with a sort of numb self-congratulation that she had held on until the end of her fourth return to the stage. The outrageous bouquet that she had just accepted lay slumped against the wall where she had flung it, fearing she might be sick into it. The audience was still applauding, as if determined that she should go back for a fifth time, but gave up at around the same time as she finished groaning and was lifting her head to the mirror.
She did not know how she had managed to play the Dvořák at all but it appeared, as if it mattered, that she had played it rather brilliantly. She had been thinking only of James, though thinking was not quite what it had been, nor had it been totally its supposed opposite, feeling. It had been thinking and feeling fused into suffering of such intensity that it amounted to a kind of
knowing
. She splashed cold water on her face and tried to stop shaking. So, she thought, looking at her wrecked face, she had played the Dvořák brilliantly because she had played it in
pain, knowing both love and loss, or rather getting to know them again. The good years since Matteo’s death seemed less like the achievement of happiness than the mere wandering of her attention. How could she have forgotten what it was like? How was it possible that she loved James enough to feel like this, but not enough to have saved him? Love was powerless except to create pain. She pushed Andrew out of her mind. Would James have considered that tonight she had loved the Dvořák enough? Yes, probably, but she never would again.
She showered and changed into jeans and retched once more, and called through the dressing-room door to yet another enquiry from Charlie.
‘Truly, Charlie, I’m all right. You go on with the others, I won’t join you for dinner. No, I’m going straight back to the hotel, I’ve got a car.’ Somehow, to join the others and send the news of the death of James Ballantyne round the orchestra would make it real. For as long as only she knew about it, she felt she could contain it, that she could make it somehow not quite the case. She stood no chance of bearing it at all unless she could fool herself that James was becoming dead a little bit at a time, in tiny pieces, until she was able to cope with the fact in its entirety.
She ought to tell Simon. He had been more puzzled than angry at her behaviour before the performance, though clearly quite delighted
by
the performance, but she had fled the minute she had got off stage and for that alone Sara knew that she owed him a proper explanation. But she could not trust herself to give it now. The kindness in his eyes would finish her, and she had to keep a hold on herself in order to negotiate a way of getting home tonight rather than waiting for her flight in the morning. She
would write to him, she decided, she would write him a letter after she got home, which was the thing she had to concentrate on doing now.
At the Osterreichischer Hof she set the desk staff into a flurry by demanding information about flights that night, went up to pack and came down again fifteen minutes later. No flights that night from Salzburg.
‘From somewhere else, then!’ she almost shouted. ‘What about Munich?’
There was no scheduled flight that night from Munich to Heathrow, but there was a charter to Stansted, leaving at 1.30 am. She could make it, just, as there was a train to Munich at 10.45. Would Madam like to book the flight? There was availability.
‘Two,’ Sara said, patiently. ‘Two seats. I must have a seat for the instrument.’ The concierge nodded without raising his eyebrows. Cellists, he’d seen them come and go: Cohen, Wallfisch, Isserlis. Very nice, some of them. Very fussy, all of them, about their instruments. This one was positively easygoing, next to some.
People who are travelling to attend to a death are the most efficient travellers, being if not quite intolerant, then indifferent to everyone else; to be in public with a privately breaking heart induces a particular stand-offish dignity. They must be constantly moving, as if by concentrating all energy on the process of getting there they can shrink the distances between destinations. Sara sat upright in the train, comforted by the speed of it. She drank water and ate peanuts, until she was sick again. As she brushed her teeth in the lurching train cubicle she deliberately did not look at her face, anticipating that it would show her her own wretchedness. In the plane she managed to doze
for a short time, so that when the flight landed at Stansted she felt able to drive and hired a car.
As she drove out of the airport and into the dark countryside she found herself relaxing and smiling until she realised that she had been travelling under an odd, vague delusion that her unhappiness, too, would end when she arrived. She had been unconsciously taking comfort from the knowledge that she was drawing closer to the place where James would be as if she believed, in some ludicrous way, that he would be waiting for her, interested to hear all about her appalling journey. For the first time she wanted to cry. Instead, she turned her mind to practical considerations. James would (she recoiled from the thought of James’s body) still be somewhere at the hospital, she supposed. She had not found out exactly when he had died, but now that she thought about it she realised that Tom must already know and could even be in Bath.
She reached the edge of the city at four o’clock in the morning. Now it was suddenly intolerable that she had arrived, for she was too early to do anything. As well as exhausted and on the edge of hysterical tears, she now also felt stupid. What difference could it have made to James if she had spent one more night in a comfortable hotel in Salzburg and arrived home on her booked flight—she added the hours up—only ten hours from now? Now there would be at least a five-hour wait in her empty house before she should even try to get in touch with Tom. The streets were deserted. She had rushed home as if James would be waiting and now there was nobody here, nobody who knew what she had done and nobody who cared. There was no Andrew and never would be, not after what they had said to each other. He did not even know about
James. Nobody did. There should be some sign that would show people what had happened, and how somebody felt about it.
Behind Bathwick Hill the pink and silver promise of light was stealing into objects and buildings. The day had almost begun, the first whole day and the first of thousands that Sara would see in the knowledge that another person dear to her was dead and would not see it too. She seized at a reason for her frantic journey home. She would watch the sunrise from James’s look-out at the top of the Sulis garden, the place where she had last heard him laugh. She would think about him for a while and leave her flowers there. She would place them just where he had lain, the beautiful, wilting flowers she had been given for the performance that only James, because she loved him, had made it possible for her to give. How unbearable it was proving to be, loving. No private ceremony with flowers altered that, yet she would leave them in the way that people marked the place of a fatal event, a gesture she had never until this moment understood the point of.
T
O
S
ARA’S SURPRISE
the gates to the Sulis were open, so she drove straight up and parked. The house was in complete darkness, not even an outside light shone. In the half-dark she set off, making for the terraces that led up to James’s gazebo. She supposed, not really having thought about it until now, that if she were challenged by anyone she would simply tell them to fuck off and leave her alone, feeling somehow quite able to insist that wandering round someone’s garden at four o’clock in the morning carrying a bunch of flowers was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
The stillness of the garden was broken by a disturbance, or more the sense of a disturbance, from the direction of the swimming-pool temple. Until now it had not occurred to Sara to be frightened, but she did now dimly think, though curiously without much concern, that the person who had murdered Warwick Jones less than a week ago was still at large and might have killed for no reason. Turning towards the temple she saw a faint gleam of light, and as she watched there came a faint sound like a
hush!
Then the light broke into dancing specks and darts which lit up the pillars and sparkled out across the dim stone steps almost
to the grass in front of the entrance. Somebody had just dived into the pool. Or was drowning.