Night Music (31 page)

‘We’d better get back. You’ve got work.’ She touched his sleeve, then moved past him, treading back confidently towards their path. ‘Come on. You can have breakfast with us before Matt arrives.’

Keep your head down, Jan had warned him, when he had confessed his suspicions to her. You need every penny and employers don’t grow on trees.
Not when you have a prison record
, was the silent addendum. Byron watched Isabel striding ahead of him, humming quietly to herself as she moved carefully through the trees. That was what prison did to you: it reduced your choices, took away your ability long afterwards to behave like a normal human being. He would spend a lifetime suppressing his feelings, having to ignore the behaviour of people like Matt McCarthy, just so that he did not confirm what they suspected to be true.

‘You half asleep, Byron?’ He had been dozy all morning, his expression closed as if his thoughts were far away. ‘I asked you to pass me that pipe. No, not that one, the plastic. And shift that bath to the side of the room. Where’s Anthony gone?’ For some reason his son wouldn’t talk to him. He walked out of any room Matt entered.

Matt shouted his name, remembering Isabel’s visit to the jeweller in Long Barton the previous day. He hadn’t meant to follow her. When he came out of the bank he had noticed her parking and, curious, changed his route to see where she was going. It was easy to keep track of her: she stood out in the little town, her clothes too vivid, her hair a wild tumble. He watched her walk swiftly across the road, clutching a roll of velvet, and waited, trying to work out what she was doing. He had gone in afterwards. The man had the velvet roll and was inspecting something through an eyeglass. ‘That for sale, is it?’ he said, trying to sound casual. He could see a pearl necklace and a flash of something red.

‘Will be,’ said the jeweller. Matt had taken the man’s card and gone to sit in his van. She had not sold her jewellery because of his invoice. It was not his fault. It would be to give herself a fresh start, free herself from her husband’s memory, he told himself several times, but he had still felt jittery and bad-tempered.

Matt had made sure that Byron spent much of the morning moving waste from the old drawing room to the skip. The sight of the other man disturbed him at the moment, although he couldn’t say why. It was easier to have him working elsewhere. Matt and Anthony had begun in the bathroom. She had harped on about it so much that he had to make it look as if they were doing something. It had taken four of them an hour to get the cast-iron bath upstairs, which Matt had quietly resented. In a few months’ time, when he finally owned the house, they would have to move it again. ‘When you put the boards back down make sure you hit the nails into the joists, not the pipes, or it’ll come out of your wages,’ he had warned Anthony, who was wearing his ridiculous woollen hat.

Anthony was straightening up when Matt called him to help move the bath again. ‘Over there,’ he said, grunting with the effort. ‘Where the two feeds are showing through.’

His son began to haul at the cast-iron weight, then stopped. ‘Hang on, Dad. You can’t put it there.’

‘What?’

‘The joists. You’ve fed the pipes underneath. They’ll only be a few centimetres thick where the bath sits on them.’

‘Well, the bathroom’s not going to stay here,’ he muttered.

Anthony frowned, puzzled, and Matt realised he had said aloud what was running through his head. ‘I don’t understand,’ his son said.

‘You don’t have to,’ Matt said. ‘I don’t pay you to understand. Just get on with moving it.’

Anthony pulled at it again, and stopped. ‘I’m not being funny, Dad, but if Mrs Delancey really wants the bath here, surely we should be feeding the pipework round the sides?’

‘And you’ve just done a City and Guilds in plumbing, have you?’

‘No, but it doesn’t take a plumber to see that—’

‘Did I ask your opinion? Did you get a promotion I’m not aware of? The last I heard, Anthony, I employed you and Byron for the heavy lifting. Clearing. Brainless stuff.’

Anthony took a long, deep breath. ‘I don’t think Mrs Delancey would be very happy if she knew you were cutting corners.’

‘Oh, you don’t, don’t you?’

‘No.’

Something scalding washed through Matt’s veins. Laura had poisoned Anthony against him. All this answering back—

‘I don’t want to do this any more.’

‘You’ll do as I bloody tell you.’ He stalked into the middle of the room, blocking the exit, and saw uncertainty in the boy’s eyes. At least the boy knew who was boss.

‘Matt?’

Byron. He was always there when he wasn’t wanted. ‘What do you want?’

‘I belive this is yours.’

Matt had taken the pet-carrier before he knew what he was doing. The words, and their implication, settled heavily in the silence.

‘It was in the far skip,’ Byron said. ‘Second I’ve found here. Mrs Delancey won’t want any more unexpected visitors.’

Matt glanced at his son, and saw that Anthony hadn’t yet grasped the significance of what Byron had said. The boy was edging towards the door, apparently planning his escape.

‘I’m going home.’ Anthony took off his tool-belt and dropped it on the floor.

Matt ignored him. ‘Mrs Delancey, Mrs Delancey. Everyone here seems to be a mind-reader when it comes to her. Well, I don’t think Mrs Delancey would like it if she knew your history, do you? Plenty of people round here wouldn’t give you the chances I have – wouldn’t even employ you.’

He met the other man’s steady gaze. ‘Your problem, Byron, is that you don’t know when you’re well off.’

‘Matt, I don’t want to argue with you but I can’t just stand here and—’

Isabel had appeared in the doorway. ‘I’ve brought you all some tea,’ she said, edging round the door. Her hair was tied back, and she had changed into a pair of shorts, revealing long brown legs. ‘Anthony, here’s a cold drink. I know you don’t like tea. Oh, and Byron, you left your keys on the kitchen table this morning. You’d better have them. I nearly threw them away with the leftovers.’

‘Breakfast?’ Matt said, his brain reeling with this new information. ‘Breakfast with the Delanceys, eh? How cosy.’

Isabel put the tea tray on a crate.

‘Got your feet right under the table, haven’t you, Byron?’ Matt went on.

‘He’s been helping me. Tea and toast was the least I could provide,’ Isabel said.

Had she coloured? Or was that his imagination?

His son shoved past him contemptuously.

Matt felt giddy. ‘I don’t think you’d have been quite so hospitable if you’d known.’

That got him. Byron’s eyes closed briefly and his shoulders slumped.

‘Known what?’

‘You mean he hasn’t told you?’

‘It’s okay, I quit,’ Byron said quietly. ‘I can’t do this any more.’

‘What’s going on?’ Isabel demanded.

Byron reached for his keys, but Matt was too quick for him. ‘Isabel – you know I’ve always looked out for you? Right?’

‘Er, yes,’ she said, cautiously.

‘I would have told you before, but I wanted to give Byron a chance. But I don’t feel it’s fair for you to be the only one not to know the truth, especially as you seem to be spending time alone with him. Are you happy at the thought of a convict sitting down for breakfast with your little family or out in the woods alone with your son?’

He saw the flicker of doubt pass over her face. He always knew how to strike at someone’s weak point.

‘You didn’t know Byron’s been in prison? I thought he would have told you during one of your cosy little outings. What did you serve in the end, Byron? Nearly eighteen months, was it, for GBH? I seem to remember you did that bloke a fair bit of damage. Put him in a wheelchair, right?’

She didn’t ask if it was true. She didn’t have to: it was written all over Byron’s face. Matt registered the sudden loss of trust, the instant re-evaluation of him, and felt the exultation of victory. ‘I thought you’d have told Mrs Delancey . . .’

‘It’s all right,’ Byron said. ‘I’m going.’ As he picked up his keys, he didn’t look at Isabel. His face seemed cast in stone.

‘Yes, off you go. And stay away from this house.’ There was triumph in Matt’s voice. He turned to Isabel in the empty room. Somewhere below them, the front door closed.

‘There,’ he said, as if that decided something.

Isabel looked at him as if clouds were falling from her eyes. ‘It’s not your house,’ she said.

Eighteen

It was all pretty simple when you thought about it. A near-perfect solution. Matt placed the new pane carefully in its frame and started to work the putty with his thumb and fingers until it was warm and malleable. He pressed it carefully down the side of the glass with a precision born of long practice, the putty smooth, its edge clearly defined. The light bounced off the glass, and the woods were alive with the birds and other creatures. Sometimes you got so close to something you couldn’t see the wood for the trees. He couldn’t help smiling at his own joke.

While the putty was drying, Matt adjusted his tool-belt and took the specially moulded wood to the other window. This was going to be the most beautiful room he had ever built. He had never put so much of himself into anything. It was dual aspect, so that when they woke, their first view would be of the lake, mist rising from it in the early morning, birds taking flight across the trees. He had ordered the cornicing and plasterwork mouldings from a specialist Italian company, then cut and shaped each piece so that it fitted together like an intricate three-dimensional jigsaw. He had plastered the ceiling so expertly that there wasn’t so much as a fingermark on its surface. It had been almost worth bringing the original ceiling down for the pleasure of creating something so beautiful for her. He had relaid the floor, board by board, so that her bare feet would never need to feel an uneven surface. He pictured her, pulling that red silk robe round her as she slid out of their huge, rumpled bed. He could see her so clearly, the dawn lighting her face as she opened the curtains. She would turn to smile at him, the light outlining her body through the silk.

Why hadn’t he worked it out sooner? It had solved everything. He would move in with her and continue the work he had started. She wouldn’t have to pay for any of it, once they were together. Her money worries would be over. It was plain she couldn’t cope by herself. Since he had begun here, she had deferred to his judgement, been reassured by him. The house would be theirs. He would be master of his dream home. Possessor of Isabel Delancey. Laura would be fine in the coach house, with her coffee mornings and complaints. She was as fed up as he was. It was astonishing – he barely thought about her now. It was as if she had become an irrelevance. Isabel had pushed everything else away. She was everything. Everything he had ever worked for, everything he had been told he couldn’t have. Everything he had had to leave when his father was cast out of this estate. Sometimes he found it hard to work out where she ended and the house began.

With renewed purpose, Matt tapped in the piece of moulding, moving to some new internal rhythm. It was possible he could have cut part of it away, saved the main bit, but he had learned long ago that sometimes the only way was to cut out the dead wood entirely.

Byron woke to the sound of banging and registered brightness sliding under the door. It took him a second or two to grasp the significance of this, and then he checked his watch. It was half past seven. Matt was already at work.

Beside him, the dogs sat silent and expectant, their eyes trained on him. He pushed himself upright, rubbing at his face, his hair. Outside, the birdsong had lost the boisterous enthusiasm of the dawn chorus and mellowed.

‘You could have told me,’ he murmured to Meg and Elsie. ‘How the hell are we meant to get out now?’

He had barely slept, walking the woods until almost midnight and then, when he returned to the boiler room, lying awake for hours as he tried to work out what to do next. He thought of ringing Jan, but he had seen how things were for them in that little cottage and didn’t feel he could intrude. He still didn’t have enough money for the deposit on the farm cottage. He had wondered whether he had been too hasty in quitting the job, but he couldn’t have continued to go along with that man’s deception. He couldn’t have guaranteed that under Matt’s constant taunts he wouldn’t eventually have behaved in a way he would regret.

He thought again of Isabel’s face as his past had been revealed to her. Her surprise, followed by uncertainty.
But he seemed so nice, so ordinary.
Byron had seen it many times before.

‘Christ.’ He scrambled into the corner as the door opened, then closed behind Thierry and the puppy, which ran to Byron and leaped on to him.

‘Ssh – ssh!’ He was trying desperately to stop it yapping.

When he looked up again, Thierry was balancing on one leg. Byron pushed himself half upright. ‘Jesus, Thierry. You gave me . . . How did you know I was here?’

Thierry nodded at Pepper, the puppy, who was sniffing at its mother.

‘Did – did you tell anyone?’ He got out of his sleeping-bag, peering behind the boy to the door.

Thierry shook his head.

‘Christ. I thought it was . . .’ He ran a palm over his face, trying to steady his breathing. Thierry appeared oblivious to the fright he had caused. He knelt down with the dogs now, hugging them, letting them lick his face.

‘I – I was sleeping here for a couple of nights until my new place is ready. Please don’t say anything, okay? It might . . . look odd.’

He wasn’t sure that Thierry had heard him. ‘I didn’t want to leave Meg and Elsie. You understand that, don’t you?’

Thierry nodded. A moment later, he reached into the neck of his shirt and brought out a small square parcel, wrapped in a white napkin, which he handed to Byron. Byron opened it and found two pieces of lukewarm toast made into a sandwich. Then Thierry pulled a squashed carton of juice out of his pocket and handed that over too. Then he knelt down again with the dogs to tickle Meg’s belly.

Byron hadn’t eaten since lunchtime yesterday. He bit into the sandwich, which was filled with jam and butter. Then he laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder, moved by the unexpected act of kindness. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and the boy grinned. ‘Thanks, T.’