Stage Fright (7 page)

On the bedside table Stephen had left details of the hotel where he was staying.

I punched in the number. The phone was picked up on the third ring.

‘The Four Seasons Hotel. How may I help you?' said a singsong female voice.

‘Oh, hello. I wonder if I could speak to Mr Newley.'

‘Mr Newley. Certainly, madam.'

I heard the rapid pattering of fingers running over a keyboard. The voice returned.

‘I'm sorry. Mr Newley isn't here.'

‘He probably hasn't checked in yet. Can I leave a message for him, please?'

‘We're not expecting him. He rang a short time ago and cancelled his reservation.'

Of course there had to be a perfectly straightforward explanation. I was still trying to work out what it was when a minute or two later the phone rang. At first I couldn't make out who it was at the other end of the line. There was a sound of – what was it – gasping, sobbing?

‘Who is this?' I said sharply.

‘Cass?' The voice was high and quavering.

‘Melissa?'

‘I think there's someone prowling around the house. I heard a clattering noise outside.'

‘Oh God.' The hairs were standing up on my arms. ‘What can I do? Shall I call the police? No, hang on, I know. I can see your house from here. Go round and switch on all the lights. You have locked all the doors, haven't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm putting the phone down now, while I go and look through the binoculars, OK?'

I put Grace down on the middle of the bed and put Woolly Bear in her arms. Stephen's bird-watching binoculars were lying on the sill. I lifted them to my eyes and fiddled with the focus. I saw a clump of tussocky grass hugely magnified and realized that I was looking at the bottom of my garden, then I swung the binoculars too high and caught a pylon on the horizon. I pulled them down and at last I was looking at the cottage. It was surrounded by a windbreak of trees. The upper windows were fully visible, every one of them glowing with light, but lower down I could see only shreds of light through the trees. I scanned the lane by the house and this time I saw something – or thought I did: a patch of white near the ground which disappeared into the hedge as soon as I focused on it. Of course! Why hadn't I thought of that?

I went back to the phone.

‘Melissa? Could that noise have been the dustbin going over? There was a dog hanging around here yesterday. I nearly ran over it.'

‘Hang on a minute. I can see the dustbin if I go to one of the upstairs windows.'

Grace might have been momentarily diverted by all this activity, but now it struck her that she was being neglected. She began to cry.

‘Oh, Lord!' I picked her up and joggled her on my hip.

When Melissa came back, her voice was full of relief. ‘That's what it must have been. There's stuff strewn all over the patio. Silly of me. I don't know why I got the wind up so much.'

‘Are you all right now?'

‘Yes, yes.' But she didn't sound it.

Grace was pumping up the volume again and her face was going red. I made up my mind.

‘Look, why don't I come over for an hour or two.'

‘Oh, I couldn't let you…' she said hesitantly.

‘It's OK. Really. I'm having trouble settling Grace. A drive in the car is sometimes the only thing that will send her off. And I could do with a bit of company myself.'

It was only when I'd hung up that I realized that I might miss Stephen's call. A watched phone never rings, I told myself, and it would be better to distract myself by going over to Melissa's than to sit here brooding. I switched the answer-machine on. I wrapped Grace up in a shawl and took her out to the car. I left the lights on in the house and double-checked that I'd locked the door properly. The evening air was unexpectedly cool and a few stars had appeared now over towards Ely.

The Fens are so flat and level, the huge fields so precisely squared off that it's like driving across a giant chessboard. The
Alice in Wonderland
sensation was increased by the way that I first had to drive a couple of miles in the opposite direction and then double back. A railway line and a couple of drainage channels, one of them several feet deep, lay between the Old Granary and Journey's End. Melissa and Kevin's cottage was the only house beyond the railway line and the barrier was operated manually by a pump. By the time I'd slowed down for the red light Grace was already asleep. This was the Ely to Cambridge line, so it was busy. Far away, towards Cambridge, a light appeared. There's something fascinating about watching a train go by. I could hear a thrumming now as it rushed towards me. As it went past it pushed a gust of wind through the open window of the car. I caught a glimpse of people sitting by the lighted windows. Then the train was gone. The thrumming receded. The red light on the crossing turned to green. I got out and raised the barrier. I looked carefully both ways before I drove over the track. I never felt at ease doing this, especially with Grace in the car.

A rutted track led from the cottage to the level crossing. As I drove up to Journey's End, the door opened and Melissa appeared, outlined against the light. She came out to meet me. It was almost dark now, a rich soft blue August darkness. She was wearing a pale dress of some soft, filmy material and her face seemed luminous in the dusk. She looked spectral, almost wraithlike. I remembered how Belinda had described the stranger whose face had seemed to float in the dark. No point in telling Melissa about that when she was already feeling jittery.

I got out of the car and she gave me a hug and a kiss. The scent of roses enveloped me. It seemed like an emanation of the night air, and then I realized. ‘You've managed to get hold of some rose-water.'

‘Not exactly. I remembered I'd already got one of those rose-based scents. Tea-rose, it's called.'

‘Mm. It's lovely.'

I followed Melissa into the cottage. It was a converted agricultural labourer's cottage and had just one main room downstairs into which the front door opened. There wasn't much furniture, just a wicker sofa and chairs with cushions of a coral-red that toned in with a brightly coloured kilim and the terracotta tiles of the floor. The house belonged to a couple of anthropologists who had let it while they were away on a field trip. The few ornaments, a tribal mask, a sculpture of a mother and child in some dark, unfamiliar-looking wood were theirs. Kevin and Melissa hadn't left much of a mark, but then they weren't here very much. When they did have a day or two off from rehearsals, they drove down to London and stayed in their flat there.

When Melissa turned back towards me I saw that it wasn't just the dimness of the light in the garden that had made her face seem white. She really was very pale.

‘You look tired,' I said.

‘Oh, I'm all right. It's so sweet of you to come over. Fancy a cup of tea?'

‘Please.'

‘Why don't you pop Grace in with Agnes?'

‘Good idea.'

Melissa headed for the kitchen. I climbed the steep staircase to the first floor. There were just two bedrooms and a little bathroom. In the smaller bedroom Agnes was asleep in her cot. I tucked Grace in at the other end, arranging the cellular blanket so that it covered Agnes's feet, but left Grace's face clear.

I strolled over to the window and looked out. Light was spilling from the house, illuminating the garden like a stage set. Beyond the pool of light was darkness, but across the fields I could see the tall narrow shape of the Old Granary. Knowing that I'd be returning in the dark I'd left some lights on, one of them in my bedroom window. The house stood out like a beacon in the landscape. And suddenly I had the strangest feeling that if I could look in through those windows I'd see myself there, in bed maybe, or sitting at my desk. And Grace would be there, too, asleep in her cot. It was as if I was standing outside my own life looking in.…

‘Cass?'

I gave a start and turned to see Melissa was standing by the cot.

‘Are you OK?' she asked.

‘Oh, yes, yes, I'm fine.'

I went over to join her by the cot and we stood looking down at the children.

‘This is like old times,' she said.

I nodded. It was. During the long days and nights in hospital attached to drips ourselves, leaning over the incubators containing our babies, we'd become very close. Perhaps inevitably some of that intimacy had ebbed away. It had been a special time, like being on board ship together or meeting on holiday, a special time, and a wonderful time, but not an easy one. I remembered how it had been, listening to the sigh of the ventilator, scarcely daring to take my eyes off the little chest as it rose up and down, the feeling of that tiny curled hand closing round my finger. I couldn't risk going through that again, I thought, not yet anyway.

‘It kind of gives the lie to astrology, doesn't it?' I said. ‘Being born so close together you'd expect their personalities to be similar, wouldn't you? But they're not at all, really, are they?'

‘I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I didn't tell you, did I, that I looked up their Chinese horoscopes? They were born in the year of the tiger but they have companion animals according to when exactly they were born. Agnes's companion is the pig. It's nicer than it sounds. It means she's easy-going and well-balanced.' She leaned down and stroked Agnes's cheek with one finger.

‘What about Grace?'

‘Her companion animal is the rooster.'

‘That figures!'

‘The rooster and the pig get on well together. Maybe they'll be friends when they grow up.'

I don't believe in astrology, or even destiny, not really. I go along with Cassius: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.' And yet we can never really know the consequences of our actions. Things so rarely turn out as we expect and always they could so easily have been different. The road forks all the time and every decision leaves behind a trail of unrealized possibilities. What if I had stuck with Joe? Grace wouldn't exist, but I might have had other children with Joe, and their existence would have seemed just as inevitable as Grace's did now.…

Melissa broke in on my thoughts.

‘Are you all right, Cass?' She was looking concerned. ‘You seem miles away. Is there something wrong?'

‘No, no, I'm OK. Someone who was once very important to me is trying to get in touch. I don't know what to do.'

‘Come on, let's have that cup of tea and you can tell me all about it.'

And sitting together on the sofa downstairs with Mozart playing on the hi-fi I did tell her about it. Joe was twenty-five, I was only twenty-one and we'd met at Birmingham University where I'd just started my PhD. We'd only known each other a few months when we got married. Joe had come over from the States on a post-doctoral fellowship in computer science. When it was over he went back to the States and took a job with a small firm in the midwest. I stayed in England to finish my PhD and then I'd been offered my first academic job in Sheffield. That was when the trouble started. Joe hit the roof when he realized that I wasn't going to join him in Colorado.

‘I couldn't face living there,' I told Melissa. ‘If it had been New York or the West Coast, things might have been different. And Joe wouldn't come back to Britain.'

‘So it was stalemate,' Melissa said. ‘You weren't tempted to give in?'

‘Tempted, yes. But in the end, too stubborn. And so was Joe. Neither of us would back down. Oh, well, who knows, maybe it wouldn't have worked anyway. Perhaps as time went on we'd have found we didn't have that much in common. That's what I tried to tell myself.'

‘So what was he like?'

I reached for my bag, rummaged in it and brought out a photograph. ‘I dug this out of an old photo album.'

We looked at it together. It had been taken on the beach after a friend's wedding in Jersey. Joe was wearing tails and I was wearing a brightly coloured cotton dress, decorated with big, splashy flowers and pulled in tightly at the waist. Joe had pulled his tie loose and I was barefoot with a pair of white sandals swinging from one hand. We were walking hand in hand on a path between gorse bushes and sand dunes. Even with my shoes off, it was clear that Joe was an inch or two shorter than me.

‘It looks so romantic … like a scene from an arty French movie.'

‘I know.
Jules et Jim
 … it was just magical, that day. I haven't thought about it for years.'

‘When you said Joe was American, I imagined someone tall and blond and athletic. The beach-boy type. But I suppose – what's his surname? Baldassarre? – is that Italian?'

‘American–Italian, yes. More Dustin Hoffman than Paul Newman.'

‘Dustin Hoffman without the nose. More like Robert De Niro, really. He is handsome.'

‘I certainly thought so,' I said, looking at the sallow skin and the brown eyes under dark, arched eyebrows. ‘Of course this was – what? Sixteen years ago? Seventeen?'

‘You didn't stay in touch after the divorce!'

I shook my head. ‘I don't know anything at all about what's happened to him. Except that he's here in Cambridge right now.'

‘Aren't you dying to know what he's like now? You are going to meet him, aren't you?'

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, I knew that of course I would. Had I ever really doubted it? I looked at my watch.

‘I'll ring him now. It's not too late. I'll only be jumping every time the phone rings if I don't. Might as well get it over with.'

A look of surprise passed over Melissa's face. Then she said:

‘Go for it. Why not? The phone directory's over there. I'll leave you to it. I'll go up and check on the kids.'

The porter at St John's told me that Professor Baldassarre was staying in a college flat in Thompson's Lane and gave me the number. I punched it in quickly before I could change my mind. It was answered almost immediately.