Eighty Days Red (26 page)

I began to panic when the furniture arrived.
It was the first time in my life that I’d ever had anything of my own that felt so permanent. I’d bought a large wardrobe, a set of drawers and a full-length mirror online from a shop in

East Sussex that made furniture from recycled timber, all of it solid, nothing flatpack. Neil, the shop’s manager who had sold it to me, had taken great pains to stress that it was made to last, all of which increased my panic at being now trapped in Dominik’s house with no option to make a quick getaway, suitcase in hand, as I had the last time things hadn’t worked out between us.

The wardrobe took four men to lift it up the narrow stairs to the bedroom, and as I watched them straining precariously to heft the thing along all I could think was how I would ever manage to move out again. I calmed myself down by remembering that it was just furniture, and I could always take an axe to it if worst came to worst and carry it back down the stairs again in pieces.

The thought made me immediately guilty, and I was extra nice to Dominik for the rest of the week. I wasn’t the only one suffering from the change to our circumstance, and he was coping remarkably well, barely raising an eyebrow as I slipped piles of teenage vampire fiction onto his shelves alongside his first editions. He firmly drew the line at acquiring a cat, but agreed to consider a goldfish, if I promised to look after it.

New York had been different. I had known from the outset that living together would be temporary, because Dominik was renting just for a few months to fulfil his scholarship obligations. I’d thought of the loft much as I would consider a hotel, which had perhaps been part of the problem.

Even when I moved in with Simón, though we were together for two years, I hadn’t made any changes to the place, bar shifting my clothes into one half of his enormous built-in closet and putting my toiletries in the bathroom. I hadn’t added so much as a photoframe to his apartment, and I had always thought of it as his apartment, never ours.

My newly found domestic status was highlighted when I received an email from my old friend Charlotte, the girl I had been close to when I first met Dominik and who had introduced me to the London fetish scene. I hadn’t seen or heard from her in more than two years, not since I had left London the first time in such a rush and moved to New York.

She had seen a review of the Groucho Nights gig at La Cigale and wrote that hearing about me again, after all this time, had prompted her to get in touch. She was now living in Paris, and had married Jasper – the male escort she had been casually seeing when I knew her in London – after falling pregnant with their first child who was now eighteen months old. A second had followed only a year later.

Jasper was one of the few men I’d known who could satisfy Charlotte’s voracious sexual appetite. But it seemed their casual affair had run to something deeper and Jasper had apparently given up escorting and was now at home looking after the kids and studying psychology, while she worked in the finance department at the British embassy.

I wrote back to tell her that I was now together again with Dominik, and Charlotte and I became engaged in a back and forth, discussing the whys and wherefores of relationships, and what it was like to settle down when you never planned to. For as long as I had known her, Charlotte had been resolutely single, even preferring to engage the services of a man of the night rather than pick someone up at a bar for a short-term fling. She had said at the time that she found it easier, and more honest, and that falling for Jasper, the escort who had become her regular paramour, had just been a happy accident.

‘Love,’ wrote Charlotte, ‘creeps up on you when you least expect it.’

The Parisians, though, were much more open than the British about their erotic natures, and while outwardly maintaining a veneer of respectability, Charlotte and Jasper did occasionally book a babysitter and visit Les Chandelles, or Cap d’Agde, the notorious nudist beach.

‘Full of swingers. You’d hate it. Stick with Torture Garden,’ she replied, when I asked her what it was like.
I couldn’t imagine coaxing Dominik into a military uniform or a latex outfit, though I thrilled at the thought of seeing him clad in riding boots and wielding a crop. He had never been one for the trappings of fetish, and preferred to live out his fantasies with the weight of his touch and words alone. Anything else would be a conversation for another time, but I doubted that it would ever include specialist bed linen or any sort of handcuffs, either of the fluffy pink or the thick leather variety.
We had made one addition to our toy box. Viggo had sent us a housewarming present. A Hitachi magic wand. Dominik had pulled it out of the box and held it up with a perplexed expression, and I had gladly given him a demonstration of how it worked.
Simón had also heard, through Susan, that Dominik and I were back together, and he had called me, out of the blue. It had always amused Simón that I hated telephone conversations, so when we were dating he’d made a point of always calling me, never texting or emailing, even if it was something banal, to check what time I’d be home for dinner, or to ask if I could pick up some milk at the local Korean convenience store.
I picked up the call before I’d had time to think about it, presuming that it would be Susan, calling to check how I was getting on in the studio. Viggo was helping me set up my own recording space for the New Zealand album. I’d been down there every day, rehearsing with the Bailly, getting back into the rhythm of classical music again after my rock hiatus. I’d found it impossible with other violins, but Dominik’s gift suited me so well it was almost as though the instrument sang as soon as I touched it.
‘Hey, you,’ Simón said, when I answered. It was the way that he always greeted me, two words that had been a sort of code between us, an entire conversation that meant ‘Hello, how are you, I’m home’, and a dozen other things in between.
‘Simón?’
‘You haven’t forgotten me, then?’
‘How are you?’ I asked. ‘You’re back in New York now? With the orchestra?’
‘Almost. Just passing through. I’m moving back to Venezuela though, for good.’
‘Conducting in Caracas?’
‘Not even that. A government job, believe it or not. Minister for Culture.’
‘Wow! Congratulations. So you get to go to lots of bull-riding events officially?’ ‘Every week. And get fat on coconut and caramel-flavoured desserts.’
‘Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.’
‘You should come and visit sometime. And Dominik,’ he added quickly. ‘Susan told me that you had got back together. And I’ve been keeping up with all your musical adventures, of course.’
‘It’s been a bit of a wild ride.’
‘It would make a good book.’
I smiled at the coincidence. ‘Dominik’s writing one. Not about me this time, he’s promised. But about the Bailly.’
‘I figured he would be. So he gives you the music, and you supply him with the words.’
‘I’d never thought of it like that, but I suppose so.’
‘I always knew you were made for each other. We never stood a chance.’
He said the words with warmth and humour, and I laughed. Simón had a habit of being right. It was one of the reasons why we’d broken up.
Speaking to him gave me a sense of closure. I was glad to hear he sounded happy as, although he’d ended the relationship, I’d always felt guilty that it was somehow my fault.
The more I thought about it, the more fearful I became that moving in with Dominik was a mistake, just like moving in with Simón had been a mistake. I just wasn’t the domestic type. I’d felt trapped with Simón, and I was terrified that I’d feel the same way with Dominik within a few months of sharing the same house day after day.
If it worked, then living with Dominik would be blissful, an answer to everything, the relationship that I always hoped I could have.
But if it didn’t work, then it would destroy everything we had.

In Dominik’s novel he had now written his way past the carnage and folly of the Second World War and reached the late 1960s, where Edwina Christiansen had become the latest in a series of unfortunate, doomed heroines and owners of the cursed violin.

Edwina was a single mother from Hannover in Germany. Her little boy was the result of an ill-advised love affair on the hippy trail when she was still in her early twenties. Following her return to Germany, she had married Helmuth Christiansen, a ship’s chandler in Hamburg, but the marriage had not lasted, his staid habits and the significant age difference too much to bear for her free spirits, and she and her young son had returned to Hannover where she worked as a technical manager and union representative at a car plant.

The violin, which she couldn’t even play, had come into her hands following the death of a distant relative and no one else in her family had laid claim to it, so it now rested at the back of one of her cupboards, and Edwina was totally ignorant of its worth.

In Dominik’s mind, Edwina looked a bit like Claudia, the graduate student he had had an affair with shortly before he had encountered Summer. It always helped him to have a mental image of his characters and there was no better inspiration than stealing from real life. Claudia’s hair was naturally light brown but she always dyed it bright red, a gaudy, unnatural colour which left faint traces on his sheets and pillows, and caused her to avoid the rain like the plague to avoid seeing the colour drip across her face, vulnerable as it was to the prolonged assault of water.

He had been writing through the night and a satisfied form of weariness was now spreading through his limbs, every typing finger heavy as lead as he searched for the right words to describe the way Claudia’s thighs met at the intersection of her shaven delta.

He had left Summer in bed upstairs shortly after midnight. They had made frantic love until she had coiled up in a ball, spent, sated and fallen asleep with a childish grin of delight illuminating her face. Dominik had tried to sleep, but his mind and body still felt on edge, feverish, and he’d walked out the bedroom and made his way to his study to see if the electric buzz still animating him could translate into his writing. It had and the night had flown by like a dream. But now it was taking its revenge, and he knew that the time to rest couldn’t be delayed any longer.

He set the computer to ‘sleep’ and pushed his chair back and was about to walk upstairs when he heard the sharp sound of the door flap. Checked his watch. The postman was doing his rounds early.

Out of habit, he lumbered towards the front door to pick up the mail.
It was the usual mix of magazines he subscribed to, junk mail, bills and a lone postcard. From Bali.

He turned the card over. It was from those old dissolutes, Edward and Clarissa. Wishing he was there for ‘the party that never ended’. Dominik smiled. Some people would never change, it seemed. They would roam the planet in search of pleasure until the apocalypse came, he guessed. There was something endearing about that.

As he put the rest of the mail on the lowlying phone table, he noticed that Summer’s Bailly and its battered case was not in its usual place in the corner where she always left it. He knew for certain it had been there the previous evening.

His heart jumped.
He rushed up to the bedroom, skipping stairs in his haste, hoping that for one reason or another Summer might have taken the instrument there. Not that she ever practised upstairs, having shortly after her arrival shifted most of the furniture in the ground floor back room that led to the garden to convert it into an improvised rehearsal space.

All sorts of doomsday scenarios flashed through his mind. Summer had been unusually quiet for the past few days, and more than once he’d caught her staring into the distance with a pensive expression on her face. Could she have had second thoughts? After everything, did she really not think their relationship could work?

He pushed the door open, his eyes getting accustomed to the surrounding darkness. He looked all around the room. No violin case.
He turned to the bed, expecting to see Summer’s shape under the covers. But the bed sheets

were thrown aside and the bed was empty.
The world stopped.
Collapsed around him.
In a blind panic, Dominik ran through the house, checking every room, blood rushing to his

head.
She was gone.
He was back in the ground floor hall, where he had begun his search. He moved a hand to

the door to steady himself. He knew – he had always known – that Summer was a free spirit. That tying her down to a conventional relationship would only drive her away. He had been selfish and stupid, and once again he had lost her.

He sank down, his back against the door. His hand fell to his sides and he felt something long and smooth beneath his fingers. It was one of Summer’s bows, lying across the mat. She must have dropped it in her hurry to escape. He hadn’t noticed it earlier as the pile of mail had fallen over it and concealed it from view, and he had failed to note its presence when he had distractedly picked up the assorted envelopes and magazines.

He ran his fingers along its length, thinking of Summer. Beautiful, fragile, proud. The woman he loved. The woman he had lost once more. And right there, his fingers gripping the only piece of Summer he had left, Dominik thought his heart might break.

He knew straight away the bow was not in its normal place.
It had been positioned as if it was pointing towards the door.
A sign?
He opened the front door. The road was quiet and free of traffic at this early hour. He

checked his watch. It was only seven in the morning.

On the narrow pavement, just a few yards from the house’s front door, he noted a darkbrown plastic guitar pick.
He bent over and picked it up.
The logo of Groucho Nights was carved across it, a cabalistic sign that Summer’s sister Fran had unearthed in a book of esoterica and that had tickled the imagination of Chris and his fellow musicians.
They’d had a few thousand of the picks produced and had traditionally thrown them into the audience at the climax of their final encores. It was a cheap and effective promo trick.
On the other side of the house, the side turning that led to the depths of the Vale of Health was like a pocket of darkness.
Dominik caught sight of another of the small guitar picks, on the opposite pavement, just a few footsteps from the kerb, in the direction of the towering shape of the Royal Free Hospital which stood at the bottom of the steep hill. He crossed the road, leaving the door of the house open behind him and still wearing the flip-flops he had been typing in throughout the night. A further two minutes down the road he found a third pick.
It was a trail.
A message from Summer?
He quickly backtracked to the house, changed into a pair of trainers and picked the first sweatshirt lying around in one of the downstairs rooms, slipped it on above his top, seized his keys and locked up behind him, and went in search of further guitar picks littering the downward path of the hill.
As he did so, his memory was working overtime. Trying to remember the fairy tale, if it was one,
Red Riding Hood
or
Pinocchio
or
Hansel and Gretel
or yet another, where a trail of small stones – or was it seeds? – had directed a character in the right direction.