Fearful Symmetry (19 page)

‘Knew just how to get to you, didn’t he?’ her father said, sounding almost gentle for the first time.

‘And then he said he was being victimised and couldn’t get hold of any money unless I helped him.’

‘Anna, didn’t you realise that Bren was wanted in connection with a very serious offence?’

‘But he didn’t do it. I just know he didn’t. He couldn’t hurt anyone.’

‘He managed to hurt the dog, didn’t he?’

‘But that was because he hadn’t got any money. That was why I said I’d give him some. I know it was stupid. I do know that now. I’m sorry.’ She looked so abjectly at her father that he took her hand and squeezed it. Andrew watched without surprise, knowing how daughters make you feel.

‘I gave him what I had on me, so he could get some dog food. I said I couldn’t get him any more till Saturday, till I could get into town to the building society. We agreed to meet in Parade Gardens, at the bit right down by the river next to the bridge. It’s a dead end, nobody goes there and there are lots of bushes. When I got there he hugged me and took my account book out of my bag so he knew how much I had. He asked for all of it, so he could get the dog’s scabs treated properly. He went on about helping Fonz, like he was really upset about him. He was really caring, kind, like when we first met. He said I was great.’ Her voice grew quieter. ‘So he waited while I went and got the money. When I got back it was still only eleven o’clock and I said let’s get the bus to Batheaston because the vet there has a morning surgery. Then he laughed and said no way, he had to catch a train. He was laughing at me. He said the dog would be all right anyway, the scabs didn’t bother him. He needed the money to get out of Bath and was I really so stupid I didn’t realise that.’

Andrew asked, very quietly, ‘Did he say any more about where he was going? Where did he say he was going, Anna?’

Anna looked at him wretchedly. ‘We’d got to the top of the steps out of Parade Gardens by then. You can see the abbey clock from there. I was saying, “Look, you’ve got to get Fonz better, he needs to go to a vet,” and he just said, “Christ, is that clock right? I’ve got to get down the station.” Then he started to drag Fonz off with him and the poor dog could hardly keep up. I grabbed his arm and I wouldn’t let go. I said, “Wait, you can’t, what about the vet?” He kept trying to pull away from me but I was holding on. He said, “Shut the fuck up about that. I’ll get him to a vet when I get there, okay?” People could hear us and everything.’

‘Did he say
where,
Anna?’

Anna burst into tears, nodding. ‘He was furious, he was trying to pull my fingers off his arm. It was so horrible. He said to me, “What do I have to do to fucking get away from you? Let me fucking go, you rich slag, and I’ll get him to a fucking vet.” ’

‘Anna?’

‘I was crying and screaming, “When, when?” People were watching. He started running and I went after him and then he turned and shouted back, “When I get to fucking York.” I let him go then.’

Adam Ward-Pargiter rose and took his sobbing, wounded, soft-hearted, over-privileged, immature daughter in his arms.

‘I am very grateful to you, Anna,’ said Andrew, with feeling.

CHAPTER
23

S
ARA HAD TAKEN
to running every day, letting her mind wander over the lives of other people, a mental tactic which partly deflected her from dwelling on her own emotional dead end. She would not concede to herself that she missed the opera group, so she thought about them instead. It was Adele she thought about most, trying to grasp Adele’s view of the world, a world where it made sense to switch on the gas before leaving work one day and return and light a match on the next. Had there been some significance for her in the hiss of the gas, or in the simple turning of one of the four dials along the cooker front? It still seemed wrong and inexplicable. Mixed with her dismay and grief for Helene was something like anger that Adele would do such a thing, which was gradually replacing her disbelief that the girl could have done something so destructive, yet so unknowingly. Andrew might have called it acceptance, but it was a more restless feeling than that.

The lanes through the valley were slippery now with fallen leaves and the wet hedgerows were darkening with the slime of dying grass; the trample of her angry feet squeezed out the smell of composting vegetation into damp air that reminded her of warm cabbages. Three miles a day became four, then five. Anything to exhaust her body and fill her mind with feelings and thoughts not directly concerning Herve or Andrew. She left her answering machine switched off and answered the telephone only when she felt like it.

Brittleness entered all her dealings with Herve, who was (and this did not help matters) virtually the only person she saw. Routinely now in their rehearsals he was irritated to waspishness, while she played with an expression on her face (a face, he marvelled, that he had once thought lovely but now more and more had the look of his mother in it) that was close to sneering. She had announced almost ten days ago that she would no longer come every day to Camden Crescent but only every other day, so Herve now made the journey out to Medlar Cottage on the days in between, resentfully carting his keyboard, synthesiser, amplifier, percussion deck and the day’s music down the stairs of the flat, across the hall and out to a taxi with an unvaryingly hostile driver. At Sara’s house he would even more resentfully unload his keyboard, synthesiser, amplifier, percussion deck and the day’s music, carry them through the awkward narrow gate, up the steep stone steps, across the front garden, into the house and through to the large music room at the back. Sara would watch, occasionally holding open a door for him but making it clear that she wouldn’t so much as push in a plug. And then he would go back to pay the driver. And approximately three hours later, after a morning’s thankless work with the unaccommodating prima donna, he would do the whole thing again in reverse.

Sara got back from her run one Monday morning at the end of October to find Herve (and his keyboard, synthesiser, amplifier, percussion deck and the day’s music) sitting in the garden. It had been raining. When he saw her he jumped to his feet.

‘Half an hour, half an hour I wait! More!’ He thrust out his wrist as if she could read his watch from twenty yards. ‘Forty minutes! And you not even here!’

‘Why should I be? You’re early,’ she replied. She could see at once what had happened. But she was already enjoying his distress and deliberately prolonging the confusion because Herve’s climbdown, when it came, would be the more humiliating if she gave him maximum rein to abuse her for her lack of punctuality and professionalism, as she knew he was about to. She walked past him into the house, with the languorous, well-toned swing of someone in very short shorts who has found a five-mile run no trouble at all and knows her buns to be worth looking at. Look, don’t touch. Herve stared after her, his jaw working. She turned and came back to the door.

‘Are you coming in or aren’t you?’ With her eyes she took in all the equipment on the grass in its black vinyl, rain-spotted covers. ‘I expect you can manage. I’ve got to shower and dress, of course, but you’re welcome to come in and wait.’

She disappeared upstairs. Wait he did, pacing the music room after he had lugged in and set up the equipment, again single-handedly.

She reappeared half an hour later on the dot of ten o’clock wearing a black silk shirt and black Levi’s, gleaming with demonic health. As she took the Strad out of its case, pulled out the end pin and tightened her bow, she noted with glee that he had gone almost beyond speech. Almost.

‘What is this! This rudeness! So rude to me! Eleven o’clock! An
hour
late now. Sara, this is not right, not professional, this I cannot—’

‘It is ten o’clock, Herve. Not eleven,’ she said, calmly tuning up. ‘The clocks went back on Saturday. The clocks go back one hour, for the winter.’

‘So why do you not say? To inform me? How am I to know this? You tell me nothing!’

‘I say nothing, Herve, because it is in all the newspapers, to remind people. It is on the radio. And the television. And if you’d been out once in the past thirty-six hours and bothered to look up once, you’d have seen it on the abbey clock, or the Post Office clock. Or the clocks in shops. Everywhere.’

‘I do not see such things.’

‘Fine. Suit yourself. You don’t have to. But it’s not my responsibility to see them for you.’

‘All the time I am working, or I am thinking of work. And I have nobody to take care of these things for me. Now Helene does not ring me so much.’

‘You’re supposed to be a grown-up now, Herve,’ Sara said in a mild voice. ‘Not a child. But yes, it must be
inconvenient,
Helene grieving for her only daughter and not feeling quite so chatty. Not running after you.’

It was thrilling, making someone this angry. She wondered if she could make him lose his temper. He seemed determined not to. He merely shrugged with the discomfort of the thought she was burdening him with and switched on the tape recorder. It was a rough recording, but the sound that came eerily from the speakers was Adele’s voice, intoning his wordless, witless notions.

‘
What
is that?’ Sara jumped up and switched off the tape recorder. ‘Oh, how could you! How
could
you? She’s dead! How can you use her voice like this?’ She was appalled enough to cry.

Herve was defensive. ‘This for me is not the point. This is the sound I want.’ He turned on the tape again and the strange inhuman voice floated around them again. Sara was struggling with tears. Herve gave an annoyed sniff and with a ‘tch!’ switched off the machine. ‘Ach! No, maybe it’s not so good. The acoustic. Too dead. The workshop no good for recording.’

‘The workshop? You recorded that in Jim’s workshop?’

‘Yes, I don’t want fuss, interference. So I visit Adele in the workshop,’ Herve said loftily. ‘Only one time. But, ach, the tape I cannot use.’

‘I think that amounts to exploitation. You know quite well she should have been offered a fee, don’t you? You can’t just get people to sing for you for nothing, you know that. That’s why you went to the workshop, so Helene wouldn’t know. That’s disgraceful.’

Herve shrugged. ‘You react too much, like always. I will not use the tape, even, so what fee? What harm? And Adele is dead, yes, very sad. But just an accident. Death is everywhere. We must accept it.’

With a sniff he jammed the music onto Sara’s music stand, with the clear message that he required her to start work straight away. Sara looked at it slowly without changing her expression of open contempt. Then caressingly she drew the cello against her, closed her eyes and as a slight smile settled on her lips, began to play. The grave, shiveringly rich sound of the Christiani cello of 1700 swept through the room, with a power that would have made salivating beasts lie down and turn over to be tickled. It was the first movement of Edouard Lalo’s Cello Concerto: touchingly, achingly Romantic, and Sara was playing it, to annoy him the more, with almost sexual joy.

Softly, she began to speak. ‘Like it, Herve? This is the sound this instrument makes, when it’s allowed to. Nineteenth century. Romantic, elegant. Grown-up music. It’s about the big things: big, unmanageable, awkward human things. Do you have any idea what I mean? Listen.’ She played on in silence for a while, not caring whether Herve was listening resentfully or allowing himself to be soothed. ‘People have died. Imogen Bevan died, and all you can do is think of yourself and cook up some nonsense about you being next, as if you were that important. And Adele is dead. So don’t talk to me about “just an accident” and try to sniff it away like it was something stuck up your nose.’ She drew breath, not wishing her anger to cut into the music. After a few measures she said, ‘Their deaths require explanation, at least. Adele is lost to the people who loved her. Do you hear that now, in the music? It’s about that pain, perhaps. Joy at what was. Loss, resignation. Mainly, it’s about love. There would be no grief, without love. In the end, it’s all about love. It’s not about ideas. Not about
notions
.’

She should stop here, she knew, she’d said enough to wound him. But a slightly nervous, dismissive
pfaw!
from Herve made her look up, and the sight of his petulant face struck a match in her which ignited with sudden, destructive heat.

‘And you know, Herve, it’s not that I’m stuck in the nineteenth century, although that’s what you’d like to think. You think emotions in music are outdated, don’t you? You’d like to say I’m just sitting in some cosy traditionalist time warp, wouldn’t you? But I love lots of contemporary music.’

She stopped playing abruptly and put down her bow. ‘Schnittke’s First Cello Sonata, for example.’ She played the opening few bars. ‘It’s wonderful. I can’t play it the way Natalia does, of course. Natalia Gutman: Schnittke wrote it for her. But it’s got emotions in it, all right. Wild, dangerous ones.’ There was no response from Herve. ‘So I expect it’s way beneath you and your notions. Anyway, it was written in 1986, after all. It’s over ten years old—how
passé
.’

There was a hellish silence, during which Sara must somehow, she realised afterwards, have made the decision to chuck the burning match into the dry gunpowder, although she was unaware of it at the time. For she said, ‘No, it’s not contemporary music I dislike, per se. It’s yours, Herve. Your “music”. Your pretentious, inhuman, self-regarding, tight-arsed—’

She got no further. With a wail and a spring towards her, Herve roared, ‘You!
You
dare to speak like this!
You
—you do nothing, nothing to make this music work! There is no collaboration! You are so . . . so head in air about those opera people, that Andrew—oh, I see all—and these dead ones, Adele and that other! They are dead! So you can do nothing! What about me? No, I am only game to you! And you accuse me! I need only some help from you, I get nothing. I travel all over, always alone, alone since my mother . . . my mother, she would be so angry at this. I have nobody now, I am alone, a stranger here, you put me in dangerous flat . . . I am so lonely . . .’ He sank onto the sofa and burst into tears.

‘Oh, stop that! Stop it! Don’t be ridiculous!’ she cried, more in desperation than anger, suddenly swamped with guilt. She grew flinty in her own defence. ‘That is complete nonsense. You know it is! You’ve pushed me to the limit! Stop it now! If we are to work together I cannot, I . . . I
will
not put up with this kind of thing.’

Herve drew in a deep breath and got to his feet. He spat his next words, but with his Slav dignity restored. ‘
If
. Yes, indeed, if. For myself, I am sick, sick of it all. I phone taxi now.’

‘Yes, do. And make them hurry,’ she snapped. As a sour silence curdled around them, Sara put away her cello in its case and Herve began snapping cables and leads apart, rather as if they were Sara’s neck. Unable either to stay in the room or say a civil goodbye she blurted, ‘I’m going outside,’ and stepped through the French window out to the garden. Almost before Herve had turned round to see the door swing shut behind her, she was lost among the dripping trees.