Fearful Symmetry (6 page)

‘And for the duration of the project they’re staying here with me. They’ve been getting to know our lovely city and Cosmo’s been doing all his research. And Poppy’s managed to get a little job as well. And the house is just so alive again! Which is so lovely, I do so love being surrounded by all their
creativity
.’

In another silent exchange Valerie and Jim agreed that, even for Helene, this was going a little far.

Poppy was now leaning forward with her round bottom firmly embedded in the back of the sofa cushions. She stretched up, straightening her arms and planting her hands on her knees, and looked round. Valerie noted how much Poppy would benefit from a thorough waxing, starting with the upper lip.

In a deep, unsmiling voice she said, ‘We’re totally committed to this project, Cosmo and I. We think it’s just tremendously exciting as a project, and we’ve got tons of ideas. And of course we want to get tons of input from you too. After all, it’s a community opera. And I’ve got lots of ideas about how we can really get the
whole
community involved. So, if I can kick off with a few logistics, I’m making myself available to the project on a daily basis, but please try to avoid Tuesday and Thursday mornings unless it’s an emergency. You can access me at any other time, whatever, okay?’

She stared round in the silence that followed. What kind of emergency should we be expecting in a community opera? Valerie was wondering.

‘I mean, please don’t think I’m getting all kind of bureaucratic about it, but I’m actually working two nights a week on Mondays and Wednesdays and it’s quite demanding and it might get kind of manic if I don’t just set some boundaries now and I hope everyone understands, okay?’

‘What do you do, Poppy?’ Valerie asked pleasantly. ‘Helene said you were in the theatre. Are you working at the Theatre Royal? Stage managing or something?’

Poppy closed her eyes and raised her thick eyebrows. Then she opened her eyes and looked languidly at Valerie, shaking her head from side to side slowly.

‘No, actually. I was doing a bit in London, prop-making and stuff, just filling in while I was doing my course. But there’s no real work in theatre these days, that’s why I was doing this course. I mean, I’m practically a fully qualified acupuncturist and homeopath. Now we’re in Bath I’m doing two nights a week in a care home for the elderly. The Circus Nursing Home, just along from here.’

‘Right,’ said Valerie, knowing she had just heard a prepared speech and thinking, Aha, so she can’t get a theatre job, and they must need the money. She looked over at Jim, who was stroking his beard, but his raised eyebrows told her that he hadn’t clocked that one.

Cosmo was standing up now. The earlier unsightly blush that had spread over his face had settled back into an uncomfortable mottle over his cheeks. The rest of his skin looked too fine and white, and his lips too fat, red and petulant for a man. He was not even successfully boyish, since his long, downy hair was receding fast from his high pink forehead and looked like a thinning, damp, mohair shawl slipping slowly off the back of his head. His bulging eyes, crustily myopic, together with his narrow sloping shoulders, round belly and short legs, gave him the air of a viable but unpromising foetus, rather startled to find itself on its feet and wearing a jacket and baggy trousers.

‘Right, folks. I’m, ah, Cosmo. As you’ve heard.’

He was looking at the ceiling, resolutely addressing the air.

‘I’m, ah, delighted to be here. Helene suggests kindly that you may want to know a little about me. Well, I’ve been involved in music from, ah, birth, you might say. My father’s a musicologist, now retired, and my mother taught maths. I always say I got the best out of both of them, as I’m the only child! Anyway, usual stuff, degree in music, ah, composing since university, various things, choral, ensembles, piano. Some London performances, including Marthe Francis’s debut recital at the Wigmore, some youth commissions, based in London, went to Prague earlier this year. And the reason I’m now in Bath is thanks to my teacher and mentor Herve Petrescu’—he paused to allow the name to impress them deeply—‘who was the reason I went to Prague. That’s about it.’

He gave an embarrassed, slightly sardonic smile in Poppy’s direction. ‘It was hard to believe at first that the Circus Opera Group of Bath would approach Herve Petrescu in Prague for suggestions for their community opera maestro, but you did, and so there you are. And here I am.’

He gave a little mock bow to a little mock applause, led by the beaming Helene. Then, with an almost right-angled bend of the wrist, he pressed the back of one hand into the small of his back, took two or three steps away from the group and turned on his heel to face them. He raised his other hand, pressed his fingers and thumb together and, frowning at his fingertips as if they held something small, interesting and wriggling, began.

‘My music, you see, depends on a degree of, ah, perceptive prominence so that the least identifiable or neutral processes mainly act on developments related to time, while the, ah, most identifiable or marked processes are perceived as patterns.’

Poppy gazed at him rapturously and nodded encouragement. Cosmo licked his lips.

‘So conceptually, my music, my art, corresponds to crossing a new perceptive threshold, which takes on an almost thematic, ah, function. Only almost.’ He smiled, sensing that his listeners needed that reassurance. ‘But, and this will be clear to everyone, this implies, I feel necessitates, a degree of rethinking vis-à-vis the theme, apropos the principle of textual, and contextual, integration.’

Adele, who had been sitting in the window seat with the platter of biscuits on her lap, announced flatly with her mouth full: ‘Fourteen.’

Cosmo looked helplessly at Poppy, who addressed the room earnestly: ‘And that’s why this process of consultation is so crucial. So, right, are there any questions for Cosmo or myself? Or can we take that as all agreed, then?’

Poppy and Cosmo exchanged a look across the silence. Cosmo folded his arms and for the first time looked almost relaxed.

‘Great. Looks like everyone’s happy, then. So, we’re not going down the Jane Austen route, right? And we’re definitely not having the Romans and the, ah, hot springs. Great.’

‘Thirteen,’ came the slightly muffled voice from the window seat.

A
S
A
NDREW
came through the door Valerie yelled from the kitchen, ‘Andrew, get in here!’

Christ, how could she know? He entered the kitchen tentatively.

She was bringing a little casserole out of the oven.

‘Just sit down while I tell you. Here, chicken and rice. You must be starving.’ She put the dish on the table, lifted the lid and plunged a fork into the steam. She began to stir the contents round with such speed and ferocity that the fork became a blur. But she was smiling.

‘Gnash. Gnash. It’s brilliant, isn’t it? Come on, eat!’ She clanged the fork against the side of the dish and pushed it over.

Andrew, dumbly suspicious, sat down.

‘Beau Nash.
Brilliant
theme. Good title, isn’t it,
Nash
? Or maybe just
Beau
? Anyway, much better than anything on Jane Austen or the Romans.’

Andrew chewed and nodded, interrupting Valerie only to thank her for getting him some supper. ‘It’s very nice. Thank you. Especially since I had to miss the rehearsal. I’m sorry I was kept late.’

‘Doesn’t matter, eat up. I’ll tell you all about it.’

Andrew had never seen Valerie quite like this. He managed not to groan when she told him that she had suggested that Cosmo write in a large solo cello part, and that Poppy had made a note of it.

‘You’ve got to meet him. And Poppy too, of course. He’s obviously brilliant, obviously going places,’ she said. ‘He’s been studying with someone, not sure of the name, obviously the best, anyway. Harvey something.’

‘Herve. Herve Petrescu,’ Andrew said. ‘Personally I think he’s overrated. But sure, only the best work with the wonderful Herve Petrescu.’ He could not share with Valerie the news he had heard from Sara that evening over the bloody cup of tea, about the new commission and Herve’s imminent ‘residency’ in Bath. Nor could he share the moment when Sara had told him, apparently regretfully, that Petrescu would be taking up most of her time. Nor did he say that his first wild hope, that Sara was regretful because long rehearsals with Herve would prevent her spending most of her time with Andrew, had quickly died, because he had detected in Sara some considerable susceptibility where Herve Petrescu was concerned. And least of all did he mention to his wife the stomach-souring jealousy that he now felt at the very mention of his name.

‘What does he look like, this Cosmo character?’

‘Oh, he’s young, younger than me. Than us, that’s to say. Late twenties, early thirties. Not conventionally good-looking. Brown hair.’

‘And the girlfriend?’ Andrew asked, trying to steer his mind away from the thought of Sara and Petrescu together.

‘Older than him, quite an organiser. Did stage management originally. She was doing a course on aromatherapy and stuff when they came here, now she’s working in a nursing home. But a sweet girl, rather plain. I expect she mothers him, yes, that’s what he’d need. A bit of mothering from an older woman . . .’

Andrew scooped up the last of the rice and managed to maintain his rhythm of placid chewing. Was it because, after his evening with Sara, he was better attuned to hear it, or was it his imagination that was making him think that in Valerie’s voice he was now picking up just the tiniest edge of the same susceptibility?

CHAPTER
8

P
LEASE,
J
AMES,
PLEASE
.
I can’t have him here. I just
can’t
.’

‘Sara, darling, isn’t it a heaven-sent opportunity, to have him there with you? There’s bags of room, isn’t there? I can picture you both having a lovely creative time of it, a “period of intensive rehearsal”, in your country retreat. And then you get your pinny on and cook a nice little supper and warm his slippers . . . and then after that, I mean after you’ve done the washing up, well . . .’

Speaking from Brussels, the mockery in James’s voice travelled well.

‘Don’t! Yes, I’m sure
he’d
love it, I know all about his reputation. Yes, all right, there are five bedrooms and an acre of grounds, that’s not the point. It’s so embarrassing. Of course I can’t have him staying here. Please can he stay in your flat? Camden Crescent would suit him perfectly.
Puh-lease
, James? I mean, you won’t even be there.’

‘And he won’t mind having an address that’s a well-known scene of a recent serious crime? Possibly popular with terrorists? Probably on the open-top tour bus route by now? Yes, we’ve heard. Andrew Poole rang yesterday.’

‘Oh, James, look, you shouldn’t be flippant. That poor woman’s dead. Anyway, Andrew knows who did it.
Thinks
he knows. What? Oh, because she had a row with someone in a shop. It could have been you or me.’

She could hear James giving a slightly guilty murmur at the other end. Or was Tom giving him a shoulder rub?

‘Look, the point is I can’t have Herve at Medlar Cottage.’

‘You’ve slept with him, haven’t you?’

‘No! No, I
haven’t
! And you’ve got a nerve! I have
not
slept with him. And so what if I had, anyway?’

There was a muffled laugh, followed by a sigh.

‘James, tell Tom to stop that at once. James? James, you are the limit. Stop laughing at me. Why are you so chirpy, anyway? I thought you were supposed to be exhausted and stressed-out with that new works for piano thing you’re doing.’

‘Oh, I am, I am,’ James giggled. ‘I can’t think why I was asked to do it, after the things I’ve written recently about contemporary music, but there you are. Never again, though. I know now why they get someone different to do it every year: it’s because nobody would do it twice. I’ve got to do all these programmes, four recitals featuring three new young composers each, but for God’s sake, don’t ask me if they’re any good. I’ve no idea. In the end you might as well pick them out of a hat.’

Sara protested, ‘Oh, come on, you must think they’re good.’

‘No, honestly, darling, what I’ve been through, trying to decide what to play. I got dozens of scores, mostly bollocks, and unreadable. And then you get all the misunderstood little wannabes ringing up, whining about the selection. There’s no pleasing them. You’ve no idea what some of these people would do to get their stuff performed. So, what’s Herve like in bed? You must have slept with him.’

‘I have
not
slept with him! Look, I just want to borrow your bloody flat. Is that so difficult?’

‘You haven’t? In that case you’re one of the few, from what one hears. Ah, wait, yes. Of course, I see. You’re
considering
sleeping with him, and having him as a house guest would be awkward in case you do and then it doesn’t work out. That terrible silence at breakfast. Yes, darls, I do see.’

‘James, you are the most smug married bastard I have ever known. You couldn’t be more wrong. I just want my house to myself. I never even actually invited him—he just kind of assumed.’

‘Whoa, whoa! Stop! Plenty! What? No, sorry, babe, that was me talking to Tom. He’s spilling. Trying to get me drunk.’

‘James, let him have Camden Crescent, please. I mean, it’ll mean a bit of rent, won’t it? And if I’ve got him somewhere else all lined up, it’s a fait accompli, it lets me off having him here, don’t you see?’

She could hear his obvious glee, even though he probably had his hand over the receiver, and some more conversation in the background.

‘Are you there? Look, Tom says to say’—James’s voice grew wavery with laughter—‘on balance, we don’t mind taking Herve’s money, he must be making plenty. So, sure you can have the flat for Herve until we get back. It’s fine with us, as long as we get a blow-by-blow of what he’s like. You know, in bed. We think it’s
so
funny.’ He dissolved into laughter again.

‘Sometimes I hate you two, you big, ugly fairies.’

‘Love you to bits, babe, you are such fun to tease. Big snogs from Tom. Bye!’

P
EOPLE WHO
live in English cities are actually proud of how little they know about other people around them, Sara thought. She was sitting at the Lambridge traffic lights on her way to James’s flat and looking straight ahead wishing, if not pretending, that all the other cars didn’t exist. Perhaps in cities everywhere it has become a virtue not to notice your neighbours. We didn’t like to ask, people say, having overheard screams and blows from next door for months before the fatal battering. We did wonder, they murmur after the hospice ambulance as it bears away someone in their street who, they’d noticed, had recently lost a lot of weight and all his hair. We never really saw her is the boast of those so careful of their neighbour’s right to privacy that they inadvertently uphold also her right to lie dead for weeks in a lonely house before either the stink or the buzzing eventually proves more compelling than the observation of good manners that forbade, at the point when it might have done some good, any concerned knocking at the door.

But by whatever means death comes, it is never long before prurience dressed in the clothes of shocked concern does come knocking as if, in expiation for neglect of the living, the well-being of the corpse can be enquired after. As soon as it is safe to go and have a good gawp, people do, demonstrating that it never was good manners that kept them away but a violent distaste for being thought nosy. And if nosy is what they are being now, well, it’s not a vice of which they are going to hear themselves accused by the deceased, is it?

All of which, Sara thought, once she had parked at the far end of the crescent and was walking to within sight of number 11, made it hard for her to admit that she could not be altogether
un
curious about the basement flat. But probably her interest lay in the fact that a peep at the basement flat would also be a glimpse into Andrew’s world, albeit one in which she had no more right of occupancy than she had in his marriage. And then, what was so morally superior about feigning a lack of curiosity about what happened to other people?

So it was galling that as she walked slowly past the railings on her way to the door there really
was
nothing to see. The windows of Miss Bevan’s sitting room shone on the still-watered plants in the area; through the polished glass Sara could see the feet of well-behaved furniture standing in the conventional places. She marched straight up to James and Tom’s place, reminding herself what she was really here for.

A
S SHE
was preparing to leave, she looked round the flat, newly aired and spruced up for Herve’s arrival. After making up the bed there had been little to do in the way of cleaning, because Peggy, who ‘did’ for James and Tom, was still coming in once a week. Sara had brought fresh flowers and filled two vases, one for the drawing room and a small one for the bedroom. She had stocked the fridge and brought one or two of her own illustrated books on Bath, a street map and the current issue of
Bath City Life
. The last, being a glossy monthly mag, did not carry the story of Imogen Bevan’s demise in the flat below. Not that she would keep it from him should it crop up, but there was no need to shove it in his face moments after he had crossed the threshold. She left the books, map and magazine on the coffee table, along with a bowl of fruit and a bottle of champagne with a label saying ‘Welcome’. Looking round, she bit her lip. Perhaps, after all, she had made the place look like a hotel. Dammit, she might as well go and fold the loo paper into a little point, she was so ridiculous. Locking up behind her, she very much hoped he would not think her corny. She hoped he would feel touched, and by her rather than by her efforts.

Coming down the stairs from the first floor Sara saw that the door that led down to the basement flat at the end of the hall was ajar. She approached it tentatively. It could be the police, although she thought she remembered Andrew saying that they had finished ‘at the scene’ the day after the death. Perhaps the place was being burgled. But surely burglars would have closed the door to get on with a quick burgle in peace? Could it be family? She knew also from Andrew that Miss Bevan had had none. Squatters? Whoever it was, it was plainly none of her business, and all the more irresistible for that.

She paused in the doorway and looked down a flight of empty crimson-carpeted stairs. Just then the sharp warble of a tremulous female voice intoning ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ floated up to her ears. Sara’s first crazy thought was that this was Miss Bevan soliloquising a little hysterically, it being indisputable that she (and only she) could claim, since the afternoon of the bank holiday, to be nearer her God to Him. She shivered. The wailing voice continued. Sara didn’t believe in ghosts, but some people did. Perhaps it was religious fervour that was edging this strange voice slightly out of control, and what she was overhearing was an exorcism. Sara had never been at an exorcism, but something told her that to announce herself from the top of the stairs with a ‘Coo-ee! Only me!’ in the middle of the opening hymn was unlikely to lead to an invitation. Instead, she tiptoed silently down the stairs and followed the voice through an open door on the left.

Standing singing in the middle of the very tidy sitting room, facing the window that looked out onto the front area, was a woman with hair of a wild red who was clutching a handkerchief tightly in one hand and a pair of spectacles in the other. She stopped singing and swung round, staring and open-mouthed, while benign but total incomprehension shone from her blinking eyes. She raised one hand and put on her glasses, through which she continued to peer at Sara. She looked quite irretrievably bonkers.

‘But I’ve got your Beethoven,’ she said, with the relief of sudden enlightenment. ‘Haven’t I? Good God. You’re what’s-her-name. The cellist.’

‘Oh, er . . . er, no. No, but I look like her. I must do. People are always saying—’

‘Sara Selkirk. Yes, you are. On Deutsche Grammophon. That really isn’t you?’

There was a silence. Sara felt a complete fool. Should she own up, offer to sign something and just go?

‘Are you sure? Well, you’re very like her. Anyway, I’m Dotty,’ the woman said finally.

Sara was not sure what to say to this.

‘Dorothy Price. I’m the executor, I’ve got this lot to sort out.’ She turned, and waved the hand still clutching the hanky around the room.

Turning back, her hand dropped and her face relaxed into a genuinely warm smile. ‘I wasn’t really expecting anyone just to walk in, least of all a cellist. Or a cellist look-alike, rather. It was all a little surreal for a minute there. Are you a neighbour? I suppose this is Neighbourhood Watch in action.’

Sara extricated herself from having to admit to pure, dumb curiosity by explaining about borrowing the flat upstairs and getting it ready for a friend. She found herself lying about coming down to see if whoever was down here needed any help, or tea. Or anything.

‘I mean, I just thought, it must be upsetting, having to see to a person’s things. Someone who’s died.’

Dotty smiled sensibly and looked embarrassed. ‘Well, yes, it is. You’re right. Because it was such a horrible way to go. It did rather come over me when I first came in. That’s why I was singing. I always sing a hymn. One of my favourites. That always stops me crying quicker than anything. Although the way I sing might start everybody else off. Do forgive the row.’

Sara smiled and repeated her offer of tea. This wailing woman was almost certainly extremely sane. The eyes behind the standard, middle-aged, gold-rimmed glasses had a look of intelligent patience. She was wearing a belted dress of light wool, printed in floralish, dusty colours, and fashionless but good shoes of the flat sort favoured by English women who walk everywhere very fast. The springy red hair, although cut in a style designed to look after itself, appeared to have strong ideas of its own. Sara put her age nearer sixty than forty.

‘Do you know, I’d love some tea. I did bring some bags and milk, but I forgot that the kettle’s useless. So if we could use yours—but use my teabags, they’re in the kitchen. Now if you wanted to do that, I could make a start on these books.’ Not only was she sane, she was clearly used to organising people.

Dotty turned to the bookcases while Sara went into Miss Bevan’s kitchen where, it seemed, any few minutes that had ever gone into the preparing of food had been insignificant in comparison with the hours spent cleaning up afterwards. A smell like coal tar mixed with Brillo pulsed out of every surface and archaic object, a smell as outdated and all-pervading as the belief from which it arose: that a thing was not properly clean until it had been scrubbed to oblivion. The enamelled cream bread bin, with
BREAD
painted on it in green, sat crumbless, alongside matching tins for
TEA
and
SUGAR
, on a cream worktop which looked clean enough to operate on. Opposite, a rack of painted shelves held a set of sky-blue 1950s china and two small biscuit tins. The stainless steel sink was unstained and gleaming despite its age, the draining board was empty, the brown plastic plate rack upended to dry off. A white cloth was folded over the polished arch of the cold tap and a metal scourer sat in a little green saucer on the windowsill next to a Cornish ware jug holding a washing-up mop with a wooden handle. Not only were the chrome rings round the four burners of the stove next to the sink perfectly polished, but not one trace of any burned-on anything spotted the coiled electric elements. This was a cooker on which not a single sausage had ever dared to spit.