Funeral Music (10 page)

‘What a lovely vase.’

He smiled, pleased that she had noticed. ‘French. Late eighteenth century. Probably made between 1780 and 1795. I deal a bit in antiques, actually. French and English.’

He tidied away the freesia stems, discarding also the rubber bands, leaves and wet cellophane that Sue had left. The simplicity of his movements, the long hands, the choice of absolutely the right vase and the unfussed, pleasing result reminded Sara of James. Another artist. And a heterosexual one with a divine bottom, she thought, as Paul turned to the sink to put water in the vase. She finished her drink, reminding herself that he was actually attached to someone else, and, moreover, to a twenty-fourish, blonde fitness instructor next to whose body hers would probably look like a bag of spanners. And don’t forget, antiques or no antiques, that he’s a waiter, the inner voice warned, and that you’re a snob. And a dirty old woman, it whispered, working out that if Paul were about thirty, that would make him six years younger than she was.

‘Is that Olivia’s study in there?’ she asked, nodding towards the panelled door.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, a little surprised. ‘Haven’t you been here before? Sorry, I tend to treat the place as home.’ He paused. ‘Come and have a little look. Olivia’s got some wonderful things. Not hers, of course, the museum’s; she does quite a bit of work here. She won’t mind, she likes people to see. If you get her started, she’ll keep you there all evening.’

Feeling a little intrusive, Sara followed Paul into the room. Curtains were drawn across the French windows.

‘It’s for the light levels,’ Paul said. ‘She often has textiles here. She’s cataloguing some shoes at the moment. Here.’

He stepped over to the desk where a deep-sided grey cardboard box sat among piles of papers. He lifted the lid and carefully pulled back leaves of tissue paper. ‘Acid-free box and paper. Look. But don’t breathe over them, or touch them. Moisture, you see. Finger acid.’

Sara stepped forward and peeped in as if she were leaning into the pram of a sleeping baby. In the box, standing upright, was a pair of pale green silk shoes with tie fastenings of fragile, frothy ribbon.

‘Also late eighteenth century. English,’ Paul said. The heels were sharp and high and the toes narrowed to an agonising point, but it was the tiny scale of the feet they had been made to fit that struck Sara most. She thought of her own feet, not as now in her beloved Missoni sandals, but in huge cushioned trainers and thick white socks, pounding along her five-mile circuit round the lanes of St Catherine’s Valley. The owner of these shoes, a teetering doll, might have been just about able to mince once or twice round Sydney Gardens before collapsing elegantly at tea and going home in a sedan chair. She looked at the shoes in silence, wondering if their owner had died old or young. The last time she had worn these shoes, did she know it was going to be the last? Or had she just heaved them off her feet with a sigh, after stepping it out all evening at the Assembly Rooms in a matching pale green silk gown, with no thoughts in her head but relief for her pinched toes and the next day’s morning calls? Now the shoes in which she had danced her quadrilles and cotillions, leaving behind the stain of her heels, were simply historically interesting, ultimately more memorable than their owner. But the greatest eloquence of empty shoes, Sara thought, is to tell us, as if we didn’t know, that all it comes down to in the end is the running of trivial errands.

Paul carefully wrapped the tissue over the shoes and replaced the lid. Sara followed him back out to the kitchen and went back to her stool while he opened the fridge in search of another bottle of wine. He found a whole poached salmon on a platter. He took it out, peered at it and made an irritated noise with his tongue. ‘Chilled solid! What is she thinking of? It should have been out of there an hour ago.
Chilled
fish – just
awful
. There is no flavour in fish
chilled
like that.’

He looked as if he might spit on it. Was he going to throw a chef’s tantrum? No, he was fetching things from cupboards. He was going to throw egg yolks in a bowl and did so, separating them flamboyantly with one hand, showing off.

‘Mayonnaise?’ asked Sara.

‘No,
sauce rémoulade
,’ he said Frenchly.

‘Oh, good,’ said Sara, not flinching. ‘That’s the one with capers, gherkins and parsley, isn’t it? Shall I chop? Are you using anchovy essence or mustard, or both?’

He was impressed, as she intended him to be, and rewarded her with a look of amused surprise and a smile which revealed annoyingly lovely teeth. He fetched her a chopping board and, unwrapping a length of canvas on the worktop, selected the smallest knife from the roll.

‘You can use this. Be careful, it’s very sharp.’

An intimacy surrounds any two people preparing food that will end up in the same dish, and Olivia’s reappearance a few minutes later, albeit in her own kitchen, was felt fleetingly by all of them to be an intrusion. She gave a broad-minded smile at Sara and Paul’s communion over the chopping board.

‘I showed Sara the shoes, Olivia,’ Paul said. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘No, that’s fine,’ Olivia said. ‘Since you know how to handle them. Aren’t they wonderful?’

‘Lovely.’ Sara smiled. Olivia began to lay the table around Sue, who had followed her in and was sitting languorously eating olives. Sara looked up, feeling guilty even for her purely mental piracy of Sue’s man, and deftly sliced the top off her finger.

‘Bugger it! Ow! Oh,
shit
. Sorry!’ she yelped, trying not to drip blood into the little pile of chopped parsley. She slipped clumsily off the stool and looked round wildly for kitchen paper, shoving her free hand into the pockets of her dress for a handkerchief, simultaneously reassuring everyone that it was a stupid and unimportant scratch and realising that it was her fingering hand and that if she had removed the whole finger pad it would affect her playing. Oh, God, couldn’t
somebody
find her a handkerchief? She was aware suddenly of Paul’s long, slow-moving hands taking hold of her wrists. He gently removed her left hand from the grip of her right and without inspecting it, wrapped a white tea towel round it. He led her, still by the wrists, over to the sink where the cold tap was already running, pulled the hurt finger under its flow and held it there.

‘Take a few deep breaths,’ he said quietly.

She did as she was told, and after a minute the heat in the throbbing finger subsided into an icy anaesthesia. She said brightly, ‘I’m fine. It’s fine now, thanks.’ Paul released his hold on her wrist and stood, watching.

‘It
was
sharp, wasn’t it?’

‘I warned you.’

She turned the finger slowly under the water. She would lose a flap of skin, that was all. She apologised again, pulling her hand away to dry it. Immediately all the pain flooded back into the cut. Blood welled out and plopped into the sink.

‘Keep it there,’ Paul ordered, drawing her hand back under the rod of water whining from the tap. ‘You’ll have to keep it there a while, until it runs clear.’

‘I’ll get a plaster,’ said Sue, who had come over from the table and was bending into a drawer.

‘It needs a proper bandage,’ Paul said. Sue came round and stood on the other side of Sara, staring at the finger dangling under the fall of water.

‘No, a plaster,’ she said. ‘A plaster would be better.’

Sara was aware of a hissing noise which was coming from between Paul’s lips.

‘And
I
say that it needs a proper bandage,’ he said slowly.

Olivia had a green plastic first-aid box open on the worktop. ‘Here’s a bit of gauze. If you fold it it can go under one of these big plasters,’ she said, hitting on the compromise. Sue and Paul exchanged a look over Sara’s head that made her want to duck.

‘I can do it,’ Sara said, hoping to preempt any squabble over the privilege, but succumbing easily to Paul’s insistence that he could do it better than she would herself.

At supper it was a relief when the conversation turned from interesting injuries and recommended treatments to the now mundane topic of the murder. Sara endured the tedious trading of hypotheses and counterhypotheses, which was always accompanied by the reiterating of everyone’s alibis. It was strange how people felt the need to do that. Almost everyone she had spoken to had, sooner rather than later, and unprompted, delivered the statement that exonerated them personally from all suspicion. ‘Well, of course I...’ was usually how it started. Sue, well, of course, had left the Assembly Rooms that night at a quarter to eight and arrived nearly fifteen minutes late for her late shift at the health club. She had locked up just after eleven and then gone over to Paul’s place, a bedsit in the staff quarters in the grounds of Fortune Park, where she was staying, as she usually did, for the weekend.

‘I’ve got my place in Larkhall now, but I’m not usually there at weekends,’ she said. ‘It’s Cecily’s house and I’m more the lodger, only she’s having this thing with this married man.’ She sighed. ‘So it’s agreed, I make myself scarce at the weekend. Stupid, that, really, I think. Never works out, does it? I don’t think so, anyway.’

She looked at Paul, who appeared not to be listening. ‘Anyway, he’s there at the weekend, usually. Sometimes just for an afternoon, sometimes longer. Suits me to keep away, anyway.’

She smiled winningly at Paul. ‘Suits
us
, doesn’t it?’ Paul gave a faint smile. ‘Even with our shifts. There’s always a bit of time together. We were both working that night, I remember. Paul got in just before one, didn’t you?’

He nodded. ‘We finished early in the Assembly Rooms so I went over to help with the desserts at the Pump Room. I left to come home just after eleven.’

‘But it’s only about half an hour out to Fortune Park, isn’t it?’ Sara asked.

‘Oh, yes, by car it is. But I take my bike in the summer. It’s an hour and three-quarters, then.’

So that’s how he got that butt.

Sue was talking again. ‘Bad enough in the summer sometimes, though, isn’t it? You got soaked that night; your hair was wet. It
poured
, didn’t it?’

Olivia gave Paul a surreptitious coded glance at which he rose obediently and refilled glasses, while she left the table and returned with an overcrowded cheeseboard. She had obviously briefed him beforehand to look after people’s glasses, which seemed a little intense for a supper party for four people. Or perhaps he was just accustomed to playing host for her. He had certainly known where everything was kept in the kitchen cupboards, and had turned out the
sauce
rémoulade
and some fairly ritzy salads to go with the salmon in the same mesmerising way that James had worked in Sara’s own kitchen. As they picked at the cheese Olivia still seemed anxious and Sue lapsed into silence. It was as if Paul were the holder of initiative for the whole household. He was the source of energy, Sara supposed, a kind of battery, without which the other two would simply run down and stop. Across the table Sara was able to look properly at him. His hair fell in thick brown skeins over his head and was so long Sara guessed that he had to tie it back for work. He had a long nose of interesting Gallic near-ugliness, but his face was dominated by his extraordinary green, almost unkind eyes. He looked back at her. His eyes were feral; Sara was live meat, and he was considering whether to bite her in half now or play with her for a bit first and bite her in half later. She was convinced that he knew precisely the effect he was having on her, including the moments following the cutting of her finger when in the confusion of pain, embarrassment, fright and mess, there had been a fragment of joy because he was touching her with such care. He was quite unreasonably sexy.
We are simply not designed to withstand such men, Sara thought, looking over at Sue.

How did she cope? She certainly worked hard to look the way she did. Her skin, suspiciously golden against her white T-shirt, looked marinaded and lightly oiled, ready for grilling. She wore delicate gold jewellery: a tiny chain with a minute something on it – possibly an ‘S’ – and three or four meagre rings. Like her blondeness, her jewellery was pretty and feminine in a High Street way, but her shiny health would have suited bold, ethnic things, bright enamelled bangles or a heavy beaded collar. Her thin, strong body was a model of aerobics-moulded loveliness, the contours of her pared-down haunches looking convincingly Californian for a girl from Corsham. But all her strength was physical, concentrated in her confident muscles; she conveyed no other power. It was as though her will were an injured cat hiding in a deserted building. Her black eyes were windows with broken panes.
What at first had seemed in her to be mental vacancy was really dereliction.

Olivia’s overorganised menu moved on smoothly to the finale of strawberry pavlova. She had worked hard for them. Sara wondered why she had gone to the trouble of inviting her at all, since she was obviously so tired and things at work were clearly more than enough for her. Was it really a concern for Sara’s well-being? Olivia had not really enquired about her beyond what politeness dictated. And she was surely too sophisticated to harbour any cosy ambitions to ‘get the young people together’, not that Sara regretted that she had. Over coffee in the beautiful drawing room, she concluded that perhaps Olivia was simply responding to an instinct to gather people round her after the outrage that had occurred in their midst.

Remembering how tired Olivia had seemed, Sara rose to leave before eleven. She noticed that Sue and Olivia, coming downstairs to see her off, brought the used coffee cups with them, keen to have done with the clearing up and have the evening over. They said good-bye at the front door and turned back towards the kitchen. But Paul walked with her down the path, into the cool, private peace of the summer night. Sara was deliciously aware of him close behind her, near enough for his arms to reach round her waist, for him to bend his head to brush his lips across the back of her neck.