Funeral Music (18 page)

CHAPTER 19

HE HAD LEARNED that the best restaurants were the Bofinger and Chez Paul in the Bastille, La Méditerranée and Le Bistrot de Paris in St-Germain, and sometimes, in the middle of the day, Juveniles or Aux Bons Crus. It was inconceivable that he would ever actually eat in them, and although he had grown almost content with his baguette-based diet he could occasionally, loitering outside, feel angrily and hungrily excluded. The last two places could be hazardous, because the stockbrokers and bankers who frequented the restaurants close to La Bourse were less likely to linger afterwards on the pavements and, being Parisian, were never entirely lacking in vigilance. And they could be disappointingly light on cash, although good for watches, lighters and the plastic cards which he knew how to sell on. At this time of year, the best harvests were still the brasseries where tourists gathered, and the best time for picking was after dark when they emerged with full stomachs and swimming heads into the night, careless on dinner and atmosphere. He was scornful of the joy they felt at being in Paris and was sometimes aware, even as his fingers were slipping into bags and hooking their wallets, that he was robbing them of this, too.

Le Marais, where he was now, was no good for his purposes. From his bench in the garden in the middle of the dark square he watched, through the plane trees, as the waiters in long aprons from Ma Bourgogne passed among the outside tables under the colonnades, bright in the light beaming out from the interior. There were plenty of tourists here as well, of course, but most of the diners would be the young and fashionable inhabitants of the apartments hereabouts who would be wise to his type and infinitely more experienced in the ways of the city than he. He felt a rush of anxiety to be elsewhere, anywhere that he would feel less conspicuous and foreign.

He was nervous, although the man he was meeting was supposed to be reliable. Not that any guarantees came with that kind of information. But he had learned that there were ways of getting out of France if you had the money and knew the right people, and now after two months working the streets and the tourist spots he had got enough together to get to England and even to get by in London for a while. In England, he’d been told, there was plenty of casual work for cash and little trouble from the authorities; here it had been impossible to get any sort of job. Everywhere he went, even for waiting or kitchen jobs, he had been expected to sign things, things to do with the minimum wage laws, and how could he do that without immigration papers? And he had made the mistake of lodging with some of the other West African Wolof people in a cheap, crowded boardinghouse in Montmartre where he had discovered, too late, that police raids were common. So his name and his illegal status were known, and he had been lucky to escape arrest and deportation.

The message had been to be here at midnight. There were to be no names; the man was simply Le Fournisseur – the Supplier – while he himself would be addressed as Le Client. It was simply a matter of business: the price, the arrangements, the deal. What would he look like? From which of the garden’s four gates, lit only by the white globes hanging from black, wrought-iron posts, would he approach? Le Fournisseur was obviously experienced and careful. Le Client checked again that he was on the right bench. He had been told to stand facing the equestrian statue in the middle of the garden in the Place des Vosges, find the bench that the horse seemed to be looking at, and to wait there. It had been easy, because the horse’s head was turning sharply, to identify this bench in the southeast corner, but he detected in the instructions a practised method of avoiding any confusion in mistranslation of left or right.

Looking across the garden once more towards the restaurants under the colonnades surrounding the square, his eyes picked up a movement among the heads of the people dining at Ma Bourgogne. A heavy man was standing up and removing the napkin from his throat. With a nod to the waiter, he was crossing between tables and moving alone into the darkness on the edge of the pavement, where he hesitated, waiting for a car to pass. Now, as Le Fournisseur crossed the road towards the gate and entered the garden, his eyes were coming to rest firmly and unmistakably on the bench and on himself, Le Client, waiting under the gaze of the cold bronze horse.

CHAPTER 20

H, SARA, SARA, forgive me for not getting up.’ The frail, amiable voice came from behind the rosebushes. As instructed by Olivia, Sara had come straight in by the garden door. She followed the wavering parallel lines in the grass to the point where they disappeared onto a patch of lawn behind a mass of thick flowering Albertine and saw at first little else other than a generous bottom encased in tight grey cotton. Serena had parked Edwin Passmore’s wheelchair and was now leaning over him, tucking a mohair blanket in around his legs. Edwin’s white head darted out around her ample sides and he beckoned at Sara encouragingly with a flat brown hand as big as a paddle.

Serena straightened up and turned round as she reached them. ‘Well now, here’s our important visitor!’ she exclaimed to Edwin. ‘We’ve been getting very excited, haven’t we? Very impatient to show off our new stairlift and get out to the garden! Right-oh,’ she said comfortably, ‘no worries, okay? I’ll pop off and get you some tea. Would you like that?’

She looked as if she might squeeze their cheeks between her thumb and forefinger. Sara replied, in the surprised tone that seemed necessary despite its being four o’clock in the afternoon and tea the very thing she had been invited for, that that would be lovely. They watched Serena’s progress back across the grass to the house.

‘Tedious cow,’ Edwin said, pulling off the blanket and adding in a loud voice, ‘Australian, you know! She can’t help it!’ although the effort brought on a wheezing cough.

He waved Sara into a garden chair next to him and said, ‘Forgive me, I shouldn’t say such a thing, but she does ask for it. But we haven’t even properly met. But I know
of
you, of course. I’ve got your Elgar concerto. I think your playing is . . .’

He frowned slightly as he considered what to say, pausing just sufficiently long for Sara to feel a wave of worry that he didn’t like it.

‘Extraordinarily warm, sensitive. Nothing flashy, but romantic,’ he said, smiling at her with a blue-eyed, intelligent look. ‘In exactly the right spirit for the piece. The only way I ever want to hear it.’

‘Oh, I’m so pleased,’ Sara said, delighted. ‘I’ve got all your baroque recordings. That Handel piece, “Eternal Source of Light Divine”. It is simply wonderful. That long, long countertenor melody, then the trumpet answering. It’s sublime.’

‘Good, good,’ Edwin said, nodding. ‘That pleases me very much. I did always love Handel. Oh, my, but countertenors. Aren’t they stupid? No, that’s unfair.
All
singers are stupid.’

‘Oh, really? What about cellists, then?’

‘Oh, bone-headed and cloth-eared, most of ’em,’ Edwin said, laughing. ‘Present company excepted, of course. No, actually, my dear, I hope you didn’t mind being summoned. When I heard you’d been here to supper I was rather cross with poor Livy for not bringing you upstairs so that I could meet you. So I got her to ask you to tea.’

Sara detected the imperiousness of the long-term invalid.

‘And it’s very kind of you to come.’

‘It’s a pleasure. And you’ve just got your stairlift, I hear, so you can entertain in the garden. That must be lovely. I love my garden.’

‘Bloody marvellous, I can tell you. Olivia knows how I love the garden. She is bloody marvellous, my Olivia, goes through a lot. Thinks I don’t know.’

Edwin smiled beatifically, then seemed to fade. He took a laborious breath and his eyelids drooped. He smiled weakly at Sara and said, ‘Hang on. Just a minute.’

He reached back and with one hand picked a coil of curved clear plastic tubing from a hook on the handle of his wheelchair. Sara realised that his hands were not especially big at all, but only seemed to be because his wrists were so wasted. Under his clothes his body was terribly thin; his long legs, sticking out and meeting at the knees, were like two poles draped loosely in gabardine. The tubing led to a black metal cylinder propped up on a stand behind the chair. Expertly he attached the two curling ends at the other end of the tubing into his nostrils and hooked the loops round his ears. It looked a little like a toy stethoscope, and a bit daft on his long, dignified face. He breathed in and immediately brightened.

‘Ridiculous bloody setup,’ he grumbled. ‘Oxygen. Can’t go long without it. But I hate to meet someone for the first time with half a mile of tube wrapped round my face. Vanity, no doubt.’

They were interrupted by the arrival of Serena with a tea tray. Sara noticed with pleasure that there were only two cups, so Serena would not be joining them. She wanted this charming, funny man all to herself for a while longer. She said, ‘I’ll pour, shall I?’ giving Serena time enough to glint with goodwill and encourage Edwin to ‘manage’ one or two of his favourite biscuits. When she had gone, they sipped at their tea for a while. Edwin surveyed his garden, and, waving from his chair, pointed out some of his favourite plants.

‘That’s a Cyprus rock rose,’ he said, ‘with a scent like crushed sweeties. Do you like it? Old Serena, she likes the lavender best. Old-fashioned, she says, that’s what she likes. She’s from Sydney, you know. Doing Europe. Bath’s a revelation to her, of course.’ He chuckled. ‘She went to see that film,
Emma
. Raved about it. Oh, I said, borrow it. It’ll be in the bookcase.’

He began to snigger and some of his tea went down the wrong way. As he recovered he reached out to touch Sara’s arm and said, in a voice high-pitched with mirth, ‘And you know what she said? She said, “Oh, is the book out already?” ’

Edwin’s wholehearted and malicious pleasure in Serena’s mistake was infectious; they both shook with laughter. They talked on. From time to time Edwin would pause and let his eyes close for a few seconds. Then he would open them and say, ‘Go on, go
on
,’ impatient with his own fatigue. He told her reliably scurrilous stories about his days as a baroque trumpet player: foreign tours, unpopular conductors, memorably good, and bad, concerts.

‘Oh, God, Munich. Before the war of course. We dragged the entire wardrobe into the corridor. Funny at the time.’

After a while Sara said, ‘I’ve brought my cello. I wonder if you might be in the mood to listen to something?’

Edwin gave her another beautiful, blue-eyed look, full of gratitude. He had knotted his handkerchief in the corners and was wearing it on his head, in defiance of Serena, who had brought out a ridiculous sombrero for him.

‘Oh,
would
you?’ he asked, like a child. ‘Would you really?’ He paused, looking at her carefully.
‘Dare I ask, perhaps, for one of the Bach cello suites? I would love that.’

Sara was stricken. ‘I don’t play those now,’ she said. ‘I haven’t . . . I can’t... I mean, is there anything else? I really haven’t played those for a long time.’

‘I know,’ Edwin said quietly. ‘I do know, and I think I understand. I just think’ – he paused – ‘that the time comes when we have to go on, you know, somehow. I thought perhaps here, it might be possible, not really a performance, only me. But never mind, anything would be lovely. You choose.’

As she hesitated he went on, ‘I do so love those pieces. It’s not, in a way,
playing
that they require, is it? It’s
living
. In performance, you have to live them. I always think they are... a little glimpse of eternity. Does that sound stupid?’

Sara shook her head. ‘No, I think you’re right. And that, of course, is the difficulty.’ She looked away. ‘I would like you to hear one. I could try, if you’ll forgive any lapses. It really has been a long time. I haven’t played them since Paris. You heard what happened? I think word got round.’

Edwin smiled and, nodding slowly, looked at her so kindly she thought she would cry. ‘But never mind. Just never mind,’ he said. ‘You’ll be all right.’

And so Sara brought the instrument out to the sunny garden and planted herself a way off in the shade of an overgrown lilac bush by the garden wall. Edwin stayed where he was, tucked up in his blanket again, surrounded by his beloved rock roses, and turned his face up to the sun. At first Sara’s playing was so soft that she did not even drown out the noise of distant brakes as a bus trundled down Bathwick Hill, but Edwin did not mind. It reminded him where he actually was, and so only increased the wonder of it, that he at eighty-four, with his lungs played out and the rest of him rotting quietly in a wheelchair in a dusty city garden, should yet be in paradise. He had always supposed that time was meant to stand still at such a moment, and was finding that it wasn’t. It was ticking on, and every second was sweet, finite and precious. For this little while he was feeling the slowing pat-pat-pat of his existence measured out not in daily pain but in the gentle beat of the sun on his tired temples, in the passing of each easy, flower-filled breath and in the wise and wordless cadences of Bach, played by that beautiful girl with the shining hair.

He was smiling as his eyes closed. ‘Yes, we do have to go on, you see, even when it seems impossible,’ he said, as the music drew to its end.

He opened his eyes and called softly across the grass to her as she approached and took her seat beside him. ‘The gift! It does, in the end, all come down to the gift. If you have a gift but cannot give it, then everything’ – he waved his great hands in a vague circle – ‘everything becomes blocked. There is a boulder in your stream. Until you move it, you cannot give, nor can you receive. You understand. The time does come when you find it moves. Of course, you still miss him. Of course. But you will move it, one day.’

Sara turned to him. ‘I don’t know what to say. Except that I wish I’d met you long ago. I’ve known Olivia for a while, and yet this is the first time we’ve met. And it’s been just...so...lovely. May I come again?’

But there was no chance to say any more. Serena was bustling back towards them. It was nebuliser time again and Edwin, more tired even than usual, agreed that it was time to go back in. Suddenly everything was focused on the physical task of getting Edwin, wheelchair, rug, tubing and cylinder back inside. Sara helped, clumsily, following behind Serena who was pushing the lumbering chair, wheeling the oxygen cylinder on its little stand, holding up the tubing to keep it from being trapped under the wheels. The entourage made its way up the slope into the back of the house, in by the French window and across Olivia’s study. This time the curtains were drawn back and the desk held only two or three large heavy books and a telephone. Serena wheeled Edwin from the study out into the kitchen and from there into the hall to the foot of the stairs.

‘Isn’t it clever?’ she said to Sara, stabbing down the wheelchair brake in front of the stairlift. ‘No worries. Three men here for an entire weekend getting it put in and guess who got to clear up? Not that I mind, it makes such a difference, him getting out. Now, let’s get you in the seat.’

The raising of Edwin from the wheelchair and the transfer to the little folding seat installed on its track against the wall was achieved.

‘Quite a nifty little contraption, eh?’ said Edwin triumphantly to Sara. A safety bar like a small aeroplane table was unfolded down in front of him and clicked into place. He pressed the button on the edge of the bar.

‘Now watch this!’ He glided slowly upwards for a few seconds and with another press of the button, stopped, his legs dangling. ‘Ha! Wonderful bloody setup!’

‘You’re a lucky fellow, aren’t you?’ said Serena, folding the mohair blanket. ‘What these things cost!’ She turned to Sara. ‘You wouldn’t believe it. There are three flights, you see. Up here to the drawing room and Miss Passmore’s room, Sue’s old room and the spare above that, and Edwin and my room right at the top. We thought we’d had it when the Terry Trust turned us down, didn’t we? But Miss Passmore got round it somehow. No worries.’ She beamed at Edwin, waiting patiently in the little seat. ‘You’re a very lucky fellow.’

‘Ah, but we don’t worry about the cost, do we?’ Edwin said grandly. He winked down at Sara. ‘The gift. A gift of love, an offering of love. Not that I know anything, of course. Rum setup if you ask me, but I’m not complaining.’

And then, bestowing a royal wave as he ascended, he hooted a little breathlessly, ‘Churchill, that was the fella! Remember Churchill?’