Night Music (36 page)

He would have the house for the McCarthys. He would show everyone round here that what mattered was not where you came from but what you could achieve. He would restore the house and his family’s reputation.

It should have been fairly simple to ensure that the widow, the interloper, did not stand in his way for long. But then, on a blustery early-summer night, the widow had become Isabel, breathing, pulsing Isabel who had flooded his head with music and made his life seem drab, grey and silent. Isabel, who floated ethereally through the trees, whose hips swung with music, who had looked at him with slanted, defiant eyes, who had made him realise what he was reaching for, what had been missing all the time he had been preoccupied with practicalities and square footage. The only woman who had ever posed a challenge. He still wanted the house – oh, he still knew it was his. But it was no longer enough.

Matt McCarthy shut his eyes, then opened them, trying to clear the noise in his head. He fumbled with the CD player in the dashboard until Handel’s
Water Music
started. He turned up the volume. Then as the strings soothed him, restored him, he grabbed his notebook from the glove compartment and began methodically to write a list of all the things he had still to do, from sealing pipework to installing that last window. He could remember every last nail, every last piece of plasterwork. No one knew that house better than him. He sat and scribbled, ignoring the darkened pages that fluttered to the footwell, as the sun dropped behind the Spanish House.

For three days and two nights Isabel did not sleep. She lay awake, engaged in a million silent confrontations with her dead husband. She railed at him for his infidelity, berated herself for leaving him alone so much that he had felt the need and taken the opportunity. She replayed family events, holidays, her trips away, inserting this woman into what she had considered their memories. The excessive spending, his more frequent trips away last year: it all made sense, and knitted together into an ugly pattern. Nothing was hers now, nothing solely theirs. His affair had corrupted everything. And she hated herself for having been too self-absorbed to notice what was happening, too complacent to think of checking bank accounts, credit-card statements.

She had hurled her wedding ring into the lake at midnight, not sure whether to laugh or cry when she did not hear the splash. But mostly she wept for what he had done, by default, to their son. That very morning, at breakfast, she had recalled, Laurent had kissed Thierry’s head and made some comment about how grown-up he was. Was that some coded message? Had it been Laurent’s way of warning Thierry not to speak? Had hiding his infidelity meant more to him than his son’s peace of mind? Or had he said that Thierry was growing up simply because he was?

It corrupted everything, this knowledge. It made her head spin.

Matt had come the morning after she had made the discovery and when she heard his van, and the knock at the back door – she had removed the emergency keys from under the mat – she had opened it and told him it was not convenient.

‘You need the bathroom doing,’ he had said. ‘You’ve been going on about it for weeks. I’ve got all the stuff in the van.’ He looked awful. He had several days’ stubble on his chin and his T-shirt was grubby. Not building-work grubby, but crumpled, greyed, as if he had slept in it.

‘No,’ she had said. ‘Now is not a good time.’

‘But you said you wanted—’

‘We’ve been using a tin bath for months. It’s hardly going to make any difference now, is it?’ And she had closed the door, not caring that she had sounded rude, or that Kitty would wail yet again that they were living in prehistoric conditions. She hated Matt for being a man. For sleeping with her when he, too, was married, and not having the grace to appear as if he had given it a second thought. She winced when she remembered her own unthinking duplicity. Hadn’t she done to Laura what she was so distraught at having had done to herself?

No one else came to the house. She ignored the few telephone calls. Outwardly she gave a virtuoso performance. She cooked, admired the new chicks, and listened attentively when Kitty returned with Anthony from the hospital where Asad was recovering well from the asthma attack. She listened, with satisfaction, to her son’s voice. He was tentative at first, and self-conscious, but he asked for breakfast instead of helping himself silently to cereal, he called his puppy, and later that afternoon she heard him laughing at it as it raced after a rabbit near the lake.

She was glad that the children no longer wanted to return to London: the house in Maida Vale had morphed overnight from a lost idyll, a comforting home, to a place of deception, of secrets.

At night, when the children were asleep, unable to play the violin, she walked through her unfinished house, accompanied by the mosquitoes that had found their way in through unfixed windows, the scurrying of nocturnal creatures under the floorboards or in the eaves. She no longer saw the naked plasterboard. That it was a shell in places did not make it any more or less a home than the supposed haven in London. It was not about décor or soft furnishings, or the number of floorboards that were missing. It was not about wealth or security.

She was no longer sure what made a home. Any further than it was about two quietly sleeping bodies upstairs.

Jack-by-the-hedge. Hairy bittercress. Wild thyme and chanterelles. Byron walked round the edge of the woods, where the aged trunks segued neatly into pastureland, hemmed by years of successive farmers, and, in the dim light, picked himself a supper from the places he had known since he was a boy. He had lost weight, but suspected it was due less to his having to forage than to his lack of appetite.

He had spent the last few days holed up in the daytime, sleeping in the heat, and wandering the woods at night, trying to work out what to do next.

She was wary of him now. That much was clear. He had seen it in the way she had jumped when she saw him coming through the trees, in the way she fixed on a smile, too broad, too bright. He had heard it in the determined nature of her greeting, as if she wouldn’t show him how afraid she was. He knew that reaction: he had seen it in those villagers who knew him by reputation rather than in person.

When Byron thought of Isabel being afraid of him, of her family believing he could do them harm, something heavy fell upon him like a shroud.

There was little point in attempting to remain in the Bartons, he knew. His past, no matter how misreported, would hang around him like a filthy stench as long as people like Matt were there. And with the land shrinking, swallowed by ‘unique’ new home developments, industrial units or arable farming, there were few people locally who could offer him work. He had seen the new career options for people like him: shelf-stacker, security guard, mini-cab driver. Something in Byron died even when he was reading the advertisements and picturing himself in a concrete car park, being told by a supervisor when to take his fifteen-minute break and paid, begrudgingly, the minimum wage.

I should not have challenged Matt, he told himself, for the hundredth time. I should have kept my mouth shut. But he didn’t believe it.

‘Hello?’

She had put the first line of her address at the top of the letter: 32 Beaufort House, Witchtree Gardens. An odd thing for a lover to do, Isabel thought. To be so specific. As if he might confuse you with somebody else.

Forty-eight hours after she had received the letters, she had called Directory Enquiries and found there was only one Karen living at such an address. Karen Traynor, destroyer of marriages and memories. Who would have thought that two words could have such an impact on so many people’s lives? Isabel pictured her as tall, fair, athletic, perhaps in her late twenties. She would be immaculately made up – women with no children always were: they had time to be self-obsessed. Did she play music? Or had Laurent relished possession of someone whose mind wasn’t always drifting elsewhere?

She didn’t know what she would say, although she had rehearsed a hundred arguments, a thousand pithy put-downs. She suspected she might shout at her or scream. She would demand to know where all their money had gone. Where had Laurent taken her? How many hotels, Paris breaks, expensive treats had there been when Isabel had assumed he was away on business? She would show the woman what she had done, explain to her that, contrary to what Laurent might have said (what
had
he said?), she had been an intruder in a marriage that was still full of passion, still pulsing, still alive. She would put her straight, this unthinking, selfish girl. She would make her see.

And then the ringing stopped, and a woman’s voice – well spoken, unremarkable, probably not that different from her own – said, ‘Hello?’ And after a pause: ‘Hello?’

And Isabel, a woman who considered life empty if her own head was not full of glorious sound, found she could only listen in silence.

On the third evening the heat wave broke. The sky grew dark abruptly, with a rumble of thunder, like timpani warming up for a big finale, and then, following mucky clouds that scudded towards them, in an impatient rush, a torrential storm. It sent the creatures in the grounds scurrying for shelter, and rivulets of water gurgling towards ditches.

Byron sat under the house and listened, first to the exclamations of Isabel and Kitty, who were running to the washing-line, squealing and splashing as they gathered in the laundry; then, with a wry smile, to Thierry, who was singing to himself as he passed the boiler room. ‘It’s raining! It’s pouring! The old man is snoring!’ joyfully unselfconscious. The dogs sat alert, their eyes switching from the door to Byron, waiting for a signal, any signal, that they, too, could run outside, but he held up a hand and, with a groan, they settled.

‘He went to bed and banged his head and couldn’t get up in the morning.’

As the footsteps disappeared inside, Byron stood up slowly. He had packed his belongings neatly into two bags. When the rain slowed a little, he would walk through the woods to where he had left his car and go.

A door banged. Above him, abruptly, the air was flooded with music. A whole orchestra – something dramatic he had heard before. He heard Kitty’s voice, pleading, ‘Oh, not
this
,’ and then the sound was muffled as someone closed a window. He could just hear whirling violins, voices, escalating to a frenzy.

Byron pulled out a pen, and wrote a short note, folded it neatly and placed it on top of the boiler. Then he sat, in the encroaching dark, and waited.

‘Nicholas?’

‘Did you get them?’ He didn’t ask who it was.

‘They’re beautiful,’ she said softly. ‘Absolutely beautiful. They came just before tea.’

‘I was worried. I thought perhaps he’d want to know where they’d come from. But you said—’

‘He’s not here. I don’t know where he goes, but he’s rarely here now.’ She didn’t tell him she had seen her husband’s car parked in the woods when she was out walking the dog. Why not park outside the widow’s house? she had asked him silently. At least then you’d be honest.

‘I wanted to send roses, but I thought they’d be too obvious.’

‘Most roses don’t have any fragrance now, anyway.’

‘And the woman suggested lilies. But aren’t they a bit overpowering? And funereal?’

He wanted to show her how much thought he had put into buying the flowers for her. She was touched by this. ‘Peonies are my favourite,’ she said. ‘You’re so clever.’

‘I suspected they might be. I wanted you to know . . . that I think about you all the time. I’m not pressuring you but—’

‘I will decide, Nicholas.’

‘I know—’

‘It’s just that it’s all moving terribly quickly. I promise it won’t be long.’

She sat on the side of the bed and gazed at her left hand, the diamond-cluster ring her mother had considered vulgar. Was a vulgar ring preferable to an adulterous daughter? ‘It’s complicated. With my son and everything.’

‘As much time as you need.’

She wished he was there. She felt certain of everything when he was with her, when she felt his hands on hers and could see the sincerity in his face. When she was alone, with Matt’s absence casting a shadow over her home, and the Spanish House making her imagination run riot, she felt wretched. Was he there now? Laughing at her? Making love to that woman?

She could barely show her face in the village. The Cousins’ shop was still closed. Since Matt’s fight with Asad people had barely looked her in the eye, as if she were blamed by association. She could not see her girlfriends: she was not ready to tell anyone the truth of what was happening to her marriage. What had happened to her marriage. She had lived there long enough to know that her life would be conversational currency before long.

A tear fell, unexpectedly, leaving a dark stain on her trouser leg, spreading outwards.

‘Can I still see you on Tuesday?’

‘Oh, Nicholas,’ she said, wiping her face. ‘Do you really have to ask?’

It was the first time it had rained and nothing had leaked, and Isabel, who no longer took such things for granted, considered that a small miracle. Perhaps Matt had his uses, after all. The storm had lifted something, bringing a different perspective, so that briefly she could forget bills, betrayal, Laurent, and instead relish the shrieking lunacy of the children in the rain, and the rainwater on her skin after days of sticky heat. She had listened to their chatter that evening, not complained when they threw wet socks at each other, causing the puppy to bark. She had slept that afternoon on her unmade bed, and woken calm and cool, as if a fever had passed. They had all been lightened by the storm.

She went to Thierry’s room. He was in bed now, the dog on the duvet. She would not scold him: if it made him happy, a few muddy footprints were a fair price to pay. Isabel drew the curtains, hearing a distant thunderclap, seeing the strange blue half-light as the storm moved east. Then, as she bent to kiss him goodnight, he put his arms round her neck. ‘I love you, Mum,’ he said, and the words sang in her head.

‘I love you, Thierry,’ she said.