Silent Children (2 page)

It was a game, Leslie knew, but playing it came with the job. "All the best ones. I own the one you were just looking at, the Solti."

"Ah yes, the worthy Georg. A solid fellow. Too studio-bound in this instance, however."

"You might like the Bohm, then. That's live at Bayreuth."

"Every cough and rustle of the audience and lumbering of feet onstage faithfully reproduced, no doubt. Not for me."

"How about the Furtwangler? We've had more people fall in love with that than any other recording."

"With the recording? It must be getting on for my age. Maybe I should take that as a sign I've still a chance in the romantic stakes, would you say?" The customer, if that was the word for him, let his briefly speculative gaze drift over Leslie's face, then tugged his hat down as though to contain himself. "Thanks so much for indulging me. I hear it rumoured young Rattle may attempt the cycle. I believe I'll await his reviews," he said, and let himself out of the shop.

She watched him cross Oxford Street once the two-way parade of buses and taxis and venturesome bicycles allowed him. As he disappeared up Wardour Street toward the film distributors and sex shops, she asked Melinda "What was your customer wanting to sell us?"

Melinda copied out the catalogue number of an order to phone through before she straightened up, rustling with all the layers of lace meant to make her body seem as small and pretty as her face. "A pile of discs for types who'd be afraid to come in here."

"I thought I saw
Mellow Out With Mozart."

"You did, and there was
Tremendous Tchaikovsky Tunes."

"The Best Bits of Beethoven?"

"That as well, and
Open Up to Opera."

"Never
Don't Back Off Bach."

"Afraid so. I was polite, all the same. But did you see the Haydn operas went? And the Gardiner Beethovens to that old chap who'd heard the finale of the Eighth, and he took the Dvorak quartets as well. And we mustn't forget the student you persuaded to brave Elliott Carter."

"We aren't doing too badly for a couple of girls who used to work at His Mistress's Voice," Leslie said, and the phone rang.

Melinda turned down the disc of
The Lark Ascending
and lifted the brass receiver of the antique phone they'd chosen to go with the oak panelling the shop had acquired in its incarnation as a specialist in all the coffee there was. "Classical Discount," she said, and with hardly a pause "Yes, she is. It's your mother, Les."

"Maybe she wants my advice," Leslie joked, and accepted the heavy receiver. "Yes, mother."

"Perhaps if you occasionally took mine, you'd have reason to be grateful."

It wasn't an accusation so much as an expression of her constant disappointment with Leslie, with her having done only just as well at school as her parents expected, falling short of the university they'd considered best for her, graduating from the university she'd enjoyed for three years only to find work in HMV, and as for her life since then... "I have, you know, mother," Leslie said gently. "You just don't notice when I do."

"Name me one occasion."

"None of the ones when you tell me to do things you know I won't so I'll feel I've let you down." Leslie kept that to herself, not a new experience, and said "This isn't why you rang, is it?"

"I fear not. When I drove to collect Ian he wasn't there."

"Oh dear. Could you have missed him?"

"You should know there's very little I miss. He was meant to be in detention yet again, but he'd failed to present himself."

Leslie's grimace was so fierce that a man examining the display of standees in the window moved away quite speedily. "What's his crime now, do you know?"

"I made it my business to find out. He and his usual cronies were caught smoking. The solitary crumb of comfort, if it's that, is they were only cigarettes."

"Takes after me at his age, don't say it." When her mother took her at her word Leslie said "He'll be home. He knows where his dinner is. Maybe he just didn't want you seeing him in disgrace again."

"I fear I've almost grown used to that. Perhaps if you were to show a little more concern about his behaviour—"

Leslie interrupted only partly because an idea had suggested itself. "It's Thursday, isn't it? That used to be Roger's day off. Maybe Ian's gone to him."

"Perhaps I can leave you to ascertain that."

"I'll call now," Leslie said. Her enthusiasm deserted her as soon as her mother rang off, but she dialled the number that, however much she resented it, she found readily available in her head. The phone hadn't finished ringing twice when a breathless voice demanded shrilly "Hello?"

"Hello, Charlotte. Is Roger there?"

The phone emitted a clatter that suggested it had been flung away. "Mummy, it's Roger's old wife," the eight-year-old shouted across at least one large room.

The phone took its time about speaking again. "Leslie. How are you? How's your business?"

"Fine."

"I'm very glad to hear it," Hilene said with a genuineness Leslie found harder to cope with than she thought insincerity might have been. "What can I do for you?"

There was no use retorting that she'd already done a great deal more than enough. "Ian isn't with you, is he?"

"Well, no, he wouldn't be. It's not our day for him, is it?" With so little change in her voice it was clear that her daughter had stayed in the room Hilene said "You haven't hidden your friend Ian anywhere, have you?"

The giggles that provoked must have been accompanied by an outburst of Charlotte's vigorous shakes of the head. "No scent of him here, I'm afraid. Is there some trouble?"

"He's at the puffing stage. Silly boy and his silly friends couldn't even wait to light up till they were away from the school."

"Gosh, I thought we'd impressed on him how dangerous they are. Nasty smelly cigarettes. They make you ill, but you can't stop smoking once you start, so don't you ever touch them."

Only the words, not her tone, made it clear that most of this was addressed to her daughter, and all of it felt like a rebuke to Leslie, who retorted "I didn't expect him to be there, but I thought I'd better check."

"I'll tell Roger when he brings the car back from being fixed. Poor old thing, it's starting to show its age."

"That gets to us all," Leslie told the younger woman, younger by only two years that weren't worth resenting, and was about to ring off when Hilene said "If you ever need to talk about Ian, please know I'm here."

"Yes. Thank you, Hilene," Leslie said with an effort that involved squeezing her eyes shut until she replaced the receiver. She opened them when Melinda laid a soft, warm, slightly moist hand over hers. "How bad this time?" Melinda said.

"He's wandered off to be by himself and feel the world's against him. I remember how that used to feel."

"So he won't be with his friends you don't like at least."

"They're locked up at school for a while. Maybe he's somewhere he doesn't want to be with anyone," Leslie said almost without thinking, and then her eyes widened as her mind did. "I know where he is," she said, and saw Melinda know it too.

Less than an hour later the train drew into Stonebridge Park. It hadn't quite halted when Leslie edged the door open and jumped onto the platform to dash down the ramp to the main road. No doubt her fellow commuters took her for one of themselves, in more of a hurry to get home than they were. Most of them followed her across the road into Wembley and dispersed themselves through the streets of the suburb, and before she'd crossed three streets she was alone with her hurrying footsteps.

An airliner hauled a ragged strip of cloud across the wide blue sky above the broad red roofs. A bat patted a soft ball in some child's back garden, a lawn mower drew long deep purring breaths. Here was the house where she'd kept hearing someone in an upstairs room practising the solo part of the Trumpet Voluntary once ascribed to Purcell, each rehearsal a little improved, but the window was silent now. Here was the front drive where she'd seen a large dog and a kitten that would have fitted in its stomach lying back to back in last year's midsummer sunlight while they took turns to pant, but the concrete was deserted. The memories were awakening others she was going to have to face. Ahead was the junction with Jericho Close, and now here was its corner where the paving stones had cracked and sunk under the weight of a builder's lorry or some other vehicle, and she could see to the end of the cul-de-sac—to the house that was pretending to be as innocent as its equally whitewashed partner.

It still looked like hers. It was the only house that had been just hers and Ian's. Her curtains still bordered the windows, and as she walked swiftly up the short quiet discreet road, her mirror framed by wooden blossom on the front-room wall greeted her with a flare of sunlight. It might have been a warning, or an indication that she ought to notice what she already had: the For Sale sign had been broken off its pole, and a curtain was swaying to a halt in the smaller of the two front bedrooms—Ian's room.

She unlatched the gate and lifted it the half-inch necessary to prevent it from catching on the rogue fragment of the jigsaw path, and saw the For Sale sign propped against the inside of the low chunky wall, crushing a dandelion that had invaded her flower bed. She marched along the path and reached for the bell push to summon Ian. Then, wanting to discover how the house felt to her, she slipped her keys out of her handbag instead and, with a stealth she couldn't explain to herself, opened the front door.

For a moment her hall looked as it should. The plump green carpet extended itself up the stairs, at the foot of which the phone sat on its table, though the line had been cut off for months. Her collection of wonderfully dreadful record covers, starting with Beethoven and Glenn Gould in the cab of a truck, still decorated the wall over the stairs. But the hall led past the front room and the dining room to the closed kitchen door, glossy as sweat, pale as fear. She reminded herself that Ian was upstairs and made herself pad quickly down the hall to rest one hand on the painted wood, which was chilly and slick. She pushed and felt the metal ball of the catch lose its grip on the socket with an almost imperceptible click, and the door swung inward.

Whiteness almost blinded her: the white of the wall cupboards, the cooker and dishwasher waiting in patient silence, the tall refrigerator humming its monotonous note, the slitted blinds at the windows—the new floor. She thought concrete was floating above it until she saw it was only a fan of sunlight that was turning the dust white. She clenched her fists, and when they began to relax she ventured a step into the room.

There was no use her pretending: she no longer had a sense of treading on a hidden grave. Nevertheless her mouth was dry, and so she crossed to the sink and lifted a glass down from the cupboard and filled it from the tap, having run that longer than she ordinarily would. She raised the glass and took a tentative sip, and then a mouthful. It wasn't just cool, it was calming, and tasted as pure as water ever did.

She finished it as she gazed out at the back garden. Her side of the hedge was as tousled as a five-year-old's hair. At the end of the strip of lawn that was brandishing weeds at her, the umbrella of the garden table drooped like a neglected flower against the alley wall. She turned away to be confronted by the open cupboard full of items there had seemed to be no point in moving until she and Ian had somewhere else of their own to live. She was feeling altogether less compelled to retreat off the new floor than she'd expected when she heard the stair immediately below the landing emit the creak even the thick carpet couldn't hush. She set the glass down on the pine table and paced into the hall.

Now that Ian knew he'd been heard he let his weight drop on each stair, every step a declaration of defiance. He swung himself around the end of the banister and lolled into the hall, confronting her with his thirteen-year-old bulk as though he didn't care whether it impressed her as more than a gawky object, too much of which he didn't quite know what to do with. His black school blazer with its scuffed elbows didn't help his image, nor did his reddish hair that refused to lie down no matter how much he sprayed it, and even his necklace of a tie that was dangling its strangulated knot failed to create the effect it was meant to have. He couldn't know that in him she was seeing a version of her own awkward adolescence, of the compulsion to rebel even against oneself. Perhaps he didn't realise he had Roger's broad square face and her eyes, as apparently sleepy as they were keen. She mustn't let any of this, nor her surge of exasperated affection at the sight of him, divert her from dealing with his behaviour. She was opening her mouth when he spoke in his new mostly deep voice. "Can we come back to live?" he said.

"Will you listen to what she's proposing now, Edward." To Leslie her mother said "Sometimes I think I don't understand you at all."

"She has to make her own decisions, Ivy," her father said, but Leslie had the impression of being discussed like a customer at the bank he managed when he added "She's old enough to live with the consequences."

"They aren't consequences just for her. There's a child to be considered."

Outside the picture window the expansive houses of Wealdstone paired off toward Harrow. Whenever Leslie came to it the street was as quiet as a waiter in an expensive restaurant, and now the evening had muted its sounds further while toning down the sunlight, but the quiet fell short of her parents' house, where at times it seemed no conversation was complete without the accompaniment of some tape of their old favourites. Just now John Lennon was demonstrating how several repetitions of "her" were hidden in "too," which failed to lift the concern that weighed down her mother's long face toward the mouth. "Do you hear what I'm saying, Leslie?" she said. "I hope you aren't going to retreat into one of your sulks, or you'll be having him take after you in another of the ways you've discovered you don't like."

Leslie restrained herself to glancing at her son, who was perched on the edge of a soft fawn leather armchair, his legs in purple calf-length shorts wide apart as he leafed through an Internet magazine she could tell he wasn't actually reading. "You're being considered, aren't you, Ian? You want to move back."