Song Of Time (5 page)

Music spilled from our house in that strange summer as it had never done before. Leo played brilliantly now, with fire and with tenderness. Sometimes it was scary to hear the music he made, especially when he and I were alone in the house. I’d retreat to my room and lie on my bed listening awestruck as Bach unravelled below in terrifying cathedral-leaps of light. How, I wondered as I lumbered through the spiralling
Ciaccona
bar by bar on my muted violin, did anyone ever make such sounds? What sometimes made me afraid of Leo’s playing now was the knowledge that, for all its soaring loveliness, what I was hearing was an expression of his illness. White plague, of course, was a misnomer. As the leaflets which Mum produced pointed out, the condition wasn’t fatal, at least in countries with advanced medical services. In fact, in a world which had already experienced AIDS, Ebola, MRS, pyrexia and cat flu, WRFI seemed like a small thing to non-sufferers—after all, didn’t we all have to watch what we ate? At the same time, there was also consider-able ignorance and hysteria. I remember how cousin Kapil insisted it was all down to “them fucking Pakkis”, whilst several Indian boys at my school were beaten up with WRFI as a pretext. Leo’s diet was often characterised as being like a slimming fad, and thus no big deal. The facts that he’d suffered liver problems and a kidney infection and was still losing weight were ignored, as were the fiddly tests he had to undertake of his blood and urine each morning, and the aches and the weariness and the dreary food, and the knowledge that his illness was the main reason our house hadn’t sold.

There was no longer any question of Leo going to Oxford, or to London; he would have to study at home. Blythe announced that she had also decided against the LSE in favour of Birmingham. She was a frequent visitor to our house that summer, and we would sometimes visit hers. I remember how the air in Dad’s Renault suddenly seemed to cool when we reached the suburbs of Edgbaston, and the sky lost its sour tinge of grey and the trees tossed their heads as the security gates opened and we negotiated the speed bumps beyond. Long lawns green beneath sprinklers spread towards many-windowed palaces of mock-Tudor, mock-Medieval, mock-Modern.

It seemed like another world, although Tim and Natalie Munro were decent people, and decently unembarrassed about their wealth. The rich upper middle classes of those times still spent generously on the armies of maids, minders, drivers, attendants, dog-walkers and nannies who then kept their lives afloat. That summer, though, there was a new device—a toy, Tim Munro called it—which trimmed their lawns in place of their old mowing service. Green and sleek, one of the outriders of the next wave of independent labour-saving machines, it buzzed through the sunshine as we sat around the swimming pool. Leo stayed lounging on a recliner as Blythe ploughed gracefully through the water. He was prohibited from swimming, but he’d stripped down to his costume, and I noticed how his ribs protruded and the bones of his shoulders stuck out in painfully sharp angles. His flesh had shrivelled almost everywhere apart from his belly, which projected like a child’s. He was starting to look alarmingly like those pictures of starving people which we then saw so much of on TV. I, conscious of poor Leo, and that my own body looked nothing like Blythe’s, or even Mum’s, had remained resolutely fully dressed.

Climbing out from the pool, gathering a thin wrap across her shoulders, Blythe beckoned, and led me down through the garden.

“I wanted to show you these. See, aren’t they lovely…?”

A gardenia bush, draped with bridal white blossoms, was flourishing in this changing climate. I, though, was more conscious of the droplets sliding across the slopes of Blythe’s bikinied body as she stooped to inhale the creamy smell. One of the things I undoubtedly disliked about my brother’s girlfriend was that she was rich, but that was hardly her fault, any more than her beauty. After all, as my parents sometimes reminded me, we Maitlands scarcely lacked for much ourselves. What I really felt, I decided as we walked on, and the brief image arose, prompted by her near-nakedness, of the time when I’d disturbed her and Leo in that hot bedroom, was mostly envy, and a vague, uncomprehending disgust.

“Leo tells me you’re progressing with the
Ciaccona
. He says you have an ear for Bach.”

I smiled—unwillingly flattered, but flattered nevertheless. I knew that Leo never said anything about music unless he really meant it. “I’ve been practising a bit more.”

“I still feel guilty about giving up with the cello.” Her fingers shredded a fern. “Not that I have given up. But I don’t think I could bear to play professionally. There’s nothing worse in life, I think, than being only just good enough. I’d end up sawing away year after year at the pop classics in some provincial orchestra. Always living in hotels. Nerves and bad hands. I love music, but not that much…That’s why I’ve decided to study law, although I suppose you think that’s a cop-out.”

I was flattered again by the thought that Blythe should care about my judgement. “Law’s supposed to be a discipline, isn’t it? One of those things that’s—”

“Yes, I know, well-paid,” she said, mis-finishing my sentence for me. “But I’m not doing it for the money, Roushana. I know I’ll sound like some dumb beauty queen if I say it, but I’d like to make some sort of difference.”

Pigeons clattered. Doves cooed. In the distance, the lawnmower droned. What difference, I wondered, and to what?

“And then my staying at home—that makes a sort of sense as well. It’s what most students have to do, and Mum and Dad are totally happy to pay for a flat. They say it’s a good investment. They wouldn’t bat an eyelid if Leo lived there as well.” She gave me a sidelong glance, sly almost, through the wet snakes of her hair. “Do you think he would?”

I shrugged, still basking in her need to confide. “It depends on how he is. I don’t think Mum and Dad would mind, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s just so hard to know how things will work out. Now it’s summer, everyone’s expecting the damn virus to return. And Leo’s had to put up with such prejudice. And this ridiculous business with our trip to Venice…”

After years of caravans and self-catering, we were going this summer to Venice, and Blythe was coming as well. But an endless series of obstacles had arisen because of Leo’s WRFI. We’d had problems with the airline, the insurance companies, and then the hotel, but mostly, as the supposedly open borders of Europe slammed shut, with the British and Italian authorities.

“But that’s sorted, isn’t it?”

“Your mother’s so
tenacious
.” Blythe chuckled. “I can see where Leo gets it from.”

Not that Leo was tenacious, at least in any ordinary sense—he was so innately good at things that he’d never needed to be. At least, the darker thought struck me, until now…

We were standing now in the blue shade of the trees which lined the furthest end of the Munros’ garden. The grass here had been allowed to grow into a kind of meadow, although the flowers which sparked their colours as the trees swayed were too many and varied to have grown here by chance. Beyond, I supposed, was another garden, or the fringes of some health club or golf course, but we could have been deep in some idealised Romantic painting of the countryside, and Blythe, barely dressed as she was, was like a sprite or nymph. I realised, a little belatedly, that our walk, our conversation, our ending up alone here, hadn’t been a matter of chance.

“This is my favourite place in our garden. It’s where I most feel at peace—where I like to think.” Taking off her wrap, laying it on a stone bench and sitting down with a small shiver, Blythe patted it for me to sit beside her. “You know, you and I, we have a lot in common.”

We
were
both female, I supposed, although with she as she was, and me in baggy shorts and a surfing tee-shirt, that didn’t seem like much. And we both loved Leo as well. That was it, I supposed. Whatever it was.

“Roushana, you’ve got no idea how much he thinks of you.”

Warm though it was, even in this warm, idyllic shade, it was my turn to shiver.

“He’s not always as good as he should be at saying what he means. Oh, I know he can express himself and talk passionately about anything under the sun, but that’s not the same, is it? It’s like talking in essays…”

Blythe’s skin had almost dried now. She tanned well, and her colour was somewhere between mine and Leo’s—it was shade which white people always wished their skin to be then, yet it seemed filled with a sort of shadowy anonymity in that seed-floating meadow.

“So I don’t really know how he feels.”

“About what?”

She shrugged. “I wish I knew. Me, I suppose. But—”

“You could ask.”

“That’s too easy. He’d see it coming a mile off.”

For all my envies and reservations about Blythe, I’d always had a somewhat idealised picture of her relationship with Leo. After all, they were both so good at so many things, so surely they’d be good at being together? And perhaps they were, or perhaps they had been, but I was getting the impression from this oddly sideways—and, yet, yes, enjoyably adult—conversation that she was worried that things between them wouldn’t last. Was there something I could say, I wondered, which could hasten this process, help bring at least one tiny part of Blythe’s endless good fortune tumbling down? I toyed with sharing imagined doubts Leo might have expressed, or sharply casual asides about the way Blythe talked or walked or looked, but I couldn’t put them into my brother’s voice any more than I could phrases of frank adoration. Blythe was right; Leo was good at talking in essays but he couldn’t express himself like this. That, after all, was why he played music, and that, I suddenly realised in a flash of sheer insight, was what I was trying to do as well as I scraped and bumbled my way through the towering landscapes of Bach—I wanted to say the unsayable. And Blythe, for all her proficiency and talk about provincial orchestras and hotels (which struck me then as a quite glorious way to live), had never grasped that that was what music was about. To her, it was just another accomplishment, like horse-riding or learning how to dive gracefully into her parent’s pool. No wonder she and Leo were drifting apart. And, yes, I thought, he deserves better. But there was no way I could have put any of this into words, even if I’d have had the nerve to confront Blythe. Instead, I did the thing which Leo had recently explained to me most musicians are poor at doing; I let silence do the work.

I was conscious of Blythe’s presence beside me—the physicality of whatever she was. I’d never really thought of her before as being made of the same human stuff as me, but, glancing down, I noticed the purple bruises of what looked like the fingertips of a grasping hand amid the raised goosebumps on her thighs, and the small crease which folded into her belly below her navel. She seemed to blur and divide. Half of her was still the Blythe of this spectacular house, the Blythe who gave speeches and accepted bouquets on podiums, the Blythe who stood in twilight at our doorstep in her beautiful clothes. And then there was the Blythe enclosed in the measly stuff of flesh and bone, which shat and excreted, which would crumble to dust and leave nothing.

“What I mean is,” she said finally in her quick, clear and accentless voice, “that if he said or did anything—if he meant anything, even if he didn’t want anyone else to know or hear—you’d let me know, Roushana, wouldn’t you?”

I turned to her and smiled. “Yes,” I said; it was the easiest lie I’ve ever told.

“Good!” She patted my hand, once more the deputy-head girl. “I’m glad that’s sorted. Now, shall we go and see what everyone else is up to?”

It was the day before we were to go to Venice, and almost exactly a year since Leo and I had smoked dope. There was the same texture to the heat in our garden, and the splay of the cherry tree against the sky seemed unchanged as I lay beneath it, but this time I was alone. What had also changed since the year before was the chaos which filled the house as everyone packed in preparation for tomorrow, and what had changed was Leo.

I’ve always hated day-befores, with their sense of blurry imminence. With Blythe coming with us to Venice as well, and because we were going by plane instead of packing everything into the car as we usually did, all the normal last-minute anxieties were magnified. Mum and Dad scurried to and from the shops for mosquito plugs, spare batteries for their handhelds, late additions to Leo’s diet: more and more things. Then Nan Ashar and Gran Maitland came around, fussing and wringing their hands, leaving us with Tupperware boxes stuffed with unsuitable food-stuffs. Blythe, to her credit, kept out of the way. She and Leo would be sharing a room, whilst I would also have one of my own. I’d never thought that I’d yearn for the
Clarions
and
Belviours
with their laminated lists, but I did.

Lying in our garden, I stared up through the cherry tree’s boughs, thinking through a difficult multiple-stopping in the thirty fourth phrase in the
Ciaccona
as I watched a glinting plane tear a white wake across the sky.

Leo’s shadow blocked the sun. “Thought I’d find you out here,” he said, then he stretched beside me on the spread rug as if nothing had changed and laid his arms beneath his head. “What are you thinking about?”

We talked for a while of musical practicalities, and he told me it was okay, sometimes, to hate the instrument you played.
Music isn’t the instrument. Music is the sound it makes, and the person who makes it. Sometimes, the physical thing you use simply gets in the way…

“It’s the same with a person,” he said, confiding to me and the splintered sky. “No matter how fond you are of them, not matter what you think you feel, it isn’t
them
. It’s like they’re a mirror and all you can really see and feel is yourself and the thing which you can never reach.”

“And you want to smash the mirror?”

He chuckled. “Yes. That as well.”

I smiled up as the last contrail thinned, picturing Blythe shattering deliciously to pieces.

“Do you remember when we were out here last year?” he asked.