The Facts of Life (27 page)

‘Wouldn’t you know it!’ he laughed, ‘she likes Clementi, of all things!’

After weeks of cracked mumbling, it was a shock to hear him using his full voice. Sally smiled encouragement but said nothing, frightened he might stop, but he played solidly for over an hour. It was as though his musical language and interest in his daughter had burst simultaneously through a soft wall in his mind like a flashing spring of new water. He tried piece after piece, testing Miriam’s reactions, although her gurgles and shouts were probably as much a reaction to her father’s sudden vivacity as to the harmonies he was producing.

After dealing with the washing, Sally threw open the door to the garden and began to sweep the steps in the wintry sunshine. Behind her, Edward continued to play, Miriam to shout, oblivious of the arrival of the postman. He brought an electricity bill and a late holiday postcard from her parents, who were already back from visiting friends at Hastings. There was also a thin envelope with a Dorset postmark. Frowning at the unfamiliar writing, her heart telling her in advance of its contents, Sally tore the letter out and sat on the steps to read the news of her old friend and second mother’s death.

Sally swore on discovering she had left her umbrella behind when dropping off Miriam with her father. She switched off the wind-screen wiper and peered out across Westmarket’s broad main street to the imposing entrance of the Grand Hotel. The torrential rain showed no sign of slackening up. She turned up her raincoat collar, tucking the tails of her headscarf well down inside it, braced herself, and opened the car door. Her coat was drenched almost to blackness before she could even cross the road and she arrived in the hotel lobby as inelegant and crossly shuddering as a waterlogged cat. Above the quiet chink-chinking of tea things in the dining room, a violin played sentimental melodies. Sensing the eyes of staff and guests on her, as they padded about the thickly carpeted lobby, Sally shook as much rain as she could from her coat, untied her clammy scarf and ran a comb through her hair. She looked about her.

Miss Bannerjee was reading the
Telegraph
on a corner sofa, her legs stretched out before her. She wore shiny, bright-buckled patent leather sandals, merely a few inches in length. The newspaper almost hid her; it was only a tell-tale flash of canary yellow silk, as she smacked the wrinkle from a page, which caught Sally’s eye and stopped her walking straight past.

‘Miss Bannerjee?’

The paper was lowered and Miss Bannerjee’s eyes were at once wide with concern.

‘But you’re soaked. I’ll get us more tea. Waiter! Another pot please. And brandy. My guest must have a shot of brandy. With perhaps a splash of Stone’s ginger wine.’

A brief fight with the waiter ensued, in which he insisted that such things could not be served at such a time. Miss Bannerjee won the day by raising a voice as shrill as her clothing was exotic and invoking the cause of Medicinal Purposes.

Warmed with brandy, her coat and scarf despatched to the hotel’s bowels for drying, Sally sat back in an armchair to face the executor of Dr Pertwee’s estate.

‘Your letter mentioned the will,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so worried about it, I didn’t like to tell my husband. Is there some problem about The Roundel?’

‘Absolutely none. The legal papers confirming Alice’s adoption of you and the deeds to the house are still in the safekeeping of her bankers in Rexbridge. They merely await your collection. As she had expected, her relatives in Surrey kicked up something of a stink. They came to Corry for the funeral and when they saw that you weren’t there and then heard the terms of the will, which stipulates that your daughter is to inherit the house after you, they had you down as something of a gold-digger –’

‘But I couldn’t possibly have got there!’ Sally protested. ‘I explained at the time; my husband –’

Miss Bannerjee raised both her small palms to calm her, clattering silver bracelets on her wrists.

‘Of course you couldn’t. And I made it quite clear to them. Anyway, as Alice had predicted, they seemed perfectly pacified with her legacy of jewellery – far more valuable than the house and much less bothersome to maintain. However there was one thing she wanted held back for you.’

‘But she’d given me so much already,’ Sally sighed. She had no use for valuable jewellery and dreaded anything which might further antagonise the mysterious Surrey cousins.

Muttering to herself, Miss Bannerjee heaved a big, old-fashioned leather brief-case on to the sofa beside her and thrust an arm through its brass-studded maw. She groped for a moment then raised her eyebrows and brought out something wrapped in royal blue spotted silk.

‘There,’ she said, placing it with a clunk on the table between them. She poured them more tea. ‘From Alice. A final legacy.’

Sally lifted the bundle to her side of the table. It was surprisingly heavy. She unknotted the silk and folded it back to reveal a layer of yellowed newspaper. Peeling that aside she found a carved stone figure. It was female, with sharply conical breasts and an exaggerated lap, broad enough to bear up twins, or even a grown man. The hair was wound up underneath a crude crown, the eyes were inscrutable slits and the full mouth was pulled back in what could have been a smile, could have been a growl. The stone was icy to the touch. Sally shivered involuntarily.

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘She’s no beauty, certainly,’ said Miss Bannerjee, ‘but there’s a vigour to her. I’m afraid I couldn’t resist taking a closer look on the train here.’

‘I’ve never seen her before.’

‘Alice had been keeping her in storage. She brought her out – perhaps with a view to ensuring she reached you – and had her on her bedside table throughout her last illness. She’s an Anglian princess. Or a goddess, perhaps. She was dug up in the peat during excavations to build The Roundel apparently. So she really belongs in the house. Look at the strength of those arms! Blessings in one hand and cruel destruction in the other, I should say. Alice’s family had always kept her quiet in case the place was invaded by bossy archaeologists. The Surrey cousins made no mention of her during their scavenging, so I can only assume that even they don’t know of her existence.’

Sally set the figure back on the table to look at her for a moment then felt compelled to pick her up again, feel her small density, chill and weighty in her hands. Repelled as she was, she could not help admiring the passive force with which the carving asserted its ancient identity over the scene of genteel cake-slaughter.

‘I’ve no doubt that she’s worth a great deal to a museum or a specialist buyer,’ Miss Bannerjee added firmly, ‘but Alice was adamant that she shouldn’t be sold.’

‘But of course,’ Sally agreed. ‘I wonder what she’s called.’

‘Oh, deities are far more potent when they’re nameless. Think of the tremendous difference in his worldly standing when Jehovah became simply God! That was cheating, really; using a generic mopped up the too-specific opposition.’

‘Whatever shall I do with her?’

‘Shut her in a broom cupboard? Honour her with flowers? It really doesn’t matter. She’s only a lump of stone.’

‘Yes,’ Sally laughed. ‘Of course she is.’

But even though she knew Miss Bannerjee’s words to be entirely rational, she couldn’t help registering a shaft of discomfort at their flippancy. She noticed too the insistence with which they each acknowledged the statue’s gender; she was firmly a She, not an It.

Sally began the drive home with the statue, furled in its wrappings again, on the passenger seat beside her. Then she found herself unnerved by the way it rocked whenever she turned a corner, so she stuffed it into a pocket of her coat. Hidden in layers of cloth, it rested between her thighs.

The rain, which had barely stopped for three days, remained insistent. Whenever a car or van turned into her path, she would drop well back to avoid the great wash of spray sent up over her windscreen. The Wolseley was a venerable machine whose wiper could barely clear the water before the screen was awash once more. Twice the rain became so torrential that she was forced to pull over, unable to see the road ahead. She passed through Rexbridge, fighting down the temptation to take shelter in Thomas’s comfortable house, and set out, instead, towards her parents’ cottage at Wenborough. She was barely into the fringes of the fens when she found the road ahead blocked by the surreal sight of a policeman in waders, vainly trying to shelter under a black umbrella. He flagged her down and she cranked down her window.

‘Sorry, Miss,’ he shouted through the downpour. ‘You’ll have to find another route. The road up ahead’s blocked.’

‘What with?’

‘Flood. It’s the high spring tides. Sedwich Dyke’s burst its bank.’

‘No!’

‘Where are you trying to get to, Miss? You don’t want to go too far in this. That car doesn’t look like it could handle much.’

‘Not far,’ she lied, winding up her window. ‘I’ll find another route, maybe via Methwold. Thank you, Officer.’

She stopped at the next hamlet: There was a telephone kiosk marooned in a great brown puddle. Her feet were soaked as she dashed across. She fumbled with her change purse as she dialled with numb fingers. She rang The Roundel first, to reassure Edward that she was coming. This was the first time she had left him alone for more than an hour since his return. There was a pair of milk churns on a slate shelf beside the kiosk. She could barely hear the ringing tone above the din of the water drumming on their lids. She let it ring and ring. He didn’t answer. Praying he had not been foolish enough to venture out on her motorbike in the wet, she hung up and dialled her parents to explain that she would be later than arranged in picking up Miriam. She could not get through. The operator calmly assured her that a line was down and that normal service would be resumed as soon as possible.

The chord circled in the air, a pure, naked triad made to vibrate with a new keenness by the addition of a single dissonance. Holding it in place with the
sostenuto
pedal, Edward scratched on the manuscript with his pen, the tip of his tongue brushing his upper lip in his concentration. Then, holding the pen in his teeth, he played swiftly through the last four lines he had written and saw at once how they could be improved. Just as he began to write again, the telephone rang. He frowned, hesitated a moment, but managed to ignore its insistent interruption. The terrific wind blew a bedroom window open and set it flapping on its hinges. He knew the rain would be coming in now and staining the floor, but he managed to ignore that too. The seemingly impossible was happening: he was working again.

It had happened, like so many of the recent alterations in his behaviour, in slow, blurred degrees, perceptible only with hind-sight. At first he had merely played the piano. In his schooldays, his piano teacher never trusted him to practise enough during the holidays and forbade him to play anything in the first days of a new term but meticulous Bach and page upon page of studies. Remembering this, Edward had spent the days following his rediscovery of the piano working on his technique with the guarded determination of an athlete recovering from painful injury. Deep in a box of music he found his dog-eared copy of Hanon’s
The Virtuoso Pianist
and began to play daily once through its merciless system of finger-stretching exercises, scales and arpeggios. He permitted himself no flaws, punishing each mistake by returning to the beginning of the study in hand. His teacher would have been proud of him.

‘You don’t mind?’ Edward asked Sally. ‘It isn’t driving you crazy?’

She shook her head, but was unable, as she encouraged him, to prevent a fleeting smile at his ironic choice of words.

For he had been crazy. He saw that now. Thomas and Sally called it ‘severe depression’. Thomas found him books and poems by fellow sufferers, as though by recognising his symptoms in literature, Edward might place them in some demystifying, historical perspective. As though a man with skin erupted in deadly buboes might be comforted to read
Journal of the Plague Year
. They called it depression and Edward was content to let them. They could not know of the waking dreams he had suffered, the unspeakable fears that had pursued him. His recovery was still in progress and he shied away from society, uncertain still of how he might behave. He was, however, far enough recovered to be aware of the depths of irrationality he had plumbed. Waking to look around his bedroom without its contents seeming to condemn and threaten him, he felt he could begin to regard what had happened as something slipping away from him into the past, a separate thing, his breakdown. Waking in the darkness, however, from one of the nightmares that still seeped from within him, sour juices from an unhealing sore, he was afraid lest such blessed mornings represented only a brief, fool’s dawn in a night without end.

As well as the Hanon studies, he taught himself the
Goldberg Variations
again. He had not played them since his teens and was daunted to realise how strong his technique must have been then and how flabby it had become in the interim. He dissected and reassembled them, one variation at a time, marvelling at the games Bach played, crossing hands, inverting melodies, interweaving three or four lines at a time, spinning sonic illusions in the listener’s mind from the web on the page. He was forcing himself to play through one of the movements towards the end of the set, with a metronome clicking in his ear, when the telephone rang. For weeks, Sally had been answering it, protecting him from the outside world with words like ‘resting’ and ‘studying’, but she was pushing Miriam’s pram around the garden and Edward was at once so relaxed and preoccupied that he answered without thinking. It was Jerry Liebermann.