The Orphan Choir (17 page)

Philip was certain there was no music playing on the street twenty minutes earlier. He was an eye- and ear-witness to the absence of boys’ voices singing. I wouldn’t have been able to convince him that he was wrong and I was right.

I didn’t bother asking any of the other neighbours. Once again, I realised, I’d underestimated Mr Clay. Of course he wouldn’t play empirically verifiable loud music in the street. He wouldn’t be so stupid.

So. Hidden speakers in my lounge. It’s the only explanation.

After I got back from Philip’s, I locked the door, went to the kitchen and took the little packet of cannabis out of the drawer. From another drawer, I pulled out a box of matches, and from the counter I picked up a half-empty bottle of mineral water. I took all three to the lounge and sat down on the sofa, thinking, ‘I am
going to take some drugs. Maybe if I get high like Mr Fahrenheit (that’s what I call Mr Clay) I will be able to access his mindset more easily – the druggie wavelength; I will be able to look around this room and intuitively know where he’s planted the invisible speakers.’

I didn’t go through with my plan to get high. I remembered that Mr Fahrenheit, when I saw him do this, had a piece of what looked like silver foil stretched over the top of the bottle. I couldn’t be bothered to go back to the kitchen for foil, so I stayed where I was and cried instead.

At this rate, if no one helps me to prove what’s going on and put a stop to it, my next-door neighbour is going to kill me.

‘Mum, look how high I’m going!’ Joseph yells at me, bouncing up and down on the trampoline. He’s with a friend who, so far, has jumped silently, as I’m sure his watching mother must be smugly aware.

‘Ssssh!’ I hiss, running over just in case I need to tell Joseph again because he didn’t hear me the first time. As I move towards him, I glance to my left at the hard-surfaced tennis court, on which a young blond married couple, protected from the cold by tracksuits and fleeces with hooded tops, are playing half-heartedly and laughing at their own uselessness. I met them at the spa last week and we talked for a bit – everyone seems keen to chat to the new homeowners, probably so that they can gossip about us later – but I can’t remember their names. Hers was
something unusual like Melody or Carmody, but not either of those.

Only about one in five of their shots makes it over the net. As I move towards the trampoline, I watch them to see if they are going to react at all to Joseph’s enthusiastic outburst or to my ‘Ssssh!’, but they don’t seem interested. They are too caught up in their own giggling, which isn’t much quieter than the noise I made, and is going on for longer. The mother of the other boy on the trampoline doesn’t seem concerned about the breach of the peace either. And Joseph is already mouthing, ‘Sorry, Mum! I forgot!’

We moved into The Boundary less than a week ago, but I am already starting to work out the unwritten rules. It isn’t noise that people worry about so much as noise that no one is taking steps to deal with. My ‘Ssssh!’ would have reassured everyone in the vicinity that I was aware of the problem and would sort it out, and that is all people want here: the comfort of knowing that their neighbours value quiet and tranquillity as much as they do. After my experience with Mr Fahrenheit, I know that the killer aspect of unwelcome sound is not the decibels but the disempowering feeling of having no control over your own environment and life. Anyone could cope with loud music if they knew that it would soon stop, or could be made to if it didn’t.

When I reach my son, I say, ‘You can stay here if you want, but I need to go and make a start on lunch.’

‘He’ll be okay here with me,’ says the other boy quickly, alarmed by the prospect of losing his playmate. ‘I’m staying out for a bit yet.’ He has a Welsh accent, copper-coloured hair and large freckles and, I notice, is dressed like a gentleman farmer – the miniature version – whereas Joseph looks like a city boy in trendy jeans and without a proper coat on, his high-top trainers sitting on the grass next to the trampoline beside a far more appropriate pair of small brown walking boots. I’ll have to take him into Spilling and buy him a green padded coat like the Welsh boy’s, wellington boots, a cagoule.

‘I’m not hungry,’ he says. ‘I don’t want lunch.’

‘Okay, stay here, then,’ I tell him. ‘Come when you’re ready. I’ll save some pasta for you – you can have it whenever you want.’

Joseph rewards me with a radiant smile. ‘Thanks, Mum! You’re sick!’ This is another word he has picked up at Saviour. He assures me that it means cool and generally brilliant.

I head back to the house, having said nothing to the Welsh boy’s mother about keeping an eye on my son. I know I don’t need to. The Swallowfield security detail is meticulous. Bethan made it sound too good
to be true when I came for the sales tour, but it turns out she was spot on: discreet but ever-present was what she told me and it’s quite true. I haven’t noticed security staff patrolling the grounds – haven’t felt overlooked or spied on at all – but when I left my car window open by mistake, a friendly man in a Swallowfield-crested tunic-top knocked on my door to advise me of my lapse, and when I dropped my phone’s case while out for a two-hour walk around the estate that took in Reach Lagoon, Swallows Lake and The Pinnacle, another smiling man in an identical tunic returned it to The Boundary within half an hour of my return.

I love it here. I love everything about it, but especially the benefits I didn’t know that I or my family would get when I signed on the dotted line. I knew Swallowfield was beautiful, special, peaceful, but I didn’t anticipate the effect it would have on my mental and physical health, or Stuart’s, or Joseph’s. A mere four days here have extracted the grey-yellow pallor of the city from our skin, the etiolated aspect we didn’t know was there until we saw how different we looked after a couple of days breathing in the pure air at Swallowfield. I am not imagining this; Stuart was the one who first remarked on it, and he’s right: our skin looks buffed here, rosy pink, properly oxygenated. Our eyes have more shine to
them. We are bundles of energy who take far longer to get tired than we did in Cambridge, and when we eventually do it’s because we’ve swum for an hour and a half in the heated outdoor pool and then walked a full circuit of the wild-flower meadow, not simply because we’ve had to wait twenty minutes in the queue at Tesco on Hills Road and then kick through too many Domino’s Pizza boxes on our way back home.

We sleep better here, thanks to the darkness and the silence. The swollen patches beneath my eyes have subsided – this after no cream my Cambridge doctor had me try did any good at all. The same doctor told me I must take at least six months off work and suggested I see a cognitive behavioural therapist. Before we moved into The Boundary, I hadn’t been into the office at all for more than a month; I couldn’t imagine ever being able to drag myself in there again. Now I am thinking that on 9 January 2013, Joseph’s first day back at school, I will be able to report for duty bright and early and tell everyone that I’m fine now, thanks: the trauma is over.

Mr Fahrenheit can try to wind me up by playing choral music if he wants to, but I shall outwit him. I’ve already told Stuart: we’re going to get the attic properly insulated and swap our bedroom with his study. Mr Fahrenheit will have no way of knowing
we’ve done this; he’ll never know that there’s no longer anyone sleeping in the room on the other side of the wall from his bedroom, and he’ll waste hours of his time fiddling with the volume, turning boys’ voices up and down in the night whenever Stuart’s not there and he thinks he can get away with it. Meanwhile, I will be in the attic, fast asleep, wearing the best earplugs money can buy.

I could and should have thought of this in October or November, but I was in no fit state to save myself then. Swallowfield has saved me, as I knew it would. It’s strange. All the things that were out of control and threatening in Cambridge seem manageable from this safe distance. I am ready to throw away the drugs I stole from Mr Fahrenheit’s house; I’ve decided that I will leave the house late one night, while Stuart and Joseph are asleep, and scatter the tiny clumps of cannabis over Topping Lake as if they are the ashes of someone I loved who died. If I’m between my house and the lake, I’m fairly sure no security guard will spot me, as long as I take no more than a few seconds. I don’t think it will contravene the estate’s no-litter rule; the drugs look like tiny clippings from some kind of tree in any case, so it’s all natural and organic; it isn’t as if I’m planning to dump a truck load of empty Coke cans. I don’t know much about horticulture, but I think it’s unlikely
that an enormous marijuana plant will start to grow outside my house as a result.

It’s strange to think that I brought the drugs to Swallowfield thinking I might need them. Luckily, the security guys don’t have sniffer dogs, but still, it was a crazy risk to take – one I only took because the woman I used to be, the Louise Beeston who packed to come here, was well on her way to crazy and heading for a life as a drug addict.

I realise now that, though I never admitted it to myself, that was my back-up plan all along, from the moment I stole the little plastic bag with its illegal contents from Mr Fahrenheit’s house: if I couldn’t make his noise stop, I could numb myself with drugs instead, so that I didn’t care any more – just as soon as I learned how to do that thing with the burned bottle and the silver foil. I might have ended up needing to ask Mr Fahrenheit for lessons.

The memory of my desperation unnerves me as I walk past the entrance to Starling Copse on my way to Topping Lake. I could so easily have failed to save myself. Thank God I didn’t; thank God I paid no attention to Pat Jervis, or Stuart, or Alexis Grant. Alexis took great exception when I told her about our plans to buy a second home, as I’d known she would. She winced and said, ‘You don’t seriously want to be going endlessly back and forth to the Culver Valley,
do you? Why not save yourself the hassle and the money and move to a village outside Cambridge instead? You’d have the best of both worlds, like we do in Orwell.’

I smiled and said something non-committal. If she asked me now, I would have an answer for her: I needed, and need, more than the highlights of two worlds squeezed into one. I need two separate worlds: two physically distinct places. I have to know that my Swallowfield life still exists and is waiting to welcome and shelter me whenever I need it to. If you only have one world, one life, then however brilliant it is most of the time, you have nowhere to run when you need to escape from it for a while.

It still shocks me how quickly Swallowfield rescued my sanity. Four days here was all I needed to get me back on track – four days with the guarantee of many more to come – and I am happy again, able to put things in perspective. I know that term time will be hard, with Joseph away at Saviour, but I will simply think about us all being here together during the holidays and I’ll be able to get through the weeks of school. And if Stuart can arrange it so that he can work from home more – and he seems fairly confident that he can – that will be even better. In Cambridge, I thought I might prefer it to be just me and Joseph at Swallowfield. The pressure of the city
was slowly killing my bond with my husband; here, I have rediscovered it. When we first unlocked The Boundary’s front door and walked in, Stuart beamed at me and said, ‘Fuck, this is
amazing
, Lou! You were
so
right about this place. And this house. Look at that view.’ That was when I knew we would be okay, that it was safe for me to love him again.

He’s on the terrace behind the house when I get back, kneeling beside the new bike we bought for Joseph yesterday, trying to pump up its wheels. ‘This pump’s knackered,’ he says. ‘I’m going to have to drive into Spilling and get a new one. Have I got time before lunch?’

‘Easily,’ I say. It is already what I would normally call lunchtime, but it will take me at least an hour to prepare the food and I don’t intend to rush. As Stuart hauls himself to his feet and starts to mutter about finding his wallet and ‘bloody bike shop – sold me a dud’, I stare at the ripples on the surface of Topping Lake, at the thirty-odd houses that surround it. Winter sun glints off their roofs, lights up the facades of the glass-fronted ones. Each house is unique and yet they look like a coherent collection. Swallowfield has won several prestigious awards, Bethan told me as we took the sales tour – prizes for aesthetics, for ecological soundness, for just about every aspect of its conception and design.

I can see why people would be queuing up to bestow honours. At night all the Topping houses, lit up from the inside, duplicate themselves on the shimmering surface of the lake and it’s like looking at a mixed media work of art: light, water, stunning architecture. No wonder most of the houses here don’t bother with curtains or blinds apart from in the bedrooms and bathrooms; the estate has been laid out carefully so that no house is intrusively near to any other, and who would want to deprive themselves of such amazing views?

‘Right, I’m off,’ says Stuart, leaning out of the French doors. I didn’t notice him go inside. He’s holding his wallet in his hand. ‘Oh, before I forget – Dr Freeman rang.’

A stone lands in my heart. A stone thrown from a very long way away. Far enough to be out of reach, I thought. Apparently not.

‘Don’t panic.’ Stuart smiles at the expression on my face. ‘What, you think I’m going to say Joseph’s Christmas holidays have been cancelled and he has to go straight back to school?’

You’ve just said it. Why say it if it’s not true?

The stone is growing. Hardening.

‘Tell me,’ I say.

‘It was just a reminder about Friday. I must admit, I’d forgotten, but I’m sure you hadn’t.’

‘Friday? What’s happening on Friday?’

‘Oh. Well, it’s lucky Dr Freeman rang, isn’t it? Since we’d both forgotten.’ Stuart is trying to make light of it. I am a lead weight. Waiting. ‘There’s an extra Choral Evensong – last one of the year.’

‘On the twenty-first of December?’