The Voices (12 page)

Laura looked at him angrily. ‘Instead of standing there criticizing, why don’t you make yourself useful?’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Well, you could sweep up that glass for a start.’

Laura hurried past Christopher and back into the drawing room, where she walked around the sofa, jiggling Faye up and down and stroking her hair. She cooed and made other soothing noises. Outside, the fevered garden was awash with colour – peonies, sweet William, dandelions. The light was so bright Laura had to turn away from the window. She looked at Faye’s blood-covered toes and felt remorseful. Chris was right. She should have been paying more attention. She should have been watching Faye more closely. Nevertheless, she still felt irritated by the tone he had chosen to adopt, his blunt questions, the ease with which he had accused her. When he finally appeared she felt like picking up a vase and hurling it at him. She struggled to control her anger.

Christopher strode up to Laura and stood squarely in front of her.

‘Stop moving a second.’ He lifted Faye’s right foot, looked at it and then inspected the left. He pinched a splinter of glass from her heel and brushed it into an ashtray. ‘There’s another piece.’ After a few unsuccessful attempts he said, ‘No. It’s too small. I can’t do it.’

‘Here. Take her,’ said Laura, holding Faye out. ‘I’ll get some tweezers.’

She went to the bathroom, and when she returned she found Chris sitting on the sofa, Faye on his knee, not screaming or sobbing, but whimpering like a puppy. Christopher gripped the child’s ankle. ‘See – there.’ The splinter was quite conspicuous and glinted in the sunlight. Laura removed it without any difficulty. She held the tweezers over the ashtray and the splinter fell soundlessly. It was practically invisible when not lit directly.

‘Can you see any more of them?’ Christopher asked.

‘No,’ Laura replied.

‘I can’t understand how she reached the glass.’

‘She probably used something.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We must be more careful.’ He had used the word ‘we’ but it was obvious that he had meant ‘you’.

Laura took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped the blood off Faye’s feet. ‘I’ll give her a bath – make sure she’s clean.’

‘OK.’ Christopher kissed the child’s head and handed her back to Laura. ‘I’m going back upstairs. I was in the middle of something.’

‘OK.’ At the door, Christopher hesitated, and Laura saw that he was uncomfortable, troubled by the tension that had arisen between them. She sensed that he wanted to resolve it, to dispel the oppressive atmosphere, but she doubted his sincerity. She suspected an ulterior motive. He wanted them to part on good terms, Laura supposed, so that he could go back and concentrate on his work without being distracted by the prospect of a deferred confrontation. ‘What?’ asked Laura.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have—’

Laura waved him away. ‘It’s all right. Really. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Good.’ Christopher offered his wife a weak, apologetic smile and left the room. Laura stared at the empty doorway, listening to his nimble, eager ascent of the stairs.

When Christopher returned to the studio, the first thing he noticed was that the tape machine he’d been using was still going. He had heard Faye’s scream and run onto the landing without pausing to turn it off. The spools were still revolving. He had been recording the sound of a coin being dragged along piano strings, which he knew would produce a particularly interesting effect, especially when
played back at half-speed. The metal piano frame (salvaged from a defunct Weber he had once discovered, by chance, abandoned in a skip) was propped up near the window. Two microphones were attached to stands, their insulated diaphragms angled close to the longest and thickest strings. Christopher stopped the machine, rewound the tape and pressed ‘play’. A low, scraping sound came out of the speakers that suggested metal under stress. There was something about it that augured catastrophic collapse, the imminence of a snapping wire or the buckling of a girder. He listened to himself dragging the coin along the strings at different rates, experimenting with various rhythms. Eventually, the tape reached the point where Faye’s scream intruded. It was high pitched, urgent and quite chilling. Even though the scream had had to travel all the way from the bottom to the top of the house, the recording was remarkably clear. Christopher tilted his head to one side. The effect was quite interesting.

I could use it.

This thought, which felt slightly unnatural, almost like an insertion, was accompanied by a fleeting impression of wrongdoing, the sense that he shouldn’t really be entertaining the idea of exploiting his daughter’s accident. But it wasn’t enough to stop him. A recording of a child in
pain, a genuine recording, was hard to come by. Christopher was already considering how it might sound with reverb, or filtered, or played backwards.

Over the speakers he heard himself reacting, the dropped coin bouncing on the floor, his speedy transit; the door opening, the scream suddenly louder. Then somebody spoke: ‘Turn the key gently. I shall have what is mine.’ Faye howled, shocked by the sting of the glass, a world – previously safe – suddenly made cruel and dangerous. Then like an afterthought, reflective, spoken with tenderness and carried on a sigh, ‘She is mine.’ It was the unmistakable voice of Edward Stokes Maybury. ‘She is mine.’

Christopher pressed ‘stop’. The spools jerked to a halt and he looked around the studio. He did not expect to see anything, but an instinct, more animal than human, made him study his surroundings for some time.

That night, Christopher was lying in bed beneath a clammy cotton sheet. He pushed it down to his waist, exposing his chest, but this made little difference – he was still hot and uncomfortable. Even though the windows had been left open, the air in the room was motionless and tainted with the noxious reek of the Vale of Health
pond. He was thinking about his travel arrangements, going over the details, ticking off items on a mental checklist: passport, tickets, francs. A cab was collecting Christopher early. His plane was scheduled to land at Charles de Gaulle airport at nine a.m. and he hoped to be in Paris by eleven. Henry had recommended a quiet hotel in St-Germain-des-Prés, not far from the Luxembourg Gardens.

Laura lifted the sheet and let it fall in order to cool herself. She had been restless too, unable to settle because of the humidity.

Since their earlier altercation they had managed to be perfectly civil to each other, but Christopher sensed that things weren’t quite right yet; the subtle accords that make intimacy possible had not been fully restored, and he was uncomfortable going abroad without having first recalibrated their affections. He was superstitious in this respect, worried that if something horrible happened to him, if the plane crashed or he was run over, they would have parted for the last time without having resolved their differences.

Christopher slid across the mattress and pressed his body against Laura’s. He kissed the nape of her neck and, reaching down, insinuated his hand between her thighs. Touch, closeness. He had faith in the healing properties of
physical contact, the palliative effects of shared pleasure. Almost immediately, Laura rolled onto her back and let her knees fall apart. He was surprised by her acquiescence; he had expected her to need more coaxing, more encouragement. She pulled him between her legs and raised her hips. He felt a slight resistance, her flesh giving, and then immersion, engulfing warmth.

Their lovemaking was not particularly vigorous, but it wasn’t long before Christopher began to experience fatigue. The muggy atmosphere made intercourse effortful. Christopher found that he was running out of breath and supporting the weight of his body was making his arms ache. The moon was casting just enough light to reveal Laura’s expression. She did not look like a woman lost in a state of sensual abandon, but rather someone trying to solve a difficult mathematical problem. Her expression was determined, her lips pressed tightly together. Christopher still hadn’t got used to her short hair.

It was evident that neither of them was very excited. They were both perspiring heavily. To avoid the embarrassment of having to give up, Christopher closed his eyes and thought of someone else to expedite his climax. The person he thought of was Amanda Ogilvy.

After their exertions, husband and wife lay next to
each other in silence, moisture evaporating off hot skin, arms extended, only their fingers touching. The taint of the stagnant pond water was now fortified by the pungency of their bodies. It had been a pointless exercise. The subtle estrangement that had existed between them was still there – only made more obvious by their perfunctory union. A mosquito or some other insect was producing an irritating whining sound, but it was not irritating enough to stop Christopher from falling asleep.

He was awake before the alarm clock sounded. He turned it off and crept to the bathroom where his clothes were hanging behind the door: a crumpled, pale linen suit and a cheesecloth shirt. After he had washed and dressed he went downstairs and picked up his travel bag in the hallway. He unlocked the door, being careful not to make any noise. As he did so, Maybury’s last communication came back to him:
Turn the key gently. I shall have what is mine.
The reference to key-turning, which had up till then seemed obscure, now acquired uncanny resonances. It was as though Maybury had foreseen the moment of his departure and had judged it to be significant. Christopher closed the door, remembering the tender sighing that had followed.
She is mine. She is mine.
The sky was streaked with salmon-pink clouds and the birds were singing.

Emerging from the porch, Christopher walked to the
gate, where he paused and looked back at the house. He had been looking forward to getting away, but now something snagged. The sensation was almost physical, yet he immediately recognized that its nature was psychosomatic, that his discomfort was caused by a moral scruple – doubt, uncertainty. His leave-taking suddenly felt like an abrogation of responsibility, abandonment, neglect.

Laura and Faye weren’t in any danger, surely? He had read too much into a chance observation, made false connections and ascribed meaning where there was none. There was nothing to fear. He took a deep breath and the fresh air of the new day cleared his head. The cab he had ordered seemed to glide smoothly into the Vale and he raised his hand to attract the driver’s attention.

Second week in June

Laura wiped the surfaces in the kitchen with a damp cloth and then paced from room to room on the ground floor brandishing a duster. Everything was already spotless, but for some reason she couldn’t settle and cleaning gave her something to do. She had tried to read a novel; however, after only ten minutes she had had to set it aside. She just couldn’t concentrate. A new character had been introduced and she realized, belatedly, that she had no idea who he was supposed to be or how he was related to the other people in the story.

When she had finished dusting, Laura wandered around the house searching for other things to occupy her. She was looking for something undemanding, something that would keep her busy and provide her with a modest sense of accomplishment at its conclusion; something that would accelerate the passage of time and allow her to justify the reward of tea and biscuits that she was already planning.

‘Come on, Faye,’ she said to her daughter. ‘Let’s tidy the nursery.’

The child followed her mother up the stairs on all fours.

Laura encouraged Faye to pick up her soft toys and put them in a basket. The child copied her mother’s actions with gleeful enthusiasm. While Faye was thus employed, Laura set about organizing the books in alphabetical order. On the lowest shelf she discovered the clockwork monkey. The last time she had seen it was in the empty room on the top floor. Chris must have brought it down. The thing was supposed to amuse, make children laugh, but the cast of its expression was not simply mischievous. The monkey’s face had a sinister aspect and its grin was oddly twisted, almost a leer. Laura pushed the toy back on the shelf as far as it would go.

Faye was becoming fractious. She threw a miniature panda across the room and stamped her feet.

Laura asked, ‘What’s the matter, darling?’

The child looked annoyed and shouted the infantile equivalent of a profanity. Laura picked her up and held her close. ‘Are you tired, honey?’ She sat down on the window seat, stroked Faye’s hair, and the child became less agitated. ‘What a good girl, helping Mummy. Who’s been a good girl?’

The garden was fabulously wild and colourful. Ivy had begun to climb up the sides of the gazebo and the gorse bushes seemed to have doubled in size. Long grasses and poppies surrounded the apple trees. The overall effect suggested reckless, paroxysmal growth. Many of the plants Laura couldn’t name. Some were tall and strange, with massive petals and fleshy spikes. They were otherworldly and reminded Laura of the exotics that flourished in the steamy hothouses of Kew.

A thought came into her mind.
Sue’s coming tomorrow.

Laura was glad, not only because the garden was in dire need of attention, but also because she liked Sue and she was looking forward to seeing her again. That a professional visit from someone she hardly knew had become such an eagerly awaited occasion exposed the deadly monotony of Laura’s day-to-day existence. She felt her throat tighten with emotion.

When Chris had announced that he was going to Paris she had reacted badly. The thought of being left in the house with only Faye for company – albeit for only a few days – had made her feel like she was teetering on the edge of an abyss. Chris’s expression had been enquiring but she had managed to conceal her desperation. There was the old fear, of course, that familiar dread of loneliness, but in addition to this she was aware of something
new, a fleeting apprehension of danger. She didn’t know what it was but it made her feel weak and defenceless.

Faye was very still, nestled in the crook of Laura’s arm. When Laura studied her daughter more closely she was surprised to discover that the child had fallen asleep. Laura stood up, drew the curtains, and walked over to the cot. With a single fluid movement she deposited Faye on the mattress.