Trio

by Sue Gee

‘Lovely thing. What’s it called?’

  ‘Dream Children.’

  He’d never heard of it.

  ‘I think a lot of the stuff in that cupboard must have been Granny’s. I don’t remember Mummy ever playing it, do you?’

  He shook his head, suddenly exhausted. All these boxes, and more to be done, and already it was growing dark. Out in the hall the clock was beginning to strike. Something else he couldn’t have borne to sell.

  ‘Let’s leave the rest of this to Pickfords. Let’s have tea.’

  They walked down the long cold passage to the kitchen, passing the row of bells with their worn old lettering. Library. Drawing Room. Master Bedroom. As he’d done when he was little, standing on a chair, he reached up and gave them a ping.

  They’d never been back since the sale. Why would they? Too much going on: family life; work. He’d been made a partner in 1973, soon after Nina was born, and in 1973 Islington was full of run-down houses needing people like Becky and him to do them up. They sold the top-floor flat in Barnsbury – a pretty scruffy place in those days – and moved to a street behind the Angel and Camden Passage.

  Early nineteenth-century terraced artisan houses, built, they realised after moving in, in the wrong relation to the sun: the street ran north-south, so for much of the day you had to have the lights on, never had a proper sense of the day beginning and ending. But never mind: he could walk to work and they’d been happy there. It was great to have room to swing more than a cat in the kitchen and bathroom, Charlie and baby Nina with their own bedrooms, and a street filling up nicely with young families.

  A cheerful primary school a couple of streets away: both the children had gone there. Hadn’t learned a huge amount, but came home in a good mood. And then Charlie, who’d always had a sweet voice, got a place as a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral School. Terrific – but he’d have to board. Becky was doubtful.

  ‘Board? It’s practically down the road.’

  ‘It’s only until he’s thirteen. And we’d see him at weekends.’

  ‘Only between rehearsals.’

  ‘And after Evensong.’

  ‘I don’t know, Geoffrey. He’s so young.’

  ‘So are all the other boys. He could have a great time.’

  And he had. Anxious at first, and then loving it. And they’d loved going to hear him, Christmas suddenly really special, and Choral Evensong on Sundays – well, you might not believe, and they didn’t, but music was at the heart of the family again, as it had been for him and Evie. Everyone missed it, when Charlie left, as everyone had to, and went to City.

  But then they could leave the house together in the mornings, swinging bag and briefcase up to the Number 4 bus stop at the Angel, where other City boys were gathering. Quite a few had been at St Paul’s.

  ‘Bye, Charlie. Have a good day.’

  ‘Bye, Dad.’ The 4 had pulled up, he was moving up the queue: taller than any of his friends, and sometimes so like his grandfather – that flop of hair, that hesitant smile – that it stopped you in your tracks. Geoffrey turned away, off to the office two blocks from here, his name on the brass plaque on the door. Smith, Moore & Coulter: Solicitors.

  The plaque was still there, though he wasn’t.

  ‘The law, Geoffrey? That’s a new one for us.’

  His father had thought he might follow him into teaching, his mother had concentrated on Evie and her music, but it was Andrew Ridley who’d fired him up for the law – not even a relative, just someone from the past whom his father had kept in touch with. Old brother-in-law, in fact.

  There was a photograph of his father’s first wife in the library. She’d been a teacher, too, before their marriage, and died very young. That was all he and Evie had been told, really: that they’d lived halfway across the county in a moorland cottage, and she’d died of TB in a snowstorm.

  ‘You mean, you were married before you married Mummy?’ Evie had looked incredulous, and then upset – Geoffrey could remember that, and even at nine or ten he’d felt that they were being told out of some kind of duty, that this was a piece of history they should know: it wasn’t something his father really wanted to talk about, nor his mother to hear. And he and Evie hadn’t wanted to hear it, either, when they were young: it just felt so strange, and anyway, when you were young the past really was another country.

  When you were old it mattered hugely.

  They’d sold the Hall. They’d sold it. He’d said goodbye to Evie after breakfast, rain dripping from the trees, the Pickfords men heaving stuff out through the porch. It was half-term: she’d stay to see it all done, take the keys to the agent in Morpeth. But he had a case on: he had to get back.

  In the car, driving away down the lane towards the village, passing the cattle moving slowly over the soaking fields, passing the little church where the parents were buried, he felt numb for a bit. Then he’d turned on Radio 3. Brahms. He was suddenly sobbing his heart out.

  A fine eighteenth-century house, with gardens designed by Capability Brown. Stables and outbuildings. Tennis court . . .

  The sale enabled him to move the family to a better Islington street, a better house, tall and roomy. It faced east-west and now the morning sun poured into the bedrooms overlooking the garden, and the afternoon sun into the drawing room – when there was any sun, of course. It was all much lighter, anyway, did them all good. In 1984 Nina got into Camden Girls, the best school for girls within striking distance, and now it was the three of them setting out in the mornings together, striding up to the Angel. And now Nina had her violin, as well as her school bag, to take on the bus, nipping over four lanes of traffic to catch it.

  ‘Bye, Daddy.’

  ‘Bye, darling. Mind how you cross.’

  ‘Bye, Charlie.’

  ‘Bye.’ Tall and lanky, his voice quite broken now, he barely turned from greeting his mates to look at her. Little sisters: who needs them?

  He himself had needed Evie, a lot. And Nina had missed Charlie when she was little, suddenly an only child in term-time.

  Now she stood at the lights, not caring. Over she shot, and ran for the bus down to Highbury. Then it was the filthy little over-ground, crammed with commuters and other Camden girls.

  Life in London – it was where they belonged, and where he’d belonged for a long time now, where his adult independent life had begun.

  Walking back along the towpath, thinking about the past because he couldn’t bear to think about the present, he saw himself in sixties Bloomsbury, sitting on the pillared portico steps of University College in shades, hair flopping over his collar. Someone was strumming a guitar, everyone was singing.

  ‘The answer is blowin’ in the wind . . .’

  The end of term. A hot summer breeze was stirring the trees in the quad; girls in long cheesecloth skirts and kaftans were spread out over the grass. One of them was Becky, making a daisy chain on the lawn outside the Slade, fastening the last link and setting it like a halo on her long dark hair. The sweet smell of weed drifted into the air, though if the pigs had shown up there wouldn’t have been a joint in sight.

  ‘The times they are a changin’ . . .’

  They were, they were. Behind his shades, beneath the long floppy hair, Geoffrey still felt a bit of a square, really, though not as much as when he’d first arrived, three years ago. London had been overwhelming then, and his grandfather’s name felt like a weight round his neck, though he’d loved his grandfather, loved making things in his workshop.

  ‘Well done, lad.’

  But Geoffrey Coulter: it sounded so middle-aged.

  ‘Geoff,’ he told girls at the student disco.

  ‘Like Jefferson Airplane.’

  ‘No, Geoff with a G.’

  It felt so square.

  Now he had a bit more confidence, was hoping for a 2:1 in the History finals, and then a yea
r of Law. The history had pleased his father, and he’d enjoyed it, but the law was for himself. Andrew Ridley had got him going, down from Edinburgh for a visit to his ageing parents in Cawbeck, then driving over to the Hall, the first time for ages.

  ‘It’s a good profession, the law,’ he said, as they walked round the garden after lunch. It was the Easter holidays, Geoffrey in his last year at school, talking politely to his father’s old friend – old brother-in-law. That still felt so strange. ‘You can change people’s lives,’ said Andrew.

  Wind rippled the grass; daffodils blew in the ha-ha. In the bright spring sky the clouds were racing. Geoffrey had never really thought of the future like that, but in that conversation something in him came to life, something he hadn’t really known he had.

  Andrew Ridley was a bit of a radical – it wasn’t really a word they used then, but Geoffrey began to use it in the sixties, and against all the odds it was the sixties that made him a serious person. Looking back on it, he did realise that a lot of it came from his father, and the school in Kirkhoughton: you could change children’s lives through teaching.

  But he’d joined Smith & Moore, though not to do conveyancing. As well as all that, as well as matrimonial and criminal, they had an immigration department, their clients on legal aid. When he wasn’t working there, he was in the Law Centre on Upper Street, dishing out advice for nothing to some pretty desperate people.

  All unimaginable now, of course. Legal Aid? You’d be lucky. Law Centres?

  God, it was cold. He was back at the foot of the towpath steps, stood aside for a young mother bumping down a buggy. For a moment he had a flash of Becky, pushing Charlie along Barnsbury Street, hauling the pushchair, as they called it then, up the grotty stairs to their grotty little flat.

  ‘All right?’ he asked this young woman, and he really did want to know, reaching out to help her down on to the muddy path.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ She gave him a smile, and was off. He could hear her pointing out the ducks. As he climbed the steps himself, and a swirl of sleet came suddenly out of nowhere, he had a flash again of Becky putting daisies in her hair as she sat on the summer grass, looking up as he came down the portico steps, giving him a smile as he took off his Dylan shades and approached, about to ask her out for the first time. At last he’d found the courage.

  It all made him want to weep.

  2

  If there was something worse than entering a silent empty house on a Sunday, Geoffrey didn’t know of it. And he wouldn’t do it. He left the radio on all the time: it murmured goodbye when he left, greeted him as soon as he unlocked the front door and slammed it and the rain behind him. Sunday morning: Radio 3, Private Passions; Radio 4, Just a Minute. Today he’d left it on Radio 3, and as he hung up his coat Michael Berkeley was talking with his guest about The Sixteen, whom he’d heard with Becky when the new concert halls had opened at King’s Place.

  That was a good place to spend a Sunday: now and then they’d taken the papers, had soup and a sandwich while everyone milled about, going to a lunchtime recital or wandering through the gallery. On her birthday in the spring he’d treated her to lunch in the restaurant overlooking the canal, children and grandchildren coming to join them.

  ‘Happy birth-day, dear Gran-ny . . .’

  ‘Thank you, my darlings.’

  She blew out the candles in two great puffs, and no one would ever have imagined what was lying in wait.

  The heavenly voices sounded as he went into the kitchen.

  ‘Laudem dicite Deo nostro omnes sancti eius, et qui timetis Deum . . .’

  Today he couldn’t bear it, retuned to Just a Minute. There had to be something wrong with you if you didn’t laugh at Julian Clary, and he did laugh, as Becky had done, both of them helpless sometimes. Sleet spattered the windows. He dug about in the fridge.

  Last Sunday he’d been to lunch with Nina and David and the boys in Camberwell; the week before to Charlie, Jo and Robyn in Herne Hill. South of the river: a different world, but they were settled there now.

  You couldn’t land on your children every Sunday.

  ‘We love having you, Dad.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  But they had such busy lives, Sundays their only respite, and he had to face it, being alone. Hideous. But had to.

  Out in the hall the clock began to strike. Dah-dah-dah-dah! Even now he sometimes heard his mother singing that out to him and Evie when they were small. She’d sung it to his own children, too, on those holiday visits, and Charlie’s pure high echo had made her stop in her tracks. ‘He could do something with that voice.’ It was his father who’d suggested a scholarship.

  ‘We had a boy at the school before the war – Alfie Stote. Sang solos. Funny little fellow, but what a voice.’

  Here came the pips, the headlines, The World This Weekend. The world now was another kind of hideous.

  He and Evie had been wartime children, too young and too shielded from everything, deep in Hepplewick, to know what was going on. The air-raids on Newcastle, Churchill’s sudden surprise visit in ’41, the Fusiliers seeing action at Monte Casino and Dunkirk, the Victory Parade in ’45 – all this they were told about afterwards.

  He’d been five when it ended, had just a handful of memories. His mother and Mrs Barrow standing on chairs, putting up the blackout at those great high windows: did he really remember that, or had he been told about it?

  He did remember finding a bit of spent shell on the village green, a different kettle of fish altogether from the cartridges you found in the fields now and then from the local shoot.

  And he remembered his father coming home from school one day and shutting himself into the library, and his mother going in there and closing the door behind her, but it wasn’t until much later that he found out why that had been such a dark day.

  As he and Evie grew up, they began to learn properly about the war, from their parents and at school. Sometimes now, listening to the headlines, he thought that little they had ever heard or read about compared with today’s barbarities.

  He put on a carton of soup, got the bread out, went to the lav in the hall. The clock struck the quarter hour as he returned, and he stood for a moment looking up at its comforting, lovely old face. Charlie and Nina had loved it, too: not just the deep slow chime but the rosy pink smile of the sun, the sleepy, dusky moon – their rise and descent, and then the weekly winding.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock. His residue life stretched ahead: somehow he’d have to get through. He gave the case a pat and went back to the kitchen, turned off the soup, retuned from Syria to the lunchtime concert.

  The Wigmore Hall, a piano trio. Ah.

  And as he sat down with his lunch, and the kitchen filled with Haydn, he was once again back in that great airy drawing room, bunched up on the sofa with Nina, listening to the three of them rehearsing, day after day: their mother at the piano, Diana Embleton bent over her cello, George Liddell lifting the violin aloft. Now and then they’d given a wartime concert at the church, raising funds for the Red Cross, who were camped out in the village hall. And after the war the house had been filled with music once again.

  Now the players were long gone, and their music with them: not a single recording ever made. Listening to a trio on the radio, or down at the Wigmore, somewhere else he and Becky had liked to go on a Sunday morning, was the only way he had to reconnect with it all. He drank his soup, nodding in time to the concert; he lifted his hand from the soup bowl, conducting as he’d seen George Liddell do, just walking about the garden. That had been a good thing to see.

  Rain and applause melted into one another as the Haydn came to an end.

  He took the paper through to the drawing room, put a match to the fire.

  Half a degree up, as Becky used to say in her hospital bed. A little bit better today.

  Geoffrey fell asleep over the paper, woke
as it was growing dark. The empty day was almost over: thank God for that. He made up the fire, drew the curtains, went back to the kitchen for tea things. As he stood waiting for the kettle to boil he asked himself again how Becky would have managed, if he’d been the one to go first. He thought she’d have had friends round all the time, have probably gone to concerts and things with them, not maundered away on her own. But then she was a woman, and women were better at organising. Look at Evie: Mike gone, the farm sold, she moving into the pretty little house in Otterburn. Children and grandchildren nearby, of course, but she didn’t spend all her time with them, she was out and about, and still teaching a bit, still playing.

  He made tea, toasted a crumpet, took it all back by the fire. Becky might have been lonely as hell, as he was. He hated to think of that. Of course, he could see more people than he did: a man on his own was always wanted, and he wasn’t short of invitations. One or two women seemed to be making some kind of move towards him: Rachel someone. Earrings and floaty scarves. Rachel Yates. Background in theatre?

  Everyone’s background was a bit hazy these days, most people retired for well over a decade. But none of them was sitting about: everyone was in some kind of book group, or Amnesty group, or choir, doing voluntary stuff, keeping up with things. Good company, most of his friends, as he hoped he was, when he made the effort. And everyone being so kind, of course, these days. Come for drinks, come for supper.

  Liz Peake. Kind round face, good haircut. She and Rachel had been at one or two dinner parties, both of them interesting and bright. Was one of them widowed? Liz had been at a party a couple of weeks ago, the first of the season. Sweet smile. At first he hadn’t noticed her tentative approaches. Then he had.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so surprised,’ said Nina.

  ‘I’m getting on for eighty.’

  ‘So?’

  He shook his head, unable to believe it, really. Anyway, it was much too soon.

  And after those dinner parties or little drinks dos you still had to come back to an empty house, pretending that the voice on the radio was waiting just for you. Sometimes that felt so awful – he’d called out ‘Becky?’ once, without thinking – it hardly felt worth going out to things in the first place.