by John Burke
“Nonsense. If you want to go out with Simon, you go out.”
“I could send Babs,” she said, with the flicker of a smile.
The smile struck echoes. Walter began to laugh. It was really an awfully good idea. Simon would be far too dense to notice the difference—Simon would be delighted by the gentleness and politeness of the duplicate Barbara.
He said: “That’s splendid. That’s really wonderful. He’ll never know. Even when he kisses her he won’t notice the difference.”
“What makes you suppose I allow Simon to kiss me?”
“Oh, a friendly peck now and then…it doesn’t mean anything. No need to be worried about it,” Walter went on, chuckling. “Poor Simon!”
“Poor Simon,” echoed Barbara.
The thought of the hoax kept on recurring to Walter during the course of the following evening. He had watched Barbara dressing Babs ready for the evening out, and when, just before Babs left, the two of them came into the room in a flurry of womanish excitement, Babs was so convincing and so very human that he gave her a drink with an instinctively courteous bow of appreciation.
“Old Simon’s going to have a wonderful time,” he jeered when he and Barbara were alone together. “Damn it, he’s a very lucky chap. Not everyone has such excellent substitutes provided.”
“Simon is very lucky,” Barbara agreed.
Barbara was very sweet and agreeable all evening. She was a little quieter than usual, as though perhaps regretting the trick she was playing on Simon. But when Walter made a joke about the situation and said, not for the first time, “Poor Simon,” she smiled and echoed his words. He began to feel that he ought to give up his rather risky ventures away from home in the evenings. It was much more pleasant to sit here and talk to his wife, from time to time switching on the visio and watching the soothing colours and images on the far wall. Music throbbed gently through the room. He drowsed.
Barbara did nothing to disturb him. It was Walter himself who was the first to notice how late it was getting. He thrust himself up from his chair and said: “Where’s Babs got to?”
Barbara shrugged. “She can’t come to any harm.”
“No, but…confound it all, it’s two in the morning. And Simon doesn’t know that Babs is Babs. If he thinks he’s out with you, he has no business to be out until this hour. It’s a disgrace.”
“Everything will be all right,” said Barbara placidly.
“You’re talking it all very calmly. I mean, I should have thought you’d be insulted—”
“No,” she said, “not insulted.”
Although the room glowed with mellow light, the feeling of night had descended. Outside would be darkness. It was high time Babs was home. Walter felt rather like an indignant father waiting for an errant daughter. He was surprised that Barbara should be so unconcerned.
He reached a sudden decision. He said: “Give me the key for your cupboard.”
“The key?”
“Yes. I’ll switch off Babs. That’ll give Simon a shock.”
“But you can’t do that. He’ll raise an awful fuss. And then everyone will find him out, and—”
“We’ll give him a few minutes to get in a panic, then I’ll call him on the visiscreen and tell him what’s happened. He deserves a shock Fancying his chances with my wife—or with what he thinks is my wife!”
Barbara shook her head, but seemed unable to speak
“The key, darling,” said Walter, impatiently.
She took it from her pocket and held it out reluctantly. He turned to the cupboard and opened the panel.
“The way you take it so calmly,” he said, as he reached for the switch, “anyone would think you were Babs. Now, that would be funny—if you were Babs and I was Wally and we were sitting here talking while all the time our real selves were out somewhere…You know, I’ve almost got myself wondering if I am the real one, after all.”
He turned, laughing.
There was no reply. Barbara sat staring in front of her. She did not move, did not speak.
Walter said in a hushed, strained voice: “No. No.”
He went over and touched her. She did not respond. The finger of the clock moved smoothly and remorselessly on.
“Oh, no,” said Walter again.
He sat down heavily in the chair facing the immobile Babs. He sat there waiting, staring as though hypnotized at the calm, beautiful face before him—staring, and remembering the living face that this one imitated.
And at last, painfully, he began to understand the meaning of jealousy.
ACUTE REHAB
At first, in a dreamlike way, it was funny. Each time a nurse asked him for his date of birth before giving him pills or an injection, he was tempted to say, “I haven’t a clue,” or, “I wasn’t there at the time.” And anyway, since the date was clearly printed on the plastic bracelet round his wrist, why did they have to keep asking?
“To be sure it’s the right patient,” one nurse condescended at last. “We must be sure not to give the wrong treatment to the…the case in hand.”
She had attractively oval features, but her cheeks were very pale, almost transparent, and her eyes were remote, as if waiting for orders. Nurses, of course, were probably always tense, waiting for orders or primed to act in an emergency; but he had never expected one to be so…well, out of reach, too far away to bother with him calling out if he needed her.
She receded into a haze. The after-effects of the anaesthetic came swamping over him yet again, stirred into a slow whirlpool by the addition of painkillers and God knows what else they had stuffed into him.
The surgeon was there, smiling, looking satisfied, yet had nothing reassuring to say.
From out of the haze, the repetitive chant: “What’s your date of birth?”
He was propped up, given food and a little pot of multi-coloured pills; and then it was night, and then another morning.
“What’s your date of birth? We do have to be sure we’ve got the right treatment for the right person.”
“Look, when do I get out of here? All right, I ran over a bloke and I’ll have to face up to that in court. But—”
“You killed him.”
“It was an accident.”
“So you say.”
“I suppose I’m under special supervision here?”
“You could say that.”
Another ay. Dull. Repeated. “Your date of birth?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake—”
“A bit late to call on that name. After your sin against that child, ten years old, ten years ago. And the way you neglected your wife and—”
“No, that’s rubbish. Where did you get all that crap?”
“People talk under anaesthetic. And under sedation. And we do have our records. This is where we collect and assess such things. And decide.”
“Decide what?”
It came again, a drone of a voice without interest or the hint of a friendly laugh at the boring absurdity of it. “Your date of birth?”
“Look,” he asked again, “when do I get out of here? I suppose I’ll have to go to court and face up to dangerous driving and hitting that young man—”
“Killing him. The surgeon’s son.”
“What?”
No, there were so many disjointed things jumbling together in his mind, so many shadows and sudden stabs of colour, a buzzing of voices and sounds that were nothing like voices....
How did they know that he had known all along that it was the surgeon’s son?
There in front of him as he was driving past the hospital. The cocky young bastard. One of the youngest surgeons ever, was the boast. In fact the swaggering little sod had got there only because his father had been who he was. Pulled out every stop for him,
He hadn’t set out to kill the bastard. It was just that…well, there he was, right in front of the car, too damn conceited to bother looking where he was going.
Time to brake and shout at the arrogant little sod?
Maybe.
But actually I put my foot down, didn’t I, and went straight at the man, the young so-called consultant whose negligence had caused my wife’s death, for which I was blamed on grounds of neglect but for which he was completely exonerated. And after the impact the car was suddenly skidding and hit the lamp standard and I was over on my side…
His side. A physical awareness crept through the trauma of post-operative fantasies. He tried to turn over on his right side. But there was something missing from that side, making it awkward. Making it impossible.
“Nurse!” It was little more than a croak.
“Lie still, now. Don’t fuss, it’ll only make it worse.”
“My right leg. What’s happened to—”
“It had to come off. To free you from your car. Mr. Halliburton himself—”
“Halliburton? But he’s the one I hit, he was jaywalking and—”
“Mr. Halliburton senior.”
“You don’t mean—you can’t mean--they let his old man saw my leg off? Bloody hell, that’s unethical. He had no right—”
“In an emergency, he acted for the best. Here, we all act for the best.”
Another day, lying here.
Another day, exactly the same.
Boring.
The son’s clumsiness destroyed my wife, and now his father has begun destroying mine.
Thoughts stifling. Nightmares on and on…punishing….
“Your date of birth?”
Another day, just the same, devoid of meaning, with yet another one to come tomorrow…how many more tomorrows?
“When the hell do I get out of here? If ever?”
The word ‘hell’ set up a strange tremor. Out of the swirling phantasms there was suddenly a grey shape near his left shoulder, with an arm of absurd length raised as if in a salute—or a condemnation.
“Look, I have to get out of here sometime.” Was the shadowy figure listening? “I can’t stay here forever.”
“Why not?” It was no more than a whisper.
“It can’t go on like this. I’d rather be dead.”
The arms of the shadow reached out impossibly far, embracing the bed and the ward and what lay beyond, then curved into a tight, cold embrace, eternally possessive.
“But where do you suppose this is?”
The grip relaxed. Eternal monotony lay ahead.
“Your date of death?”
THE SVENGALI VARIATIONS
It was on the first repetition of the minor theme that the viola player’s long bronze hair began to distract him. Those glowing strands ought not to have fallen over her shoulder on the downward stroke of the bow. Not over her bare shoulder like that, at that point. It was out of tempo. Unsettling.
He found himself calculating when the next swing of hair, as fine as the horsehairs of her bow, would come. It ought to make a flourish at the start of the recapitulation, where the famous sforzando kicked the theme into a new dimension, but…no, she had anticipated it, and the swing of the hair added emphasis on the wrong beat. He wanted to call out to her, tell her to put her head back, so that the hair would whisk away and leave her shoulder bare again, glistening under the lights.
Gleaming even more brightly under those lamps rigged up in front of the altar was the bony head of the first violinist, like that of a skull, gaunt and demanding hushed respect. The second violin was a young man with an earnest smile, his eyes widening in amazement at his own skill in getting the phrasing right. The cellist was a grey-haired woman who glowered down at her bow as if daring it to go crooked and humiliate her.
The girl belonged in another world.
When the four players stood up and bent their heads to acknowledge the applause, at last she got the right balance. Her hair fell gracefully forward, and her right hand sketched an elegant arc as she swept it up and back, and bowed again and smiled.
He took a long time driving home, in no hurry to open his own front door and let himself into the nothingness inside.
The woman he had married ten years ago without thinking was in her usual position, facing the television. She pointed the remote control to turn the volume down and glanced indifferently over her shoulder. “A nice concert?”
“A recital,” he corrected her. “Just a quartet. Not bad. But the acoustics in that kirk are a bit dismal.”
She turned the volume back up again.
A week later he chose a channel himself in spite of her wanting to watch her usual soap. The quartet was appearing on a Border Television programme. But it wasn’t the same. Studio sound and lighting were infinitely better, but everything was in two dimensions. The girl’s face was beautiful but flat, her bowing did not thrust out at you. Her movements went stiffly from side to side.
And this other woman was here with him, souring the atmosphere. It was impossible to appreciate any of the nuances in the music with such a dissonance in the room. Yet it wasn’t her fault. She just couldn’t understand; never would understand. There were times when he felt quite guilty about having married her, when she was simply not up to it.
In the third movement’s sprightly ländler she said: “Why do they keep coming back to that girl? She’s not even the one playing the tune, is she?”
She knew as little about music as she did about camera angles. Of course any cameraman would keep coming back to that rapt face, that bare arm, that shoulder beginning to sparkle gently with sweat under the studio lights.
The weekend paper advertised another live performance as part of a chamber music festival in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh. It was miles from here, along that winding road under the Pentlands which he avoided whenever possible. His wife was baffled that he should change his mind for the sake of a string quartet.
“What’s so special? You could always buy a CD and no’ fash yourself dragging along there.” Then a possibility stirred. “You could take me. We could stay a night in some hotel there, and I can do some shopping next day.”
She was trying hard. He ought to welcome the gesture. But he said: “You wouldn’t like it. You know how you get sick in the car, anyway. Better stay at home and treat yourself to one of those old Elvis DVDs.”
Music had been going on in his head while she spoke. That was the pattern nowadays. She would go on talking about prices in the local supermarket and about the vandals who had smashed windows in the Castle Hotel, and he would nod; and even though she probably realized he wasn’t listening, she couldn’t possibly imagine those other sounds which were putting up a defence inside his head—the sound of the owl hooting from Janácek’s Down an Overgrown Path, the shuddering, piled-up discords accompanying the murder of Lulu in Alan Berg’s opera....
He had tried to book a seat close to the platform, but the nearest he could manage was three rows back. It would require intense concentration for him to help her, to communicate the right gestures to her. Because that was what she needed. Soon there would grow an understanding between them. Silently he sent her a message to tell her he was here, concentrating.
And even from this distance she saw him. This time she really did become aware of him. Looked at him, looked away, and then back, worried.
He had to stop her worrying, so that she could devote herself single-mindedly to the smooth progression of notes.
Sixteen bars into the first Allegro she looked back at him, scraped a sour note, and jerked her gaze back to her music stand. Mentally he reproved her, but tried to convey as he leaned forward and stared between the heads in front of him, staring into her face, the message that he understood her need for encouragement. He was with her all the way. He would give her the strength to overcome a few technical problems. It didn’t help that she was looking away, keeping her neck at an awkward angle as she avoided looking at him.
She really must learn not to be shy.
During the interval he tried to find a way of getting near to her, to chat and put her at her ease while he conveyed the support she needed. But there were officious little me
n barring the way, refusing to allow access to the players. All he could do was strain to help from a distance during the Ravel quartet and smile sympathetically as she took her bow and glanced nervously at him—probably because she had been aware of that quite ugly grace note, certainly none of Ravel’s doing, in the last movement.
She really would have to learn what he could offer her.
He felt her beside him as he drove back late that night. He would have liked to stop and put a consoling arm around her shoulders. Bare shoulders, on a cold night like this.
The woman in his home was watching some late-night spy film. Without bothering to turn the volume down she asked if he’d had a nice time, and he answered just as indifferently, while an unexpected thread of a Bach chaconne whispered across his mind, conjuring up a brief vision of a girl with bronze hair dancing, keeping his memory of the evening still alive beneath the suffocating weight of banality.
Several weeks went by without any announcement of recitals in the press or on television. Then he came across a small poster in the local tourist office advertising a performance in the library of a stately home outside Linlithgow.
The quartet was starting with Mozart’s K458, the ‘Hunt’ Quartet, and after the interval would tackle Shostakovich’s 12th Quartet. He was not at all sure how he would be able to help her through the Shostakovich, a composer he had little knowledge of. The best thing would be to have a word with her in the interval, when she could tell him briefly about any technical problems she had already encountered at rehearsal.
Seating arrangements were fairly informal, and he was able to move a chair to the end of the front row.
When the four instrumentalists came in from the side door of the library, to the usual spattering of welcoming applause, she was at once aware of him. He smiled reassuringly. She tossed her head so that the glow of her hair seemed to enfold and blend with the deep, glossy brown of the viola’s body.