by Barbara Vine
That day he committed himself to being a busker. He was a professional musician and the concourses of the Underground were his auditorium.
5
This would be the second time Mike's mother had looked after Catherine. She lived on the other side of Chelmsford and Alice took Catherine there in the carrying cot on the bus.
It was high summer, a warm sunny day. The baby was awake but fell asleep as they reached the house. Alice's mother-in-law thought she was going to have an afternoon's shopping, it was what she liked doing herself, and she believed, without any evidence for this, that Alice had been longing to get to the shops on her own. Shops were what she had missed most when she herself had been house-bound.
Alice gave her the bag in which Catherine's disposable nappies were and a change of clothes and she put the two bottles of formula into the fridge. The thought came to her that she might never see this woman again. Or this house, or this immaculate kitchen.
‘She won't need all that,’ said Mike's mother, eyeing the bottles. ‘How ever long are you going to be?’
A lifetime. For ever. ‘Not long. Mike starts a fortnight's holiday tomorrow.’
‘Well, I know that. You're not going to be gone a fortnight, I hope. Though I must say I don't know that I'd very much mind having this little sweet one for a couple of weeks to myself.’
You may have to. ‘Mike will be home at six.’
Alice told herself to stop making these appparently inconsequential statements. They were an expression of her inner fears and hopes. Fortunately, Mike's mother took them as further manifestation of her confused mental state. The baby was asleep. Alice thought she could not leave her only child, her baby daughter, that she might never see again, without holding her once more, without at least giving her a last kiss. It was not possible to do that. Even if it meant disturbing her, waking her so that she cried when put down again, she must be lifted up in Alice's arms, held close to her and kissed goodbye.
Alice leant over the carrying cot. She touched the baby's cheek with her finger, turned quickly away.
‘I'll go then.’
‘Don't worry about a thing. Have a good time.’
The bus back took her past her own mother's house. Alice purposely did not look out of the window. She and Mike lived in a flat, very small, in a purpose-built block near the station. They had been there for six months, the duration of their marriage. Alice went up to the second floor in the lift, let herself into the flat and read, for the ninth or tenth time, the letter she had left for Mike. It was not a note but a long letter explaining everything, as long and taking her as long to compose as the last piece of writing she had done, an essay comparing and contrasting Verdi and Wagner and their operas.
Alice crumpled it up and pushed it into the kitchen bin. He might find it there but she did not think he would. Instead she wrote, on the back of a supermarket bill printout: I have left. I always said I would but you didn't believe me. Catherine is with your mother, Alice. When she wrote Catherine's name she started to cry, but the thought of how ludicrous it would be, how corny, if a tear got on the note and smudged the biro, stopped her. It was then she understood that it was not too late to stay. She need not go. So far she had done nothing irrevocable. She could go down into the town centre and look at the shops, have a cup of coffee somewhere, get back to her mother-in-law by four. See Catherine again and bring her home.
Her packed suitcase was in the back of the bedroom cupboard. More valued, infinitely more needed, was the violin in its case on the living-room floor between the television and the bookshelves. She had not played it since two months before Catherine was born. On an impulse, she opened the case and took the violin out, held it and held the bow without applying it to the strings. She knew she was afraid to play after so long and knew too that if she stayed here she would never play again. But the sight and feel of it nerved her. It gave her courage. She replaced it in its case.
The money she had drawn out, emptying her account, less than a hundred pounds but better than nothing, was already in her bag. It was much too warm to wear a coat but it would be imprudent to leave her winter coat behind, and nights were always cold. Alice took off the cotton dress which was what young mothers wore in Chelmsford to shop in, put on jeans and a black T-shirt, the kind of clothes she would always wear now, through an indefinitely stretching future. The heavy, dark-blue broadcloth coat would not go into the suitcase. She put it over her shoulders. Carrying the suitcase in one hand and the violin in the other, she walked the two hundred yards to Chelmsford station and caught the 15.53 to London. They had bought the flat because it was convenient for Mike's daily train.
Later her mother was to say, ‘It's beyond belief, you left the baby behind and took the violin!’
It was some time since Alice had been in London. While at the Royal Academy of Music she had lived there but that, though not much more than a year ago, now seemed infinitely distant. A lifetime intervened, Catherine's gestation and her short existence. Liverpool Street station, in process of being rebuilt, was dirty and noisy and very large. Alice thought, as she looked for signs to the Underground, I am frightened. I am afraid of what I have done and where I am going. By where she was going she meant her uncertain, unpredictable future, not the hotel in Bloomsbury which was just a jumping-off ground.
Once, like many Londoners, Alice had carried in her head a basic tube map, at least of inner London, but she had forgotten it. Holborn could be reached directly by the Central Line, she discovered from a wall plan. I mustn't go the wrong way, Alice thought to herself as she made her way to the platform. I must remember I want a westbound train, not find myself heading off back into Essex.
She had reached London at the height of the rush. There was no hope of getting a seat. She stood against the glass partition by the double-leaved doors with the violin and the suitcase wedged behind her calves. By now her mother-in-law would be wondering what had become of her. She had not specified, but somewhere around four-thirty to five would have been a reasonable time to return. It was a quarter past five, she saw from the clock on Bank Station. Her mother-in-law would be looking at the clock too, perhaps walking up and down with Catherine in her arms.
A lot more people got in, and at St Paul's, just when Alice thought it was impossible for more to get in, five did. Someone pushed them from behind, pushed their backs with the flat of his hand, and the doors closed. The edge of the violin case cut into her leg. The coat felt insufferably hot, she thought she had seen people looking at the coat with amusement, but there was nothing she could do. There was nowhere to put it down. Catherine would be awake and would find Mike's mother unfamiliar. Suppose she cried because Alice was not there? Alice had not thought of that before. What have I done? She made a sound and suppressed it.
Mike's office was near Chancery Lane, that was his station, he must use this line. She had never thought of that before either. By now he would be in the train, the 17.20, that got to Chelmsford just after ten to six. He always got that train, he was entirely reliable, steady, though no older than she, designed for a good husband and father. A good father was what he was beyond everything. If he had been indifferent to Catherine, if he had not loved her at least as much, more, than she did herself, she could not have done it.
It should have been a relief to escape from the train at Holborn but as she crossed the platform and began to mount the stairs a feeling of confusion and disorientation took hold of her. At the top she stood leaning against the wall; her breathing had become strange. It was as if when she caught her breath she would necessarily break into a hysterical laughing and crying. She swallowed, forced herself to draw a long breath. The coat had made her so hot that she was sweating heavily. Sweat was actually running down her face like tears.
What happens next will seal my fate: the places I find, the letters I write, even the people I meet who point me this way or that. Alice set down the case and violin and wiped her face on her sleeve, wiped it on the rough wool s
leeve of her winter coat. I am entering my true life, the life I was prevented from leading – well, that I prevented myself from leading by my stupidity, my incredible folly. Whatever happens to me now will be new, will be an advancement, an adventure, and it will not be Chelmsford. My life, which was held up, has begun again.
The sound of music met her as she approached the concourse where the escalators were. She walked on, towards the music.
In her time at the Royal Academy she remembered buskers in the tube, but they played rock or sometimes jazz. The sound she was approaching, though hackneyed, its value almost destroyed by its popularity, was what the world called classical: an air of Mozart, a little night music.
Alice saw the musicians as she came to the end of the passage.
There were two of them, two men. One was playing a flute, the other a guitar. The guitar was not a suitable instrument for this piece and Alice could see that he was providing only a background strumming. His guitar case lay open on the floor in front of him and, as she watched, a woman coming down dropped a copper coin into it.
The man with the guitar was dark and smooth-faced, with longish hair, a sensitive mouth. He looked in his forties. His companion was much younger, perhaps no older than herself, fair, very good-looking, blue-eyed, with the sort of open face that persuades you its possessor must be gentle and kind. Alice had stopped to listen to them because this man, this kind-faced fair one, was quite a good performer.
She put her case and her violin down against the wall. The Mozart came to an end and she clapped. Someone always has to start the clapping and when she did a few others followed. A man put a 5p piece into the guitar case and then Alice put a 1op piece in. The fair man said thank you and he and the guitarist began to play Tchaikovsky. The music they played gradually grew familiar to Alice; it was music for the violin, the famous Violin Concerto, and it sounded very strange on the flute and guitar, so strange that it took her a moment or two to recognize it. They managed to render the melody, the tune.
Her instinct was to ignore the look the fair man was giving her, a look that was hopeful and inviting. She intended to pick up her cases and proceed with what she was here to do, go up and out into the street and thence to Streatham Street to find the hotel. But she hesitated. The certainty that this particular music was being played directly at her and for her, that the fair man had seen her violin case and perhaps a look in her eyes of wistfulness, the fair man alone, for the guitarist seemed only there for support and back-up, decided her. Except that it was not really a decision, more an unthought-out reaction.
Alice squatted down, opened the case, took out her violin and bow and, hesitating only for a moment, walked over to stand by the others. The flute faltered, the flute-player stepped aside and indicated to her the place between himself and the hollow-cheeked man with the guitar. Alice caught a reassuring smile from the guitarist.
She began to play.
When Alice was sixteen her mother, angry with her about something, said in a fury, ‘You needn't think being good-looking is going to be an advantage in life. It won't be. It'll be a burden.’
Even then she knew her mother said ‘good-looking’ when she meant ‘beautiful’, just as she said ‘fond of’ when she meant ‘love’. And she also knew she was beautiful, enjoyed it, and that her mother, also beautiful, could see her own looks fading.
‘You'll never know if people want you for your looks or for yourself. If you ever get to be a concert violinist, which I personally doubt, you'll always wonder if people want you on the platform because of your looks or because you're any good.’
‘It doesn't work like that,’ she had said loftily. ‘You don't know anything about it.’
‘You think it's going to be so marvellous having men buzzing round you, but it won't be for long, and then what'll you have when it stops?’
‘My music.’
Alice, playing her violin at Holborn station, took it for granted, she did not even have to think about it, that the man playing the flute beside her had invited her to play because she was beautiful. He wanted her to remain, to go on to Vivaldi and the Handel marches because her playing was good. She did not think it good, it was the first time she had played for weeks and the sounds she made disquieted her, but perhaps it was good enough for busking. She could not help observing that more coins fell into the guitar case behind her than had done before she began.
She had rolled up her coat and laid it on her suitcase. Playing had a liberating effect on her. She understood the true meaning of a phrase she had often heard but never defined: in her element. Incongruously, ridiculously, here in this Underground station, with musicians she did not know, playing to an unknown, only occasionally appreciative and ever-shifting audience, she was in her own element.
The fair man whispered to her, ‘One final piece and then we'll call it a day. Can you do the “Entry of the Queen of Sheba”? They like that.’
‘I can try.’
‘You're great.’
She smiled at him. The guitar had no place here and the guitarist sat back with a grin, his back to the open case, and let them get on with it. They played it as a duet, perfectly teamed, at the fast pace the piece demanded, rollicking and dramatic. Alice ended with a flourish of her bow, held it high in the air and found herself laughing in triumph.
There was real applause this time, as at a real concert. She turned smiling to the flautist. For a moment she thought he was going to throw his arms round her and hug her, she was sure he had been thinking of it, but he hesitated and she turned away.
‘You've done that before,’ the guitarist said, scooping the coins from the case and into a large brown envelope.
‘Not in the tube.’ She giggled, pointing to a notice on the wall. ‘Look. Busking or playing musical instruments in the Underground, to the annoyance of other passengers, is an offence… It says you can be fined £50.’
‘No one ever is. I'm called Peter and he's Tom.’
‘Alice.’
‘They never executes nobody nohow,’ said the man called Peter.
‘Other passengers aren't annoyed, you see. They love it.’ This was Tom. ‘It brightens up their dreary journeys. Look, you've a right to some of this.’ He took the envelope from Peter. ‘You've a right to at least a third, maybe more. You really drew the crowds with your playing.’
‘And she's prettier than us.’
Alice shook her head. ‘I don't want it. You keep it. I've got to go.’
She looked up the range of escalators. It was the gateway to life and one she suddenly had no wish to pass through, one she felt a gripping fear of passing through. But every day now would bring its own fear, a series of terrors. She must face them, get on with them, begin now. She put the violin back into its case, picked up the bundle she had made of her coat and thrust it under her arm as she hoisted up her suitcase.
‘Well, goodbye. I really enjoyed that.’
‘How about joining us at Green Park tomorrow?’
‘I won't be there,’ Peter said. ‘Got to work.’
‘What's this then if it's not work?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Have you got to work too?’ Tom said, looking at Alice.
‘No.’ She felt like telling him who she was and what she had done, only he wouldn't be interested, he'd be embarrassed. ‘I haven't got to do anything. I mean, I've really got to do everything and I start tomorrow.’ He was nodding, looking as if he understood. ‘I must go.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Well, it's a hotel, a sort of hotel. A girl I was at school with, her mother runs it. You won't want to hear about this, it's boring. I'm going to stay there for a bit while I look round for a place.’
Tom said, ‘Please come to Green Park tomorrow. Say you will. Please.’
She was almost amused by his vehemence. ‘Why?’
‘You're so beautiful to look at, isn't she, Pete? And you're a beautiful violinist. Are you really looking for a place?�
��
Alice lifted her shoulders, trying to seem indifferent. ‘Who isn't?’
‘I might be able to help. Come to Green Park tomorrow.’
She used one of Mike's worn-out expressions, immediately wished she had not. ‘That's an offer I can't refuse.’
They went up to the street with her, Tom carrying her coat and Peter her case. Alice waved as they went back down, until they were lost to sight on their way to Bond Street and then, they had said, to West Hampstead on the Jubilee.
An hour had passed since she had thought about Catherine, about her and Mike and what would be going on at home. This now returned and it seemed that her meeting with Tom and Peter had been like a dream from which she was waking up to reality. It was very light outside, a shock of harsh brightness. London felt hot and dusty and the air smelt different from Chelmsford air, a compound of diesel and petrol fumes, exotic tobacco, oriental cooking and occasionally a whiff of urine.
She found the hotel. Mrs Archer told her that apart from three vacant rooms ‘for the tourism’, all the others were let off to the council, who put homeless people into them. These were mostly Somalis and Sudanis. Mrs Archer sniffed and shrugged her shoulders, admitting that the money was good.
It was not Alice's idea of a Bloomsbury hotel. Shabbiness she had expected, but not dirt and this air of something disreputable lurking though unseen. She was told where her room was and on the stairs – there was no lift – encountered a young woman in a black veil with a small pretty face peeping between the folds. Four small children trooped down behind her. Alice's room was tiny, with a single bed, one other piece of furniture apart from the wall cupboard, a small chair, and a narrow window that would not open. Later as she lay in that bed, after she had eaten a meal in a small cheap cafe in New Oxford Street, she squirmed between sheets of a kind she had never seen before, purple knitted nylon. It seemed to her as if every hair on her body, every roughness of skin, unevenness of toenail, snagged on the sticky, shiny fibres. She turned this way and that, imagining Catherine in her cot beside the bed in which Mike slept alone.