by Liz Byrski
‘He never laid a finger on me,’ she said, ‘although I think now that he may have hit Mum. It would explain so much.’
She remembers the time she returned from France, how he had reacted to the way she had grown up in the three years away from home. There had been some pride in it, but also resentment, as though her growing up was something he hadn’t expected and didn’t really like.
‘I started to make life difficult for him when I came home,’ she says. ‘I asked awkward questions, reacted against things that I’d always accepted: the way he said grace every meal time, his expectation that food would always be on the table ready for him, the dismissive way he talked to Mum. But it was my constant demands to know about you, where you’d gone – that was what really got to him, and of course now I know why.’
‘He would certainly have been challenged by your return as an adult,’ Geoff says. ‘He resented us having come home as grown men, especially when we stood up to him, confronted him with what we knew and made it very clear that his reign of terror was over. I think he must somehow have expected he would be dealing with two teenagers and he was shocked by the reality, by the questions we asked, the way we took control and got stuck into finding out what he was doing. We were both so torn – we wanted to get the law onto him but Mum was adamant. She was terrified, afraid he would attack her or one of us, and that he would say she’d seduced him.’
‘There were other things that went on,’ Doug says, joining them at the table. ‘While we were young, out in the sheds and the orchards, he could be violent. Not with us, but with some of those young guys that helped with the fruit picking and packing. They were teenagers, and he was incredibly hard on them. He’d hit them around the head if they were cheeky, or if he felt they weren’t working hard enough.’
Simone sits in the silence, images of the past running through her head. She is finding it hard to believe how ignorant she had been, how she had assumed that she lived on an average regional fruit farm run by a family man who demanded from others the same standards as he set himself. And all the while brutality formed the undercurrent of every day.
‘So have you thought any more about coming to London?’ Doug asks, dragging her back into the present with a lighter tone.
‘I have,’ she says, smiling, happy to break her own mood. ‘I’d really love to do that. Have you spoken to Claire and Paula?’
‘We’ve spoken to Mum and she’d love to see you. But she’s still concerned that you’ll be angry with her.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘Because of Carlo . . . because of Paula.’
‘Ha!’ Simone says. ‘What else could she have done? It would be easy to make judgements but the reality was that he was going to have what he wanted and he used her to get it. She was in an impossible situation. In those days if she’d reported the rape she would probably have been blamed for leading him on. Papa always got what he wanted – I knew that about him.’
Simone sips her coffee, letting herself sink back into the pleasure of their company. ‘I’m so happy I found you both,’ she says. ‘Despite everything that I now know, I can’t really tell you what it means to me to be sitting here with you like this, to have my brothers back.’
When Geoff had driven her back to the house on Tuesday night, full of delicious food, too much wine and with everything that she’d believed about the past in tatters, she had staggered up the stairs to her room wondering if she would ever get over the anger, the hurt and the disappointment. The conversation at breakfast the next morning had helped a little. But she is still grappling with the grief of learning about the darkness of the past.
‘Have you told Adam all this?’ Doug asks.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Only that I’ve found you, and about Paula. He’s very caught up in the prospect of having uncles, as he’s always thought of you, and now an aunt as well. I won’t be telling him much more until we can talk face to face. So are you going over to England together?’
‘Yes, next month,’ Doug says. ‘Would that work for you?’
‘I’ll make it work. I’ll join you over there. Let me know when you’ve organised your travel. When we leave here I want to spend a week or two in Sydney with Ros. She has a studio where I can stay. I think for both of us it will ease the way back into our separate lives. The last few weeks have been challenging for all of us in different ways. We’ll have to go back to where we came from as different versions of ourselves. I don’t think it will be easy for any of us.’
Chapter Twenty-one
The final Sunday
Ros is walking slowly around the garden with Clooney, thinking about what she’s going to say about An Equal Music. One of the reasons she had chosen it was that she’d thought it would make it easy to segue from the violinist in the book, who is struggling to get to grips with the fact that she is going deaf, to her own struggle as a cellist trying to get to grips with Parkinson’s. But of course the other women know this now, and it’s better that it emerged in a more natural way. I must have been mad, she thinks, to imagine I could conceal it from them for weeks. Thankfully there’s so much else in the book to talk about. But the fact that this is the last book they’ll discuss here is bearing down on her. So much of what’s happened between them in their time in the mountains has been unexpected and significant, and she really doesn’t want it to end. ‘Come on Clooney,’ she calls, ‘book time.’ He wanders reluctantly towards her and they head back into the house and through to the kitchen where Adele is making tea.
She looks up. ‘Oh there you are,’ she says. ‘I was just thinking how sad I feel; the last book. I don’t want to go home, I don’t want it all to end.’
‘Me neither,’ Ros says. ‘But you’re going back with Judy, aren’t you?’
Adele nods. ‘Yes, and I’m looking forward to that . . . but . . . oh well, I guess I should be thankful we’ve had all this.’
The atmosphere is strangely awkward as they help themselves to tea. Simone and Judy are clearly also in low spirits and their collective energy for talking books is very different from previous Sundays. Ros looks around and is, for once, lost for words, but someone has to kick-start them into a discussion and as this is her book choice the task inevitably is hers.
‘Okay,’ she says, ‘it’s clear we’re all feeling less than our best, but we came here to read and talk about books, and I’m blowed if I’m going to put up with my choice getting less energy and attention than the others. So let’s get into it.’
There is a rustle of movement, shoulder straightening, shifting positions, the clink of cups being put aside. ‘So, this is An Equal Music,’ she continues, ‘one of my favourite books for various reasons, some of which are probably obvious to you all. First of all, it’s about music, and I really love the way Vikram Seth writes about it, and the way he portrays the musicians, the rehearsals and all the little dramas, triumphs, jealousies and idiosyncrasies. We’re all fairly precious about our instruments, and I suspect that most of us have pretty fragile egos even if we manage to hide that. He gets it, and he also gets that we are picky about comparatively small things, and how passionate everyone is about getting it right. I felt I’d lived through all those conversations with the members of the quartet I’ve played with for many years. It is a very close and interdependent set of relationships that doesn’t easily accommodate change. We know each other very well; we rely on each other, know the ways in which each person plays. It’s not easy to accept change in a group like that, and it’s easy to feel aggrieved or defensive if someone new has to join the group.’ She stops suddenly, feeling a lump rising in her throat at the memory of her conversation with Donald.
‘Do you think you would go and listen to your quartet play without you, or would that be just too hard?’
‘Oh yes, I’ll be there whenever I can,’ Ros says. ‘I love those guys, and I’m really proud to have played with them for so long. But
there was an awful finality in that conversation with Donald. We’ll always be friends, but what brought us together and sustained our friendship is lost now. I wonder . . .’ She stops again, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘Someone else will take my place, and because they have to focus on developing that closeness and trust, it will mean that I’ll always be an outsider. They lost their musician and I also lost mine.’
It’s hard for her to say this, harder still to accept it.
‘Will you be able to play for your own pleasure?’ Judy asks. ‘I’m sorry if it’s a silly question, but I don’t know much about Parkinson’s. I noticed your hands, but they don’t shake all the time. Can you play at all now?’
‘A little,’ Ros says. ‘About three weeks before we came here I played all the way through a rehearsal. But several times when I’ve played at home, alone, I’ve dropped the bow, or haven’t been able to maintain the fingering. It seems I have to take things one day at a time, and it may progress very quickly or quite slowly. Anyway, I guess I’m lucky because, unlike Julia in An Equal Music, I still have good hearing, so I can at least listen to the music I love.’
‘That was such a moving element of the book,’ Judy says, ‘a pianist going deaf. And that character was in her late thirties. At the beginning I thought Michael was such a lovely character, but he became single minded and selfish. He couldn’t really empathise with what Julia was going through.’
‘And he helped her to hide it from the other musicians,’ Adele says, ‘because he was so desperate for her to play with them, or really with him. He never seemed to consider how it would be for her if she did play and it all went horribly wrong. That would have been terrible for her. I don’t think he ever really entered into what the deafness meant to her. It was all about his need to get her back.’
Ros looks around the room. Remember this, she tells herself. This is us, this is what we do. We talk about books, we make them work in our own lives: walk through the doors they open for us, cross the bridges they lay out for us, and pick and choose what we need to take away from them. They brought us together, and they’ll keep us together, too.
‘Michael is always very focused on what it all means to him,’ Simone says. ‘At first I was really into him; he seemed so lovely, a kind of tragic hero, and I thought his longing for this woman he’d lost years earlier and yearned for ever since had made him wise and thoughtful, and really sensitive. But once he spots her by chance on that bus, and then she finally calls him, everything begins to change.’
‘Yes, it does,’ Ros says, ‘and I think that’s a really interesting part of the book because you don’t realise it’s happening. It’s quite subtle at first and you feel so happy for him, for both of them, that they’ve met again, and then you . . . well I certainly felt that he was trying to invade her life, take over.’
‘I think that’s very male,’ Adele says. ‘I’d like to ask Vikram Seth what he actually thinks of Michael, what he intended him to be. Because at the beginning he seemed such a rounded person, someone who had built a well-organised, textured sort of life for himself: the swimming at daybreak in the Thames, his practice rituals, his teaching. He seemed so balanced and genuine, I felt what I have sometimes felt, to my cost, when it comes to men: this is someone I could love and care for and who would love and care for me. But I ended up thinking, actually, Michael, you’re a bit of a selfish shit.’
‘Exactly,’ Ros says. ‘Michael can’t really hear anything but the wailing of his own neediness, which is why he’s able, several times, to simply trample on Julia’s relationship with her husband and her son. And to put her under a lot of pressure.’
‘So back to the question that I want to ask the author,’ Adele says. ‘It would be: how does he feel about Michael’s behaviour in this respect? I mean, was he writing this consciously, trying to demonstrate the way some men need to colonise the woman they love, attempting to separate them from others? Or does Seth himself not actually understand that, because if he doesn’t then of course he wouldn’t see it in the character.’
‘I think it’s deliberate,’ Ros says, ‘because he writes Julia’s resistance to that with such sensitivity. And Michael’s the same about the violin, his other great love. It’s not his, any more than Julia is his. It’s on loan from the woman in Rochdale, Mrs Formby, and in all the years he’s been playing it he’s never attempted to acquire a violin of his own. I know very well that the instrument you play for years becomes the one you always want to play, plus his livelihood depends on that instrument. It could be gone overnight, and it nearly is in the end, but even then he doesn’t really swing into action.’
‘He assumes that women will give him what he needs,’ Judy says. ‘We all thought initially that he was a lovely character, but we all came to the conclusion that he was self-absorbed. He really believes that Julia is going to change her life so he can have what he wants, and that she’ll throw her husband’s and her child’s lives into chaos, for him, because he loves her. Hopeless!’
Ros gets up, walks to the window and looks out into the darkening garden. ‘It’s interesting, that we all like this book, and we all see the same things in it. I’d like to know what some men think of it. Would they see what we see?’ But what she’s really thinking about is that because she was only halfway through the book when James died, she was never able to talk about it with him. Another of the many unfinished things between them that can never be completed.
‘Did you travel much, Ros,’ Simone asks, ‘like the quartet does in the story – you know, Venice, Vienna, Prague, all those wonderful cities with links to great composers?’
‘We did some tours. Vienna, but not Venice, Prague was magic, Tokyo – oh, and one year we did Paris and London.’
They return to the book, talking again about the characters, about music, about what they most love or dislike. Ros feels flat now, exhausted, almost numb; she has loved the conversation, loved introducing them to this book. But she needs to end it now, there is too much else on her mind. She rallies herself again, struggling to draw some words together.
‘I think one of the most wonderful things that novels do is reflect us back to ourselves,’ she says slowly, looking down at her shaking hands. She does’t know what to say. ‘For me . . .’ She stops, swallows, starts again. ‘For me, this loss of a musician’s hearing resonates with my own situation, and I feel a sort of desperation.’ She gazes out of the window, then turns to look back at them. She takes a deep breath, feeling weak and almost dizzy, and steadies herself by grasping the back of her favourite chair. ‘Desperation . . . yes, desperation about a future in which I am no longer a musician.’ There, I’ve said it now, she thinks, I’m no longer a musician. So who the hell am I? She sways a little, steadies herself again, sees Simone move as if to go to her but then stop. ‘Being with you all has been holding the darkness at bay. But now it’s coming to an end and I don’t know how to . . . how to go on.’ The tears are pouring down her cheeks. It’s Adele who gets to her feet now, but Ros holds up her hand to stop her. She feels fragile to the point of shattering. ‘I chose this book because I love it, but also because . . . well . . . because I thought I might find some sort of solution by talking about it. But there is no solution. It was my music and my belief in myself as a musician that has got me through the years since James died, and now that’s been taken from me. What’s left? What am I now? An old woman on a steep downward slope, losing bits of herself every day . . .’ She’s struggling to breathe now, spinning as consciousness is sucked out of her. ‘Nothing can stop it . . . nothing . . .’
When she opens her eyes the room swims back into focus. She is on the floor, her head in Adele’s lap.
‘It’s okay, Ros,’ Adele says, stroking her arm. ‘You’re okay.’
Ros struggles, wanting to get up.
‘No,’ Adele says, ‘don’t try to get up, stay there a moment.’
Simone, on her kne
es beside her, takes her hand. ‘Judy’s getting you some water,’ she says. ‘You fainted, but Adele stopped you from falling, and you’ve come back so quickly. I’m going to get some more cushions for you. Look, here’s Clooney, come to check on you.’
Clooney looks into her face, obviously surprised to find her down there looking up at him. He edges between her and Adele, sniffs her face, licks her forehead and flops down beside her, resting his head on her chest. The warmth and weight of him against her is wonderfully comforting.
‘Clooney,’ she murmurs, stroking his head. ‘What would I do without you?’
Simone reaches for a cushion and Ros lifts her head. ‘I can get up . . .’
‘Definitely not,’ Adele says. ‘We’ll help you to sit up if you want, but you need to stay here for a while.’
Ros is still slightly dizzy as Simone and Adele support her shoulders and help her to sit, propping her up with cushions.
‘Drink this slowly, Ros,’ Judy says, returning from the kitchen. ‘Don’t gulp it. Do you want to hold the glass or shall I hold it for you?’
‘No,’ Ros says, struggling, wanting to get to her feet. She feels ridiculous now, everyone fussing around her. ‘No, I need to get up.’
‘Ros!’ Adele says, and the force of her tone surprises Ros. ‘Stay where you are and drink some water, you grumpy old bat.’
There is a moment of pure silence. Then Ros stops struggling, lets go and leans back. ‘I’ll drink the water,’ she says, looking around at them, and as Judy cautiously puts the glass in her hand, she manages a weak smile. ‘I’ll do as I’m told. I know not to argue with an invincible woman, let alone three of them.’