by Ann Swinfen
Tom was less welcoming. His thoughts were absorbed in the new sloop and the fishing gear he was buying. The only times he spoke to Kate, it seemed, were to issue instructions about how the future clients were to be looked after. That brief period, after she had first come back from Hungary, when he had needed her physically and intimately, might never have been. Nowadays they never touched, and in bed kept a distance between them. Kate could not decide what her feelings were about this. In one corner of her mind she was angry that, after such pressure had been put on her, she was now cast aside and unwanted. But for the most part she was filled with the same dull indifference as she had felt when she had locked the door of Craigfast House for the last time and handed over the keys to the representative of the new owners.
She said nothing of these things to either Linda or Sofia, though both of them were more solicitous than usual. Infrequent letters from Beccy and Roz showed that they were busy and contented, and that was some consolation. Above all, Stephen seemed to have come to terms with his situation. He was deputy head boy now, and in the end-of-term exams he came top in French and fourth in English. It was evident from his cheerful demeanour that he was enjoying school far more than he had done for the previous two years, and Kate began to feel that the disaster of his A-Level results in science might prove a blessing in the long run.
Roz had written to say that she was to perform a solo on the Guarneri in the college’s Christmas concert, and she was anxious for them all to go. Kate thought Tom might refuse, but he seemed willing enough.
‘If Beccy comes down to the concert from university,’ Kate suggested, ‘then we could drive both of them home for Christmas. What we save on their train fares will pay for the petrol.’
Tom had sold his BMW and bought a second-hand Volvo estate, a little battered but built like a tank. It would be more practical for his future needs, he said, and would be the kind of vehicle to appeal to his customers. At any rate, Kate thought, it would hold all five of them and their luggage for the drive back from London to Dunmouth. Howard and Millicent had decided they could not manage the journey in the unreliable December weather; Howard’s arthritic hip made long car trips a painful ordeal. Kate promised to buy them a copy of the concert tape the college was making. She had seen very little of her parents since she had come back to Dunmouth. The problems of her husband and children, she persuaded herself, were occupying too much of her time. But she knew that she must confront them about the events from the past which still troubled her sleep. She would do it before Christmas, because Christmas was when she had promised to write to István. And Christmas was only a week away.
Several of the students were featured as soloists in the college concert, but it was clear to Kate as soon as she examined the programme that Roz and a pianist called Richard Verdhun were the principal soloists – they were each playing a full concerto, while the others had short pieces or single movements. The pianist played in the first half. He was twenty-one and in his last year at the college. Evidently he was accustomed to the concert platform; he took his seat on the piano stool calmly and professionally. He performed Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto with great technical panache, and Kate began to ache for Roz, who could not possibly match his experience. In the interval she left the rest of the family having refreshments in the refectory and wandered about the grey stone corridors of the college, reading the notices pinned on the boards and thinking the grim institutional place an odd nursery for so much bright young artistic talent.
Roz was to play near the end of the second half of the concert, followed only by the senior choir singing a medley of Christmas carols arranged by one of the college staff. When it came to Roz’s turn, Kate found she was gripping her hands together so tightly that her knuckles were white.
As Roz came on stage carrying the Guarneri, she stumbled. It was nothing, just a misjudging of the top step, and she did not drop the violin, but Kate’s stomach lurched, and she saw that Roz was a ghastly yellow white. She is going to have to overcome her nerves, thought Kate, or she will never be able to have a concert career.
Roz was playing the Elgar violin concerto. During the long opening passage played by the orchestra the soloist must stand and wait. From where she was sitting in the third row, Kate could see that Roz’s right hand, holding the bow, was trembling. When at last she lifted the violin and began to play, the first three or four notes sounded uncertain, even to Kate’s inexperienced ears. But the colour was coming back into Roz’s cheeks, and suddenly the notes became confident and the violin began to sing, gravely, seriously, as the orchestra drew back leaving the violin to its deep contemplation.
Kate closed her eyes to listen. She was thinking of Roz, but she was also remembering Eva, the little half-gypsy girl, forced to practise until her fingers bled. She thought of Eva running away with Zsigmond after her concert in Pécs, and of how beautiful she had been in that photograph of Sofia’s, holding the violin and with red roses in her hair. She thought of the escape down the Danube, and the violin left lying in the vaults, silent for all those years, then rescued and cared for by Jakob Stern, when he returned from concentration camp, the sole survivor of his family. All of these people, all of these scenes, were interwoven with the music, but when she opened her eyes as the last notes were dying away she remembered that this was her daughter, this was Roz who was playing – and she was very good indeed.
She realised that other people in the audience had been anticipating this performance. Of course the college had probably advertised the fact that Roz would be playing the missing Guarneri. But there was something extra in the applause which greeted a flushed and smiling Roz. She’s never going to be my child again, thought Kate sadly, clapping and cheering with the rest. She’s public property now.
Roz played some quick, clever little piece as an encore, and the concert finished on a seasonal note with the choir. At the party after the concert for the performers and their families, Roz was besieged. Her family found it difficult to fight their way through the crowd to reach her, and Kate was worried until she saw how poised and capable Roz seemed. One term at music college had changed her.
On the long drive north the next day, Roz slept most of the way, slumped against Beccy’s shoulder.
‘Delayed shock,’ Kate whispered, grinning over into the back seat as Beccy rolled her eyes and groaned quietly about the weight of her sister’s head.
‘Just so long as she doesn’t get too stuck up,’ muttered Stephen. ‘It’s an awful squash in here, Mum, with these two fat females taking up all the room.’
* * *
A steely winter light filled the bedroom, reflected upwards from the surface of the harbour. Kate was safely out of the way, shopping in Charlborough for last-minute Christmas supplies. In a patch of the silver light Toby lay stretched out at the foot of the bed watching Tom as he laid his hand on the top of Kate’s dressing table. Tom felt one brief qualm as he pulled open the drawer where Kate kept her personal papers. At the top, with no attempt at concealment, was a stiff envelope with your photographs printed across it. He drew it out and began to lay out the photographs along the dressing table in front of the piece of pottery Kate had put there.
The first pictures showed buildings and well-known landmarks from Budapest. Then the photographs of people began. He swept the earlier photographs back into the envelope and laid out the later ones in their place like a hand of cards. He raised each one to his face in turn, tilted it towards the light and scrutinised it closely. A kind of excitement seized him, tightening in his chest till he thought his heart would stop beating. The last photograph. He held it for a long time close to the window. The sense of relief which flooded through him set his heart racing again, and he felt his hands grow damp with sweat. He wiped them on his trousers, then carefully stacked the photographs together.
He had known he was right. Everything was easy now. For the first time in weeks he felt the band of pain in his head loosen and melt away. He smiled.
On Christmas Eve there was the first hard frost of the winter. Kate got out of bed in the front room upstairs at 24 Harbour Walk, and looked out over the river. She had woken late, after hours of frantic cooking and parcel-wrapping the day before, and it was already light. The pebbles on the foreshore glinted in their casings of ice, and as she opened the window and leaned out to smell the air, which she liked to do every morning in this house, she could hear the ice-sheathed rigging tinkling like a chime of bells from the fishing boats in the harbour.
Tom had not come home last night. He said he was staying the night in Charlborough Bay. He had gone, he claimed, on business. Something to do with gear for the boat. But he never looked Kate in the eye these days, and she knew he was deceiving her. Had he found some other woman during those weeks when he had gone off alone, ostensibly searching for a boat? A woman who would not judge him a failure, as he accused Kate of doing? Or had he simply gone off drinking?
She thought it might be a woman, but found she no longer cared. Her emotions seemed as frozen as the thin grass in the front garden. Apart from her children and the secret thought of István, nothing moved her deeply any more. And her children needed her less and less. She felt she was standing marooned on shore while the children flew away from her, impelled by some inexorable centrifugal force. Shivering in the cold wind off the river, she pulled down the window and went over to her dressing table, where Magdolna’s figure stood. She lifted it and turned it in her hands, as she had once done in Magdolna’s studio. Mother and child were both intensely absorbed – the mother in the child she was holding, the child in the fascinating world opening up behind his mother’s shoulder. Kate laid her cheek lightly against the cool ceramic hair of the mother and thought of Magdolna’s insistence that she should take this particular figure. Magdolna was right, of course. We are so wrapped up in our children we cannot see that even in infancy they are reaching beyond us. Put down that baby, Kate told the mother, and he will toddle away from you.
She breakfasted alone. Beccy, Stephen and Roz had come in late last night from a party Chris had given before going home to his parents’ farm for Christmas. They would probably sleep till midday. She took the stuffings, made last week, out of the freezer to thaw, checked that the door of the odd little larder was locked, so the dogs could not get at the turkey, and surveyed her preparations. Apart from cleaning the vegetables and stuffing the turkey this evening, everything was ready. There would be eight of them for Christmas lunch. Her parents and Sofia were spending the whole day with them. She wondered how Millicent would react to Sofia. Well, she would be able to judge better after this morning. Tomorrow evening, Linda and her two girls were coming for Christmas tea, which would bring them up to eleven. A number easily accommodated in Craigfast House, but it would be a tight squeeze here.
She called Toby and Sarah and let herself out of the back door.
The road was slippery along the harbour. An onshore wind had thrown spray up over the pavement and roadway when the tide was in, and during the night it had frozen. It was Sarah’s first experience of ice, and she slithered about alarmingly, but decided this was some new game. Ed Stannard came out of his cottage as Kate drew level, and tapped the barometer, wiping his nose and eyes with a large spotted handkerchief.
‘Good morning, Mr Stannard,’ said Kate. He was so bent and wizened, crouched against the cold wind, that she felt a surge of pity. She could not think of him as a vicious gang leader, a murderer even.
He looked up, startled. ‘Morning,’ he said gruffly, then – as Sarah slid past on her backside and splayed front paws – he gave a rusty bark of laughter. ‘Look at that then! New to ice, is she?’
‘Yes, she’s only a few months old,’ said Kate, smiling. ‘You watch yourself, it’s treacherous underfoot. The sea has been over the wall.’
‘Aye, well.’ He paused. ‘Merry Christmas to you, missus.’
‘And to you, Mr Stannard.’
* * *
There was a strong east wind blowing, but Tom stood well out from the land, reaching northwards up the coast in the sloop Lorelei. He had sailed her up to Charlborough Bay yesterday morning and taken the bus home, congratulating himself on his stratagem. His family wouldn’t even notice that Lorelei was gone from Dunmouth harbour. None of them was interested in his plans.
In the evening he had driven back to Charlborough Bay, leaving the Volvo hidden away in a back street where it wouldn’t be found too soon. He had told Kate he would be staying overnight and only returning late on Christmas Eve. That had given him a twenty-four-hour start.
He had left before dawn. Now he was past Berwick and lying off the Scottish coast. Would he be able to reach Leith before it grew too dark?
She was a beauty, the Lorelei. She moved soft and smooth beneath him, carrying him on, carrying him away from Kate. Lorelei wouldn’t deceive him as Kate had. He’d done everything for Kate and the children. More than twenty years of his life he had sacrificed to them, and they simply turned away from him now, looking as though he embarrassed them.
He hugged his arms around himself, whistling a tuneless air.
That would teach Kate. And he would not come back. He had had enough of bearing responsibility for other people.
He pulled the wad of photographs out of his pocket. He had not bothered to bring the pictures of buildings and scenery, only the pictures of people. The same people again and again. A middle-aged couple – the man in overalls, the woman square and plain. Sometimes a gangly boy with them. A tall angular woman he had seen Kate talking to in Dunmouth. And a tall man with greying hair at his temples, looking humorously at the camera, as though he was about to spring out of the picture. And one picture of the same man with Kate. They were not looking into the camera but towards each other, and the man’s hand rested lightly on Kate’s shoulder.
Slowly and methodically, Tom tore the photographs into tiny fragments and dribbled them from his fingers into the sea.
Last of all, he drew a studio photograph of Kate out of his wallet. It had been taken shortly after their marriage. She looked so young. Untainted by childbirth and motherhood. His only. Viciously he tore the photograph across the face and threw it after the others.
The scraps of pictures spun and swooped on the waves like coloured bubbles, then floated away astern in the foaming wake of the Lorelei. Tom felt a sharp clean pain in his chest. He was free now.
How long would it take him to reach Orkney?
* * *
Kate’s parents were surprised to see her. They were just putting away the breakfast dishes, but offered her tea from the remains in the pot. They all sat down in the prim sitting room, screened – by the private road, by the Terrace private garden, and by the fence – from any view of the sea. Only up on the first floor, where Kate had once had her bedroom, could you see into the distance.
The dogs were banned to the kitchen.
‘I’ll not have them in here,’ said Millicent, ‘with their dirty paws all over my clean carpets.’
Kate made a token protest, pointing out that the ground was frozen and the dogs’ feet were no dirtier than her own shoes, but she did it more because it was expected of her than because she hoped to be listened to.
Over their tea they talked about Roz’s concert and the arrangements for the next day, and then Kate put down her empty cup.
‘Sofia Niklai will also be coming to us for Christmas,’ she said.
There was a sudden, palpable silence in the room. Millicent, who was sitting beside Kate on the sofa, turned towards Howard where he sat in an armchair by the fire, as if she expected him to field this disconcerting remark, but he said nothing.
‘As you know,’ Kate went on carefully, ‘Sofia and I went together to Hungary in the summer.’
Millicent opened her mouth and Kate knew she was going to make some superficial critical remark. She held up a beseeching hand.
‘Just a minute. Before we went, Chris Harding discovered s
ome stories in the Dunmouth Herald’s archives about disturbing events that happened at Sofia’s cottage during the war. Linda also told me one or two things her father had mentioned. I haven’t felt up to talking to you about this before, but I think we need to clear the air before you spend Christmas Day in my house with my friend Sofia.’
They were listening to her intently now. Millicent was twisting a fine lawn handkerchief into a tight coil between her fingers.
‘As I understand it, Sofia and her mother were taunted and attacked on several occasions after they came to live in the cottage. They were accused of being Nazi spies. They were, of course, Hungarian refugees from Nazi persecution. In 1944, when Sofia was trying to get out of the cottage to fetch a doctor for her sick mother, a stone was thrown which struck her mother on the head, and she died shortly afterwards in Charlborough Hospital.’
Kate paused.
‘Her mother was the world-famous violinist Eva Tabor, whose Guarneri violin Roz played at the concert last week.’
Still they said nothing.
‘At that time Ed Stannard, who was a young fisherman, had been rejected by the navy on health grounds. He was bitter and resentful, and he was looking for someone to take out his anger on. Perhaps he really did believe they were Nazi spies, and that he was being a hero. I don’t know. But someone threw that stone. There was murder done at that cottage, and I believe you were there.’
Tears were running down Millicent’s face. Her head was bowed, and Kate could see the pink skin of her scalp shining pitifully through the carefully permed white hair. Like Ed Stannard, she looked old and vulnerable, and Kate wondered at the way age can appear and disappear in the human form – Sofia looking younger and younger, Millicent ageing visibly.