by Morag Joss
Sara had been grateful. She had spent a miserable morning trying to be bright and normal, taking the car down to Bathampton and going for her usual run along the towpath, getting the papers and pottering enjoyably in a Sunday-ish way in an effort to show, ostensibly to Joyce, that Andrew’s absence was a complete irrelevance. She was also showing Andrew, should he care to take an interest, that he was not the only one with people to look after. Joyce, declining the offer to be made comfortable and left with the papers, had for most of the morning followed her about, sitting or standing some distance off and watching whatever she did with reproachful, judging eyes. Over lunch, at which Joyce picked daintily, she had announced her intention to lie down for forty winks. Sara was exhausted by the effort of cheerfulness and said something insincere about managing without her.
On Monday Sara stood in the doorway of the spare bedroom with the tea, and the pile of new clothes bought on Saturday which Joyce had until now declined even to try on. ‘Come on. They’re not really jeans, they’re black. And the sweatshirt’s a good colour for you,’ she said, briskly.
Joyce, too sleep-befuddled to comment, unfolded herself from under the eiderdown fully dressed, and took them obediently. Her lips taut with uncertainty, she began unpinning herself from the pink suit. It was a long process undoing the many safety pins which served in place of the broken skirt zip but Sara waited, determined to get the suit out of Joyce’s clutches and burn it, whatever the jeans and sweatshirt looked like. She had already taken away for washing every other garment that Joyce owned and had ended up binning most of them. When Joyce got down to her underskirt and vest she turned away, offering a view less of her buttocks than the place where her buttocks should have been. She was so thin that the grey petticoat, with a tattered hem of what once had been lace and was now a nylon cobweb, fell from the back of her waist to her scrawny knees like a flat dirty curtain. Sara, sensing Joyce’s embarrassment, looked conspicuously round the room.
‘I see you’ve unpacked, then,’ she said. Joyce had replaced Sara’s iron bedside lamps with her own, one with a lampshade depicting a coaching scene and the other with a peach nylon one that looked like a showercap recycled from a pair of frilly trainer pants. She had displayed her books—a few novels, dark-spined school prizes and texts on music—in the small bookcase and stacked the overspill along the skirting board. Several ornaments of the Delft clog and brass dog variety covered the dressing table, along with a beautiful rectangular box of dark wood, inlaid with a Tree of Life design executed in soft pink mother-of-pearl and silver. That and the cello propped against the wall were the only items of beauty or value that Joyce seemed not to have been parted from.
‘I remember that box from your flat,’ Sara said, wanting to forget the dispiriting ugliness of everything else Joyce owned.
Joyce’s lips puckered up with satisfaction. She drew herself upright in her wretched underclothes, walked over to the box and lifted the lid. A strange, Eastern-sounding, modal melody came twanking out of it. ‘That’s the Egyptian national anthem,’ she announced. ‘And this box was a gift to me from’—she looked regally at Sara—‘the Queen of Egypt herself.’
‘Wow.’ Sara now remembered being told something of the sort years ago. She handed Joyce the green sweatshirt and Joyce’s head disappeared into it.
‘The Queen presented me with it when I left,’ she said as she reappeared, blinking like an emerging pot-holer.
With deliberate nonchalance she went on, as Sara offered her the trousers, ‘I was tutor to the Egyptian royal family, you know. After the war. I was sent to Cairo. I taught music to the princes and princesses for nearly two years.’ She was now holding the trousers the right way up and persuading her right foot into the leg. The twanking music box melody was starting over, slowing, each note sounding with more twwwww- than -aaank, as the mechanism wound down.
‘You’d find it easier sitting down,’ Sara ventured, realising that Joyce was in danger of falling over. Suddenly it crossed her mind that Joyce had probably never worn trousers in her life, not so much as pyjama bottoms. She was a skirt and nightdress person, a lady, and had probably thought at one time, assuming she didn’t now, that women in trousers proclaimed the coming of the Antichrist. But Joyce had them on now, and was busy tucking her petticoat into the waistband, which was loose enough to allow it.
‘It’s a beautiful box,’ Sara said. ‘What was the Queen like? Did she speak English?’
‘The Queen? Oh, well.’ Joyce was still tucking herself in. ‘The Queen? Well, it was a while ago.’ There was a pause during which Joyce opened her mouth and then folded her lips, and decided not to lie. ‘Well now, I seem to remember now, yes, that’s right. I got the box from a lady-in-waiting. The Queen couldn’t be there herself. Affairs of state and so on, I suppose.’ Her voice trailed off, the shining, imagined memory of the grateful queen entreating her to accept her gift growing dim in the dismal light of the fact that she had received the standard leaving present for minor servants via a secretary, and had only once in nearly two years met the Queen, in a room containing at least thirty others. It was not how she liked to look back on it and, for fifty years, had not.
‘Well. But Cairo—that must have been fascinating. Here, don’t forget your tea.’
Joyce sat down on the edge of the bed and took the cup as the melody stopped. ‘Och well now, it was awfully dusty. I remember that, hot and dusty. Not a clean city at all. I never saw the slums, of course.’ She blew delicately on her tea. ‘Filthy. There was some sort of epidemic, when I was there, I remember that. People died. Mass hysteria. Though that was in the countryside, not the city, come to think of it. Anyway, all gone now,’ Joyce said, with a dangerous wave of the free arm, stirring the silent air into which the last notes of the music box tune had lately vanished. ‘All gone.’ She sucked up some tea in her lips which, after sleep, were so loose they looked almost frilly. ‘Tone deaf too, the wee tykes,’ she added, after she had swallowed.
There was a silence save for Joyce’s slurps. Sara sat down in the chair by the dressing table, feeling the full extent of her entrapment. Joyce would be up and about again in a few minutes, haunting every step she took. How long was she going to stay? And where would she go? Joyce obviously had some sort of income, although Sara had been so far too squeamish to get out of her exactly how much. She had said she had no relatives or friends, which Sara guessed meant none whom she had not, in the course of her descent, estranged beyond any possibility of reconciliation. Was Joyce quietly banking on not quite ever getting round to arranging things so that she could move out again? Sara knew that she could never, ever actually throw her out. She also knew that she could never, ever tolerate her as a permanent fixture.
And there was Andrew to consider, although when she did, Sara felt only a quiet panic that he did not want to live with her in Medlar Cottage, closely followed by dismay because she could, when she was being honest with herself, see his point about territory. Would Andrew even agree to come back as long as Joyce was here? And with Joyce as a sort of resident, half-malevolent, droopy-eyed house troll his reluctance was more than understandable; it was utterly reasonable.
‘Joyce, what happened? What happened to you that made you give everything up? Why did you start drinking?’
Joyce looked at her accusingly, as if the questions were in the worst possible taste. She shook her head. ‘Oh well. It was a while ago. Something upset me, that’s all. A person. Here, and what about your er … I can’t get his name. Where’s he?’
‘He’s at work,’ Sara explained patiently. ‘What upset you? Who? Who upset you? What did they do to you?’
‘Och, you know fine yourself how it is. You should know. Did you not have the same thing, with Matteo Becker? He died, didn’t he? I saw it in the paper. Well, same thing. Someone died.’ She swallowed some tea. ‘Nobody you know.’
‘I wish you would tell me. It might help.’
Joyce drank more tea as if Sara had not spoken. Sitting in t
he peaceful bedroom at that slightly head-swimming point in a summer afternoon when an old lady might decide that, as the day is all but gone, she will take the rest of it slowly, Sara realised that it would be cruel to displace the consoling effects of tea and warmth and quiet with unsettling conversations about the past and an insecure future. Joyce was so old, Sara noticed, that the drinking of her cup of tea was an activity which she carried out with care and concentration, without trying to do several other things at once. At what age, she wondered, does a cup of tea make us sit down? It was a trivial enough concession to age, Sara thought, watching Joyce, to claim a few minutes in which to sit and sip a cup of tea, and a modest enough hope that there might occasionally be someone else around to make it. Could she and Andrew find a way to keep her, for as long as it took? Was it callous to calculate that her malnourished, alcohol-abused and elderly body would not be around to inconvenience any of them for long?
‘Now, dear,’ Joyce said, sliding her empty cup cautiously back on to its saucer. ‘Time you and I had a wee talk. You don’t want an old woman in your house, I’m quite sure of that. And I need to find myself a wee place to stay. Although after what those terrible people did to me, robbing me of half my means, I’ll need to content myself with maybe just a room. Then we’ll be out of your way, Pretzel and me.’
Without a second’s doubt Sara knew that Joyce was opening the way to getting herself clear of her in order to start drinking again. She also knew that she could let her, and that Andrew would probably say she should. The generous thoughts of Joyce enjoying her twilight years bathed in the golden light of her magnanimity, which only two minutes ago had been making her feel cornered yet rather good about herself, were now making her feel stupid.
‘I’m not letting you go off to another crummy bedsit,’ she announced, ‘just so you can start drinking your way through the rent money again. I’m not letting you.’
Joyce managed to look both stunned and pompous. Sara bit her lip, because she was not at all sure exactly what she was going to let her do instead. What options were there? Whatever happened, if Joyce were to stay off the bottle, she would have to restore some pride in herself. Her little daily self-deceptions and habits of self-aggrandisement would not substitute for the self-belief and self-discipline she would need in order to live independently. ‘You need to find something to do.’
‘Do?’
‘To keep yourself occupied, to have an interest.’ Sara knew as she spoke how interfering she sounded and how futile her interference was, unless Joyce were to start doing something she really enjoyed. ‘Your baking. Your wonderful baking? You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t bake now,’ Joyce said, with finality. ‘I am a musician, not a pastry cook.’ She gazed past Sara as if she were invisible.
‘Right. Well, suppose you start teaching again? Could you give lessons?’
‘Teach?’ Joyce’s eyes travelled to the cello case against the wall. ‘On that? Teach?’
‘Go on, have a try,’ Sara said. She rose, walked over to it and undid the clasps. ‘When did you last play? Ages, I guess? Why not have a go now?’
Joyce was chewing her lips. ‘Well, dear, I don’t know …’
‘Come on! Just a little try. You’ll be rusty, of course, but a bit of practice’ll sort that out. Haven’t you missed it?’
The instrument was dreadfully out of tune. Sara pulled the dressing table chair to the middle of the room, sat down with the cello and after several minutes managed to get it in tune without breaking any strings. Gently she handed Joyce the bow, which she took from her as if the varnish were still wet. With a slight bouncing movement in her wrist she accustomed her arm once more to its weight and balance. Her fingers had found their correct places on it instantly. She looked at Sara with nervous hope and Sara smiled encouragement. ‘I remember how you played,’ she said. ‘You were wonderful, technically brilliant. It’s impossible to forget how, once you’ve played like that. It’ll come back to you, I know it will. You remember the Bach Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C? Suppose you try the Adagio. Go on.’
She helped Joyce into the seat, easing the cello towards her thin shoulder. Joyce set her lips in a brave line and adjusted her posture until she was sitting proudly straight. With her right hand she was gently stroking the honey-coloured wood of the instrument, reacquainting herself with its sleek hollows, her fingers remembering how beautiful it was. She tapped softly on the strings with her left hand and smiled at the sound, which seemed to invite her to play. She smiled hopefully up at Sara. Perhaps she was right. She could never forget how to play an instrument like this. The Adagio. Of course she remembered it, it was not even difficult. Joyce opened and closed her left hand several times, flexing her stiff fingers, tipped back her head, still smiling, and taking a breath as if she were going to sing, placed the bow tenderly on the string. With a last nervous, excited glance at Sara, she drew it across in the stately, sombre opening notes of the piece. Sara listened, unable to look at her. There was no mistaking it: the sound which was rising from the beautiful, long-neglected cello now in the arms of one of the country’s most celebrated cello teachers was, truly and indisputably, absolutely bloody terrible.
The banging of the front door interrupted the noise and also allowed Sara, coward that she knew herself to be, to skip off with an apologetic smile without having to say anything. Andrew was in the kitchen, looking around crossly with his hands on his hips as if he were somehow angry with the room.
Sara raised her eyebrows and said, ‘Trouble?’ Don’t ask me how I am, will you?
Andrew nodded, his face softening, acknowledging to her that none of it was Sara’s fault. Actually, it is. You make me so angry I can’t think straight.
‘What? What’s the matter?’ Instead of hugging him, Sara stood with her arms folded. Go on, hug me. Tell me I’m doing a great job looking after Joyce.
‘I’ve cocked up, that’s what’s the matter,’ he said, rather aggressively. Fat lot you care, you’re so selfish. ‘We’ve got the bloke who did it and I cocked up the arrest. Possibly even the conviction.’ He sank into a chair and turned away from her. Still she did not come and hug him. Perhaps she would if he held out his arms to her, but he thought on balance he would not and besides, she had already moved away and was topping up the teapot from the kettle.
‘Tell me,’ she said in a tired voice, reaching into a cupboard for a mug. I’ve got problems too, you know.
Andrew sighed and groaned. ‘How long have I been doing this? After all these years, I can’t believe that I got such a basic thing wrong. Maybe that’s the point, it’s Bridger’s job, all that stuff, it’s so long since I did it. I suppose you just get out of practice.’ Why aren’t you sorry for me?
‘Why did you do it, then? Why didn’t you leave it to Bridger?’ Why are you so stupid sometimes?
Andrew did not reply, having no acceptable way of telling her that he had muscled in aggressively on Bridger’s work rather than spend time dealing with his own problems.
‘Have you found out who she is yet? Was, I mean?’ You’re about to tell me anyway.
‘Oh, yes. Easy. Her B&B reported her missing. I went to take a look on Saturday night. That’s why I was so late coming in, if you’d given me a chance to explain. I meant to call yesterday but all this came up. Look, Sara, about Saturday—’ It wasn’t my fault.
‘Never mind about that. Go on. You went to her B&B?’ Yes, it was.
‘Tatty place just outside Limpley Stoke. Some kind of smallholding as well, they supply the Sulis Clinic and one or two other places. Ivan Golightly, he’s the son of the bloke who runs the Sulis. Wife does the B&B, cheap and cheerless. The B&B, not the wife. Looks like Mrs Takahashi was trying to save money. She’d left her husband at a mycology symposium in Bristol.’ Okay, don’t listen, then.
‘A what?’ I’m not.
‘Mycology symposium, some academic thing, that’s not the point. He’s a professor somewhere in Japan, Kobe. It’s so
straightforward, she was trying to leave him and he killed her.’ All right, fine by me. His voice tailed off in weary gloom.
‘ What did you cock up? You still haven’t told me.’ Fine by me, too.
‘Bridger and I went to see the husband yesterday. It’s years since I did this basic stuff and I just forgot. I bloody forgot to caution him before he started talking about his wife. He as good as admitted he killed her, but that was before. And now he’s got his lawyer and interpreter and all that and of course the lawyer’s done the obvious thing and claimed that everything he said before he was cautioned is inadmissible. She’s right. The bastard practically admitted it and now we can’t use it. And I know the bastard’s guilty.’
‘How come you’re so certain?’
‘I told you, he was close to admitting it. He’s a wife-beater. She’d left him. He admits he came to Bath that morning to see her, claims he didn’t find her, but it’s pretty clear he did, and he lost his temper and strangled her.’
‘I always think of wife-beaters doing it behind closed doors. I can’t see anyone strangling his own wife in a pub. In public.’
Andrew tried to hide his exasperation at Sara’s now reflexive questioning of his judgment. While he admitted that it had been helpful before, it was not so now.
‘They’re visitors. They haven’t really got a door to be behind, have they?’ He sipped at the tea that she had now put in front of him, wishing that it were a glass of wine. As he swallowed, his insides griped with the thought that it quite easily could be, were it not for Sara’s insistence on keeping Joyce here and declaring the house a dry zone so that there would be nothing lying around to tempt her.
‘Anyway, look, I meant to come over yesterday after we’d got him in custody but of course as soon as we got back to Manvers Street the whole thing got complicated. The Japanese consulate and all that, interpreters. We had to get all that set up so his lawyer can’t claim he doesn’t understand what’s going on. It took a while. And in the end I was so angry I thought it was better to keep out of your way. Angry with myself, I mean.’ Well mainly, he thought, looking away, and meanwhile what was that bloody racket coming from upstairs?