by Morag Joss
Stephen had not. He was practically a saint but at times a forgetful one. ‘After all,’ Hilary said graciously, ‘I thought you and he made the clinical decisions. I’m very surprised he hasn’t told you. He certainly told me.’
Yvonne could have punched her. ‘We had other, more important things to discuss this morning. We don’t deal with staffing trivia,’ she said, tightly. ‘And as I now have to attend to my patient, I’ll leave you to your new colleague.’
‘My new colleague? Ours, surely. We’re a committed, multi-skilled therapeutic team, supposed to be, aren’t we?’
‘I’m clinical staff. You’re support staff. And so’s she, so you can deal with her. It’s nothing to do with me, her being here.’
‘Well, clearly. Since Stephen doesn’t seem to have told you.’
‘I suppose you persuaded him to have her. It’s bad enough, having your creepy Leech around the place. Now we’ve got to have her.’
‘I had nothing to do with it. I’ve never even set eyes on the woman. And Leech is not creepy. He’s just quiet, and Ivan needs the help, and I don’t want pressure building up on him. You try running a three-acre smallholding and a kitchen practically single-handed.’
‘It’s not single-handed! There are two chefs and three catering assistants!’
‘They need managing. Ivan supervises the menus personally. And he makes the bread.’
‘The chefs do the cooking and the assistants help to serve and clear up, and Dr Golightly advises …’
‘That’s not the point. Ivan’s permanently exhausted, and all you have to do is stick people in hot and cold baths and run sprays over them and hand them their towels …’
‘I’m a qualified nurse! I assist the osteopaths and acupuncturist as well as the doctor.’ Yvonne began to count off on her fingers. ‘I do the infra-red lamp, the hot packs, the inhalations and massages and general care. AND I’m nearly qualified to do stress counselling. And all you do is hand out paint brushes and clay and bang on about responding to colours!’
Most of the new woman’s belongings were now on the tarmac of the car park. Hilary had read books on how to handle hostility and said mildly, ‘Leech could help with that sort of thing. We need a porter-cum-handyman. He could be out there with an umbrella.’ Hilary waved a hand in the direction of Sara, struggling to the door with boxes and making her way back to the car for the next load.
‘Oh no, you don’t. It’s bad enough him working in the garden. You may think you’ve got Dr Golightly round your little finger but I’m going to speak to him again about Leech. He’s off-putting.’
‘You won’t get anywhere. Stephen knows that Ivan needs the help. And I don’t see it’s any of your business anyway. Leech just pops in occasionally with the produce and goes away again. He’s hardly ever out of that garden.’
‘That’s another thing! He shouldn’t be allowed to sleep in that shed …’
Yvonne was interrupted by the clang of the front door bell. ‘I’ll go. I’m in charge.’
‘Oh, no. I think I should. After all, I’m the owner’s daughter-in-law.’
‘I’m senior nursing staff.’
‘I’m senior art therapist, and family. And this is a family-run establishment.’
‘It’s a professional establishment. Or should be.’
‘With a family atmosphere.’
The bell clanged again, insistently, and the two women pasted on smiles and went together.
CHAPTER 21
JOYCE OPENED THE door quickly with her Yale key, stepped silently inside and closed it. She would have to see about Pretzel’s claws. The small square stairwell which rose up the height of the house from the main hall, the ‘staff stairs’ as it was called, had a bit of an echo, and while she could creep up without making a sound in the trainers Sara had got for her, Pretzel liked to go up on the bare boards next to the wall where it wasn’t carpeted. His feet as he climbed made a sound like a necklace breaking. The door to Dr Golightly’s flat on the top floor was just six steps further up on the next half-landing and she did not want him appearing and asking what the noise was. Less still did she want any enquiries as to where she had been and what she might have in her handbag. Just inside her door she waited, her heart beating hard from the climb, then turned and peered through the security spyhole that gave her a view of the landing. Nothing. The only other visible door, down a half-flight on the landing below, led into the upper corridor of the main house where the patients’ rooms were. It too was closed, as it had been when Joyce had crept past, locked from the patients’ side with another Yale lock. She imagined that it was seldom used. Only Dr Golightly might need it, she supposed, to reach a patient quickly from his flat during the night, although Joyce’s impression of the clinic so far was that they did not expect emergencies. Dr Golightly’s own door, just visible on the outer edge of the distorted circular view, remained closed. The strains of music that wafted down to her ears from behind it, presumably the sound that had drowned out Pretzel’s claws on the stairs, floated on.
Safe now, she turned back. The room was at least potentially pleasant, painted uncontroversially in some yellow or other and carpeted in a polite green. It was not large but at least the tiny single bedroom and shower-room were separate. Joyce’s suitcase and boxes stood in a row against one wall, her cello case and lamps beside them. The sofa was dark green and Sara had promised some cushions which would, she had said, make it a bit cosier. And the flowers she had brought from the garden, blowsy roses and aquilegias, were gradually overcoming the choking smells of air freshener and Mr Sheen with which the room had been hastily ‘gone round’ in preparation for her arrival. Actually, those smells would not last long against the perfumed onslaught of warm, live dog, the only consistent smell in Joyce’s life and consequently the smell of home.
Leaning against the door and surveying her new room to try to make it familiar, she listened. Stephen Golightly had not struck her as a music lover, not at any rate a lover of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites. Joyce had Stephen Golightly down as more of a doer whose sort of doing—athletic, energetic, practical—seemed to preclude the sort of thinking that she considered not just a prerequisite to a proper appreciation of Bach, but an activity of an altogether higher order. It was not quite that she despised ‘doing’ per se, but she rather disliked the kind of doers who appeared to take pleasure in merely owning a physical body and to find entertainment in getting it to do things, not an attitude that had been encouraged in Monifieth. Sara and her ridiculous daily running, for example, and whose recording this was now being played. Joyce would know the sound of the Cristiani cello and that under-use of vibrato anywhere. The recognition was enough to move her further into the room where the music was fainter, but at that moment and unnervingly, rather as if she had made it happen, the Bach stopped. A few seconds later, some Beethoven started up. It was the Seven Variations in E flat Major from Die Zauberflöte, and it was Selkirk playing again. Joyce smiled. Ah, she wasn’t bad at the wee easy stuff.
Suddenly the music grew louder. Dr Golightly’s door was being opened. Joyce grabbed her handbag and looked round wildly. This little apartment had not been home long enough for her to have worked out her hiding places. But if Dr Golightly was making social calls he wouldn’t go in the bedroom, surely? She shoved the bag into the bedroom and closed the door on it just as the volume of the music subsided again. She darted back to her outer door and opened it. Dr Golightly’s door was closed and from behind it the Beethoven played on. But her eyes travelled down, caught by a movement, to the half-landing below. The door which led into the main house had just silently closed behind whoever had gone through it. What a silly thing to do, Joyce thought, to go out and leave your music playing like that. Dr Golightly hadn’t struck her as a careless man, but it was hard to tell with some people.
She returned and lay on her sofa to wait until she could be sure that her peace would not be disturbed. She realised that her heart was pounding again, with fear a
s well as excited, faintly criminal anticipation. The handbag’s contents awaited. But even though she knew that Dr Golightly was not in his room she felt a little too flustered to make a start just yet, and of course the pleasure would be the greater the longer she withheld it from herself. Very few people understood this. Very few people understood that people like her exercised more control in an average day than they would muster in a lifetime dedicated to their sort of mundane self-indulgence. Yet she was flustered, possibly by the sheer proximity of Dr Golightly’s living quarters, and Pretzel seemed to be feeling it too, since he had not made his usual seal-like leap on to the sofa to join her.
‘C’mon, Pretzel.’ She patted an empty patch beside her. ‘C’mon up and give Mummy a wee cuddle.’ Pretzel danced half-heartedly on his front paws but did not attempt to jump. He wandered away, head down and sniffing, and wound a straggly course which led him eventually to the tartan dogbed which Sara had bought for him, which was lying under a small, circular dining-table. Pretzel climbed in, circled it twice, lay down and sank his doleful head on to his front paws.
Joyce’s mind was once again drawn away reluctantly from the package in her handbag, and she looked at him with concern. Sighing, she heaved herself to her feet and felt his nose, which was dry but cold. His ears felt cold, too. As she caressed them, he lifted his head, shivered sadly, gave a little whimper and let his head fall again on to his paws. She fetched a sweatshirt from the bedroom and placed it round him, but he still looked at her sadly. Kneeling beside him, she looked back into his eyes and recognised what she saw reflected in them: humiliation, displacement, the beginnings of bewilderment, the same refugee’s consciousness which she had grown adept at sublimating in herself, chiefly by forgiving herself her trespasses, blaming others and looking on the bright side.
‘This is home now,’ she crooned. ‘For a while, anyway. It’ll be all right when we’ve got all unpacked, won’t it, son? Eh?’ Pretzel, presumably lacking the conviction for a proper tail wag, managed a weak wriggle of his bum. Joyce muttered something, got up and stood with her hands on her hips in front of the row of cardboard boxes. Then she crouched down, rummaged for a few minutes and brought out the Egyptian music box with a show of elation that Pretzel witnessed noncommittally.
‘Here we are! A wee tune’s what you need! Your favourite wee tune, ready?’ She wound the box up and set it down to play. As the familiar, plinky melody started, Pretzel rewarded her with a brief shiver and lift of his ears, the canine equivalent of a brave little smile. Joyce joined him again on the floor.
‘Don’t let me down now, son,’ she whispered, stroking him softly. Pretzel’s body shivered again but he licked her hand, and stirred his tail on the floor. Could he be hungry? She had fed him earlier but perhaps he was unsettled by the move, perhaps an extra meal would be reassuring. Sara had placed the tins of dogfood and various supplies in a cupboard in the neat little kitchen corner arranged with worktop, sink, kettle and microwave. Joyce got up again and tipped the remaining half of the contents of the opened tin into a cereal bowl. As an extra treat she crumbled over the top some of the bread and cheese she hadn’t eaten at lunchtime (it being so dry without butter) and cracked in an egg. As she put the bowl down Pretzel flumped over, sniffed it and began to eat. Joyce wanted to applaud. There couldn’t be anything seriously wrong with a dog who still wanted to be fed, so it must just be a wee chill. She sank down on to the floor beside him and smiled as he went on eating, feeling herself blessed, granted for once the power to provide good things for the one she loved when countless times before and for others she had loved, it had been denied. And the music box’s enfeebled tune, just one more time before extinction, twanked slowly round their ears as they sat together on the floor, while tears of relief filled Joyce’s eyes and she began to cry.
CHAPTER 22
SARA YOWLED TOWARDS her top C and held it bravely, though it took longer to reach than she had expected and then seemed not to know what to do once it got there. And it was a tad harder to hold on to than real singers seemed to find it, she thought, as she heard herself slipping off it. But it was a forgiving audience (herself) and a kind acoustic (her large bathroom at Medlar Cottage). She was happy: utterly, wondrously alone and making a lot of noise. She sank back in the bathwater, took another deep breath and began Vissi d’Arte all over again.
In the mirror at the end of the bath she could just see the head of some mad, damp, naked diva (herself) above the surface of the bubbles, and she thought again what a shame it was that she looked so odd when she sang, adding unfairly to the tragedy of the sound she made. Her forehead puckered, the eyebrows straightened and rose like the two halves of Tower Bridge letting a tanker through, and it was close to obscene what happened to her lips. She sniggered and pulled herself up, sloshing water behind her on to the floor, reached over for the glass of champagne on the chair next to the bath and tipped it down her throat until it was empty. Then she reached further over, picked up the bottle from the floor and refilled her glass. Freedom. Freedom to sing atrociously. Freedom to drink champagne in the bath. Freedom to have the bath at the time of day when she would be cooking Joyce some nutritious but depressingly plain thing to eat for supper. Dammit, she thought, emptying her glass again, freedom to drink.
It was extraordinary how completely the removal of Joyce to the Sulis had restored Sara’s susceptibility to the charms of her own house. She had spent nearly the whole of the afternoon in her music room working on the Dvořák, taking it apart and putting it all back together again, and by the end managing to play it really, even if she said so herself, much the way she thought it should go. Part of her enjoyment had lain in her renewed confidence in her judgment of the piece. The re-emergence of her disparaging teacher had unsettled her faith in her interpretation. But, as she had concluded as she was putting away the Peresson cello, she was playing it right, whatever Joyce’s curling lips might be telling her. She was making it sound the way she wanted it, her way. And Joyce could go boil her head, lips and all.
Afterwards, with the mood of righteous rebellion still in her and yelling My Way above the roar of the vacuum cleaner, Sara had cleaned the house, less to pick up any remaining dog hairs than to expunge memories of her guest. For it was extraordinary how the apparently self-effacing Joyce had managed to exude a silent pessimism about everything, not just Sara’s playing, in a manner so passive and yet so encroaching. It was not the result of anything she actually said or did, nor even the self-loathing in her eyes nor the diminished pride that soured her mouth, it was more a sort of miserable weather that attached to her and lingered, a dulling micro-climate of failure that hung stubbornly in the corners of Medlar Cottage after she had passed through, almost as if it were a noxious fog rather than a person that had been to stay.
Sara supposed, lying in her bath, that she now finally saw why Andrew had found it intolerable, but she would put everything right. She had not only fallen back in love with Medlar Cottage but with him too, and this evening was going to be wonderful. She had reclaimed the house for them both and filled it with flowers. It would be just the two of them, lots more champagne, amazing food of the kind that Joyce would not have touched, and then—well, not to put too fine a point on it, they would make love. Often, and variously. Or perhaps they would just make love and have the champagne and food later if there was time which, if they started the evening that way round, there almost certainly wouldn’t be. A rush of excitement tumbled through her body and she sank, stretching, under the water. She somehow had to wait another three hours for him, feeling like this; tinglingly aware of every pore and dip and fold of her body was how she described it to herself, quite outrageously randy was what she knew it to be. She surfaced and lay soaking, planning, letting more minutes tick by, her excitement increasing. There was some delicious aromatherapy oil somewhere that she seldom used because it took so long to rub in to her skin and she was usually in a hurry to get dressed, but tonight, slowly and ceremoniously, she would anoint
her body like an Old Testament concubine. She would paint her toenails again and wear no shoes, and her clothes would be soft and easy to shrug off, silk of course, and not too many.
* * *
BY ELEVEN o’clock Sara was still sitting cross-legged on the hearth rug with her empty glass. She had spilled champagne, the last of the bottle, down her dark red silk vest, the fifty or so candles burning in the drawing room were flickering their last, her skin felt unpleasantly slippery and her feet were cold. She had taken the overcooked Thai shrimps out of the oven over an hour ago and they were in the kitchen lying in their dish, curled in yellowing coconut and ginger sauce like dead baby mice awaiting a biology practical.
At five minutes past eleven Sara decided, practising her deep breathing, that she would get up very slowly, go to the telephone and ring Andrew very nicely and just ask, very reasonably, where the bloody hell he was and what the bloody hell he thought he was doing. But the telephone base, when she got to it, was flashing a new message. Knowing exactly what it would be Sara played it. Andrew was terribly sorry. Andrew would do anything to have it otherwise. Andrew couldn’t make it because Valerie had just signed up for a Twelve-Step Women’s Assertiveness Course on Sunday nights. He had to babysit. Valerie was also asserting her right to go for a curry with the girls afterwards so Andrew would have to stay until she chose to get back, which might be very late. Andrew thought that he would go to the flat tonight, remembering how Sara had objected to being disturbed the other day. Andrew hoped Sara would understand. Andrew was dead, Sara added silently as she clicked the machine off, and so was Valerie.
The message had been left hours earlier when she had been either bawling Sinatra songs to the accompaniment of the Hoover, shouting Puccini in the bath or when her head was underwater, so it wasn’t as if he were letting her down just at the very last minute, but nevertheless disappointment and rage were fighting it out in Sara’s pounding head, and rage won. With a half-drunken shriek she stumbled into the kitchen, opened the back door, picked up the dish of Thai shrimps and hurled it outside where it crashed on to the path. Plates of fragrant rice, scallops, crab cakes, chilli dipping sauce and beansprouts went next. The champagne bottle went last, with the satisfying crump of exploding glass, followed by the startled yowl of a cat. Back in the drawing room she managed with difficulty not to kick over the burning candles and instead went round blowing them all out, noisily and furiously. Shaking, she stood in the dark, light-headed, panting, wondering what on earth she was going to do next. At what point had she conceded to Andrew—had she ever actually conceded?—the power to make her feel like this? How dare he make her feel like this? Actually, how dare Valerie do this? And the anger that they were making her feel had driven out not just any ability or desire to understand and forgive but also the capacity to think, sleep or eat. She looked round for something to destroy and realised with her last particle of reason that the only way to avoid trashing her own house was to get out of it. She tore upstairs, pulled off her clothes and changed into running gear.