by Morag Joss
‘I remember now, it was all to do with ground almonds. It was shortbread. He was about twenty, I think, damn good player. He died.’
‘Oh, God. Poor guy. Poor Joyce.’
‘The police got involved. It wasn’t very clear, you see, because his parents claimed he knew how to avoid that kind of accident and must have been told it was safe. They blamed Cruikshank. There was talk of a possible manslaughter charge, but the coroner—’
‘Procurator-fiscal,’ Sara corrected him. ‘In Scotland.’
‘Yeah, anyway, they decided at the inquest—’
‘Fatal accident enquiry, in Scotland.’
‘Do you want to hear this or not? They couldn’t prove negligence or malice, so they decided on accidental death. Crookie retired early, moved away from Glasgow, disappeared. Couldn’t handle it, Cathy thought.’
‘Poor, poor thing,’ Sara said. A picture of sad-eyed Joyce standing in the spare bedroom at Medlar Cottage, stooped in her disgraceful old underwear with the rag of filthy pink suit on the floor at her feet, swam into her mind. ‘Poor thing.’
As they continued down the steps and terraces that wound gently down the castle rock Sara found herself hoping very much that Joyce had not been in love with her beautiful, clever boy. Her pain at causing such an accident would be enough in itself, enough to demolish her self-worth and trigger the drinking. Sara did not see how it could be borne at all if she had killed not just a student in her care, but also the thing she loved.
More than halfway down was a booth selling ice creams and drinks, surrounded by half a dozen wooden picnic tables and wasps doing reconnaissance flights. They bought ice cream and bottles of water and waited until the others caught them up and folded themselves into the uncomfortable benches.
‘There’s a church worth seeing, according to the book,’ someone said after they had been sitting for a time over their drinks, trapping wasps and getting too hot. ‘Down in the square.’
‘I’m burning,’ Sara said. ‘Anywhere cool and dark sounds good to me.’ There was a groan or two and nobody moved. ‘Isn’t anyone else coming?’
‘Oh, I am,’ Bernadette said brightly. ‘I never miss a church, when I’m abroad.’ Sara could not think of any way of stopping her from coming, short of nailing her cheek to the table, which flashed for one joyous instant through her mind. But the others surely would not deliver her up to Bernadette’s sole company? She stared at them until they all, even Charlie, looked guiltily away. As well they might, the traitors.
Sara’s extravagantly pious crossing of herself on entering the church did not put Bernadette off. She followed closely.
‘It’s quite old, isn’t it? Oh, there’s a pulpit!’
And no amount of slow intaking of breath and raising of the eyes, hinting at a private burden patiently borne, not even the lighting of a candle, was going to signal to this woman that Sara might have some personal matter to discuss with Our Lord and would like to be left alone. Not that she had, but really, with a name like Bernadette, should she not have been at least a little responsive to the idea of prayerful solitude in the lady chapel?
‘Oh, isn’t that funny?’ cried Bernadette. ‘St Anton, it says. That means St Anthony. The church is dedicated to St Anthony.’ She was pointing up at a vast, filthy oil painting which hung almost in the dark in one of the side aisles. It was the seventh or eighth image of him that Sara had noticed, apart from the sign outside which gave the name.
‘What’s funny about that?’
‘Well—St Anthony. When we’re playing the St Anthony Variations tonight. And the cello concerto by Anton Dvořák. Don’t you think that’s a really weird coincidence?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Oh, where’s your imagination?’ Bernadette said, pushing her arm gently. They were not quite alone in the church, so as Bernadette continued pointing out features in her loud voice, as if she were regaling a friend in Marks and Spencers with something she had just spotted on the separates rail, Sara felt both embarrassed and bored.
‘I wonder if we should be a bit quieter,’ she whispered. ‘We might be spoiling the atmosphere for other people if we’re too loud. Don’t you think?’
Bernadette smiled pityingly. In fairness, the other visitors in the church were also tourists forced in out of the sun. ‘The Temptation of St Anthony,’ she whispered, pointing at the canvas, ‘see?’
Sara looked, wondering what was supposed to be tempting about grappling bare-handed with a toothed serpent the length of a fireman’s hose, which was what the beleaguered saint was doing. For fear of prompting an explanation, she kept quiet and moved on.
‘The devil sent him visions,’ Bernadette supplied. ‘He lived on bread and water in the desert, and he fasted in the wilderness to get rid of them.’
Sara ignored her and gazed at the next picture, in which St Anthony was simply standing with a cross or a crutch in one hand and with the other raised, blessing things. Bernadette shuffled along beside her and pointed again. ‘There he is again. He’s always got a pig with him. My two always find that funny.’
It was the first almost imperceptibly interesting thing that Sara had ever heard her say. She looked hard at the picture and indeed saw, peeping round St Anthony’s robe, a pig.
‘Why does he, I wonder,’ she said, not really asking.
‘Oh, patron saint,’ Bernadette said airily, ‘he’s the patron saint of swineherds. Every litter used to have a piglet named after him, I think. Third-century hermit, Anthony was, lived in Egypt.’
‘You do know a lot,’ Sara said.
‘Oh, we certainly know our saints in my family,’ Bernadette said. ‘Because of our name. We changed it, you know. You see,’ she dropped her voice at last to a tolerably low volume, ‘I wasn’t born a Xavier, none of us were Xaviers at all. Our surname was Thick. You wouldn’t believe it, would you, imagine being saddled with a name like that!’
Sara nodded sympathetically, not trusting herself to say anything.
‘It was fine until my parents moved to Liverpool and we came along, my sister and brothers and me. We were all teased, well, hardly surprising. Not a lot of fun, a Liverpool playground, when your name is Thick.’ She sighed heavily. ‘So we decided, all of us, to change our name. My mum wanted us to take a saint’s name, she’s quite religious, and we all agreed. Trouble was, we couldn’t agree which one.’
‘So how did you decide? Did you just toss a coin or something?’
‘Good Lord, no. We’re Liverpool Catholics, remember. We went through the whole of Butler’s Lives of the Saints and fought it out over every single one. We couldn’t agree on one we all liked. By the time we got to Xavier my dad put his foot down and that was that.’
They both laughed. Sara looked again at the dark picture. ‘So who are those people, then? What are those flowers they’re holding out?’ she asked, pointing to three tiny figures reaching up to the saint and offering in their outstretched hands what might have been huge yellow dahlias.
‘Oh, can’t remember,’ Bernadette said. ‘Don’t remember anything about flowers. Although maybe that was the other St Anthony.’
Sara looked blank.
‘You know, St Anthony of Padua,’ Bernadette said breezily. ‘Twelfth century. Devoted himself to the poor, I think.’
They gazed in silence for a few more moments and began to make their way slowly back down the nave to the West door.
‘It does matter, you know, what you’re called,’ Bernadette said seriously. ‘Do you realise, before I changed my name, people really did treat me as if I was thick?’
‘Disgraceful,’ Sara murmured, strolling ahead of her out of the church and back into the sunshine.
CHAPTER 39
SARA TOOK A taxi from the Osterreichischer Hof. Her concerto was not until the second half of the concert so she had allowed herself the pleasure of lying in her bath right up till the moment when she knew the orchestra would be lifting their bows, blowing out their horns and fretting about
their reeds, about to start the gracious St Anthony Chorale. She arrived backstage just as the first half was finishing and the orchestra was clattering in off the platform for the interval.
‘There you are!’ Bernadette was at her side. ‘It came to me later! I thought, she’ll really want to know that so I just had to find you and tell you.’
‘Tell me what?’ Sara wanted, needed and did not usually have to insist upon complete isolation and quiet before a performance. Her dressing room door was another twenty yards away. She did not stop walking, but Bernadette followed.
‘Bernadette, if you don’t mind—’
‘I knew you’d want to know, you were so interested, so I got them to look it up when I rang home. I always speak to my two at six o’clock. Anyway, St Anthony was supposed to have power over fire. People used to get this illness where their hands felt like they were burning and they went mad. In the Middle Ages they thought it was the devil or witchcraft and they prayed to St Anthony for intercession. Those people in the picture were praying for relief. St Anthony’s Fire it was called.’
‘Lovely. Now—’
‘But it wasn’t witchcraft! It was caused by bad harvests. Something in the grain, a blight or something, ergot poisoning, but then they didn’t know that—’
Sara had reached the door of her dressing room and opened it.
‘Whole fields were affected. Imagine—field after field …’
‘Thank you, Bernadette,’ she said without smiling, stepping through and closing it almost in her face.
She breathed thankfully in the quiet of the room, relaxed her shoulders, cracked her knuckles and looked at her watch. They had long intervals at these concerts, allowing plenty of time for the European great and good to sip champagne and be seen sipping champagne in their expensive evening clothes. Still a clear half hour. Sara sighed and tried to relax. All she had to do was step into her dress and shoes, tune up, warm up and breathe deeply. And stop worrying about being big enough for the Dvořák. Just love it more, whatever that meant. And Andrew less.
It was after she had changed and tuned up and was blowing on her fingers to keep them warm that Bernadette’s drivel suddenly came into her mind. Burning hands. Field after field. Was it a line from a poem or something, like ‘amid the shining corn’? Cornfields? There was something about cornfields, field after field … Damn Bernadette. She needed this space in order to prepare herself if she was going to give any kind of performance. Mrs Takahashi’s photographs. Andrew had said it—bloody cornfields, field after field. Mrs Takahashi’s pictures of the smallholding. She blew on her hands again. She thought of James and his strong pianist’s hands. ‘They feel hot, then cold,’ he had said. She heard Stephen Golightly’s words, ‘Everything here is home-made and organic, you know. If we can’t source it easily, we grow it ourselves, even some of our own cereals.’
‘Something in the grain, a blight or something, ergot poisoning’. And she was on in ten minutes. If she had more sense than heart, she told herself, she would stay right here in her dressing room until it was time to go on. She would keep calm, play her Dvořák and deal with this admittedly very long shot (what Andrew would call jumping to conclusions) afterwards. Sense told her that another two hours could make no difference. Heart, however, seemed to be telling her calmly that there was no telephone in her dressing room and that her mobile would probably be useless in this city surrounded by mountains, so she must bring her address book and all the money she had. Out in the corridor she followed the sound of voices to the crowded backstage hall where most members of the orchestra were sitting out the interval. She made her way to the side of the room where the smokers congregated next to a line of open windows.
‘Charlie, Charlie, help me find a phone, quick. I’ve got to speak to someone. It’s urgent.’
Thank God for burly, tall, competent people. Charlie took one look at her face, stubbed out his cigarette and grabbed her by the hand. ‘Must be, if you can brave smokers’ corner. Come on.’
Charlie worked his competent magic on a steward who seemed to understand his experimental German and led them behind the counter of an unused cloakroom. A pay-phone that took coins only was mounted on the wall. Sara stacked up all the money she had and flicked her address book open under ‘S’. She would not be able to reach Andrew on his cycling trip anyway, even if she could have brought herself to speak to him. Charlie watched for a second before returning to the crowd in the hall. As Sara dialled the number of the Sulis she could hear him hollering for quiet and telling his colleagues to start fishing in their pockets because La Selkirk needed their loose change and not to argue. An amused murmur rose behind her as the phone was answered. By the answering machine. Sara hesitated. How the hell was she to put it? Why was nobody answering? Before Yvonne’s official voice had fully finished thanking her for her call, she hung up. She dialled again. This time it was answered by a croaky voice.
‘Hello?’
Sara shoved in all the money she had. ‘Joyce? Joyce, is that you? Are you all right? It’s me, Sara.’
‘Oh. Oh, Sara.’ Joyce seemed to need a pause in which to recollect who Sara might be. ‘Pretzel’s dead.’
‘Joyce? Oh Joyce, I am sorry. I’m really sorry but I’ve only got a few seconds.’
There was a muffled grunt from the other end. Had Joyce been drinking? There was no time to ask her to go and bring someone more competent to the phone. ‘Joyce, listen. Tell Dr Golightly—’
‘Och, Dr Golightly?’ Even long distance, Joyce’s contemptuous spit was audible. ‘You should have heard him going on, and my poor wee dog dead. Fat lot of use. ’Course I knew he was no good, he can’t even read an X-ray.’
‘Joyce, that isn’t the point right now—’
‘Reading X-rays is basic. There he goes, pointing away at the kidneys, can’t even tell I’ve only got the one. I had one out in 1937. That was the year of the Abdication you know. Och, ruddy doctors, honest to God—’
‘Joyce! Listen, Joyce, tell … Yvonne then, tell anyone—I think I know what’s wrong with James. I think he might ttch have got er ot poi nin g, it’s a thing you g t tt sksk grai s that makess you chcch—Jo ce, ar yo on a mo ile?’
‘Eh? Oh, uh-uh. Right enough. Uh-uh, I know what it is, I remember now. That’s what the thing was in Egypt, the epidemic. A while ago, mind. Did you know I was tutor to the Egyptian royal family?’
‘Joyce, I have to go. can’t tt sksk chch now but it might well be and you’ve got to find and stop chch tt ssk ssk the br cad and make sure James gets—’
She was interrupted by soft, pitiful wailing. ‘Oh, Pretzel! He’s dead! My wee Pretzel!’ Joyce said something else but Sara was pushing in more coins and she couldn’t hear what.
‘Hello? What? Did you hear me? Are you chtt sts still there? Hello?’ A pile of coins was building up on the counter beside her as Charlie came and went. She pushed in more. ‘Joyce, I can’t ssh chtt chtt you. What’s that noise in the background? Wha ssh chttt chttt are you?’
‘I can’t hear you krr krr chtt I tt you James isn’t here.’
‘Isn’t there? What? Chtt krrkrr you’ve got to tell them it’s ss ch er got ch er ch. Hello?’
‘Nobody’s here. James IS IN THE RUH,’ Joyce shouted.
‘What?’ She was running out of time again. As she jammed more coins in she screamed, ‘What? Tell them, then! Joyce? You need to tell the hospital. Then the Sulis—make sure they know. Can you hear me?’ The line clicked and the dialling tone buzzed in her ear. Charlie stood nearby, concerned.
The members of the orchestra were slowly moving about, picking up their instruments, combing hair, waiting. Two minutes. Frantically, Sara summoned the steward again and together with Charlie she managed to get the number for international directory enquiries. She dialled it, got through at once on a perfect line and after only a few seconds’ wait heard a mechanical voice giving her the number of the Royal United Hospital, Bath.
The agitated concert hall manager was n
ow at her elbow. ‘The audience is seated, Fräulein Selkirk. The orchestra is ready to go on.’
‘Just a minute. I’ll only be a minute.’
‘Fräulein Selkirk, the recording team is ready. And the audience must not be kept waiting—’
She was through, but the line was echoey. The Austrian manager had been joined by the orchestral manager.
‘Eh, Miss Selkirk, is there a problem? Would you get ready to go on stage, please?’
‘RoyalUnitedHospitalhowmayIhelpyou?’ said someone who sounded like a toy, her voice miniaturised by the bad line.
How may they help her? Christ, where would they like her to start? She took a deep breath, raised a finger to indicate one minute to the furious and now sweating concert manager and said, ‘I’m ringing about a friend of mine. I’m ringing from abroad. Can I speak to him? James Ballantyne.’
‘What ward?’
‘I don’t know. The name is James Ballantyne.’
She paused to shove in coins.
‘When was he admitted?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know that.’
‘Miss Selkirk, I really have to ask you—’
‘One moment.’
‘SSH! I won’t be long, promise. Sorry.’
After eight rings and more coins a female voice said,
‘GeneralEnquiriesvisitorshelplinehowmayIhelpyou?’
‘I want to speak to a patient but I don’t know the ward. James Ballantyne.’
‘Fräulein Selkirk, Sir Simon is asking if all is well and wishes you please to get ready to go on stage at once.’
Sara answered by cramming more coins in the box.
‘Hello? I’m calling from abroad, can you possibly hurry?’
‘Onemomentplease. When was the patient admitted?’
‘I don’t know, I already told someone that—’
‘Do you know what the patient was complaining of?’
‘Fräulein, with Sir Simon’s approval I am now sending the orchestra on stage. You must come now.’
‘No, well, I mean, not for sure—that’s why … Look, the name is James Ballantyne.’