by Vina Jackson
Speaking to him gave me a sense of closure. I was glad to hear he sounded happy as, although he’d ended the relationship, I’d always felt guilty that it was somehow my fault.
The more I thought about it, the more fearful I became that moving in with Dominik was a mistake, just like moving in with Simón had been a mistake. I just wasn’t the domestic type. I’d felt trapped with Simón, and I was terrified that I’d feel the same way with Dominik within a few months of sharing the same house day after day.
If it worked, then living with Dominik would be blissful, an answer to everything, the relationship that I always hoped I could have.
But if it didn’t work, then it would destroy everything we had.
In Dominik’s novel he had now written his way past the carnage and folly of the Second World War and reached the late 1960s, where Edwina Christiansen had become the latest in a series of unfortunate, doomed heroines and owners of the cursed violin.
Edwina was a single mother from Hannover in Germany. Her little boy was the result of an ill-advised love affair on the hippy trail when she was still in her early twenties. Following her return to Germany, she had married Helmuth Christiansen, a ship’s chandler in Hamburg, but the marriage had not lasted, his staid habits and the significant age difference too much to bear for her free spirits, and she and her young son had returned to Hannover where she worked as a technical manager and union representative at a car plant.
The violin, which she couldn’t even play, had come into her hands following the death of a distant relative and no one else in her family had laid claim to it, so it now rested at the back of one of her cupboards, and Edwina was totally ignorant of its worth.
In Dominik’s mind, Edwina looked a bit like Claudia, the graduate student he had had an affair with shortly before he had encountered Summer. It always helped him to have a mental image of his characters and there was no better inspiration than stealing from real life. Claudia’s hair was naturally light brown but she always dyed it bright red, a gaudy, unnatural colour which left faint traces on his sheets and pillows, and caused her to avoid the rain like the plague to avoid seeing the colour drip across her face, vulnerable as it was to the prolonged assault of water.
He had been writing through the night and a satisfied form of weariness was now spreading through his limbs, every typing finger heavy as lead as he searched for the right words to describe the way Claudia’s thighs met at the intersection of her shaven delta.
He had left Summer in bed upstairs shortly after midnight. They had made frantic love until she had coiled up in a ball, spent, sated and fallen asleep with a childish grin of delight illuminating her face. Dominik had tried to sleep, but his mind and body still felt on edge, feverish, and he’d walked out the bedroom and made his way to his study to see if the electric buzz still animating him could translate into his writing. It had and the night had flown by like a dream. But now it was taking its revenge, and he knew that the time to rest couldn’t be delayed any longer.
He set the computer to ‘sleep’ and pushed his chair back and was about to walk upstairs when he heard the sharp sound of the door flap. Checked his watch. The postman was doing his rounds early.
Out of habit, he lumbered towards the front door to pick up the mail.
It was the usual mix of magazines he subscribed to, junk mail, bills and a lone postcard. From Bali.
He turned the card over. It was from those old dissolutes, Edward and Clarissa. Wishing he was there for ‘the party that never ended’. Dominik smiled. Some people would never change, it seemed. They would roam the planet in search of pleasure until the apocalypse came, he guessed. There was something endearing about that.
As he put the rest of the mail on the lowlying phone table, he noticed that Summer’s Bailly and its battered case was not in its usual place in the corner where she always left it. He knew for certain it had been there the previous evening.
His heart jumped.
He rushed up to the bedroom, skipping stairs in his haste, hoping that for one reason or another Summer might have taken the instrument there. Not that she ever practised upstairs, having shortly after her arrival shifted most of the furniture in the ground floor back room that led to the garden to convert it into an improvised rehearsal space.
All sorts of doomsday scenarios flashed through his mind. Summer had been unusually quiet for the past few days, and more than once he’d caught her staring into the distance with a pensive expression on her face. Could she have had second thoughts? After everything, did she really not think their relationship could work?
He pushed the door open, his eyes getting accustomed to the surrounding darkness. He looked all around the room. No violin case.
He turned to the bed, expecting to see Summer’s shape under the covers. But the bed sheets
were thrown aside and the bed was empty.
The world stopped.
Collapsed around him.
In a blind panic, Dominik ran through the house, checking every room, blood rushing to his
head.
She was gone.
He was back in the ground floor hall, where he had begun his search. He moved a hand to
the door to steady himself. He knew – he had always known – that Summer was a free spirit. That tying her down to a conventional relationship would only drive her away. He had been selfish and stupid, and once again he had lost her.
He sank down, his back against the door. His hand fell to his sides and he felt something long and smooth beneath his fingers. It was one of Summer’s bows, lying across the mat. She must have dropped it in her hurry to escape. He hadn’t noticed it earlier as the pile of mail had fallen over it and concealed it from view, and he had failed to note its presence when he had distractedly picked up the assorted envelopes and magazines.
He ran his fingers along its length, thinking of Summer. Beautiful, fragile, proud. The woman he loved. The woman he had lost once more. And right there, his fingers gripping the only piece of Summer he had left, Dominik thought his heart might break.
He knew straight away the bow was not in its normal place.
It had been positioned as if it was pointing towards the door.
A sign?
He opened the front door. The road was quiet and free of traffic at this early hour. He
checked his watch. It was only seven in the morning.
On the narrow pavement, just a few yards from the house’s front door, he noted a darkbrown plastic guitar pick.
He bent over and picked it up.
The logo of Groucho Nights was carved across it, a cabalistic sign that Summer’s sister Fran had unearthed in a book of esoterica and that had tickled the imagination of Chris and his fellow musicians.
They’d had a few thousand of the picks produced and had traditionally thrown them into the audience at the climax of their final encores. It was a cheap and effective promo trick.
On the other side of the house, the side turning that led to the depths of the Vale of Health was like a pocket of darkness.
Dominik caught sight of another of the small guitar picks, on the opposite pavement, just a few footsteps from the kerb, in the direction of the towering shape of the Royal Free Hospital which stood at the bottom of the steep hill. He crossed the road, leaving the door of the house open behind him and still wearing the flip-flops he had been typing in throughout the night. A further two minutes down the road he found a third pick.
It was a trail.
A message from Summer?
He quickly backtracked to the house, changed into a pair of trainers and picked the first sweatshirt lying around in one of the downstairs rooms, slipped it on above his top, seized his keys and locked up behind him, and went in search of further guitar picks littering the downward path of the hill.
As he did so, his memory was working overtime. Trying to remember the fairy tale, if it was one, Red Riding Hood or Pinocchio or Hansel and Gretel or yet another, where a trail of small s
tones – or was it seeds? – had directed a character in the right direction.
At first, I thought it was a ridiculous idea.
I ought to just leave a note for him on the breakfast bar: ‘Gone for a walk. Come and find
me,’ with a map attached and an X marking my planned destination.
But the more I thought about it, the more the idea began to take root in my mind, like an acorn
quickly sprouting.
I had woken in the night to find him gone, his side of the bed cold and the covers flung off as
if he had left in a hurry. Dominik was eternally neat, and under normal circumstances he would
have pulled his side of the sheet up behind him.
I immediately felt a pang of anxiety. Thought that he might have woken up to find me
alongside him and felt that the bed was too full and he wanted to be alone. Sometimes, I felt that
way, still unaccustomed to us being together. Perhaps he’d gone to seek refuge at a hotel, or with
a friend, maybe asked Lauralynn to let him into one of Viggo’s guest rooms for the night. The bedroom, without him in it, had felt suffocating. I had pushed the covers off and quietly
padded down the stairs. That was when I saw the light on in his study, and as I approached,
heard the very faint clicking of his fingers on the keys.
He was writing.
The door was slightly ajar, and I creaked it open a little further and called his name softly, to
check if he wanted a hot drink, or a glass of water, but he hadn’t responded.
He had that familiar expression on his face, part joy, part furious concentration, the way he
gets when a new idea has dawned on him in just the right way, like an irregular visit from an
unpredictable muse, and I thought it best not to interrupt.
I’d poured myself a glass of milk and returned to bed, but I still couldn’t sleep. I sat awake for the rest of the night, thinking about the future, and what it might hold for us. Whether we would make it. Whether moving in with him so quickly would prove to be a
mistake.
Only time would tell.
My eyes had alighted on the Bailly which I’d left in the hall the evening before, and my
fingers twitched, longing to pick it up and play it until I wore myself out and tiredness finally
settled like a heavy cloak around my shoulders and dragged me into sleep, but even with the
door closed, I feared that my music would rouse Dominik from his creative trance like a siren
song and bring him back upstairs.
Sometimes I felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, because Dominik always followed the notes
of the Bailly. He used the sound of my violin as a barometer of my mood, and I noticed that, out
of habit now, he would glance at it wherever I left it to double check that it was still safe and
firmly tucked away before turning out the light.
I had listened to the story of the Angelique which he was using as the bread and butter of his
novel. I’d always been interested in the history of my instruments. Always wanted to know
which hands had held them and what stories they’d told before they came to me. But I wasn’t
quite as romantic about the whole thing as Dominik was, and teased him for his superstitions. The person wielding the violin had more power than the instrument, surely? Even Mr van der Vliet, my late violin teacher, had always taught me that the right player
could bring music out of anything, even by rubbing a stick against a woodsaw. But that got me started, thinking about the Bailly, romantic fairy tales and legends, and once
the kernel of the idea had planted its seed, I couldn’t escape it. Soon I had a fully hatched plan. I dressed quickly, in my old black velvet dress that I still used for performances sometimes,
the one that I’d bought from Brick Lane years ago, and had worn for Dominik at our first recital.
It felt poetic.
Then I’d picked up the Bailly, and realised the first stumbling block in my plan. I had to give
him some kind of clue. But what?
I clicked open the case and brushed my fingers over the almost orange-coloured timber, as
warm as a sunset, and hoped that the violin would provide me with an answer. The violin didn’t, but the case did. The pocket bulged, and I reached in and found a stash of
the Groucho Nights branded guitar picks that we used to fling into the audience to an often
frenzied welcome.
Perfect. Like a trail of breadcrumbs that I would drop along the way to the Heath, that would
lead to me, rather than a gingerbread house.
To be doubly sure that he would at least have a chance to work it out, I left a spare bow on the doormat, pointing in the direction that I was headed, where he would find the first guitar
pick.
Dawn was breaking as I made my way along the downhill road to the open reaches of the
Heath. The orange ember of the sun rising over the tree-lined horizon sent streaks of pink into the
sky like tentacles. I was rarely awake so early, and having barely slept at all, felt as though I had
stepped into a dream, a haze of chilled air punctuated by birds tweeting and the soft rasping of
the wind through the trees.
I was careful to drop the picks as I went, in all the places that Dominik would recognise. I
followed the same route that he had led me on the first time that I’d walked this trail. Again, I
was barefoot, and I smiled at the familiar feeling of spongy earth beneath my feet. Past the ponds, across the small bridge by the outdoor swimming area and up the path. I
winced as the sharp pebbles dug into my feet and was careful to place a guitar pick on a large,
black stone that stood out of place amongst the other smaller, pale rocks so that Dominik would
find it. By now, he should know for sure where I was taking him. I hadn’t walked the same route
since that day long ago when I had first played Vivaldi for him here, but the way was burned
onto my brain as fiercely as a treasure map.
Finally I reached the soft grass again, and sighed with pleasure as the dew nursed my stonebitten feet. Then I was under the canopy of trees that blocked the light like a curtain, before
emerging out into the open, within sight of the bandstand that sat atop its gloriously green hillock
as if it had sprung out of the earth like a tree made from wrought iron pillars instead of dirt and
wood.
I hadn’t bothered with the guitar picks for the last few hundred feet. Dominik would be able
to hear me by now.
If he came.
And I was sure that he would.
I stepped gingerly onto the stone steps that led to the bandstand’s small stage, and turned and
looked out onto the open field, and the line of trees from where Dominik would soon emerge. It was just me, the Bailly, the birds and the Heath. No doubt at least a few early morning
joggers would appear soon, disrupting my solitude, and that thought nearly put me off the next
plot point in my plan, but I resolved to do it anyway.
What was the point in playing a recital for Dominik, on the bandstand on the Heath, if I
wasn’t nude? It was my final message to him.
Maybe it was just the sleepless night talking, but by the time I reached the Heath, I had made
up my mind.
If he appeared, if he noticed the violin, and me, missing, and followed my clues to the
bandstand, then I would take it as a sign that we were meant to be together, and I would banish
my doubts and commit to making it work.
If he didn’t, if he carried on writing for the rest of the day, or found me missing and
presumed I had gone for a jog and left me to it,
then I would move out, and put the whole thing
behind me. Start again. Single.
One final roll of the dice. Putting our fate into the hands of fate. It seemed a very Dominik
thing to do, the kind of thing that he would recognise and approve of. But that was the very
reason why I thought it would work, because I proposed to meet him halfway, by appearing
naked, and playing Vivaldi.
Just like the first time.
I kicked off my dress, closed my eyes, and launched into concerto number two, ‘Summer’. It was out of order, but I planned to finish on ‘Spring’, because it felt like a beginning, which
suited my purposes. Ending on ‘Winter’ would be too depressing.
The notes flew from the Bailly as soon as I touched my bow to the strings, and I was gone
with it, flying across the Heath on the wings of a song.
I was playing the final notes of ‘Autumn’, when I remembered my purpose, and opened my
eyes again, scouring the tree line for any sign of him.
Maybe he hadn’t come after all, and this was all a stupid idea. Maybe we’d made a mistake
and this was fate telling me to leave, to run away while I still could, before either of us ended up
getting hurt. But as I played on, I knew that in my heart I wanted him to come to me. My bow hand shook slightly as the enormity of my feelings surged, as I whispered a silent
prayer to Dominik. Find me. Come for me. Don’t give up on us. I felt a tear escape, sliding
down my cheek and landing on the smooth surface of the violin. And I knew, right there, as the
sweet notes of Vivaldi rose through the morning mist, I could not live without him.
I saw a silhouette, emerging from the canopy of trees, about a hundred yards away. It was impossible to identify anyone at this distance. My heart began to beat wildly, as I thought I recognised the old university athletics team sweatshirt, but I pushed the thought out of my head, closed my eyes again, and let the violin take over.
I thought I felt his presence hovering nearby, tiny shifts in the air around me, as I launched into ‘Spring’, the end of my recital, the first movement. Watching me, planning his next move, or maybe just listening to the music.