by Emma Davies
‘Yes.’
Tom studied her face. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Now try that again, only this time tell me what actually happened. You don't become a child prodigy by accident. Having a nervous breakdown doesn't just happen. And people don't disappear for years on end and then suddenly reappear as if nothing had happened in the intervening years.’
Isobel remained silent.
‘Okay, then tell me why you looked so scared back in the hallway just now? When you thought I had somehow followed you here to discover your identity. Or perhaps you might like to tell me why you thought your mother had sent me here? Or even why you're terrified that you can't play with any emotion… in fact you never could, could you? Technically brilliant, but cold as ice, that was what the critics said, wasn't it? What a terrible legacy for a sixteen-year-old child…’
‘Have you quite finished?’ Isobel’s lips trembled in a face that was deathly pale, her dark eyes huge by contrast. He could see that she wanted to be angry with him again, to lash out and rip him to shreds with her words, but she also knew he was right.
He held out his hand to her across the table, and was relieved when she gave a rueful smile and tentatively wound her fingers in his.
‘Your turn,’ he whispered.
‘I've spent so many years trying to deny the truth, trying to work out even what the truth was amid all the lies, that sometimes it feels as if I don't even know what it is any more.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Except here, at Joy’s Acre, this is the only truth I have right now.’
‘It's as good as any you'll find,’ replied Tom.
She nodded. ‘I came here because I thought it would be a place where I could forget about everything else and concentrate on the one thing I thought I needed to do, and that was work. Now I realise that the opposite is true. It's not the work I need to concentrate on at all, but all the things I'm trying to forget. And for some reason, Joy’s Acre seems to be the place to do that. I've spent most of my adult life under the care of one psychiatrist or another, trying to come to terms with my childhood, and perhaps unwittingly, by coming here I took the first step.’
Isobel gave his hand a squeeze and gently withdrew it, lifting her mug and taking several swallows of tea.
‘My childhood was an extraordinarily cold and lonely place, and as an only child I learned very quickly to amuse myself. My mother played the violin and I can only assume that I must have picked it up one day and begun to play in an effort to relieve my boredom. There must have been lessons and practising, and before I knew it I was playing in front of an audience. And for the first time in my life I heard the sound of appreciation. People were applauding me, and telling me what a wonderful child I was, and the sweetness of that was like a drug I began to crave more and more.’
‘I used to watch you at performances and think how glamorous your life must be,’ said Tom. ‘I used to feel envious of you, and it never once occurred to me what it must actually have been like.’
‘My life was planned out for me from the minute I got up, to the minute I went to bed. Everything was carefully controlled, and the more successful I became, the harder I had to work. But it was worth it, just to hear people telling me they loved me, and how beautiful I was.’ Isobel scratched her head, frowning. ‘I stopped going to school early on and instead had a private tutor who went everywhere with us but, apart from a couple of hours each day, I spent the rest of my time practising. I had no friends, but then I had no need of any, and certainly no time to play with them.’
‘So, when did it start to go wrong?’
‘It’s hard to really pinpoint, but I think it must have been around the age of eleven. I guess my hormones were kicking in because I became very emotional, crying one minute and flying into a rage the next, and I knew it was affecting my playing, even if the audiences didn’t seem to notice. And so my parents arranged for a “coach” to come and work with me, a behavioural specialist who taught me to isolate my emotions and totally remove them from my playing, and for a while it worked. I was able to play ever more difficult pieces and the audiences went wild. It became a vicious cycle. The only way I could keep up with the demand for these pieces was by completely locking away anything else I felt and to concentrate only on the technicalities of what I was playing. I was so successful that no one thought of the effect it was having on me.’
‘Or they did, but they knew exactly what they were doing…’
Isobel gave a hollow laugh. ‘Nothing else mattered just so long as Isobel, the playing machine, carried on… and that was fine until I got a little older and could no longer carry the child prodigy card. I was beginning to be seen and treated like an adult, and certainly compared to them as a violinist, and that’s when the first critical reviews began to appear, saying that I was cold and that my playing lacked emotion, and they were right of course.’
A tear dripped off the end of her nose.
‘Oh, Isobel…’
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Please don’t. If you’re nice to me, I’m going to lose it completely.’
Tom let out a soft breath. ‘And what would be the harm in that? You’ve been treated appallingly in the past, Isobel, by the very people who should have stood up for you, loved you, and cared for you, but you don’t have to let that colour your life now. You can be whoever you want to be.’
She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said, ‘it’s not that simple.’
‘Only because it’s so hard to let go of the past—’
‘No, that’s not it. You don’t understand,’ she repeated.
‘So tell me,’ he said. ‘Explain to me why you can’t be whoever you want to be now…’
Another tear splashed onto the table, and she sniffed hard. ‘Because my life is not my own, Tom. I still belong to them.’
Chapter 18
Isobel winced. It sounded so ridiculous when she said it like that. She was a grown woman for heaven’s sake, how could she belong to anyone? And yet she did, and it was so hard to explain what she meant. She didn't really know how it had happened either, the insidious taking over of her life, done so skilfully that she had never really realised it was happening. Except that over the last couple of weeks, and more so in the last couple of days, things were becoming much clearer. And as they became clearer they also became more frightening as Isobel realised the scale of the abuse that had been meted out to her.
Not violence, but abuse took many forms, and in her case it had been hidden under a supposed need to keep her safe, and to look after her. But her liberty and her ability to think for herself had been taken away from her, and that was abuse just as surely as if she had been beaten every day for the last ten years.
‘I know what you're thinking,’ she began. ‘Even I don't know how it happened, how I could let it happen, but that's the trouble with things that creep up on you gradually – it's often hard to see the situation for what it is, because you become so used to it, and you don't know any differently. But you have to understand what it was like when everything came crashing down.’
Tom was being so kind. He was sitting in front of her now wearing an anxious expression, and her hand still rested in his. It tightened gently, and he smiled. ‘I'm not here to judge, Isobel,’ he said. ‘You can say whatever you like.’
‘I was only young you see, only sixteen, and although I’d done things and experienced things, had to cope with things most sixteen-year-olds hadn't, I was still emotionally very immature. I didn’t have the mental ability to take decisions, or understand the ways of the world financially or legally, and for the first few years after my breakdown it was all I could do to get through each day. Even when things slowly began to get better, in a way it was too late because things had already been put into place and I couldn't see that they needed to change.’
‘You must have made a huge amount of money,’ said Tom. ‘Is that what you're referring to?’
‘Partly,’ she replied. ‘My parents acted as my manager, and yes, you�
�re right, by that stage I was very wealthy. The money from sales of records alone was staggering and given my age it was put into a trust for me. At least some of it was. I still don't know all the details, it happened so long ago. But you have to know that for several years I was in and out of hospital… It started with my nervous breakdown, but by the end I was drinking far too much, and eating far too little… I had my liberty officially taken away from me on more than one occasion as a result. And although it was for my own good, they’re terrifying places, Tom – the hospitals, I mean. I became so confused and frightened of being put there again that I would agree with just about anything to prevent it. It meant that my parents’ hold over me could tighten even more, and to start with I even welcomed it. It wasn't until much later on when I began to come to terms with things that I realised how wrong this was. But even then, I still wasn't brave enough to change anything. When you're told repeatedly over and over that you're still ill, and that you can't cope by yourself, you begin to believe it.’
‘So, what happened to change all that?’
Isobel shuddered. ‘I got wise,’ she said, feeling the same wave of disgust sweep over her as always whenever she thought about it.
‘To put it bluntly, the money began to run out. Whether it had been unwisely spent or mismanaged, I don't know, but we had a huge house and a luxurious way of life, the only problem was that I was no longer earning money to sustain it. My parents had no careers of their own, having long since given those up, and as the conversations began to turn to the subject of my beginning to work again, I realised that I had been the goose that laid the golden egg – the only trouble being of course that I was no longer laying. The worst thing was I also realised that if I was ever going to be able to stand on my own two feet and live my life the way I wanted to, I would need to earn money to support myself, and so I had to go along with my parents’ suggestions. It was Catch-22.’
She drew in a long breath and, with a sheepish smile, picked up her mug and drained it, buying herself a little more time. It had been hard enough sharing the details of her past, but in a way it no longer held the fear for her it once had. The future, however, was a very different kettle of fish. That was a very scary place indeed.
‘Earlier, you said that I was staging a comeback, and that's why I freaked out, because no one knows about any of this. No one must know for very obvious reasons, but the thought of what I need to do now terrifies me. It's taken me months just to get to this point, to pluck up the courage and leave home. I didn’t tell my parents where I was going because they would have only stopped me, and even now they have no idea where I am. When I arrived at Joy’s Acre I thought that all I needed to do was work on my music like we'd agreed and everything would be okay. Except that it isn't, it could never be.’ She looked up at Tom. ‘So, you mustn't tell anyone,’ she urged. ‘I still don't know what I'm going to do, but no one must know.’
‘Isobel, I would never betray your confidence.’
‘Over the last little while my parents have been trying to find an opportunity for me to be rediscovered. I've never stopped playing, putting in the same hours of practice pretty much every day, but for the last five years or so I've also begun to write my own music. I even changed my name legally by deed poll so that I could continue unhindered by my past, and eventually, my parents found a promoter who was willing to take me on. He knows the whole story of course, he had to, but even he is bound by a secrecy clause in my contract. I am supposed to be writing an original piece of music that will blow the minds of the music industry, at which point my true identity will be revealed and my comeback will be the massive success my parents have designed it to be.’
She sat back in her chair and sighed. ‘So now you understand my predicament,’ she added, ‘because there is no original piece of music, at least not one that will blow the minds of the industry.’
Tom too had sat back in his chair, and was now watching her with a thoughtful expression on his face. But she couldn't really tell what he was thinking. She didn't know whether he was shocked by what she had told him, or uncomfortable in her presence. Either way it saddened her. She thought back to how she felt earlier, how seeing Tom, feeling his warmth, just before she began to play had meant so much to her, but now she had blown it. She didn’t just have baggage, she had a whole wardrobe full of matching suitcases, and no one in their right mind would want to help her carry them. It was quite possible that Tom even thought her stupid in the extreme – a weak and feeble person who deserved exactly what she had got.
The seconds were ticking by and there was still no response from him. Isobel guessed she had her answer. She didn't think she could bear to look at him for much longer, and was just about to leave the table, when he suddenly leaned forward and plucked a strawberry from the bowl in front of them, popping it into his mouth whole.
‘Do you know what I think?’ he said. ‘I think you should tell the lot of them to just sod off.’
At first she thought she hadn't heard him right, but then she took in the sudden grin on his face and realised that she had. It was such an extraordinary change in the mood that the tension in the room popped like an over-inflated balloon, and she giggled; she couldn't help herself.
‘I can't do that!’ she cried.
‘Why not?’ he replied, chomping on the fruit in his mouth.
She looked about the room. ‘Because… because…’ Put like that it certainly seemed hard to think of a reason why. She threw up her hands. ‘Well… because I have no money for one. Or very little anyway. And if I did a thing like that there is no way I could go back to live with my parents, so I'd have nowhere to live… Plus of course the rather important fact that I do have a contract to fulfil, and a piece of music to deliver…’ She was rather warming to her theme.
‘Nuh-uh.’ Tom waggled his finger at her. ‘Don't you go throwing up huge bloody reasons why you can't tell them to sod off, let's think of some reasons why you can.’ He picked up another strawberry. ‘Okay, firstly money. Some would say it’s a necessity, but it's a very overrated commodity in my opinion, which brings me to your second point; somewhere to live. I believe you’re paid up here until the end of August, which is four weeks away, so you have somewhere for now, and after that you can come and stay with me; and don’t look at me like that, I have a spare room. This obviously completely negates number one, because you would no longer have any need for money… Now I can see that you want to interrupt, but hold onto those thoughts for just a little while longer until I've at least come up with a cunning plan to address point three.’
He nibbled at the end of the strawberry, watching her over the top of it with an impish grin. ‘So… as far as the contract goes, you have actually written a piece of music… some music, but, correct me if I'm wrong, it's not the piece of music that you believe is going to set the world alight. So therefore the obvious thing to do would be to write a different piece of music that will, but then I’ve told you that already.’
She snorted. ‘And what if I can’t?’
‘Then you’ll have had a wonderful holiday.’
‘And the contract?’
He thought for a moment. ‘This guy’s an agent, right? So even if you do deliver a piece of music, that's just the start of his work. The only way that he will benefit financially from this equation is if he finds a way to make this benefit you. At the moment, it's just a speculative punt, and so while everybody hopes that this will lead to a great and glorious future, if he doesn't find a way to make it benefit you, then neither of you have lost anything, and no harm done. That might be a very simplistic way of looking at it, but I wouldn't expect that you have any legal obligation to him at all.’
Isobel's heart almost missed a beat. ‘Do you honestly think that's true?’
Tom nodded. ‘I honestly do.’
‘Right. Well then I guess I want to think about it… but there's no way I can come and stay with you.’
‘Why not?’
Isobel st
ared at Tom. ‘Well, because…’
It would be very difficult to tell Tom why not. After all, in all the times they had been together he had never made her feel uncomfortable, in fact, he had acted like the perfect gentleman. But Isobel was well aware that there was truth in the saying no smoke without fire, and if the comments made by Clara and Trixie were anything to go by, Tom was not someone she wanted to get entangled with. She couldn’t help liking him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t trouble, and staying with him would just be asking for it.
‘I’ll think about it.’ She grinned, not wanting to hurt his feelings, and picked up a strawberry of her own.
For a moment Tom echoed her own smile, but then he grew serious again. ‘Listen, Isobel. I know you think I'm being flippant, but I can't begin to imagine the things that you have gone through. And yet, what I see before me now is a beautiful young woman who has an extraordinary talent and, despite everything that has happened to her, still manages to be kind and caring. You have your whole future ahead of you and, perhaps more than anyone, I understand the need for you to prove a point to your parents, and to yourself. But you have to know what you truly want your future to be, and if it's not heading in the direction you want it to, only you can change that.’
She nodded solemnly, recognising the truth of his words. ‘I really don't know what to say,’ she said. ‘I never meant to burden anyone with any of this, but today, the last few days… I don’t know, perhaps it's just that I've put some distance between myself and my problems, but Joy’s Acre has begun to show me possibilities I never thought I'd have, and now you’ve shown me that they can be within my grasp after all.’ She stared out through the window at the golden late afternoon sun, suddenly feeling tired beyond belief. ‘So, what do we do now?’ she asked.
Tom followed the direction of her eyes, and inhaled a deep breath. ‘I think we both need to eat, rest, and see how we feel in the morning. With any luck the pair of us will feel ready to take on the world, and then that's exactly what we should do.’