‘Is it Bruno?’
‘What?’
‘Are you pining?’
Tara looked genuinely amazed. Bruno had not figured much in her thoughts at all recently. ‘No.’
Rachel looked at her anxiously. ‘I think you should have a word with the doctor.’
‘Donald Giovanni?’ Tara asked sarcastically.
‘Tara!’
‘Are you two sleeping together yet?’
‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘Is that OK with you?’ Two can do sarcasm.
‘Not really.’ Tara felt a nauseous lump in her stomach. She looked at her mother’s concerned, lovely face. ‘But then why shouldn’t you? Yes, it is OK.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. Will you get married?’
‘Probably.’
‘Let Daddy get cold first.’
Rachel flinched. ‘My God, you can be so cruel.’
Tara sighed. ‘I don’t want to be. Really.’
‘You’re not well. Will you go and see the doctor?’ Please.’
‘All right. But not Donald – too embarrassing.’
‘There’s Dr Potter on Mondays and Tuesdays. She’s lovely – grey hair, a perm.’
‘Sounds just the job. Book me in.’
After supper Tara went to the bathroom and flushed the toilet to conceal the noises of her vomiting.
Dr Potter was sympathetic and also very perceptive.
‘You say you have lost nearly twelve pounds. That’s rather significant for a small person like you.’
‘Yes.’ Tara lay like a rock under the doctor’s kind yet impersonal hands. It was nine weeks and one day since any other human being had touched her in an intimate way. Nine weeks since he had touched her. Her body felt shrivelled and rejected.
‘Are your periods regular?’ Dr Potter asked, pressing cool gently probing hands on Tara’s stomach.
Tara tried to work it out. ‘They’ve always been a bit unpredictable. Except when I was on the pill.’
‘Are you on the pill now?’
‘No, I came off a couple of months ago when I broke up with my boyfriend.’
‘So what’s happened since then?’
‘A few dribbles here and there.’
‘And in the last four weeks?’
‘Nothing.’
Dr Potter slipped on disposable gloves. ‘I’m going to make an internal examination. Just relax.’
Tara felt fingers slide inside her. And suddenly an amazing, utterly terrifying idea hit her. Why on earth had she not thought of that before?
‘Relax,’ the doctor said. ‘Have you had the opportunity to get pregnant?’ she asked as she straightened up.
Tara recalled the dark animal pain and pleasure of her love-making with Saul Xavier, the way he had driven deep inside her and pounded without mercy. ‘Yes. But I thought you were unlikely to get pregnant just after coming off the pill.’
‘Statistical probabilities always allow for chance occurrences,’ the doctor commented drily. ‘I’ll do a test. I’ll need a urine sample.’
Some breathless minutes passed after which Dr Potter was able to confirm her suspected diagnosis. ‘What do you feel about this?’ the doctor asked, looking at Tara over her half moon glasses.
Tara was feeling temporarily numb. ‘Scared witless,’ she said. Now that it was a certainty her thoughts skittered about wildly. There was the issue of how to tell her mother, whether to have an abortion. Whether to go ahead and have the baby – cope somehow.
And what to tell Saul Xavier – if anything.
Tara looked at the grandmotherly Dr Potter. This calm mature woman must have had hundreds of interviews like this one. She seemed so wise and serene. Whereas she, Tara, was nothing more than a randy little fool who’d got herself in the club, up the spout.
And then amazing words ran through her head. I am having Saul Xavier’s baby. Tara felt a strange thrill of excitement pierce her self-disgust and terror.
‘It’s a miracle, isn’t it?’ she said to Dr Potter. ‘I’ve “got caught” or whatever else they call it. It’s an utter mess. But it’s magic – fantastic!’
Dr Potter smiled. ‘Indeed it is.’
‘Do you want to consider a termination?’ she asked Tara after a long silence.
‘I don‘t know. I suppose so. No, I don’t think so.’
‘There’s no rush. You can take a few days to think it over. It’s early stages yet.’
Tara placed her hands on her stomach. ‘How far on am I?’
‘Eight to nine weeks is my estimate.’
‘It’s a real life. A little person. I couldn’t kill it.’
‘You could consider adoption, of course. There are so many couples longing to have a baby and so few babies available.’
‘I need to talk it over.’
‘Of course. I’m sure your mother will be very helpful and sympathetic.’
‘With the baby’s father,’ Tara said.
‘Yes, naturally.’
Tara looked at Rachel’s worried face and said, ‘It’s OK Mum. I’m perfectly A1 fit. I just need to eat plenty of good food and start thinking positively.’
She waited until the next day, until Rachel was safely at the surgery. She prowled around the telephone, Saul’s professional card in her hand. The one he had handed to her after the funeral. The one which had his mobile and private home numbers handwritten on in black ink, and underneath the message: ‘Don’t waste your potential. Accept a helping hand. Unfortunately the mobile number had been mainly obliterated by an injudicious spill of coffee.
She re-read the message with grim smile of irony.
Several times she had dialled the home number and then slammed the receiver down before a connection was even made. At other times she let the number ring out. On hearing the rhythmic purring she felt she would be sick. Her fingers clicked off the connection, annihilated the purrs.
‘Just DO IT!’ she raged at herself, placing her finger on the dial once more.
A woman’s voice answered. His wife. Oh no! She willed her voice to be steady, to follow the clear unadorned little script she had written out. One which would cope with all eventualities, whoever answered her call.
The person on the line did not conform to any of the possibilities she had foreseen. Nor was she Saul’s wife apparently. At the close of their brief and amazing conversation Tara found herself desperately unnerved, her heart drumming hotly against her ribs.
She obtained the agent’s telephone number from Directory Enquiries. The secretary who answered sounded most amused to be asked the whereabouts of Mr Xavier. ‘Oh, we don’t keep a tail on his movements I’m afraid. And it’s not our policy to give out any private information.’
Tara’s heart sank. ‘Right,’ she said wearily. Desperately she made her mind sharpen and focus. ‘I’m a relative,’ she said.
A disbelieving pause. ‘Look, hang on!’ The voice relented. There was a shuffling of paper. ‘The Tudor Philharmonic is giving a concert tonight. He’ll be in rehearsal now most likely.’
‘At the Festival Hall?’
‘No. The Royal Albert. Hope you find him.’
Tara made no preparations. She simply set off. An hour and a half later, her heart having failed her at the main door to the great hall, she made her way around the side of the building and eventually found herself in its backstage depths. She remembered the place well from the countless times she had visited to hear her father rehearse. Even now, despite her sick apprehension, she still felt a spark of excitement as she made her way up the long narrow corridor wryly named the “bull run” by keyed-up players which led to the back of the performing area.
Music poured from the stage; Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the last movement throbbing with zest for life and sheer unadulterated joy.
Tara felt a smile creep over her face. The positive thrust of the music gave her the courage to step out of the gloom of the corridor onto the partially lit stage. She perched on a small chair cl
ose to the drum section. Her eyes leapt over the ranks of the orchestra and made an instant connection with Xavier. Dressed in black, shirt sleeves rolled up his muscled forearms, he was utterly absorbed in his task. Completely composed. Calm and cool. Living the music.
She heard his low voice teasing and cajoling as he entered into a dry dialogue with the string section.
‘So we have a twenty-bar crescendo, ladies and gentlemen. In five bars you’re already there. Fortissimo! What have I done to encourage you into this indecent haste?’
A murmur of laughter. They set off again. Tara was intensely aware of the personal force of strength flowing from Saul Xavier into each player. Under those compelling eyes no player would stand a chance of straying from the magnetism of his will. Whatever it was that Xavier wanted musically, the players would have no option but to give him.
She recalled the sensation of being held in a steel band when he had directed her and Bruno’s singing on the day of her father’s funeral. As she watched him, a dark ripple of thrills shot through her nerve endings.
At the close of the rehearsal he was heavily in demand from all sides. Tara sat quietly, waiting, watching. She was not even sure that he had seen her. In fact after half an hour she was concerned that he had no idea of her presence and that he might simply walk away, leaving her to seek him out all over again.
Or maybe he had seen her but wanted nothing to do with her. She had, after all, rebuffed him very soundly. And the letters and flowers hadn’t been coming for a week or so now.
A sickening anxiety droned inside. It occurred to her that she had hardly stopped feeling sick ever since she met him. Eventually the stage emptied. She began to breathe more deeply. Xavier was talking with a tubby silver-haired man. They turned their backs to her and began to walk away into the huge auditorium.
Tara slumped on her seat with despair. Minutes passed. She felt rooted, unable to move. And then she saw him returning, making his way to the platform. He vaulted up onto the stage and moved across to her. He stood very close, almost touching. Looking down. Silent. Immobile.
‘This has taken a hell of a lot of courage,’ she said.
He sat beside her. He took her hands in his. ‘And the waiting has taken a hell of a lot of restraint.’
She looked at him. Drank him in. She felt that she was jealous of the air he breathed. That if he asked her to lie down and die for him she would. These were not the thoughts of a liberated woman, she told herself.
‘So?’ he said.
‘So.’ She gazed deep into his eyes, holding nothing of herself back. ‘I’m having your baby.’
Utterly incredible words.
Xavier’s eyes sharpened. Tara experienced a moment of piercing terror. And then his lips curved into a smile of pure delight. All the dialogue she had prepared became null and void. The ins and outs of terminations and adoptions. All unthinkable. But she supposed those issues would have to be discussed anyway.
‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked him. Humble now. Placing herself entirely in his hands.
‘Come to me. Be with me. I need to look after you. Both of you. What else?’
‘Just like that?’ She was astounded. Unable to think clearly. Of the many responses she had imagined from him, this was the simple obvious one that had eluded her.
‘Of course. Why not?’
‘Your wife might not be too keen.’ Dear God, Saul , she thought. This is dangerous. You’re talking about revolutionizing lives. Yours, mine. Your wife’s.
Not a muscle of his face flickered. ‘This is nothing to do with her.’
‘The house you share must be something to do with her.’
‘I have more than one house.’
As if that were the issue. She stared at him, astounded by this brutal, single-minded clarity of purpose. Afraid too.
‘Tara!’ He rattled her arm. ‘What are you thinking? You haven’t thought of killing it?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘Tara!’ His eyes were like guns.
‘I could just have done it,’ she said, facing his relentless gaze. ‘You would never have known.’
‘So why didn’t you?’
‘It’s yours as well as mine. Equal rights for fathers.’
He was incensed. ‘Is that a real feeling, or something you read in a magazine?’
‘What do you think?’
He looked at her, assessing and then understanding. His smile came from deep inside. ‘We’re going to make a wonderful pair you and I.’
‘I hope I’m up to it,’ she said drily.
And then, with a force entirely out of her control, the belief that they could do this thing came suddenly flooding in. For days she had felt herself motionless and still. She had been the deep inanimate pool which collects at the head of a death-fall cliff. And now she was the roaring cascade of water, all sparkle, movement and shimmer.
She and Saul Xavier. They were truly a pair. They matched each other, understood all that was unspoken. For all that he was so ferociously talented, for all that the chasm between their life experiences was formidable, they would be soul mates.
She reached out and touched his face. ‘I want it too – more than anything. Your baby growing inside me.’
He looked at her with pure adoration. ‘I’m forty years old Tara,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I am past my youth.’
‘And I am nineteen,’ she replied. ‘There’s a generation between us. And that situation is unlikely to change.’ Her eyes beamed out a challenge. ‘So!’
She telephoned her mother. There was no reply. One of Donald’s nights obviously.
Saul was heavily engaged with a multitude of musical personnel. Tara wandered through the vast hall, renewing acquaintance with its broad expanses and its hidden nooks and crannies, sniffing it out in the manner of a dog long banished from its home.
A number of players recognized her, recalling the little girl who used to trot alongside her father, Richard Silk, holding tightly to his hand and looking around her wide-eyed at the huge stage and the vast amphitheatre of the auditorium with its gilded balconies banked one on top of the other.
In this curious lonely hour, suspended between her old and new life she felt no connection with the previous Tara: the biddable little girl, the rebellious young adult. In this hour she felt like a latter day child bride, a Dauphine or an Infanta sent to attend on her husband-to-be in the country of which he was ruler.
What had just taken place between her and Saul was still in the realm of fantasy. She had not yet fully adjusted to the incredible idea that a new life was growing inside her. To be now faced with the unfolding of a whole new life for herself was almost too awesome to comprehend.
Saul secured her a prime seat for the performance. The view was magnificent.
The orchestra members came trickling in, seating themselves and forming a vast black and white chequered board. Tuning up commenced, that familiar confused din that had thrilled her with anticipation from being a tiny child. Short brays from the clarinets, tiny shrieks from the piccolos, the boom of drums and the velvet growl of double basses underneath.
And then, as though an unseen hand had moved over them, the noise faded and subsided. The audience stiffened, sat upright.
She watched Saul cut a swift path through the players: tall, upright and unsmiling, a hunter on the attack. As was usual the applause from the audience was neither registered nor acknowledged. It was yet to be earned.
His two taps on the rostrum caused the hum of the auditorium to sink to a sigh. And from a sigh to total silence.
The overture to Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio. It started innocently enough. And then exploded into the auditorium, all flash and dazzle, grabbing the audience by the throat, sending electric impulses down the spine. Another sudden change and the audience were lapped in a sweet melody. Love music from the yearning sigh of the strings, the water-clear purity of woodwind.
The house lights went right down, leaving onl
y the low-intensity lights on the music stands to bathe the orchestra in a soft glow. The neon bulb in Xavier’s podium light illuminated the Maestro from below. Tara stared in fascination at the chilling image created: a harsh, macabre mask darkly shadowed and menacing, its frowning eyes glinting in the cold light like steel balls. Xavier’s mouth was drawn in a tight thin line as he conducted and his jaw worked furiously with concentration.
Tara felt her breath coming in thick gasps. Then something began to happen in her belly, some horrible crawling turbulence, a rhythmic droning that rapidly progressed from sensation to pain. She was aware of snakes of grinding torment, dark oily trickles sliding between her thighs.
She sat transfixed, trying to control reality, to push away the evidence of sensation. Stop! she shrieked silently to her disobedient body. Stop this!
Wildly she sprang from her seat, stumbling mindlessly up the sloping aisle and out into the broad stairway, desperate for cool air. Somehow she got herself to the foyer. Her head was filled with terror. She lurched into the street, instantly attracting the attention of a taxi. ‘A hospital,’ she moaned urgently. ‘Any hospital. Quickly – please, please!’
CHAPTER 12
Rachel tried not look at the phone. It was past midnight. Tara was not at home and this was one of her working nights.
She’s an adult, Rachel told herself, her mind filled with visions of rape and blood and death. She’s probably out with friends. But what friends? Tara had been distressingly alone, almost hermit-like since Richard’s death. Should she try and contact Bruno? She paused, her fingers stroking the smooth plastic of the phone. Something told her there would be nothing to be gained from that.
She tried to forget about the phone and poured herself yet another large whisky. The liquid slid like fire down her throat. Still her imagination continued to torture her with the maimed mangled body of her only child.
When the doorbell sounded and she saw Xavier standing there in the doorway, the only thing she felt was tremendous relief. It was the arrival of a member of the police force she had been dreading. ‘I’m sorry madam, I have some rather bad news. May I come in?’
‘Is she here?’ Xavier said. He looked wild – desperate.
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