The door opened and Georgiana stood before him, immaculate and lovely in an aquamarine satin negligee. Her face through the perfect make-up showed little sign of strain, although there were faint creases between her brows and tiny lines fanning out from the corners of her lashes which he had not noticed before.
She looked at him uncertainly. Behind her the house appeared darkened and dead looking. There was a terrible doom-laden silence hanging in the air.
‘Georgiana,’ he said, taking her hands in his. ‘I’ve come to see your holiday home.’
Slowly she stepped to one side.
‘You’re looking very lovely,’ he told her, moving smoothly into the narrow hallway. ‘At your most beautiful.’ He laid a protective hand on her shoulder, allowed the pressure to increase before he removed it.
She took him into a recently restored kitchen full of stripped pine and oatmeal-coloured tiles. There was a hideous, slum-like mess on the table. A soiled nappy was screwed up on one of the chairs emitting a sour, earthy stench.
At the sink Georgiana fiddled with the kettle.
As Dr Denton surveyed the outer scene and contemplated the internal squalor in Georgiana’s head he was surprised to find himself both shocked and sickened. He had thought he was beyond all that. But this was not the consulting room. This was life.
‘Your holiday home,’ he commented soothingly, staring around him with appreciation.
She nodded. The silence was becoming unbearable.
Georgiana paused as she turned off the taps, tilting her head sharply like a watchful lone animal on strange territory.
‘You feel happy here,’ Dr Denton suggested gently.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said pitifully. ‘I got no sleep. There were no beautiful dreams.’
Dr Denton took a few moments to consider the appropriate response.
Georgiana stiffened. Her eyes slanted towards the door and the stairway. Following her gaze Denton found himself immobilized, stripped of all power of action.
With a swift and vicious movement Georgiana slammed the kitchen door. She looked around her, her eyes blinking and puzzled. Eventually she crossed to the cutlery drawer and took out a bread knife, then took bread from a hand-painted stone bin. Grasping the blade of the knife she stared at it, turning it so the blade flashed with a pale white light from a frail struggling sun beyond the window.
Her fingers moved experimentally over the glinting serrations. A thread of blood darted across the pad of her thumb. She looked across to Denton. She looked back at the knife.
He breathed deeply, held himself still.
Georgiana turned and looked out of the window. Following her glance Dr Denton saw Xavier coming up the path towards the door. He flinched inwardly, fearing an explosive response from Georgiana when her husband challenged her.
‘Saul is here!’ Georgiana exclaimed. She went swiftly out into the hallway. ‘Saul!’ she said, her voice bright with anticipation.
Saul held out his arms to her and she moved into them with a long sigh. ‘You’ve no need to worry any more now,’ he told her. ‘I’ll take care of everything.’
‘Thank God. Oh, thank you God!’ She wound her arms up around his neck. With one hand Saul gently disengaged the knife and allowed it to slide to the floor.
Suddenly there was a shrill scream of terrified infant rage from the upper floor of the cottage.
Saul flung his head back, a great sigh easing itself from deep in his chest.
The noise of the baby’s crying intensified and accelerated, hammering through the fabric of the cottage.
‘I didn’t get any sleep at all,’ Georgiana complained piteously.
‘Ah, my poor Georgiana,’ Saul said. ‘What torment. You always needed your rest so badly. Well you must have it now. I shall take you to bed and then I shall take care of the baby whilst you have a lovely long sleep.’
Georgiana gave a sigh of blissful relief. Saul was back and suddenly life was simple again. Saul would know what to do to stop the baby crying. He would take care of everything.
He led her upstairs and propelled her to the frilled four-poster bed dominating the main bedroom. He wound the bedclothes tenderly around her and kissed her cheek. Then closing the door behind him he raced into the next room.
Alessandra stood in her cot, a pathetic deserted figure bellowing in despair and misery. Her soiled, soaked nappy was entwined around her feet and the stench of urine coming from the bedding was rancid and powerful. Her face was laced with tracks of countless unstoppable tears and her lips were purple with distress.
Anger to see his beloved child subjected to such a painful and humiliating ordeal swirled viciously through Saul’s head. Alessandra stared at him in distrustful bewilderment for a few seconds and then she threw out her round baby arms to him. ‘Dadda!’
He held her very close, feeling her heart ticking frantically against his collar bone. His eyes closed as a surge of feeling engulfed him.
Later on Dr Denton moved around the kitchen attempting to put together some kind of breakfast. Xavier sat down at the table with the damp Alessandra on his knee.
She appeared ravenous, snatching up fingers of toast and cramming them into her mouth. Xavier cradled her head in his hands from time to time and kissed her brow. ‘Thank God she is safe and well!’
Dr Denton looked at the child’s face, smooth and serene once more as the negative feelings had simply drained away and evaporated into the air. Suddenly he felt very tired.
‘I need to get back to London,’ Xavier said abruptly. ‘Will you deal with things here?’
Dr Denton nodded. ‘I think she is going to need a period of in-patient treatment,’ he ventured.
‘I want the best clinic there is. She couldn’t bear anywhere coarse and brutal.’
‘There is no shortage of good places.’
‘Will you see to it?’
‘Of course.’ Dr Denton gave the answer automatically and then thought about it. ‘I’d be glad to.’
Xavier stood up, clasping the child closely against him. ‘Poor Georgiana – I had no idea how ill she had become.’
That is one way of looking at it Dr Denton thought. Psychopathically narcissistic and potentially dangerous is another.
As Xavier began to prepare the child for their journey Dr Denton was impressed with the almost maternal ease with which he handled her. He had thought that the charismatic, worldly, Xavier would be a man encapsulated in a protected world, a man with little tolerance of the ceaseless, irrational demands of a child. He saw instead the strong bond between father and daughter, the trust in the child’s eyes, the tender protectiveness in the parent’s. All the complex mesh of shared genetics.
Xavier, a man alone in the world. No parents, no family. A man of his own creation. But he had his child. Warm flesh, pulsing blood.
Thank God for that, Dr Denton kept inwardly repeating.
Xavier eventually left, Alessandra safely harnessed into the seat he had wrenched from Georgiana’s Mercedes. Dr Denton listened to the high whining note of the car’s engine as it faded into the distance. As Xavier’s presence withdrew from the house, so Dr Denton felt his own personal freedom and professional competence slowly seeping back.
He waited for an hour or so, then made fresh tea and mounted the stairs to Georgiana’s room. She lay on her side, tranquil and lovely, one golden-skinned arm resting outside the covers.
Dr Denton sat on the bed and stared down at her for a long moment, stroking her cheek with lingering fingers. Then, very gently, he pulled the covers back and slipped his hand on the curve of her waist.
CHAPTER 26
Tara struggled back into consciousness. The first thing she registered was the reassuring figure of her mother sitting close by the bed.
Rachel smiled. ‘Hello.’
Tara reached out her hand and Rachel grasped it.
Alessandra’s safe,’ Rachel said. ‘She’s with Saul.’
‘Aah.’ Tara felt new warmth ste
al through her body. ‘That’s all that matters.’
She registered the grinding ache of emptiness in her belly and knew that the baby had gone. But the feeling was nothing stronger than mild regret. Alessandra was safe. Life could continue. Nothing would ever be so bad again.
She looked at her mother. ‘There are so many things I need to say to you.’
Rachel smiled.
‘About the past.’
Rachel shook her head. ‘There will be all the time in the world.’
Tara started to frame some thoughts but the words would not come.
‘They’ll wait,’ Rachel repeated.
Suddenly Rachel dared to take her daughter in her arms. They were clasping each other, laughing, then weeping with joy. This is like some kind of re-birth Rachel thought.
‘Is my brain damaged?’ Tara asked, fighting hard against the urge to drift back into a doze.
‘You need to rest now. Alessandra is safe, and that is what you need to focus on,’ Rachel said, knowing that only the doctors could speak to Tara about what had happened and what it meant.
After Rachel had left Tara lay staring at the ceiling. The events of the last forty-eight hours swam in and out of her memory; the recollections of having been in Vienna to play at the concert jostling with the image of Alessandra in some terrifying unknown danger.
I shall never leave her again, she kept telling herself. Never! She had a powerful sense of her life having swerved away from the direction in which she had recently steered it.
Saul looked through the glass partition and saw Tara lying propped on a mound of pillows. Her face was calm, her expression strong and accepting and brave.
She should not have to suffer like this.
He recalled all the times he had hurt her, holding her away from him through his need to withdraw into himself. How he had too often silenced her need for simple affection with commanding sex. How he had dared to smite her with his disdain on that last fateful drive.
And still she loved him. And sadly he knew he must hurt her further.
He placed the armful of flowers he had brought in a mound at the foot of her bed. She held out her arms to him, tears wetting her eyelashes.
‘Where is Alessandra?’ she asked him.
‘At home asleep. Rachel and Donald are standing guard.’
‘I should not have gone to Vienna,’ Tara said, angry to find that she was unable to stop crying.
‘It would have happened some time, whether you had gone or not,’ he said, not quite believing it.
He told her what had happened. How Georgiana had been at her old tricks of watching the house and garden from her car, how she had seized on the brief opportunity to snatch Alessandra.
He went on to describe the scene at the cottage. He told her about Dr Denton’s offer to ensure Georgiana received all the care and treatment she needed.
Tara listened to the flow of words with a sense of revulsion and horrible guilt. She looked into Saul’s face and read the thoughts behind the carefully constructed phrases. She understood that there would no longer be any question of a divorce. He would never say so openly. But his heart would no longer be in it. They had destroyed Georgiana and now they must pay for it.
So be it, Tara decided. I shan’t make any demands. Alessandra will always be ours, and that is enough.
The next day when came he pulled her hard against him, a gesture of deep love, an insistent desire that must make itself known, even if it could not immediately be satisfied.
Tara put her lips against the hard warmth of his cheek. As his fingers pressed into the bones at the base of her neck she held herself still, schooled herself not to cry out. The tingling down her arm intensified, small needles of sensation stabbing like tiny electric shocks in the tips of her three middle fingers.
Xavier stiffened. Gently he pushed her away from him, looked deep into her face. ‘What is it?’
She shook her head. She shrugged.
‘Tara! What is it?’
‘I have this terrible stiff neck.’
He flinched. ‘So?’
‘So, there could be damage to the nerves in the vertebrae.’ She reached up and touched the place. ‘It’s only minimal, nor serious. It will probably get better over time.’
She recalled the discussion with the consultant an hour before. An analysis of the scan she had undergone the day before and kept fiercely secret. He had talked to her for some time, his voice low and calm.
‘A slight loss of sensitivity in the middle three fingers of your left hand,’ he had said. ‘Maybe a little numbness in the tips. Maybe in time very little that will bother you at all.’
‘I’m a violinist,’ she told him. ‘A concert soloist.’
She had seen the doctor frown, finding it hard to meet her gaze for a few moments.
‘It is all right,’ she had told him. ‘I shall deal with it. My little girl is safe – that is what matters.’
Saul touched her shoulder, his face tense. ‘Tara, speak to me. Surely it’s treatable.’
‘No! There is nothing further to be done. There may be some spontaneous improvement, but I get the impression it’s unlikely. And it will make little difference to my everyday life.’ She stared at him, steely in her courage, in her challenge and defiance.
He took her hand. Her left hand, her precious tremolo hand that sought the strings of her violin and coaxed them into throbbing song. The three crucial fingers looked entirely normal. But outward appearances could be cruelly deceptive.
He looked into Tara’s face. She shook her head as she stretched out her fingers and examined them. ‘Something has happened,’ she said. ‘A loss of power and precision. And it’s permanent. I just know.’
He was silent.
She smiled at him. ‘It’s very unlikely that anyone will notice – as long as I don’t walk onto a platform and try to play my violin.’
‘Oh, my darling!’ he groaned, closing his eyes in grief.
‘No more concert performances,’ she said drily, wondering if deep down he would be glad. She wasn’t sure yet what she herself felt; the shock was keeping her numb.
She had the strong sense of the three of them having committed a sin for which they were now being punished in various ways. Thinking of it in that light and admitting the faults of the past brought a curious relief. And with it the freedom to begin building another life.
She knew without a doubt that it would be necessary to build afresh. The idyll that she and Saul had shared was over.
PART THREE - THIRTEEN YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 27
Saul Xavier was leading a seminar of student conductors at the Music Centre in Tanglewood, Massachusetts – the summer location of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The cream of music students throughout the world was drawn to Tanglewood each year, a significant proportion of them being students of conducting.
Saul had been conducting the young Boston players for five summers now, and between rehearsals and concerts he would spend time with emergent young conductors as they tried out their skills on the student orchestra.
On a vivid August morning, heralding the start of yet another sweltering day, the students were assembling in the theatre concert-hall, a shed-like building with corrugated steel doors, incongruously set in the sedate greenery of the Tanglewood grounds. Having unpacked their instruments they were now seated on the stage, excited and keyed up. The student conductors sat in the front row close to the stage, their eyes riveted to the music scores on their laps.
Tara, sitting on her own in the middle of the auditorium noticed how young they all looked, most of them in their late teens and early twenties. Every year the students looked younger as she and Saul got older.
On the programme were Schubert’s Fifth Symphony and Stravinsky’s Firebird. Two of the student conductors would each conduct one work, whilst the others would watch and hopefully learn.
Exactly a minute before the starting time of the rehearsal Saul arr
ived at the main entrance to the hall and made his way down the auditorium.
Eyes fastened on him. A reverential silence fell.
Vaulting athletically onto the stage he went to sit beside Gustav Walter, the coordinator of the conducting course, and instantly nodded to the first conductor to start proceedings.
The young man was a tall beanstalk with a mop of tight auburn curls. Tara was interested to hear how he would tackle the challenge of Schubert’s deceptively delicate music. She had talked with the young conductor at length over a number of beers and coffees during the past couple of days. She liked his openness and sensitivity, loved his wide-eyed enthusiasm. She had a strong wish for him to do well, not only because she judged he was good, but also because she feared that she would feel unnerved and angry if Saul were to unleash his venomous sarcasm upon the young man’s trusting head.
She breathed a sigh of relief as the student took the orchestra effortlessly through a sensitive, warm and honest rendering of the piece. Not even Saul could fault that. She noted with pleasure how the would-be conductor was openly grateful for playing that pleased him, how he requested things of the players rather than making demands. He preferred to coax rather than instruct. She had the impression he would go far.
At the end the players applauded their conductor with warm spontaneity and Saul inclined his head in gracious acknowledgement of a task well done.
The next student set the orchestra off with arms whirling like windmills and a bending and stretching at the knees more suited to a rigorous exercise regime in a gymnasium than directing from the podium. His clumsy verbal commands to the players: ‘Loud’, ‘Soft’, ‘Short’, ‘Long’, were clearly heard over the music.
Tara bent her head towards the score balanced on her knee so as to hide her amused astonishment.
At the close of the piece Saul and Walter summoned both students and talked them through their performances. Tara heard Xavier’s dry, sardonic tones biting deep into the unfortunate last performer.
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