by Patrick Gale
In swift succession he registered her dancing cheek to cheek with her fiancé, eyes blissfully closed, then found the crowd abuzz with people looking for him. Apparently he had no sooner left the room than Sally called to leave a message about Miriam.
‘I looked and looked, Sir,’ the porter said. ‘Couldn’t find you anywhere.’
‘I … er … I slipped up to my office,’ Edward explained. ‘I’d forgotten some notes I left there.’
‘I tried there too,’ the porter insisted maddeningly.
‘Really?’ Edward stammered. ‘I must have missed you by seconds.’
He drove home like a madman. He was terrified at his inability to hold the car on a straight course and all too aware that the apparent clarity in his head was a dangerous deception wrought by adrenalin. Inevitably he made guilty pacts with fate.
‘Never again. Spare her and I’ll never do it again.’
When he had to swing out of the path of an oncoming lorry, startled by a furious blare from its horn, he even honoured the Hebraic teachings of his grandmother, considering the possibility of offering himself in poor exchange.
The Roundel was silent when he arrived and his footsteps rang out as he ran upstairs to their bedroom. Sally was dozing in bed, an open novel slipping from her hands. She woke slowly, smiled to see him there and yawned.
‘Oh it’s you!’ she said fondly. ‘I hope you didn’t rush.’
‘Of course I rushed. I got your message about Miriam.’
‘But I said not to rush home on her account,’ she said, laughing. ‘She’s fine. Her temperature dropped back down and I didn’t want you to worry.’ She kissed his cheek.
‘I drove like a bank robber.’
‘I’m so sorry. Poor darling. Kiss her goodnight and come to bed quickly. I got Richards over to look at her just in case. There’s been some meningitis around and –’ She yawned deeply as a cat. ‘It’s probably just a little cold. It was so silly of me to lose my nerve. Not like me at all. It was not having you around to calm me. Where were you? The porter man kept me hanging on for ages, and when I called again the person who answered said he was still out looking for you.’
‘I went up to my office for a bit then I went outside for a walk. I had a headache. It wasn’t much fun without you.’
‘I’m sorry. God I’m tired.’ She yawned again and stroked the lapels of his dinner jacket. ‘This needs dry cleaning again. You’re always spilling food on it or something. Wretch.’
He took the novel from her hands and pulled the bedding up around her shoulders, kissing her again, then slipped next door to kiss Miriam. Hearing her deep breathing, smelling her sweet, babyish warmth, he was disgusted that instead of delight at the child’s good health, he felt only relief that his act of betrayal had gone undetected.
Once back at work among his colleagues, he could not ignore a persistent feeling of fear and suspicion, tortured by the possibility that someone might be about to accuse him. Unable to forget, unable to suppress a detestable hope for a repetition, he at once dreaded and longed to see Myra again. So publicly and so advantageously engaged, she was unlikely to grant him any indiscreet acknowledgement. Her actual reaction was worse than he could have imagined. When she passed him in a crowd of costume assistants on his way to the sound studios, he prepared a careful, non-committal smile only to have her look straight through him. Their coming together the night before had been so abrupt, so brutal even, that now he was left with the crazed sensation that it might never have happened at all but had been the product of alcohol and feverish fantasy.
Once more, Edward tapped his baton impatiently on the music stand.
‘No,’ he said and the players broke off raggedly. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘Again, please.’
Behind their window, the projectionists rewound the film, then one of the technicians wearily raised a thumb from inside the sound cabin. Raising his baton for silence, Edward tried to sound patient.
‘I know the sudden rhythm change in bar twelve is difficult at that speed, but it’s an exact reproduction of the sound a train makes as it goes over points. Think of that when you play and it makes sense. And if the strings mess it up, George can’t coincide his blowing the whistle with the image on the screen. And if he can’t do that then we must start again, and again until he can. All right?’
He glared at the ‘cellists, convinced that two of them were laughing at him but caught only innocent attention on their faces. He could not believe the story had not leaked out. For all the names on the payroll, the studios were small as a village when it came to the dissemination and elaboration of gossip. The smallest secret – from a bust size to a birth mark – was soon uncovered, so he could not understand how his, large by any standards, was taking so long to become shaming common knowledge. Perhaps they really had been unobserved and he was to go unpunished?
Edward waved to the technicians. The red recording light came on and the film began to roll again. On the big screen before him giant numbers counted from five to one. He gave the upbeat and the string players began to scrub at their furious semiquavers as footage of a train’s wheels and hammering pistons flashed overhead swiftly followed by the scarlet words 4.15 TO BUCHAREST. There were more shots of wheels, then snaking track and flashing sleepers, then steam billowing white against a dusk sky and the gaping maw of an approaching tunnel, then a jet of steam from the whistle. George was still having trouble with his whistle and the sound came late. Edward stopped immediately, causing the orchestral train to derail messily around him.
‘Sorry,’ said George helplessly. ‘I … Sorry, boys.’
‘Again,’ Edward sighed, with an exhausted flap of the hand to the technicians.
Again the film was rewound, again the red recording light came on, again the strings and percussion mimicked the furious clattering of a train and carriages over points. This time the string rhythms were perfectly articulated and George’s whistle flawlessly synchronised, so they carried on well into the film’s title sequence. Surprisingly they flew through a tricky passage Edward repeated later in the score for a murder scene, in which the brass players had to slide mutes in and out of their instruments to suggest the distorted blare of another train hooting as it flashed by in the darkness. Then Edward glanced across from them to give George the cue for another crucial whistle blow.
The blow came exactly on time and the players were flummoxed to see Edward drop his baton on the floor, stagger off the podium and race around to where George was sitting. He stared hard in the faces of two women flautists and at George and they stared back, wondering what their offence could possibly have been this time. For a moment they thought he was going to wither them with sarcasm or throw a tantrum but instead, far more alarmingly, he seemed to crumple from within.
‘Forgive me,’ he stammered. ‘For a second I thought – Forgive me.’ Then, to everyone’s amazement, he slumped into a vacant chair by the kettle drums.
‘Sir?’ the junior percussionist asked him. ‘Sir? Are you all right?’
But Edward was examining his hands, lost in thought. Around him murmurs rose to open-voiced discussion. Hands touched his arms and shoulders, spread fingers passed back and forth before his eyes. A doctor was sent for and – a sure sign of crisis – the technicians emerged from their soundproof layer. A motherly viola player conjured up a cup of strong tea for him but she had to take it back, kindly tut-tutting, when he threatened to let it slop all over his lap. He wanted to thank her, to explain, but mustering words had suddenly become an overwhelming effort.
It was as though he were slithering into a waking dream that held him tight as a bog; to struggle would make things worse but if he relaxed, the panic in his gut might soon pass. He kept his eyes lowered, lest they betray him by showing him more substanceless horrors. A studio nurse arrived with a commissionaire and, as they led him from the room, he heard the woman with the tea say, ‘Well, of course he was in a camp, poor love. In Poland somewhere, I think it was. It would take
years to get over it. It’s a wonder he’s as sane as he is.’
24
When a studio car brought Edward home, Sally’s heart turned over.
‘He’s been overworking,’ she told Jerry Liebermann. ‘Sometimes he’s been so frantic to meet your deadlines that he’s done without sleep altogether. No-one can keep that up for long. I insist he takes a complete rest.’
A doctor nominated by the studio’s insurers drove out to The Roundel and concurred with her opinion. Edward was freed from contracts for two cheap war films and a lavish Shakespeare project. Jerry sent him flowers, as did the studio orchestra. Myra Toye actually sent flowers to Sally, a big bunch of yellow roses. The card, which Sally was obliged to show to her mother, her father, the Richardses and countless other fans in the coming weeks said, ‘Take good care of him, Mrs Teddy. We need him back in one piece and soon!! Yrs. Myra Toye.’
Edward was indeed tired. Sally made herself up a bed in a room on the other side of the gallery and moved Miriam’s cot in with her so that they would not disturb him during the night. He slept whole days away. He was too tired to read and turned off the radio moments after he had turned it on, muttering about there being ‘too many voices’. Even music seemed to disturb him, and repeatedly Sally found windows she had left open closed again, as though birdsong too was an insufferable stimulus. When Miriam was being affable, which was usually just after a feed, Sally took her in to visit him but he was uneasy holding her – often shaking his head and hiding his hands in wordless refusal.
Invariably the baby soon picked up on his tension and began to grizzle.
One day he seemed to feel stronger, for he dressed and came downstairs. Sally dared to imagine a steady recuperation, with him beginning to work again sporadically, clad in his fetching silk dressing gown, and her serving him small, eggy lunches on a tray. Although she knew they needed the money, a part of her enjoyed having him all to herself again.
The effort of staying upright, however, or even making conversation, soon proved too much for him and he became as immobile and withdrawn in an armchair as he had been in bed.
She shut the piano lid one day while she was dusting and it remained shut.
Meanwhile she was amazed at how her fascination with Miriam never seemed to lag. If anything, her needless panic over the baby’s mysterious fever had made time with her all the more precious. She could watch her, play with her, hold her for hours. Since the birth she had felt no need of adult company beyond Edward’s and with him away at work so much, would often spend days on end wrapped up in her daughter’s emerging abilities. Fellow adults, particularly childless ones, only made her embarrassed at her preoccupation. Visitors no sooner arrived than she longed for them to be gone.
‘I’m becoming quite bovine!’ she wrote to Dr Pertwee. ‘I’ll never lose all the weight I put on, I move so little and I swear I move at half the speed I used to. My head seems fixed at forty-five degrees from the vertical I’m so obsessed with her. The other day I’d just given her a bath and I caught myself sucking at one of her little feet like some great, hungry cow. Reassure me. Can this be natural?’
She could not understand Edward’s reluctance to hold their child. It seemed to her that if he only let that soft, vulnerable creature sink on to his lap, let her pull myopically at his jacket buttons, let those milky blue eyes fix on his, then all his secret pains would rise to the surface and evaporate in love. She began to find herself guiltily drawn to spend more time with Miriam and less with him. At the slightest sound from Miriam, she dropped her novel and ran from his side with as much eagerness as concern.
When he began to have fits of crying she was appalled. She kissed him, held him to her, rocked him in her arms, begged him to tell her what the matter was. But he could never say or, if he spoke at all, it was only to mumble an apology and say it was nothing, nothing at all.
‘But it must be. Don’t be daft. Edward, I love you. You can tell me. What is it? What’s wrong?’
At last her persistence would drive him from the room. If she pursued him, she felt brutal, if she stayed away, she felt callous. The sound of him weeping quietly in another room wrenched at her vitals as insistently as her baby’s wailing. She knew she could never stand by and let Miriam cry and, at first, the same seemed to be true of Edward’s pain. With Miriam, however, she could still the cries, offer milk or a comforting shoulder, rock her back to sleep or bring her down to play. With Edward, it seemed, her approaches were useless. After many failed attempts to comfort him, each one leaving her more depressed at her impotence than the one before, time gave her lessons in hardness. She found, to her disgust, that she could stare at his sob-distorted face across a room without flinching. If, midway through one of the many meals during which she provided most of the conversation, she looked up to see his eyes red with trickling brine, she could politely overlook it as one might somebody’s runny nose. Her parents called a few times, bringing flowers and fruit, as to the conventionally sick, but she could tell they found the situation alarming and she saw the willingness with which they accepted her suggestion that they leave him in peace.
Sometimes she stirred at night, aching for his touch, his sleeping grasp on the underside of her breasts, the pacifying weight of his thigh between hers, the soft, slow stages by which their somnolent shifts beneath the bedclothes could warm into lovemaking. Then she felt the chaste confines of a single bed around her or heard Miriam making her muffled, sucking, baby sounds and remembered. Twice, maybe three times, she had tried to kiss him or run a hand across his neck with more than an everyday, nursing tenderness, but she felt herself rebuked at his stiffening, as though her touch chilled him to the marrow.
Gradually her compassion for him came to be coloured by irritation; a change insidious as the arrival of mildew on the dining room ceiling. He broke a plate on his slow progress about the kitchen and her angry words were out of all proportion to the event. When a heavy cold made him adenoidal, she became unreasonably disgusted at the noise he made by trying to munch toast and breathe at the same time.
‘Must you do that?’ she cried out, when she could bear it no longer. He stopped chewing, stared at her for a moment, replaced the piece of toast on his plate and, murmuring, ‘Sorry,’ left the room.
‘Edward? Edward don’t be silly,’ she laughed. ‘Come back.’ She followed him to the door, but he had vanished into the fabric of the house as completely as any chastened child and she was left alone with the rays of heartless morning sunshine and his uneaten breakfast, an accidental ogress.
The day she finally came to accept the worst began with her losing her temper again. Miriam was fractious with the cutting of a tooth and had woken her repeatedly through the night. Pink and cross from boiling up nappies, Sally was carrying the steaming linen out to the garden to hang it when Miriam’s cries rang out through the house again.
‘Damn!’ she swore as she opened the door. Edward was sitting in an armchair, hunched and sniffing. Even the way he sat made her angry, because she sensed he was trying to shrink from her view. More tired than her work as a doctor had ever made her, worried about how long the insurers would continue to pay his salary, and intensely frustrated suddenly with being the only one in the house who did any work, she snapped at him bitterly.
‘Oh for Heaven’s sake, why can’t you shut her up for once?! You are her father, after all.’
He turned his sad, blank look on her as she stamped out to the washing line. He would not move, of course. Not to help, at least. He might slip into another room out of her way, go upstairs and lie on his bed to stare at the ceiling like some miserably captive ape, but help his wife? Take a small part in caring for his daughter, his own flesh and blood? Oh no. That was asking too much. Sally hung out the nappies, stabbing the fury out of her with clothespegs, until she was calm enough to be dismayed at the kinship in rage she was beginning to feel with her mother.
When she returned to the house he had, indeed, left his armchair and disappeared.
Once again she was appalled that he was making her into someone best avoided. Miriam had stopped crying, which made Sally’s burst of anger feel even more unjust. She climbed the stairs in any case, to make the beds, then froze in the doorway to her room, amazed. Edward was leaning tenderly over Miriam’s cot, his hands lowered to rub her back to sleep. She had not known, until she felt this relief, how deeply his apparent rejection of the baby had wounded her. Then she took a few soft steps into the room to lay an apologetic hand on his shoulder and gaze down with him. He loved Miriam! Miriam would help him! All would be well!
But his hands were not stroking. He was holding a pillow over her little face and his hands were shaking with the effort of pressing down. Sally let out a kind of roar and ran at him, pushing him so hard he lurched to one side and fell, still clutching the pillow. Miriam writhed in the cot, bellowing and snatching at the air with angry fists. Sally picked her up and held her possessively to her shoulder. Edward was rising from where he had fallen. His teeth chattered.
‘Get out!’ she yelled. He raised a hand defensively. ‘You! You – just get out!’ Simply by running at him she was able to drive him from the room. She kicked the door shut with a bang and fumbled to turn the key in the lock, then she sat heavily on her bed and began to rock back and forth, calming herself as well as the hysterical baby. Slowly Miriam’s cries lessened. Sally brought her down to lie in the crook of her arm. She stroked her cheek and Miriam suddenly yawned. Sally looked up to see the two of them in the old, stained looking-glass which leant beside the wardrobe waiting for someone to rehang it. The tableau they made might have been soothing in its domestic normality were her face not pinched with fear. She looked back to Miriam and stroked the baby’s wispy hair.