Funeral Music

by Morag Joss

  CHAPTER 18

  TETCHY WAS NOT the word, but it was the one Sue used to excuse herself. ‘No, I’m sorry, I’m a bit tetchy today. Sorry. Of course you can change your order. Bagel instead of baguette, cream cheese and smoked salmon with dill dressing, not the beef, but you do still want the mayonnaise, sorry, the horseradish. No butter. And salad. With tortilla chips but no dip. Right. No problem.’

  She could have ground her back teeth into powder, fed up with them as she was. The lady who had suffered such indecision over her lunch had now strolled over to the poolside and was blandly piling her hair into a swimming hat covered with rubber dahlias. In a few minutes she would be swimming up and down with pursed lips, keeping her earrings dry, while Sue argued with the hotel kitchen about the changed order and failed to convince them it wasn’t her mistake.

  It was Paul again, of course. He had been to Bristol again on Sunday. He had not said a word about what he’d been doing there but she knew it would be the antiques again. Honestly, they were taking over. His room and hallway were filling up with horrible things, chairs, mirrors, a washstand, all dark and really old, and playing havoc with the energy rhythms. Feng shui was right out the window now. It was Tuesday, and so far this week he had already worked a double shift and despite the trouble he had got into last time had taken on another job for Coldstreams. And why? Why was he working so hard and what was he doing with all the money? He never spent much on her and they never went anywhere really nice. He had always agreed with her that they should both save ‘for the future’, only when she came to think of it, he had never quite said what he thought that future was. With this last row, she feared that it might not even include her. At one time, months ago now, he’d more or less gone along with her plans. He’d let her believe they were his plans too. A flat together. Moving away to get jobs. There had been a bit of talk at one time about wanting to start a restaurant, which had subsided into just running one and lately had not been mentioned at all. She had even suggested that he use some of his savings to do a degree in catering, which, along with her promise to help support him while he did it, had been greeted with polite scorn. She was beginning to suspect he hadn’t saved a penny. If he would only talk to her, but he seemed to be, if anything, even more remote. Was there someone else?

  She sighed and gave herself a trial squeeze in the midriff. She had been practically living on iced tea and exercising like a racehorse for over two weeks to try to make up for that Saturday with Cecily and she was only now able, just, to look down at her stomach without shuddering. It had started with the hot chocolate. Looking back, the rest had more or less crept up on her, and that was why constant vigilance was so important. After their second bottle of wine, with which they’d demolished Cecily’s entire store of crisps and nuts, they’d gone to the fridge and decided that a tiny bone of pecorino cheese, some furry pesto and a few leaves of floppy chervil provided no sort of answer to their need for serious comfort, added to which all that sort of stuff had reminded Cecily of Derek. So they’d rung for pizza and ordered not quite the biggest with as many extra toppings as they could fit on and eaten it all, surprisingly fast, with another bottle of Spanish red. Sue had then fallen asleep on the sofa (she still wasn’t sure how long for) and awoken to a crisis. There was nothing for dessert! She clearly remembered wandering up the street with Cecily soon after this, lurching into JVC News and buying two large tubs of Häagen-Dazs and a frozen pineapple cheesecake. They had both found this funny at the time. On the way back, they had decided to celebrate properly, and anyway, the fresh air had given them an appetite and the pizza, in retrospect, had been rather small and a long time ago. So it had been really funny to stumble back through Cecily’s door bearing three warm brown paper carrier bags with oil-soaked bottoms as well as the ice-cream, the cheesecake, a Goldie Hawn video and two more bottles of wine.

  They had been giggling as they unpacked the tubs from the bags, discarding the saffron yellow dripping lids, and stacked up across the coffee table a line of aluminium dishes precariously full of lamb tikka masala, chicken pasanda, beef korma, vindaloo prawns, naan bread, turmeric rice and poppadums. A blob of food landed on Derek’s photograph and gave him a yellow eye-patch and a head bandage. That had been funny. Then it had been a great laugh to sprawl on either side of the table stabbing into the dishes with forks and fingers and swigging the Fitou from tumblers. They had even laughed at the movie. It was some time afterwards, after the cheesecake and the wine but before the ice-cream that Cecily had heaved herself towards the kitchen muttering that the double pecan fudge chocolate ripple needed something to go with it. She had returned waving a brown liqueur bottle.

  ‘Amaretto,’ she sniggered, ‘under the shink. I knew I had it,’ and uncorked it incompetently, tipping it unsteadily towards Sue’s glass. Nothing had come out at first, and Cecily had peered up it like a pantomime pirate. Then a slug of oily caramel had appeared at the neck of the bottle and dropped with a soft plod into the bottom of the glass, where it sat like a well-sucked toffee.

  ‘My God,’ said Sue, peering into it and breathing in the vinegary smell of ancient almonds, ‘how long have you had this?’

  Cecily replied, swallowing a belch, ‘Oh, a while. Shmeant to keep. Shtoo expensive to drink all in one go.’ Scanning the label, she said, ‘I mean, somebody paid three pounds nineteen and six for thish. Jusht wants diluting. Where’s the lemonade?’

  Sue smiled at the memory. Cecily was so great. She wasn’t letting that Derek walk all over her. Sue would take a leaf from Cecily’s book and face up to Paul. She would make him talk to her, get things out in the open. Whatever was going on with Paul, it would be better to know. Be out with it, whatever it was.

  For some reason this brought her mind back round to Cecily and the end of that evening, whose shaky closing sequences she viewed as if through a faulty projector. She remembered wondering dimly why Cecily was shouting into the loo – who could be down there at this time of night? – and finding that the soothing tiled wall on which she was just resting her cheek for a moment was the bathroom floor. That was the bit she most hated to dwell on, so it was with mixed feelings that she was interrupted by the dripping return of Dahlia Head because she had not yet, she suddenly realised, rung the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 19

  HE HAD LEARNED that the best restaurants were the Bofinger and Chez Paul in the Bastille, La Méditerranée and Le Bistrot de Paris in St-Germain, and sometimes, in the middle of the day, Juveniles or Aux Bons Crus. It was inconceivable that he would ever actually eat in them, and although he had grown almost content with his baguette-based diet he could occasionally, loitering outside, feel angrily and hungrily excluded. The last two places could be hazardous, because the stockbrokers and bankers who frequented the restaurants close to La Bourse were less likely to linger afterwards on the pavements and, being Parisian, were never entirely lacking in vigilance. And they could be disappointingly light on cash, although good for watches, lighters and the plastic cards which he knew how to sell on. At this time of year, the best harvests were still the brasseries where tourists gathered, and the best time for picking was after dark when they emerged with full stomachs and swimming heads into the night, careless on dinner and atmosphere. He was scornful of the joy they felt at being in Paris and was sometimes aware, even as his fingers were slipping into bags and hooking their wallets, that he was robbing them of this, too.

  Le Marais, where he was now, was no good for his purposes. From his bench in the garden in the middle of the dark square he watched, through the plane trees, as the waiters in long aprons from Ma Bourgogne passed among the outside tables under the colonnades, bright in the light beaming out from the interior. There were plenty of tourists here as well, of course, but most of the diners would be the young and fashionable inhabitants of the apartments hereabouts who would be wise to his type and infinitely more experienced in the ways of the city than he. He felt a rush of anxiety to be elsewhere, anywhere that he would feel less co
nspicuous and foreign.

  He was nervous, although the man he was meeting was supposed to be reliable. Not that any guarantees came with that kind of information. But he had learned that there were ways of getting out of France if you had the money and knew the right people, and now after two months working the streets and the tourist spots he had got enough together to get to England and even to get by in London for a while. In England, he’d been told, there was plenty of casual work for cash and little trouble from the authorities; here it had been impossible to get any sort of job. Everywhere he went, even for waiting or kitchen jobs, he had been expected to sign things, things to do with the minimum wage laws, and how could he do that without immigration papers? And he had made the mistake of lodging with some of the other West African Wolof people in a cheap, crowded boardinghouse in Montmartre where he had discovered, too late, that police raids were common. So his name and his illegal status were known, and he had been lucky to escape arrest and deportation.

  The message had been to be here at midnight. There were to be no names; the man was simply Le Fournisseur – the Supplier – while he himself would be addressed as Le Client. It was simply a matter of business: the price, the arrangements, the deal. What would he look like? From which of the garden’s four gates, lit only by the white globes hanging from black, wrought-iron posts, would he approach? Le Fournisseur was obviously experienced and careful. Le Client checked again that he was on the right bench. He had been told to stand facing the equestrian statue in the middle of the garden in the Place des Vosges, find the bench that the horse seemed to be looking at, and to wait there. It had been easy, because the horse’s head was turning sharply, to identify this bench in the southeast corner, but he detected in the instructions a practised method of avoiding any confusion in mistranslation of left or right.

  Looking across the garden once more towards the restaurants under the colonnades surrounding the square, his eyes picked up a movement among the heads of the people dining at Ma Bourgogne. A heavy man was standing up and removing the napkin from his throat. With a nod to the waiter, he was crossing between tables and moving alone into the darkness on the edge of the pavement, where he hesitated, waiting for a car to pass. Now, as Le Fournisseur crossed the road towards the gate and entered the garden, his eyes were coming to rest firmly and unmistakably on the bench and on himself, Le Client, waiting under the gaze of the cold bronze horse.

  CHAPTER 20

  H, SARA, SARA, forgive me for not getting up.’ The frail, amiable voice came from behind the rosebushes. As instructed by Olivia, Sara had come straight in by the garden door. She followed the wavering parallel lines in the grass to the point where they disappeared onto a patch of lawn behind a mass of thick flowering Albertine and saw at first little else other than a generous bottom encased in tight grey cotton. Serena had parked Edwin Passmore’s wheelchair and was now leaning over him, tucking a mohair blanket in around his legs. Edwin’s white head darted out around her ample sides and he beckoned at Sara encouragingly with a flat brown hand as big as a paddle.

  Serena straightened up and turned round as she reached them. ‘Well now, here’s our important visitor!’ she exclaimed to Edwin. ‘We’ve been getting very excited, haven’t we? Very impatient to show off our new stairlift and get out to the garden! Right-oh,’ she said comfortably, ‘no worries, okay? I’ll pop off and get you some tea. Would you like that?’

  She looked as if she might squeeze their cheeks between her thumb and forefinger. Sara replied, in the surprised tone that seemed necessary despite its being four o’clock in the afternoon and tea the very thing she had been invited for, that that would be lovely. They watched Serena’s progress back across the grass to the house.

  ‘Tedious cow,’ Edwin said, pulling off the blanket and adding in a loud voice, ‘Australian, you know! She can’t help it!’ although the effort brought on a wheezing cough.

  He waved Sara into a garden chair next to him and said, ‘Forgive me, I shouldn’t say such a thing, but she does ask for it. But we haven’t even properly met. But I know of you, of course. I’ve got your Elgar concerto. I think your playing is . . .’

  He frowned slightly as he considered what to say, pausing just sufficiently long for Sara to feel a wave of worry that he didn’t like it.

  ‘Extraordinarily warm, sensitive. Nothing flashy, but romantic,’ he said, smiling at her with a blue-eyed, intelligent look. ‘In exactly the right spirit for the piece. The only way I ever want to hear it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so pleased,’ Sara said, delighted. ‘I’ve got all your baroque recordings. That Handel piece, “Eternal Source of Light Divine”. It is simply wonderful. That long, long countertenor melody, then the trumpet answering. It’s sublime.’

  ‘Good, good,’ Edwin said, nodding. ‘That pleases me very much. I did always love Handel. Oh, my, but countertenors. Aren’t they stupid? No, that’s unfair. All singers are stupid.’

  ‘Oh, really? What about cellists, then?’

  ‘Oh, bone-headed and cloth-eared, most of ’em,’ Edwin said, laughing. ‘Present company excepted, of course. No, actually, my dear, I hope you didn’t mind being summoned. When I heard you’d been here to supper I was rather cross with poor Livy for not bringing you upstairs so that I could meet you. So I got her to ask you to tea.’

  Sara detected the imperiousness of the long-term invalid.

  ‘And it’s very kind of you to come.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure. And you’ve just got your stairlift, I hear, so you can entertain in the garden. That must be lovely. I love my garden.’

  ‘Bloody marvellous, I can tell you. Olivia knows how I love the garden. She is bloody marvellous, my Olivia, goes through a lot. Thinks I don’t know.’

  Edwin smiled beatifically, then seemed to fade. He took a laborious breath and his eyelids drooped. He smiled weakly at Sara and said, ‘Hang on. Just a minute.’

  He reached back and with one hand picked a coil of curved clear plastic tubing from a hook on the handle of his wheelchair. Sara realised that his hands were not especially big at all, but only seemed to be because his wrists were so wasted. Under his clothes his body was terribly thin; his long legs, sticking out and meeting at the knees, were like two poles draped loosely in gabardine. The tubing led to a black metal cylinder propped up on a stand behind the chair. Expertly he attached the two curling ends at the other end of the tubing into his nostrils and hooked the loops round his ears. It looked a little like a toy stethoscope, and a bit daft on his long, dignified face. He breathed in and immediately brightened.

  ‘Ridiculous bloody setup,’ he grumbled. ‘Oxygen. Can’t go long without it. But I hate to meet someone for the first time with half a mile of tube wrapped round my face. Vanity, no doubt.’

  They were interrupted by the arrival of Serena with a tea tray. Sara noticed with pleasure that there were only two cups, so Serena would not be joining them. She wanted this charming, funny man all to herself for a while longer. She said, ‘I’ll pour, shall I?’ giving Serena time enough to glint with goodwill and encourage Edwin to ‘manage’ one or two of his favourite biscuits. When she had gone, they sipped at their tea for a while. Edwin surveyed his garden, and, waving from his chair, pointed out some of his favourite plants.

  ‘That’s a Cyprus rock rose,’ he said, ‘with a scent like crushed sweeties. Do you like it? Old Serena, she likes the lavender best. Old-fashioned, she says, that’s what she likes. She’s from Sydney, you know. Doing Europe. Bath’s a revelation to her, of course.’ He chuckled. ‘She went to see that film, Emma. Raved about it. Oh, I said, borrow it. It’ll be in the bookcase.’

  He began to snigger and some of his tea went down the wrong way. As he recovered he reached out to touch Sara’s arm and said, in a voice high-pitched with mirth, ‘And you know what she said? She said, “Oh, is the book out already?” ’

  Edwin’s wholehearted and malicious pleasure in Serena’s mistake was infectious; they both shook with laughter. They talked o
n. From time to time Edwin would pause and let his eyes close for a few seconds. Then he would open them and say, ‘Go on, go on,’ impatient with his own fatigue. He told her reliably scurrilous stories about his days as a baroque trumpet player: foreign tours, unpopular conductors, memorably good, and bad, concerts.

  ‘Oh, God, Munich. Before the war of course. We dragged the entire wardrobe into the corridor. Funny at the time.’

  After a while Sara said, ‘I’ve brought my cello. I wonder if you might be in the mood to listen to something?’

  Edwin gave her another beautiful, blue-eyed look, full of gratitude. He had knotted his handkerchief in the corners and was wearing it on his head, in defiance of Serena, who had brought out a ridiculous sombrero for him.

  ‘Oh, would you?’ he asked, like a child. ‘Would you really?’ He paused, looking at her carefully. ‘Dare I ask, perhaps, for one of the Bach cello suites? I would love that.’

  Sara was stricken. ‘I don’t play those now,’ she said. ‘I haven’t . . . I can’t... I mean, is there anything else? I really haven’t played those for a long time.’