by Adam Thorpe
Milly had complications, afterwards. They went back to ‘John and Lizzie’s’ where the ‘top’ obstetrician in the country (better than ‘the most promising’, Jack wanted to say) dealt with it all and afterwards explained to them, shiny with the considerable amount of money it had cost them, that the operation was successful but the chances of her conceiving a baby, let alone carrying it full term, were heavily reduced.
‘You mean I’m sterile?’ said Milly, who felt that ever since the four-by-four had pulled out in front of them she had ‘switched tracks’ onto a very dark line.
‘I didn’t say that, Mrs Middleton,’ said the top obstetrician, swivelling his chair gently behind a very broad antique desk. He was in his mid-forties, with chubby fingers. The backs of his hands were as smooth and gleaming as burn-scar tissue, the black hairs on them too obvious. Jack would have liked to have liked him, but he couldn’t.
‘I never used the dreaded “s”-word,’ the doctor added, with a faint smile.
‘Well, it comes to the same thing,’ Milly snapped. She was never awed by top people because she could trace her family straight back to the entourage of William Rufus, where a Henri du Crane lurked behind his nose guard, but Jack knew there was also terror in her tone.
‘Not exactly,’ said the doctor.
There was a pause. Milly had visibly shrunk. ‘We took a year even to get that far,’ she said.
The doctor’s eyes swivelled onto Jack’s face. ‘Did you have frequent, or at least regular, penetrative sex?’
‘Frequent enough,’ Jack replied. His face burned with embarrassment.
‘Not unusual,’ said the doctor, putting on his wire-rimmed, oval glasses. ‘As you know, male sperm counts have lessened over the last few years, for whatever reason.’
‘Pesticides,’ said Milly, staring at the floor.
‘Or tight jeans,’ said the doctor, looking over his glasses at Jack, like a headmaster who suspects something.
‘Don’t wear tight jeans,’ said Jack.
‘Everyone expects procreation to be easy, like purchasing a hamburger or a car. But actually, although maternal and infant mortality rates have vastly improved –’
‘In the rich countries,’ Milly broke in.
‘Exactly,’ said the doctor, some of whose clientele arrived in stretch limos. ‘But even here it’s the same old messy, difficult business.’
‘Can we sue?’ Milly asked, businesslike again. She seemed to be holding herself together remarkably well.
‘Sue?’
He looked alarmed, which was gratifying.
‘The driver of the vehicle that pulled out in front of us and that we only just missed. Who caused the stillbirth.’
‘There was no actual contact between the vehicles?’
‘No, but we hit the kerb. We were late and my husband was driving a bit fast.’
‘Whatever, Mrs Middleton, there is no direct proof that the accident, such as it was, caused the death of your baby. Internal organs like the brain or the womb are not fixed by seat belts, they shift forward and speed increases their weight considerably. I believe your child suffered either a lesion or a straightforward head injury on striking the obstacle of the belly wall constrained by the seat belt, but there’s no objective proof here that would hold up in a court of law.’
The phone rang and he answered it. Milly and Jack looked at each other rather blankly and then at the window, where the sky was almost clear of cloud. The room was large and airy with a good view of the pitch at Lord’s. They were playing a match down there: hearty, hefty men without a care in the world. Tiny spots of sound, willow on leather. Jack was wondering whether to object aloud to Milly saying he was driving a bit fast. He was sure he hadn’t been driving over thirty, but then he didn’t have a very clear image of anything but the huge bonnet suddenly continuing out in front of them. The doctor came off the phone and picked up a silver ballpoint and twirled it between his fingers. A notice on his pinboard warned in blood-red capitals about the Millennium Bug, looking very foolish six months after the non-event. It was somehow reassuring, but nothing else was. It made Jack think of the Dome, his mega-break, his failure.
‘And what do you do, Mr Middleton?’
‘I’m a composer.’
The doctor’s face lit up. ‘Are you really? Not of pop music, I hope.’
‘No. Contemporary. Lots of squeaks and squeals.’
‘How interesting. I’m a great fan of Berio. What do you reckon?’
Jack nodded slowly. He felt curiously outclassed. This man had dabbled in Milly’s insides and was an expert on Berio. ‘Pretty good,’ said Jack.
‘There’s no one else in Italy, is there? I used to think Ligeti was Italian but he turns out to be Romanian.’
‘Hungarian,’ said Jack, effortlessly seizing on the opportunity and adding a long-suffering sigh for good measure. ‘Technically.’
Disappointingly, the doctor only acknowledged his error with the tiniest of nods. ‘Can’t think why it’s all dried up in our dear old Italy. They had Verdi and Puccini, after all. I play the tubular bells.’
Milly had covered her face in her hands, although she wasn’t actually crying.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, half to herself; ‘I feel completely without hope.’
They left the hospital arm in arm, watched by swarthy men in reflective sunglasses around a woman in a full veil. Milly’s things were in a small rucksack on Jack’s back. They could hear the applause from Lord’s the other side of the road. A mother with her newborn in a carrycot was getting into a silvery-black, open-topped Audi. An X-type Jaguar was purring in neutral behind it, its very pregnant passenger laughing happily as she levered herself out.
‘I’m going to watch the cricket,’ said Milly, unexpectedly.
‘Are you sure? Don’t you want to go straight home?’
‘I just want to be with normal things.’
‘Not sure cricket is normal,’ Jack said, ‘but if we’re both free –’
‘Why? What would you have booked up on the day I was leaving hospital?’
‘I said, we’re both free.’
As they watched the cricket, Jack wondered what he had done wrong. He felt as if their life had developed some sort of shadow in it, like a tumour on an X-ray. A curse. In the old days, or if they were Americans, they’d have prayed for support and forgiveness. Why forgiveness? Because they’d been too blasé, that’s all. Not a great sin.
You were arriving like a mad man. That simply wasn’t true.
He knew why Milly didn’t want to go home just yet. Home would mean, not just the stink of fresh paint (the builders, plumbers and electricians had by now been transmuted into the painters and decorators), but the absence of what should have been. The absence of Max. Max in the room they’d earmarked for the nursery. They’d agreed that if Max or Pippa didn’t work as names, they could change them after a few days. The name had to fit the child. Now there was no child and the name was a phantom, marked in careful script on a little plastic tub of ashes they planned to scatter on the Heath or in the grounds of Wadhampton Hall one day. They were vague about this. The tub was kept behind Milly’s clothes in the wardrobe. Jack opened the wardrobe from time to time, to take the tub in his hands and look at the contents. The ash was like the ash that Graham, the Hall’s gardener, scattered around the roses and the cooking plums and the peaches in the greenhouse. It wasn’t sieved, it had bits in it. Tiny slivers and nobbles of bone.
They watched the cricket. The game was soporific, calming. The sun warmed the wooden seats; the white figures on the bright green turf and the trees against the blue sky were reassuring. The faint smell of linseed oil, coconut cake and warm grass completed the reverie. It was an MCC match, still early in the season. There weren’t all that many spectators, and only a handful were beerily rowdy under wide straw hats further along their stand.
Et in Arcadia Ego, thought Jack, ruefully. He’d been watching Saturday cricket one sunny day in Hayes
with his older brother, a tranny between them playing Sandy Shaw, when the music had been interrupted by a newsflash: Bobby Kennedy had been shot. How old was he, then? Six? Seven? He remembered it as if it had occurred last week. His brother, Denny, who’d had long hair and was ten years his senior (which was why Jack’s parents had always struck him as older than most), had started crying, to his little brother’s great surprise. Only recently had he realised that his brother might have been crying about their mother’s blindness, the accident having happened only a year or so earlier, and not really about Bobby Kennedy.
Whatever the reason for it, Jack sometimes reckoned that all his art was attempting to crystallise that moment, set its disparate elements in permanent and mutual suspension.
‘All right?’ he said, squeezing Milly’s hand.
She pulled it away from him and settled it in her lap. ‘Of course I’m not,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe something so stupid can ruin your life.’
‘People are actually killed,’ said Jack, floundering a little. The sun was too hot on his head, even though it was only June.
‘My God, someone was killed,’ Milly said, staring at him in astonishment. ‘In case you’ve forgotten.’
Jack kept quiet for a while, stung. The batting had resumed and the soft thock of each connection and the ripples of appeal and applause started to weave musical ideas in his head. He’d forgotten his shades, and his cheek muscles ached from squinting.
Eventually he said, tearing himself from the shuttle of his ideas: ‘I read somewhere that getting pregnant is a complete lottery. The main thing is that our chances are not zero. Then becoming pregnant can put it all back to normal, anyway.’
He could not get out of himself, could not reach Milly. She clapped at a four, with the others, and gave the tiniest shrug of acknowledgement. Nothing more.
‘Maybe that dream of yours about the filing cabinet burning was a premonition,’ she said, later, in the taxi back. She had had another cry on leaving the cricket ground, and her eyes looked as they did after her weekly swim at the fitness club near her office in Soho. ‘And that caged fox thing. Were they the same dream, in fact?’
Jack shook his head. ‘No, different. Different dreams.’ He looked out of the taxi window at the people and the traffic.
Once you start lying, that’s when the shadow appears. And he thought again: That’s when it appeared.
FOUR
Five years later, a couple of days after the Kenwood concert, Jack sat in his study in Hampstead listening to Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, which, although a lesson in minimalist lyricism, was popular with the educated masses. He always found it calming, just piano and violin mirroring and returning, raindrops and wind, very simple and innocent, always returning to the A. The huge Bose speakers caught the most shadowy detail, down to the slide and knock of the pedal. It was very beautiful. He sat at his piano and sketched out some of the ideas that had been running through his head, scribbled over the bars strung like hair-thin wires between one internal ear and the other. These inward bars sometimes reminded him of a barbed-wire fence on a plain somewhere vast and grassy and wind-blown like Mongolia, snagging whatever blew through. Some of it was plastic, shredded. Even that served.
Then he sat in the window seat, set to cushions in the dormer, and looked over the Heath. He had everything, and he had nothing. He didn’t need to teach, not financially speaking, but he took interesting private students just to keep up with what was happening at that level, and one of them was about to arrive. Since the bombs on the Tube a month ago, this student – a nervous Thai girl – had bought a bike, which kept breaking down. That was the term she used: ‘breaking down’. How could such a simple machine ever break down? What she meant was punctures or the chain falling off. So she was generally late.
Following his lesson, he was due to attend an emergency meeting of the local community group: new people had moved in three doors up and wanted to deconsecrate the parking place in front of them that was reserved for disabled drivers. Apparently, the sign on its metal post interfered with their front outlook, but their real reason was clearly even more selfish: to have the convenience of a space directly in front of their house – for their massive Jeep, braced by what looked like chrome scaffolding and with tinted windows like a hearse. It would have been Milly’s job, this meeting, but Milly was at work. Jack hated meetings of any kind. He was on the advisory board of three music colleges, including Dartington, and their get-togethers kept cropping up with frightening regularity.
At least Milly’s parents had gone back home to Hampshire.
It was a leaden sky, and the Heath seemed bored with itself. The bombings had happened and now they were over, the rescue workers had finished in the sweltering depths, the rats had finished eating the dead, the words had all been said. No one had anything more to say. Nobody he knew had been involved, except for those close enough each time to hear the ambulances and fire engines amassing more densely than usual and who had immediately felt a thrill of fear. Milly had been driving to Hastings to advise on a private sheltered-housing project’s grey water capture and had phoned him as soon as she’d heard, but he was taking a shower and there was Shostakovich on the bedroom stereo so he didn’t catch the ring. She left a message. Because she was phoning from her mobile in the car, it was scratchy and barely decipherable, but he’d picked up the gist at one o’clock, when he’d taken a break from his ideas to listen to the news over a salad. Nobody else had phoned him in the time between, so he was possibly the last person in London to know.
On the evening of the second wave of attacks, that had not killed anyone because the bombs were faulty, Milly and he had set out on foot to the Indian restaurant on Fleet Road and had seen a woman run over by a double-decker down by the old cinema. She was black, and she was dressed in a long black dress, and was very hefty in the hips. She was stepping out with her shopping on the far side of the zebra crossing. They heard this cry (something between a yell of realisation and a scream) beyond the sudden, surprising mass of the double-decker, and then a few bright oranges rolled out from under their side of the bus as it came to a stop. Jack ran across, thinking he would be about to see something terrible, something sheared in half or torn into tripe. Just in front of the bus, with the vehicle’s white plastic bumper broken off and resting against her, the woman lay on her side in the road, so fat she might have been pregnant.
‘This is bad,’ she shouted, trying to prop herself up on one elbow, having been pushed or maybe dragged some twenty yards by the bus. ‘This is bad, I know it. It’s really bad, I tell you.’
An ambulance from the Royal Free happened to be right there at the junction, on Pond Street, so Jack never got to help her. She was rolled gently onto the stretcher, and all the time she was saying, ‘It’s bad. I know it’s really bad.’ She was moving her feet, however, in their high heels.
The driver of the bus had come out with his hands on his head, like a trapped felon. ‘Christ, I don’t know what happened,’ he kept saying. ‘I just don’t know what happened.’ Everyone was watching in the detached way people do watch such things, and the young guy who had been waiting at the zebra crossing with the victim turned to Jack and said, ‘It’s such a bad day. It’s just such a bad day, innit?’
And now it was over, and the bad day had sunk into all the other days and was obliterated except for fragments floating on the surface or deep in people’s minds.
The piece Jack was working on right now was an attempt to catch some of these ideas. Provisionally entitled It’s Just Such a Bad Day, it was scored for chamber choir and percussion and scheduled to be performed in the Purcell Room as part of the South Bank’s Contemporary Music binge in November, for which the theme of ‘Terror’ had been tacitly agreed by everyone involved. But it was not going well. One little fragment was not connecting to another. It was a chain bracelet without the links. Everything must have a reason for being, and must be born out of another. The four bombs were sounded on
baroque timps, as modern kettledrums had too much of a spill-over of dominant overtones and he wanted a very clear and precise tonal colour. There was also a cymbal crash, which he kept moving about but could not find a place for. And yet he saw it and heard it in front of his eyes. The worst of it was that a truly brain-worming pop song about a bad day, with almost the same refrain, was being incessantly piped the minute, it seemed, he stepped outside.
He thought of the snow leopard in the zoo in Estonia. He often thought of it, as he often thought of the fox. They were related. One was before, one was after. Both were in a cage many times too small for their being. It seemed like yesterday, the whole thing. He felt his face warming with the memory. A Filing Cabinet on Fire in the Middle of the Street, with Caged Fox described what had happened, but in the words of music, words that have no literal sense, only the sense of one idea or emotion or texture flowing out of another until the final hush before the applause.
Listening to his piece, in the middle of the barn at Snape Maltings in 2001, Jack had wondered why he wrote anything at all. It had sounded, at first, paper-thin and trite. Then, during the middle section, with the melodic line of the voice finding its resonance in the ecstatic major of the instruments, he had been taken there, taken to the place inside himself where he had found another, all that time waiting for him.
As if the world had been turned on its axis to face her and he was helpless before her, helpless and on his own.
Howard phoned him in the middle of the lesson with the anxious Thai, who had turned up fifteen minutes late owing to the fact that her bicycle had been stolen just before she left. Jack didn’t believe her because she lived in West Hampstead and it would have taken her more than fifteen minutes to walk it. He wondered what made such a gifted musician tell lies, albeit harmless lies. She was twenty-one and still lived with her parents, who ran a restaurant in Earls Court. Where Howard lived, as it happened.