by Adam Thorpe
‘It’s been quite a while now,’ said Jack, vaguely.
Howard got up and served the boy more guava juice. The boy was swinging his legs on the chair, making a tapping noise. Jack felt repelled by Howard’s goodwill: it made him feel like a pensioner, or crippled in some way. He finished his tea and stood.
‘I’ll be off, then. Thanks for the cuppa.’
‘And thank you, really truly.’
‘Bye-bye, Jaan. Go well.’
The boy seemed elsewhere, studying the guava juice.
‘No, I mean it,’Howard insisted, at the door. ‘Ffiona Fortissimo isn’t the world’s gift to the viola but she’s awful earnest. Meant a lot to her. I’ll owe you one.’
Jack noticed Jaan watching them from the kitchen. Jack gave him a little wave. The boy looked away.
On the way down the two cold flights of marbled stairs, Jack realised that Howard was his best friend. He realised this because, out of all their friends, he was the only one who could be moved to tears by their childlessness. Howard had once considered adopting with his late partner, Julian, but they’d both been busy men (Julian had been a music festival tsar). Then again, kids were never what you expected them to be. Berio wrote his thirty-four violin duets for his son when his son was still only a baby, Jack recalled. He wasn’t sure whether Berio’s son had taken up the violin, in the end. Maybe the poor little squit had had no choice. Or maybe he’d looked up at the white clouds and craved the harp.
Jack left the building and turned up Bolton Gardens. He was aware of a woman crossing the road a little behind him and he stopped and he followed her with his eyes as she went into Howard’s block.
He trotted back to the porch, his heart pounding. The woman was already climbing the stairs. She was dressed in a thin skirt and a loose summer blouse; a cotton cardigan was thrown around her neck.
Then she was gone.
Jack was hidden behind a tree on the other side of the road. Only his nose showed, and as much of one eye as could be used without giving his position away. The boy was talking and half skipping as he emerged, holding hands with his mother. His mother had released some cap on his shyness. She was nodding, smiling, carrying his little viola case in one hand like a kind of gun.
Jack wanted to shout her name, but instead he stayed very still. He stayed very still until she had gone.
* * *
Jack sat at his piano and played Pärt’s Für Alina over and over, free to do what he would with the tempo and the metre and his memories, until Milly came up and said he was keeping her awake. She’d thought it was Keith Jarrett. It was two o’clock in the morning and she put her hands around him because she thought he was doing it for them, the night of their wedding anniversary, externalising the sadness and the joy. He stroked her hands and nodded.
The anniversary meal had been fine, although Milly reckoned he was troubled, and she knew why he was troubled because she was also troubled. Everyone was troubled but that was different, that was macro-trouble in the background. They ordered two bottles of wine and the food was not disappointing, for once – almost matching the exorbitant price. It was a new French place a few minutes’ walk away and they’d had to book a table a fortnight in advance. It was cosy and chic at the same time, with lithographs of Parisian doors under soft spotlights and authentic French waiters, although they were less discreet than at home and flashed their eyes at the women, as if playing a role expected of them. Jack had great problems getting into gear throughout the meal, talking and smiling with only the front of his face. Milly was exhausted and so drank to compensate, her eyes glittering and her cheeks flushed. She was full of a contract she had just signed and sealed, involving remanufactured systems furniture for a hotel chain Jack had never heard of.
‘The whole idea,’ said Milly, adjusting her beaded top, ‘is that green hotels are what people want to stay in.’
‘Having flown there by kerosene-burning jet.’
‘These hotels are all in the UK, actually. They’re pretty exclusive. We’re going to use unemployed artisans to recycle the furniture and make really interesting personalised stuff.’
‘Composting toilets?’
‘No, not yet, but you wait. When the water runs out…’
‘Most people don’t care a toss, Mill. They’re fat, greedy and selfish.’
‘Stop that, Jack.’
‘What?’
‘That funny tense thing you’re doing with your lower lip. It’s really ugly. It’ll give you wrinkles.’
‘I’ll start to be respected.’
‘How did the composing go?’
‘Composting. Dry.’
‘Jack, cheer up. It’s our twelfth. I love you.’
‘I love you, Mill.’
They clipped glasses and drank. The waiter came, chuckling at nothing in particular. Someone had probably made a joke in the kitchen.
As usual they’d contemplated going on to some sort of hip club, but neither of them knew much about hip clubs and, anyway, they felt too old. The nearest really hip clubs were Camden Town way and they didn’t fancy braving the dealers to get to one, even by taxi. They wound up back home, sipping Calvados in the front sitting room to George Butterworth’s songs in the background, which felt suitably plangent. Jack had bought her some big, open-throated white lilies which scattered orange powder from their stamens. He told her about Howard and Ffiona but not about Jaan, let alone the boy’s mother.
‘I’ve got this feeling,’ said Milly, looking at him carefully. They were seated opposite each other, Milly curled with her legs up on the sofa. The scented candles were burning. That was the only light. It was restful, although Jack couldn’t find this restfulness inside him.
‘What?’
‘It should be tonight. It’ll be tonight.’
‘What will?’
‘I feel really chilled out. It’s partly being totally knackered, actually, but who cares? My defences are down. Because I think,’ said Milly – who was saying this as if she’d never said it before – ‘that I’m my own worst enemy. I think it’s psychological, that I’m blocking. This is a mega-major discovery, Jack. I think my mother is too dominating.’
‘What’s Marjorie got to do with it?’
‘I think I’ve been denying motherhood because of her.’
‘OK. Lets me off the hook.’
‘If I’d just shacked up with anyone – you know, if I’d left you and just slept around, not caring, no protection –’
‘And got Aids,’ he pointed out.
‘That’s irrelevant. I’m talking theoretically. Because actually I love you.’
‘Uh-huh. And so?’
‘I’d have probably got the pee word, Jack.’
‘Pregnant. Let’s say it.’
‘Yeah. Rock on.’
‘And?’
‘And so,’ she said, gazing at him intently.
Jack had lost the thread. His face felt unformed. He had a picture in his head of Kaja in front of the Baltic Sea, twilight turning the water an astonishing colour, metallic, neither silver nor blue but that danced in your eyes and went both brighter and darker at the same time. But he went to bed with Milly and they made love in the old position, and she gripped his knees and he stroked her spine and her desperation and did his Japanese meditation thing and it was fine, she went very calm and peaceful. He crept out from beside her and played Für Alina until she padded up and held him from behind.
‘Still got my feeling,’ she said. ‘Really strong, it is. I think Max is with us on this one.’
He hesitated before replying. He really couldn’t cope with Max being involved from on high, or wherever, waving with those miniature fingers.
‘That’s cool, Mill. Really it is.’
Kaja, he recalled at that moment, meant ‘echo’ in Estonian.
‘Love you, mate.’
‘Love you to bits, Mill.’
The next day he went out to get bread and pâtisseries at Louis’. It was Tuesday – Milly’s
early hour at the fitness club. As he was about to open the front door, the Guardian nosed its way through the letter box and hung there, thick as a loin of venison.
He walked a mite shakily up the High Street, post-cognac. The air was swimming around him, losing the night’s freshness, ready to become a hot August day. Someone looking like Errol Flynn was checking his text messages as he crossed the road without looking. The Waterstone’s window was full of books by John Irving. A huge Tesco Metro truck was turning into Heath Street, wiping out the row of shops beyond. As usual he felt the world was losing its particularity of place: he wondered if anyone else under about eighty felt this.
In Louis’ Patisserie he bought two apple-filled croissants for breakfast and some sticky raisin buns for tea, breathing in the fragrance of the Continent. It reminded him of Tallinn, and he had an attack of butterflies. No, it wasn’t the cognac. Only one customer in the coffee room behind: a stiff, smart woman who looked guilty about having a breakfast of sweet pâtisseries in Louis’. Jack tried not to stare at her, as if in wonder. He was half comatose, not responsible for his actions.
You could be in deep yogurt, pal.
He crossed the road to Tesco Metro for milk and basics. He fumbled with his change at the checkout and the pence went rolling. He let them be but customers picked them up for him, as if he was disabled or old. He thought about how you knew people and then you realised you didn’t, that most of what you thought about them was what you needed to think about them. The Tesco Metro truck blocked the entire view from the cash tills and was throbbing out diesel fumes and its unloading mechanism squealed and hissed so loudly that Jack had to block his ears on coming out of the shop. He was getting more and more sensitive to everyday noise, he’d noted. No one else seemed bothered by motorbikes without silencers or the crash and roar of the bin lorry or people screaming into their mobiles. Even the acceleration of a passing car made him sweat. And walking past the boutiques and their knobbly wall of music was the aural equivalent of having a sharp stick run along his ribs, up and down, up and down, up and down. What he needed was a little reed-fringed island, the slippery expurgation of a sauna.
He tried to picture the High Street when podgy-looking cars with chrome bumpers hummed by once every ten minutes or so, leaving a whiff of leather and walnut. He bought a Ham & High in the paper shop, his nerves flinching slightly when he saw the word TERROR in all the headlines: maybe something had happened while they were drinking cognac. But it hadn’t, it was just the long sustained echo of the booms, the cymbal crash, the timp’s calfskin, pitched C2, struck four times and resonating to the seventh harmonic over the quiet. Or maybe it was the press, stretching it out artificially, manipulating emotions in the same way music did.
Curiously, he felt a drop of disappointment mixed in with the relief. The day after the second wave of bombings, the Independent’s tabloid-like headline, CITY OF FEAR, had sent a chill through his body. And then he’d realised that no one around him looked in the least bit frightened.
When the wrong person was shot point-blank by the forces of order on that very day, then he was scared.
Waiting in the paper shop’s queue, he glanced at the Ham & High: a young guy on a bus had been stabbed to death in Islington for objecting to having chips thrown at his girlfriend. Jack thought: That could have been me. If someone was throwing chips at my girl, I could not have turned the other cheek. One minute you’re on a bus and full of life, the next minute you’re dying. When he pictured the scene, he saw the chips bouncing off Kaja’s face, not Milly’s. He realised that he hadn’t taken a bus for years.
He was separated from most people in the world by this one shit thing: money.
A silky black Rolls with a chauffeur and a Saudi-looking guy in shades in the back was waiting at the lights as Jack came out of the paper shop. Its number plate said: AA1 UV. He felt better, because he had something to despise.
Gap had just opened its doors and was playing that track by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which wormed around in his head while he was making coffee. He laid for breakfast in the ‘garden room’. This was a twenty-foot extension they’d had done, with recuperated Edwardian French windows all along one side and a forest of pot plants, so that the house melted into the garden. It was a beautiful room, with elm floorboards and a 1920s Dutch pine table. It was the room in which, if the sun shone, Jack felt most contented with his life.
It smelt a little sickly today: that was the lilies. It overpowered the scents from the garden. Jack had opened the French windows wide and was watching a bird on the unkempt lawn. Their gardener, Will, was a balding hippy survival who dressed in denim dungarees and believed that weeds were beautiful. His main tool was a daisy fork, although he left the daisies. He was very expensive. Milly’s landscape consultants thought the garden was not untidy but a cottage masterpiece. It had been photographed for glossy magazines. Jack reckoned it looked a bit of a scruff.
Milly was not yet back. They’d made love and maybe this time would be the jackpot. Instead of imagining her pregnant, or cradling a living baby instead of a dead one, he pictured her coming in and saying, ‘Jack, I’m off to Berlin. I’ve fallen in love with a woman. I need a life change. I’m no longer chasing phantoms. I don’t care about having or not having kids. She’s a video-installation artist called …’
Jack thought about a name. He was hungry. He sat down at the table and bit into the croissant but couldn’t find the apple. Even in Louis’ it always ended up at one end, as if they were made on a slope. Better to get the plain ones, without the filling. But he was seduced by the aromas of cinnamon and honey and crust dusted by flour. Easy to be seduced. Café Majolica had smelt good, too. Coffee, almonds, curd, a girl’s sweat. England was deprived of pleasant smells, there was too much sugar and beer and frying in deep fat. There was too much fat. Too much incontinence. His music was very ‘severe’, as Jean-Luc the oboist would say, meaning something different, because in French you could say it of a landscape and mean it as a compliment. A video-installation artist called Matilda. Gabriella. Lolita. Nicole. Karen. Yeah, Karen was about right, pronounced Germanically. The bad thing was, a very dark part of him – the part that once, when he was nine, wanted to push his father into the Bonfire Night pyre in the field by their estate, for instance – was hoping Milly would come in and say just that, because then he could start all over again, without rancour.
He would call Kaja, who was a few miles away. He would leave the country. He would pick up where he’d left off.
Broken off.
He put his head in his hands. He was frying his brain, or what? Milly was ten minutes late.
I love you, Mill, he said to himself, but almost out loud. I love you to bits. Please don’t go off with anyone, man or woman. Please don’t get blown up. Please let’s carry on, just as we are, because we know each other better than anyone else ever can.
And this room, for instance. This house. Radio 3 playing Bártok, right at this moment. This massive, beautiful house smelling of lilies, its garden murmuring through the open doors. A laughable distance from the Heath. It was almost in the frigging Heath. What could be better than his life?
Nice try, but no. He would not change his life, or have it changed for him. All they needed was a kid or two. Or six. Has someone got a problem with that? The cosmos, for instance? The fucking cosmos?
Eh?
He would call his new piece by that old discarded title, Echo.
‘Kaja’ in Estonian. It was a silent homage. The muse thing.
Milly would come in while he was working, sometimes, and then go straight out again. Later, Jack would ask why and Milly would say, ‘I felt your Muse in there. She got jealous when I came in.’ She’d always say ‘muse’ with a hint of a capital.
Really what this meant was that he was working well. She was usually right. There was an intensity when one little element linked with the next and gradually a landscape unfolded. An interruption spun it away, broken. Even the wine gums wo
uld remain untouched.
He felt that the muse, embodied in Kaja for the last six years, could turn into an interruption. Muses could be very dangerous.
‘You’re my muse, Milly,’ he wanted to say, when Milly said this thing about the muse being jealous, but he never did. It wouldn’t have been true. It would have been trite. It might have led to bad consequences. Above all, he did not want to be trite. As soon as he felt a line of music as existing in only two dimensions, he scrubbed it. Two-dimensional was surface, was triteness. Everything was tempting you away into triteness, it made up 99 per cent of human manufacture. White clouds were not trite, and they were always changing, melting into other forms and wonders.
Milly phoned from the fitness club. She’d met Deborah Willetts-Nanda – remember? – and was having brekkers there.
Jack mooched, feeling lonely. He hoped Howard would phone so he wouldn’t have to make the decision to phone him. He took a walk on the Heath and met no one he knew and came back by the second-hand bookshop in Flask Walk.
Jack now studied the stacked, cramped shelves without taking any books out. He found the dark catacombs of threatened places like this a metaphor for his own mind, and strangely uplifting. Echo. Everything was echo. He’d been commissioned to write a piece for Magdalen College Choir, last year, to a short poem by John Fuller, and he went to Oxford to visit the chapel, to gauge its acoustics. They were near perfect, but he wrote something that he knew would fling the sound into echo and hang there. Fuller was very pleased, and Radio 3 broadcast it live, and for a moment Jack thought that being a composer could not be touched as a profession. He had thought the same when he’d won the Munich Ernst von Siemens Prize for Young Composers when he was still young. He didn’t think it very often, these days.
The music shelf had nothing interesting. He noticed a battered copy of Noel Streatfeild’s Grass in Piccadilly, which was dated 1947 and had once belonged to an Elsie Crowthers. Jack remembered reading Streatfeild as a thirteen-year-old, skulking in Hayes Town Library. This was for adults. He kept having to remind himself that he was an adult. Married twelve years yesterday, taking his breakfasts in a twenty-foot extension called the Garden Room that he and his wife had had built on to their very own desirable and extremely tony residence.