by Adam Thorpe
‘Will?’
The human form rose and melted into Milly as it strode out into the sunlight. She was holding a tall glass of either lemon barley water or Pernod. He could just hear the ice.
Shielding her eyes, she shouted, ‘What do you think this does to me?’
Jack thought he heard laughter from a couple of gardens away.
‘I dunno,’ he said, feebly.
‘It kills me. You’re killing me.’
‘Better call the police,’ came a falsetto voice. It was probably the rented place two doors down, full of braying trainee City lawyers a couple of years off from their first million.
‘Shuddup!’ Jack shouted, into the air. ‘Or I’ll come straight round and clobber you!’
He’d surprised himself. He was a yob, after all. But he was really livid. He shook his little bat. It was hot in the sun in the middle of the lawn. Oddly, there was no response. Perhaps he hadn’t shouted loud enough: a high jet was moaning overhead, drawing every other sound into its own shadow.
‘Bravo,’ said Milly.
‘And don’t you start,’ said Jack, without meaning to.
He stood helplessly, the bat dangling from his hand. Milly came nearer and stopped and took a swig of her drink. He smelt aniseed – it was definitely Pernod. It looked by the colour to be mixed strong. She glared at him and then she said, very quietly, ‘I’m phoning the bank. Just in case she has a taste for schlock skirts and flash jewellery.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know what I’m talking about.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Get a haircut, first. Then go fuck the hell out of her, maybe even for free. Have five more half-Estonian kids.’
Jack sighed. He was slightly frightened of her, like this. ‘You know she’s got this … French-Canadian banker guy. It’s over, me and her. It was just that one … you know … just that one single …’
‘Lovely and productive and totally mental night of sex,’ said Milly. ‘Righto. I’m obviously le problème. Or is it la problème?’
She shook her head as if shaking off a fly. Her fish earrings leapt about on the end of their line. She was staring fixedly at one point near her on the lawn.
‘Go catch something painful and lingering,’ she said, and took a gulp of her drink. Then, once again: ‘I’m incredibly close to a complete nervous collapse.’
She was definitely fairly drunk. That was unusual. She was still staring.
‘Milly,’ said Jack, dropping his voice right down, imagining Edward’s ear taking grain-prints off the fence, ‘I’m still in love with you. I’m not in love with her. I love you to bits, in fact. I don’t love her. I forgot all about her once I’d left Estonia, until she popped up again. We have to get on top of this one, right? She and I had a very civilised chat in Regent’s Park, by the Boating Lake –’
‘Good setting,’ said Milly, sourly. ‘Lots of quacking. I love you, I love you,’ she squawked, very loudly so that it bounced off the house. She’d been at the Pernod more than he’d realised.
He smiled, keeping it cool and reasonable and low. ‘There was a bit of quacking from the ducks, yeah. Look, we had this nice chat and she told me about her … about René from Quebec …’
‘Raoul.’
‘Yeah, I meant Raoul. About Raoul from Quebec … and it’s like this. As follows. I’m going to help Jaan with his music and with his cricket skills, take him out on the Heath, that kind of stuff. Extremely civilised. I’m really naff at cricket, as you can see, but –’
‘And me? What do I do? Play bridge?’
‘You’ve never played bridge.’
‘Keep hens? I’ve always wanted to keep hens.’
‘I’m gutted, Mill, I really am …’
‘Snort cocaine? Shack up with Edward Cochrane?’
‘I’d kill him first,’ Jack chuckled. ‘You do what you think is right to do.’
‘I’m planning to.’ She gave a shrill peal of what might have been laughter. ‘The story of my life. Trying not to screw up the environment.’
‘And that’s incredibly admirable, Mill.’
‘Oh, fuck off!’ she screamed. ‘You conceited little lying prick!’
She hurled the glass down on the lawn, where it broke and jaggedly rolled, looking dangerous.
‘Hear! hear!’ came the same voice as before, its nasally youthful bray pinpointing its origin.
Jack turned, gripping his junior bat in both hands like a club.
‘Come here and say that, you bastard!’ he screamed, in the trainee City lawyer’s general direction. And then sank to his knees, exhausted, as if something vital had snapped in him.
There was no response except a few high-pitched snorts, presumably of helpless laughter. Milly was already storming off towards the house. His own voice was peculiar to him, as if all he’d heard was an echo of it in a vast cathedral. His soul felt like a peasant in old-fashioned costume, walking away from him down a country lane overshadowed by thick trees. He had never considered himself as having a soul in the conventional sense, or not since he was a boy, but now he felt it very strongly. The grass by his knees was so interesting. He really didn’t want never to know grass again – its intricacies, its faint hint of incense and golden things, its summery warmth after a day absorbing the sun. Its apparent passivity.
Eventually, he recovered enough to go inside, sensing the house as empty; that Milly had left – vanished, perhaps, into the fog of unknowing for ever.
As he walked up the three flights to his eyrie, he thought of Kaja quoting Flaubert in French, his remark about the bracken caught in the stirrup. He was a complete pseud: he knew sod all about literature, French or otherwise. Or about much else.
All he knew about was music. In a sort of swollen, overdeveloped way. Parallel to life. Its own world. Like maths.
But birds made music, didn’t they?
As he lay on the study couch, Debussy’s First Arabesque uncoiling on the stereo, Milly’s invective ran through his mind over and over again. She had called him conceited – which was quite untrue – and a liar. He could not deny having lied. Didn’t everyone lie, more or less, just to get by, as a form of necessary negotiation? He tried to think how Milly or Kaja had lied, failing to find a single example. He resolved never to lie again. Or even to fib.
He lay on the couch and tried to force his tears to the surface, squeezing his heart, but failed. The strange point about making music was that lies were impossible. No words or pictures meant no lies. And no honesty either, maybe. It seemed to him the height of honesty, that detail of the bracken getting caught in the stirrup. He really would like to write a piece of music expressing that detail, that honesty. He could smell the bracken. He could hear it tear from the stirrup as the lover, what’s-his-name, pulled on it. He would like to tell Kaja about this inspiration, because she would understand its impulse. Milly wouldn’t. She had never understood him, in fact – or not this part of him. Milly had called him a conceited little lying prick.
That was it, then. His marriage was over.
He tasted his tears, as people did in books. He was lying there, quite still on the couch, and tears were welling up in his eyes and making their way erratically over his cheeks to nestle in his lips. He let them, along with the mucus from his nose. He recalled doing this as a small boy, surprised at how much kept coming out. He felt an abject failure. About ten years ago he had felt the opposite: that he was altogether to be envied – admired as the most promising English composer; married to a wealthy heiress of ancient stock; bound for the glories already bubbling in the cauldron of his gift; anticipating children. The years had slipped by from snowdrop to snowdrop ten times and no one had noticed. There was nothing you could do about it: he was well past forty, he was greying above the ears, he was no longer young and promising, his mother was probably dying. He was not even fermenting in the bottle of this house, whose value rose and accumulated wealth faster than either of them could earn through
their work, their art. It was crippling, this knowledge of their wealth, suppurating second by second from the brick, the new stucco, the strip of garden, even the simple grass. All over London and further afield it was the same: wealth like a smell, like the air itself, ebbing and flowing and leaving the unfortunate millions who did not breathe it stranded further on their dry rock, grappling with badly fitting masks. To them, wealth was a gas, a poison. He had never realised this before. He would like to have smashed the City lawyer over the head with the bat, seen his teeth mix with his clear brain fluid. It was amazing, that he could feel so violent, so dangerous. He was touching something in him that was as hidden and deep as coal.
He went to the piano, sitting bowed, not making a sound. He saw his hands turn dark as he spread his fingers as wide as they would go – dark with the coaly violence in him, and blurred from his tears – and brought them down in one great massed chord that was the beginning of something more.
The next day, he sat in his bare-walled childhood bedroom in Hayes and thought about what the doctor had said a couple of hours ago in his clipped and careful Indian English.
‘I’m not sure your dad quite understands, but your mum is a very ill lady, Mr Middleton. Unless we believe in miracles, she is not going to pull through. I feel so sorry for her. Moyna has been so brave. Being blind, too. It’s jolly difficult.’
The doctor’s room in the hospital was gloomy but generous, its big desk awash with papers. His mother had an infection, it had got into a heart valve, she was refusing to eat, she was thin and desperately hot under her skull brace.
‘I see, yeah,’ said Jack.
He wondered if he was doing this right. The doctor probably expected him to break down. Instead he was hovering an inch above his own emotions, not really feeling much except this kind of shadowy suspicion that what the doctor was saying might be true, impossible though it sounded.
‘Do you understand what I’m on about? Given your dad’s state, it might be best to keep all this between us.’
‘OK. He’s bad too, is he?’
‘I’m worried about him,’ said the doctor, placing his long, neat fingers together under his chin. ‘Not very worried, but just… concerned. He looks exhausted, doesn’t he? He’s no spring chicken.’
There were noises from outside, from up and down the corridor, pure ambient scratch music, like something improvised in the seventies – the trundling of trolleys, jolly shouts of orderlies or nurses, squeaks and bleeps and trills and thumps. In here, Jack felt safer. He even felt that the doctor, with his kindly Indian eyes and effeminate hands, might be able to perform the miracle.
No, his mother would perform the miracle. She would show them all. And the doctor would be ever so glad. He must break this sort of news every day, Jack realised, but now it was as if he was doing it for the first time. And maybe he really did feel sorry for Mum. Jack felt a lump in his throat, not because of his mother, but because of this doctor’s kindness, because of this drop of kindness in the great shambles of the NHS. He and Milly had offered Donald a place for Moyna in a private clinic, but Donald’s pride had interfered. Donald had voted Labour for decades – the old decent Labour, as he would call it. This had not been usual among his fellow skilled workers in the EMI factory in Blyth Road. But after Moyna’s accident at her factory, and the shameful attitude of the Tory owners, he had converted to socialism, a socialism streaked with fine flawed lines of the extreme right when it came to race or law and order. Anyway, it was hard for Donald, to sit in the hospital and watch the NHS at work. But this doctor – he was the saving grace, along with some of the nurses. While most of it felt like a massive orchestra getting by through sheer bluster, trying to drown out Death blasting away on the Hammond organ, this doctor knew it was all about more than fingering.
‘How long do you think she’s got, then?’
‘A month, tops,’ said the doctor. ‘Maybe as little as a day. We just don’t know, you see.’
‘She’ll be back here by Christmas,’ said Donald, over a meal from the local Chinese that filled the house and probably beyond with its deep-fried smell. ‘So you and Milly could spend it here. I don’t suppose your mum’ll be able to travel.’
‘Who says she’ll be back?’
‘Well, obviously she’ll be back by then. Her neck has only got a couple more weeks to go before it heals. She’ll be glad to get that scaffolding off.’
‘What about the infection?’
‘Antibiotics. More rice, Jack?’
Moyna deteriorated very quickly. The doctor knew exactly what he was talking about, but it still surprised Jack. The weaker she got, with bouts of delirium, the less caring the nurses were. So, for the first time in his life, Jack combed her hair. She also requested a nail file, and Jack popped out to buy one. She was too weak to use the nail file, but let it rest in her cupped hands as if just holding it was something. She had always looked after her nails. Perhaps it was something to do with being blind, with the heightened sensation of touch.
He said nothing to his father about Milly. Milly was down in Hampshire right now, recuperating at the Hall, probably riding a lot. Moyna wondered why Milly wasn’t visiting. She was perched in the straight-backed leatherette hospital chair – the hospital was unable to furnish one more suited to a patient with a weight of metal on her head, though apparently they’d looked. Her short-term memory was pretty well shot: it was easy to imply that Milly had popped by the day before.
‘You were asleep, Mum.’
Moyna didn’t know her short-term memory was shot, and got very angry once or twice, insisting that Milly hadn’t been at all for ages. Which was, ironically, true. Certainly truer than the idea that the Earl Mountbatten of Burma had shaken her hand that morning and given her a prune, which she’d entertained on and off for some time.
Jack had been in Hayes a full week, now, and Milly had not got in touch from the Hall.
He had popped back to Hampstead on Monday to give the Thai girl her lesson, practising his cricket on the lawn and moping over the bomb passage in Waters of the Trip Hazard, still unable to find a place for the cymbal crash. The whole situation felt unreal, as if it had never happened – Milly would be coming back from work later on, gagging for a tipple; and then, on the lawn, he saw the glitter of broken glass, still sticky with Pernod and full of ants.
He had phoned Kaja immediately and postponed the rendezvous in Kensington Gardens to the following week, using his mother as an excuse. Kaja had said very little, merely that Howard was going to be away teaching in Sicily so there was no viola lesson next week.
‘Sicily – yeah, of course. How nice. We’ll stick to Peter Pan, anyway,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve bought a cricket set for Jaan.’
‘OK.’
He had gone to Charles Tyrwhitt’s in Jermyn Street to buy the type of long-sleeved polo shirt his father liked, chosen a pre-cooked meal at Fortnum’s, and arrived in Hayes in time for a mournful bite to eat with his dad, at the table outside, to the trance beat of a car parked with its doors open the other side of the fence. The noise chased them inside, in the end.
‘I could complain,’ Jack ventured.
‘I don’t want two of you in hospital,’ said Donald, pushing his poulet de Bresse about with his fork. ‘Or in the morgue. When you were a baby it was mods and rockers. Then it was hippies and skinheads. Now it’s raving lunatics in plimsolls.’
Jack chuckled, appreciating the joke – Donald wasn’t given to jokes – but it turned out he was being dead serious.
Jack spent most mornings at the hospital, his sentence relieved by the odd break in its spotless, trendy ‘brasserie’ in the hospital’s swish new ‘Cartwright Centre’ across a well-watered lawn. Jack was never quite sure what this ‘centre’ was, though the brasserie was generally full of doctors and nurses escaping the hectic shabbiness. The long list of private donors above the lobby’s fountain included, Jack was surprised to see, ‘Richard and Marjorie du Crane’.
Moyna hardly a
te. If they forgot to bring in a menu to tick off in the morning, she got nothing. The first day Jack was there, it was beef curry and treacle tart. Moyna told the nurse to give it to Jack. ‘He needs fattening up,’ she said. The nurse, who was short, red-faced and shaped like a grapefruit, turned out to be from Latvia. She was strict and bossy, with no identifiable sense of humour, but she left the tray. Jack made cutlery and chewing noises, pretending to eat; in fact, the sight and smell of the curry made him feel ill. It was as close as food can come to looking like sewage.
‘Enjoying it?’ Moyna asked.
‘Lip-smacking good,’ said Jack. ‘Quite spicy, though.’
‘It all is,’ said Moyna. ‘It’s all the coloureds in the kitchen.’
Donald came in to relieve Jack and helped himself to the treacle tart. It peeled his dentures from his gums and caused a minor fuss, which Moyna enjoyed as distraction from her own pain.
‘I hope nothing’s wrong between you,’ she said, one morning about a minute and a half after Jack had arrived. Her voice was not weak so much as high and piping, like a caricature of someone very old. She was stock-still in her usual, hopelessly unadapted chair, head down low as if taking a bow.
‘Between us?’
‘Between you and Milly.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘You think of everything, given enough time,’ she said, staying bowed over with the weight of her scaffolded head. It must be pulling on her half-healed neck, Jack thought. And her eyes these days looked milkier, blinder. Before the fall, it was hard to tell from just looking at them: there were no panda-like burn marks around them, no scarred smoothness anywhere, because it hadn’t been that sort of accident. The drips in her arm, the bruises they made, the saline solution and waste bags around her like her innards pulled out on wires: he felt deadened to it all, to the horror of it all. She’d once been a shop-floor supervisor in a sausage factory, bustling about, giving orders, laughing and scolding in a white coat with a clipboard and beehive hairdo, looking like a doctor. He had to remember this.