by Angela Huth
The neighbours in Artisan Road had somehow discovered, many years ago, the emptiness of Grace’s afternoons and had ‘roped her in’ for help of various kinds. She was an active member of Neighbourhood Watch, she accepted invitations to wine and cheese parties whose purpose was to discuss Doing Something about a zebra crossing at the junction of Artisan and Hogarth Roads, and for five years running she had organised a group of local carol singers. As the only pianist among them, every November she arranged rehearsals in the Handle dining room, where the singers could secretly try out a descant. As a result Grace was frequently congratulated on the quality of the singers: their high standard earned them an unusual amount of mince pies, and considerable sums for whichever charity they were raising money.
Raising money for those less fortunate, in fact, was an occupation that Grace found more rewarding than most, provided it was on the simple level of going round with a collecting box. She liked a good excuse to wander up neighbouring drives, pass an eye over the disparate tastes of privet, marigolds, or aubretia surfing over a clump of stones. She found it intriguing to glance through front windows, guess at the lives from the small clue of curtain or ornament. She loved the moment of a front door opening (not a very frequent occurrence, afternoons) and the brief exposure to the different smells of halls: the stands of hunched coats, the glimmer of mirror on dark old walls (redecorating the hall was low on the list of priorities in Artisan Road), the flash of patterned stair carpet, the flutter of High Street candelabras. – Grace’s eagerness for this particular form of good work was quickly detected among local charitable organisers, and for years she had been amply furnished with opportunities to walk her way round the neighbourhood armed with a tin, or envelopes that must be first delivered and later collected. It was on a November afternoon almost a year ago while on duty on behalf of the sufferers of muscular dystrophy (an annual appeal designed to catch donors before the Christmas shopping season) that she first met Lucien.
The Firs, a few houses down the street from the Handles, was so frequently unoccupied during the afternoons that Grace had almost given up ringing the bell. She knew nothing of its owners except that they were called Watson and had moved in some three years ago. Mrs Watson, rumoured to be a widow, was not a member of Neighbourhood Watch or any other local organisation. Grace had never seen her, but others claimed to have caught sight of her occasionally driving off early in the morning. A high privet hedge guarded the front of the house from the inquisitive glances of neighbours. After a while the more gregarious folk of Artisan Road assumed Mrs Watson wished to keep to herself, and interest in her apparently low-key life soon waned.
The house itself was one of the more eccentric in the road: the ground floor was built of bright red brick, the upper floors were snow-cemmed pebble-dash. High gables were inlaid with dark beams that pointed in random directions, a reference to the Tudor period probably not designed to be humorous, but which always made Grace smile. The house was an exact replica of a doll’s house, made in the forties, she had been given as a child. She had spent many happy hours in that house, easily able to reduce herself to the size of the miniature family that lived there, and joined the life she provided for them through her imagination. Though she had never been inside The Firs, each time she passed it she sensed an inner gust of recognition. She felt warm towards it, and curious.
That particular afternoon there was a light on in an upstairs window. Even on dark winter afternoons Grace had never seen a light before. Encouraged, swinging the collecting tin in hope, she hurried into the gloomy area of tarmacked drive behind the privet hedge, and rang the front doorbell.
After a long time–so long, Grace was about to give up – the door was opened by a young man in pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt. He was unshaven, apparently sleepy. Grace felt immediate awkward guilt. Perhaps she had woken him. He held a Walkman in one hand. The wires of his earplugs flopped over his chest. He looked hard at Grace–a mystified, unseeing look as if he could not quite focus–and was puzzled by her presence.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Sorry if I’ve disturbed you,’ said Grace. ‘I’ve come–’
‘Do I know you?’
‘No. But I’m a neighbour. I’m collecting for …’ Suddenly confused, Grace could not remember for whom she was collecting. Was it the blind, the deaf, birds, animals, Bosnia? She looked down at the label on the pretext of rattling the tin. ‘Muscular dystrophy’
‘I don’t know anyone with muscular dystrophy’
‘Nor do I.’
‘I’m Lucien.’ He suddenly grinned, unplugged himself from the Walkman. ‘Let’s see what we can do.’ He turned away from Grace to a cluttered hall table. The hall was panelled in dark wood, and narrow. Two shut doors. Very few clues, except for a dying pot plant.
Lucien picked up a woman’s crocodile handbag–real, Grace realised. He pulled out a twenty-pound note and handed it to her. Grace hesitated.
‘That’s an awful lot,’ she said.
‘She can afford it.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure. She’s ordered a Mercedes. She’s got three diamond rings, champagne stuffing the fridge, everything she bloody wants. She can afford it.’
As Grace still made no move, Lucien stepped towards her and pushed the note clumsily into the tin. So near, he smelt powerfully: a sour-sleep smell, smoke, sweat, garlic.
‘Well, if you’re sure,’ said Grace. ‘Thanks very much.’
Lucien moved back into the house.
‘Where’d you live, then?’
‘Reddish House, just down the road.’
‘One with all the leaves?’
That’s right.’ Think I know it. I don’t go out much. What’s your name?’
‘Grace. Grace Handle.’
Lucien thought about that for a long time. Grace wondered if he would ask the usual question, but reckoned he did not look like the sort of young man whose musical tastes encompassed Handel. She shifted, ready to go.
‘Want to come in?’
Grace hesitated again. Curiosity nearly overcame her.
‘I’d love to. But I have to get round a lot of houses before it’s dark.’
‘Yeah, well.’ He put back the earplugs. ‘Tell you what, I’ll drop round to your house one day. We could carry on talking. All right?’
‘That would be fine.’ Unsure that he could hear her reply, Grace nodded. Lucien shut the door. Grace hurried back to the road swinging the collecting box again, this time almost in triumph. What a very curious encounter, she thought. It would make a good story to tell William at supper that night. The sort of thing he would enjoy.
Later, encouraged by William’s laughter, she embellished her description as far as she could without breaking the frail fabric of reality. And next morning at breakfast, when the wild-looking Lucien stuck his head through the kitchen window and said he was coming to join them, William recognised the truth of his wife’s story. But reluctant to become involved in neighbourly chat so early, he hurried upstairs without finishing his coffee. Uninvited, Lucien quickly took his chair and would have drunk from William’s cup had not Grace thrust a clean one at him.
He looked at her furiously. ‘Lobelia’s bought a leather coat!’ he shouted.
‘Who’s Lobelia?’
‘My bloody mother. The one who gave you twenty pounds. I’m going to cut it up, burn it.’
Several replies flashed through Grace’s mind, but she made none of them. Instead she offered sugar, milk, toast and marmalade before Lucien returned to his angry diatribe.
That first morning of ranting was eleven months ago.
2
William Handle was a man constantly amazed by his possessions. It seemed to him unreasonable that he should be the owner of a house and its furniture, a car, a violin of some value, and a cupboard full of clothes. He knew his amazement bordered on the irrational, but having come from a family for whom making ends meet was a daily struggle, he felt it was no wonder that appreciation of security and wor
ldly goods should churn so powerfully within him.
Had it been through his own earnings he had acquired these worldly goods, he sometimes thought, then perhaps he would have felt differently. Pride, perhaps. Or at least some sense of achievement, having been able to provide comfort for his wife. But players in a string quartet, no matter how excellent, do not rank among British high earners. They are not the sort of people who have no need of mortgages. When William and Grace were first married they lived in a rented flat in Finsbury Park, a modest place that became intolerable once Jack was born. The combination of a screaming baby and William practising the violin (four hours a day, then) was more than any of them could bear. But there was no money to move somewhere larger.
When Jack was two Grace’s mother died, leaving her daughter the handsome estate she had inherited from her husband, a banker. The Handles immediately sold it, enabling them to buy Reddish House, where they had lived ever since, and intended to remain for the rest of their lives. There was enough income left comfortably to provide for necessities, so William regarded his salary as a bonus, not really needed, but useful for luxuries (a new lawnmower, the occasional bottle of good port, a generous pension fund). There being quite enough money for their modest needs, the Handles had little interest in it. Unlike most of their friends, it was not a subject that concerned them.
Buying Reddish House was their only major investment, and one they never regretted. Artisan Road ran through an agreeable part of a suburb of a large town west of London. The artisans after whom it was named may have built modest cottages in what was once a country lane. No sign of them now. The road was a collection of very disparate houses, only a few of which were true to their own period. The Handles’ house was one of these: a solid Edwardian building upon which no one had experimented with a Tudor addition or a Georgian front door. Windows were deeply set in the blocks of pale grey stone, though the charm of the stone itself was mostly invisible beneath a thick growth of Virginia creeper, from which the house had taken its name.
William’s father was dead by the time they bought the house–a mercy, really, he sometimes thought, for Archibald Handle would not have approved. A frustrated architect himself, he would have preferred his son and daughter-in-law to spend the money on something a little more experimental, something of their age. Ideally, he would have liked them to commission him to design and build something for them. William often imagined what they might have been spared: a glass box with no chimneys, roof of curved steel wings to give the impression the whole structure could become airborne at any moment.
William’s father was an architect with ideas so far ahead of his time that he found it impossible to find an employer to share his vision. The only time he worked as part of a team in an office was a disaster. Within weeks he was sacked for urging others to let their imaginations soar, making them restless. He was an unwanted influence. It was unlikely any solid firm of architects would wish to employ him, he was warned. And the warning proved right. Archibald was forced to work freelance for the Council, who kept him under a tight rein. Bus shelters, they kept requesting. Archibald did he best. He sent in designs of the most imaginative bus shelters any council had ever been quick to reject: and in the end produced what the great unenlightened, as he called them, wanted, for pitiful remuneration. The great sadness of his life was that he was never commissioned to design a single private house. The hundreds of ideas and detailed drawings, all filed, went to waste. ‘I was never discovered,’ were his dying words to William.
On the morning of the concert in Northampton William’s departure was delayed by thoughts of his father, combined with appreciative thoughts of Reddish House. He stood just outside the front door fingering leaves of the Virginia creeper, feeling the cold stone beneath them. He felt oddly reluctant to be on his way. What should have been a completely routine day–morning rehearsal at Grant’s house, on to Northampton for an early supper before the concert–held none of the comforts that anticipated routine normally provided. Why? He didn’t know.
Grace hurried out of the house carrying his violin case. She pretended she had not seen him fingering the Virginia creeper–he was always touching inanimate things, William: making sure they were real; testing their solidity; ascertaining they were not going to dissolve–at least, that’s what she imagined.
‘You’ve forgotten …?’
‘No I hadn’t, my Ace. Would I forget my violin? Have I ever?’ He slung it on the back seat of the car. In truth he had forgotten it. First time ever.
‘So.’ Grace crossed her arms under her breasts to make a comfortable shelf for her rapidly beating heart. When Lucien arrived this morning she had had to tell him he must go–William was prowling about, preparing to leave at ten thirty. She had told Lucien he could come back later, but he had left so grumpily she doubted he would, and the equilibrium of her morning had vanished. ‘Your plans? I’ve forgotten.’
‘Rehearsal, concert Northampton, home.’
‘Late?’
The infinitesimal pause, as William got into the car, served to accommodate a thought so alien it frightened him. It was also too vague to see any clear meaning.
‘Hope not,’ he said. ‘No reason why I should be. Any hold-ups and I’ll ring.’ This was the comforting thing he always said as he left. Grace pushed her head through the open window. They kissed. William, Grace saw, had his determined-to-concentrate-on-the-road face, which pleased her, for he was not a driver attuned to the possibility of others’ foolishness, or indeed to his own. She watched him back into the bush of spotted laurel, which had suffered badly over the years–he had never mastered the art of reversing. He gave her an affectionate nod, obeying her instructions never to take one hand off the steering wheel unless strictly necessary. God bless him, Grace said to herself.
Once William had left behind the perils of the town, and was safely on a dual carriageway where he could meander along at forty mph without annoying anyone, he switched on the radio. He found the station that played the ‘popular’ classics that usually he avoided. This morning, as always, it was playing gymkhana music: marches, the stuff of pageants and jubilees, tum-te-tee-tum. This morning William needed that sort of crude rhythm to jerk him back to normality. For even now, three miles along the familiar road to Grant’s house near Aylesbury, blessed ordinariness eluded him. His nervous apprehension was increased by the fact he could not tell from whence it came. (People laughed at him when he used the word whence: but he liked it and had no intention of dropping it because it had become archaic.)
It was nothing to do with Bonnie Morse, he had decided while shaving–having spent some troubled hours of the night wondering if she might be the cause. His new viola player, once he had got hold of her on the telephone, had sounded so ordinary, so practical, down to earth, efficient, shouting against dogs barking in the background, he was convinced her incredible mouth was a figment of his imagination, and the ideas that had lapped at him through the rain the other night were no more than a trick of the mind brought on by the process of ageing. All the same, the conversation, concerning her familiarity with the fourth movement of Schubert’s Quartet in A minor coming up in a week’s time, hadn’t quite stilled him. He rang her again not an hour later. Almost at Aylesbury, he reran the conversation in his head.
‘Bonnie, William Handle here again–so sorry, but blow me if I forgot to give you instructions how to get to Grant. Bit complicated … ‘At previous rehearsals she had come by taxi. For some reason she had decided to drive today, which gave rise to William’s anxiety about her finding the way. So often he assumed his own worries were shared by others.
A fractional brush of a sigh came down the receiver, he thought.
‘Mr Handle–’
‘Oh I say, do call me William–’
‘Well, William, thanks a lot but Grant did me a little map. Doesn’t look too difficult. Think I’ll be fine.’
‘Right, good.’ Grant was an unmarried man, some fifteen years younger than
William. ‘See you, then.’
‘See you.’
No, it was almost definitely nothing to do with Bonnie Morse.
When William reached the driveway of Grant’s house–a converted barn–he saw he was the first to arrive. No sign of Bonnie’s little red car, or Rufus’s very old Morgan. He switched off the radio and contemplated the legs of his new corduroy trousers. They were the colour of ripe young wheat, and soft to the touch. Grace had given them to him two Christmases ago. As with every new garment, he had put them to mature in his cupboard for a while, to get used to the idea of them before wearing them for the first time. This morning, unpremeditated, he had chosen to put them on for no apparent reason, and already he liked them. Good trousers: Grace had impeccable taste.
Grant had lit the Norwegian stove–which he did only on rehearsal days, alone he liked the cold–and was making coffee. He had lived in the barn, inherited from his parents years before the converting of barns became fashionable, for as long as William could remember. Both Grant’s parents had been musicians. He had spent many evenings of his boyhood listening to them playing, with a group of friends, far into the night round a paraffin stove. It had never occurred to him to be anything other than a musician, though for some time he could not decide which string instrument to make his own. Then by chance, at thirteen, he found an old seventy-eight record of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, which he played on the ancient radiogram (his parents lived in an unwitting time warp into which most modern technology was given no chance), and the decision was made for him.
The cello happened to be an appropriate instrument for Grant, for he was a large man, six foot two with the shoulders of a rugger player. He carried his instrument around as easily as the others carried their violins. His only problem was chairs: the kind provided on concert platforms were uncomfortable, perilous to his massive size. Several had not been able to withstand his weight, and had collapsed beneath him mid-concert. Grant’s seating problems had become one of Elmtree’s running jokes: something they would have to either explain to Bonnie Morse or–perhaps a better alternative–let her see for herself.