The Things You Do for Love

by Rachel Crowther

  She stood for a moment in front of the mirror. Her hair was longer than usual, curling around her ears, and the square jaw, famously pugnacious, was softened by months of strain. So, she asked herself, how is this going to work? Her reflection faced her out, as it had always done, but it didn’t offer the reassurance she hoped for. I have no more idea than you, it seemed to say, and its expression alarmed her.

  *

  By the time he fell ill, Flora hadn’t loved Henry for a long time. At least, that’s what she would have said: a convenient gloss. He would have said he loved her, of course. Henry always said he loved her. Not enough, her sister Jean might whisper – Jean who was both more delicate and more ruthless than Flora – but that wasn’t the whole story either.

  When memory sneaked up on her like this, Flora sometimes thought, with a rush of anguish, of her honeymoon, and sometimes she floundered in search of a name for what she’d lost: something both more complicated and more quotidian than love. It was unfair, she reflected, that life could deliver up an unsatisfactory marriage and then make you regret its ending so keenly – and that the opportunity for reconciliation, near its end, should come at such cost. A cost, indeed, that she was only just beginning to count.

  Flora wasn’t given to self-pity. Self-pity she saw as the fallback of those without the privilege of free will, or the ability to weigh up side effects and opportunity costs as they exercised it. She had always, she thought now, held herself honestly to account. This thought elicited a draught of reassurance, but it was followed by a flutter of doubt. What exactly could she be held accountable for, among all that had happened in the last sixty years? That was the rub. That was the question staring back at her from the mirror, the reflection she couldn’t quite face.

  Outside, the sky was dark and starless. It was midnight, although her body clock was so thrown out by travel and emotion that it could have been almost any time at all. Despite her tiredness, Flora wasn’t ready to go to bed. She had plenty of books, packed for the trip to Alsace, but she didn’t feel like reading. Taking out her phone, she reread her daughters’ replies to the text she’d sent from Calais. No reproaches; only a polite curiosity. Exhibition good – Lou. A few surprises – Kitty. And then, an hour later – Alice won! All send love . . . Nothing more.

  Flora didn’t need reminding that there was precious little waiting for her back in England. Orchards could absorb her energy for a while, despite the improvements she and Henry had made before he died – but interior decoration couldn’t replace the operating theatre and the outpatients clinic, the cut and thrust of the conference circuit. And her daughters both had lives of their own: Lou was working towards partnership in a city law firm, and Kitty was doing a postgraduate course in composition at the London College of Music, just as Henry had wanted. She shouldn’t forget, Flora thought, how good they’d both been to Henry while he was dying – good to her, too – but certainly they’d be relieved she wasn’t coming home yet. They weren’t used to taking account of her. She closed her eyes, searching her mind for images of her children. Ordinary moments: little girls in the bath, in the garden. A scattering of memories, she thought. What could she possibly expect of them now, when they’d been raised against the odds, in the interstices of her surgical career?

  For the second time that day, an image of Landon came into her head: Landon’s address at Henry’s funeral, which had succeeded so effortlessly in making her life with Henry – their family life – real and whole, alongside the recitation of Henry’s achievements as a public man. Landon who had hardly visited when Henry was ill, but had been such a pillar of strength in the fortnight after his death; whom she had almost allowed herself to rely on for a little while. But she couldn’t expect anything of him, either. That was dangerous territory indeed.

  Flora moved abruptly away from the window. Her eye fell on the French guide book in her suitcase, and as she picked it up the fold-out map at the back fell open. She tried and failed to concertina it back into place, then carried it over to the desk and spread it out flat. Such a huge country, she thought. She leaned over it, tracing département boundaries with her eye; following the Loire and the Rhône, the Seine and the Garonne as they wriggled across the map like coronary arteries; picking out the sharp ridges of the Alps and the Pyrenees. And slowly, slowly, a sort of calm spread through her: something less than happiness, but more than mere resignation. A little like the feeling in theatre when the laparoscope slides into place, offering a first glimpse of the unknown.

  It was true, what she’d told the woman on the boat. I have plenty of time to travel now. There was no need for a grand plan, no need to make more than one decision at a time. There was more than enough to occupy her here. She’d spent the last week, with Henry’s well-meaning cousin, on the eastern side of France: should she head south towards Paris now, or move further west?

  4

  It was eleven o’clock by the time Lou and Alice left the Taelwyn. Even her gloomiest estimate had been too optimistic, Lou reflected. She wasn’t accustomed to being bettered in the game of worst-case scenarios, but she was too tired to care. By the time Alice finally shook the hand of the Chair of Judges and said goodbye, all she could feel was relief.

  Alice had driven the minivan to London earlier in the day and left it in an underground car park a few blocks away. They walked along the quiet streets in silence, passing through squares of tall white houses – perfect family houses from some fantasy time in the past, Lou thought, like a set for The Nutcracker or Peter Pan. The car park was from a different kind of set, dank and dimly lit, ready for an ambush or a shootout. The minivan squawked as they approached, its doors unlocking obediently.

  As they drove across Waterloo Bridge and headed down Kennington Road towards the string of long-engulfed villages between central London and the M25, images loomed and faded in Lou’s head, a distorted slideshow of the evening behind them. Bacchus, his eyes sharp and knowing, vine leaves wound with terrible delicacy among the strands of his thick hair. Kitty looking at her, oddly blank-faced. Landon, purveying soothing balm. The great swarming sea of people around them all the time.

  They had behaved, she thought, as the Joneses did on such occasions: with a kind of equivocation that only partly hid the truth. Not enough had been said, about the sculpture or Flora’s absence or anything else; certainly not about Henry, nor how apt the choice of Bacchus was, with its allusions of creativity and joy as well as dissolution and excess. The Joneses had always been expert at reserving their judgement, at preserving a calm exterior. It was, Lou thought, part of the legacy of their childhood.

  Lou was accustomed to seeing Kitty as a responsibility – her sometimes wayward, somewhat damaged, little sister. It was hard to believe that Kitty was grown-up now, but there had been a moment this evening when Lou had looked at her and understood that they were feeling the same hotchpotch of conflicting emotions: admiration and affront, pride and embarrassment, affection and antipathy. They’d promised to meet the following week: Bacchus had done that much for them, Lou thought. But she wondered, suddenly, whether Henry’s death would bring her closer to Kitty or set them down further apart.

  *

  Alice pulled up at a red light, jerking Lou out of her reverie. Lou glanced across at her. Alice’s hair was dishevelled, her body tense and upright. Her uncharacteristic tears as she’d accepted the prize medal an hour or two before had owed less to the emotion of winning, Lou understood, than to remorse. She felt a clutch and wriggle in her belly as she remembered that she too had things to explain and to apologise for.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Alice said again now. ‘About Bacchus. About not telling you. I hope I can make amends.’

  ‘There are none to make,’ Lou said.

  ‘Well.’ Alice kept her eyes on the road. She’d seen how distressed Kitty was; presumably she attributed Lou’s silence to the same cause.

  ‘I’m very pleased for you,’ Lou said. ‘About the prize.’

  Where were
the words, the courage, to tell Alice about the baby? That would certainly assuage Alice’s guilt, and claim it for herself instead. Was that what stopped her? A weary disinclination to be in the wrong for the rest of the journey home? Not just that, Lou knew; nor just the sculpture’s confounding of emotions already too complicated to see clearly. No, it was something more primeval. Something about the power the secret knowledge of pregnancy brought: something more familiar to Tudor queens than twenty-first century lawyers, perhaps. This was news for which superstition required the right circumstances, the right reception. She needed to be sure of that before she said anything.

  ‘Remind me how you know Landon Peverell,’ Alice asked now.

  ‘He introduced my parents,’ Lou said, grateful for the change of subject. ‘He and Flora knew each other as children, and he met Henry at Oxford.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem very like Henry,’ Alice said.

  ‘He’s had a sad life,’ Lou said. ‘His wife’s been ill for years; they never had any children.’

  She felt a little stab then, a reminder of how the meaning of that phrase had shifted for her. Landon would have made a good father, she thought. Alice glanced at her: there was something softer, easier in her face now.

  ‘I’m glad we didn’t go ahead with the baby plan,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind too much.’

  Lou opened her mouth, then shut it again. The air around her head seemed to have frozen; for a few moments she could barely breathe. What could she possibly say to Alice now?

  She stared through the windscreen at the crisscross of nondescript streets, the shut-up shops, the places still serving pizza and kebabs and curry. The nausea had evaporated, some time when she wasn’t paying attention. Perhaps they could stop and eat something. A midnight feast: wasn’t that the time for kissing and making up? But the lights had changed, the minivan was accelerating past the garish signs, and the faint waft of garlic and hot meat was gone.

  5

  Kitty was no stranger to the Piccadilly Line at night. Most evenings the journey home passed almost without her noticing, but occasionally the familiar scene – the echoing ticket hall, the airless tunnels, the lighted train rattling in from the dark – suddenly seemed ominous. Sometimes this happened for no particular reason, but at other times – tonight, for example – it was easier to explain.

  She stood near the entrance to the platform, her iPod plugged in and her eyes fixed in an expression of boredom. She’d realised this was one of those off-pitch evenings when she’d noticed a man in a pin-striped suit along the platform and felt a fillip of relief, gone as soon as it was acknowledged. Why shouldn’t men in city suits be rapists or murderers? It was the perfect disguise – unless you were a Greek god, and could turn yourself into a shower of gold. Kitty wished suddenly that she’d asked Daniel to come with her this evening. Not for protection, she told herself, but for company.

  She looked away, turning her mind deliberately back to the exhibition. Alice was good at suffering, she thought, and impassive cruelty, as well as – but no, she wasn’t going to think any more about the figure of Bacchus. Think instead of the agony of Daphne’s transformation into a tree: naked arms twisting into stiff twigs, shapely legs taking root. Or Leda, her head pinioned by the swan’s sadistic beak. How could you get all that pride and brutality into stone eyes, Kitty wondered, and still make them unmistakably a swan’s? How could you show the sweetness of a body so distorted by pain? She knew people asked similar questions about music, but music seemed altogether more straightforward to Kitty. Every detail was coded in the dots on the stave, ready to be recreated each time it was performed – ready to be pored over by students of composition, if they paid proper attention to their studies. But however hard she looked at Alice’s sculptures she couldn’t fathom how she managed to extract so much emotion from a solid block of stone. Lucky Lou, having someone so talented, so out-of-the-ordinary, to love her.

  Kitty had her iPod on shuffle, and as the train approached the soundtrack in her headphones moved from Mia van Arlen to Messiaen. The pin-stripe man sat down opposite her, his attention absorbed by a free paper. As the rich thread of a cello melody filled her ears, Kitty felt her nerves relax at last, absorbing her in the drama of Messiaen’s narrative rather than her own.

  This was another thing Kitty didn’t understand: that people could listen to music as though it was just sound. Sometimes she hated music, wished it didn’t exist, but she couldn’t ignore it when she heard it; couldn’t not feel it. As a little girl she’d understood music better than language for a while. Standing beside her father when she was three or four, listening to a Beethoven quartet, she’d recognised in his face the same emotions she felt, but she couldn’t name them. She’d been so overwhelmed by the experience that she’d cried – and then everything had been spoiled, because someone had scooped her up and taken her to bed. After that she’d learned not to betray herself. She’d kept it all inside, her music and what it meant. Even now, alone on the late night tube, she stared ahead as though her attention was focussed on the advertising posters above the pin-stripe man’s head, with her mind full of Messiaen.

  But when the movement came to an end she turned it off. The events of the evening wouldn’t lie quietly, and there were other things on her mind too. It was too much, Kitty thought, to be miserable about her music and her father at the same time. Of course they were connected: it was from Henry that she’d inherited any talent she had, and Henry who’d been responsible for her musical education. But it was tough to find herself wavering in her resolve to abandon the MA course because she’d seen her father’s face this evening. It was tough to think that everything she did in the music world would be shaped by him and infused with his memory, but that he’d never again hear anything she heard, or played, or wrote.

  And it was just like her mother to disappear just when she could have been – no, it wasn’t even that. It would have been worse if Flora had been there to see the statue this evening. She’d disappeared when they were expecting her back, that was all: she’d left them wondering.

  *

  It was after midnight when Kitty got out at Wood Green, but the High Road was still busy and brightly lit. When she’d chosen her flat, she’d traded a longer tube journey for a shorter walk to the station, because she liked knowing she could be on the train ten minutes after she woke up, heading anywhere she wanted – but also because she loved the way a tiny bedroom and bathroom and a cupboard-sized kitchen had been carved out of a large Victorian room here, leaving an L-shaped sitting room with a window onto the street. This flat was the first place she’d ever lived alone, and it sometimes felt more like a companion than a home: she was never sure what kind of mood she would find it in. Welcoming tonight, she hoped, starting up the stairs. She could do with –

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice from the shadows. A voice she recognised, but even so the shriek of alarm was fully formed before Kitty could stop it.

  Daniel had been sitting on the landing with his back against her door: he scrambled to his feet and reached his arms out to hold her.

  ‘Hey – ssh! It’s me.’

  ‘I know it’s bloody you. What are you doing here? How did you get in?’

  ‘The guy opposite opened the door. He recognised me.’

  Kitty was trembling, the pent-up emotion of the evening spilling out now in Daniel’s arms. She let him hold her for a moment, paralysed by the familiar push-pull of his presence; the pleasure of remembering his smell, his solidity, the pressure of his hands in the small of her back. Had she really not wanted to see him all this time? Her father’s death had been a sea-change, she thought: Life Before had been stopped in its tracks. It had been too hard to start everything up again. Too hard to think about it.

  ‘I haven’t seen you for weeks,’ Daniel said now, his breath muffling her neck. ‘I thought it was about time. I thought . . . I needed to see you, anyway.’

  ‘You scared me.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to.
I hoped you’d be pleased.’

  She and Daniel had met at the auditions for the music college the previous spring. Daniel was nothing like the others – all those musicians who looked as though they’d lived in a dimly-lit practice room for the last decade. Daniel had enough life in him to fuel six people, an electric mix of aloofness and dissatisfaction and vulnerability shimmering through the outward aura of assurance. He’d been given a Rhapsody of Kitty’s to play that morning, and she’d been transfixed by his virtuosity, by the way he’d brought her music to life. But she’d felt more than admiration, much more than that. She’d wanted him to look at her, touch her, hold her: she hadn’t cared what came of the audition as long as he spoke to her afterwards. Since then there had barely been an hour when she hadn’t thought of him, either with longing or with dread.

  ‘So can I come in?’ he asked.

  Daniel was like a spice whose taste she couldn’t remember when it wasn’t in her mouth, and longed to recall. Daniel was exhausting.

  ‘Not now,’ she said.

  He let her go and took a step backward, his eyes on her face. ‘It’s midnight, Kitty,’ he wheedled. ‘I’ve been waiting almost two hours. You’re not going to throw me out into the night?’

  He sounded almost certain of his chances; there was the slightest undercurrent of a teasing reproof. Was it that, or the small gap of doubt, that triggered something inside her? Kitty looked back at him, at the sweet arch of his cheekbones and the thick curls spilling onto his forehead, and words came out which she seemed to have no hand in.