The Things You Do for Love

by Rachel Crowther

  Martin stared at her. ‘Where’s your house?’

  ‘In Oxfordshire. Not far from Didcot.’

  ‘That would do,’ he said. ‘What’re you asking? Rent, I mean?’

  Flora looked around at the gravel paths, the box hedges and lavender and the decorously pruned shrubs. Something rose in her chest, carrying the words out on a little eddy.

  ‘How about a swap?’ she said. ‘I’ll stay here, you go there.’

  She half expected to regret the proposal at once, but she didn’t. In fact once it was voiced, the idea seemed to her quite deliciously pleasing. Not simply the elegance of it, the avoidance of management fees and legal agreements (although she spared a thought for the estate agent’s dutiful emails); not simply the sudden allure of staying here, right here, for a month or two, trying out the nooks and corners of the garden and finding the perfect moment to sit in each of them. There was something more elusive, more rarefied, too. Something about a particular kind of intimacy: having free rein in someone else’s house, among their possessions. Something about the curious blend of safety and risk involved in trying out someone else’s life, and letting them loose in yours.

  ‘Well,’ said Martin, ‘I’m not a man to shilly-shally. I’m heading back to London on Monday, so if you’re serious, I can take a look at the place then.’

  August 1978

  Above the heavy front door there’s a half moon of glass, patterned with art deco swirls, which Flora already associates with the pleasure of coming home. There’s no light shining through it yet on this summer evening, and her heart skips at the thought of Henry sitting at his desk as the house settles to dusk. This, she thinks, is the first of thousands of homecomings: the first thread in the weft of married life.

  ‘Henry?’ she calls, as the door shuts behind her. There’s no response. Can he be out? Damn: she should have rung from the hospital, as soon as she knew she wasn’t on duty tonight after all. She puts down her bag and starts up the stairs. ‘Henry? I’m back.’

  On the landing she hesitates. The bedroom door is shut, but now she can hear – imagines she can hear – muffled voices. A radio? Burglars?

  ‘Henry?’ she calls again, loud enough to be sure an intruder would hear. A tingle of fear, only half-credible, flickers through her chest. She keeps one hand on the newel post, ready to sprint back down the stairs and out of the house.

  There’s silence, and then – thank God! – a voice she recognises.

  ‘Flora?’

  Chiding herself, she runs along the landing and throws open the bedroom door – then stops short. Henry is in bed, and beside him, taking no trouble to conceal herself, is a woman with a lot of blonde hair and an expression of unabashed amusement.

  *

  As the sound of the front door slamming shut echoes in the narrow hallway, Henry faces Flora, his back to the front door. Along with an eddy of perfume there is something less tangible in the air: the ghostly remains of Flora’s joy at returning to her husband after her first day back at work as a married woman. That, more than the perfume, causes the constriction in her throat and the throb of distress in her chest.

  ‘Why?’ she manages to say.

  Henry looks at her and she looks straight back: this is important, some unfamiliar part of her brain tells her. It’s no good avoiding his eyes, or his expression. She remembers his kisses this morning, his sweet words, and she feels as though she’s falling, as though they are both plummeting downwards in a lift.

  ‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ he says.

  Flora shakes her head. For the first time she feels a bite of anger, clean and sharp and almost welcome, cutting through the disbelief and confusion.

  ‘I mean, why did you marry me?’

  ‘Because I love you,’ he says. ‘Because you love me.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’ Flora can feel her shoulders trembling. ‘For Christ’s sake, Henry, don’t demean me any further.’

  ‘My darling . . .’

  He takes a step towards her, then stops. Flora can see the door handle now, and for a second, a long, considering second, she wills herself to push past him. She isn’t a runner-away, a giver-up, but she can see that it might be the best and the bravest thing to do, after two weeks of marriage. She could run to Landon, perhaps. She remembers his reaction when she told him about her engagement and it strikes her suddenly, sharply, that she might have made a terrible mistake, overlooking the boy-next-door.

  For a long time neither of them says anything more, although the buzz of thought is almost audible, the things each of them knows the other is thinking. Flora hasn’t had much experience of men, and she can’t flatter herself that she suspected Henry’s weakness before this evening, but she understands the situation very clearly now. Henry hasn’t apologised, and she knows that’s not an oversight. Should he at least be sorry that he’s been found out so soon, she wonders, or is it better this way?

  She looks up at the semi-circle of light above the door, the pale gold of a late summer sunset. She can see what lies ahead: or at least, she can see that her marriage is going to be entirely different from what she expected. She feels, just now, very young and very innocent. Despite her medical training, her headstrong independence, she is the product of a sheltered upbringing. The honeymoon is over, she tells herself, and she has to shut her eyes to keep the tears in.

  ‘Flora,’ Henry says. The tremor has spread through her body now, and she doesn’t resist when he puts his arms around her. ‘I’m telling you the truth,’ he says. ‘I love you, and I want to be married to you. If you change your mind I’ll understand, but if you stay with me I can give you everything you want. I’ll always support you. I’ll always love you.’

  Even as she stands there Flora can feel the moment slipping past, the moment when she can say, that’s not everything I want. Her career for his infidelity: does he really expect her to accept that bargain? But she doesn’t reject it. She doesn’t escape through the door; she doesn’t pull away from him; she doesn’t find the words to put her case.

  While he holds her – while she stands stiffly encircled in his arms, resisting the pulse of desire that feels undignified, even vulgar, in the circumstances – she opens her eyes again, and gazes into the rooms on either side of them, filled with the heavy curtains and dark furniture she didn’t choose. Henry’s heirlooms, inherited along with the money that persuaded her mother he was a suitable husband.

  ‘We can move out of London,’ he says, as though he’s read her mind. ‘We’ll find a house in the country, wherever there’s a job for you. I can do my work anywhere.’

  Henry hesitates for a moment, and Flora thinks he’s going to say, we can be happy. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t say anything else, and perhaps it’s this restraint that tips the balance. She lets him take her hands and lead her into the kitchen, and she accepts the glass of wine he pours for her. Just one glass: there’s an operating list tomorrow, and she needs a steady hand.

  14

  A couple of years ago, when her father’s cancer first came back, Kitty went to see a counsellor. It was her mother’s idea – and the woman reminded her of Flora, in a way. Kitty didn’t go back after the first session, but some of the things the counsellor said stuck in her mind.

  How would you describe yourself in one sentence?

  Kitty still played that game sometimes. Sum yourself up in ten words, or six, or two. She never quite hit the right note: always too morbid or too flippant. She wasn’t suited to introspection, she decided. She couldn’t keep enough of a distance to see herself squarely.

  Then there was another question: What obstacles have you encountered in your closest relationships?

  Kitty didn’t need a counsellor to answer that one. Not so much Henry’s cancer as his affairs. Answer that, she’d wanted to ask: how could she love someone who’d caused them all such hurt? How could she love him so much and – not hate him; it wasn’t that simple. Fear the power he had over her. Resent her susceptibi
lity to him. Much the same as her feelings about Daniel, she thought now.

  She hadn’t seen Daniel since that evening when he’d turned up on her doorstep. It was true, what she’d said to Lou: she missed him. She missed the sex, and the reassurance of having someone close, and being wanted by him. But the longer she didn’t see him, the more she felt it was right to stay away, not to answer his calls or his texts or his emails even though it pleased her that he kept sending them. The obstacles to her relationship with Daniel, she thought, were too deeply entangled with him, with the two of them, to count as something separate. The reasons for wanting him were also warning signs: the way her feelings engulfed her as soon as she was near him; the fascination, complication, of sharing music; the fact that he had no parents and hers were . . . Oh, and anyway, how could you explain, how could you analyse – whatever it was they had? Sometimes the whole thing felt like a figment of her imagination, a mirage that would disappear if she opened her eyes or clicked her fingers, and at other times it felt so real and so essential that – like her own psyche – she couldn’t stand far enough back to see it clearly, and couldn’t be complete without it. Was that love, or self-delusion? How could she tell?

  After their first encounter at the music college auditions, that moment of coup de foudre, they hadn’t seen each other until the autumn. Daniel had spent six months as an intern with an opera company in Melbourne, and although her father would have paid for a plane ticket if Kitty had asked, it would have been impossible, ridiculous, to follow him across the world after such a brief meeting. Nothing had happened by then, nothing substantial or definite that she could rely on in the intervening months, and although she’d been quite certain, after that first day, of the understanding between them, it hadn’t been enough to save her from agonies of doubt and speculation. She’d read and reread Daniel’s blog, and occasionally allowed herself to post a response. When October arrived, she knew that he knew who she was, but nothing else was clear anymore: even her own feelings had been tortured out of recognition over the summer. And Henry’s health had gone downhill, too. Nothing was quite as it had been.

  Daniel was the first person she saw when she walked into the auditorium that September morning, eight months ago now. Back from his Australian winter, he was smaller than she remembered and his hair had grown. And he was looking out for her: that was instantly clear. His smile of recognition came as a shock, as did the tumble of doubt in her stomach, the unsettling sense that she had been deluding herself (and even, somehow, Daniel) all summer.

  Whether it was down to chance or the staff’s recollection of their collaboration at the auditions, Kitty never found out, but they were thrown together for the three-day exercise designed as an ice-breaker and introduction to the course. The two of them and a hapless cellist whom Kitty hadn’t seen again after the end-of-week performance, and for whom she’d written a painfully derivative Elgaresque Romance which entirely failed to disguise the romance already consuming Kitty and Daniel. For three days they were barely apart. At night they confessed that they’d thought of nothing but each other during the months of separation, and by day they played, planned, experimented, revelled in the extraordinary harmony between them. Every time Daniel left a room or entered it, Kitty felt again that tumult that she assumed was love.

  And then the week ended, the whole group came back together to play to each other, and Kitty saw that others had bonded just as they had, and had produced performances just as interesting as theirs. She saw, too, that Daniel was certain of his claim on her. The floundering inside her had turned by now into something that was conspicuously closer to dread than to love.

  Looking back, it felt as if there had been a showdown, perhaps more than one, but in fact there had simply been the slither and soar of a relationship that no sooner got on its feet than she wanted it to stop, and that was no sooner dismantled than she wanted it back. Sometimes it seemed that the difficulty was entirely on her side, but she had just enough self-knowledge to recognise that what she was being offered wasn’t entirely straightforward.

  And then Henry’s death had provided a watershed, and Kitty had seized it. Was this what she wanted, she wondered again now? It seemed to her sometimes that she was cutting off her nose to spite her face – but there was another reason to stay away from Daniel just now, a good reason to put him out of her mind. Since her tutorial with Prof Davidson she was writing, composing, in a different way from before: she was deeply absorbed by her song cycle. She didn’t want to let Janet Davidson down, but that wasn’t the only thing driving her. She understood what that word meant now: a driving force. It wasn’t pleasure but compulsion, urging her onwards. She’d found a public library not far from the college where she could concentrate, certain she wouldn’t be disturbed. Every day now the hours slipped smoothly past, and Kitty worked.

  *

  On Fridays the library stayed open until half past seven. At seven fifteen, the librarian started moving quietly among the tables, shutting down the computers. Kitty was the last person left. The elderly man with the ancient tweed jacket had left half an hour ago, and the tall black woman who’d been typing noisily for a couple of hours had gone too. Kitty sat back in her chair and stared up at the blank ceiling. Had she really been here all day? Worse, had she been here all day and not finished yet?

  The deadline for the song cycle was in three days, the concert performance only a week away, and something wasn’t right with the last song. The poem was difficult for her: An October Salmon, one of Henry’s favourites. The dying salmon whose glory days are still a vivid memory was painfully poignant. Sometimes, instead of the torn and damaged fish, Kitty saw Alice’s Bacchus, his sharp eyes watching her while she worked. Perhaps she shouldn’t have chosen that poem, but it hadn’t been a choice, exactly. It was more as if the poem had insisted on its inclusion. Kitty stared at the words again, each of them completely familiar by now, their pitch and tone engraved in her head. How could she do justice to their bitterness – death’s clownish ceremonials – and to the dignity of the ending? How could her music convey the stillness, the stopped-ness of the old salmon, as well as the perpetual motion of the ocean? She had never felt before this overwhelming desire to identify what was missing from a piece, or the desolating sense that it was beyond her grasp.

  When she was a small child, Kitty had taken for granted the soundtrack that played in her head. She’d assumed that places and scenes had their own melody, and that everyone heard them in the same key, just as they saw the world in the same colours. When she understood that this musical accompaniment wasn’t something other people had, it had made her feel special. Her experience of life, and her memories, had an extra layer of pleasure or suspense or fear, almost as if she was living in a movie: a special gift bestowed on her by some benevolent deity. But after Henry’s death, the world had fallen silent: a devastating change. It was only recently that she’d realised how helpful the stream of music in her mind was for a composer – a kind of sixth sense, like the special way a painter might see the world in terms of shape and texture – and now it had gone. She couldn’t have explained this to anyone else. She’d hardly been able to acknowledge it to herself as part of what she’d lost. It was too private, too peculiar a thing to put into words – a sign of madness, even – but she’d thought life would never be the same again.

  These last few days, though, she had found another way to access the music in her head. It was harder this way, but more satisfying. In the past it had always been there, waiting, whenever she’d cared to listen in: she’d been able to draw out whichever strand of melody presented itself for a particular mood or occasion, or release a jack-in-the-box fragment of orchestral colour. But she’d never felt in control of it, and it had seemed almost a cheat to write it down, as though she was poaching something that didn’t really belong to her – like the shoemaker and the elves.

  Since her meeting with Janet Davidson, the process had been entirely different. Perhaps it was mere
ly a question of focus and intention, but she’d found herself striving to find the building blocks, to select and shape what she wrote, not simply transcribing something ready-made. Her automatic soundtrack was still muted: the music only flowed when she sought it out, but it brought an exhilaration she’d never experienced before. This felt like honest toil, like proper creativity. Sometimes she’d had to feel her way in the dark, agonising over one tonality or another, but the material hadn’t let her down – until just now. Now, she saw that she’d been deceiving herself into believing she was honing a craft rather than mining a natural resource. She had absolutely no idea what to do when she was stuck: she had no other tools at her disposal beyond the dry technicalities of chords and progressions.

  She felt a burst of anger, now, towards Janet Davidson. Surely this is what she should have been taught, over the course of the MA? Surely it shouldn’t be a case of waiting blindly for inspiration? And if it was, then clearly Prof Davidson was wrong, and what Kitty had written so far had been a flash in the pan, not something she could go on doing. That thought made her feel worse than she had since Henry died. No, worse than she’d ever felt: as though the whole of her, everything that mattered, had been sucked into a whirlpool. Things she hadn’t even known were important until they were being snatched away.

  And now, she thought with another stab of frustration, she had to stop anyway. The librarian was watching her, and the clock was ticking towards seven thirty. Kitty could feel the song slipping away, the thread of it escaping like the lifeblood of the salmon. God, she hated music. Hated Janet Davidson, and hated herself for being lured into such a ludicrous pursuit. See what she’d been driven to now: a dead end.

  She stuffed the sheets of music into her satchel, frightened by the strength of her feelings. She’d been working too hard, she told herself. She needed a drink, an evening off.

  It was a surprise to come out into the sunshine. The days were getting longer: it would be light for another hour or two still, and the London streets were full of bustle and optimism. But Kitty felt flat and tired now that the first rush of anger had cooled. She wished there were something happening this evening, something in her diary, but there wasn’t. That was her own fault, of course. It wasn’t just Daniel she’d pushed aside when her father was dying. She’d been living a strange, isolated sort of life these last few months, and she couldn’t face explaining herself to any of the school friends or fellow students she could possibly call. Instead she walked to the tube station and made her way down to the northbound platform.