16
Flora knew at once where she was. Years of waking for surgical emergencies had instilled the habit of instant alertness, but this morning there was no need to follow it with instant action.
The other side of the bed was still warm, the faint smell of another body lingering between the sheets, and a streak of golden light between the curtains suggested the sun had risen several hours ago. The morning after the night before, she thought. It was a long time since she’d been in this position, facing the consequences of sexual recklessness – except perhaps after certain reconciliations with Henry which she’d later thought ill-considered. And on those occasions, she’d woken to a sinking awareness of weakness, or wishful thinking, that was conspicuously absent this time.
She shut her eyes again, remembering the way night had fallen more suddenly than she was used to, and Martin had been more diffident than she expected. The birds on the wallpaper, the slight smell of lavender in the room, the luxury of being held in his arms until she fell asleep. There was nothing to qualify the pleasure of the memory except a slight fearfulness that she had no wish to address now.
She listened for signs of movement below, imagining Martin preparing breakfast in the kitchen – perhaps even setting a tray. But that thought reminded her of Francine Abelard, and Flora didn’t want to think about Madame Abelard: about her kindness, her long friendship with Martin, her reaction to Flora’s absence last night. There was a dressing gown on the back of the door; slipping it on, Flora opened the curtains, and her heart bloomed at the sight of the garden laid out beneath her. Whatever else happened, she thought, Les Violettes was hers for the summer.
Just then, she heard the front door open. Another dip and flutter, recollecting what lay immediately in store. She came downstairs quietly, but Martin heard her before she reached the kitchen.
‘Morning,’ he said. ‘Perfect timing. Just back from the village.’
He made a show of holding out a plate of croissants, as though pleased to have a prop to hand.
‘Delicious,’ said Flora.
For a few seconds they stood looking at each other – not awkwardly, Flora thought; more as though to savour the moment before anything else was said or done – and then Martin came towards her and kissed her on the forehead, one hand still balancing the plate.
‘I promise this isn’t what happens every time I meet someone in the village shop,’ he said.
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
It occurred to her that she might have expected to see him differently this morning – to realise that he was older or fatter or less well-kempt than she had remembered – but she didn’t. It was remarkable how straightforward the situation felt: no betrayal, no guilt, no dismaying reality to face up to. Perhaps this was what the next twenty-five years were for, she thought impishly, as she watched Martin spoon coffee into the cafetière.
‘I Googled you this morning,’ he said, when they were sitting on the terrace.
‘How very modern.’
‘You’re a distinguished woman: I didn’t realise. You’ve been very modest.’
‘You didn’t ask for a CV.’
Martin tore a piece off his croissant and spread jam on it with the care Flora had begun to associate with his approach to food. The right amount of jam, she thought. The right kind too, no doubt. She remembered again her morning in bed, sampling Madame Abelard’s jam: an age ago.
‘I wouldn’t have dared to speak to you if I’d known,’ Martin said.
She smiled. ‘Well, then, I’m glad you didn’t.’
*
Martin offered to drive her back to the farm, but Flora preferred to walk. She needed the exercise, but more than that she dreaded the idea of reappearing on the Abelards’ doorstep, at midday, with Martin. She rather dreaded the idea of returning at all, in fact. Quite apart from a natural fastidiousness about hospitality and the dignity of appearances, if she was going to be living in the village for the rest of the summer, the Abelards’ opinion was of more than passing importance.
She had half-imagined Madame waiting in the hall for her, but she needn’t have worried. Only the skinny farmyard cat witnessed her arrival, slinking out of the barn to mew at her in hope of a titbit. Flora shut the heavy front door behind her and climbed the stairs. The silence was strange. She had always felt, before, the presence of people here – of Madame, at least; her husband was rarely to be seen, either in the house or about the farm – but today she was sure the house was empty. There were no cars outside, no faint clatter of dishes from the kitchen, no whisper of a voice or a radio. It was dark inside – darker than Les Violettes, with its white paint and large windows. The landing, laid with threadbare rugs, was longer than she’d noticed before, with more doors leading off it. Flora had to resist an impulse to explore, now she had the house to herself. Which of these rooms were occupied by the Abelards, she wondered, and which by guests? Had new visitors arrived yesterday? Had there been a jolly party around the table d’hôte last night, conversing in some polyglot combination of languages?
When she opened her own door, the barrenness of the room came as a shock. The milkmaids looked forlorn this morning, pushed clumsily back from the window: Flora straightened the folds of material, glancing down at the view that had kept her company these last few days. She couldn’t put her finger on what she was feeling. Anticlimax, she supposed, but it felt more complicated than that. Not a sense of flatness, but of restlessness, impatience, hunger. And of doubt: suddenly, like a change of light, a different view of her situation. She was sixty, a widow, wholly out of practice in the matter of pleasure-seeking. Did she have any right to this – to any of this?
She rested her hands on the windowsill and stared out at the apple trees, the woods beyond, the distant spire. And then her sister Jean’s face rose in her mind’s eye, wearing an expression Flora had seen many times: not just disapproval, but the expectation of disaster to follow. Come-uppance, Jean would say. And perhaps she was right, Flora thought. Would the joy she had felt this morning tarnish more quickly than she could have imagined possible?
She pushed open the window and leaned out a little way to feel the sun on her face. No, she wouldn’t give it up just yet. Wasn’t this exactly what she’d felt all those years ago, waiting for someone to call – waiting for Henry, probably? She might be older and wiser, but the uncertainty, the doubt, was surely the same; the sense that happiness was more than she deserved. At least she wouldn’t be left in limbo this time, anyway. Martin was coming to take her out for dinner this evening, before he left for England tomorrow. That much she could count on. As for his departure, she knew that was one reason things had followed the course they had with so little hesitation – so there was, she told herself firmly, no cause for regret.
She turned away from the window now and considered the afternoon ahead. A walk, she thought. A long walk, and then a bath. Perhaps she should email Lou and Kitty too, not to tell them about Martin, certainly not that, but to mention the possibility of the house swap. Perhaps one of them might come and visit her, this summer. The thought of her daughters at Les Violettes, admiring the garden in the full heat of August, was both complicated and delightful.
17
Sitting rigid in her seat in the concert hall, Kitty was back in primary school, waiting her turn to show a painting or recite a poem in assembly. She remembered vividly the weight of expectation, and the intensity of feelings running so close to the surface that she was sure they must be visible: dread and longing steeping her skin.
The hall could hold two hundred, and already half the seats were full. Kitty gazed at the white walls, the blue upholstered chairs, the gold lilies at the side of the stage. The shush of conversation swelled and receded around her, echoing up to the steepled roof. The acoustics were taunting her, she thought, showing off the refinement that would ensure every note was heard, every trill and slur and discord.
It wasn’t the first time Kitty had heard her music performed, but this
felt like a new experience. The lunchtime series at St Mark’s, Marlborough Square: Kitty Jones juxtaposed with Schumann and Brahms, performed by the young Czech baritone who’d won the college Lieder Prize earlier in the year. And, God help her, by Daniel. Daniel who was already sitting at the piano, his pale hands arranging the pages of manuscript on the scrolled stand. Daniel who knew every inch of Kitty from the texture of her skin to her harmonic fingerprint; whose interpretation of her music mattered more than anything, just now. She’d wondered if Daniel might be asked to play her piece, though she’d been glad not to know in advance, more than happy that the College never involved composers in rehearsal for the showcase, insisting that their music stood alone.
Kitty felt sick now. She could see Janet Davidson on the far side of the hall, but she didn’t want to speak to her. As the clock at the back of the hall ticked silently past 12:55, Kitty shut her eyes, pretending, like a child, that she was alone and could hear nothing.
*
The opening notes lifted from the piano as slowly and carefully as if they were being thought of for the first time. Lifted and then lingered in the air, languorous but persuasive, perfectly placed. Kitty opened her eyes again, and her mouth opened too, as though she needed to see and breathe and taste the sound as well as hear it. It felt as though the song needed her complete attention to will it on – although the extraordinary truth was that Andrej and Daniel were making the sounds she could hear, evoking so precisely the music in her head. This must be like giving birth, seeing what was inside you take shape in the world.
The rest of the audience had vanished now. There was only Kitty and the performers and the space above them in which the sound waves hovered and spread. Not even Kitty, perhaps; all that mattered of her was in the music. Andrej’s voice held a long G, closed it on a careful, not quite English diphthong, then slid gracefully onto a high E and unfurled the plaintive phrase that signified to Kitty something more than the words of the setting: something that Andrej’s impeccable breath control seemed to yield up between the notes. Kitty’s heartbeat accelerated with them, drawing out a pure thread of emotion from the interplay of words and melody. This was something she had never known before, a surge of feeling she couldn’t explain or control, bringing recognition beyond rational meaning: something that felt very much like love.
*
Afterwards Kitty smiled or frowned; she couldn’t have said which. She stood among the hubbub of comment and congratulation (they were assiduous, her fellow students: they couldn’t be thought offhand on such an occasion) but it swirled round her, past her. And then Daniel was there, and Andrej, who had sung Schumann with less verve than Kitty’s songs, and who looked disheartened now it was over.
‘What did you think?’ Daniel asked, and Kitty could see that people were listening, waiting to see how the tortuous relationship between composer and performer would play out.
‘Good,’ Kitty said. Not enough, not the right word at all.
‘It’s a great piece,’ he said. ‘Great music.’
‘Thank you.’
Daniel looked at her for a moment longer, then he smiled in a way Kitty recognised – B minor, she thought; a B minor cadence of a smile – and moved away.
Kitty looked after him for a moment, then her eyes moved to Andrej. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Your voice is beautiful.’
*
Outside, the crowd was rapidly reabsorbed into the bustle of the London afternoon. Kitty walked towards the tube station, her head lifted towards the invisible sun. The sky was the neutral grey of winter today, but the branches of the apple trees in the square were sprigged with blossom, late this year but proof, nonetheless, of the inevitable momentum of the seasons.
Kitty felt an intoxicating sense of limbo and of promise. She could feel the air against her cheeks, the scent of earth and tarmac filling her lungs, things sharply defined all around her. Unfamiliar emotions swilled in her head, but there was something delicious in the knowledge that she didn’t need to seize them at once: that they would be there when she was ready for them, like a strange city waiting to be mapped.
‘Kitty!’
Daniel’s voice, not far behind. Kitty’s heart slipped and caught itself. She clutched her coat across her chest, burying her knuckles in the velvet of the collar. She knew he would follow her, catch her up. Could she – did she want to – escape him? She took another step, and another. She could feel the street sliding out of view now, and the pull of Daniel’s advance.
‘Kitty!’ he called again. ‘Kitty, please!’
Kitty stopped. Daniel drew level, close enough now for her to feel the glow of heat from his short sprint.
‘This is silly,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’
For a moment Kitty held on to the sense of clarity she’d had, the spring of possibility within her. Then she turned to look at Daniel and felt other things, the familiar temptation of yielding to his conviction.
She couldn’t think of herself alone when Daniel was there; that must mean something.
*
‘I’m sorry about your father,’ Daniel said. Her head was cradled against his chest. He lifted her hair out of the nape of her neck slowly, one strand at a time.
‘You said.’
Kitty could feel Daniel’s fingers brushing her shoulder, and the slow rise and fall of his ribcage. The concert, the apple blossom, the quality of the air in the street had all merged and settled into a particular kind of memory, like a day recalled from a photograph.
‘I didn’t think you’d noticed.’
‘I did.’
He moved slightly, craning his head to glimpse her face. ‘You’ve been avoiding me.’
‘I’m here now,’ Kitty said.
‘Yes.’
She was here, and it had been nice, this last hour; it had been lovely. Soothed by the pressure of skin against skin and the soporific half-light of late afternoon, it was hard to understand her reluctance to see him. He played her music beautifully; that was important. He had the same infallible instincts as Henry, the same innate understanding. She’d never met anyone else who’d been born with the entire musical canon apparently hard-wired into their brain, and that was something to admire – to be thrilled by, even. And she liked him holding her like this.
She made a little noise of remorse and confusion, burrowing her head further into the crook of his arm, and he kissed her forehead.
‘Tell me about your father,’ he said.
‘What about him?’
‘Anything. Tell me about a time you remember with him, when you were little.’
Kitty waited for the shudder of grief, but it didn’t come. Instead there was a wash of something lighter and sweeter, and a picture of herself in a red dress made of some thin, cool material, standing beside a duck pond.
‘He used to take me out at the weekends,’ she said. ‘When my mother was at the hospital. We’d go on expeditions.’
‘With your sister?’
‘Not always. She was much older. But there were other people, sometimes.’
Quite often, in fact. Certainly on the duck pond day. She could see the surface of the pond now, filled with the reflection of the sky, through a fringe of reeds as tall as her. The ducks were silent, gliding like ghosts over the grey water.
‘So where did you go?’ Daniel asked.
‘Sometimes to the zoo, or the cinema. Usually just to the park.’ Kitty paused. ‘I got lost, once. I ran away. I’d never seen my father so angry.’
Round to the far side of the pond she had run, on and on, down a long avenue of trees that sheltered her from the sun. Past a kiosk she thought she recognised, and people picnicking and playing football, until her legs hurt and there was nothing familiar in sight. And then a blank, a blur, until her father was there again, and the woman and the child who had been there before had gone. He was crying, her father. She knew he was only pretending to be angry and that he was sorry, and she let him gather her up and carry her home. Sh
e remembered that vividly, a journey that went on and on like a dream. My darling, he’d said, his voice filling the whole space inside her. My precious girl.
For a while neither of them spoke. The light had ebbed further, and the shadows filling the room were growing darker and softer.
‘I never knew my father,’ Daniel said.
Kitty twisted towards him, and her stomach twisted too. She had forgotten Daniel’s situation, carried away by her own story.
‘I thought they died when you were five?’ she said.
‘My mother did. I didn’t know my father. He wasn’t on the scene.’
She ought to have known that, Kitty thought. Daniel rarely talked about his family, but she could have asked him more questions.
‘Have you tried to find him?’
‘I’ve never felt the lack of him. I had my grandparents.’
Kitty’s stomach pitched again: the grandparents were dead too now, she knew that much. She couldn’t imagine what it must feel like to be entirely alone in the world.
‘Poor Daniel,’ she said, stretching her hand up to touch his face.
‘Why poor me? You can’t lose something if you’ve never had it.’
Kitty squeezed her eyes shut. Sometimes she knew what Daniel was feeling without looking at him, and at other times the expression on his face almost overpowered her. He had a way of mixing emotions like cocktails, with a kick she didn’t expect. She felt herself suddenly on the verge of tears that weren’t hers to shed.
‘I suppose not,’ she said; then, ‘I love you, Daniel,’ although in fact what she was thinking was that all this was too much for her, just at the moment. Her neck hurt from lying curled against him, and the light had gone from the day, and she wanted to go home now and spend the evening on her own. She wanted to find that city, the one her music had opened up for her, and she didn’t want to hear Daniel’s reply.
18
Flora climbed gratefully into the bath when she got back from her walk. The abbey she could see from her bedroom window was further than it looked, and her legs ached, but the exercise had done her good. There was nothing like walking to bring things back into perspective, she thought. No surprise that it had spawned so many metaphors. They rolled through her head as she lay in the hot water, a comforting liturgy of common sense: putting your best foot forward; getting your feet back on the ground; reminding you where you stood.
The Things You Do for Love Page 13