by Hazel Prior
At least we have something to talk about straightaway. “Look, Andy! I found a picture of you.” I hold out the page of The Fishing Wire for them both to look. Laughter spreads around our foursome and the ice is broken.
“Well, I’ll be f— flipped backward by a flying kipper! It does look like me, doesn’t it!” He holds the picture next to his own face and pulls a similar expression. “If only I was holding a fish, you wouldn’t know the difference.”
“Perhaps Sandra will be your fish,” suggests Clive, who has slipped into laddish mode.
“Will you be my fish, Sandra?” Andy asks pleadingly.
She puffs out her cheeks and opens and shuts her mouth. I have to hand it to her, it’s a fair imitation.
But from then on everything slides downhill. I do my best, but the evening only provokes in me a stronger and stronger yearning to be somewhere else. We position ourselves at a table in the corner so that Sandra gets the view of the sea and Andy gets the view of Sandra. The meal arrives and we forge our way through it. I find it too big and a bit tasteless. Sandra shovels cod and chips into her mouth and gabbles on and on about the time her cousin was on X Factor (“. . . and Simon Cowell was, like, OMG”). Andy leers at her and interjects dry comments. She shrieks with laughter. I ask the odd question and try to maintain polite interest. Clive alternates between competing with Andy for double entendres and grinning at me. But no matter how hard I try not to, I’m still thinking about Rhoda and what she may or may not be hiding.
“You’re very quiet, Ellie-wells! What’s up?” asks Andy eventually.
“I’m fine, just a little tired, that’s all.”
“I’ll take you home soon,” Clive promises. Then he gets up and buys another round of drinks. I try to keep a pleasant smile anchored to my face.
Twenty minutes later Andy and Clive are trading insults about their boss while Andy plays footsie with Sandra under the table.
Then Clive stands up. “Gotta go and take a leak. Won’t be long. Guard my beer!”
Andy starts wheeling out fish-related jokes.
“What do you call a fish without an eye?”
Sandra doesn’t know and it doesn’t matter whether I know or not.
“A fsh!”
Her laugh tortures my eardrums.
“There’s two parrots sitting on a perch. And the first one says—”
A waitress is passing. “Is this finished?” she asks me, indicating Clive’s beer glass.
“Yes,” I say before I can stop myself. She balances it on the corner of her tray and disappears.
Andy looks at me. “You’re brave,” he says.
Sandra leans across the table and brushes a crumb from his beard with her manicured fingers.
He looks gleeful. “I think there may be some more in there, if you wouldn’t mind checking . . . ?”
At that moment Clive arrives back.
“What the . . . ? Who took my beer?”
Sandra points at the waitress, who is now wiping down a neighboring table.
“Why the hell did you let her take it?” he thunders.
Andy smirks and Sandra giggles.
“There was only a tiny bit left and it’s getting late,” I tell him. “Clive, let’s go home. I’m sure Andy and Sandra can do without us.” Andy gives me a sly wink and thumbs-up while Sandra looks at Clive hopefully. But he’s fuming.
“God, El, I bloody wanted that beer. I can’t believe you did that!”
To take a man’s beer from him is to let loose a Pandora’s box of demons. I cower under the hailstorm of swearwords. The blood has rushed to my face with the humiliation of it. Even Andy and Sandra look uncomfortable. Part of me wants to buy my husband another drink to atone for my sins, but part of me just says no. I can’t always let him win.
Clive drives us back, even though he’s over the limit. It isn’t worth protesting, but I cling to my seat belt as he screeches round the lanes. He’ll be like this until morning, possibly tomorrow as well. I don’t feel as full of remorse as I’m meant to, though. In there somewhere is a naughty, stubborn little strand of triumph. I was desperate for some headspace for my own thoughts, and now I have it.
No matter how much I’ve tried, I am still obsessing. I need to decide whether to pursue a line of inquiry or whether to leave well enough alone. I should probably leave well enough alone . . . but I know I won’t.
| 23 |
Dan
How could I have been so wrong? So wrong for so long? Rhoda says I am made of the wrong ingredients. Perhaps I am just not cut out to have a girlfriend. Perhaps I don’t fully understand the way girlfriends’ minds work and therefore girlfriends get fed up and don’t want to put up with me. Perhaps I am destined to be always alone. This seems likely.
Roe Deer is not, not at all, my girlfriend. I say the sentence over and over to myself. There is now a big hole in my life. I am listening to music a lot every day, not just because I want to but because I have to. Music helps fill up the holes that people leave behind.
The Roe Deer hole reminds me of the other two largest holes in my life, one mother-shaped and the other father-shaped. It is the father one that I think about most. Maybe this is because my father and I discovered harpmaking together. Unlike my mother (who was more concerned with fitting me into a mold that I couldn’t really fit into no matter how hard she tried) my father always wanted to do whatever made me happy. I have discussed fathers with Ellie the Exmoor Housewife. Ellie agrees with me that fathers are very important. We are both sad that our fathers aren’t around anymore.
After my father was killed in a car accident I had a problem with my hands. They refused to do what I wanted them to do. They wriggled about all over the place. Whenever I tried to draw or to saw or to drill or to glue anything, my hands wouldn’t let me, they were flapping and thrashing around so much. I cut the third finger of my right hand quite badly on the band saw. It became impossible to make harps. The situation went on for exactly three weeks and four days, which is a long time not to make harps, very. So what my sister Jo and I did during that time was this: listen to music.
We listened and we listened. We listened to orchestras and string quartets, operas and jazz trios, reggae and hip-hop. We listened to Vivaldi, to Beethoven, to Fauré, to Palestrina, to Joan Baez, to Sting, to Led Zeppelin and the soundtrack of Star Wars. Some pieces of music were hard to listen to at that time. Others were soft and soothing. They were all necessary. Otherwise everything inside us would have turned to dust. We listened together and we listened separately. My sister Jo cried for hours, then listened some more. I went on walks, then listened some more. That is how we survived.
After all the music my hands eventually calmed down again. So what I did next was to make harps continuously for six months, stopping only to eat and sleep. I made my most exotic and experimental harps at that time: tiny little delicate harps and huge great clomping harps and harps of all sorts of peculiar shapes.
I was in the middle of making peculiar harps when my mother went and died too. When this happened, exactly the same thing followed as with my father. My hands wobbled and flapped around for three weeks and four days. So I listened to large doses of music and after that I made a load of harps very quickly indeed. Odd, exotic, strange harps.
Jo sold the peculiar harps as quickly as she could. She said we needed money, as we were waiting for a thing called probate. Probate was in no particular hurry, so it was just as well I was in such a manic harpmaking mood. One of the women who bought a peculiar harp (it had seven crescent moons carved in a falling formation all down the pillar) put a film of herself playing it on YouTube. Jo brought her laptop computer into the workshop and showed it to me. She said the harp sounded peculiar as well as looking peculiar. She said you could hear the grief. I don’t know about that, but I think she may have been right.
* * *
•
• •
The evening with Thomas was helpful, in that he did a lot of head shaking and pint buying and uttered the word “Women!” many times. However, the girlfriend-to-not-girlfriend switch was still problematic and hard for my brain to grasp. So the following day I went back to the woods and leaned against the pine tree again and carried on thinking about Roe Deer. I thought about all the things that had happened between us over the last six years. The memories were as clear as ever in my head, but now it was as if I was viewing them through a different lens. Or as if somebody had come along and altered all the colors.
I stayed thinking among the pine trees for a long time.
Pine trees are very beautiful and they have a scent that never fails to beguile my nose. They have made their home here, but they do not absolutely belong on Exmoor. They were planted in the 1940s because people needed wood to build ships so they could fight each other more effectively, it being wartime. Then wartime stopped, so people were not so bothered about building ships and killing each other, but the pines still kept on growing.
Although I like pine trees, they have two clear disadvantages. Disadvantage number one is that they create a lot of darkness. When you are sitting under pines, you cannot appreciate the sky, as it’s all blocked out by their dense shade. Disadvantage number two (which is a result of number one) is that other plants won’t grow under pine trees. Not at all. Under pine trees the forest floor is nothing but old, brown pine needles, thousands and thousands of them.
However, if you go to an area where our native deciduous trees are growing—the oaks, ashes, birches, hazels, hawthorns, beeches—then you see that all sorts of things thrive under their branches. There are the magical greens of the mosses and ferns, the bright white of the wood anemones, the acres of shining bluebells in May, the foxgloves in early summer. And every autumn the trees create their own rich carpet of dazzling colors.
After a bit I found I was wanting to move on from the pine tree where I was leaning, so I gathered up my crutches and move on is what I did. I walked a little farther along the woodland trail. Soon the birdsong grew louder and the path came out of the pines and lightened and there were birches and oaks flanking my way. They had lost their leaves but were still beautiful because you could see the intricate tracery of every twig. The birches were shining silver-white. Just a few were hanging on to little twists of yellow leaves that lifted and spiraled in the breeze. The last time I focused in on birches was the day I planted birch seeds for Ellie the Exmoor Housewife. Birch is her favorite.
What happened next was that I found the birches had got right in there, into my thoughts, and I wasn’t thinking about Roe Deer anymore. Not at all. I was thinking about Ellie.
First I thought about the way Ellie walks. It reminds me of a young colt; sometimes hesitant and leggy, unsure of quite where to place the feet, but then breaking suddenly into a trot or canter, tossing the mane, as if no longer caring. A sort of clumsiness combined with a sort of grace.
Next I thought about Ellie’s face. The way her hair curls around it in different ways on different days. The gentle slope of her nose. Her lips, and how they curve sometimes up and sometimes down and sometimes she opens them and words come out. The words have a singsong sound, a bit of a lilt, with an inflection like questions even when they are not questions. When Ellie speaks, all of her face is animated, her cheekbones, her dimples, the flesh of her forehead, the line of her jaw, the arch of her eyebrows. Her eyes.
Her eyes, the color of bracken in October. Sometimes Ellie focuses them on my own eyes and sometimes she focuses them into the distance as if she is looking for something and sometimes they are shielded from view by her eyelids. Then they will come back and focus on my face again, and I see all sorts of things reflected in them.
* * *
• • •
Next time I see Thomas I ask him what is his opinion of Ellie’s eyes.
“Why you asking me that, mate?” he demands.
I tell him it’s because I want to know the answer.
“Well, in that case I’d say they’re a good pair of eyes. Yup, good ones. No question, boyo. Ellie Jacobs—new girlfriend material, deffo. But she’s hitched already, isn’t she?”
I confirm that Ellie Jacobs is indeed hitched.
Ellie Jacobs is hitched and I am made of all the wrong ingredients.
At least we still have music.
| 24 |
Ellie
Clive pauses with his fork halfway to his mouth. “What sort of concert?”
I pour a bit more gravy onto my chicken. I’ve worded the proposition carefully and modulated my voice to sound as if I was hoping for the answer yes, while all the time I am in fact praying for the answer no.
“Harp music,” I tell him. The word “harp” is loaded with risk and tight emotion, but I do my best to make it sound carefree and trivial. I rush on before he can make any sarcastic references to Exmoor eccentrics who dole out harps to women they’ve just met. “Christmas music mainly, I think. Carols and stuff.”
“Christmas seems to start earlier every year,” he comments. “Not sure I’m ready for carols yet.”
I say nothing but set to work carving the chicken on my plate.
“Hmm . . . In Taunton, you say?”
“Yes, in one of the churches. I’m taking Christina too, as she hasn’t been anywhere for ages.” I cut a potato into small pieces and mop up some more gravy with it. “I expect it’ll be quite mushy, but it’s the sort of music she enjoys. Well, the sort of thing both of us enjoy, really. I expect you’d enjoy it too, if . . .” I carefully insert a note of pleading as I tail off. Exploiting Christina again is a stroke of genius. She has happily agreed to come with me, but her presence is calculated to guarantee Clive’s absence.
He sniffs. “Think I might give it a miss if you’re sure you don’t mind, hon-bun.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. Although I know Dan won’t be there I’m intending to go and speak to Rhoda afterward and it would be tricky pretending to Clive that I’ve only just met her.
“No, I don’t mind,” I tell him with an air of resignation. “It’ll be nice to have a girly chat with Christina at least”—a comment that clinches it.
“How’s her hand these days anyway?” he asks, tucking more chicken into his mouth.
I’d almost forgotten about that particular lie.
“Oh, much, much better.”
I’ll need to keep him away from Christina for a good while longer in case it occurs to him to inspect her hand. “Apparently she won’t even have a scar,” I add, mentally congratulating myself on my foresight.
“Oh, good. Seems a crazy kind of accident anyway, cutting open your hand on a can opener. Only Christina could manage something like that.”
“Yes, I suppose it is a bit bizarre.” I ponder for a moment, then add: “But it was one of those old-fashioned can openers that takes a lot of brute force. She was using it for a can of chickpeas and something made her jump—I think it was her smoke alarm suddenly going off—so she ended up jabbing herself. Nasty. There was blood all over the kitchen, she said.”
Clive wrinkles his nose. “Too much information.”
He is right. I’m only setting myself up for future problems. I’m now going to have to brief Christina about the specifics of her can opener and her smoke alarm.
* * *
• • •
The night is raw, starlit and frosty. The roads are covered in a thin film of white. They haven’t been salted so I drive with utmost care until I reached the edge of Christina’s village, where they are a bit clearer. She comes out to meet me, swathed head to toe in pashminas, scarves and boots. She looks colorful and stylish. She makes me wish I’d made more of an effort. Still, my agenda tonight isn’t to try and impress anyone, just meet a couple of people if I can.
Slow traffic crawls around the outskirts
of Taunton. We’re running late and it takes me some time to find the church, then there’s nowhere to park nearby. I eventually leave the car four streets away and Christina and I end up running. We arrive at the church, panting, just as the concert is about to start.
We slip into a pew near the back. I take a brief look around. There are plenty of elderly couples, but I can’t see any small boys at all.
Rhoda’s harp is placed at the front. The lighting glistens on its strings and sweeps over its frame with glowing amber brushstrokes.
“Wow!” cries Christina. “Is yours like that?”
“Smaller. But similar, yes,” I boast.
When Rhoda steps onto the stage the audience lets out a gasp. She is svelte and stunning in a golden dress that hugs the curve of her hips then drops in shimmering layers to the floor. Her hair hangs in a single perfect coil over one shoulder. Her slinky black gloves reach up to her elbows. She smiles graciously and makes a show of sliding them off finger by finger before she sits down at the harp.
From the moment she begins playing we are all transported. Notes call to each other, flutter and echo across the arches of the old building. Arrangements of folk melodies, classical pieces and familiar carols ring out, each enhanced by the fey quality of the harp. We drink them all down with relish.
“God, I think I’m in love with her!” whispers Christina in my ear.
“Shut up and listen,” I hiss.
The intermission arrives in no time. The audience moves en masse to the back of the church, where mulled wine is being served.
Rhoda is some time joining the throng, but when she does I aim myself straight at her. She’s already deep in conversation with a small, sharp-nosed man. Her guitarist friend hasn’t come for reasons I can only guess.