Ellie and the Harpmaker

by Hazel Prior

  I butt in. “Rhoda, that was fantastic, fabulous! Really moving!”

  She inclines her head. “Thank you, Ellie.”

  “May I introduce my friend Christina, who is a great fan of yours.” Christina darts an arch look at me but shakes Rhoda’s hand, her bangles jingling.

  “And this is Pete.” Rhoda indicates the diminutive man. “He plays the cello.” I shake his hand, then let him talk to Christina for a minute while I ask Rhoda if her parents have come to support her this evening.

  “Yes, of course. That’s Mum over there in the navy skirt and jacket, and Dad with her, with the bald head.”

  They look amiable enough, but they’re not talking to anyone. They’re standing stiffly and sipping their wine in a slightly awkward fashion. Rhoda catches her mother’s eye and waves. The mother mouths, “Well done!” across the room at her.

  Rhoda is clearly keen to resume her conversation with Pete the cellist, who is now being monopolized by Christina, so I leave the three of them to negotiate and edge over to the parents.

  “Your daughter is very talented,” I begin.

  They look pleased, as parents would.

  “I’m Ellie, one of her harp students.”

  We shake hands. The mother is tall and slim with a fine bone structure, similar to Rhoda’s. Her hair is neatly curled and she is wearing glasses. The father is slightly shorter. He has a shiny bald patch but rather heavy eyebrows. The only physical trait he seems to have passed on to Rhoda is the bright blue of his eyes.

  “Have you been learning the harp for long?” he asks.

  “No, not long,” I reply. “But I must say Rhoda’s an extremely good teacher. I’ve only had a few lessons with her, but—well, I think I’m improving quite fast.”

  They make polite noises of interest and appreciation.

  “I’ve got a harp very similar to hers. It’s made by the same man, Dan Hollis, the Exmoor Harpmaker. I expect you know him?” I prompt.

  I watch their reaction, a little exchange of glances passed furtively between them.

  “Yes, we’ve met Dan a few times,” says the father.

  “Yes, he’s a very fine craftsman,” adds the mother.

  “Oh, isn’t he? And a dear man!” I insist. “He’s been so sweet to me. And he thinks the world of Rhoda, of course . . .” I let the sentence dangle.

  “Oh, does he?” the mother says in a noncommittal voice.

  I nod enthusiastically. “He adores her!”

  The pause is awkward. I need to throw in a casual comment to encourage them to share more information, but my brain isn’t functioning very well.

  “They’re such a lovely couple!” I blurt out at last, and immediately regret it. I always resort to crass clichés when stressed.

  The father’s eyebrows have shot upward. The mother puts her lips tightly together and views me through narrowed eyes.

  The father says: “Another glass, dear?”

  “Yes, that would be nice,” she answers, handing him her empty.

  “Can I get you a second, er . . .”

  “Ellie,” I remind him.

  “. . . Ellie?”

  “No, no, I’m fine, thanks. Driving back home. Must be careful.”

  He disappears into the crowd for refills.

  “I live some way away,” I explain. “But I expect you’re local to Taunton, are you?”

  “Yes, we live quite close,” replies the mother. “Not too far from Rhoda, which is nice. We get to see her whenever she’s not too busy with all her harp activities.”

  “Ah, how nice to have family close by. I hardly ever get to see my mother; she’s up in Yorkshire, much nearer my sister.”

  “Ah, is she?”

  “Yes. It’s a shame we can’t both be close to her. That bond with parents is so vital, isn’t it?”

  She gives a forced smile and glances over in Rhoda’s direction but says nothing.

  “It must be nice to be near shops too, here in Taunton,” I babble on. “I have to drive for miles just to buy a pint of milk. It’s lovely scenery where I live, mind you; I do love Exmoor. But sometimes I think it would be so great to be nearer a bit of culture.”

  “Mm-mm, yes, I’m sure.” She’s looking bored now. “If you’ll excuse me I must just go and have a word or two with my daughter.”

  She makes her way toward Rhoda and her cellist friend. Christina has vanished. I guess she’s gone outside for a cigarette. I return to our pew to await the second half of the concert. I sit pulling at my eyebrows. There has to be a way of finding answers to my questions; otherwise, I’ll obsess forever. I’ll have no eyebrows left at this rate.

  “Did you find out anything?” asks Christina, plopping down next to me.

  “Not enough.”

  I cross my arms. Bit by bit my anxiety is hardening into stubborn determination.

  * * *

  • • •

  “But the car’s that way. Isn’t it?” Christina is forever doubting her sense of direction, usually with good cause.

  “Yes, but we’re not going to the car yet,” I reply, sotto voce.

  “What? Why?”

  “I’m following them.” Rhoda’s parents are ahead, strolling arm in arm. “I need to know where they live.”

  “Can’t you just ask them?”

  “Well, I would have done, but the opportunity didn’t arise, and I need to be subtle.”

  Christina shoots me a glance. “Why the urgency, Ellie?”

  “It seems crazy, but I can’t deny the facts. Rhoda and Dan have been together for years. At one point she put on weight, then she disappeared for a while. And now she and her parents are hiding something from him. Christina, Dan is my . . . my friend, my kind, lovely, good-hearted friend. It’s not fair on him. And it’s driving me insane. I need to know the truth. Stop!” I put a hand on her arm. The couple are getting into a white Toyota.

  “Christina, wait here!”

  “Eh?”

  “Remember the number plate and tell me which way it goes!”

  I turn and run back along the streets to where my own car is parked. I leap in, breathing hard, rev up and drive at top speed—thank God the roads here are clear of ice—to where she’s waiting. I can only hope that Rhoda’s parents are ditherers. As I reach the spot, I lean over and open the door for Christina. She hops in.

  “They went straight down and turned left at the end!” she cries. “And I don’t remember the numbers, but the letters were BLT. At least that was memorable.”

  I shoot down the street. As we round a bend we see the tail end of a white car disappearing up another side street. I turn after it. The number plate has a BLT.

  “Well done, Chris! Great detective work!”

  “Thank you, my dear fellow! But—?”

  “I’ll tell you later . . . I may have to indulge in a little light espionage first.”

  She gawps at me. “Who the devil are you and what have you done with my friend Ellie!”

  I tail the Toyota through a few more twists and turns of Taunton and down past a smart row of detached houses. It eventually swerves into the driveway of one of the houses near the end of the row. There’s a big willow tree in the front garden, which slightly obscures something else that piques my interest. The sign on the gate reads Swandale.

  “Swandale. I’ll remember that.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Another trip into Taunton, this time alone and in daylight. Clive said he was stopping by at the gym on his way back from work, so hopefully he won’t realize I’ve been out again.

  The drive seems to take forever. So does the wait.

  Visions pass before my eyes.

  Then, suddenly, it’s over. I know what I wanted to know. What I cannot now unknow. What touches me and worries me and terrifies
me. And I have to decide what to do about it.

  | 25 |

  Dan

  Ellie the Exmoor Housewife was wearing a woolly hat, green, when she came to the barn this morning. She took it off and her hair crackled with electricity and stuck out sideways. She ran her fingers through it and it calmed down a little and allowed itself to be tucked behind her ears.

  “Morning, Dan,” she said. “How are you?”

  I told her I was very well, thank you. I said this because it is what you are supposed to say, not because it was strictly accurate. If I had been strictly accurate I would have said my leg was full of grinding pain and my hands were numb. The numbness was due to the fact that I had just come in from a frosty walk (or actually, a frosty limp) and I had collected twenty-three pebbles from the stream. The water of the stream is sparkly clean but ice-cold, not designed for finger comfort. They were nice pebbles, though. They were mottled, red-brown and silver streaked, the color of rain clouds, the color of autumn sycamores, the color of dolphins. Some smooth, some rough. Some flat, some rounded, some jagged. Each will be assessed in due course and viewed against different types of wood to see which ones will end up embedded as jewels in the bodies of harps. The others will just be used for admiring independently.

  Ellie didn’t seem to appreciate them at all when I showed her. Neither did she go up the stairs to her harp, but instead she did her pacing, hovering, shuffling thing. I left the pebbles on the end of the workbench and started to plane a piece of apple wood for the Fifi harp.

  Ellie stood by my shoulder. She lingered. And lingered. Seldom have I seen so much lingering. I stopped planing and turned to look at her. She opened and shut her mouth a couple of times. Eventually words started trickling out in a random monologue.

  Roe Deer. She brought up the subject of Roe Deer. So I held up a hand to stop her and I told her Roe Deer was not my girlfriend anymore. I wanted to be clear and I wanted Ellie to know the Truth of the Matter. (I like things to be clear, and I very much don’t like the fact that it took me so long to find out the Truth of the Matter myself.)

  “Oh!” Ellie said on receiving this information. Her voice was stiff and fragile like a beech twig. “Oh.” The corners of her mouth looked as if they couldn’t decide whether to go up or down. “So . . . so when did that happen?”

  I told her that it had apparently happened five years ago but that Roe Deer had only informed me about it last week. Possibly, if I had not asked her about it, she would never have informed me at all. If Ellie had not requested confirmation on this matter, it would never have occurred to me to question it, but she had, so I did, so there we were.

  “I see,” is what Ellie said. She put a hand on my arm. I moved her hand off my arm again. I did not want any hands on my arm at that moment.

  “So . . . so are you OK?” she asked.

  This was a difficult question to answer. Over the last four days my levels of OK and not-OK had been yo-yoing so much I didn’t really want to think about it. Talking about Roe Deer had made me focus on something that felt very sore, though, and I was now far closer to the not-OK end of things than I had been when Ellie came in. I therefore said nothing and hoped that she would go upstairs and play her harp.

  But she still didn’t go upstairs to her harp. She leaned against the workbench and started mumbling stuff about life being unpredictable and how you never know what is just around the corner. As she went on, she gathered momentum and suddenly a great gush of questions came whooshing out at me. She has always been somebody who asks questions and normally I don’t mind it, not at all, but today it grated. However, Ellie is special and I did not want to offend her even when my levels of OKness were plummeting. I therefore did my best to answer.

  I told her no, I was not lonely. If ever I felt lonely I could have a chat with Phineas and that would sort it out. I agreed that it was important to have support in times of crisis and that friends were helpful. Yes, Thomas was a good friend, and so was she, Ellie. Very. And, yes, it would be nice to have more family around, but as both my parents were dead and my sister Jo did not live that close, there wasn’t very much I could do about it. No, I had not particularly considered ever having children, but yes, I did like children. So long as there weren’t too many of them at once. Yes, if I ended up with any one day that would be fine. It was not looking very likely, though, the way things were going.

  I didn’t answer her question about how I saw myself in the future. But she then asked the same question again but slower and louder and in slightly different words. So I told her I did not see myself in the future at all. I did not possess a crystal ball, and even if I did I doubted whether it would work. I lived in the present. I lived bit by bit, as I went along, and that suited me fine.

  She twisted her mouth to one side and she picked up one of my pebbles and put it down again. Then she started pulling out the hairs of her left eyebrow.

  At that moment there was a scuffling sound and Phineas came in through his pheasant flap. He looked at us both sideways, then he looked at the harps, then he looked at us again. I don’t know what he was thinking, but obviously it was an exhausting thought because next he put his head down and aimed himself straight for his bed. We watched his tail disappearing through the archway.

  “Dan,” said Ellie, still picking at her eyebrow, “I’d really like to meet your sister sometime. You talk about her so much and she sounds . . . nice. She lives in Bridgwater, doesn’t she?”

  I confirmed that this was the case.

  “Do you think it would be all right if I called in on her one day? Or . . . is she coming here at all in the near future? Could I possibly meet her then?”

  I was quite surprised, as people don’t often ask to meet Jo, but I told her yes, that would no doubt be possible. In fact, somebody was intending to buy my Starling harp so Jo was coming over to fetch it on Friday and if Ellie wanted to coincide with her then, she could. Only, I added, it might be a good idea for Ellie not to mention to Jo that I had given her a free harp, as Jo would not take kindly to that, Jo being my chief accountant and business consultant and a little bit inflexible about financial matters.

  Ellie said she promised not to tell Jo about the free harp, but that she would quite like a woman-to-woman chat with Jo.

  A woman-to-woman chat? What does that involve?

  “What does that involve?” I asked her.

  She cleared her throat. “That involves just me and her. Alone,” she said, underlining the words.

  It must be a particularly private female thing she wants to discuss, the sort of thing that I wouldn’t understand.

  Anyway, I said I was sure that wouldn’t be a problem.

  | 26 |

  Ellie

  Rhoda isn’t that much younger than me, but she has two parents who are still alive and well. She has no idea how lucky she is.

  I ring Vic. “How’s Mum?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  I do. I know only too well.

  “And you?” I ask.

  “Busy sewing name tapes into socks.”

  Vic has four children who are forever losing items of gym kit and a mother who cannot recognize her own clothes. Sewing on name tapes is one of life’s necessary evils for Vic.

  “Ugh, poor you!”

  My sister is a great ally, although our lives have gone different ways. These days Vic is all about family. (I don’t actually know what I’m all about, but it’s not that. I sometimes wish it was, but try not to think about it.) I’m longing to confide in her. She knows nothing of my harp playing, let alone Dan and Rhoda and my recent discovery. But I’m sensing a need for caution.

  “Is it still all right if Clive and I come up for Christmas?”

  “Of course!” she cries. “I’m relying on you to help with the dinner, not to mention everything else!”

  “What’s the plan?”

 
“The usual: turkey, presents, tree, everyone running about.”

  “I bet the kids are getting excited.”

  “Oh yes, uncontrollable!” She laughs.

  I can see them now, the little flock of terrors I love so dearly: two boys, two girls; all enthusiasm and noise and mess. “I’m really looking forward to seeing you. Will Mum be joining us for Christmas Day?”

  “Yes, one of us will go and pick her up.”

  “Do you think we can make her enjoy herself?”

  “We’ll certainly try.”

  I sigh. “Vic, thanks so much for everything you’re doing.”

  “Ellie, it’s OK. I know you’d do more if you could.”

  “Just let me be grateful, will you?”

  “All right, then. Off you go. Be grateful.”

  “Vic, you are fabulous!”

  “Yes, I know. Fabulous me! Fabulous, patient, long-suffering, resentful me!”

  I know exactly the face she’s making as she says it. We’re so alike.

  I try to soothe her. “Resentful is allowed. Mum resented us first.”

  “Not half.”

  A stream of memories runs through my head. Mum disliked any show of emotion, punished any hint of self-interest, clamped down on any flights of fancy. She didn’t even like it when we, as little girls, gave names to the bees and slugs in our garden. (Bertie Bee was my favorite. And when I burst into tears on finding Bertie dead one morning—I was sure it was him, although all the bees looked similar—Mum said: “Ellie, grow up! You’re so silly to let things like that affect you.”) I never once saw her cry, even when my father died. She didn’t radiate warmth as mothers are supposed to do. The only thing she radiated was disapproval.

  “Do you think we totally ruined her life?” I ask Vic.

  “Well, if she didn’t have us, where would she be now? Rotting away in some dire council-run place with smelly loos. And zilch visitors.”

  As the dementia set in, Mum’s few friends dropped away. Only Vic and I come to see her now, and my own visits are infrequent. Yorkshire is just too far away from Exmoor.