Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (8 page)

Perhaps it was simply the effect of receiving a clear set of instructions, however dubious: when I put the phone down, a detached, business-like mood had come over me. I could see clearly just what I needed to do. I went into the kitchen and switched on the lights. Sure enough, the “middle-sized” saucepan was sitting on the cooker, awaiting its next task. I filled it to halfway with water, and put it back on the hob. Even as I was doing this, I realised there was something else I had to establish before proceeding any further: namely, the precise amount of time I had to complete my work. I went into the living room, picked up the phone, and called Emily’s work number.

I got her assistant, who told me Emily was in a meeting. I insisted, in a tone that balanced geniality with resolution, that she bring Emily out of her meeting, “if indeed she is in one at all.” The next moment, Emily was on the line.

“What is it, Raymond? What’s happened?”

“Nothing’s happened. I’m just calling to find out how you are.”

“Ray, you sound odd. What is it?”

“What do you mean, I sound odd? I just called to establish when to expect you back. I know you regard me as a layabout, but I still appreciate a timetable of sorts.”

“Raymond, there’s no need to get cross like that. Now let me see. It’s going to be another hour … Maybe an hour and a half. I’m awfully sorry, but there’s a real crisis on here …”

“One hour to ninety minutes. That’s fine. That’s all I need to know. Okay, I’ll see you soon. You can get back to your business now.”

She might have been about to say something else, but I hung up and strode back into the kitchen, determined not to let my decisive mood evaporate. In fact, I was beginning to feel distinctly exhilarated, and I couldn’t understand at all how I’d allowed myself to get into such a state of despondency earlier on. I went through the cupboards and lined up, in a neat row beside the hob, all the herbs and spices I needed. Then I measured them out into the water, gave a quick stir, and went off to find the boot.

The understairs cupboard was hiding a whole heap of sorry-looking footwear. After a few moments of rummaging, I discovered what was certainly one of the boots Charlie had prescribed—a particularly exhausted specimen with ancient mud encrusted along the rim of its heel. Holding it with fingertips, I took it back to the kitchen and placed it carefully in the water with the sole facing up to the ceiling. Then I lit a medium flame under the pan, sat down at the table and waited for the water to heat. When the phone rang again, I felt reluctant to abandon the saucepan, but then I heard Charlie on the machine going on and on. So I eventually turned the flame down low and went to answer him.

“What were you saying?” I asked. “It sounded particularly self-pitying, but I was busy so I missed it.”

“I’m at the hotel. It’s only a three-star. Can you believe the cheek! A big company like them! And it’s a poxy little room too!”

“But you’re only there for a couple of nights …”

“Listen, Ray, there’s something I wasn’t entirely honest about earlier. It’s not fair on you. After all, you’re doing me a favour, you’re doing your best for me, trying to heal things with Emily, and here I am, being less than frank with you.”

“If you’re talking about the recipe for the dog smell, it’s too late. I’ve got it all going. I suppose I might be able to add an extra herb or something …”

“If I wasn’t straight with you before, that’s because I wasn’t being straight with myself. But now I’ve come away, I’ve been able to think more clearly. Ray, I told you there wasn’t anyone else, but that’s not strictly true. There’s this girl. Yes, she
is
a girl, early thirties at most. She’s very concerned about education in the developing world, and fairer global trade. It wasn’t really a sexual attraction thing, that was just a kind of byproduct. It was her untarnished idealism. It reminded me of how we all were once. You remember that, Ray?”

“I’m sorry, Charlie, but I don’t remember you ever being especially idealistic. In fact, you were always utterly selfish and hedonistic …”

“Okay, maybe we were all decadent slobs back then, the lot of us. But there’s always been this other person, somewhere inside of me, wanting to come out. That’s what drew me to her …”

“Charlie, when was this? When did this happen?”

“When did what happen?”

“This affair.”

“There was no affair! I didn’t have sex with her, nothing. I didn’t even have lunch with her. I just … I just made sure I kept seeing her.”

“What do you mean, kept seeing her?” I’d drifted back into the kitchen by this time and was gazing at my concoction.

“Well, I kept seeing her,” he said. “I kept making appointments to see her.”

“You mean, she’s a call girl.”

“No, no, I told you, we’ve never had sex. No, she’s a dentist. I kept going back, kept making things up about a pain here, discomfort of the gums there. You know, I spun it out. And of course, in the end, Emily guessed.” For a second, Charlie seemed to be choking back a sob. Then the dam burst. “She found out … she found out … because I was flossing so much!” He was now half-shrieking. “She said, you
never, ever
floss your teeth that much!”

“But that doesn’t make sense. If you look after your teeth more, you’ve less reason to go back to her …”

“Who cares if it makes sense? I just wanted to please her!”

“Look, Charlie, you didn’t go out with her, you didn’t have sex with her, what’s the issue?”

“The issue is, I so wanted someone like that, someone who’d bring out this other me, the one that’s been trapped inside …”

“Charlie, listen to me. Since the last time you called, I’ve pulled myself together considerably. And quite frankly, I think you should pull yourself together too. We can discuss all of this when you get back. But Emily will be here in an hour or so, and I’ve got to have everything ready. I’m on top of things here now, Charlie. I suppose you can tell that from my voice.”

“Fucking fantastic! You’re on top of things. Great! Some fucking friend …”

“Charlie, I think you’re upset because you don’t like your hotel. But you should pull yourself together. Get things in perspective. And take heart. I’m on top of things here. I’ll sort out the dog business, then I’ll play my part up to the hilt for you. Emily, I’ll say. Emily, just look at me, just look how pathetic I am. The truth is, most people are just as pathetic. But Charlie, he’s different. Charlie is in a different league.”

“You can’t say that. That sounds completely unnatural.”

“Of course I won’t put it literally like that, idiot. Look, just leave it to me. I’ve got the whole situation under control. So calm down. Now I’ve got to go.”

I put the phone down and examined the pot. The liquid had now come to the boil and there was a lot of steam about, but as yet no real smell of any sort. I adjusted the flame until everything was bubbling nicely. It was around this point I was overcome by a craving for some fresh air, and since I hadn’t yet investigated their roof terrace, I opened the kitchen door and stepped out.

It was surprisingly balmy for an English evening in early June. Only a little bite in the breeze told me I wasn’t back in Spain. The sky wasn’t fully dark yet, but was already filling with stars. Beyond the wall that marked the end of the terrace, I could see for miles around the windows and back yards of the neighbouring properties. A lot of the windows were lit, and the ones in the distance, if you narrowed your eyes, looked almost like an extension of the stars. This roof terrace wasn’t large, but there was definitely something romantic about it. You could imagine a couple, in the midst of busy city lives, coming out here on a warm evening and strolling around the potted shrubs, in each other’s arms, swapping stories about their day.

I could have stayed out there a lot longer, but I was afraid of losing my momentum. I went back into the kitchen, and walking past the bubbling pot, paused at the threshold of the living room to survey my earlier work. The big mistake, it struck me, lay in my complete failure to consider the task from the perspective of a creature like Hendrix. The key, I now realised, was to immerse myself within Hendrix’s spirit and vision.

Once I’d started on this tack, I saw not only the inadequacy of my previous efforts, but how hopeless most of Charlie’s suggestions had been. Why would an over-lively dog extract a little ox ornament from the midst of hi-fi equipment and smash it? And the idea of cutting open the sofa and throwing around the stuffing was idiotic. Hendrix would need razor teeth to achieve an effect like that. The capsized sugar bowl in the kitchen was fine, but the living room, I realised, would have to be re-conceptualised from scratch.

I went into the room in a crouched posture, so as to see it from something like Hendrix’s eyeline. Immediately, the glossy magazines piled up on the coffee table revealed themselves as an obvious target, and so I pushed them off the surface along a trajectory consistent with a shove from a rampant muzzle. The way the magazines landed on the floor looked satisfyingly authentic. Encouraged, I knelt down, opened one of the magazines and scrunched up a page in a manner, I hoped, would find an echo when eventually Emily came across the diary. But this time the result was disappointing: too obviously the work of a human hand rather than canine teeth. I’d fallen into my earlier error again: I’d not merged sufficiently with Hendrix.

So I got down on all fours, and lowering my head towards the same magazine, sank my teeth into the pages. The taste was perfumy, and not at all unpleasant. I opened a second fallen magazine near its centre and began to repeat the procedure. The ideal technique, I began to gather, was not unlike the one needed in those fairground games where you try to bite apples bobbing in water without using your hands. What worked best was a light, chewing motion, the jaws moving flexibly all the time: this would cause the pages to ruffle up and crease nicely. Too focused a bite, on the other hand, simply “stapled” pages together to no great effect.

I think it was because I’d become so absorbed in these finer points that I didn’t become aware sooner of Emily standing out in the hall, watching me from just beyond the doorway. Once I did realise she was there, my first feeling wasn’t one of panic or embarrassment, but of hurt that she should be standing there like that without having announced her arrival in some way. In fact, when I remembered how I’d gone to the trouble of calling her office only several minutes earlier precisely to pre-empt the sort of situation now engulfing me, I felt the victim of a deliberate deception. Perhaps that was why my first visible response was simply to give a weary sigh without making any attempt to abandon my all-fours posture. My sigh brought Emily into the room, and she laid a hand very gently on my back. I’m not sure if she actually knelt down, but her face seemed close to mine as she said:

“Raymond, I’m back. So let’s just sit down, shall we?”

She was easing me up onto my feet, and I had to resist the urge to shake her off.

“You know, it’s odd,” I said. “No more than a few minutes ago, you were about to go into a meeting.”

“I was, yes. But after your phone call, I realised the priority was to come back.”

“What do you mean, priority? Emily, please, you don’t have to keep holding my arm like that, I’m not about to topple over. What do you mean, a priority to come back?”

“Your phone call. I recognised it for what it was. A cry for help.”

“It was nothing of the sort. I was just trying to …” I trailed off, because I noticed Emily was looking around the room with an expression of wonder.

“Oh, Raymond,” she muttered, almost to herself.

“I suppose I was being a little clumsy earlier on. I would have tidied up, except you came back early.”

I reached down to the fallen standard lamp, but Emily restrained me.

“It doesn’t matter, Ray. It really doesn’t matter at all. We can sort it all out together later. You just sit down now and relax.”

“Look, Emily, I realise it’s your own home and all that. But why did you creep in so quietly?”

“I didn’t creep in, darling. I called when I came in, but you didn’t seem to be here. So I just popped into the loo and when I came out, well, there you were after all. But why go over it? None of it matters. I’m here now, and we can have a relaxing evening together. Please do sit down, Raymond. I’ll make some tea.”

She was already going towards the kitchen as she said this. I was fiddling with the shade of the standard lamp and so it took me a moment to remember what was in there—by which time it was too late. I listened for her reaction, but there was only silence. Eventually I put down the lampshade and made my way to the kitchen doorway.

The saucepan was still bubbling away nicely, the steam rising around the upheld sole of the boot. The smell, which I’d barely registered until this point, was much more obvious in the kitchen itself. It was pungent, sure enough, and vaguely curryish. More than anything else, it conjured up those times you yank your foot out of a boot after a long sweaty hike.

Emily was standing a few paces back from the cooker, craning her neck to get as good a view of the pot as possible from a safe distance. She seemed absorbed by the sight of it, and when I gave a small laugh to announce my presence, she didn’t shift her gaze, let alone turn around.

I squeezed past her and sat down at the kitchen table. Eventually, she turned to me with a kindly smile. “It was a terribly sweet thought, Raymond.”

Then, as though against her will, her gaze was pulled back to the cooker.

I could see in front of me the tipped-up sugar bowl—and the diary—and a huge feeling of weariness came over me. Everything felt suddenly overwhelming, and I decided the only way forward was to stop all the games and come clean. Taking a deep breath, I said:

“Look, Emily. Things might look a little odd here. But it was all because of this diary of yours. This one here.” I opened it to the damaged page and showed her. “It was really very wrong of me, and I’m truly sorry. But I happened to open it, and then, well, I happened to scrunch up the page. Like this …”I mimicked a less venomous version of my earlier action, then looked at her.