The Devil's Music (24 page)

    I could cover my tracks a little here. I put an arm around her and kiss the top of her head. ‘Sorry.’

    ‘For—?’

    ‘Some things I’m no good at talking about.’

    ‘Want to try?’

    ‘You’re tired.’

    ‘Yes. We could get into bed and talk. Cuddle up. That would be nice, you know?’

    If I get her into bed, I can probably persuade her into more sex.

    ‘It’ll do me good to stop thinking about the Diving Woman,’ she adds, wearily.

    We head back to her place. The night is clear. Stars scattered like glitter remind me of Crete.

    She makes hot chocolate from a jar. Takes off her clothes and climbs into bed. No elaborate routine washing or slathering creams and lotions on her face. Her big white bed takes up the entire floor space of a Pullman compartment. It’s so much more comfortable than anywhere at The Siding. Lying on my back under the thick duvet with her body curled up next to me, I’m surprised to have no desire for anything else, just to lie there.

    ‘It was something I said, wasn’t it? About the Diving Woman?’

    So, she’s not giving up. I don’t say anything.

    ‘Andrew?’ She runs her spread fingers through the hairs on my chest, rests her palm where the hair grows thickest, the centre line between my nipples, floats her fingers on the bounce of hair and presses down lightly, then lifts her hand away – the space between her hand and my skin like something missing – her touch returning to move lightly up over the hairs on my belly, slowing again as she reaches the curls of chest hair. With her strokes, something coiled within me loosens. My body grows loose and heavy.

    ‘I’m listening.’

    ‘It’s such a long time ago.’

    ‘Think of it as a story about someone else, that helps with murky things from the past, I find. You know that thing people do for agony aunts: “
Dear Virginia Ironside, I’ve got this friend who’s got pregnant by her brother and has already had two abortions
...”? Try that.’

    A part of me is irritated at the way she makes it sound light and inconsequential, but I’m comfortable and not sleepy yet so I experiment with a beginning. ‘Many years ago there was a small boy who loved this beach—’, and my memory of that terrible day becomes the story of Elaine.

    I reach the part where the man digging for lugworms starts to run, and I can’t go on. I roll on to my stomach, fists clenched, holding my breath. I have to get out. I get as far as the edge of the bed, head down, unable to think where my clothes are, my knee and thigh jiggling uncontrollably up and down, up and down, but there’s a grunting choking sound that must be me because my chest and throat are strangled. A cry comes out. A yelp.

    Sarah’s there, taking my head into her arms. I’m struggling away from her because I can’t breathe and will explode and have to get out.

    But she’s still there, holding my head and stroking my hair and saying, over and over again, her voice soothing, ‘It was an accident, Andrew, an accident. It wasn’t your fault.’ And finally I’m exhausted. There’s nothing left.

    We lie down together. She strokes my hair.

    When I wake in the morning her hand still rests on the back of my head.

You clutch the gloves, cream suede with scalloped cuffs, to your handbag. The handbag, also cream suede, makes you wish for something more stalwart. Today, in the muted green of the waiting room, the raspberry red of your suit is frivolous and garish – a reminder of another self. Yesterday Jean pounced on this outfit, whipping the suit from your wardrobe with a rustle of laundry plastic, exclaiming with delight that it’s the image of one Oleg Cassini made for Jacqueline Kennedy.

    It’s only been a few days. You feel exposed.

    You bought the suit to wear for your weekend together – although once you arrived, the two of you hardly stepped out of bed, just stayed there, cocooned together in The Siding as wind and sea railed outside. Undressing each other that first afternoon – the lunch you’d so carefully packed abandoned on the kitchen table – he gazed at your body with delight. You could read it in his eyes, his smile. He couldn’t believe how beautiful you are, he kept saying. He kept repeating
how beautiful
as he contemplated your body, smiling and reaching out for you again and again. Later that afternoon, bubbling with a laughter urging you to fly, you bounced from the bed, jumped into slacks, pulled a sweater of Ian’s over your head and danced out, barefoot, into the wind, bounding across the pebbles and on to the sand, swooping and shouting, mouth wide to breathe in the air, to lick the salt. The wide sky was layers of smudged purple and grey, frothy with wind-flurried white. Ian followed, chasing, vaulting over breakwaters, as the two of you raced across ripples of sand to the sea’s edge.

    ‘It’s not suitable,’ you told Jean yesterday. You took the suit on its hanger and put it back into the wardrobe.

    In your head, you have to keep things separate. Wearing this outfit while being Andy’s mother and Michael’s wife, frays the edges.

    ‘Why ever not? Come on, it’ll make you feel better.’

    ‘I don’t believe what I wear will make me feel any better at all.’

    ‘Look, it doesn’t help anyone when you’re walking round looking like a wet weekend. You’re taking Andrew to see this psychologist because he’ll make suggestions that will improve things. He’ll have seen it all umpteen times before. So, stop agitating. Be hopeful.’

    Jean didn’t add, as you knew she was tempted to,
or you’ll end up as bad as you were after Susie, after Elaine
. Today Jean is not here to boss you into a more positive frame of mind. Silence wads your throat and lungs.
Breathe, breathe
.

    You will have to tell Ian. It’s making you ill, the deceit. You will be strong and you will stop it. He’ll find somebody else in no time at all.

    The thought makes a sob catch in your throat. Michael, nose in a newspaper, pats your thigh. A wave of nausea washes over you and, pushing the red jacket sleeves up from your wrists to cool them, you wonder where, through which of these closed doors, the Ladies will be. You’ve not been sick but this nausea has been a nuisance for a couple of days, a bug perhaps, that the children have brought home from school. Thank goodness you got through the family interview. Three wooden chairs lined up, in an uncarpeted room, and the psychologist’s desk. The psychologist’s hair, receding from his forehead, was white and so too was the neat beard hiding his mouth. He wore a three-piece suit, a bow tie and horn-rimmed spectacles.

    Michael did most of the talking, and you listened to his mellifluous voice, almost hypnotised by the calm recounting of the details of your lives. Andy swung his legs and snapped the catch on his toy gun. Then you and Michael were ushered out, leaving Andy in front of the desk, cowboy hat pulled down over his eyes, legs still swinging and one fawn sock down at his ankle.

    He’s still in there with the psychologist, your little boy. The little boy you adored so much that once he was born you hadn’t wanted another child, didn’t really want or need any other human being. Michael’s desire for you after Andy’s birth was an intrusion. No wonder Michael quickly grew so jealous. It is your fault.

    But, four years later – too long a gap, Michael kept on and on – came Susie. In the nursing home, you’d wondered if it was the wrong baby they’d given you, because you felt nothing except a bone weariness. A few days after Susie’s birth, you turned your face to the wall when they wheeled her in for her feed. Back home, the repetition of nothing on nothing, day after day, inside your head, became a barren wilderness. And the days folded in on themselves, all those endless blank surfaces. Then, to fall pregnant, just three months after Susie’s birth, with Elaine – the tears prickle up behind your nose again.

‘Come on, Andy! Don’t be chicken.’

    Hugh’s voice echoes up through the darkness of the hole. I sit on the ground and put my legs in first, the way the others did. The sides of the coal chute are gritty cold.

    ‘Come on!’ Stephen calls up. He’s fat, but he didn’t get stuck. I shift my bottom forward a bit and then I’m sliding down. I can taste sooty dust and I’ve landed on a knobbly heap of coal and coal sacks.

    ‘It’ll make a jolly good den, won’t it?’ Hugh runs up and down the slope of coal, de-rrum de-rumming the tune to the
Lone Ranger
and pretending he’s galloping on a horse. ‘Yee hah!’ he shouts. ‘Yee hah!’

    Everything is shadowy. Stephen stands with his back flat against the wall, biting his lip. He has a smear of black on his forehead and it gives me an idea. I lift my hands to my face and rub my cheeks.

    I put a finger to my lips and whisper, ‘Camouflage,’ I wait, to make sure they’re both listening, ‘will be essential while we explore.’

    The three of us mess our hands about in the coal dust and rub our faces. Hugh and Stephen look like the Black and White Minstrels Mum watches on television. Their teeth show up white in the dimness.

    The house sits above us like an attic – dusty floorboards and sheets over things. It’s not properly empty. The ghosts of the people who once lived here are going to come out of the walls as soon as we’ve gone. On the outside the house looks different from all the other houses in our road. The windows have no curtains and the paint is coming off the front door in flakes. It made me want to come and look inside.

    ‘It’s a mental institution, this place.’ I nod my head at the others. ‘We’re going to explore the wards and find all the padded cells. There may be mad men. Lunatics!’

    The others go quiet and nod their heads back at me, fingers to lips.

    ‘Maniacs!’ Hugh nods back.

    I’ve told them all about the lunatic asylums where maniacs in straitjackets are tied up and left to wriggle like maggots in padded cells.

    Hugh goes first up the twisty stairs leading out of the cellar. Stephen goes last behind me because he’s slow and puffy. The door at the top is ajar and dusty. Sunlight comes through the gap.

You undo the clasp on your handbag and finger the familiar jumble: the compact in its velvet pouch (from Paris, the honeymoon, a gift from Michael); lipstick, handkerchief, door key, Eau de Cologne. You dab cologne on to your handkerchief and press it to your forehead, the sides of your nose, your forehead again. It’s the waiting, the silence, the high-ceilinged room with its waxy dark floorboards. Green foam, an oasis, shows through the sparse colour of a floral arrangement: an unnatural place for flowers.