The Song of Hartgrove Hall (37 page)

‘I shan't say a word. I shall lie and accept the guilt and the cost of those lies as the cost of loving you.'

Edie stares at me, her face still paper white. ‘Tell Jack – tell him I'm not feeling well.' She turns and hurries from the room and I hear the sound of her footsteps running up the stairs.

Ten minutes later, Jack and George appear from the garden.

‘Where's Edie?' asks Jack, pouring drinks.

‘She has a headache,' I say. ‘I don't think she's coming down for dinner.'

A
t half past six on Sunday evening, Lucy's car appeared in the driveway. I watched from the kitchen window as both girls climbed out, Lucy wrapping her arms around Clara who was clearly crying. I hurried to the back door and ushered them into the kitchen. Clara sat down at the table, her head in her hands, and hiccuped with sobs so violent that I couldn't understand what she was trying to say.

‘What is it, my darling? Is it Robin? Is he all right?' I asked, panicked.

‘Robin's fine,' said Lucy.

Clara looked up, her face streaked with tears. ‘You always think everything's about him.'

I waited quietly for her sobs to subside.

‘Ralph's left me,' she said at last.

‘Oh darling, I'm so sorry.'

‘Are you? You never liked him.'

‘No. And I like him even less now. He's an execrable man. I'm terribly sorry.'

She looked so desperate, so unhappy, that I felt something crack in my chest. I'd never wanted her to marry that beastly, smug man. His interest in music was mercurial, a sinister failing in a person. I rummaged through the cupboards and poured three very stiff gin and tonics.

‘Where are the children?' I asked.

‘Staying with a friend,' said Clara. ‘We haven't told them anything yet. I don't even know what it is that I am going to tell them. I need some time to think.'

Her eyes were puffy from crying and she wiped them with a scrap of hankie.

‘He's sleeping with someone else. Says he's in love with her and wants a divorce. Never meant it to happen. He's so fucking sorry—'

Here she started to sob again. Lucy rubbed her back and pressed the gin and tonic upon her.

‘Oh Clara,' I said, sitting down in the chair beside hers and clasping her hand. ‘You'll be all right. You really will. We're here to help you. Anything you need. Money. Lawyers.'

‘An assassin,' said Lucy grimly. Evidently, now at least, she disliked Ralph as much as I.

Clara didn't seem to hear. ‘An affair. With some woman in Accounting. It's humiliating. It's such a bloody cliché.'

I wished Edie were here. The longing was so fervent it was like a physical pain. Edie would have known what to do. She would have gathered Clara to her, taken her weeping daughter into bed with her, as she did when the girls were small and sick with a fever. Edie sang away all their sorrows, easing them into sleep. With a grimace, I accepted that, even if Edie had been here, this was a sorrow that could not be sung away.

Clara rubbed her eyes, making them redder still. She'd cried so much that her eyelids looked bruised and her skin had a waxy translucence.

‘Things haven't been right between us for – oh, I don't know,' she said. ‘We barely see each other. He's always working and I spend half my life driving Robin to piano lessons in London. And some time while I was stuck in traffic on the A303, Ralph was talking about sales invoices and year-end returns and falling in love with a woman called Angela.'

‘It's not Robin's fault,' I said.

‘No, of course it isn't,' snapped Clara. ‘Ralph and I drifted apart, so far apart that there was space for bloody Angela in Accounting to squeeze into the gap between us.' She sighed and rubbed her forehead, a tiny crease
appearing, a perfect copy of her mother's. ‘I knew things weren't right but somehow I was always too tired or busy to do anything about it.'

‘Stop it,' said Lucy firmly. ‘You're making it sound as if it's your fault and it isn't.'

Clara nodded and swallowed, holding back the tears. She slid her empty glass across the table. ‘I want Mum,' she said and began to cry again.

I found the pain of seeing her visceral unhappiness quite unbearable. One thinks it must become easier as one's small, pigtailed daughters grow into self-reliant women with families and smart careers, but it doesn't. Not a bit. I reached out to pat her hand and then withdrew, unable to offer any solace.

‘I'll run you a bath,' I said at last. ‘I always ran your mother a bath when she was upset. Gin and a hot bath make everything a bit better, she always said.'

‘Yes, do,' said Lucy. ‘And I'll come and chat to you while you soak, Clara darling.'

I left the two of them colluding earnestly in the kitchen and went to draw a bath upstairs. I sat on the edge of the tub – chosen of course by Edie – a cast-iron, clawfoot design, positioned so as to have a splendid view of Hartgrove Hill and the copse. It was dark and a yellow slice of moon dangled low above the ridge.

I thought of Sal, for the first time in many years. Was I a better man than Ralph? I usually tried hard not to think about Sal. I had behaved too badly. That period of my life had exposed the very worst of me and, as an ordinary coward, I preferred not to dwell on such things. I secreted Sal deep down inside my conscience and did my best to forget about her. I'd never told Clara or Lucy about her. There had never been occasion to. For the first time in decades, I was stricken about the affair – if I ever confided in them, could they forgive me?
It didn't matter, I told myself. There would never be a reason to tell them. And yet, as an owl hooted at the back of the hill and the water thundered against the side of the bath, I knew that it did matter. I didn't merely want their love, I wanted their absolution.

—

Clara came downstairs in Edie's old dressing gown, her face flushed from the bath, and curled up in the chair beside the fire in the drawing room. The firelight and the rosiness of her skin made her look closer to fifteen than forty. She tucked her knees beneath her chin and stared absently at the flames. The two of us had sat here together much like this the night before her wedding. I hoped she didn't remember.

‘We sat here just like this the night before my wedding,' she said.

‘You were dreadfully nervous,' I said.

‘With good reason, it turns out.' She sighed. ‘I asked you whether you were nervous before marrying Mummy and you said, “No.” That you'd never been less nervous of anything in your life. Only the thought of not marrying her had ever frightened you.'

‘Did I really say that?'

‘Yes.' She turned to me, her eyes glistening once more. ‘You don't know what it's like, Papa. I wanted what you and Mummy had. You made it look easy. No, not easy, inevitable. That's it. I thought my happiness in marriage was inevitable. And it wasn't.'

‘I'm so sorry, darling. We didn't mean—'

‘Of course you didn't. It's not your fault that you were happy. It was wonderful. Just quite a lot for us to live up to. It's why Lucy's never bothered to marry, you know.'

‘What on earth do you mean?'

‘She's not as silly as me. She wants what you had and won't
settle for anything less. She always knew it wasn't easy or inevitable.'

I felt a horrible gloom descend upon me. I never imagined that my own happiness would compromise my daughters'.

‘Stop it,' said Clara.

‘Stop what?'

‘Looking so bloody dejected. I told you, it's not your fault. You and Mummy were terribly lucky. Anyone else's bad luck is not your fault. It's nothing to do with you at all.'

This was an opportunity for confession, for me to confide that, yes, some of the unhappiness inflicted over the years had been entirely due to me and to Edie. Clara gazed at me with such frank love, such sadness and exhaustion, that I couldn't bear to tell her. There was no need for her to know that her father wasn't quite the man she'd thought. That he wasn't worthy of such esteem.

Robin spent even more time at Hartgrove than before. While his sisters flocked around their mother, proffering both anger and consolation, Robin retreated. He wanted neither comfort nor conversation. He wanted music. I allowed him to play the piano for longer than usual, and I temporarily lifted the ban on Beethoven – accepting that Robin needed to play through his loss and his fury. His childhood had slipped from a major into a minor key.

I tried not to listen to the music swilling through my own thoughts. I was drained from writing and needed to pause; I no longer had the stamina I once possessed. Nonetheless, melodies nagged at me, calling for me to come and play, much as my daughters had done when they were children and I was trying to work. Then, I had turned from the girls, irritated by their plaguing, and I had shut the music-room door, retreating
into music. Now, I attempted the reverse. I ignored the tunes pulsing in my forehead like a headache and attempted to focus solely on Clara and her children. I invited them all around for supper after Robin's piano practice, taking care to choose the seat between Annabel and Katy, much to Robin's surprise. I attempted to engage them in conversation, but I had scant idea of what to say. I didn't recall struggling to engage with my own daughters but my granddaughters remained little strangers – polite, pretty and distant as dollies.

I hacked at a roast chicken and distributed plates.

Annabel shook her curls. ‘I'm a vegetarian, Grandpa.'

‘You are? Since when?'

‘Since, like, for ever.'

Both girls stared at me with wounded bewilderment.

‘Oh, there's probably some cheese or smoked salmon somewhere in the fridge. You can have that if you want.'

‘I don't eat fish. Is it vegetarian cheese?'

‘I really wouldn't know, darling. I can't imagine it eats many steaks.'

I glanced across the table at Robin who smiled at me with some sympathy. Perhaps supper had been a mistake. Discussing Brahms with Robin was infinitely less taxing than being interrogated on the contents of my fridge by two visitors in pink-and-white-striped jeans and fancifully coloured trainers. I tried gamely to ask the girls about school and clubs and netball practice but the unpleasant truth was that I wasn't terribly interested in the answers.

Afterwards Clara and I washed up the dishes.

‘It's good that you made an effort with the girls. They'll appreciate the attempt.'

‘Will they? Seemed rather futile to me. I'm afraid we don't have a great deal in common. I don't know what to say to them. I've become one of those tedious elderly relatives I dreaded as a child.'

I did not add that I found the girls somewhat tedious myself.

Clara looked at me oddly and then gazed out of the kitchen window, where clouds glowed crimson like a coal fire, improbably beautiful.

‘Half the time I don't know what to say to Robin. He's my own child and yet I sit there in the car with him on these endless drives to and from London and I don't know what to say.'

‘You can talk about music.'

‘I can't. I don't know how. Not in the way that he does or that you do. I'd sound like an idiot. And, anyway, I don't hear music the way the two of you do.'

She fumbled with a cup and dropped it so that it smashed on the tiled floor with a xylophone crash.

‘Damn it.'

She began to cry. Those days, Clara's tears were always close to the surface.

‘For goodness' sake, Clara. It's only a cup. Here.' I dropped another, which shattered on the tiles with a satisfying tinkle.

She laughed. ‘It's not the stupid cup, Papa. It's Robin. You don't know what it's like, not knowing what to say to your own child. I don't know how he's coping with it all. He must be missing his father. He saw Ralph last week and afterwards he wouldn't talk about it.'

‘I think he's all right. He's angry. Lots of Beethoven at first but he's returning to Mozart again and I think that's a good sign. As long as he's not reaching for Schoenberg, I think we're in the clear.'

She gave a weak smile. ‘You see? You get him. I can't decipher him at all and he thinks I'm an idiot.'

‘Of course he doesn't.'

‘Last week I told him I liked the Debussy he was playing. He gave me a reproachful look and said, “That was Delius. Don't you know anything, Mummy? You have very stupid ears.”'