The Song of Hartgrove Hall (40 page)

The journalist leaned forward and adjusted her tape recorder. I wondered uneasily how much I had said aloud.

‘Who was Jack, Mr Fox-Talbot?'

‘My eldest brother.'

‘Is he still alive?'

‘We're not in touch.'

The queasy feeling returned. A yellow haze clouded my vision, and once again I was close to tears. This really would not do.

‘Are you all right, Mr Fox-Talbot? We can always do this another time.'

‘No. No. I'm perfectly fine. Perhaps you'd be so kind as to fetch me a glass of water from the kitchen? I think I've had rather too much sun today.'

The woman glanced over to the window. The drizzle had settled into heavy rain. Still, she did not contradict me and trotted off to the kitchen while I furiously attempted to gather myself. I riffled through the CDs in their rack, trying to find something rousing to distract me. Every bloody one seemed to be conducted by sodding Marcus. He grinned at me from the covers, smugly gratified by my distress.

The next CD was one of Edie's. I'd conducted the Bournemouth Symphony as she sang the soprano solo for one
of my arrangements of Dorset folk songs. It had not been a hit. No one else liked it much when Edie dared to sing anything other than her usual wartime drivel. I'd loved this record – I'd not been able to bear listening to it since she'd died. It was odd: I could come face to face with photographs of her and revel in a masochistic nostalgia, but I could not listen to her recordings. Even after several years the sound of her voice was too much.

‘Your water, Mr Fox-Talbot.'

‘Thank you, you're most kind.'

As I took it from her, I discovered that I was still holding Edie's CD. Her photograph mimed a song at me, her mouth open like a bird's.

After the lady journalist left, I retreated into the garden. Usually I avoided interviews, and while I'd wanted to promote Marcus's concert, I had an unpleasant feeling that I'd given away far too much of myself without saying anything useful about Marcus or the music. I surveyed the flower beds. The last of the Michaelmas daisies were black from frost, and the foliage was all dying back, leaving expanses of bare brown earth. Ours had always been a summer garden.

I was worried about Robin. Knowing I'd upset him felt ghastly, and I was filled with shame. I'd relied too much on the boy. He'd given me a ball of string to help me find my way out of grief's labyrinth. Now after Marcus I'd propped myself up on him once again. He wasn't quite eight years old. Dizzy, I sat down on a rain-dashed bench, soaking my trousers. I hoped he'd forgive me. Children were more tolerant and more merciful than adults, weren't they? If not, I'd buy him a box of chocolates and a piano. That ought to do it.

I heard his voice ringing across the empty garden:
I'm sorry I didn't play it how you heard it in your head. I played it how
I heard it in mine.
He was no longer a musical savant playing by instinct. He now wanted to interpret for himself. He was no cipher but an independent artist. I felt a belly-punch of nostalgia for the baby musician he'd been – happy simply to listen to what my music told him. I supposed that this was how mothers must feel when their dimple-kneed toddlers metamorphose into skinny schoolboys. I felt horribly unnecessary to him. The charms of the old Steinway and cake with Grandpa would ebb, and one day he wouldn't want to come and visit at all. I would be a duty, not a necessary pleasure. I registered with some disquiet that, for me, Robin had become inadvertently and dangerously essential.

Tired and out of sorts, I was unable to resist the melancholy ruminations I usually told myself sternly to avoid. I'd lost a good many people over the years. It made me sound very careless. But it happened at my age. One missed them all. The Christmas card list became shorter and shorter. Each year one crossed off another few names. Saved a fortune on stamps.

It began to drizzle and I returned to the house. I headed for the music room, but then I veered into Edie's study instead. I'd still not emptied it. Mrs Stroud had finally tidied away Edie's things into the desk but the room itself remained untouched. The pink damask wallpaper. The pretty writing desk and the hopeless kitchen chair she used instead of a proper desk chair. The photographs of the children were spread out in a ring around the blotter. Clara on her wedding day – all white gauze and smiles; Lucy at graduation, looking tense and with an unflattering haircut. The grandchildren were pictured as they had been before Edie died: Annabel and Katy in matching polka-dot, little-girl dresses; Robin a serious-faced infant, wielding a rattle like a club.

The room no longer contained the sense that Edie had just walked out for a moment, soon to return. It was a museum.
The memories had been mothballed. I fumbled through her drawers and pulled out a mouldering pack of mints and an ancient packet of cigarettes, half empty. Edie always claimed that she'd stopped – but once in a while, I knew she'd sloped off to the potting shed like some elderly schoolgirl and had a quick fag behind the roses. I could always tell, but she preferred it if I pretended not to. I hadn't thought about this for yonks, and it shook me. How many other aspects of her had I forgotten? She was vanishing, piece by piece, and I hadn't even noticed.

Delving deeper into her drawer, I found a copy of the Torah, which I hastily set aside. Any souvenirs from her religious endeavours served only to remind me that this was something we had not shared. It annoyed me, this defiance not only of logic but of us – she and her chum Jehovah wilfully excluding me.

I yanked open the drawer with more force than was necessary and succeeded in spilling the contents all over the carpet. Swearing, I lowered myself painfully onto my knees and started to dump back into the drawer biros, paper clips, packets of tissues, letters and old Christmas cards. An elegant and familiar script caught my eye – I examined the picture on the card. A robin on a beach. A trifle vulgar and at odds with the beautiful handwriting inside, which I recognised even though I hadn't seen it for many years. It was very similar to my own, only taller, more masculine, more graceful. My dizziness returned. I sat back, wondering how on earth I was going to get up.

My heart crescendoed in my ears, its tempo quickening from a steady
adagio
to a furious
allegrissimo.
I was suddenly frightened that I would die right there of a heart attack on the not-terribly-clean carpet and no one would notice for days. Mrs Stroud would discover me as she prodded my corpse with the hoover. A pain bloomed across my chest and in my gut. I
forced myself to breathe. I pretended my heartbeat was the pulse of the orchestra, and I its conductor – no instrument dare disobey the maestro. I tapped a slower rhythm in my head, and, sure enough, compliant and meek as a desk of second violins, my own heart obeyed my command of
ritardando
and slowed to a steadier pace. The pain subsided.

Calmer now, I read the inscription:

‘To Edie, Happy Christmas, love, Jack. The Lotus Club, Longboat Key, December '98.'

I turned over the card. There was nothing else.

I couldn't sleep. I sat up in the dark with a glass of whisky, listening to the creak and shudder of the house. Jack had been quite clear: he would not forgive us. And yet there was the Christmas card – did it reveal a softening of his resolve? Or perhaps he had forgiven Edie and not me. For Christ's sake, why hadn't she told me he'd sent it? Why, of all things to send her, did he choose a bloody Christmas card? Or were there other cards, a letter even?

I rifled through her desk, taking it apart drawer by drawer, leaving an armada of papers strewn across the rug, but I couldn't find any others. Had she tossed them out? Hidden them? Or was this the only one? I might never know. Anger flared with the whisky fumes. I'd not been angry with Edie for a long time. It was a queer feeling. Before, when I'd been angry, I'd tell her and we'd have a jolly good row. This anger had nowhere to go and it trickled through me like meltwater.

I'd never attempted to find Jack. He knew where to find us. He'd asked us to leave him alone and it had felt like the very least I could do, considering. Yet the card suggested other possibilities. Perhaps I ought to search for him. Perhaps he'd been waiting for me to do so for years. Bloody Edie. I could
always stuff the card back in the drawer and forget about it, but that was silly talk. I knew it was there, and so a decision must be made.

An owl hooted through the stillness and at a distance another answered. I sloshed another finger of whisky into my glass, satisfied to find that I was buoyant with alcohol, bobbing most obligingly upon waves of fifteen-year-old Macallan.

Had Edie ever seen Jack, I wondered. She'd certainly had the opportunity to, during her various concert tours. A lustrous spark of jealousy flared deep inside me, long dormant, suddenly and uselessly rekindled. There was something bracing about it, however futile, like desire for the dead.

I fingered the card, re-examining it for hidden messages. Of course there were none. It was entirely without context. A floating sign, like a stray line of a libretto from a lost opera, and I could not interpret it with any certainty. And yet the card itself gave me cause for hope. I chose to see it as a token of forgiveness. Surely, if Jack could forgive Edie sufficiently to post her a gaudy card of a Florida beach sprinkled with glitter, then perhaps, just perhaps, he might forgive me.

‘A holiday?' said Clara. ‘You want to take us all on holiday to Florida?'

‘Yes. A week or so in the sun after Christmas. You certainly need a rest after all the nastiness with Ralph. I can play a little golf.'

‘Have you ever played golf?'

‘No. But Florida sounds like the sort of place one starts.'

She stared at me as though I'd finally cracked.

‘Afterwards, I thought we'd take the children on to Disney World.'

‘Aren't the girls a bit old?'

‘You're never too old for Disney World. Isn't that their slogan? And besides, Robin will like it.'

‘It's very generous of you, Papa, but wouldn't you prefer Vienna or Prague? Somewhere with music and culture rather than' – here she paused, as though about to say a particularly dirty word – ‘golf.'

‘Maybe I fancy a change.'

Clara did not look convinced. I did not tell her about Jack's Christmas card. I wasn't quite ready to confess to her the whole sorry business. Besides, I hadn't written to tell Jack that we were coming. He might have moved away. He might refuse to see us. He might be dead.

While Clara was bemused by the idea of the trip, the children were delighted. I'd not travelled for some time and had not been overseas since a year or so before Edie had died – she'd been too unwell to travel and I hadn't wanted to leave her. Now I found myself anxious about the journey and the prospect of being away from home. I woke in the early hours, fretting about details: suppose I mislaid my passport, or neglected to pack my good non-crease trousers, and what if my bags got lost? This new-found timidity irked and shamed me. I'd conducted concerts all around the world and had taken pride in my speedy, lightweight, last-minute packing – yet for this trip, I started to prepare my suitcase weeks in advance, fussing endlessly over what to take. At least, I consoled myself, Clara would be there to look after any last-minute fumbles.