The Song House (11 page)

She sits on the edge of the bath and traces her hand along
the wall, feeling beneath the paint and the lining paper a wide,
ridged band, and it gives her an odd sensation when she
touches it, as if her fingers are reading Braille. A revelation
sparkles through her: the wall is a palimpsest of another room
and another time. This bathroom
is
new – pretend old – and
so are all the other rooms. The atrium downstairs with its pristine
cushion covers and architectural greenery; the cold sitting
room on the other side of the library with its smell of furniture
polish; the barely used dining room – all fake. Whatever
really went on in them, whatever lives were led, have been
eradicated. No photographs. No personal items. No one lives
here. These rooms don’t stand for anything, and they don’t
signify anything, except the determination to wipe out what
went before. All that is left of Kenneth’s past is the stuff he
hoards in his den. And his music. He has retreated, she thinks,
he has withdrawn himself from all of this. That’s why he wants
to bottle up the good memories, because, despite his best efforts
to cleanse his past, it’s all still here underneath: the odour of
despair, the stink of loss. It makes her sorry; not for Kenneth’s
family, and not for herself, but for him. Of course, he isn’t to
blame; he’s an innocent, just as she was.

Like a ghost she retraces her steps, back down to the prefect’s
office, to the empty page.

MAHLER, SYMPHONY NO.1 first movement.

You were fourteen, Kenneth, when you first
heard this piece. Not much older than your
son was when he stole me from my mother.

Thomas Bryce is sleeping, his chin on his chest, one arm
hanging down the side of the chair. In his lap, his glasses rest
on top of the newspaper, magnifying a corner of the racing
page. The television in the corner of the room is flat-screened
and massive. He keeps it switched on most of the time, and a
cookery programme is starting now; the title sequence, of a
brash fanfare followed by angry shouting, doesn’t disturb him.
On the shelf behind Thomas the radio is turned down low; he
keeps that on too, just in case. A fat spaniel lies stretched out
in front of the dead fire. On the floor by his side, Thomas has
left his dinner plate. A short while after he fell asleep, the dog
bent over and licked it clean, before flopping herself back onto
the rug.

Sometimes, when Thomas wakes up in the middle of the
night, he’ll see nearly naked women on the television screen
with their fingers in their knickers or sticking their thin buttocks
in the air and pumping them up and down or pinching
their nipples really hard. They want him to call or text; there’s
writing at the bottom of the screen that Thomas now knows
are messages from men, asking the girls to do things to themselves
or each other. He doesn’t bother trying to decipher the
messages any more, and he isn’t remotely stirred by what they
get up to with their bodies. Their faces interest him. He likes
the plumper ones, and the ones who look like they need a
wash, and he likes to see the barely disguised boredom in their
eyes. He wonders about how old they are, whether their
boyfriends are sitting at home watching them and wanking
off. Occasionally he’ll lean forward out of his chair, worrying
that he’s seen a bruise or an insect crawling on them, satisfied
that in the end, it’s just another tattoo. Often he’ll fall back
into a restless sleep and won’t wake properly again until he
hears the early morning shipping forecast on the radio.

Thomas doesn’t go to bed these days; there’s no point: his
bladder wakes him frequently, the sharp urgency coming with
no warning, or not enough warning to get downstairs to the
toilet. He uses the bedroom only to change his clothes, which
he does rather less often than the woman in the shop would
like, standing there behind the counter with her can of Glade
at the ready. No shame to her. He’d like to tell her what he
thinks of her, so concerned with herself, worrying about a
smell, frightened by the idea of germs. He’d like to tell her
how everything dies in the end, how it all goes bad; he’s only
reminding her of a natural process. And the landlord at the
Winterbourne never makes any objection when he turns up
there for his two pints of bitter. Thomas remembers the place
when it used to be the New Inn and you could sit at any of
the tables and pass the evening, having a drink and a smoke.
Then it had a refit and started doing food and all that was left
of the old pub was a long bench opposite the bar. The rest of
the space was for diners. The landlord never said don’t sit there,
he just got a waitress to put place mats out on all the tables
and a reserved marker in the middle. Thomas would squash up
on the bench with his pals, all in a line, and they’d watch people
from town turn up in their cars and order from the menu and
sit at the tables, candles glowing between them like a secret.
Then the landlord asked would it be all right if he left Bramble
at home. It wasn’t all right, and he told him so, and they
boycotted the pub, him and Freddy Peel and Flynn and Flynn’s
cousin Raymond. But they crept back, eventually, Thomas as
well. These days, when the landlord isn’t looking, he sneaks
Bramble under the bench where she’s happy to lie with everyone’s
feet on her. These days, Thomas isn’t allowed to smoke
in the pub any more. He wonders how long it will be before
he isn’t allowed to drink.

Bramble’s not a bad dog, but she’s lazy. Her problem is she
thinks she’s a pet. Thomas has had a few dogs in his lifetime,
all working stock. He can tell that Bramble hasn’t ever been
worked. Her previous owner put her in a rescue centre because
he was too old to care for her. When the girl at the centre told
him that, Thomas wondered if she thought that he was too
old, too, at seventy-eight. He’s taught Bramble a few things,
but she hasn’t got the nose for field work. Her retrieval is
aimless at the best of times, and her delivery is poor: she drops
the dummy anywhere. And she eats too much, foraging in the
bins at the back of the lane when he tries to reduce her
portions. Her breath is on him now, a happy, panting stink.

When morning comes, regardless of what kind of night he’s
had, Thomas will go through his regime: turning off the sidelight
to watch the dawn come up, quiet and steady, or quick
and rash, through the window. Different day, different dawn,
same routine. At seven-thirty, he’ll make some tea and toast,
and take Bramble out for a stroll along the river. It’s what he
does every day, and he walks the same route, never deviates. It
was difficult to keep to it for the first few years, he’ll admit
that. Despite his resolution to go on as before – to take the
river path, track left down the far field and into the copse –
by the time he’d re-emerged at the other end of the wood,
Thomas would find himself half a mile off course. Sometimes
he’d be knee-deep in a farmer’s crop; sometimes he’d be at the
lane at the top of the village. Once, he was back at his own
front door. As if his feet were wandering of their own accord,
he thinks, As if they had a mind of their own. He’d had to steel
himself, then. Whichever particular dog was at his heels,
Thomas would retrace his steps, find the footpath, and continue
the way he always did when he used to work the river: past
the Earls’ place and along the bowl barrow field.

He pushes Bramble to one side, and shifts in his seat, testing
the heaviness in his groin. There’s a politician on the radio
answering questions, a man on the television is having an
argument with another man. Thomas stumbles through to
the kitchen and urinates into the sink, thin stop-start spurts,
running the cold tap to help him. Through the window, the
view is of the lane and the sinking sun, a greasy smear of amber
hovering in the distant trees. He squints at it, willing the pressure
in his bladder to subside, trying to concentrate.

He beat his problem eventually, although in a funny way the
Earls helped: after the business had died down, they turned the
field over to wheat. But then someone decided it was the site
of an ancient monument and had to be protected. They could
grow the wheat, they could reposition the culvert, but they
couldn’t disturb the barrow. Now you wouldn’t know it was
there, unless you were looking for it. Thomas tries not to think
of what happened; there’s no point. He knows he will only
relive it again in the morning, as he does every day when he
passes the spot, passes the Earl place, passes the barrow where
all those years ago he found the girl. He has beaten his problem,
is what he always tells himself. It was Sonny that unearthed
her. Now, Sonny, he was an exceptional hound.

Kenneth tries to stop himself from checking his watch; time
won’t move any faster just because he’s looking at it. Through
the tinted window of the train, the lights of the tower blocks
flee back to London, leaving only his reflection, staring uneasily
in at him. He thinks about the number of times he’s made this
trip in his life; countless occasions when he was a young boy
coming home from school, then a hiatus of forty years or more,
when he drove everywhere. Can’t do that now, wouldn’t trust
himself now. Not after that last episode, cruising at speed the
wrong way up the motorway, car headlights flashing like sparks
in front of his eyes. He knew something was amiss; the central
reservation was over on the passenger side, the one-way became
inexplicably two-way. Too late, Kenneth realized that it was
him going against the flow and not everyone else: by then, the
sparks of those oncoming headlights had turned into the blue
scroll of a squad car beacon.

A caution, and his licence revoked: he was told that he’d
been lucky, but he didn’t feel lucky; he felt as though he’d had
an arm cut off. Will suggested a chauffeur, not understanding,
or choosing to ignore, the simple pleasure of driving, with only
The Pearl Fishers
or
La Bohème
for company.

Oh Mimi, he says, thinking of Maggie, You will love Jussi
Björling, I just know it.

Kenneth decides he will play her some opera on his return.
He checks his watch again.

Maggie is burning dinner. After she’d written up the song notes,
she’d laid her head on the desk and closed her eyes: only the
stained-glass woman in the window to watch over her, the light
in the room gradually softening to caramel brown. She felt
unable to move; couldn’t even reach up for the latch when the
cool draught of river air rose up and scattered the pages. When
she roused herself, it was to a dusk-filled room, the beam of a
car playing over the walls as it swung up the drive. Maggie
thought it would have to be William. Remembering Kenneth’s
bathroom, she bolted up the stairs and checked herself in the
mirror. Her face bore a long pink crease where she’d been lying
on her sleeve, an imprint of mottled dots on her cheek. She
filled the washbasin, smelling again Kenneth’s shaving soap, and
splashed her face with water. As she was making her way back
down, the doorbell rang twice, two short peremptory bursts,
followed by an expectant silence. She wiped her hands along
her dress, breathed in and out slowly, pulled the heavy door
open. It was not William. Standing before her was a woman in
a pale-blue trouser suit, her hair carefully coiffed, a diaphanous
scarf around her neck. Maggie felt faint with relief. The woman
barely glanced at her before pushing her way inside.

Can you tell Mr Earl that Mrs Taylor is here, she said, making
a statement of the question, Where is he? In his
den
, I suppose.
She set off so fast along the hallway, Maggie had to half-trot
to keep up. She was oddly satisfied to see that the woman had
a chalky white teardrop of bird excrement on the back of her
jacket.

He’s not here, said Maggie, catching her up at the kitchen
door.

The woman turned.

What do you mean, he’s not here? Of course he’s here, she
said, peering into the kitchen, He’s always here.

He’s gone to London – on business, said Maggie. Even she
thought it sounded like a lie. The woman looked at her directly
for the first time.

I do apologize, you must think me very rude. I’m Alison
Taylor, she said, holding out her hand, A friend of Kenneth’s.
And you are?

Maggie, she said, shaking the offered hand. She felt the cold
lump of a diamond on the other woman’s finger, the bones
beneath the gliss of hand cream.

And are you a guest, Maggie? she asked, and not waiting for
a response, added, It seems rude to leave a guest all alone, don’t
you think?

Maggie didn’t reply immediately. She was thinking that this
was the woman who had styled the atrium, and probably all
the other rooms too; could see right through the woman’s eyes
and into her skull: friend of Kenneth or not, she wanted this
house and her place in it.

I work for him, Maggie said, at last, And he’ll be back later
this evening. Would you like to leave a message?

Alison Taylor turned her wrist over, sliding a gold bracelet
around to reveal a small watch-face, which she studied, tapped
with her fingernail, and jangled away again up her sleeve.

I don’t think so, she said, through a bleached smile, He’s
clearly forgotten.

Maggie followed her out into the hall.

Was he supposed to meet you? she asked, unable to help
herself, Only, he didn’t mention it.

Ah, and why would he? Are you his secretary?

Even though the smile was still in place, the woman’s tone was
hostile.

I’m . . . we’re compiling an archive.

An archive. How fascinating. And what kind of archive are
we compiling?

Maggie opened the door.

I think maybe Kenneth will want to tell you that, she said,
marvelling at how smooth she sounded.