Fearful Symmetry (3 page)

It was only as he began to ask her murmuringly about her house, was she on e-mail, did she have only one music room, could he have his own private space, did she have any sound equipment, that she began to hear the klaxon going off in her head instead of the voice now very close to her ear:
DON
’
T DO IT DON
’
T DO IT DON
’
T DO IT
. She drew away, uncertain whether his suggestion was refreshingly honest in its barefaced opportunism or an insult to her intelligence.

‘We can work together at my house,’ she’d replied. ‘It’s perfect for working. But I’d better find you somewhere else to stay. To start with.’

And now she would have to. He appeared not to have thought about such practicalities for himself until that moment and now, probably because she was so damned susceptible, she realised furiously, it had become
her
responsibility, just as it had been Leggy Mute’s job to light his fags. How? How had that happened? But she could see that if she did nothing, precious time would be wasted while he tried to find somewhere by himself when he arrived, or got peevish about not staying with her. Oh yes, and he loathed hotels. ‘Wanted: superior private accommodation for intense, foreign, possibly domestically helpless, rich and famous composer. Liable to emit, or cause to be emitted, loud, insane electronic noises.’ She would have to deal with it.

And an even more immediate problem faced her tomorrow. She thought again of Medlar Cottage, concerned at how very intensely she wanted to be back in it and to move around all its spaces, feeling her body and mind rest into the embrace of each room. She pictured the furniture, standing undisturbed through a hundred comings and goings of daylight and dark, the stopped, waiting clocks and the propped-open fridge. Every uneven, well-known step of the stairs, every quirky door, each little draught and creak were marks of her house’s own fragile familiarity, which by her absence she might have obscured into strangeness. What if she crossed her own threshold and instead of the private peace that she longed for, found again only the same smothering loneliness of a hotel? She had not been home in nearly two months, and now she could not face it alone.

S
HE PICKED
up the telephone and rang Andrew in England, where it was four o’clock in the morning.

CHAPTER
4

E
GG
?’

‘Sorry?’

‘An egg. Want one?’

‘Oh, yes. Thank you. Are you having one?’

‘Am I, sorry?’

‘An egg.’

‘Oh. I don’t think so. Thank you. Unless—’

Oh, Christ, Andrew thought, locking his teeth together. She is actually going to ask:
Unless you mind having one on your own?

‘Unless you mind having one on your own?’

‘Why does Daddy always get an egg now?’

Natalie and her brothers looked up from their bowls at the breakfast bar.

‘Can I have an egg too?’

‘Eggs are yuck. I want toast.’

‘You’ve got cereal. Eat up. Then go and clean your teeth.’

The children resumed a subdued sucking on their honey clusters and some half-hearted kicking at one another’s ankles, silently enquiring of one another whether that was the I Mean It voice or the Don’t Bother Me one.

‘Didn’t I hear the phone last night?’

‘Yes. About four o’clock.’

‘Was it a call-out? I didn’t hear you go out.’

Andrew lowered his voice and turned away from the children. ‘Valerie, I thought the kids aren’t supposed to know I’m sleeping in the spare room? How could you not know it was a call-out if the phone was still in our room?’

‘Oh, it goes over their heads,’ Valerie said, glancing over to the breakfast bar. The chewing children looked blandly back at her. ‘You three. Teeth. And do it properly.’

‘Why is Daddy sleeping in the spare room?’

‘Is that why he gets an egg?’

‘Cereal’s yuck.’

‘
Now,
’ said Valerie, talking in unmistakable I Mean It.

They scattered, like little looters disturbed from the wreckage of their breakfasts. When they had gone she turned round to Andrew.

‘So was it? A call-out?’

Andrew sighed. ‘No.’

‘Quite enough nastiness already, with that letter-bomb. Poor woman.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Quite enough, you being called in on your bank holiday off, without another call-out at four o’clock in the morning.’

‘Yesterday was an emergency. The ambulance people twigged that a crime was involved, and the casualty doctor called us. A criminal explosion could be a terrorist bomb. You’ve got to act immediately.’

‘Oh, don’t emergency procedure me. Why would the IRA blow up a seventy-five-year-old spinster?’ Valerie said.

‘I didn’t say political terrorists. We ruled that out quite quickly. But someone sent an old lady a letter-bomb that blew up in her hands, even if it wasn’t meant to be fatal. I call that terrorism.’

‘So who was it?’

‘Dunno yet, unlikely to be a random nutcase. More likely a—’

‘On the phone, Andrew. At four o’clock in the morning.’

‘Oh. Actually, it was Sara,’ he said, very nearly failing to sound neutral. ‘She’s in New York. She claimed to have forgotten the time difference, but you know what she’s like.’ His voice tailed away into a slight clearing of the throat. He remembered Sara’s tearful voice and felt like a disloyal bastard to be running her down. But Valerie must get no inkling of how he still felt about Sara. She was already making him suffer enough for their non-existent affair, the affair which he and Sara had never actually, but nearly (to his regret only nearly), had.

‘So, no, instead of a random nutcase,’ Valerie said, ‘your little blip.’ She turned to the cooker and set about boiling Andrew’s egg.

Andrew sat down and opened the paper. To content herself with just that was a sign of new and considerable restraint in Valerie and he knew he should give her credit for it. Three months ago she had declared herself prepared to accept what he had told her all along, that the affair had never happened, and that when he had left to move into a flat it had not been in order to be with Sara. On that basis Valerie had allowed him to move back in but not to sleep with her because she needed her own space (her version). Seeing his children grow steadily more listless as the weeks of their separation went by, Andrew had given in to her demand that they try again, although he would take the spare room because he did not want to sleep with her (his). Like lots of couples, they were learning how to be kinder to one another. They had allowed themselves to grow apart, and Andrew’s cello lessons with Sara Selkirk were not and never had been the real problem. It was more a question of cultivating some shared interests and having fun together (theirs).

It was the new, fun-seeking Valerie who had signed them both up for the Circus Opera Group. ‘I’ve signed us up. They said singers and instrumentalists are welcome and no audition is necessary.’

‘I hate musicals,’ Andrew had said, lapsing into the style of the old regime, ‘and I won’t sing.’

‘It’s not a musical, it’s an opera. A community opera. And you won’t be singing. I’ll sing and you’ll play your cello. It’ll be fun.’

Although it was a novelty to have Valerie not openly resentful about his cello-playing, the words ‘community opera’ were almost enough to send him running. He needed neither a community nor an opera, he needed only as much nineteenth-century cello repertoire as he could lay his hands on and time to play it. And Sara. But he knew that there could be no defence against the imperative that he and Valerie have fun. At the same time he calculated that he could use his working hours as a reason to keep himself safely away from most of the rehearsals. ‘As long as I don’t have to sing, then,’ he’d said.

Valerie was now a ‘key member’ of the Circus Opera Group and frequently referred to Sara as Andrew’s ‘little blip’. Andrew had grown accustomed to locking his teeth together and allowing her to, calculating that the breezier Valerie became about Sara, the easier it would be for him to carry on seeing her, of course only for lessons, once she was back. It had even been Valerie’s suggestion that Sara might be able to recommend somebody to compose the community opera. ‘Isn’t she supposed to know everyone? I’m sure you could persuade her to find us a nice young composer.’

Reluctantly, Andrew had mentioned it, just as Sara was leaving for the six-week block of engagements which was just ending. ‘Well, yes, I do know people, but I thought the community was supposed to compose it,’ she said. ‘Look, I’m packing. I’ll give it some thought.’ Until last night, that was the last time he had spoken to her. He turned a page of the newspaper.

‘Has she done anything about a composer?’ Valerie asked, as if she had been tracking his brain. She was buttering toast viciously, as if trying to get something off it. ‘The group’s starting up again tonight, remember. It’s getting desperate now.’ The group had spent the three months before its summer break on part-songs and squabbles about the theme of the putative opera. Opinion was divided on whether it should be about Jane Austen or about the Romans and the hot springs. Andrew’s contribution to the debate had been to point out that for one thing Jane Austen had disliked Bath and for another he hoped nobody seriously expected him to play the cello ponced up in a toga.

‘I’m sure she has,’ Andrew answered, without lowering the paper. ‘I didn’t ask. We didn’t chat, once I pointed out the time.’

He turned another page. ‘She just rang to ask me to send a PC to check that Medlar Cottage was okay. Got herself in a state about possibly coming home to a burgled house,’ he lied.

He looked at his watch. It was nearly eight o’clock. He had another twelve hours in which he had to act normally.

‘And it was handy, in a way, her ringing. She knows the people who live above the Bevan woman. They’re away, and of course we want to interview all the neighbours. And as it happened Sara had their other numbers.’ He lowered the paper. ‘Look, I’ll try to make it to the rehearsal tonight. But this letter-bomb case will be coming first with everyone for a while. There’s a lot to do. There are no obvious suspects. We need to interview a lot of people, and quickly. So I’ll try, but don’t count on me. All right?’

Valerie grimaced with understanding, for which Andrew felt a whole second’s worth of guilt. But only another twelve hours until he would see Sara, until she would be stepping off her plane and coming through the Arrivals Hall. She would be tired out, laden with her luggage and cello case, but still the most beautiful woman in the whole building. And she would be a little lost, looking for him, and as soon as she saw him the anxiety would leave her face and she would smile and walk towards him, because she had asked him to be there and of course he would be, waiting to wrap his arms around her and take her home.

‘O
NE FUR
coat isn’t the issue. The issue is exploitation. Totally innocent animals are being exploited. I happen to believe that’s worth fighting for.’ As she finished speaking Anna Ward-Pargiter opened her eyes very wide behind her glasses and took a deep breath, clenching her lips tightly as she did so. This arrested, momentarily, the wobble that had started up in her chin, but after a few seconds back it came, the involuntary contraction that puckered up her lips and tightened her throat. She grasped her chin tightly between a thumb and forefinger and tried to blink away the moistness that was gathering in her eyes. Now there was stuff wanting to come down her nose and invisible wires seemed to be tugging down the corners of her mouth. Oh shit shit shit shit shit—she was going to cry.

Andrew exchanged a glance with WDC Frayling, who took the cue and said quietly, ‘All right, Anna? Shall we stop there? We can stop for a minute if you like—there’s no problem.’

Anna was now finding that it was impossible to leave off gulping and sniffing. She didn’t understand this. Bren had said they were pigs. But these pigs were coming over all nice. She took off her glasses, reached for a hanky, found none, sank her head onto her arms across the table and bawled like a three-year-old. Shit—now there would be stuff all over her sleeves.

‘Anna, it is quite clear to you, isn’t it?’ WDC Frayling went on. ‘You are being interviewed as a witness, not, so far, as a suspect. You are not under arrest. And I know you said you didn’t want to, but you can still use a phone and let someone know you are here. You’re allowed to change your mind, you know.’

Anna always collapsed the minute people were nice. From the day Mum left, and right through the divorce, she had kept a hold on herself. She knew it was only a question of winding a part of yourself up so tight inside that it took up a very small space, and then you could forget it was there, like looking after your tights at boarding school. The small drawer you had was fine when you rolled each pair into a hard little bumpy ball, but a complete mess if you let them unravel everywhere. Her brain told her that she was a statistic, another ‘child of divorced parents’. It achieved nothing to blub about it. And that had been absolutely fine until her housemistress had wanted to see her about her bad marks and, instead of the scolding she was expecting, Anna had been asked gently how she was coping with it all. She had not even finished saying ‘absolutely fine’ before the tears had come. Now here she was blubbing again. Thank God Bren wasn’t here to despise her for it.

At the sudden scrape of the chair she looked up. DCI Poole had stood up and was towering over her. He was very tall, strong-looking too. The lady policeman was leaning back in her chair, waiting. Now Anna understood. The man was reaching down into his pocket, probably for a truncheon. The floppy, unravelled part of Anna that made her cry tightened again into a hard, undetonated little land-mine of attitude. Shit. That warped bitch probably got a kick out of watching people get beaten up. This was exactly what Bren had warned her about. Now she was going to get it. She jumped to her feet and shrieked through her sobs.

‘I’m a minor! I have rights! You lay a finger on me and you’ll see!’ She was interrupted by a burst of astonished laughter from DCI Poole who, having finished searching in his pockets, had sat down again and was presenting her with a folded white handkerchief.

‘Lucky I had a clean one,’ he said, less to Anna than to WDC Frayling. ‘Here.’

Anna sat down and took the handkerchief, whispering thanks and burying her face in it. After several moments during which nobody spoke, she emerged from the folds of the hanky looking calmer, as if she’d had her nose plunged in a huge white flower. Then she found a clean bit of hanky, rubbed at her glasses, put them back on and looked up, sniffing, at DCI Poole. He had brown eyes, too. And something else about them, not just the colour, suddenly reminded her of Dad. Her face disappeared into the hanky again. How was Dad?

‘Whether animals are the issue or not, I want to hear again about the fur coat in the Oxfam shop. You went in there on Tuesday the twenty-fifth of August, at approximately ten fifteen, is that right? What happened?’

Anna swallowed. ‘We were just walking past. I just had a peer in on the way past and Bren went on. Then I saw the coat and called out to him.’

Funny, Anna thought, how you can make it sound so uncomplicated, almost normal. It didn’t matter to anyone but her that they had been walking along in silence because that morning Bren had been not speaking to her. Or that the night before, after he had rolled off her, she had lain awake, pleased that they had made love, even though it had happened in silence except for his quiet grunting into the pillow behind her shoulder. And that in the morning, when Bren was as aggressively silent as before, she realised she had been wrong to hope that the lovemaking signalled the end of this particular bout of ‘not speaking’.

‘Why won’t you speak to me? What about last night?’

‘What about it? You wanted it.’

It had shocked her into silence to hear him describe making love as ‘wanting it’. This was about love. When they had first met at Glastonbury it had been falling in
love
. Why else would she have left home and spent all summer in one grotty room in Bath with him? He had been in love with her too, so much so that he had not even wanted her to ring home, although she had once or twice, telephoning when Dad was at work and leaving messages to say she was all right. It struck her for the first time that Dad deserved better than that, and then she knew it was pointless to try to stop them coming. She took off her glasses again and tears of the hot, unstoppable kind coursed down her face, while she sat there, shaking softly and making hardly any sound at all.