Hide and Seek (12 page)

Pianorgasm.

Together, we lie silent. Inside me, I can feel Leo doing little somersaults. But this isn’t about him, right now.

I’ll need to say something, acknowledge what just happened.

“I love your father’s music,” I say, putting that tender jokey edge in my voice.

“Me too,” Will says, with no joke in his.

And he rolls away from me. He doesn’t hold me. There is no glory of my bump. I am not even there for him.

So I wonder, as we turn off our bedside lamps, whether he even knew the rhythm he was making love to. Whether he knows just how much Max is inhabiting – inhibiting – him. And whether it really all will be all right in the morning.

Chapter Five

-Sophie-

Crotchets and quavers still remind me of the pall-bearers. Like black-hatted heads above the line of the coffin, they stand out starkly against the staves of the composition book. Whose book is it? I turn to the front. Oh, Emilie Beaumont. All
très jolie
with her blonde ringlets and big brown eyes, until the tantrums start. Then she turns red and cries and stamps her foot. How I hate children like her. So, yes, young Emilie’s quavers, malformed and straggly and in a major key as they are, do their funereal march across the page. I nearly didn’t even go to Max’s funeral, to see those pall-bearers. Nearly stayed away. Couldn’t face him being lowered into the ground. All those people, staring. Whispering their suspicions. Pointing their black-gloved fingers at us both, me and Guillaume. But it would have been more dangerous not to go. We’d have been conspicuous by our absence. And things might have been said. Things I couldn’t control.

And so I went. And what I remember most is that some awful organist tried to play an extract of Max’s work, but they played it so badly it was almost unrecognisable. I’d been silently weeping before, but I made it my job to sob big loud sobs when that music started, just to cover up the horror of what it meant, for Max actually to be dead, for his genius to be lost, for him never to play his own music ever again, just to be played badly by mediocre hobbyists. And little Guillaume, I think he tried to take my hand, but I wouldn’t let him. I wouldn’t let him. So that, besides everything else, gets added to the guilt list.

It’s not just notes, though, that are like death. Pianos, too, have their reminders of the mortality of Max. At first, I was not even able to look at a piano. It was not just their resemblance to coffins. It was that I felt I was looking straight at Max. But not live Max; Max laid out dead on the hospital bed. The keys were like the ribs of a skeleton, topped and tailed not by anything as useful as a head – just black nothingness at the end of the run.

But then when the realisation of his absolute final gone-ness hit me (appropriately, like a blow), I turned to pianos for solace. I liked to press my face against the keys, to hug the shiny wooden body, to run a finger along the red felt that separated the two. I was thrown out of several music stores. At the time, I found it heartless. On reflection, I suppose it may have been my unnaturally dilated pupils, that over-stimulated frenzy, and the fact I talked to the pianos, that meant the security guards were compelled to remove me. Little Guillaume would slink out behind me. Half the time, I wasn’t even aware of bringing him with me, but he’d turned up, all the same. It would have been so easy just to leave him in one of those piano shops. Open up one of the lids of a grand piano, stow him inside, then shut it again. Leave his head pressed against all those strings. Hammers coming down at his temples.

Arrête, Sophie – tu te rends folle
. And I don’t want to drive myself mad. Madness would not be helpful. Madness doesn’t get you an income. Marking that little bitch Emilie Beaumont’s work would get me an income. Shut off the pain, the guilt, the feeling, like before. When you allowed yourself back into music again. Not to play professionally any more, not like when I met Max. My violin is well and truly shelved. Smashed, in fact. It had seemed like a good idea, at the time. I couldn’t sit in an orchestra again, hear that build-up of sound, the passion that went with it. Max’s piano would always have been centre-stage, in my mind. Like the first time, when I was part of the orchestra that recorded the first concerto. We’d joked, when he’d started his next piece (a quirky piano-only concerto), that he’d only written his earlier concerto with orchestra so that he could snare the first violinist. Now he had one, he could move on to solo work. Not that I was his first violinist. His piano had built up its share of notches.

I toss Emilie’s composition book to one side. It isn’t happening. I’m having a Max moment. If I can just engage in that, maybe I’ll finally get closure, put it all to one side. So, let’s psychoanalyse: did I feel rejected that he didn’t want my violin accompaniment, in that second concerto? Maybe. Maybe that’s why we argued in the run-up to that second recording. Or maybe it was still because of Guillaume, the distance I felt since he was born. Not just from Max, but from everything. The distance I tried to close by shouting. By throwing plates, sometimes. And, yes, make yourself confront it
–
other things. I would quite literally give anything for us not to have argued that evening. Had I known what the consequences would be.

So yes, maybe that’s why I put the violin to a violent rest. Pursued teaching, the ‘easier’ option. But then, of course, came the impact of the staves. The horror of those notes, their little black heads against the white and black background! How could they be innocently suggesting a tune? How could they not represent Max, lying on that black and white chequered floor? Follow the head, they seemed to be saying, follow the head as it moves about. Hit that note, get it just right, position it evenly on the line, strike it through. And worse, far worse, sometimes the heads had little tools next to them, the sharps, so shaped that they looked like –

No! It had been too much. And so I’d told all my students to do composition on blue staves in pencil. Found a little cheap supplier of poor quality composition books, whose staves had meant to be black but had turned out blue. Bought them from my own salary. Told the pupils that is how real composers work. They believed me; and their parents did too. They are professionals, not artists, those parents. What does a doctor or a lawyer know about music? I could almost hear them ignorantly boasting to their friends about the authentic musical education their talentless children were getting. Shame they also chose to talk about it to the Head of Music. He called me in to see him. He said he’d surveyed many composers and none of them had heard of my theories.
Idiot
. He didn’t know any real composers. Not composers like Max. Max didn’t care whether he wrote in pen, or pencil, or blood, on black staves or blue, or even any staves at all. He just created and played. But I couldn’t say that, could I? Couldn’t let on, about Max. It had been a risk, even putting my connections with that orchestra on my CV, even though I knew I needed to, to get the job, to validate myself. Didn’t mention Max’s name though. Just said I had led the strings section in the works of ‘various contemporary composers’. I’m sorry, Max. Again.

And now, there it is. The reason I don’t indulge in this. There is the familiar welling of sorrow. It will drag me down, down to Bois de Boulogne. And I can’t go that way again. Won’t. I’ve worked so hard to rescue myself. And besides, it wouldn’t even give me safety there, now. I’m not so young. Maybe I wouldn’t be at risk of rape. But now that I’m ‘older’ – I never was older, with Max, him being five years my senior – they would probably see an old lady, mug me. Take my bag, sell my identity, before I could buy a new temporary one from them and shoot it up into my veins.

So, instead, now, let us see what
mes enfants terribles
have concocted for me. Has little Emilie made any sense of my instructions? I wonder if when they compose, these children, they become the awful anti-social ogres that Max used to become. They certainly do not have the excuse of genius. I tut, crossing out a stray sharp that had found its way into C Major. I tell them C Major is the learning key. They don’t need to trouble themselves with sharps. Or worse, flats, with that great curved weight on the end of them, sitting right next to the note head. So many of them, ironically, in Max’s first concerto, written in B-flat Minor. If he’d chosen that key deliberately to court comparisons with Tchaikovsky it had certainly paid off: reviewers claimed he was as ‘bold’, ‘heroic’, ‘fierce’ and ‘eerie’ as the great Russian, ‘taking listeners to the same depths of melancholy and heights of passion’. None of that, in the year I teach. We play it safe in C Major. Although there is a danger, doing everything in the relative key to Max’s second concerto. A Minor. Just as haunting as his first. Perhaps even more so. For how it ended. Perhaps I’ve spent these teaching years intentionally skirting dangerously close to his memory – keeping him near but far enough away not to trouble me. But I don’t teach them about relative scales here. They can learn all that when they get to
lycée
. Until the Head of Music finds out, and quibbles it.

Yes, genius had been Max’s every excuse. For his hours of silence, his refusal to co-operate in household chores, his dreadful failure to acknowledge Guillaume when the boy wanted to play. His excuse for everything. Not that he even needed an excuse when we first started going out. I just enjoyed watching his genius. It was like he was making love to the piano. It was the same face when he was striving to orgasm. The same lifting up and down of his hips at the piano as he reached the climax. Except later on he saved the intensity for the piano. Apart from when Guillaume was conceived. He gave a virtuosic performance then, when it mattered.

So, yes. At least his excuse was valid: genius. The question is – was mine?

Chapter Six

-Ellie-

The bed is empty. It’s still dark. I look at the clock. 4am. Will must have gone to the bathroom. At any moment there’ll be the familiar pull of the chain and the dozy stumbling back to bed. That used to be my domain, in the first months of having little Leo in my belly – the sudden stumbles to the bathroom, the groggy return. But things have settled down, now, for me. Still I wait. And wait. 4.20am. I guess in a few months’ time I’ll probably consider six hours’ uninterrupted sleep, preceded by oddly arousing sex, to be a very good deal. So, out of bed, let’s find out what’s going on. Opening the bedroom door, I head to the bathroom. The room is dark and empty; no Will. Through the frosted window there’s a faint glow. If I just stand on tiptoes to look through the non-frosted upper section, I can see out into the night.

Fire! OK, so that’s the sleep gone. Will is standing in the garden surrounded by fire. I scrabble with the sash lock on the window and throw it upwards. Yes, there he is – great orange flames in front of him.

“Will!” I shout out of the window. “What are you doing?”

But he doesn’t reply. Maybe he can’t hear me over the sound of the flames. I pull my dressing gown from the hook on the bathroom door and run downstairs as quickly as I dare. Mustn’t trip; mustn’t hurt the baby. I slip on some shoes, unlock the back door and run out into the garden.

“Will!”

Now that I’m out here, the flames are both less and more alarming. Less, because I can see they’re coming out of the leaf incinerator, so he’s not actually randomly setting fire to the lawn. More, because of their roaring intensity, and because of Will’s expression staring into them. His mouth is twisted into a mixture of sadness and anger. His eyes do not blink, but from them escape tears.

He doesn’t seem to have noticed me appear in the garden. So I walk to him, round the flames. I put a hand on his shoulder.

“Will?” I ask, as gently as I can, like I’m dealing with a small boy, even though inside I’m screaming ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

He jumps a little and looks round at me. He smiles slightly and holds up one hand.

“Hey,” he says, in greeting. “You’re early.”

“For what?” I ask.

“The funeral.”

Oh. Of course. The dawn funeral. But there is not yet any sign of the sun in the sky.

“I thought I’d get the pyre and everything ready, for when you were awake,” he continues.

The pyre? Jesus. “What are you going to burn, Will?” I ask.

“The old life,” he says. “Or the new life. Whichever way you want to look at it.”

New life. I hug my arms protectively around my belly and foetal Leo.

I see Will notice the gesture. He looks up from my belly to my face, his eyes wide in alarm.

“Do you think I’ve gone mad?” he asks. “My old life, the imagined life, with my father. The life of sitting under his grand piano while he hammered out tunes overhead. The life of the musical tour.”

Oh. I see.

“I know,” I say. “I was just cold.”

Will stares at me. Then he moves on. Fine. He’s accepted the lie.

“If you’re awake, we can make a start, if you like?” Will asks.

“It’s your funeral,” I shrug. “Sorry, that sounded flippant, I didn’t mean…”

“No, I know. Remember, though, Ellie. This was your idea.”

Yes, but not the pyre. Not the flames at 4.30 in the morning. Still, how like Will, to do something properly if he’s going to do it at all.

So I nod, and squeeze his shoulder. “It’s the right thing to do, Will. I’m proud of you.” All the things a mother would say. See, I can do this.

“Good. Right. I’ll make a start.”

He moves off out of the firelight. What other props does he have out here? He comes back with a small CD player. Of course, music. And yes, there in his other hand is the familiar CD case.

“Only quietly, Will,” I warn him. Bit naggy, maybe, for this nurturing style. But I’m thinking of the volume at which he usually plays Max Reigate. “We’ll wake the neighbours.”

Will nods, and presses play on the CD player. Sound blares out. Will had obviously anticipated playing the music loudly. He bends down and adjusts the volume. It is quieter now, almost inaudible above the crackle of the flames. But I can imagine the sounds even if I cannot hear them. Feel them in me, after last night. Those three familiar chords, setting the beat, the beat to which Will made love to me. Fucked, says a little voice in my head, not made love. And his father. Not you.