Hide and Seek (7 page)

“Sweetie, I’m sorry if I upset you. It’s just there are certain signs – ”

“The way you were doing all that manoeuvring, that manipulating, it was – ”

“How I got you in my clutches in the first place,” I say, aiming for coquettish.

I see from the shocked look on his face that I have missed the mark.

“OK, forget I said that.” Moving on. “Look, I know it’s a bit disorientating, a bit – ”

“Disorientating? Listen to yourself! You are trying to say that my dad isn’t my dad at all, I’m some, some bastard child, from a sex romp between my mum and a random composer!”

“Not a sex romp. You saw how that letter was signed off. And there was a photo, in the album, of them, together.” If only he’d listen. If only I didn’t have to cope with this male reaction. Anger is not an appropriate response to logic.

“What, on a date?”

“No, a group of them, your mum, your fake dad – ”

“Cut that out!”

“OK, Gillian and John, if you prefer, in a group shot, at a picnic, including Max Reigate.”

“Which proves nothing. Absolutely nothing. Jesus, Ellie – why are you so determined this should be right?”

“It’s not a case of me being determined. It’s just right. It stacks up.”

Will leaves the nursery and moves into the bedroom.

“Look, I have to go to work tomorrow, this talk and die lecture is coming up, I need to put some good hours in…” he says.

“I just wish we could see that letter,” I say. “That would prove it.”

“Ellie, leave it, OK? I’m tired,” he says, doing a fake yawn.

“I bet she’s locked it away on one of those study drawers,” I tell him. “All we need to do is break in, prise them open, and – ”

“‘All we need to do is break in’!” Will repeats back at me. “Do you know what?” He glares at me. But then I never do know what. Because he leaves this long pause and it’s like he’s making himself be calm. When he speaks again, his voice is quieter, softer. “We’re both tired. Let’s just get some sleep, OK?” And he kisses me on the forehead.

So that’s it, fight over? I feel vaguely disappointed. Where do I go now with my theory on his father, if we’re not going to shout about it? Actually, screw ‘theory’ – I’m pretty damn sure I’m right about this. All the evidence is there. Plus it just feels right, you know? Otherwise, why would Will be so in love with that music? It’s in his blood.

As Will brushes his teeth, I consider as I lie in bed going into the bathroom to continue the discussion. Because it’s for his benefit, not mine. What do I care who his father is? I just feel he has a right to know. But I don’t move, I just stay where I am in bed. Otherwise, I might end up telling him all I know about Max Reigate. What I learnt, when I Googled him. It would be too much for Will, at this stage. Better get him to accept the main fact, before I move onto the others. Other.

Besides, it will all be all right in the morning, as Mum used to say, when she tucked me in. Any remaining tension will be gone. She had this almost pagan belief that the sun coming up for the start of a new day cleansed all the trouble that had gone before – whether that was mean girls at school or a fight with a boyfriend. I told myself that when I heard about their crash, that night. ‘It will all be all right in the morning.’ Except it wasn’t, of course. Because in the morning, they were no longer there. There’s an exception to every rule though. That was it. For all the other mornings, everything will be all right. By the power of my mother’s word.

So I turn off the light, position myself on my left side (good for the baby) and drift away to sleep. When Will comes back to bed, I wake for a moment as he settles behind me, arms looped round me in our usual sleep-spooning. Not holding me quite as tight tonight, but maybe he’s just worried about hurting little Leo. Or maybe we haven’t quite made up yet. But I still feel myself drift off towards sleep. I don’t have any guilty conscience that would stop me. Why, after all, would I? I just want the best for Will, and the truth is always the best. For us, anyway.

I awake in the night to the sounds of music. At first, I think I am imagining it, that it’s a fragment of dream that’s wafted over into my waking world. But no. I am fully awake. And it’s really there. And Will really isn’t; the bed next to me is empty and cold. The sound is coming from downstairs. I get out of bed and open the bedroom door. The music gets louder. I tiptoe downstairs to the living room. The door is shut. I push it open, as gently as I can. Will is curled up on the sofa in foetal position. His eyes are shut. In sleep or in contemplation, I don’t know. On the coffee table lies the Max Reigate CD case. His concerto is the music I heard. I look at the CD display indicator. Still on the first track, so he can’t have been listening long.

“Will?” I say softly. No answer. I wait a moment. How that piano hammering away can act as a lullaby, I don’t know. But then, the pianist’s not my father. I tiptoe out of the room again. The music can offer more persuasion than I can.

In the morning, I go downstairs to find Will already at the breakfast table. He looks up when I come in. There’s a smile. Small, but enough. The anger is gone.

“Let’s find that letter,” he says.

Chapter Twelve

-Will-

I can see Ellie thinks that she’s convinced me.

But she hasn’t.

I just don’t want any more of those dreams. As I walk to the station, I feel like I’ve only slept for twenty minutes. And of course, that could be true. But it must all have been REM phase, otherwise I don’t know how I managed so many nightmares.

And there’s the counting to ten mentality. In other words, the need to indulge your pregnant wife. I was furious last night, when we got home. Really, I was. It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I couldn’t stand to look at her any more that night, to go and sleep on the sofa. But you can’t do that, can you? You can’t run away from the mother of your child, however mad she is. And half of the madness must be hormone-induced. Can’t ever
say
that of course – I’d be lynched, or divorced, or both. But it’s true, I’m sure. So half the stuff that Ellie comes out with isn’t her at all; she’s just a mouthpiece for raised progesterone. I’ve got to be the strong, stable one in the centre of this. To take responsibility for keeping our marriage on track until that baby’s out. It will all be much better then.

At first, though, I couldn’t sleep at all. I was just too angry. At myself, just as much as at Ellie, for rising to her bait. I’d put my arms round her to spoon her, like we usually do – she can’t stand it when I sleep with my back to her – but my heart wasn’t in it. Then came the remorse. I shouldn’t be lying in bed projecting anger into the home of my little boy. Ellie, in her own peculiar way, is just looking out for me. She gets these odd ideas. That’s why I love her. She must know I was still angry. In anyone less strong, these arguments might cause mental turmoil, even a miscarriage. In fact perhaps they had. I raised my head from the pillow to listen for signs of distress. No. There she was, snoring gently to herself. Which made me a bit angry again, given she was the one who’d stopped me sleeping.

So I went downstairs instead, rather than lying next to her, simmering in resentment. And I tried to sleep. But how can you sleep when your wife has decided that your father isn’t your father? How can you not replay all the conversations you remember? And try to find in your memories the ones that you can’t? I tried and I tried to think of Max Reigate being there when I was little. But there’s nothing. Nothing before that eating of the daffodil outside the house in Kingston, captured by Kodak.

And if your wife is claiming that your real father is in fact an eminent musician, how can you stop yourself from replaying his music as well? So I got out the CD and played it to myself. I really listened this time. To the orchestra all together at the start, quiet, mellow, but expectant. Then in it comes. The third voice. The Reigate voice. Strident, unapologetic, like the voice of some eternal truth. You can almost tell he wrote the concerto himself. It is designed to show off the piano. No little tinkling tunes. Straightaway, there’s this intense mood. All these heavy notes and accents. Every three notes, there’s one really powerful one. Like a war march, or something. Every so often, the orchestra will get a look in. Or the orchestra such as it is – he doesn’t even seem to be using the full one, just strings and woodwind, so there’s nothing to compare with the weight of the piano. In the first movement, there are just two voices – orchestra and piano. But later, in the second and third movements, it’s like a three-way conversation, violins fiddling and oboes whining against the weight of the piano. But they cannot win. Not against all that force, all that violence. You feel like you’re becoming the piano, its music is so far inside you. It’s a wonder they managed to record it live, the way he hammered at the strings of the piano. You’d think they’d split and break. Maybe that’s part of his skill; exerting just enough pressure with the hammers so that the instrument can go on functioning. He gives it a bit of a rest in the second, slower movement – saves himself for that soul-wrenching final cadenza at the end of the third. Then the piano tuners lift the lid and see the real damage.

The second track, or movement, whatever it’s called, is a bit softer at first. And he’s allowed the string section a bit more of a look in. There are three ingredients then, in an uneasy harmony – him, the violins and the woodwind. Still that brutal and haunting central tune though, carried across the three of them. And even though it’s slower, the second movement, you are constantly in suspense about where the piano will take you next. But it’s nothing to the last movement. The sheer pulsating violence of those runs, the anger, almost, with which the piano answers the violins. It’s like some kind of defiance – yes, yes, YES goes the piano. No, no, NO, say first the strings, then the woodwind. The piano gets the last word though. Heroically, brilliantly, romantically, it comes in with this final flourish. Think of the fingers that play that. The brain that composed it. Think of being fathered by that genius. What it would be to share the same DNA. Pounding away on the keys, Max Reigate makes his final transcendent affirmation, every note accented. HERE I AM, HERE I AM, HERE I AM. AND THIS IS WHAT I DO.

Then it stops. The piano goes, the piece ends, just like that. As if the music was never there.

But of course, the silence afterwards is part of the music. It’s the silence that stays with you. The silence that your brain can’t deal with, so it recreates the playing all over again. In your dreams. But in your dreams, there are two keyboards. They’re shaped like staircases, spiralling up and down, in a double helix. And you’re running – or rather I’m running – up and up and up the piano-stairs, trying to find the way to the other staircase. Because on that other staircase, there are these most amazing fingers walking up and down, caressing the notes. And I want to be caressed too, by those fingers. I want to sit on them, allow them to carry me UP UP UP and DOWN DOWN DOWN. But it’s not just that. I need to get away from my keyboard staircase. From the hammers that are pursuing me. It’s like the piano has been inverted, and rather than the hammers being inside, they are all on the outside, bashing the notes. Except they’re not piano hammers – they’re actual hammers, and each key they hit, they smash. Fragments of black and white fly around, filling the air between the two staircases. And the hammer gets closer and closer and closer and I try one last time to jump. I think I can do it, I think I can bridge the gap. But I’m suspended between the two staircases; time stops and I don’t know, I just don’t know, if I’m going to make it. And that terror, that inbetweenness, is what wakes me.

And it’s what makes me agree we need to find that letter from Max. The letter to Mum. Because I can’t let it go, now, can I? Now Ellie has brought it up, so insistently. I can’t just not know.

We’ve made a plan. We spent so long making it over breakfast that I had to miss my usual swim at the Rotunda. I think over the plan as I wait on Kingston platform for the train. I think over it as the train takes me to Waterloo. I think over it on the Tube, on the way into Guy’s Campus, on the way up to my office, along from the hospital building. Even, if I’m honest, on the toilet. Because it’s this plan that will tell me if Ellie’s mad, hormone-laced theories are true. And because I can’t stand the idea of my father not being my father – because who would that make me? But nor can I bear being denied a connection with Max Reigate. Max Reigate. There is such an emotional association with that name in my mind now. I can’t just be a fan of his music. There has to be some blood link there, doesn’t there?

The plan isn’t much of a plan. It’s a creep in when your parents are sleeping using your spare key, then jimmy open your mum’s filing cabinets sort of plan (Ellie is convinced Google will tell her how to pick a lock; she’s going to spend the day practising). It’s based on a hope they don’t set the burglar alarm at night, that Dad (?) won’t suddenly want some Digestive biscuits and milk during the night (like he always used to get me if I couldn’t sleep, when I was a child – oh, Dad, I love my Dad), that Mum won’t get it in her mind to have a midnight listen to her old flame’s LP. Or come downstairs to creep out into the night to be with him. Oh, listen to yourself! It’s fantastical. I’ve become the victim of Ellie’s over-hormoned imagination.

I try to focus on the work for my lecture. I just need a few more cases of the ‘talk and die’ phenomenon, make it more real and human to the attendees, then I’ll be fine. It’s my first public lecture and I want it to be accessible and informative. Brilliant but casual. The sign of a bright future and a well-spent past. I leaf through the journals my research student has flagged for me. “There are some great ones here!” he said, enthusiastic to find plenty of trauma victims, poor suckers crept up on from behind with a bat or a hammer. Or even a piece of lead-piping. Classic Cluedo fun. Except these are the odd ones, the almost survivors – they think they’re fine, having fended off attack. They go about their day. Then later on, they’re dead. And I’ve got to teach my students to be alert to that. I’ve got to share these mysteries with the scientifically-minded public and my fellow faculty members. To remind them to look beyond concussion, to keep those observations going overnight. And to know what it means, when the blood starts to form, when the brain starts to swell. How easy it is to miss the signs.