Losing Nicola (15 page)

Another time, he rings to say that there is an outhouse at the back of the property, assigned to Flat Two, and Mrs Sheffield is sorry but she hasn't cleared it out yet. If I could deal with it, she'd be happy to take the cost off the purchase price. ‘For goodness sake,' I say, ‘tell her not to worry. I'm buying the flat as seen. I can manage to clear an outhouse.'

‘More of a coal-hole,' says Gary.

‘Whatever it is, I'll handle it.'

He telephones again. ‘The grand piano,' he says. ‘The vendor wonders whether you want to keep it. Otherwise it'll have to be taken to the auction rooms in Canterbury. Not that she's likely to find a buyer – nobody has room for things that size any more.'

‘Does that include the piano stool?'

He rustles through some papers. ‘As far as I can see, yes.'

‘How much does she want for them?'

‘Actually . . .' He sounds disgusted. ‘If you want to keep them, they're included in the price.'

Finally the flat is mine. I've already been able to have it painted throughout with faint sea-greens and blues. The bathroom has been retiled and modernized with a high-speed shower as well as a new bathroom suite. The kitchen, too, has been refitted, more in keeping with my acquired American tastes. The faded red-velvet curtains have been changed for floating white voile, the floors sanded and waxed, the knobbly grey carpets replaced with good rugs.

I have had business cards printed, a paper-boy delivers the daily newspaper, the milkman calls each morning. I am anchored down here.

I travel light these days. Nearly all my possessions were disposed of when I left England to live in Paris and then moved on to Michigan. Leaving the States, I was disinclined to bring back anything that might remind me of my pointless marriage, so all I have are books, one or two treasured pictures, a few snapshot memories.

Apart from them, I possess nothing beyond a few items which once belonged to Aunt (three pairs of heavy linen sheets from Harrods, still in their original wrapping; nine silver spoons; a sandalwood-lined cigar box full of beads; a green glass jar; the Canon's woodcut-illustrated translations from the Hebrew of the Old Testament, a Wedgwood dinner service). There are also odd bits and pieces, things that Fiona has lent, given or dumped on me (‘Aunt's books, darling, there are some rather fine first editions, the Canon was something of a bibliophile.') as well as other books I'd left with Orlando before I went to France.

I find myself hiring a car and trekking round the stores in the area to buy essential furniture, kitchen equipment, cleaning things. It amazes me how much has to be purchased in order to set up even the most basic household. But eventually I have the promise of sofas, chairs, a dining table, a chest-of-drawers. I even have a bed, the department store happy to sell me a slightly battered floor model, and, for a price, to deliver it immediately. The people in the flat below have lent me a card table until my new possessions arrive. I can use the music-stool as seating until then.

Resting a hand on the polished top of the Steinway, I wonder what made me so eagerly agree to keep it. I play not very much, not very well. Yet sitting at the keyboard, playing songs and hymns to which I accompany myself, or running through the music of my youth, I recognize happiness creeping between the gauzy white drapes – or, if not happiness, then at least contentment – and my hands grow unaccustomedly nimble until notes pour effortlessly from my fingers. Chopin, Schumann, Schubert, Mozart; I am deep into nocturnes, fugues, divertissements which I scarcely remember learning.
I einem bechlein heller
, I sing, looking out at the blazing sea.

The silk oriental rug I bought in a fire sale in Montreal hangs on the wall. Mrs Sheffield's handsome India-paper editions have long ago been removed from what has become my sitting room, but the shelves remain in place, solid mahogany still edged with remnants of scalloped gold-stamped leather. I have been collecting similar copies for years – Jane Austen, Dickens, Hardy – and now at last they stand on shelves worthy of their leather bindings, their gold-tooled covers and gilt-edged pages. There are many second-hand bookshops in the town and it will be a pleasure to browse at leisure, filling in the gaps in my library. And there are still Aunt's ‘very interesting' books to go through; I pick up a few and find either racy thrillers from a bygone era, or gloomy collections of the Canon's sermons, neither of which will be taking pride of place on my shelves. I have spent several hours unpacking my own books, placing my dictionaries, my reference books, paperbacks and poetry, in an orderly fashion in the bookcases.

I half-expected to be lonely but find quite the opposite: that I am full, sated with my new life. For the moment, at last, I need no other company than my own.

My family rallies round to help me move in. Dougal, my eldest brother, now a GP in Shropshire, arrives in his sleek Volvo, his wife Krista sending flowers, a home-baked cake, bath-salts, but unable to come herself since she has flown to Vienna to visit her mother. Orlando is there, of course, as he always is, and always will be. Callum is with us, too, a rare treat since he lives now near Adelaide, and has acquired that lean outback appearance that so many Australians have, as though their eyes are fixed on distant horizons while they count innumerable sheep. Bella comes, driving down from London, leaving behind her husband and two young sons. Even my youngest brother, Bobby, who has grown rich on laundromats and coffee-bars, and lives with his fourth wife in permanent exile in the Channel Islands, sends down a couple of men in canvas aprons who have shifted my few possessions into the flat and departed before the rest of us have finished greeting each other.

Efficient Bella has brought piles of sandwiches. Callum produces three bottles of cheap champagne. Dougal provides half a dozen bottles of wine for my ‘cellar'.

And Orlando has brought me a house-warming present, a painting. It's a view of the rocking sea, the cliffs of France, the wrecked pier and the broken spars out on the horizon where the Goodwin Sands have lurked for centuries, to trap unlucky sailors.

‘Darling!' I am overjoyed, for this is not the current prospect from my window but the much-missed view from our childhood home, ten doors down. ‘It's wonderful!'

‘Where did you get it?' Callum wants to know.

Orlando grins at us, his particolored hair and eyebrows giving him the look of a two-legged badger. ‘Recognize the signature, anyone?'

‘Whose is it?' Dougal is sprawled on my Chesterfield sofa, placed so I can stare at the sea all day long if I wish.

‘Bertram Yelland.'

Orlando and I glance at one another and then quickly away. The ghost of Nicola flutters between us. In twenty years, we have never mentioned her name to each other. I wonder if she is branded on his brain cells, as she is on mine.

‘I know that name from somewhere,' says Bella.

‘He's now a rather successful painter,' says Orlando.

‘He always said he would be.' I remember a summer morning, Ava and Bertram talking, his insistence that he would make his name one day.

‘I was walking down Bond Street the other day and saw this in the window of a gallery.' Orlando grins. ‘I knew it was the perfect present for Alice.'

‘Just a minute . . .' Callum frowns. ‘Wasn't he that awful man who lodged in the side bedroom at Glenfield, all those years ago?'

‘That's right.'

‘Good Lord!' The others open their eyes in surprise.

‘An art teacher, wasn't he?' says Bella. ‘A bit scary, if I remember right.'

‘A right bastard is what he was,' Dougal says.

‘He's apparently all the rage, one of those painters who go in for female nudes with varicose veins and sagging bellies in undertaker blue.' says Orlando.

‘I remember him constantly erupting from his room.' Callum laughs. ‘Red-faced, smelling strongly of drink and poor dentistry, shouting damn it all to buggery, you little sods.'

‘I didn't think it was all that funny.' Dougal shifts on the sofa. ‘I wonder if Fiona knew how he flicked at our bare calves with a wet knotted towel. God, that used to hurt.'

‘Only if he caught you. I usually managed to get away.'

‘Much worse,' said Orlando, ‘was the way he'd suddenly emerge from a bush or from behind a tree when we were innocently rambling through the countryside, and start charging at us with a stick.'

‘Or even,' I add, ‘with a length of bramble he'd torn from the hedge, switching at us, while we tried to outrun him.'

‘Hares fleeing the hound.'

‘It was clear even then that the man was as mad as a hatter,' Dougal says. ‘I don't know why Fiona didn't get rid of him.'

‘Anyway,' says Bella, looking at my painting, ‘there are no naked blue ladies here, thank goodness.'

‘That's just how Shale used to be before they tarted the place up,' Dougal says. For the rusting hulk has long since gone, the broken pier has been replaced with an ugly concrete construction, even the tilting masts have been removed.

‘Mr Bloody Yelland . . . I don't believe it.' Callum slowly shakes his head. ‘Talk about coincidences . . .'

‘People say there's no such thing as coincidence,' I say. Not that I believe it. There are too many other coincidences in my life for me to be sceptical.

‘I'll tell what's a real coincidence,' says Dougal. ‘That after so many years, Alice should just have happened to be down here and just have happened to find this place, just up the road from where we used to live?'

‘Don't you think it was
meant
?' Orlando raises a sardonic eyebrow. Like me, he doesn't believe in such things, and normally I would have made some scoffing remark. But today I don't.

‘And what's more,' says Bella. ‘This is the very place where Alice used to take piano lessons from that German refugee.' She raises interrogative eyebrows at me. ‘Whatever happened to him, I wonder?'

I've so often wondered the same thing. Wondered what might have been the result,
if I hadn't taken the coward's way out, ten years ago.

‘It must be possible to find out,' I say. ‘Do you know, I actually met him in Paris, when I was living there.'

‘Is that his piano?' asks Callum.

‘It was the owner's. It's mine now. It's the very one I took lessons on.'

‘That stool's a nice piece.' Dougal fancies he has an eye for furniture, though you don't need one to see that the stool is an exceptional bit of work, made of fine polished mahogany, with a seat whose lid lifts up to hold music, and an elaborately turned wheel for lowering or raising the height. ‘Where did you get it?'

‘The previous owner threw it in with the piano.' I look round at them all. ‘Mrs Sheffield.'

‘Strewth,' says Dougal, sitting up. ‘Mrs Sheffield . . . she had that stunning daughter, remember?' He makes eyebrow-lifting faces at Callum.

‘Linda Sheffield. She was a bit of a goer,' responds Callum.

‘You two are so crude,' Bella says. She looks faintly worried, as though hoping that her two little boys will turn out differently.

‘I wonder why you and Orlando had lessons and the rest of us didn't,' says Callum.

‘We looked like more promising material,' I say. ‘Besides, Fiona didn't have any money for the rest of you.'

‘Besides, it was my godmother, Ursula Motherwell who paid for all
my
music lessons,' Orlando says. ‘Good old Ursula. Without her, I wouldn't be half the man I am today.'

Dougal remarks, ‘Wouldn't have half the trust-fund either, I dare say,'

‘That didn't come from her.'

‘If you ask me,' says Bella, ‘Fiona could see it was far too late to try to civilize the rest of you.' She pulls her big hold-all closer and starts removing sandwiches and fruit. ‘Thought we might need something to eat.' I see that she is wearing Ava's beautiful aquamarine ring, which we learned years ago had been given to her by the man who later became her second husband.

‘You're a marvel!' I hug her. She is so considerate, so steady, so like her mother. ‘Thanks for being so thoughtful.'

‘Well . . . trying to get this lot fed . . .' She shrugs. ‘By the way, I brought you a couple of things . . .' Another plunge into her bag. ‘You always used to love him so I thought I'd bring him down to keep you company.'

‘Rory O'Sullivan! Oh Bella, you couldn't have brought me anything nicer!'

Rory O'Sullivan is a knitted soldier doll in khaki uniform. From the polished Sam Browne belt across his torso and the gold buttons on his knitted shoulders, I deduced as a child that he must be an officer and a gentleman. Not having any other doll, I had envied him from the first moment I set eyes on him; he was Bella's, a gift from her mother. Now, I set him carefully on the window-seat so that he could look out at the view, and the shelving beach from which so many of the other survivors of the officer-class had once plunged into the sea for their matutinal dip.

‘Sorely missed,' Orlando says softly, taking my hand. Our beloved Ava died of cancer three years ago. I'd flown over from Michigan for the funeral, knowing that she was leaving a gap in our lives which nothing would ever fill. In many ways, I believe we miss her more than Bella can, for in the face of Fiona's unorthodox parenting, not only was she our substitute mother, she was the rock to which we clung.

‘And something else . . .' Bella produces some thick albums from the depths of her bag. ‘Seeing as you'd moved down here, and you were once good friends with that horrible Nicola girl, I thought you might be interested in these.'

‘What are they?'

‘They were Mum's. She collected all the cuttings she could about the . . . the murder, especially since we were all kind of involved. And I also brought the cuttings she'd put together about the Farnham murder, since Nicola was part of that too.'