Night Music (15 page)

‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t move the children again. They’ve had so much upheaval. We need to make this work.’

Matt shrugged.

Isabel’s voice grew more determined. ‘We’ll do the most urgent things. The house has survived this long – it’s not about to fall down around our ears, is it?’ She braved a smile.

There was so little expression in his face that it was hard to tell what he thought.

‘Up to you,’ he said, tapping his pen on the table. ‘I’ll cut costs where I can.’

He spent another twenty minutes going round the house, wielding his tape measure, making notes. Isabel tried to go on practising in the kitchen but his presence made concentration impossible. The sound of his footsteps and his whistling made her oddly self-conscious, her playing halting and erratic. In the end, she went up the steps to the ground floor and found him peering up the dining-room chimney.

‘I’ll need to get up a ladder and have a look at that,’ he said. ‘Think one of the pots may have collapsed on itself. It’s okay,’ he added, ‘it’s not a big job. We can just cap it off. I won’t charge you for that.’

‘How very kind. Thank you,’ said Isabel.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’d better be off and pick up some of the materials.’ He nodded towards the window. ‘How’d you get on at ours this morning?’

Isabel had forgotten that Laura was Matt’s wife. ‘Oh . . .’ she said, twisting her hands behind her back. ‘Oh . . . it was very kind of Laura to invite me.’ She realised, too late, that she had failed to imbue her voice with any enthusiasm.

‘Trial by housewife, eh?’

Isabel blushed. ‘It . . . I don’t think I was what they were expecting.’

‘Don’t let that lot worry you. Got nothing better to do than natter about each other’s soft furnishings. Bunch of curtain-twitchers. I tell Laura she spends too much time with them.’ He had reached the door. ‘Don’t worry about all of this. I’ll be back first thing tomorrow. If you can clear your stuff out of the dining room we’ll start with the floorboards in there. See what’s going on underneath.’

‘Thank you,’ said Isabel. She felt unaccountably grateful. She had found his presence a little nerve-racking at first. Now she was reassured by it.

‘Hey,’ he said, saluting as he went down the steps, ‘what are neighbours for?’

There was no place on earth lonelier than an empty double bed. The moonlight slanted through the window on to the ceiling as Isabel listened to the panes rumble peacefully in their frames, the distant calls of wild creatures. They did not frighten her now, but neither did they alleviate her sense that she was the only person awake in the whole world.

Earlier that evening, when she had first climbed into bed, she had heard weeping. She had got up again, pulled on her dressing-gown and hurried to Thierry’s room. The covers were over his head and he wouldn’t come out, despite her pleading. ‘Talk to me, darling,’ she had whispered. ‘Please talk to me.’ But he wouldn’t. But, then, he didn’t have to. She had laid a hand on him, feeling the muffled shudder of his crying, until his tears became her own. In the end, she had lain next to him and curled her body round his. When, at last, he slept, she had peeled the covers off his face, kissed his cheek, and almost reluctantly padded back up the rickety stairs to her own room.

She stood barefoot in it now, the rough boards against her soles, gazing at the curiously illuminated landscape. The trees in the distance had become a deep purple abyss. The shadows, the walls and pillars round the house shifted in the half-light. Something dark and swift ran across a path and disappeared into the black. She saw him suddenly, walking towards her from the trees, his jacket slung over his shoulder. But then he was gone, a spectral trick of her imagination.

‘Laurent,’ she whispered, pulling her robe round her as she climbed into the cold bed. ‘Come back to me.’

She tried to picture him getting in beside her, his weight depressing the mattress, the creak of the springs, the comforting heaviness of his arm draped over her waist. Her own hands on the silk of her robe were too small, too fine. There was no weight, no meaning behind her touch. She felt the empty expanse of linen beside her, the unwarmed pillow. She heard the silence of a room with no one else breathing. She imagined Matt, across the lane, his strong body enclosing his wife’s, his arms wrapped round her, Laura smiling in her half-sleep. She saw all the couples out there breathing, murmuring to each other, their hands entwined, skin meeting skin. No one will ever touch mine again, she thought. No one will ever take pleasure in me like he did. And a wave of longing so powerful swept over her that she thought she would choke.

‘Laurent,’ she whispered into the darkness, tears leaking from her closed eyes, and began to move against the silk. ‘Laurent,’ she cried, her hands trying to conjure music from a body that refused to listen.

Somewhere below, Byron called Elsie, his terrier, to heel, hearing her excited scurryings in the undergrowth. He lifted his torch, swinging its beam in front of his feet, watching the shadows move as creatures fled into the dark woodland. The lads in the pub had told him poachers had been laying traps up this end of the woods, and while he knew his little dog was too smart to get caught in one, he wanted to lift them before anything else did. You didn’t forget your first sight of a fox or a badger that had been stuck in one for a few days, gnawing at its limb to free itself. And besides, being out with the dogs was better than sitting in an empty cottage brooding about his future.

His phone rang, and he retrieved it from his pocket, whistling Elsie back as he did so. She sat down, half on his boot.

‘Byron.’

‘Yes?’ Matt didn’t bother to introduce himself now. It was as if he thought he owned him, even at this hour.

‘You finish sinking those posts?’

Byron adjusted his neck. ‘Yes.’

‘Good. Tomorrow I need you to help me pull up the floorboards in the dining room at the Spanish House.’

Byron thought for a minute. ‘The dining room? Surely that’s the only good room in the house.’ It had been a joke among the locals – Pottisworth’s only sound room was the one he hadn’t used for decades.

There was a brief silence. ‘Who says it is?’

‘Well, whenever I’ve been in—’

‘Who’s the builder here, Byron? You or me? Know much about wet and dry rot, do you? Learn that while you were inside?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll meet you there at eight thirty. And the next time I want your opinion on building work, I’ll ask for it.’

The space in front of the narrow beam of his torch was pitch black, the terrain unreadable. ‘You’re the boss,’ Byron said.

He flipped his telephone shut, thrust it deep into his pocket and tramped wearily on into the wilderness.

Nine

Kitty sat in the tin tub, drew her knees up to her chest and laid her neck on the hand-towel she had folded and placed behind her. The towel got sopping wet, but it was the only way you could relax in a tin bath without severing your head. That, and tucking your knees up so your calves didn’t have to hang over the top, cutting off your circulation. She had the electric heater on nearby so that when the water cooled, as it did really quickly, she didn’t shiver for a full twenty minutes when it was time to get out. Her mum swore Kitty was going to electrocute herself but, given the state of the house, she thought she’d take her chances here as well as anywhere else.

She heard a vehicle outside, and decided it was time to begin the laborious process of emptying the bath, which she had, of course, overfilled. She thought she would never again take a plughole for granted: the sheer backbreaking tedium of endlessly lowering a bucket into the bath until it was empty enough to lift made it not worth filling in the first place. She heard Matt’s voice downstairs as she wrapped herself in her towel. He was saying something about breakfast, telling Mum to put the coffee on, laughing at some joke she hadn’t heard.

Most people complained about having builders in. Kitty remembered the mothers at her old school exclaiming about the dust and dirt, the cost and upheaval. They talked as if it were an ordeal that had to be endured. Like surgery.

It had been almost ten days now, and despite the chaos, the fact that she couldn’t walk in a straight line downstairs without watching for missing floorboards or hold a conversation without being interrupted by the tearing sound of planks being wrenched from joists or hammering, she was enjoying it. It was nice to have other people around, and not just her and Mum, who always had her mind somewhere else, and Thierry, who never said anything any more anyway.

Matt McCarthy always chatted to her as if she was older than she was, and she recognised his son from school. She found it difficult to go into a room when Anthony was there because somehow his presence made her blush and go a bit tongue-tied. She wished one of her friends was around so they could tell her whether he was actually lush, or whether she was imagining it.

When Matt and his son had turned up that first morning she had been embarrassed that Anthony had seen their house looking as it did, that he must think this was how they had always lived. She wanted to say, ‘We used to live in a normal house, you know. With a fridge.’ Mum had begun to put the stuff that had to be kept cold in little baskets that she hung from the masonry outside the kitchen windows where foxes couldn’t get it, and their fruit in orange nets, protection from the mice, and half of Kitty loved that because from outside it made their home look a bit like a gingerbread house, or something out of a fairytale, but the other half was humiliated. Who else had to leave their food hanging outside? She was terrified that Anthony would say something at school and everyone would laugh at her, but so far he hadn’t.

Once, last week, when Matt had found out they were at the same school, he had said, ‘Why don’t you take Kitty out one night, boy? You could go into town, show her the sights.’ Just like that. Like it was nothing. Anthony had sort of shrugged as if he might, but she wasn’t sure if he’d done it because he wanted to, or if he was trying to keep his dad happy. ‘I bet you’re finding life out here a bit slow after London,’ Matt said, when she brought them a mug of tea – as if she’d always been out clubbing and stuff like that. She could have sworn Anthony had raised his eyebrows, which had made her blush again.

Byron, who had only come for the first two days and then gone back to working outside, hardly said anything. He had seemed awkward in the house, as if he were built for outdoors. He was taller than Matt, and quite handsome, but he never met anyone’s eye. ‘Byron’s our great conversationalist, aren’t you, mate?’ Matt would joke, but Byron smiled as if he didn’t find it funny.

Mum was a bit stressed most of the time. She didn’t like the builders’ radio always being on. She didn’t get pop music and Dad had always said that having it burbling on in the background was just another form of pollution, but she didn’t seem able to ask them to turn it off. She had been forced to move out of the master bedroom, as it needed too much structural work, and into the box room, so she went on to the battlements to practise – the only place, she said, that she could find silence. When Kitty went outside and heard the violin up top and Matt McCarthy’s radio down below it sounded like a competition.

Thierry seemed not to notice. He spent most of the time he wasn’t at school in the woods, and Mum said to let him be. Kitty had collared him to ask him what he did out there, but he had just shrugged. For the first time Kitty could see why Mum and Dad had found shrugging irritating.

On the floor above Kitty, Matt McCarthy unrolled the architectural plans Sven had drawn up eighteen months previously, and held them to the light from the landing window, trying to decide which parts of their carefully thought-out renovations he could legitimately use. Some things, such as the extension at the rear, were not possible yet, but others, such as the resited bathroom, the master bedroom and the new windows in the upper floors, could be considered part of any straightforward repair work. There was little point in trying to do anything in the kitchen until he knew whether planning consent would be forthcoming for the extension, but there was plenty of basic structural work to be taken care of before then. In fact, thought Matt, it was fair to say there were months of remedial works to do. At significant expense.

He breathed in the familiar scents of the old house, grateful suddenly for this turn of events. It was a pleasure to be working here. Within the walls of the old place, he felt he had been given back control of his life and of something that had been snatched away from him.

He rolled up the plans, and placed them carefully in the cardboard tube, put on the lid and slipped it back into his holdall as Byron emerged at the top of the stairwell. For a man of his size he moved quietly – too quietly for Matt’s liking.

‘Right,’ said Byron. ‘Where do we start today?’

‘Good question. And there are a million possible answers.’

‘How’s the house coming along?’ Asad was polishing apples, his long, dark fingers working the soft cloth. Kitty sat on the crate by the freezer and sipped her tea. ‘I see Mr McCarthy’s there most days.’

‘And his son. And Byron, but he doesn’t come every day.’

‘Are things improving? Are you more comfortable?’

‘I wouldn’t say that exactly.’ Kitty inhaled – Henry had been making olive bread and it smelled delicious. She was half hoping they might offer her some. ‘They’ve ripped lots of stuff out, though.’

‘I’ve heard there’s not much worth saving.’ Henry appeared and put two loaves carefully in the bread basket. ‘Does it have any original features?’

Kitty grimaced. ‘I don’t know. I think spiders are the main one. I found one in my sock drawer last night. It was so big I thought it was looking for some to wear.’

Asad tilted his head to one side. ‘And how is your mother?’ He said it as if there might be something wrong with her.

‘She’s okay. She’s worried about how much it’s all costing. She says it’s a lot more expensive than she thought it would be.’

‘I don’t suppose Matt McCarthy comes cheap,’ said Henry, and sniffed.