Night Music (22 page)

Matt McCarthy felt unbalanced.

As Isabel walked away, head down, shoulders hunched against the wind, he strolled over to the other man. ‘A word,’ he said casually.

Byron looked up.

‘The widow,’ he said. ‘Don’t get too involved.’

To his surprise, Byron didn’t protest. He didn’t even try to pretend that he didn’t understand what he was saying. He stood up straight, so that he was a good half a head taller than Matt and their eyes met, for longer than Matt had expected. Byron’s were unreadable.

‘You’re warning me off,’ he said, low and even. Then walked away, but his expression had said clearly what he had failed to say aloud:
Even you can only warn someone off what is actually yours.

In the late afternoon the wind picked up, and Matt and the men, spattered with rain, and struggling with the increasingly claggy ground, left early. The digger sat immobile on the lawn in a swelling sea of mud. Now and again Isabel would look at it, then away, reminded by its glaring yellow presence of their financial position. In an attempt to lift her mood she had made some biscuits, but it was impossible to tell when they were ready in the range and, diverted by a Schubert symphony, she had forgotten them. By the time the children came home they were the colour of burnished leather, with an aroma not dissimilar.

Thierry hurled his schoolbag over a kitchen chair, picked one up from the wire tray, sniffed it and put it back. Kitty merely looked at them and raised her eyebrows.

‘Good day, lovey?’ said Isabel.

Thierry shrugged. Kitty was rummaging through her bag.

‘Kitty? Did you have a good day?’

‘Just the same as any other,’ she said offhandedly.

Isabel frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

Kitty’s sharp little face spun round. ‘It means that stuck in a new school where I don’t have any friends, in a house I hate, in an area I don’t know, one day is as crap as any other. Okay?’

Isabel felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach. Kitty had never spoken to her like that before. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Kitty, what on earth’s got into you?’

Kitty’s eyes showed contempt. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know,’ she said.

‘But I
don’t
know.’ Isabel’s voice rose. She could not cope with this today, not on top of everything else.

‘Liar!’

Isabel grabbed a chair and sat down opposite her daughter. She saw that Thierry’s wide, dark eyes were darting from his sister to herself, his mouth clamped shut. ‘Kitty, tell me what you’re so angry about. I can’t help if I don’t know what’s going on.’

‘You!’ said Kitty, venomously. ‘You go on and on about how much you love us, and when it comes down to it you don’t love us at all. Even now Dad’s dead, we’re still second to that bloody violin.’

‘How can you say that? I gave up my career to be with you. I’m here every morning, every evening, waiting for you to come home. I haven’t worked since we got here.’

‘That’s not the point!’

‘It
is
the point! You and Thierry come first in everything!’ You don’t know how much it costs me to be here, to have sacrificed my career, she wanted to add, but she couldn’t cast that burden on to her daughter.

‘I
know
!’ Kitty yelled. ‘I know about Mr Cartwright. I know you could have sold the Guarneri and we could have stayed in our home!’

Isabel blanched. She had almost forgotten about that, so thoroughly had she immersed herself in the Spanish House.

‘You lied to us! You told me we couldn’t afford to stay in our house, the house we loved, with all our friends and Mary. You said we had to move here – and all the time you could have sold that violin and we could have stayed at home with the people we loved. You lied!’ She drew breath, then hit Isabel with the killer blow. ‘Dad wouldn’t have lied to us!’

Thierry pushed back his chair and sprinted out.

‘Thierry – Kitty – I’m not even sure that if I had—’

‘Don’t! I heard what Mr Cartwright said!’

‘But I—’

‘This isn’t a bloody home to you! It never was! It was just a way for you to keep your precious violin!’

‘Kitty, that’s—’

‘Oh, leave me alone!’

Kitty flung her schoolbag on to the table and stalked off, rubbing her face with her sleeve. Isabel wanted to follow her children, try to explain, but she saw it was pointless. Because Kitty was right. And there was little she could say to defend herself.

Supper was a subdued affair. Thierry said nothing, but ate the macaroni cheese, refused an apple, then disappeared to his room. Kitty kept her head down, and answered Isabel’s questions monosyllabically.

‘I’m sorry,’ Isabel said. ‘Really, Kitty. I’m so sorry. But you have to know that nothing is more important to me than you and your brother.’

‘Whatever.’ Kitty pushed her plate away.

She and Thierry went to bed without protest, which was disturbing in itself, and Isabel was alone in the drawing room, with the lights flickering and the wind whistling through the undergrowth outside.

She built up the log fire, drank half a bottle of red wine too quickly, and found that even the roaring flames offered little comfort. She noticed with relief that there was a comedy programme on television. But as the opening credits rose, there was a sudden
clunk
. The pixellated picture shrank into a white dot and disappeared. Simultaneously the lights went out, leaving her cloaked in silence and darkness. It felt almost like an insult, as if the house itself was laughing at her. Isabel sat immobile on the sofa, illuminated by the embers of the fire. Then her face crumpled and she was sobbing.

‘Bloody house!’ she yelled. ‘Bloody stupid house!’ She stood up and fumbled for matches, then searched for the candles she had not thought to put in a particular place, still swearing, her voice muffled by the wind outside, and by despair.

Matt had spent the evening at the Long Whistle. He had been avoiding Theresa who, picking up on his lack of interest with finely tuned antennae, had become irritable and petulant, flouncing around behind the bar and casting meaningful looks in his direction. He had met her flashing eyes and attempts at intimacy with indifference. There was nothing he liked less than a desperate woman who couldn’t get the message.

Besides, his mind was on other things.

He had come to the pub, rather than going home, because he knew that, while she chose to ignore much, Laura could not ignore his obvious and growing disquiet. He felt uncharacteristically at odds with himself. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw Byron’s face as he looked at Isabel. He had caught in it something raw and unguarded, and slowly it had dawned on him that it had reflected something in himself. When he closed his eyes he saw not Theresa or his wife but the pale expanse of Isabel Delancey’s collarbone, the scattering of freckles where her chest had been exposed to sunlight. He saw her smiling and swaying up to him, her hips undulating, her self-consciousness lost in sensuous appreciation of her music.

Byron’s response had been right. She did not belong to anyone. She was not tethered, as he was. The thought of Byron going near her made his beer taste sour. The thought of anyone else with her in that house, the house that held his imprint on every board, made his jaw set in a determined line.

‘Going to be a wild one tonight,’ said the landlord, his eyes on his crossword.

‘Yup.’ Matt downed his drink and put his glass on the bar. ‘You might be right.’

He ignored Theresa’s frantic attempts to get his attention. He was not sure what excuse he was going to use to explain how late he was. But driven by something he did not entirely understand, fifteen minutes before closing time, Matt found himself in his van, heading towards Little Barton.

Down in the boiler room, Byron settled the dogs, turned off his radio, and prepared to read his book by the light of the candles he had bought that morning. It was odd how quickly you could adapt to your surroundings, as long as you had the barest of home comforts. To his new home under the house he had now brought a chair, his battery-powered radio, the dogs’ baskets and a camp stove. Having washed in a cleaned sink, eaten proper food and drunk a mug of tea he was feeling, if far from cheerful, at least more even about his fate. It was only three weeks until the puppies could be weaned. One of the farmers on the other side of the church had already offered to pay him a couple of hundred for the boldest. If all of them fetched that much he’d be well on his way to a deposit.

When he was more stable financially, he would set about finding a job somewhere else. He was increasingly uncomfortable about Matt’s involvement with this house. There was nothing he could put his finger on but he had felt in his gut that all was not right, that Matt had not given up on owning the Spanish House. It would blow up at some point, or Mrs Delancey would be forced to move on, and Byron did not want to be around when either took place.

It was almost ten to eleven when he heard the boiler click off. He glanced at his watch, puzzled. The timer was set for eleven thirty. He climbed out of his sleeping-bag, ignoring the hopeful glances of his dogs, and went to the door. Every light was off.

A few minutes later he heard sobbing. ‘Bloody house,’ she was yelling. ‘Bloody stupid house.’

The power was down. He froze. It might be a fuse, but she might not know where the fuse box was. He could turn it back on for her, but then he would have to explain how he had come to be so close to her house.

Byron stood still, and Meg whined, picking up on his discomfort. He shushed her.

He listened in the dark to Isabel Delancey tramping up and down and felt a deep disquiet. None of this was right, yet he was powerless to do anything about it. He heard her violin start up and her misery transferred itself to the strings. He was no connoisseur of music, but even he thought he had never heard anything so sad. He recalled her earlier that day, approaching Matt McCarthy with her well-thumbed book of figures, her sleep-deprived face. So, even those who appeared wealthy could be teetering on the edge of debt. In some respects, she was no better off than he was.

It was this that drove him from the boiler room – that and the observation that it might have been his sister and Lily in Isabel’s place. He could hear her, preoccupied by her instrument on the other side of the door, playing her melancholic song in the dark. He would walk to the front of the house, see if the coach-house lights were on, and knock on the door. He would say he was just passing. He would feel better knowing that she and the children had light.

He was just closing the door when he heard the crunch of tyres on the gravel. Without his own car there, he had no convincing explanation for his presence. He could certainly not afford to be seen. He reopened the door silently, and withdrew back into the space under the house. Then he sat in the dark, waiting.

There were no lights on at the house, and for a moment he suspected she and the children had gone out and felt something like disappointment. Then, as the wind dropped momentarily, he heard her violin, and guessed that the electricity was down. Perhaps because he had downed several drinks, or because the last few months had endowed him with some appreciation of this kind of music, Matt McCarthy remained where he was and listened. His window open, the cool wind on his skin, he let the music match the anguished, riven mood of the weather whistling around him. He sat outside the house that should have been his and let himself feel something alien to him.

The lights stayed out.

He didn’t know what finally drew him in. Later he thought it might have been the desire to help, perhaps to check the fuse box. Or it might have been the music. In neither instance was he being honest with himself. The front door, as was common, was unlocked. He walked in and closed it softly behind him, and stood for a moment as the house creaked gently around him, like an old ship on high seas. He wondered whether to call out, but part of him sensed that this would halt the music, and he found, to his surprise, that he did not want it to stop. So, he walked stealthily along the hallway, then down the staircase to the kitchen corridor, and there, in the doorway, he saw her. She was playing, tears rolling down her cheeks, her eyes closed.

He looked at her, and something in him short-circuited. Her mouth was slightly open, her head tilted forward, shoulders back. She was lost in something he could not own. She bit her lower lip, wincing as the music reached a crescendo, as if the sound caused her pain. He could not tear his eyes from her. He felt like a boy again, as if he were watching something he was not supposed to see, something beyond him, something he could not have for himself, and his throat caught. And as he stood, frozen, her eyes opened, and widened slightly as she saw him through the gloom.

He made as if to speak, but she carried on playing without a break. She was watching him now, her eyes fixed on his, her arm working as if she was incapable of halting the flow.

‘You have no power,’ he said, as the music quieted briefly.

She nodded.

His eyes were locked on hers. He moved closer to her, drawn to the rise and fall of her chest, the juddering movement of her body. Her utter self-containment, set against what he suddenly saw in her eyes – something raw with need, with physical loss.

She dropped her hands to her sides before he reached her and made a faint sound, as if in surrender. He had his arms round her waist, half folding her body backwards, crushing her to him, pushing her through the door into the kitchen. She scrambled to place her violin on the table, and then her pale, cold hands were in his hair, her mouth open against his. He heard her gasp, felt them against his skin, the shocking warmth of her thighs as he pushed his hands up her skirt, the sweet, gratifying melding of her body against his. Something inside Matt McCarthy sang, loud and piercing, became deafening, as she pulsed against him, and something low and gutteral escaped his chest.

They slid inelegantly to the floor and he had her beneath him, where he needed her, where he had needed her to be since he first saw her. And he knew he wanted ownership – not just of the house but of this woman. He bit her neck, made her submit, felt her surprisingly strong fingers clutching at his skin, and his last thought as the wind rumbled against the windows, as the house groaned like a living thing around them, a faint surprise that her eyes were tight shut when his own were open, wide open, as if he were seeing a whole universe for the first time.