The Voices (18 page)

He squeezed the scarf. ‘You say that, but . . .’ Suddenly, he lost the urge to argue the point. Instead, he folded the material into a neat triangle and placed it on the dressing table.

‘How was the rehearsal?’ Amanda asked.

‘Excellent,’ he replied. ‘The cello solo was sublime. Shall I turn this off?’ He tapped the lampshade.

‘All right.’

The room was plunged into darkness.

Amanda’s body bounced as Simon got into bed. They lay apart for a few moments before she rolled onto her side. She slipped her hand beneath his pyjamas and trifled with his chest hair. ‘I’m so tired,’ Simon yawned. ‘It really was a very exhausting evening.’

‘I’m sure it was.’ A little too much emphasis on the word ‘sure’ introduced scepticism into an otherwise supportive response.

Simon either didn’t notice or willfully ignored the hint of bad feeling. ‘Another long day tomorrow,’ he said, adding a laboured sigh for effect.

‘Yes,’
Amanda repeated, ‘another long day.’

She closed her eyes and thought once again about Leda surrendering herself to the amorous swan. The emotion that accompanied images of this bizarre union was dangerously close to envy. A half-dream of brightly illuminated down, like falling snow, ensured a smooth transition from wakefulness to sleep.

When Amanda opened her eyes again it was morning. She could hear Simon’s regular exhalations and felt discomfited by a full bladder. Pulling the covers aside, she got out of bed and went to the bathroom. While seated on the toilet, her gazed wandered. Simon’s clothes were hanging on the back of a chair and he had pushed his shoes between its legs. She noticed that the shoes were dirty. After wiping herself and pulling the chain she went to take a closer look. They were covered in dust, and when she turned them over she saw that mud had collected in the corrugated rubber soles.

The rehearsal had taken place in a West End church. That’s what Simon had told her. In which case, why were his shoes so filthy?

Christopher switched off the radio and listened to the new recording. After his introductory remarks an old woman’s
voice floated out of the continuous static. ‘God have mercy.’ There was a short pause and the quivering contralto continued: ‘I dare not approach while he reposes near thy heart.’ Somewhere deep in the radio noise, he thought he could hear a distant cry, a dreadful keening. He stopped the tape, rewound it for a few seconds and pressed ‘play’. There was nothing but static. He checked the rev counter but the cry seemed to have disappeared. Christopher’s perplexity was mild. He had become accustomed to the occasional experience of auditory hallucination. Listening to static for long periods of time seemed to encourage the brain to overinterpret the slightest perturbation. He let the tape run on. A young man, desperate, almost hysterical:
‘Ich stehe allein! So ganz allein!’
The voice was unusually clear.
I stand alone! So utterly alone!
There was a sob, followed by the words:
‘In meinem kleinen Zimmer.’ In my little room. ‘Mir wird so eng!’ I feel trapped.
This was followed by two minutes of empty whooshing, after which the static began to ripple with faint, incomprehensible whispers. A burst of flutter preceded the old woman, who returned to issue a warning: ‘Do not heed the speech of shadows.’ The remaining ten minutes of the recording were void. Christopher pressed ‘stop’ and removed his headphones. ‘Not bad,’ he said out loud. It had been a productive night.

The studio was unbearably hot and when he changed position, he found that his shirt was damp and sticking to his skin. He could smell his own perspiration, his lips were dry and he was thirsty.

In the kitchen, he poured an inch of concentrated orange juice into a tumbler, filled it with tap water, and stirred the mixture with a fork. He gulped the sweet liquid down his parched throat and put the bottle back in a cupboard. There were some dead ants next to the ant bait. Although tired, he didn’t want to go to bed, so he went to the drawing room and lay down on the sofa. ‘The speech of shadows,’ he said, savouring the alliteration. It would make a good title. Up until that point he had only thought of his composition as ‘the piece’, but giving it a name seemed to advance the project a stage further and he felt a sudden rush of excitement. He imagined seeing those same words printed in the
Radio Times
or on the front of a concert programme. The prospect of his critical rehabilitation made him feel slightly agitated so he got up and began pacing around the room.

He had completed several circuits of the sofa before he was halted by his own reflection in the French windows. His hair was sticking up, his shirt was hanging out and he needed a shave. There was something about his selfneglect that made him look older. Through his reflection,
Christopher thought he could see a glimmer of light. He walked to the window and peered out into the garden. There was indeed a faint luminescence and he judged that its source was in the vicinity of the gazebo.

‘What the . . .’ A slight increase in brightness confirmed his thinking. The gazebo materialized momentarily like a lantern, a skeletal structure of posts and struts. The light was clearly coming from inside. Was it a fire?

Christopher rushed to the kitchen and found a torch in one of the cupboards. Then he returned to the drawing room, unlocked the French windows and stepped out onto the terrace. The light had vanished. He made his way to the gazebo and flashed the torch around the interior. He saw a blanket, bottles and some newspapers. Nothing was smouldering or scorched; however, he detected a trace of tobacco smoke in the air, which troubled him a little, but not for long. He noticed that the neighbours, who smoked excessively, had left one of their windows open. Christopher scratched his head. He was sure he had seen a flickering light.

There was a sudden noise – the swish of long grass – and an impression of movement. He swept the torch beam around the garden. An animal, a cat – or was it a fox? – appeared in the circle of illumination and then
leapt out of view. There was more sound, scrabbling, a thud, and then silence. His heart, which was hammering in his chest, began to slow down again.

Christopher walked back to the house and checked the side entrance. The beam of his torch penetrated the darkness, revealing a dustbin and a ladder lying on its side. Mr Ellis – the builder – had neglected to collect the ladder after his departure and Christopher had failed to arrange for its disposal. Beside the dustbin was a cardboard box that had been stuffed to capacity. Its sides bulged and some of the contents had spilled onto the ground. Christopher crouched down to pick up one of several magazines. He was surprised to see that the cover girl was a younger incarnation of Laura. It was a 1960s edition of
Glamour.
She was pouting at the camera and looking very sexy. The torch beam travelled across the ground and came to rest on another image of his wife. There she was, sitting on a chair, the shortness of her miniskirt revealing the full extent of her slender legs. Her hair was a glorious fountain that fell to her shoulders and curled upwards. She looked like the quintessential sixties ‘dolly bird’. Christopher shone his torch into the box and discovered more magazines of a similar vintage, all of them graced with images of Laura in her elegant prime.

The following morning Christopher entered the kitchen and found that Laura and Faye had already finished their breakfast. Faye was playing with some plastic farm animals and Laura was inspecting the cupboards to see if any more ants had appeared.

‘The bait worked,’ said Laura.

‘Good,’ Christopher responded, before inserting a spoonful of cornflakes into his mouth. They managed to sustain a superficial conversation, but Christopher wasn’t really listening. He was rehearsing the confrontation that he was about to instigate. He knew that what he intended to do was unnecessarily theatrical, a provocation, but he couldn’t desist. It was as though he had become detached from his own mental processes. He got up, left the kitchen, and returned carrying the box of magazines he had discovered the night before. Like a robot, he held the box over the kitchen table and let it go. The crockery jumped and the spoons rattled. Faye looked at him quizzically then went back to playing with her animals.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Laura asked.

He removed a magazine from the box and tossed it in Laura’s direction. She looked down at her own image.

‘I found them last night. Why on earth did you throw them away?’

‘I’ve been having a clear-out.’

Her face was blank, her lips pressed together. Christopher noticed a burgeoning surplus of flesh beneath her chin.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said, throwing his hands up and letting them fall again. ‘I just don’t understand.’

‘What don’t you understand?’

‘Why you’d throw these away?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t want them anymore.’

‘But it’s your life. It’s what you did.’

Laura sighed. ‘I modelled clothes, Chris. That’s all.’

He pulled another magazine out of the box and held it up.
‘Vogue.
They put you on the front cover of
Vogue.’

‘So what?’

‘Doesn’t it mean
anything
to you?’

‘Not now. No. It’s the past.’

‘What about Faye?’

‘What about her?’

‘Don’t you think she’d like to see these magazines when she gets older?’

‘I hope not. I hope she’ll be interested in a lot more than clothes and make-up.’

‘She’s a girl! Of course she’ll be interested in clothes and make-up. And there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’ Laura’s expression encouraged Christopher to reflect on his rhetoric. He responded defensively. ‘Being
feminine won’t stop her from becoming a doctor or a lawyer.’

‘But being
feminine,’
Laura said, inscribing the air with quotations marks, ‘as you put it, makes it hard for a young woman to get taken seriously, especially if being
feminine
means showing your legs and painting your face. I don’t want Faye to grow up thinking that her mother was particularly proud of being a professional clothes horse.’

‘Don’t be so ridiculous. The kind of work you did had genuine artistic value. Some of those shoots really captured the spirit of the time. Children are naturally curious about what their parents got up to when they were young. It’d be nice for Faye to see some of these.’

‘Please. Take the box outside and leave it by the dustbin. Those magazines are mine, not yours, and I want to throw them away.’

‘I don’t know . . .’ He was too exasperated to continue speaking. He took a deep breath and tried again. ‘I don’t understand. What’s the matter with you?’

‘Ah.’ It was only a single syllable, but it communicated sudden, grave insight – resentment and anger. Christopher was too het up to detect such nuances. He did not register the portent in her eyes. He only saw the severe, masculine cut of her hair and the pendant bulge
beneath her chin. ‘I don’t know what you’re becoming – what you’re turning into.’

Laura stared at the magazine in front of her. A red rash had suddenly appeared on her neck.

‘You want me to be like this again, don’t you?’

The truth of the accusation had the effect of leaving Christopher speechless. Eventually, he replied, rather weakly, ‘No.’

‘Well, it’s not going to happen. OK?’ She picked up the magazine and placed it on top of the others in the box. ‘Now, please. Take it outside.’

Christopher conceded defeat and silently did as he was told.

Before going up to his studio he went into the bedroom to find a thinner T-shirt. Although it was still early in the day the temperature had started to climb. On Laura’s dressing table he saw the bottle of perfume he had bought for her in Paris. It was unopened.

For the rest of the morning Christopher couldn’t concentrate. He tried to focus on his music but he kept on thinking about Laura, and when he listened back to what he had recorded he was disappointed. It didn’t compliment the scene he had been watching on the TV screen:
androids converging on a moon base surrounded by parabolic dishes. The soundtrack lacked urgency and the textures were too thin. He was tempted to erase the tape and start again, but he resisted the urge. What he needed was a break, some fresh air to clear his head. In the hallway, he shouted out, ‘I’m going for a walk, OK?’ Laura didn’t respond. He shrugged, slammed the door and walked down to the gate.

As he crossed the road he noticed that the tarmac was tacky. The soles of his shoes stuck to the ground and when he lifted his feet he heard a tearing noise. He had to curl his toes otherwise his shoes would have come off. The sun was so strong the tarry surface had begun to melt. He had never seen anything like it before. Apart from a little thundery rain on the first Sunday of the month, the sun had been a permanent fixture and temperatures had soared into the eighties every day. The sky had become a glaring dome of blue-yellow haze. London was burning up. He remembered a headline he had read in the
Express
a week earlier: ‘Sweat It Out For Fifty Years’. Scientists had just discovered an atmospheric phenomenon called the ‘greenhouse effect’ and experts were predicting longer and fiercer heatwaves to come. In a final twist of fate, the weather had joined forces with the inept politicians, striking unions and terrorists to hasten
the end of Britain. The whole nation was about to spontaneously combust.

Christopher hurried onto the shaded path beneath the trees on the opposite side of the road and began to penetrate the wooded margin of Hampstead Heath. Once again, he began to think about Laura. What was happening to her? She had been changing for some time now, but the process of transformation had accelerated over the last few months. Throwing away her magazines was a symbolic act, a disavowal of her past. In effect, she was declaring that she was no longer the person who he had fallen in love with. And if that was true, didn’t it follow that their relationship would suffer or, even worse, become unworkable? Yet neither he nor she could just walk away from their shared commitments. There was Faye to consider. Christopher suddenly felt tension arising as two contradictory impulses pulled in opposite directions. On the one hand, he accepted the responsibilities of marriage and family, but on the other hand, the artist in him balked at the prospect of confinement in an unhappy domestic situation. A photographic image of Ancel’s apartment clarified in his mind: the tall windows, the oil painting, the scantily clad young lover. Christopher felt envy curdling in the pit of his stomach, like many men of his generation, he had heard Cyril Connolly’s assertion that
There is no more
sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall
repeated more times than he cared to remember. Perhaps there was some truth in it after all.