скачать книгу бесплатно
‘He probably does.’
They both gave sad sighs in unison. These guys were such a good duo.
‘OK, enough, Petrushka. What’s it about?’ asked Kris.
Jenny’s fingers danced over the keys as they read over her shoulder. Weird Russian story. Starts at a fair – usual street scene – then a puppeteer arrives with three marionettes – Petrushka, who’s this kind of the fool figure in Russian stories, the ballerina, and the Moor.
‘The Moor?’
Totally not PC these days, but this was made up around 1910 in Russia. The dance suggests a love triangle between the three. Petrushka loves the ballerina, the ballerina fancies the Moor, and the Moor prefers his coconut tree.
‘I see what you mean about not very PC. What do they do with it these days for schools?’
Jenny shrugged. Her business was the music not the visuals. And then it gets wacky.
‘Only then?’
The next act is inside Petrushka’s box – very surreal. The one after that is in the Moor’s room where, after worshipping his coconut, he gets it on with the ballerina, breaking Peeping-Tom Petrushka’s heart.
‘And children watch this?’
That last part’s implied. I’m more worried by the messages they get from the coconut bit. Last act the Moor chases Petrushka back to the fair and kills him for interrupting. The crowd is about to turn on the Moor but the puppeteer points out Petrushka is just a doll. He carries the slain mannikin back to the puppet wagon. Jenny was enjoying herself. She had always liked this bizarre story with its shifting perspectives.
‘Is that the end?’
In a poorer ballet it would be, but no! She grinned, fingers hovering.
‘Stop teasing us. Tell us how it finishes.’
The puppeteer is now alone and the stars are out. The spirit of Petrushka rises from the doll for a final defiant gesture. You are left wondering what is real and what is not? Was Petrushka to be considered a doll or human? And then, it’s all a show anyway so what do we believe? Everyone was acting roles.
‘Very Russian,’ said Louis. ‘Anguished and melancholy. I blame vodka and long winters.’
It’s beautiful. There’s a fantastic chord in the middle that’s known as the Petrushka chord. Two major triads clash – it’s really bold.
‘I guess we aren’t talking Chinese gangs?’ said Kris.
She elbowed him. C major and F# major.
‘I forget when I look at my hardest worker cleaning the tables that she had all this culture at her fingertips,’ said Louis.
‘And when she looks at her boss, she probably forgets that she’s looking at one of London’s top Jazz vocalists,’ said Kris.
We are all overlooked treasures.
‘If we weren’t on duty that would be the cue for the group hug.’ Louis stacked their empties on a tray and got up. ‘Unfortunately, us overlooked treasures have overlooked customers to serve.’ A small queue of early birds had gathered by the till with only Frieda to serve them.
Kris put his hand on Jenny’s arm before she followed. ‘I hope you like the house, Jenny, but I think it’s a bit of an acquired taste. If you have any problems with Bridget or Jonah, let me know, OK? I can talk to them for you.’
She patted his cheek in thanks and blew him a kiss.
‘I can’t help worrying about you!’ he called as she moved away to her cleaning station.
All the guys in her life seemed to feel that way. She’d prefer someone just to love her but that didn’t appear to be on the horizon. A selfish schoolboy ex and two gay pals: not promising prospects. She really should make the effort to get back on the dating circuit. Now she had a nice place to bring someone home to without Harry looming in the corridor, maybe she would.
Chapter 13 (#ulink_46e5d5ad-438c-594d-b536-8fe01ba6d21d)
Bridget, One Year Ago
Today I’ll go beyond the front gate.
Duster in hand, Bridget stood at the window of Jenny’s bedroom gazing down the path to the untrodden green beyond. This room had the best view of Blackheath; hers looked out on the garden, to the lilac tree and the shrubbery, a closed, safe prospect. She came in here at least once a day to challenge herself.
I’ll put on my coat, make sure I have my keys in my handbag, and I will go for a walk in Greenwich Park. Simple. Nothing to fear in that. I remember the park well and it won’t have changed too much, not that little red brick museum on the hilltop with the absurd ball on the roof. I’ll watch the tourists straddling the line marking Greenwich Mean Time, holding sticks up to take selfies. Ridiculous, funny people. They’ll make me laugh. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.
Admiral Jack had built the house here because it sat on the exact same longitude as the observatory. Bridget imagined the line running through her front door, through this room, and out through the lilac tree, hopping over the fence and continuing beyond. It was like Mercury, messenger of the gods, circling the globe so fast you only saw the grass bending in his wake. It linked her to all those foreign countries that lay on the same line on the map: France, Spain, Algeria, Burkina Faso. Who lived in Burkina Faso? It sounded as made up as Timbuktu, which was also a real place apparently, in Mali, another country on the Prime Meridian. Ghana, Togo, the long stretch of the Atlantic and finally Antarctica. Bridget closed her eyes, summoning up the eerie vastness of the southernmost continent. Her husband’s great-uncle had died with Scott somewhere out there. His family were full of people who went on adventures and never came back. The empire was casual about its sons. The Jack dynasty never learnt the lesson that it was safer to stay at home.
She idly wiped a fingerprint off the pane. Her new tenant must have tried to open it but the lower sash was broken. Only the upper one slid on its ropes. Bridget pulled it down a little to let some fresh air into the room. Jenny used a strong perfume; Bridget could still smell it even though her lodger had left several hours ago. Jenny favoured that fake strawberry scent that was in so many of the cheaper deodorants. Bridget found it unpleasant but she could hardly ask the girl to change something so personal.
Bridget emptied the bin into the plastic bag she carried. What were dead poppies doing in there? She should remember to mention to Jenny that there was a compost heap behind the gardener’s shed and not to use the waste basket for recyclables. She hadn’t yet made up her mind about her new lodger. Change was not easy, not for Bridget. Kris had filled the house with his booming bass and his immoderate laughter. She’d like the military forthrightness he brought to every situation, the precision with which he’d made his bed and folded his towels. He played his new songs to her, flattered her outrageously, and managed to head off any arguments with some novel distraction techniques learned from his army days. Her favourite was when he had prevented her bickering with Norman about who was suffering from the worst aches and pains by throwing his prosthetic at them both. As a dramatic gesture it had been priceless. She and Norman had been properly shamed into not mentioning health matters on a Tuesday again. In fact, it had been solemnly entered into the list of house rules right at the bottom. Number twenty-four: thou shalt not moan about thy health in company.
As for Jenny, she was best described as Kris’s opposite. Her silence made others fill the gap.
We all end up talking too much around her, Bridget mused. She went into the bathroom to clean the mirror over the sink. And that can be dangerous.
When did I get to be so old? She turned away from the dark-eyed, hollow-cheeked woman who rose from the depths of the mirror-pool.
I’ll soon deal with you, my pretty. She sprayed blue glass cleaner onto the surface, blurring her reflection. Like Dorothy in Oz making her foe melt. Switching to a J Cloth, she briskly polished the mirror and didn’t meet her own gaze again.
The jury in Gallant House was still deliberating their verdict on Jenny. The vine liked her but the lilac tree wasn’t sure. The birds in the attic resented her music and the mice in the pantry approved her choice of breakfast cereal. And as for Bridget … It was like the space between dropping a stone into the old well in the kitchen courtyard and hearing it hit the water many feet below. Many had come and gone over the decades since Paul died. It would be interesting to find out if Jenny was one of the ones who stayed the course.
Taking her bucket of cleaning supplies, Bridget walked downstairs to prepare herself a light lunch as a reward for her housework. She paused in the hallway by the front door.
Today, I’ll open it and walk right out and keep going, she promised herself. She touched the coat hanging on the peg, her best one, not the old one she used in the garden. It was getting a little dusty on the shoulders. That wouldn’t do. She took it down and shook it. She should send it to the dry cleaners. Feeling in the pocket, she found a bent railway ticket. She checked the date. 8 January 2002. Definitely time it went to the cleaners. She wouldn’t be able to go out, would she, not until it came back?
Relieved, she went into the kitchen, made herself a salad, and set about revisions on her latest chapter. She’d reached the part where she entered the narrative, the young bride of the much older Paul Whittingham. He had been the son of the first owner of the house not to bear the Jack surname. His mother had been the eldest of a string of daughters, and wrenched the place from being owned by Jacks to settling disgruntled under a new dynasty, that of the undistinguished Whittinghams. It hadn’t lasted long, had it? She wondered if she should contact one of those ancestry websites and have a family tree drawn up. That way she could leave the house to some lucky Jack who was unaware he stood to inherit. The house would like that; she would feel happier back in familiar territory.
But what if the Jack the tree turned up were American, or, God forbid, Australian? She would have to take that into account, of course, when it came to choosing, vet the individual thoroughly. Better the house was left to charity than that. Her own relatives – all distant cousins – would fume when they found out what she had done only at the reading of the will. It would be like a scene from Dickens. Such a shame she by definition would be unable to attend.
I’ll specify that my will is read in the drawing room, she decided. If there is an afterlife of the sort that allows me to come, then I’ll make sure I’m present. I’ll swing from the chandelier with the ghosts of past Jacks. That is something to look forward to in all the grim prospect of death. A last hurrah.
She looked down at her chapter.
Chapter 14 (#ulink_a42560f2-fe0e-50c8-b9f0-901cafac1c87)
The House that Jack Built – Chapter Thirty – My Old Age
At first, I wasn’t keen on Paul Whittingham. He never appreciated me in his youth, bringing his long-haired friends home to smoke spliffs in the snug and tell his mother that the smell came from the joss sticks. Employment sobered him. The hair was cut, a suit donned, and the city beckoned. He followed his father into Lloyd’s shipping. How his ancestor the admiral would’ve scoffed to see his flesh and blood sitting at a computer screen analysing the risks of going through the Suez or around the Horn. Go out there and see for yourself, he would’ve bawled in his voice that carried over the storm. But Paul was made for comfort. Not for him was life on the High Seas; he was born for riding a desk and drinking down the pub with his friends. They all grew soft, rounded faces and bellies, hair retreating, courage shrivelling. The irony is that the Eighties made these men out to be heroes. Insurance, as he told the woman he was wooing, is much more interesting than it seems.
He was lying to her, of course. All the men who brought their wives here have lied to them one way or another. All have had mistresses. Sometimes that mistress was a woman, more rarely a man, on occasion the sea. Best of all was when their first love was me.
I dismissed this new wife of Paul’s at the beginning, thinking she was too flighty for the flabby insurance broker. A dancer, he told his mother proudly. A prima ballerina. Or had been. Bridget Taylor had risen through the ranks of the Royal Ballet but, before she could take on any of the leading roles, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. She rejected the temptation of pushing herself beyond her body’s limits, resigned from the ballet and took to temping – quite a come down for one who had dreamed of her name in lights. And then Paul fished her from the typing pool. Needing a respectable date for the company Christmas dinner at the Savoy, his eye fell on the elegant secretary in her neat French suits. As the date turned into a relationship, he found he wanted to lose a few pounds, take up some active hobbies, even attend the opera with her if she so wished. They never went to the ballet. She didn’t ask and he never suggested. He learnt tactfulness in his middle years.
His mother was delighted her lacklustre son had polished himself up. She handed over the house and moved to Bournemouth where her sister lived. A Jack returning to the sea – none of us were surprised.
Paul went on one knee to propose under the lilac tree while it rained down bridal confetti. He offered his bride his love, his considerable income, a share in his pension, and a house. It was me that decided the lady in his favour. She liked him well enough, but her first love had been dancing and that had died on her. Rather than be a widow for the rest of her life, she settled for the pleasant prospect I offered.
They hoped for children to fill the empty rooms, but Paul was never the most virile of men. His wife languished, wondering what was wrong with her. It was only after his accident that she discovered what she was missing.
Chapter 15 (#ulink_42cf9c2e-4e6b-5f4b-9709-4efbc968d722)
Bridget put a line through that last paragraph. It was all true: Paul in another age would’ve realised that he was gay, or at least more suited to celibacy. Instead he’d taken the route most thought inevitable in those days: a heterosexual marriage. That didn’t mean she wanted that private failing laid open to all those who read her account so they could dissect and dismember. The house had witnessed it, as well as their mutual relief when they no longer had to pretend they enjoyed the marital bed after Paul had retired from active service. It was his sporting hobby that brought about that state of affairs. Tennis. Not a collision on court or anything of that nature, but a tumble from the balcony of the tennis club when he’d drank too much champagne – a more middle-class fate could not be imagined, he had always joked. She didn’t want readers to get the wrong idea about Paul. He could be huge fun and was blessed with an acerbic sense of humour about himself. They’d liked each other quite fiercely. The way he dealt with his injury was the truly heroic period of his life. They may even have grown to love each other a little.
His injury had also set her free. With his tacit consent, she had looked elsewhere for sex. As long as there were no consequences, she was free to choose. The house had witnessed her embarkation on what was to be a series of affairs. It had been with their first tenant, an Italian naval officer who lodged with them for a glorious six months, that she’d discovered the sensuous woman hidden inside her. If only she could’ve still danced professionally, she was sure she would now have produced incandescent performances as the many lovers in the prima ballerina’s repertoire. She hadn’t known enough when she was twenty-one, even though she had thought she knew it all, in the way the young have to think they are the first to discover love. Silvano he’d been called, which sounded romantic even before he started whispering sweet demands in his husky Italian. They’d had their trysts up in the attics on a daybed she’d stored up there, safe from interruption as Paul kept to the ground floor. She’d even danced again, just a little, as her lover lay back on the cushions and watched. Brava! he’d said. Brava!
Everyone should have one lover like that Italian in their life, she thought. One Silvano.
‘Mrs Whittingham! I’m just off!’ called Jonah.
‘I’m in the kitchen!’ Her tenant was a very different kind of man to Silvano but equally interesting in his own way: a talented actor if she was any judge.
He stuck his head round the door. ‘I’ll be late – night shoot.’
‘I’ll leave the chain off the front door for you.’
‘Thanks. Hard at work I see?’
‘I don’t suppose you want to read it, do you?’ She was only teasing. Jonah hadn’t proved to be a sympathetic audience for her work so she didn’t pursue him any longer. She’d given up with Kris too, and Rose all that time ago, and the forgotten ones in between. Perhaps Jenny would be the right reader? Her bookshelf was promising.
‘I’m afraid I won’t have time. I’ve got to learn my lines.’
‘You dodged that bullet very nicely, Jonah. Well done.’
He returned her smile with a brief one of his own. She’d been helping him have an easier time at college and on set by teaching him some of the tact than he’d missed out on in his unorthodox education.
‘What do you think of Jenny?’ she asked, curious what he’d made of this rival in the house.
‘She’s lovely and odd all at the same time.’
‘Lovely and odd. Hmm, yes, I suppose that’s accurate. She should fit in then. You find her attractive?’
He shrugged, clearly not wanting to answer that. ‘She played me a tune on that fiddle of hers that put a knife right in the gut – it was amazing.’
‘I thought I could hear music when I went to bed.’
‘We were in the snug. Did we disturb you?’
She knew full well he’d gone out on the balcony again but unless she actually saw him on it, she didn’t feel it her place to reprimand him. It meant he didn’t fog up the snug with his little roll up cigarettes. She had an acute sense of smell and stale tobacco numbered amongst her least favourite odours.
‘I enjoyed it. I might have a problem if she decides to practise in the middle of the night but as an evening serenade it was very pleasant.’
Jonah rubbed the back of his neck making the tattooed bolts twitch. Did he know that the Frankenstein creature in the book didn’t have those; that it was the clumsy interpretation of film? The original had been stitched, not bolted, together. ‘I spoke to her later too. We had what you’d call an embarrassing encounter. She thought she heard a ghost.’ He gave her a straight look.
‘Most people hear odd things here. I’ve always rather hoped there is a ghost but I’ve never seen one. Have you?’
He dropped his gaze and laughed; a short bark, not a belly laugh, of real humour. Poor Jonah: so sad under everything. All she could do though was offer him her affection to make up. ‘I’m too unimaginative for a ghost to waste its time on me. Anyway, I told her not to worry.’
‘Good. I hope she’d not naturally highly strung. I had another of those once.’
‘Another what?’
‘Highly strung tenant. Gillian her name was. She couldn’t settle here, thought people were interfering with her things, told terrible lies about me. I had to get rid of her in the end.’
‘You kicked her out of Gallant House?’
‘I’m afraid I did.’
‘Well, it’s your house, your rules. I reckon Jenny will be fine, though, once she’s got used to it.’
‘I hope so. It’s so good to have music here again. Kris leaves big shoes to fill.’
Jonah glanced up at the clock. ‘Right, really must go. Don’t work too hard now, Mrs Whittingham.’
She pointed to her cheek and, after a slight hesitation, he bent down to give her a perfunctory kiss. He didn’t like doing that but she wanted him to see her as family. Everyone who lived under her roof had to understand that. He also never stopped calling her Mrs Whittingham even though she had invited him to address her as Bridget numerous times. Jonah was stubborn that way, a core of steel she didn’t think she would bend. He quit the kitchen in a hurry and the next thing Bridget heard was the front door slam. She hadn’t managed to break him of that habit either.
I could follow him, she thought. Trail him to the station, then to the set, and watch them film the next episode. Perhaps I could be an extra, sit in the waiting room with a bloodied handkerchief to my temple, or leg in plaster?
She got up, went to the kitchen door and put her hand on the knob.
What am I thinking? She snatched her hand back as if the handle burned her. People don’t do that, they don’t go haring after their lodgers to thrust themselves into their work. I’m turning into a crazy old woman with stupid urges. She sat down again at the table, gathered her papers and patted them into order. Maybe she would revise Chapter One again. That was her favourite. Yes, that would be best.
Part 2 – The Fool’s Room (#ulink_c56c0d48-5729-525d-bf8a-502f5198da6a)
Chapter 16 (#ulink_2a5b5518-e738-5849-8424-ec1e8100b70f)
Jonah, Present Day
‘I’ve been reading your file, Jonah, and it says that you’ve had anger management issues for years, ever since you were young, in fact. The first serious incident came when you were nine. Is that right?’
The way the inspector said it made it sound so tidy. Anger management. Turn left in the brain past accounts and record keeping. Jonah shrugged. ‘Can I smoke?’
‘Not allowed anymore,’ said the female detective. ‘Public building.’
‘Yeah, and we can’t have the boys and girls in blue dying of lung cancer thanks to all these chain-smoking criminals.’ He twiddled his thumbs instead on his lap, so hopefully they wouldn’t see his nervous gesture.
‘So you view yourself as a criminal?’ The inspector swooped in on his use of the English language.
‘Reformed. But not yet kicked the habit of Mr Benson and Mr Hedges. Sorry, I can’t remember your names.’
