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‘Tits! I think I’m getting a cold!’ She wheels round, glaring at me accusingly. ‘Does Alex have a cold? I’d better not be getting a cold, Evie.’
I shake my head ‘no’, relinquishing any hope of actually finishing a sentence.
‘It’s the stress. The stress is outrageous! This concert is doing my nut in! Look at my glands, will you?’
I can’t tell you how many times a week I have to look at Allyson’s glands.
She sticks her tongue out. ‘Do you see anything? Is my throat red? Splotchy?’
No one is more paranoid about her health than Allyson. The kitchen counter is lined with vitamin bottles and herbal tinctures; her room emits a steamy, Arthurian mist from under the door, the result of a humidifier churning away constantly in a corner, and she sleeps more hours a day than a cat. Still, all her effort pays off: she has one of the clearest, most powerful singing voices I’ve ever heard.
I take a peek. ‘No, darling. It’s fine.’
‘Thanks. Oh God, Evie! What am I going to do?’
‘Well.’ I pick up another mug from the draining board. ‘You could always…’
‘Balls! I’ll have to call Junko again. But she’s like a robot; she understands nothing of the power and passion I need for these pieces!’ She looks at me. ‘You have heard about Piotr, haven’t you?’
I shake my head and she leans forward, her voice uncharacteristically low.
‘He’s the one who walked out in the middle of the final rounds of the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow a few years ago!’
She stares at me eagerly.
I’ve no idea what she’s talking about.
‘It’s the most famous piano competition in the world, Evie! He just stopped playing in the middle of his second concerto and left! When he was on the verge of winning!’
‘But why?’
‘It wasn’t good enough…he didn’t like the way he was playing.’ She rolls her eyes. Ally’s competitive nature is so keenly honed that the idea is clearly anathema. I find it quite intriguing. ‘He’s crazy, Evie! Insane! He was playing Prokofiev Three, with a full orchestra and suddenly he just stands up and walks away!’
‘So if he’s crazy, Ally, why are you so keen on working with him?’
‘Have you heard him? He was playing Gaspard de la Nuit yesterday and I thought I would faint it was so heart-breaking…Oh fuckity fuck fuck fuck!’ She collapses her head into her hands. (If Puccini had been composing for Allyson, ‘One Fine Day’ would’ve become ‘Where the Hell Is He?’.)
I take a piece of cheese out of the fridge, turning this new information around in my mind.
‘And now he teaches at the Royal Academy’
‘But he could’ve been huge!’ she mumbles.
We sit a moment.
Eventually, she looks up. ‘You know what we should do? We should go out, you and I; just the girls! We could go dancing or something!’
Every couple of months she does this; she launches into a campaign to force me into socializing, usually just after she’s finished some big job.
‘Well, maybe. I don’t know, Ally. I think I’m a bit old for dancing.’
‘I’m older than you are,’ she reminds me.
‘Yes, but you’re, you know, trendy…’
‘You could be trendy. Let’s go shopping. It would be fun!’
She’s staring at me with those huge, unflinching diva eyes.
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You always say that. If I had your face and your figure…’
‘Ally! Stop it!’ Why am I so embarrassed?
‘You’re not even wearing make-up, are you?’
‘Please!’ I shake my head.
‘I’m just saying it’s a waste! I’m going to stop asking one of these days and then you’ll be sorry!’ Opening one of the dozen bottles, she tosses a few pills into her mouth. ‘So the old fart walked out on you, did he? You’ve mentioned him before—what’s his name?’
‘Mr Hastings.’
‘Poor Mr Hastings.’
‘Actually, he’s a very difficult character,’ I point out, suddenly defensive.
‘Yes, but you would be difficult too, wouldn’t you? If you’d never lived out your dreams. Makes people crazy, Evie.’ She retrieves her drink and kisses me on the top of my head. ‘Night, darling.’
Standing alone, I pour what’s left in the kettle into my mug. There’s not enough for a full cup, so I leave it. And I stare out into the vast black space that’s the garden in the rear.
I’ve never thought of Mr Hastings as having dreams. Or at least not any that extended beyond making my class a misery. The revelation that he might endows him with an unwelcome vulnerability in my mind. This, along with Piotr’s anti-happiness diatribe, has finally tipped me over the edge. I’m exhausted and unexpectedly riddled with self-doubt.
I’m done slaying dragons for today.
Moving mechanically, I wipe down the kitchen counter before turning off the lights. And I have that feeling I get at the end of almost every day: the sensation of having left my body and watching it from a distance—a kind of physical déjà vu. Walking back up into the hallway, I’m floating, insubstantial; repeating the same evening rituals; pausing to make sure the front door’s locked, checking and rechecking.
I turn to make my way up the stairs.
And there, sitting in the darkness of the living room, is Piotr.
He’s at the piano. But there’s no sense of impending action. No crinkle of anticipation, as if he might, at any moment, begin to play. Instead, a powerful calm surrounds him.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask him if he’s all right. To break the silence, smoothing it over with noise, questions and conversation.
But then an unexpected intimacy overwhelms me.
His stillness is revealing. It’s as if he’s unfolding, very slowly, before me; invisible layers dissolving into the shadows. The longer I linger, the more I can see…
I step back.
This isn’t an experience I should be having with a man I don’t know. A man who doesn’t even like me.
And yet a fierce longing clutches at my heart: to be in a room where I’m not alone and yet where nothing—no words, no movement, no explanation—is necessary.
Walking upstairs, I move as quietly as possible but the third stair from the top creaks unbearably. She’s awake.
‘Is that you, Evie?’
‘Yes, Bunny’ It’s like being a teenager again.
‘Did you lock the front door?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Come in and say good night properly, then.’
I push open the heavy wide door. Her room’s spacious, with a set of small adjoining apartments which take up the entire first floor. She’s sitting, propped up in her lit-bateau bed on easily two dozen pillows, dressed in a linen nightgown covered by a pale-gold bed jacket. Across her lap, an ancient edition of Swann’s Way competes with the half-dozen copies of Hello! and Tatler which cover her bedspread.
Pulling off her reading glasses, she cocks her small silver head to one side, examining me thoroughly. ‘Oh, Evie! If only you tried a little! A bit of make-up, a nice haircut…’
I stare at the carpet and smile. ‘Now, why would I want to do that, Bunny?’
She pats the end of the bed, inviting me to sit down. ‘You never know, darling. Lots of girls meet lovely men at work. That’s where Edwina met her partner.’
(Edwina, her only child, came out as a lesbian and moved to Arizona with a woman from her father’s accountancy firm shortly after Harry’s death. Bunny stayed with them for a month last summer. They run an extremely expensive, chic little gallery specializing in Native American art and are not, as she puts it, ‘unfashionably gay’. ‘They’re really terribly sweet,’ she assures me. ‘Discreet, with very flattering hairstyles. And it’s such a relief not to have to humour them the way one must with a man. You know, Evie, as long as one of you can cook, it can’t be that bad.’ I’m not sure she understands that it’s more than just a convenient living arrangement; with Bunny it’s almost impossible to tell.)
‘Believe me, there are not lovely men where I work. Quite the opposite. And besides, you’re forgetting that I have a perfectly marvellous man of my own. How was he tonight?’
She smiles. ‘As always, the best. Although his diet is appalling, my dear. I made some borscht tonight. Did you see it? There’s a little left over in the fridge. I thought it might be nice, for Piotr, you know.’
‘But borscht is Russian, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, well, close enough. But Alex wouldn’t touch it. Can you imagine?’
‘Who in the world would turn down your home-made borscht?’
‘Well, Harry didn’t think much of it.’ She smoothes away a crease in the sheet. ‘But then, Harry had no taste. No taste buds, even. Too many cigars. Never allow Alex to smoke, promise me!’
‘I’ll do my best.’ I rise to leave and then stop. The mention of Harry reminds me…‘Bunny forgive me if this is in any way inappropriate and you don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to, but…’
She laughs. ‘My goodness, Evie! So formal!’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just…’ How to put this? ‘Do you ever see Harry? I mean, now?’
She looks at me. ‘He’s dead, dear.’
I feel foolish. ‘Yes, I know, I was just wondering if you ever…I mean, if you believe that people can come back, you know, once they’re…’
‘Gone?’
I nod.
‘Well.’ She thinks a moment. ‘He sometimes makes an appearance in the mornings. Shuffles in wearing that dreadful old dressing gown and carrying a copy of The Times. Wants help with the crossword. Stuff like that. Chit-chat, really’
My heart dives forward in my chest. ‘And what do you do?’
‘Well, the shit knows I’m not speaking to him.’ She picks up her copy of Proust again. ‘I just ignore him and he goes away. It’s the cheek of it that’s so annoying; the fact that he thinks he can just pick up where he left off.’
She speaks without a trace of irony or insincerity…can it be true? At any rate, she’s begun reading again—her hint that our conversation is over.
I drift over to the door; still full of questions, but unable to arrange my tangled thoughts. ‘Sleep well, Bunny’
‘You too, darling.’ She looks up. ‘And honestly, if Harry starts hassling you for clues, just tell him to piss off. Never could spell.’
‘Right.’
She goes back to her book and I close the door. Like so many conversations with Bunny, I have absolutely no idea if she’s serious or just having me on.
As I pass by Allyson’s room, I hear her humming softly. Something lovely. Something I don’t know. Probably something German.
I climb the last flight, twisting the doorknob very carefully. Slowly, I creep through to the next room.
And there he is, sleeping. In his Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas. Alex, my lovely, gorgeous, perfect four-year-old son. I lean down, softly kissing his forehead. And he shifts, brushing away the clinging attentions of his watchful mother, even in sleep.
I could spend all night staring at him, at the gentle curve of his forehead, the soft, smooth pink of his cheeks, the angelic (at least in repose) set of his mouth. Every day he grows more and more beautiful.
Like his father.
A cloud trails across the night sky. Cold white moonlight floods in through the window. Everything’s illuminated, the countless toys scattered across the floor, the second-hand rocking chair in the corner, the brightly painted toy chest…Here is a world where nothing’s lost for very long; where everything’s retrievable. A fragile, temporary universe.
I settle quietly, as I do so many nights now, in the wooden rocking chair and watch.
He’ll be bigger tomorrow and yet I’ll have never seen a glimpse of him growing in the night. But I’m here, nonetheless. A sentinel, standing guard against a whole, impossible, unknowable future.
And here, in the stillness of my son’s room, with the soft, sighing rhythm of his breathing for company, the thought enters again, uninvited.
Would I do it differently?
If I had to make the choice again, is this the fate I would choose?
I look out at the silent street below. At the daffodils bowed by the wind and rain.
It’s a fragile, temporary universe.
And always has been.
‘This is it,’ Robbie says.
