Chapter 45
FORTY-FIVE
ORLA
Anna asked me to babysit the children last night – if babysitting is even the word, given that Barney is barely a child any more and Lulu is practically an adult.
She suggested I have them round at my place – a sort of double lock, I suppose: not only insurance that Lulu wouldn’t be able to sneak off anywhere again, if indeed she was minded to do so, but also a form of punishment, because being minded by me is nowhere near as interesting a prospect as being at home alone or round at a friend’s house.
For Barney, though, it didn’t seem like much of a hardship at all. As soon as we’d eaten our takeaway pizzas, paid for by Anna, he asked if it was okay for him to play the piano, and I gladly agreed.
Must you? grumbled his sister, plugging her headphones into her ears. It’ll be more cringe than Katy Perry singing Woman’s World.
Mum’s gone to see Joel Chamberlain at the Royal Albert Hall, Barney said. I’m proper salty about it. At least here I can have some music.
You might be pleasantly surprised, I told Lulu. Your brother’s been working hard.
So Lulu took her headphones out. She and I and the cats sat together on the sofa and Barney began to play – hesitantly at first, because he’s not used to having an audience, but then with growing confidence, even showing off a bit as he got to what I guessed was a particularly complex point in the piece, speeding up and then bursting into giggles as he hit a succession of wrong notes.
Hey, Lulu said. You’re actually not shit.
I am quite shit, her brother countered modestly. But I’m getting better.
Lulu looked at him almost as if she was seeing him for the first time. Since when’s this been a thing?
Barney explained that he has been coming round here a few times a week for the past few months to practise, since before his father’s death, and looked at me slightly doubtfully as he told his sister that I hadn’t minded – I’d encouraged it. I reassured him that I didn’t mind at all.
Lulu said, Wow. You know, if you’d started when you were younger, you could’ve been, like, a prodigy or something. Like Mozart. Only not deaf.
That was Beethoven, Barney said. Don’t you know anything?
Then I offered them some of the strawberry ice cream I have in the freezer, and they followed me eagerly to the kitchen.
While we ate, a sudden connection leaped into my mind.
Joel Chamberlain. The musician Anna had gone to see play; the man whose photograph I cut from Beatrice’s magazine and sent to Laurel.
The man who must have been the recipient of Gray’s kidney donation all those years ago.
It was the taste of the ice cream that reminded me of it. When I’m ill, it’s one of the few foods I can face. My grandmother always used to tempt me with it when I was a child, and I suppose the comfort it gives me is associated with that, rather than with any physical benefit.
When I’d been laid in bed with a cold, all those years ago, and the strange man came to knock at the door of number eight, only to be told by Gray never to come again, I’d eventually made my way downstairs and ice cream was the first thing I ate. That man – that stranger – was Joel Chamberlain.
I am as certain of it as I can be. What was he doing here, and why did Gray not want to reconnect with an old friend?