Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #19
And she’d said yes, Dad, of course I’m sure. And Sam had kicked and she’d huffed and puffed to get in and then out the car and of course Ricky was sleeping with at least three girls in the chorus by the time Sam was six months old, although she didn’t chuck him out until Sam was almost two.
Her nose starts to stream a little with cold.
She tucks the notepad back in her bag and wipes her face with her sleeve.
She shuts the lid of the oboe case, the damp air’s no good for the reed.
She’s well and truly shafted without that thing: it’s her only way of keeping her menfolk alive.
One more year and Sam will be leaving university and he can sort himself out, although he’s determined to be a musician so who knows when she’ll be able to retire and ask him for cash for a change.
She should have seen it coming but those years of Sam’s childhood were a fog of debt and exhaustion.
She was working in the West End six nights a week and taking recording whenever it came up, and in the dressing room during intervals she would sit with a little book and write down everything she’d earned and everything she’d spent, watching the columns stubbornly refuse to balance.
Her father had been Sam’s main carer since he was four, bedtime stories, bumps and bruises and bellyaches, he was the one who did all of it.
By the time she broke through the surface of the mist and gasped for air, it was too late to save him.
On her thirty-seventh birthday – Sam was nine – her father made her sit on the sofa and listen to her son play Bach, and of all the curses of all the fairy godmothers, the boy was talented.
Then it was please Mum, I’d like to learn the sax like Dad and her father had said, go on Jeanie, it’s well and truly in the boy, his blood sings like yours and mine.
Orchestra after school and jazz band on Saturday afternoons and her nothing more than a chauffeur and cook, never a chance to make up for those lost years.
And still, only paying off interest on the credit cards and waiting for those royalty payments with her heart in her mouth and hoping the mortgage and her salary didn’t sail past each other at the door to her bank account.
Once he’d started to buy that horrendous aftershave and spend hours sitting alone in his room only to thunder down the stairs whenever the phone rang it was Mum, do you know anyone who can teach me the guitar, I’d like to get better.
A growth spurt and a dusting of hair on his chin and he was forever out, God knows where and who with but he’d smell like dirty clubs and weed on a Sunday morning, though he still sat down to play duets with his grandfather, the way she had every morning of her adolescence.
Then, Mum, can you help me write my personal statement, and Mum, have you got a minute to listen to my audition pieces, and God love the boy he was planning to be a musician like the rest of them.
She must have made it look easy, all those years of scrimping and all those grey hairs of worry.
She must – and she regrets this bitterly – have made it look fun.
She should never have allowed it. She should never have let her father teach him the piano and said no to the sax.
She should have locked her father’s LPs in the attic, got a job in a supermarket and signed him up for extra maths instead.
Then he might be training to become an accountant now.
Then he might stand a chance of making something of his life, building something solid that matters.
Not ending up somewhere like here, literally away with the fairies. Not ending up like her, broke and alone, and utterly dependent on a bit of cork and brass staying dry to keep body and soul together.
She shoves her laptop back in her bag and fastens one latch on the oboe case, but before she can swing her handbag over her shoulder her phone buzzes. A text. She opens the message with one swipe of her thumb.
We hope all aboard the Grub is going well and you have still not been taken to another realm!! xoxo
Toni. Jean’s vision swims, her heart starts to pound.
Only the second time she’s heard from them in the almost two years since they’ve been gone.
The first time, she messaged back that she missed them desperately and there has been silence ever since.
Why have they got in touch now? Today, All Souls’, the day of dead things.
And with such a nothing message too. No meat to it, nothing even to snack on.
No acknowledgement of the long silence, nor the sweetness that filled their days before it.
On their first day the three of them had sat together in the wings on the chairs Mackie had set out for them, politely ignored by the dancers and crew.
Beryl had leaned back, eyes closed, hands mimicking AJ’s as she picked out the intricacies of the score and Toni had watched the comings and goings of the dancers with delight.
Jean watched the show and listened to the score with an eerie sense of déjà vu. Everything was familiar to her.
After the show the three of them stood in a jumble in the corridor outside Belinda’s office with their suitcases and instruments.
Toni, her curly black hair tied up with a scarf and her cello-callused fingers nervously smoothing the hem of her jacket; Beryl with her long grey hair arranged in an elegant chignon.
They said the words, pricked their fingers and Belinda had got out her watch – sync to me, please, then I’ll show you to your cabins – and they were pledge-mates forever and ever.
Afterwards, they sat in the dining car and Jean asked them how they met.
She read somewhere that people thought you were a good conversationalist if you asked them questions about themselves.
And she was trying to be a good conversationalist, belatedly.
She was trying to see this job as an exciting new chapter, not a final failure in a long string of fuck-ups, trying not to think of herself as a drowning salmon, swimming upstream to where she had been spawned.
She had just turned forty-eight, Sam had started university and her father had moved into Hillview the week before. She had seventy-four pounds in her bank account, three maxed-out credit cards and a sheaf of bills in her suitcase.
It was in Prague, Toni had said. We were each covering for a friend at the symphony there…
…then she went off on a contract to Sydney for a year and I went back to London, recording and teaching…
…but we couldn’t do long distance, not at our age…
…so we asked a friend if they knew anywhere we could tour together…
…but no cruises because I get seasick…
…and he gave us Belinda’s number.
The pair of them smiled at her like one being and Jean felt something move in the pit of her stomach.
That night she’d thought it was jealousy, to have someone to go through life with, to lean on when the wind almost blew you down, to keep the chill of loneliness at bay.
Now she thinks of it as something awakening, stirring.
An ember of a long-dampened fire kept smouldering in a ball of kindling, finally given air.
And what about you? Toni had asked. How did you come to be here?
A lie would have been so easy, so quick and clean.
I was born here, she said.
Toni’s mouth fell open and Beryl’s perfectly painted eyebrows shot into her hairline.
My dad was first violin, my mum was clarinet. Apparently I used to spend shows in a basket in wardrobe and my mum used to feed me during the intervals. They left when I was about a year old so I don’t remember a thing.
But that wasn’t strictly true. Jean did remember. Or her flesh did, that deep place inside us which music is the first to fill and the last to leave. She knew all the melodies, could hum them perfectly, knew she’d have no need of her score by the end of the week.
And how did they keep you, you know – Beryl waved her hand vaguely at the window – safe?
Salt scattered around me and thirteen horseshoes sewn onto the mattress. There was a picture in my parent’s house when I was growing up.
It sat in a silver frame on the mantelpiece, the colours fading a little more each afternoon when the sunlight streamed in through the window.
Now the photo sits on a chest of drawers in her father’s room and he makes the carers dust it every single day.
Sam said that he tells them the photo is of his daughter, his granddaughter or Queen Mab, depending on his mood.
Well, we’re very pleased to meet someone of such distinguished pedigree. Beryl had said, and their curiosity about her was sealed. Jean basked in it, discreetly. It was the only interesting thing about her.
Her father had pledged with AJ as second violins. Just the two of them standing in the old company manager’s office, their violins propped against the wall. They sat next to each other night after night, bows gliding in perfect synchrony, until her father was promoted to first violin.
Then the old conductor had been taken during the curtain call.
As her father told the story, Mungo St John Fitzwilliam – cellist, conductor, pinewood-whittler, Morris-dancer and Welsh folklore enthusiast – placed his baton upon the music stand as the dancers bowed and bowed and bowed and the musicians stood in silence.
And in the blink of an eye, something from the audience reached into the pit and took him.
The last thing seen of him in this world was the oily shine of his patent leather shoes.
The next morning Percy Montgomery, the old company manager – dark circles under his eyes and a scent of pungent fear-sweat wafting whenever he moved – called her father and AJ into the office with the Crow glowering in a corner.