Infidelities (3 page)

There is nothing but silence in these trees. In the fading light the paleness of the tree trunks, beige and grey and violet, rises up around her like people in a crowd parting to let her through. There’s the smell of wet earth and leaves and the greenness of the leaves, the haze of green that seems to come from them is like a kind of breath.

She thinks,
anywhere
, imagining the yellow robes flittering just ahead, in and out of the trees, like wings. Where to begin to find him? She walks ahead a few paces, turns,
traces a new direction. Still the branches full of green leaves hold back the sky, keep it from coming down over her head, still the trees step back, reassemble themselves, to let her pass by. Her foot catches on something, a root, some sort of viney tendril, and when she leans down to unwind it from her sandal she notices how wet the ground is, how all the time she’s been walking her sandals have become thick and clogged with buttery lumps of mud. She takes them off altogether and leaves them. There are all the textures of the forest floor she can feel now underfoot, of leaves and twigs and the softness of mulch and she walks on, enjoying the sensation of her feet shaping themselves with each step to the contours of the ground, seeming to know which way to go.

Anywhere
…

She realises she’s walking quite quickly this way. And that sound she can hear, it’s the sound of her own breath like she’s running, panting. Her heart beating.

Anywhere
…

Rising, beating. Walking faster all the time faster, like she really could be running now. The feeling of being on the run from something, from someone, or running towards them, the feeling of being completely lost. For she is lost, but she knows it as surely as she knows that her bare feet are carrying her onwards, careless, that her body is happy here, the ground against the skin of her bare feet, disappeared from that other place, from that kitchen and the person in that kitchen and the children who are in the room above that kitchen, and slipped into these woods,
become a white shape in the disappearing light, in the growing darkness, flitting in and out of the trees, towards a scrap of yellow fabric, maybe, that glimpse of saffron colour amongst the trees, but it’s as though forgotten, what it was she came for, what she’s looking for even as she runs on, seeking, towards it.

She didn’t find him. Later, she couldn’t even work out how long she’d been in there, in the trees, cutting from pathway to pathway, couldn’t remember when the last of the light leached from the sky and the violet colour that was left deepened and mixed itself in with black. She couldn’t remember, either, at what point she stopped feeling herself to be looking for the monk who, she’d been told, crazily, was going to be asleep in the woods that evening. All she remembers is that she went in looking for him and she came out having forgotten, for a time completely, who she was, what she was doing, why she’d gone in.

That in itself had been a kind of miracle, she would reflect much later, when telling this story to herself, her story, as though to someone who might write it down, putting in all the details, one line following another line. How she managed to get out of the woods that night, find her way back to the car and how, in the instant of seeing it there, the inside light on in the darkness because of leaving the door open, and you might say, making the air around seem darker because of the illumination, still she didn’t feel the huge relief she might have felt as follows
a panic, but in fact the opposite was true. For the sky didn’t seem dark, or the earth wet or sharp with stones and roots, nothing treacherous at all, in fact, to make her feel there’d been anything strange or odd about what she’d been doing.

It’s true, none of it had scared her, she thinks, when she looks back over these events. Being in that shadowy place, somewhere that was unknown to her, where she may or may not have encountered a holy man whose language she did not speak … What exactly was she planning to say to him, anyway, if she’d found him? What, if anything, was she going to do? None of that had been part of it, actually, had seemed important – only that inevitable sense of entering the woods, then the feeling once inside them of flight, of letting her feet take her, at first deeper and deeper in, and then out again to the car, a light, a key.

The engine started straight away and Helen drove home, went quietly inside the house where all the lights were on, empty bottles on the table and the smeared plate … Bobby’s dirty things. Mechanically she tidied the remains of him away, switched off the lights, made her way into her daughter’s room. There was no question of being with her husband now. That thought came to her like the memory of yellow cloth in the woods – real but not real, imagined but also seen …
Like a vision
. That’s what it had been. She’d heard herself say the words.
A vision
. What she’d been part of. What the whole day had been. Quietly, she got undressed down to her T-shirt and pants, checked on the boys quickly and slid into bed
beside her child. She held Winnie snug into her, against her belly, felt the weight of her warm breathing body. In seconds she was asleep.

In the middle of the night, though, or so it seemed, she was awoken by Winnie’s sharp cry. The child was sitting bolt upright on the bed clutching herself, the covers tumbled off. ‘There’s blood!’ She was pointing. ‘Look! Blood!’

For there, marked like viscera, was a smear of dark across the sheet, gone from the middle right down to the bed’s depth, and for a minute Helen thought her daughter was right – the slippery colour of it, the thick womblike consistency in the dark, old and womanly and primal, like bridal stain or miscarriage or afterbirth, matter come from deep within herself …That it really was blood. In the dark that’s how it looked. But it was the mud from her feet, from where she’d been, what she’d been doing, that was in the bed with her. It was earth mixed with water that was on the sheet, that was the mark all through the bed that had scared Winnie so – although it could have been blood, Helen realises, years and years later, and Winnie grown up now and the boys, and Bobby far, far away. That it was part of herself come out of herself, a change that occurred in one day, one night, that made everything different to how it had been, so the mark that was left could have been like blood. May as well have been.

The flowers had all come home to roost in the magnolia trees along the Euston Road. It was springtime in London. A song, Elisabeth thought, the moment she saw the pink petals fluttering in the branches: Springtime in London. Magnolia trees. A song.

Of course it wasn’t warm, she’d registered that the moment she’d stepped out of the Edinburgh train on to the platform at King’s Cross. It was freezing, actually, outside on the taxi rank waiting her turn, there was a bitter wind and her winter coat felt thin. Yet speeding along in the cab a few minutes later, looking through the window after all this time away at a sky that could mean any season at all, that dove-belly grey of the city she used to know so well … There it was, all right, in the pale colour of the flowers ruffled up together, perched amongst the bare branches: Spring again, she’d thought, even now.
It could be spring. Let it be
.

The taxi seemed to take a long time, though, even with all this daydreaming, these thoughts of homecoming,
remembering. It didn’t seem to be very busy on the road, but whatever it was, the cab stopping, starting, red lights every couple of minutes and then a queue formed on the flyover to take the turning for Westbourne Park, it made their progress slow enough … So maybe there was a lot of traffic after all and she’d just forgotten, after the years in Scotland, what London was like, what the congestion of people here was like. The cars banked up as they came off the Westway, and stopped – all the taxis and four-wheel drives that everyone seemed to favour nowadays, the motorcycles and the vans and the buses … It was unnecessary, is how it seemed, to be taking this long when she was close enough to the flat after ten minutes or so in the cab and Elisabeth normally would get out and walk if only she was feeling stronger. In the old days she would have.
But, hey
. That was then, right? This was now. And if she was back on the island she wouldn’t even be thinking about traffic, about any of this. Whether she could walk, couldn’t walk, gauging the progress of a London cab against her own perfectly good stride that always had served her well on her beloved hills, the round walk she used to take along the seafront every morning, and up along the lookout before cutting down to the house … But that was then, now, too. The island, her life there. Back then she’d never needed to think of strong or not strong, about any of this. She’d be … Just …

Well, forget about how she’d be. Let it be spring, instead. Nothing more. Just magnolia trees. And blossoms. A song
in the key of – G major. Yes, that would do it. Or A. A lovely big glissando to start and then straight into something bright and long and easy for the alto voice. Just think about a song like that, and leave the rest, don’t let thoughts drift on to anything else. So it took a little longer to get from one place to another, so there were a lot of people here, all wanting, just like she was, to get from one place to somewhere else … That’s big cities, right? She used to know about them, remember? ‘You’re not on your hill now,’ Edward would say to her, if he was here. ‘Look at me, darling. Look at me. Everything’s going to be all right, okay? Look at me. I promise you.’

Yeah, well
. Elisabeth smiles. Edward and his ‘Look at me’. He’d done the best he could and she loved him for it, loved him, for his steady way with things. The fact that he never once, not once, acted scared or weak or worried. He’d just behaved as he always did: Take one thing at a time, don’t jump the gun, rush to conclusions. So one doctor had one opinion, so they’d ask another one. That’s what he’d said, right back at the beginning. And there were specialists, people who knew more than those giving out the diagnoses, half the time, you just had to find out who they were, how to get to them. It would all be okay. So she’d looked back at him, let him hold her gaze with his fine, steady gaze: ‘All right?’ he’d said. ‘I promise you.’ And the letters came in, and the calls, and there were appointments fixed in all the big hospitals in Scotland, the research hospitals … And she’d had the first round of surgery, and then the second …

She’d call him the minute she got into the flat. Both of them had had the same idea, after all, to give London a go now they’d tried everything else and he’d wanted to come with her only it had been her who’d said she’d rather travel down on her own. He’d want to know, of course he would, how the journey had been, how she was feeling. He seemed a long way away, already, somehow, Edward. A long way away, and another life. ‘I can be on a plane the minute you need me,’ he’d said. So she would call him, she would, the minute she got in – and yet …

‘Well, we’ll see.’

‘What’s that, love?’

The cab driver half turned his head, catching her eye in the rear vision mirror. ‘Didn’t get that, you were saying?’

‘Oh, nothing.’ Elisabeth looked out the window, the trees were bare again, this part of Paddington where they were now. No sign of those glorious flowers. ‘Only I was thinking …’ she said, bringing herself back into the present, ‘The traffic. Has it been this bad in London for long? I mean, I remember it, but—’

‘Not familiar, eh?’

The driver gave out a laugh. He was still half turned towards her – there was that phrase, wasn’t there, about only having one eye on the road? That was him. ‘Careful,’ Elisabeth wanted to say, although she herself never drove any longer, never drove on the island, why would she need to. Still –
Careful
.

‘But I suppose we’re not moving that fast, are we?’ she said to him now.

‘Never, love. It’s London.’ He shook his head. ‘Not fast now, not later. Not any time of day. Where you from, anyhow?’

‘Scotland.’

‘Yeah?’

‘A small island, way off to the west.’

‘Phew!’ the guy whistled. ‘Up there, eh? So what you want to come here for, then? Too quiet for you, is it? Up there? You fancied a visit or what?’

‘Oh, I’m going to be staying,’ Elisabeth said. ‘I’m coming back, you see. I used to live here. So yes, I’m planning to stay. For a while, I mean.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

There was a prick, then, a sting.
Idiot
. That was from not concentrating, letting herself drift. Not seeing the blossoms.
Idiot
, twice. Think about the song. She wasn’t going to cry.

‘You’re here for Easter then, aren’t you?’ said the driver. ‘You’ve come in the nick of time, starting yourself off with a holiday and all. You got friends here? Family?’

‘Something like that.’ Elisabeth no longer felt like crying. She just wanted to get to the flat now, off the flyover and back into Westbourne Park and home.

Home
.

That was a strange thought, though. With the tenant only just having moved out and Elisabeth herself not having been at the flat for years, so it was hardly home, was it? But, ‘Just call her and explain,’ Edward had said.
‘Alice will understand.’ And she had, too, lovely Alice Fairburn, the perfect tenant, Elisabeth always said. How lucky they were to have her. It seemed like it was only hours after Edward had spoken to Alice and she’d moved out to her sister’s in Islington, all her clothes, bits and pieces, everything. ‘Take it back for as long as you need it,’ she had said to Edward, he’d told Elisabeth that she’d put it that way. With no pressure, no decisions that had to be made.
Because it won’t be for long
, Elisabeth thinks now, had thought then, too, straight away. Coming in as she was that minute to the street where she used to live and it looking just the same as it always did and the trees out here, too, the magnolia tree by her own front door in blossom … Despite what she’d told the driver, it’s what she thought as the cab had turned the corner … She was back for a visit, after all. She wasn’t planning to stay.

Yet the place was so familiar. That feeling of being back, once she was inside the front door. It was lovely how certain houses did that to you. For though it had been several years, more than several, since she’d last been in Circus Gardens, the moment she turned the key in the lock and the key turned, and she stepped into the front hall … All of the past rushed up to meet her then and it really was like no time had passed between then and now, no time. There were the wooden stairs before her, some of the risers bashed and half painted as they’d always been; there the landing at the top, the long window giving on to the little terrace where she used to sunbathe … Alice
hadn’t changed a thing. The window – just the same. The terrace. And how many years ago was that, anyway? Since she’d been that girl sitting out there in the sun with a book and a tube of suncream?
Life is long, after all. See?
Edward coming up on her from behind, as she was sitting out there in the sun, putting his arms around her. ‘So this is what you do all day, is it?’ he’d be saying. ‘When you tell me you’re composing?’ – and her laughing and saying it was true, she’d written this piece or had a draft for that. Or she was thinking about something, on a larger scale perhaps. ‘What is it this time, an opera?’ he would say. ‘No, just a string quartet.’ ‘Ah, right. Of course. A string quartet.’ Laughing again, and kissing her.

So …

Life is long.

There was the window. The little terrace.

See?

And then, lugging her bag, up the stairs, past the landing, past the kitchen, there was the sitting room, too, just as she had left it, with the grand piano still there – of course it would be. She went over and touched a key, middle C. Dusty to the touch but clear sounding. She ran up and down the scale a couple of times, then into D, and E, all the way through the octave, and then the bass hand. Out of tune by now, the piano would be, but not so bad. She sat down at the bench. She’d done so much of her early work on that piano, even now she thinks, lying up here in bed, how it seems to wait downstairs for her like a friend. Going through the scales again, C major, then D,
then E, then F … And the piano responding to her touch, just as it always had. Then F sharp minor. And ouch. That note. In particular. It would take a lot of tuning after all to put that note straight again – but Elisabeth took off her coat even so and played a little Chopin Prelude, and it didn’t sound so terrible, did it? And after that a piece she’d written herself called ‘Circus Gardens’. She went to play it through but then, in the midst of the first passage, before she could finish, the feeling again, of the prick, the sting. And having to put her hand up to her mouth to press back the force of emotion.
Idiot. Idiot
. Circus Gardens. It was unlikely she was going to see Edward again.

Edward
.

His idea to get the piano in the first place. He always had the best ideas. It was Edward who said ‘Let’s buy it’ when they first saw the piano, the perfect size of it, in the saleroom. ‘You’ll play it but it’s for both of us,’ he’d said – because it was to be a kind of a prize, sort of, a reward. For the first piece she’d written that had been properly performed, for the novel he’d published. ‘We’re in this together,’ Edward had said. ‘Let’s get it. This can be the beginning.’

Remember?

‘Of course I remember.’ She speaks the words out loud, to the window, to the blue sky. The piano is downstairs, quiet now, but waiting.

‘I remember it all.’

She started to pick out another tune, something else from the same time, those early years when they’d only
just moved in here – but stopped. Really she should have arranged to have had the piano looked after. Alice was never going to do that. Alice wasn’t a musician, it wouldn’t occur to her to have it played regularly, properly tuned. Maybe they should have had someone else here who would have taken more care – but then, Elisabeth and Edward had never been the kind of couple who thought things through that way, they let things pass, let things go. And so it was years since Elisabeth herself had even played it, years and years, and she’d been young and well, in love and strong and all the future outside the window, part of the blue sky, like it might go on for ever. Like an octave you might spin out from under your fingers and it would go on and on up the scale, and on and up and never reach the end. All the notes of the keyboard and beyond, more, still there to play, the white notes, the black notes, whole notes, accidentals, on and on … As though playing all the way through time, Elisabeth thinks, and here she is now …
Here she is
… As though already the end is here but really it’s all part of the same octave, the end of the tune within the notes because there’s no beginning, lying here, and in the same way no end either, so that’s all right, then, close your eyes. The lovely past with its music all around you and the sun on the terrace and your legs bare and stretched out before you and the heat beating down on the top of your head, Edward’s arms around you … Close your eyes … Because …

Here she is
…

And she remembers thinking that on that day, too, when she’d arrived at the flat, was standing there by the piano. ‘Here I am,’ she’d said to herself then, the moment she’d dreaded come to rest around her, after she’d finished playing, in the silence. Really, she thought then, it wasn’t so bad. To be alone. To have decided alone what she was going to do. To have come down off her hill. Not so bad.

‘Go back,’ Edward had said. ‘Set your mind at rest. Have the tests. See the people at the Wigmore Hall, let them arrange for you to do the Adagio for them like you want it. Have some time, do that. I’ll be here. When you’re ready, I’ll come and get you. I’ll be waiting.’

Because she’d kind of known, hadn’t she? From the moment she decided to come back here on her own? That it was all down to her from now on, that she wouldn’t see Edward again. From the moment the doctor called that last time, and he’d asked her to come in; how his rooms in Edinburgh seemed colder than before and there was no nurse there with him this time, and how he came to the door to meet her … Because after they’d spoken, her first thought then was: I can fit it all in. Get back to London. Hear them do the Adagio, be there at the Wigmore to hear it. Organise the legal stuff, the medical stuff. I’ve enough time. In a couple of months, early spring, there was time then to fit it all in. There’d be rehearsals, she’d told Edward, and she wanted to be at some of the rehearsals, to meet the conductor who she’d never met, and, she told him, she would
see the specialist then that they’d both talked about, have the tests he offered and the new treatment, and Edward had called Alice and fixed it with her and Alice had said to ‘take as long as you need, no bother’. She had a sister in Islington, she’d said; Elisabeth could just go back to the old flat and settle right in …