Infidelities (4 page)

The diagnosis had always been fixed.

That last appointment, the doctor coming to the door to meet her – what was that phrase of his, in the consulting rooms at Edinburgh? ‘We know where we stand’ – Elisabeth thought of him, David someone, as she sat at the piano, in Circus Gardens, in London. David Airdrie, that was his name. It was as though he was from another life. And another life ago again when she’d stood with Stewart Campbell in his consulting rooms in the village, in the little medical centre she’d barely been to before all this – the odd antibiotic, one year a bad flu – and there was Stewart using the same expression, near enough. That they would need to do some scans, that she would have to see someone else. On the mainland, in Inverness, but Edinburgh preferably, so they could ‘know where we’re at’, had been his phrase. Elisabeth had been aware then, in his choice of words that day, that people only used that kind of language when talking about something more serious than an operation. An operation, after all, was something to prepare for and recover from. There was a timeline present in ‘operation’ that wasn’t present in ‘know where we’re at’. ‘Know where we’re at’, she’d thought then, has no timeline at all. So by the end of the summer when she’d
seen the second specialist, and what was his name, too, a friend of Stewart Campbell’s wasn’t he? and he’d given the second opinion and the date was fixed for the first round of surgery a year ago … The language was clear. Take another opinion again, for there was nothing to lose, after all, ‘and then we’ll know where we are’, is what he’d said. But the fact was, by then, Elisabeth knew pretty well where she was. By the time she got to Edinburgh last month she knew. And in the couple of weeks that had followed that last, terminal, diagnosis, she’d finished up the Wigmore commission as though lit up from within by a weird excited electricity, wrote it all through in one great piece, the string parts and a whole new instrument line she hadn’t even known was there – laid a flute’s silvery strand through the entire piece, start to finish, like a silver thread – the electricity that seemed to pass through her own body in the weeks of composition alive in the music itself … A trace of her, it might be, like the flight of a bird passing from one end to the other like the flight of a bird through a mead hall – wasn’t that how the Norse poem had it? She would set that to music too, if she had the time, that unknown writer’s thread of flight …

But her work was done by now. And ahead of her: Meeting the conductor. The rehearsals. The performance. That would be the next few, brief weeks of spring. All the birds flown through the music and home and until then she had this flat, these rooms, this piano. So yes. Springtime in London. Magnolia trees. And enough just to be back here, wasn’t it? – with one tree right outside
her window, by the front door of the flat, the petals of its flowers thick and resilient and curved as wings.

The travel had made her tired though. So after spending those few minutes downstairs, after she’d got in, she pretty much went straight to bed. That’s what illness is like, she thought, as she made her way up the stairs.
Is
like
… It was all absolutely exhausting. She had energy enough to get out the sheets and duvet cover from the linen cupboard, the pillowcases … Just enough to half make up the bed – not put the cover on after all, it was too heavy – then when the last cotton pillowcase was on, she kicked off her shoes, dropped her skirt to the floor and crawled into the cool new sheets, drawing up the raw, uncovered duvet close to her, before falling into a dreamless sleep …
Is what illness is like
. Was the first thing she thought, hours later it must have been, when she opened her eyes and it was dark.

At first, she couldn’t work out where she was at all. She lay there in a sort of state, actually, trying to remember what window it was, what wall was outside the window, trying to remember what it was about herself she had forgotten while she’d been asleep … Then there it was again: She was going to die. The remembering itself not nearly as bad as the nearly remembering, those scrambled nano-seconds after sleep when she came into consciousness in a sort of terror, was how it felt. The remembering not nearly as bad as the trying to. More … inevitable. Like all of life was. One thing going on to make another thing. One
day into another, and some days ending with another day to follow, others just ending.

She lay for a few more moments, savouring the dark and that feeling of coming into rested-ness in this bedroom with which she was so familiar. How many times she’d been here alone in the darkness. Times just like now …
Now
… She thinks,
Let it be now
, as if she might close her eyes now and the light would be gone from around her. Times like all of those times, early in the evening when she would lay down to rest before going out, taking a few minutes before she rose to get dressed, to get ready, lying quietly and letting the daylight fade slowly from the familiar walls and edges, letting the violet, the shadows in. Or waking in the middle of the night and Ed beside her. All of it, all those times and everything about this room known to her and familiar. All the laying down. All those dusks. Midnights. Sleeps.

In the dark of this particular night, she smiled. It could almost have been one of those evenings from long ago, and she and Ed were on their way out to some big party or there was a concert or a reading he might be giving, a recital … That feeling of lying in a soft dark room but very soon you would be stepping out the door and a whole new portion of the evening would open up before you: bright-lit rooms, music, the tap of glasses, chink and rise of conversation … In the moment of thinking about it, a whole kind of energy came alive in her in a rush, a feeling of yes – and she decided that she would go out. Just go out that second. Put the rest of it off – the phoning, the sorting out the flat, unpacking – and instead step out like
she’d stepped out then, single and clear and full of youth and energy and the future. As if nothing could trouble her in the world, nothing at all.

She picked out a pair of jeans from her bag and pulled them on, found her jacket where she’d left it cast across the bedroom chair, and went downstairs and out the door.

The magnolia tree was right where she’d left it. Standing shock still in the night air, the branches whitened in the cast of the streetlamp and all the beautiful blossoms crowded upon the branches but utterly motionless, like each of them was waiting for something. Elisabeth stopped for a second, no, she must have stopped for a full minute, waiting herself as she stood there before the tree. The night was warm. The earlier chill she’d felt in the day, when she’d got off the train, had been absorbed into something lovely in the air, a kind of early summer heat it was like, and the moisture too had evaporated, giving the navy sky and air around her this lovely wide sense of expansiveness, comfort, contentment. She felt as though she could just take off her jacket right there, that she could just be wearing her T-shirt in this dark warm air … And she did, she took off her jacket, and with that mood of carelessness came the feeling of being young again, like she was in her early twenties, before composing, before performing, before meeting Edward and marriage and moving to Scotland and to the island … Before any of it and here she was, running around
the place like she used to run around, going out late, staying up all night and working in bars and restaurants and going to weird, out-of-the-way music festivals and concerts in abandoned warehouses that only started at midnight and were all lit up by candelight … Remember that time …
Remember it?
the blossoms asked her.
Who you once were? Who you are?
She realised that when she’d come out the door she’d had no idea what she was going to do with this navy-coloured night but she knew now.

There was a pub on the corner of her street where she used to go, years ago, and she would meet Ed there sometimes, after work, or they would go across for a late-night drink, or sometimes she would go there on her own and take a seat up at the bar, talk to the barman who she knew, and there was an old Irish priest who used to drink there, like a character out of a Graham Greene novel, Ed always said. She would often talk to him too, a clever, clever man, sit for a while and talk with him about sin and death and hopefulness …
Where is that old priest now?
The place used to stay open late, she remembers, lying in bed and the window open to the pale blue early summer sky. Not like a pub at all, in London, but like an Irish bar, or a New York City bar. Coming closer to it, though, she saw that it had been painted, given some sort of treatment, a theme of sorts – what was that? It used to be a beaten-up-looking kind of place but now she could see it had been decorated to look that way, that was it, glamorous and tattered, like a kind of salon – still it was the same place as she remembered, the same kind
of crowd inside, same kind of music coming from the jukebox, used to be, though tonight it was coming from a band set up in the corner, a guitarist and a drummer and someone on the violin … That’s who she used to be.
A
violinist
. Elisabeth smiled. The door was open so she went inside.

The noise and number of people hit her in a rush. Men and women pushed up around the bar, or were seated at little tables, gathered together and talking, laughing. There was great heat coming off them, energy, as though each person there couldn’t be more engaged by those around them, lit up by their company and alive with it, all kinds of people, as though the whole world was there. Elisabeth made her way through them and would order what she always used to order – a vodka and tonic, lots of lemon, lots of ice. It was the drink for parties, remember? The parties? She would buy a pack of cigarettes too, later, and smoke one outside.

‘Hi there,’ the girl behind the bar shouted a little, over the band. ‘What can I get you?’ She was Australian, was she? Or from New Zealand? That jolly, capable sort of voice, that outgoing manner. The voice of someone who has spent a lot of time in the sun, lying on a beach beside a big blue sea, on a flat green lawn.

‘A V and T, yeah?’ she said, when Elisabeth told her what she wanted, and smiled. ‘Sounds good to me.’

Elisabeth was fishing in her pocket for money. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘With a lot of ice, please. And lemon.’

‘Like it that way, myself.’ The girl smiled at Elisabeth again, only this time held her gaze. ‘Everything okay?’ she said.

Elisabeth stopped, for a second her heart stopped – was that what was happening? Her heart was stopping? Her body stopping and this was the end, not later at all, as she’d thought, but here now, now … Then she steadied herself. ‘Can I get change for the cigarette machine?’ she said.

The girl had turned back to the drink she was making. ‘Nah,’ she shook her head, shunting ice into a tall glass. ‘Don’t have one any more. But I’ll give you a fag if you want. I’m having a break in a minute. We can smoke outside.’ She turned around and gave Elisabeth another one of her smiles, straight off a beach, full of sun and long hot days.

‘Okay?’ she said.

‘Okay,’ Elisabeth replied.

The whole thing just like being young again. That’s what Elisabeth thought later. The okay, okay. The no need to worry about anything, about what might happen next, because everything would be okay. That ease, that feeling of the night containing everyone and everyone was there together, that everyone might be your friend.

Okay
.

Okay
.

She hears herself say the words.

‘Okay,’ said the girl again. ‘I’m going to come and find you, okay, in a minute, and we can go outside together
then and do that bad thing.’ She made a gesture of putting a cigarette to her mouth, inhaling, exhaling.

Elisabeth nodded, ‘Sure’, and went back over towards where the band were playing. The violinist was running through a lovely A minor arpeggio, hunched over her instrument like she was an old Highland fiddler and drawing the bow over the strings as if she were at a ceilidh in the hills, that light feathery sound you heard at all the village dances on the island … It was pretty, arriving through the thick hum of the bar’s chatter and the thrum of the guitarist’s chords. And reminding Elisabeth of something. Of her flute, she realised. The flute in her Elegy for Strings, her Adagio – that same quality of an alternative sound that might well not be expected, that did not so much compete with or participate in the music made by the others in the orchestra, but was simply an alternative to it, weaving through the tune and lifting it, lightening it like a flight path of sound cut through the trees. Elisabeth was elated. She realised she was. To be hearing that sound now. And played in this way. And at this time. To be out late at night and on her own, deeply alone, in the way she loved to be, with all the world gathered around her for company if she needed it, but she probably didn’t after all. She wanted to dance, and talk to people, to stay out late and … stay. The band finished their number and everybody clapped.

‘Well,’ the singer said. ‘Well’, and they started into the next number.

A boy beside her leaned in. ‘They’re good, aren’t they?’ and Elisabeth turned. He was young. Mid-twenties,
late-twenties. Over his head the girl from the bar put up two fingers, mouthed ‘Now’ and pointed towards the door.

‘Are you a musician?’ the boy said.

Elisabeth smiled, ‘I was.’

She detached herself from him – his hand was on her forearm – and made her way outside.

There was a group of people standing in a clutch, four or five girls in black boots and skinny coats, young men with big jackets and parkas. She took a place beside them, on the corner. From here she could see her flat; she’d switched the lights on before she came out and the windows of the sitting room were yellow squares against the dark air, and light showed too from the bedroom above. The euphoria from before, from inside, was still with her, in her heart, in her head, but suddenly the body felt weak again. She needed to sit down. There was an upturned drinks crate by the wall, a few of them had been put out there as impromptu seating and a number of people were gathered around them, smoking. There was movement beside her, the girl from the bar; Elisabeth took her arm and they sat down together.