Semi-Sweet (32 page)

Adam grabbed his clarinet case and followed her into the hall, in time to see her stepping through a doorway farther down.
He walked along the dim corridor, wondering what the next hour would bring.

The second room was smaller than the first and held only a piano with a long bench beneath, a small folding table, a wooden
kitchen chair, and a music stand. A wooden clock on the wall showed half past eight precisely.

“There’s a cat on the piano,” Adam said, standing in the doorway.

An enormous marmalade cat was sprawled along the top, staring fixedly at Adam with its yellow-green eyes, the tip of its tail
flicking languidly.

Vivienne was riffling through a bundle of papers on the table, her back to the door. “He likes music,” she murmured, without
turning around. “But if you’d rather I put him out…”

“No, no,” Adam answered. “It can…I mean, he can stay. I don’t mind.”

Cats did nothing for him; he felt no affinity with them whatsoever. Give him a dog any day. On the other hand, he had no serious
objections, as long as they kept a reasonable distance from him. He hoped fervently that the current one would respect his
boundaries.

That unblinking stare was unnerving though. Adam shifted his attention to the window next to the piano and saw the woman who’d
shown him in. She was kneeling on a green pad beside a flower bed, a pale blue basin on the ground next to her, a supermarket
plastic bag covering her hair. The gardening gloves were back on her hands.

“Is that your mother,” Adam asked, “in the garden, with the bag on her head?”

“Yes,” Vivienne replied shortly. She wore a dark gray cardigan over a black top and black trousers. Her hair was pinned up
tightly.

She lived with her mother. No sign yet of anyone else. She wasn’t wearing a ring. Adam’s hopes rose a notch.

“Sit down,” she said softly, still not looking in his direction. She added something under her breath that he didn’t catch.

“Pardon?”

“Eighteen,” Vivienne repeated, selecting another sheet and scanning it. “Euro. For the lesson. Per lesson.”

“Oh.” Adam hadn’t given a thought to the cost. Eighteen euro seemed reasonable to him; he must be getting the child’s rate.
“That’s fine. Where do you want me to sit?”

His voice sounded too loud. The room smelled faintly of mints, with a musty undertone that he guessed was coming from the
cat.

Vivienne lifted her head then and regarded him, her cheeks deeply flushed now. “Chair,” she said, the faintest suggestion
of surprise in her voice. “The bench is for the piano.”

“Oh…right. Of course. Silly me.”

He stepped across and took his seat, feeling the cat’s stare following him all the way. Outside the window the older woman
got awkwardly to her feet, crossed the lawn with her basin, and upended it into a round green container. On the way back to
the flower bed, she glared into the room, and Adam hastily shifted his gaze.

Vivienne placed a sheet of music on the stand. Adam read “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and imagined what Hannah would say.

“Jacket,” Vivienne murmured, pulling the long bench out from under the piano and sitting on it. She was about three feet diagonally
across from Adam, with the music stand between them. “You need to take your jacket off.”

“Right.” He placed the clarinet case on the floor, shrugged off his leather jacket, and hung it over the back of the chair.
“I’ve a lot to learn,” he added, rolling up his shirtsleeves.

Vivienne made no response.

“I heard someone playing the piano,” Adam said, just to put something into the silence, “while I was waiting.” He picked up
the clarinet case and opened it.

Vivienne reached an arm across and turned over the front page of the sheet music.

“Was that you?” he asked, determined to have some kind of conversation as he twisted the pieces of his instrument together.
“Were you playing the piano earlier?”

“No,” she murmured, her eyes on his hands. “That was a pupil.”

“Oh? You teach piano, too?”

“I
only
teach piano,” she said, the color rising in her face again.

“You only teach piano?” Adam stared at her. “But you’re teaching me the clarinet.”

She lifted her eyes and met his for an instant. “I said no,” she reminded him, her voice holding a hint of impatience now,
her gaze dropping back to his hands. “I
tried
to say no. You kept asking.” She was clearly ill at ease, her hands pressed between her knees, her shoulders hunched.

“Sorry,” Adam said. “It’s just that…er, I’ve always wanted to play the clarinet, and I assumed, since you played it…”

She only taught piano. She only taught piano to children. He tried to feel remorseful—he’d badgered her into it, hadn’t allowed
her to refuse him—but his delight at being so close to her, at having her all to himself, didn’t allow for remorse.

“Sorry,” he repeated. “And thanks again for taking me. I’ll behave, I promise. I’ll be a model student.”

She didn’t smile, but her expression relaxed slightly as she gave him a tiny nod before turning to look at the sheet music
again. He wondered how many lessons it would take for her to be at ease in his company.

“We’ll begin with the scales,” she said, “and move on to this simple tune”—indicating the page—“which you can practice at
home for the next time.”

The next time. She was almost close enough for him to reach out and touch her face, to take off her glasses and unpin her
hair. He smelled flowers, and the musty animal scent. Her face was covered with pale freckles that blended into one another.

“What’s the cat’s name?”

“Pumpkin,” Vivienne answered, looking pointedly at the sheet music. “So we’ll start with the positioning of your fingers.”

“Mine’s Adam,” he told her as he raised the clarinet. “My name, I mean. I don’t think I mentioned it before.”

Another tiny nod. Clearly, the name of her only adult pupil wasn’t of great interest to Vivienne O’Toole.

“The memorial Mass is on Sunday,” Alice said. “I’m going.”

She hadn’t mentioned the funeral to Tom; she’d slipped out of the house that morning and said nothing. She’d walked to the
church, still afraid to get behind the wheel of a car, any car, and Geraldine had ended up driving her home, such a state
she’d been in. No comment had been made regarding her red eyes at the dinner table later that evening, which had been a relief.

But now she was annoyed at his lack of involvement. How could he just detach himself when he’d been the cause of it all? “I
think you should go,” Alice said. “It would be the right thing to do, to go to the Mass.”

He made no response, and Alice felt her anger rising. “You can’t avoid people forever,” she said sharply. “You can’t just
stop everything because of what happened.”

Tom put down his knife and fork. “I can’t go to that Mass,” he said. “I just can’t. You can’t expect me to.”

“You have to face up to things,” Alice persisted. “You have to move on, like I’m trying to do.”

“How can I move on,” he said, “when I don’t know if I’m going to jail or not? You’re expecting too much of me.”

“Well, I know one thing,” she said, the irritation scratching inside her. “Drink isn’t going to help. Drink is what caused
all this.”

He pushed his chair back abruptly and walked toward the door.

“Oh, finish your dinner anyway,” Alice said impatiently. A sausage and a half and two bits of white pudding, still lay on
his plate. “You can eat your dinner without anyone seeing you.”

He made no response as he left the room, and she listened to his steps on the stairs. She laid her cutlery down and put her
head into her hands. After a while she took the two plates and scraped what food was left on them into the bin.

At nine o’clock precisely, as Adam was still trying to grasp the concept of breathing from his abdomen—which made no sense
to him, when everyone knew your breath went in and out of your lungs—the door was pushed open and Vivienne’s mother, whom
he hadn’t noticed leaving the garden, walked in with a small tray that held a glass of milk and a plate of biscuits.

“Break,” Vivienne said, taking the tray. No attempt at introductions was made. The older woman didn’t look in his direction.

Adam got to his feet and put out his hand as the woman turned to go. “Adam O’Connor,” he said clearly. “Delighted to meet
you, Mrs. O’Toole.”

For a second he thought she was going to ignore him and keep going, but after the briefest of pauses she offered him her hand.
“We’re not used to catering for adults,” she said flatly. “I only have Jammie Dodgers.”

“They’ll do fine,” Adam assured her, trying to remember the last time he’d been presented with a plate of childrens’ biscuits.
“I wasn’t expecting anything at all.”

She looked scandalized. “We always do a break,” she told him. “The children find the hour too long.”

“I can understand that,” Adam said gravely. “Thanks very much.”

She left the room without another word. Adam turned back to Vivienne, who had set the tray on the windowsill. She held the
glass of milk out to him. He took it and accepted a Jammie Dodger when it was offered. “Thanks.”

He never drank milk, apart from a drop in tea or coffee—it affected his sinuses—but he suspected that a refusal would cause
more discomfiture. He wondered if he could find a way to give it to the cat, who was watching the proceedings intently from
above. Vivienne hadn’t taken a biscuit; it looked as if the three Jammie Dodgers were all his.

He decided to give conversation another try. “Have you been teaching music for long?”

“Eight years,” she answered. “You’ll need to practice your abdominal breathing at home, every morning and evening. It’ll take
the strain out of playing the notes.” As usual she didn’t meet his eyes; her gaze seemed to be focused now on his left ear.

“I will,” he promised. “And how long have you been playing the piano yourself?”

She shifted on her bench. Personal questions were clearly a problem. “Eighteen years,” she said, examining a speck on her
cardigan sleeve.

“Wow, that’s—”

“Twelve years the clarinet and oboe,” she went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Eleven years the violin. Six years the saxophone.”

Adam looked at her in amazement. “You play all those instruments?”

Vivienne nodded and looked pointedly at his glass, and Adam drained it—no hope at all of palming it off—and finished his biscuit.

“Now,” she said, turning back to the music stand, and Adam brushed Jammie Dodger crumbs from his shirt and lifted the clarinet
again.

“Mam?”

“Hello, dear. Everything all right?”

Hannah smiled. Her mother’s first question whenever she phoned her, maybe every mother’s first question.

“Everything’s fine…I just thought you might like to know that I met John Wyatt for coffee the other day.”

Foolhardy, really, putting her mother in the picture so soon. Nothing might come of it; she might be ringing again in a few
weeks to say it was all over. But Geraldine needed some good news. They all needed something positive to focus on.

“Oh, love, I’m delighted to hear that, I really am—he seemed so nice that day in the shop. So he called back?”