Semi-Sweet (38 page)

“Could you get me some tea?” she asked Patrick.

She wanted him gone. She didn’t want to look at him.

“Listen to this,” Stephen said. “‘Bradshaw-Dunne, on June eleventh, to Leah Bradshaw and Patrick Dunne, a son, Reuben William.’”

“What? Show me that.”

Stephen passed the paper across the table, and Geraldine scanned the notice. “Bradshaw-Dunne—that’s Fiona’s doing anyway;
she’d be into double-barreled. And what kind of a name is Reuben?”

Stephen sliced the top off his egg. “It’s biblical.”

Geraldine studied the notice. “June the eleventh, and this is what?”

“The fifteenth. The eleventh was last Friday.”

“So that explains Fiona missing bridge. I thought she was avoiding me.” Geraldine tossed the paper aside and returned to her
half grapefruit. “She’ll probably be a right pain when she gets back. She’ll be handing around photos, and we’ll all have
to ooh and aah.”

Stephen smiled. “Under the circumstances I hardly think she’ll be expecting much oohing and aahing from you.”

 “No…Not that I care about that anymore, not now that Hannah’s found someone much nicer.”

Stephen made no comment. Nice new man notwithstanding, he very much doubted that Geraldine had forgiven Fiona’s daughter for
breaking up Hannah’s previous relationship.

“We’re holding interviews today,” he said instead, “for Tom’s replacement.”

“Isn’t there someone replacing him already?”

“Yes, but now that he’s officially taking unpaid leave, we have to interview. It’s a legal thing.”

Tom was due in court on Friday, and he and Alice were traveling to Dublin on the following Monday. Alice was dropping Tom
at the treatment center his doctor had organized, then returning home alone. He would be gone for at least a month. Visits,
particularly in the first two weeks, were not encouraged.

“She’ll find it lonesome on her own,” Geraldine said.

“I suppose she will.” Stephen finished his egg and got to his feet. “Well, I’d better be off.” He bent and kissed the top
of Geraldine’s head. “Don’t get up,” he said, as he always did, and Geraldine, who never got up, went back to the paper and
read the birth notice again.

Bradshaw-Dunne. A bit of a mouthful. She’d never seen the point of double-barreled names. And Reuben sounded too like Ruby
to sit comfortably on a boy.

June the eleventh. She worked backward to the middle of September, two weeks before Stephen’s fifty-seventh. They’d gone out
to dinner for his birthday, the four of them. Hannah and Patrick had given Stephen the boxed set of Seamus Heaney’s poems.
Hannah had been full of chat, Geraldine remembered, about having made the decision to look for a suitable site for her shop.
Patrick had mentioned a cruise his father had just booked, sailing around the Greek islands in January. And the whole time…

Ah, who cared about all that? Ancient history now. She turned to the television listings.

It was his fifth music lesson. They’d spent four hours together so far, and Vivienne remained as out of his reach as ever.
Adam was becoming dispirited.

I like the name Vivienne,
he’d said at the end of the second lesson. That had gotten no response. When he realized that she answered questions but
generally ignored comments, he stuck to questions.

Is your brother older or younger than you?
he’d asked during a pause in lesson three.
Have you any other siblings?

What music do you like to listen to?
End of lesson three.

How old is the cat?
At the break in lesson four, as he tried not to taste the milk he forced himself to drink.

And at the end of lesson four, in desperation, without thinking:
We’ll have to stop meeting like this.
She’d blushed deeply at that. He’d kicked himself and retreated hastily.

He felt as if he were maintaining the most delicate kind of balance, tiptoeing toward her until he felt her drawing back,
easing off until she relaxed again. Forward and back, in and out, like a pair of dancers performing some preordained routine,
the distance between them never lessening.

Maybe he should just give up, admit defeat. But he couldn’t.

And now they were on the fifth lesson, and he wondered how much longer it would be before she kicked him out for asking too
many questions, or for not concentrating enough on the music.

This evening she wore a dark blue top and a gray skirt. The top was buttoned almost to her chin; the skirt skimmed her ankles.
He wished she wore brighter colors and showed more skin. He wished, just once, that she didn’t tie up her hair. He wished
she wasn’t still terrified of him.

“I design Web sites for a living,” he told her as he unzipped his jacket. “Making music is just about as different as you
can get from that, I suppose.”

“Actually,” Vivienne said, “it’s not. Music is as logical as computing.”

Adam tried not to show any reaction. This was a first: This was the closest they’d come to a real live conversation. He’d
made a comment, and she’d responded.

“Really?” He was careful to keep the surprise out of his voice. Casual, keep it casual.

“Of course.” She rummaged through the bundle of pages on the card table. “Music is the most logical thing there is.” She pulled
a sheet from the pile and brought it to where he sat. “It’s even got its own symbols—I’ve pointed out some of them already.”
She indicated a flowing, curlicued sign that appeared at the start of each set of lines. “See that? Do you remember what it’s
called?”

“Er—”

“It’s a treble clef. I told you it places G above middle C. It always does that, it never changes. And this? Remember?” Indicating
a hash symbol, which Adam was pretty sure was called something different here and whose significance he couldn’t for the life
of him recall.

“This is a sharp sign,” she said, thankfully not seeming concerned by his ignorance. “It means any note in that position is
a semitone above the true pitch. It can’t mean anything else, ever.”

She was leaning toward him. Their shoulders were almost touching. Her nails were unpainted. He could smell her powdery scent
that reminded him of babies. He could almost feel the warmth of her body.

“And look at that dot,” she said. “See where it is? To the right of the note, never to the left. A dot always, always lengthens
the note by one half its value. Never one quarter, or one eighth, always one half.”

She wasn’t blushing. There was no hint of shyness or embarrassment in her voice. On the contrary, it was filled with a confidence
he’d never seen in her before.

“And look, here, the time signature, one number over another. The bottom number always represents the note value of the basic
pulse of the music—so here the four represents the quarter note. The top number, in this case three, always indicates how
many of these note values appear in each measure, or bar. This example announces that each measure is the equivalent length
of three quarter notes. So this piece is in three-four time.”

“Three-four time—that’s a waltz, isn’t it?”

Without even trying, he’d stumbled on a way through to her. It was as if he’d cracked a code or found a key.

“Yes,” Vivienne said. “This piece is a waltz. It’s Hungarian.”

“I have two left feet,” Adam said. “Don’t ever take me dancing.”

And instantly he realized his mistake as Vivienne drew back, the flush rising in her face. “Well,” she said, the sheet music
still clutched in her hand, “so…we’ll begin.”

He’d strayed into the personal, and she’d scurried away from him. But for the first time, she’d let her guard down. For a
minute or so, her awkwardness had vanished and she’d been herself with him.

He winked at the cat on the piano, who stared back.

Alice toasted bread, that was all. No eggs, no sausages, no pudding. She put out the box of bran flakes, but she knew that
it would be untouched. She took the orange squeezer from the cupboard and put it back again. Just tea and toast.

Tom had gone to the doctor, as he’d promised. Alice had phoned to make an appointment, and the following afternoon Tom had
taken a taxi to the surgery, about a mile away. She’d offered to drive him there, but he’d refused. When she got home around
six—straight from work, no more lost afternoons, no more of that—he was back, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of instant
coffee in front of him.

What did he say?
Alice had asked.

He gave me a prescription,
he’d told her,
for sleeping pills.

Alice hadn’t known he wasn’t sleeping.

And he wants me to go for…treatment.

Treatment?
But of course she’d known what it meant.

He’s going to try and get me into a place in Dublin for a few weeks. I told him I’m in court on Friday, so some time after
that.

His face was so terribly bleak, his eyes empty of expression. The skin around his mouth was puckered, and deep folds ran down
his cheeks. Dark shadows under his eyes. Such a gap now between his shirt collar and his neck.

Alice, I’m sorry,
he’d said then, in that same hollow voice, but Alice hadn’t trusted herself to give a response. She’d turned away from him
and begun to get the dinner ready.

And now Friday was here, and Geraldine was doing the full day on her own in the shop. Stephen had offered to come with them
to the court, but Alice had said no, they’d be fine.

She put a slice of toast on Tom’s plate and filled his cup with tea. She picked at her own slice until it was time to go.
Just over an hour it usually took her to drive to Galway, so they were allowing an hour and a half, because the courthouse
was in the city center, and traffic might be bad, and Alice wasn’t good with the one-way streets.

The day was fine, the sun shining out of an almost completely blue sky. Neither of them commented on the weather as Alice
drove off, remembering the last time—was he remembering too?—they were both in a car together. The sky had been blue then,
too, although it had been much colder. She remembered the whir of the heater drowning the radio. She remembered turning down
the heater and hearing about a long tailback at the Red Cow Roundabout, just before—

“Put on the radio, would you?” she asked Tom. “Find something nice. Lyric, maybe.”

Their solicitor was waiting for them in the lobby of the courthouse. He shook hands with them, his grip so strong that Alice’s
rings dug painfully into her fingers. “Soon be over,” he told them. “Won’t last long, just a formality.”

They sat on a wooden bench outside the courtroom, waiting to be called. Alice leaned against the wall, feeling its coldness
through her light gray jacket.

Soon be over. Won’t last long.