Strange Music (39 page)

‘Except you, apparently.'

She pulled the corners of her lips into an imitation smile.

He looked right and left. ‘Willard thought they were a different variety of comfrey when he saw them. I said, “Yeah, but obviously non-invasive.” Anyway, it's well outside the walled garden, which is all he bothers about, really.'

Debbie returned with her treasures.

Faith flipped through the sketchbook, then trawled it more carefully, then called out: ‘Wolf! Come and look – I think we've struck gold!'

Chris passed the butt back to Debbie for the last drag but she waved it away. He guessed that, mentally, she was already moving all her gear into a little bedsit in Camden Town or the Finchley Road, where she could say, ‘Hampstead, actually.' And, indeed, he could hardly wait for the day. As with all redheads her skin held a particular aroma – an enticing blend of cinnamon and honey but a thousand times more aphrodisiac, and it was driving him mad to have her around the flat and yet
not
have her.

Coming from double-British-summertime midnight into the gloom of the boiler room, Felix still had to pause to let his eyes adapt to the true dark down there. It was a moment or two before he could even see the outlines of the far door, which led into the cross-passage and the coal bunkers. He was here to tell May – in the nicest possible way – that it was no go. He didn't actually have the words yet, not quite, but they would come to him. He was sure of that. His erection had come and gone a dozen times over the past few hours but he wasn't going to let
that
rule his better judgement.

He was still hunting for words, the right words, when he heard someone approaching in the cross-passage. He was now dark adapted enough to skip across the room to the boiler without stumbling over the intervening litter. He was already opening the firedoor when the passage door was opened by . . . Adam!

Adam carrying a blanket.

‘Felix!' he said jovially.

‘I think this could do with a bit of stoking. Ah, there's the poker.' It sounded so fake but Adam was too bent on misdirections of his own to notice. ‘Found this lying in the passage out there,' he said, arranging the blanket precisely where Felix had placed it earlier (and in a less determined frame of mind, of course). More, he was laying it down with, presumably, the same side showing and with one corner cocked up over the arm of the prototype chair. Felix, of course, hadn't noticed these details when he first threw it there – but Adam, the true professional, had. ‘Well, on with the motley, then!' And off he went, dry-soaping his hands and whistling
The Rich Maharajah of Maggadore
(who, in the words of the song,
never learned how to do-oo the rumba
).

As the echoes died away, May drifted ghostlike into the boiler room. When she saw Felix she halted, just inside the door. ‘I thought he was
you
,' she said, ‘until it was too late. I'm sorry.'

Felix shut the firedoor and flipped the turnbuckle. ‘I can't cope with this,' he told her.

‘Give us a hug before you go?'

He shuffled awkwardly to her and she fell into his arms. The true conversation occurred between their bodies; that is, his erection did not revive and she sensed it and he knew she sensed it and so they parted on a wave of . . . mere warmth.

‘It's really very good of you,' Bruno said.

‘Oh . . . we couldn't let one of the choice and master spirits of this age doss down among hoi polloi,' Eric assured him. ‘Besides, your earlier remark – that our little capitalist kibbutz could be a portent of the future for all – has nagged at me ever since. You see, I don't think we're nearly capitalist enough.'

‘But that is
precisely
why this community may foreshadow the future. For two reasons—'

‘No! Hear me out . . . please.'

‘Why are you laughing – or trying not to?'

‘Oh!' Eric lifted both hands in resignation. ‘We have a joke at Manutius that at the end of your honeymoon you said to your wife, “I enjoyed that, my darling . . . for two reasons” . . . Anyway! Let me start by revealing that our rent here – our total rent for all eight families and five acres of garden – is just five-hundred-odd per
year
! It's even more ludicrous than the ludicrously subsidized rents they enjoy in Russia. And even though we divide it roughly in proportion to what would be the market value of each apartment, the rents only vary between seventy-odd at the most and twenty nine at the lowest – per year, remember. If we were out there in the real world,
each
of us would be paying at least five hundred a year for something much pokier than
this
!
You could actually fit a council house inside this one room.
So we all feel pretty equal.'

‘But?'

‘Yes –
but
! But one of these years the gravel company will have to face the fact that, having secured the right to tear the guts out of the old Panshanger estate, they are never, ever going to be allowed to extend their gravel pits to this side of the main road. When that penny drops, the second will follow – that the Dower House is worth far more to us than it ever will be to them. Between thirty and forty thou', I'd guess. And, of course, we'd snap it up!'

‘Sitting tenants!'

‘Exactly.'

Bruno chuckled. ‘But that, of itself, won't turn you all into rabid capitalists!'

‘What? When
my
apartment has a precise commercial value to
me
? And those bastards in the next-door apartment go on neglecting their bit the way we
all
benignly neglect the place now? Dragging down the value of mine? And of everyone else's? There will be divisions among us deep enough to lose a herd of elephants in. We will be as fissiparous as the most bourgeois street in upper-class suburbia.
But . . .
' Eric held up a magician's finger. ‘There's more! Stir into that mix some twenty . . . twenty-five children! What people here haven't grasped yet is that the
children
make this community – not us. The Tribe, we call them. At the moment there are twenty-three of them – including three who moved away to the village. But ten years from now there'll be about twenty-nine . . . thirty. And a few years after that, they'll start flying the coop. The young of all species are – as you well know – nidifugous, and ours will be no exception. And as they go, they will take some of their spirit with them, leaving us, the founders as mere husks. Yes!' He leaned back with a contented sigh, swirling the brandy round and round in his balloon.

‘You can be sure of this?' Bruno asked before turning to Isabella, who had sighed and kept her eyes on the ceiling throughout her husband's diatribe. ‘What do you say?'

‘I say he's talking utter nonsense,' she replied. ‘But that's true almost all the time.'

Eric smiled. ‘When they asked Groucho Marx what happened to Zeppo, he said they kept him on the payroll and showed him every script and if he laughed at a joke, they cut it out.' He waved a hand toward Isabella. ‘Every family has one. So it's certain, you see.'

He imbibed the brandy by sniffing its fumes.

He leaned back and closed his eyes in ecstasy.

‘The future of the Dower House Community,' he said, ‘is – inevitably – fissiparous and nidifugous.'

nidifugous
: flying from the nest as soon as capable of living independently.

fissiparous
: divisive, tending to break into parts or factions.

Is Eric right to make this prophecy? Or was Faith closer to the mark when she told the Rowhanis in Istanbul that Eric only ever sees half of any truth – and always misses its essence?

You can follow the continuing fortunes of the Dower House community in the next volume:
Promises to Keep
– coming soon.

And if you're curious about the earlier history of this little powerhouse of a community – how Adam and Tony and (reluctantly) Willard, conceived the idea . . . how Willard almost lost Marianne . . . how Felix almost failed to join . . . how Faith became his mistress and then steered Angela his way . . . how Nicole would gladly have killed Marianne until . . . but no! The rest of that list, and much, much more, is lovingly detailed in the first of these Felix Breit novels:
The Dower House
.