The Orchid House (32 page)

‘Yes, sir,’ Olav had nodded. ‘Your story went big in the papers across the Pond – the Yanks love a drama. So, the deal with them is that the Carnegie will be your comeback performance. Being blunt, honey, it’s less to do with your talent and more to do with the fact that the PR machines can go into overdrive.’

‘When is the recital?’ Julia asked.

‘Ten months’ time, at the end of next April,’ Olav had confirmed. ‘Which gives you enough opportunity to get your fingers back on those keys and build up your confidence. Whaddya say, Julia? It’s one hell of an offer and I can guarantee it will never come again.’

Clutching a pillow, Julia walked over to the bedroom window and stared down at the garden beneath her. She had less than a week to give Olav her decision. Could she do it, she asked herself for the umpteenth time. Find a way somehow to climb over the mental void? Julia shut her eyes and imagined playing. As usual, adrenalin started to pump through her veins and she broke out in a cold sweat.

She had not, up to now, broached the subject with Kit. How could she explain that the instrument she used to love held such fear for her now? He might think she was being silly, force her, pressurise her to start playing, and she couldn’t cope with that.

On the other hand, she thought, as she walked away from the window and laid the pillow with its delicious smell of Kit on to the bed, he might be able to help her. She had to trust that he would understand: she was desperate.

That night, she mentioned the Carnegie offer casually over supper.

‘Wow!’ he said. ‘Julia, that’s amazing! What an honour. Will you take me with you so that I can sit in the front row, catch your eye and stick my tongue out at you during a particularly tense crescendo?’

She smiled tightly, then shook her head. ‘I just don’t know whether I can do it, Kit. It might be too much, too soon. I can’t really explain why I’m so frightened, why my body reacts the way it does every time I go near a piano. Oh dear …’

His expression became serious and he reached his hand across to hers. ‘I know, sweetheart. How long have you got to think about it?’

‘A few days.’

‘I wish I could help, wave a magic wand and make it all right for you,’ Kit sighed, ‘but I know I can’t. It has to be up to you.’

‘Yes.’ Julia nodded slowly and withdrew her hand. ‘If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a walk around the park and try and think.’

‘Good idea,’ Kit agreed. He watched her leave the kitchen, then cleared the empty plates and washed and dried them, deep in thought.

A couple of days later, before Kit left for an early meeting with the farm manager in the estate office, he brought Julia a cup of tea and sat on the bed next to her.

‘Better be on my way,’ he said, leaning over and kissing her. He studied her and added, ‘You look tired, sweetheart. You okay?’

‘Yes,’ she lied, ‘have a good meeting.’

‘Thanks.’ Kit stood up from the bed. ‘By the way, I’ve got a mate who I’ve allowed to fish in our stream. He said he’d probably have a couple of trout for our supper tonight. He’ll drop them in this afternoon.’

‘I’ve never cooked trout. What do I do?’ Julia asked shyly.

‘I’ll show you how to gut them later,’ he answered, as he walked towards the door. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot – in case I’m not back, there’s a piano tuner coming in at eleven this morning. I doubt that beautiful old instrument gathering dust in the drawing room has been played since you last played on it. And as it’s rather valuable, I thought I’d better get it serviced. See you later, sweetheart.’ He blew her a kiss and disappeared out of the door.

Promptly at eleven, the rusty front doorbell tinkled, and Julia went to let the piano tuner in to the house.

‘Thank you, Madam,’ the old man said respectfully. ‘Could I trouble you to show me where the piano is? Last time I came here was over fifty-five years ago, when Lady Olivia asked my father to tune it, before Lord Harry came back from the war.’

Julia looked at him in amazement. ‘My goodness! That’s a long time ago. It’s this way.’ She led him through the series of rooms, put her hands to the brass knob of the drawing room and immediately felt them start to shake.

‘Here, Madam, let me,’ he offered.

‘Thank you. It’s rather … stiff,’ she replied, embarrassed, as the piano tuner turned the handle easily. She had no choice but to follow him into the room. She hovered by the door and watched him walk towards the piano, then lift the dustsheets.

‘Beautiful instrument this,’ he commented admiringly. ‘My father always said it had the purest sound of any piano he’d heard. And he’d heard a few,’ he chuckled. ‘Now then.’ He opened the lid, studied the yellowing keys and lovingly put his fingers to them. He played a fast arpeggio, sighed and shook his head. ‘Dearie me, we do sound in a bad way.’ He turned to Julia. ‘It’ll take me a good while, but I’ll sort it, don’t you worry, Madam.’

‘Thank you,’ Julia replied weakly.

‘Yes,’ the piano tuner bent down to open his tool-case, ‘the sad thing is, my father told me Lord Harry never played again when he eventually came home.’

‘Really?’ said Julia. ‘I’ve heard he was a wonderful pianist.’

‘He was, but for some reason –’ the piano tuner sighed and began to play the first few bars of Liszt’s Sonata in B minor – ‘he never did. Perhaps it was something that had happened to him in the war. Such a shame he wasted his talent, isn’t it?’

Julia could take no more. ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ she answered abruptly. ‘And send the invoice to Lord Crawford, please.’ She turned tail and hurried away from the drawing room.

Later, she went to pick patiently through the remnants of vegetables in the kitchen garden to cook with the trout that evening. She would have liked to sort the area out, to clear it and reseed it, but as there was no guarantee they would be here longer than it took to find a new buyer, Julia supposed it was pointless.

Suddenly, her ears pricked up. She could hear Rachmaninov’s Concerto No. 2 floating out of the drawing room on the breeze towards her.

Kneeling amongst the weeds, she put her hands to her ears.

‘Stop it!
Stop it!
’

She could still hear the music through her fingers, the notes she could not bear to play assaulting her senses. She gave up trying to block the sound and, as her hands fell to her sides, she began to sob.

‘Why do you have to play
that
? Anything else … anything else.’ She shook her head and wiped her streaming nose on the back of her hand.

It was the signature tune to her grief.

That terrible night, as she had played for her enraptured audience, wrapped up in her beautiful music, lost in her own world, then enjoyed the applause and the cheers and the bouquets and felt the selfish exhilaration of her achievement, her little boy and her husband had been dying in agony.

Julia had tortured herself over and over, agonising about just
when
it would have been during the concerto they had drawn their last breaths. Would Gabriel have screamed out for her as he lay suffering intolerable pain and fear, wondering why his
maman
wasn’t there to help him, to comfort him, to protect him?

She’d let him down at the moment he’d needed her so very much.

The thought was unbearable.

And Julia knew the worst part was that the piano – an inanimate instrument, with no heart or soul – had stolen her love and attention. It had come before the needs of her child and her husband, and now represented all that was selfish and inadequate about her. She slumped in despair, only comforted by the thought that the skinny carrots and the one lettuce she’d found were self-sown descendants of those planted by her beloved grandfather.

‘Oh, Grandfather Bill!’ she entreated the heavens. ‘What would
you
have said to me right now, if we’d been sitting together in the hothouse, like we used to?’

She knew he would have been calm and rational, like he always was when she had gone to him with a problem. He’d have looked at the facts, not the emotions surrounding them. He was a great believer in fate, and God, she knew that. When her mother had died, Grandfather Bill had taken Julia into his arms after the funeral. She had wept on his shoulder, inconsolable, the thought of her mother alone in the cold, hard, ground unbearable.

‘Your mum’s safe now and at peace, up there. I know she is,’ he had soothed. ‘It’s us lot left behind that are suffering without her.’

‘Why couldn’t the doctors make her better?’ she’d asked pitifully.

‘It was her time to go, my love. And if it
is
that time, then there’s nothing to be done.’

‘But I wanted to save her …’

‘Don’t punish yourself, Julia,’ he had comforted her. ‘There was nothing more any of us could have done for her. Us humans think we are in control, but we’re not, you know. I’ve seen enough of life to realise that’s a fact and there isn’t no changing it.’

Julia sat quietly, thinking about what Grandfather Bill had said that day. Was this also true of Xavier and Gabriel? Had it been their ‘time’? Could she have made the difference if she’d been with them?

It was an unanswerable question.

And as for the fact she’d been playing the piano … Julia wiped her streaming nose and knew, in reality, she could just as easily have been at home, waiting for the two of them to come back from the local beach along the same treacherous road.

And was she, as Grandfather Bill had said all those years ago, punishing herself? Depriving herself of the one thing in her life she knew could provide comfort and a balm for her troubled soul?

More of Grandfather Bill’s words came back to her as the piano tuner played the last few notes. ‘
You have a God-given gift. Don’t waste it, will you, Julia …
’

As silence descended from the drawing room, a thought came into Julia’s mind: she’d lost so many people she’d loved, but the one thing she still had that was
hers
, and could never be taken away from her, was her talent.

Eventually, as the piano tuner’s car drove away, Julia stood up and walked slowly back towards the house. She stood on the terrace, a sudden ray of hope and understanding lighting up her face. Her gift was the one thing she could count on, it would be there for her until the day she died. It couldn’t desert her, because it was part of who she was.

And she mustn’t desert
it
.

Would Xavier and Gabriel thank her for never touching the keys again? Would they wish that, out of their deaths, came the death of her ‘God-given’ gift?

No.

Julia put an instinctive hand to her mouth as she realised clearly for the first time how her grieving, guilt-ridden mind had played tricks on her. She had allowed the demons in when she was so vulnerable and let them take root.

They had to be banished.

She strode purposefully towards the drawing room, her head full of all those who had loved her and still did love her, and sat down at the piano. Ignoring her body’s reaction, she placed her shaking hands on the keys.

She would play for them all.

And for herself.

When Kit arrived home from his meeting an hour later and heard Chopin’s ‘Études’ coming from the drawing room, his eyes filled with tears. He sat down abruptly on the staircase in the entrance hall, in the spot where he’d first set eyes on Julia. And listened in awe, humbled by her magnificent talent.

‘I’m so bloody proud of you, my darling,’ he murmured to himself. ‘You not only have a rare gift, but you are brave and beautiful and strong. And, God help me,’ Kit wiped his eyes on his forearm, ‘I only hope I can be worthy of you, and keep you with me forever.’

32

From then on, the silence that had held dominion for so many years over Wharton Park was broken. Instead, the house was filled with the sound of beautiful music, as Julia banished her demons and played on the exquisite piano in the drawing room for hour after hour, relishing her return to the instrument that was simply part of her soul.

‘Thank you for helping to lead me back,’ she had whispered to Kit, as they lay in bed on the night that her fingers had first retouched the keys.

‘Don’t thank me, sweetheart. It’s you that’s managed to be brave enough to break the spell,’ he had answered generously. ‘Besides, the piano
did
need tuning.’

But Julia knew that, without Kit’s thoughtfully executed prod in the right direction, she would not have got there alone.

‘I spoke to Elsie today,’ said Julia over supper a couple of weeks later, ‘and she announced that now I’m living at Wharton Park, she’d like very much to visit us. She suggested this coming weekend. Would you mind if she stayed for a couple of nights?’

‘Of course not,’ Kit was quick to reply, ‘you don’t need to ask. This is your home too. Actually, I’ve been asked to play cricket for the village team this weekend, so that’ll keep me out of your hair on Saturday, at least.’

Julia could see Kit was pleased about the cricket invitation. ‘I’d also like to ask Alicia and her family over for Sunday lunch. They haven’t seen Elsie for years.’

‘Good idea,’ agreed Kit. ‘And, actually, if Elsie’s up to divulging the rest of her tale from the past, it’ll be evocative listening to it here. Living in the house makes it even more fascinating to find out what my relatives got up to in days gone by,’ he added.

After supper they went to sit outside on the terrace, in Julia’s favourite corner spot. The old metal furniture set was rusty, but proved that someone before her had also decided this was the best and most sheltered vantage-point from which to view the park.

‘What a glorious evening,’ Kit breathed, enjoying the warm night air. ‘I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to find new vistas to enjoy. Yet here I am, sitting on a terrace that’s part of my roots, thinking there really can’t be a more beautiful spot in the world. I’ve finally stopped running. And I’m happy. I love it here with you. Thank you, sweetheart, for helping me stop.’

‘Kit, as you say often enough to me, it’s you that’s made the decision.’ Julia took a sip of the vintage Armagnac Kit had found on a dusty rack in the cellar. ‘Actually, I wanted to … discuss something with you.’