Fig and the Flute Player Read online

  Contents

  About Christine Harrison

  Title Page

  PART ONE - London and Brighton

  PART ONE Chapter 1

  PART ONE Chapter 2

  PART ONE Chapter 3

  PART ONE Chapter 4

  PART TWO - Kiev

  PART TWO Chapter 1

  PART TWO Chapter 2

  PART TWO Chapter 3

  PART TWO Chapter 4

  PART TWO Chapter 5

  PART TWO Chapter 6

  PART THREE - Brighton, Walsingham and London

  PART THREE Chapter 1

  PART THREE Chapter 2

  PART THREE Chapter 3

  PART THREE Chapter 4

  PART THREE Chapter 5

  PART THREE Chapter 6

  PART FOUR - Ireland and London

  PART FOUR Chapter 1

  PART FOUR Chapter 2

  PART FOUR Chapter 3

  PART FOUR Chapter 4

  PART FOUR Chapter 5

  PART FOUR Chapter 6

  PART FOUR Chapter 7

  PART FIVE - St Petersburg

  PART FIVE CHAPTER 1

  PART FIVE CHAPTER 2

  PART FIVE CHAPTER 3

  PART FIVE CHAPTER 4

  PART FIVE CHAPTER 5

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Christine Harrison was born on the Isle of Wight. She lives and writes on the west coast of Wales, which has been her home for many years. Her award winning short fiction has brought her national acclaim and recognition. She won the Cosmopolitan Short Story Award with ‘La Scala Inflammata’ which was then published in an anthology, The Best of Cosmopolitan Fiction, and she has been a contributor to many anthologies of women’s writing from Wales including Power and All Shall be Well.

  Fig and the Flute Player

  Christine Harrison

  PART ONE

  London and Brighton

  1

  SHE saw him first. As she stepped off her train, she saw him. He was going through his pockets looking for his ticket, the other passengers streaming past off the Irish boat train into Paddington Station. It was getting dark, a band was playing ‘See Amid the Winter’s Snow’, and she fell in love at first sight with this travel-stained young man who couldn’t find his ticket.

  It changed everything. Small things were suddenly charged with importance, things like a poster advertising Chekhov’s The Seagull, the words underlining the great white soaring bird, even a litter bin full of orange peel and empty cartons, how beautiful litter could be, the shining bits of tinfoil, the brilliant orange peel.

  We throw away years of life. We walk in mist. Then unexpectedly something shifts, subtly, hardly at all, and everything is changed. It was like that.

  She spoke to him. ‘Have you looked in your top pocket?’ she asked him.

  His smile was vulnerable, a bit flash. ‘You’re a genius,’ he said, fishing out a scruffy-looking ticket, narrowing his eyes as if scrutinizing it. As if it must be a forgery.

  ‘Yes, I know.’ She spoke softly, almost under her breath. Her breathing seemed to come lighter and faster, making it more difficult to speak.

  He helped her to the barrier with her case, then handed it back. How was she to keep him with her? She didn’t know. She wanted simply to say to him, ‘Stay with me. You have greeny sort of eyes and a certain look of rough grace about you and I have fallen in love with you.’

  But he smiled again and rambled off towards where the Salvation Army band was playing. Most people rushed about in straight lines. He rambled as if at a village fair. She watched him for a minute as he stood with a little knot of people, mothers with their children mostly, listening to the carols. She reckoned he was a country boy.

  Her intuition was working overtime.

  So she wasn’t surprised when he came into the cafeteria. That was why she had gone in – to wait for him to walk through the door.

  ‘You again,’ he said, and sat down.

  ‘You’re a very pretty woman.’ It wasn’t said in the usual flirtatious way, but with a sort of abstract joy. It was the last straw. Then, ‘I’ll get myself some coffee,’ he said. ‘Don’t go away. Isn’t the music a treat?’

  His soft accent lingered in the air round her as she watched him go off to buy coffee – and come back with beer. He took a sip before he put the glass down. As he sat near to her she breathed in his breath, malty from the beer and a clean male smell.

  She wanted to keep that scent near her. Don’t go, she told him without words, silently, don’t go. You have made everyone into shadows now.

  When he sang, very quietly, a snatch from ‘See Amid the Winter’s Snow’ she smiled; and then suddenly, softly he came out with his own descant to the melody.

  ‘It’s my favourite carol,’ she said; if it wasn’t before, it was now. A sliver of ice on a nerve whenever she was to hear it from that day to her dying day.

  ‘Are you a singer?’

  ‘A flautist, chiefly. But I do sing after a fashion. What’s your name?’

  ‘Maisie. Maisie Shergold.’

  ‘Maisie.’ He repeated it. She gave him her card, shameless, in case he suddenly went off to be lost in the London crowds. He put on gold-rimmed spectacles to read it. A country boy but educated well by priests, she guessed.

  ‘My name is Michael. Michael Curran. Flautist and singer of true songs.’ He put out his hand, rough and warm, she took it in hers. At last she had touched him.

  ‘What sort of true songs?’

  ‘Bit of folk, bit of blues, bits of pop, mixed with madrigal. My own slightly unusual mixture.’

  ‘Your own unusual truth?’

  ‘Everybody’s truth.’

  She raised her eyebrows and smiled. ‘Tall order.’

  ‘Do we have a sceptic in the railway station?’ He looked at the card again. ‘Doesn’t say sceptic,’ he said. ‘Says art historian. Eastern Orthodox iconography.’

  ‘Perhaps historians have to be sceptics. But romantic too. My own slightly unusual mixture.’

  She hardly knew what she said, or what he was saying. What the words meant was less important than that these sounds and smiles between them were lightly bonding two strangers together; beyond the bonds of sight and smell and touch already established there were bonds of the intellect, not to be underestimated. Maisie was the last person to despise such bonds – but they came last. And still the intellect had not yet been yielded a place, still they hardly heard what the other said, only the timbre and mood of the words. But now it was time for words to be used in a different way; discovering, probing.

  ‘Tell me about Maisie Shergold. She’s more than a pretty face.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s clever.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought that was it. Clever.’ He smiled.

  He got up.

  Don’t leave me, Michael Curran. I want to hear you sing and play the flute. I want to feel your warm rough touch again.

  ‘I’m going to get another beer. What would you like?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Only for you to return. Never to leave me. While he fetched his drink, she got out her diary for something to do. It was nearly the end of the year, the little book thick with numbers, reminders, names, appointments. She wrote in faint writing, ‘I met Michael Curran on Paddington Station. They were playing “See Amid the Winter’s Snow”.’

  But as they left the cafeteria the band were packing away their instruments.

  ‘Taxi or underground?’ he asked. Whichever takes the longest. Pluto took Proserpina to the Underworld. It was lucky she was ever seen again.

  ‘Underground,’ she said. ‘It’s quicker at this time of day.’

&n
bsp; ‘Time matters not to me,’ he said. ‘Where are we going, anyway?’

  ‘Somewhere where we can have a meal, a glass of reasonable wine. A wash. The Andromeda. It’s a sort of club for sort of ladies.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘Do they let in men?’

  ‘Sometimes. But sometimes they are captured and kept there. Especially musicians.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ he said.

  Brushing her hair and cleaning her skin with damp cottonwool in the washroom, she filled the deep basin, with its old brass fittings, with water and plunged her hands in up to the wrists.

  ‘I am nearly forty years old,’ she told herself, ‘and old enough to know better than this.’ But she knew it was not a question of anything like that. For she knew suddenly but obscurely that his image had been with her before she had ever met him.

  She looked at her hands under the water.

  It was as if she had loved him before she had seen him. As if there had been a template of who she would love in her mind’s eye, her heart, her secret mind. Always? She did not know that – or when that particular face, and mien, and bright smile, and way of turning the head, and walk, and light, easy way of standing about, but particularly that face – that especial face – had imprinted themselves on her. It was not an accident that she had met Michael on Paddington Station; her life had led up to that point – she had been looking for him, searching for him without knowing that she was. And when she saw him, she knew him from the first glimpse, the first second – she knew him at once.

  She dried her hands, and flicked her dark hair about. Large brown eyes looked back at her from the mirror, faint circles under them, as in a water-colour painting.

  When she went into the dining-room, she found him, waiting for her, in a still, quiet way, standing by the bar with a whisky. ‘Shall we eat?’ she said.

  They had their meal tucked in the privacy of a dining-booth. These had been used in the past by men about town to entertain ladies from the theatre, but were now mostly used by women who wanted to entertain business clients in a certain casual privacy.

  ‘What are you up in town for, anyway?’ she asked. ‘A concert?’

  ‘Practice session,’ he said. ‘We’re all meeting up later at the Fiddler’s Cat, Shepherd’s Bush way.’

  ‘Oh.’ She rested her chin on her hand, elbow on the table.

  ‘Yes, come if you like. This is very good beef.’ He ate in a simple way that she liked.

  ‘They do good plain cooking here. Shall I come?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, come. You might be bored. But come.’

  Maisie helped herself to a small spoonful of cauliflower. ‘All right, I’ll come.’ She had forgotten that she had been looking forward to going home, resting after an irritating meeting about a museum purchase. All that had happened a long time ago. To someone else.

  It was in an upstairs room over the Fiddler’s Cat. Michael leaped ahead up the tattily carpeted stairs and then up another bare-boarded flight. But she could see straight away, as he opened the door and took a gulp of the thick, solid atmosphere, what this was all about for him – it was a drug to him. A curtain of smoke. Someone playing the same trapped phrase over and over again on the bass guitar, with insistent melancholy.

  He changed as the drug pumped through him. His eyes even changed colour, she could have sworn. He drifted off in that sure, aimless way that was his own and was at the heart of something important about him, a contradiction, and left her to her own devices.

  ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ she asked a thin bearded man sitting on the floor against the wall carefully rolling a cigarette paper.

  ‘Wasting your time. You ought to be out there making money.’

  ‘Do I look the type?’

  ‘You look like my English teacher at my old school.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I was in love with her. She was the only teacher who was any good.’

  Michael had kind of taken charge of the room. ‘The sound I’m after is – well – sort of sensual madrigal – a contradiction in terms, you might say. Virgin and the whore. Well, let’s kick it around, anyway.’ He grinned. He sang a phrase. He had no voice as voices go, but it made the skin prickle. An erotic reticence.

  ‘Try it out. Yes, that high pure sound. Yes. We’re nearly there.’ He grinned again.

  ‘Sensual madrigal.’ The bearded man laughed a high-pitched laugh.

  ‘There’s something else,’ said Michael. ‘Underneath, a kind of throb. Got it? That’s the sound. A blood-throb. And a sort of nervous tension. Fear, perhaps.’

  ‘You’re an intellectual, Michael,’ said the bearded man, glum now.

  Michael was sorting out the rhythm section, the drummer using a brush, listening to the others, listening to what Michael was saying, listening to the sound of his brush, ear cocked.

  She watched him as he sang a phrase or two, one hand cupped over his ear. He seemed to have forgotten about her. Abandoned her. They couldn’t get the pause right before the last phrase came in. ‘It’s right when it’s easy,’ said Michael; and next time it was right and they went on a bit until they faltered again. ‘It’s easy when it’s right,’ said Michael; and they tried again and it was easy and right.

  ‘This could go on all night,’ the bearded man said to Maisie.

  Again she wondered what she was doing there. Wondered what she was doing loving Michael Curran, watching him as he sang, swaying very slightly behind a curtain of curling smoke, his figure neither tall nor short, elegant and sturdy. But what was she doing, how did she get into this? It was as if she had been pulled down a path she had always known was there somewhere inside her. And already the whole thing was confusing her life.

  She had to be in Brighton the next day, she had an appointment with an old man, a White Russian émigré, one of a handful of exiles dedicated, it seemed anachronistically, to the restoration of the Russian monarchy. He had something to tell her, to do with an ikon. It sounded interesting. She did not want to miss that Brighton train. She smiled, remembering his letters, so vivid even in their formality and courtesy.

  Taking her smile for an invitation, the bearded man put an arm round her. Impatiently she stood up. She’d get a taxi and go. She felt angry then. What was stopping her going up to Michael, taking his hand, saying, ‘Come back with me. I’ve fallen in love with you’? She was too tired now to go through any subtle foreplay, any waiting. Tired and angry. Surely she had lost him.

  She went to look for a telephone. The bare landing looked infinitely melancholy.

  He put his hand over hers on the telephone.

  ‘Don’t disappear into the night, will you, Maisie? I want to come with you now.’ There was something in his voice that hesitated.

  ‘Why don’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s the others. I can’t let them down.’

  I would, she thought, I’d let everyone down.

  ‘We only get together once in a while and then we have to make the most of it. You can see that, can’t you? I can’t let them down.’

  ‘Of course you can’t let them down,’ she said. ‘You can’t possibly.’

  ‘Oh, hell, I’m coming with you. Hang on a minute.’ He was back in a couple of minutes. They clattered down the stairs.

  ‘Did you get a taxi?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes. How do you escape out of this place? It’s all bolted and barred.’ They would have to stay all night, after all.

  ‘Easy,’ he said, and led her out of an unlocked side door into the quiet, bitter cold of the street, with the taxi throbbing.

  ‘Off Kensington Church Street,’ she told the taxi driver. She looked up into the sky, rich with stars, then bent her head inside the cab.

  She had that feeling again. Of being inexorably drawn towards something. A haven. An abyss. How was she to know?

  ‘I live in an enormous room on the second floor,’ she told him, as they drew up outside wrought-iron gates flung open on to a path shining in the
moonlight like a strip of water. She found her key with a sure blind movement.

  ‘Rose lives in the rest of the house – Rose is my daughter. At least she lives in two rooms and has filled the rest of the house with her junk – antiques and so forth – she has a fledgling antique business in Knightsbridge. It’s a shop about as big as a sentry box, so everything ends up here.’

  Michael closed the door behind them and stopped the flow of her words. He covered her lips first with his fingers and then with his mouth, as if tasting something for the first time. She felt herself go straight into his arms. It was what she had been waiting for all evening, ever since she saw him standing there fumbling for his ticket. She sniffed delicately at his special smell, and he acquainted himself with hers.

  He followed her upstairs.

  Inside her room, he dropped their bags on the floor and put his arms round her again. Gently she released herself and went to draw the heavy curtains.

  ‘Whisky?’ she asked. ‘Or a sort of Chablis? I’m not a great drinking woman.’

  ‘Whisky’s fine,’ he said, taking off his coat and then flopping on her bed. ‘It’s a great room,’ he said, looking up at the beautiful moulding round the high ceiling. A fine carpet worn in the centre. Lots of books. Great armful of white chrysanthemums in a glass jar dumped on the table cluttered with papers, typewriter, word processor, reference books. A graceful wicker chair (rescued by Maisie from the endless stream of second-hand furniture that passed through the house) by one of the windows. The four-poster on which Michael sprawled and which could be concealed with heavy lace curtains. A small kitchen and a bathroom. Maisie’s living quarters.

  ‘What do you actually do?’ he asked, taking the whisky and drinking it down in one go. ‘What does an art historian do?’

  ‘I’m a freelance consultant. My special interest is in religious artifacts, most particularly of the Eastern Orthodox Church, eleventh to fifteenth centuries.’ It sounded a mouthful.

  ‘You’re clever.’

  ‘You asked me before. Yes.’

  ‘Don’t know any clever women. Not really clever. Only pretending to be.’

  ‘I’m not pretending. Do you avoid them?’