Fig and the Flute Player Page 3

  In the morning, she woke up early and got up at once. She went quietly into the kitchen and made a cup of tea. Later she took a cup to her mother.

  ‘Don’t get up, Ma. Would you like breakfast in bed?’

  ‘No, I’d rather get up. I hate eating in bed.’

  ‘Did you enjoy your bridge?’

  ‘They’re such a lot of old fogeys,’ said Mrs Sharpe, sipping her tea.

  ‘I’d better be off, Ma. I want to get back.’

  ‘But what about your breakfast?’

  ‘I’ll just have a bit of bread and jam.’

  ‘I’ve got bacon, mushrooms, everything.’

  ‘And I’ll see you soon. I’ll give you a ring. I have to go, Ma. Take care of yourself. Give me a ring if you need me. If you don’t need me, even. I may see you next week – I’ve got to come down on business. Bye now.’ Maisie kissed her mother’s soft, dry cheek.

  ‘Is anything the matter, dear?’

  ‘No, of course not. Everything’s fine. I must get back, though. I’ll telephone.’

  And she was gone.

  Mrs Sharpe sighed and leaned back on the pillows, closing her eyes. She really missed seeing her ex-son-in-law. She had enjoyed it when Leo and Maisie had been together, when they had come down to Brighton, full of their busy lives, and Rose had been a little girl, thrilled to go out to a tea-shop with her grandmother. Nothing stays the same, she thought, not for five minutes. She went back to sleep and slept unusually soundly until nine o’clock.

  By which time Maisie’s train was pulling into Victoria. Railways stations were different for Maisie since her meeting with Michael. They had taken on an almost paradisical aura, it was not too much to say that. A railway station, the platforms, the people, the mysterious trains themselves, the cafeteria and kiosks, the whole being of the place, its sounds and sights and smells, were like walking in the Garden of Eden, the pillars rose up like trees to support the airy fretted ceiling. An unearthly voice came over the tannoy. Happiness rose up in her, a new fresh feeling, a flow of sweet energy – she had forgotten she could feel these things.

  She decided on the spur of the moment that before she went home she would stop off at the Andromeda and have a shower, make herself beautiful.

  The place was practically empty. She had a shower, a coffee, a chat with someone she vaguely knew.

  Outside she bought anemones from a thin young man. She bought six bunches.

  Now it was time, it was really now. She would soon be with Michael. Her heart soared; with a smile, clutching the flowers, she hailed a taxi. She nearly said Michael Curran as her destination. Laughing at herself, she sat in the back of the taxi, thinking to herself, hugging the thought to herself, in ten minutes or so, in five minutes I shall be with him. She felt so well and happy, so very well and full of vigour and kindliness to everyone in the world. She could do anything. Achieve anything. Only all she wanted was Michael.

  She loved the way he walked; loosely from the shoulders. She loved his voice, soft and precise. She loved his love of music. The way he needed to use his glasses to read. The way he folded them and put them back in their case, and tucked the case in an inside pocket. His strong hands with clever-looking fingers. His eyes which lit his face. His quirky humour.

  And even before she had opened the door of her room she knew he wasn’t there.

  3

  WHEN Maisie had telephoned from Brighton, Michael had not been far out of earshot; the telephone rang in the room above him. He was downstairs at Rose’s soirée.

  When Maisie had not returned, he felt deflated, because he had geared himself to seeing her at a certain time. He had spent the day quietly exploring the area, walking in the park, sitting in its orangery, watching the birds in the wintry flower-beds, watching other solitary figures wrapped against the bright cold weather, withdrawn into themselves, thinking their own thoughts as he thought his, and now, coming back to the flat, he was bored.

  He wished he’d gone over to the Fiddler’s for the lunchtime practice session. He’d been neglecting his music and was thirsting to get back to it.

  So when he met Rose on the stairs, and heard the Stones’ music coming from her room, he stopped and chatted.

  ‘I’m Rose,’ she’d said. ‘Mummy left a note about you. You’re Michael Curran.’ And she invited him to look in on her soirée.

  Maisie never came to these occasional evenings, Rose explained, because her father would bring Irene and it was a bit awkward. It was just that the two women tended to avoid each other. So Michael had said he’d come in for an hour or so as Maisie was late.

  ‘Red or white, or vodka with cider, a vile and almost lethal drink?’ asked Rose. ‘This is Bernard, Bernard Glantz. But don’t listen to his tosh,’ she added, as Glantz came up behind her.

  ‘You let fate take over,’ Glantz was saying, ‘you relinquish control. A manipulative relationship is not true love.’ His ugly face looked serious and anxious.

  Rose laughed, she was a bit drunk. ‘True love,’ she said scornfully.

  Michael took a glass of wine from her. ‘So young and so untender,’ he said, looking grave.

  ‘Some people are capable of it,’ Glantz went on, ‘some are not, being hedged about by their own neuroses and not free to love. That is what my work is about – freeing people to love.’

  Rose glared at him. ‘Is that what you do, Bernard?’ she said rudely.

  ‘I try to, but I seldom succeed in full.’

  ‘Whoever succeeds in full?’ said Leo Shergold. Rose introduced Michael to her father and to the thin, dark young woman with an attractive cast in one eye.

  ‘What are we talking about?’ she asked.

  ‘Love,’ said Rose. ‘At least, that’s what Bernard is talking about.’

  ‘That’s what Bernard usually talks about,’ said Leo.

  ‘Are men really interested in love? I mean, do they know about it?’ Irene asked. The cast in her eye seemed accentuated as she spoke.

  ‘What on earth do you mean, my darling?’ Leo took a sip from a glass of white wine, then passed it to her. She drank for a little while, delicately, like a wild creature at a secret pool.

  ‘It’s all to do with women’s different conception of time. A woman’s idea of time is cyclical,’ she said. ‘Women feed back into the creative cycle – clever little things, aren’t we?’

  ‘Perhaps the tide is going out for men,’ Leo said in an unworried voice.

  Michael was not listening now, he was wondering if Maisie was back. He excused himself, quickly draining his glass, and went upstairs to see if she had returned. It was late now, she must have stayed in Brighton for the night, she had said something about her mother being there. But he felt let down.

  There was a certain quality about Maisie, something ungraspable; something vague, floating, about her, she wasn’t real, corporeal in some sense. Even in bed she had been like that. It fascinated him, but fed his loneliness.

  He made a cup of coffee and took down a book from the neatly filed travel section on Maisie’s shelf. Kinglake’s Eothen. He drank his coffee, reading bits at random, half-waiting for the telephone to ring. It didn’t. After nearly an hour, he began to feel at a loose end again and went downstairs to rejoin Rose’s little gathering.

  There were about thirty people there by this time, and the room was full of voices, nearly drowning the chaste Indian music on tape. He drifted to a group near the window, Rose was among them; they were talking about art and politics. How people went grinding on over the same things, chewing on them like bones they couldn’t bury or leave alone, he thought.

  ‘Take Solzhenitsyn,’ someone said. ‘His books are really political tracts, not novels. A work of art can never have any lesser aim than to be art. With Solzhenitsyn the aim is political.’

  ‘What utter nonsense,’ said Rose. ‘We read Paradise Lost at school. Would anyone dare to say that wasn’t art? Yet all Milton’s work was political.’

  ‘It depends what you mean
by politics,’ said an old man with wintry blue eyes and a foreign accent. ‘You could say that everything, even this glass I am holding, or that marble-topped table, is in its way political. A piece of spare Amish furniture makes a political statement, so does an elaborate eighteenth-century desk.’

  ‘Politics is part of life,’ agreed Rose. ‘We breathe it in. It is carried in our bloodstream.’

  Michael regarded her. ‘What particular politics are in your bloodstream, Rose?’ he said, reflecting that, at the moment, there was probably too much vodka in it.

  ‘She is a puritan,’ said Glantz. ‘That says everything.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Rose, ‘I bend with the wind. I float.’

  Michael laughed, and the old man looked at him severely.

  ‘If we have sense,’ he said, ‘we keep our politics secret to ourselves, keep it in the bloodstream only. You have never learned about that in this country – perhaps you will.’

  ‘What is your country?’ Michael asked. Habitually he kept his own Irishness out of things, it caused less trouble. He felt Irish only in Ireland. It was different with this old man, who wore his country on his sleeve.

  ‘I am a Russian,’ he said proudly, as if to say, ‘I am highly born.’

  There was a pause in the chatter amongst the little group, not an awkward pause, but one in which something of significance was being absorbed. Something that actually mattered to someone had been said.

  ‘I have never seen my own country,’ the old man went on. ‘My parents were made exiles and I was born in Paris.’

  ‘Mr Menshikov lives in London now,’ said Rose. ‘He has come to discuss business, he has some wonderful pre-Revolutionary pieces.’

  ‘Business not politics,’ said Michael, smiling and accepting a glass of wine and a plate of food – supermarket delicacies arranged artistically on a Victorian flowered dinner-plate.

  ‘Art not business,’ grinned Menshikov.

  ‘We’re back to politics, then,’ said Rose.

  ‘Exactly,’ said the old man. ‘And power. Power is the root of everything.’

  Oh, well, thought Michael, it passed the evening. He would rather have been with musician friends.

  The old man was talking about money for the organisation. He spoke of this organisation in a low voice, as if talking about God.

  Where was Maisie? wondered Michael. He supposed she was all right. A woman of the world, used to looking after herself. He was surprised how very much he missed her and wanted her. If anything had got into his bloodstream, it was her; and how quickly it had happened, like a fix, a strong drug. What would have happened if he had known where his rail ticket was that afternoon on Paddington Station? By now he would be immersed in practice and recording sessions and soon be thinking of going back to Ireland – and Kate. Instead of waiting for Maisie, listening to an old guy who lived in a sort of time-warp and seemed to be trying to raise funds for a secret society by selling his furniture. But the old man’s voice was clear in his head as he went upstairs to Maisie’s room, which had quickly become a sort of home to him now. ‘Power is the root of everything.’ Was it? Was it?

  But if you were in love you relinquished power over your loved one, as Bernard Glantz had said. Maisie had some kind of power over him. And why did he mind that?

  She hadn’t come home. He felt somehow diminished, enslaved now by his wish to hear the telephone ring, hear her voice. She had not come home. Was she showing she wasn’t enslaved by him? Showing who held the balance of power?

  Of course she’d just missed her train, or been persuaded by her mother to stay … or mugged on the last train home. Or she’d met another stranger on another station. This last prospect was the worst to contemplate. Worse than thinking of her bruised by a mugger’s blows, blood trickling from her nose. Why was it worse to think of another man caressing her than being hurt by another man? With Kate it wasn’t like that. With her it was the other way round.

  Impatient with his wandering, feckless thoughts, Michael took out his flute and began playing a piece by Corelli. Music was the thing. It was the only thing you could rely on.

  He finished up the beer in the fridge, ate some cold ravioli, went to bed and slept well.

  Next day he went over to Shepherd’s Bush and found them in the Fiddler’s Cat having a lunchtime session. He apologised for his absence, and got straight down to work.

  Maisie was still at the back of his mind, but the music was what was in control of him. They worked, and laughed, worked and drank and smoked, and worked. It was his niche, his home, his heavenly home, his hiding place.

  About nine o’clock that evening he telephoned Maisie from the telephone on the bare landing.

  ‘I’ve got to go to Kiev,’ she was saying, ‘for a conference on the twenty-fifth.’ Her voice sounded vague, far away, as if in Kiev already.

  ‘But that’s Christmas Day,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, well, everything doesn’t stop for Christmas Day there and it’s twelve days later in the Orthodox Church. Anyway, will you come?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll come, Maisie.’

  And they were back where they started.

  4

  THEY caught a mid-morning train down to Brighton.

  Brighton Station was bustling with life, festive with holly and bunches of mistletoe; chrysanthemums, white and bronze, stood in buckets of water.

  ‘Everyone’s doing their Christmas shopping,’ Maisie said, taking Michael’s arm. ‘Let’s do ours.’

  ‘Food first,’ said Michael.

  They found a red gingham table-clothed little cafe and had scrambled eggs and good coffee. Then they wandered about the Lanes, arm-in-arm. Maisie bought a scarf with roses on it for Rose, and perfume, ‘Elle-Même’, for her mother.

  Michael bought a cameo brooch and a little gold brooch set with pearls in the shape of a violin, both Victorian, to send to Ireland.

  ‘What does your mother look like?’ Maisie asked.

  ‘Like a witch,’ said Michael, ‘a fierce, intelligent old witch with a bleak sense of humour.’

  They found a post office and Michael wrapped the gifts there and then and got them off to Ireland. Maisie watched as he absorbedly wrote messages on two cards. Then, folding away his gold spectacles with a deft movement, he said, ‘What now, my love? What time is the appointment with your Russian aristo?’

  ‘Not for another couple of hours. I’ll take Ma’s present round. She’d like to meet you.’

  ‘Is she like a witch too?’

  ‘I don’t think so, not my idea of a witch, anyway. She’s my mother. I’m probably too close to see her or describe her objectively, I suppose she’s like me, only older.’ She felt his arm tighten about her.

  ‘Are you sure she won’t mind a strange man turning up? I could wait for you.’

  ‘She loves men. I want you to come.’

  ‘And I want to come.’

  ‘Really, you wouldn’t rather go for a drink?’

  ‘It’s tempting.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘I’m coming.’ He squeezed her arm and kissed her quickly as they walked. ‘No drinks. I wish to meet your mother cold sober.’ Which was why he laughed when Mrs Sharpe filled up his glass with whisky.

  They sat by the window looking out at the winter sunshine caressing the little front garden, and drank whisky and ate smoked salmon. Maisie gave her mother her gift, not to be opened until Christmas Day.

  ‘I always open my presents after Midnight Mass,’ said Mrs Sharpe. ‘Suppose I didn’t last out the night, I’d never know what I’d got. Coffee, anyone?’

  ‘Oh, yes, a quick cup of coffee, then we really must go. I’ll make it, Ma.’ And Maisie left Michael and her mother weighing each other up and chatting about the person they had in common.

  ‘She’s a clever girl,’ her mother said, as Maisie brought in the tray of coffee. ‘She speaks Russian and she makes a nice cup of coffee.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Michael smiled at
Maisie. She had once thought that wide, bright smile was a bit flash. What she had thought was flashiness was a sort of bitterness in the smile. She couldn’t quite define it, understand it; the bitterness was part of the smile, part of its warmth and gaiety. It turned Maisie’s guts to water.

  As they drank their coffee and chatted, Maisie could feel the slight disapproval her mother felt for Michael, not really for him, but for the relationship, the situation. She had not accepted the break-up of Maisie’s marriage. As far as she, Evelyn Sharpe, was concerned, her daughter was still married to Leo Shergold. But she was friendly enough, hospitable, of course.

  ‘More coffee?’ she was saying.

  ‘We must get off,’ said Maisie.

  ‘She’s always dashing about,’ said Michael. ‘A restless lady.’

  ‘Send me a card from Kiev.’

  ‘I’ll probably telephone.’ Maisie picked up her briefcase and pulled on her gloves; she was dressed quite formally for her meeting with Denisov.

  And when she got there she was glad that she was. For when Maisie and Michael were shown up to the large room overlooking the square, it was obvious that something extraordinary was happening.

  Often it is the sense of smell that reacts initially, picks things up, and it was the smell that Maisie noticed first. The room was blurred with the pungent fumes of incense. It is, like chloroform, a smell that touches the mind and clings to the memory. Denisov was there, sitting in a high-backed chair, looking very frail, perhaps ill. Michael was startled to see beside him the old man with the wintry-blue eyes, Menshikov, who had been at Rose’s soirée. Standing opposite was a robed priest of the Russian Orthodox Church who was swinging a censer back and forth in front of a small ikon, which Maisie recognised as the Ikon of the Mother of God of the Black Steppes. With a queer stirring of excitement, she knew that this was not a copy, but the legendary original.

  The atmosphere in the room was intense. With an involuntary movement, Michael crossed himself. It was something like the numinous sense of wonder that comes immediately after the birth of a child. A quietness. A sense of fullness, as if something had at last been accomplished; something that had been long waited for, long expected.