“If you want something to drink, you’ll have to see to it yourself.”
“Later. Do you want something?”
She shakes her head, gently rocking Lila back and forth.
“When is Don back?” Don is a soloist now, with the London Symphony Orchestra, in which Thea also used to play. They’re touring Europe.
“Tonight.” She tells me about Lila, who already sleeps the whole night through sometimes. The children’s voices mingle with hers, with the deep, distant drone of machines in the factory on the other side of the street. The city seems to be growing louder and louder.
“Thomas wants to marry me.”
“Again?” Thea gives a little shake of her head as she looks at me.
“I believe he really means it.”
“I’m sure he does.” She sighs.
“But he isn’t faithful. He isn’t the marrying kind. Me neither.”
“You could do it. And then just carry on as you are.” Her face expresses optimism, her voice sounds dubious.
“I walked home by the river yesterday, and saw how it would be. I could go back. He was busy painting the Thames again, the view from his boat, his fourth one.”
“Mine!” Dodie runs into the room with Joey close behind. He’s trying to snatch a wooden train from her hand—and when that doesn’t work, he tugs at her pinafore, and then Dodie screams. Thea intervenes, puts Dodie in a corner with her train and gives Joey a crust of bread.
“How are things in the orchestra now?”
“Same as ever. We’re playing Tchaikovsky.”
“So you’re in that phase again. What about your research?”
“I’m reading a book at the moment about how they condition Pigeons. Really nasty work.” I tell her about the way the Pigeons are trained, with food and electric shocks. “You know what I think: that it’s not only immoral to study birds in lab conditions, but it’s also bad science. They behave differently then. The birds we had at home when I was young were much cleverer than this kind of research suggests.”
“Joey, leave your sister alone!”
I stand up. “Would you like a cup of tea?” When I’m in the kitchen I put the kettle on and make a start on the washing up. Just enough light falls through the octagonal windowpanes onto the work surface.
“Len, don’t wash up,” Thea calls from the sitting room. I pretend not to hear.
When I go back to the room, everything is peaceful. Joey is playing in a corner with the train. Dodie is dressing a doll. Thea puts Lila into her cradle. I give her a cup of tea, lukewarm, milky and sugary, just as she likes it.
“You didn’t wash up, did you, Len?”
“Is this how you thought it would be?” I tilt my head to catch her eye.
She laughs. “No. And it’s not what I wanted either. But it’s fine. When Don’s home again, I’ll have some breathing space.”
“Don’t you miss performing?”
She shakes her head. “No time for that.” Lila starts to cry. “Would you like to hold her a while?” Thea rocks her back and forth, till she has calmed down, and then puts her in my arms. “That suits you. But listen, I’ve got something to tell you. We’re probably going to emigrate, to Canada. Don wants to go back. He can get a position there too.”
“Really? And you think it would work out?”
“It’s so beautiful there.” She has a dreamy look. “Wilderness. Untouched forests, wild creatures. And it always snows in the winter.”
I don’t tell her she could go to Scotland for that. Lila gazes at me and I sing softly to her, about a fat little mouse that has left its nest for the very first time, until she falls asleep, and wakes up again two seconds later and starts crying.
“Billie!” Stockdale silences the orchestra with a swift movement of the hand. The premiere is tomorrow and he’s not at all happy.
“Come on,” I say. “Just let us play right through, for once. You yourself don’t know exactly what you want. One moment it’s Joan’s fault, then Billie’s, and then someone else’s, but you’re not setting the right tempo.”
Everyone looks at me in amazement. It’s an unwritten rule that we simply accept Stockdale’s fits of temper. He’s the boss. There’s a story about a clarinettist, Sasha, who answered him back once. She was never hired anywhere again. It was before my time and the story has, of course, been embroidered.
The silence grows deeper, until someone finally coughs—Priscilla, or one of the other cellists.
“So. And you know better, do you? Perhaps you’d like to stand here then. Put your violin down.”
“I don’t know better. It’s just that it’s always the same.” I speak loudly and clearly. “You start a little too slow, for the upbeat and the first few bars, and then you begin to speed up and that’s the point where it all goes wrong. So, either you should start at a swifter tempo, or you should stick with us after the first bar.”
“Come on then.” He is slowly turning red. His fingers are white around his baton.
“I don’t want to quarrel with you. But I’m not the only one who thinks this.”
“Oh, is that right? Not the only one.” He taps his baton on the palm of his other hand, controlled, deliberate and in the correct time.
I glance behind me—no one is backing me up, no one makes eye contact, everyone is waiting till this is over. Fine. Let them sort it out themselves. “Well then. Are we going to continue?”
Stockdale gives the upbeat, quicker than before. We play the whole piece just a little too swiftly, but all the way through to the end, and a little too loudly; the nerves need to be expressed, apparently.
“Gwen,” Stockdale says as I’m putting my violin in its case. “Do you have a moment?”
Joan walks past, her face averted. So, no support from her either.
“I’m sorry I said it in front of the others.” I look directly at him. The colour of his face has returned to normal.
“So they talk about it, do they?”
“Everyone talks about everything and sometimes about you.”
He briefly clenches his fists. “The gossip here is unhealthy!”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“Come on, Gwen. Seen like that, it’s all a case of much ado about nothing. We’re off to the bar. And practise with that baton a little, since you’re such an expert.”
On Sunday I walk back by the same route, along the Thames, which lays its waves over noise, absorbing sounds, returning them, not as echoes but as wind. I was walking swiftly when I set off, but at the station I’m passed by city gents, at the water by day trippers, where the path narrows by children with buckets and spades on their way to the riverbank, and where the ash trees start I can’t go on. I sit down on a tree stump. Three steps further and I would be able to see the boat.
A Magpie lands in front of me, snatches something from the ground, and flies up. A few weeks ago I wrote a response to a study on the language of Magpies—they’d been totally isolated from their kind and treated like machines, and that was the inevitable result of the experiment too; and yet Magpies are really sociable birds, who can be taught anything. My letter was published. The editor wrote back to me and asked if I also did scientific research.
An older man, with a walking stick, tips his hat to me in greeting. I’ve seen him here before—he lives somewhere in the area. I wave back.
Two Crows land not far from my feet. They have something to discuss. They don’t hold it back.
I stand up, pat the dirt off my skirt, breathe in. A woman’s voice is calling something, laughing. She is blonde, young, taller than me and slender. Thomas is holding her arm, and he’s laughing too, his face alight. He only sees me when I’m really close.
“Len. I thought…” He shakes his head. “I thought that you, that we…”