Now, after a final buoyant flourish of the bow, she laid her hand upon the strings to still their vibration. Was there any other instrument, she wondered, any other creature that could grunt with elegance? She rested her cheek briefly against the glowing wood, leaving a dusty peach-brown imprint, then leaned the cello against her chair and in all her calicoed splendour billowed across to the window.
She stood gazing out at the cedar tree, struggling to maintain the sensation of joyful calm that had possessed her whilst playing. But she had no sooner noted such feelings than joy became mere happiness, and pleasure transmuted quickly into a dullish lack of ease. May sighed and, for comfort, wrenched her thoughts to her recent colour workshop ‘There’s A Rainbow Round Your Shoulder’, which had been over-subscribed and very well received. But even this stratagem was only partially successful. Visions of uplifted participants all thinking aquamarine faded despite all her best efforts to the contrary, and the shadow of anxiety returned. She realised she was not even looking forward to her coming regression and these were often most exciting occasions.
May was extremely cross that this should be so. She didn’t have a lot of patience with folk who ‘mooned about’ as she put it. Fretting over this and that, refusing to get to grips with the problem, never mind putting it right. Rather self-indulgent she thought that sort of thing. Now she was doing it herself. And really without excuse, for there was certainly no shortage of people to go and talk to. Unfortunately one of them (she didn’t know which) was the cause of her concern. She would have liked to turn to the Master even though it was not usual to bother him with temporal matters. The fact that in this instance she could not caused her genuine distress. It was as if a constantly reliable source of warmth and light had been unkindly doused. She felt not only bereft but also rejected - which she knew to be unreasonable. The difficulty was that her beloved guru - innocently and unwittingly she was sure - was partially to blame for this sense of unease.
It had happened like this. Two days after Jim died May had been passing the Master’s chamber on her way to the laundry room. Although the door was ajar his beautiful passe-partout zodiac screen was positioned in such a way as to conceal any occupants. Low voices were chuntering on, stopping, starting again and May assumed a spiritual-growth stroke chakra-cleansing session was in progress. Then, suddenly a voice cried out: ‘Oh God - why couldn’t you have left well alone! If they do a postmor -’ A vigorous shushing cut this short.
The resulting silence seemed to May, standing as if bolted to the floor, quite stifling. Of a smothered, tightly wrapped quality. Then she understood from the rustle of a robe, rather than any footfall, that someone was coming around the screen. She jumped aside just in time, flattening herself against the corridor wall, and the door was firmly closed.
Trembling with surprised distress, May continued to stand there. She had hardly recognised the Master’s voice, so choked had it been with emotion. Whether anger or fear it was hard to say. Could have been either. Or both. She struggled to persuade herself that she had misunderstood or that the words, taken out of context (and she had heard none of the context), could have quite a different meaning from the one apparent. But to what could the words ‘post mortem’ apply except Jim’s death? The inference was surely inescapable.
In the laundry room, pouring ecologically sound enzyme-free pale green washing granules, May silently railed against the malevolent sprite who had directed her steps that morning. For, like the majority of the community, she firmly believed that the shape and disposition of her day was ordered not by herself but by her stars and she couldn’t say she’d not been warned. Zurba, moon of Mars, had been skidding about from here to breakfast all week.
When the time came to take out the dripping piles of brilliantly coloured washing, May couldn’t help reflecting on the contrast between their freshly rinsed unstained perfection and her own darkly blemished thoughts.
And then, about a month after this, another almost equally disturbing thing occurred. She had been awoken in the middle of the night by a soft bump in Jim’s room, which was next to her own. This was quickly followed by two more as if a chest of drawers was gently being opened and closed. May had heard someone moving around there on a couple of occasions during the day but had thought nothing of it, assuming that whoever it was would be about the sad task of sorting out Jim’s things preparatory to their disposal. But this nocturnal prowling was something else. Guessing at burglars, she had bravely taken up her heaviest tome (New Maps of Atlantis and Her Intergalactic Logoi), crept along the corridor and, holding her breath, with fingers pinched tight around the handle, gently tried Jim’s door. It was locked.
Silent though her pressure had been, May heard a sudden flurry of movement. Although alarmed she stood firm, holding New Maps high above her head. But the door remained closed. Uncertain what to do next, still listening, she heard a metallic grating sound and realised it was the window latch. She rushed back to her room but by the time she had put down the book and reached her own window it was too late. Next door’s casement gaped wide and she was convinced she saw a shadow, a dark disturbance, at the end of the terrace.
This made her rethink her assumption that the next step would be to raise the alarm. For whoever it was had not made for the street and the outside world. It would have been easy enough for them to do so for, like many other large Elizabethan houses, the Manor was only a modest distance from the main village street. There had been a bit of half-hearted vandalism a few months before, (some bulbs uprooted, rubbish thrown in the pond) and the Lodge had purchased a halogen lamp which switched itself on after dusk if a person or vehicle appeared on or near the drive. It was not on now.
Doubly disturbed, May rested on her window seat and gazed out into the perfumed night uncomforted by the rich complexity of garden scents or shining perfection of low hanging stars. It was a moment of extreme isolation for her. Not the bleak, four-in-the morning intensification of solitude when the possible time and manner of one’s death presses like a blindfold on the mind. Hers was a humbler but no less terrible sensation. She had discovered that in her Eden - for so happy was she at the Golden Windhorse no other name would do - was a serpent. Double-faced and -hearted, double-tongued.
Who it was she as yet had no idea, but she believed - no, she knew - that the person fleeing from Jim’s room had reentered the house. Her mind backtracked to that earlier disturbing snatch of conversation. She was convinced, even whilst chiding herself for such dramatic silliness, that the two incidents were connected. The temptation was to put them both aside. Carry on as usual in the hope that nothing else peculiar would happen, then in time the whole thing must surely fade from mind. The phrase ‘mind your own business’ was perhaps not entirely inappropriate here. But that sort of attitude was completely against the ethos of the community. The whole point of living in such a way was that everyone constantly minded everyone else’s business. That’s what caring was all about.
And so May’s thoughts treadmilled back to the well-worn theme of the mystery prowler and the mystery voice. Fretful and distracted, she had been tightly pleating her skirt. Now, released, the camels sprang forth giving a more than fair impression of a living caravan.