‘How do you know that? Were you spying? How pervy. What did you see?’
‘Never mind what I saw—’
‘Well you obviously do.’
He thinks of her father, the barrister, cross-examining a witness to expose the truth. ‘I saw him with a woman, in the van. Fucking.’
‘And you think it might have been me?’
‘You weren’t around anywhere. Someone said you were in the van.’
‘Someone said,’ she repeats, her tone laden with sarcasm. There is a silence. And then her voice in the darkness: ‘Anyway, if it was me, what would you do?’
It’s a good question. What would he do? ‘I just need to know, that’s all.’
‘I don’t think need has anything to do with it. You want to know. You want to know what I do with my body.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘It’s ownership, isn’t it? You want to own my body, and the thought of my sharing it with other men – Elliot or whoever – makes you think you’ve been robbed of something that’s yours. But it’s my body, to do with what I like.’
‘You’re putting words into my mouth.’
‘I don’t think I am. I think you are a typical bourgeois male chauvinist.’
And with that she turns away from him and goes to sleep. James lies beside her in the narrow bed. Still he doesn’t know. Was that her in the van with Elliot, or not?
In the morning she claims to remember little of the evening before. ‘What happened?’ she asks, sitting up in bed, her hair in chaos, her face pale and drawn. As she looks round the cramped room she gives strange glimpses of her mother. ‘God, I feel awful. Did I behave badly?’
‘You weren’t at your most charming.’
‘You say that just to get your own back.’ The sheet has slipped from her shoulders. Her small breasts look limp, like discarded balloons after the party. ‘The music was good. I remember the music.’ A sudden, sideways glance. ‘Did I do things I have to apologise for?’
‘If you don’t remember them, I don’t think they count.’
‘How very Jesuitical of you. Did we…?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not. I remember a long walk, going round and round in circles.’ She slips out of bed and roots around amidst the mess for a T-shirt. ‘God, I feel awful.’
Watching her, James feels intimacy alloyed with indifference. It’s how he imagines a marriage might be after many years, when love has died and familiarity has taken its place. While she goes to the bathroom he gets dressed and finds Jitka in the tiny kitchen making coffee. Her husband has gone out early. Something to do with his work. She looks at James with quiet, thoughtful eyes. ‘Did you have a good time last evening?’
He smiles at her and wonders, thinking of how he danced with her, pressed up hard against her for a moment, touching his lips on hers.
‘It was fun. The music was good, wasn’t it?’
She laughs. ‘The music was bad. But it was still fun.’ She pushes past him in the narrow space, resting her hand on his waist for a fraction of a second longer than one might expect.
28
That evening there is the Birgit Eckstein concert, in a nineteenth-century auditorium named after a prince of an empire that no longer exists. The orchestra – the sharp figure of Jitka is there in the first violins – is flanked by gilded columns and backed by the façade of a Greek temple. Overhead is a ceiling of plasterwork in blue and gold, while all around are fluted pillars and pilasters. Into the focus of this comes first the conductor, the Russian Gennady Egorkin, a sharp, anxious man with a receding hairline that makes him look older than he is. He stands on his little podium and faces the applause with something like apprehension. Then the fragile figure of Birgit Eckstein appears in the wings, looking a little like a cleaning lady who has just found a cello lying round the place, picked it up and wandered onto the stage to find the owner. But she is the owner, and Egorkin holds her hand aloft to display the fact while she gazes round with faint bemusement at the audience. The applause engulfs the pair of them. It echoes from the nymphs and satyrs, thunders on the boards, resonates in the instruments. As it slowly dies away Frau Eckstein takes her seat, hitches up her skirts and pulls the cello to her. Her Guadagnini, an Italian gigolo clutched between her legs.
There follows an intense silence. One thousand people anticipating the moment. Egorkin bows faintly towards Eckstein, then turns to the orchestra. Maybe everything is to his satisfaction. If so, he raises his baton to start, like an artist putting his brush to canvas, and with quiet care paints the first notes – solemn, pensive strokes, a theme played back and forth between woodwind and strings while Birgit Eckstein sits immobile on her plinth, as though cast in pewter. It is only when the orchestra seems about to reach some kind of conclusion that suddenly, almost unexpectedly, she moves to strike her cello. That act brings about a kind of miracle, something strangely organic, a fusion between the sensuous curves of the instrument and the sharp angles of Birgit Eckstein’s small frame, the two contrasting shapes becoming one sonorous body resonating throughout the auditorium, crying out in tones that are almost human. Is it a lament for something innocent that is lost for ever? James tries to cling to the notes as they circle round him, but they are ephemeral, evanescent, each following the other and all dying away before he can work out what to do with them. It is the totality that matters, not the fragments; the whole complex wave equation, not the individual terms. And as he listens, emotion creeps up on him without his being aware of it, like a thief in the night coshing him from behind. His nose stings and his eyes smart. Frau Eckstein’s small figure clutches at the body of the cello, grips its torso between her legs, sways with it, senses – you can tell, from the body of the auditorium you can tell – the vibrations of it with her thighs and her belly as she draws her bow across the strings as though fingering the flesh of a lover. He had never imagined that anything to do with classical music could be so blatantly sexual. And he senses Ellie beside him feeling the same thing. What she cannot experience with sex she can capture here – possession, surrender, the absorption of self into something greater than the individual. Perhaps she knows it. She grips his hand with tight talons while the crescendos, the climaxes, the agonising slides into the depths, the slow, meditative passages work their way through the hall and into the thousand listening minds.
After the performance there is applause and bowing and a bouquet of flowers. While the orchestra stands, the indomitable soloist leaves for the wings before being called back to further plaudits, a strange ritual that takes on some of the qualities of a dance, the conductor holding high her hand as though leading her in a gavotte, Birgit Eckstein carrying her cello with the other, the orchestra players making their own little gestures of applause, the whole thing choreographed by obscure tradition. People call for an encore and on her third re-entry Frau Eckstein offers a faint smile and steps back onto the podium. There is immediate silence. She sits, composes herself for a moment, then lifts her bow, and from the first chord James knows, with the sudden thrill of arcane knowledge, what it will be – the Prelude from Bach’s C-minor cello suite. When the piece comes to the end amidst the storm of more applause, he is in tears.
A novel experience, that, to be moved to tears by the abstract sounds of music. In fact, a first for James. Something to do with the instrument itself, so close to the human voice in tone and timbre, but also something to do with the shock of familiarity, that he knew the player and also that he knew what she was going to play as an encore and recognised it as soon as she struck the first note.