The access to their top-floor flat was up a metal staircase added on to the side of the house, which gave out a booming noise however quietly you tried to step. If the Cerrutis had too many visitors, or Phil ran back two at a time because he’d forgotten something, or Nia rapt in one of her daydreams came stomping up, a heavy stolid little thing, after playing out in the garden, then the retired Reverend Underwood who lived with his wife on the floor below would pull back the net curtains and rap on the windows at them. Helen made Phil climb up in his socks when he came in after playing late at night, with his shoes in his hand, unless it was raining. She also feared that if he’d been drinking he’d slip on those damn stairs and break his neck. And the stairs meant she had to keep Sophie’s pushchair down in the garage where Phil kept the car. Every expedition, even round the corner to the grocer’s, or to the clinic for Sophie’s orange juice, was a performance; when they got home she had to climb the stairs with Sophie struggling in her arms, laden with her shopping bags, clinging on to the metal handrail, desperate not to look down. Nia would go first and be entrusted with the keys. Straining on her stout legs she could just reach the keyhole. Solemn with her own importance, each time not quite believing that the trick would work, she would stagger forwards, hanging on to the keys, as the door swung in upon the familiar safe scene, extraordinarily unchanged since the moment they’d gone out, which would by now seem to Nia like hours and long ages ago.
Helen left Phil on an April evening, at about half past six. They had parted at breakfast on perfectly friendly terms; then one of Phil’s lessons had been cancelled in the afternoon, which meant less money, and she had heard him bounding up the stairs, pleased of course at the release, a couple of hours before she expected him. She wasn’t ready for him; she’d taken advantage of Sophie’s afternoon nap to wash the linoleum in the kitchen, and was on her hands and knees in her oldest slacks, with her hair tied up in a scarf. Nia was leading one of her dolls on an adventure round the lounge, instructing it confidingly: along the bookcases made of planks and bricks, behind the jazz records, among the hilly cushions on the low couch covered in olive green, through the forest of the goatskin rug whose skin peeled in scraps that looked like tissue paper. The weather was grey, the clouds had been suffused all day with a bright light that never quite broke through them. Helen had all the windows open up here in the flat, she hated stuffiness; they were so high at the top of the house that they looked out into the hearts of the garden trees almost as if they were birds nesting. It was that suspenseful moment in spring when the cold has loosened its grip, the tender leaves are bursting out everywhere, a bitter green smell tugs at the senses. The adults are all poised for something momentous to happen to fill out the meaning of this transformation, anxious already in case another year is slipping past without certainty, without anything becoming clear.
— That’s a very attractive proposition, said Phil when he came in and saw her scrubbing the floor intently with her back to him, her bottom stuck up in the air. He ran his hand suggestively around the curve of it under the tight cloth.
She looked over her shoulder at him, resting her weight on one arm, wiping her sweaty face on her shirtsleeve. — You’re early.
— Cancellation, he said jubilantly. — Freedom! I’ve come home to practise.
Usually, when she was ready for him, Helen made an effort to be welcoming when Phil came home: to have a meal ready, to freshen up her make-up and perfume, to take an interest in whatever he’d been doing. She had herself had a perfectly nice day. She had taken the girls to the park on the way back from the shops this morning; this evening when Phil went to play she was going to cut out the new chunky white cotton drill she had bought to make a suit to wear to his sister’s wedding. She didn’t even mind washing the floor. She was sorry for Phil, having to go out and teach when he hated it.
— But you can’t practise here, she said.
This was their oldest quarrel, ever since they’d moved from their first flat to this one, after Nia was born.
— They won’t be in, he said easily, as if they hadn’t been over all this so many times before. — They won’t mind.
— Why didn’t you stay and practise at the college?
— Because I hate the college. Because I can’t wait to shake the stinking dust of the college off my shoes.
— But at college they have soundproof rooms.
He stood quietly then for a few moments without moving; Helen pretended not to notice his portentousness, swirling the scrubbing brush in her bucket of water.
— Do you really hate my music so much, Phil said: not as a question but in a sort of wondering cold calm.
Phil Cerruti was a very good alto player, something in the style of Art Pepper but of course not that good. Art Pepper was his hero; he played his records over and over, he learned his solos off by heart. He got a lot of work, in the city in the west of England where they lived and the area round about, but not enough work yet to give up teaching. Helen loved him to play. She had fallen in love with him watching him onstage: his small loose-jointed body, its movements delicate and finished as a cat’s, twitching to the off-beat. Moods passed visibly, like weather, over the transparent white skin of his face, blue under his eyes when he was tired. Men were drawn to Phil as well as women; his energy was a steady heat, a promise. He walked out of the kitchen without another word and went into the lounge. Helen went on scrubbing the floor for a while and then she got to her feet with her scrubbing brush still in her hand, and followed after him as if she had something more to say. Phil was sitting on the couch beside the open alto case, wetting the reed in his mouthpiece. He had let his thick black hair grow recently almost down to his shoulders (the teacher-training college had complained). Nia and her doll were paused en route around the room, looking at him; Helen knew she was surprised that her daddy hadn’t greeted her with his usual exuberance.
— All day, Helen said, — I have to stop the children running around, in case the Underwoods start banging on the ceiling.
— Let them bang. We pay our rent, we have a perfect right for our children to run around, for me to practise my music if I want to.
— Don’t raise your voice, she said. — They’ll hear you.
— What the hell do I care, if they hear me?
— I have to live here with them, all day every day.
— Then let’s move. This is insane. I need to play. We need to feel free, in our own home.
— We’ll never find a flat as nice as this, in such a nice area, for this rent.
— What do I care about nice?
— I care.
— I can’t live like this, Phil shouted. — You’re killing me.
He dropped the alto on the couch and rolled on to the floor, shouting at whoever might be listening in the flat below as loud as he could, with his face down against the carpet. — You’re bloody killing me! For Christ’s sake!
Helen threw the scrubbing brush hard at him. Dirty water sprayed around; the brush bounced against his temple, wooden side down, and he yelped in real pain and surprise. — Jesus Christ! Nia looked astonished and embarrassed. Helen went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her and lay down on the bed. Sophie was still asleep in her cot in the corner, her breathing weightless and tiny as a feather on the air. The rank smell of Phil’s hair on the pillow filled Helen’s nose and senses; her heart seemed to be leaping to escape out of her breast. They quite often quarrelled; what she said to herself usually was that Phil was like a child, emotional and volatile. But today she believed it when he said she was killing him. She had been washing the floor so contentedly, and then in the space of a few minutes her body had been seized and occupied by this violent tempest; she saw starkly that their two lives now were set against one another, that he was desperate for freedom and art and that she needed to stop him having them. She had heard the scrubbing brush crack against his skull; she couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t true, that she didn’t want to destroy him. It was horrible, that they were yoked together in this marriage. She thought that if they went on like this she might one day soon tear his saxophone out of his mouth and stamp on it and break its keys.