The Devil's Music Page 6

  Wednesday: dust through house, rugs, baking.

  Thursday:

  Friday:

  The twin tub stands in the middle of the kitchen floor, filled with damp washing that needs to be put through the wringer, and there’s the lining of the new winter curtains to finish. But there’s that weight of slowness, a silting. Sometimes you just sit. You sit on the edge of the armchair as if you’re about to get up and get on with something.

  You count the stairs as you climb them. In Andy’s bedroom, a red wigwam takes up most of the floor space and every night since his fifth birthday he’s slept in there. His bow and arrows lie on the floor by the entrance. Through the tasselled door flaps, the space inside the tent is inviting, red and warm from the glow of the sun on the material. Andy’s stroking the coloured feathers of his headdress from base to tip. He wriggles over to the back of the wigwam to make room.

  You slip off your shoes, get down on hands and knees and crawl in. There’s the smell of cheap, dyed cotton. No room to lie flat, so you tuck your legs up. Already the skin behind your knees is damp and slippery. He leans across you and pulls at the door flaps, trying to make them meet. The manufacturers have been economical with the fabric and it is flimsy, the hemmed edges flop apart again. You prop Hiawatha on your thighs and Andy snuggles close, thumb in his mouth. The top of his head is warm and biscuity.

  You begin to read and his fingers on the feathers slow, then stop, so you ease the headdress from his head, lower the book on to the eiderdown and look up into the cone of the wigwam where the four long canes meet and poke through the cloth. The repetitive rhythm of Hiawatha laps at your mind:

  dark behind it rose the forest,

  rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,

  rose the firs with cones upon them,

  bright before it beat the water.

  Your eyes have closed. The outside sounds of the June day buzz at your ears: the lawnmower a few gardens away; sparrows landing on the gutter. Then, the whoosh of car tyres, slick, glides you along, takes you with it, and you’re back at St Mary’s, years ago, it’s raining, and you’re hurrying from the nurses’ home, shutting the door on the steamy, crowded kitchen: the clothes airer in front of the stove hung with stockings and suspenders; Hoggie at the ironing board again because she has a date and is trying to straighten her red frizz by ironing it through brown paper; Nurse Pierce, limp on a chair, just come in from her shift, her feet in a bowl of water. You almost run, would if it was permitted, across the forecourt towards the tall lighted windows of the hospital to push through the swing doors and be swept up by the current of routine and emergency before you even have time to remove your cloak. You’re laughing and chattering with the other nurses as Mr Robertson, the consultant oncologist with a penchant for patterned bow ties, passes, raises his tufted eyebrows that point in different directions, says, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ because he thinks you look like Ingrid Bergman – and from behind a clipboard Matron shoots stern looks through the thick brown frames of her glasses.

  And your Oxford lace-ups are marching down the corridor as your fingers pin your hat into your hair, your eyes glance at the watch swinging against your apron, you check the instruments fanned out, gleaming metal on white cloth, and the heat from the circle of lights above the operating table is on your face, fierce.

  But it’s the sun on your eyelids, glaring through the walls of the wigwam, that wakes you. You twist over, curled on your side, to face Andy and, as you do so, your breasts – swollen and tender, heavy with the milk Elaine doesn’t drink – shift position.

  Andy lies on his stomach, arms up on either side of his head, hair damp around his ears. He sleeps so soundly you could pick up a leg or an arm and let it down without him stirring. You run two fingertips across the top of his back, where his neck meets his shoulders and blond hairs lie against his skin. The hairs gather together, growing towards his spine. He’s breathing through his mouth because one cheek is squashed against the pillow, pushing his lips apart. They are moist. You remember your nipples spurting milk in response to his cries. Sometimes your breasts would be full and tight as they are now and you would go to him, nudge him awake, desperate for the relief as he latched on and began to suck. Often, when his lips slid from your nipple as he fell asleep, he’d have a milky blister from sucking. You’d lower him into his pram and wheel him down the garden knowing that his contented sleep was entirely due to you. You don’t want to spoil him, Michael had said.

  If you were to offer him your full breast now, if you were to dab his bottom lip with the tip of your nipple, would he, in his sleep, begin to suck? You bend towards him, feeling the heat rise up from his skin, and put your lips on his back, between his shoulder blades. His breathing is steady.

  You sit up. It’s stuffy in here, the air like a sponge. You should make yourself get on with something while he’s asleep. You crawl out of the wigwam and wander into the box room where it’s cooler. The sewing machine on its small table is surrounded by piles of folded curtain material. The mending basket is overflowing.

  You’ll ask Michael if you can go down to The Siding earlier this summer. Jean could come with you to help with the three children; she loves the railway carriage house as much as you do. You’ll feel better under the open skies, crunching over shingle banks, smelling the mudflats at low tide and sleeping to the suck and whisper of waves.

  Early days, is what you’d say to a patient. Take it easy, give yourself time.

  You have hours, day after day of time.

  You should finish the winter curtains as quickly as possible because you’ve bought some material in the sales to make curtains for The Siding. In the end-of-roll box there were several oddments of a pale blue splashed with huge dark cornflowers, very cheap, and just right for the small windows of the railway carriages – four rows of them; a lot of sewing to do. The first thing you’ll do when you get down there this summer is take down the pieces of limp towelling and sides-to-middle sheets. Make do and mend. You haven’t told Michael about the cornflower material; you scrimped on the housekeeping.

  The lining material is thinner than the green velvet that you have chosen for the winter curtains, and your guiding fingers can only just keep pace with the silver foot as it slips along the ironed seam. Even so, you want to press harder on the pedal, to keep pressing until the needle can no longer keep up, until its steady up and down is forced into a different rhythm, a more extravagant motion, one that no longer produces a row of tidy stitches.

  Your hair is hot and heavy. You lift it with both hands, relishing the shift of air on your neck as you twist and divide the handfuls of hair into sections, folding them into the French roll you wore for nursing, pinned with three Kirby grips from your pocket.

  Michael says the winter curtains for the house should go up in September, so you aim to have them ready before you go down to Sussex for the summer. He wants to save on the coal bill. The door that opens on to the garden doesn’t fit well, and there is a cold draught once the fire is lit. He wants a curtain over the front door too.

  The needle jerks. It snaps. You lift the foot, turn the seam over and find that the thread is tangled into a clump. The previous twelve inches or so of stitches have pulled the seam into wrinkles. It will have to be unpicked.

  Michael has already had bristles fitted along the bottom of the back door, and metal strips around the door frame. You worried about Andy’s fingers getting caught. He’ll only do it once, Michael said.

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  You can see Michael’s face in the dressing-table mirror three times.

  ‘She’s almost four.’

  His mouth is talking from three different angles. Triple. The word sounds precarious. And it doesn’t seem possible that four years have passed since Elaine’s birth.

  ‘Soon she’ll be too heavy for you to lift. A decision has to be made.’ He bends towards his reflection and slides the knot of his tie up to his collar. The centre mirror ti
lts. A deft adjustment settles the knot into place, three times. ‘—take the expert advice we’re given—’

  His words topple like skittles; their falling clatter making you dizzy.

  ‘—Elaine’s awareness—M.D.—general well-being—future complications—’

  The bedspread lies wrinkled on the floor.

  C a n d l e

  w i c k

  Meanings dwindle into images; nonsense.

  ‘—institutions—several highly recommended—beneficial—siblings—’

  No.

  You will tell him about yesterday. Slicing onions, Elaine asleep in the carrycot, legs splayed open, her nose close to the curled fingers of one hand as if she was trying to breathe her own smell. Then, the doorbell, Elaine’s eyes flying open, a little gasp.

  You will tell him, now, and then this will stop. But you’re half in, half out of bed, nightdress rucked under your thighs, words rolled up somewhere, like socks put away in a drawer.

  ‘For all concerned—future—’

  It was only yesterday. The doorbell rang again, an insistent buzz, and Elaine straightened her legs, beat them twice on the mattress, her eyes fixed on you. You’d thrown down the knife, wiped the smell of onions on to your apron and heaved Elaine up out of the carrycot.

  ‘There are no other options.’

  Take a breath. Speak now.

  You’re back, almost tipsy with it, yesterday, on the doorstep – smiling and stumbling a little, Elaine clasped against one shoulder – and the huge, tawny man in white painting overalls smiles back, the tips of his teeth showing through a bush of reddish beard. Something: a swoop in your blood. You had wanted to grasp hold of him, tell him. Elaine had heard the bell. You were certain. You wanted it to happen again. He could ring the doorbell again. Your eyes pricked from the onions. He put down his tool box and offered his hand.

  It might happen again.

  Michael pauses at the bedroom door. He’s crisp and ordered, ready for the hospital. You smudge the tears from your face with the heel of your hand.

  ‘We can’t go on like this.’ He gestures towards the contents of the room, the tasselled bedside lamps, the pink roses on the eiderdown, as if this is the unsatisfactory clutter of your marriage. ‘You’re exhausted.’

  There’s dust on the glass top of the dressing table, a pattern of spring flowers on the curtains: wisteria blue, the colour of Elaine’s eyes.

  You look back to him. ‘No.’

  ‘Well, someone has to do something, make a decision, soon.’

  He closes the door. A distant rattle from a passing train. Anger scrapes in your stomach.

  M.D. he always says, M.D. Why can’t he say what he means? Why can’t he just say, ‘Mentally Deficient’?

  You get up, walk through to the box room where Elaine is lying on her back, awake, but silent and still in the early morning light. Andy is curled, asleep on the floor beside her cot, wrapped in his eiderdown.

  Later, you reach into the cupboard under the sink for Vim and a cloth. From behind the closed door of the dining room comes the muffled sound of movement: a ladder dragged across bare floorboards; the metallic ring of a wallpaper scraper. The broad, tawny-haired man has been in there for hours, since before you took the children to school. It’s difficult to concentrate. Elaine is propped up with cushions in her usual place on a rug on the floor, but there’s a charge to the air – someone else, not a child but an adult, in the house all day. You can’t shake off the sense of his presence. You notice fragments of yourself: the angle of your wrist and gold watch; toes peeping out from cutaway shoes; bare legs beneath the flared skirt of your gaily patterned sundress.

  It’s warm for May; perhaps you could offer him a drink.

  Outside the dining room you pause; listen. There’s the shift of boots on gritty boards; a sigh. You knock on the door before opening it. The dining room is unrecognisable, a space heaped with dust sheets and paint pots, strips of wallpaper hanging from the walls. The brown tiled surround of the fireplace is surreal: order and pattern in the middle of the chaos. You sniff, feeling a sneeze at the back of your nose. The air smells of soot and glue.

  ‘Some tea?’ Your voice echoes in the uncarpeted room. ‘And would you like to take your lunch in the kitchen?’

  ‘Ay, if you’re sure now.’ His accent gives the words a different texture. You concentrate so as to catch the separate sounds and make sense of them. Scottish? Irish? He strides towards you, then halts, glancing down at his filthy boots. ‘I’ll take these off, will I not?’

  He bends and his sudden dipping movement is startling – the bulk of him so close, his head down at your feet, his shoulder muscles swelling as he tugs at his shoelaces. You turn quickly to the kitchen.

  He pads after you, the top part of his overalls hanging down from his waist. Underneath, stretched over his torso, is a faded cotton T-shirt that seems incongruous – a child’s item of clothing. He’s young, possibly ten years younger than you. Michael mentioned a few details when he arranged for the redecoration. He’s the son of a patient, a struggling artist living in a houseboat on the river. His name ... is it Ian? The family is from somewhere north of Aberdeen.

  There’s a patch of sweat on his chest and coppery hair surges at the neck of his T-shirt. His hair is tousled and pale with plaster dust. He puts a hand up to it, and through a rip in the seam under the arm of his T-shirt you catch a glimpse of his underarm hair: thick, fluffy, almost blond.

  ‘Ach, I’ll mebbe step outside. Hae a wee dust doon.’ He grins like a boy.

  From her rug on the floor, Elaine whimpers. She’s miserable today, her chin red and sore from the dribble. You put the tea towel and cutlery down on the draining board. He comes in through the back door, asks if he can hold her and already he has his back to you, squatting down over the rug and moving a hand with fingers spread wide to catch Elaine’s eye. She quietens, gazing up at him.

  Reaching up to the cupboard for teacups and saucers, you watch as he puts his hands under Elaine’s arms to lift her. He straightens, holding her out at arm’s length as if gauging how best to hold a solid four-year-old child who has the wavering head of a newborn.

  ‘She’s ...,’ you begin, because Elaine will not be comfortable held like that, but he is speaking, ‘—such a bonny wee lass.’ He holds her now with her stomach firm against his chest, one arm running up her back and a broad hand spread across her shoulder blades. Blond hairs gleam on his forearm. Elaine’s head bobs at his shoulder, her neck straining.

  You swirl boiling water round the teapot as he dandles Elaine around the kitchen, murmuring to her and showing her things over his shoulder. He points out the cupboard doors, swinging them open and closed, open and closed. He flaps the tea towels hanging from the airer, pulls the roller towel on the back door so that it rattles and the moving stripes of colour catch her eye. Her head stills. Whenever he stops walking he lifts one heel up and down in a rapid, repetitive rhythm that jiggles Elaine’s body. She starts with her humming noise, a sort of musical groan in her throat that varies pitch with the vibrations of his movement. You stir the tea; the tension in your shoulders eases.

  He stands, holding Elaine, jiggling, while he drinks his tea and that’s when he tells you about his sixteen-year-old brother who lies on the settee for most of the day. He can’t speak a single word.

  ‘But he has a smile,’ Ian says. ‘A smile for his own breathing. Smiles ear to ear when you step into the room. You canny ask for more.’

  Ian refuses to sit to eat his sandwiches, so you pass them to him one by one from the greaseproof paper bundle he’s brought with him. He holds Elaine; she’s quiet and relaxed. He asks questions, and you are talking, about the children, and then about nursing. You find yourself telling him about studying for your final exams at St Mary’s, how cold the nursing home was. To keep warm, you and Pierce and Hoggie bought the cheapest tickets you could at Paddington Underground and travelled round and round the Inner Circle Line with your books. After th
e twelve-hour shifts on the wards, the lull of the train’s rhythm and the warm air made you dozy. You pinched the skin on each others’ arms to keep awake.

  When Elaine falls asleep in his arms, he passes her over and you carry her out to the pram. You stretch the cat net over and think of the Mary’s Penny you were awarded after four years of nursing training, its inscription, ‘Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.’ You were proud to be a nurse from St Mary’s. Is that why you’re still talking about it as if it were only yesterday? As Michael’s wife you have no need to work the wards. And now that he’s arranged for Mrs Hubbard to come and clean three times a week, the days have even less of a sense of purpose.

  Running your hands through your hair, feeling your skull, you find it, the lump – small, hard – from the dressmaker’s pin that anchored the nurse’s cap to your head. Fanned folds of fine starched muslin were held in place with two white Kirby grips at the back and, at the front, the pin pushed through the underside of the starched band, its sharp point embedded into your scalp. ‘It will,’ Sister Tutor said, ‘hold the cap in place, even in the storm of a surgeon’s fury.’ And once the hard round ‘pea’ had formed, the pin was no longer painful. The local hairdresser felt it. She met your eyes in the mirror and said, ‘Another nurse from St Mary’s?’ Nodding sagely, she tapped her scissors on the back of your chair. ‘Can always tell.’

  By the time you step back into the kitchen, it’s empty. Ian has returned to the dining room and the door is closed.

  Chapter 2

  Susie is five. I need to teach her about knots and untying.

  The garage doors rattle in the wind. On the concrete there’s a wet patch where the rain blows in. Father’s saws hang on nails, big saw down to little saw. By his vice is the tin of green jelly stuff for cleaning his hands. There’s the smell of dirty metal and pine-tree sawdust and the dark brown stuff Father paints on the garden fences every summer. I’m not allowed in here by myself.