Dying Fall (11 page)

She nodded, and she tried to smile. But her eyes were filling with tears.

‘Maybe you don't want to talk about what's upset you. Maybe you're afraid to.'

She flinched.

‘If you can't talk to me, couldn't you talk to one of the college counsellors?'

She shook her head. ‘And I don't want you to, either, miss. Things get around.'

‘Not from our counsellors. Everything you tell them is confidential. You know that.'

She shook her head stubbornly.

‘How about I talk to them in general terms? Find out –'

‘I don't want you to find out nothing. Oh, miss –'

‘OK. Manjit. I won't do anything without your say-so. I want you to know I'll always listen if you want to talk to me. Right? And I want you to write down this – it's my home telephone number.'

She looked me straight in the eyes. ‘Thanks, miss. Miss, promise me you won't tell anyone – anyone. Please.'

I hesitated.

‘Miss, I daren't be late in case anyone – you know –'

But although I nodded kindly, I wasn't quite sure that I did.

I was out of my depth. I knew I ought to be doing something but I'd promised to do nothing, in particular not to talk to those very colleagues whom I'd have trusted with my life. I worried my way round the situation for the rest of the day. There was a meeting across the lunch hour I had to go to, but I might not have been there for all the contribution I made to the new College Development Plan. Shahida and Richard kept eyeing me with concern. As we split up to go to our classes, Shahida gave me a quick hug.

Richard hung back. ‘You're sure you don't need some time off?'

I smiled at him sadly: he'd want to know about Manjit, might be able to help her, but I could no more confide in him than she in me.

‘Remember, all you have to do is ask. Call me at home if you need me: I'm always ready to help.'

I nodded my thanks. I didn't expect to have to take him up on his offer before the weekend was over.

Saturday morning's rehearsal with the MSO started off as a fairly flat affair. Stobbard Mayou's rhinitis was better, but he was much more dour than I'd seen him. Aberlene and Jools had come on to the platform together, obviously in mid-row. But they'd settled in their places, and provided no entertainment for the onlookers. When the break came, I opened my coffee and Mo went to the loo. I sat there gloomily. Normally I'd have sought out George. And there was something more trivial to worry about too. I kept getting the feeling that Mayou was looking at me. With no great affection, either. Very odd, since we'd parted on the best of terms on Thursday, and I wasn't singing out of tune. Then there was a movement beside me: Aberlene. She sat down and accepted the remains of the coffee.

‘This must be very hard for you,' she said. ‘The first rehearsal without George. Bad enough for us playing on Monday. You know we played something in his memory. Not
Nimrod.
Mayou and the soloist got together and decided to do the
Adagio
from Mozart's d minor concerto. John Murray. Nice man, as well as being a great pianist.'

I nodded. One day I'd turned up at George's to find John Murray flat on his back under George's sink.

‘Are you all right, by the way?' It was crude but I didn't feel very subtle today.

‘Fine. Apart from bloody Jools, that is. Sophie, she's really pissing me off at the moment. I know she's a friend of yours, but I've got to sound off at someone. You know she's always had a bit of a reputation for hobnobbing with guest soloists and conductors?'

I nodded. ‘George used to loathe it. Used to make awful jokes about officers and other ranks.'

‘I mean, she was all over that violinist, Jacques Whatshisname – the one that had the accident.'

The young man in question had fallen from his hotel room in Rome a week after he'd played in Birmingham. There was a strong rumour he'd been trying to fly, but it had been discreetly hushed up.

‘And now she's in and out of Mayou's room as if they were best buddies. Which I'm sure they're not. They have the most awful rows.'

‘She seems to have the most awful rows with everyone,' I said. ‘Including me. What was she having a go at you for?'

But Mayou was already coming on to the stage, and Aberlene had to scuttle to her place.

The second half of the rehearsal was much more impressive. Apart from an awful bout of sneezing, Mayou was altogether more alert, and he contrived to wake us up too. He sang all the choir parts – simultaneously, it seemed. He pushed aside the stool and reached and dipped, scooping music from the air. Five minutes in, he pulled off his sweatshirt to reveal an Oxfam T-shirt, a textbook set of muscles and, when the T-shirt lifted with his arms, a golden torso that simply demanded to be touched.

We allowed ourselves to be seduced.

And then it was all over. A smile and a wave and he was gone.

Mo sighed, reached into her handbag, produced a spray and covered herself with Opium.

And she covered me.

My sneezes rivalled Mayou's. My eyes flooded. Any moment now I'd succumb to an attack of asthma. Thank God for Ventolin. But I was still wheezing and crying when Tony Rossiter ran into me – almost literally – on the stairs.

He peered at me with what seemed like genuine sympathy. ‘Are you sure you're all right? I suppose you've got this flu bug.'

I didn't have enough breath to deny it.

‘I don't think you should get close to Stobbard. Not like this.'

‘Stobbard?'

‘He sent me to find out how you are. He's in his room. No, don't go down. I'll tell him you've gone straight home to bed.'

I ran down the stairs beside him.

‘Tony, why was Stobbard asking for me?'

Before he could reply, Stobbard's door burst open and Jools shot out, thrusting her way between us. Stobbard had followed her to the doorway and now stood looking at us. He shook his head gently and strolled towards us. ‘My, my. All that just because I asked her to produce a more authentic sound. Hey, Sophie, you don't look so good.'

‘Flu, Stobbard,' said Tony, stepping between us.

A sneeze cut off my denial.

‘Sounds like you've got it real bad.' His hair was still wet with sweat – it curled, irrepressibly.

A phone rang. Tony ran to answer it. Aberlene emerged from the band room.

‘Stobbard,' she began, ‘I really must –'

Tony came back at a gallop. ‘Stobbard, it's Munich! Can you take over from Muti? He's got the flu. Any Beethoven Symphony you like and some Japanese doing the Brahms d minor concerto.'

‘What is it you say over here? No peace for the wicked? Tell them Beethoven Four and fix a flight. Sophie, why don't you – no, I guess you'd best take care of that flu.' He smiled and was gone.

Back in Harborne, the allergy a thing of the past, I glowered at my marking and wondered what Stobbard would have asked had it not been for my sneezes.

Then the phone rang. But it was only Jools. Jools? Apologising?

‘I said some things that were out of order. Can I cook you a “sorry” dinner some time? Like tonight? I've been let down by my date, see, and there's all this food.'

I presented myself at eight, at Jools's very pleasant flat in a modern block just off Augustus Road. I'd have thought any accommodation attached to anyone else's was inappropriate for a musician. But Jools claimed never to have had any complaints from her neighbours, and they always greeted her pleasantly enough if we encountered them on the stairs.

I'd caught a bus. I don't like Saturday evenings full of boy racers who don't see cyclists till they've knocked them over and maybe not even then. I'd treat myself to a taxi home. I took a bottle, of course. There wasn't any reason for me to follow Jools's abstinence. It wasn't as if she'd just become a strict Baptist.

Her flat didn't look as if she was a strict anything. She was the only person I knew who had her pad done up by interior decorators. None of your MFI furniture. Maples or Lee Longlands for her, upmarket stores not far from the Music Centre. In the far corner of her living room were a neatish pile of music, her music stand and her bassoon case. Unlike George's, it was the light-weight, cylindrical type, the sort musicians with cycles or motorbikes prefer. It was as pristine as the rest of her flat. She actually greeted me with a gin and tonic. She stuck to tonic herself, but I took her offer as a tacit peace offering. I followed her into her fitted-everything kitchen to gossip while she cooked.

Gossip! We hardly spoke to each other. I knew she hated being interrupted while she was cooking, so I got on with dressing the salad while she poked baked potatoes and showed the steaks the grill. I had to ask her to let mine linger there a little. Rare I like but not
bleu
.

I did learn that she'd had a fight with Tony over coach travel, and if what she said was true I couldn't blame her. Apparently she'd asked if she could use her car for the recent trip to the North, and he'd vetoed the idea. Then he'd gone and taken his own. ‘Whoever heard of a grown man getting coach-sick?'

I tried to remember school outings. Had Tony been one of those who had to sit at the front/by a window/next to teacher lest he be sick?

‘New girlfriend?' I asked idly. ‘New car, of course.'

‘No. He's been doing it for weeks. Long before Stobbard came.'

Stobbard. Not Mayou. Stobbard.

‘How do you get on with – Stobbard?' I asked in a carefully neutral voice.

‘All right.' The way she said it, she might have added, ‘And what is it to you?'

While she brewed coffee I went to use the loo. If the rest of her flat was luxurious, the bathroom was truly opulent. I pondered on some weird Perspex lining to the bath, and envied her bathrobe which would have taken me a week to dry. So, for that matter, would her towels. I knew we earned roughly the same: no doubt her parents had paid for this lot. There were times when I rather wished I'd chosen my ancestors a little more carefully.

I peered at myself at the beautifully lit and angled mirror. Whoever had bequeathed me my genes had ensured that I would be small and wiry, with mousy hair and an undistinguished face. All that activity outdoors was wearing my skin: I ought to take as much care of it as Jools apparently did. I picked up a bottle at random: ‘Capture. Anti-aging complex'. At thirty-five? But Jools had always had a lovely complexion. I'd ask.

‘Jools,' I began, stirring sugar into the coffee, ‘I was looking at some of your cosmetics and –'

‘How dare you touch my stuff! How dare you go poking round my things?'

‘Hang on, Jools. I only wanted to ask –'

I thought for a moment she was going to strike me. Then she sat down.

‘What did you want to ask?'

‘Only how you keep you skin so nice.'

She condescended to talk cosmetics for a bit. The conversation became beautifully normal and trivial. When the phone rang, however, she carried the receiver into the hall. I might have had a prowl round and inspected her latest acquisition, a small bronze. But I didn't want to provoke another outburst, so I stayed where I was, letting my eyes rest with great pleasure on the elegant room. George had always admired it. I suppose it was that which made me say, when she came back into the room, ‘Tell me about George. His last concert.'

I don't know what response I expected. Another flounce. A moan that she'd been over it time and time again with the police. A bored reiteration of what she'd said in the pub.

I didn't expect her to turn chalk white. Nor could I work out why she did.

After a moment's consideration she said, quite calmly, ‘He played OK. Until that domino in the slow movement. Afterwards, he said he was going to meet you. But he stopped on the platform to talk to Aubrey. Aubrey'd managed to get his hands on some pheasant feathers from somewhere and was drying out his oboe. You know how seriously he takes the whole business.'

I nodded. Aubrey takes his oboe very seriously indeed.

‘So I went down to the Band Room. With Chloe. Then I came to the pub.'

‘So you didn't see him after that?'

This time when she went white I'm sure it was with anger. ‘I've already been interrogated, thank you. I'm sure your policeman friend would give you a transcript.'

‘I'm not trying to interrogate you. I just need to know about George. To lay him to rest. Goodness knows when the funeral will be. I tried laying flowers at the Centre.' I stopped at the memory of all that mud.

‘So I heard. Why don't you ask Tony? When I left, Tony was threatening to kill him. As I hoped he told your policeman friend.'

To have phoned for a taxi would have meant asking a favour of Jools and waiting till the taxi came. I preferred to do neither.

It wasn't a bad night. The clouds were still high, and when I saw the back of the number 10 bus pulling away from the stop I decided to make the best of it and walk. I'd simply follow the bus route: there weren't any short cuts to tempt me.

Of course, walking's a wonderful way to mull over an evening. There was Jools's moodiness to think about. She'd always been abrupt; tonight she was abrasive. Steriods – weren't they supposed to cause aggression? Not that she'd ever admitted to taking anything. There was her flat to reflect on, too. There was something different about it. In my mind I paced round that living room of hers. The full-length curtains. The subtle lighting. The leather chairs. All those were familiar. So what was it?

At this point I realised I was not alone.

I'd reached the end of Woodbourne Road, where it turns left into Gillhurst Road. Practically the home straight.

A car pulled up beside me. And stopped.

I ignored it. Walked faster.

As I turned the corner, the car turned it with me. Pulled ahead of me. Stopped.