Requiem (26 page)

He began to get headaches. His limbs began to ache, and he started to get irritable. He had no doubt it was psychosomatic. Too much stress – or how did the therapists put it? – the burden of suppressed emotion. Well, there was plenty of that. He lost some of his appetite, too, and his jeans started to get loose at the waist. He took to going to the studio late at night and, aided by forbidden cigarettes, tried working into the early hours, to see if that would hit the mental trigger. But though he went through the motions, tapping out one or two bars, he knew it was hopeless. After a few minutes, he’d start to read something light – the latest
Melody Maker
, or a Sunday colour magazine. Sometimes he’d try a sketch or, more usually, work on a detailed copy of an osprey illustration. Pencilling in the intricate featherwork of the wings was, he found, profoundly calming.

During these nights he also listened to the radio, to plays, discussion programmes, music – anything, in fact, to fill the long hours while Alusha slept. While she was awake, he could cope; there were the meals and the long ritualistic sessions in the kitchen with complex recipes and finicky ingredients, and the walks with Alusha – increasingly short – and in the evenings the videos and games of backgammon.

But in the night there was nothing, just the grinding truth, and his inability to deal with it. He came to the studio to escape. Escape? From Alusha? It was true. He knew it, yet couldn’t bring himself to face it, just as he couldn’t bring himself to face the reason. It had got to the point where he almost avoided touching her. In bed, when she curved her back into his stomach and drew his arm round her, he was filled with such misery that he could hardly speak, far less sleep. He waited in despair and self-hatred until she slept, so that he could ease away from her and escape the sharp points of bone where the soft roundness of her bottom had been, avoid the stick-like arms and the shrunken breasts where there had once been smooth firm flesh. In the day he could eliminate the picture of her wasting body from his mind and look her in the face and feel immense love and real bursting hope; he could, simply, believe. But the nights were impossible, because it was then that the evidence was at its most stark and inescapable.

In late February there was a change. She stopped sleeping at night. She began to mutter and turn, often for hours at a time. If he tried to touch her, she pushed him away and, still half-asleep, swore at him in French. At other times he woke and knew she was awake too. When he reached out to her he found her skin cold with sweat, her hands clenched. She’d murmur about dreams and feeling restless, but he knew it was the pain. She never mentioned it of course, but when she thought he was asleep, she’d flick on the light and wash down some pain killers.

He stopped his late night visits to the studio then, and a week or so later, his early morning ones as well. Curiously, he didn’t mind; it was a relief to give up the farcical attempts to work. Now at least his course was clear, and his life revolved more than ever round Alusha’s needs. When she woke in the night he’d ask if she wanted anything, and though she never did, she’d squeeze his hand and keep hold of it, and he liked to think he was helping to ease her pain.

To pass the long nights while he lay at her side he took to reading celebrity biographies, because they were straightforward and held his attention better than anything else. Often, though, he would just lie awake in the darkness, awed by Alusha’s iron will and staggering perseverance. Where did this strength come from? How could she keep it up, day after day? How could she smile at him and chatter away and joke with him through the pain and sickness and despondency? Sometimes he caught her eyeing him thoughtfully, as if he were the one in need of inspection, and then the dogged uncompromising look disappeared from her eyes and was replaced by something altogether darker and angrier and softer.

She was amazing. He only wished he could be the same.

The thing came to him quite suddenly. It was on a day in early March or, more precisely, an early morning. He woke at five and there it was in his head: the choral work – theme, words, and orchestration, a whole bloody section, as if some ghostly superscribe had composed the entire thing, and, in case that wasn’t enough for him, had obligingly written out the words and music in manuscript.

Checking that Alusha was asleep, he pulled on a robe and went straight down to the studio. He scribbled out some of the words, tried the melody on the piano, then the variation, and squirmed in anguish. Something was wrong; it didn’t sound the same.

He tried again, but now something else wasn’t right. The main theme had gone. Closing his eyes, maintaining his calm, he tried to recapture the sound that had been so vivid in his mind just ten minutes before. One phrase was crucial, he knew: a haunting minor cadence. If he could get that … He tried several ways, none of them right, and felt the mixture of elation and despair that always came at moments like this. Then, abruptly, the phrase came swooping back into his mind. At first it hovered there, amorphous and tantalizingly difficult to grasp, but slowly, patiently he began to pin it down until, quite suddenly, there it was: utterly complete, absolutely perfect. Well – as perfect as it was ever likely to be.

Once it was down on paper it began to look rather ordinary, and he could see plenty of imperfections – were the words a bit trite perhaps? Was the melody an unconscious rehash of an existing song?

Problems like these weren’t new, of course. They came up all the time and, from long habit, he had learnt to ignore them, at least until the work was finished. The work … Having never written a choral work before, he wasn’t too sure what to call it.

He scribbled down a few more words, fragments, phrases, then started to work on the baritone and bass harmonies for the main theme.

At seven the ideas ran out and he realized he’d have to come back to it later in the day.

As he eased his way gently back into bed he sensed the stiff watchfulness of Alusha’s body beside him, and knew she was awake. As the silence stretched out, he felt all his old helplessness slip over him, familiar as an old coat, heavy as lead.

‘All right?’ he whispered finally in the direction of the back of her head. She had been particularly bad in the last few days, stiff with pain, and withdrawn and irritable.

‘Yes.’ Her voice was low and rough. ‘Yes … And you? Were you writing? Did you have some ideas?’

‘Mmm. Maybe.’

‘I know that maybe of yours,’ she said in her increasingly halting speech. ‘Good. I’m happy. It’s been too long.’ She paused and he knew she was sorting out her next batch of thoughts and assembling her words in the right order, something that she no longer found easy. ‘You should write another album,’ she said eventually. ‘It would be good for you.’

This was so unlike her that he raised his head to peer at her in the darkness. Normally, she never commented on the pace or, more recently, the total absence of his work.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I should.’

‘I worry about you.’ Another pause. ‘About what will happen to you.’

If her earlier remark had surprised him, this gave him a ripple of alarm. Ever since the accident any conversation that touched on defeat, on the idea of Alusha not getting well, was never to be mentioned.

‘Plans,’ she said. ‘You need plans.’

‘What plans?’ he said lightly. ‘Since when have we ever made plans?’

‘Always,’ she said crossly. ‘Always. And we need some now. Listen – ’ She paused, then gave a harsh little sigh of frustration because the words would not come out right. ‘We’ve been doing things wrong, haven’t we? Don’t you think?’

He felt sick. ‘What?’ But he knew. He knew exactly what she meant.

‘We never talk,’ she said doggedly, ‘about what will happen.’

He didn’t reply. Although he’d thought about little else for the last few months, he couldn’t begin to discuss it. He felt chilled, emotionally suspended.

The silence stretched out. Then she said: ‘Thank you for the pain killer … for getting some more. It helps.’ Her voice was low, laboured, and totally matter-of-fact.

‘Does it?’ This was the first time they had ever mentioned the fact that Alusha had found the morphine and was using it regularly.

‘I tried without for a day or so … But no good. So I start again tonight. It makes me a little high, I think. And rather silly. Or more silly than usual.’ She gave a snort of amusement that was almost a sigh. ‘You’ll just have to put up with that.’

Nick pulled her closer to him. ‘I’ll try.’

‘You know …’ She didn’t finish.

After a minute, when she still hadn’t replied, he prompted gently: ‘Mmm?’

‘You really must get on and finish that song or whatever it is,’ she said.

He sensed that she’d been intending to say something quite different, but he didn’t press her. ‘I will,’ he whispered. ‘I promise.’

She pulled his arm further round her body, and tucked it under hers. Later she fell asleep again. Dressing quietly, he crept down to the studio to have another look at the song.

He played it several times but it didn’t sound right. The magic, such as it was, had gone. The grand chords, the mystical quality he was so sure he’d captured had degenerated into something tawdry and uninspired.

The dawn when it finally appeared was grey, dark and cold. He leant his elbows on the desk, thrust his head into his hands and wept.

A
ROAD TO
the edge of nowhere. Narrow and unmetalled, riddled with potholes, the track climbed tortuously through rough grassland and geometric blocks of forest towards empty hills. Then, just when Daisy felt certain nothing but wilderness could lie ahead, a patch of green appeared above, nestling in a crescent of forest, with a solitary dwelling at its edge.

The car bounced and weaved over the last few potholes, and Brayfield brought the car to a halt in front of a sagging picket fence. Daisy got out and, meeting the wind, pulled her jacket close around her. She wandered across the track and looked out over the broad landscape. The ground sloped gently away from her in a long sweep of newly planted forest and bracken towards a valley dotted with sheep and a meandering river marked by a snaking avenue of black trees.

She had never been anywhere like this before. She couldn’t get over how quiet it was. No people, no noise. No real noise, that was. She didn’t count the whistling of the wind, which sounded unreal, like the whooshing noises made by the special effects department in an old film. But beneath the wind, and almost as loud in its way, was a kind of mysterious silence, which was both weird and compelling.

After the sounds, the next thing she noticed was the space. Nothing but rolling hills, forest and water; miles and miles of emptiness. As she’d remarked to Brayfield on the drive up from Glasgow, it was hard to believe that this was the same country that contained London and Birmingham. It wasn’t, Brayfield had reminded her sharply, not the same country at all. This was Scotland, quite a different country, and she’d best not forget it. Daisy had almost smiled until she saw he was deadly serious.

Presumably it was this very emptiness that brought the super-rich here. At five or six million for a nice little estate they probably thought the peace and quiet was cheap at the price. Nick Mackenzie’s place was no more than fifteen miles from here; she knew – she’d looked it up on the map. She’d sent him a note to say she was coming and left a phone message with the David Weinberg office, but there had been no reply. Too concerned with his wife. Too reluctant to go over old ground. His original reply had, after all, been clear enough. But it would have been nice to have had a go at changing his mind.

She turned to find Brayfield waiting patiently by the gate. Brayfield, a heavy Highlander with a congenial manner and a terrifying smoker’s cough, was her contact from the local branch of the Transport and General Workers’ Union.

The house was small and single-storey, built of grey stone with small windows sheltering under deep eaves, a modern replica of a Highland croft. In the perverse way of small dwellings it had turned a blank side-wall to the view down the valley and chosen to face a stand of dense pines.

Brayfield led the way up a short path which ran through a patch of unkempt grass and dead plants. The curtains in the window to the left of the porch were drawn; as Daisy watched, one of them quivered and fell still. Brayfield knocked and the door swung open immediately. A stout grey-haired woman stood there, wearing a mauve sweater and grey tweed skirt with lace-up shoes. She had a square face with small eyes and a thin-pressed mouth. She looked about fifty but could have been less. Brayfield introduced her as Mrs Bell.

Mrs Bell gave Daisy’s jeans, boots and bomber jacket a long dubious stare before standing back to let them in. The interior was dark and smelled of damp and fumes from some heating fuel. Mrs Bell led the way into a cluttered living room with a dralon three-piece suite adorned with sunflowers, a gold and orange rug over a threadbare brown carpet and fading pink rose-patterned wallpaper. In one corner was a television showing a football match with the sound turned down; in the other, a bed which was masked by the high back of the settee so that, from where they were standing, its occupant was almost hidden from view. Mrs Bell went up to the bed and bent over it, smoothing the bedcovers and talking in a low murmur. Finally she came back to them and said in a studiously low voice: ‘Just five minutes now. He gets dreadful tired. And keep your voices down. He cannot manage with the noise.’