Song Of Time (17 page)

I was more worried for Mum than I was for myself. She came here regularly, and was alarmingly casual about the seals of her suit. Indeed, I wondered if, with her thinning hair and the hidden griefs for her lost life which had somehow borne her this far, she normally wore any protection at all. But at the same time, and as the dalits of Ahmedabad One circled us and gathered up our offerings of thermal blankets, painkillers, water tablets, I understood. Not India, but Mum. That the only way that she had been able to come to terms with the loss of Dad and Leo was to confront death. And death was here.

The dalits of Ahmedabad One sensed that I was different, and I tried not to shrink back as, fingers wavering like the tubers of frail plants, they strained to touch me. Eyes glittered. There were gasps, lickings of tongues and soft chuckles like the sifting of dust. A thin bare hand pressed my gloved one, then I was looking into the hollowed face of a young girl as a package, passed from hand to hand, was presented to me.

“What is it?” Mum asked, pressing close as well, her hands as eager as the dalits’. “What can you
see
?”

The package was a baby, squirming inside a stained cloth. I didn’t know much about babies then, but this one seemed to be extraordinarily light, and extraordinarily young. It was like those children you once used to see in incubators. Its ribcage fluttered like a bird’s. You could see the pulsation of its heart. The child mewed. Its gaze was ancient. Did they want me to keep it? Was this some kind of exchange? I didn’t know what to say or do, so I simply held the softly squirming child until, after a long moment, it was lifted from me, and passed back to the girl, who fled into the ruins, her quick feet raising puffs of dust.

The rest of the dalits of Ahmedabad One were also disappearing, clutching their supplies, whilst the UUN soldiers were eyeing the haven of their half-tracks and thinking of the comforts of the Blue Zone. But Mum hadn’t finished here yet, and she snapped at their commander that they would have to wait. These men were, I suddenly realised, almost as superstitiously wary of my mother as they were of the dalits.

“Here…” Her grip tightened on my arm. “There’s a leaning telephone tower that way isn’t there?”

I shrugged a yes, then realised she wanted me to lead her towards it.

We passed blasted shop-fronts, Maruti cars twisted and piled bumper to bumper, scarred and peeling half-adverts for Maha candy and Kingfisher beer, old Starbucks signs, and a melted heap of custard-yellow plastic buckets. I stumbled and wavered far more than Mum did as I tried to describe all I saw.

“Is this a corner? Are there traffic lights where it goes downhill? Is there a pink-painted wall opposite, and a sign for the buses?”

All of these things were, or once had been, here.

Mum smiled. “This is where I was when it happened, Roushana. I was crossing this very road. See, how you can see from here right down into the heart of the city? Of course, my mind was occupied with other things that morning. We were planning legal action—now, can you believe it?—over some tiny bit of land. And I was crossing this road, which was a feat in itself, but something made me hesitate. It’s the first thing that happens, you know—the flash. There’s no way of telling. But I looked towards the sky over the post office just before it came…”

We stood amid the torn tramlines at the centre of this once-busy road. Down the hill, tumbling out of the business districts and towards the river, scrawls and tangles of burnt-out wreckage became one indecipherable mass. It was dark down there and a kind of blackness towered up into the sky. I cringed when something flickered, although it was nothing more than the beginnings of this afternoon’s thunderstorm.

Still, I had to ask. “What did you see?”

“I saw the Brahman,” my mother’s hands dug into me. “I saw God.”

The hot skies churned and rumbled as I stood on the runway of the Blue Zone beside the churning engines of the plane which would bear me away from India. It was said that there might still be a proper monsoon this year, which would be good for the crops, help reduce the famine, but would also displace the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war who were living along the flood plains.

“I’m really not sure that you’re the same, Roushana,” Mum murmured into my shoulder as she hugged me goodbye. “You’ve changed.”

“Of course, Mum—didn’t you say that India…?”

Her hands ran questingly down my sides, across my belly. Her lips lingered against my neck. Then she leaned back. Behind us, the engines of the plane were getting louder still, but the grip of her hands was strong, and the glints in her eyes were piercing. “Whatever you do next, Roushana, I want you to take care—for me. I don’t normally say that, do I? I’m not that selfish. But I’m saying it now. Take care. Not for yourself, but for your mother. Will you do that for me…?”

Back in England, I finally took notice of all the signals—the belly-aches and water retention, the missed period which I’d put down to stress—which my body had been sending me all the time I’d been in India. The patch for the pregnancy test was the same shade of grey as the badge Mum had given me. Then it turned blue.

The father of the boy child I knew I couldn’t possibly have was a fellow musician named Snow. He’d been easy, smooth and sinuous—a little cold, as well—and the end of our short relationship had been there from the start. There’d been few hard feelings, although we hadn’t really spoken to each other since, and I had no intention of speaking to him now. But something amid the cocktail of prophylactics we took in the brief time we were together, an overdue implant, a software glitch, or mere bad luck, must have let us down. All I thought, all I saw, was that thin, lost baby in Ahmedabad One. That, and my musicianly career in ruins.

I did what I had to do. There were surprising, atavistic pains, and a large amount of blood. Afterwards, I felt immensely relieved, and hugely reprieved. I showered myself raw until I was squeaky-clean as new plastic, as brushed steel. I told myself that that was it and that nothing had changed, but the new violin which I had nursed so carefully through all the waits and the arguments with security to and from India no longer seemed to belong to me. I came to hate the smoothly clever weight of it, the suspension-bridge sheen of its strings.

I parcelled it up carefully inside its case, took it to the local UPNS and addressed it to the lad in Mum’s village who’d briefly played it. I didn’t really expect it to get to him, but the thing didn’t feel like mine and I wanted it to go somewhere—out into the world. I had dreams long after of some shadowy figure playing it amid swarms of smoke and birds, but I never saw a face.

IT WAS GROWING DARK BY THE TIME I’D finally roused myself from inside the church and climbed the long hill back here to Morryn. Adam was touchingly worried, but soon set about preparing an excellent meal from the somewhat squashed and wilted produce in Mum’s old nylon shopping bag. As he worked, chopping and cooking things by hand in the way he prefers and with all the machines put away or ignored, I showed him some of Mum’s pictures of India on the screen above the counter, and told him about Gujarat One and Two, and that ridiculous violin. I even mentioned my lost child. Yes, the pain’s still there, but I realised as he served out the meal that it’s hurt me more in all these years I’ve kept it hidden. There’s no doubting, as well, that Adam’s becoming part of the process of my remembering. He listened as we ate, and the food, even if I can’t now quite remember what it was, was dreamily delicious. If there’s a question of any sort—the plain, simple ones of when and where and how—he simply asks. He accepts the litter of my life so readily. Perhaps he hopes he will even find something there of his own.

Despite my long day and the hard climb back up from Fowey, I felt surprisingly sprightly after we’d finished eating. Even though it was dark, I decided to give him a belated version of the tour of the house I once always gave all Morryn’s guests. Morryn’s first foundations and cellars go back to the rebuilding which took place around Fowey after the town was sacked by the French in the 1500s. It’s expanded higgledy-piggledy since, growing and shedding various outbuildings and extensions. The house was requisitioned during the first two world wars because of its commanding view sea, and was even briefly a school. Mostly, though, it’s simply been a place where people live.

I told Adam about the changes Claude and I made. How we replaced the ugly flat roof which had covered part of the ground floor with a proper one of Cornish slate, and restored those lovely chimneys. And I told him how Edward had spent his childhood years in the room where he now sleeps, and how Maria had slept next door in a place which is still filled with stuff she won’t let me throw away. My daughter takes after me in that respect: I told him that as well. I found a torch and took him into the yard, and showed him the old two-seater loo, and the garage where Claude once kept his beloved Aston Martin DB5, his James Bond car, which is now a home for nothing but dust and spiders. Standing out in the starry darkness with Morryn hunched under a bright moon, I was better able to explain how the old kitchen was replaced by Maria’s bold fan of seaward-looking glass, and I could also talk about the other kind of activity of which this house, like all old coastal Cornish houses, once partook. Those midnight arrivals, muffled oars—however it is that do you that—and the roll of barrels. The old boathouse below the cliffs is as much cave as it is building, and Claude used to claim that there was once a way down to it from the cellar. But Claude would. Back inside the house, I got Adam to pull at the rusty hoop of the hatch beneath the stairs, and he helped me down into the dank space for—what?—the first time in how many years? The torch played over the remains of my husband’s wine collection. I rarely ever drink now, especially after what happened to me in that hotel in Sydney, but Adam was curious to try one of these expensive vintages before it went forever to waste, and I, to be honest, didn’t put up much of a resistance.

Back the kitchen, and now that he’s banished the implements, Adam had to search though a whole lifetime of old-fashioned utensils before he found a corkscrew, which I could picture Claude’s darker fingers enclosing as he peeled away the foil and addressed it to the bottle. We retired with our glasses to the music room, and Adam suggested that I play something for him. It doesn’t seem strange by now that he under-stands what it means to own a Guarneri, and that one should hold it correctly without touching the precious varnish. I was almost expecting him to start playing, but he simply handed it back reverentially. So I played him some Kreisler—so briskly that the automatic piano was struggling to keep track, and then
Les escaliers de Montmartre,
which I ended up doing solo as a sort of jig, I was playing so devilishly fast and well. After that, I performed some reels, and Adam clapped along. In fact, he kept excellent beat, urging me on to ever greater extravagances as he stood up, and, quite unprompted, did a quick, whirling, dance. I thought of finishing with a heavyweight showpiece, perhaps some Paganini, but that would have spoiled the mood. Music doesn’t have to be difficult or complex. Music can simply be
fun
. How stupid of me to have ever forgotten that!

I think Adam drank more of the wine than I did, although I can’t be sure, and I was never a connoisseur, but nevertheless, tonight’s vintage tasted extraordinarily fine. I can still feel it flooding into me, rich and dark as the night sky beyond these windows, as I haven’t done in years. Giggling like a schoolgirl, I virtually floated up the stairs when we’d finally finished playing, and it took more than the usual effort of will to perform the tests and treatments I’m supposed to perform on this aging, stupid body of mine before I got into bed. Tomorrow, I have my weekly appointment at the clinic in Bodmin. But tomorrow can wait. It just feels so good just to lie here with Morryn’s walls still ringing from the music we made, and the taste of wine, which for me will always be the taste of Paris, on my tongue.

WHAT WAS IT LIKE? OVER ALL THE YEARS SINCE, I’ve been asked that question so many times by so many people. The names tumble off their lips. Harad Le Pape, of course, and Karl Nordinger with his churning melodies. But to be there—in Paris, and then, of all times. You and Claude Vaudin. Claude Vaudin and you. The stolen Giaconda. The riots in the Orsee. The concerts. The deconstructions. The deaths. The famous heap of dog shit outside the Pompidou. Bicos. Max Rochereau. Could you smell it? Taste it? What was it like? To be there.

After London, Paris was gripped by a wilder kind of turmoil. Closer, as ever, to the heart of Europe, though that heart was frail. The great new virtually-clad buildings, vast expressions of civil pride, guttered in the smog and rain. Crippled and diseased soldiers from the latest North African adventure begged and stole in the streets, whilst my tenement in the 10th arrondissement clamoured night and day with arguments in two dozen languages. Adverts taunted across the clouds. Buy this, buy that. Invest, invest. They were selling mining rights to the Ocean of Storms by then. On rare, clear nights, lasers fingered the moon: another crash waiting to happen—you could imagine it rolling down from all that weight of spoiled expectation and splashing right into the Seine. There were bombs outside the mosques. There were crucifixions in the churches. Walking to the Metro each morning on my way to the Conservatoire, I was accosted by Bible-sellers, prophets, mothers with babies, and the sellers of stolen umbrellas and salvaged pros-thetic limbs. But I was young and sharp-elbowed enough to dodge and swear my way around them in French, and I soon learned to carry my violin out of its case. That way, people assumed that I was merely a busker.

Was I more than good by then? I’d got this far, hadn’t I? I was a budding soloist, a name to be looked out for, even if I could scarcely afford to buy food. Shouldering through the smoke of chestnut vendors amid the jostling Parisian crowds, dodging the ghost vans and the moaning flagellatees and the water sellers, sitting in muggy cafes and queuing for the free benches at concerts, I carried my caseless violin as if it was the brimming receptacle of my carefully nurtured talent, and a statement of naked intent.
It’s down to you now Sis,
and at last I was proving that I could make my mark.