Song Of Time (26 page)

Once I’ve done my best to tidy him up, Adam and I return to our separate but interlocking orbits. It’s afternoon already, and perhaps it’s time I called the kids. I try to picture Edward sitting at what he terms his desk in the garden-like space of his office. There’ll be birdsong, the rustle of trees. London’s so much greener now—the areas which aren’t submerged. Even his house, which was once part of a substantial Chelsea terrace, looks as if it’s been invaded by jungle. Grass grows in the lounge and there are useful insects in the kitchen. My heart aches to think of what this kind of bio-frippery will do here when some stranger takes over Morryn.

The last time I saw my son in the flesh, his family arrived here in a seaplane which alighted out there on the sea like origami folded by a Picasso. My grandchildren Ayana and Cornell are not-quite twins; they were born within six months of each other. They’re just so
big
. So
young
. So
perfect
. They talk to each other in noises I can’t decipher, and lumbered around Morryn like baby giants, playing games and chasing after things which I can never see across these same gardens where Adam is now cutting and tying back the plants in preparation for the winter to come. Then there’s Edward’s partner Ivy, who looks like an elf, albeit a surprisingly large one, and dresses to match in bright, morris-dancy colours.

One afternoon—the only afternoon they were here with me—Ivy and the kids went off alone to explore along the cliffs and Morryn suddenly seemed extraordinarily quiet. Looking for my son, I noticed that the doors to the garage were ajar, and found him standing amid the shadows, apparently deep in thought.

“Oh! You surprised me,” I said loudly in case he thought I’d been looking for him.

“This place…” He chuckled. “I haven’t been here since…Since Dad died, I suppose.”

I’d hardly been out here myself much in recent years. This garage, with its tools and shadows, is still entirely Claude’s. Only the space where he used to endlessly fuss and fiddle over the DB 5 remains empty. I remember how he once removed and stripped down the entire engine, and then talked about it for months after—said it was as big a task as mastering the Bach 48. Sometimes, he’d summon me in and I’d have to hold the choke or rev the engine whilst he leaned into the bonnet or lay underneath.
Now, a bit more…No, no, no, no…Slower, for fuck’s sake…
The garage would fill with choking blue smoke, and I’d leave with my clothes stinking and a looming headache. Still, we all loved Claude’s DB, his James Bond car. It had been worth a small fortune, would be worth a bigger one now. It was just all the oil and fuss and the
stop stop stop what the shit do you think you’re doing
that I couldn’t take. And then Edward came along, and he was happy to help his Dad, and I was happy to let him.

“He never did quite fix that oil leak,” Edward said.

We stared at a darker blotch on the old flagstones.

“Imagine, though, if Dad ever got it working perfectly!”

“What would he have done then!”

We smiled at the thought.

“They were the best times with Dad,” Edward said. “You know how much easier it is sometimes to talk to people when you’re not actually paying attention? It was like that in here with him. Dad said there was poetry and music in the best kinds of engineering. And I believed him— I still do. The music itself, the proper music, all that power and passion, was so much harder for me. But this…” He gestured through the dusty bars of sunlight and shade with such quiet passion that I half expected the DB’s shining silver flanks to reappear. “This…”

My son’s at least as handsome as Claude was. Unlike Maria, where our varying racial strands intermingled in the frustratingly incomplete beauty of her frizzing hair, that broadly hooked nose, Edward possesses good looks and an easy composure.

“You seem,” I said in the silence he’d left me to fill, “a bit preoccupied. Is it work?”

Still staring at the space left by the DB, he said, “I sometimes feel that part of me’s missing. It was great working on things like that car with Dad, but most of the time he wasn’t here. And even when he was…Even when he was…”He shook his head and a gull tip-tapped across the corrugated roof. “I wish I knew. You’re just Mum to me. When you walk out on that platform, when you pick up your violin, I’ve seen how you become someone else—I’ve watched you change. But Dad never did. He was always up on the podium. There was always an audience. Except maybe when he was with his car. Then there was that stupid accident and it was all too late…”

I can see it now: the DB, looming out of the shadows and dust. I can smell the leather, the precious fluids and oils. I can hear the engine’s bumbling roar. It was perfect by the end. Claude even fixed that oil leak. He fixed everything.

Edward and I didn’t say anything. We just stared at the empty space in our lives which that lost car had made. Both smiling and solemn, easy-going but private, the last environment on this earth I’d have expected my son to be suited to was the wild disorder of world finance. I could have seen him as some kind of designer, a maker of things, but Maria— who never seemed to care about the look of
anything
and always thought in the abstract—went that way instead…

Maria, she divides her time between small prestige designs and more worthy projects, closer to civil engineering than proper architecture, which she risks her life and health to supervise down in the third and fourth worlds. Neither of them pays well. I’m deeply proud of her, but at the same time I also sense a sort of timidity. The undertow of her CV is that she’s a safe pair of hands for the odd bit of sensitive new building and restoration, but shies away from the big statement which would define her as an architect. Perhaps if she finally got herself a proper partner of some kind…Now, that
would
be a change. But the dowdy ponytail she affects to tie back her crinkly Afro hair has remained unchanged for years, and so, almost literally, have her stone-dusted clothes. Everything about her—even the thought of my calling her up this afternoon—says
leave me alone…

And what would I say? How can I ever tell either of my children that I’m dying? I’d do anything—
anything
—to avoid upsetting him. What-ever love is, I think I still feel it towards them, and I’m almost sure that they feel something similar towards me. But Edward’s Edward. And Maria’s Maria. And I’m me. It’s a love between different species. I can’t call them. Not
now
.

Morryn unfolds in scents, sounds and objects as I leave the garage and my son and the DB’s ghost. I enter rooms. I touch memories. The sky darkens. Once again, Morryn fills with shadow and the tide comes in, and then Adam and I eat dinner. The food he’s prepared, from what I can taste of it, is heavenly, although eating now has become another act of remembering—a journey into this ever-present past. I perform for him. The Prokofiev
Sonata
. A couple of Chopin arrangements. Of course, some Bach. The automatic piano sits quiet. It’s a genuine solo recital, and the choice of pieces comes instantly, whilst Adam sits and listens. It’s become part of our routine; part of whatever we both are. Appreciative, intent, he makes an excellent audience. When the music is playful, he taps his foot and grins. When it becomes sad, tears grow in his lovely eyes. And the other feelings, the ones which only music can express, they come and go as well on his expressive face. Sometimes, I think he knows far more about music than he cares to admit. But then he knows about everything—so why not this?

Sleepless, dreamless, helpless, I lie back in the vivid dark of my bed.

THE WALLS OF OUR ATELIER WERE STAINED with continents of damp when we returned to Paris. Moulds of a brown and green Atlantis had shaped themselves across the walls of our kitchen hallway and strange grey planets hung in orbit above our bed. Our sheets, left unwashed and unmade, were forested with fungal furs. We laughed and we complained, but Claude’s landlady Mme. Loic merely shrugged her bosom and stroked one of her cats. After all, this was Paris, and it was summer, and what exactly did we expect? The air reeked of rotting plaster and bad drains. I experimented with smoking Gitanes, more for the smell, which we both liked, than the physical effect. Coughing, I sat outside on the narrow balcony in the sudden intervals of sunlight, surrounded by sheets and clothes and rugs and towels as we tried helplessly to get every-thing aired. Down below, through four floors of steaming washing similarly hopefully strung, the flooded, shining streets were teeming. Bells, gunshots, sirens, the calls of mullahs and the muffle of loud-hailers and stamping, trumpeting parades made strident bar marks through the roar of traffic.

Scores ran, books collapsed and milk soured. The fridge motor howled. My Guarneri swelled. As I practised, I thought of Rousseau’s tigers, of swaying palms. In the afternoon, thunder always growled, and rain blatted the swinging windows. Even though we knew it was coming, we always brought our washing in just a little too late, and lived another day in sodden clothing, and made love on mushroomy sheets.

There had been a strike at the Sorbonne, and a lock-out at the Conservatoire. Concerts were held, cancelled or re-arranged according to bomb-threats or government edicts or sudden, new assessments of some dead or living composer. Wagner came and went, Boulez had his hour, and I was no longer studying, but striving to keep up with being a full-time soloist. By now, the figures which Claude and I were seeing in our bank statements were so large that the presence of a plus or a minus sign seemed irrelevant. Meanwhile, there was always the election. Mathilde Irissou had risen ahead in the polls whilst we were away in Washington, then had been dragged back by forces no one seemed able to explain, except perhaps the spin machines, and they weren’t telling. The newspapers in that summer were made of an interactive plastic, and the floppy sheets we bore home pulsed like the fungus on our walls as predications and scandals ebbed and flowed. Once you’d got to the bottom of a page, you could start again at the top, and the news, the reviews, even the adverts, would be entirely changed. Even more than it had in Washington, it really did seem that France—and in particular Paris—was the cockpit in which the fate of democracy would be decided.

And in a way, it was. What we didn’t then realise was how little democracy actually mattered.

Mathilde Irissou came and paced our atelier whilst outside a fleet of her armoured cars blocked the street. She, too, had taken up smoking Gitanes, and she waved her cigarette with a grace I envied, then ground it out in one of pots of orchids which tumbled around our windows. The socialists were ahead in the polls, but the spin machines were saying they had peaked much too early, and now one of the filth-sheets had found some early images of her which, while harmless enough, were nevertheless much less elevated than her famous portrayal of bare-breasted Liberty. Was it still impossible for a woman to function in politics without this stupid leering? Worst of all were the expressions of support she was now suddenly receiving from her fellow socialists. For them, with their own selfish dreams of advancement, the best thing that could happen was that she lose the election. She flicked the starter of another cigarette. Her agile lips plumed. She made neons of emphasis as it trailed in the air. Look at the people Boullard was allying himself to—goose-stepping Le Fale, that fraud Christos. He’s using fear, and he can’t possibly control them. It’s like Hindenburg with Hitler…

“We have to attack, and the worst thing is these people aren’t even politicians. Anything I say about tax initiatives or raising the rights of the individual will be treated as an irrelevance. That’s why I need you. You’re both important. You stand for something true which people believe in.”

She’d included us both in her prowls and smiles, but now she strode towards Claude, who was lounging on his favourite stool beside the piano, and stood close between his unscissored legs. Her chin jutted. Her earrings glowed. Briefly, as new thunder cannoned and the windows swung, she really was Liberty incarnate, surrounded by barricades of cloud. It was impossible not to feel roused.

“I want you to go for those bastards,” she murmured. “You can get at them in ways that I can’t. Show them it isn’t their stupid belief that matters. Show them there’s something other than fear and superstition. Show them that the truth is what counts…”

Le Fale didn’t last. Next morning, or the morning after, pictures of him far more damning than those of Mathilde Irissou were circulating. By the weekend, and just like his hero Mussolini, he was found hanging from a lamppost. But Christos was different. Christos was inescapable.

No one knew quite where he had come from, nor whether he really had grown up with that ridiculous name, but he began his rise to fame as the sort of wandering beggar-vendor who often accosted Parisians and the city’s few remaining tourists. Christos sold bottled water, but he also sold visions, and a philosophy which combined Judaic, Christian and Islamic eschatology. Basically, he claimed the world was ending, and that he was its final prophet. Although there were many others like him, he drew the largest crowds. And the water which bore this name and image sold exceptionally well.

Within a year, Christos had become an industry rather than merely a prophet. He acquired the old brewery at Marne la Vallée and used its spring and bottling plant, and the abundant free labour of his followers, to out-produce and undercut the competition. His vendors, stooped with their heavy sacks, were a regular sight on the streets of Paris. People, even many of those who didn’t believe, bought Christos’ bottles because clean water was something everyone needed in these torrential days with the tap supply polluted by cholera B. But many did believe, and the churches and the priests and the mullahs prevaricated, and the Pope famously called him a Holy Fool—for what was so very wrong with giving money to the poor for something so essential as water? People drank Christos’ product. They kept it by their bedside to ward off bad dreams. Many even bathed in it, and claimed to be cleansed, saved, healed…