Song Of Time (30 page)

“You don’t miss the cities—places like Paris?” Adam asks as he begins to unpack our lunch.

“I miss Paris as it was, I suppose. And I miss Claude. But so many things changed—and so rapidly. Nothing was ever the same.”

“Some of the people you met, though. They’re extraordinary! It’s like a history lesson. I mean…” he shakes his head as he slices a green pear. “…Harad Le Pape. Not because of the sex thing, but just such a
character
.”

“You should see what’s…” I trail off.

Adam glances up, smiles, then resumes baring the pear’s gritty flesh.

We eat. There are cheese tartlets. There are mushrooms stuffed with pate. Did I buy this stuff when I went down to Fowey? Did Adam make it? My hands blur as I raise the glistening objects from my blazing white plate. I’m in a hall of mirrors. There’s the food itself, then all the things I remember food to be. My own children’s cries are muffled by the soft shush of the waves. Did my eyesight misbehave like this before I had the crystal implanted? A bottle of lemonade, cloudy and bitter and sweet, makes my lips stiff. A distant object, flashing and turning, passes across the strengthening sun. Adam stands and begins to unslip himself from Claude’s clothing. Soon, he’s naked. In fine silhouette, he stretches unselfconsciously, and I sit and watch the bob of his buttocks as he wades out into the sea.

Can he swim? Well obviously. His limbs scarcely break the bay’s slick water and soon, he’s far out, and turning, waving. I wave back to him. He makes it look so easy. I remember my own attempts to come to terms with this element. Apparently, I always hated swimming pools, their clamour and stink, even when I was a baby. My parents both tried to teach me how to swim in the sea on our French summer holidays, although Dad was reluctant to haul me out of the shallows, and Mum was so quick to do so I always screamingly resisted. So it fell to Leo. He wasn’t concerned about arm-strokes and leg-movements. He simply wanted me to understand that the sea would let me float if I gave up resisting.
It’s just a matter of letting go
, he explained to me as we sat on the hot shore.
The sea wants to support you, Sis. All you have to do is to let it. The sea’s where we came from. You know, our blood is exactly as salty as the sea was when our ancestors left it…
I looked out at the pedalos and the circling seagulls and tried to tell myself that I belonged out there. Mum, as she emerged from her brisk morning swim and the sun shone on her wet limbs, really did look as if she was made from saltwater, and Dad, in the splashing, trundling way he swam, was like the pedalos although Leo, of course, swam better than either of them. He’d competed for his school until he’d found that the commitment was getting in the way of his music. He’d even won cups.

We crossed the hot sand and waded the toddler-strewn shallows. Then, just as the shock of the water lapped my ribs, I let my feet go upwards, and Leo supported me. He floated me out as I lay back on this tickling, bobbing surface. My ears bubbled with a clamour of sea-sounds, but the moment between us was intense and quiet. As the waves lisped close to my face, I thought of the salt-blood in my veins and told myself that all I needed to do was nothing, but I was acutely conscious of the strength of Leo’s arms as they cradled my back and thighs. He seemed far stronger than the sea itself.
This
I loved, the sun, the sky, the gentle water, the sense of being safely uplifted. But the moment beyond, and the effort of making no particular effort, of letting go of some immaterial
something
without even trying, was beyond me. I felt the loosening of his support, and the cold, sudden drag of my own useless body. Instantly, I was sinking, bubbling, gasping. A moment—long though it seemed— and the sky crashed back and Leo’s face, laughing, concerned, re-emerged in splintered sunlight. Then my feet were back on the hot, guilty sand as I staggered sneezing and coughing back up the beach to my fortress of towels and sunshades.

And so it went. Day after day throughout that holiday. Leo wouldn’t give up. The pattern repeated so often it became a sort of ritual: my brother’s visionary words, his calm but persistent persuasion. Dad out there already, churning to and fro with the pedalos. Mum standing on the edge of the shore like some dark Aphrodite. Calmly, unswervingly, the unavoidable moment came when Leo took my hand. The chuckling water deepened as he led me through the shallows until its coldness hit my lungs, and I gave way to the push of his arms, and lay back as he held me and I urged my nuisance of a body to let go until the moment of release came, and once again my mouth filled and my nostrils burned as salt darkness closed over me.

I couldn’t give up, either—Leo would never have given me that oppor-tunity—but the time of our holidays was finite, and I dreaded letting him down even more than I dreaded the idea of swimming. I rehearsed in my dreams. I pictured myself flying, floating. Every day, I really did believe that the sea would support me. But it didn’t happen, and our last day on the beach finally came. As we took the boarded steps across the dunes, I already knew that yesterday and all the days before would simply be repeated unless I did something radically different. It was then, as I flapped out my towel and lay down in the hot light, that a simple under-standing came to me. Today, I really would let go. I would submit as I had never submitted before, and let the sea take me. I would simply lie back and drown.

Leo seemed to sense something changed in my attitude, and there was none of the usual persuasion as he led me out from the frothy shallows. I knew that these people I saw around me, the swimmers and the paddlers and the sunbathers, would soon be gathered around to look down on the beached and discarded body of the girl who had drowned to prove that she was incapable of swimming. The water seemed especially eager and playful today as it flashed around Leo’s waist and took the air from my lungs. I lay back and submitted. Leo’s head and body were haloed by the sun as he drew me out into deeper water. Certain that I would die, I smiled up at my brother as the water chanted in my ears, urging him to let go of me forever. And then he did, and for once the sensation truly was liberating. I lay amid the shifting billows, waiting for death to overcome me. I never really was conscious that I was floating until I felt Leo’s grip on my arm, and the shock of his presence was enough to send me into one of my usual flailing spasms. I’d done it—I’d floated!—but I felt a weight of disappointment as we both finally clambered out from the shallows. After all, I’d tried to die, and had merely learned how to swim instead…

I taught my own kids how to swim in the summers we spent down here at Bezant Bay. I took them out into the waist-deep water, marvel-ling as I looked down at them at the pale slimness of their limbs, and thinking that Leo had been right—we humans really were made for this other element. I marvelled, too, at how they both trusted me, lying back with their hair fanning, and the ease with which the sea bore them. I even tried it with Claude, who’d never managed to learn how to swim despite all the pools which had once glittered in the back gardens of Georgetown, but something was missing. I loved the idea of holding him, of the lifting softness of his long body, but he always sank like a stone the moment I let go. He was happier just sitting on these rocks reading some new score, or impressing us with whatever food he’d bought for lunch. When Claude was with us in Bezant Bay, you could scarcely call it a picnic. There was white wine, exquisitely chilled and of a particular vintage which he would explain to the kids as he let them sip it, and rugs, and silk cushions. Raising his glass, serving us all crab sandwiches on fine crusty bread with golden Cornish butter, or telling us his latest story about the eccentricities of some distant orchestra—
that
was when Claude was in his true element. I decided one day as we watched the kids swim out towards that far rock that the reason he couldn’t cope with the sea was because he was incapable of submitting. Emboldened by the wine, I even told him about my own struggles to learn how to swim, and how I’d finally managed it only by accepting in a childish but entirely sincere way that I was going to drown. But Claude was frowning.

“But that’s the whole point,” he told me. “Why
should
I give in…?”

Claude never did learn to swim—but he still loved this bay, and espe-cially the view from the top of those cliffs. He’d stop the DB when the road still went this far just to take it in. On stormy nights, he’d stand on the last of the drop, laughingly conducting the wild air like Mickey Mouse in that scene in
Fantasia
. For Claude, Bezant Bay was Isolde’s
Liebestod
as she gazed out for her lover’s return from these very shores. For Claude, it was the legend of the Spanish privateer with its cargo of gold coins—bezants, indeed—which supposedly lie somewhere in these blue waters, and have given Cornwall the stars on its shield. For Claude, everything was in the abstract. Everything had to be a performance. He couldn’t let a single thing in the world escape his control.

Adam stands in the shallows, shining and dripping.

“Come on,” he beckons. “You could at least paddle.”

I lever myself up. I tuck up my dress a little. And then—for what have I got left to hide?—a little more. Adam’s arm is cold and wet and strong. Mine feels thin and dry as driftwood. All the abrasions have vanished from his body. Everything about him is clean and pure apart from the waterproof patch I sprayed on yesterday beneath his ribs, which has that same air of faux-modesty which a triangle of costume possesses when it barely covers a bulge of crotch or breast. I stick to the shelf of rock which projects just beneath the tide, coyly protesting that the water’s far colder than I expected—although it always is—and then that I might fall, slip. But I really
am
nervous. Adam, wading the deeper water which lies beside me, raising his arm to keep his grip on my hand, is beautiful, strange, anonymous and sea-born. He could drown me so easily. He could drag me in. His penis is surprisingly large, despite the sea’s cold. It bobs and rises with the wavelets which strike his thighs. I can’t remember if I ever noticed before that penises could float.

The sea’s where we came from. You know, our blood is exactly as salty as the sea was when our ancestors left it…It’s just a matter of letting go…

Suddenly, shipwreck claws are surrounding me and I’m genuinely afraid. Adam leads me carefully back to the land. Already, the tide’s coming in. The sun’s getting lower. Another afternoon gone, and I can’t help wondering as we trudge back along the shore if I’ll ever see Bezant Bay again. The steps up to Morryn blur in Escher angles of light and shadow. It’s such an enormous effort to get to the top of them that I then have to sit down, regather myself and rest. Adam helps me to the bench at the sea edge of the lawn. Once I’m down on it, I grumpily decide I don’t want to move. Understanding as ever, he hurries off to get me some blankets from the laundry cupboard. Didn’t we lock Morryn’s doors when we went out? How does he know how to get back in? The ques-tions are gone by the time he returns, and the warm, late sunlight falls like a blessing on my face. With assurances that, yes, yes, I’ll be fine, okay, alright, I persuade him to leave me so that I can just sit here and take in the last of this glorious evening…

A blank moment follows. Not dreams, no. Or if they are dreams, they’re dreams of nothing. The sun’s almost gone. The sky is lilac. The sea is blood. This is the future, Sis, where the dead fly towards the stars on wings of light, and I’m cold and stiff. Vague irritation that Adam’s left me like this comes and goes with the hiss of the in-reaching tide and it’s blustery dark by the time, trailing cold, damp blankets, I finally haul myself around the bench and begin to shuffle up the lawn.

Morryn blazes like a paper lantern. All its windows are alight. Is Adam really in there? Did I lock the doors? The freshening wind tugs at the trees. There are so many years I’ve been here alone, but it’s those when Morryn was inhabited by other lives which return to me now.The children, of course. The smell of spoiled cakes and summer sweat. Even more, it’s Claude. For him, emptiness wasn’t tolerable. Silence had to be pushed out of the way. I can hear all it again now. He’ll be playing that weird, modern, sensory stuff—it can’t even be called music—which he clambered across age, good taste and common sense to keep up with, filling Morryn with machine drums, bizarre smells, tortoiseshell lights, murmurs in lost languages, shrieks like tortured whales. No melody, no exposition and resolution. Just things tipped together into chaos which Claude, who’d once listened to Miles Davis, Ella and Sinatra to unwind, claimed he enjoyed.

Morryn’s front door shudders. Even now, that lost clamour is barely in retreat. My skin crinkles. There
are
voices, disturbances, shimmers of touch and taste. It’s eerie. What’s left of my hair starts to rise. But it’s not some alien roar. It’s Claude’s voice—no, it’s his
voices
—not one of him but many, tumbled together as if in some ghastly parody of those shrieks and flutters with which he once used to fill the house. I limp up the hall towards the heart of this disturbance , which seems to lie in the music room.

Adam’s sitting at my desk surrounded by torrents of data. Images of my dead husband—interviews, performances, newsclips, nominations, speeches, fawning profiles, bitchy reviews, news and publicity shots— dance and swarm around him. Claude old and Claude young. Claude in moments of doubt and Claude in his pomp. It’s dizzying. A plughole swirl.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I manage to croak.

Adam stills all the images. A thousand Claudes fade as he turns on my chair to face me. “I’m so
sorry
, Roushana. I didn’t realise how late it had got—I should have gone outside to see how you were. But you did say I could look things up on the screen.” He makes a gesture. “I got absorbed, and you said it might help—”

“—plainly, it hasn’t, has it?”

He looks pained. “It was just…Knowing who you are. I mean, there’s so much on record. About you. And about Claude. But I had no right. Of course I had no right.”