Song Of Time (36 page)

“Well…” Mum sighed, as I finally sat down on the bed beside her. “Here I am. Just like John Lennon in the Toronto Hilton without Yoko.”

I nodded, although I didn’t understand the reference until I checked it later, and it was Amsterdam in any case. Then she asked me about my work, and about our journey, and soon I had to stop her pressing a button to call in one of her secretaries to discuss the details of the supposedly impromptu, but, by Indian standards, reasonably well-planned, recital Claude and I were supposed to be giving.

I revised my first impression. This
was
a shock. Mum had shriveled since even the last broadcast in which I’d seen her, and she seemed to shrink further with every breath, falling back into these gold-embroidered silks and cushions as nothing but bone and skin. Something angry flared within me. I kept glancing at those watching sensors. As if they— and the unwavering public eye which Mum had become even better than Claude and I at exploiting—were to blame for her illness. And she was in considerable pain by now. She told me as much, in her usual matter-of-fact way, but then I knew already, for she’d recorded every detail of her agony in her worldwide diary. This, I realised as I stared into the changed face of the once young, once beautiful woman who had waved to me from the shore with her limbs shining on French beaches, would be the last time I would see her alive. The saddest thing of all was that I didn’t feel remotely like crying.

Dry silence fell. For all her tiredness, Mum seemed restless and frustrated. I guessed that by now our presence was stopping her from seeing someone else, or checking on the progress of some initiative. When I died, I vowed to myself then, I would do so alone, and quietly. Then I felt the bones of her hand make a small movement.

“Roushana, what are you thinking?”

I shrugged.

“Have you got there?”

“Where?”

She blinked slowly in that way she’d always done when she felt that her daughter was slow in understanding something. “The place you wanted to get to. With your life. With your music.”

“I suppose I have,” I said, wondering.

She made a small sound, and I thought it was some kind of spasm before I realised she was laughing. “Remember how we argued about your violin playing! That day we went to the shops in Fowey?”

“Yes.” I met her stare. For a moment, we were both walking along those damp, fishy streets, trying on clothes and, yes, arguing. And with us, unspoken, then as now, was the lingering ghost of Leo. We didn’t even need to say his name. He was there, just as always. “I do remember.”

We left Mum shortly afterwards, and Claude went off to arrange things for our recital, whilst I, knowing that my husband, who was always wary and finicky about his health, wouldn’t be comfortable going there himself, set about finding the quickest and simplest way of getting to Ahmedabad One. I tried asking at the hotel desk, and even thought about finding whatever remnants there were of the UUN, or of ringing my Indian-subcontinent agent. Then I just walked outside. It was past midday, fragrantly hot, and the roads along the main strips were spasmodically busy. Cyclists and cars crawled. There were a few lorries. Taxis as well. I tried hailing one. The driver touched his prayer beads when I asked him if he’d take me to Ahmedabad One. But he nodded.

What had once been shanty towns had now acquired a sense of permanence. Concrete, mud and stucco had replaced the flimsy tents and shacks, although they were still set with unexpected scavengings from the destroyed city, here a window of plate glass, there the rear-end of a van, which gave the landscape a collage-like effect. And it was all widely-spaced within large expanses of florid greenery. I scanned the skies for the carrion birds which had once circled over the funerary fields of the Parsees, but all I saw were sparrows, and a flock of flamingos rising like pink smoke from a lake in the mid-distance.

The early half-life of the radiation had decreased considerably, and the dead area within Ahmedabad One which the dalits inhabited had contracted. Still, there was a point where the houses gave out, and the road grew rougher until the driver finally stopped at a rise which looked down over the old city. The afternoon sun blazed down at us as we climbed out and he sat on a rock to mop his head and I crossed a short rise. What I saw in the wide bowl beneath, fanning out towards the blue bay, was nothing but softy steaming greenery. If the dalits were still down there, they’d become the lost tribe of a new jungle.

I laughed out loud, to think that the saddest of all places should look like this, and make me feel so happy. In a few days time, the husk of Mum’s body would be bathed, dressed in white and surrounded by garlands. Then she would be burned, and no doubt it would all happen before the all-seeing eyes of those sensors. But I was remembering that ridiculous violin I’d once had, and which I’d sent back to this place, and which perhaps lay down there somewhere, burrowed by insects and embroidered by creepers. And then I was remembering the baby I’d never really thought of having, all for the sake of my career, and for the sake of music. Now, I was crying, and I knew in that moment that the performance Claude was organising would be my last for many years, and that I wanted us to find a house that I could really live in, and have children.

Claude was intrigued by my insistence after Mum’s funeral that we find a house in Cornwall. But he was never one to turn away from change, and he loved exploring the neat little fishing villages which had been there for too long to be troubled by the world’s recent difficulties. Nothing could have been more different from the clean lines of balconies and hissing road-ways of our flat in Beijing, but that was good as well. He said he was reminded of Cape Cod. He read
Jamaica Inn
and
The Hound of the Baskervilles
(Devon, not Cornwall, Dartmoor, not Bodmin, but then my husband was still an American) and rediscovered for repertoire the works of Arnold Bax. My initial vow that I would cease performing right after Mum’s death proved impossible to sustain, and, between winding down my existing commitments and honouring Claude’s, finding a house took many months, much of which we wasted looking for that cottage not far from Fowey were Mum and Dad and I had first stayed. I couldn’t believe that somewhere so seemingly solid could have vanished, but Claude was prepared to humour me. Another joy which he’d discovered in Cornwall was driving by hand along narrow, winding roads. He was already talking of getting hold of some antique MG or Austin Healey.

It was a happy time for us. The Cornish landscape, which always seems to have the bones of autumn poking through even on the warmest of days, had coped well with the darker skies of the years following Yellowstone, and ancient landscapes of lichened churches and moor-lands unrolled as we explored abandoned farmhouses, Georgian seaside villages and ridiculously over-large estates. We liked Padstow, and Claude was attracted to Saint Ives, which had become cheap enough to harbour a bickering colony of artists once again, but, if for no other reason than my continuing insistence that that cottage still had to be there if we could only find the right turn along some country lane, we kept returning to Fowey. And then, one day, we found Morryn, long-empty and looking ridiculously romantic as it hunched black in the sunset against a massive crimson sky. As we walked around the low stone wall towards its waiting windows, we already knew that this would be the place. The rooks cawed. The gulls screamed. That saying that there is no first time for coming home is wrong, for here we were. Laughing, expectant, already half-made, our unborn children seemed to rush out to us on the darkening breath of the sea along with Morryn’s characteristic scents of nettles and wood rot and old stone. I could already see their faces, could smell the pillowed crowns of their sleeping heads, and I knew that they would become everything that was best of Claude and I.

I became clerk of works for this house’s restoration. After the abstrac-tions of music, I found that I enjoyed the practical challenge. Claude came and went, continuing, as we’d agreed, on his world-hopping career whilst I put mine on hold. Scorning the idea of having children by the use of modern aids, and after the minimum of tests and interventions, we strove joyfully to conceive in the old-fashioned way. For Claude, for us both, those questing journeys across the Cornish landscape had become addictive. Now that we had our house, we began looking for his car instead. Old sports cars of the type Claude craved were ridiculously rare, and the idea of one left forgotten in a barn belonged in the sort of story you’d expect to hear in a snug Cornish bar on long nights when salt rain lashed the windows, but that didn’t mean we didn’t believe it. More questions, more drinks, other bars, and the car even acquired a marque. It was an Aston Martin, DB 4 or 5 (I learned from Claude there was little difference) abandoned in near-perfect condition by some local eccen-tric—up near St Austell, no, no, another voice in another bar insisted, it was down beside Penzance—who chased away with a shotgun anyone who expressed an interest in it.

We took dead ends. We risked roads that had been torn off from the cliffs. We stopped amid the heather to make love. Then, one grey after-noon, we found it. The house was large and dilapidated, but, instead of the whiskery old man we’d envisaged, the door was opened by a youngish woman in an open caftan with ornaments of glittering silver wire twined across her skin. The place was some sort of commune, and the answers we got about the car were vague. We surmised that, like ownership of the house itself, the turbulent years had eroded such certainties, but, settled in a damp birch copse more as if it had risen from the earth than ever been driven there, lay a mossy mound from which what might have been a wing mirror protruded. Still, the house’s inhabitants knew the worth of what they claimed they had, and the price they asked was ridiculous.

The DB arrived here a week later. Claude meanwhile had had the builders divert the attentions of their machines from plumbing to have the old stables made sound. The thing just sat there, still barely a car at all, let alone that legendary near-pristine marque, but Claude was bliss-fully happy and I smiled with him as he prowled the mottled flanks whilst the smashed and blinded headlights stared towards the steel racks of his new tools. I hadn’t fully appreciated that he hadn’t wanted an antique car to drive, but something he could remake from almost nothing. Smelling of moss and rot, shedding leaf-falls of rust, the ancient DB wheezed and creaked as, leaning me back against the gouged and dented bonnet, Claude began to part my clothing and caress me.

Does a woman know? Does it have to be some special moment? It could have been any of the frequent times we made love in the few days before Claude headed off to a new guest-residency, but that was the moment we set aside for the making of Edward in our private mythology. Pregnancy came as a shock to me. I’d always imagined my body was my own, and the sheer alienness of the symptoms, the sickness and the swellings and the changes to my senses, was disconcerting as well as discomforting. I never quite got to the point of wishing we’d had the baby grown in some fleshy pod, but it was close, and it never got closer than during the act and aftermath of giving birth. Claude had managed to call off his commitments to be with me, although he turned out be surprisingly squeamish. I’d never thought about men and women being particularly different, but now that I was leaking blood and milk from various orifices, we seemed like other races. Work on Morryn still hadn’t finished, and Claude was soon back off to Stockholm, and I was moving through a fog of plaster dust and weariness, falling over dangerous bits of ambulatory machinery whilst I attempted to take care of this squalling parcel of new flesh which we’d decided to call Edward in commemoration of the greatest of English composers.

Maria came a year later, although she seemed like the eldest, the more responsible and burdened, even when they were—what?—only three or four. Kids, they change and grow so quickly. Blink, and you’re back sitting in the old kitchen with the wheezing new Aga which had looked beautiful in the showroom but never worked properly here in Morryn, and that gassy smell of damp we spent years trying to eradicate until it vanished of its own accord. Blink again, and everything’s gone. But no one had told me that motherhood would be lonely as well as so absorbingly busy—a spinning kaleidoscope of joy, exhaustion, irritation and times when your conscious self swirled off entirely and you realized as you grazed the soggy remnants of long-abandoned breakfasts that whole days had passed without thinking at all.

We had a Rumpus Room built in what is now part of this new kitchen. Far more than the climbing frame in the far garden which Claude, whistling and busy in the way he was when he did these projects, had made for them, the Rumpus Room was where our kids loved to play. A glory of what was then cutting-edge technology, it was their generation’s equivalent of television or the internet, but all-invasive. Edward and Maria swam in hologram oceans of cartoon pap. Some of it—a lot of it—was great fun. I still have a soft spot for those gaudy faces and bizarre voices. But it was all so
loud
, so
big
, so bossily
cheerful
, and there was so
much
of it. I was determined to be an involved parent, and not to use the Rumpus Room as a baby-sitter for the kids. So I sat with them in that padded cell, and swam in daydreams of candyfloss, and joined in all the games and songs. I’d already realised that I wouldn’t be the great mother I’d intended, but at this I was at least determinedly adequate, sharing laughs and digitised adventures with my kids. Then we’d head down into Fowey, and I’d sit amid the roll-up mats with the few other similarly hollow-eyed females who’d made the increasingly rare decision to have offspring. Back at home I’d dole out the processed pap which was pretty much the only thing which Edward and Maria would eat until they were well into their twenties. Too tired to prepare anything else, I’d then eat the same myself.

There I was, humming
bouncy-bouncy-bounce
or some other inane Rumpus Room jingle each evening as I waited for that stupid Aga to at least
think
about finally bringing some water to the boil. Then bath-time—a whole round-the-house-chase—and fifteen last minutes and not a second more in the Rumpus Room before bed. And
humpy-bump
up the stairs.And so to bed bed bed bed bed…! And, yes, a story. Just the one. Then, when I’d finally got them calm and settled, Claude would call from halfway across the world just like the doting father he really was. And the kids would be awake again as he got them wildly, newly excited with jokes and games and gifts. The last thing they wanted when he finally rang off was to climb back into bed and go to sleep. Okay. One
last
story.
One
last song. A kiss. Their sweat-and-talcum smell. Their eyes glinting from the dark like the wild, untamed things they truly were. And me heading downstairs, certain that they’d soon be gigglingly thump-creeping down after me. Not a perfect mother, no—and how that feeling hurt—but finally and at last I was able to make my longing way towards my violin.