Song Of Time (40 page)

There’s no mystery about what happened in Paris. Christos really had vanished from that warehouse when Claude and I got there on the night of Yellowstone, leaving nothing behind but his chains. But, inevitably, Claude was angry to find that high space deserted whilst the world partied and his homeland lay destroyed in sulphurous fumes. He grabbed the abandoned chains and flung them, and then that virtual helmet. He kicked and smashed all the expensive recording equipment. Things skittered and bounced and flew. Not for the first time in one of Claude’s rages, I had to duck out of the way.

Sometimes, things also got broken in our Paris atelier. We used to joke about it as we cleared up afterwards, saying it was one way of keeping the place free of clutter. Not that Claude was some madman— he was always careful. That Turner watercolour—even in his worst moods, he’d never have damaged that. Nor his Bechstein, or his beloved hi-fi, or his Miles Davis recordings. Claude always knew what not to break, and I had my moments, too. Not that I could match Claude’s rages, for Claude was always passionate, Claude always
cared
. He loved, hated, hoarded, shared, made and destroyed, in equal measure. Even more than his being American, it was what he truly was, and rage was something he often used with his orchestras, for he was never one to hold in his frustrations and quietly sulk. There was a story going the rounds when I met him—of course, there were already many Claude Vaudin stories by then, but this one was of how he’d grown so frustrated in a rehearsal that he grabbed the principal second violin’s instrument and stamped it to pieces. Next day, he returned with a huge bouquet and a replacement violin far better than the broken one. Of course, the woman played like an angel after that. Not that I know whether this incident ever really happened—that isn’t the point—but if it did, Claude would already have been certain that the violin was of particular consequence before he smashed it, and that he could afford to replace it with a better one.

Claude was a careful tornado, a picky poltergeist, and I soon learned when to stand back, and when to get involved. Sometimes, for whole days, and without at first even my consciously noticing, I could feel the air sharpening as a fragile brilliance began to radiate from the objects which I knew he would eventually break. And yes, I sometimes grew a little wary—who wouldn’t?—but when he flung things, when he ranted, I didn’t believe for the longest time that I was being flung and ranted at as well. Yes, there was sometimes flying glass. Yes, there were occasionally beating fists and punched holes in the plasterwork. But the pain was always directed inwards, and what I remember most is tending Claude’s bruises and grazes. I remember licking them, kissing them, oiling them with antiseptics and studying the slow progress of their sunset colours across his midnight skin. And if the flying plates and broken glass and those wall-punchings sometimes accidentally hurt me as well, that was also simply part of what we shared. As long as it didn’t show, as long as it didn’t stop me from playing, as long as he kissed those secret marks afterwards when we made love, I was proud to share and bear them. For the longest time, for all that magical summer which we spent in Paris, I felt safe and trusted, and I loved Claude beyond all doubt and across all bounds.

We were riding a rollercoaster, it’s true, but, with Claude, I’d never expected anything else. Once, we took a holiday. It was a year or two after Yellowstone, but the skies across much of the globe remained dark, and it was hard to imagine anything more luxurious than a warm beach, warm skies, a warm sun. The place seemed like a dream even when we got there—although it was also a well-fortressed one, fenced, concreted and colonnaded against the threats of earthquake, tsunami, eruption, hurricane, virus and terrorist bomb. All we could hear from the window of our room was the innocent swish of sea and palm trees. We swam naked. I put on beads and henna to make love. It was everything we’d wanted, the escape we’d long promised ourselves, but Claude still had several projects he had to keep an eye on. I was prepared to switch off and trust my agent, but Claude was his own agent even when he employed someone else. We were nearly at the end of the holiday when news of some predictable crisis finally reached him. I can’t even remember what it was, but he raged. He prowled off down the beach making his own dark clouds, swirled in his own sub-tropical storm.

Sitting waiting in our room, sipping a lurid cocktail, I stared at the big, white conch shell which rested on the cabinet opposite our bed. It had innards of pink mother of pearl, and I could see it growing that characteristic sharpness and brilliance with which I was now all too deeply familiar. I already knew what would happen when Claude returned, and still part of me thought that it was really pretty rock’n’rock to trash a room like this, here in paradise. And all of me waited. All of me stayed.

It was another accident—not anything Claude had ever intentionally meant—but that shell hit me full in the side of the face, and I remember staring at myself afterwards as the doctor tilted a mirror, seeing the sutures and swellings. For the first time, I realised that real accidents weren’t things you could sense coming for days, weeks, ahead. I even briefly wondered if I was a victim. But I was wrong—I was always wrong. Claude was a totally different man next day: sweet and needy and endlessly apologetic. He was funny as well. He showered me with gifts. I’d never felt so wanted, so needed. We got deliciously drunk. We fucked and fucked and fucked. By now, part of me was thinking it was just some stupid accident and wouldn’t happen again, and another part knew he’d be helpless without me, and the rest was wondering why I’d just sat and waited for him to return in the certain knowledge that something like this would happen, and that it was all probably my own stupid fault.

The bad times, the really bad times with Claude, were rare. And in fact, they were surprisingly tolerable, especially when I knew how much better things would be once we got to the other side of them. It was the long, brittle build-up which I always found hardest to take. I longed then to
do
something, to make him or me better, to re-shape his world. And I wanted to love him more—show him what I really felt so that he would stop hurting himself. But it was hard: it was walking on eggshells. Don’t get me wrong. There were months, weeks, whole years, when Claude led a happy and busy and productive life, and so did I. The idea of being without my husband was almost laughably grey, and I missed his love and all the excitement which came with it dreadfully when he wasn’t around. And the kids made a difference, too, just as I’d been sure they would. No matter how dark his rages became, some part of him could always put things down, turn away, go off to have another few drinks or head out into the garage and fiddle with the DB. If there’d ever been the slightest sign that Maria and Edward saw that side of him, I’d have left him in a moment. But, just as I had in that sun-tropical hotel room, I waited. I stayed.

I resumed my career after my maternal break, and Claude continued with his. For me, especially, things went well. As the critics noted, I and my playing had matured and people were soon talking about me without using Claude’s name as well. And when they did mention Claude, he didn’t always come first. To me,
Roushana Maitland and Claude Vaudin
always had an odd ring, and you can imagine how Claude felt. Professional jealousy, that terrible beast, began to squeeze its green scales between us. Claude took up other violinists—often female, always young—he tried re-interpreting Ligeti and popularising Schoenberg and there was that disastrous tour playing Chopin, but eventually he had to come to terms with the knowledge that people were most eager to see him conducting me. They weren’t wrong, either. We produced some magical performances—key interpretations which the few who still care about such things number amongst the greats—but the more feeling Claude and I poured in the music, the less there seemed to be left over for our everyday lives. Claude still ranted, Claude still battered and ranged, but I’d seen it all by now, and the mood swings and the weeks of edgy expectation had begun to bore me. I no longer waited. I just stepped back and let him get on with it. In the darkest corners of my heart, I even began to pity him, and then to feel a gathering contempt.

I came to understand far more than Claude ever did about his moods. After his season at Glyndebourne performing
Der Rosenkavalier
to bored and uncomprehending crowds who’d never thought of Strauss as a sexually explicit modernist, I already knew exactly what lay ahead. Even when he returned home to Morryn as if nothing had happened and then stayed that way for days, I still knew the storm would eventually come. I even sometimes found myself standing in the garage when he was out walking the cliffs in the last days of that long, late summer, stroking the DB’s silky paintwork, breathing its odours and watching the sharp sparks of sunlight which broke through the crack in the middle of the doors. It wasn’t prescience by now. It was simply knowledge.

I got drenched when I went down to the market in Fowey on the afternoon when the blue skies finally dissolved in dark flurries of cloud. Hauling myself and my shopping back up the coast road through the rain in a soaked summer dress, seeing Morryn looking so warm and welcoming with all its chimneys smoking and its windows alight, I almost broke into a run, such was my hurry to get home. But I knew as soon as the wind slammed shut the front door that the simple evening of our being together wasn’t to be. Claude was wild as the coming storm. Sounds, smells and crunchy glass filled the hall. It could almost have been one of those sensory collages he still claimed to like, but, even before I fully realised what was going on, I could tell that this was a creation of his own. Voices were calling from screens, and there were gaps amid the pictures along the walls. Music was playing—several tunes at once in a Charles Ives cacophony—and litter sprawled the stairs…

“All this crap!” Claude was bellowing. “Can you live as what you
are
, Roushana? Do you have to be like some fucking tortoise, dragging your whole life behind you? How the hell can you even
breathe
with the weight of all this stuff…?”

I was beginning to understand. This stuff was all mine—or so Claude thought. My clothes—old ones I’d put aside because I was fond of them, or those which I thought might become fashionable again. My knick-nacks and keepsakes—many of which had associations with the kids and our life here in Morryn. Paintings and objects—some of which went all the way back to Paris. Odd musical instruments we’d collected on our travels…In a surge of weariness, I put down my dripping bags. I could already see the mess I’d have to clear tomorrow, and the changed Claude who’d help me patch things up. The least emotion I felt was surprise. But the air was smoky, and that
was
a little more unusual. Picking up my bags again—although I knew by now that we’d never eat what was in them—I headed into our old kitchen where the Aga’s furnace was open, and stuffed with crackling papers. Something fell out, its singed corners glowing. It was an old, flat, two-dee photo of Leo, standing smiling and alone in our back garden. Grabbing a poker, I raked out the rest of the smoking mess. It was all Leo. His commendations, his school reports. Books of his, some with the corners still turned back where he’d stopped reading. And more photographs. Then I understood. Quietly raging, I left the kitchen. It was the same throughout Morryn. Even the precious data about my brother I’d collected, recordings of his performances, school interviews, old e-mails, family videos, was freshly deleted from the screen in the music room,…

Now, finally, I did feel a falling sense of surprise. But I was mainly angry—angry with Claude, and all the more with myself, for I really should have seen this coming. My husband had been working on this ridiculous inferiority complex he felt about Leo for years. I thought I’d learned how to handle it. Every time he said something harsh or foul, I’d quietly step back and let him stew, and then, when he was next away, I’d put another picture or memento of Leo up on Morryn’s walls in quiet revenge. Now we’d both got what we wanted, which was the biggest scene of all.

I was so used to Claude’s rages that I barely noticed what he was saying, or his attempts to shove me out of the way as I pushed my way past him and down the hall. In a cold rage, I ran out into the teeming yard and dragged open the garage doors. I’d always had a fascination for Claude’s racks of tools. They were oiled, polished, the best, most expensive, brands, but to me they had that same odd mingling of aesthetic precision with pain which I’d once associated with the implements you glimpsed in dental surgeries and hospitals. Turning up the lights, I lifted one out, which made a sweet ticking sound and changed its displays as it swung in my hand. A torque wrench, I believe, and tipped with finely-machined angles of some terrific metal which—I could feel it before it happened—would slice with ease through the DB’s fifteen layers of buffed and lacquered paintwork, then deep into the bodywork beneath.

The storm beat the garage’s open doors and hammered across the roof as I set to work, but the delicious noise which the wrench made still carried. It was a kind of grinding sound—teeth against blackboards, steel across slate—but inordinately satisfying. I drew the keen metal back and forth across its front panels in painterly swirls. I inscribed hieroglyphs across the wide, fat bonnet. I felt as if I was changing the DB into some-thing else: no longer a car, but some totemic symbol of the wounded thing my marriage to Claude had become. My husband was watching. I could see his silhouette hunched outside where the storm raged at the edge of the light thrown from the garage. The air swirled. It was brittle. Sharp. Intense. Electric. Chewing my lip as I gouged more marks across the DB, I got a foretaste of blood.

“What the hell are you doing, Roushana?” he finally shouted. Such a bathetic comment, I thought, as he lumbered in, half-drowned.

“What do you think?” Mine was little better, but this was hardly a time for words.