Song Of Time (42 page)

Adam’s a little thinner, a little sharper—a little older, indeed. It seemed odd for him not to be wearing Claude’s old clothes as he helped me up from my place beside the fire and led me through the house and out into the cold gardens beyond.

“How are you feeling, Roushana?”

I chuckled, wavering between him and my walking stick. “I should be asking
you
.”

“But I’m fine. They say I can leave shortly.”

“Where will you go?”

“I thought I might explore around here for a while—I mean Cornwall. And I’d love to go north, perhaps do some walking and climbing, see the Scottish glaciers. Then I’ll probably visit Paris.”

“It won’t be the same, you know.”

“No.” We’d reached the steps leading into the deepening glen, where thick frost still rimed the trees beyond the sunlight’s wan edge. “That’s why I want to see it.”

Our footsteps crackled as we made our way down into a place of shadows and ice. It was another kind of crystal, and I thought as we wandered through it of the alien presence which Adam and I had once shared, and of which we are now both being drained. Liang Ho was as understanding about my change of heart when I went to Bodmin as he’s been about all my other doubts and vacillations. All it took was a small amendment to my medications, then a day or so of slight sickness, and an odd taste in my mouth which lingers even now. I’m sleeping properly again already—dreaming, as well—and I laughed out loud as I walked through that frosted glen with Adam to think of the twisted version of my past which returned to me last night.

“I’m not getting any younger, you know,” I muttered as the sound of the sea grew nearer.

“Neither am I,” Adam countered—although he doesn’t know what he means. He can’t do; he’s far too young.

The steps levelled in a space of frosted grass where the sea and sky beyond were both incredibly clear and pale. The ruins of a small building were etched amid the white fronds and I peered around again, trying to re-position my thoughts within this strange yet oddly reminiscent place.

“How far are we,” I asked him, “from Fowey, here?”

“You should know, Roushana. Isn’t that the journey you’ve just taken…?”

Our breath plumed, fading and changing everything, but I was sure by now that I really was seeing the remains of the cottage where I’d stayed with Mum and Dad when we first came to Cornwall.

Adam was talking again, saying how things would never have worked out like this if it hadn’t been for me. I stopped him by laying my hand across his own.

“Morryn’s yours. It’s all been arranged. That woman—the one who was with me before you arrived—she was saying how you might have come that way along the shore because of something about what you are—or were. Some kind of a trace of a memory…”

Adam gazed at me—his hair is longer now and his eyes, in this winter frost, were coldly grey—and then something, a twinge of distaste, almost of horror, seemed to cross his face. “I don’t
want
to know, Roushana. I mean, why should I? Where would it get me? Whatever personalities I once possessed are gone—they’re irretrievable.”

“But don’t you sometimes wonder…? Don’t you wish…? I mean— to have some proper memories?”

“You’re forgetting, Roushana. I do have proper memories—and most of them are about you.”

That’s it, I suppose. There was a moment, on that last night together in Morryn, when Adam would have let me have his body as a repository for everything I could possibly become. I can still scarcely believe such an act of self-sacrifice was possible, but neither now, I think, can he. After all, he’s young, and he’s talking of going to Paris, exploring Scotland, and isn’t that just the way things should always be? I’m the only one now who’s obsessed with knowing who Adam might once have been. Studying the changing light in his eyes as we sat there in that forgotten place and the pale sun edged over the whitened trees, I thought of how he’d listened to me in the times when I still could master my violin, and the intensity of the emotions which had played across his mobile face. Even now, he tells me, he devotes a great deal of his time to discovering—or re-discovering—music. The way Adam listens, the way he
is
, he’s far more than just a spectator. He can already pick out complex melodies by ear on a piano, is beginning to understand chordal structures, and he’s always scowled at anything resembling a wrong note. But I
like
that scowl. It’s part of what he is, even if it takes me back—well, to Paris, and to playing my violin in our atelier on those nights when Claude was out trying to re-arrange the world and Karl Nordinger and I were alone.

I can’t help it. With or without the jewel in my head, sitting here in Morryn, or standing with Adam this morning in that frosted place, the past remains inescapable. Only yesterday—recently, anyway—I caught sight of something red when I opened an old wardrobe filled with clothes I’ll never wear again. I lifted it out, momentarily surprised, then remembering…

And Paris. Paris especially. I really can picture you, Roushana, in that red leather raincoat…

I’d shaken my head when Adam had said that, firmly told him I’d never possessed such a thing, but I was completely wrong, for that coat and I had been inseparable in the rainy Paris spring. I’d worn it when I first visited Harad Le Pape’s 5th floor apartment in the Marais, and again on that afternoon when Claude and I had been sitting in that bar after a fraught rehearsal at the old radio building and a lonely, dripping figure had burst in. Such a ridiculous thing to forget…

Adam gazed at me with those eyes which are winter-cold, yet remain filled with an openness and faith which I hope will never be abraded in the way that Karl Nordinger’s was. But, yes, I can well imagine how Karl might have clung on to life no matter how sour he found it, until it was possible for him to make the leap which his own early software was partly responsible for creating. And I can also see how Karl would have grown as disillusioned there as he would anywhere else—in fact more so, with the sheer terror of endless potentiality, and having no excuses left for feeling anything but sheer joy. Karl would still have been Karl, and he’d soon have been pondering other ways of escape.

Karl? Is that you…?

Part of me longed, and still longs, to ask Adam that question, but I know as well that he’s right. Whatever he was, whatever happened, has gone. It’s not even a memory. And I feel the cold so much more now— my lips were freezing as I stood leaning beside him, my eyes were turning to ice—and there was still something else, something important, which I’d planned to say.

“I know you’ll probably say I’ve given you enough already, Adam. But there’s one last thing I want you to have, and it’s not a gift—not really. It’s more of an inheritance, or a responsibility. I know, I can tell, that you have it in you to be an exceptional musician, and I’m sure you’ll get there, if that’s where you to want to go. So, Adam, anyway…” I took a slow breath, feeling more of the Cornish cold pouring into me. “…I’d like to give you my Guarneri.”

There was a long pause. Then he simply nodded and hugged me a little tighter. “Yes,” he said. “I’d like that. I’d love to learn how to play.”

“Just as long as you don’t expect people to
care
, Adam. Or anything like instant results. You’ll probably need to get yourself a simpler, less tricksy instrument to cut your teeth on. And you should always remember to
listen
. Practise on its own is nothing. You need to make sure you plan to…” My breath faded into the frozen air. I was starting to sound like Claude, or Leo. “No—forget all of that. Just enjoy it, Adam. That’s all I want you to do.”

Soon I was seated again shivering before that fire in the hall of the clinic, and people were hovering around me and Adam was holding my frozen hands, and asking me if I was alright, if I felt okay? Then it transpired that the car to take me back here to Morryn was already here and waiting, or perhaps had never gone away. We parted with a smile, a hug that buried me in the broad warmth of his chest, and a promise that next time he would save me the journey and come and visit me here in Morryn. I felt relieved, for I’ve taken more than enough journeys lately, and I’m not sure I have the energy to ever travel again.

Heading back home in that bubble vehicle through this newly glittering world with the waterfalls frozen and the failing roads unwinding their dirty-bandage trails, I thought of Blythe, and remembered my recent trek to Birmingham, and the different city I found. Birmingham is feral now—there’s no other word. The tower blocks have rotted and fallen, and the roofs of the many terraces have slid screes of tile and rubble across what once were roads. Windy and sere with fern and bramble, the landscape is returning to the open heath which Birmingham was before we living humans invaded it. Even with the assistance of the devices which had helped to bring me there, it took a wearying effort to find the part of the area which had once been called Moseley, and then Augusta Road. Our house now smells of foxes, trapped rain, feral cats, and it’s shrunken even more than I have. I couldn’t believe as I peered through at the tiny spaces from the ivied hall that this was where so much
life
had once been contained. The stairs are too dangerous to climb now, the roofwork is rotting, the piano’s keys have grown green, a lopsided grin, and the bath into which Mum would retreat after a long day’s teaching has fallen through into the lounge. It squats there like some alien presence with its once-white belly filled with moss and leaves.

I was already exhausted by my journey, but there was one other place I wanted to visit before the machines bore me back to Cornwall. The Calthorpe Estate where the Munros once lived was always verdant, although the trees and palms which had once prospered there are succumbing to these seasons of deeper cold and the dwellings, which had always hidden behind high hedges and long walls, seemed even further in retreat now, and even more deeply consumed by wilderness. It’s amazing to think how I’ve managed to survive when so much else which seemed immovable has fallen and crumbled, although the swimming pool at the back of their house is still recognisably there, even if its waters are greened and the plastic loungers have been strewn like strange sculptures across the heathered slopes which were once lawns. Fighting brambles, I made my way down towards the place where Blythe had led me on a summer afternoon long ago. And there it was—those sheltering trees and that same stone bench. I was suspicious, and peered for runnels of crystal just to check that this was real, for nothing else I’d seen had been anything like the places I remembered. It was another season, but this glade remained a charming place. Sitting on that same stone bench, conscious of the empty space where the living Blythe, a prim wood-nymph in her bikini, had once sat beside me and made me promise I’d take care of Leo, I finally noticed something different, and I stood up and rustled through the leaf-fall to investigate. Just an outcrop of stone, another piece of garden statuary, but large and grey and square. Even before I’d leaned close enough to read the inscription, I already knew what it was. It seemed so unlike Blythe, and oddly gothic, to have arranged for her body to be laid here, but perhaps even the dead need to grieve…

Now, as I sit here in Morryn, at my music room desk, I’m still surrounded by memories. Here’s a Polaroid photo of Mum and Dad on the day I was born, whitened in one corner by the ghost of a carelessly placed thumb. Mum looks as tired and drawn and relieved as you’d expect any new mother to look, and her eyes are even more reddened by the flash, whilst Dad is caught in one of his perpetual moments of surprise, and not quite fully sitting on the bed nor standing up either. I don’t look like anything much; just a blue hospital blanket and one tiny hand. And here’s Leo later on that same day in that same blue-walled room, dragged out from school with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his looped and Velcroed shorts as he feigns unsurprise at this new arrival who will undoubtedly twist around his entire world. Of course, he looks much younger than I remember him, with a smudgy nose and a sticking out little-boy crown of hair. And then here I am again and again, on rugs and in bouncy chairs, awake or asleep or crowned with suds, squalling in reluctant family groups on the shoulders of aunts who grin hopefully back at me as if they’re expecting me to remember their names. I was a spring baby, so there are many glimpses of the garden of our house on Augusta Road. A golden rod of forsythia, a mossy cold-frame, a dandelion-strewn patch of lawn, and what these images cannot provide I can easily fill in. The glint of Nana Ashar’s many-ringed fingers and the murmur of her voice as she slips back into Gujarati as she leans over me with that wetly regretful look which never quite left her eyes. Ice cream chimes against blue skies scratched with passing of tiny aeroplanes. The smell of next door’s tom.

Here, floating on the screen above my desk in the music room, is the video of my first birthday. Our old dining room, racked with cupboards and plates, didn’t change much in the time I knew it. It’s another bright spring day, and the lens of Dad’s video camera flares as it dances around the jelly-strewn table. A couple of Leo’s friends are here to placate him over my queenly domination of the day, and here also are my two Nans, both of whom are offering contradictory and unwanted advice as Mum scurries in and out of the kitchen with bits of streamer in her hair until the wooden blind clatters down and the CD stops burbling Disney tunes and the cake, resplendently single-candled and adorned by fondant icing Teletubbies, finally emerges. Disturbed by this sudden focus upon me, I look suspiciously around from my high chair, my hair a neat black bob now and my cheeks reddened from teething. Predictably enough, I start crying, and the camera is plonked down in close-up of a half-eaten sausage as Dad reaches to lift me up before the scene cuts. We’re out on the street now, walking down towards the park, and Mum’s bagged the camera and is zooming in on him in mild revenge for all the times he’s zoomed in on her. He smiles but looks wryly uncomfortable to be caught on the wrong side of his Panasonic, and Mum’s disembodied voice is warm and close.