Song of Time (2008), page 20
“I suppose … ”
He pointed towards the door we were standing beside. “Has he shown you in here?”
I realised as he opened it that this was Claude’s old bedroom. Rather than explain the circumstance in which I had seen it, I shrugged my ignorance.
“Come, come … ” He beckoned me. “You might learn something.” He clicked shut the door. “I don’t know why, he’s never had anything to hide, but Claude can sometimes be a little secretive.”
Claude’s old bedroom seemed less small in daylight. In many ways, with its football and baseball rosettes, cups and trophies (Claude having been as near-professionally good at sport as his mother was at singing), and with its long alcoves of shelves filled with toys, games and gadgets, it looked like an idealised version of the room where an American boy might once have slept. Claude hadn’t needed Ludwig and Stockhausen glowering down from the walls to remind himself of his seriousness as a musician, so instead there were merely discreetly sexy posters of the last decade’s pin-up females. And it was all so tidy, as if he’d left knowing people would visit it as some kind of shrine. The stones and shells he’d collected from some beach holiday which lined the ledges of the tall casement windows looked like something from a museum. I picked one up. It was some kind of polished fossil, and there was still a faded price tag underneath.
“Well … ” Tony patted the space beside where he sat on his son’s bed. “What do you think?”
“Of what?” I moved by him. “This? Washington? America?”
“You can start anywhere you want.”
“I’m not sure I can. It’s been marvellous. But … Maybe back in Paris … ”
Tony nodded as if I’d said something profound and coherent, and we were pushed a little closer together by the sag of the springs. “Just keep an eye on him for us, will you, eh? The thing about Claude is … ” He shook his head. “Well, we always knew he was so special, so unique, that there was never any thought of our having another kid. But I suppose that’s a huge weight of expectation. He’s so good at everything. But it’s a tightrope act and we worry sometimes that he’ll fall, but he never has. But now he’s got you as well as us. You won’t let him down, will you?”
The question raised uneasy memories, but I nodded gravely. Tony Vaudin had the sort of tone and approach which could make you accept most things. In other decades, he’d have easily made senator. In other centuries, and if he hadn’t been black, he might even have got to be president.
“I hear that that guy—what’s his name, Northanger?—has got a new symphony that you’ll be playing?”
“That’s the plan. Although I’ll only be performing a few phrases.”
“And he’s using AI to write it!” he chuckled. “That’s just what half my students do with their dissertations. But to be honest, I much prefer the ones which are written using someone’s poor old brain. Computers are still useless at making mistakes. You know, we had to put a ban on A plus markings, because all of them were written by machine. So now we’ve got a ban on excellence—and there’s another word you can’t use in Washington these days.”
I chuckled, too. Tony and Lujah never seemed to lose their good humour at the way the world was going.
“These things, these intelligences … I guess we really are getting closer now to a time when they really will be able to mimic human emotions and feelings. Then where will we all be, eh?”
I looked around again at the many shelves of Claude’s childhood possessions. “I suppose,” I said, “we’ll have to leave perfection to them, and try to be as human and fallible as we can be.” Once again, Tony nodded gravely and encouragingly. I supposed that this was his tutorial mode, but our legs were pressed against each other’s now, and the dressing gown I was wearing had ridden up and parted midway above my knees. As I gazed down at my thighs, wondering vaguely how I might cover myself without it seeming prim, I realised that Tony was staring as well.
“You’re right,” he said with soft, surprising passion. “We have to be human. We have to be prepared to be fallible.” As if by accident, his fingers brushed against my flesh as he reached beside me to pick at a stain which lay on the cover of Claude’s bed. “We can’t all be like Claude, Roushana,” he murmured. “We must all find things out in our own way—make our own mistakes … ”
I don’t know what I then said, but I managed to stand up and leave Tony Vaudin in his son’s bedroom to get on with my preparations. Next day, and after a well-reviewed performance, Claude and I flew out from Washington and returned to Paris, and to our real lives.
13
KIPPERS FOR BREAKFAST; the smell of them fills the house. Yesterday’s rain was an illusion, and summer is holding, and I wander the rockeries afterwards in brisk morning sunlight, picking at the weeds—or perhaps they’re proper plants, and as if it matters. And perhaps I don’t need to sleep, dream, any longer, either, for even after these long, turbulent nights of memory, I still don’t feel particularly tired. Adam sits in the new kitchen which he now possesses far more than I have ever done, or even those redundant machines, looking out at the world from the screen. Then he brings out orange juice for us both on a tray—he’s long picked up on the fact that I don’t like to have too much coffee—and the tinkle of the glasses takes me to the back garden in Moseley, and to Leo. Not back any longer. The past is here even as we sit, we talk, and Adam says that perhaps he’ll do a bit of gardening himself, and I watch him as he moves with easy youth and purpose amongst the fading hydrangeas, still dressed in bits of Claude’s old clothing. Then I go inside, and the sun moves across Morryn’s furniture and warms the rugs. Thus, in our close but separate orbits, do Adam and I now exist.
I find him later in the music room with the Sony Seashell dangling from his hand.
“This doesn’t work.”
“It’s old—of course it doesn’t,” I snap.
“But isn’t this the thing that you said Blythe gave to Leo? The one with all the recordings … ?”
I take it from him and put it down. “It’s just … ”
“Just what?”
“Well, from everything you’ve told me, I understand how important Leo was to you. And all those photographs, recordings, awards you said there were. But there’s so little of him here in Morryn.”
“Memories aren’t about objects,” I tell him. That’s how it is with Adam. For half the time, the questions he asks, the way he looks at the things, the ways he picks them up, feel like an intrusion, but for the rest it’s an unburdening, a blessed relief. Here, I show him, pushing aside some of my old childhood drawings—that flat sun and squashed people with their square-roofed house which surely must exist somewhere other than inside every child’s head—is the programme for that benefit performance I gave when I went with Claude to Washington. Copperplate paper, now yellowed, cornered with pink flecks of wine …
We talk, we share—or I do anyway—for that’s what living’s about, isn’t it? We’re not islands. We’d die, drown, if we were.
“So,” I try asking him, “what do you remember now?”
“Many things. But none of it’s personal. None of it’s me. It’s as if—” An expression of something close to pain seems to cross his face.
“Not even in your dreams?”
He gives another of those almost Indian sideways shakes of the head.
“But you’ve heard of the symphonies of Nordinger? You know what happened to Venice? You can picture the dome of Saint Paul’s?”
“All of those things, yes—I can recognise them even before I call up on the screens. But they don’t seem real, exactly. It’s just information. It’s as if I’ve just read about them.”
“Nobody reads these days.”
“Well … Looked them up.” “I suppose we’ll just have to stick with calling you Adam, then.”
“Yes. Abaddon.” He still says it in that odd way. Then he leans from the chair he’s sitting in and he gives a gasp. His hands flutter towards his right side.
“It’s that cut, isn’t it? The bigger one? You’d better come upstairs and let me look at it again.”
He nods, then submits. Upstairs, he sits on the same stool in the bathroom he sat down on—how many days ago was it? The other cuts, abrasions—those I can see anyway on his wrists and neck now he’s not naked—have faded. Crouching down, I lift up Claude’s old tee shirt to take a peek. Adam’s skin is golden, and his belly really does look like some medieval painting, but wasn’t the spear cut on Christ’s other side? For the life of me, I can’t remember. But, unlike the other Adam, at least he has a navel.
The waterproof coating I sprayed on peels back easily. So does most of the dressing beneath. This is all going to be fine, I tell myself. Easypeasy. Nothing but flesh and adhesive. Then he gasps again, this time more loudly, as the last of the strip clinging to the wound resists my fingers.
“Another moment. Just hold still.”
He submits, although his belly is now sucking in and out. But I need to look—what alternative is there?—and my hands, these hands which have shaped the innermost feelings of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, are suddenly cool and firm and steady and authoritative. Adam groans as I give the dangling white tape a firm tug. I try again. His belly has stopped moving now, his whole body is arched, the muscles have turned rigid. One last pull against a momentarily stronger resistance. There’s a slight sound of something parting, then something large and sodden drops with the dressing from my fingers. The wound is wide open, glistening. The plug of artificial skin I inserted has failed to meld. But there’s no odour, which is something, isn’t it?
“How does it look?” Adam finally hisses.
My sight blurs, although the sunlight which washes up from the sea is clinically bright. Defined within this prism, the mouth of the wound looks far wider than I remember it. The flesh seems re-shaped, peeled back as if by curious fingers, and inside …
“Is it infected?”
“Hard to tell … it’s as if … ” Not a wound, but some new orifice, thinning and gaping as Adam begins breathing again.
“Is it serious? What can you see?”
It’s a tunnel, glinting but oddly bloodless. Doubting Thomas, I might almost put my fingers into it, but I refrain. My breath, with my face still close, pulses against Adam’s belly. Yes, yes, of course it could almost be a vagina. It isn’t, but it isn’t a wound, either. And inside, glittering in strange encrustation, are the pillars and grottos of a crystal cave.
“I don’t know,” I tell him, standing up. “Give it time. No, I don’t think it’s infected.” I lay a hand on his shoulder. “But we’d better put something over it.”
His breathing is easy now, and his smile, his endless sense of gratitude, has almost returned. He’s withdrawn again into the pretence of being whatever he imagines he is, and I’m just a schoolgirl playing nurse. Leo, I can’t help remembering as I unravel new padding, never was a good patient long before he got struck down by WRFI. Come on, Roushana, I’d be dead already, even when it was only ketchup sauce and old bandages. The world had to revolve around him, especially when he wasn’t feeling one hundred percent. No wonder Mum became a sadhu, a saint …
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, morrisdancy 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, easygoing 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. Whatever 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?
