The Concert Pianist (24 page)

‘Timber frame, wattle and daub.'

Derek hooked his finger at Ed.

Philip surveyed the wreckage around them.

‘Why have you come back today?'

‘Oh . . . uh . . .'

‘D'you mind standing . . . That's it.'

Behind Philip was a section of ceiling that had buckled and cracked open, its wires and pipes jutting out like the innards of a severed limb.

There was the sound of breaking glass from under Ed's reversing foot.

Derek tried again. ‘Isn't this rather traumatic?'

Philip
imagined Clarissa peering from the kitchen door, looking around to see where the children were.

‘So you wanted to come . . .'

He swallowed. It was gathering now.

‘Please.'

He felt a cold tingling across the back of his shoulders and neck. The room seemed to colour itself in again, filling up with furniture, the curly top of Peter's head in the chair below him, Clarissa coming from the kitchen; and then it released back into the mess in front of him.

‘I came to acknowledge something,' he said, turning to Derek.

Derek drew close, adjusting his earphones.

‘Can you leave me for a moment?'

‘Oh! . . . Sure . . . Sure. Come on, Ed.'

Ed lowered the camera, looked around grimly.

It felt strange to be alone. He stood quite still, let his eyes wander. He was waiting to feel something. He expected the emotion to come suddenly, a welling and glutting, the original agony. He was so close to its source, stepping into the past every few seconds, coming back to the spectacle around him.

They seemed absent. Their spirits had deserted the place, leaving it doubly desolate.

He forced himself to picture things: the stencils on the loo wall, the spider plant on the mantelpiece, Peter's slippers by the fire, the children's toy box behind the armchair, the pale light from the window falling on chair covers, Katie's plastic mermaid tucked under the valance.

Nothing came to fill the emptiness inside him. He exhaled, almost frustrated, like a woman in labour making slow progress. Nothing would come into him, nothing would invade him except silence and emptiness and things that were not.

He trod out of the building.

Derek and Ed sat on the grass amongst buttercups and daisies. Ed had retrieved a flask from his shoulder bag in the car and was taking a swig. Philip walked across the lawn and sat down next to them. They took it in turns with the flask, circulating it two or three times. The vodka had a bracing effect on Philip, a hint of heartburn.

Derek started to laugh. He seemed quite shaken.

Ed
raised his eyebrows. He was similarly affected.

Derek's voice was thick now. ‘You took us by surprise there, Philip.'

They started to giggle. Ed leant on his arm, averting his gaze.

Derek wiped an eye and held his hand over his brow.

Philip focused on the view. He felt a frisson. Time was not straightforward. Every particle of the view settled exactly on memory.

He laughed softly and then crumpled down sideways, his head falling into the grass. For a moment he watched the flask changing hands, saw Ed's chin and cheek against the sky, then he looked at the grass - out of focus - close to his forehead.

He guessed at what he would have to go through. Nothing so simply agonising as grief. A calamity had happened out there in time and he had somehow to find a way of making it happen inside his head. He had to find a way of allowing it through his mind like a toppled tree being dragged, branches and all, through the middle of a house, scratching and ripping at floors and furniture, detritus everywhere until the damn thing is hauled through to the other side, and then the damage is done. He was daunted by the concurrency of this problem with his everyday life. This had been going on for years, side by side with his plans and routines, bulking larger all the time; and now here he was at the centre.

He sat up again, took a rolly off Ed, checked the garden, what could be seen of it. Beyond the drive the lawn had turned to meadow. It was a green haze of thistle and dandelion. The gravel was carpeted in grass. All the roses and shrubs were overblown. The hedges tottering. On the edge of pastureland it took no more than a couple of seasons for nature to scramble over everything, choking borders with nettles and bindweed. The barns seemed embedded in the sloping ground.

Only the fields beyond were the same - fields manicured by chomping cows and nibbling sheep.

Ed was behind him as he walked through the thick grass to the orchard. The camera was not intrusive. There was nothing to intrude upon. He tracked and panned, following point of view, but Philip was drifting now, almost unaware of himself. He had no objection to the documentary. Self-consciousness had deserted him. The public were welcome to whatever they could gain from this spectacle.

This
was where he had stood before, between leaning apple trees in autumn, noticing with a crush of pleasure a cluster of rosehips against the blue sky: red on blue, sharp in the morning light, a hyper-vivid miracle. It was a solitary moment, allowable then, a childlike discovery. They had parented him, he knew that, but the house and its garden seemed to nurture him, too.

He wondered by what means they had allowed him to share in their Eden, offering him the run of the place
en famille,
and the right to survive their fate.

He found a sapling Metasequoia suffocated by grasses, reduced almost to a trellis by rampant weeds, its needle clusters thin and sparse. He had planted it and now he disentangled the branches with tender futility.

They were present all of a sudden, as if he had seen them yesterday, Peter coming across the lawn with his tousled hair, white shirt and jeans - a Pan-like figure; Clarissa wafting around the house, snipping rosemary and thyme. They displayed the happy purposefulness of people who had found their nest and had the talent and temperament to make the most of it.

Derek peered out from behind a giant hogweed. He seemed troubled by the abundance of vegetation. He raise a thumb at Ed and framed with his hands the idea for a shot over Philip's shoulder towards a hump-backed hill. ‘Elgarian. Sort of.'

Derek was more sensitive and poised now. His movements deferred, drew on, yielded. He had the dissimulated alertness of someone who has caught on and is nervously determined to get the goods.

‘D'you have photographs of this place?'

‘Probably.'

‘Then-and-now effect?'

They paused at a gate, Philip wondering where to go, where to look.

‘Why come here today?'

Philip opened his mouth, shook his head. He felt a little giddy.

‘This happened a while ago.' Derek looked over his shoulder. ‘It's odd to rake it up. What made you . . . all of a sudden . . . want to come back?'

‘I . . . I owed them a visit.'

Derek
appeared to digest this. He nodded, bit his lip. ‘You think of them as still here?'

Philip was open to the suggestion but could not confirm it.

Derek waggled his finger at Ed, who was side-on a few feet back.

‘The sudden non-being of someone you know is mysterious,' said Philip.

‘Hard to accept?'

‘I couldn't have come here before now.'

‘Too painful?'

‘Of course it was too fucking painful!'

Derek suffered the impatience without blinking. He seemed ready to be given something.

‘I mean . . . either you say, “Shit happens.” Forget it, get on with your life, because there's no point . . . Or you say, “I have to acknowledge it. Until I let it overwhelm me, I can't say I've survived.” '

They stood, the three of them, on the drive, shade playing in their faces. A pair of dragonflies jiggered past.

The shadow of a branch swayed against the brickwork of the barn.

He was crying now. He fingered away the tears, panted in air, against the sobs trapped in his throat.

Derek drew the cameraman away, averting his own eyes.

Philip gestured, hoping the gesture would help him, but nothing came of it.

Derek glanced along the driveway, debating something.

From here the house was out of sight, concealed by the barn. The three men gazed at the light-shot opening beyond the canopy of trees.

Philip moved off along the drive, slowly drawn back. The other two stood behind him checking their equipment. Eventually they followed at a distance.

This time when he cleared the barn and the fringe of willow leaves the house looked more simply awful than before. Some builder should by now have bought the plot and redeveloped it. He went closer, feeling strange pity for the house.

He gazed through a kitchen window at the dim mess inside, walls flaking and peeling, like a degenerating womb. He glanced back at
the
men and slipped in through a door to the annex, former scene of wellington boots and curls of mud on the floor. In the kitchen the ceiling plasterboard hung loose and gaping in places. The counters were intact, Formica curling; the floor tiles were covered in a scree of dust and rubble. Over the sink there was a trap-door-size hole in the ceiling. Philip came under the aperture and looked up at the rafters of Katie's bedroom. It seemed as if the squarish manhole had been neatly cut by firemen to gain access to the room above. He levered himself on to the counter, stood up on the old units and made his way around to the sink to get a better look. Standing on tiptoe his eyes came just above floor level. He was nose to nose with the leg of a bed. As far as he could tell the fire had not penetrated this room. The walls bore smoke-stained wallpaper, but the door had shut out the flames from the landing. The massive central chimney stack had protected this chamber from the worst of the heat.

He braced his arms and levered himself up, boards creaking, plaster crumbling away and clattering on the sink. He pulled through slowly, wedged a knee on a rafter and rolled sideways on to the bedroom floor.

There was the same smell of smoke, but as he got up, dusting his knees and elbows, he saw that the room was intact. He looked around in a kind of dull wonder, and slowly he realised what he was staring at. Everywhere there were toys, children's books, fluffy animals. Her possessions were on the chest of drawers, the shelves, the mantelpiece. Sticker books, a fairy calendar, a pink plastic hairbrush, the bedraggled queue of toy rabbits and giraffes, sitting patiently on the floor. He turned with a lurch in his heart to see her dressing gown hanging on the back of the door. The men had come in to get her, come too late, of course, taken the poor thing out through that hole, but nobody could face climbing up again to clear up her things. He caught his face in his hands and sat slowly on the end of the bed. The room had been waiting for him all these years, waiting for him to come and see what had happened.

He sat in a trance, as if trapped by a spell, the cluster of memories coming at him from every corner of the room, through stale air that still carried a bouquet of the past, so close now, so concurrent, so rivingly familiar. His eyes rested on everything in turn, every single object he could find to notice and take in. She was there in his mind
so
suddenly, and this was the difficult thing. These little icons of childhood were imbued with her child self, the lilac toy mobile, the scrap of ribbon, the crayon. How real she had been, little Katie, having her crack at existence with such zest! He could hear the sound of her singing to herself between bossy mutterings as she managed the mermaids or the rabbits. His heart had flowed towards that little girl, whom he thought of as his child only because he loved her so much for herself; he loved the premise of her character, the fact he had known her since day one, had seen a brand-new original human being enter the world, and what was excruciating now was the vividness of this child in memory. She was there. In his mind's eye she was seconds away.

One could almost believe the rest of the house was intact. He dared not open the door on to the landing: a black cavern, no doubt. He noticed how a clothes-rack pole slanted across the wall, barring the window and rescue.

He realised, this was it, yes, because he could not remember, not voluntarily, could not bring himself to picture them, the whole dear family in this house, in this garden, until he had seen for himself that they were gone. Until he had forced this charred ruin into his mind, this rank shell, this dusty, musty death-trap; until he had seen with his own eyes how things stood in reality, and got into his head the stark fact of their awful deaths, the past was closed to him, an unreachable dream. He could not even do Katie the justice of calling her to mind. Had not been able to, had not dared to. And yet in his mind they were everywhere now, so close, just the far side of a corner in time.

He lay on the bed, lips parted, caving in slowly, mildew hanging in his nostrils, dust in his hair, silence sitting on him like a press, a weight that would ease the breath out of him, a flattening weight that crushed away thought and sense and self.

When he opened his eyes, he felt not quite himself. He lay on the mattress without turning his head.

Before descending through the hole he put his hand on a fluffy rabbit and waited a second. He stroked the rabbit but left it where it was. Sliding down into the kitchen the smell of smoke hit him like a wall, a bitter stink you could almost taste.

Outside
on the lawn the brightness was dazzling. Everything seemed whitened by sunlight. Ed and Derek were standing in the grass by the stream. They were talking and nodding easily.

A cow in the field flicked its tail.

They looked at him as he came out, but he kept his distance, crossing to agate by the field.

Ten minutes later he was up on the hill, the poplars behind him hissing like surf. He stared at the wide yonder of fields, catching his breath. The hills were a lattice of light and shade. Woodland tributaries flowed off the slopes and met in the valley. In the flat distance the limbs of a beech tree magnificently erupted. He stood there with mouth agape, letting the emotion run out of him, sorrow out, sensation in, a glut of it, his tears flecked by the wind.