Читать книгу Facing the Music - Andrea Goldsmith - Страница 7

The man rolled into a wedge of sun, his chest was bare and there was a gentle snoring. Anna glanced at him, then was staring, the man resembled Duncan, the man in the bed looked like her father: the same heavy brown hair, the same chalky skin, the same pulpy cheeks, the same ribbed forehead, and over it all the loosening flesh of a man in clear view of old age. She shuddered and swallowed and escaped the bed; how was it possible that on the day she was to see Duncan after an absence of twelve years she should first find him on her pillow?

It had been such a joyless night. She should have worked, or cleaned the house, should have done anything but pick up a stranger in a Hobart bar and go back to his hotel. She looked again; he had not resembled Duncan in the floury light of early morning, only now, as he lay sleeping, his body slack, his face in repose, did she see her father. Only now, with Duncan just a few hours away, did she feel the touch of her father’s mighty hand.

She turned away, tried the window for some fresh air, but it would not open. The excesses of last night were pressing on her; she grabbed her clothes, hurried into the bathroom and drank straight from the tap. Immediately, a flush of heat, slick and prickly. She peered into the mirror, she looked terrible; her pale skin was streaked with grey, her hair, recently renewed to a luscious orange, was a corroded mess, and her eyes had almost disappeared in the huge bruises of last night’s makeup. She splashed water on her face, inhaled two or three times, felt suddenly dizzy and sank to the toilet seat. The noise of crackling plastic had her on her feet again; the lid had split, three neat breaks and nothing she could fix. She threw a towel on the floor and sat down. She could hardly feel any worse: the stranger in the bed, Duncan with his expectant hovering, and a head corsetted by too much alcohol and too many cigarettes. Yet she had planned last night, had wanted to avoid any fretful and useless rehearsals of future woes, had wanted, in truth, not to think.

But with the midday plane to Melbourne to catch, could delay no longer. She dragged herself to her feet and started to dress. First to extricate herself from the stranger, a visiting businessman, or so he had said last night, in Hobart to buy hand-crafted furniture. ‘Although I’ve nothing planned for tomorrow morning, so we can have breakfast together, see in the day slowly.’ They had been walking from the bar to his hotel, he had given her a squeeze and winked in the night light. She heard herself groan, she’d had quite enough of his groping, all she wanted to do now was leave.

How uncomplicated sex used to be, but not last night. Rather than the oblivion she had sought, her fears were sharper than ever, and just when she needed her wits about her, she was exhausted and sick and saddled with a Duncan look-alike in the next room. She returned to the bedroom; stale odours fanned her disgust, his snoring too; she took one last look, then woke him. With his eyes open, the resemblance to Duncan fortunately disappeared; the man, however, was reluctant for her to do the same. He reached across the sheets, caught a hand, clutched at a breast. She pulled away, stood out of range.

‘What’s wrong with you? I told you I had the morning free.’ He reached for his watch. ‘Christ! You must be bloody crazy. It’s Saturday morning, it’s fucking seven o’clock and you’re up and dressed – ’

‘ – and must be off.’

‘Why in bloody hell didn’t you tell me this last night.’ He was silent and sulking and stubbornly supine. She left him to his moping and set about collecting keys and handbag.

‘Come here.’ The words oozed out of him. ‘Come here, darlin’, what’s the hurry?’ She shook her head and made for the door. His anger flared again and a nastiness about the eyes. ‘Going to your next bloke, eh?’

She left without another word, dropping the television remote control unit into his briefcase on the way out. In the lobby, she informed the porter that the man in room 253 was planning to leave without paying, had vandalised the toilet and stolen the television controls, then stepped into the late autumn morning.

Within thirty minutes she was home, and after a shower rang Raphe. Lily had settled in well, he said, although had not been much interested in sleeping. They had been up for hours, had finished breakfast by six, then Lily had organised a concert for the pets – ‘Your daughter will be running the country one day’ – and had been about to leave for the market when Anna had phoned. He laughed. ‘I feel as if I’ve put in a day’s work already.’

Then Lily was on the line, full of the morning’s activities and not in the least perturbed about being away from her mother. She told Anna about the concert and her plans for ‘something really cool’ later in the day. ‘I’ve rigged up some percussion for Raphe – he’s got no ear but plenty of rhythm – ’ there were protests from Raphe in the background, ‘ – and I’ll do all the rest. Of course the cats and dogs like different things which makes it a bit hard.’

‘And the budgerigars?’

‘They like anything but don’t really matter, they’ve got even less sense of a tune than Raphe. I wish we had some pets, Mum. How about a dog?’

Anna said they’d discuss it when she returned from Melbourne.

‘And you’ll be home on Monday?’

Anna assured her she would, and after sending kisses down the line, asked to speak to Raphe.

‘You’ve got the number at the college, and my parents’ number as well. You’re to ring if anything happens, anything at all.’

‘I understand Anna, stop worrying. I’m sure there’ll be no reason to contact you ’

‘But if there is – ’

‘I’ll be discreet.’

‘They must not know about Lily.’

‘And won’t from me.’

‘Thank you Raphe, thank you. It’d be impossible without you.’

She waited for him to hang up, stood cradling the receiver against her chest, closed her eyes and saw her dark-eyed daughter alongside Raphe – a child with a man not her father but someone who knew and loved her – and told herself to stop worrying, Lily was no ordinary child.

When Anna became pregnant eight, nearly nine years ago in London, the decision to have the baby would have been so much easier if she could have known the joy this child would bring. As it was, when the decision was finally made the reasons were not particularly clear, although she knew she wanted something of her own.

‘How about a cat?’ Lewis had suggested. ‘I wouldn’t mind a cat here.’ He had cast a not-altogether-confident gaze about the scrappy London flat they shared.

‘No, cats tie you down. I want to move, to travel. A baby can come with me. A baby,’ she had cupped her hands, ‘is a little flame of life.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Anna. How’s your little flame of life going to keep you? How will the two of you live?’

‘I’ll stay with the group until I can’t fit around the cello – you flautists don’t know how lucky you are – I’m earning a bit from my composition, and there’s always copying work. I’ll manage.’

‘And the father?’ Lewis had asked. ‘Is he to know?’

Anna shook her head. Besides, she was not exactly sure who the father was. She had hoped it was Hugh, the blond aesthete from the London Chorale who wrote lyrical poetry and had a way with money, but when Lily was born with a thick crop of black hair and olive skin, the odds on Hugh lengthened. Strangely, and despite the difference in colouring, mother and child looked alike. There were the prominent cheekbones broad and angled, the almond-shaped eyes beneath the arched eyebrows, the compact, sharp-edged mouth, the finely carved nose, and the slight frame – all features inherited from Juliet Bayle, Anna realised. Then there was the music; like Anna, Lily was very musical.

‘But she’ll be tougher than I was,’ Anna said aloud, and noticing she was still holding the phone, replaced it and went to make some coffee.

It had been her decision to take Lily to Raphe’s yesterday, she had wanted time alone to prepare for the trip to Melbourne. So much for the peaceful morning she had planned, ruined by last night’s mistake, the drinking, the stranger, the sex, all had been a mistake, her head was throbbing and she could hardly swallow for the putrid taste. Long gone were those mercurial nights of forgetting, far-flung nights of booze and pills and sex; if it were oblivion she had been wanting, she would have done better with a new form of forgetting. But the fact of the matter was, Duncan’s letter, the first since she had left home, had caught her unawares, had revived feelings she thought long dead, and she had been terrified. Here she was, a dozen years distant from her father, a grown woman, a mother, a successful composer, and still he could unsettle her. So it was not surprising, that when she found herself in need of a form of escape, she had resorted to the well-tried strategies of the past, long alcohol-sodden nights laced with anonymous sex.

The first time she had been only fourteen, during those redraw days following her decision to give up the cello. Such a terrible wrenching it had been. Duncan, never one for deep emotion, had been delighted, and Anna was pleased to have made him happy, but, and she only realised this much later, his had been an unfair price for a father’s love. It was then that her own love for him had died, buried along with her dreams of becoming a solo cellist. Again, with hindsight, she would come to see that the loss of her love was a way of never forgiving him. And she did not forgive him. Not that he ever knew, ever suspected anything was amiss; she had continued to work with him as if nothing had changed; each day after school she would sit with him in the music room, studying his work, discussing it, playing it and revising it. Music helped anaesthetise the pain.

At night, however, it was different, at night she would lie awake picking over her lost dreams. Ever since the age of three when first she had heard the cello – heaven’s music she had called it, much to Duncan’s amusement – she had wanted to be a cellist, had wanted to explore the sprawling landscape of that indomitable instrument. And now would not. ‘A composer should avoid allegiance to any one instrument,’ Duncan had always said, and she had listened to him, everyone listened to him. When finally she decided, he put his arms around her in an uncharacteristic show of affection and kissed her. ‘We’ll have much more time together now,’ he promised. And so they did, but the pleasure she expected did not materialise, instead, just a lukewarm sadness like a perpetual bereavement that would become so pronounced she no longer knew where she ended and the rest of the world began. It was then she was compelled to act and for a few hours assume a different persona far removed from the arid plains of her disappointment.

It would happen once, maybe twice a week, Duncan and her mother asleep in their room, no lights, just the lumbering shadows of a house grown dry in the joints, all asleep except Anna, lying in her bed trying to dodge the phantoms of wakefulness as they rush at her through the granular night. And in their wake, a sickly, sticky quivering that clutters the air and clings to her skin and eventually drives her from her bed. She goes to the window and parts the curtains, stares at the city lights and tries to comfort herself. After all, the loss of the cello has not left her entirely bereft; there is still the work with her father, and if it is less than what she needs, it nonetheless has its moments. She talks softly and calms herself and returns to the bed. But within minutes the quivering is back and the hurtling shadows, and she must rush to the window, to the city lights so close, urging her away from the house, away from Duncan and her mother, away from this blank misery she cannot define. Staring and glaring, the bright lights coax and promise, and finally she can stand it no longer, the loss, the stifling emptiness. If she could escape her body, she would think, shed it like a cicada, she would do so. For the loss of the cello was visceral, a very particular amputation; without its swollen warmth her balance was disturbed, without its majestic tone she was weakened.

She tried to tell herself it was only a partial loss, that she could still play the cello whenever she pleased, but with their future together gone, with no reason to plumb its depths, it had become a gelid love. What had been essential, what had fed her body and nourished her spirit, had been reduced to something casual, and in the process had been transformed. As was she; only fourteen, yet possessed of a puny half-life and growing smaller. It was not enough to play the cello as a hobby, as a form of relaxation, for without the studying and the exploring, without the edging towards perfection, there was no seduction, no craving, no appetite at all.

And so she learned that the casual artist was a contradiction in terms, that to be an artist, to delight in one’s art and thrive on it, one must confront it over and over again, must on a daily basis learn to know it anew. When she was young, people used to say that with her natural talent the cello came easily. But they were wrong, the natural talent could do no more than show her the potential of the instrument; the rest, the striving to reproduce its vast universe was the labour of her days. So it mattered not that she could still play for comfort or pleasure, she had never sought that from the instrument, and while she might still dabble a bit, the cello as she had known it was gone. As for the work with her father, it certainly helped fill the gap, but there was something about his carefully-felt phrases that could not sustain her, and certainly not during long nights flayed by ghosts.

Which was when she would decide to go out. She would dress, put on makeup and leave the house, and every time she left, she knew with an intuitive knowing that others before her had done the same, had crept down the stairs while their parents slept, into the hallway skirting the loose floorboards, down the two stone steps worn smoothly concave after a century of use, and out the kitchen door to the small back garden. She sensed these others as she climbed over the back gate and into the lane, for to think her misery was unique would only compound her suffering.

To the city she would go, its pubs and bars pumping life into the night. The proprietors soon got to know her and stopped pestering her for identification, leaving her to drink and laugh until late, to pass a few hours when she could forget the burnt-out days of life without the cello. At closing time, more often than not, she would take to the back lanes for sex with a stranger, which was just another form of forgetting, probably the best of all. Over the years there must have been hundreds of men, anonymous men, young and old; and sometimes there was money, which she always accepted – after all, the sex was blatantly utilitarian, so why not the occasional prostitution?

Looking back on those days she was amazed she never got into trouble, but did not, or at least nothing she could not handle. Besides, if she had focused on the dangers she would have had to devise other forms of forgetting.

She was about fifteen when first she took the car, and this proved to be as effective a pain-killer as sex with strangers, particularly in winter, cold turbulent nights and the streets deserted, and she would pull on her clothes and leave the house. Juliet insisted the car be parked in the lane; her only interest, apart from Duncan, was the garden, and given it was such a small plot, she refused to part with any of it for off-street parking. With the car in the lane, stealing it was easy.

Anna always followed the same route, driving away from the city towards the bay. The road curved around the beachside suburbs, past large, glass-fronted houses with blank, tinted stares, and on the other side, the wintry water, chopped and frosted by the southern winds. The window would be open and she would inhale the salted air; her hair, still brown in those days and very long, would lash her icy face. On and on, forty kilometres from the centre of Melbourne, on through the satellite suburbs and then the climb. The road cut into the side of the cliff and rose steeply above the bay, turning suddenly inland at the summit. When she reached the top, Anna would turn the car around and stop, would stare beyond the road to the glistening sea, and in her imagination she would press the accelerator and surge forward in a wild soaring through the welcoming sky.

So clearly did she see this death, she wondered if it were a common experience. She decided to ask her friend Nadia, older by a year and very much wiser, a gifted violinist, whose parents, so different from Duncan and Juliet, wanted their daughter to be a solo performer. Nadia had not liked the question and refused to answer. It was only when Anna persisted that gentle Nadia turned on her and grabbed her by the arms. ‘You can be so stupid sometimes,’ she had said. ‘When will you learn there are certain thoughts you must push away? When will you learn to turn your back? Anyone can see their death, but only a fool would give in to it.’

Nadia was a serious girl, which made her a valuable friend but a not-always-easy one, and while she had wisdom beyond her years, on this occasion Anna chose to ignore her. For the fact of the matter was, that far from fear and danger, flying through the air in the moment before death was a kind of ecstasy.

This is how it would be. She would be at the top of the cliff, would turn the car around so the sea is in front of her, the road descending for perhaps a hundred metres then curving to the right to follow the line of the cliff. She starts the car, takes the road only so far as the bend, continues straight ahead over the glimmering, heaving sea, hearing the rushing wind as she speeds through the air, and music rising in a fantastic discord that mocks the costive rhythms of her father. Never in her imaginings does she touch the water; she glides above the waves in a prolonged moment of insight and the music she hears is her own. So it happens, in her parents’ car at three in the morning, she always pauses before the descent to decide if this will be the night, and never actually decides, never actually knows who, at the last minute, turns the wheel, but feels the sadness of knowing what she has missed.

‘Are you afraid of dying?’ Anna asked Nadia a couple of days after the first death questions.

Nadia was back to her usual self and had been quick to answer. ‘Not afraid,’ she said, ‘just not ready.’

From Anna’s perspective, Nadia’s was a perfect life. Her parents believed the solo performer occupied a special place in the world, indeed, so exalted was the place, that when they heard Anna had discontinued her cello studies, they tried to persuade her to change her mind. They spoke of the loss, both to Anna and to music, spoke too, of the terrible disappointment for her father. Anna explained that Duncan fully supported her decision, and kept on explaining until they withdrew, but it was clear they did not understand. Their view was shaped by their daughter, the girl with everything, clever, talented and adored by all. ‘Not afraid,’ she had said to Anna’s question about death, ‘just not ready.’ Anna had looked at her and was puzzled, Nadia was the sort of person to live for ever. Then Nadia had laughed. ‘Just joking,’ she said.

But she was not. During the ten years Anna spent in London, she had written a handful of postcards to Nadia and each time had received a long and considered reply. On arriving back in Australia she had tried to contact her old friend. When she failed to locate her at her past two addresses, Anna rang her family to find out where she was living. Five months before, Nadia had killed herself; perfect Nadia who played the violin like an angel and was loved by everyone, had killed herself. ‘She’d been depressed for a long time,’ her mother said. ‘Even if we’d known, we couldn’t have stopped her.’ Nadia had drowned; weighed down with whisky and valium, she had walked into the ocean and sunk. ‘She always liked the sea,’ Anna said, feeling as if she should say something. ‘She never liked anything,’ her mother had replied.

Anna kept a photograph of Nadia on the mantlepiece. ‘This was Mummy’s friend Nadia,’ she would say to Lily. ‘She played the violin so beautifully people said she played like an angel.’ Often she would listen to her old tapes of Nadia, hearing now she was dead, the furious rushing at emotion that shaped the playing. And while she listened she would remember her wise friend who, even as a child, knew the perils of life, her soft-skinned, almost-smiling friend who never seemed quite large enough on a broad empty stage.

Not so long ago, while playing one of Nadia’s tapes, Lily had joined her; the child had listened without comment until the music was finished and then announced she wanted to be just like Nadia and play the violin like an angel. Anna had not known how to respond, so shocked was she to think Lily might have anything in common with Nadia and her short, stained life. She had studied her daughter, searching for Nadia’s porcelain calm, the self-crushing gentleness, but to her relief found only the outspoken child bursting the seams of her young life. And when she played, she showed none of Nadia’s outward reserve. Lily’s face, indeed her whole body, was fused with the music.

‘I’ll play like Nadia,’ Lily said again.

‘And so you will,’ Anna had replied, ‘like an angel.’

The violin was Lily’s first instrument but she could turn her hand to anything, the piano, percussion, even conducting a pets’ chorus. And Anna smiled, her daughter would be all right, and not just for the two days she was in Melbourne, Lily was a child to grasp opportunity with both hands and fly.

Anna roused herself and turned her thoughts to the day. First, some food; she was not hungry but with Duncan and her mother looming, it would be impossible to eat later. She took a roll from the freezer, cooked it under the griller and ate it with an apple. Next, her luggage; she chose the smaller of her two bags and packed quickly. She washed the dishes, tidied up, and with an hour to spare, left the house for a walk up the mountain.

A couple of years before, with Lily about to start school, Anna had decided to leave London and return to Australia. If not for Lily, she would have stayed, her friends were in London and her work, but she thought Australia would be better for the child. She had picked Tasmania because it was cool, it was said to be very beautiful, it had a relatively low cost of living, and it was an island, detached and contained like herself. A return to Melbourne, the city she loved, had been out of the question, and would remain so while her parents lived there. It was pure chance that had led her to this house on the mountain. A couple of weeks after her arrival in Hobart she had met Raphe at the market. He had been minding a friend’s herb stall when a sudden downpour had given him and Anna an undisturbed half-hour to become acquainted. It turned out the stall-owner had recently moved to the mainland and her house was available to rent. Anna decided to take it and two years ago she and Lily had moved in.

It was an old house even by Tasmanian standards, small and rickety and built of time-bleached timber, with a steep roof of streaky iron which was home to all manner of wild life. The first winter Anna had been terrified, it was as if the roof had been invaded by a troop of sumo wrestlers. Such was her relief when the wrestlers turned out to be a family of possums that she decided they could all live together amicably. The rats, however, with their scratchings and dashings and resonances of filth were quite another matter.

‘They’re only bush rats, hardly rats at all,’ Raphe had said, making no attempt to hide his humour.

‘A rat is a rat.’ And nothing would persuade Anna otherwise.

‘You’ll get used to them, you’ll have to, because there’s no getting rid of them. Look on it as an act of charity, giving shelter to a much-maligned and misunderstood species.’

After two years Anna still had not adjusted to them. And Raphe had been right, there was no getting rid of them; no matter how well-sealed the roof, they managed to find a way in, and once established they multiplied. She bristled at their scratchings and was always scared they would take over the rest of the house. Of course she could have moved, but had come to treasure the place too much to be driven away, even by rats. The house was perched high on Mt Wellington, just thirty minutes from Hobart, no neighbours she could see, but people close enough should she need them. And while there were times she missed the life of a large city, she had enjoyed a gentle blooming these past couple of years.

She pulled on her walking shoes and made her way up the steep incline via the path she had cut through the blackberries. Her chest still ached from last night’s cigarettes, and she pushed herself harder. The slurp of her shoes in the mulch of autumn rains joined with the hissing wind, and the call of birds too, several different kinds that Anna could not name, although she had come to recognise their voices. The thick undergrowth of ferns and grasses amongst lichen-patched rocks was also familiar, and the huge burnt-out tree trunks, moss-covered and lying like bloodied welts on the slopes. She looked up at the jagged white skeletons of trees burned in the fires of 1967, and wondered whether they, too, would collapse into the undergrowth some day.

It was a changing bush. In winter there was snow, usually a couple of dumps each season, and later a blaze of yellow as the acacias burst. There could be no mistaking this landscape for a pocket of Europe; the trees, in particular, reminded her where she was with their slender branches caught in a fertile tussle for the southern sun. And the sky was a lilac blue, so different from the pallid blue of London, different too, from the gaudy skies of the Australian mainland. And the passage of winter to spring, with none of the civility of the London awakening nor the half-hearted attempt of the mainland, here all was extravagance and a magnificent hotch-potch of light and colour. It was a landscape for music, and had, in fact, inspired much of Anna’s recent work. Her response to the land surprised her; always she had lived in large cities, a chameleon of the shadows emptying her emotions into the streets, shaping and reshaping an identity within the city’s swarming anonymity. She had wondered what would happen to her away from the life-giving byways of the city, yet here in her mountain house, far from withering and shrivelling up, she had thrived.

Just before the main track she stopped, and breathed in the still, fresh air of solitude that had kept her here these past couple of years. In the distance was the sea, a sombre blue in the thin autumn light. The green pastures, stretching from the water to the lower slopes of the mountain, were blotted with sheep clinging together beneath clumps of trees. As the incline stiffened, so the forest began, with dollops of orange and yellow and red amongst the green. It had been a sanctuary for her and Lily, and would, she hoped, sustain her for the trials ahead. Duncan had written, for the first time in twelve years he had written, he had written of illness and death, he had sounded weak and pathetic, he had asked her to come home. Duncan Bayle, born to receive, whose needs had always been anticipated, rarely asked for anything; for him to do so meant the situation was serious. She had rarely refused him and would not now, more for herself than for him, for if he were to die her guilt would be ferocious. Most of her life had been spent in thrall to her father, she could not risk his death holding her forever captive.

There had been a time when she believed that without Duncan she would have no music, without Duncan she would have no life. He was a genius, everyone said so, and from her earliest years, it was as if music, all music including her own, came from him. She had hoped as the years went by to forgive him the loss of her cello, after all, it had been his gift in the first place, but, far from this happening, time only tightened her resentment. Although worse, far worse, was the fear of having no music at all. With the cello gone, there was only Duncan’s music to sustain her, hours of his music every day; to leave him, therefore, had required enormous courage. Initially it seemed her worst fears had been realised when, for the first time in her life, she found herself without serious music, but a few months more saw something of a renaissance, and in time she was to acquire a reputation of her own as a composer that even Duncan would have admired.

She had arrived in London after several months travelling, needing a place to live and a job. The job she found first as the cellist in a chamber group that performed backings to advertisements, and a place to live immediately followed. The flautist with the group, Lewis, whose boyfriend of several years had just left him for a ménage à trois in the Bahamas, needed a new flatmate, and within twenty-four hours of their meeting, Anna had moved into his Islington flat.

It had been strained living with a stranger, and bleak without proper music. She had stayed away from the flat, foraging deep into the London streets and long into the night in search of a heavy, dreamless sleep. She rarely played the cello except with the group, as for composing, she had always regarded that as Duncan’s work.

And so it had happened: for the first time she knew a life without music, yet was managing in a kind of survival. And tried not to dwell on it; only the arrogant can risk knowing their life is empty of purpose.

It was a long time before Lewis knew anything of Anna’s past. When first they met, he had asked if she were related to Duncan Bayle; Anna’s curt denial had prevented further questions. However, a couple of months later, on a rare evening Anna was home, he had asked again. The two of them were sitting at the kitchen table sipping port and eating crisps and chatting about the other members of the group, when out of the blue, Lewis said, ‘You are his daughter, aren’t you? You are Duncan Bayle’s daughter?’

There was something in his tone to suggest that being Duncan Bayle’s daughter was not an altogether fortunate circumstance.

‘Don’t you like his music?’ Anna had asked.

‘Some of it, although I was thinking more about being his daughter, how living with a so-called great man would not have been easy.’

In the pause that followed, Lewis had stood up and taken some dishes to the sink; on the way back to his chair he had stopped behind Anna and put his hands on her shoulders. She had felt a light pressure and a movement of his fingers, gentle, persuasive and rubbing the film off her memories. And began to talk, and once started, found herself unable to stop. On and on she went, fuelling the narrative with more and more port, talking not about Duncan, there was nothing to say about Duncan, but of the nights with strangers, the drugs, the booze, the car at the top of the cliff. She talked about the loss of her cello, about the years of shuffling uppers and downers in a bid to maintain appearances.

‘And so I passed my childhood – not exactly in a state of innocence.’ Then, more to herself, ‘It really was an awful time.’

Lewis had listened without interruption. When she was finished, he sat in the silence, shaking his head in disbelief, and in his face a sympathy Anna found intolerable.

‘I did all right,’ she said quickly. ‘I must have, I’m here to tell the story.’

‘It’s a wonder they didn’t lock you up.’

‘But that’s just it!’ Anna was triumphant. ‘Only by doing what I did, all that crazy behaviour, could I be normal when it was required. Neither my parents nor my teachers thought anything was wrong.’ She paused. ‘Well, not until I refused to work with Duncan, then they couldn’t help noticing there was a problem.’

Lewis could not believe her parents didn’t know. ‘They must have done. All those years of stealing the car and staying out all night, you must have looked like death at breakfast.’

Anna shrugged. ‘They never said anything, and if they did know yet did nothing about it, then they deserved to lose me, deserved a lot worse than that.’

The next morning Anna was too embarrassed to face him. She stayed in bed listening to the stirrings in the flat, waiting for him to leave. After the front door closed, she must have remained where she was, for by the time she got up, the shape of the piece had formed. She could not remember moving from the bed, could not remember the search for pencil and paper, did not know exactly how she began, it all seemed to happen on a fresh plane of consciousness, one clear of bitterness and burnt-out dreams.

There was no doubt, however, about the music. It was a composition for flute and piano, far freer than her father’s work, drawn in the first instance from the London streets where she had walked so often, walking away from her past – not forgetting it, mustn’t forget, just creating a little distance – streets packed with people and traffic, old buildings solid amongst the new, decaying monuments, the human stories in the shadows, threads of sound like the voices of a fugue peeled apart then left to mingle and reconnect in a not-always-comfortable union. The music took up the motion of the city, moving between the landscape and the people, the past and the present. Duncan had never been interested in the flute, had regarded it as light-weight and prissy, far too feminine for his liking. It was an instrument for detail, Anna now decided, and Duncan had never been one for detail.

As the piece evolved, thoughts and images that had flitted by during her London wanderings reappeared, almost as if they had been waiting to be used. So many thoughts, so many memories – of Duncan and her childhood, but also memories not specifically her own. As she wrote her music, she recalled the derelict grave of a young man killed in action in 1943, and the rough-hewn accent of the ancient woman downstairs, and found herself, only twenty years old, but with an entire century in her grasp. It dawned on her that it is the detail, the ordinary aspects of life which are full of meaning, that form the backbone to memory and understanding, but you have to be alert or you’ll miss the cues.

As she roamed through London she had noticed everything: dusty faces, fenced-in parks, gilt-edged tourists lugging cameras, a man dragging a German Shepherd on a lead while talking into a dictaphone, his two young children walking solemnly behind. She saw the man and thought of her father, understanding, perhaps for the first time, that the only way Duncan could have assumed a right to her childhood was because he did not see the child, saw only an extension of himself. Duncan always acted as if there were no past, not much present either except in his desire for admiration, it was only the future that mattered. Duncan, a man who eschewed detail, a man who believed he could do anything, was a man without memory, and without memory he lacked moral judgement. This, she decided, was the prerequisite to a no-fault life – no memory.

All the details that nourished memory she gave to the flute: the grime and shadows, the cracks in the pavement, the man with his dog and dictaphone, transforming them into a scrambling, mid-range, percussive torrent above the rocky chords of the piano. And Duncan was there, more a presence than an intrusion, and unusually benign. We have worn out words, Anna had thought. Who can trust the written histories to fill up memory? Who can believe my father? But buildings with their enduring scars, and landscapes and strangers, are quite another matter. And music too.

She wrote the city, she wrote the memories, working in a way new to her, utterly engrossed, answerable to no one, moving between the table and the old upright in the living-room, stopping neither for rest nor nourishment and discovering for the first time the supple pleasures of her own music.

When Lewis returned that evening, he was surprised to find her at home. He slipped in quietly, sat in the living-room and listened. After a while she turned to him and asked if he would take up the flute part. Hours later, when they had finished for the night, Anna smiled and embraced him. ‘It’s called London Nocturne – not particularly original I know.’ And still smiling, ‘It’s for you.’

Nearly twelve years ago in a pokey Islington flat, and so much music since. And other cityscapes too, the latest, Colony, for cello and orchestra, inspired by Hobart, and written for Madelaine Beck. Madelaine had been thrilled, such a commotion when she rang from London, the playing of phrases over the telephone, the minutes ticking by – not that Madelaine Beck and Eve Carstairs were short of money, but still an impromptu concert at two dollars a minute seemed something of an indulgence. Then Eve was on the phone. Everyone was talking about the new work, she said, and everyone expected Anna to be present at the première. ‘I’ve told them you will, you and Lily both. I’ll organise everything from this end, all you have to do is pack your bags and get to the airport.’

Anna had protested at the time, the huge distance, the difficulty of taking Lily out of school, but now as she clambered down the slope back to her house, and Duncan just a few hours away, she wanted to be far from here, wanted to be with her friends. She collected her belongings, made a last minute check of the house and locked up. No sooner had she done so than the phone rang. Immediately she thought of Lily, unlocked the door and rushed inside.

‘I thought I must have missed you.’

It was Eve, and of course it would be, Anna had written to her as soon as she had heard from Duncan.

‘I’ve just received your letter. What could he possibly want?’

‘He says he’s sick, certainly he sounds sick, but who knows with Duncan?’

‘You couldn’t just ignore him?’

‘I never could, if I’d done so years ago my life would have been very different. I have to go, but I’ll make it brief, just a couple of days.’

Anna heard Eve light a cigarette, heard the deep inhalation.

‘I’ve never liked your father, never. He’s not a man to be trusted.’

‘I know, Eve, but for the first time in my life, I feel I have the upper hand.’

There was more puffing on her cigarette and more anxious words.

‘Eve, please, stop worrying. I’ve been away twelve years, what can he do in a couple of days? I’ll be fine. I’m sure I’ll be fine.’ And decided to change the topic. ‘I’ve been giving more thought to Colony, and if you’re still happy to help, Lily and I might come over for the première after all.’

Eve picked up immediately. ‘Of course you will, I never thought for a moment you wouldn’t. Set aside a month, no, make it two, I want plenty of time with you, in fact, I wish you’d come back to London for good. You should never have left, Lily’s an adaptable child, and your friends are here.’ There was a pause, and a sinking back into the voice that reminded Anna of water boiling. ‘I’m so worried, Anna, so worried about your seeing Duncan. You will be careful, you must be careful. I just wish I were there, wish there were someone close to give you support. How about Raphe? Couldn’t he go to Melbourne with you?’

Anna explained he was looking after Lily. ‘He’ll keep her safe, and that’s more important than having him for myself.’

‘You’ll ring me as soon as you know anything. Anything at all.’

Anna assured her she would.

‘I spoke to Madelaine a short time ago. She’s in America until the end of the month; she sends her love and says she’ll play your old cello scherzo as an amulet for you.’ And again, ‘You will be careful?’

‘Of course, Eve, of course.’

‘It’s hard to refuse a genius, my dear.’

As well Anna knew. No one refused Duncan, not Anna, certainly not Juliet, nor any of his students or admirers. But Eve had, years ago now and had not seen him since. And Madelaine too. Duncan had written a cello concerto for her, and he never understood why, at the last moment, she had rejected it. But Anna knew. Fifteen years ago, and her first meeting with Eve Carstairs, the shock of it and that sense, never again repeated, of being skinned alive. Who would have guessed that Eve and Madelaine would become her closest friends? And what would have happened to Anna if they had not? London Nocturne would have disappeared without a performance, and Anna would still be playing advertising jingles, stuffed with boredom and the futility of a life stripped of its central passion. Or worse, she might have returned to Duncan in order to put some proper music back into her life. If not for Eve and Madelaine – well, it did not bear thinking about, for if anyone had made her a composer they had. And yet, it could have worked out so differently. Only fifteen years old, and running wild, or rather, just running, that was Anna when first they met.