The Facts of Life Read Free Page B

concert seemed to be of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Parry and Purcell. It was easy to watch her because they were sitting in the back row of the Tompion Chapel choir stalls and she was leaning forward for a better view. She looked – he sought a suitably English phrase – fresh as paint. Not fresh as a daisy – that comparison was only fit, for white-socked children or a newly-laundered shirt. Paint suggested something of her glow, her sweet, unthreatening face, her flawless complexion. She was older than him by a few years, certainly older than several of the hospital nurses and many of the eager girls his friends entertained around Rexbridge, but there was an abundant healthiness to her, an energy, that left the others grey by comparison and made Edward feel ten years her senior. After the months in hospital, in basic training, in internment and the grim years before that, she seemed to offer his life a freshness that dared him to lower his guard at last, to feel again.
    He looked at the nape of her neck, where lines of down curled beneath darker hair, where the skin was still pink from having been scrubbed. He smelled, through the music, a faint waft of vanilla – evocative with unwitting cruelty – and he found the very look of her released memories he had not dared to recall for a long time. He breathed in the perfume, and there was his mother, humming to herself, cheeks pink with effort, as she tried to roll out biscuit dough while reading a textbook at the same time. There was Miriam, his sister, catching his eyes in her looking-glass with her mischievous glance as, lips pinching hairpins, she curled thick hair high on her head before her first adult dance.
    He had not cried once since they had hurried him on to the boat for England, as he begged them,
begged
them to come too. Miriam had been coughing when he left. She had probably been tubercular as well. Once again he prayed she had been lucky; that the disease had taken her before the cattle trucks could. For a moment these thoughts, combined with the Mozart, were almost too much for him. He wanted to sob aloud, to break through the polite Viennese spell cast by the piano. Feverishly he distanced himself with an old trick, learned at boarding-school. The music was just music. He systematically reduced it back to a neutral code, stilling his spirits by forcing his mind’s eye to trace a composer’s scribbled notes on an imaginary score.
    During the interval, tea and biscuits were served from a trestle table outside the vestry door – that pervasive British tea, brewed strong as German coffee then drowned in milk as though for an infant’s softer taste. Sally bought some, laughing at Edward’s squeamishness. She made him warm his hands, at least, on her cup before they walked around the shadowy interior of the chapel, which she had never visited before. She said nothing about the music and he thought it best not to press her. When the Schubert was finished, however, and they were caught up in the small crowd pressing to leave by the narrow door, she touched him hesitantly on the back and said,
    ‘Thank you. That was special.’
    ‘Worth the trouble of tracking down those music books for me?’
    ‘Definitely.’
    They emerged into the quadrangle, where concert-goers were standing around exclaiming at the clarity of the stars in well-rounded tones, confident of their unchallenged place in the scheme of things.
    ‘Would you like to hear some more?’ he asked. He knew at once, from her silence, that he had pressed too far too soon.
    ‘Edward,’ she said, when they had walked a few yards. ‘You’re very young. You’re what, twenty? Twenty-one?’
    ‘I’m twenty-four,’ he told her, piqued.
    ‘Twenty-four. Sorry. Well you’re twenty-four and I’m … I’m not that young. Edward, when you’re young you want one thing and then you get a bit older and you want another. People’s needs change and … Sorry. I’m being presumptuous.’ She laughed