“I can tell you what happens, Toby.”
“But I need to see for myself.” Tugging his shirt over his lean torso, Toby says, “You understand that, Jazz.” There is a plea in his voice.
In those early days Toby played a Karl Honderich instrument, such a jewel, he’ll claim, but left somewhere on the Paris Metro during that explosive week. The luthier’s dead now, Toby likes to remind him, and many of the old boys are gone for good; Segovia’s ancient history and Bream’s too old to play in public.
Toby still can’t believe it might be over for him, too.
Jasper tastes the soup, a trifle charred. He grabs his own clothes off the floor and dresses, minus underwear. Upstairs the women croon along to “La Vie en rose” as if they were in some Left Bank dive — picture the bearded poet in the corner, cranked on absinthe.
“We haven’t had this conversation in years,” Jasper says. “I thought we were out of the woods.”
Toby bristles. “I’m getting old.”
Now Jasper laughs. “You’re twenty-nine.” And I’m forty-three, he might add, but doesn’t. “I saw this coming.”
Toby blinks. “Saw what coming?”
“Your need to prove yourself.”
“Really?” Toby likes to discuss his motivations.
“Remember how you felt after cleaning out Klaus’s house?” Toby’s face freezes, and Jasper understands that he’s onto something. “His carefully contained life scared hell out of you.”
Klaus recently moved himself to Lakeview Terrace. He may be a senior citizen with a touch of Parkinson’s plus the diabetes, but he’s managing well. The move is a great mystery to his son and Jasper.
“It sure as hell depressed me,” Toby says.
“Perhaps by entering the competition you’re proving you aren’t Klaus, or anything like him.”
“That’s a theory.”
Encouraged, Jasper continues. “You’d be up against some of the best musicians in the world.”
Toby offers a smile. “Perhaps I’m one of the best in the world.”
It is so tempting to offer the damning word were. You were among the best, Toby, as we all were something else.
After supper Toby flees outside for a smoke, though last week he claimed he’d quit for good. Jasper lifts the blind and sees the boy perching on the top step at the same time as one of the medics pops open the clinic’s rear door, heading for her own break. Pushing down her mask, she searches in her pocket for a light, cigarette already dangling from her lips. Where Jasper works, all guests and clients who enter the building must don masks and latex gloves, but once upstairs and cleared of obvious symptoms, they remove the paraphernalia — the risk of infection is still low. Tourists are keeping a wide berth of the city, and who can blame them, given media hysterics? The latest Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is packing up, and Wagner’s Ring Cycle played to half-empty houses. Yet the casualty list is still under thirty.
Jasper catches a glimpse of Toby’s jaw grinding molars to dental dust. The medic is speaking with animated gestures and sucks at her cigarette, then holds out her pack to Toby. Can he use another?
You bet.
Her scrubs, Jasper is sure, reek of high-power disinfectant.
Yesterday Toby said it wouldn’t be a bad idea to put all the quarantined people together, maybe in the old TB hospital in the west end of the city. He got all worked up about it, a man of vision. They would be well fed and given interesting things to do during the two-week period, learning crafts like pottery and carving canoe paddles — a sort of camp. Doctors could try new antivirals and other experimental treatments. Then he stopped speaking, for in that second he’d felt the virus hover, waiting opportunistically for an opening.
Evening fog draws off the lake, and Toby shivers. Inside, Jasper shivers, too.
Three
Toby knocked on the door of his father’s house in the Beach and waited for the slow clump of footsteps. It was always the same: Klaus would swing open the door, gaze at his son for a moment, then say, “I’d just about given up on you,” because Toby was a measly ten minutes late. Six o’clock was six o’clock in Klaus’s books.
He knocked again; maybe his dad was in the bathroom. Old guys can have trouble in there. And so he waited, spinning on the concrete step and looking across the street toward the rickety clapboard bungalow belonging to their neighbours. Not many original cottages left in the Beach.
Another knock and still no answer. This was weird, for Klaus was a man of habit, an apostle of routine, and it was Wednesday evening, Toby’s designated visiting hour. The car was parked in the driveway and the hall light was on. Fending off a spritz of alarm, Toby let himself in with his key. He stood in the foyer and waited to hear something, that characteristic clearing of throat, footsteps, anything.
“Papa?” he called out. His voice echoed in the hallway, bouncing off the shiny floor and walls.
“Papa!”
Zilch. No sound of toilet flushing, no clicking of shoes on tile. Now Toby was getting officially alarmed. His father never walked anywhere, didn’t see the point when he owned a car and paid insurance on it. The place emitted an overwhelming pong of furniture polish and floor wax.
It might happen like this, Toby thought. A day like any other except his father will have collapsed somewhere in the neat two-storey house and it will be his task to find him.
He sucked in a breath and marched down the hallway, switching on lights and calling out, “Papa? Wo bist du?”
The only response was a thrum from the ancient refrigerator. Everything looked to be in order, spic and span. Toby entered the kitchen with its spongy vinyl chairs and freshly mopped floor — and that was when he spotted the note propped against the toaster: “Gone to live in Lakeview. Please dispose of household contents. K.H.”
Man of few words.
Why on earth would Klaus move himself to that cheerless institution?
Holding the note, fountain pen written on the back of a recipe card — waste not, want not — Toby felt only dismay. Klaus had no need to set foot in Lakeview again, not after his wife died. You’d think he’d be grateful to be clear of the place and its antiseptic smells.
Toby began the job right away. The overhanging roof made the rooms darker than they needed to be, and he turned on lights as he prowled from room to room. When his mother was up and running, she’d fling open the windows in the spring, but she’d had no say in years. Karen had been resident in Lakeview Terrace longer than anyone, starting at age forty-seven when, the story goes, her moments of peculiarity turned into lapses of judgment and an urge to set fires. She died in neurological chaos, a slight woman with frizzy hair whom Toby didn’t visit often enough. In the early days he used to take his guitar to Lakeview to play for some of the old ladies; they made a fuss over him, child among the ancients. But Klaus never missed a day during
