out of sycamore and cedar for a small specialist market. Oriole was now International Sales Director for the famous Dree pill, the new wonder morning-afterthe-night-before contraceptive. She was beginning to be away from home more often than she was in it, as Hugh had sadly observed, flying round the world: so far her work had taken her mostly to Europe, but now China was opening up as a market. Neither of them looked forward to it.
Oriole took the dustpan and brush and went back into the dining room. Clive had taken the phone back from Hugh and had resumed his version of events. Clive, at thirty-four, was Oriole’s age, seven years older that Hugh. But the boys, as their mother still called them, could have been twins, and were often mistaken for such. Both were tall, well-built, blond, thatch-haired, square-jawed, highly educated, softly spoken and gentle-eyed. Oriole was little and bustling, dark and petite. Clive made virginals in the Flemish style inset with ebony, an even smaller and more specialist market than that for lutes. Oriole was famous for having a cloth ear: she couldn’t tell a lute from a virginal from a viola da gamba when she first met Hugh. He was the one who could tell the true notes, the pure sound, who understood the music of the celestial spheres. She only knew from pharmaceuticals. But their bodies fitted together, spoon like: there was just the right differential in height.
‘They’re Oriole’s cups,’ Clive was saying. ’Oriole’s grandmother married out, and her mother too, and Oriole herself is living out, as it were, so she’s only a quarter Jewish anyway, and I shouldn’t think that would affect an exorcism, would it? The ghost wouldn’t have to be Christian to take notice? It could be a pagan, an ancient Roman, anyone.’
‘Is your brother suggesting,’ asked Oriole of Hugh, as she carefully swept the larger pieces into the dustpan, all thinly fluted crimson and gold and blue and sharp edges, ‘that the phenomenon goes with the cups? Because it needn’t. It could come from this house, which is old enough. It could be Sarla’s neurosis, bubbling away. It could just have drifted in from outside. That’s why I don’t want some priest in here, nailing it into the here and now, making it real, stopping it just drifting off again, undefined, whatever it is.’
And here she was, talking about ‘it’ as if ‘it’ was real. She sat on the floor and picked up tiny splinters of porcelain with a piece of sticky tape, as the restorer advised. The first time it had happened, a year ago, Hugh had used his forefinger to get the little bits, dampened by his tongue, and a sliver had pierced the tip of the finger: just a tiny drop of blood, but enough to go septic and spread, and the chemicals he worked with didn’t help it heal. He’d been on antibiotics off and on ever since. She’d told him to be careful but he hadn’t been.
‘Besides,’ she said now, ‘if it gets into the local papers it will do God knows what to property prices.’
Hugh hooted with laughter and took the phone from Clive and said, ‘Now Oriole’s worrying what exorcism will do to property prices. We are cursed, we are afflicted, the laws of nature are reversed, and Oriole, who must be the richest self-made woman in the country, is still worrying about money!’
They were not fair to her. They ganged up on her. Money was important. They would notice soon enough if they didn’t have her to spend it on them. And getting the house had been her sacrifice, not theirs, which they failed to notice. She and Hugh had been living in London. She had been travelling miles to work: he was using the garage for a workshop. She’d told her employers she was going to take a year off and have a baby, and risk losing out in the promotion stakes. Dree had come back with an offer of a house and the post of International Sales Director for their new product, which they thought was going to be big, plus a chunk of company stock.
‘My!’ said Hugh. ‘They certainly think well of you!’ He’d sounded quite surprised. ‘I suppose you couldn’t take the job and have a baby?’
But he didn’t offer to look after it, she noticed. Well, he was young. He was an artist. The pram in the hall was the enemy of promise and all that. She said she thought not: the new job would mean flyinground the world and uncertain hours, and what was the point of having a baby and not being around to rear it? She’d decided to stick to her resolution: she’d have the baby, not the job. They’d scrape along on her savings and him making lutes in the garage.
But then they went to look at the house. It was outside Maidenhead, on the Thames, and within easy reach of Heathrow. They’d taken Clive with them, in an effort to cheer him up. Clive had come to stay for three months when his marriage broke up and he needed somewhere to recover. That had been a year ago. Oriole and Hugh congratulated themselves on not being married. Look at what happened to Clive and Penny: a wedding in a cathedral, all that pomp and ceremony, and then she runs off with a banker.
‘Mercenary bitch,’ said Hugh, savage for once in defence of his brother.
Oriole and Hugh had been together for seven years: they were happy. She’d met him when he was just out of Oxford and she was five years into Dree. Her mother and father were both dead. Her grandmother was three years into Alzheimer’s. So it didn’t matter to anyone on Oriole’s side that she and Hugh weren’t married, there was no-one for it to matter to, and on Hugh’s side she sometimes got the feeling they might even be relieved, though they would never say so, they were far too polite. They wanted Hugh to be happy, but she was not quite their sort. They were the Shires and the clergy: she was Essex and the rag trade, however fond of her they had grown.
Once she and Hugh and Clive and Sarla had seen the house, of course, everything changed. There was no way they could not have it. It was old and beautiful—some of it dating back to Elizabethan times: it even had a few of the original chimneys left—one of those houses you sometimes find down pretty country lanes, Mercedes and Range Rovers hidden behind high well-kept hedges. Directors’ houses. (If her parents could see her now, how proud they would be!) And Clive could have a whole wing to himself, practically, and not get under anyone’s feet, and not have to hurry in the business of starting out on his own again, working out which way his life was to go. There was a cedar of Lebanon tree in the garden, and the grounds ran down to the Thames, and there was the barn, which could be converted into the workshop of Hugh’s dreams, and Clive could share it, and contribute towards the overheads. A drop in the ocean, thought Oriole, but she did not say so. The men had their dignity. The last thing they wanted was to feel kept. It was just hard to make a profit from making old instruments, if you set about the task with love and integrity. They were above money, anyway. They were master craftsmen, artists in their own field, world-famous. TV crews came to film them working: mostly educational films, school programmes, that kind of thing. But it made her feel humble.
In fact everyone—that is to say Hugh, and Clive, and Sarla, who already in the two months since she’d joined the London household, in preparation for the so far unconceived baby, had filled out and lost her derelict look and had her missing front tooth replaced by Oriole’s most expensive dentist—had looked so happy Oriole had given in. Job not baby. When Dree threw in one of the new little sporty Mercedes as the company car she stopped thinking about it. Most of the time. And perhaps if she was so easily put off she was not really cut out for motherhood. And Hugh had his lutes for babies. And she had him for a child. And so on.
The first time it happened it was Oriole’s thirty-third birthday. The three of them were having supper in the kitchen. They’d been in the house for two months. The designers and decorators had just moved out. Sarla was off to night school. They were eating
