worry about it, darling,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s hardly surprising. Of course you’re tired. Think what you’ve done during the last week, flown to Athens and back, and Frankfurt, and nobly stopped goodness knows how many more accidental babies being born, and dealt with the builders, not to mentioning burying your poor grandmother.’ Hugh hadn’t gone with her to the funeral. That was a sore point. It was true that the poor old soul had been out of the real world for so long the transition from life to death was a formality, and Oriole herself had cut down visiting to once every three or four months—well, five or six, but what was the point anyway—so she felt she couldn’t complain. She just felt bad and could have done with Hugh to hold her hand. ‘And I expect it stirred up a lot of unconscious stuff about the family disgrace,’ said Clive. ‘Funerals are like that. Bread and cheese and pickle is fine by me.’
Oriole’s father, in the rag trade, had committed fraud and been sent to prison for six months, and died there, when Oriole was sixteen, and Oriole’s mother, fraught with grief, shame, and despair, had followed him into the hereafter within months of that, which was why Oriole had never gone up to Oxford, for which she had a scholarship. She’d been the only child, and had to borrow money to bury them. Which she supposed you could dispose of in the phrase, ‘lot of unconscious stuff about the family disgrace’. He was right. The funeral had brought back into memory things better not thought about. That was why she liked to live in the present. Hugh and Clive could afford to live in the past. Way back to Elizabethan times, when their family first entered the records. It was just that musical instrument delivery dates were in the here and now and the other reason they couldn’t come to the funeral was, for Hugh, that some Monteverdi specialists were jumping up and down for the new lute they had commissioned, and for Clive, that a Californian computer millionaire wanted a virginal as a wedding present to his newbride, and for both of them every hour counted. And she hadn’t minded. It was just such a badly attended funeral. Herself, as the last remaining member of the family, only child of an only child, and a few kind nuns from the convent where her grandmother ended her days, all apparent links to the Jewish community gone. Because distant family had been lost too, in the camps in Germany. Another thing best not thought about. She hadn’t even gone to see Schindler’s List, the Spielberg film: Hugh and Clive had gone and come back red-eyed, and reproached her. They thought she was heartless: she might think she was only a quarter Jewish but it would have counted at the time—and she should at least take some notice.
The temperature had dropped, although it was mid June—this year her birthday had fallen on the longest day, the solstice. Oriole went to turn up the central heating. She’d just sat down at the table again when the cup lifted off its saucer on the dresser, and hurled itself against the wall behind her, with the crack and the sharp splintery sound you somehow didn’t forget, and the kind of stillness afterwards, as if everything sat extra quiet and wary.
‘That cup can’t have done that by itself,’ said Hugh, the first to speak. ‘Perhaps there was some kind of vibration.’
‘I did just turn the heating up,’ said Oriole. The first instinct, it seemed, was to deny that anything untoward had happened. ‘The plumbers were a nightmare.’
So they had been. A steam shower had struck them as strange and unnecessary, and a Jacuzzi bath for two as insane, and they’d fitted the plumbing in accordance with the adjectives in their heads. Oriole had had to threaten them with court action. There were no pipes running anywhere near the dresser but she didn’t want to think about that. Or that the cup hadn’t slipped and fallen, but had somehow got out of its saucer and hurtled itself across the room in an arc that swooped low past her ear and then rose to a higher point to hit the wall.
‘Could be subsidence,’ said Clive.
‘Could be,’ said Oriole. ‘If so, I’ll sue the surveyors.’
‘She would too,’ said Hugh proudly, and because Oriole was tired went to get a dustpan and brush. Oriole said the cup would have to go to be restored: Hugh thought it was beyond repair, but Oriole pointed out that a set of six Meissen cups and saucers in fine condition—at least to date—was truly rare and valuable and you had to measure them in thousands, not hundreds, of pounds.
‘Nothing should be measured by money,’ said Hugh.
‘I thought your parents were poor,’ said Clive. ‘If as you say your father stole to support the family and keep you in school uniform, shouldn’t he have sold the cups?’
‘They were my grandmother’s,’ said Oriole. ‘All she had of the past. She carried them over the mountains on foot, pregnant with my mother, and kept them safe.’
‘Then that’s understandable,’ said Clive, agreeably. ‘Though I’m afraid your gran had a very Mittel-European taste.’ Hugh said Oriole didn’t much like going into family history, and one way and another in the gentle wrangling the event got lost. It was isolated. Just something that happened. Except Hugh, picking up the pieces, had hurt his finger. Oriole asked Sarla to be careful when she dusted the dresser, and not to get the cups too near to the edge of the shelf in future. Then they forgot about it. There was too much else for everyone to think about.
The second time it happened was at the autumn equinox. They were eating in the dining room. The first cup had come back from the restorers that very day, accompanied by a little note saying what a particularly lovely piece it was and if she was interested in selling the set she knew a buyer who could house it appropriately. More or less suggesting that Oriole wasn’t a responsible owner of valuable antiques. So she and Sarla moved the whole set onto the sideboard in the dining room, being careful to place it safely well back against the wall. They were eating a lentil and carrot bake—Hugh and Clive had lately become vegetarians. That was okay by Oriole. These days she ate more than enough First Class protein on various airlines every week to satisfy her carnivorous needs outside the home. And Sarla bought steak for herself, which she ate in the kitchen. Clive had asked Sarla to join them in the dining room since she was now so much one of the family, but she wouldn’t. She liked to read novels while she ate.
‘Lucky old Sarla,’ Oriole said somewhat bitterly, over the lentil bake. ‘All I ever get time to read is company reports.’ ‘It’s your choosing,’ said Hugh. ‘We’re all free to do as we like in this world. And we are what we choose.’
Sometimes Chinese government officials would speak like that, in riddles, which somehow placed them firmly in occupation of the moral high ground, so if you weren’t careful you ended up giving more than you got.
‘And I’m the one who employs her,’ said Oriole, ‘so I’m the one who ought to ask her to join us at table, not anyone else,’ and there was a shocked silence while the brothers looked at her. ‘You don’t own people because you pay them,’ said Hugh. Tell that to Dree Pharmaceuticals, thought Oriole. ‘It’s just nice to have a woman around at mealtimes,’ said Clive. ‘And you know you’re so often away. Don’t be so dog in the manger, Oriole.’
And she was just thinking she might have been married to both of them, except she only went to bed with one of them, the way they both kept telling her what to say and do, when the second cup took off, a flash of gold glittering in the air, in its unnatural arc, and smashed. This time Oriole spoke first.
‘If that’s the one just back from the restorers I shall scream. Do you know what she charged me? Four hundred and eighty-three pounds.’
‘Oh, money, money, money,’ said Hugh. ‘No wonder things in this house don’t lie quiet.’
He was pale. The wound on his finger hurt quite a lot. It
