insisted on having it restored. Yet the brothers were the ones who valued the past. Their past, that was the trouble, just not hers.
‘Perhaps this is an earthquake zone,’ said Clive. ‘You do get minor shakes in this part of the country.’
‘A group illusion,’ said Hugh. ‘It must be. And we have been smoking funny cigarettes.’ Well, the brothers had. Oriole didn’t touch the stuff. She was allergic to marijuana: just the whiff of it could give her vertigo. They were careful not to blow smoke in her direction but didn’t offer to stop smoking. It soothed their nerves after a stressful day in the workshop. And it had been rather stressful lately; Sarla had told her in her now almost perfect English, last time Oriole had arrived home from a trip abroad. At a certain stage the wood used in making lutes has to be steam-heated and softened, to be curved into shape, and the damp and the heat would cause the wound to open up again and widen. Clive had tried to take over the process from his brother—that was the point of sharing the workshop, so they could help each other—but he wasn’t good at it. Virginals are foursquare and sharp-angled and straight-sided, nothing more than boxes, really. Clive was too strong and sudden: the wood felt the reproach and cracked and broke. To each brother his skill. And an orchestra called Early Ensemble were to do a major performance of Monteverdi’s l’Incoronazione di Poppea in Athens, and were waiting for delivery, and might start thinking about another, inferior, supplier. It was not the money that mattered, it was the loss to music.
The mended cup had stayed in place. A perfect one had self-destructed. Oriole picked up the pieces.
‘If you’re not careful,’ she said to the five cups and six saucers which remained, ‘I’ll put you in a bank vault to keep you safe, and you’ll never see the light of day again’. And she thought she heard a kind of sighing in the air, and wondered where she had heard it before. Her blind, blank grandmother, not telling day from night, friend from foe, the bad times from the good, not any more, would sometimes sigh like that. She didn’t say this to the brothers. If personalities survived, at what age did you reconstruct? Did you drift round as you departed the world, an old lady with no mind left, but supported in comfort by your granddaughter, or as the young pregnant girl who escaped from Germany, on foot over the Alps into Spain, carrying a bulky paper parcel? When the times were bad as they could be, but at least you had your youth, and a future if only you could secure it? And would her grandmother come back to haunt, or to help? Was she more pleased to have the comfort of the home, at the end, or displeased because Oriole had put her in a convent and failed to visit her enough? The nuns said she wasn’t conscious of the passing of time, and didn’t recognise her, she should not bother, and she hadn’t, and she should have, and it was too late. She almost wished the cup would get her like a slap around the ear, instead of just missing each time. It was odd how accepting you felt at the time these things were happening. Only afterwards did fright set in. That cup too went off to the restorers: you couldn’t let it get away with it, whatever either of the its might be. The brothers put it down to too much dope, and cut down.
The third time it happened was around the Christmas solstice. She and Hugh and Clive were doing the Christmas cards at the last moment, as ever. It didn’t seem to matter that she now had secretarial staff and untold wealth from stock—the Dree pill, which she now took herself—was becoming a kind of world staple, like cat’s-eyes in the road, and Oriole owned stock in it—you still found yourself having to do the Christmas cards at the last moment. They were sitting at the dining-room table. ‘You could let yourself off a quarter of them, Oriole,’ Clive said. ‘Since you’re a quarter Jewish you could quarter claim it wasn’t your festival.’ It wasn’t as if the brothers went to church themselves. They went to the midnight service on Christmas Eve to please their parents and that was about it. ‘I suppose I could,’ said Oriole, mildly, and at that point the third cup whistled through the air past her head and broke. The second cup was due back from the menders but hadn’t yet arrived. The area of plaster where the cups hit was ruffled and cracked. The builders would have to be got in yet again. This time no-one moved to sweep the pieces up. Hugh spoke first.
‘So it’s not a question of numbers,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s not that it wants to be three cups and six saucers, because now it’s four cups and six saucers.’
‘And it’s nothing to do with solstice or equinox,’ said Oriole, ‘because the exact solstice is tomorrow. It’s every three calendar months precisely. Make sense of that if you can. Though it could still be a statistical anomaly. Too small a sample.’
They were talking quite calmly.
‘It’s Oriole’s head they go for,’ said Clive. ‘It’s Oriole they’re
angry with. I think she’s got a poltergeist.’
‘People don’t get poltergeists as they get mumps,’ said Oriole.
‘And I’m too old. Blame Sarla if you want to blame anyone.’
But of course he wouldn’t. Sarla was sleeping with Clive. It had been on the cards for a long time. Neither of them showed any signs of moving out. Sarla went on eating in the kitchen, and Oriole went on paying her wages. It was absurd and embarrassing. Oriole had asked Clive if he meant to marry Sarla or if she, Oriole, was meant to go on paying her lawyer’s fees, and Clive had told her not to be jealous and neurotic, of course he wasn’t going to marry Sarla, or live with her, she was not his permanent cup of tea, or he hers, and to suggest they should marry to save money was surely a rather shocking thing. He and Sarla just enjoyed each other. He even said he’d learned the art of non-commitment from Hugh and Oriole, which would have upset and hurt her had she time to be hurt and upset.
‘I think Clive’s right,’ said Hugh. ‘I don’t think Sarla is the neurotic one round here.’
Betrayal! Oriole went to her bedroom and slammed the door. In her absence Sarla swept up the pieces and put them in the bin and joined the brothers for coffee. Oriole could hear them laughing. They were probably smoking more funny cigarettes, to combat the stress of the paranormal-which-could-not-be-denied. Sarla had found a reliable supplier at night school. Hugh came in and comforted her and told her how much he loved her, and said she mustn’t show her jealousy of Sarla, it was demeaning, and she’d rather upset Clive by being so mercenary. He fell asleep. She stayed awake. That was the third time.
Oriole wasn’t daft: she knew the limits of their relationship well enough. She gave Hugh what he needed, money, and he gave her what she needed, endearments. She knew she was an Essex girl made good and the brothers had been good to begin with; and that though both Hugh and she presented themselves to the world as being in love it wasn’t quite that: it just suited them both. If you asked her to choose between her job and Hugh she’d probably choose the job, just as Hugh would choose making lutes rather than her. And what was love anyway? If it existed, it did so in the same way as ghosts existed, an unreasonable anomaly in a reasonable universe. Her mother had loved her father and love it was that killed her. Her grandmother had loved her country, and loved its past, and its music, and even a stupid set of porcelain cups and saucers, far too gaudy and ornate for today’s tastes, enough to risk her life for, and what was her reward? Nothing. One daughter, dead before her time. One negligent granddaughter, and nuns at her graveside. Who will be at mine, wondered Oriole? And then she had to sleep too. She set the alarm for six-thirty.
The second cup came back with another desperate note from the restorer. Oriole had a glass cabinet made for the remaining cups and saucers. They
