Once a dancer (trained at what had then been the Kirov, she said), she now looked stringy, even anorexic, and her recently renovated red hair gave her pale skin a greenish tinge, in no way ameliorated by the burnt orange dress she had chosen to wear. Most of her clothes were cast-offs from the Knightsbridge boutique where she worked. Its accent was on the bizarre; it and Tamara suited each other perfectly.
Edvard couldn’t now remember why he’d married her. He had not at that time been quite as unbalanced as he’d become, but England and the English had depressed him beyond bearing, and he had presumably turned to this fellow-Russian in desperation. Eyeing the suitcase, he said, ‘No, Tamara, I don’t want you here.’
‘Oh darlink, you have other lady?’
No, he had not! Owing to the fact that Lisa MacDonnell, that contrary bitch, had locked herself into her studio with her chunks of marble—serve her bloody well right!—while Jacey was in London, sulking. He said, ‘I want to work.’
‘So work. Tamara will be a mouse.’
Edvard seemed not to have heard her; he had suddenly been seized by the unalterable conviction that Concertante 100 was no good, he’d gone over the top.
Tamara, eyeing his wild appearance, was thinking that divorce from this incipient lunatic had been the most sensible course she had ever taken. But she came of sensible peasant stock and knew that the way to a man, never mind his heart, was via his stomach. She said, ‘I will stay, I will make Borscht.’
‘Tamara, we got a divorce, remember? You didn’t want me, I didn’t want you. Please go away.’
After the recording session yesterday afternoon, he had gone to the Messaien concert at the Barbican. But he hadn’t been able to bear it because the master made his own work seem like mere sound and fury signifying nothing. He had left in misery during the interval, finding himself lost in the concrete hell of the Barbican complex. A kindly attendant, like something out of Kafka, had led him through the echoing labyrinth of this insane asylum before ejecting him into the wet and messy streets of the capital where he had walked like a lost soul.
‘Perhaps,’ said his ex-wife, ‘I will also make Koulibiaka.’
‘No point. They’re having one of their dinners tonight. I’m not going.’
‘Certainly you’ll go,’ cried Tamara, who had attended a previous dinner and found it enchanting. ‘You shall escort me, I shall wear my new green with sequins.’
Edvard had now remembered that he himself actually had an important reason for wishing to attend; so he smiled and said, ‘And I will wear my scarlet shirt, we’ll be sensational.’
In her stable-yard studio, Vicky Lind finished the ‘December’ hares and signed the watercolour with her well-known signature. Then she went to the window overlooking the yard and stood there staring out towards the stall where the mare awaited her foal. The vet emerged from it with Oliver Langdale; the vet got into his car and drove away; Oliver returned to the manor. For some reason she was unable to analyse or rationalize, Vicky Lind had become … ‘involved’, there was no other word for it, in the whole business of this pending birth. Why? She’d seen all kinds of animals born, she’d even given birth herself. Technically there was no mystery; but if she closed her eyes she instantly saw the mare’s large lustrous eyes, could almost feel the trembling which racked her every now and again. So few things ever affected her personally that she was almost afraid of the degree to which she was … very well, obsessed by the small (vast) everyday act of nature which was proceeding ineluctably over there at the corner of the yard. It seemed to have some meaning for her which she was unable to understand.
Presently she became aware of the postman’s van parked near the manor; turned and went to collect her mail, she was expecting a contract.
Laurence Otterey had heard the clack of his letter-box but couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed in order to claim a few bills, and so lay there staring at the Kilner jar in which Mrs Merritt had transported her soup. He had made up his mind to abandon the damned novel, in fact to burn it so that there was no going back short of writing those 180 pages all over again, a penance he had no intention of undertaking.
He turned his face into the pillow and lay there inert, as if his block, the whole ton of it, had squashed him to death.
Down at The Lodge, Edvard Kusnik rewound the tape of Concertante 100 and then stood watching it wipe itself clean forever. Was it the trash he now imagined it to be, or was it perhaps the best thing he’d ever done? If the latter, others, not he, were responsible for its destruction: all those anti-Semitic apes who inhabited the rest of Crestcote. Yes, and that went for Lisa MacDonnell too; if she hadn’t preferred her chunks of marble to his own beautiful, warm, virile body all this self-doubt might have been avoided; there was nothing like a little active sex for bolstering artistic confidence. By the time the silly cow came to her senses it would be too late. In fact, he thought grimly, watching the slowly revolving tape, it was already much, much too late.
Sarah Langdale was very fond of her resident sculptress, preferring her to any other member of the community; it was an affection which Lisa MacDonnell returned. They now leaned side by side against Lisa’s marble, watching through the door of the coach-house/studio the interesting antics of Madame Vicky Lind who had cornered Sarah’s husband on the far side of the yard, waving a sheet of paper under his nose and at the same time haranguing him energetically. Oliver Langdale was looking irritated and apprehensive; both were red in the face.
‘What,’ inquired Sarah, ‘do you imagine it’s all about?’
‘Oh, this,’ replied Lisa without hesitation, ‘bet you anything you like. I know she got one.’ Sarah took the photocopied anonymous note, liberally marked with rings from the bottom of Lisa’s coffee-mug, and stared at it. I saw you in London last night. Wickedness! More later.
‘But … Lisa, what does it mean?’
‘Nothing, I’d say, except that there’s a nutter around.’ She had turned to the marble and was feeling it with practised fingertips.
The Lord of the Manor, followed by an expostulating Vicky Lind, was now advancing on them. He was saying, ‘You mustn’t let it upset you, for God’s sake, it’s obviously some kind of practical joke.’
‘Even the crowd you’ve got here,’ snapped Vicky, ‘would hardly call that a joke.’
Still examining the marble for possible flaws, Lisa said, ‘Anyway, I’d have thought we’re all far too self-centred to even think of playing jokes on each other.’
‘You don’t suppose,’ asked Sarah, aghast, ‘that everybody’s been sent one?’
Oliver was avoiding his wife’s eyes, for the simple reason that he had found a copy of this very communication among the correspondence awaiting his return, and he was only just containing the guilty conscience and panic it had aroused in him. As Sarah, Mrs Merritt and young Kevin suspected, he had no more been in Ireland buying a horse than in India buying an elephant; he had been shacked up in Brown’s Hotel with his latest lady-love who happened to be the wife of an exceedingly rich and influential neighbour. A dreadful suspicion crossed his mind that this appalling Lind woman was using the letter to blackmail him: he said, ‘Were you in London last night?’
‘No. I was here, and lots of people saw me.’
Panic was making Oliver feel weak in the back of his legs. Somebody
