Between Each Breath Page 3

  Layer after layer of pain.

  The next programme, about either dried-flower arranging or how to cope with grief (I wasn’t sure, because there were occasional black-and-white head shots of pale-looking women), sent me off to sleep.

  The following day, after breakfast, I looked up majolica in a dictionary in the bookshop next door. A fine kind of Italian glazed earthenware, from the former name of the island of Majorca. Nothing to do with flowers. The bookshop didn’t have Anna Karenina, or only in French, German, Estonian – and Russian, of course. Milly had told me it was even better in French (her French is good), but it would be too much effort. Instead, I bought a newish biography of Handel and a trash thriller to help me sleep.

  There was a phone in the apartment, but I wasn’t phoning Milly because that was what we had agreed, outside an emergency. I really felt like talking to her, though.

  Either that, or I would go back to the café for the book.

  Yer what?

  The waitress had served me a latte. We had exchanged two glances, lasting a total of three or four seconds. One thing I really wanted to avoid was to act like a prick to myself, let alone other people, just because I was abroad.

  Milly was not in when I tried her. I didn’t leave a message.

  I was at the flat’s front door, ready to retrieve Anna Karenina from the café, when the phone rang.

  ‘Hiya. Whassup? It was you trying to phone me?’

  I loved her to bits. I even loved her voice to bits. Its complicated sonic texture, both silk and light grit.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing serious, Mill. Just wanted to talk.’

  ‘You’re having fun, though?’

  ‘Well, I’m working.’

  ‘You sound pissed off,’ she laughed.

  ‘What? Pissed off?’

  ‘You see?’

  ‘Mill, I’m not pissed off. I’m only pissed off by you saying I am, because I’m not.’

  ‘I’m fine, by the way.’ A beat of silence, while I was working this one out. ‘Thanks for asking.’

  ‘I didn’t have a chance,’ I all but cried. ‘Why do you think I tried phoning you up?’

  ‘Because you were lonely.’

  ‘Not really. Well, I haven’t talked to anyone for about five days, almost.’

  ‘How’s Estonia? Snazzy enough?’

  ‘I’m blown away. No, seriously, it’s good.’

  I sighed again, then realised how the sigh must have sounded like frustration.

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you until you got back,’ she said, ‘but my period’s three days late.’

  ‘Three days? Wow!’ I came over more astonished than I’d meant to.

  ‘Well, it’s not that long, but you know I’m a stickler for punctuality.’

  ‘Sounds hopeful.’

  ‘Keep your fingers crossed.’

  ‘They’re, um, casually crossed, so as not to attract the gods’ notice.’

  ‘How’re the birds, Jack?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well,’ she insisted, ‘you know what everyone said before you went. The most beautiful girls in Europe.’

  ‘Don’t see it, myself. They probably meant the Ukraine. Or maybe the Balkans. Look, I’m here to work. I’m being really monkish. I’ve expanded to three sopranos and the theme’s going haywire. I’m into static pitch-fields and all that crazy stuff.’

  ‘Jack, don’t make it painful to listen to. It’s your mega break.’

  ‘It won’t be,’ I assured her, modulating my annoyance with a chuckle. ‘It’s going to be all serene, unless otherwise stated.’

  ‘Heard that one before. Love you. Gotta go. I’m majorly busy with a bloody great Heal’s contract.’

  ‘Big kiss.’

  ‘Ditto,’ she said.

  All compositions are echoes of other works, sometimes your own. They recycle, quote, beg, borrow and steal. And yet they end up personal, and sometimes they end up memorable. I sat humped at the thick table, too hot in my coat, staring at the phone.

  My wife was pregnant, at last. Very early days, but still.

  And it should have been glorious news, it should have appeared somewhere in the piece as an ode of joy, solo oboe, a single sustained syllable from the second voice.

  I got up and stood by the open window; the cold air was a relief. Over the six years we’d been together, we’d got to know each other better, physically and mentally, than anyone else had ever known us, including our parents. I couldn’t imagine life without Milly. Without her confidence, her support, her dazzling smile, her zeal to do good in the world. The du Cranes were part of my life. Their gobsmacking wealth was in my veins: the huge Hall in Hampshire and the whopping privacy of its grounds, the wildness of its woods bordered only by a tiny winding lane hardly anyone took, bar the odd teenage maniac. It was all transfused into me.

  So what was up? What was the game?

  Yesterday I’d seen her walking ahead near the Dominican Monastery: skintight jeans, wasp waist, a dark-gold cascade of hair. Turned out to be a false alarm. An inner wolf whistle, that was all. Dozens similar, here. So I lost myself in work.

  I’d studied Pärt’s scores but had so far avoided playing the CDs: I preferred what I heard in my head.

  Pärt is a Russian Orthodox believer. What does Jack Middleton believe?

  I dunno what I believe.

  Is your piece therefore a metaphysical challenge to the master?

  I guess so. Pärt’s simplicity is very sophisticated. I like the photos of Pärt on the covers of the CDs I have with me here. He’s got this great Tolstoyan beard. You feel he’s the symbolic Estonian, bearing his country’s anguish and suffering. This makes his music far from serene.

  Your own music generally lulls the audience into contemplative bliss, only to savage it with dissonance and atonal disorder.

  Yeah, like a mob bursting into a cathedral. Once, when Pärt was asked a question in an interview, he poured a glass of water over his head.

  Warning: removing a wedding ring can be dangerous. You can pull your finger off at the same time. Which means the ring is still on your finger. Mine – my ring, that is – only slipped off after a lot of soap, water and yanking, leaving a fleshly indent all round, like something turned in wood.

  I placed the ring carefully in my bumbag. This is only a very temporary separation, I told myself.

  And crossing the windy old Raekoja Plats with my head thrust forward, dodging the craft-market stalls and their floating customers, I heard myself say to myself: You’re nuts. You’re having a breakdown.

  Milly and I had been trying for a kid for well over a year and a half. Now it was hallelujah time. Mill would grow plumper, her breasts would expand, she would slow down. In the end she would waddle. After the birth I would feel life-changed and compose works that even my mother would listen to without gritting her teeth. Our tall house in Richmond (too tall, I always felt, but Daddy du Crane had insisted, and it was brilliantly quiet bar the planes) would look down with horror upon bright plastic scattered on the rugs and up the original mahogany stairs, and the sweet whiff of baby lotion would permeate every room like bleach in a hospital. There would be screaming, wails, interruptions. I knew all this from my sister and from friends who had embarked on the same odyssey a little earlier. And Milly wanted six. We would (this was her plan) move to the country and have six of them, their little legs scampering over the soft lawns, squealing with happiness. Six opportunities for fatal interruption, every day.

  ‘Uxbridge,’ I teased Milly, once – keeping straight-faced. ‘I fancy bringing them up in Uxbridge. Very convenient for London.’

  We were having a swift one in the Plough and Horses, mulling over the future at the beginning of the year, before the real anxiety about our childless state had set in. She looked at me in horror.

  ‘You are joking.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind giving them, you know, what I had,’ I said, as if meaning it. ‘Similar surroundings. Very nice fo
r kids.’

  ‘You were brought up there. You hated it.’

  ‘Uxbridge borders. People in Uxbridge were better off. Laughed at people in Hayes. Wouldn’t ever want to go back to Hayes itself, you see. Stank of Nescaff from the factory.’

  ‘You are quite genuinely weird, you know. Uxbridge is completely naff. So is Hayes. You said so yourself. When I first met you you said you were from Hayes, and I asked where’s that, and you said it’s a growth on Uxbridge’s brown pipe.’

  ‘The A4020. I was showing off.’

  ‘Gosh, Jack, that’s not like you.’

  I sipped my beer, hurt, as she played with her new toy – a mobile phone. It was work again. Afterwards I asked her if she’d ever been to Uxbridge.

  ‘No, but…’

  I nodded slowly, smiling my contempt.

  ‘Oh, everyone knows,’ she said, twisting her face and wobbling her head.

  ‘Ugh,’ I teased. ‘Uxbridge. Yuk. Nasty, sticky place.’

  ‘Shuddup.’

  ‘But Daddy, you should see them. They don’t even have horses!’

  ‘They probably do. Or certainly those disgusting four-by-fours. It’s probably full of wannabe Amandas, these days.’

  ‘Hang ’em high, bruvvers,’ I intoned, giving a bunched fist salute.

  Underneath, though, I felt pretty cross. I’d felt the same sensation when my best friend Howard Davenport, the viola player, had leaned over to me in an Arvo Pärt recital and said, ‘Mystic chewing gum, mate.’

  Why should it be five oboes and three sopranos, anyway? Why not one oboe, one voice, a cymbal and a bass drum? A tiny bell? Complete simplicity. As spare and clean as a piece of driftwood on a Baltic strand. Long pauses of nothing. The millennium welcomed on calm.

  I approached the café slowly, as if walking with care over the cobbles; as if it was already winter and there was ice.

  Breathtimers.

  The punctuations of silence.

  There were three incredibly giggly girls in their mid-teens at the central table, drinking Pepsis and finding depths of interest in a mobile phone. Even here.

  The door squealed shut behind me and they looked up. I hoped they wouldn’t find me naff. In my duffel, and slightly on the short side, well stocky (never fat, never fat), with messy hair that was still black, I was either very naff or very cool. They glanced at each other and burst into giggles again. I scanned the room as if I hadn’t noticed, discreetly checking my hair. Sometimes my hair lets me down. It has a dollop over the forehead I have to keep pushing away. My Hitler wave, schoolmates’d call it. I’ve never let it go.

  She wasn’t in sight. My heart was nevertheless hammering, despite myself. The shaven-headed barman was wiping glasses; he caught my eye and smiled in the faint, serious way of Estonians – if they smiled at all.

  ‘Um, hi, I left a book here, a book, three days ago? Anna Karenina? Tolstoy? Left? A book?’

  ‘Yeah, OK. Wait.’

  So people left books here all the time. No sweat.

  There were other customers in the Majolica: a couple of middle-aged tourists in orange parkas studying a map as if they’d walked here from the Lake District; a man in a Sartre raincoat reading Le Monde; a mournful woman with dyed red hair and a bibber’s eye bags. The music was off. The barman had gone into the kitchen, but was still in earshot. He was talking to a girl, but the girl’s voice was not the same. I tried to look relaxed, realising everything was pretty relaxed except my mouth, which could have blown a trumpet, no problem.

  There was a warning behind the bar about the Millennium Bug, in English. The thought of what might happen in under three months frightened me. The giggly girls were probably only about thirteen, in fact. She’d left the job, obviously. She had vanished into the big noisy world for ever. The cheery threesome erupted into laughter at something one of them had said, or maybe at something on their mobile phone – certainly not at me – and I leaned my elbows on the bar in an attempt to look cool and mature. One day, maybe when I hit forty-six, I would feel mature, I reckoned – it must happen to you eventually. I would wear a long dark coat and look like the head of an opera house.

  The barman came out with the girl who wasn’t the right girl and together, without looking at me, they searched behind the bar. The girl shook her head, pulling a face. She had a sharp chin and nose and her dark hair was dyed bright green at the top, like the way they mark a spot in the road destined to be hammer-drilled.

  ‘Sorry,’ the barman said, ‘no book.’

  ‘Don’t worry. My fault. Good to know someone’s appreciating it.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘That’s OK,’ I said, waving my hands. ‘I’ll have a coffee, anyway.’

  ‘A coffee?’

  ‘A latte, please.’

  ‘OK. Siddown, if you want.’

  I stayed at the bar. I felt more in command, there. I was finding my breath again. I didn’t mind the pretentious decor, this time. Ten or so years ago there’d have been no hip café-bars in Tallinn. Russians everywhere and a sense of grey and brown inside the head and outside the head. No ugliness because no beauty, no dissonance because no tonality.

  It was probably her day off. I could pass again tomorrow. Or I could ask the barman. I could summon up the courage and ask him, outright. I practised it in my head: Maybe your other waitress found it, put it somewhere. The other girl, you know? Coppery-blonde hair? Her day off, is it? And I knew I would flush from either ear to the tip of my nose, the teeny-boppers watching like hungry cats.

  Milly was possibly pregnant. My wife! My missus at home! One of the du Cranes, of deep Norman lineage. The woman I had sworn to stay with till death us do part. Not that I’d wanted a church service, and not with that vicar of several unshaven chins.

  ‘OK?’ The barman was looking at me, concerned.

  ‘Yeah, I’m great. Thanks.’

  ‘Y’know, sorries about the book.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter at all. Only the two of you serving, then? Short of staff today, then?’

  ‘What?’

  There’d only been two of them before, I remembered.

  ‘No, it’s great. Thanks.’

  ‘OK. You like music?’

  ‘I like silence. Really quiet is fine.’

  The girls exploded into giggles again, as if I was triggering them. The barman was putting on some more music. It wasn’t lounge, it was house – even more minimal. I’d try to keep up with the electronic scene, and this was definitely familiar. The way the bass and the drum snaked and coiled around each other, the use of effects, the hypnotic repetition and glacially slow development.

  ‘You like?’

  ‘Yeah, I know it. Don’t tell me. It’s that group from Berlin with a French name.’

  The barman looked impressed. ‘Hey, that’s correct. Isolée,’ he said, nodding. ‘This is the new one. Real good, huh?’ He was bobbing about a bit.

  ‘Great. Just great. Excellent. Do you like that French band with the Scottish singer and a terrible name? Telepopmusic, they’re called.’

  The barman leaned on the zinc and frowned. ‘Not St Germain?’

  ‘No, not St Germain. Telepopmusic. Check them out.’

  The phone went and he had to answer it, chatting in Estonian with the receiver tucked under his ear, wiping glasses. The guy’s pretty cool, I thought. And in some ways I felt I had not done too badly myself.

  Someone had scribbled on the wall – perhaps the interior designer – Qui êtes-vous? Personne. Moi non plus. A line from one of the poets etched into the chairs, perhaps. I momentarily played with the idea of being in a film, a French film – acting as a barfly in one of those intense, brooding French efforts in which nothing much happens except that it’s all about desire. I’d wanted to go out in the evenings after my restaurant meals, to hit the clubs, but instead I’d walked myself around each night to exhaustion. It wasn’t easy going into a place on your own, unless you were out to clock someone. There’d been a club that was all
white, like an operating theatre, with acres of white leather to sit on and empty but for two black guys in the middle, drinking cocktails the colour of diluted blood. It was a new sensation, after England, wandering around a city on a Friday night without the fear of getting beaten to a pulp.

  The barman dropped a couple of paper sugar-twists in front of me.

  ‘I forgets that. Pardon me. You can’t really on me.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You can’t really on me,’ the barman insisted, as if my English was poor.

  I nodded as if my ears had just cleared. ‘Who can rely on anyone? Thanks.’

  In fact, I’d finished my coffee. The Isolée track was beginning to swamp my mind. The words and groans were remixed to snap in two and reappear – highly sexual. It was meant to be taken with drugs.

  ‘That’s good,’ said the barman. ‘Sugar bad.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so. No, it is. Welcome to Europe,’ I added, half ironically.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It’s good to see your country in free Europe. One day you’ll be part of the European Union.’

  ‘We wait to see,’ said the barman, sucking on a tooth as he wiped the zinc. He was about twenty-six coming on seven hundred. He was wiser than wise, because he had the history of Estonia at his back. All his childhood under the shadow.

  ‘I say that to you,’ said the barman, suddenly, pointing a finger at me. ‘Welcome to free Europe! You know?’

  ‘I like that,’ I grinned, a little ashamed. ‘That’s true. Yeah.’

  I generally notice posters the day after the performance it is advertising. This one on the newsagent’s, which I had passed all week, was caught just in time: a concert performance that evening of Handel’s opera Acis and Galatea. Rarely performed, though a number-one hit in Handel’s time. I guessed the group was amateur, which is sometimes an advantage.

  The concert was to be held in the big white church a couple of minutes’ walk away, in an area that had been bombed stupid in the war: the rubble and the foundations of houses had been left ever since, surrounded by a flimsy fence, were now an example of Soviet wickedness. Grass and weeds grew thick in ground plans of lost homes. The church, called St Nicholas, had been restored, playing host to exhibitions and concerts: I wasn’t sure whether or not it was deconsecrated.