Love Song Read online

Rose smiled and waved a hand for him to sit on one of her two cane sofas.

  ‘Sit down, Charles Felbrigg, and tell me your choice of tisane. There’s Rose, Lemon flower, Peppermint – actually they all taste like shampoo, but you can choose anyway, and if you don’t like it, keep it for the final rinse!’

  He laughed, and then, shifting a little in his seat, he stared at the cushions, and then at her, and asked, ‘Why do landlords in Clapham and Battersea always insist on furnishing rooms as if they were in Spain?’

  Rose made their two teas with little bags in two nice china cups and sat down opposite him, at the same time offering him a plate of small lemon biscuits.

  ‘For the same reason I am offering you a tisane and bikkies – m o n e y. Merney!’

  Charles sighed, suddenly and loudly, and stared at the mean cane sofa upon which he was trying to pretend that he was comfortable.

  ‘If you always rented rooms in London you would think there were no other kinds of furniture besides patio chairs and sofas, wouldn’t you? Once someone becomes a landlord and lets out rooms it seems it becomes a religion with them to furnish the world with cane. Cane should be banished from this sceptred isle for ever. If only someone could be found who could prove it was harvested from some diminishing resource – or from some reed bed where its harvesting could be proved to be endangering the life of a newt – then we could all take to the streets in protest.’

  Rose laughed, and so did he, and she was glad to notice that he had nice even teeth, which meant that he was not just quite beautiful, Rose realized with an inner sigh of satisfaction, he was very beautiful, even down to his teeth.

  ‘Listen, professor. I didn’t ask you for tea to discuss furniture.’

  ‘OK, so I’ll give in, and ask. Why do you call me professor?’

  ‘Because you look like a professor.’

  He squinted down at himself, soft linen shirt, sleeveless cardigan, reading glasses around his neck on a cord. ‘I suppose I do.’

  But he said nothing of what he did, and so Rose said, ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I am dreadfully afraid that if I tell you you will not want to go on having tea with me.’

  ‘Well, as long as it’s not …’ Rose considered for a minute. ‘As long as it’s not anything to do with animal research or making cosmetics out of something unspeakable, or pulling down trees, or torturing people for information they don’t possess, I’m pretty sure I won’t mind.’

  ‘I am afraid you will. No, I can’t tell you what I’m doing at the moment, it’s just so uninteresting.’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘I’m writing a biography of a very obscure French novelist for a European paperback house who will have not the slightest interest in it once I deliver, which is why I too sit on cane furniture and suffer the slings and arrows of Hugh’s horrible cane furniture.’

  ‘Oh. But that’s quite exciting, isn’t it, writing biographies?’

  He smiled. ‘If the person is exciting, it is exciting, if the person you have chosen is a pill – and the man I am writing about at the moment is just such – it is exactly like spending too much time with someone you don’t like on a very, very long train journey, with no stops. Now,’ he leaned forward, suddenly earnest, ‘you must tell me, why is it that you make those funny noises going downstairs and upstairs all day long? Or, at least, most of the morning, anyway?’

  Rose smiled mischievously. ‘Because, professor, I am learning to be what my great-great-aunt Rosabel used to call an aahctress and humma, humma, humma is a breathing exercise that strengthens the diaphragm and therefore helps the voice. I don’t just want to be a telly actress, you see. I want to be a great actress, the kind that fills a theatre with her voice, that can project to the back of the Upper Circle, not just mutter in a TV studio – know-what-I-mean?’ She lowered her voice. ‘Know-what-I-mean-love?’

  Charles Felbrigg smiled, and his smile was genuine, and dazzling.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘Rose Merriott. Let’s see. You must always try out stage names, do you know that? As if announcing them, or as if – well, anyway, let’s try it for size. Ready? Right. You want to be a great actress. Let’s see – Dame Rose Merriott. Mmm. Yes. It does go, actually, doesn’t it?’

  Rose looked at him, startled. ‘Do you think so?’

  Again the dazzling smile. ‘No doubt of it, Dame Rose Merriott.’

  ‘Another tea? Or rather, I should say – would you like a change of rinse, prof?’

  ‘No, really. No, I think I’ll stay with Peppermint, if you don’t mind.’

  Rose frowned and stared at his hair. ‘Yes,’ she agreed slowly, ‘good, because it seems to be doing your highlights the world of good.’

  Charles smiled and unconsciously put up a hand and passed it over his thick dark hair. ‘The dame and the professor? Makes us sound like a couple of Mafia types, doesn’t it?’

  Rose laughed, and then she leaned forward and said, ‘Actually, I suddenly thought, if you’re so clever, and so bright, and if you write, surely you can help me, can’t you? Because I am reading Ibsen’s The Wild Duck at the moment, and – well, you could help me work on it, couldn’t you?’ She sensed at once from the calm look to his eye that this was just what he wanted to be asked, that ever since she had said she wanted to be an actor he had been intrigued.

  ‘We could read it together,’ he agreed. ‘But don’t expect too much of me, will you? At the moment I am only a biographer.’

  ‘You’re clever, that’s enough for me,’ Rose told him, and going to her bedside and picking up the book she settled herself artlessly beside him, which they both at once realized could be going to be a mistake.

  ‘Would you prefer it if I sat opposite you?’

  ‘As a man – no. As your professor – yes.’

  Rose changed her place and sat opposite him. But that too, although she did not know it, was a mistake, because it meant that Charles noticed even more how her thick dark hair caught the light, and how fine her eyes were, and how pale her skin, and how long her legs.

  He quickly held up the copy of the play to block his vision of her. ‘Right, Act One, Scene One.’

  He started to read, and as he did so Rose realized afresh that it was not only actors who possessed lovely voices.

  Melinda stared at their mother who just lay there, eyes closed, arms straight down by her sides, her breath regulated by the ventilator which stood to one side of the bedhead.

  ‘She looks so young like that, doesn’t she, Claire? She looks more like our sister than our mother.’

  ‘I thought only old people got strokes,’ Claire murmured. ‘I thought only old people like Aunt Rosabel got pegged by strokes. I didn’t know people as young as Mums could get one.’

  ‘No, I know.’ Melinda nodded. ‘Me too. Until Jack explained. He knew someone even younger than Mums who had a stroke. A friend of his ex-wife’s. She had it while she was having a baby as well.’

  ‘Did this woman recover, Mellie?’

  Melinda looked across at Claire, and at once began to rearrange some more flowers. ‘I don’t know – I don’t really remember,’ she lied, remembering her mother’s dream, her saying over and over to Melinda, ‘You see the baby was there, Mellie, in my dream, a boy, a baby boy – and you were walking with him to the church, and Jack was with you, and you were all there, and I wasn’t.’

  The fact that Claire knew Melinda was lying became enough reason now for her to slip her index finger into her mother’s tubed hand.

  ‘There’s something else, but perhaps I shouldn’t say it,’ Melinda began, looking at her comatose parent. ‘It may not even be true. Aunt Rosabel told me, so it probably wasn’t.’

  ‘Her hand tightened,’ Claire put in suddenly. ‘I swear I felt Mums’s hand tighten just as you said that name – Aunt Rosabel. And again. I did, I felt it.’

  ‘It can’t have done—’ Melinda hurried back to the bed.

  ‘Mellie? She’s not dead!’ Claire whispered. ‘See? If sh
e can squeeze her hand in mine, Mel, she’s not dead after all!’

  Chapter Fifteen

  From inside her sea-green shell Hope knew that Melinda was back again, because the music on the tapes had been stopped, and she could hear her talking.

  ‘Anyway the weather’s broken, which means I’ve been able to gallop Goosey at last. We had our first really proper serious piece of work last week and she feels amazing. She just loved it, Mums. She really stretches out now, and of course all that racehorse speed – if I can control that cross country and use it properly, she’s going to be sensational. Oh – I nearly forgot – though I don’t know how – she won her first dressage last Sunday! How about that? There were two intermediate horses competing, and one Open, and Goosey beat them all! She really has come on in leaps and bounds. Well, I told you last week how well she was going, so seeing that we’ve got her ground work so good now, we might have a good round at Aldon.’

  For a while there was not much more to say after that so Melinda quickly put the music back on for Hope, and held her hand instead, because they had all agreed it was stupid just to talk for the sake of it, and that it was much better to stop when there was nothing more to say.

  As Claire said, ‘Just as you would talking to someone on the telephone. If you’ve run out of things to say, you stop. There’s no shame to that. It doesn’t mean you love her less, or anything, does it?’

  So for the next few minutes Melinda just sat with Hope, holding her hand, and listening to the music on the tapes that Jack had so painstakingly made for her while wishing that her mother could answer her back.

  Of course there were things that she could tell her, but which she did not like to touch on, such as the fact that Jack had hired a nanny for James and Letty, and reorganized the rooms at the Mill House so that they were all there together. They still came back to Melinda and Claire on Nanny’s day off and for half of the weekend, but Claire and she were able now to get on with things a bit better. Although at first Melinda missed having Letty and James around all the time, and found herself looking round for them every five seconds. Or waking fearfully in the night, thinking that she had heard the baby crying in the next door room, she would run in to him, only to find his room empty, and herself feeling an idiot as she remembered, too late, that he was now at the Mill House.

  It was pathetic, but for a while she even missed things like making up the bottles and setting fire to the nappies in the back garden, so used to the routine of looking after them both had she become. But it was ridiculous to pretend that they were anything but fine and not missing life at Keeper’s Cottage at all, and in the end, that was what mattered.

  Besides, Jack had given Letty two baby rabbits, and what with the large garden and the indoor swimming pool there was so much more for her to do that Melinda was now giving that attention, that time, which she had once been giving to her young siblings, to the Grey Goose.

  ‘I think my seat is improving,’ she said after a while, wondering how long she could keep up what little news she had to tell her, especially since Hope had never been interested in horses, and was always what the colonel would call ‘a bit of a foot follower’ when it came to stable news.

  After a minute or two more, talking of jumps made, and jumps down, and spreads, and various kinds of bits that she was trying, Melinda stopped suddenly and sighed. What was the point? Mums had never been that interested in horses. A bit, but not much, and just because Claire had thought she felt Hope squeezing her hand did not mean that she necessarily had, it did not really prove anything. And it had never happened again, so doubtless it had just been her imagination, her wishing that she had felt it.

  To her shame Melinda found herself thinking, What are we all doing this for day after day after day? Perhaps we are all mad? Should we not listen to her doctors and switch off her machine?

  Only yesterday she had found Jack fast asleep, his head on his hand, still at Hope’s bedside, still hoping, not giving up. And although he awoke with a smile she thought she saw, for the first time ever, that having passed from madness to commitment he might now, like her, be journeying from commitment to defeat. There was something in the back of his eyes, and in his voice, that was not as strong or as certain as it had been, something that had disappeared.

  ‘We’ll win through, see if we won’t, Mellie,’ he reassured her, looking all too apologetic that she had found him asleep and that he had awoken sounding and perhaps looking dejected. ‘I know we’ll win through. It’s just a question of—’

  ‘Kicking on?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Your friend Marcus said another month and then we’d talk. It’s now—’

  ‘Don’t let’s talk dates, Mellie.’ He turned away, at the same time squeezing her arm lightly. ‘Don’t let’s get too narrow, talking dates. Being with your mother all the time, I hardly know or care what the day is!’

  Melinda felt a sudden surge of possessiveness. Yes, Hope was her mother, and not Jack’s mother, and Jack might be James’s father, but was not yet Hope’s husband. He had to wake up to that fact, not always be there, in the hospital, busy owning her the way it seemed to her that he sometimes was, as if he was the only one who truly cared, as if none of them cared as much as he did.

  But as quickly as the thought came, Melinda rejected it, feeling ashamed, for she knew that Jack had actually been a tower of strength, and that Hope had wanted to have the baby as much as they had all wanted her to come through it all right, that she need not have had it, that finally, really, it had been her decision, and not Jack’s fault.

  ‘No, OK, sorry. No. We won’t talk dates. I hardly know what day it is either, at least I wouldn’t, if it wasn’t for the Grey Goose. I say, Jack, she’s really coming along well, you’re going to be proud of her, one of these days. The colonel, everyone at Locketts Farm – you know, the place where we school her? They can’t believe how well she is coming along.’

  ‘Great. By the way – good news. Josh is coming home tomorrow.’

  Josh. Melinda could not say anything, least of all to Jack, but she somehow could not face seeing Josh. Feeling as she had before about him, now that their parents had actually had a baby together, and in such terrible circumstances, she could not see that how she had felt about him was not in some strange way wrong.

  It was ridiculous. But being with Josh, she and Josh, did not seem the same at all, now that so much had happened between their parents. It was almost embarrassing. No, not almost – it was embarrassing. Besides, Josh had not even written to her once from South Africa, where he’d been sent to study farming methods – not about Hope, not about James, nothing, which only went to prove that he must feel the same – really embarrassed. As if their parents having a baby together meant they were somehow related, even though they were no such thing. It was stupid. It was pathetic. It was everything. But there it undoubtedly was. Things could not be the same, and probably never would be.

  ‘I am boxing up to go to see the colonel.’

  ‘Fine. Josh will drive you, be happy to, I’m sure he would.’

  ‘No, don’t worry him. Please. I’m being driven, it’s a share, two of us going for some show jumping, dressage, the lot. It will be a long day.’

  ‘I’ll tell him anyway. If he wants to come he can call you, eh?’

  ‘OK, but really, there’s no need.’

  But as it happened, the next day came and went, and Josh did not call, and Melinda thought she knew precisely why.

  Rose was frowning at the professor. They had reached an understanding over The Wild Duck. His interpretation had won hands down over hers, and in consequence, on his advice, she had changed her audition pieces and was now waiting to hear it she was called back. Which she would be if he was right, and could not be if he was wrong. Because she had completely changed all her ideas about acting because of him.

  ‘Supposing I don’t get in anywhere, supposing no-one wants me, prof?’

  ‘You will, but—�
�

  ‘But?’

  ‘Once there it’s simply a question of deciding – do you or do you not want to stay there. That will be your particular problem, I would say.’ He smiled at her. ‘You are so gifted, Rose. You were gifted from the moment you were born, it’s quite obvious. But sometimes people get to places, colleges, drama schools, universities, what you will – and bingo. They don’t want to be there any more. They find out that what they need to nourish their talent is just not there, and that it would be harmful to stay. That is what happens. Sometimes. Maybe not to you. But sometimes, to other people. It happens. And then.’

  ‘And then?’ Rose demanded impatiently. ‘And then, prof, please tell me?’

  ‘Then, Dame Rose, you leave.’

  ‘After all this sweat, no way!’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’ He tapped the page of the play he was holding with his pencil. ‘Now take it from Act Two, Scene Two, please.’

  They had progressed to buying two of everything to study, and so Rose frowned down at her copy of The Winter’s Tale and started to read. But she could not, not with this thought hanging over her, so she stopped before properly beginning.

  ‘If I was talented, I would not have needed so much direction from you, would I?’

  ‘On the contrary, talent is always humble, it looketh not for praise, but for help, it seeketh not reward except in getting it right. Now, are you ready?’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  Nevertheless, deep down inside her Rose sighed.

  It was such an exquisite problem, really – seeing the professor each morning, working together on her pieces every night, but not doing anything about anything, about each other, because, quite simply, they could not. There was no time for being in love, or anything even approximating to it, at least not at the moment.

  Sometimes it was so difficult, trying not to fall in love with him, because Charles was so beautiful, so finely made, he reminded Rose of an exquisite drawing, and she found that not only was it difficult not to fall in love with him, but she worried over him it she heard him coughing when she passed his room, or if he looked pale because he was working too late, and she wanted to do and say all sorts of things. But it was not possible. There were other things in life that were far more important to her, one of which she thought about all the time – success.