Juliet closes her eyes and leans back in the chair, feels her spine grate against the wooden slats. Always a slim woman, her bones now jut through a skin grown sullen and limp; her face, however, has been largely spared and people would still call her handsome. Never a beauty, she has long possessed a certain style, a sharp-faced ballerina, long-legged water-bird sort of style, which she has always valued, providing as it did a certain distinction within the blighted air of her first family and a presence within the notoriety of the second. Her hair is straight, cut very short and dyed. It turned a sudden stormy grey in her twenties, and although she disliked it, had left it alone – part of her Calvinist heritage, she supposed, not to tamper with God’s work. But a few years later, with Anna a baby and the other first-time mothers at the infant welfare centre a good ten years younger, Juliet had her hair returned to the dark brown of her youth and preference and has continued to do so in the years since. Good years, in the main, and rewarding years as Duncan rose in the musical world.
She leaves her chair and paces the room. His best work is still in front of him, of that she is sure, all that is needed is a return to the stable work habits of his productive years, and with all other avenues exhausted, that means Anna must come home. It is a reluctant admission, because, in truth, Juliet does not want her daughter back, was pleased when she left, had looked forward to a future, just the two of them as it had been in the beginning, Duncan’s work on the same gleaming orbit and time for relaxation as well. At first it seemed all would be well. They had travelled to Europe, a little work but mainly leisure, and back home he had put the finishing touches to a quartet he had been working on when Anna had left. It was only when he turned to his new Fourth Symphony that the trouble began, and even then not immediately, for Duncan had known slow starts before. But when a slow start stretches into a decade of silence then it becomes something else. People no longer referred to a creative block, they simply said he was past it.
Juliet returns to her table but does not sit down. Through the window she watches Duncan as he walks to the letter-box. She is not the only one to show the wear and tear of these difficult years; it is not that he looks older or has gained or lost weight, rather he carries himself differently, as if clinging to shadows with the grime of an unsatisfactory journey clogging his pores. This is a man who has known better days and would never know them again unless his work picked up. She turns away. She has tried everything and things are getting worse, if it took Anna’s return, then, for Duncan’s sake, so be it.
The decision now made and Duncan soon wanting his coffee, she goes into the music room to fetch his cup. She lingers in the doorway and feels herself relax. It is strange how this room can still affect her; it is a place that appears always new, despite having known it since childhood. From the very first time Duncan invited her to hear his music, this room – the piano, the desk, the shelves, the very air – has formed the scaffolding of her hopes. As a girl, she longed to be part of his world, find for herself a niche within his spangled sphere. In her own family, everything revolved around poor damaged Robbie, but in the Bayle household, Duncan led the way, and he was going places. After the first visit, she returned again and again, would sit in the music room while he worked, listening, watching, steeped in bliss – she, ordinary Juliet Leonard, and not at all musical, the girl from next door whose life would be a stubbornly pitiful affair if not for Duncan Bayle.
He liked her there, he said. ‘You’re so calm, you seem to absorb the music. It helps me.’ And it helped her. She would escape her own dreary family, the weak father, the mother who had succumbed to the guilt of her late-life child, and Robbie who thundered through the house from early morning to late at night, would escape to Duncan and another world.
Best of all, she liked it when he played his own music. She would sit in the chair that would become Anna’s chair, immersed in a thrilling and tender pleasure. She had no language to describe it, either then or since. Sensations come closer – sun on skin after the chill of a house, a dollop of icecream on a burning throat, a hand stroking her back, bare feet in cool sand. And he was mesmerising to watch, his large body curved over the keyboard, eyes closed by the music, heavy hair swaying from side to side, fingers curling and rolling and chasing one another over the keys. From the very first time she knew she had found a place previously unknown, a soothing, kindly place where she wanted to stay forever. And from the beginning, she knew there was something about his music that seemed to enter her and attach to what she recognised as the best part of herself. With Duncan she became other than who she was.
‘You’re not exactly my muse,’ he would say, ‘more my rock.’
And so had remained. Throughout the courtship, throughout the marriage, the first ten years just the two of them, and then Anna’s arrival. Juliet would nurse the baby in the music room, suckle her on music was how she thought of it, and when Anna proved so musical, Juliet knew she had played her part. She was proud of her two musicians, her husband the composer and her daughter the cellist; would sit with Duncan in the music room and know he needed her, and attend Anna’s concerts and know she was needed there too.
And then it all changed. Of course she continued to provide for them, she worked, she cooked and cleaned, but while she admired her two musicians publicly, alone she would grind on her loss. When Anna became so impossible, here at last was good reason to dislike her daughter, and when finally she disappeared, Juliet prayed she would stay away.
With Anna gone, Juliet returned to the music room, but what once had helped him had become an intrusion, what once had soothed him was now an irritation; in the end she left him to work alone and increased her support in other ways. Long ago she had made her choice and had never wavered, not during the bad times with Anna, not during these past twelve years, and, she reminded herself, not now.
She returns to her desk, dials the doctor’s surgery and leaves a message with the nurse about the sleeping pills, then takes a sheet of notepaper from the drawer. She is sure the silence would lift if only he were to put aside his Fourth Symphony and work on something else. It has become a spectre, a threatening, choking presence, and as much as it clings to him so he clings to it. When she suggested recently that the symphony was an ineffectual, even destructive lifeline, he countered with a savage denial: she did not understand, the Fourth was to be his signature piece, it would represent a life dedicated to music; to let it go would be to reduce his life to ash. Juliet said he was being melodramatic, but he simply shook his head and returned to the scarred and tattered pages of manuscript.
It had always been his method to work on at least two pieces simultaneously, each fed the other, each became larger under the influence of the other. Such had been the case when he began the Fourth; there had been a collection of tone poems for the piano, not his best work, but melodic pieces that were proving quite popular. He then had started a piece for flute and voice, something Anna had wanted him to do for years, which was when her absence started to grate.
Juliet sighs, Anna must return. She would write to her, and this time, instead of the lukewarm requests of earlier letters, would leave no doubt of the seriousness of the situation. Life with Anna had been torture, but, as much as Juliet has tried, life without her was little better. And she has tried, but it is Anna’s return he wants.
She looks up as he comes into the room, his face is blanched with the cold and he is coughing. She stands up, takes the letters from him and gives his arms a brisk rub.
‘That feel better?’ she asks.
He nods, smiles faintly.
‘I’ll