Before I Knew You Page 9

  ‘So are you a retired scriptwriter?’ Sophie had pressed cosily, dreamy from the dope, the itchy patches on her skin soothed and forgotten.

  Carter had shot her a dark look from under the grey thickets of his eyebrows. ‘I’ll only answer that if you promise to tell me why you were hugging that darned tree like your life depended on it.’

  ‘A panic attack,’ said Sophie, promptly, aware that while the figure of Carter himself appeared to be moving in and out of focus, her mind, thanks to the dope, had ascended to a level of astonishing and glorious lucidity. ‘Difficult things … converging … yes, that was it – converging.’

  ‘Wow – sounds tough.’ Having posted the Casablanca DVD back into its correct slot, Carter returned to his TV chair and perched on its arm, facing her. ‘Would it be wrong of me to ask what those “difficult things” might be?’

  Sophie had hesitated, fiddling with the tie on her robe, torn between the desire to talk and a dim awareness that it would indeed be wrong, just as the man’s kindness and being there in the delicious cool cinema were wrong. But then she started and it was impossible to stop. She had told him everything – much of it in the wrong order – about Tamsin, about having been happy and then suddenly not, of the intruder and the months of living under some dark invisible cloud. ‘We were all fine, nothing damaged, and yet nothing has been quite the same ever since. It’s like I lost something that day, my confidence – something. But the worst of it – what had just dawned on me before the “tree-hugging”, as you put it – was that all along I had been blaming Andrew for letting the horrible boy into our house, into our lives, as if he could have done something to prevent it, which of course he couldn’t. And he senses it – poor Andrew – I know he does. There’s been this distance between us, you see,’ she had confessed, in a small voice. ‘That’s part of what’s changed, why we came out here – the house swap. It’s to try and sort things out.’ She had laughed, nervously, as sense and sobriety came flooding back in, bringing the room and her recklessness into sharp relief. ‘Really, I should go … I shouldn’t have come …’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you did.’

  The frankness of the remark, its quiet intensity, was like an alarm bell. Colouring, Sophie hastily got up from the sofa, holding the edges of the robe tightly across her chest. ‘Well, that’s nice, obviously, and thank you, Carter – for listening and so on, but now I really should be getting back …’

  ‘Hey, no need to run.’ Carter had raised both arms in the manner of one professing himself to be devoid of weapons. ‘That lotion has sunk in nicely – you could have another swim first.’

  ‘Thanks, but I don’t think so. And thank you for being so kind. The swimming, the oatmeal stuff – you’ve been great,’ Sophie had jabbered, fighting the door handle and a sudden absurd terror that it might be locked.

  ‘Enough with the thanking,’ Carter had replied drily, reaching past her to manoeuvre the handle, which she had been twisting in the wrong direction. ‘Only people who aren’t friends thank each other all the time.’

  ‘Friends?’ Sophie had turned to squint at him as they stepped back out into the eye-aching brilliance of the sun.

  ‘Sure … at least I hope so. And Nancy and Andrew – I want all of us to get along. Next time make sure he comes, okay?’

  Sophie had fled through the little gate in the picket fencing that surrounded the pool and into the trees, ignoring Carter’s shouts about forgotten promises to help look for the cat.

  It seemed incredible, Sophie mused now, smiling to herself as she jangled the melted shingle of ice cubes in the bottom of her glass, that only a week and a half had passed since all the high drama of that first encounter – her running off like some madwoman wanted for a monstrous crime. She had waited for Andrew’s return that evening with dread, certain that he would detect some new and terrible change in her. Smoking a joint of all things (even as a teenager, drugs had never held any allure for her), not to mention the private film-watching, the wild, disloyal talk – he would see it all, surely, somehow, flashing in the guilty flints of her eyes.

  But Andrew had arrived back from his overnight stay and golf game in the most unexpected of moods – sombre, sheepish, almost to the point of penitence. Playing down what had clearly been a marvellous time with Geoff and Ann, he had listened intently to Sophie’s somewhat edited version of the day’s events, asking all sorts of uncharacteristically detailed and polite questions. When she showed him the rashes on her hands and legs, describing their neighbour’s timely intervention, he had said only how fortunate for her that Carter had been around and well done for allaying some of the man’s bullying need to be of service by at last taking a dip in his pool.

  While Sophie had prepared supper he had sat down for his now customary evening session at the Stapletons’ piano, galloping through a few familiar old favourites before slipping into an experimental style she hadn’t heard in years, trying chords and key changes with different snatches of tune in between.

  They had eaten in front of the television, exchanging surprisingly effortless, companionable remarks – snippets of text-news from the girls, the triumph with the water sprinklers, the worrying absence of the cat – before retreating to bed where Andrew, instead of emitting his usual silent electrical storm of disappointment at her lack of interest in sex, had for once been the first to fall asleep, his mouth open, his glasses down his nose, his book on his chest.

  Aware of a shadow across her body, Sophie opened her eyes from her reverie to find Carter standing next to her lounger. They had spent so many hours together now that in her mind they had all merged into one: a thick, hazy layer of sun and conversation, tea and silence, all of it as restorative as it had been unexpected. Through his slightly bowed legs she could see the grizzled snout of Buz, the dog, which had heaved its sagging old body into the baking shade offered by the outdoor dining table.

  ‘He hates it when she’s gone,’ Carter commented, by way of reference to the pet and the continuing absence of Nancy, whose casting session had not only proved genuine but had resulted in a guest appearance in a soap, tying her to a new, hectic schedule. He squeezed an inch of sun cream into each palm and held out both hands with a questioning nod.

  ‘Yes, please.’ Sophie rolled over and tugged the straps of her costume off her shoulders.

  Carter leant over her to perform what had become a favourite task, glad she could not see the extra, unflattering sag the position gave his belly. ‘Things still going better with that husband of yours?’ He spread the cream slowly, smoothing it in even sweeps over her shoulder-blades.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Sophie sighed, her voice full of the happiness and perplexity that this fact afforded her, while her body relaxed under the now familiar pleasure of Carter’s big, kind hands moving across her hot skin. ‘It’s so weird – nothing has been said but it just feels as if there’s no pretence any more. We’re each doing our own thing – meeting up like half-strangers in the evening and managing to be pleasant as a result. Andrew can’t believe how happy I am to be left alone while he goes gallivanting with Geoff and Ann. After each excursion – golf, music, whatever it is – he walks into the house wearing a guilty expression, like the girls when they were little and had done something fun but terrible and were awaiting a telling-off. But he can also see how much more relaxed I am and thinks it’s time on my own that’s doing the trick – reading lots of novels, popping over here for the occasional swim.’

  ‘Well, that’s the truth, isn’t it?’ Carter murmured.

  ‘Hmm, not quite … or, at least, there are a few gaping holes in that truth, aren’t there? Like the reason I’m more relaxed is because that panic attack made me realize – at long last – how angry I was with him …’ Sophie paused, amazed at how simple things could be when one dared to spell them out. ‘Oh, yes, and the minor detail of having poured my heart out to a total stranger, then allowed him to ply me with drugs … ’

  ‘Hey now, let’s not exaggerate,’ C
arter protested, laughing. ‘Three spliffs in two weeks hardly constitutes plying … at least, not in my book. The point is, you needed a friend and I just happened to be available for the job.’ Carter tried and failed to keep the huskiness from creeping into his voice. Her back was so long and slim. Working in the cream, he could feel the indentations of her ribcage; and her pleasure at his touch, he could feel that too. God, he had forgotten that – the simple sweetness of skin on skin. Nancy worked at their sex life like she worked at everything else – vocalizing, negotiating, analysing, as hell-bent upon maintenance and improvement as she was with regard to her own body: surgery, regular shots into her face, she did the whole deal. And as an actress in her mid-fifties, Carter didn’t blame her. It was the toughest of professions for older women and he admired her fighting spirit. But there was no eroticism to it, no vulnerability, no need …

  ‘Hey, thanks, I think that will do.’

  ‘Sure.’ Carter hastily retreated to his own sun-bed. The deal was friendship, he reminded himself; confidants who hugged and trusted and told each other their worst and best thoughts. He had sold her the idea himself, during the charm offensive that had persuaded her into a second visit – a door-stepping encounter that she’d thought had just happened to coincide with the husband being absent, when in fact it had been the worthwhile product of two hours’ uncomfortable surveillance, hovering with binoculars between the thinnest clumps of trees at the end of his drive. And she had bought into it like a trusting kid, telling him more details, not just about the recent ups and downs of her marriage but also about her childhood and the wheelchair-bound sister with allergies whom she had loved so dearly.

  So far Carter had done his best to buy into it too, showing Sophie round the place, telling all the stories behind his belongings – from the tackiest ornament to the framed Oscar nomination that hung next to his desk in the office. One afternoon he had guided her around every inch of his huge yard and its environs, proudly pointing out and naming the orange-gold Helenium, the rainbow colours of the Echinacea beds, the black-eyed Susans stalking the edges of the dusty pink hydrangeas and electric purple-blue Caryopteris, shyly saving his favourites – the proud sentinels of the Casablanca lilies – till last, in the hope that she would make the same irresistible connections that were firing in his own mind; that she, too, would feel how the beauty of what they were sharing went way beyond flowers. Out loud he had admitted only that the landscaper did the heavy work, but that the choices and design were all his. Sophie had been so admiring, so attentive that he couldn’t even bring himself to add the sorry truth that the discovery of his green thumb had only come about because of the dust gathering on his notebooks, the yawning blankness where once there had been torrents of words. Without the yard to work on he would have gone mad.

  ‘Still no sign of the princess?’ he ventured now, closing his eyes in a bid not to stare too greedily. Instead the image of her near-naked body shimmered across his retina, as clearly emblazoned as a brand on a hide. She had brought a novel this time and he already felt jealous of it.

  Sophie lowered her book with a groan. ‘Not a peep. Except that I keep putting out food and every morning it’s gone … ’

  ‘Crazy lady – that will be raccoons or skunks or coyotes … ’

  ‘Coyotes?’

  ‘Beth and William – you’re going to have to tell them.’

  ‘I know. I’ve been putting it off. I just didn’t want to ruin their holiday, that’s all. I’ll get Andrew to give them a call tonight.’

  ‘Coward.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Sure. A beautiful one, though.’ Carter grinned, showing off the dental work that had kept his face young. ‘That’s my favourite of your swimsuits, by the way – high on the hips. You look great, even if the white bits from the other one make it kind of weird.’

  Sophie threw her towel at him and did a running dive into the pool. When she surfaced he was in the water next to her, his face close, his eyelashes dripping. ‘What?’ he gasped, as she stared.

  ‘I was just wondering. You and Nancy … couldn’t you have children or …?’

  ‘We moved here to start a family but Nancy’s career took off and then suddenly it was too late.’ Carter ducked back under the water, not to hide his tortured thwarted-father emotions, as Sophie supposed, but to escape the temptation of placing his mouth against hers, which, darkened by the pool water, looked good enough to bite clean through.

  6

  Andrew studied the rows of singers and musicians while he conducted, noting with some dismay how old most of them were and hoping they were all too lost in the challenge of trying to follow his baton to guess they were being scrutinized. The choir, apart from being thin on tenors, had already proved itself to be basically sound, most having performed the piece before. Ann, in the front row of the altos, was working hard as usual and professional to a fault, her mouth wide, her eyes glued either on him or her score. The orchestra, too, were indisputably accomplished, barely missing a note, and yet, as so often happened during the first combined session of music and vocals, the cohesion felt shallow, while the pace – even in the fastest movements – was woefully uncertain and lacking punch.

  After ‘His Yoke Is Easy’ had laboured to its end in a plodding, methodical manner entirely contradictory to the intentions of its creator, Andrew clapped his hands to call a halt to the run-through, risking a quip about the yoke sounding pretty cumbersome from where he was standing. To his delight there were gales of goodhearted laughter. ‘And at times the choir and orchestra appeared to be pulling the yoke in entirely different directions … I don’t suppose anyone here could stay an extra half-hour, could they?’ he ventured next, as more ripples of amusement died away. ‘If we’re not going to get booted out of this hall, that is.’ He shot a questioning look at Ann, who responded with a thumbs-up. Meanwhile all heads seemed to be nodding to indicate a willingness to stay.

  It was certainly different, Andrew mused, garnering another laugh as he rolled up his shirtsleeves and pulled a devilish face before raising his baton again. In England choirs might practise for a few weeks before such events, but orchestras, like soloists, tended to pride themselves on requiring one run-through just a couple of hours prior to performance. But this was New York and a word-of-mouth gathering of volunteer musicians assembled in a high-school hall by Ann. There would be two more rehearsals at least, and no one was receiving a fee, not even the soloists, who were various music students he had yet to meet, apparently grateful for any chance to showcase their talents. The proceeds of the event were destined for a small charity working with street children in Peru, a cause all the more poignant for the fact that the original conductor (now in hospital with a diagnosis of severe pneumonia) had adopted two little girls from that part of the world.

  As Andrew pressed on with the rehearsal, any sense of the limitations of the assembled throng of musicians fell away, as did the fact of being packed into a school hall on the Upper West Side on a baking Friday, with the smell of floor polish in his nose and beads of sweat sliding down his temples. He was a conductor – a conduit, literally – for some of the greatest music ever written. Of advanced ages the players might have been, but compared to many of the schoolchildren he had to work with back in London, with their short attention span and crammed curricula (music squeezed in for a lot of them, often as the last priority), they were workhorses, Trojans, heroes to the last man and woman. By the time they got to the end of the extra half-hour the ‘yoke’ section had lightened to a tight, breathtaking gallop, which made even the hairs on his own neck stand on end, while the ‘Hallelujah’ had reached a volume and energy that seemed to shake the very rafters of the hall.

  Afterwards coffee, tea and orange juice were served by Ann and a group of her friends from a trestle table in the corridor outside the hall. The singers and musicians clustered round him, all exuding the warmth and openness that Geoff had cited as the reason he and Ann had found it so easy to make Am
erica their home. They thought Andrew’s skills were considerable and queued up to tell him so, interrupting each other with their compliments.

  ‘We might not let you go back to England,’ teased one of the flautists, a woman of such width that during some particularly impassioned playing Andrew had feared for the security of her narrow school chair.

  ‘I told you I’d found the answer to our prayers,’ Ann crowed, bestowing a proprietorial congratulatory pat to Andrew’s sweat-dampened back, wondering if she had yet done enough to make up for the early dreadful faux pas about the handicapped sister. Seldom had Geoff given her such a roasting. Deeply shamed, she had begged to be allowed to offer an outright apology; but Geoff had talked her out of it, insisting that with someone as sensitive as Andrew (so much the quintessential buttoned-up Englishman), it would only make things worse. So Ann had simply devoted her energies during all their subsequent encounters to being as nice as she possibly could, aware that with the flaky Sophie in the background, the poor man needed all the looking after she could manage. Asking him to step in on the chicos perdidos cause had turned into a particularly inspired triumph, not just because Andrew had been so visibly flattered, but because he was a magnificent conductor – she had forgotten quite how magnificent and had remarked on the fact with sufficient frequency for Geoff to grumble that he had once been rather good on the saxophone, if she could be bothered to remember. ‘Yes, sweetie, and now you’re good at lots of other things,’ she had quipped, tugging her husband’s chin between her forefinger and thumb, enjoying the rare display of possessiveness.