It’s been thirty years since it happened. A lifetime, for some. Yet I still hear his cries. I still feel eyes on me. Still hear the whispers: I know what you did.

I’ve spent so long hiding that I barely remember what it’s like to be seen – to be known for who you really are. But all that must stay where it’s buried. For better, for worse.

No-one can ever know what happened that day. And no-one ever will. Because they can seek all they want, but this is a secret I’ll take to my grave. No matter who comes knocking.

The chilling second part of Hide and Seek by Amy Bird: a new novel, perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn, SJ Watson and Liane Moriarty. Is finding the truth worth losing everything?

Also by Amy Bird

Yours is Mine

Three Steps Behind You

Praise for Amy Bird

‘This novel contains many shocks and turns, it’s filled with emotion and makes for an addicting and fast read’ –Uncorked Thoughts on Yours is Mine

‘There were moments that goosebumps spread across my arms…the last chapter left me a little breathless.’ – Katlyn Duncan, author of The Life After Trilogy on Yours is Mine

‘… there are twists and turns in here that you will never see coming.’ – Emma Kerry, Emma Kerry’s Notebook on Yours is Mine

‘I honestly cannot recommend this book enough! It is fast paced and thrilling, and will have you gripped from beginning to end.’ – Amy Nightingale, Compelling Reads on Three Steps Behind You

‘As a psychological thriller this works extremely well…it is perfectly paced with some real heartstopping moments and a terrific exciting finale. I enjoyed it very much, it appealed to my darker nature and I will definitely be looking out for more from this author.’ –Liz Loves Books on Three Steps Behind You

‘For those of us who love a dark read, this is just perfect.’ – Christine Marson, Northerncrime on Three Steps Behind You

‘I couldn't put this book down.’ – Kelly White, Waterstones bookseller on Three Steps Behind You

‘A novel full of twists and turns. Readers will be surprised who they end up cheering on. Highly recommended.’ – Rosemary Smith, Cayocosta72 Book Reviews on Three Steps Behind You

Hide and Seek Part Two

Amy Bird

Copyright

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2014

Copyright © Amy Bird 2014

Amy Bird asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9781474007528

Version date: 2018-06-27

AMY BIRD

Amy Bird lives in London, where she divides her time between writing and working as a solicitor. Hide and Seek is her third psychological thriller for HQ Digital. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London, and is also an alumna of the Faber Academy ‘Writing a Novel’ course, which she studied under Richard Skinner. As well as novels, Amy has written a number of plays, including The Jobseeker which was runner-up in the Shaw Society’s 2013 T.F. Evans Award. She is a member of the Crime Writers’Association. Her husband, Michael, writes too and one of their favourite pastimes is to ‘fantasy cast’ films of their novels while cooking up new concoctions in the kitchen. For updates on her writing follow her on Twitter, @London_Writer.

The following must be thanked for the creation of Hide and Seek: Messrs Alkan, Beethoven, Grieg and Tchaikovsky for the concerti that helped me imagine the music at the heart of this novel; my talented editor Clio Cornish for helping me find that heart’s true beat; the rest of the HQ Digital team for their passion in bringing the book to readers; my fellow HQ Digital authors who have spurred me on, both on-line and in person; my legal colleagues, who have indulged my authorial leanings; the friends, family and enthusiastic readers who championed Three Steps Behind You while I was working on Hide and Seek. And finally, love, gratitude and joy to my husband Michael. You are with me in all creations.

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Book List

Praise for

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Endpages

About the Publisher

DEVELOPMENT

Chapter One

-Sophie-

One more sip, and I’ll go. Really. But I take a sip and think the same again. This beer is my treat, after all. And everyone needs a little treat. To keep them sane. Particularly in exile. There are worse places to be in exile than the peace of Quai de Jemappes in Paris. Even though the sun has started to pale and the glory of its reflection on Canal Saint-Martin that tempted me into the after-school indulgence has faded. But mon dieu I deserved it today. Those children at the elementary school! Why can they not get the right notes in their scales? It must be deliberate. They must know by now there are no sharps in C Major; I’ve taught them the rules often enough. How I wanted to smack their little fingers each time they reached for a black note. Pas de dièses! Smack. And in English too, so they got their daily bilingual quotient. No sharps! Smack.

I didn’t though. It’s all about restraint, I’ve learnt. Repression. There’s to be no violence, now. And besides, it’s not allowed. I might not be sacked, might be ‘lucky’, be sent off to some robust lycée to teach the rough secondary-schoolers. There, it would be a different sort of sharps to forbid them from. A far more dangerous sort. That I well recall.

As I take another sip of my beer, a man walks past me, whistling a tune to himself. A joyful little melody. A different man, a different key signature, from what I was used to. But such a familiar activity. And suddenly, there I am again, with Max. As he pottered from room to room, or from house to restaurant, or studio to home. Always the whistling, so annoying, yet so beautiful. So Max. And now here he is again in my mind. That whistle penetrating all. That’s what I get for my ‘treat’, my indulgence in this afternoon beer. The past, now present again.

Oh, why can I never remember how difficult it is to forget? Why could I not have known back then, as I perforated myself with the same number of pinpricks as those little dots of lights made in the sky, and me just as high, while I lay on that night-time grass in Bois de Boulogne? Why did I never remember that all you lose is a few days, not your real memories, the ones that (unfortunately) matter? Guillaume, or Will, if we’re being English, seemed to have found it easier. Although I suppose he might have started to remember, after I ran. Little Guillaume. Comme il était mignon. So very sweet. I remember when he was first born. Well, of course I do. I’m his mother (am I, still, does it count, when you’ve left your children?). You couldn’t forget bringing your son into the world. In the maternity ward, back in London, we took it in turns to cradle him. Max, bearded then, scuzzing his face against little Guillaume’s so that it tickled the baby into gurgles. So intimate, so loving. So back then. I drain my glass. It doesn’t do to reflect too much. I must focus on the moment. There are English tests to mark and written scales to correct.

“Tu veux une autre, Sophie?”

I shake my head and smile, walking away from the bar. I don’t want another beer. If I have one, the later memories, of that day, before Max went to the studio, will not be repressed. It will all hit me again. I know. Not like in the first six months, before I ran, when it was with me all the time. Whatever highs, whatever lows. The guilt, of leaving, and of everything.

“Domage!” says the barman. “À demain, ma petite rose!”

I do a casual wave over my shoulder. See me tomorrow? You wish. I have someone else lined up for that. Alain, my new beau, I’ll have you know. Except I don’t say that. I just swing my hips a little bit. Well, why not? The barman’s following me with his eyes again, I bet. Guilt and drugs do wonders for the waistline, for keeping a pallid complexion, and chemicals for keeping the hair that deep black-brown. Back when Max was alive, I’m sure I was rosier, rounder. Never fat, of course. But less European. If I went back now, none of those English schoolteachers, or the orchestra gang, would recognise me. Or look at me, even if I introduced myself. I know the English – married one, didn’t I? Even though his passions were distinctly more France than Angleterre. Yes, I know exactly what they would be like, those teachers, if I went back. They would stare at the floor, or talk about the weather, until one of them, envious of my figure, would blurt out an accusation. The others would tut and hush and apologise, and talk some more about the weather. But they would all look at me with that same accusation. The orchestra people would be horribly underhand – there’d be whispers in the second violins, gossip in the woodwind, and the odd hissed slur just before the conductor raised his baton. I wouldn’t be safe, even when the music started. Over-zealous bow movements would knock me in the face. My music would mysteriously have the critical page missing. My perfectly tuned violin would untune itself while I visited the bathroom.

And so I had to come back here and I have to stay. Away, safe, untroubled. At least by external influences. And of course, away from Guillaume. He won’t find me here. However hard he looks. I was anxious for a whole year, when he turned eighteen. That’s when people start looking, isn’t it, for their ‘real’ parents? But no. Nothing. And so, thirty years after it all happened, I can continue my life. No one here knows, no one will drag me back, no one will ask ‘And what do you think your son looks like now?’ Or, worse, ‘Oh, doesn’t he look so much like his father?’ And so I don’t have to think about it. If I try very hard. And I mean to keep it that way.

Chapter Two

-Ellie-

OK, so maybe I should have told him about Max Reigate being dead earlier. But he wasn’t going to engage brain with my theory, was he, that way? Not very interesting to speculate over whether your mother may or may not have had an affair with a dead musician. No real outcome, no real hope. Plus why bother him with mourning the loss of his father when we didn’t know conclusively it was his father? I know what that loss is like. You don’t want to mourn it if you don’t have to. So it was all from the best of intentions, really. I wasn’t to know he was adopted. At least I gave him the extra Gillian tit-bit, even if I’ve no idea what it means. An olive branch. He should be grateful for that.

It’s a shame most of this is addressed, in my head, to Will’s back as he lies apart from me in bed.

Part of the purdah that he’s put me in.

Oh, it’s not an official purdah, of course. Officially, I’m forgiven. We had the showdown. We had the ‘But why didn’t you tell me?’ And we had my very cogent explanation. Perhaps not as cogent as the one I’m addressing to his back. I more gave him a summary – ‘I thought I needed to help you to the truth, and I needed to do it in stages.’ He was still upset, though, of course. I’d let him believe in a future that didn’t exist, get excited about a father he’d never meet, a man he’d never become etc etc. But I never knew he would turn out to be adopted, did I? I still thought his mother was his mother, just that there’d been a bit of a fling with a sexy pianist. Still would have been a bit of a headfuck, I guess, but not this much.

And you know, he bought that, I think. I thought. Began talking at mealtimes again. Making little jokes. I thought I was out of the doghouse. I thought maybe a bit of sex would help seal our reconciliation.

No.

He is tired a lot. Suddenly. The yawns appear as soon as I initiate anything.

Might be unconnected. Might be my belly. Might be – a general downness, I guess.

But whatever it is, it’s not great. Evenings are too quiet. Too soft. We can’t do the ‘sex makes amends’ bit.

It’s not all bad, though, I guess, this place we are now. I am kind of enjoying practising my nurturing and mothering skills on him. If I can’t practise my other skills on him. Good timing, in a way. Is the ickle boy sad? Shall I cheer him up? Of course I don’t actually say that, do I, and nor would I. Bit odd. But I guess that’s what I can say to little Leo, when he starts being his own person. So it’s fine to think it, as I bring Will Rich Tea biscuits and tea, like my mum used to bring to me when I was sad, and it was too early in the day to simply say the next morning would wash the grief away. Plus he hasn’t really got a mummy at the moment, has he? Never had one, in the real sense. May have to work on the Sophie Reigate née Travers bit, in due course. But for now, he has me. I need to look after him. And I guess maybe I do need to practise. Because it’s not long now, until I’m due to pop. Three and a half months. Three and a half months to learn how to look out for a defenceless little person. Learning how to let it feed on you. For it to get enough sustenance without sucking you and your existence totally dry. Oh, Mum – the eternal postcard: I wish you were here. I would give up all the antenatal classes in the world for half an hour of your wisdom.

It would be better, of course, if I didn’t also have to practise the sleepless nights bit right now. It’s like, really, thanks Will, thanks for lowering the balance of my sleep bank before I’ve even become so huge that I can’t sleep at all. Or before we’ve even got a wailing sprog to attend to. Because, honestly, I challenge anyone to sleep through Will’s sleeping. Quiet evenings, maybe, but not quiet nights. He’s never been much of a snorer, but he’s sure as hell making up for it now. Not by snoring. No, that would be fine. It’s the tossing and turning, and the drumming, and the muttering that get me. Like really sinister muttering, if you didn’t know him. ‘Mummy’ he’ll murmur, which would be a bit Norman Bates if you didn’t have the back story. Plus ‘talk and die’. Ghoulish to anyone else. But I know he’s worried about his lecture, I’m sure of it. There’s only so much compassionate leave you can get out of a case like this and time is ticking before he needs to deliver it. They’ve already rescheduled to make allowances for him. Understanding his bad sleep etiquette doesn’t make it any less annoying, though – just as you’re about drifting off to sleep, there comes another ‘drum drum drum’ of his fingers on the bed posts, or he’ll roll right over onto you and your precious load, and sleep is suddenly hours off through fear of foetal crushing. I guess it’s maybe a blessing when he’s turned away from me, like he is at the moment. If he were hugging me in his sleep, like he always used to, little Leo would have been tapped to death by Will’s fingers by now.

But it can’t go on, can it? Because what I’d need, if it were little Leo I was looked after, is a solution. That was always Dad’s role. I’d come to him as a teenager, whinging about something, and he would just say: “Look, wipe away the tears, and tell me what you’re going to do about it.” Practical and pragmatic. Shame he didn’t have time to do anything practical when the other car came ploughing head-on, the wrong way down a dual carriageway. But now. Follow Dad’s advice. Don’t cry about it. Be proactive. What am I going to do, about Will, about this sleeplessness?

And I think I have an idea. Yes, there we go. That’s what I can do. It’s in two parts. The first, I can find in my medicine cabinet.

Chapter Three

-Will-

Ellie, she thinks she has all the answers. All the explanations for everything. For her own behaviour, for everyone else’s behaviour. But for all her knowledge, all her senses, all her knowing, she doesn’t feel what I feel. If she did, she would never have told me those lies. She would never have let me imagine a life with Max Reigate. Right from the start, right from when she looked him up and found his initials, she should have told me. I don’t know when the rules changed. We always tell each other everything. Or at least, we did. But there are apparently different rules now. Apparently we only have to tell each other everything when it suits us. Full disclosure – but only when convenient. After it actually fucking matters. After you’ve actually emotionally fucking invested in a new future.

Count to ten. Come on, remember – mother of your child. No arguments causing miscarriages. Retrieve the hammer out of the crib and install it in the toolbox. Go back upstairs, into the nursery, with its ghoulish dead-father crib, and smile at your pregnant wife.

Looking at her, through my smiles, I know she doesn’t feel how I feel about something else too. Doesn’t feel as I feel about a mother who simply thought ‘Hey, this is all too difficult since my husband died. So even though my little son has just been left fatherless, I’m going to make him motherless too, by just giving him unfeelingly away.’ You’d think she would. With her own mother, up on the almighty pedestal she’s now deified on, and with her own impending motherhood, you’d think she would have as little sympathy for Sophie Travers and she does for Gillian.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I test her out again. But no. Same old response. Ellie just goes on about the blood clot again. “There may have been an accident,” she says, seated on that sex-cum-nursing chair like it’s a judge’s bench. “That might be what Gillian was referring to. Or someone attacked him. Imagine how Sophie must have felt. Like she couldn’t be a mother at that moment; just a grieving widow.”

But I don’t want to imagine it. I haven’t got the mental space to imagine it. The only things I have space for are this: the concerto; hatred of my non-parents; sorrow, true horrible devastating sorrow, of my life not lived; Ellie lying to me; and the blood clot. The phrase Ellie heard Gillian use: What happened that day. Because, you see, I haven’t forgotten those words. Or how they link to the blood clot. And there, again, I know more than Ellie. Partly because, you see, I am an expert in this area. So I know these blood clots. I know what they mean. The violence they entail. And I also know because there is now not a single page of the internet that mentions Max Reigate that is unread by me. I know that when he left home, he was fine. I know that when he started to record that album, he was fine. And I know that mid-way through, he died.

And I know what that means.

Talk and die.

I know it’s not just a blood clot, of course, the talk and die phenomenon. Christ, if anyone knows that, I do. But these people who write these Wikipedia entries, they’re not going to be able to differentiate. Say to the average person: there was an epidural haemorrhage, a build-up of blood between the brain and the skull, and they’ll say oh, right. You mean a blood clot. Not getting, in their ignorance, the fatal beauty – sorry father, my dear departed father, but I mean from a scientific point of view – of the pressure of the bleed from damaged blood vessels around the skull trauma just building up, building up, until gradually gradually the pressure on the brain gets too much. An almost perfect murder, it would be, in some regards. If you gloss over the fact you need everyone not to notice you hit the victim on the head, and need to get the pressure just right, plus cross your fingers a lot that they won’t just pass out concussed immediately or, even more disappointingly talk and…talk.

So, what I mean is, Wikipedia saying ‘blood clots’ isn’t going to rule out talk and die, is it? I mean, a mighty coincidence if it was that, what with that being my area of academic specialism and all. Unless that’s what subconsciously got me interested in the area? You might say I could just find Sophie. Ask her. And I will do. In due course. But I’m a scientist. I like to develop my thesis and my research. I like to make my scientific case. And so before I put her to the test, before I get her to confirm my theory, I will get my facts. Then we’ll see what she has to say. About whatever happened that day, with my dad. My dad, Max (still getting used to it). With my background, perhaps I should be the last person to say ‘But healthy pianists don’t just collapse in the middle of recordings!’. But, you know, healthy pianists generally don’t just collapse in the middle of recordings. What perhaps happens is that before the recording, at home, say, like one of those typical domestic epidural haematoma cases, someone –

But part of the protocol, it seems, for my present situation, is if I start to share these theories or appear a little agitated, Ellie pops open the valium. Not for her, in her present condition, but for me. To quieten me. So before I can fully get my head round the theory of the special clot, of who might have caused it, tablets that Ellie has found from goodness knows where are in my hand. And because I still just about trust her – even now, after what she kept from me – it’s only after I’ve taken two in one swallow that I ask her what they are.

“Don’t fight it,” she says, leading me into the bedroom. “Just lie back and succumb,” she says, as she switches off the lights and leaves the room. And so before I know it I’m being raped by the valium, forcibly relaxed into its grasp and my eyelids they’re going going go…

I’m on a piano. Not playing one – on one. But it is not an ordinary piano and it is not an ordinary me. The piano is the size of a large ship. In fact, it is a large ship. It crosses a stormy sea, waves crashing on it and over it. I’m standing on one of the white keys. I’ve shrunk – not just in stature, but in years. I’m a little boy again, wearing shorts. With my small fingers, I’m clutching onto the lip at the edge of the piano keys. The giant hand of an unseen person is pressing down on the keys, one by one, getting closer and closer. Each time a key is pressed down, a huge chasm opens up. It isn’t just a gap between the regular keys and the one being pressed, like it would be on an ordinary piano. As each key is played, it falls, down down into the sea, down to the hammer-like engine pistons of the ship, and below them to the sea, with a great splash. I can see them as they fall, see the gap opening up below me. The sea churns beneath the piano – slam, slam, slam into its great legs that stretch out over the waves. The beat of the sea is not regular though – it has strange riffs and rhythms. Max’s rhythms, of course.

But it’s not Max I call for. “Mummy! Mummy!” I shout as the hand gets ever closer, the sea ever nearer.

There is no sign of Mummy. She doesn’t answer my call. But there is another sign. A sign from above – a clap of thunder. I look up from the piano and see a gap appear in the clouds above the sea. There is a presence there, with eyes and face but they are so indistinct, I cannot tell who they are. The presence, whatever it is, has a hammer. Like a Thor of DIY, the being waves the hammer, and brings it down from the clouds. The hammer fills the whole of the sky between the clouds and the sea. The hammer strikes the piano – crash! But the wood casing of the piano is intact. And the mighty hand continues, progressing closer and closer to me.

“Mummy!” I’m screaming. “Mummy!”

The hammer is raised again up into the sky, but even as the giant piano-hand has revealed another gap into the sea beneath, the hammer is coming down again. And up. And the piano hand is now on the key next to me and in only a moment I will, I must, fall into the sea below, unless I can just jump along to the next key. But no; the hammer is being swung again. If I could just make the presence realise I’m here, make it notice me, then it will stop, won’t it?

“I’m here! I’m here! I’m here!” I shout.

But the presence either ignores me or doesn’t hear because down comes the hammer, and along comes the hand. I try to scale the black key above me in case the hand is not playing the sharps, but the sides of the key are too slippery and besides, I see now that the hand is playing both black and white. And as the hammer from the Thor-presence hits the piano, the hand comes level with me. And the void to the sea opens up, and I’m falling, falling, falling, my face to the sky. I see as the waves close around me that the presence is not unknown, it is very known. It is Mummy, Mummy, Mummy.

And then I’m not in a piano, I’m in a bed, and there’s another Mummy, but a different Mummy, a Mummy-to-be, and it’s saying “Will! Will! Shh, you’re fine, you’re fine.”

I try to tell her, “But I’m not, because the sea will get me, and she, she, and the hammers… What?”

And then I realise it’s my bed, and the sea that’s here is just the sea of my sweat, the waves just me tossing and turning. And I’m here with my Ellie. For a moment there is a swell of relief. But only for a moment. Because then I think back to the other dreams. The pianos. The hammers. The water. What if they’re not just dreams? What if they’re memories?

Chapter Four

-Ellie-

Well, the valium didn’t help much. So it’s on to plan B. The funeral.

“You gained a father so quickly,” I tell Will. “And then lost him again. It’s classic grief you’re experiencing – anger, frustration, interrupted sleep. We need to let you mourn, properly. In the open.”

“You want me to visit his grave?” he asks me, taking a sip of his tea.

Not getting it yet, then.

“You can do that too, of course – and you should. But I mean the whole thing,” I explain. “The whole mourning process. Your own version of a funeral for him. I’ll do a reading. We’ll light a candle. You can cry. We don’t need to tell anyone. But it will be cathartic. Trust me.”

I have the experience here and he knows it. Will doesn’t answer immediately. I take a sip of my peppermint tea to show that this is a chilled out thing, with no pressure. That there’s no competitive mourning, no seasoned orphan one-upmanship going on. Just love. When he still doesn’t respond, I’m thinking of my next move – a bit of a lower lip quiver, bit of a sob about how his disturbed sleep patterns are affecting me, when I’ve only just started sleeping again. A bit manipulative, maybe, but I know best, right? Or I will do, when I’m a mother – which will be soon. So I must be in the early stages of knowing best now. If only Will would acknowledge it.

But then he finally says something useful. “And then we can move on?”

So I nod, with great understanding. “When you’re ready,” I say, mentally adding ‘Please move on soon, I need my sleep.’

“A proper funeral?” he asks.

“A proper funeral,” I confirm.

And then, he like really gets the idea. Before I can stop him, he’s run off for the Yellow Pages and is looking up undertakers and God knows what else. All these conversations on the phone in the next room. Well, I’m not going to intervene. It’s his funeral. I can take a little cat-nap here on the sofa, while he does all his preparations.

The doorbell rings at some point and I’m sure I hear chatter about a coffin. Will sounds upbeat about something. Actually sounds happy. So it must be a dream. I close my eyes again. And I must have slept for a bit, because Will has been really busy. I don’t find out how busy until bedtime, when there’s something stiff on my pillow (lucky me). Except it’s not Will. It’s a formal envelope, addressed to me. Will used to do this with anniversary cards, but this isn’t a special date. I wouldn’t have forgotten. OK, so I did, once, but never again.

“What’s this?” I ask Will, about the envelope, as he slides off his trousers. Oh, hello, not the only stiff thing. Looks like the bump will be getting some action tonight, finally.

“Your plan,” he says.

Inside the envelope, in Will’s best copperplate, black ink on white card, I read:

‘A celebration of the life unknown; a burial of the life not lived.

In remembrance of Max Reigate, father and pianist.

Tomorrow, at dawn.’

Is this some grim attempt at humour? I look up at Will. He’s not smiling. Not a joke, then. He is taking my suggestion seriously. So I need to show I’m proud of his engagement with my idea, like the good little nurturer I am. I climb across the bed and squeeze his hand. He squeezes back. I squeeze him some more. He kisses my lips (top ones). Oh my. Am I out of purdah? I stick my tongue into his mouth. He pulls up my nightdress and he is straight in there. Foreplay, you could at least send me a postcard, wherever you’ve gone. But I’m not so sure I wish you were here. Because Will, he finally wants me again. He needs me, bump or no bump. So he is in, then out, then in then out, then i-i-n at a slower rate and o-u-t for three still slow, then in in in, out out out. It’s a new rhythm, one he’s not used before. When we get to the afterglow – which, um, actually, I’m feeling will be quite glowing – I can tease him that his father’s death has in some ways done him good.

And then I realise. The rhythm he’s using is the one he has been tapping on chairs and tables and drumming in his sleep. It is his father’s rhythm. It is the rhythm of the Max Reigate concerto.

I try to vary the pace. But I can’t: they are his thrusts and I daren’t force myself too much against him, or pull him too much towards me for fear, however unfounded, of damaging the baby. And – ahh – actually – seems like my body is responding. Pretty perfect rhythm, you know. And so I’m kind of locked into it. And Will’s varying his ins and his outs in tempo to the music that must be in his brain. Our breath…it becomes…this ragged…accompaniment. The crescendo, it mounts and Will is in out out, in out out, in out out. In in out. In in out. IN OUT IN, IN OUT IN, IN OUT IN, IN IN IN IIIIIINNN.

Pianorgasm.

Together, we lie silent. Inside me, I can feel Leo doing little somersaults. But this isn’t about him, right now.

I’ll need to say something, acknowledge what just happened.

“I love your father’s music,” I say, putting that tender jokey edge in my voice.

“Me too,” Will says, with no joke in his.

And he rolls away from me. He doesn’t hold me. There is no glory of my bump. I am not even there for him.

So I wonder, as we turn off our bedside lamps, whether he even knew the rhythm he was making love to. Whether he knows just how much Max is inhabiting – inhibiting – him. And whether it really all will be all right in the morning.

Chapter Five

-Sophie-

Crotchets and quavers still remind me of the pall-bearers. Like black-hatted heads above the line of the coffin, they stand out starkly against the staves of the composition book. Whose book is it? I turn to the front. Oh, Emilie Beaumont. All très jolie with her blonde ringlets and big brown eyes, until the tantrums start. Then she turns red and cries and stamps her foot. How I hate children like her. So, yes, young Emilie’s quavers, malformed and straggly and in a major key as they are, do their funereal march across the page. I nearly didn’t even go to Max’s funeral, to see those pall-bearers. Nearly stayed away. Couldn’t face him being lowered into the ground. All those people, staring. Whispering their suspicions. Pointing their black-gloved fingers at us both, me and Guillaume. But it would have been more dangerous not to go. We’d have been conspicuous by our absence. And things might have been said. Things I couldn’t control.

And so I went. And what I remember most is that some awful organist tried to play an extract of Max’s work, but they played it so badly it was almost unrecognisable. I’d been silently weeping before, but I made it my job to sob big loud sobs when that music started, just to cover up the horror of what it meant, for Max actually to be dead, for his genius to be lost, for him never to play his own music ever again, just to be played badly by mediocre hobbyists. And little Guillaume, I think he tried to take my hand, but I wouldn’t let him. I wouldn’t let him. So that, besides everything else, gets added to the guilt list.

It’s not just notes, though, that are like death. Pianos, too, have their reminders of the mortality of Max. At first, I was not even able to look at a piano. It was not just their resemblance to coffins. It was that I felt I was looking straight at Max. But not live Max; Max laid out dead on the hospital bed. The keys were like the ribs of a skeleton, topped and tailed not by anything as useful as a head – just black nothingness at the end of the run.

But then when the realisation of his absolute final gone-ness hit me (appropriately, like a blow), I turned to pianos for solace. I liked to press my face against the keys, to hug the shiny wooden body, to run a finger along the red felt that separated the two. I was thrown out of several music stores. At the time, I found it heartless. On reflection, I suppose it may have been my unnaturally dilated pupils, that over-stimulated frenzy, and the fact I talked to the pianos, that meant the security guards were compelled to remove me. Little Guillaume would slink out behind me. Half the time, I wasn’t even aware of bringing him with me, but he’d turned up, all the same. It would have been so easy just to leave him in one of those piano shops. Open up one of the lids of a grand piano, stow him inside, then shut it again. Leave his head pressed against all those strings. Hammers coming down at his temples.

Arrête, Sophie – tu te rends folle. And I don’t want to drive myself mad. Madness would not be helpful. Madness doesn’t get you an income. Marking that little bitch Emilie Beaumont’s work would get me an income. Shut off the pain, the guilt, the feeling, like before. When you allowed yourself back into music again. Not to play professionally any more, not like when I met Max. My violin is well and truly shelved. Smashed, in fact. It had seemed like a good idea, at the time. I couldn’t sit in an orchestra again, hear that build-up of sound, the passion that went with it. Max’s piano would always have been centre-stage, in my mind. Like the first time, when I was part of the orchestra that recorded the first concerto. We’d joked, when he’d started his next piece (a quirky piano-only concerto), that he’d only written his earlier concerto with orchestra so that he could snare the first violinist. Now he had one, he could move on to solo work. Not that I was his first violinist. His piano had built up its share of notches.

I toss Emilie’s composition book to one side. It isn’t happening. I’m having a Max moment. If I can just engage in that, maybe I’ll finally get closure, put it all to one side. So, let’s psychoanalyse: did I feel rejected that he didn’t want my violin accompaniment, in that second concerto? Maybe. Maybe that’s why we argued in the run-up to that second recording. Or maybe it was still because of Guillaume, the distance I felt since he was born. Not just from Max, but from everything. The distance I tried to close by shouting. By throwing plates, sometimes. And, yes, make yourself confront it – other things. I would quite literally give anything for us not to have argued that evening. Had I known what the consequences would be.

So yes, maybe that’s why I put the violin to a violent rest. Pursued teaching, the ‘easier’ option. But then, of course, came the impact of the staves. The horror of those notes, their little black heads against the white and black background! How could they be innocently suggesting a tune? How could they not represent Max, lying on that black and white chequered floor? Follow the head, they seemed to be saying, follow the head as it moves about. Hit that note, get it just right, position it evenly on the line, strike it through. And worse, far worse, sometimes the heads had little tools next to them, the sharps, so shaped that they looked like –

No! It had been too much. And so I’d told all my students to do composition on blue staves in pencil. Found a little cheap supplier of poor quality composition books, whose staves had meant to be black but had turned out blue. Bought them from my own salary. Told the pupils that is how real composers work. They believed me; and their parents did too. They are professionals, not artists, those parents. What does a doctor or a lawyer know about music? I could almost hear them ignorantly boasting to their friends about the authentic musical education their talentless children were getting. Shame they also chose to talk about it to the Head of Music. He called me in to see him. He said he’d surveyed many composers and none of them had heard of my theories. Idiot. He didn’t know any real composers. Not composers like Max. Max didn’t care whether he wrote in pen, or pencil, or blood, on black staves or blue, or even any staves at all. He just created and played. But I couldn’t say that, could I? Couldn’t let on, about Max. It had been a risk, even putting my connections with that orchestra on my CV, even though I knew I needed to, to get the job, to validate myself. Didn’t mention Max’s name though. Just said I had led the strings section in the works of ‘various contemporary composers’. I’m sorry, Max. Again.

And now, there it is. The reason I don’t indulge in this. There is the familiar welling of sorrow. It will drag me down, down to Bois de Boulogne. And I can’t go that way again. Won’t. I’ve worked so hard to rescue myself. And besides, it wouldn’t even give me safety there, now. I’m not so young. Maybe I wouldn’t be at risk of rape. But now that I’m ‘older’ – I never was older, with Max, him being five years my senior – they would probably see an old lady, mug me. Take my bag, sell my identity, before I could buy a new temporary one from them and shoot it up into my veins.

So, instead, now, let us see what mes enfants terribles have concocted for me. Has little Emilie made any sense of my instructions? I wonder if when they compose, these children, they become the awful anti-social ogres that Max used to become. They certainly do not have the excuse of genius. I tut, crossing out a stray sharp that had found its way into C Major. I tell them C Major is the learning key. They don’t need to trouble themselves with sharps. Or worse, flats, with that great curved weight on the end of them, sitting right next to the note head. So many of them, ironically, in Max’s first concerto, written in B-flat Minor. If he’d chosen that key deliberately to court comparisons with Tchaikovsky it had certainly paid off: reviewers claimed he was as ‘bold’, ‘heroic’, ‘fierce’ and ‘eerie’ as the great Russian, ‘taking listeners to the same depths of melancholy and heights of passion’. None of that, in the year I teach. We play it safe in C Major. Although there is a danger, doing everything in the relative key to Max’s second concerto. A Minor. Just as haunting as his first. Perhaps even more so. For how it ended. Perhaps I’ve spent these teaching years intentionally skirting dangerously close to his memory – keeping him near but far enough away not to trouble me. But I don’t teach them about relative scales here. They can learn all that when they get to lycée. Until the Head of Music finds out, and quibbles it.

Yes, genius had been Max’s every excuse. For his hours of silence, his refusal to co-operate in household chores, his dreadful failure to acknowledge Guillaume when the boy wanted to play. His excuse for everything. Not that he even needed an excuse when we first started going out. I just enjoyed watching his genius. It was like he was making love to the piano. It was the same face when he was striving to orgasm. The same lifting up and down of his hips at the piano as he reached the climax. Except later on he saved the intensity for the piano. Apart from when Guillaume was conceived. He gave a virtuosic performance then, when it mattered.

So, yes. At least his excuse was valid: genius. The question is – was mine?

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