Crackpot. Philip Loraine
that he knew he was no such thing, the air had seeped out of the egotistical life-jacket and all the good reviews in the world couldn’t inflate it again.
Not being married wasn’t much fun either. Darling Mary had been fun: until he’d squashed her under the dreadful weight of his writer’s ego, not to mention his eternal absences with that great whore, his work. He missed her; he wished, sometimes desperately, that there was another woman in his life; but the women at Crestcote didn’t appeal to him: Lisa MacDonnell, very beautiful but too strong, too self-sufficient: Sarah Langdale, charming but with a husband who’d knock you flat if you coveted her—despite his own misdemeanours: young Rosamund Turner … well, he’d never been a baby-snatcher, even if she hadn’t been otherwise engaged; besides, he liked Rosamund too much; they had a delightful father-daughter relationship, she found him easy to talk to, had even come to him for advice, and this had flattered him because everybody at Crestcote was her friend.
That left Vicky Lind, no doubt perpetrating at this very moment another of our furry or feathered friends. Pretty, blonde, thirtyish, she did not, alas, have an iota of sex-appeal, and all the men at Crestcote were aware of it. Oh well … no desirable women around, why not a whacking great measure of Scotch, nothing like it?
Vicky Lind was indeed painting: a pair of Northern hares in their winter white, December for next year’s Vicky Lind Nature Calendar, she always liked to get them done six months in advance. That she was, after the first encounter, of no interest to men didn’t worry her in the very least: any more than the fact that her husband had left her, in boredom and frustration, after two years. He had by then performed the only function he was good for, supplying her with a son, her darling Jonathan, at present studying in California. Laurence Otterey was wrong about her age, nearer forty than thirty. Like many another selfish woman, she was in excellent condition, sustained by vanity and her ability to make a great deal of money. This meant that she could afford the best of everything; her Crestcote apartment was a wonder to behold, all pale blue and pink and mauve: ‘I’m an air person, you see, ethereal.’ In her opinion the others lived like pigs; in their opinion she lived like a successful nineteenth-century tart.
She also possessed a chic little mews house in London, within walking distance of Harrods; but for her work, which she took very seriously indeed, it was necessary to spend much time close to the wild creatures which made her such a handsome living. To give Vicky her due, she thought nothing of waiting for hours, sometimes in bitter cold, in order to draw or photograph them. Crestcote, with its security and lack of boring household worries, constituted, as far as she was concerned, a perfect country residence.
Down at The Lodge, Edvard Kusnik was creating Concertante 100, a piece which had been commissioned by the BBC for next year’s Promenade Concerts: pounding his piano, which was electronically linked to the synthesizers, while another battery of speakers relayed the orchestra, recorded yesterday in London at great expense. Various microphones were committing the whole gigantic muddle to tape. Of course he couldn’t hear the postman who had just called, and in any case he sometimes didn’t look in his mailbox for days.
Edvard was thirty-four with curly jet-black hair and a romantic pallor: quite striking, particularly in Israel where he had spent his youth, and where a driving desire for escape had for years done battle with the duties of a good Russian-Jewish son. God, how he loathed that bleak sun-blasted landscape, the backs-to-the-wall enmity with every other country, or so it always seemed, and most of all the bullying moral blackmail which decreed that any talent must be used for the greater glory of the State. To hell with the State!
He didn’t love England, scruffy little hole, any better than Israel, but he did very much love the green peace and quiet of The Lodge at Crestcote House, seeming unaware of the degree to which his composing shattered what he loved. As for the other so-called artists who inhabited the place, they struck him as self-opinionated, ignorant, largely without talent and certainly anti-Semitic, as were the dolorous oafs who lived in the local village. If he were seized from his bed tonight and burned alive it would be no surprise to him.
Of course the dolts at Crestcote couldn’t admit to liking or understanding his music, for by doing so they’d find themselves treating him as an equal; therefore they must denigrate him and it, making uneducated criticisms. And yet … and yet … How could they know that their comments were merely the echo of a malign and bitter fear buried deep inside Edvard Kusnik? Had he, at some point in the past, taken a wrong turning? Music offered so many crossroads and byways and little dark alleys which might lead to magnificent new avenues. Or might not.
Even now as he listened to his own opus, his heart began to sink. It would have sunk a great deal further and faster had he known that his ex-wife, Tamara, was just at that moment coming in at the back door behind him, armed with an ominous suitcase, and unheard of course owing to the numbing din.
Suddenly Edvard leapt up from the piano with a cry, automatically silencing the synthesizers and flipping a switch which killed the orchestra stone dead. A robin could then be heard out in the garden singing his melodic autumn song, Edvard’s atonal noises seemed to encourage them. ‘Shit!’ he said; then turned and saw his ex-wife. Further words failed him.
Tamara was six years older than her divorced husband. Once a dancer (trained at what had then been the Kirov, she said), she now looked stringy, even anorexic, and her recently renovated red hair gave her pale skin a greenish tinge, in no way ameliorated by the burnt orange dress she had chosen to wear. Most of her clothes were cast-offs from the Knightsbridge boutique where she worked. Its accent was on the bizarre; it and Tamara suited each other perfectly.
Edvard couldn’t now remember why he’d married her. He had not at that time been quite as unbalanced as he’d become, but England and the English had depressed him beyond bearing, and he had presumably turned to this fellow-Russian in desperation. Eyeing the suitcase, he said, ‘No, Tamara, I don’t want you here.’
‘Oh darlink, you have other lady?’
No, he had not! Owing to the fact that Lisa MacDonnell, that contrary bitch, had locked herself into her studio with her chunks of marble—serve her bloody well right!—while Jacey was in London, sulking. He said, ‘I want to work.’
‘So work. Tamara will be a mouse.’
Edvard seemed not to have heard her; he had suddenly been seized by the unalterable conviction that Concertante 100 was no good, he’d gone over the top.
Tamara, eyeing his wild appearance, was thinking that divorce from this incipient lunatic had been the most sensible course she had ever taken. But she came of sensible peasant stock and knew that the way to a man, never mind his heart, was via his stomach. She said, ‘I will stay, I will make Borscht.’
‘Tamara, we got a divorce, remember? You didn’t want me, I didn’t want you. Please go away.’
After the recording session yesterday afternoon, he had gone to the Messaien concert at the Barbican. But he hadn’t been able to bear it because the master made his own work seem like mere sound and fury signifying nothing. He had left in misery during the interval, finding himself lost in the concrete hell of the Barbican complex. A kindly attendant, like something out of Kafka, had led him through the echoing labyrinth of this insane asylum before ejecting him into the wet and messy streets of the capital where he had walked like a lost soul.
‘Perhaps,’ said his ex-wife, ‘I will also make Koulibiaka.’
‘No point. They’re having one of their dinners tonight. I’m not going.’
‘Certainly you’ll go,’ cried Tamara, who had attended a previous dinner and found it enchanting. ‘You shall escort me, I shall wear my new green with sequins.’
Edvard had now remembered that he himself actually had an important reason for wishing to attend; so he smiled and said, ‘And I will wear my scarlet shirt, we’ll be sensational.’
In her stable-yard studio, Vicky Lind finished the ‘December’ hares and signed the watercolour with her well-known signature. Then she went to the window overlooking the yard and stood there staring out towards