He leaned forward and kissed her on the brow. “Of course.”
Nick Smart was watching, bemused. His eyes moved away. He touched his watch with his right hand, a delicate gesture, as a conservator might remove dust from a painting, with a silk cloth.
CHAPTER FOUR
OVER BREAKFAST the next day she said to Jamie, “You changed your tune.” She had not intended it to sound like an accusation, but that is how it came out.
He had been feeding mashed-up boiled egg to Charlie, and he kept at his task as he replied. “Why do you say that? What tune?”
“A metaphorical one,” she said. “Nick Smart’s piece.
He buttered a small piece of bread and spread white of egg across it. Charlie, watching eagerly, reached out to snatch the morsel. “Gently does it,” said Jamie. “There. How about that? Delicious, isn’t it?” This is what babies are, thought Jamie: graspings and softness; splatterings of food, dribbles of liquid; small, unintelligible sounds of creaturehood. He half turned to Isabel, licking a small smear of egg from his fingers. “I found it better second time round,” he said. “Some pieces are like that. You hear things that you’ve missed.” He paused and wiped his hand on a small piece of paper towel. “Actually, one should always be prepared to listen to music again. I remember that when I first heard Part I missed a lot of the subtlety. I thought it was Philip Glass all over again. But it isn’t.”
Isabel reached for a slice of toast and began to butter it. Charlie watched intently.
“And what was he like? Nick Smart? Were you impressed?”
Jamie reached forward and tickled Charlie under the chin. “Very interesting. We had a good talk. We went to a bar down near the Pleasance. He has a flat over there, behind Surgeons’ Hall somewhere. This bar was a real down-to-earth place. Locals standing there looking at you with that look…that appraising stare that you get when you go into a local pub and you don’t belong.”
Isabel kept her voice even. I might have wanted to come, she thought. Had it occurred to him that she might have wanted to go along with them? “And you talked music?”
“Mostly. He’s quite an accomplished composer, you know. He was at Tanglewood last year, that place in New England, doing a summer seminar. They don’t invite just anybody.”
“I’m impressed.”
If there was sarcasm, intended or otherwise, in Isabel’s tone, then Jamie did not pick it up. “Yes,” he said. “He is impressive. And he suggested that we could work together on something. He’s interested in writing something for the bassoon and wants to try some ideas out on me.”
She absorbed this disclosure in silence. Of course it was perfectly reasonable that Jamie should work with other musicians and composers; of course he had to do that. But for some reason, she did not like the idea of his working with Nick Smart. She wanted Nick Smart to go away, to not be there.
She swallowed. “Good,” she said. “It sounds as if you’ll enjoy that.”
He’s without guile, she thought, and his reply had that note of boyish enthusiasm that so appealed to her. “Yes. I’m really excited about it. I love working with composers. And he’s the real thing, Isabel.” He picked up Charlie’s plate and scraped at the last vestiges of boiled egg. “But I can’t work out why he should want to work with me. Why me?”
Isabel looked at him, and looked away again sharply. She had an idea, but she would not spell it out for him. Not yet.
JAMIE HAD THE ENTIRE MORNING and part of the afternoon off. He had cut back on his teaching commitments recently in order to give himself more time for rehearsals and the occasional recording sessions that he had begun to do. This meant that he was also more available for Charlie, which of course Isabel encouraged, although Grace did not. Grace regarded herself as being responsible for Charlie during the day, in order to give Isabel time to devote herself to her work. Or that was how she dressed up her desire to keep Charlie to herself as much as possible. Fathers are all very well for when they’re older, she told herself, but when they’re small, as Charlie still is, they need women to look after them. Jamie picked up Grace’s unspoken jealousy, but sailed through it regardless.
That morning he would take Charlie to the museum, he decided. They could have something to eat in the cafeteria, and Charlie could be shown some of the working models of machinery, held up against the glass cases so that he could see the intricate whirring models within. He had watched these with some interest on the last occasion that Jamie had taken him there, although it was not clear whether he had the remotest idea of what was going on. A bassoon could equally well be a steam engine, and a steam engine a bassoon, thought Jamie, reflecting on the fact that for Charlie the world was probably just shapes and sounds.
Isabel had once remarked to Jamie that it would be interesting to know what would happen if a mysterious virus were to wipe out everybody older than four, leaving the world to infants and toddlers. Presumably all these small children would be like Charlie, faced with the models of machines, uncertain what everything was.
“Would we learn what everything was for?” she asked. “Or would we have to invent things all over again?”
“It would be one great feat of reverse engineering,” said Jamie.
Isabel was not so sure. “What about music notation?” she asked. “Would we eventually work out what musical scores meant, if we had nothing to base our knowledge on?”
Jamie thought we would, although he doubted whether anybody but the four-year-olds would stand a chance. “Those aged one, two, and three would pretty quickly fall by the wayside,” he said. “Because the four-year-olds, who might just be able to fend for themselves, would not do anything for the younger ones. Four is too young for altruism.”
She thought about this. Would it really be as William Golding had predicted in
