Far below she could now see a row of pretty pastel houses, the kind she would have loved to have settled down in, lining the bottle-green, oily waters of the canal, on which floated brightly coloured barges, attached at the centre like the petals of a flower. All round was debris, where bulldozers and cranes were in the process of flattening beautiful old russet buildings, churches, meeting houses and a factory with tall pipes. I’ll be bashed down before I have any chance to enjoy life, thought Abby, her eyes following the path of the canal which flowed under roads and bridges, past a man throwing sticks for his shaggy white dog, along a row of dark cypresses, into the mist, keeping its head down, amid the hubbub of the city. The hands of the little red clock-tower merged into one at six-thirty.
Abby flipped. She was enmeshed like Laocoon, she had to break free. First she chucked Rannaldini’s contracts out of the window. Blue birds of unhappiness, they wheeled downwards. Then she took the earliest shuttle to Heathrow, and booked herself onto Concorde.
Buoyed up by an excess of champagne, she wept over a piece in the
Abby got stuck back into the champagne.
I’m immortal, she thought drunkenly as they approached New York. I could fly this aeroplane if they asked me and I can fly straight back into Christopher’s heart.
Still feeling immortal, she called Christopher on landing, but was utterly deflated to be told he was out. Sandra, his manipulative blonde secretary, had gone to the dentist. Christopher’s mobile had also been switched off. He was probably at a recording session, where they were not popular.
In despair, plunging down from the champagne, Abby took a taxi to her Riverside apartment. Geography was taking over. This was New York, every brick and street number reminded her of once being happy with Christopher. The river looked grey, seal-like and unfriendly, boats were chugging sluggishly upstream like commuters. Someone had left the elevator door open, so she had to hump her bags up five floors.
Letting herself in, Abby gave a sigh of pleasure to see the pale peach walls, the dark peach carpet. Going into the living-room, she was startled to find an empty bottle of champagne, two glasses and a bunch of pale yellow roses, roughly rammed into a vase. Abby’s first terrified thought was burglars. Her eyes raced round the walls and furniture checking pictures, ornaments and silver, but everything seemed in place.
Then, as painful as stubbing one’s toe on a dog bowl in the dark, she noticed the grey pin-stripe jacket hanging on a chair. What, too, was the crocodile wallet she’d given Christopher doing on the glass table beside the keys she’d lovingly had cut so he could let himself into the apartment? A letter from Rupert had already been opened.
Somehow Abby’s buckling legs carried her next door. She had always wanted a beautiful bedroom. Other stars celebrate overnight fame with Ferraris, yachts or Picassos, or a Central Park penthouse. But Abby, as she practised nine hours a day and faced tiny, indifferent audiences in draughty halls, had only dreamt of a bower of bliss.
In the centre of the room was a vast four-poster, richly swagged with crimson velvet, hand-printed with vast blush-pink peonies. Half a dozen white lace pillows reared up like the Himalayas against the wrought-iron bedhead, which had been intricately woven into a pattern of treble and bass clefs; perfect to cling onto when she writhed like an electric eel above and below Christopher.
She had called in a lighting specialist, to cast a flattering rosy glow, so that Christopher, unlike Tithonus, would never grow old.
On the walls was more crimson velvet, on the polished floor rose-patterned rugs, and on the scarlet lacquer bedside tables, where she’d left them ten days ago, were two huge vases of lilies, whose petals were beginning to droop and wrinkle like old limp hands.
The only blot on her bed of crimson joy was Christopher filling his secretary, Sandra, in very non-dental fashion.
The horrified silence was broken by Abby.
‘That’s why you kept on at me to buy a New York apartment, so you could send me off on tour and hump this fat tramp in comfort,’ she yelled. ‘Why didn’t you use the office carpet, or the back seat of the Volvo like we used to? Does Beth know about Sandra? I figured it was key not to upset Beth.’
Looking round, she noticed the closet doors were open. Sandra had obviously been trying on her clothes. A peacock-blue party dress lay inside out on the floor. A bottle of lemon-and-rosemary oil stood unstoppered by the bed.
‘I’m surprised you bother with that stuff, Sandra,’ Abby addressed Sandra, almost chattily, ‘the only thing Christopher enjoys having massaged is his ego.’
For a frozen moment Christopher panicked — then he wriggled out from underneath Sandra, and wrapping a red towel round his loins, advanced on Abby.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he thundered. ‘How
Abby looked at him in bewilderment.
‘I cannot believe what I’m hearing.’ Holding her hands over her ears, she stumbled out to the kitchen.
Christopher followed her, determined to bluff it out.
How dare she treat with Rupert behind his back; how dare she leave Rosalie in the lurch, and swan off with that old reprobate Rodney Macintosh.
Abby’s eyes were rolling, she was as grey with shock as the river outside. Christopher could smell the champagne sour on her breath. He was just reaching the fortissimo climax of his fury, when Abby told him she had chucked Rannaldini’s contract out of the window.
‘It’s now being dumped on by Birmingham pigeons, which is what it deserves. You don’t give a fuck about me. I’m just the eternal jackpot on the fruit machine. How many millions of notes have I played to buy this apartment, and you’ve just desecrated it. Well, you’ve blown it this time.’
Seizing the carving knife, which Sandra had used to level the bottom of the rose stems, Abby bent back her other hand, almost abstractedly examining the veins, faint as biro marks, on the inside wrist. Then, raising the knife, she made a deep cut, half an inch above her watch-strap.
Seeing her hand hanging like a snowdrop, spurting blood, and the agency’s livelihood gushing away, Christopher leapt forward to stop her slashing her right one.
‘Not your bowing hand, for Christ’s sake.’
SEVEN
Abby was raced to hospital. Micro, neuro and plastic surgeons jetted in from all over the world to save her career. After a seven-hour operation, including a massive blood transfusion, they managed to repair both the tendons and the arteries and suture the nerve sheaths. As the nerves had been severed, she was spared a lot of pain when she came round. That would come later as the nerves grew back pitifully slowly at a millimetre a day.
She was kept heavily sedated with tranquillizers, antibiotics and painkillers pouring in through the drip. Counsellors poured in, too, and physiotherapists to waggle gently the lifeless fingers.
Abby had no movement left. She couldn’t cup her hand, move her thumb across to her little finger or open and shut or splay her fingers at all. She would have to wear a splint for months to stop her hand contracting like a vulture’s claw, which meant all the muscles would waste.
Abby asked only one question: would she ever play the violin again?
