Elodie was still not entirely sure what it was that Alastair’s company did. Something to do with acquisitions. He had explained it more than once – it was all about consolidation, he said, the joining of two entities so that their combined value might be increased – but Elodie was always left with the sort of questions a child might think to ask. In her line of work, an acquisition referred to the delivery and possession of an object. Something solid and real that could be held in one’s hands and which told a story through its every mark.
‘When Tomas was dying,’ said Mrs Berry, picking up the thread of her story, ‘right towards the very end, I started to fret. I was so worried that he’d be frightened; I didn’t want him to have to go alone. At night, my dreams were filled with the image of that little boy, alone on our doorstep. I didn’t say anything, but we’d always been able to read each other’s thoughts, and one day he turned his head towards me, unprompted, and told me that he’d never been frightened of anything in life since the day we met.’ Her eyes glistened and her voice filled with wonder. ‘Do you hear that? Nothing in life had had the power to frighten him, because he knew how much I loved him.’
Elodie had a lump in her throat. ‘I wish I’d known him.’
‘I wish you had, too. He’d have liked you.’ Mrs Berry took a large sip of her drink. A starling swooped down to land on the table between them, eyeing the jar of grubs keenly before giving a loud call and removing himself to a bough of the apple tree for a further inspection. Elodie smiled and Mrs Berry laughed. ‘How about you stay for dinner,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you a happier story, about the time Tomas and I accidentally bought a farm. Then I’m planning to beat your socks off. I have my deck shuffled and ready to go.’
‘Oh, Mrs Berry, I’d really love to, but I can’t tonight.’
‘Not even cards?’
‘I’m afraid not. I’m on a deadline.’
‘More work? You work too hard, you know.’
‘Not this time; it’s wedding business.’
‘Wedding business! Honestly, people do complicate things these days. What more do you need than two people who love one another and someone to hear them say it? If you ask me, even the latter’s surplus to requirements. If I had my time again, I’d run away to Tuscany and speak my vows to my Tomas on the edge of one of those medieval hilltop villages, with the sun on my face and a wreath of honeysuckle in my hair. And then I’d enjoy a jolly good bottle of Chianti.’
‘Is there any other sort?’
‘That’s my girl!’
Upstairs, Elodie kicked off her shoes and opened the windows. The honeysuckle from Mrs Berry’s garden had grown voraciously over the summer, clinging to the brick back of the house, so that its fragrance drifted up on the warm afternoon breeze to infuse the flat.
She knelt on the floor and opened the suitcase of tapes her father had packed for her. Elodie recognised the suitcase as one he’d bought about twelve years earlier when she convinced him to go on a classical music tour in Vienna. It had seen better days and was an unprepossessing choice to hold such precious cargo. No one would ever have guessed that it held his heart, which Elodie supposed was part of his thought process: all the better to keep it safe.
There were at least thirty video cassettes inside, all labelled meticulously in her father’s careful hand, by date, concert, location and piece of music. Thanks to Mrs Berry, Elodie was in possession of what was surely one of the last video players in London, and she connected it now to the back of her TV. She chose a tape at random and inserted it into the player. Sudden nerves swirled in her stomach.
The tape had not been rewound fully and the room filled immediately with music. Lauren Adler, celebrated cello soloist and Elodie’s mother, was in close-up on the screen. She hadn’t started yet, but was embracing the cello, its neck entwined with her own as the orchestra played behind her. She was very young in this video. Her chin was lifted, her eyes fixed on the conductor; long hair cascaded over her shoulders and down her back. She was waiting. The stage lights illuminated one side of her face, throwing the other into dramatic shadow. She was wearing a black satin dress with shoestring straps, and her fine arms – deceptively strong – were bare. She wore no jewellery except for her simple gold wedding band; her fingers, resting on the strings, were poised, ready.
The conductor was onscreen now, a man in a white bowtie and black jacket. He brought the orchestra to a pause and, after a few seconds of silence, nodded at Lauren Adler. She drew breath and then she and her cello began their dance.
Amongst the many articles Elodie had devoured about her mother, one adjective had appeared over and over: Adler’s talent was sublime. The critics all agreed. She had been put on Earth to play the cello and each piece of music, no matter how well known, was reborn in her hands.
Elodie’s father had kept all of the obituaries, but the one from The Times had pleased him especially and so it had been framed to hang on the wall amongst the stage photos. Elodie had read it many times and there was a passage that always stuck in her memory: ‘Lauren Adler’s talent opened a fissure in ordinary experience through which purity and clarity and truth could be glimpsed. That was her gift to her audience; through Lauren Adler’s music they experienced what religious people might call God.’
The label on the videotape said that this performance had taken place at the Royal Albert Hall in 1987 and that the piece of music was Dvo?ák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104. Elodie jotted a note.
Her mother was playing unaccompanied now, and the orchestra – a blurred sea of women with straight faces and men with dark-rimmed glasses – sat very still behind her. The heart-stripping cello notes sent a shiver up Elodie’s spine.
Lauren Adler had believed that a recording was a dead thing. She’d given an interview to The Times in which she’d said so, going on to describe live performance as the precipice on which fear, anticipation and joy met, a unique experience shared between audience and performer, which lost all potency when pressed into permanence. But the recording was all Elodie had. She had no memories of her mother the musician. She’d been taken to see her play once or twice when she was a very small child, and of course she’d heard her practising at home, but Elodie couldn’t actually remember hearing her mother play professionally – not that she could separate her from her experience of other concerts, performed by other musicians.
She would never have confessed as much to her father, who was wholly invested in the idea that Elodie carried those memories inside her; moreover, that they were an intrinsic part of who she was. ‘Your mother used to play for you when she was pregnant,’ he’d told her more times than she could count. ‘She used to say that the human heartbeat was the first music that a person heard, and that every child was born knowing the rhythm of her mother’s song.’
He often spoke to Elodie as if she shared his memories. ‘Remember when she played for the Queen and the audience stood in ovation at the end for over three minutes? Remember the night she performed all six Bach cello suites at the Proms?’
Elodie didn’t remember. She didn’t know her mother at all.
She closed her eyes. Her father was part of the problem. His grief was just so pervasive. Rather than allowing the chasm left when Lauren Adler died to close – even to help it close – his own sorrow, his refusal to let her go, had kept it wide open.
One day, in the weeks following the accident, Elodie had been in the garden when she overheard a couple of well-meaning women who’d come to offer consolation and were now returning to their car. ‘A good thing the child’s so young,’ one of them had said to the other as they reached the front gate. ‘She’ll grow up and forget and she’ll never know what she’s missing.’
They were right, in part: Elodie had forgotten. She simply had too few memories of her own with which to fill the hole made by her mother’s death. But they were wrong, too, for Elodie knew exactly what she was missing. She hadn’t been allowed to forget.
Now she opened her eyes.
It was dark outside; night had swept the dusk aside. Inside, the television screen was fizzing with static. Elodie hadn’t noticed when the music stopped.