She had not brought very much with her, aside from clothes and food, except for a small CD player, along with her CDs, and a carton of books. After she had cooked a meal from tins and Dr Toy’s hospitality, she sorted through the CDs.
Once she would automatically have reached for Mozart, but tonight she needed something stronger, something that reflected her mood and knew how it felt to fall fathoms deep into the heart of black bitter agony, but something that also demonstrated how the agony could be torn out and ripped to shreds before it was exultantly discarded. Schumann’s Fourth? She did not know very much about the lives and motivations of the great composers–what she did know she had picked up from Richard–but she knew Schumann had created that symphony on emerging from a period of intense depression, and that it depicted the trapped, tortured spirit finally breaking free of dark savage unhappiness and soaring joyfully into the light.
After that flight of rhetoric it would have to be Schumann. Antonia thought she would pour a glass of Godfrey Toy’s wine, and then curl into the deep armchair by the window and listen to the symphony. The rain pattered lightly against the glass and a little gusting wind stirred the thin curtains, but inside the cottage it was warm and safe.
Warm and safe. Except for that well of clutching terror that might still lie waiting for her in that perfectly ordinary kitchen…Except for that blue hatchback that seemed to have followed her for three quarters of the journey here…
Dr Godfrey Toy looked out of his window on Quire House’s first floor, and was pleased to see lights in the windows of Charity Cottage.
It was very nice to think of someone being in the cottage for the winter; Godfrey always felt much safer when people were around him. Stupid, of course, but ever since–well, ever since what he privately called the tragedy–he had always been a touch uneasy about being in a house by himself. Just a touch. Particularly at night, and particularly in a house the size of Quire–all those empty rooms below him, all those stored-up memories.
But he loved living at Quire; he loved his flat with the high-ceilinged rooms and the big windows. This summer he had had the men in to spruce it up. He had chuckled quietly to himself over this, because it sounded exactly like a twittery maiden lady furtively recounting something slightly risqué. I’m having men in, my dear.
Anyway, they had done a good job–nothing grand, just a coat of emulsion everywhere, well, and one or two rolls of wallpaper if you were keeping tally. And, if you wanted to be really pedantic, a few licks of varnish to banisters and picture rails. But nothing so very much, and it had cost the merest of meres, despite the professor’s caustic comments about extravagance. Anyway, Godfrey considered it money well spent.