‘So now you’ve passed that test,’ said Vid. ‘I’ve got another one.’
‘I’ll win this one,’ said Sam. ‘Bring it on. Sporting trivia? Limbo? I’m great at limbo.’
‘He is surprisingly good at limbo,’ said Clementine.
‘Oh, me too,’ said Tiffany. ‘Or I used to be. I’m not as flexible as I once was.’
She put down her drink, bent her body back at an extraordinary angle so that her T-shirt rode up, and thrust out her pelvis. Was that a tattoo just below the waistband of her jeans? Clementine strained to see. Tiffany took a couple of steps forward and hummed limbo music as she ducked under an invisible pole.
She straightened and pressed her hand to her lower back. ‘Ow. Getting old.’
‘Jeez,’ said Sam a little hoarsely. ‘You might give me a run for my money.’
Clementine stifled a giggle. Yes, my darling, I think she would give you a run for your money.
‘Where are the kids?’ he asked suddenly, as if coming back to reality.
‘They’re right there,’ said Clementine. She pointed at the gazebo where Dakota and the girls were still playing with the dog. ‘I’m watching them.’
‘Do you do yoga?’ Oliver asked Tiffany. ‘You’ve got great flexibility.’
‘Great flexibility,’ agreed Sam. Clementine reached over and discreetly pinched the flesh above his knee as hard as she could.
‘Ah-ya.’ Sam grabbed her hand to stop her.
‘What’s that, mate?’ asked Oliver.
‘Bah! It’s not a limbo competition!’ said Vid. ‘It’s a music competition. It’s my favourite piece of classical music. Now, look, I will be honest with you. I don’t know anything about classical music. I know nothing. I’m an electrician! A simple electrician! What would I know about classical music? I come from peasant stock. My family – we were peasants! Simple peasants!’
‘Here we go with the simple peasants.’ Tiffany rolled her eyes.
‘But I like classical music,’ continued Vid, ignoring her. ‘I like it. I buy CDs all the time! Don’t know what I’m buying! Just pick them at random off the shelf! Nobody else buys CDs anymore, I know, but I do, and I got this one day, at the shopping centre, you know, and on the way home I played it in the car, and when this came on, I had to pull over, I had to stop on the side of the road because it was like … it was like I was drowning. I was drowning in feeling. I cried, you know, I cried like a baby.’
He pointed at Clementine. ‘I bet the cellist knows what I mean.’
‘Sure,’ said Clementine.
‘So let’s see if you can name it, hey? Maybe it’s not even good music! What do I know?’
He fiddled with his phone. Naturally the cabana had a built-in sound system that was linked to his mobile phone.
‘Who says only the cellist can enter this competition?’ said Sam. Clementine could hear him imitating Vid’s speech cadences without realising he was doing it. It was so embarrassing the way he did that, picking up waiters’ accents in restaurants and coming over all Indian or Chinese. ‘What about the marketing manager, eh?’
‘What about the accountant?’ Oliver followed the joke with heavy-handed jolliness.
Erika said nothing. She sat with her forearms perfectly still on the armrests of her chair, staring off into the distance. It was unusual too for Erika to disengage from a conversation like this. Normally she listened to social chitchat as if she’d be sitting for a quiz later.
‘You can all enter!’ cried Vid. ‘Silence.’
He lifted his phone as though it were a conductor’s baton and then dropped it in a dramatic swooping motion. Nothing happened.
He swore, jabbing at the screen.
‘Give it here.’ Tiffany took the phone and pressed some keys. Immediately, the lush opening notes of Fauré’s ‘After a Dream’ cascaded through the cabana with perfect clarity.
Clementine straightened. It almost felt like a trick that out of all the pieces of music he could have picked, he’d chosen this one. She knew exactly what he meant when he’d described ‘drowning in feeling’. She’d felt it too, when she was fifteen, sitting with her bored parents (her father’s head kept snapping forward as he dropped off to sleep) at the Opera House: that extraordinary feeling of submersion, as if she’d been drenched in something exquisite.
‘Louder!’ cried Vid. ‘It needs to be loud.’
Tiffany turned up the volume.
Next to her, Sam automatically adjusted his posture and assumed his stoic, polite, I’m-listening-to-classical-music-and-hoping-it-will-be-over-soon face. Tiffany refilled glasses with no discernible reaction to the music, while Erika continued to stare into the distance and Oliver wrinkled his brow, concentrating. Oliver could possibly name the composer. He was one of those well-educated private school boys who knew a lot about a lot of things, but he couldn’t feel the music. Clementine and Vid were the only ones feeling it.
Vid met her eyes, lifted his glass in a secret salute and winked as if to say, Yeah, I know.
chapter twenty-nine