The Children's Bach Read Online Free PDF Page B

country.’
    â€˜Once humans have touched them,’ said Vicki, ‘the other animals can smell it on them, and they kill them. Nature red in tooth and claw.’ She curved her fingers and bared her teeth.
    Again Athena stared at her. There was a sudden flutter of colour in the corner of her eye. ‘What was that?’
    â€˜I saw it too,’ said Vicki. ‘I think there’s a lady out the back with a net dress on.’
    â€˜At eleven o’clock in the morning?’
    â€˜Maybe she’s getting married.’ Vicki blew on her coffee. ‘Funny music, isn’t it. Arab or something.’
    â€˜It’s a tango,’ said Athena.
    *
    Spring came. In the mornings, when the first person opened the back door, the whole bulk of air in the house shifted and warmed. Women sighed in expensive dress shops, as if even to contemplate fine stuffs were too much to bear. Dexter took Arthur to the National Gallery. On the way he spoke to the boy in magisterial tones about the lives of artists: Dexter loved tales of exalted suffering, of war and failure and unsympathetic wives and alcoholism. Arthur loitered in front of an etching called Se Repulen : two devils, one wielding a huge pair of scissors with which he was about to cut the other’s toenails. ‘Looks like me and Mum,’ said Arthur.
    Philip, too, got out the clippers and trimmed Poppy’s toenails while she recited, for her exam, the circulation of the blood. ‘The right atrium contracts,’ she droned, ‘and the left . . .’ ‘I thought it was “auricle’’,’ said Philip. ‘It used to be,’ said Poppy, ‘but not any more. They’ve changed the name.’ ‘How the hell can they change the name of something?’ said Philip. He dug the lower blade of the clippers under the nail of her big toe and snapped the handle to. She gasped. The lump of nail flew across the room and bounced off the desk leg.
    Elizabeth used the presence of Vicki at her place as an excuse for sleeping nearly every night at Philip’s. He did not mind: he was not the kind of person who could be bothered minding. But he stayed out later, fell into strange beds in houses where a boiling saucepan might as easily contain a syringe as an egg; he excited pointless passions in girls who knew no better than to sprawl for hours among empty pizza boxes at the studio and wait for somebody to notice them. He came home at that hour when light is not yet anything more than the exaggerated whiteness of a shirt flung against a bookcase, a higher gloss on the back of a kitchen chair. Poppy left her writings on the table and he read them eagerly: her happy flights of fancy, her visions of an adult world, her lists of invented names: the endless ingenuity of the only child. ‘Finn and Angela have arrived on Dasnin,’ he read in the light of the open refrigerator, ‘to find an abandoned and desertous planet completely devoid of any living form.’ If he came home late enough he found her sitting up to her solitary breakfast. She had cleared the table and placed before her a cup of tea and a plate of toast and bacon. She had already been out for a jog around the park. She was clean and bright. She read as she ate; some great work or other, Norah of Billabong, The Once and Future King . She did not leap up and swamp him with greetings: she raised her face to him with her composed, modest smile. All about her was the order which she had created. God, the joy of her, the pleasure! He put down his guitar case. Will anyone ever love her as much as he does?
    Vicki slept and woke alone in the high room. She was scrupulous about keeping her clothes in the suitcase, out of the way behind the partition. One day she tried on all her sister’s things: the slender shoes, the Italian cotton, the crushable linen, garments whose subtle cut invested their mannish shapes with a femininity so intense that