The Gradual Read online

  The weather was concerning me. We had sailed away to the islands as winter was about to break and we were absent on the tour for about two months. At the back of my mind, as I revelled in the hot and gentle airs of the islands, I had sometimes had the thought that we could not avoid returning to Glaund during its worst weather profile. Once winter set in we normally suffered several freezing months, usually with dirty old snow on the ground and new snow falling regularly. This weather – a dank, pollution-rich mist, stiff with the residue of smoke and waste materials, but still above freezing temperature – was more like what we had to suffer before and after the worst of winter.

  I came to a subway station and was glad to catch a train to the main rail terminus. I had to squeeze into the compartment, pushing myself and my bulky luggage against the people already crushed inside. I looked around at the faces. There was no mistaking which town I was in. Those fixed, tolerant, patient faces, putting up with life, carrying on. No eye contact, no signs of happiness. Everyone ignored me, even those whose bodies were pressed against mine, whose faces shadowed my own.

  Warnings about trains delayed by the fog greeted me at the main station, a familiar problem in Glaund City, but while I was in Questiur the fog had not seemed too thick. I could see it lowering heavily under the arched roof, though, and felt a familiar sense of resignation about being delayed yet again. However, I was fortunate. An earlier train, delayed by the weather, was still held back in the station. Darkness was falling now. I bought a single ticket, hurried across the vast central concourse to the platform. Grey-blue smoke from the noisily idling engines of the waiting trains billowed up into the murk. I lurched along the platform with my heavy load of luggage and found a row of empty seats in a central carriage. In spite of the chill weather I was perspiring with the effort and my anxiety to catch this train. I made myself comfortable, my bags and violin case stowed overhead, and after a few moments, amid the noise of the station and the train doors intermittently slamming as other people boarded, I began to doze.

  I was dimly aware of the train shuddering and swaying but it was only a while later that I woke up completely. It was dark outside, with few lights showing. The train halted soon after this and I recognized the station name. I was already more than half the distance home. I tidied my clothes after the earlier rush to get the train, made sure my baggage was secure, and when we finally halted in my own station I was ready for the final stretch. I wished I had had time to phone ahead to Alynna, but it was too late for that. I found a rank of taxis in the station yard so I took the first one and gave the driver the address. Five minutes later I was outside my home.

  All the windows were shuttered.

  No light showed. I felt a chill in my heart. I went through into the shared entrance hallway.

  Stupidly, I pressed the bell-push, and heard the familiar chime inside. There was no noise or movement from within. I scanned the window by the door for any sign of life, then I used my key and it turned at the first attempt. The door would not open. I used the second key on the deadlock, the one we never had need for when we were at home, and after this the door swung open. It brushed against a pile of unopened mail that had accumulated.

  I stepped into the darkened hall, dragging my luggage after me, and slammed the door. Alynna was not there and as I hurried around the unlighted rooms it seemed she had not been in the apartment for many weeks. I looked for her in the dark, frightened, feeling desperate. I called her name, fearing everything: an accident or illness, a break-in, perhaps worst of all a departure of some kind, an angry exit. None of the lights worked, but then I went to the fuse box and threw the master switch.

  I renewed my search, in less of a panic but fearing more. The furniture was all in place, the windows were closed and locked, the whole flat felt airless but clean. My studio was intact and my piano was locked with the stool parked neatly against the pedals. Papers I did not remember lay on my desk, many of them still in unopened envelopes.

  The place was chilling me. There was no food in the kitchen but the cutlery and crockery had been washed and put away. The refrigerator door hung open, revealing more unlighted emptiness.

  I switched on the heating and was reassured by the sound of the boiler coming to life. With the apartment gradually becoming liveable again I made a third search, meticulously, trying to discover what had happened.

  There was no trace of Alynna at all. Her clothes had disappeared from the closet, her various ornaments and books had been removed, the room she used as a studio was empty. Even the carpet had gone. I looked for something she might have left, to explain to me why she had moved out. A forwarding address, perhaps, or a note. But nothing.

  I was shocked. Before I left there had been no suggestion that anything like this was going to happen. We had been contentedly married for years. True, it was based more on mature companionship, understanding and loyalty than on romantic passion or physical love, but we had been happy. Or so I thought. We each had our own lives but still felt closely connected, which I had assumed after years of living together was something we were both used to and accepted. There had been no hint that a break-up was about to happen. My feelings of guilt about Cea briefly gripped me – could Alynna have somehow found out? I could not see how.

  I had not eaten since that morning while on the boat, but there was nothing at all in the apartment. I went out and bought some food from a shop that was still open, then took it home and tried to eat. I had little appetite.

  I spent the night alone in my bed – the mattress was bare but I found dry sheets and a blanket. I barely slept. Every time I roused in the night I was aware of absences, like the silent pauses in the compositions I once had thought so daring and essential.

  One of my first tasks in the morning was to look through the mail that had accumulated, some of the correspondence Alynna had placed on my desk before she left, as well as the unopened envelopes.

  The first thing I noticed when I started looking through them was that not one of the letters or postcards I had sent to Alynna from the islands was there. Did this mean she had received them and taken them with her? Or had they simply not arrived?

  Among the first envelopes I opened was one with the words URGENT – LAST WARNING printed in red ink on the front. Inside was a disturbing letter from the property company from whom I rented the apartment. The letter warned me that because the rent had gone unpaid for more than six months they were taking immediate action to evict me, confiscate all my property and sue me for the arrears. My first reaction was that it was an error. I had settled all my bills before I left for the tour and Alynna knew exactly what had to be dealt with while I was away. I had made sure she had enough money in her account. Why had she stopped paying the rent?

  I ransacked the pile and found earlier letters from the same company. One by one the letters detailed a growing backlog of unpaid rent: reminders, demands, warnings, threats. Their patience was exhausted.

  Although I was stricken with a sense of unfairness as well as shock, the sheer mystery still bothered me. How had this happened?

  I looked through the other letters, many of which were from statutory suppliers: payments for town gas, electricity, fresh water, waste disposal, property taxes, telephone – all these were in arrears. The tour had made me cash rich, temporarily at least, so as I mentally totted up the outstanding amounts I knew I could settle the most urgent ones at once, while the rest could certainly be paid within a day or two.

  When I looked at the accounts from my bank – their statements too were buried in the pile – I discovered that financially I was better off than I thought. My agent had been sending regular payments for royalties on my recordings and these had mounted up. I was not wealthy, but at least the crisis of unpaid debts could be resolved.

  Then at last I noticed the dates on these letters.

  25

  There was worse to come. Before the end of that first morning I learned that both my parents were dead.

  My fa
ther had died first – he was seventy-eight, in poor health and his death occurred only six weeks after I left on the first ship south. From a sad, erratic note written by my mother I learned a little about what had happened. She must have written the note not long afterwards. Her tone was mock-understanding, but the true feelings were there: ‘I know you are away and that your journey is important to you, but—’ She finished few of her sentences and her handwriting was uneven. She had always prided herself on her steady, beautiful hand. She seemed to be muddling up my father’s death – it sounded as if he had suffered a stroke – confusing it not only with the still unexplained absence of Jacj but also with me. She had lost all three of us. One sentence asked me when I was going to leave the army. Another said she was missing me endlessly. I could barely make myself read these words. There was a mention of a funeral, but she did not say where it had been. She said nothing about her own health, what she might be going through beyond the great loss of husband and sons. She said she had tried to visit me at the apartment (even though she knew I was away?), but had found neither me nor Alynna at home.

  When was this? Her note was not dated. Had she written the note during that visit, sitting in the communal entrance hall outside our door? Or did she come back later and deliver it then? How much time had passed since?

  The saddening note had been pushed through the door so that it landed in the heap of everything else. There was no envelope, no stamp, and therefore no postmark or any other clue to when it had been written.

  Elsewhere in the pile of mail I found a letter from Sella, my mother’s younger sister, a distant and disapproving figure for most of my life. This letter was dated, so I could tell it had been written about six months after my mother’s note. Sella made no secret of what she saw as my culpability for being away so long (‘you have chosen to allow month after month to elapse with no news of your whereabouts, or how we may contact you, or an explanation of when you will decide to return – Malle said she would forgive you but I am not sure anyone else but your mother ever would’). At least she gave me the date of the funeral, where it had taken place and where both my parents were interred. She enclosed a bill from the undertakers.

  These dates! Even as I discovered them they made no sense. Everything was wrong. According to Sella my mother’s funeral had been about eight months after I left, but I had been away less than nine weeks!

  I read more letters, opened more demands for payment, and I began to piece together some idea of when things had happened, but I still could not see how. Months had passed, a year, maybe more? It was impossible. Either every letter and bill I opened carried a deceptive date, or I had lost several months of my life.

  Perhaps I had gained those months. I couldn’t grasp the meaning. Had I suffered a period of lost memory? If so, how and when, and where was I at the time? Nothing traumatic had happened to me, I had suffered no blows to the head, or concussion. I remembered the whole trip vividly, the islands, the ships, the concerts, all the events and thoughts and experiences.

  I was sitting on the floor of my hallway, leaning back against the wall, envelopes and letters and bills spread around me, and my life, or my memory of life, was betraying me. I had lost Alynna, lost my parents, bills were mounting up, the flat had been empty and cold and sealed up. My entire past had disappeared.

  Later, when a horrid, frigid calm had come over me, I tried to estimate how much time I had lost, or gained. From the dates, known events, the escalating and dated demands from the landlord, it seemed the time period was about one year and eleven months. At the end of that grim morning I confirmed this when I walked out of the apartment and bought a copy of the daily newspaper.

  Objective evidence! I had been touring in the islands for just under nine weeks. That should have put my return in mid-winter, but I now knew that I had missed that winter, the summer following, the winter that followed that, another summer, and here I was in the late autumn, first weeks of winter, nearly two years after my date of departure, season of fogs and gritty Glaundian air.

  I began to calculate back. Alynna appeared to have stopped paying the rent for the last six months, so that must mean she had abandoned the apartment between about five and seven months ago. My father had died during the first winter I was away, my mother, heartbroken and feeling abandoned by her sons, had followed him to the grave nine weeks later. So Alynna stayed on in the apartment for about another year after that, before leaving? Until the spring of this year? But she was apparently not here when my mother visited and left the note. That was much earlier. Had Alynna already moved out at that time? Perhaps a simple explanation was that she had been away from home that day.

  I tried to imagine how their deaths affected Alynna, in my absence. She had always been affectionate with them both, but it was a dutiful and cool affection, warmed only by respect.

  Feeling stunned and disorientated I spent the afternoon in town, calling on my creditors, making payments, apologizing for the lateness, promising it would never happen again, settling the interest surcharges, the penalty fees, the collection demands, the outrageous costs of lawyers’ letters.

  The music of the islands fled.

  The contaminated air made my lungs hurt, my eyes water and my throat sore. My mind was empty. I could not see the ocean – I could barely see the sky. I was dealing with the sordid reality of a broken marriage, an abandoned home, bereavement, isolation, loss. And inner silence.

  26

  What was I to do about Alynna? Firstly, how would I find her? She had left no messages, no forwarding address. Not even any clues I might try to follow. Then, even supposing I might see her, what would I say? What would she say to me?

  The world of classical music in Glaund is relatively small, so I asked my colleagues what they knew. People helped. Within a week of returning I had been able to find out where she was living. She had moved back to Errest, and she was living with someone. No one said who it might be, whether it was someone known to me or not, male or female. I was not able to find an address for her, or a contact number. I was told she was still giving lessons, and she played violin occasionally with one of the smaller orchestral ensembles in Glaund City. I knew it was possible, even likely, that I would run into her sooner or later.

  Then she contacted me by telephone.

  ‘I hear you’re back at last,’ were her first words.

  ‘Alynna?’

  ‘Were you expecting someone else? Of course it’s me. What happened to you?’

  ‘What happened to you?’ I said, before I thought.

  ‘I’ll come round to see you now.’

  She put down the phone. I had been cooking some food when the phone rang, so I turned it off, suddenly not at all hungry. I took two bottles of beer from the refrigerator and opened one of them – Alynna preferred wine but I had none.

  I climbed up the stairs to my studio and went to the window while I waited. I sat in the dark and drank beer from the bottle. Across the coast road that ran past the building, across the narrow strip of clifftop scrubland, I could see the sea and in the distance the dark, indistinct shapes of the islands. Everything had begun with Dianme, Chlam and Herrin. I was in a turmoil of conflicting feelings: guilt, incomprehension, unhappiness, defiance, anger, expectation … but in truth the guilt was foremost.

  I heard Alynna at the outside door, letting herself into the apartment with her own key – when I first came home I had deliberately not changed the lock in a sort of blind hope that she would return. Since then I had lost all impetus to change things. She came up the stairs, opened the door to my studio, switched on the light.

  We stared at each other across the room, two people in need of explanation but not knowing how to start. She looked larger than I remembered her: stronger, taller, her hair was cut differently. I stood up and felt her regard. She was dry-eyed. I was angry, but also scared and nervous. I realized I liked seeing her, but dreaded what we would say. Sorrow appeared to have abandoned us both just then. How would we
start explaining to each other?

  ‘Why didn’t you wait for me to return?’ I said.

  Why didn’t you return when you said you would? she said. You’ve been gone so long. How could you expect me to wait?

  ‘Why didn’t you pay the bills?’

  You didn’t even write to me. Why not?

  ‘Have you moved in with someone else now?’

  I think you met someone else while you were away. That’s why you didn’t come home. Why won’t you admit that?

  ‘I had no one to meet, no one I wanted to meet. That wasn’t what happened. There was never any chance of that. Are you happier now? I wish I knew what I could say.’

  You’re lying. There must have been someone else. Another woman.

  ‘I had a brief fling. It was not planned, not serious, we had been drinking and we didn’t think what we were doing. She is a professional woman with a life of her own. She is also married, and separated. She isn’t important – not the reason I was away from you. We spent one night together. It won’t happen again. It can’t happen again.’

  I knew that was what it was. You don’t have to lie about it.

  ‘I’m not lying. She isn’t what happened. There’s some kind of problem. I lost time. I can’t tell you what it means.’

  You’re looking younger. You’ve lost some of that weight. It makes you look fit again. The trip must have done you good. Why won’t you tell me what happened, why you stayed away so long? Why didn’t you come home when you said you would?

  ‘There’s a problem with time and I don’t know how to explain it to you.’