Truly Madly Guilty(2)

‘I remember I’d dressed my little girls extra warmly,’ said Clementine.

Sam probably dressed the girls, thought Erika.

Clementine cleared her throat and gripped the sides of the lectern with both hands. The microphone was angled too high for her, so it seemed as though she were on tippy-toes trying to get her mouth close enough. Her neck was elongated, emphasising the new skinniness of her face.

Erika considered the possibility of discreetly edging her way around the side of the room and zipping over to adjust the microphone. It would only take a second. She imagined Clementine shooting her a grateful smile. ‘Thank God you did that,’ she would say afterwards, while they had coffee. ‘You really saved the day.’

Except that Clementine didn’t really want Erika there today. She hadn’t missed the horrified expression that flashed across Clementine’s face when she suggested she’d like to come along to hear her speak, although Clementine had quickly recovered herself and said it was fine, lovely, how nice, they could have coffee in the local food court afterwards.

‘It was a last-minute invitation,’ said Clementine. ‘The barbeque. We didn’t know our hosts that well. They were, well, they were friends of friends.’ She looked down at the lectern as if she’d lost her place. She’d carried a little pile of handwritten palm-sized index cards with her when she walked up to the lectern. There was something heartbreaking about those cards, as if Clementine had remembered that little tip from their oratory lessons at school. She must have cut them up with scissors. Not her grandmother’s pearl-handled ones. They’d gone missing.

It was odd seeing Clementine ‘onstage’, so to speak, without her cello. She looked so conventional, in her blue jeans and ‘nice’ floral top. Suburban mum outfit. Clementine’s legs were too short for jeans and they looked even shorter with flat ballet shoes like she was wearing today. Well, it was just a fact. She had looked almost – even though it seemed so disloyal to use the word in relation to Clementine – frumpy, when she’d walked up to the lectern. When she performed she put her hair up and wore heels and all black: long skirts made out of floaty material, wide enough so she could fit the cello between her knees. Seeing Clementine sit with her head bowed tenderly, passionately towards her cello, as if she were embracing it, one long tendril of hair falling just short of the strings, her arm bent at that strange, geometric angle, was always so sensual, so exotic, so other to Erika. Each time she saw Clementine perform, even after all these years, Erika inevitably experienced a sensation like loss, as though she yearned for something unattainable. She’d always assumed that sensation represented something more complicated and interesting than envy, because she had no interest in playing a musical instrument, but maybe it didn’t. Maybe it all came back to envy.

Watching Clementine give this halting, surely pointless little speech in this little room, with a view of the busy shopping centre car park instead of the hushed, soaring-ceilinged concert halls where she normally performed, gave Erika the same shameful satisfaction she felt seeing a movie star in a trashy magazine without make-up: You’re not that special after all.

‘So there were six adults there that day,’ said Clementine. She cleared her throat, rocked back onto her heels and then rocked forward again. ‘Six adults and three children.’

And one yappy dog, thought Erika. Yap, yap, yap.

‘As I said, we didn’t really know our hosts, but we were all having a nice time, we were enjoying ourselves.’

You were enjoying yourself, thought Erika. You were.

She remembered how Clementine’s clear, bell-like laughter rose and fell in tandem with Vid’s deep chuckle. She saw people’s faces slip in and out of murky shadows, their eyes like black pools, sudden flashes of teeth.

They’d taken far too long that afternoon to turn on the outdoor lights in that preposterous backyard.

‘I remember at one point we were listening to music,’ said Clementine. She looked down at the lectern in front of her, and then up again, as if she were seeing something on the horizon far in the distance. Her eyes were blank. She didn’t look like a suburban mum now. ‘ “After a Dream” by the French composer Gabriel Fauré.’ Naturally she pronounced it the proper French way. ‘It’s a beautiful piece of music. It has this exquisite mournfulness to it.’

She stopped. Did she sense the slight shifting in seats, the discomfort in her audience? ‘Exquisite mournfulness’ was not the right phrase for this audience: too excessive, too arty. Clementine, my love, we’re too ordinary for your high-brow references to French composers. Anyway, they also played ‘November Rain’ by Guns N’ Roses that night. Not quite so arty.

Wasn’t the playing of ‘November Rain’ somehow related to Tiffany’s revelation? Or was that before? When exactly did Tiffany share her secret? Was that when the afternoon had turned to liquid and began to slip and slide away?

‘We had been drinking,’ said Clementine. ‘But no one was drunk. Maybe a little tipsy.’

Her eyes met Erika’s, as though she’d been aware of exactly where she was sitting the whole time and had been avoiding looking at her, but had now made a deliberate decision to seek her out. Erika stared back and tried to smile, like a friend, Clementine’s closest friend, the godmother of her children, but her face felt paralysed, as if she’d had a stroke.