LITMIR.BIZ

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didn’t answer them. He didn’t look at them. He fixed his eyes on Eurydice’s and he took a breath and he sang.

They flew. The music lifted them. He could no longer see her but that was only because the darkness was, once more, absolute. She was definitely there. He could feel the soft secret parts of her body that he knew as no one else did, the valleys flanking her hip-bones, her earlobes, the backs of her knees. The sense of them was on his fingertips. He could smell her hair. Her being warmed his back. Always, when he woke in the morning, he knew before he opened his eyes whether she was still in the bed. It wasn’t that they slept entangled as they had when they were young. Their bed was wide, and they kept to their own sides of it, but always there was that warmth which is not only bodily – the warmth of another person’s presence. Breathing makes a sound, but it also makes a vibration in the air. She was there. She was following him. Her following powered his flight and his song powered hers.

      My song is love unknown

He sang hymns in the bath. He used to sing them on his bicycle before his knee seized up. His singing life had begun in church when he was a child. The lady who drove the library van smiled at him from the choir stalls and he thought she was inviting him to fly up with her, so when she sent her voice looping above the others – high, higher – he followed her with his own. Afterwards his parents apologised – Honestly, I don’t know how he even knows the descant – but the library lady smiled again and said to the vicar, ‘I think we’ve found our soloist for “Once in Royal”, haven’t we?’ He didn’t know what she was talking about. He was seven years old. After that he sang with the lady every Sunday. The most useful part of my entire education, he’d tell interviewers. Forget about God; we have to keep the churches open so young people get a chance to sing.

      But O! my Friend,

      My Friend indeed,

      Who at my need

      His life did spend.

      He had no intention of spending his life for Eurydice, or anyone else for that matter, but he had to get her out of there, and himself. They had to keep rising. In the dark room he had held her gaze, because he thought that his seeing her made her visible. Now, with the same dogged fixity, he concentrated his will on a point of light an immense distance above them. He was tired. He couldn’t remember why he was in this dark place, why his wife was clinging to him, so heavy, so heavy, but he knew he must keep his eyes on that light, must keep his voice sounding out, however dry his throat or short his breath, must keep ascending on a stream of silver sound – limpid, ethereal, suave as upwardly flowing milk – leaping towards the light.

He was so angry when they resuscitated him that the nurses – two men – backed off momentarily, accustomed as they were to dealing with the desperate, before buckling-to again and holding him down. Milla said, ‘We nearly lost you too. Can’t have that, Oz. What would poor Dodie do?’ Dodie was the dog. He hadn’t given her a thought. Milla must have handed her over to some friend or neighbour. What the fuck made her think he cared buggeration about the dog? He couldn’t give a shit about the dog. He’d never liked it.

      A nurse said, ‘Don’t let him upset you, love. It’s shock. And the dementia. He’ll be the perfect gentleman again once he’s calmed down.’ He heard as from a long way off. He fought. He shouted. He wanted them all to be upset.

      He had so nearly made it. His song had amazed him, so beautiful it was, and so potent. As deep water will not accept a bladder full of air, as it forces it back up to rejoin its own element, so the darkness had repulsed him. With music streaming from his mouth he was luminous. He was swept back up into the light. But he was swept alone. His power to save Eurydice depended on his being independent of her. He mustn’t turn to her for help. He mustn’t turn at all. But, with his attention fixed on the gleam, he had forgotten whom he was carrying. Tossing in the current of song he became bewildered. He didn’t know what he was doing here. He knew there was something he needed to worry about. Was it the heating? Something like that. He took his eye off the circle of light. He looked around. He had lost his sense of purpose. He needed a clue, a cue. He looked back.

The darkness had thinned. He could see dimly. He could see Eurydice. She was wearing a headscarf tied under the chin, the way she used to when he first knew her. Again, there was that warmth. She looked exasperated as she caught his eye and then he could see her bracing herself again. She moved her hands as though she was smoothing out a tablecloth. She said, ‘Never mind, darling.’ He surged on, helpless, while she drifted and spun a while, and then began to sink, so slowly that she seemed to be barely moving, back into the murk.

      ‘You couldn’t have saved her,’ said Milla. ‘Nobody could.’ Oz knew that. He was a rational human being, except when he was tired or flustered. He knew that a hospital was a place from which one couldn’t count upon returning. He just wished that he could have died too.

      His voice was not what it had been of course, but it was still a marvellously affecting instrument. A group of young women who performed folk songs a capella invited him to join them on tour. On stage they deferred to him. In the B-and-Bs they fussed over him, and made him hot drinks and lent him their pashminas to wrap around his throat. Reviewers were snide. ‘What’s happened to him?’ asked his agent. ‘Has he lost his marbles?’ ‘Well yes, he has,’ said Milla. ‘He’s also lost his wife.’

ACTAEON

      He was quite a bit younger than me, than most of us actually, but he called us his ‘boys’. Looking back on it, I’m surprised no one protested, not even Eliza. ‘Let’s do it, boys,’ he’d go, at the end of the Friday meeting. ‘Let’s nail those sales.’ When we went for a drink (which we did weekly, it was the next piece of the Friday warm-up), Acton talked like a human being, an English one from suburban south London, but in the meeting room he spoke as though he’d picked up his entire vocabulary from Business and Management manuals, and like his parents (nice people, mother a greengrocer, father a nurse, proud of him) were part of Chicago’s criminal aristocracy.

Americans think British voices are darling. The British think American voices sing of potency and success. Acton was phoney through and through, but we didn’t care. We relished the smoothness of his act. Estate agents aren’t crooks, contrary to popular belief – I mean not many are – but we are all performers. We were accustomed to seeing each other, on heading out to meet a prospective buyer, pop on a new persona while picking up the keys. We knew, when Acton was bullshitting, that he was doing what he had to do, and the great thing was, if he succeeded, we each got a cut.

      Diana had been surprised when he proposed that the entire sales department should pool their commissions. That wasn’t normal, not in our outfit. She suspected that he was exploiting us, but he was subtler than that. He wanted us to love him more than we envied him. You couldn’t imagine him getting his knees muddy, but he had a football coach’s appreciation of group dynamics. When you think about it, team spirit isn’t altruism. It just makes sense. One of the reasons he closed the most deals was that he kept the best properties for himself (‘What my clients pay over-the-odds for is exclusivity,’ he said), but another was that he was a brilliant salesman, seducer, beguiler, fiddler with the minds of the credulous. We all found him irritating: but we were all thankful for the luck of being on his team. It was down to him that I felt able to propose to Sophie that year, down to him that we got together the deposit for our flat in Harlesden. And, yes, it was Acton who spotted the flat in the first place and told me it was under-priced and that we should swoop. Sometimes a good leader lets a bit of profit pass, because to have your underlings indebted to you – that’s gold.

Diana had known him since he was in nappies. He was her best friend’s kid brother and the two girls, babysitting, would pootle around the bathroom while he watched them with a small boy’s sly judgemental eyes. When they put on face-masks he cried. When they wiped them off again he chuckled, and danced a little foot-to-foot shuffle to celebrate their resumption of their normal selves. They made healthy carrot and hummus snacks for themselves – because they were

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