Last Movement by Joan Aiken

Author:Joan Aiken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2018-04-12T10:51:34+00:00

8

Water Music

As usual, when she got back, Julia found Dikran lying on his bed.

“I don’t know why you didn’t make an evening of it,” he said in a surly tone. “Why didn’t you go to a nightclub? Have dinner somewhere? Stay the night at the Fleur de Lys?”

“Mike wanted to get back and hear the Hamlet rehearsal,” Julia replied coldly, affecting to be unaware of his sarcasm. “Kerry Farrell has arrived, and she’s going to be singing tonight for the first time. I thought I’d go and listen, later on—do you want to come along?”

“You know I can’t stand that man’s music. Now,” he said, “now, I suppose, what time you have left over from that little Turkish pimp is going to be spent puttering around with the girl-is that it?”

“Oh, Dikran—don’t!”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t be like this! She’s a very nice girl—you liked her yourself, didn’t you? You thought she was interesting—I could see. I just like her, that’s all. What’s wrong with going shopping with her?”

“Nothing—nothing—nothing!” he snarled, and, turning away from her, lay curled up with his face to the wall, sullen and silent. Julia gave a long, impatient, unhappy sigh. For the past two or three days Dikran’s temper seemed to have been deteriorating hourly. He alternated between morose gloom and fairly active rage. Was it unreasonable that she wished to spend as little time as possible in his company?

Since she could think of nothing to say that was conciliating, she turned to leave the room.

“Now where are you off to?” he demanded.

“I’m due for a sauna in half an hour. I thought I’d go and listen to some music first. Why don’t you come along?”

“Because I don’t want to listen to any more goddamned amateurs!”

She shrugged and left him. No use to point out that many of the performers to be heard at Helikon were not amateurs at all but top-class professionals; in this mood Dikran was unsusceptible to reason.

Actually it was the amateur side of Helikon that Julia chiefly enjoyed. She loved to walk past a window, hear a burst of music, and, looking in, see three long-haired young persons in swimsuits playing a trio entirely for their own pleasure, lost to everything but the enjoyable noise they were making.

She loved being able to drop into any room, sit and listen to the music that was going on there, then, when she pleased, move on and dip elsewhere—or lie out under the lemon trees, with a distant, leaf-checkered view of the Aegean, and hear snatches of organ, flute, strings, or choir, from open windows or distant groups. The sense that all this joyful sound was free, given and taken purely for pleasure, added to her delight in it. Whereas for Dikran she feared that it worked in exactly the opposite way: his appreciation of anything went up in direct proportion to its cost; in a month’s marriage she had already discovered that, and she occasionally asked herself, with unwonted bitterness, whether her own value to him

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