The Splendour Falls

The violin faltered, and stopped, and my ears rang in the sudden silence. Neil opened his eyes. They were brilliant and beautiful, unfocused, the eyes of a dreamer surfacing. And then he looked towards the open door and saw me and he smiled, a broad exhausted smile that included me in its happiness. ‘Bloody Beethoven,’ he said. ‘He does make one work for it.’

It was my own fault, I thought later. He’d as much as told me, by the fountain, that whatever happened between us would be up to me, that I would have to come to him. ‘Whenever you’re ready,’ he had said. And now here I was, standing in the doorway of his room, not saying anything, trying desperately to remember what message I’d been sent to deliver, while Neil set down the violin and came towards me. Even when he took my face in his hands, I couldn’t say a word. I only stared at him, and thought He’s going to kiss me … and then, in a rush of panic, I remembered. ‘You have a telephone call,’ I blurted out.

My eyes followed Neil’s mouth as it halted its descent. ‘I beg your pardon?’

I cleared my throat, and repeated my message. ‘Thierry sent me to tell you.’

‘I see,’ he said. But he didn’t take his hands from my face, and he didn’t move away. We might have gone on standing there indefinitely, staring at one another, if it hadn’t been for Garland Whitaker.

It was difficult to say which sound came first – they seemed to happen all at once, like tracks laid down upon the one recording. I heard the front door slam, and Garland’s voice half screaming and half sobbing words without apparent meaning; and then somewhere someone smashed a glass and through Neil’s window came the first faint wail of sirens in the fountain square.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

And some were push’d with lances from the rock,

Neil moved with calm deliberate speed. He was downstairs in the entrance lobby before I’d even reached the stairs, and by the time I followed, he and Thierry had between them coaxed some sense from Garland Whitaker. Her eyes were still half wild in her pale bewildered face, and her voice held traces of a shrill hysteria, but her words came easily enough, between small sobbing breaths. I heard the words, of course, but I didn’t for a moment believe them. It simply wasn’t possible.

‘No.’ My voice, half strangled, made Neil pause and turn his head, but for all his swiftness he was not in time to stop me.

I didn’t seem to touch the ground. I felt the heavy door swing to my desperate push, and heard the screech of tyres as I dashed across the narrow road. At the edge of the fountain square, where the château steps wound down between the lovely ancient buildings, the bright red ambulance stood waiting, blue light flashing, doors flung wide. The square was crowded, full of people, questioning and murmuring and elbowing each other for a better view. I pushed my way with purpose to the fountain, searching for one face among the many …

‘What is it?’ asked a man, ahead of me, and his companion answered, ‘Someone’s hurt.’ Just hurt, I thought. I knew it. Somehow Garland Whitaker had got the story wrong.

But then my eyes found Simon.

They had moved him to one corner of the square, to one of the benches, where he sat huddled like a child with a blanket round his shoulders. Someone had given him a cup of coffee, and a kind-faced man in uniform knelt by him, talking, but Simon didn’t respond. He looked so young, so unutterably young, his frozen face beyond emotion. I shivered in the chill spray of the fountain as the gathered crowd increased the tempo of its murmuring, excited.

The medics were bringing the body down.

‘No, don’t look.’ Firm hands took hold of me and turned me round, away from the spectacle. Above my head Neil’s voice spoke low and steady. ‘Don’t look.’

Dry-eyed, I focused on the weave of his crisp white cotton shirt, and the tiny frayed bit at the point of his collar, and the way it moved with his breathing. He didn’t speak again, didn’t try to comfort me or stroke my hair, and yet the comfort flowed out from him anyway and kept me standing still.

Around us the voices swelled, loud and confused. The doors of the ambulance slammed shut, an engine roared and rumbled off, and then it was all over.

Neil let go of my arms, breaking the spell. My gaze shifted upwards from his collar, and our eyes locked. For a long moment we just stood like that, staring.

‘He isn’t dead,’ I said, at last.

His voice was gentle. ‘Emily, don’t.’

‘He isn’t dead!’ I felt the bitter sting of tears at that, and pushed him off, stumbling blindly up the square towards the château steps. It was a foolish thing to do, I knew, a foolish thing to say. I’d caught a glimpse of the stretcher as they brought it down the steps, and I’d seen as well as anyone the swaddled figure strapped to it. The sheet had been drawn up over the face, which plainly meant …

But I couldn’t bring myself to even think the words.

The crowd of people on the steps had thinned, and those remaining moved obligingly aside to let me pass. It must have been my face that made them move aside with quiet words and pitying glances. My face, I thought, must look a bit like Simon’s: cold and bloodless, empty-eyed. I pushed on, lungs burning, to the uppermost angle of the steps, where the high cliff wall rose stark and merciless in front of me, sharply outlined in the harsh sunlight. A bit of street lamp and a sign peered over the wall’s top edge, and at its base the cobblestones spread rough and jagged in the shadows.