Never Mind Miss Fox Read online

  The next morning Clive ran all the way to his office in Chambers.

  This was something he did once a week and considered quite normal, but it seemed to make other people as angry and defensive as if he had told them he was religious, or teetotal. “All the way to Chancery Lane?” they would comment, gaping at him. “Are you mad? That’s miles.”

  “About five and a half miles, if you go in a straight line,” Clive would say.

  This morning, after he had changed and drunk a lot of water from the cooler, he walked into his colleague Belinda’s office. “Have you got a minute?” he asked, and shut the door. He was no longer out of breath, but his heart beat very fast. “It’s Eliot Fox,” he began.

  It was only seven a.m. and Belinda’s face was still cross-hatched with sleep. While he explained—“London—piano—Eliza”—she took off her glasses and rubbed at her eyes, and when he had finished she put the glasses back on and blinked up at him.

  “Jesus,” she said. “It’s your worst nightmare.”

  Clive had already had the same thought, but when he heard it spoken aloud he flinched.

  Belinda did not believe in coffee shops but she did believe in kettles, mugs and instant coffee. Clive watched the sugar dissolve from his teaspoon.

  “There are two ways you can play it,” said Belinda. “The first is total denial. The wall.”

  “Or?”

  “Come clean.”

  Come clean, thought Clive. He pictured himself on his knees with a scrubbing brush. It would be no use; those stains were indelible. “How?” he asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘how’? Come clean. Clean as a whistle: tell Martha everything.”

  Piano lessons lasted forty-five minutes but, “For the last five,” said Miss Fox, “we’ll listen to a bit of something. We only have this term together so we might as well enjoy ourselves.”

  Eliza was not used to enjoying herself, and certainly not at school. She did not trust her luck: her lessons so far with Miss Fox had seemed too good to be true, so it was typical that they would only go on for one term. Her proper teacher, Mrs. Bridges, had gone off to have a baby—probably in a maternity colony, like one of the bats that Eliza and her mother had looked up on the computer—and Miss Fox was the substitute.

  “You look too nice for a real teacher,” Eliza told her.

  Miss Fox smiled. “That’s a relief,” she said.

  Eliza had been given a biscuit to nibble as she listened to Miss Fox play the piano for the last five minutes of the lesson. Lessons with Mrs. Bridges had not included biscuits, and even if they had the biscuits would not have been like this one. It was brittle and Italian, and contained pieces of almond. Eliza was not certain she liked it, but she knew it must be delicious and special because it came from Miss Fox. Pleasing her new teacher was all that she wanted to do, now and always, and so she wrapped her legs around the legs of the piano stool and thought of something nice to say when Miss Fox next paused in her playing.

  The first thing that came into her head was, “I like your hair,” which also happened to be true.

  “I like yours,” Miss Fox responded.

  Now Eliza fingered the end of her ponytail, speechless with pleasure.

  “What about this?” Miss Fox played a bit of something solemn. “Do you like that?”

  Eliza wrinkled her nose. “It sounds like maths. Have you got a husband?” she asked quickly before Miss Fox began to play again. “Or children?”

  “No. Have you got brothers or sisters?”

  “No. Mum dropped me down the stairs by accident when I was little, so she didn’t want any more babies after that.”

  Miss Fox looked at her in the way that people tended to do when Eliza delivered this information. Eliza quite enjoyed the effect; Martha, if she overheard her daughter, did not.

  “I was all right,” Eliza reassured her teacher, “but Mum was really upset for ages.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Fox, “I expect she was.”

  “It was all her fault, you see—she was supposed to be looking after me. I had to go and live in intensive care, in the hospital. I don’t remember it but Dad does and so does Mum but she doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  There was no response to this.

  “Dad says I’m the only child that ever got cleverer after falling on its head,” Eliza said, kicking the legs of the piano stool.

  “That’s right—you come top in everything, don’t you?”

  Eliza made a face. “Not swimming,” she said. “And coming top is kind of good and kind of bad. Mum, Dad and the teachers like me but everyone else hates my guts. It’s not good to know stuff, at school. Or do stuff.”

  Miss Fox did not try to argue or sympathize but instead played something else. “What about that—does that sound like maths?”

  “No,” said Eliza, “that sounds nice—what is it?”

  “They were both Bach,” replied Miss Fox. “From something called The Well-Tempered Clavier. It’s my favorite piece of music.”

  “It’s a nice-sounding name,” said Eliza, thinking it over. “What’s a ‘clavier’?”

  “It’s another word for a piano—an old-fashioned one. ‘Well-tempered’ actually means ‘tuned.’”

  “It sounds like the piano’s in a very good mood,” said Eliza. Just then the bell rang in the corridor outside. “Yuck,” she added. “Now it really is maths.”

  When Clive came home from work there was a bicycle chained to the railings outside the house. He stood and looked at it for a moment, suspicious and afraid.

  If Belinda had been there she would have said, “You are insufficiently prepared for this meeting. Walk away. Pretend you got stuck at work. Come back when she is gone.”

  Clive told his feet to take him away, but instead—traitors!—they took him up the steps to the front door and through it, into the communal hall where he was faced with a brimming tide of junk mail that tried to lap back over the threshold and into the open air. He waded through the leaflets and cellophane envelopes to the door of his flat, turned his key in the lock and pushed the door open an inch. This is my home, and now Eliot Fox is in it.

  Hearing voices and laughter he opened the gap a little wider. He cocked his head and listened to Martha’s low murmur and Eliza’s shrill interruption, “No, no, Mum—it’s not there, I’ve already looked.” It sounded ordinary and harmless. Perhaps he had been mistaken; perhaps the bike was innocent. Encouraged, Clive walked forward into the flat.

  The hallway was tight and small with hung-up coats and he imagined hiding (in a pocket, or folded into a pair of winter gloves, or tucked into Eliza’s woolly hat and bundled onto a shelf) until the threat of Eliot Fox had passed, but again his feet took him forward. At the threshold of the next room—the kitchen—he teetered, holding his breath and wondering—Is she here or is she not?—and then there was a movement—the glimpse of a movement—in one corner. He turned his head.

  The room was dim after the sunlit throb of the street. Clive could make out only a shape: something—someone—facing him with folded arms and a sharp silhouette. There was really nothing of her—just a narrow blade, resting on its point—and yet Eliot seemed to occupy the room, to take up more space than she ought and to leave him no air for himself.

  She was alone. Martha and Eliza were downstairs. Now Clive felt short of breath.

  The kettle came to a furious, rummaging boil and switched itself off. Into the silence Clive cowered and flinched before he spoke: “Eliot?” He peered at the shape of her, not trusting his vision.

  She did not reply at once and there was a moment of suspension as if his words were traveling to her through the air in slow motion. But then in a quiet, cool voice she said, “I bet you wish you’d told her, Clive. What are we going to do now?”

  Clive put out straying fingertips to steady himself on the back of a chair. He opened his mouth but whether to breathe or speak he did not know. He pictured himself turning over as he fell through the air from a great
height—this was a dream he had had so many times before, for so many years, and he knew how it would be: it always ended just before he hit the ground and today—here—now—awake and before he could speak—

  “Dad! Dad! Dad! Mum! It’s Dad!”

  —Eliza had run up the stairs and into the room to grab him by the hand.

  4

  Eliot had come back to the house from the school gates, pushing her bike alongside Martha and Eliza on the pavement.

  “You’ll come in, won’t you?” Martha had said. “Just for a moment?”

  “Please?” Eliza had begged, hopping between them over the cracks.

  It was plain that Eliza had fallen in love with Miss Fox. “I know I shouldn’t mind,” Martha confessed to Clive in private, “but I do.”

  I do too, Clive thought.

  “It won’t last,” he said aloud, in a level, careless voice. “It’s a crush.”

  “They’re the worst!” laughed Martha. “Crushes are dangerous—you’ve no idea what little girls are like.”

  Clive pictured Eliza leading Eliot round his home:

  “—This is the hall, this is the kitchen, this is where we watch TV and down here are the bedrooms, come and look, this is Mum and Dad’s and this is mine, it’s really small—”

  This was Eliot, pulled by the hand from room to room: Eliot looking, Eliot standing, Eliot peering and Eliot seeing.

  At last she said, “I ought to go,” and they all went out to the step.

  Eliza was hotheaded with excitement and attention. “It’s so weird,” she said, “isn’t it, Dad? That Miss Fox is my teacher? And you’re all friends?”

  But Clive was fiddling with the catch on the door and didn’t hear her.

  Martha laughed and took Eliza’s hand. “Life before you, Eliza—can you imagine?” She was teasing and happy.

  Clive followed Eliot down to her bike. With his back to the house he took a breath and asked her quietly, “Are you going to tell?”

  It shocked him to hear his own voice, speaking that question aloud. Eliot, however, did not seem surprised. She unlocked two locks and steadied the bike against her hip while she slid the keys into a pocket. Her reply—quiet; half-smiling—mystified him: “Tell Martha? I won’t have to.”

  She looked over his shoulder to wave at his wife and daughter, smiling on the top step, and then she pedaled away.

  “Well,” Martha said, back in the flat with the door shut. “How about that? Eliot Fox, no less, in our house. What would Tom say? I can’t wait to tell him. Or do you want to?”

  But Clive was lost for words.

  Later, sitting at the kitchen table with her homework, Eliza said, “Miss Fox says if we go to her house at the weekend I can practice. Can we?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Martha. “We’ll go on Saturday.”

  “Instead of swimming?” said Eliza, perking up.

  “As well as swimming.”

  “Bum. Dad too?”

  Clive was staring at the computer screen. “No,” he said. “I have to work.”

  Eliza cut her losses and subsided into her seat. She remained, however, distracted from her studies by her new favorite topic. “Dad, don’t you think Miss Fox is really cool?”

  Clive said nothing.

  Martha glanced at him. “She was always cool,” she said, stepping in. “Even aged fifteen. Tom was in love with her—did you know that?”

  If Martha resented Eliza’s love for Eliot, thought Clive, she didn’t show it. She sounded as loving and admiring of Eliot as Eliza could wish her to be. That is good parenting, he thought. Skillful lying. He stared at the computer screen in front of him where words seemed to wash and shimmer from one side to the other like a flock of starlings.

  “Uncle Tom? Miss Fox?” Eliza goggled. “Fifteen?” Now her books did not interest her in the slightest. She stared out of the window, twisting her pen in her hair—something she did during moments of contemplation. “It’s funny—isn’t it,” she said, “that Miss Fox and I both have almost the same name. I mean the ‘E—l—i’ part.”

  “Yes,” said Martha, “I thought that too. We might get you muddled up!”

  This was a joke but it was a lovely idea; Eliza smiled with pleasure, twisting the pen. “Isn’t it funny, Dad?” she repeated.

  “Hilarious,” said Clive. He used a flat, dead voice to smother the whole subject.

  Martha and Eliza were muted and Clive cursed himself. Pull yourself together. Turning his head from the screen he said, “I’m a bit…I think I’ll go for a walk.”

  Martha looked at him with a question mark on her face that expected an answer, but Eliza had knitted her pen into her hair and got it stuck.

  “Ow,” she bleated, turning in her seat to face her mother. “Help.”

  “Ridiculous child!” said Martha. The two were locked together, unknotting and detangling, when Clive slid out of the door.

  He stood on the step and wondered where to go. Eliot Fox has got me out of my house, he thought in surprise. Already. He felt a current of fear, as if a worm had been sleeping inside him and now it was awake, rippling its length along his guts.

  Absurd! He shook his head at himself and trotted down the steps.

  Each morning Belinda smoked one cigarette, standing on the bit of broken tarmac behind the office. “My club room,” she called it. Belinda preferred pronouncements to conversation: “I have to have one ciggie with my caffè istante. Otherwise I can’t go to the loo and then the whole day falls apart.” No one could argue with this.

  Today Clive followed her out of the emergency exit and told her what had happened. After puffing, sipping and coughing she said, “I thought I told you not to see Eliot.”

  “She was in my house!” Clive protested. “What could I do?”

  “Make something up. Leave. Go back later.”

  “I can’t start lying—”

  “Start? What do you mean, start? You’ve been lying for years.”

  “Well…” began Clive. “I never actually told any lies, not actual lies—”

  “Oh, God,” she interrupted him. “Men!” She was really angry; he took a step back. “What bullshit you talk!” She mimicked the bleat of his voice: “‘Never lied, never lied’—haven’t you heard of lying by omission?”

  “OK, OK.” Clive tried to placate her.

  “I don’t want to hear about this, Clive. I’m serious. I’ve told you before.”

  “It’s just that…I don’t know what to do.”

  “Go away. Leave me alone. These are my favorite three minutes of the day, and you’re spoiling them.”

  Clive had known Belinda would not tell.

  “I wish you hadn’t told me any of that,” she had responded to his confession. “It’s a bad, rotten deed, what you did. If I were Martha and I found out—”

  He had quaked to hear her judge him. He had wished he’d held his tongue. He would have knelt at her feet and begged for her silence, if need be, but—

  “The only thing that matters now is Eliza,” Belinda had told him. “Let’s not mention it again.”

  —and Clive had been reprieved.

  He had been safe, then, but he was not safe now.

  Saturday afternoon began well. Martha and Eliza took three buses to Eliot’s house, which was a stout, brick villa at the top of a leafy hill.

  “I like it round here,” said Eliza.

  “I’m not surprised”—Martha was in a buoyant mood—“we’re in Hampstead.”

  Eliot opened the door in denim shirt and jeans.

  “How do you manage to look so young?” Martha said. “I said the same thing to Clive the other day. And you used to be so grown-up, for your age! It’s not fair.”

  It was a sincere—if glib—compliment, but Eliot did not enjoy it. “I wasn’t,” she frowned. “I don’t.”

  Martha had said the wrong thing. How could it be? She had been rebuffed.

  Then Eliot seemed to relent. “It feels like a lifetime since thos
e days.”

  “It’s more than my whole lifetime,” piped up Eliza. “Years more.”

  Looking at the little girl, Eliot smiled. “That’s right.”

  Once inside the hall—empty, echoing—Eliza said in surprise, “But there’s nothing here. Is this where you live?”

  “Only just,” said Eliot. “I lived in America until the other day.”

  “Don’t you have any stuff?”

  “Just my piano. And a bed of course.” There was a pause. Eliza was expecting more and it came—at last—in small, rationed mouthfuls. “This is my friend’s house. He’s selling it, but he’s letting me stay for a bit.”

  “Your friend must be massively rich,” Eliza sighed. “Where has he moved to?”

  “He’s got lots of houses,” said Eliot. “So he can choose from different places.”

  “We’ve got two houses,” Eliza said—and then corrected herself: “Well, sort of. A flat and a cottage.”

  Martha blushed. “Eliza, do stop—”

  “And so have Stan and Jack.”

  “—rabbiting on.” To Eliot, Martha explained, “Stan and Jack are Eliza’s cousins. Tom’s twins.”

  It was another mistake: the spoken name seemed to create a smashed silence, as if Martha had dropped a stack of plates. But it was so many years ago, she thought. How can it still matter?

  Eliza had expected the piano to be a beautiful antique but it was a plain, black upright, scuffed at the corners. A pair of unpolished pedals poked out from underneath, like the slippers of a tired but obedient servant. It was a disappointment—but then Eliot stroked the lid with her palm before she opened it, as if she were greeting her favorite horse in its stable, and so Eliza knew that despite its appearance it must be special. She spelled in her head the plain, gold letters of its name: C. Bechstein. “Is it old?” she asked, too shy to touch it.