Peter Robinson: Before the poison

Then two large magpies flapped across the garden, and the moment was gone, the spell broken.

I was planning to work on a non-film project, a piano sonata I had been thinking about since Laura’s death. This was to be a major, long-term project, music people would listen to, I hoped, and even remember me by. Even though I had the grand piano, I would still need a study, somewhere I could park my laptop, send emails, check websites and contemplate the fruits of my labours. One of the spare upstairs bedrooms, I thought, would suit me perfectly.

The obvious choice was the other corner bedroom at the front of the house, but that, I decided, would make an excellent guest bedroom. It was the same size as the one I had chosen and also had en suite facilities. There was a double bed, bedside tables with lamps, and a large oak wardrobe, the heavy, old kind with a full-length mirror on the door. For some reason, it gave me a shiver up my spine. Perhaps I had once imagined monsters hiding in an old wardrobe and emerging when the lights went out? I gave it a wide berth. The cornices on the ceiling were elaborate bacchanalian swirls of grapes and laurels, as in my own bedroom.

I found myself drawn to one of the smaller back rooms – there were four of them in all, opening off the corridor that split the upstairs back half of the house into two, ending in a leaded-glass casement window looking out over the back garden.

The room I chose was a plain, small room right at the back, perhaps at one time a sitting room, study or sewing room, with nothing much to recommend it on the surface, except that it had windows at the back and side. But there was something about the atmosphere, a feeling, a tingling sensation in my spine, something I couldn’t put my finger on, that drew me to it and made the decision for me.

It bothered me because I don’t usually get feelings like that. I suppose I consider myself to be a fairly rational being – for a musician, that is – an atheist with no particular belief in life beyond the grave, or in a spirit world. But nor had I ever been the sort of person who pooh-poohed anything beyond the merely solid, physical and concrete. I had met enough gurus and religious freaks in LA, and I knew that the inexplicable happened, and that science and logic didn’t have an explanation for everything. I had no idea where my inspiration for music came from, for example, but that didn’t stop me from grabbing it and working on it. Whatever decided me, the small back room it was, and I was happy with my choice.

The walls were a pleasant, nondescript shade of pale blue, and a small oil painting of the folly across the dale, looking romantic and somewhat sinister in the moonlight, hung over the tiny fireplace. There was a worn armchair that had probably been there since the house was built, and beside it stood a small oval table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, on a level with the chair arms, where someone might rest a cup of tea, a book or a nightcap alongside a candle or small shaded lamp.

Most important as far as I was concerned, there was a chair and a wobbly roll-top escritoire, made of walnut, which was just about big enough for my laptop. The inside contained a number of pigeonholes and a little drawer. All empty. I wondered whether there was a secret compartment, as I had seen so often in movies, but I searched everywhere and found nothing. All I had to do to make it stable temporarily was wedge a folded sheet of paper under the guilty leg. Then, when I acquired some suitable tools, I could set about putting it right permanently. The top would be suitable for keeping a row of reference books handy.

There was also an old glass-fronted wooden bookcase filled with several shelves of coverless Everyman editions, poetry by Keats, Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth, Lamb’s essays, novels by Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, along with a number of cheap, ancient, musty-smelling hardcovers by writers nobody has ever heard of, the kind with no dust jackets, water damage and bent edges that you can buy by the boxful at charity shops like Oxfam or Sue Ryder.

When I opened the glass door and smelled the old books, I was immediately transported to the huge bookshop I had discovered in Milwaukee many years ago, a warehouse of a place, floor after floor and room after room of dusty books piled everywhere, torn and stained covers, a smell of mould and damp sawdust. Laura and I had spent an hour there and had come out with two carrier bags full – everything from old sixties paperback editions of Updike, Roth and Nabokov with lurid covers, to a tattered bicycle repair manual and a pocket Japanese dictionary. We had laughed all the way back to the restaurant, mostly because, if we really thought about it, that hour we had spent in the musty old bookshop was literally our first date. I had asked her to lunch with me the night before, and we had stumbled across the place on our way there.

See how easily distracted I am by memories of Laura? These are the blind alleys I suddenly find myself wandering down, the cul-de-sacs of lost love, where the grief waits with its sharp blade, jabs at me all of a sudden like a mugger in the night and makes my eyes burn. These are the deserted plazas of the heart, my very own boulevard of broken dreams. Get a grip, you sad old bastard, get a grip.

‘Problem, Mr Lowndes?’

I was standing outside the bank a couple of hours later, getting in the way of the people queuing for the cash dispensers, when I saw Heather Barlow.

I smiled. ‘Chris. I told you.’

‘Chris, then. But you seem a bit discombobulated.’

‘You could say that.’ I gestured towards the bank. ‘They won’t let me open an account without a utility bill. I told them I’ve just moved in, and I haven’t received one yet, and I need a bank account so I can pay my utility bills. They don’t seem to get the irony of it. They don’t care. They say it’s the Bank of England’s rules to protect them from terrorists and money-launderers. Do I look like a terrorist or a money-launderer?’

Heather looked me up and down. ‘Well, you could probably pass for a money-launderer, but a terrorist, no, I don’t think so.’

‘And when I told her I felt like I’d just been in a Monty Python sketch, she pulled a face and said, “Who?”’

Heather laughed.

‘I’m glad someone thinks it’s funny,’ I said. ‘Look, I need a drink. In fact, I think I need two. And maybe some lunch. Care to join me?’

Heather glanced at her watch. ‘Why don’t we go to the Black Lion? It’s just down Finkle Street here. They do a decent pub lunch.’

‘Lead on.’

We entered a narrow street beside the bank, pedestrians only, except for local delivery vans, and walked past a row of shops, including a butcher’s, a charity shop and a post office. ‘What will you do about the banking?’ Heather asked.

‘I suppose I’ll leave things as they are for the moment. I can put everything on plastic and have it paid off by my US bank until I get a utility bill.’ I shook my head. ‘I even threatened to take my business to another bank. Guess what the girl said?’

‘What?’

‘“You’ll have no luck there. They’re worse than we are.”’

‘You’re not in Los Angeles any more.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘It’s just here.’

We walked through the door and down the short flight of steps into the pub. To the right was a flagged dining area, and one of the tables near the window was free. The room wasn’t quite a basement, but I still got the sensation of looking up at the people passing by outside.

Heather took off her coat and shook her hair, then sat down. ‘How about I get us each a glass of champagne,’ I said, ‘and we can have that toast?’

Heather laughed. ‘You can try,’ she said. ‘More realistically, I’ll have a glass of white wine, please. Dry, if they ask.’