Crescendo

Her eye met Gideon's black glance and she stopped laughing and grew sober. Gideon walked away and Ruffy looked after him, ears pricked. Gideon gave a little whistle. Ruffy moved, paused and looked at Marina. 'Off you go,' she nodded. Ruffy grinned and tore after Gideon.

The fitting did not take long. Mrs Dudeck moved around with a mouth full of pins and talked through them without swallowing one. Her small sitting- room was crowded with ornaments including a garden gnome who sat on the top of the television with a cross, bored face.

She had no garden, only a short expanse of yard which she had had paved in multi-coloured stone tiles. 'My patio,' she called it, and liked to eat out there in the summer. It gave her the excuse for a long-running war with the neighbourhood cats. Each time she saw one crossing her precious patio she ran out screeching with flapping arms.

Her husband, Mr Dudeck, was an enormous man twice her size and was petrified of her. He had a deep rumbling voice and was as gentle as a lamb.

Mrs Dudeck bullied him in a high thin voice. They had no children, which was just as well since con­trolling Mr Dudeck took all his wife's energies.

'Dudeck will bring it up tomorrow,' she promised as Marina left. Mr Dudeck drove the baker's van which toured all the local villages. Slow-moving, slow-thinking, he enjoyed his job which kept him out in the open air and out from under Mrs Dudeck's feet. Marina always found it comical to see the great broad-shouldered man in the crowded little sitting-room, like an elephant in a china shop. He looked so uneasy, afraid that his elbow would dislodge one of his wife's beloved figures or his feet make one of the small mats crumple underfoot, but his face would shine with pride as his wife showed Marina her latest purchase. He eyed the brightly glazed little figures with delight. On the beauty of the ornaments he and his wife were at one, al­though Mr Dudeck was never allowed to touch one.

Marina walked quickly back to the cottage by a short cut and came in through the kitchen door. As she opened it she heard the piano. She knew it was not a recording; Marina was too familiar with the individual sound of her own

piano to believe that. Her ears were very keen.

She stood outside the music room, frowning, in­credulous. It couldn't be Grandie—that was im­possible. Once he might have coaxed the keys to give forth this miraculous delicate sound, but that was long past, sunk in the depth of memory.

She had not come through the front door so she had not seen if there was a strange car parked out­side.

They must have a visitor, she thought, racking her brains to recall a name to match this wonder­ful musical achievement. Someone from London, an old pupil of Grandie's—before his hands became quite useless he had had some pupils for a few years and all of them had gone on to become famous. Grandie only took the really promising ones.

She pushed open the music room door and froze on the threshold. Everything tore and rent inside her head. The room went dark and she saw figures moving through the darkness, but she was lost in it herself, soundlessly screaming, with parted lips which were bloodless and a face which was taut and stiff with pain.

CHAPTER FIVE

IN the moments when she stood there Marina felt the merciful curtain come dragging down and she winced in the bitter light of what she now remem­bered.

The girl of eighteen she had imagined herself to be was dissolving like a fading dream. It was a woman who stared at Gideon as he tried to take her into his arms.

She fought away from him, giving deep little groans, as though she were someone drowning who

refused to be saved, and fought off rescue in a panic and terror which no calming words could touch.

The piano still gave off that faint vibrating hum which came when music ended. No wonder he had refused to play for her, lying when he said he was not in her class!

Grandie thrust him aside and tried to put an arm round her, but she could not bear that, either. She felt as though she were shaking into pieces, her whole body shuddering. She wanted to be alone— not to be touched, to be free.

'Don't touch me!' she said hoarsely, and turned to run up the stairs into her own room, bolting the door and hearing their footsteps coming after her. . 'My God, I warned you,' Grandie said thickly. 'Gideon, 1 warned you. I'll never forgive you.'

Gideon spoke close to the door, his voice plead­ing. 'Marina, let me in, darling. Let me in to talk to you. I've got to talk to you!'

'Go away,' she said in a voice which was not her own, a high still little voice, a child's, remote and cold.

It had been so easy in this quiet little backwater to slide back into the safe past, a past still un­troubled by dreams. Now the dreams would come and she would have pain.

She sat down on the bed and wondered how she was going to bear it. Grandie and Gideon were talk­ing outside. Gideon said suddenly, very loudly, 'I'll break the bloody door down!'

Grandie was angry, too, but his anger was with Gideon. 'This is still my house. Leave her alone!' He sounded like a man on the verge of doing some-

thing violent. 'If you'd left her alone in the first place this wouldn't be happening. You're as selfish as ever, Gideon.'

Marina stopped listening to them. Her mind was occupied with the bitter memories she had been try­ing to lock away for months. They poured into her like acid and she crouched on the bed, her hands over her eyes.

When she was eighteen, Grandie had taken her to London to take up a place at the Royal College of Music. Marina had not wasted her long years under Grandie's personal, unstinting tuition. In some ways she was more advanced than most of the other students and in others she had been a very shy, withdrawn girl who was almost entirely ignorant of the world in which she found herself. Her first months at the college had been a wild, dizzying whirl of new experiences. She kept Grandie in touch by letter and she made new friends, but it was still Grandie who was her only close friend, her mentor and her ally.

Just before the end of that first term, Grandie had come to London to hear a concert given by one of his pupils; one of the most brilliant pianists of the day. Afterwards he and Marina were going back to the cottage together. That evening she had sat in rapt intensity listening to music so perfectly executed and interpreted that she was deeply im­pressed. Grandie and several other friends whom they had met that evening took her on to a party afterwards. It was being given in honour of the pianist. He was knee-deep in excited women in the long cream and gold room. Marina shrank into a chair, terrified by all the people. Her upbringing had made London an ordeal for her. She detested noise, she feared crowds.

Now she sat on a chair and stared at the black head, watching the movements of the tall lean body, listened to the occasional note she caught of his deep voice.