Autumn Read online

  I wanted this Christmas to be different.

  How little I knew.

  I awoke from my trance. The grey faces in the audience were applauding politely, some watching me with concern, sensing how unsteady I was on my feet, the echo of the Caprice still floating through the nave. I turned round and saw Lauralynn sitting there, with a wry smile on her face as if she could read my mind like a book, clapping along with the crowd and the other musicians. She rose to her feet, leaving her large cello leaning against her chair and gave me a peck on the cheek.

  ‘That was … hot, darling,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Good girl.’

  There was such a look of complicity on her face that I felt naked and almost blushed.

  ‘It’s a piece I often practise,’ I defended myself. A lie.

  Her lips twisted, unbelieving and her eyes sparkled. I acknowledged the public’s applause, retreated to the green room and seized my overcoat and walked out of the small church as Lauralynn’s ensemble began playing Schubert’s String Quartet in G Major, not my favourite piece of music by a long stretch. I knew she wouldn’t be offended by my sudden departure.

  I liberated my bike from the railing. Glanced at my watch.

  Dominik would be home by now.

  We could fuck.

  For all I cared, the damn turkey waiting for us in the oven could roast a little longer. It would keep the salmonella at bay …

  A late afternoon cold was falling.

  I turned the key in the lock, half-opened the door and a fragrant wave of warm and reassuring cooking aromas swept over me. There was music coming from the study where Dominik worked. He always wrote accompanied by the sound of rock music playing loud. I set my violin case down by the door and was careful not to slam it shut and alert Dominik to my presence. I hurriedly checked the kitchen oven and moved the vegetables I had prepared earlier onto one of its lower shelves, below the now darkly-braised turkey, and changed the setting, still faithfully following the instructions from the cookery book I had acquired a few weeks earlier.

  I tiptoed up the stairs to our bedroom, slipped out of my coat, unzipped the little black dress and stepped out of it, treading on stockinged feet to the wardrobe to hang it up and pondering what I should now wear.

  Echoes of the music Dominik was playing as he typed resonated from the floor below. I recognised a Lana Del Rey song and all its lush orchestration. The record came to an end and I stood there uncertain as to the outfit I should present myself to him in, torn between thoughts of simplicity and ostentatious excess, a familiar fever dream spreading through my veins as memories of games and embraces past swirled through my mind. I waited for a while for the next album to start so that I might perhaps select something that would effectively accompany the music, materials, colours, looseness or tightness that would prove perfectly complementary to the tune he would choose to spur on his imagination. He’d been working on a new novel for some time now but the details he had been willing to provide me about it were still sparse.

  I waited.

  The thin grey pencil skirt that emphasised my small waist, with a white cotton blouse, if he chose Arcade Fire?

  The pleated trouser suit, if he opted for country music?

  I stood facing the wardrobe mirror, standing in my underwear, matching Victoria’s Secret opaque panties and bra, with just the right balance of sexiness and propriety, and a pair of open crotched tights.

  Still no music.

  Possibly he was deeply absorbed in the section he was writing and didn’t wish to be distracted by having to hunt for the right music to play next?

  Or maybe I should walk into his study just naked?

  No, I concluded. Nudity had its codes, its rituals. Sometimes it even became a uniform. Something I had learned from experience with both Dominik and other men.

  The silence spreading across the house was beginning to puzzle me. So unlike him.

  I took a final glance at myself in the mirror. I looked nothing like a lingerie model. Let alone a porn star. My hair was a tangled mess of red uneven curls falling down to my shoulders, my breasts were far from voluptuous, my painted lips a comic parody of come hither-ness and my skin was deathly pale.

  But I knew this was also the way Dominik liked me.

  I stepped back.

  Horny woman in underwear. It would have to do.

  I slowly made my way down the stairs.

  At the study door, I couldn’t hear any sound of typing. Nor any movement inside.

  I knocked. Not that Dominik ever appeared annoyed when I interrupted his writing.

  There was no answer.

  I reckoned he hadn’t heard me, lost in the pathways of his writing imagination. As I was so often when I allowed the music to take me over.

  My hand reached for the doorknob.

  Turned it.

  I pushed the door open with my toes.

  The room was in part darkness, just illuminated by the standing lamp by the desktop computer. The deep black leather chair in which he sat faced the screen and I could see the tip of his head. He was motionless.

  ‘Dominik? Do you mind if …’

  There was an uncanny stillness in the air.

  Hesitantly I walked towards the desk.

  Dominik still didn’t move.

  My mouth felt dry.

  I reached the chair.

  He was still wearing the same clothes from when we had shopped a few hours earlier.

  He sat immobile in his chair, facing the shining screen. Seemingly lost in thought.

  My eyes were absurdly drawn to the flickering cursor left abandoned there in the middle of a word penumb …

  It would have been penumbra, I knew. A wave of guilt rushed across my mind, as if I had been found spying on him, his thoughts. Betraying his confidence. Cheating. Reading his words before they were ready for public or private consumption.

  My movement at his side did not catch his attention.

  I looked down.

  He was pale as chalk, his features frozen into a mask of indifference.

  I knew in an instant he was dead.

  I remained calm even if inside of me a storm was brewing, frantic, confused, waves of despair and fear grappling in close combat. I clenched my fists and tried to remember the little I had learned about mouth to mouth techniques at school in New Zealand, although a voice deep inside kept on telling me it would prove useless.

  It was useless.

  There was no magic in my breath, and unlike in a bad movie he didn’t come to with a spluttering cough and a look of surprise.

  I didn’t cry.

  I called for emergency services.

  A heart attack they said later. Sudden and destructive. There was nothing I could have done, I was told, even if I had been present.

  But I knew I should have been there. At least held his hand, whispered final words in his ears, lullaby him away on that dreadful journey. Said something he would have heard, words to cushion his passing. Something.

  ‘Just one of those things,’ they said.

  I knew Dominik’s father had died of a heart attack, but had put that down to simple old age, and Dominik was still young. There had never been a sign of anything wrong with his health, at any rate in my presence. He still jogged around the Heath regularly and used some home gym equipment which he said kept him alert and able to concentrate on the screen for long periods of time, but I always suspected was down to a vanity he was unwilling to admit to.

  The ambulance came. In a daze I opened the door to the green-and-yellow-suited paramedics. They went through

  the motions, nodded sympathetically. But it made no difference.

  They took the body away and left me with a sheaf of papers I would have to fill in. Forms. Questions. Only then did I realise I had stood with them all that time in my underwear
, the way I had been dressed or rather undressed when I had walked down to Dominik’s study. Not one of the ambulance staff had thought to bring it to my attention while they went about their business. Not even the older woman who appeared to be the vehicle’s driver. I didn’t care. So many strangers had seen my body that it no longer made any difference.

  The ambulance drove away. To the Royal Free Hospital down the hill? To a morgue somewhere? A warehouse where the bodies of the dead were kept in cold storage until all the formalities were completed? I had no idea. The only thing I had asked them before they left was whether a postmortem would be necessary in the circumstances and was told it was highly unlikely. It was a clear open and closed heart attack case.

  Right then, I couldn’t face the possibility of Dominik being cut open somehow.

  Then realised with a shock that I didn’t even know whether he would have wished to be buried or cremated. It was something we had never even thought of discussing.

  I took my tights and bra off and went to bed in my Victoria’s Secret panties. I wanted to cry but the tears just wouldn’t come. I slept a long time.

  Two days later, there was a call for me to visit the hospital with the completed paperwork and I was asked whether I wished to pick up the clothes he had been wearing at the time of his death and in which he had been carried away.

  Shocked by the request, I choked, unable to provide an answer.

  I was hanging up the coat that he had last worn and left folded over a stool in the kitchen when I came across the envelope, tucked into the inside pocket. It was addressed to me in Dominik’s elegant script.

  For Summer on a Winter’s Day, I read.

  An anxious spasm tore through my stomach as I unceremoniously ripped the envelope open, hoping for lost words from beyond the one-way mirror behind which Dominik now rested.

  There were none. Just a rough map.

  At first it made no sense. It was rudimentary and stylised, like a child’s sketch of a desert island, with a large X marking the location of a lost treasure. I turned the page around and some features became familiar.

  I paused for breath.

  Suddenly realising where all the thin string of little arrows led and the message the map conveyed.

  When had Dominik drawn it?

  When had he intended to let me come across it?

  On January 1st, I guessed. He’d always had a pronounced sense of ritual, which sometimes bordered on the melodramatic albeit in an intensely romantic way. Was this some scheme to lead me like a fairy tale heroine towards a post-Christmas present?

  Where had he planned to leave the envelope?

  On the low bedside table on my side of the bed, where I would have found it on awakening while still fighting back the reefs of sleep, and Dominik had conveniently left the house so as not to spoil the surprise.

  I grabbed the sheet of paper, and ran downstairs. Here I tightened my running trainers’ laces and slipping on an old scuffed leather jacket I hadn’t worn in ages walked out of the house. The snow that had fallen a few days earlier had mostly melted away, just small hillocks and clumps now, like muddy collars, circling the base of the trees that lined the other side of the road by the Heath.

  The steep descent into the Vale of Health was just a hundred yards away from our house and the first tall tree below it was a peculiar shape and stood at an uncommon angle. I remembered Dominik once pointing it out to me.

  And it clearly was marked on his crude map, next to a sketch of what appeared to be a guitar pick. An image indelibly carved into the back of my mind. I crossed the road, bent down by the tree’s trunk and, gloveless, dug into the thin layer of snow and dirt with my fingers, closing my eyes and relying on my sense of touch explored the crumbling pocket of broken ice and disturbed soil until I found it.

  A guitar pick.

  I knew where the trail would lead.

  From the last time a similar trail had been created.

  By me. For Dominik.

  As an affirmation.

  I hurried down the hill. I knew that in my rush I was missing out on a score of further cheap guitar picks outlining the route, but I had no doubt in my mind where they would lead.

  I pulled up the jacket’s collar as an arctic breeze enveloped me when I walked out into the open space of the Heath, near the car park and continued down the dirt road by the ponds.

  Then across the bridge and a narrower path to the left that led into a wooded part of high trees.

  I could have made this journey with my eyes blindfolded.

  And I involuntarily shuddered at the thought of the actual blindfold.

  That first time in the crypt when I had played for him …

  My breath was fogging as I quickened my pace and, finally, reached the clearing.

  The hill of grass that led towards the metal bandstand.

  I was panting by the time I reached the large gazebo.

  Checked against the map he had left for me.

  N for North. S for South and so on …

  Got my bearings.

  The large X dominating the sketchy map indicated the northern angle of the bandstand.

  Once again I fell to my knees, and broke the thin layer of ice that covered the ground. My fingers could no longer feel the cold. I burrowed. My heart on hold.

  Felt something hard. Dug around it. Took hold of the object between four fingers and pulled it out.

  It was a small box.

  Within the box was another box. Not an ordinary cardboard sort, like the outer layer, designed to protect the contents from the elements but a minuscule trunk, about two inches thick, square, and half the size of my palm, with tiny gold hinges at the back. It was covered with a fine layer of deep-blue velvet that was silky to the touch.

  I clasped it tightly in my hand and sucked in a mouthful of cold air that burned my lungs. I had been holding my breath. My heart beat rapidly in my chest.

  Oh, Dominik, what have you done? Surely not an engagement ring. We were both of the view that marriage was for other people, not for us. And maybe it was something of a resolutely old-fashioned pretension, this idea that we didn’t need the trappings of tradition to bring us closer together. Neither of us had ever wanted children, either, so the legal and other benefits were not so important.

  My knees began to ache on the cold ground. I pushed myself to my feet and brushed my hands off on my jeans.

  No, I thought. Dominik would never buy me an engagement ring. He had far too much imagination and an ingrained taste for the unconventional for that.

  My mouth turned up in a smile as memories of other creative and daring situations he had previously surprised me with flooded across my mind. Once, as I stood in front of him nude and about to play the final solo from Max Bruch’s violin concerto he had asked for my lipstick and then used it to paint both my nipples and cunt lips a deep, vivid shade of red. I would never forget the feeling of shock, when I realised what he was planning, and the sensation of the cosmetic on my skin, waxy and arousing as he painted me. His lover, his whore.

  I didn’t count to ten, or take a deep breath. I just flipped the lid open. And there, resting on a bed of black silk lining was a delicate gold bracelet, so thin that it seemed as though it would break with the slightest force. I picked it up gently and studied it as it lay on my palm. It felt sturdier in my hand than it looked. Rather than a regular clasp, the closing mechanism was a tiny padlock – not even half the size of my pinky fingernail – that snapped over a loop with a gentle press and twist motion.

  It fitted around my slim wrist as perfectly as if Dominik had taken a measurement while I slept. He did not have the option of checking my size against other similar items in my wardrobe as I did not own a watch and rarely wore jewellery.

  Despite having been out in the cold for no doubt many days, the metal was not cool to touch. The
gold had a warmth to it that I knew would suit the red of my hair and pale skin.

  I only wished that it had been Dominik’s hand securing it to my wrist and not my own.

  Which made me think.

  It was obvious to me what he meant by the padlock. He had never really approved of BDSM-style collars – thought them too obvious, and although he never said as much, I knew instinctively he would have felt that such an accessory would have added a pantomime rather than erotic element to our relationship.

  So, this was another compromise. I would have dearly liked to wear Dominik’s collar, but it just wasn’t his style.

  Even if the padlock’s symbolism was obvious, it wasn’t like him to not leave a note or a card, in place of any words he might have spoken in person. The written word was Dominik’s expressive medium of choice. He often left little notes for me around the house. Sometimes just to say that he had popped out to run an errand and when he expected to be home, and sometimes with instructions of what he wanted me to be wearing or doing when he arrived back.

  I picked up the box again and studied it more closely. There it was, tucked inside the protective case that I had nearly discarded. A sheet of white notepaper, folded in half and then again. Thicker than computer paper and sharp at the edges. It was a bright night, and light enough that I could still read the black font.

  Dearest Summer,

  A bracelet, and not a collar – because I only ever hope to own a part of you. That part I will keep locked in my heart forever. The rest, my dear, is yours. As I will always be.

  Your Dominik.

  I thrust the note and the bracelet’s case into my jacket pocket and began to run, tripping and sliding on the Heath’s soft earth as I negotiated my way over roots and stones too quickly in the fading light, wishing with every particle of my being that I could somehow summon him back so that he would be there when I returned home, triumphant, having solved all the clues in the puzzle he had set me.

  But when I pushed open the door and walked inside there was nothing but empty rooms and the sound of my own breathing, still ragged.

  I missed him. I missed his presence. I missed the rich timbre of his voice and the habit he had of calling me for no particular reason, even though he knew that I hated phone calls. I missed the sound of his fingers tapping on the keyboard late at night that sometimes kept me awake or permeated my dreams. I missed the way that we laughed about it. How I sat across the breakfast table from him on nights where he had been possessed with inspiration or was simply too terrified by the spectre of a deadline that he refused to come to bed and we would both be haggard, him from sleep deprivation and me from the strange visions that his keyboard created in my brain as I slept to images of tap dancers beating out a rhythm on a stage or the pitter patter of raindrops on a tin roof. He would forcibly argue that I couldn’t possibly hear him from all the way up the stairs and I would jokingly say that, in the same way other couples were joined at the hip, we were joined at the brain.