‘You don’t think she set this up?’ Clifford said.
‘No.’ Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know. He hadn’t told his mother he was coming to Lochbannon. He hadn’t even told her he was thinking of asking Phoebe to marry him. It was coincidence. Happenstance. Wasn’t it? ‘Mum had to leave the country at short notice. I haven’t talked to her since she texted me.’
Clifford made a scornful sound. ‘I don’t give your engagement to that little bit of trailer trash a month. You haven’t got the balls to handle a chit like that. Stick to your nice girls, son. Leave the bad ones to me.’
James put his phone away, and then stopped and looked back at the house in the distance. He was assailed by two very different thoughts. First, sticking to a nice girl suddenly seemed very unappealing and second, the thought of Aiesha being anywhere near his father suddenly sent a shudder running down his spine.
* * *
James was coming back from his bracing walk to the woods when he heard the music coming from the ballroom. It was like nothing he had heard from there before. And it wasn’t anything he would hear in a Las Vegas lounge bar, either. It was lilting and melodic and yet...strangely haunting. The cadences were deeply poignant, touching on a chord deep inside him, like someone plucking on the strings of a hidden harp.
He stood at the door of the room, watching as Aiesha’s hands danced over the keys of the piano. She was dressed in a hot-pink velour tracksuit that had teddy-bear ears on the hooded top, which she’d pulled over her head, presumably to keep her own ears warm. The look was quaint, cute and endearing. It showed a side of her that was young and playful, as if she didn’t care what people thought of her attire as long as she was comfortable. She had a fierce frown of concentration on her forehead, although there was no musical score in front of her. She seemed totally unaware of anything but the music she was playing.
He was transfixed by the sound. Rising and falling notes that tugged and twitched on his heartstrings, minor key chords that were like emotional hits to his chest. Feelings he hadn’t encountered for decades came out of hiding. They crowded his chest cavity until he could barely breathe, like too many guests at a cocktail party.
She came to the end of the piece and closed her eyes and bowed her head as if the effort had totally exhausted her.
James stepped into the room and she jolted upright like a puppet being jerked back up by its strings. ‘You might’ve knocked,’ she said with a frown of reproach.
‘I didn’t realise it was a private performance.’
She got up smartly from the piano and crossed her arms over her body in that keep-away-from-me gesture he was coming to know so well. A faint blush was on her cheeks, which she tried to hide by turning her back to look out of the window, where the sun was trying to get its act together but making a lacklustre job of it.
Her teddy-bear ears looked even cuter from behind.
So did her toosh.
‘Nice walk?’ she asked.
‘Did you watch me leave?’ Was that why she had chosen to play such beautifully evocative music while he was out of the house?
She didn’t turn around. ‘Pretty hard to ignore that dog’s crazy yapping.’
‘That dog has a name.’
This time she did turn around. Her expression showed nothing. Zip. ‘Your eye looks terrible.’
James shrugged. ‘Just as well there are no photographers lurking around.’
‘The roads are still blocked?’
‘Well and truly.’
She didn’t show disappointment or relief. She showed nothing. Her face was a blank canvas. But two of her fingers fiddled with the zip on her tracksuit jacket, the sound of metal clicking against metal as rhythmic as a metronome.
He moved across the floor to the piano, tinkling a few keys to break the silence. ‘What was that piece you were playing?’
‘Why do you ask?’
He turned and caught the tail end of her guarded expression. ‘I liked it. It was...’ he searched for the right word ‘...stirring.’
She walked over to the walnut shelving where all of his mother’s music was stored, her fingers playing along the spines like a child trailing a stick along a picket fence. James wondered if she was going to answer him. It seemed like for ever before she let her fingers fall away from the spines with a sigh he saw rather than heard. ‘It’s called An Ode to Archie.’
‘You composed that yourself?’
‘Yeah, what of it?’ Her eyes flashed at him. ‘You think just because I’m a club singer I can’t write music or something?’
‘Did you write it for the Archie on your wrist?’