The Perfect Girl

TESSA

At the end of the concert, the crowd has an edge to it, an atmosphere, like a kind of low-level static. Lucas’s performance hasn’t succeeded in washing away the unease caused by Tom Barlow’s scene.

As Lucas takes his bow I check my phone and I have two texts:

Maria: Don’t say anything

Richard: Where are you?

I reply to neither of them. I’ll do as Maria says, she knows I will, and Richard can wait. I imagine he’ll have made it out of his shed and back into our house, and suddenly worked out that he’s alone.

When I look up, Chris is by my side.

He’s brusque: ‘Maria’s taken the car and I want to get home, but I think I need to stay for at least a few minutes. People will be expecting me to.’

He’s probably right so I say, ‘I’ll wait. I’ll give you a lift whenever you’re ready.’

He makes no direct reference to Tom Barlow’s outburst.

We don’t know each other very well, Chris Kennedy and I, because Maria has always kept him to herself, like a piece of treasure that she’d found, and no wonder really, because she’d been through hell.

When Zoe was convicted Maria’s marriage fell apart and she was left on her own to pick up the pieces. Zoe spent eighteen months in jail and in that time Maria had to cope with the transition from farmer’s wife with a talented, beautiful child, a musical prodigy no less, to single mother with a teenage child with a criminal record.

She moved from Devon to be near me in Bristol, settling into a rented flat in the only area of the city she could afford, and starting work as a secretary at the university, a job that Richard got her, and that she could barely hold down at first, so powerful was her depression.

It was the piano that changed everything, as it always had done throughout Zoe’s life.

Zoe’s father would have none of it; he blamed her piano playing for much of what had happened before. He said it had led to her being different, being above herself, and that had in turn led to the bullying, and the accident.

The rest of us took a different view: that piano could help Zoe rediscover herself, repair her self-esteem and provide her with a path for the future. Her talent was so ferociously strong that none of us could bear to let it rest, and, after all, what else did she have left apart from that and her intellect?

On advice from Zoe’s therapist at the Unit, we encouraged Zoe to start playing again when she came home, and after a couple of months of practice on a keyboard that Richard bought for her, and the shlonky pianos at her new school, and with the help of some lessons from a teacher that Richard found and I paid for, Maria entered her tentatively into a low-key, local competition to help her recover her form.

It was a repertoire class that Zoe entered. It was non-competitive, and there were only two entrants. The other was Lucas.

Zoe played brilliantly that day, considering. She rose to the occasion.

I sat with Maria and Chris Kennedy sat just a seat away from us. We were the only people watching, apart from the adjudicator, who would not declare a winner, but would give feedback to the players.

After Zoe’s performance, Chris leaned over to us and asked who Zoe’s teacher was. Maria answered him, and it wasn’t long before I felt like a lemon and took Zoe to find a cup of tea while they chatted intensely in the corridor outside the performance hall, and Lucas skulked around the perimeter.

Chris and Maria exchanged phone numbers that day, ostensibly to share information about Lucas’s piano teacher, who Chris declared to be ‘the best in the south-west, and the only teacher for a talent like Zoe’, and they met up soon afterwards.

It became apparent very quickly that Chris was extremely good for Maria. She began to dress better, and to take care of herself. She smiled. She moved Zoe to the new teacher, who cost Richard and I twice as much, but we were happy to pay. When Maria finally declared that they were in a proper relationship, it felt a little bit as if Chris had saved her.

However, in spite of all that, and even though I’ve met him on numerous occasions for social events, Chris still feels like a bit of a stranger to me. The only semi-intimate conversation I can claim to ever have had with him was when we met on the train to London once, by accident. It was just after Grace was born because I remember the way he seemed to glow when he spoke about her.

Chris was on his way to be the key speaker at a backslapping networking lunch for successful entrepreneurs, millionaires who want to be gazillionaires. His description, not mine, and delivered with a healthy dose of irony. I was on my way to a conference about feline hyperthyroidism.

After we met on the platform at Bristol Temple Meads, he kindly bumped me up to first class where he laid his business tools out lavishly across the table that was between us: Financial Times, BlackBerry, iPhone, laptop, speech notes.

While he made a business call where he stared out of the window and said things like, ‘Well, as soon as it gets to market it’s a matter of how I judge that,’ and, ‘Yup, yeah sure, indeed. This all plays back to… yes, well, it’ll raise hairs, won’t it, but it is the fact we’ve got to get into it,’ I sat in front of him feeling intimidated and not daring to eat the flaky sausage roll I’d bought for breakfast, or to get out my Hello! magazine.

Still, I didn’t need the magazine, because after the call Chris and I chatted all the way, about my work, about his, and about baby Grace, who’d just been born. ‘Maria is such a natural mother,’ he said. ‘I’m a lucky man, after everything.’ And I’d felt happy for my sister, because who would have believed that she could have had this turn of fortune after Zoe’s trial.

‘Do you know what I loved about your sister, when I first met her?’ he asked.

I shook my head. When Chris first met Maria she’d been a shadow of the girl who boys trailed around after when we were at school.

‘She’s a beautiful woman, obviously,’ he said, ‘but what I noticed most of all were extraordinary qualities of sweetness and poise, as if she just knew who she was. She was like a fine piece of porcelain; I couldn’t believe my luck.’

I smiled at the fondness in his words and the emotion, but my first thought at that moment was that Chris didn’t know Maria very well; that he’d met a version of her that was coshed by antidepressants and shock and he’d mistaken those qualities for frailty and composure.

Obviously, I kept that thought to myself at the time, but it did make me wonder whether Maria had since concealed what I thought of as her true personality traits. Had Chris ever got a full, no-holds-barred view of her robustness, her intelligence, or her humour, the qualities that were innate to her, that would surely reappear even a little bit once she and Zoe began to recover? Or had she kept those under wraps purposefully, not wanting to spoil the dynamics of this relationship, or the good fortune of this second chance?

I was brave then. I asked Chris about his first wife. Pure nosiness, but who isn’t curious about the uncommon circumstances of a man bringing up his son alone? I’d asked Maria about it, of course, but she was either badly informed on the subject or incredibly discreet because she said very little except that Lucas’s mum had died from illness when he was ten and that it had shattered him and his father. Chris had apparently not had a significant relationship between Julia’s death and meeting Maria.

In the train, emboldened by a surfeit of caffeine on an empty stomach, I said, ‘Has it helped Lucas get over his loss, to be part of this new family?’

‘Very much so.’ Chris’s answer was swift and sure.

‘How did his mother die?’

‘She had a terminal brain tumour, a particularly savage one.’ He spoke in quite a clinical tone, but his hand twitched on the table and he began to turn his BlackBerry over and over in his palm.

‘Oh. I’m so sorry.’ And I was. I felt a blush creeping up my neck and across my cheeks. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘I don’t mind. Lucas was devoted to her of course but it wasn’t easy towards the end. She wasn’t very stable. I, we, Lucas and I are so very grateful that Maria agreed to marry me. She’s a wonderful woman, your sister. I’m a lucky man.’

That day on the train I wondered if Maria had done the right thing keeping Zoe’s past from Chris. Surely, I thought, that can’t last. I resolved to advise her to tell him, when the moment was right, when he would surely understand. But the conversation never worked like that, because when I brought it up Maria was appalled. I was not, ever, ever to consider interfering in her and Zoe’s life like that, she told me. She had found her soul mate and she was going to do everything she could to make it work for her and for Zoe. I was to keep quiet about their past and keep my nose out of their business.

And so I did, but in the concert hall on this stifling night I wonder again if that decision isn’t destined to bite us all.

I dismantle the camera and tripod set-up clumsily, and when I join everybody who’s enjoying a post-concert drink I notice that the atmosphere still isn’t quite the usual one of satisfaction, where the audience appears to bask in the pleasure of exchanging opinions about what they’ve just heard. Tonight it seems more conspiratorial. People are huddling, and some are discussing Lucas’s performance, but most, I can tell, are talking about the outburst.

I strip the cling film from two plates of food that have been laid out on a trestle table at the side of the room. Each has a selection of little snacks on them, which Maria made herself.

Lucas appears beside me, and he looks white. ‘Well done,’ I tell him. ‘You played beautifully.’ I say this even though it isn’t entirely what I believe, and I touch his arm lightly because he’s a nice kid and I always seem to have this urge to reassure him even though he’s incredibly composed; maybe because he’s incredibly composed.

‘Is Zoe all right?’ he says.

‘I think so. She’s with her mum. I’ll call them in a minute.’

‘Should we go home?’

‘I’ll drive you and your dad back very soon.’

‘Do you…?’ He wants to ask me about what happened, I can see that written all over his face, but I say, ‘Let’s talk about it later, OK?’

He looks at me, and now he’s wearing that inscrutable gaze of his again, and after only a fraction of a pause he begins to help me.

Chris peels away from the crowd discreetly after about twenty minutes, and we find Lucas sitting in a pew in the church, doing something on his sleek little tablet, which he hastily slips into his music bag.

In my VW bus, they both seem huge: all knees and hunched shoulders.

We travel mostly in silence.