When I finally arrive home that night, it is to a house in darkness – Mother must have gone to bed hours ago. I am starving, and worn out from the stress and tension of the day. Peering tiredly into the refrigerator, I quickly put together a cold collation – a few slices of applewood smoked ham, some strong Welsh farmhouse cheese, a handful of Bath Olivers and a pot of Fortnum's Coronation chutney, before collecting a nice bottle of Chevalier de Lascombes from the cellar, and carrying the whole lot upstairs. I would usually eat in the kitchen, but tonight I feel the need to surround myself with music, music that will transcend my soul and soothe my spirit, which is in sore need of both, after recent events. I head straight to my rooms, and after a longer, hotter shower than usual, I retreat into my own inner sanctum – my music room.
I love my music room; it is small, but perfectly formed, equipped with the best high-fidelity system that money can buy, and absolutely soundproof. There is only one article of furniture in it – a sleek black Eames lounge chair and matching ottoman (although technically, I suppose that's two), carefully placed for optimum acoustics. There are no windows, and minimal lighting. It's almost like a sensory deprivation tank, except that it is designed to refine and maximise the auditory experience. It is the place in which I feel safest, my escape from the ugly realities of the work we do, and from my own fears and loneliness. No one but me ever sets foot here. I even clean it myself, so loath am I at the idea of anyone else entering it. It is my own little private piece of heaven on Earth.
I search through my DTS CD collection, rejecting Mozart (all of which is now forever associated with Ruth), Bach (a personal favourite for his mathematical precision and order, but not what I am looking for tonight), Handel (too bright), and Rachmaninov (too heavy) before settling on Beethoven's Seventh. Beethoven truly understood what is to be human, with all the attendant joy and sorrow of our mortal condition, and tonight I crave to understand and be understood. Settling into my chair, balancing my plate on my pyjama-clad middle, I hit the Play button on the remote and close my eyes in bliss as the opening bars begin, slowly at first, gathering tempo, then falling back, the woodwinds leading the strings at first, as I am surrounded by the beauty of Beethoven's vision of balance and grace, transformed into sublime sound…
Somewhere around my third glass, I decide that of all the instruments in the orchestra, I am most like a bassoon. The bassoon is such an old-fashioned instrument, a little odd looking, perhaps not to everyone's taste, but capable of producing such a sweet and mellow sound, so steady and reliable…not an instrument which is not very often featured in the orchestra, but one whose contribution would be missed if it were not there…the violin, of course, reminds me of Ruth – I believe she actually plays both the violin and the piano, although where she would find the time for either nowadays is beyond me. The violin, queen of instruments, with all the beauty and flexibility of the human voice, but needing a maestro's delicate touch to truly animate its soul…the music swells and shifts into the Allegretto, the change of key into A minor bringing a dramatic tension to the music which reminds me of the three of us today, during Ruth's hearing. I pour another glass of wine and contemplate the acoustic baffles on the ceiling as I recall the day's events.
The relief that I felt immediately afterwards was soon tempered by the realisation that neither Ruth nor Harry must ever know that I was an unseen witness to their exchange. I must be careful to act as if I know nothing about it at all, instead of the warts-and-all reality. I had not had an opportunity to speak with Ruth for the rest of the day; she had taken an uncharacteristically long lunch hour, and for once left on time, without so much as once looking in the direction of the inner sanctum. I had deliberately avoided her, not wanting to draw Harry's interest; he had been like a bear with a sore head after leaving the interview room, and everyone had felt the strength of his displeasure as he voiced his annoyance with all things Section D. People assumed he must have had a particularly unpleasant meeting with Guy Facer, or perhaps with Oliver Mace, and thought no more of it; only Ruth and I knew the truth, and we were each keeping that knowledge to ourselves.
I can only hope that Ruth will see fit to tell me herself what the outcome was – I know that Harry would no more tell me about his private dealings with staff, than program his own DVD player (as Colin can attest). Harry's telling little comment after Ruth had exited the interview room has preyed on my mind all day. If I had been hoping to gain incontrovertible proof of the man's feelings about Ruth, then I have succeeded admirably. But, as Classical literature repeatedly teaches us, the seeds of one's own destruction are frequently sown in one's success, and I cannot escape the guilt that washes over me as I recall the banked-up heat of their interplay, the passion in Ruth's voice as she stood up to Harry, and the muted sadness in his voice as he tells his innermost thoughts to a cold, empty room. I had gone there, later, to retrieve the fallen micro-bug, and had found it just inside the entrance to the door, crushed. Whether by accident, or design, I cannot say, but Harry had trodden on it on his way out. Weeks of painstaking work, gone like that. I almost wish I had never devised the wretched thing, but as my father used to say, nothing is ever wasted in the grand scheme of things, and I already know that I will rebuild that design, refining it until it attains operational perfection. It had performed far better than I could have hoped for, under the circumstances…and on the subject of performances, I am still in awe of Ruth's fiery turn in the interview room.
Ruth had refused to be intimidated; she had told Harry exactly what she thought of him (thereby going boldly where many an angel would fear to tread) and she had protected us both from Harry's ire, or jealousy…or worse. I can't get that odd little comment from Harry – be careful, Ruth. I've seen how he looks at you. Be kind to him, won't you? – out of my head. I will have to be much more careful, I tell myself; I had assumed that no-one ever pays me much attention, but I had made the critical error of underestimating Harry. Others before me who had done so were no longer alive to contemplate the error of their ways, much less from a very comfortable chair while listening to Beethoven, so I pour myself an almost unprecedented fifth glass on the strength of that cheery thought, and slide a bit further down in my chair, tipping my now-empty plate onto the floor as I do so. The galling thing, as well as our saving grace, is that the truth of the matter has not yet dawned on Harry. I pray that it never will…
I know that not for one moment would he consider me to be a rival in romance; he just wouldn't think I had it in me – poor, shy, geeky, awkward Malcolm. Not so Harry – decisive, confident, bold, masterful Harry, leader of men, lover of women. Or, to be more accurate, of one woman in particular, it seems…his lonely voice, at the end, haunts me. I wish I hadn't heard that, because it makes it so much harder now. When I had believed that the interest was mainly on Ruth's side, and that Harry for professional reasons was choosing to overlook it, I had felt that it wasn't beyond the realms of possibility for me to win her affections, given world enough and time…but now I could see that it wasn't 'Time's winged chariot drawing near' that might put paid to my fondest hopes, but the soft-footed tread of my boss and friend. I drain my glass and heave myself unsteadily up from my almost recumbent posture, methodically shut down the various components of the custom-built sound system, wondering vaguely why the LED displays are blurring as I try to focus on them, and take myself to bed, the last lines of Marvell's elegant poem running through my overtired brain:
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
As my head hits the pillow, my final thought is that Ruth and I have already twice torn our pleasures (although perhaps without rough strife) from each other, and with the memory of her in my arms, curled up against my body, I fall asleep, to dream uneasy dreams fuelled by too much late night wine and cheese, of Ruth and Harry alone in a room I cannot reach, with Beethoven playing madly in the background while they argue with each other and I try frantically to improvise a bug out of old bits of stereo equipment which keep slipping from my shaking hands...I wake with a stifled cry, and turn over, seeking a cooler sleeping position, pushing the duvet over onto the other side of the bed, a bed I have never shared with anyone else, but which now seems to my alcohol-fuelled imagination to be filled with her. I drift off to sleep again, and now my body's memory takes over my dreams. Her bare back, curved against me as we sleep…her hair, spilled across my chest like a skein of finest silk; the look on her face, that final time together…the feeling of completion, of finding something I have been searching for all my life, as our bodies met…the peacefulness, afterwards…incredible!
When I wake at my usual hour, despite my somewhat foggy head, I have absolute clarity on two things. One is that sensibly or not, I love Ruth, and she must have feelings of some sort for me, to have been with me in the first place, and then to have borne the brunt of Harry's disapprobation over the Fortescue business…yes, there must be something there. Something she might not even be aware of yet, but there nonetheless; and two, I'm not going to let her go without a fight. Carpe diem, indeed.
A/N: the poem, if you are wondering, is Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress. If you haven't noticed already, Malcolm reads. A lot.