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  ‘Very fiddly,’ Eric and I agree.

  ‘What shall I do with this?’ Silas holds up his squirrel.

  ‘Finish the tail, put it down to experience and give it to Blossom,’ I suggest. Blossom has been quite complimentary about the squirrel and it’s her birthday next week.

  ‘Good idea.’ Silas looks relieved. ‘I could tie a ribbon round its neck and it might look quite festive.’

  ‘Very festive.’ I hesitate for a moment. ‘If I play through the rest of my programme again, could you tell me what you think?’

  ‘Sorry, Ruth. Yes, of course.’ Silas puts aside his squirrel and sits down, folding his hands in his lap. ‘Play on. I’m listening.’

  This time, they both listen attentively, and as usual, applaud enthusiastically when I’ve finished. I’m not sure that my uncles are the most discerning of audiences, but no-one could say they aren’t encouraging.

  ‘Very good. Very good indeed,’ Silas says. ‘Isn’t it amazing that a few pieces of cat gut and some horse hairs can make a sound like that.’

  I can see that he’s still in taxidermy mode, but he does have a point. I wonder, not for the first time who first decided to try this particular combination — wood, gut, horse hair — for music-making, and pay silent tribute to them. Whoever it was must have been a genius.

  We all stop what we are doing, and start to get ready for market day tomorrow. Eric and Silas have to prepare the produce for their stall, and I must look out something suitable to wear. I’m not sure what the dress code is for street musicians, but respectable poverty seems safe and easy, so I settle for a pair of old but clean jeans and a Save the Dolphins tee shirt (after all, everyone loves dolphins, don’t they?).

  On Wednesday morning, I feel quite excited. At last I can take a bath (the badger is drying out in the kitchen; Eric kindly let me have the first go, but not before he’d scrubbed the bath thoroughly with disinfectant, muttering darkly about badgers and TB). Do I wear make-up? I decide not, but I have washed my hair and I tie it back in a neat ponytail. Mr. Darcy, who has settled himself comfortably in his usual place by the Aga, is not pleased to be disturbed, and has to be dragged out to the Land Rover, growling and complaining. It’s a bit of a squeeze, what with the sacks of vegetables, the pots and jars of dairy produce and several buckets of early chrysanthemums, and I sit squashed between my uncles with my violin on my lap and Mr. Darcy lying across my feet. But physical discomfort apart, it’s a beautiful morning, the sun is shining, and there should be plenty of punters. It seems a promising start.

  When we arrive at our destination, Eric and Silas park me outside Boots, and go off to sort out their stall. I set out my music and tune my violin, placing its empty case invitingly open for any contributions. Mr. Darcy lies beside me looking appealing. He has that doggy knack of resting his chin on his front paws and raising his eyebrows one at a time, rolling his eyes tragically at passers-by. If my playing doesn’t do the trick then Mr. Darcy’s theatricals can hardly fail.

  But I have forgotten how hard busking can be. It’s not just the lack of eye contact or even the being ignored, but the way people take a kind of detour round the busker, leaving an arc of empty pavement in a relatively crowded street, as though it’s contained by an invisible fence.

  ‘You need some change.’ Eric has returned to see how I’m getting on. ‘Here.’ He empties the contents of his pockets into the violin case, leaving a respectable collection of coins, some keys and a grubby handkerchief. He retrieves the handkerchief and the keys, and shakes the money about a bit. ‘See if this’ll do the trick.’

  I thank him, and play on. Sure enough, the coins begin to arrive, among them some pounds and even one five-pound note, and my confidence grows. I smile as I play (I remember this used to help in my student days) and gradually I begin to enjoy myself. One or two people even stop to talk, to ask about the music and make a fuss of Mr. Darcy and generally pass the time of day. A man from the greengrocer’s offers Mr. Darcy a bowl of water and an elderly woman buys me a sandwich in a plastic wrapper and says something about homelessness being a disgrace (do I look homeless?). The church clock strikes one o’clock, and I decide to take a break.

  And it is then that I see Amos.

  At first, I think it’s just someone who resembles him, but this is unlikely. Amos is huge; six feet five and broad-shouldered, with a particular loping walk. He has his back to me, and must be twenty yards away, but when he turns, it is Amos’s face, Amos’s beard, Amos’s familiar furrowed brow distantly reflected in a shop window. I feel a swell of joy and of longing, for while I haven’t given a lot of thought to Amos over the past weeks, suddenly I know that of all my friends he is the one I most want to see. I want to see him and feel him and talk to him, and most of all, I want to tell him about the baby. He may not be pleased — in fact I’m pretty sure he won’t be — but I’ve decided that he has a right to know and to choose whether or not he wants anything to do with his child.

  Amos begins to move away again, and I am faced with a dilemma. He is walking fast, and I know that I’ll never catch him up carrying a violin case and leading a reluctant dog. On the other hand, I can’t leave them unattended. The violin is my most precious possession, and Mr. Darcy can’t be depended upon not to go walkabout if I leave him. For a moment, I hesitate, and in that moment, Amos quite simply disappears. One minute he is striding away up the street, and the next, he has vanished. I decide to abandon my patch and go after him. Clutching my violin and dragging Mr. Darcy on his lead, I hurry up the street, peering into shops and down alleyways, vainly calling Amos’s name, and attracting some very odd glances in the process. But to no avail. My mission is hopeless; Amos could be anywhere.

  I lean against a wall to get my breath back, and tears roll down my cheeks; tears of disappointment and frustration and, yes, tears of longing. Because something lost acquires many times the value it had before, and it would seem that I have just succeeding in losing Amos. Of course, it’s quite ridiculous to get so upset. When I awoke this morning, nothing could have been further from my mind than Amos, but now that I have seen him — so nearly missed him — it seems unbearable that I’ve been unable to speak to him.

  And it was such a coincidence. What is Amos doing in this little market town? I believe that he has an aunt in Wiltshire, so he could be visiting her, but even then it’s amazing that our paths should so nearly have crossed. I could look the aunt up, but of course I don’t know her name. I could phone Amos, but he’s recently changed his mobile number, and I don’t even know where he’s living at the moment, or where his parents live.

  Suddenly the day has lost its shine. Even the fact that I have managed to earn nineteen pounds and forty-six pence (not at all bad for a morning’s work) fails to lift my spirits. As I return to my post and share my sandwich with Mr. Darcy (who perks up considerably), I ponder my situation. And by the time the church clock strikes two, I have made a decision.

  Somehow, I am going to find Amos.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Amos and I go back a long way, and our relationship has always been one of comfortable familiarity rather than of intimacy. We were at music college together, where we did all the usual student things; rag weeks, beer-drinking contests in The Bell, wild parties and giggling trials of a range of ‘illegal substances’. When I think back to my student days, I wonder why anyone put up with us at all, but then maybe they too had enjoyed their years of reckless irresponsibility.

  And of course, we played our music. The one thing we were all passionate about was our music, and we spent long hours in cramped practice rooms playing our scales and studies. Amos’s preferred practice room was adjacent to mine, and to this day I believe that one of the reasons I have tended to play too loudly is all those hours trying to drown out the sound of the trombone. Once, only once, I knocked on his door and asked whether he could tone it down a bit.

  ‘Tone it down?’ Amos roared, appearing in the doorway like Moses delivering the ten commandm
ents. ‘Tone it down? What do you think this is?’ He waved his instrument at me. ‘A bloody harmonica? You get back to your scraping and I’ll do my blowing, and may the best man win.’

  I never complained again, and soon afterwards we became friends.

  We laughed at each other’s jokes (Amos could be very funny) and cried on each other’s shoulders. We advised each other on matters of the opposite sex and commiserated when things went wrong (which they frequently did). Amos weaned me off what he called ‘silly drinks’ (Bacardi and coke, snowballs and Avocaat) and introduced me to the delights of Merrydown cider and best bitter, and we even briefly shared a flat. Free from the complications and pitfalls of sexual attraction (we had long since agreed that we were not each other’s type), our friendship lasted happily throughout our student days, and while there have been times when we have had little contact with each other, we have always kept in touch.

  Amos is far more gifted than I, and I envied him his musicianship, which he seemed to take for granted. While I had to work hard to pass my exams (college examinations were a far cry from the ones I had taken at school), Amos seemed to sail effortlessly through his. While I panicked and lost sleep, Amos remained calm and optimistic.

  ‘It’s just an exam,’ he used to tell me. ‘Just a silly little exam.’ And he would clock up yet another distinction.

  But the world outside college was tough and competitive, and when we left, Amos struggled as much as I did to find work. He did some jazz, and some teaching, and even spent a season playing in a dance band on a cruise liner, while I spent three years playing in a string quartet, which eventually folded through lack of funds (and, I suspect, talent), taught on the peripatetic circuit, and did a few more run of the mill jobs while ‘resting’ between musical engagements. My parents tempered their disappointment with quiet triumph. Hadn’t they always said that my chosen career was a perilous one? I did my best to ignore them. In the meantime, Amos and I drifted apart.

  It was the orchestra which brought us together again.

  New, young and enthusiastic, for a while the orchestra did fairly well under its prize-winning youthful conductor (another colleague from college days). We worked hard, travelled long distances, and accepted pitiful salaries to make it work, but in an age when even the best orchestras struggle for money, it was doomed. After a difficult two years, our conductor reluctantly decided to down-size from full symphony orchestra to chamber group, and since there is no room in such an ensemble for second-rate violinists or even first-rate trombonists, Amos and I found ourselves out of a job.

  At about the same time, Amos and his wife of eighteen months decided to divorce. I had always had my doubts about Annabelle (so, he told me afterwards, had Amos), but had never voiced them. Annabelle was willowy, glamorous and fiercely intelligent, but utterly unmusical. Having done everything she could to mould Amos into the kind of husband she wanted (if she didn’t like beards, trombones, or beer, why on earth had she married him?), she found herself a sleekly pin-striped financial wizard and settled cosily with him into the gleaming chrome and glass and leather of his riverside flat. This didn’t prevent her from trying to take Amos for everything she could get (he had practically nothing, so her efforts were fruitless), and the experience left Amos disillusioned and miserable.

  ‘It’s not that I still love her,’ he confided to me in the pub, on that last evening together. ‘It’s just that everything’s turned so nasty. She doesn’t want me. I don’t want her. Period. Why can’t we leave it at that? What’s wrong with “irretrievable breakdown”? Few things could be as irretrievably broken down as our marriage. But no. She wants to cite “unreasonable behaviour”.’

  ‘Hers or yours?’

  ‘Mine of course.’

  ‘What unreasonable behaviour?’ I asked him.

  ‘Good question.’ Amos sipped his pint. ‘Something about noisy practising and chicken curry and socks —’

  ‘Socks?’

  ‘I like brightly-coloured socks and she hates them. Hardly grounds for divorce.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have worn more subdued ones?’ I ventured.

  ‘Ruth, you’re missing the point.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The woman is totally unreasonable. Another beer?’

  ‘Please.’

  Amos pushed our empty glasses across the bar and nodded to the barman.

  ‘No mention of her adultery, of course,’ he continued. ‘Now that is grounds for divorce. But, oh dear me, no. I’m not allowed to drag her precious “private life” through the divorce courts. So it’s back to me and my curries and my socks.’ He sighed. ‘I never asked for all this unpleasantness, but it seems that it goes with the territory. I just want to get the whole thing sorted as painlessly as possible. Not a lot to ask, really.’

  I agreed that it wasn’t.

  ‘Thank God we didn’t have a kid.’

  ‘Did she want one?’

  ‘No. Annabelle’s career means far too much to her.’

  ‘And you? Did you want children?’

  Amos gazed into this beer glass, as though searching for an answer.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I think I did. Well, I did once, anyway. But marriage to Annabelle soon put paid to that.’

  ‘But with the right person?’ I persisted.

  ‘Ah. The right person.’ Amos grinned. ‘With the right person it might be quite a different story. Yes. I think with the right person kids would be fun.’

  How ironical that only a couple of hours after this conversation took place we were destined to make our own baby.

  Of course, the baby would never have happened if Amos hadn’t invited me back to his flat for coffee.

  ‘You’re too tipsy to go home yet,’ he said, steering me out of the pub and down the road (I had driven up to see him). ‘You need coffee, and plenty of it.’

  But the coffee failed to make much impression, so Amos suggested that I should stay the night.

  ‘You can have my bed and I’ll sleep on the sofa,’ he said.

  His words hung in the air like something unfinished, as though waiting for one of us to deal with them. I looked at the sofa. It seemed about half the length of Amos; it was even too short for me. Amos caught my glance and smiled at me. I smiled back. I noticed for the first time that he had very sexy eyes (how come it had taken me so long?) and Amos obviously found something he rather liked about me. He took my hand.

  ‘On the other hand...’ he said.

  ‘On the other hand,’ I replied.

  We both laughed, and suddenly, we were in each other’s arms, tearing at each other’s clothes like a pair of teenagers. Within minutes, the floor was littered with shirts, jeans, socks (including fluorescent green ones) and underwear, and we were hot-footing it to the bedroom.

  Amos was a good lover; gentle and considerate as well as passionate; and despite the effects of several pints of beer (usually death to my libido) I found myself responding in a most satisfactory manner. Afterwards, I lay with my head on his chest thinking fondly of the importance of old friends and wondering why on earth we had never done this before.

  ‘We make a good team, don’t we?’ Amos said, stroking my hair as we drifted towards sleep.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Shall we do this again some time?’

  I laughed.

  ‘Why not?’

  I could feel him smiling in the darkness.

  ‘Why not indeed.’

  But when we parted company the next morning, we made no plans for a repeat performance. Amos had his divorce to worry about, together with the question of where the next pay cheque was coming from, and I had my gap year. But we promised to keep in touch, and meet up again “some time”.

  ‘I’ll send you a postcard,’ I told him as we kissed each other goodbye.

  ‘Send me lots,’ Amos said, ‘One from every destination.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ I promised.

  But we had both forgotten that Amos was having to move out of
his flat and didn’t yet know where he would be living, and neither of us could have known that the piece of paper upon which I’d written down his new mobile number had already been left behind, mislaid in a tumble of bedclothes.

  By the time I reached my car that morning, I had already lost Amos.

  CHAPTER TEN

  For a few days following my near-encounter with Amos I feel low and dispirited. I am troubled by disturbing dreams, in one of which my poor little seahorse/rabbit (in my thoughts and dreams, it is still a seahorse/rabbit; never the grainy grey foetus of my scan) is weeping inconsolably. ‘I want my daddy, I want my daddy,’ it cries. I pick it up and try to hold it, but it slithers from my grasp and disappears, and when I awake, I too am weeping. In another dream it has packed up its belongings and is leaving.

  ‘Where? Where are you going?’ I cry.

  ‘To find my father,’ it tells me, bundling up its possessions in one of those red spotted handkerchiefs you read about in fairy stories. ‘You are not enough.’

  You are not enough. And of course, it is right. When I come to think about it, I have never been enough; not a good enough daughter, not a good enough violinist, and now apparently not a good enough mother, even though my baby is not yet born.

  Is Amos the answer? Quite probably not, since however good a father he might prove to be, he wouldn’t make up for my own shortcomings as a mother. And supposing he were to turn out to be a better parent than me; how would I cope with that? What would it be like to bear and give birth to a child, and then have someone else come along and cope better than I could? But even I know that parenthood is not a competition — rather, a team effort — and as Amos said all those months ago, he and I make a good team. I decide to put all thoughts of the baby on hold for the time being. After all, I have over five months before I have to meet my problems head on, as it were. Anything can happen in five months.

  Fortunately, my broodings are interrupted by the activities of Sarah, that paragon of motherhood, for the following week she gives triumphant birth to her family of piglets.