Read The Children's Bach for Free Online Page B

about playing us something?’ said Elizabeth.
    â€˜Oh no – I’m hopeless.’
    â€˜Come on. No false modesty.’
    â€˜No, really!’ said Athena. She turned from the sink with the knife in her hand. ‘You don’t realise what an elementary stage I’m at.’
    â€˜You can’t be that bad,’ said Elizabeth. She opened the book. ‘ The Children’s Bach . God, listen to this – how pompous. “Bach is never simple, but that is one reason why we should all try to master him.’’ Show us how you’ve mastered him, Athena!’
    â€˜Oh, please don’t make me,’ said Athena. ‘Please. I can hardly play at all.’
    â€˜It’s true,’ said Vicki. ‘She can’t. You play like a mouse. I heard you plinking away in here the other day and I thought, poor Thena!’
    Athena turned back to the sink.
    â€˜Yes, dear,’ said Dexter. ‘You ought to practise when you’re the only one home.’ He turned over a page of the newspaper. ‘It’s a bit dreary having to listen to someone picking their way through those pieces.’
    He sat reading at the table with Billy on his knee. Vicki folded the scarf. Athena shifted the potatoes about under the dribbling tap.
    Elizabeth braced herself. ‘Vicki wouldn’t remember this,’ she said, ‘but our mother had a saying. She told it to me when I realised my voice wasn’t going to be quite as fabulous as I’d hoped. If only those birds sang that sang the best, how silent the woods would be .’
    â€˜Clumsy syntax,’ said Dexter. ‘ Woods and would right next to each other.’
    â€˜Say it again?’ said Athena.
    â€˜ If only those birds sang – that sang the best – how silent the woods would be .’
    â€˜She must have been a nice woman,’ said Athena.
    â€˜I don’t know if nice is quite the word,’ said Elizabeth. ‘She was the sort of person who’d put on Ravel’s Bolero first thing in the morning. And she had a voice like somebody falling off a mountain.’
    â€˜Shutup, Elizabeth,’ said Vicki. ‘She was nice! She was! Just because you didn’t –’
    â€˜She used to like ironing,’ said Elizabeth. ‘The easy stuff – you know, tablecloths, hankies. She got cancer.’
    â€˜I know,’ said Athena. ‘Vicki told me.’
    â€˜She wouldn’t go into hospital,’ said Vicki.
    â€˜That must have made things hard for you,’ said Athena. What selfishness, she thought. I would have been more sensible. ‘Why on earth wouldn’t she go?’
    â€˜Well,’ said Elizabeth, ‘I suppose that would have been admitting to herself that she was going to die.’
    It was a patient and courteous answer to an ignorant question. Athena felt ground drop away from under her feet. She hung over a black gulf, she heard the wind. Her self was in tantrum, panicking. What ? Me die? Life go on without me ? Impossible! It was briefer than a pulse. It was over before she had time to gasp. She held the hard potato in her hand. For the first time she looked at Elizabeth properly, with open face.
    Billy drew a breath and started to scream in short, sharp cries. He flung himself back on Dexter’s lap; he clapped his left hand over his ear, and bit into the heel of his right hand, held it against his large crooked teeth and pressed, pressed. He went ‘Eeeeee!’ high up in his skull.
    â€˜Quiet, Billy,’ said Dexter in a firm, pleasant voice. ‘Shhh. No more screams.’
    He stopped at once, but moaned and would have gone on biting himself had Dexter not drawn his hands away and held them. Two streets away a tram chattered. The wail of an ambulance faded in spasms.
    â€˜What’s the matter with him?’ whispered Vicki. ‘Why is he biting himself?’
    â€˜It’s the sirens,’ said Dexter. ‘They