Chapter before the penultimate one

Virginia knew she would have to cheat a bit, where the similitudes were concerned. There was insufficient time to make them each from scratch. She would have to cast a standard male and a standard female body, then spend the day working on the faces. But the trouble was they were going to have to be small, she wouldn’t be able to fit full, doll size models in her bag or carry a pan big enough to burn them in with the other ingredients. She would have to make dolls’ house size effigies.

Virginia’s boy had become a physicist and computer nerd, and not followed his artistic instincts as a career, but he spent so much time at work glued to a computer screen that he had continued his sculpting and drawing as a hobby, rather than gaming all evening and every weekend.

Virginia went into his room and started to collect together the materials she would need and to find the roll of miniature sculpting tools. At first, she was at a loss to find the things she needed and felt guilty trespassing among her son’s possessions. But time was running out. She opened the left-hand cupboard of the wardrobe; it was the one which had been in her bedroom at Kineburn. And there, on the shelf where Virginia had once put a pair of long, black satin evening gloves and suffered dreadful nightmares as a result of that action, was the roll of sculpting tools and behind it, a whole set of ready-made, tiny wax figures. Virginia could not believe her luck. These would do, and she had plenty of time to get to work. She took them out and examined them carefully, in the light. These were not simply blanks, ready to get to work on. They were the real thing. Each already represented the very bastards unto whom Virginia wished to cause harm.

So her boy wasn’t such a Daddy’s boy after all. He had done a really good, detailed job, as if he were going to cast the wax models in bronze. She examined the smug look on the face of one particular female, who was never out of the news, and laughed out loud, at the half frog, Utter Bastard In Chief, who looked as if he were sucking a pickled lemon and the other one who looked like what he was, a serpent, or Count Dracula. The members of the judiciary were obvious by their wigs but Little Big Wig looked nice, rather like Virginia’s mother in a way. Virginia found she had tears in her eyes. She hated being disappointed in God and nature. She trusted God to do his work properly, to make life easier for his people, that they might judge each other. But then she remembered John telling us not to judge lest we be judged and thought, “Sod it. Our human relationships on earth are dependent on us being able to judge each other and in order to do so we must be able to spot a bastard over a country mile. Bastards ought to look like bastards. God had no right to make life difficult by making the chief judge who has the supposed right to judge, granted by Her Majesty who is anointed by God, look decent.” But then perhaps she was just a pawn. Gerald Warner and others had easily found out the flaws in the supposed reasoning behind her overthrowal of the monarchy. She had been used, possibly, because she did look decent and her vanity had allowed that usage. Virginia felt something stir in the undergrowth of her conscience.

So would Virginia have the cheek to steal her son’s careful work? Yes, she considered there could have been only one reason to make the things in the first place and the preservation of democracy she had decided depended on it. At the back of the same shelf was a sketchbook. Here again Virginia had hit the jackpot. Her boy had inherited her own father’s skill at portraiture, but something about the scientific part of his mind, his close attention to detail had made his pictures even more useful for her purposes. These were not artistic portraits where the character was somehow depicted with broad strokes and less attention paid to the minutiae of detail. These were exact studies.

Now Virginia had the rest of the day in front of her, it would not be necessary to spend the day in drawing or model making. She would have to do something neutral. She decided she would play her violin. Music had its own narrative, she would play pieces which required concentration, rather than things she knew well. Work at something taxing which yet would allow her to make progress. To that end she began to rummage through the shelves of violin music in the cupboard of a regency sideboard. Picking new music was always a task Virginia found daunting. She could never tell how easy anything would be to get the gist of, by reading it through in her mind. She wasn’t sure why it was so much easier to get the gist of things so easily when one had listened to someone else, playing them, but it was. Why, when one could sight read, did sight reading not convey enough of a message to the mind? Or at least to Virginia’s mind. Was it something to do with the nature of prayer? God understood music as prayer, Virginia had decided. Writing it down was the way a composer made his prayer public. It was only necessary for it to appear in the form of notation in order that the conscious mind of one human being could convey it to another, but the task of decoding the music as it appeared as a written message got in the way of the music itself, which was not meant to be decoded, but meant to go straight into the brains of the composer’s fellow men as sound and straight up to God as prayer. If music were words there would be no need to have someone else read them aloud, in order to fully comprehend them, because words were only intended to be words, they did what they said on the tin. Music was meant to convey sound so there was some kind of logic in the need to hear it as sound to fully comprehend the message it contained in its form as notes on the stave. It was not surprising, therefore that God did sprinkle the earth with a few people who were ‘super sight readers’, otherwise the beauty of the messages in the music would be lost as it had been lost before notation. But failing to read music perfectly and having to screech about to find the high notes and often stop to count up the number of ledger lines always felt like failure. On the other hand Virginia could play by ear pretty well, so that music in its written form was not really necessary to her. And she could improvise in the style of Shostakovich, or play variations on Hebrew sounding melodies.

Virginia had never considered her violin playing to be one of her obsessions, perhaps this was why she had never really progressed with it as an adult.

After a while Virginia decided to work on the slow movement of the Khachaturian concerto, she had long known and loved, but never mastered. It was just about within her ability. But it was so many weeks since Virginia had played that her back was soon aching, her left arm drooping and her fingers stiff. She would have to put a sock in it and rest, or she would be in no fit state for her night’s work.

She climbed the stairs and Phoebe climbed after her and they both lay down on the bed, Virginia with her iPad, to search for maddening news and comments in the online editions of the papers.

But before long she was asleep.

She dreamed her soul was up beside the long, curved, wooden curtain pole which fitted around the huge bow window, in her bedroom. And that she was looking down on her sleeping body on the bed, beside the dog. Nick was in the room, ironing a shirt, getting ready for work. He must have finished his project and be back in England. Virginia saw that out of the window it was late spring, the colours of the leaves were bright green and the copper beech was just fully open. The radio seemed to be on Radio 4, which it had not been in reality for almost four years. And Virginia listened as the news readers announced the Government’s plans to end the Fixed Term Parliament Act, reform the House of Lords, return the Supreme Court to the Lords where it had always been before the Blair nonsense, and to bring an end to the ‘zero carbon by 2050’ targets which had been set by Mrs May. Yet all the time she listened to the glorious news, the slow, sad, haunting refrain of the Khachaturian violin concerto she had been playing, swirled around the furniture and the chandelier and the plasterwork. What was it telling her? What prayer had she been sending out in code via the music as she had played?

On waking, Virginia realised her mind had invented this lovely vision of the future to spur her on, to make the effort required to get the people who were holding the country back out of the way. But she also knew it was mostly an idle fantasy, even though it was one a great majority of people in the country would like to see become reality. What was true was that once the nation was a sovereign state again, governed by a parliamentary democracy, the Government would still be made up of self-serving, arrogant people who only wanted to feather their own nests and give jobs to the boys. Virginia didn’t think she had the energy to carry on dealing with all of them, for the next forty years. Perhaps the significance of the Khachaturian coming back to her in her dream was not to do with the music as prayer, but about the nature of the way the composer himself had lived out his life under Soviet authoritarianism. He had been denounced for a short time, but then taken up again, he had coped, written beautiful and interesting music, done his thing in the teeth of all that was awful about the Communist set up and with the aid of what it was just about possible to consider must have also been good about it, though it went against Virginia’s grain. This is what most people had to do, in most systems, governments could not be allowed to make people miserable all the time, their influence must be held at a distance. Ordinary people were entitled to democracy and to choose the people who made the laws which affected their lives directly, but they must set about living their lives to the best of their ability, come what may. But then again Jacob Rees Mogg had promised an election would bring a return to democratic normality. She trusted Jacob,for all he had not been clever enough to spot the devilry of his enemies. And she didn’t want her neighbours to just have to put up with things and to keep buggering on in the face of the antidemocratic state, she wanted to follow Christ’s second commandment, as long as one didn’t have to speak to one’s neighbours too much. Oh, but that was the old man in general, not men in particular thing wasn’t it? No good old girl!

Virginia made herself a cup of tea and drank it with her back against the Aga. Really she should have made a start on the Christmas cake and Christmas puddings today. But her heart was not in it. She would take Phoebe for a short walk then collect together the other items she would need for her night’s work.