Free Cat With a Fiddle (9781101578902) by Lydia Adamson

and climbed the stairs, an outdated issue of
Opera News
tucked under his arm. This was my cue, my chance.
    I lingered downstairs another ten minutes or so and then, surrendering Lulu to her rightful mistress, I too went up.
    Mathew’s door was ajar and there was a light on. I knocked gently and immediately heard his friendly, “Come on in.”
    I closed the door behind me. He was lying across the bed, still fully clothed, his hands clasped behind his head.
    â€œI’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “Might I talk to you for a few minutes?”
    â€œOf course,” he said. “Sit down.” He smiled pleasantly at me, but as I was lowering myself into the straight-backed chair nearby, it was as though he were suddenly gripped by panic. He sat straight up. “There’s nothing wrong, is there?”
    â€œNo, no. We’re all fine.”
    I had to play this carefully, remembering to act the naïf.
    â€œThis is probably a very bad time to ask what I’m going to ask you,” I began haltingly, “but I’ll be going home shortly, and something Beth told me is so . . . interesting . . . that I just want to know a little more about it. I guess I could ask her, but . . . well, you know what shape she’s in . . . ”
    â€œWhy don’t you just ask?” he said. “Go ahead.”
    â€œOkay, I will. You see, Beth told me the quartet’s here on a spiritual retreat, which is a little difficult to understand. Because these women are . . . well, professionals. They aren’t some church basement group on the run from a few bad notices in the European press.”
    â€œHmm.” He nodded. “Well, you couldn’t be more right about their professionalism. But the truth is that I did bring us up here for a kind of spiritual renewal. Not to sound too hocus-pocus about it—I mean, I don’t consider myself a guru or anything.
    â€œBut those reviews really
killed
us. It was quite a comedown after almost two decades of being one of the premier string quartets in the world—and they particularly loved us abroad.
    â€œI guess Beth told you about the going over they gave us.”
    â€œYes, she did,” I said. “I was sorry to hear it.”
    â€œLet me tell you, it was brutal. Brutal! But you know, all that claptrap about our having lost our communal passion hit home in a strange way. The mesh was gone, and we knew it. And I knew we had to do something to get our chops back. It’s been rough on everybody lately, but I had to do something.”
    There was a long silence. He unclasped his hands then and swung his feet around to the floor, staring hard at me as if trying to determine whether I understood the danger confronting the Riverside Quartet.
    His voice became even more animated. “I
had
to do something for these women—my friends, my . . . It occurred to me to bring everybody all together in a kind of naked state, if you’ll pardon the expression. To get at those things that seem to be tearing at us. And to make some sort of . . . primary contact with each other again. The way we once were. Friends. Comrades. What have you.”
    He stood up suddenly and brought the fist of one hand violently into the palm of the other. The movement startled me, and I sat back hard in my chair.
    â€œBut it was all a fantasy,” Mat said bitterly. “Not only did I fail to pull everybody together—look at the horror that’s happened up here. Will is dead. It was futile from the very beginning. All my fault. I had forgotten the way great string quartets are made. I guess I just . . . forgot.”
    He sat down, calmer now. “You don’t know what the hell I’m talking about now, do you?”
    â€œNot really,” I said.
    â€œI’ll try to explain. See, it used to be that groups like ours—chamber music groups,