4

MARY CONSULTED HER parents-in-law one evening when David was out of the way. They listened with serious faces.

‘What does David think?’ Horace Blackwall asked. ‘I take it you’ve talked this over with him.’

‘Yes. He told me to ask you.’

‘But what was his opinion?’

‘That I should take my chance if I wanted to.’

The three then sat silent, Horace fidgeting unusually. His wife passed him a bowl of fruit, a plate and a knife, and he looked at her affronted. Joan seemed amused, superior, as if she had the answer ready if they called on her. He waved the dessert away, changed his mind, pared an apple, trying to remove the peel in one strip, failing. Now he quartered it, cut out the core.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ he told Mary provisionally, baring his false teeth for a first bite.

The girl was prepared to wait.

‘Do you want to go?’ Joan asked suddenly.

‘I’m torn.’

‘That means you do,’ Joan pronounced.

‘Not of necessity,’ said Horace, apple to lips.

‘No dear.’ Sweet sarcasm.

The women tittered, and Horace relaxed, waving the bitten fruit to indicate that once he had cleared his mouth, he’d sound off again.

‘Tell us,’ he began. Immediately his wife whistled the witches’ duet from Dido: ‘Tell us, tell us, how shall this be done?’ The tone had impudent clarity, though Horace did not recognize the reference. Joan and Mary smiled at each other; he frowned. ‘I don’t know what you two are giggling about.’

Mary, now straight-faced, explained that she did not want to leave David, that she was enjoying her job, her house, her spare time.

‘All that will have to go,’ he said. ‘I see that. But what about the other hand?’

Again, soberly, Mary expounded Elizabeth Falconer’s scheme. They listened intently, but Horace’s right leg, cocked over the left, was kicking.

‘I know nothing about these things,’ he said, ‘but it all sounds rather vague.’

‘So it is,’ she admitted. ‘And until I give my agents the go-ahead, it will remain so.’

‘Remain so.’ He repeated the two words softly, criticizing the phraseology, which raised the matter from sense to specious debate.

‘Nobody can tell me anything, or promise me anything specific. Not as yet.’

‘That sounds as if you commit yourself, and then leave the terms to them.’

‘I needn’t sign the contracts.’ She glanced at her father-in-law. ‘You don’t like the look of it, do you?’

‘I know nothing about it, Mary. But don’t get it into your head that I’m writing it off as unbusinesslike. Even in my line, one has to put feelers out sometimes, expose oneself to danger before anything can happen. I understand that well enough. But one has to be sure that if there’s half a chance of a deal, one wants it, one’s ready to exert oneself and that the signed agreement will be checked.’

Joan made wordless noises, of doubt or disparagement. Her husband pulled his half-glasses even farther down his nose.

‘It must be exciting,’ the mother said.

‘In a way. Yes.’

‘I should go, then.’

Mary, suspicious, did not immediately answer.

‘I thought,’ she began, ‘that you would say I shouldn’t leave David, that my place was with him.’

‘Not these days. The woman’s career is as important as the man’s. A good number of young people live apart.’

‘But is that marriage?’

‘Goodness knows what marriage is, or means,’ Joan answered. ‘But if it stops you doing something important for yourself, then I don’t approve of it.’

Horace spluttered.

They discussed the few facts they had, skirmished round the effect on David’s character, before both parents agreed that if the American venture was what she wanted, then she should go.

‘Don’t you want to talk to David first?’ she asked them.

‘By no means.’ Horace, benign. ‘You do the talking with him.’

She reported this to her husband, and at her insistence they tramped over the grounds of argument again.

‘That’s it,’ he decided an hour and a half later. ‘You must go.’ He jumped up to open a bottle of dry sherry. ‘To success,’ he toasted her.

‘I don’t know, David. I don’t know.’

They made love to rescue them from fright, and next day Mary rang Liz Falconer.

In fact, it took three days to reach the singer, who heard the decision calmly, instructing her to inform her agent. She showed not much concern, and no understanding of Mary’s dilemma. Rather sharply she advised her protégée to get back to serious practice, and at once.

‘There are no decent teachers about here. Start taking consultation lessons with Peter Reddaway. You could go up to London each Saturday.’

Mary, quite dashed, told her husband she’d a good mind to pack it all in.

‘She’d no idea,’ she complained, ‘how I felt.’

‘Why should she have? You’ve got out of the habit of taking risks.’

Furious, she turned on him, snarled her fear. He was so unresponsive that she burst into tears. He took her in his arms.

‘There’ll be as many rotten things as good. You know that. You’ll have to get used to it.’ He kissed her. ‘The hard nut.’ She smiled, gushed again into tears, clung madly round his neck.

Mark Wentmeyer, her agent, rang after a week and arranged to see her in London. She could combine this with her first lesson at Reddaway’s studios. Mark had talked to Liz Falconer’s agent, and they had cobbled a scheme together that was worth looking over.

‘Cobbled?’ she asked.

Mary was to go over to the States in the middle of January where she would join an ad hoc opera company for a two months’ universities’ tour as a trial for employment when Falconer arrived in April.

‘And the advantages?’

‘You’ll be there. You’ll be known. You’ll be in full practice in case they want to audition you again. This whole thing of Falconer’s is a mystery. She won’t stay for long, because she’ll be in Bayreuth all summer. It’s a short season, mainly Mozart, some chance of Purcell. She’s taking the opportunity to get you in on the circuit, Harold says. After that, it’s up to you.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘Two things. It’s a marvellous chance for you, if it comes off. This university opera’s a new affair, but strongly backed. Ulrich Fenster’s chief conductor the two months you’ll be engaged, and he’s on the up and up, if anybody is. And the producer they hope for is a real notable. Redvers Gage. If they get him. The payment’s nothing to write home about, but I’m working on that.’

‘You’d advise me to go?’

‘Yes. Provisionally. But I’ll know more about it by the time you come up to see me.’

David did not accompany her on the first trip to London, where Peter Reddaway heard her sing and suggested that she would need a fuller voice if she were to make a success of the American trip. He outlined a set of exercises, all of which she had heard before, ran through a song or two with her, and dismissed her on the hour. Disappointed that she had not discerned in him one iota of enthusiasm for her talents, her performance or her personality, she suspected that he had other pupils better than she who lacked the influential connections to put them on the American circuit. He even appeared loath to give her a lesson each week.

At her agent’s office, she voiced these doubts to Mark Wentmeyer.

‘Peter’s a good teacher,’ he said, ‘but he might not suit you. Work as hard as you can for him, and . . .’

‘But he was so dull.’

‘He’s had too much success. He was only very moderate himself as a singer, but a good musician. I thought he’d do better as a conductor. But in the past fifteen years he’s had some marvellous pupils.’

‘Did he teach Elizabeth?’

‘He did. She still goes to him. Or that’s the story.’ Wentmeyer patted her arm. ‘He’s now of the opinion that one needs only to stand in his presence and improvement begins. But he can teach once he puts his mind to it.’

Mark looked pleased, expansive. He proposed that he’d tell her what he knew about the American company and that they would then discuss the plan of campaign over lunch. He must be enthusiastic, she concluded, in that she’d never eaten before at his expense.

An American tycoon had left money, a great deal, to be spent for the betterment of opera and opera singing. ‘Now, you know what opera’s like,’ Mark’s eyes twinkled; ‘you can spend a fortune just looking for a suitable theatre, never mind putting one singer unaccompanied on stage. So the trustees, lawyers, an impresario and academic musicians, five all told, decided to set up this company, to perform short seasons of early operas over the next six years, Dido, Venus and Adonis, Semele, Locke’s Cupid and Death, perhaps the Incoronazione di Poppea, round university campuses and towns. It’ll cost a bomb, but even if it doesn’t show much success commercially, they hope to raise funds, and it’ll provide employment for orchestral musicians and promising young singers. The scenery’s some simple marvel to be made by the plastic arts department at NYS, and the Met and the professional theatre have lent some costumes, a sure sign they’re not threatened. The conductor’ll mainly be this young man called Fenster, who’s said to be good. They haven’t nobbled Gage yet.’

‘And where do I come in?’ she asked after further long explanations.

‘That’s it really. That’s the baffler. Lizzie’s leaned on somebody. There are always wheels within wheels, even in a charitable concern like this, people doing themselves a bit of good, and I guess Lizzie Falconer’s short season across there was always touch and go, and so she could demand your inclusion. That’s how it is.’

‘You don’t say a word about merit,’ she objected.

‘There’s plenty of that about. If that were the only criterion we could mount a dozen times the number of operas and still leave good singers unemployed.’

‘So it’s nepotism or nothing.’

‘Don’t get that into your head. They’ll slide you out quick enough if they don’t think much of you.’

‘Don’t you think,’ she asked, ‘I’m taking a risk? Putting my head on the block?’

‘No doubt of it.’ He roared with good-natured laughter.

‘What should I prepare?’ she asked.

‘Get yourself copies of the things they’re doing and be ready to sing any part that lies between middle C and C in alt.’

‘That’s not sensible.’

‘I know. I know. But you’re in with this, and . . .’

‘Isn’t it possible that they’re waiting for me to arrive and then they’ll find some excuse to push me out, or make me resign? Since I’ve been foisted on them?’

‘Three-quarters of the singers have been foisted, as you call it,’ Wentmeyer argued. ‘It does no good to think about it in that way. Ulrich Fenster will listen to what he’s got when he starts his preparation. Time’s going to be short, I guess. He’ll want you to pick up parts in a hurry. That’s why I say, “Be ready”. You’ve plenty going for you: looks, a good voice, an English accent, and, not least, Lizzie Falconer’s backing. Come on, girl. God knows where this may lead you.’

‘Away from my husband.’

‘If you get into the big league you’ll be able to afford to tote him around with you, and get tax-relief on him as your consultant for historical research.’

Mary enjoyed the lunch because she realized that Wentmeyer saw advantage in his contact with the Falconer agents and the American end; he’d take something out of this for himself in any case, but it would do him no harm if she made a good showing. They laughed; he was excellent company; the wine calmed her trepidation and he covered his lack of information by bursts of praise.

‘You’ve actually sung with Falconer,’ he said, ‘and so well that she’s recommending you about the world. There won’t be too many of them in that position.’

‘If not her, somebody else.’

‘There aren’t too many Falconers, I’ll tell you. And they don’t fall over themselves to give a lift up to rivals.’

‘You think over what you’ve just said,’ Mary answered him. ‘She only praises those who are no good, and won’t stand in her way.’

‘You won’t be a Falconer. Ever, ever.’ He laughed, his small beard flashing, his hair bouncing about his ears. ‘And to the best of my knowledge you’re the only one she’s done anything for. Or taken the initiative over. “Oh, Mary, this London’s a wonderful sight”.’

She returned in euphoria, but the mood changed swiftly, darkly enough.

‘I don’t want to go, David,’ she wailed, clinging.

‘You do.’

‘It’s ridiculous. I’ve a job and a home and a husband I love. When I get over there I’ll make a hash of it, and come back with my tail between my legs. I’m a fool, David. Don’t let me go.’

He hugged her.

‘If I stopped you from going,’ he told her in her calmer moments, ‘you’d never forgive me.’

She eyed him then.

‘Sometimes you’re a wise man,’ she said.

‘Yes, but not often.’

They laughed, embraced, with more than a month to go.

Mary worked hard at voice production and her study of the operas. Twice a week they had dinner with the senior Blackwalls so she could practise for an hour or two with Joan as accompanist. The men were not allowed to listen.

‘Go and puff your cigars,’ she ordered them. Neither man smoked. ‘This is work in progress, not fit to be heard.’

‘I’d listen to you gargling,’ Horace told her.

She fell into a tête-à-tête with her father-in-law quite often, at work and at the weekends. He supported her powerfully.

‘I shouldn’t want you to go,’ he said. ‘Splitting up the partners of a new marriage is dangerous, but it has to be done in my sort of world. I know that. Neither shall I see much of you myself, and we shall miss you. Joan and I really like you.’

The voice ground out its sentences, impressing her.

At Christmas the departure seemed close enough to warrant a fervid gaiety in the festivities. David played in a concert or two, conducted a makeshift Messiah, and the pair attended parties, where she deliberately stayed sober.

‘I’m going to drive you back,’ she told her husband, who had drunk sufficiently to stroke her buttocks in public. She did not care; she needed all the reassurance she could find. ‘I didn’t know it would knock me about like this,’ she would confess, ‘or I wouldn’t have taken it on.’

‘You’ll be as right as rain once you’re there.’

‘And you?’

‘I shall have to grin and abide.’

‘Does that appeal then?’

‘It does not.’

‘Where’s your puritan ethic?’ she mocked.

Her own unease was demonstrated by her complaints about the lessons with Peter Reddaway.

‘He’s an egomaniac,’ she told her husband. ‘Everlastingly demonstrating what he can do. I hate wasting the whole of a Saturday going to London just to hear him boast. I learn as much from your mother in ten minutes as I do from my hour with him.’

‘Give it up, then.’

‘I may need him later. And it does keep me singing.’

‘Joan would do that.’

‘I know. But he’s the outside world. I pit my arrogance against his. I’ve got to learn to be the sort of bighead he is.’

‘Oh, dear.’

David dreaded the tension in his wife’s lips, the dark round her eyes.

No word came from the agent; whenever they rang he’d heard nothing, not even the place to which she had to report for rehearsals.

‘Really,’ Mary argued, ‘they must know by now.’

‘I’m not sure about that. This is the initial shot at a one-off, experimental affair, and though I guess that the first few ports of call are fixed, in fact, I’m certain they are, the venue for the preliminary rehearsals will be a matter for negotiation. They’ll rehearse in some school hall or barn or something.’

‘You make it sound very attractive, I must say.’

‘This is something out of the ordinary run of things.’

‘So I shall be living in a tent?’

‘Oh, no. But they’ll be collecting their wits. Honestly. There’ll be a fortnight’s intensive chaos after which you’ll be fit to sing at Bayreuth. This boy Gage is terror, they tell me, but he won’t mind if you rehearse in the street.’

‘Find something out, will you?’

‘I’ll ring my New York end and instigate inquiries.’ His jokey choice and stress of words did nothing to allay anxiety, any more than the blank silence which followed.

A week before her departure she sang Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben at a charity gathering with Joan Blackwall as her accompanist. This had been half-arranged for six months, then seemingly forgotten and revived just before Christmas. Mary complained bitterly, but she knew the songs well enough; David remembered her singing them at the Royal College, and she had looked them through carefully enough once this performance had been mooted.

Joan, out of character, was uncertain even of the place at which they were to appear.

‘This is the story of my life,’ Mary said in public, laughing. ‘Plenty to sing, but no idea where,’ and to David, ‘I can’t understand your mother. She must be off her head.’ He understood the desperation of the statement.

The chosen venue turned out to be an Edwardian mansion in the park, the town house of a business magnate. The event was for cancer research; Mary sang and a violinist played a Tartini sonata. For the rest, drinks were served, raffle tickets and donated gifts sold, one or two competitive paper games were played and for this people paid good money, and promised more. The uncertainty about this happening was due to an enormous sale of expensive tickets by an energetic couple who had access to radio and newspaper publicity, and who found that they could not cram in the expected crowd and had to look at short notice for a larger space. They were never despondent, because they knew exactly what it was that they were after: a huge private house, preferably owned by somebody of note. Through friends they worked on Sir Harold Fitch, the managing director of a pharmaceutical complex, who opened his grandee’s palace, Kenilworth, for the evening.

David bought a ticket, five pounds for admission only and the opportunity to purchase expensive alcohol. A television announcer auctioned toys, and then pretty trinkets. People talked at the tops of their voices, drank and seemed pleased with themselves. Many of the men wore evening dress as they wandered about the four large reception rooms and the foyer at their disposal; wives sounded as satisfied, as flashbulbs registered promised appearances in future issues of the local snob magazines if not the national. Nothing happened quickly; it took an age to dragoon an audience into the right place for the fiddler, and even as he played the voices at bars in the distance interrupted his powerful flow.

Mary did not sing until after ten o’clock; David thought that by that time the drink-happy audience would never assemble itself, but by 10.10 the concert hall was packed, more standing than sitting as the television personality silenced all clamour, David admired the man’s iron charm, to announce Miss Mary Stiles, who next week was to make her American debut in opera, and whom they were lucky to have persuaded here tonight, but who out of her magnificently large generosity had put aside other commitments to sing these eight songs which he would paraphrase. They must offer her a fit welcome. They did. And her accompanist, Miss Joan Blake, formerly of the Royal Academy of Music, London. The announcer straightened his face.

Mary’s entrance stunned her husband, though earlier he had watched her dress.

She had chosen white, which she wore with stately beauty, enhanced by the pallor of her face, the dark short shining curls. As she bowed, she smiled diffidently, but to them all, on the rows of chairs or behind a pillar, glass in hand. Her mother-in-law, trailing her, looked what she was, a well-to-do provincial lady in her best dress, who had been wrongly convinced by some back-street coiffeuse that a confection of grey waves would add to her attraction. Her turn would come, at least for the few listening to Schumann rather than Mary, when her fingers touched the keyboard.

In the earlier songs Mary Blackwall stood radiantly, her voice vivid with delighted love, the freshness of attraction, the brilliancy. The practice of the last weeks had provided power, and Schumann’s melody compelled the audience, enlivening bodies to the fingertips, setting them on the edge of expectation in ‘Er, der Herrlichste von allen’. The room, jammed tight, with heads at all angles, the colours of dresses clashing or blending with the darkness of men’s suits or the blackness of tall windows, seethed with excitement, David thought, so that people lost themselves in the genius of new love, marriage, childbirth and finally in the sustained sorrow of death. He said as much to his father later, and the old man nodded, at this mystery, life’s passing, its bright fixing by this young man under womanly guise and voice, but David noted that as the audience walked out they spoke of gin, raffle tickets, chiropodists. That perhaps did not matter, he decided, in that for some minutes ordinary people had been allowed to climb, levitate above everyday concerns.

Mary herself, swamped with congratulation, surrounded by admirers, had lost the supple beauty she commanded on stage, had replaced it by a stiller, more composed version. She shook hands, said the right thing, charmed but stood away. For the first time she convinced her husband that her success in America was assured, that she had the social strengths to complement the musical. This sudden confidence warmed him, stiffened him, made it clear that he had done right in encouraging her to go. And yet in this paradigm he barely recognized the wife he had married.

‘Are you tired?’ he asked. ‘Do you want to go home?’ He had finally got near enough to speak.

‘No, not yet.’

She enjoyed every second of her triumph, grew larger with it, picturesque.

‘Well, what do you think of that, then?’ Horace Blackwall had taken his son aside.

‘She sang beautifully. She really did. She’s a different woman from what she was three months ago.’

‘Oh? How?’

‘Her voice has come on since she started practising Dido. I didn’t think it possible. The change is extraordinary.’

‘You said “a different woman”.’

‘That’s right. It, musical enlargement, can’t help altering the personality.’

‘So if she becomes a big star . . .?’

‘I don’t think that’s possible. She’ll never have Liz Falconer’s tremendous vocal equipment. Or, at least, I don’t think so. She’ll improve, but not in that . . .’

‘You’re not sure, are you?’ Horace snapped his false teeth together.

‘Tolerably.’

‘Tolerably.’ Horace mocked his intonation. ‘Are you frightened she will?’

‘Not frightened, no.’ He answered the fool according to his folly. ‘I hardly consider that. I don’t like the idea of her leaving me.’

‘I see.’

His father patted his shoulder in comfort, an awkward, dry movement, though David, once he was able to dissociate it from the dark-coated stick figure, saw it for what it was, and felt warmed.

‘Joan played absolutely beautifully,’ he said in return.

‘Yes.’ Horace brushed his chin. ‘She could have made her way as a professional.’

‘Did she want to?’

‘I don’t know. She played a great deal after we were married, in good amateur circles. At least until you were born. Even then she kept her practice up.’

‘Do you think . . .?’

‘Go on.’ Horace rebuked his son’s hesitation. Truth bettered tact in his view.

‘Has she regretted it?’

‘I’d think so. Sometimes. She doesn’t say much. She’s a remarkable woman, your mother. There’ll be days when she’s sorry she didn’t take her chance. Just as she might have envied those with stable family lives and comfort if she’d been flitting about the world. Nobody’s ever satisfied.’

‘And has Mary’s trip opened it up again?’ David pursued.

‘It hasn’t crossed my mind, but then I’m a selfish devil, as well you know.’

Joan Blackwall crossed towards them.

‘Now, then, you two.’ She smiled, lifted out of herself by the occasion, younger than her years. ‘What are you so serious about?’

‘David’s wondering if you ever regret not having a professional career in music.’

A stab of anger reddened the son’s face. Joan pursed her lips, lifted her eyes to a large Victorian painting of The Eve of the Flood. The sky stretched blood-streaked as an illustration in a textbook of anatomy over a diminutive ark and Noah’s dwarfed family. She seemed faintly amused.

‘You played marvellously well tonight,’ David said.

‘We’ve done quite a bit together these last few weeks. It helps.’

‘You have the hands,’ he answered.

‘Thanks.’ Now she touched him, but more lightly than her husband, more prosaically, as if she were about to straighten his jacket. ‘I enjoyed it. She really has come on. I have to open up to keep with her.’ She had returned to her scrutiny of Linnell’s liverish clouds. ‘She was superb.’ An ecstatic whisper now changed to mundane power. ‘This other thing. Because Mary’s going to America, you think . . .? You think . . .?’ Another trailing away as if sense could not be exactly conveyed or attempted.

‘He wonders,’ Horace’s voice croaked, ‘if it’s made you regret you never took your chance.’

She considered that, much at ease.

‘No. Not really. A professional life’s awful. You know that, David. All the air travel and hotel rooms and being pleasant to the world. And that’s when you’re outstandingly good. Otherwise you’re sitting at home fretting yourself to death that no engagements are coming your way. No. I did the best thing by letting your father make the money.’

Her son looked over to where a group of men surrounded his wife, whose face seemed alight.

‘But you played like an angel,’ David said.

‘There’ll be five or six hundred people in this country who’d do it as well given the practice I had. Oh, I did it respectably, I grant you. But I’m in no way unique.’

‘I married an honest woman,’ Horace said.

‘Is that good?’

‘I do think he’s beginning to learn,’ Joan gibed.

‘But what?’ Horace.

They all laughed, insecurely, but joined the social round, chattered until the early hours, imagining they enjoyed themselves.