THE HOUSE STRUCK cold, damp. Though he had washed the dishes, the unshaken cloth still covered the breakfast table. He turned on the heating, searched through a muddle of old letters to find that he had one airmail form. That evening the Trent Quartet were rehearsing from seven o’clock since Wilkinson had been away with his family and would not be back for the morning meeting. In the hour or two at his disposal he would write. He tore scrap paper from an exercise book for a first draft.
My dear Mary,
I write today because I’ve heard nothing from you. Your mother and father gave me a résumé of your letter to them. They did not show it to me, and as far as I could make out you did not give them any explanation except to say that you had fallen in love with your producer. Perhaps that is explanation enough. You can well imagine the effect on me; I was shattered. During the time of your long silence, I had imagined for myself all the bad reasons why you did not write, but that had not protected me from the blow when it landed. I don’t want to make a performance of it here, because I can see whether I say little or much I shall seem feeble, but I can tell you that I felt as if life wasn’t worth going on with. It’s easy enough for someone to write that, but in this case it’s the truth. I’ve done my best to make myself not give up, to keep busy.
When your parents told me, I expected some word from you, that, at least, you would let me know what you thought or felt. Instead the same cruel silence. I don’t know why this is. I don’t understand it at all. But the one or two people I’ve spoken to about your decision have said the same thing: ‘It’s not like Mary.’
I don’t really know what to write because I don’t know where or even who I am. It’s as if all the rules I’ve worked by have been kicked away. Though I feel bitter, I hope you are happy in what you are doing. If you decide to return, I’m still here. [How was he to finish? With love? Yours? He wrote his name clearly, even on the rough copy.] David.
He looked it through, reading it with care, counting the alterations. There were sixteen. It did not say what he wanted, nor was it impressive. He walked into the kitchen to make a pot of tea, for this two hundred odd words with long blank pauses had taken an hour to write. Did his letter make it clear to her that she had acted meanly? He had not managed that, he thought, but the thing, ugh, said roughly all that was to be said. ‘I am devastated; you owe me an explanation; I will take you back.’ The last sentence of his letter was unclear, but again it reflected his own difficulties, ambivalence. He made the tea, sat sipping it scalding hot, both dull and desperate. He rose, washed out his fountain pen, filled it and copied the letter on to the airmail form, addressing it in block capitals. Snatching up his jacket he rushed along the street to the postbox, so that the message would be on its way by 7.30 tomorrow, Monday morning. On the slower walk back, he felt slightly relieved that the matter had been taken out of his hands, but indoors he had no inclination or energy to spend time on preparation for the evening’s rehearsal.
Realizing that he had sat wasting half an hour, his mind a chaos of unfocused, unpleasant shifts, he rang his mother to tell her he had written the letter.
‘I’m glad,’ Joan answered. ‘What did you say?’
‘I’ve kept a copy.’ He read it to her.
‘That’s good,’ she said unenthusiastically. ‘It’s pretty much the same as we wrote.’ She hummed to herself, perhaps preventing an interruption. ‘Will you read those last two sentences again?’ He complied. ‘That means you’ll have her back, if she wants it?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘It’s not exactly clear.’
‘No.’ He spoke sharply. ‘I’m not clear myself.’
‘You don’t mean it?’
‘I don’t expect her to come back. She’s made up her mind. She’ll be adamant.’
‘David,’ his mother spoke after a long gap, ‘are you sure there was nothing wrong between you?’
‘I’m not sure of anything now, I can tell you. But I hadn’t noticed. Perhaps that’s a judgement on me. Now I think back to it, and in view of what’s happened, it’s quite likely she was worried and frustrated when she thought she could have been travelling about the country from one engagement to another. But I’ll say this for her, she didn’t make a big thing of it. Of course, there was Dido; that meant going over to Falconer’s and meeting Falconer’s coach once or twice, and then she practised with you.’ He blew his breath out histrionically. ‘But as soon as she got to the States and among other professionals, it may have churned it all up again. I don’t know. Did you ever feel deprived?’
‘Often enough.’
‘And didn’t you want to get on with your career?’
‘Yes.’ He guessed his mother was smiling. ‘I had depressions and fearful headaches.’
‘But you didn’t do anything about it?’
‘No. I remember one offer I had from James Selkirk. He wanted me, or he and his agent did, to join him to play four hands, two pianos.’
‘You turned it down?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he asked someone else?’
‘I don’t know. He made his own way as a solo pianist.’
‘I’ve never heard of him. Where is he now?’
‘He’s professor or principal of some academy in Canada. I’m not sure.’
‘And were you torn?’
‘What do you think?’
‘And what did Dad say? Or didn’t he know anything about it?’
‘He said,’ each word fell separately, pearly clear, ‘that I must make the decision and that he was willing to support me whichever way I chose.’
‘Did he mean it?’ David said sourly.
‘As far as I know, yes. In fact, I’m certain he did.’
‘But you didn’t take him up on it?’
‘No. Your father was very busy. He’d begun to expand the firm when he came out of the army and at that time he was making really large changes. He terrified his father, who was a good old-fashioned businessman, very very cautious. Your grandfather wasn’t old, he’d be middle fifties at this time, but he was just aghast at what was happening. He could see every penny he’d made being lost. And he fought your father. “Horace is a gambler,” he told me. “He’s no sense of proportion.” But Daddy didn’t give in, and his father lived long enough to see himself very rich.’
‘And so?’
‘He needed me. I didn’t understand it very clearly, I admit. He was out a great deal at all hours, and I was left on my own. I didn’t like it. I felt I came a poor second to his work. It made me angry. I thought he was selfish. I used to knock hell out of my piano. And I made him buy me a big concert Steinway in addition to the Bechstein.’
‘But don’t you ever regret . . .?’
‘I did. Times without number. And it made me awkward and ill tempered. But then you arrived and by the time you were ready for school it was too late.’
‘Does it worry you now?’
‘No. I’m fifty. I’m also pretty certain that I wouldn’t have made it. One doesn’t know, because luck plays a part, and I can name one or two people who weren’t as good as I was who have done quite nicely, thank you. One other matter. Your father was a genius in his line, we tend to forget that, and he needed me at home with his apple pie or hot-water bottles. There you are.’
‘Interesting,’ he said in his dry, history-lesson voice. The use of the word ‘genius’ intrigued him. She had used it before of Gage.
‘Just one thing before this phone bill ruins you.’ Her tone darkened. ‘What about the child?’
‘What about it?’
‘You didn’t mention it in your letter.’
‘I take it she has got rid of it.’
‘I see.’
They did not speak for some little time, until David made his excuse and rang off. He found himself shivering, but took himself out to rehearsal.
Next day in school, as he crossed the yard from the music room to spend a busy free period, he felt a lightening of his spirits. He did not understand this, and it was not until the working day had finished and he sat over a cup of instant coffee in the common room half listening to two colleagues complaining about their mortgages that he realized why he was optimistic. The fact presented itself to him with a small jolt of pleasure that since he had now written to his wife he could expect an answer. He instructed himself warily that this was by no means certain and that the reply, if it came, might well be unacceptably disagreeable, but his brain or his body seemed immune to reason. He added his mite of contradictory information to the discussion, immediately staunching his colleagues’ flow. When he had finished his coffee, he went out smiling.
He remembered an episode earlier this academic year.
It must have been in October, and during one of his few lessons with the sixth form specialists, he dealt with economic history, they had questioned him about inflation, during the Tudor period, then earlier, to throw light on what was happening now. He encouraged these digressions, feeling that Dick Wilson made narrow medievalists of his pupils, lively, learned even, but not prepared to venture out beyond what the facts told. One could deduce, certainly, but within strict limits; Wilson had been heard to declare that his subject was history not prophecy or crystal-gazing.
David had argued with his students but had been more positive than his knowledge allowed, and when he came back to check found that one or two of his salient facts were wrong. Immediately he made a close note of corrections to be offered, and prepared a recantation.
So far, so good.
He had completed his research that evening, found himself incapable of sleep, was in black despair by the next day. He could not account for the strength of the feeling. It was not that the boys might report his errors to Wilson, who’d have no qualms in quashing them there and then and probably in animadverting on his colleague’s ignorance; the trouble rankled from the fact that he had been so badly wrong.
Mary, cheerful with the beginning of real rehearsal for Dido, and the first American hints, concerned herself with his gloom, probed so successfully that he, again out of character, confessed.
She was taken aback.
‘But you just made a few mistakes,’ she said mildly, ‘which you’ll put to rights.’
‘Mistakes I oughtn’t . . .’
‘We can’t know everything.’
‘This is a subject I’m supposed to be teaching. And worse, I was convinced that what I told them was correct. I misled myself.’
‘Yes. But you’ll get it right next time. I can see you’re a bit cross with yourself, and you’ll be more careful in future, but you’re taking it to heart as if you’ve ruined their careers or murdered their mothers.’
‘You don’t seem to see how . . .’
‘No, I don’t.’ She spoke sympathetically. ‘You’ve dropped a little clanger. It’s not the end of the world. Good God. When I think of some of the musical mayhem I’ve committed.’
‘You knew as soon as you’d made your mistakes. I didn’t. I thought I’d offered a logical case.’
‘David. David.’
By the next day his gloom began to lift, so that he could barely recall his agitation. When he took the history sixth again, they accepted his self-castigation, began to argue from the new facts, seemed in no way put out, took it all in their easy stride. He walked out of the period much relieved, whistling Mozart. Over the evening meal he reported the outcome to Mary, who, serving lamb casserole, brought out a bottle of red wine.
‘We’ll drink to scholarship,’ she said expansively.
‘Don’t know why I made such a fuss.’ He felt ashamed.
It was a week or two later that she confessed how frightened she had been.
‘I thought I kept these things to myself,’ he answered.
‘We know otherwise now.’
‘I really am sorry.’
He saw that these two days had disturbed her, perhaps because his own depression had been so powerful, and yet he could have sworn he’d done his best to make civil conversation, to help with the chores, to cover the shocked sense of inadequacy that tore him.
‘Let’s put it down to artistic temperament,’ she had said drily, dismissive, but he wondered now if the small episode had in some way altered her perspective on him, revealed that she had not married the steady helpmeet she had counted on.
The headmaster called him across the games field.
‘How are things with you, then?’ Reeve asked. The upper school, released for the last hour to watch athletic sports, milled round, scarfed against unseasonable cold. David, thanking him, murmured reassurance. ‘And how’s your wife? When is she due home?’
David shuddered, uncertain whether to confess. There would be no advantage; Reeve did not ask out of interest. The man vaguely recollected some fact, important or not, about a colleague, and made that the subject of his inquiries. He could as easily be asking about the purchase of a video machine or a set of golf clubs. David braced himself. The world would have to know, and before long; he’d make a start here.
‘She’s talking about not coming back,’ he said. Reeve looked vague, as though the start of house relays had distracted him from the sentence.
‘So Dick Wilson tells me.’
That jolted painfully. These two human shadows, interested only in their own small corner of unreality, had taken in information about him, remembered it, discussed it. David decided on silence.
‘What will you do, then?’
‘There’s nothing much I can do, is there?’
Coated spectators, tracksuited competitors passed both ways.
‘I don’t suppose there is,’ the headmaster whispered. ‘I don’t suppose there is.’ Reeve stroked his chin; his fingers looked red, bitten by the cold. ‘My wife was asking. Yes.’ A member of the maths department hovered three yards away for a word. ‘Sometimes I wonder what the world is coming too.’ He waved the mathematician away. ‘How can we account for an occurrence of this nature? It’s not as if you had,’ he fumbled for a word, ‘deserved it. Of course, we don’t know the devices and desires of the hearts of others. We never can. I’m sorry, sorry.’ The head began to walk away, from David, from the maths man, from the races, from the human race. He turned again. ‘Perhaps you’d like to call on my wife. She’s a . . . woman.’ The adjective had been snatched away by the wind. Reeve hitched at his collar and set a spanking pace across the field.
A week ahead David arranged to call on Mary’s parents.
The Trent Quartet were to play that Sunday evening at a semi-private concert at the local polytechnic. One of the vice-principals was retiring and his wife had chosen to mark the occasion thus. She was a woman who knew her mind and had demanded a modern work. She felt that she had made enough concessions to the musicians by agreeing to this date, a Sunday, though in fact the friends she wished to invite seemed away at all other times. Barton, who had conducted the negotiations because he taught a few hours a week there, said he came away with the impression that the place was run by absentee administrators. Payne, unsure about its readiness, reluctantly agreed to play the Shostakovich 8. He could find no time for extra rehearsals, but they met as usual that Sunday morning and were to make a runthrough in the hall at six for the eight o’clock concert.
David, after an unsatisfactory morning when even Barton showed edginess, lunched with his mother, father again away, and had then driven over to Derby. A sharp walk would have done more good, but he felt a necessity to talk to the Stileses. They had heard nothing, phone calls had established that, but the sense of obligation, to them, to himself, had been strong.
He warred inside himself.
The disintegration of harmony at the rehearsal still marginally disturbed him. He himself had carefully prepared the piece, could play the notes without difficulty, but knew that the four together lacked cohesion.
‘We’ve four separate ways of playing this,’ Barton had grumbled.
‘You fixed the bloody concert up,’ Wilkinson answered, ‘before we’re ready.’
‘It’s the only possible date before Easter. I thought we’d be able to rehearse more often than we have.’
‘Some of us have families and homes.’ Wilkinson, who was mainly culpable.
‘We’re thinking of turning pro,’ Fred Payne said, not pacifically, ‘and here we are performing in public not half prepared. It won’t do us any good.’
‘Nobody’ll notice,’ Wilkinson muttered. ‘Not in this damned thing.’
‘Once you think like that, you’re lost.’ Barton, very quiet, senatorial.
‘Look who’s talking.’
They pressed on, hating the composer, each other, themselves.
David stayed behind for a word with Cyril Barton, after the other two had rushed off.
‘Well, what do you think?’
‘I feel depressed,’ David answered. ‘We’ve never been in such disarray before.’
‘They tell me,’ Barton began, ‘that when the Borodin first played this to Shostakovich, he covered his face and wept. If he heard us, he’d sob his socks off.’
David looked up in surprise at the tone. Barton was not dispirited.
‘You’ll see,’ Cyril Barton continued, ‘when we meet at six for a runthrough. It’ll come together. We can play the notes; we’re over that hurdle. If we’re going to be any good, it’ll gel.’
He smiled at his slack language, the face thoughtful, rapt.
David, encouraged suddenly, explained in a brief sentence or two about Mary.
‘I’m sorry,’ Barton replied, placing a hand on his friend’s sleeve. ‘I didn’t know anything about it. It must be hell. Our troubles are small beer compared to yours.’ He plucked his sentences, divided each from each, out of the air into which he stared. ‘I’m a bachelor. I never got married; I won’t say I didn’t think about it, but sex wasn’t important. I’m not the other way inclined, like Fred. I’m not quite a eunuch, either. When I hear something like this, that you’ve just told me, I guess I’m lucky. And I begin to ask myself: “What use is Haydn and Shostakovich to this poor chap?” I can’t answer it. I didn’t suspect anything; you’ve worked like a Trojan with us. I don’t know; I don’t know.’ He shook a bewildered head; his eyes were wet, and the intelligence seemed drained out of his face, as if after a fearful and unexpected physical attack. ‘At times like this, I wish there was something that I could do, or even say. But there isn’t.’
‘Thanks, Cyril.’
‘I feel angry. And that’s not like me. I want to go and hit her.’
‘You don’t know her.’
‘No.’
‘It might be my fault.’
‘You should know that.’
Cyril Barton had given the wrong answer, though he’d no idea. This decent man spoke his decent, limited heart.
‘Would you like to stay and have some lunch with me? I’ve got plenty.’
David explained that he had arranged to go to his mother’s and then to Derby.
‘Yes. You don’t expect to learn anything extra there, do you?’ Barton put the question with extreme diffidence, edging it out word by word as if afraid to trespass on David’s grief.
‘No. I spoke to them on the phone yesterday. They’d heard no more.’
‘I don’t know how you’ve put up with it.’ He hutched away, trying to end the conversation.
‘I’ve worked hard. That’s the value of Haydn and Shostakovich.’
‘When my mother died, she lived here with me, this was her house, it paralysed me. I hadn’t the strength to play or teach or do any shopping, even. She was old, and I’d had to look after her. But she died without warning. I went in with a cup of tea as I did usually, and she’d gone in the night. It was easy; must have been. That’s the way to die. But I hadn’t expected it. I just broke up. I’m a quiet, sensible middle-of-the-road man. Fred says that’s why I swapped from violin to viola. But I was like a child who couldn’t check his tears. It didn’t matter who was there or where I was. I just broke down. And yet you . . .’
Barton had turned his face away from David to the wall.
‘Thanks, Cyril.’
David swayed, battered, unstable as his companion. Two men, on the edge of tears, blocked the neat passage of bay-windowed, terraced house, 1905.
‘See you at six, then,’ David said, recovering.
‘I wish I could tell you it would be all right. It isn’t any use, is it?’
‘No. I don’t suppose so.’
‘It’s terrible, isn’t it? And happening to a man like you.’
David looked into the open, rucked face of somebody who apparently believed that with a certain standard of education you disqualified yourself from vicissitude. He wanted to make a gesture towards Cyril; moved, he stood still.
His mother provided lunch, allowed him to help with manual dish washing so that talk could be extended for a quarter of an hour, then shoved him off towards Derby.
‘I’ve heard nothing from them,’ she said. ‘Not that I expected anything.’
‘Family failing.’
‘I don’t make them out, David.’
‘She wears the trousers.’
‘Mr Stiles doesn’t say much, certainly.’
‘He does as he’s told because his wife’s good at organizing, but he has his little reservations. He’s a bit crafty.’
‘Do you think he’s upset by what’s happened?’
‘Yes. Because it’s disturbed Eva and that means trouble for him. Otherwise, I don’t think Mary can do any wrong where he’s concerned.’
‘Was he against her marrying you?’
‘Not at all. But when she changes her mind, his changes with her.’
As he drove towards Derby he felt pleased that he could propound such views without doing violence to himself. Their truth was doubtful, but his mother was comforted to find him capable of laying down the law.
The Stileses hovered, ready for him, for anything.
Their lounge, upstairs over the shop, faced north and this afternoon seemed unusually dark under the piling clouds. The couple bustled offering hospitality, tea, coffee, sherry, a full biscuit tin, the electric light. They inquired after his health; he answered, at the same time refusing sustenance; the gas fire hissed to overwarm solemn furniture. Both parents-in-law had dressed for the occasion; the line of father’s white shirt shone below the navy blue sleeves. He wore gold cufflinks.
David explained that he could not stay long, that he had to go home, collect his instrument and concert gear to be at the Poly for rehearsal at six. Eva Stiles asked intelligent questions about the programme, seemed interested in what he said about the difficulties of performing Shostakovich. Without embarrassment she recalled Mary’s learning Alban Berg songs during one holiday from the college. Father constantly hitched his trousers to prevent bagging at the knees.
In the end, after a silence, Mrs Stiles sat a little straighter as if to announce that real business was at hand.
‘After you rang yesterday dinnertime,’ she began, and stopped. ‘We were very busy. Rushed off our feet, and the two lads we have in on Saturdays are no more use than ornament. But after I talked to you, it worried me all afternoon. It bothers me, I can tell you, most of the time, but I thought, there you were, ringing up, coming over the next day, and we’d heard not a thing. I mean we’d written, twice, and you, and your mother, and we’d tried to get in touch by phone and not a peep from her in reply, and it didn’t seem good enough. It smarted with me all afternoon. I said as much to Dad, on the one occasion we had two minutes spare, but we were busy. When we closed at six, we didn’t clear up as we usually do on week nights, I said we’d do it this morning, we plonked ourselves down in the dining room for a bit of a meal, we don’t want much except a pot of tea, you’re not hungry after a day like that . . .’
‘We ought to go out for dinner,’ Stiles said. ‘Now and again.’
‘You don’t want it, and I don’t. All I need is to get my shoes off and my slippers on and rest my hipbones. Any road, when we’d had our bit of a snack I said to Dad, it came to me suddenly, “I’m going to have a bath,” we’d got the immersion on, “and while I do I want you to ring her up.”’ Mrs Stiles stopped again. ‘You should have seen his face. And heard the excuses. Wasn’t it too late? “It’s early afternoon there,” I said. What should he say? I’d do it a lot better than he would. “George,” I said, “just ask her what she thinks she’s doing, and if she’s not there leave a message for her to ring us. She’ll know if it’s you ringing it’s serious.”’
George Stiles wriggled.
‘So I went off and George tried. It was Saturday afternoon. I hadn’t thought of that. But in the end he got through to somebody who said he’d leave her a message.’
‘They’re back, are they?’ David asked.
‘I know no more than you do.’
‘And you’ve heard nothing.’
‘No, we have not. But at least we tried.’
‘Who answered?’ David asked, sorry for his father-in-law.
‘Some man.’ George sat straight. ‘You can’t tell from the way these Americans talk whether he’s a professor or the caretaker. Eva should have done it. She’d have nailed him down. I was bemused what with the dialling and waiting.’
‘Don’t you dial straight through?’
‘Yes. But there’s a bit of a gap. And then I thought nobody was ever going to answer the thing once it started ringing their end. But I hung on. And then this man picked it up, in time, but he didn’t say who he was. I explained who I was, and who she was. He seemed to get it, told me he’d leave the message. He didn’t say whether the opera was there or not.’ Stiles looked apologetically towards his wife.
‘Thanks anyway,’ David nodded, frowning.
‘We don’t know where she is, or what she’s doing,’ Mrs Stiles began angrily. ‘It’s like searching in a fog.’ She continued in this vein, easing herself, alarming the men. Her spleen brought her no relief, nettled them. As if she felt bound to instruct them she recited what she knew of Mary’s stay in America, looking now and again to David for additions or corrections that were not forthcoming. The men satisfied themselves with a silence as gloomy as the room.
At the conclusion of the performance, she went outside to the lavatory, and noisily returning pressed David to a cup of tea, a piece of cake baked that morning.
‘You’ll need it,’ she said, ‘if you’re playing. I know what it’s like. A mug of urn rubbish and two arrowroots.’ She laughed vividly as David capitulated. He ate his way slowly through a slab of delicious fruit cake he did not want, and then fought off her attempts to cut him a second slice.
He rose as the clock struck four.
‘I don’t like to think of you there all on your own,’ Eva said. ‘I don’t know how you’ve put up with it, all these weeks. You must have more patience than I have.’
‘Not very hard,’ Stiles said, back of hand.
‘Listen to that. Swearing like a navvy this morning he was just because he dropped a bag of nails.’ She laughed again, mirthlessly, hard and high.
‘I didn’t use any words you didn’t know.’
‘And I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’
They were uncomfortable, this pair, distressed on his behalf, niggling at each other. She cut and wrapped him a slab of cake as he left.
‘We’ll be in touch,’ Eva shouted, too loudly, on the pavement. One or two interested Sunday pedestrians dawdled past. ‘We’ll let you know if we hear anything. And ring us up if you’re short of company.’
‘You do that,’ Stiles said, ‘and don’t forget.’
David shook hands with George, kissed Eva, who for a second in profile reminded him of Mary, a caricature perhaps, but her mother. The two fussed excitedly out here as if they’d done their duty; he guessed they’d be glad to be rid of him. In person he blighted their Sunday afternoon’s peace, but once he’d disappeared he’d be an interesting topic of conversation. As he drove away the parents waved, making something of it, seeing him out of their lives, regretful, not unthankful for the entertainment. He dismissed his speculations, centred interest on Shostakovich.
He had not been in his house twenty minutes before the phone rang.
‘I’m glad I’ve got you.’ Frederick Payne. ‘I’ve been trying since three. Can you pick Walter Wilkinson up about quarter to six tonight? His car’s kaput again.’ He gave the address. ‘I’ll see he gets back, but I’m supposed to go out to value a fiddle; I’ll only just make it. If I hadn’t caught you this time, I’d have had to cancel it.’
‘You’re busy on Sundays?’
‘Somebody’s always asking me to do something. I s’ll be glad to go this afternoon, though. It’ll take my mind off Shostakovich.’
‘We shan’t have much time on that.’
‘Play it straight through. Hear what it sounds like in their hall. Glad I caught you. I thought you said you’d be home later.’ He described the route. ‘I’ll tell Walt to be ready.’
Wilkinson opened the front door to David.
‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘While I get my coat on.’
In front of a gas fire Wilkinson’s wife sat with a small girl on her knee. The child, perhaps two or three years old, had been bathed, so that her golden, fine hair was still damp, with darker flat stripes on the soft halo. She wore a long nightgown and stared at the visitor with large eyes.
‘Lorna, this is David Blackwall. You’ve heard me speak about him.’
Mrs Wilkinson smiled. She looked no older than Mary, in jeans and a white blouse. She lowered the book of stories in greeting.
‘Read it, Mummy,’ the child whispered.
‘In a minute, chick.’
‘What is it?’ David asked. ‘A fairy tale?’
The girl quite violently buried her face in her mother’s breast.
‘That’s Emma,’ Wilkinson said.
‘Hello, Emma.’
The child did not move, sat still enough to conceal breathing.
‘She’s shy,’ Mrs Wilkinson said.
‘Till you get to know her.’ Proud father.
Mrs Wilkinson put an arm tighter about her daughter. She seemed an untidy young woman, fair hair loose, in shabby jeans, but smiling, much at home, showing large, even teeth. Her hands were red though the skin of her arms was pale, gold-furred.
‘It’s early upstairs tonight,’ she said. ‘We’ve been to Nana’s. My dad had to bring us home. Walt’s car broke down.’
‘Is this the usual bedtime?’ David asked.
‘As long as she’s in by seven.’
‘And this is number two,’ Wilkinson stood by the table on which lay a carrycot. David looked in. A very small bald baby slept under a ribboned quilt. ‘That’s Sarah Amelia.’
‘How old is she?’ David asked the mother.
‘Seven weeks tomorrow.’
He noticed that Lorna’s blouse was discoloured, splashed at both breasts. Emma had resumed her upright pose. Wilkinson had left the room. On the wall above the gas fire incongruously shone mounted crossed swords over a heraldic shield.
‘They keep you busy, I expect,’ David said.
‘Between the three of them.’
‘Yes.’
‘He’ll be calling out for a handkerchief in minute.’ She smiled, easily, painlessly; she would know the answer.
‘Read it, Mummy.’ This time the child’s voice had a small, forceful clarity.’
‘When Daddy’s gone. In a minute.’
‘Do you get broken nights?’
‘Yes. But we can’t grumble. She’s not too bad.’
Lorna Wilkinson crossed her legs, lifting her daughter. She leaned back, unembarrassed, seemingly very young. One could meet a dozen such in the cloakroom of any disco. She wore uneven mauve eyeshadow and her short fingernails were plum-dark red; her shoes had ridiculously crippling high heels.
‘She’s a good baby. They both are. Weren’t you, chick?’ She hugged Emma to her. Wilkinson returned in dark raincoat. ‘You’ve found the hankie I put out for you?’
‘Yes, thanks. We’ll be off now. I shouldn’t be late. We’ll have it over for half past nine. You go to bed, if you want.’
He bent to kiss his daughter, wife, and then dipped into the cot.
‘Right.’ He rattled the ‘r’ for David, an adult. ‘Bye-bye.’
In the car he complained about his banger, but without ferocity, as if his family had softened him. After a minute he jerked inside his seatbelt.
‘Lorna’s not keen on our turning professional,’ Wilkinson said.
‘What about you?’
‘Starting kids on the fiddle bores me stiff. But travelling round wouldn’t suit, either. That’s if we made it. Still, you can’t have everything.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I don’t know. Wait. I’m putting it off until Bob Knight comes. I mean, if I stay the Education Committee’s quite likely to cut down on peripatetic music teaching. They regard that as expendable. I’m in two minds. It’d be different if I were a bachelor.’
‘Is your wife a musician?’
‘Not professionally. She sang in the Harmonic and the Bach. She worked at the Central Library.’
Wilkinson sucked his cheeks in sombre reverie.
A caretaker led them into a hall where Payne and Barton were already occupied in discussion.
‘Big place.’ Wilkinson cocked a suspicious eye after greetings.
‘And only a small audience,’ Payne answered.
‘The students have been invited,’ Barton told them. ‘Not that many will come.’
‘Will you try the light?’ The caretaker wore a suit. ‘I stepped the bulb up, and put another by in case that one blows.’ Payne fiddled for the switch.
‘Can you raise it a couple of inches?’ the leader asked. More time wasted.
‘We’ll try the Mozart for volume,’ Payne said. ‘Bit of the first movement, and anything else you want, and then we’ll do the whole shebang of Shostakovich.’ They removed their coats in no hurry, prepared to play.
‘Have we got a room somewhere?’ Payne quizzed the caretaker, and tiptoed round, unwilling to sit.
‘Just through the door there. Not very spacious, but you won’t have far to walk. Cloakroom just across the passage. Shall I show you?’
‘Are you in a hurry? To go?’
‘No. I might just as well sit here and listen to you.’
He took his seat in the middle of the front row, where he swelled his chest, crossing his arms, proprietorially.
They began the Mozart, confidently, stopping at the first double bar.
‘Beautiful sound,’ Payne said.
‘And we can hear one another.’
‘Let’s do it again, so we aren’t caught out.’
They completed the movement this time enjoying themselves.
‘I’d like the Adagio,’ Barton said. ‘Or some of it.’
‘How’s the time?’
‘Twenty-five past six.’ David.
‘Right. I want us out of here at half seven or soon after.’
They smiled, satisfied with the big sound of their Mozart.
‘Now then. Shostakovich. As if this were the real thing. Blind on straight through. We’ll pick up the bits and pieces when we’ve done that.’
They played cautiously at first, then, caught up, strongly, as if amazed at their progress. The concert performance two hours later touched, snarled, hung sobbing amongst the wide spaces, the empty seats, with a hundred or so spectators jolted, goaded, arm-broken into sympathy by the plangency of sound. True, the four told one another there were still too many mistakes, weak joints, awkwardnesses, but their fear furbished their skill and the composer’s shattered art shouted his apprehension, his sorrow, his clawing for stars. Only when the Trent Quartet had finished their concert did they grasp quite what they had done; talent and terror had united.
‘Some bloody good playing,’ Payne congratulated them as they cased their instruments.
‘We got somewhere near it.’ Barton.
‘How about it, David?’ Wilkinson asked, as if the few minutes inside his home justified the intimacy of questioning.
‘It was good,’ David answered. ‘And puzzling. As if we didn’t quite make out what we were doing so well.’
‘That’s exactly right.’ Barton, bemused.
A handful of the audience broke in on them garrulously. A bottle of champagne was opened for their benefit, but the effect was spoilt when they had to drink from teacups. The recipient of the concert, a stout man with untidy hair and insecure spectacles, thanked them but vaguely as if he had difficulty in recalling what they had done for him. His wife boomed out her pleasure. The principal of the place, grey hair smoothed down over his square white face, a trio of subordinates at his shoulder even on Sunday, arranged words into three banal sentences. A balding man, with a red, lively, Jewish face, touched Barton’s arm.
‘Great, Cyril,’ he said, ‘great. Thanks.’
‘Shostakovich must have been a poor, lost sod.’
‘You showed us how much. It was superb. I’ve never heard that better played, on record or off. You’d fathomed it.’
‘Who was that?’ David, who’d been close by, asked when the man darted away.
‘Joe Horowitz. A mathematician. Family all killed in Auschwitz. They didn’t know how he stayed alive. He’d be three or so at the time.’ The age of Emma Wilkinson. ‘Some English professor adopted him. I don’t think he’s got over whatever it was he saw.’ Cyril watched the congratulatory antics with a guarded expression. ‘It doesn’t seem right that Shostakovich is battered about and all the result is a retiring present for some stuffed shirt.’
‘“Butchered to make a Roman holiday.”’
Cyril’s expression cleared, and he laughed out loud, committing himself with gusto. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘It really is.’
David guessed that Barton had worried himself that his colleague might be unable to bear Shostakovich’s collateral grief, and was relieved to find himself wrong. Pleased with his knockabout psychologizing he offered to take Wilkinson back.
‘I like Cyril Barton,’ he said to Walter in the car.
‘He’s all right. Bit of an old woman.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Just a year or two older than Fred. Thirty-five, perhaps.’
‘I thought he was more than that.’
‘He’s mean,’ Wilkinson answered, at a tangent. ‘Wouldn’t give the parings of his fingernails away.’
‘Was he an only child?’
‘Yes. And his parents were getting on, from what he says. I was one of five.’
‘Are the others musicians?’
‘Two of my brothers are brass players like my dad. An uncle left us a fiddle in his will; that’s why I started. How do you get on with Fred?’
‘Payne? He’s good.’
‘He’s a homo, you know.’ A throwaway whisper.
‘Does that make any difference?’
Wilkinson struggled largely in his seat.
‘Can’t help it, can he? Funny chap. I knew him a bit at the Royal Manchester. He was ahead of me. Bit of a big noise. Led the orchestra and so forth. He wants to drag the rest of us along with him and his ambitions.’
‘And you don’t approve?’
‘I don’t know about that. You’re either one hundred per cent behind Fred, or you’re out. He got rid of Jon Mahon. Oh, I know he left for Australia, and all the rest of it, but he knew Fred didn’t want him, was fetching Knighty down. Jon tried to do it on him by nipping off without notice and saying nothing. That’s why we’re lucky with you. You don’t think of taking it up, do you? As a career?’
‘No.’
‘Fred’s weighing you up, I reckon. He’s not sure about me, but keeps me on because I play well. He knows the sounds I make are as good as his, if not better. And that’s what you need as number two. A bloody good player who practises and doesn’t go in for ideas above his station. He’ll out me if I don’t fall in with his plans, I tell you. The reason I asked you was that when Bob Knight arrives there’ll be ructions. Between him and Fred. Knighty can play, he’s better than some fancy soloists, but he’s aggressive and high-spirited, all for a barney. Fred’ll let anybody argue; he’ll listen to you for a bit, but he’s got to be the leader.’
‘Isn’t that as it should be?’
Wilkinson looked across, considering.
‘Yes, if he knows what he’s on with. Somebody’s got to make his mind up. He’s also very good at organizing practices. He knows when to go over bad patches, and when to leave them. You don’t waste much time at rehearsals; you’ll have noticed that. But once old Jocko Knight appears there’ll be bust-ups, I reckon. And that’s why he’s so pleased to have found you. He’ll waft you in Knight’s face; a Cambridge man who can play.’
‘And is this good for the quartet?’
‘There have to be stresses. There are bound to be, it stands to sense. But a good leader’ll use them. He’s made me feel uncomfortable these last few weeks because I wouldn’t turn out every hour of the day and night to rehearse this Shostakovich. Oooh, yes. A hint there, a plain prod here. He’s let me know.’
They had arrived outside Wilkinson’s house.
‘Are you coming in?’ He consulted his watch. ‘Nine twenty.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘What would you do if you were in my position?’ Wilkinson asked.
‘I can’t answer that, because I don’t know how successful you’ll be. Presumably you have a mortgage. Would your wife mind your being away at nights?’
‘Yes. She’d put up with it, especially if we were making money.’
‘Which you won’t be for a start?’
‘That’s the snag. We’re starting late. It might be some years before we get recognized. I’ve some private pupils I’ll be able to fit in. Jim Talbot’ll find me casual work. I think Lorna wants me to give it a whirl. I’m the one dragging his feet. I thought I quite liked a flutter. What did you think about your wife going to America?’
‘She would have regretted not taking the chance.’
‘And you let her go. If she makes a success of it, you might never get her back. Not in the old sense. She’ll be dodging about the world.’
‘That’s so.’
‘And you still let her go?’ Question and statement.
‘The financial situation’s different from yours.’
‘I see that.’
David, suddenly reduced, debated whether to unburden himself to the man, decided against it.
‘We did ourselves proud tonight,’ he said, dredging the muddy sentence up.
‘Ye’. Thanks for the lift, then. Seeing yer.’
Wilkinson had left the car, slammed the door and disappeared up the entry of his house, quick as a snake.
For the first time David saw the face of the street, a well-built terrace of workmen’s cottages, each decorated differently with bright colours. One had white shutters; several flush doors. Curtains varied; pink lace to heavy yellow; one or two tenants had replaced the sash windows with black lengths of plate glass. Families lived here; made their mark. Fifty years ago, the doors would have been brown, varnished with artificial combed grain; only wear and tear marking off one from another. Now doors and windows, drainpipes and ledges had the garishness of a fairground.
That represented human effort. Men pleased their wives and established their egos with this free-for-all do-it-yourself.
He did not like it.