Temple and Newman
Solicitors and Notaries Public,
Lincoln’s Inn Fields
London
19 October 199-
Dear Mr West
re: ESTATE OF P B WEST DECEASED
I am pleased to inform you that Probate has finally been granted in respect of your father’s estate and the enclosed Statement shows the monies which you can expect to receive. We have deducted our own charges for the handling of this matter, together with the fees for your own divorce from Mrs E West. This, as you know, became absolute last month. However, you will see that a modest sum remains due to you, along with the cottage, which forms part of your father’s estate, and which was purchased in 1932 by your grandfather, Mr Jude Weissman. I regret that the Title Deeds are not as comprehensive as I should wish, but no doubt this is due to Mr Weissman being in Vienna at the time of the purchase, and also he employed Irish solicitors for the transaction. Matters were further complicated by your father’s decision to change the family’s name from Weissman to West in 1953, although I cannot say I blame him for that.
I understand that you have recently resigned your post with the Music Faculty at Stornforth University, and that you intend to live in the cottage. The Abstract of Title is at best sparse, and there is no proper record of past transfers, so that we have had to prepare a completely new Abstract. (See item No.4(c) on the attached account.) This missing information led to a small confusion regarding the ownership of and responsibility for the eastern boundary which abuts the grounds of a monastery, but I am glad to say that despite the quite remarkable age of the monastery, the monks were able to provide surprisingly detailed Deeds for inspection. The matter has been amicably resolved in our favour, the Father Abbot having undertaken to make good a section of dilapidated retaining wall.
Your Title now appears to be sound and although I understand the cottage has not been lived in since the unfortunate business in the Forties and must therefore be in a near-derelict condition, at least the property is as yet unencumbered by any mortgage.
Yours etc.
M B TEMPLE
Stornforth University
21 October 199-
Dear Mr Temple
I cannot imagine where you obtain your information, but since it appears that my overturning of the tables in the Money Lenders’ Temple last month (see New Testament) has reached your ears by some nefarious and invisible means, I shall be grateful for whatever crumbs fall from the rich man’s table, no matter how modest, although to call them modest is an exercise in meiosis. Your own account renders me bereft of speech, which my former superiors would tell you is no mean feat and if the erstwhile Madame West succeeds in her financial demands, my bankruptcy will probably be announced next week. Between the orange wife and the litigious gentlemen of your profession I shall be lucky to be left with a pound of flesh to call my own.
What do you mean by saying that the sparse nature of the Title Deeds is probably due to my grandfather having employed Irish solicitors? Are Irish solicitors inferior to English ones? Or merely less venal, which I can see would make them lesser mortals in your eyes. I don’t know that I much care for the idea of having an ancient Order of monks for neighbours, but at least I shall be spared late night parties and loud rock music.
Do I detect a note of sarcasm in the comment that the cottage is as yet unencumbered by mortgage?
Please let me know when I can have the keys.
Yours etc.
ISAREL WEST
Temple and Newman
Solicitors and Notaries Public,
Lincoln’s Inn Fields
London
25 October 199-
Dear Mr West
re: ESTATE OF P B WEST DECEASED
The above matter having at last been completed, we beg to enclose our cheque in settlement.
I understand that the keys to Mr Weissman’s property are held in Curran Glen itself, and I enclose a letter of authority for you to present to Mr Edward Mahoney whose firm acted for your grandfather, and who is now its sole partner.
If in fact you do wish to mortgage the property we would, of course, be happy to make suitable arrangements on your behalf.
With good wishes,
Yours etc.
M B TEMPLE
Stornforth University
27 October 119-
Dear Mr Temple
Since when did the derelict cottage of dubious Title become a property? I suspect it was since the sordid matter of a mortgage was raised.
No thank you, I will dree my own weird.
With good wishes to you as well,
ISAREL WEST
It pleased Isarel to take the route to the cottage that Jude himself would have taken so many years earlier. He knew only the barest details about it, other than it had been acquired in the Nineteen Thirties – 1932 had old Temple said? – when Jude was a young man. Within the family, it had been spoken of simply as ‘Your grandfather’s cottage’, and Isarel had never done more than vaguely visualise it as somewhere on the west coast.
But as he came out of Shannon airport, driving the small hire car – enough money left for that at least! – and following the directions sent by the apparently efficient Edward Mahoney, he realised that Curran Glen was much farther west than he had thought.
‘Beyond civilisation,’ his father had once said. ‘Overlooking Liscannor Bay. Quite impractical, of course.’
Jude would probably not have cared about the uncivilised and impractical situation of his cottage, and Jude’s grandson, setting out to re-discover it over fifty years later, did not care either.
Jude would have driven out here almost as a matter of course: in the Thirties cars had been getting commonplace, and he had already made more than sufficient money to own one.
But in Jude’s day the roads would have been little better than widened cart tracks, and he would not have had to cope with the constant drone of traffic and the smell of petrol fumes. Isarel frowned and concentrated on getting the journey over as quickly as possible. Over the hills and far away . . . Yes, as far away as possible. Worlds and light years away from greedy grasping females and soulless faculty professors who preached about Art but practised Accountancy. The beginnings of a grin curved his lips. It had been good to tell them what he thought of them. It had been almost worth the loss of his lectureship.
Over hill, over dale. The ribbon of road unwound before him, sometimes fringed by woodland, sometimes by fields. Thorough bush, thorough brier . . . Was it out here, surrounded by ancient fey Celtic magic that Jude had conceived the eerie ‘Devil’s Piper’ Suite? It had acquired such a sinister reputation, that most musicians and conductors fought shy of it and the critics used the word ‘darkness’ about it. It had never been played in public since Jude had played it inside Eisenach Castle in Northern Germany over half a century ago, although there were one or two rather pale recordings still in circulation. Isarel had heard it on Radio Three about a year ago, part of a concert of compositions that traditionally had a faintly Satanic connection. Jude’s beautiful brilliant music, filled with images of pouring blue and purple shadows, soaked in creeping menace, had been offered, halfway between apology and amusement, as something of a curio, cobwebby with age and creaking with disuse. ‘A storm petrel,’ said the announcer in the carefully expressionless tone of one who would be torn into pieces by wild horses galloping in four different directions before admitting to a belief in superstition. ‘The Macbeth of the Music World,’ he had added for good measure, at which point Isarel had thrown a book at the radio and stalked out of the room.
He pushed away the memories and turned into the main street of the next town he came to, drawing up on the forecourt of a small supermarket. He piled food and provisions into a wire basket, hesitating over things like eggs and cheese, unsure whether the cottage would have a workable fridge, or even electricity. He bought them anyway, but added several packs of wax candles and half a dozen boxes of matches in case, and moved on to the wine section. Was he going to drown his glory in a shallow cup and sell his reputation for a song? He supposed he had already done that and pretty irrevocably as well. The Grape had employed its Logic absolute on the jarring Sects of Academe, or was it warring Sects? There was probably not a lot of difference. Damn the plebeian professors in Stornforth and curse Liz and her selfish greedy ladder-climbing. He added several bottles of whiskey and a case of wine, because if he was really going to drown in the shallow cup he might as well do it with panache. He wedged the cartons of food on the back seat, consulted the directions, and set off again.
As he rounded a curve in the road, there was the far-off glint of water with the sun on it over on the left, and there was a scent of something smoky and autumnal on the air. Peat fires? Peat burning in the hearths, and smoky Irish whiskey and the soft rainfall that the Irish had the insolence to call mist. A sudden longing for something – happiness? – spiked across his mind, and then vanished, because the village was ahead: sheltered by a fold of cliff from the coast road. There was a huddle of rooftops forming a winding village street and fields and scattered white farmhouses.
And dominating it all, the grey stones and clerestory windows and towering spires of the monastery.
Curran Glen.
It was thorough bush, thorough brier with a vengeance now. As Isarel turned off the small village street, which was little more than a handful of shops, a Post Office and a pub, the tarmac disappeared and gave way to a dusty cart track. He could see the silhouette of the monastery more clearly now: there was a high wall surrounding it but as Isarel drove on he glimpsed cloisters and a small gatehouse, and what looked like a chapter house. He wondered in a half-interested way, where the eastern boundary, the cause of M B Temple’s dispute, was situated.
A little farther along was a signpost leaning drunkenly on a post, and reading ‘No Thoroughfare’, and Isarel experienced an unexpected jolt of ownership. Mine. Whatever is at the end of this overgrown cart track, it’s mine. He thought it would be better by far than the small furnished campus flat at Stornforth, and infinitely better than the characterless neo-Georgian house in a cul-de-sac that Liz had demanded and got, and then filled with beige carpets and white anaglypta walls and featureless furniture in blond ash and smoked glass. She had had the bad taste to screw her lover in their bed, and the even worse taste to let Isarel catch them doing it. Isarel had enjoyed that last gesture of sending her the Title Deeds to the house and he had torn up her sickly-sweet note in which she had wished him happiness, the bitch. He hoped she would marry her Sales Director with his false bonhomie and boastful tales and he hoped they would make one another thoroughly miserable.
The monastery was on his left now, and there was a winding bouncing drive for several hundred yards, with bushes and thrusting thickthorn hedges pushing against the sides of the car and whippy branches that painted sappy green smears on the windscreen. Isarel engaged second gear and drove grimly on.
When he wound down the car window birdsong flooded in, and there was the scent of peat fires again. I am coming home . . . The thought thrust unbidden into his mind and he pushed it aside impatiently. The solicitor – what was his name? – was to meet him here at six o’clock. Isarel glanced at his watch. Five forty. Plenty of time to explore on his own.
And then it was there. Set back from the track a little, standing behind a tangle of brier and blackberry, with a white wicket gate, half off its hinges.
Jude’s house.
It was much larger and considerably older than Isarel had expected, and it was certainly worthy of a grander name than cottage. A red brick four-square house with the tall flat windows of the Regency, and crumbling stone pillars on each side of the front door. The brick had long since mellowed into a dark soft red, the colour beloved of Titian and Burne Jones for their roseate-skinned, full-cheeked ladies, and the sun was setting behind the house, bathing it in a fiery glow and dissolving the windows into molten gold. Isarel switched off the ignition and the silence closed down, broken only by the evening birdsong and the faint ticking of the cooling engine.
Some kind of creeper covered the lower portions – a pity if that had to be stripped away, but it might have weakened the brickwork – and now that the sun was sliding below the horizon, he could see the dereliction. The upper windows had shutters, half falling away, and all the window frames were rotten and crumbling. As he had thought the brickwork was soft and powdery where the mortar had dried and flaked off, and there was an ominous dip in the roofline. He made a quick calculation of his finances and scowled.
The garden was a tangled mass of thrusting rose bay willow and rank grass, but to one side were ragged-headed wild roses, and immense bushes of lilac and lavender. In full summer they would scent the air for miles around. On the other side was surely the remains of a herb garden: was there rosemary there? Rosemary, that’s for remembrance . . . It would hardly be remembrance for Jude, especially out here where memories would be long. Elder would be more in keeping. Judas, the traitor, hanged on an elder tree . . . Isarel frowned and turned back to the house, searching for electricity or telephone cables. Nothing. Isolation with a vengeance, then. Alone and in the sea of life enisl’d . . . What kind of a benighted place had he come to, for God’s sake?
But the feeling of I am coming home, and the feeling of something tremendous just beyond hearing and just out of vision, was still with him, and he was suddenly fiercely glad that he had arrived early and that he could be on his own with the house until the solicitor arrived.
Tacked onto the sagging gate was an oblong of wood with a name – ‘Mallow’ – and a rusting chain that snapped in two when he lifted it. Isarel had not known the name of Jude’s house, and the old resonance of the word pleased him. It was a purple word, a soft violet-tinted word. If you wrote music about mallows you would give it a dark velvety feel: a minor key but a rich wine-dark one . . .
If you wrote music . . .
He had not written a note since the day he had walked out of Liz’s Habitat bedroom, but now, without the least warning, the music was with him again, pushing its way up in his mind: something golden and warm and something that was laced with such allure that it was almost sexual in quality. Follow me over the hills and far away . . .
Jude haunting his days as he had haunted his nights all those years ago?
It was nothing more than tiredness: the flight here, the drive through unfamiliar country. Too much wine the night before. Well, all right, maybe it was a little that he was coming to Jude’s house. But if Jude walked anywhere, he would surely not walk here. This had been his hideaway, his retreat. This had been where he had brought his women.
He walked round the house, looking into the windows, putting up a hand to block his own reflection, trying to make out the shadowy outlines of furniture. Probably woodworm and death watch beetle had long since made matchwood of the furniture, but so far as he could see, there were at least chairs to sit on and a table to eat off.
He progressed to the window on the left-hand side of the front door, but before he could make out the contents of that room, there was the sound of another car coming up the rough track behind him, and he turned his back on the house and went down the track to meet the solicitor.
Edward Mahoney had not seemed very keen to stay, or even to enter Mallow.
He had handed Isarel a bunch of keys, conscientiously labelled with things like ‘Garden Door’, and ‘Cellar’, and ‘Small Scullery’, and then he had gone. Another appointment, he had said, his eyes sliding away from Isarel, determinedly turning his back on the house. And then his family expecting him for supper – Mr West would no doubt excuse him from giving the guided tour? It was said with the slight quirkiness of the Irish, but for all that, there was a note of genuine anxiety. Mr Edward Mahoney quite clearly did not want to enter Mallow, and so far from wanting to enter it was he, that he did not even want to be in its vicinity for long.
Haunted after all? Isarel grinned, and picked out the key labelled ‘Main Door’.
The lock slid open and he stepped inside.
Edward Mahoney walked up the nice, neat drive of his garden and turned the latch of his own front door. He was very glad indeed to have left the tumbledown Weissman estate behind, and he was extremely relieved that he had so adroitly managed to avoid actually going inside. He would not have entered that house after dark if the Furies had been at his heels. He would prefer not to enter it in full daylight either, really. Not that anyone had ever seen anything, not so far as Edward knew and he did not, of course, believe in such nonsense. But you had to expect that there would be a few stories about a place empty for so long.
He permitted himself a touch of complacency. The past weeks had been tricky, what with the finicking English solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn making every kind of difficulty, and what with this Mr West’s father – Jude’s son, that was – having changed the family’s name in the Fifties, although that was no more than Edward would have done himself given the scandal.
Isarel West had been younger than he had been expecting: no more than thirty or so. You tended to think of university lecturers as elderly, of course, and probably West was one of these modem aggressive clever young men you heard about. Edward had no time for them, although he frowned, remembering Isarel West’s disquieting likeness to the photographs of Jude at the height of his fame. Thin-faced and dark-haired. The kind of intense dark eyes that foolish young girls sometimes found attractive. It might be as well to ensure that Moira was not thrust into any kind of contact with Mr West, not that the child would be interested, she did not bother with boys or nonsense about pop groups or film actors.
He let himself into his house and stood smiling, waiting for his womenfolk to put aside whatever they had been doing, and come running out to welcome him home.