From the night of his return, Edward felt sickeningly disoriented. It seemed impossible that so little had changed in his brief absence. He was now irrevocably different from the young man who had nervously taken Ivan’s telephone call. His unavowable secret had changed the expression on the face that met his gaze in the looking-glass as profoundly as any livid scar.
Acts of violence produced a reaction – a gun’s report, the smack of colliding skin and bone, blood, bruises, cries of pain or horrified gasps – but his, seemingly, had produced nothing. The body – he could not think of it as his sister – had been destroyed; no questions asked, no accusations levelled. A tasteful helping of its cinders had accompanied him, passportless, home.
Had he found The Roundel now as weirdly warped as the sets from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari it would have been more comforting than the sweet normality which greeted him. Only the harsh onset of January and the charred remains of the Christmas decorations accorded with his mood. The house was as still, the landscape as desolate, his wife as lovely as when he had left them.
His work-in-progress lay untouched on the piano top, challenging him to continue it seamlessly. But he felt compelled to break away from the passage he had been writing, developing instead the theme for Lucifer. Aged years in a matter of days, he reapproached the work with a new professional realism, promptly reducing its status in his mind from grand opera to staged church cantata.
Even the arrival of snow, coating the mutilated rose-bushes, piling thick against the door, blocking out the light from the dome, was not alteration enough.
He found himself seeking to effect a more dramatic change by making greater demands on Sally. He would take her often now, abruptly, in the kitchen, the bathroom, the larder – anywhere but in the smothering confines of their bed. He was wilfully inconsiderate in the hope, perhaps, of producing an indignant reaction, but he provoked nothing in her beyond mute acquiescence, tempered occasionally with a wry, wincing smile.
In the end it was she who heralded the change to his life, with the staggering announcement of her pregnancy.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
She told him precisely how she could be sure and it struck him how easily women could pretend to be pregnant since the proof all lay in areas from which ignorance and fearful disgust kept men at a long arm’s length.
When his happy surprise had subsided and he had drawn her on to his lap on the piano stool, she ran a fingertip softly across his brow and down his cheek and said, carefully, ‘If it’s … If it’s a girl, I think we should call her Miriam.’
His embrace froze for a second then he hugged her anew to hide his true feelings behind a mute show of approval.
Citing a passage from A Husband’s Love, she said her pregnancy should not be affected by their lovemaking, but he found himself awed by the thought of the little thing within her, and was possessed by irrational fears that his entry would somehow damage it, causing it to deform or bleed away. He even woke terrified from a dream once, in which it had bitten his penis clean off at the fleshy base. Sally tried to comfort him.
‘It’s perfectly safe,’ she urged. ‘You’re not that big!’
He knew she was laughing at him. He could hear the chuckle behind her words.
Change bred change. Despite her protest that the prospect of a baby need not affect her working ability and that they would ‘manage somehow’, he began looking for work that was better paid and which he could combine more naturally with composition than his previous job in the bookshop. Thomas made discreet enquiries around the colleges but found that none of the choirmasters or organists was on the verge of leaving. Besides, Edward was loath now to take work so far from home. Depressed at the prospect of someone saying yes, he began to offer his services around local schools as a piano and singing teacher.
The answer came, indirectly, from Miriam. As a sop to his devout grandparents’ memory – ‘alleviating the curse’. Sally called it – Edward contacted Rosa Holzer about a proper disposal for Miriam’s ashes. Having berated him for his sinful ignorance in having his sister cremated, and sighed that she did not know where the world was heading, Rosa agreed to organise a small memorial service at her local synagogue followed by a late lunch at her new house in Golders Green. She was plainly flattered to have been consulted.
They travelled up in the train, with the mortal remains in Sally’s bag between them. Some fifteen people attended. Edward had not realised that so many friends of the family had survived the war and were living in London. His eyes remained dry throughout the service and, oddly, it was Sally who shed tears. She blamed it on the haunting singing of the cantor, who she said had a voice to wake the dead. Edward had become hopelessly christianised by his boarding-school years and found himself as confused as her in the turbulent sea of Hebrew prayers.
There was a flower bed to one side of the gloomy cemetery where the ashes were used to fertilise a camellia Rosa had bought for the occasion. Its glossy foliage looked alien against the frosted London soil and was already thick with flower buds for the spring.
‘It’s a Williamsiae,’ Rosa assured them. ‘Such a lovely, feminine pink.’
Sally had been nervous of meeting the witch-like woman again, but her blurting out about her pregnancy and her hope for a daughter she could call Miriam worked on the old woman’s features like a charm. The news even drew out a smile and an almost earthy chuckle from among the sighs that came as naturally to Frau Holzer as breathing.
Sally later joked that she felt the curse on the marriage was modified if not exactly lifted; a long, enchanted sleep, perhaps, instead of certain death. But it was for Edward to fear the old woman’s influence, for she telephoned the morning following the ceremony with ambiguous good news.
‘Jerry Liebermann. You must have talked with him, Eli. The big fat man with the handsome son about your age. Heini, he’s called. No? Well he talked to you … So. Now you remember!’
Edward remembered a man who claimed to have been at school with his father in Berlin, who had left Germany in the early thirties and who was now a major force in the British film industry. He had seemed more interested in Sally than in Edward, persisting in embarrassing her with his bullying flirtation – ‘But your figure, the way you walk; don’t tell me you’ve never acted. Of course you’ve acted! I’ve seen you in something. April in Venis? The Moon in June?’
‘He wants to try you out as a composer,’ Rosa said with satisfaction.
‘A composer?’
‘That’s what you do now isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but what does he want with my music? A wedding march? A requiem mass?’
‘Here’s his number, Eli.’ Rosa would not even acknowledge his artistic qualms. ‘Take it. You’ve a wife and child to support now. Offers like this don’t grow on trees.’
Edward made the call. He did not wait for Sally’s return from work so he could ask her advice. He rang. He committed himself. Half an hour of music was required that could be chopped and edited later. An introduction and finale. A march. A waltz. A polka. And some ‘horse music and train music’ as Jerry Liebermann put it. The film was an adaptation of Anna Karenina, to be called Desire and to star a young actress called Myra Toye. Edward and Sally had seen her in a few films already, and, in his opinion, she was more suited to modelling bathing costumes than personifying complex adulterous passion.
‘Very romantic. Very Russian,’ Jerry enthused. ‘We’ve got all the best boys on it. Rosa tells me you write plinky plonky music. Stravinsky stuff. We won’t be needing that here. One note of that and you’re out. Except maybe in the train bit. Give us a really blistering chord for the death. No, Teddy – I can call you Teddy, can’t I?’
‘Well, actually –’
‘Great. Teddy? We need Tchaikovsky really, only the real thing’s been used to death already. Maybe throw in a touch of Rachmaninoff. Now don’t say no. You can do it blindfold. And don’t pretend you don’t need the money, ‘cause I saw the state of your suit and I bet it’s your best and only. Am I right?’
When Sally came home for lunch that afternoon, she paused just inside the front door, surprised at the delicious harmonies and soaring melodies flooding from Edward’s fingers. When he told her the news she laughed and kissed him, happy as he had seemed on hearing of the baby. The money Jerry offered, it was true, was spectacular compared to anything either of them had ever dreamed of earning. She recalled the flirtatious little man with his bizarre accent – half cockney, half German – his sombre, painfully respectful teenage son – ‘Shake hands with the lady, Heini. Show her you’re a gentleman’ – his chauffeur, cigars and pinkie ring.
Edward watched her joy and welcomed the sense that two swift telephone calls had corrupted him utterly. Here was the absolute change he needed. Here was the outward show of rot he deserved. No tortured chords for the sister-smotherer but a slow professional suicide by sweetness and facility, candied harmonies, corrupt, forgettable pastiche. All day, all week, undemanding, flashy melodies poured from his pen at a speed he would never have believed possible. He pilfered shamelessly from Russian symphonies, opera and ballet scores. He borrowed whole chord progressions, changed two notes to disguise a stolen eight-bar theme.
Rosa Holzer and Jerry Liebermann had snatched his soul as Miriam’s due. Playing through a gaudy ballroom waltz, to which Sally was already humming along on the landing, he knew himself reborn: Edward Pepper, the Fleapit Faust.