Eustace had never travelled so far from home in his life and certainly not on his own. His mother had lent him a folding, Black Watch tartan suitcase, which she said was lighter than the others. She had stored it with lavender bags in it to prevent it turning musty in the loft and he felt sure it would make his clothes smell like someone’s grandmother so packed it at the very last moment in case.
He had never paid much attention to his clothes before. He wore his school uniform most of the year but otherwise wore the clothes his mother bought him and which reappeared in his wardrobe washed and ironed. He had black lace-ups for school and Lysander sandals for holidays. His socks were all knee-length and either black or blue, his Y-fronts, all white. His long-sleeved shirts, like his father’s, were all Tattersall checks; their summer equivalents were plain coloured T-shirts. His mother would countenance nothing with a picture or words on it. He had never considered any of this until required to pack the tartan suitcase with seven of everything, plus a jersey in case, because Scotland was colder than Weston.
Then it dawned on him he was not just going on a cello course, nor going for an extended music lesson, but spending a week in a big house full of complete strangers who might judge him for what he wore. He was grateful that his mother had returned from one of her recent trips to Bristol with some new, flared jeans for him and a couple of cheesecloth shirts but decided to save these for later and travel in clothes he had already broken in.
As the journey was to take nearly seven hours, he packed two of his longest books – a collection of horror stories by H.P. Lovecraft, which Vernon had lent him, and E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View . Louis had recommended he read the Forster.
‘You’re the perfect age for it,’ he said in the tone he used in which Eustace could never distinguish kindness from teasing, ‘as it’s all about yearning and escape.’
Come the morning he had assumed he would catch a train from Weston but his mother, not smitten by the expected headache, insisted on driving him to Bristol to catch the train from there.
‘It won’t be complicated changing trains,’ he told her.
‘No,’ she conceded, ‘but you’ve your cello as well as the suitcase with you and it would be a disaster if you missed your connection.’
Although his father always had chores to keep him busy in the morning, he insisted on coming as well. ‘Nonsense. It’ll be fun,’ he said. ‘It’s not every day you go on an adventure like this.’
But actually it wasn’t much fun as his parents’ forced air of holiday jollity and their slightly repetitive questions about the course kept breaking down into little irritated exchanges about his father’s reluctance to overtake lorries.
‘I’m sure they’re going as fast as they can,’ he’d say.
‘If he misses his train, it’ll be all your fault,’ she’d snap back. ‘So, is this woman giving you individual lessons, Eustace, or teaching you all as a group?’
‘I think it’s a bit of both,’ Eustace started to tell her. ‘Mainly it’s ensemble work in little groups but she’ll work with each of us in turn as well.’
Already her attention had drifted back to the road. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘You can overtake him now ! Oh really, what on earth is the point?’
As the car was not especially large, the cello case had to lie diagonally across the back seat, over Eustace’s lap and obscuring his view. The boot was full of bags and boxes because his father had decided to combine the errand with a trip to the Cash and Carry afterwards. This meant that his suitcase, riding on top, kept bumping the back of Eustace’s neck and giving off a powerful whiff of lavender bags. He concentrated on keeping his eyes to the front and breathing deeply and slowly in an effort not to become inconveniently carsick.
They arrived on the edge of Bristol for the start of the weekend crush – something catching the train from Weston would have spared him, though he didn’t like to point that out. From cursing and bickering and presenting Eustace with questions, his parents fell into an increasingly tense silence. Then suddenly they were at Temple Meads Station and the squabbling began again as they searched for a parking space. They raced to the platform for the Cornish Scot, which arrived from Cornwall minutes later. The cello had to go in the guard’s van but, as pleased as a child performing a conjuring trick, his father produced a plastic covered bicycle chain and stout padlock and locked the case securely to the guard’s van cage around its neck and upper handle while his mother tied a large label to it which named him as the owner and said Travelling to Berwick-upon-Tweed . Then she insisted on finding him a forward-facing seat and stowing his case on the overhead rack, introducing him to a rather startled woman who looked like a retired schoolmistress, in the hope that she would watch over him. Finally she gave him a hug and a kiss, which was so unlike her it reminded him he had never gone on such a journey without her. His father handed him some spending money for emergencies and a packed lunch Mrs Fowler had made and told him to call them on arrival and reverse the charges. He also made a nervous joke about not talking to strange men. Finally the guard blew his whistle and they both jumped out and closed the door and waved like mad, so that he felt obliged to lift a hand to wave back.
It was a relief to pull away from the platform, which his father had jokily run along to keep him in sight, and to take the Lovecraft stories from his case and settle down in his seat. He caught the eye of the retired schoolmistress, who smiled kindly.
‘Your mother didn’t give me the opportunity to say,’ she said, ‘but I’m only travelling as far as Birmingham New Street. But you’re a big, sensible boy. I’m sure you’ll be just fine after that.’
‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘Thank you.’ And he began to read.
Apart from one boy who only had to come from Edinburgh, everybody else seemed to have come up on a train from London. By prior arrangement they had also sat in the same carriage and talked and laughed and shared picnics and stories all the way up. Their train had arrived in Berwick ten minutes before Eustace’s and they were waiting together in a happy, noisy cluster, marked out from everyone else on the platform by their instrument cases. None of them knew Eustace, of course, so there was no sign of recognition until, in a slight panic lest the train head on to Dundee with it on board, he hurried to the guard’s van and unpadlocked his cello. Seeing him climb down with a cello case now, as well as his suitcase, the others cheered and waved.
Then a comfortable woman in a pink tweed coat and horn-rimmed spectacles hurried over saying, ‘Eustace?’ And shook his hand saying, ‘I’m Peg, the Cello Centre administrator. We don’t do surnames at Ancrum.’
She led him across the platform to the group. ‘Everybody, this is Eustace, all the way from Somerset.’
‘Hello!’ everyone shouted. It felt as though he had arrived at a birthday party after the cake had been eaten and the jellies brought out.
‘Do you all know each other already?’ he asked the flame-haired boy beside him.
‘No!’ people shouted but the boy said, ‘Yes. Some of us play together at school. I’m Ralph,’ he added and shook hands with a solemnity that made Eustace suddenly homesick for Vernon.
‘Now,’ Peg said. ‘Home to settle in quickly then out for supper. The minibus is this way.’
Following her, Eustace instinctively stuck beside Ralph, as the only other one who had begun to speak to him. ‘You’re not a cellist, then,’ he said, seeing Ralph had a violin case with him. ‘Sorry. I’m stating the obvious.’
‘Jean has to have a few of us, and a pianist or two, for the ensembles,’ Ralph said gravely. ‘But we still get a lot out of it. It’s musicianship she teaches as much as specific cello technique.’
And, sure enough, Eustace spotted two or three violin or viola cases among the luggage being shouldered all about him. Two people had no instruments at all, only music cases, thus identifying themselves as pianists.
Their instruments and cases were piled into a van by a man Peg introduced as Young Dougie, who must have been at least sixty. Then three of the older boys climbed up front with him and the rest of them boarded the minibus driven by Peg. Eustace decided to sit and see what happened and was quietly pleased that flame-headed Ralph sat beside him. Ralph had kept his violin with him, Eustace noticed, and hugged it on his lap as a mother might a baby with wind.
‘Do you ever let it out of your sight?’ he asked him.
‘Only when I’m asleep,’ Ralph admitted. ‘And, even then, I quite often reach out if I wake in the night, just to check it’s still there. It was my grandfather’s. It’s the reason I began playing. I’ve just started at the Menuhin School. I’m mainly here because of my little sister, Naomi.’
‘Oi!’ A hand smacked Ralph on the back of the head. ‘I’m only a year younger than you and much more mature.’
Ralph made a scoffing noise but was smiling and Eustace twisted in his seat. A very pretty girl with a savage haircut scowled at him.
‘I cut it myself,’ she told him, seeing him look. ‘My friend has cancer and they can make a wig with it.’
‘But not for her ,’ Ralph said. ‘Our mother was so angry.’
‘Was it very long before?’ Eustace asked her.
‘I could sit on it. I’m Naomi,’ she added. ‘And this is Freya, who is so scared she was sick on the train.’
‘Eustace,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit nervous, too,’ he told Freya, who had a woolly hat on, although it was quite warm, and looked as though she had been crying as well as sick. ‘Are you a cellist as well?’
She shook her head then almost soundlessly said, ‘Violin,’ and gave him a heartbreakingly brief, crumpled-in smile.
Ralph and Naomi had been that Easter, they told him. Just like him, Naomi was taught by a former pupil of Jean’s but they were both students at the Menuhin School. A couple of others, they’d discovered on the train up, were at somewhere called Chet’s and another two were about to start at Wells. More than ever, listening to the casual way they described lives already dedicated to their chosen instruments, Eustace felt the want of his place at Clifton.
‘So what’s Mrs Curwen like?’ he asked Ralph.
‘We don’t call her that. We all call her Jean,’ Ralph said. ‘Honestly.’
‘Jean’s amazing,’ Naomi added. ‘Nothing matters to her more than music. Not food, not housework, not gossip, not clothes.’
‘Music is a religion,’ Ralph cut in dramatically, ‘and Jean’s a priestess. She can be a bit terrifying.’
Freya looked tearful at that so Naomi added swiftly, ‘But only if she thinks you’re not taking music seriously. Or if you’re rude about Haydn.’
Once they’d passed beyond the outskirts of Berwick, Peg followed Dougie’s van through several miles of beautiful, rolling countryside dotted with mature oaks and handsome houses. It was not how Eustace had imagined Scotland. From films and shortbread tins, he had expected gloomy lochs, towering mountains and romantically ruined castles, but Ralph assured him that was the Highlands.
‘This is the Borders,’ he said, in a tone that summoned up Vernon. ‘Walter Scott country. It’s Scotland but completely different to the rest. You won’t see much countryside beyond the park, in any case. Jean keeps us pretty busy.’
They drove in at the gates of a wooded estate. Angus cattle grazed alongside sheep. There was a little estate church then a bridge over a river and then, on a rise in the land, a handsome Georgian house with big white windows, and rambling extensions out to its rear. There was a pretty double-sided flight of steps up to a sort of terrace by glazed doors on the first floor but they drove around to a more serviceable entrance off the crowded courtyard at the rear. There was palpable excitement from Ralph and Naomi and the others who had been before. Eustace felt his own first-day-of-school apprehension was matched in Freya’s expression as she pulled her hat even lower over her brow.
Jean came out to greet them, leading a small cluster of men and women. She gave an impression of height though that was probably an illusion created by good posture. She had thick, unruly dark hair tinged with grey and the lines of someone whose feelings were never hidden. As the other grown-ups ranged behind her, she laughed and began to hug anyone making a return visit.
‘Welcome back,’ she told them and Eustace decided she made him think of a lioness. She gave that impression of nobility and of coiled strength. ‘And to the rest of you, welcome to Ancrum. I’m Jean and this is my husband, Fraser and two of our full time students Magda and Brigitte, all of whom you’ll be meeting and working with. We need to settle you all in quickly before we take you to supper. Give your name to Magda here.’ She indicated a grinning young woman with very straight blonde hair. ‘She’ll tell you which room you’re in and which of us will be leading you there. All cellos into the ballroom please, where I promise they’ll be perfectly, perfectly safe. There just isn’t room for them and you and your suitcases in the bedrooms. But we make an exception for violins because we know how you worry!’ This was said with an affectionate stroke to Ralph’s cheek, which brought on a blush.
They queued to give their names to Magda to look up on her clipboard. Each adult was collecting a different cluster of them for a different part of the house. As he gave his name and Magda was examining her list, Jean called out, ‘Eustace? You’re with me!’
He turned and she shook his hand.
‘I’ve heard all about you from dear Carla,’ she said. ‘How is she?’
‘Oh,’ Eustace said, uncertain. ‘All right, I think.’ And he was briefly unnerved by the directness of her stare. This was not a woman from whom you could have secrets or for whom you would ever dare not to practise.
He was happy to find he was in the same room as Ralph and a tall boy called Fred who played the viola and seemed dauntingly grown-up. They were joined by one of the pianists, Pierre, and Jean marched them at speed through the house. They went via the huge ballroom, so Eustace could leave his cello there, then up an uncarpeted back staircase – what Jean called the Maids’ Staircase in a tone that implied she might once have been used to maids – to a long room in the attic with five beds in it.
‘Ralph can lead you both back to civilization in a moment,’ she said. ‘The boys’ bathroom is just back along the corridor – girls are up a different staircase entirely – and we’ll be off to supper in—’ She glanced at her little gold wristwatch. ‘Six o’clock. All right? Happy, Eustace?’
Eustace smiled and nodded and she briefly beamed back.
‘Good boy.’
They deferred to the tall boy, Fred, who was clearly the oldest and let him take the bed slightly apart from the others and nearest the window. Eustace took a bed in the farthest corner, which, he was pleased to see, had its own reading light. Pierre, who had an accent, so was presumably French, immediately set about carefully unpacking his suitcase into a chest of drawers. Nobody else bothered.
Ralph led the way back down the Maids’ Staircase. The family’s rooms, he explained, were on the first floor, where a stuffed bear with raised paws warned against trespassing. They were staying where the rest of Jean’s lucky handful of full time students lived during term times.
‘Do they do nothing but cello?’ Pierre asked. ‘Surely there are laws about needing to learn other subjects?’
‘Oh yes,’ Ralph explained airily. ‘They study maths and languages and they can do A levels in history of art and music, of course.’
‘But Jean teaches them the cello,’ said Fred a bit mournfully. ‘And everyone knows that’s what matters most.’
‘Is there somewhere like this just for violas?’ Eustace asked him and Fred seemed to notice him for the first time.
‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘Unlike cellists, we tend not to draw attention to ourselves.’
The others jeered kindly. Jokes at the expense of viola players were a musical tradition.
They came through a big panelled hall where a mounted stag’s head looked down on a rocking horse and an array of wellingtons, walking boots, walking sticks and an old side table where a framed, signed photograph of Pablo Casals stood amidst a welter of unopened letters, including some bills marked URGENT in red letters.
At every turn there seemed to be rooms cluttered with music stands, standard lamps and antique dining chairs. There were oil paintings, many of them battered and even torn and patched, of horses, dogs, country houses and the men and women who lived in them. A deerhound the size of a pony emerged from her lair under a piano to nibble Ralph’s ears and was introduced as Rowena.
Immediately breaking the group down into clusters of three or four to settle them in was good psychology. By the time Jean was striking a tam-tam to summon them down to the back door, tentative alliances had formed and there was chatter and laughter as they climbed into a succession of more or less filthy household cars. Jean and Fraser stayed behind but Peg and the younger tutors drove them to a large Victorian guesthouse a couple of miles away where, in the formal dining room, Magda led them in singing a grace in German. Then softly spoken local girls in uniform served them. There was a choice of three dishes for three courses but all of them, at Jean’s insistence, were vegetarian. Pierre, who had sat with Eustace, Ralph and Freya (who was still in her woollen hat but seemed marginally less unhappy) was aghast.
‘I have steak twice a week usually,’ he said. ‘Not this . . . rabbit food.’
But Eustace thought it sounded rather good. He had a glass of tomato juice to start then grated Double Gloucester with slices of Bramley apple on a bed of lettuce. Freya’s nut cutlet and roast vegetables looked rather more sustaining. Ralph assured him the puddings were excellent and said the menu never varied so one could work one’s way through all options. Fred was at a different table, Eustace saw, where his height and good looks had left him surrounded by girls, including Naomi, but she saw him watching and gave him a private smile that seemed to say, ‘I know. We’re ridiculous.’
In the course of the meal it emerged that Eustace was the only one at his table not attending or about to attend a school noted for its music department. Even Freya’s eyes widened when, prompted by Pierre, he told the sad story of his music scholarship.
‘A comprehensive?’ she murmured, her voice much richer and deeper than her wan expression led one to expect. ‘You poor thing.’
‘It’s really not that bad,’ he said, instantly warming to the kindness in her tone. ‘I’ll still have lessons with Carla Gold – she’s a pupil of Jean’s – and I can join the local youth orchestra once I’m fourteen.’
‘But it’s the practice. When will you practise?’
Eustace told them he would practise after school, the way he always had, but both Pierre and Ralph pointed out that their schools made both solitary and supervised practice a part of the daily timetable. Freya rather boldly added that practising outside school hours required more discipline.
‘Half of us would probably grind to a halt,’ she said, ‘if we didn’t have parents or teachers pushing us.’
‘What would you do if you stopped?’ Eustace asked her.
She looked at him owlishly, scratched an itch on her scalp through her hat. ‘Climb trees?’ she suggested. ‘Read books? Get a boyfriend?’
The other two laughed at her.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ Ralph said. ‘She’s easily the strongest player in our year,’ he told Eustace. ‘You know you are,’ he added when she flicked a pea at him. ‘You’ll play the Britten concerto next term. You’ll be in the Royal College at eighteen and you’ll go and do postgrad abroad then become a soloist.’
She shrugged and returned to picking at her food. ‘It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t rather climb trees and read books,’ she muttered.
‘Does your mother push you?’ he asked Pierre.
Pierre pushed away his plate with a pout. ‘She’s a tyrant and a bitch,’ he sighed. ‘And completely unreasonable. But I happen to love what she makes me do. Yours?’ he asked Ralph.
‘Oh,’ Ralph said. ‘Ours is famously unhinged. She played Casals recordings to Naomi in the womb. Jean taught her, you see, and she never got over Jean’s disappointment when she stopped playing to get married. Naomi didn’t stand a chance. I’m just along for the ride.’
‘So not true,’ Freya said.
Once again Eustace felt himself singled out for not having a mother who pushed him relentlessly or even at all. He did not admit this however, covering up by making the others laugh with an entirely untrue story of how his mother used to go through his weekly practice book and quiz him to check he had done everything listed there.
‘Have you done D minor? Well, have you?’ rapidly became a catchphrase the others repeated to each other as supper progressed and he felt guilty for turning his mother into a joke.
After supper, because apparently it was some kind of tradition, those who had been before led all the others down to a recreation room in the basement where there was a ping-pong table. There were only two bats but they played an elimination game called Round the Table. This involved everyone squeezing into a circle revolving around the table, hitting the ball just once then slamming the bat back down for the next person behind them. It was easy enough to start with but, as people were eliminated for failing to snatch the bat in time or wildly mis-swiping the ball, the atmosphere became hysterical. Eustace surprised himself by staying in quite long. The last two, reduced to having to spin once on the spot between hits, were Naomi and Freya, both experts and briefly savage in their determination to win. When Freya caught Naomi out with an especially fast return, Naomi shouted, ‘Did you do the D minor? Well, did you?’ so that Eustace knew his joke about his mother had spread to other tables. They played twice more until Magda fetched them out via the door into the garden.
Girls his own age were a rarity, something Eustace had not known since the primary-coloured idyll of his Walliscote kindergarten class before starting at St Chad’s. He realized half-way through the furious, clattering progress of the third game that girls on the course had been a source of dread to him. He had worried their presence would expose or test him, that, being male, he’d be expected to approach them in some peculiarly male manner. He had foolishly made no allowances for their being free agents and was surprised to find them approaching him, talking to him and, strangest of all, finding him funny. He had never thought of himself as funny before, apart from privately with Vernon, thinking himself strange and intense. Perhaps girls’ humour was different to boys’, relying more on words and less on physicality?
As they took their seats in the minibuses he found himself surrounded by girls as Fred had been on the way from the station and at supper. They were very inquisitive, he discovered. He had thought the conversation at Ancrum would be all of music, but they wanted to know where he lived, if he had siblings, what he did for pleasure. As he tried to answer them in ways he hoped would hold their interest or make them laugh or like him, he realized he was shaping a persona, a version that was and wasn’t quite himself. It was at once protection and another source of worry. Could these girls, from unhappy Freya to the two contrasting sisters who lived in a very grand public school where their father was organist, tell he was not like other boys? Could they sense it off him, like a sweet, unmanly smell? Was that why they seemed so immediately confiding and comfortable with him as they weren’t, say, with the older boys? Perhaps they were unconsciously treating him as another girl?
When they returned to the house they were directed to the ballroom where chairs and music stands had been set up, not in a conventional orchestral layout but in two generous semicircles facing another chair, which, in its emptiness, radiated a kind of power. Like most of the furniture he had glimpsed in the house, the chairs were antiques, an array of dining chairs, many of which seemed still to have their original upholstery on them, the silk rotten from sunshine, with horsehair and wadding showing through in places. They all took their instruments and bows and clustered the cases together in a big bay window. Suddenly Jean was among them, also holding her cello and bow. She was smiling. It was as though the palpable excitement in the room and the simple presence of young players keen to play gave her joy.
‘Sit wherever you like,’ she called out. Her voice was quite high but commanding, her accent evocative of the past, like that of an old BBC announcer. She wore brown leather court shoes, a tweed skirt and a pink silk blouse. With her thick, unruly hair and lack of make-up or jewellery, and her craggy bird-of-prey profile, she could not have been less like Carla. She would have looked quite at home serving tea and slices of cake at the Women’s Institute. And yet something in her voice, in her effortless authority, made him want to please her any way he could. Suddenly she pointed to the chair nearest her.
‘Sit here, Eustace, so I can hear you.’
She sat in the central chair, facing them all, rapidly tuned her cello then played an A for them all to tune to. She smiled around the room as they tuned. Her posture was extraordinarily upright. He couldn’t help but notice the way she stuck out her left foot just as Carla had taught him to do from the start.
‘Chord of C major,’ she called out. ‘Any note in the triad you like.’ Lots of people started on a bottom G or a C then changed their minds. Eustace picked the E above middle C as it was easy to tune.
She looked around her as the chord hummed and buzzed. He noticed she was playing a high C, in thumb position. She had found it without so much as a glance.
‘And listen. And tune to each other. Good. Now C minor.’
Eustace obediently shifted down a semitone to E flat, again a note he felt confident finding and tuning.
‘Everyone who’s on the fifth, sharpen it. That’s better. Now for something fairly unrelated. F major.’
There was a momentary hesitation then a blurring as people chose their notes, then a condensing of harmony so pleasing he couldn’t help but smile. Jean looked around the room and smiled back at him.
‘Now. Anyone born in January, add in an E flat.’ She unerringly took in that Eustace and Freya had each added the dominant seventh. ‘Only two of you! So. Quieter. If you can’t hear Eustace and Freya, you’re too loud. Balance to them. That’s it. So. Good.’ She held up an eloquently bony hand and they all fell silent. ‘Hello Rowena,’ she said to the deerhound, who had briefly come to look in from the doorway. ‘Later.’ Rowena walked away with a sigh. ‘So. I am Jean Curwen, for those of you who don’t know me, and this is my calling: the cello is my life. I happen to think music, not money or being clean and tidy, or doing brilliantly at exams or being pretty, is the single most important thing in life. Music knits. It heals. It is balm to the soul but it is also the refiner’s fire. It requires rigour and application and although you’re only with me for this one precious week I expect rigour and application from you all while you’re here. But we will also have fun.’ And her face was wreathed in a mischievous smile.
‘Now, before we play anything, I notice that two of you have steel strings.’ There was some glancing around to spot the guilty parties – one of the older boys on viola and a girl cellist who looked about ten but was possibly just very small. ‘I’ll find out your reasons for playing with these later, but let me just demonstrate something. Eustace?’ She stood, gave Eustace her cello to hold then held out her hand for the girl’s instrument. ‘May I?’
Blushing, the girl passed it to her. Jean sat again and played a little half-scale on the A string.
‘Thank you.’ She handed the cello back.
‘Now listen.’ She took her cello from Eustace and played exactly the same figure with exactly the same bowing pressure and speed. ‘Do you hear the difference? Yes, gut strings are harder work, because there’s a natural friction there that forces you to seek out the tone with your bow. And you can always compromise and use silver on gut, which speaks more readily than gut alone. The steel string lets you sound those notes more easily but there’s a natural pulse to the gut resonance, which the steel lacks. And steely players are obliged to confect a pulse through too fast a vibrato or by gushy bowing and the effect is falsely passionate. In the worst cases it becomes hysterical. You probably think I’m quite mad. Eustace certainly does.’ This with a glance at Eustace. ‘But I know what I’m saying as the cello is my life, and I have been crucified for my truth.’
This last declaration came out with a terrifying crackle in her voice so that nobody knew where to look. She broke the momentary harsh atmosphere with a handclap.
‘So,’ she said, ‘let’s celebrate new friendship by playing Fauré. There are several great composers who never understood the cello or any stringed instrument really, like Wagner.’ Somebody hissed theatrically. ‘Yes, quite. But Fauré understood strings intimately and wrote especially well for us cellists. This is an arrangement of the Libera Me from his Requiem. Violins and violas, there are parts for you. The rest of you, I’ll give you parts at random. Just play whatever lands up on your stand. It’s a very fair arrangement. You all get the big tune at some point!’
She handed her cello to Eustace again and swiftly distributed music across the room.
‘It will feel glorious playing together at last and your instinct will be to show off and play out. Please don’t, even when you have the tune. This week is all about chamber music and half the art of chamber music is listening to each other. If all you can hear is you, you can’t very well listen to your neighbours. So . . .’
She took back her cello with a polite, ‘Thank you, Eustace,’ then counted them in. ‘One, two, three, four.’
Once the pizzicato introduction had begun, she sat down to join in. She was playing from memory, he noticed. She had given him a part that began with the melody. Was this on purpose, so she could hear his playing? He played it confidently, knowing two or three others were on the same line, including Naomi. It lay exactly in his comfort zone, in third and fourth positions, where he could reach for the kind of resonance Carla called searing and true . At least it did at first. Glancing ahead down the handwritten page, he could see there was a middle section where it strayed into thumb position.
Jean seemed to be having fun, turning her smile this way and that across the room like a lighthouse, for all that she was paying close attention to everyone’s playing. She sang as she played – sang the Latin words in a high, girlish voice at odds with her leonine looks. He found he was transfixed by her long right leg and caramel-coloured court shoe thrust out to balance her bowing arm, presumably as she had taught Carla and precisely as Carla had taught him. He was moved and reassured by the familiar gesture as he was by her elegantly extended bowing arm and supple strength in her wrist as it flexed to begin each up-bow. It so mirrored Carla’s technique as to be like spotting a family resemblance in a relative never met until now.
Suddenly they were in the middle section, lots of them scaling in thumb position in thirds, and it wasn’t so bad because there was safety in numbers and the music was still glorious, but different, glassy and nervous. ‘Tremens, tremens factus sum ego, ’ Jean sang. ‘But hush! Yes it’s high and hard but piano , piano . We’re scared for our lives! That’s it! And here it comes again. Dum-dum. Da dum-dum. Da dum-dum. Nice rounded pizzicato hands, please. No need to be timid. It’s the relentless tread of the advancing angel. It’s the End of the World and there’s no escape. Yes. Yes! And here’s the heavenly tune again. But this time it’s bigger because you’ve prayed and there is no hope but GOD! And GO!’
And she stopped talking to play along with the melody only now she wasn’t smiling; she was in character, utterly solemn, eyes briefly closed. When they finished, she roared approval and clapped.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think there is no better composer for the cello than Fauré. Have any of you learnt his sonatas yet? Or the piano quartets and trio?’ Naomi put up her hand. ‘Naomi!’ Jean said. ‘Lucky, lucky girl. At least one group will learn Fauré this week. Why is Fauré so great? He has purity of purpose. He is a scholar yet he delights in pure harmony. So. Have we time?’ She glanced at her tiny, ladylike wristwatch. ‘Yes. So. Back to the beginning. Do you all know what Libera Me means?’
‘Save me?’ Eustace boldly suggested.
‘Yes. It is one of the prayers near the end of the Latin Requiem or mass for the dead. Spare me Lord from eternal death on that terrible day. Which day, dear Freya?’
Barely audibly, still wearing her woolly hat, Freya murmured something.
‘Yes, the end of the world. And look what Fauré does! The pizzicato is relentless. It is the thing you cannot escape. It is your fate. Dum-dum. Da dum-dum. Da dum-dum. Or perhaps it’s the beating of your frightened heart. But then the prayer!’ She played the first phrase of the melody. ‘The prayer is a melody that would unlock heaven. It’s saying sorry, sorry for all my dreadful sins but it’s also saying PLEASE! So, first the pizzicato. Let’s try it again and now we know what it is, that it’s Fate, it’s terrifying, I want it energized . Can you do that? Of course you can! And—’ She laughed. ‘One, two, three, four.’
They played it again, only this time instead of joining in, she walked among them, now conducting, now simply crying out little phrases of encouragement, now singing in Latin in that high girlish voice. She was quite mad and utterly wonderful and Eustace would have followed her barefoot into a desert.
At home Eustace always had a bath before going to bed. It would have felt quite wrong putting his pyjamas on dirty. The other boys in the room just stood around brushing their teeth at the bedroom sink then pulled on pyjamas or, in the case of Fred, got into bed in their pants. He decided to seize the chance of a bath, guessing there would be competition for it in the morning. It ran slowly, with much coughing and gurgling from the pipes, which he hoped wasn’t bothering people, and the chilly little room soon filled with comforting steam. The bath was extremely narrow, chosen to save hot water in the washing of children, or maids perhaps, so soon filled. He lay back, staring at cobwebs on the sloping ceiling nearby, feeling the chipped enamel hug his hips and, as usual, avoided looking at his body. The hot water stung where he had used the hair remover the night before.
On the wall to one side in a battered bamboo frame hung a large reproduction of Augustus John’s Madame Suggia, demonstrating her formidable swan bowing technique. Like Jean’s extended left foot, it was another family resemblance, evoking his earliest lessons with Carla, before she gave up her flat in Weston and moved to Clifton.
Quite possibly Carla had lain in this very bath at his age, though Naomi had implied that the rooms in the girls’ wing were a little less spartan, as Jean’s attitude to the differing needs of the sexes was quite conventional. He looked at Madame Suggia’s magnificently haughty pose and thought of Carla’s pretty handwriting spelling out the principles of good wrist and upper arm pronation. He remembered the curious thrill when she had first explained the term panâche .
The long evening had left him keyed up with its rush of unfamiliar people and new sensations. He was worried he still hadn’t learnt everyone’s names, and the boys his age were rather daunting, with their offhand familiarity with London and its great concert halls, the authority with which they recommended this or that brand of string or rosin and, most especially, with the casually shared assumption that they were all going to pursue music as a career. But he knew already that he wanted nothing more than to return there as one of Jean’s full time students.
He was startled by a desire to cry and let out a little silent sob before stifling the urge with a hot, wet flannel across his face. He missed home he realized, as he never had on the nights he had spent in Clifton, missed his deeply carpeted bedroom and bathroom where the bath didn’t pinch or scratch, missed his father’s nervous good humour and his mother’s casual glamour.
There was laughter in the corridor. Two of the older boys were talking quietly but their broken voices rumbled. He smelled tobacco and realized they must be smoking out of the little window off the end of the attic corridor beside the bathroom door. He tugged the flannel off his face, pinched his nose and plunged his head beneath the water. There was a large bottle of Vosene on the bath’s edge. It smelled pleasantly of hot summer roads.
This unfamiliar pang he felt was homesickness, he knew. He recognized the symptoms from William Mayne novels about children sent away to boarding school but hadn’t realized it could affect you in your teens. It made him want to live and study here all the more; like a thumb sliced open on an A string, it was part of the necessary pain of passion.