Eustace assumed Jean assembled a programme of compositions on the basis of the number of instruments represented on the course, but it was tempting to think she cast the pieces like roles in a drama after only one evening of hearing everyone play for her, sensing whatever natural affinities emerged within the group. Ironically, given that most of them had probably neglected sport and the development of their bodies to allow more time in which to hone their technique, chamber music was just like sport. Having the wrong player on the team pulled it down while being picked for a team of a higher standard than yours could help raise your game. And just as in the worst times of school sport there was the abiding horror of not being selected or pointedly being selected only when there was nobody better on offer. At least they weren’t lined up while two captains took turns to choose their teams.
Eustace dressed and came downstairs ahead of the other boys who, as he’d predicted, were queuing up to use the one bathroom and making ribald jokes about bad smells and people taking too long.
He met Naomi in the kitchen, where she was chatting in impressively fluent-sounding German to one of the full time students, who was solemnly layering some kind of smoked fish on to toast for herself while Naomi stirred a double boiler of porridge. The student was dark and pretty but grave, which Eustace instinctively trusted.
‘Guten morgen ,’ she told him.
‘Guten morgen ,’ he replied haltingly; Naomi giggled.
‘Ich heisse Brigitte ,’ Brigitte said, tapping her chest where a little gold crucifix dangled. ‘Und du ?’
‘Er . . .’ Eustace began.
Naomi prompted him, ‘Und Ich . . .’
‘Ah, yes. Und Ich, Ich heisse Eustace .’
‘Hey, Eustace,’ she said with a brief flash of good humour.
‘Brigitte has to speak German to us at all times, even if we don’t understand it,’ Naomi explained, ‘because Jean thinks it’s good for us and because it’s the language of Bach, of course.’
She served them porridge and invited him to join her in having both demerara sugar and sliced banana on top. She explained her and Ralph’s famously unhinged mother was German and had spoken nothing but her own language with them at least until they started school. He noticed how she kept touching her hacked-off hair and wondered if she was regretting having cut it so impulsively.
Suddenly there was a rush of people for breakfast. Naomi and Eustace bunched up in a corner of the long kitchen table with a pot of tea and Brigitte fled with her fishy toast and a murmured greeting. Eustace was dying to join everyone in examining the announcement Jean and Fraser had pinned up, which he had failed to notice when he first came in, but would have had to ask Naomi to get up to do so. She saw his eyes flick towards it repeatedly and smiled.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You’re not playing De Fesch with those stuck-up girls from Cheltenham. Jean’s put you with us to learn the Schubert quintet. Just the slow movement, I think. She must have been impressed by your pizz last night. And you’ve got your lesson with her straight after lunch, which is good as it gets it out of the way. Mine isn’t until Thursday, so it’ll loom.’
Freya was still wearing her hat, although the kitchen was probably the warmest room in the house on account of the Aga on which Ralph and Fred were now making industrial quantities of toast. She granted Eustace the nearest he had seen her produce to a full smile and stirred a half-teaspoon of honey into a mug where she had poured hot water over a slice of lemon. She pulled a face when Eustace gestured to the remains of his porridge.
‘I can’t keep anything down before lunch,’ she said quietly.
‘You’re playing with us,’ Naomi told her. ‘Schubert quintet, slow movement.’
‘Oh. And I’d been looking forward to a week of playing with those . . .
‘Ssh,’ Naomi warned, glancing over Freya’s shoulder.
Eustace saw she meant a pair of tall, sharp-elbowed sisters from Cheltenham who had spent much of the previous evening telling anyone who would listen that their father had just finished recording a new Beethoven cycle with his quartet, which put all previous recordings in the shade.
‘The Alice Bands,’ he said. It was the nickname he had thought up in the bath the previous night. He was gratified when Naomi nearly sloshed her tea.
Because they didn’t need a piano, they were assigned the dining room to practise in. This lay across the way from the kitchen and similarly felt as though it was in a basement because you could only see out of the windows and across the garden if you stood up on tip-toes. It had been the servants’ hall, Ralph explained.
‘They didn’t want servants looking out too easily. Here. Give me a hand.’
Eustace helped him rumble the table against one wall to give them enough space to set five old dining chairs in a circle.
‘Jean says they’re just the right height and encourage good posture,’ Naomi said. ‘Though that’s only true if you get one whose seat isn’t collapsing. Here. The hard ones are best for cellists,’ she added, setting out two hard chairs side by side so that Eustace didn’t need the cushioned one he had just picked up.
They had just set up their stands and begun to tune when their viola player arrived. He was an older boy, tall with striking black hair and blue eyes. Eustace hadn’t noticed him the night before.
‘I’m Turlough,’ he said, with a shy smile around the circle and they all gave their names.
‘You’re Irish,’ Ralph said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Stating the obvious,’ Naomi said.
‘Yes,’ Turlough said. ‘My flight from Dublin only got in first thing. Who’s got a good A here?’
‘Perfect pitch,’ Freya muttered from under her hat and gave them all her A to tune to.
The music had been left in there for them. It was interesting, Eustace thought, that Ralph and his sister took the first violin and cello parts as though by right and equally interesting that neither he nor Freya demurred. But perhaps chamber music, all music in fact, relied on such natural hierarchies. As the only viola, Turlough sat between the two paired instruments like a referee.
‘So who’s the second cello for this?’ he asked, when they had tuned.
‘Me,’ Eustace said.
‘Much the most important line in this movement,’ Turlough said and winked at him.
Wishing he didn’t blush so easily, Eustace glanced to Naomi’s part and saw that it was a mass of long-held notes compared to his. And then suddenly Ralph was counting them in and they were playing.
As with the Fauré the night before, he sensed it was a piece he ought to know. The movement was slightly baffling. It began with one of those passages where time seemed almost to stand still. Ralph played a hesitant sort of interrupted monologue on the violin to which Eustace’s cello responded with a sequence of pizzicato phrases while the other three players sustained harmonies that shifted so slowly the changes in tonality were barely detectable. It was like watching a square of moonlight slowly move across a floor. Then came a quite different, stormy middle section, in which Eustace finally got to snatch up his bow to play a repetitive figure that seemed to power the storm along until, in a magical transition, the stillness of the opening section returned, but somehow transformed by the knowledge of darkness at its heart. The square of moonlight was no longer just that but moonlight in a prison cell or stealing across the lino of a hospital ward.
He had never played with such strong, confident musicians, apart from in his lessons with Carla and Ebrahim. They were perfectly in tune; they made no mistakes, so far as he could see. You would never have guessed they were sight-reading. They somehow found space around their playing to watch one another, to smile, to communicate. In particular the tone Turlough produced from his viola was quite unlike the rather woolly one Eustace was accustomed to hearing from the viola player at St Chad’s.
The experience was so intense that it left Eustace a little shaky and he was relieved that everyone else had so much to say the moment they finished that it gave him time to recover and quickly to pencil in some fingering that had come to him as they played.
They made a second attempt at the first section. Eustace had his back to the door, so only heard it softly open and close as they played. Then he saw Turlough and Freya glance up. They stopped as agreed just at the transition to the middle section and he heard Jean’s voice behind him. He hadn’t realized she had been standing so close.
‘Thank you,’ she said, briefly placing a hand on Naomi and Eustace’s shoulders. ‘Isn’t it an extraordinary movement?’
They all nodded, shy suddenly.
‘Have any of you played it before?’
Everyone said yes. Eustace must have looked surprised.
‘And they didn’t tell you? Oh, that was mean. You did well, Eustace. One of the hardest things about pizzicato is that it goes downhill. Very hard to control its tempo and not rush. Ralph and Eustace, you’re already getting the hang of that exchange. Although it feels terribly exposed for you both. In a way the hardest thing is sustaining those long, long chords.’
‘We were just talking about that, Mrs Curwen.’
‘Turlough, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I pronounced it right?’
He nodded, with a grin.
‘You all call me Jean, here. Mrs Curwen sounds as though she breeds shelties and has no sense of humour. And what did you decide?’
‘I said I thought it was like staggered breathing in a choir,’ Naomi said. ‘That perhaps we should aim to change bows at different times.’
‘Hmm. Yes. And did it work?’
Freya smiled.
‘Not sure, eh? It is just hard. But Schubert was a string player. He never asks the impossible the way Tchaikovsky does. Let’s just hear the three of you for a bit without Eustace and Ralph.’
She pronounced Ralph Rafe , at which Naomi gave Eustace a sort of secret smile with just her eyes. Jean counted them in and walked slowly around them in a circle as they played. Eustace took the opportunity to gaze full on at Turlough. He had tugged off the jersey he had been wearing when he came in and his striped T-shirt revealed very pale arms with well developed muscles, as though he rowed boats when not playing the viola. As he bowed, his forearm actually rippled. It was in oddly manly contrast to the child’s Timex he wore.
‘That’s it,’ Jean said softly as she walked. ‘Try to keep those chord changes so together and smooth that we hardly notice them happen. Smoother bow changes. That’s more like it. Thank you.’
She clapped her hands and the three of them stopped playing. Turlough looked directly at Eustace in a way that made him sure he’d seen him watching. Freya scratched her scalp under her hat with the tip of her bow. As she talked, Jean rested a hand on Freya’s shoulder very kindly, as if to show she knew it could not be spoken of but that she understood that she wore the hat because she was unhappy and felt self-conscious without it even though it drew attention to whatever lay underneath.
‘Now let me hear those first thirty bars again with all of you. Ralph, what do you think this is about?’
Ralph paled. Eustace had already picked up from talking to him that his approach to music was deeply technical and that Jean’s narrative interpretation made him uncomfortable.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said at last.
She laughed. ‘I do like a man who says nothing when there’s nothing to say. Well it’s Deutsch 956 – opus 163 posthumously – so it’s very, very late. He finished it just two months before his death. He almost certainly knew he was dying. He was desperately ill and being treated with mercury. We know that he wrote this, along with the great last three piano sonatas, just months from his death at only thirty-one – and that a few years earlier he had written these words. On the road to martyrdom, nearing eternal ruin, my life is annihilated in the dust; a prey to unheard-of grief – kill it and kill me myself. So imagine! His bones are in constant pain, all his body hair has fallen out or been shaved. Light hurts his eyes. He has pustules all over and he has lesions in his throat and on his tongue that mean he can no longer sing his songs or talk to friends. And yet he writes this! This wonder! Now Ralph, you’re a sensible, scientific man just as dear Freya here is a sensible, scientific woman so let’s not talk sad stories, let’s talk theory. What key are we in?’
‘E major?’ Freya said it as a question but it was clear and they all knew it.
‘Yes. Sunniest of keys for these strange, still outer sections. But then where do we go? I bet Eustace knows.’
‘F minor,’ said Eustace.
‘And is that odd?’
‘Well it’s completely unrelated to E major,’ Naomi offered.
‘Exactly! And it erupts into this tranquillity but the tranquillity isn’t quite the same after. Traces of the tempest remain, see? There?’ Jean leaned to point over Naomi’s shoulder at her music. ‘Right near the end he dips back into F minor then out again into E major. It’s as though he’s lifting a trapdoor in the floor in front of you to reveal the abyss. I always think it’s rather terrifying. But the hard thing is not to over-egg it. It’s Schubert, not Mahler. So, young Ralph,’ she laughed, ‘bearing all that grimness in mind, have another go. Remember it’s a conversation, not a solo. Chamber music is always a conversation, even when only one of you is talking. But what’s so strange and sad here is that the violin doesn’t get proper answers. The second cello gives dusty answers, almost echoes. They’re like poor Echo following Narcissus around, if you like, and Ralph says I’m so sad and all Eustace can answer is So sad. And now The Madwoman will shut up and let you play.’
But then she continued, ‘Just two more things! You three, with your long, held notes, try thinking of them as lights. These two are walking sadly through the world’s most beautiful wood at dusk and you three are like film lighting men holding them in this halo as their conversation, their circular conversation, winds on towards the eruption. And finally, finally, ask yourselves if the E major is as happy as it seems. Or is it like moonlight on the face of a dying man? So. Off you go.’
They lifted their bows and began the movement again. She had given them no technical advice whatsoever, just talked at them, ranted almost. And yet it seemed to Eustace their playing was changed for, as he concentrated on timing his pizzicato answers precisely, trying to make them sad echoes of Ralph’s questions, he found he was picturing the Fort at home, in autumn, with piles of dead leaves and him walking a few paces behind Vernon, and finding nothing he said could catch his attention or make him turn around to face him again.
She left them alone soon after that, listening long enough to hear some of the middle section and telling Eustace they could look at that together in his afternoon session. They were playing when she left and continued until Freya complained that she had flunked an entry and wanted to try it again. Then Naomi said,
‘You know this means she has singled us out?’
‘What for?’ Turlough asked warily.
‘She usually leaves supervision of the morning sessions to Fraser and the others. But on most courses she picks one group and visits them every day and makes their piece the finale on the last night. Last time it was those sisters from Hungary, remember?’
‘How could I forget?’ Ralph sighed.
‘Isn’t that unfair on the others?’ Eustace asked. ‘I mean, everyone has paid to be here.’
‘Music’s never fair,’ Freya told him. ‘Like beauty.’
‘It’s good Jean wants to work with you on this,’ Naomi added. ‘How are you bowing that figure in the middle section?’
He demonstrated his idea, slurring the triplets. She frowned.
‘I think that’s too uneven, and bloody hard to keep up. Try just bowing it out; you’ll end on an up bow, I know, which feels odd but actually that gives a nice propulsion and lets you swell into each repeat of the figure and start again with a wallop of a down bow. ’
He tried it. She was right; that bowing had far better momentum. He sensed Naomi was right about most things.
At around eleven there were footsteps on the stairs and a rush of noise and chat in the kitchen as the others broke for coffee. By unspoken agreement, the five of them played on, working on the passionate middle section, and Eustace couldn’t decide if they were showing off or simply single-mindedly dedicated, or both at once.
They broke when everyone else had gone upstairs again, stopping for instant coffee and banana bread, which Freya insisted they spread with butter and honey for energy. She wasn’t sad, he was coming to realize, but furious. From little things she let slip, she revealed she had a great store of anger, like a banked-up boiler hotbox, against her school, her father, her teacher, her hair and most other people. She had extremely high standards about everything and he was honoured when she began to smile at his comments.
As they stood around the kitchen table munching their buttery honeyed banana bread, stretching out their backs after long sitting and dazed from intense focus on the Schubert in a badly lit room, Freya suddenly said, ‘It’s appalling you’re not being allowed to take up that scholarship.’
‘The important thing is my lessons with Carla. And those are nothing to do with school.’
‘I can’t believe you’re taught by Carla Gold,’ Naomi said.
He felt a glow of pride.
‘I heard her play Beethoven in Cork,’ Turlough said. ‘She’s pretty stellar.’
‘Doesn’t mean she’s a good teacher,’ Naomi said.
‘She has such good hair,’ Freya said and pushed angrily at her hat.
Lunch was a cauldron of vegetable soup and a mound of bread rolls heated in the Aga. The soup was thin and under-seasoned but there was a big block of cheddar to grate into it. The Klengel Variations for cello quartet were being worked on, a Haydn piano trio and the Fauré one. Everyone enjoyed saying how amazing their piece was, but how challenging, how much fun they’d had with whichever tutor came in to work with them on it. Nobody mentioned Jean visiting their rehearsal and the quintet kept quiet about it. Pudding was tart apples and woolly pears.
Eustace’s session with Jean was the first of the afternoon and she had written BE PROMPT! in capital letters at the top of the schedule so he decided to go straight to the library so as to practise there while he waited for her. But Jean was already in there when he arrived, eating the last of a plate of oatcakes, sliced apples and fingers of cheese.
‘Oh sorry,’ he said, making to back out. ‘I’m early.’
‘Come in, dear Eustace,’ she said. ‘It’s quite all right. Punctuality is so important for musicians. You’ll hardly ever be working alone and one late person holds everybody up. You set yourself up over there while I finish nibbling.’
The library was a beautiful room, panelled in oak. The shelves were packed with music and books about music and composers. A watercolour of the house hung over the mantelpiece and the silk curtains and cushions on the window seats were rotting, fabric hanging in strips here and there, but the effect on a fine day was pretty, their pinks and blues faded like old flowers.
There were two chairs and stands still in place from a piano trio rehearsal that morning. He set his Schubert part and pencil on one of the stands then perched on the piano stool and played himself a D minor triad to tune to.
‘I can tell who taught you,’ she said, with a smile.
‘I don’t have a piano at home,’ he admitted. ‘Just a tuning fork.’
‘And what more does a boy need?’ she said. ‘What an interesting old instrument. I couldn’t help noticing last night. Could I have another look?’
She came to sit in one of the chairs and he handed it to her along with his bow. She thanked him, sounded the strings to check his tuning and flattened the C string slightly. Then she played a few bars of the middle section of the Schubert.
She didn’t play out, the way the rest of them tended to, parading their big tones to one another like so many peacock tails, she played inwardly, as though to herself. And yet the tone was rich. It was like someone playing at full volume but in a distant room.
‘How do you do that?’ he asked.
She grinned. ‘Little finger,’ she said. ‘He just seems to rest there but on a piano up bow he does so much. What a nice cello. Did Carla find it for you?’
‘Yes. In Bristol.’
‘Ah. A famously good hunting ground. Well done her. I’m rather envious. There you go. Have it back before I grow too attached. Play me that very bit, from the key change, until I tell you to stop. I’ll talk probably. I talk all the time while pupils play, but keep on playing.’
She sat back on the other chair. She sat as though about to play herself, very erect, as though at table but perching almost on the chair’s front.
He began to play, trying not to rush, trying to remember how the other parts had sounded above him that morning. But she didn’t talk. She listened intently until he reached the end of the arco passage and began on the pizzicato of the last third.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Good simple bowing. Some people fiddle around with it but that’s a good solution for that figure because it gives it the right propulsion.’
‘That was Naomi’s suggestion,’ he confessed.
‘Ah. Naomi is good at bowings. You know why? She sings! Singers get it almost instinctively because there’s a natural grammar to stresses and uplifts when we sing, as there is when we speak.’
‘Carla always tells me to sing when working out bowing,’ he told her.
‘Good for Carla. Now listen. I’m appalled about Clifton. She wrote to tell me when she signed you up for the course.’
‘Ah.’
‘You’re at a crucial stage, you see. Two years in the wrong environment could ruin your technique.’
‘Oh but I’ll still be learning with her,’ he assured her. ‘It’s just school.’
‘But it’s not, do you see?’ Her tone became suddenly urgent, firm. He had heard the boys talking about Jean’s notoriously swift rages but this wasn’t rage so much as caring very deeply. He could not imagine daring to look away when she spoke like this. ‘It’s about nurturing. If you’re a music scholar it’s a clear, unambiguous statement of priorities. If you’re just another boy in just another school, it wouldn’t matter how marvellous your teacher was, if the lessons happen elsewhere and outside school hours, do you see?’
‘I think so,’ he said, although he didn’t, not really, since he had always had his cello lessons away from school.
‘You enjoyed this morning, I think. Playing with the others?’
He nodded.
‘I could see it the moment I came into the room,’ she said. ‘You were glowing with it. We must see if Carla can help set you up with a quartet or a piano trio back at home or in Bristol.’
‘I’m hoping to join the youth orchestra in Weston.’
‘Well that’s good,’ she said, ‘but the trouble with orchestral playing is you’re so hidden within the group it might get you into bad habits, whereas in a chamber group you’re effectively a soloist whenever you play. So. Play me that section again, but I’ll fill in the first cello part. It’s such a strong figure, such a strong rhythm that you need to lean into the other lines but sort of pull away from them at the same time.’
He had no idea what she meant but nodded and quickly retuned while she went to collect her own cello. She sat, played her A as a cue to him to play his so that she could tune to him, then she counted them in and he began to play. To his amazement she had the first cello line by heart and, because she had no music in front of her, she watched his playing closely as she played. Her look was hawkish and unsmiling, so he focused on reading his music instead.
She broke off abruptly. ‘Would you like to study here, Eustace?’ she asked. ‘As a full time student, I mean. Once you’re sixteen?’
‘I’d like that more than anything,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘Dear boy. Such enthusiasm. Well I can’t promise anything. You’re still very young and we’d only take you after O levels. It was different when we were based in Ladbroke Grove but it is so remote here you’d have to board and we’d have to teach you everything. And we can’t do that until you get most of the other subjects out of the way. But talk it over with your parents. There are grants and scholarships you can apply for if, well, if they can’t manage fees. When you come back at Easter, we can see how you’re progressing and then maybe lay plans. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Now. Back to the beginning and show me that pizzicato again. You’re in dialogue with the violin, echoing him at least, sad little echoes, but we need a sense of direction in each phrase like the one you’d produce if you were bowing, not plucking . . .’
After the lesson he couldn’t put his cello back in the ballroom because a group was rehearsing Klengel in there. A log fire had been lit in the intervening sitting room, as it had turned chilly since the morning, and Freya, Naomi, the Alice Bands and several other girls were flopped in there across the sofas and chairs, worn out from practising. He lingered a while to warm his back and pet Rowena, who was slumped on the rug before the fire, mumbling a toy made from an old sock stuffed with other socks and knotted. But they were talking about teachers and players he didn’t know, then Naomi condemned someone’s description of a concert programme as so provincial in a way that made him uncomfortable. Besides, his head was still buzzing from the things Jean had told him and he dreaded having them made ordinary by thoughtless cross-examination so he gave the deerhound one last lingering rub behind the ears, which she seemed to like, then quietly slipped off upstairs.
He had thought to lie on his bed for a while so he would be at his best when they played again later. Turlough was practising Bach in the bathroom across the way. It took Eustace a few moments to place a piece he recognized as the sarabande from the second cello suite because it was up an octave. It hadn’t occurred to him before that, of course, any cello piece could be borrowed for the viola, or vice versa, with only this simple transposition, as their string arrangement was the same.
Turlough didn’t break off diffidently as Eustace would have done, but then Eustace would never have practised facing a wide-open door as though playing to an audience. He was standing with his back to the window and afternoon sunlight formed a halo around his curly hair and made his expression hard to read. Eustace had thought to walk heedlessly into their room, which he saw through its open door was mercifully empty, but Turlough shifted position in such a way as he played that the light fell full on his handsome face and their eyes met. After which it would have felt rudely dismissive to walk on, so he simply sat on the creaking floorboards and leaned against the wall to watch and listen until the movement came to an end.
Clapping would have felt silly and he was learning from the others to be cooler in his responses.
‘That works well,’ he said. ‘I like the way you didn’t draw out the last phrase the way some cellists do.’
‘Thanks,’ Turlough said, scratching an itch on his thigh with his bow adjuster. ‘Oh my God, you just had your Jean session. How was it?’ His lazy smile did something to Eustace’s stomach.
‘She’s incredible,’ Eustace said. ‘It’s odd because, compared to my teacher at home, she doesn’t give much technical instruction. It’s more that she just inspires or talks in terms of phrasing or feeling.’
‘It’s flattery,’ Turlough said. ‘She takes your technique as read and talks to you as a fellow musician. Bet she’d have the same effect on a clarinetist or a trumpeter.’
‘But she— Well, she cares so deeply about the music you feel you’re sort of doomed to disappoint her just by being human.’
‘Listen, you did well this morning. Weren’t you intimidated?’
‘By you lot? Of course. You’re all so good. But you sort of swept me along with you.’
Then Turlough just looked at him without speaking so that Eustace rather wished he hadn’t stupidly sat himself on the floor like a child and could just stroll on his way like an adult. ‘You kept looking at me as though you wanted something from me,’ Turlough said at last.
Eustace laughed and picked at some hard skin that was cracking painfully beside his left thumbnail. It would hurt if he had to play thumb position tonight but he knew better than to let it show or to risk bad tuning by wearing a plaster on it.
‘Don’t be daft,’ he muttered, mortified at having his thoughts so easily read.
‘It’s a cruel truth,’ Turlough told him, ‘but you’ll find the boys who get kissed the most tend to be the ones who want it least. Wanting is never sexy.’
He retuned and began to play the first minuet from the same suite, turning aside slightly as he did so as if to release an unwelcome supplicant from an audience.
Eustace scrabbled to his feet and continued to the bedroom. Luckily there was nobody else in there so he could flop on to his narrow bed and clutch the pillow for comfort. That morning the bed across from his had not been claimed but now, he saw, there was someone’s holdall and coat dropped on it. The holdall handle had an airline tag attached so he guessed the things belonged to Turlough.
He rolled over, clutching the pillow again but facing the wall now. The sound of Turlough’s viola was inescapable, warm, insistent. Why had he felt the need to say anything? It was simple cruelty. Somehow Eustace felt far more vulnerable to sharp words there, in a house full of glorious music and more sensitive, interesting company than he had ever had at St Chad’s, but perhaps that was because he had always faced school on the defensive, expectations low and pre-armed against cruelty. He wished he had not come upstairs. He wished he had stayed safely by the fire with the deerhound and the girls. But then he fell sound asleep.
When he woke the viola had fallen silent and the light had changed. Quite unused to falling asleep in daylight, he was disorientated and took a moment or two to remember where he was and why. Then he sat up abruptly, worried it was late and he had missed supper.
Turlough was sitting on the neighbouring bed watching him. He smiled perfectly kindly. ‘I was about to wake you,’ he said, ‘but you looked so peaceful.’
‘Is it suppertime?’
‘Uh-huh. Time for another pear and cheese salad or whatever. I’m sure Jean puts us all on vegetarian diets because she thinks meat arouses passions. That woman has a deep mistrust of sex.’
It was the first time Eustace had heard anyone speaking disrespectfully of Jean and he was shocked. He sat up fully, swinging his feet on to the narrow stretch of old carpet between them.
‘I quite like salad,’ he said, which made Turlough smile.
‘Do you want that kiss now?’ he asked.
Eustace was trying to think of some suitably cool retort when Turlough abruptly took his head between his hands and kissed him full on the mouth. Once, twice, then a third time more lingeringly, pressing Eustace’s lips apart with his tongue. He withdrew a little, gazing at him then rubbed his rather rough thumb across his lips, as though to wipe the kiss away, and said, ‘Come on. Supper.’ He jumped up and hurried out, leaving Eustace to compose himself and follow.
The week was at once so repetitive – in the unvarying routines of working on the Schubert in the mornings and playing en masse in the evenings and the equally unvarying menus at lunch and supper – and so rich in its content, that Eustace could not have looked back with any certainty and said what happened when every day something new was thrown into the mix. One day Jean made everyone lie on the floor of the darkened ballroom and Listen. Really listen to one of the new Philharmonia Hungarica recordings of the Haydn symphonies. Another afternoon he found himself roped into sight-reading a Dvorˇák string quartet just for fun. Although he was shy of them, behind his attempts to play the clown, he found he loved the novelty of spending time with the girls either flopped sleepily on sofas around the fire or talking intently at the kitchen table or, when the sun shone, on the flight of stone steps at the house’s front.
It was odd, perhaps, to have travelled so far without seeing anything of the local countryside and its buildings but he felt he was exploring in his head, through the company of bright, gifted people and the great luxury of being somewhere where music was not a hobby or a mere accomplishment.
He experienced two instances of Jean’s furies. One came the morning after his lesson with her. It wasn’t late – perhaps five to eight – and they were all awake but enjoying just lolling in bed reading or chatting about nothing in particular when there was a sudden thunder of feet along the corridor, the door flew open and Jean marched among their beds with a face like thunder.
‘Dairymen, nurses and miners have all been at work for hours,’ she said. ‘What on earth do you think you’re all doing?’
The other instance involved Haydn, with whom she was currently obsessed. It was an afternoon and, on a whim, he and Pierre and one of the Alice Bands had stumbled on the so-called Gypsy Rondo and Pierre was driving them into playing it ever faster, which was fun: music as sport. The cello part was extremely simple, so it was easy enough for Eustace to keep up and join in the fun. And suddenly Jean burst through the library doorway and stood there glaring.
‘How dare you?’ she asked. ‘How dare you play like that? Men and women were taken out of Viennese and Hungarian orchestras and sent to their deaths simply for being Romany or Jewish or communist, many of them great musicians. The Nazis made some of them play in the camps to cover the cries from the gas chambers, and still you have the . . .’ She was so furious her thick hair seemed to be crackling and she was having trouble finding the words. ‘You have the vulgarity to play like that! No more Haydn for you this afternoon.’
She scrabbled the music off their stands and then, aware perhaps that she had made a spectacle of herself, strode out with it under her arm and slammed the door behind her.
In neither case did any trace of her anger show when they saw her next. It rose and spent itself like a summer storm and left only her usual smiles and intensity behind it. But in both cases it left Eustace only wanting the more abjectly to please her.
As for their morning sessions on the Schubert, he would not have thought it possible to work on one movement in such detail, day after day, and not become bored. But he was far too intent on perfection for boredom. He was particularly fascinated by their discussions about bowing, their experiments with trying a shared phrase now this way, now that, until they settled on unanimity. And as a fellow cellist, Naomi made him see how his fingering choices affected the sound of a phrase as much as his bowing ones, the same notes played in fourth position on one string could sound mellower but less confident than in first on the next string up, just as his first finger could lend an unwanted strength to a note better sounded with his weaker fourth. The course wasn’t a competition; they were all friends on the same voyage of discovery.
‘But it is a competition, of course,’ Turlough said. ‘It’s inevitable. One group will play better on the last night and everyone wants it to be theirs.’
‘We’ll win,’ Naomi said. ‘We’ve got the best piece.’
It was impossible not to catch snatches of the other groups at work, especially as unofficial pressure mounted and some groups began to rehearse in the afternoons as well, casually demoralizing one another with a cascade of Vivaldi or a lush serving of Klengel’s purple harmonies. But theirs was the only piece on the programme that could be described as intense. It had a compelling inwardness to it they felt sure would give them an advantage if they could only achieve perfection. Ralph practised on his own so hard that the girls began to speak of him in hushed tones as of some martyr and Eustace found himself fretting about things that had never especially bothered him until now, like how to maintain a smooth pressure at the very tip of the bow or how much vibrato to use on his pizzicato to be resonant without being, dread words, vulgar or hysterical .
As for his feelings for Turlough, these lurched between elation and humiliated despair because Turlough could go within a minute from smiling on him like the sun to blanking him out entirely. Just when he began to suspect Turlough gained some pleasure from treating him cruelly, Turlough would make a discreet gesture to follow him from a room and would lead him to a store cupboard or the cellar or a remote corridor to kiss him again.
Eustace was quite prepared, after his explorations with Vernon, to do more but all they ever seemed to do was kiss. And because Turlough, at nearly sixteen, was so much older, he didn’t feel he could take the lead. And he began to sense Turlough liked him to be utterly passive, childlike, innocent even. Just once he let his hand touch the front of Turlough’s jeans as they kissed in the chilly bathroom after the others had gone to bed. Turlough immediately pressed him against the wall so tightly he suspected he was taking his own private pleasure. He tried not to dwell on the fact that Turlough showed no curiosity about exploring Eustace’s body in turn.
He was interested that none of the girls seemed to have the least idea about Turlough, although one or two of them knew him quite well from other courses and youth orchestras. Naomi clearly had a crush on him, as she reddened whenever she spoke to him or he to her, even in rehearsal, where she was normally so bossy. And Turlough flirted with the girls, or teased them at least. Certainly his regular absences with Eustace seemed to have aroused no suspicion among the other boys in their room but then, Eustace was coming to realize, he was more aware than most of them; taking their music so seriously seemed to have put the usual preoccupations of adolescence on hold. Looking around the room as they were brought together to sing madrigals or to play arrangements from Bach or Purcell of an evening, he couldn’t imagine any of them doing anything so perverse as buying a porn mag and giftwrapping it in order to seduce a school friend.
Despite being married Jean retained this same purity and, one sensed, encouraged it in others. When they had discussed various musicians, not just cellists and conductors but composers as well, it was clear that she frowned on anyone associated with love affairs or scandal. Wagner one would expect to be disapproved of by her, and Carl Orff, as an enthusiastic Nazi, was not to be named, but her condemnation of Jacqueline du Pré came as a surprise. For her, it seemed, a preoccupation with sex or a prioritizing of it overlapped in her mind with that other crime against music: hysteria.
Prompted by Naomi and Ralph phoning home from the guesthouse after their penultimate supper there, when everyone else had gone down for the traditional minutes of noisy release afforded by the ping-pong table, he remembered guiltily that he had done neither of the things he had promised to do: send a postcard or call his parents to reassure them he had arrived safely. He waited a polite distance from the little telephone booth in the guesthouse lobby, pretending to read Horse and Hound but observing the constrained politeness with which the siblings spoke to their parents. Then he took their place and rang home.
He let it ring and ring but there was no answer. This was odd as they rarely went out, or not together. He thought about calling the number that went through to downstairs, as this would be answered by whichever nurse was on evening duty, but decided it might give the impression that he was in trouble or homesick, so he decided against it and went to join in a last session of Round the Table. By sheer fluke, he did well and ended up facing Turlough, who made him lose concentration by smiling.
When they were sent to bed later he contrived to stay awake reading until the others had turned out their lights. Turlough, who ignored bedtimes, appeared silently in the bedroom doorway, framed in the wash of light from the corridor, and gestured with his head to summon him. Running a bath by way of cover, he kissed him up against the sink, sliding hands under Eustace’s pyjamas this time while firmly pushing Eustace’s hands back to his sides whenever he tried to touch him in return.
‘Do you want me to lie you on the floor now and fuck you?’ he muttered.
‘Yes,’ Eustace told him, though in truth he was not at all sure, being fairly certain that it would hurt and that Turlough would not be gentle and wouldn’t care.
Turlough pulled back in a way he had, to look at him, examine him almost. ‘No,’ he said with a teasing smile. ‘You want it too much. Now run back to bed so I can have a quiet wank in peace.’