Ladies From Hell (26 page)

There were too many people in the room, she could no longer cope. Paul was talking to her certainly, his face intent and sad, but she couldn’t hear the words. The Burials man was there, with his invisible soap; and Jack again, alarm on his face, shouting a warning. She tried to start up, but it was too late; no time, even, for the full sting of terror. Footsteps thundered on the landing, the door burst open and Michael ran at her, livid-faced. He would have reached her, but he was nine feet high. His head struck the lintel with a ringing crash; he fell back raging, and she sat up. She was panting, she thought she had cried out, perhaps for Paul. But that was useless; for Paul was … ridden hence, her mind supplied, cloppingly.
Geritten hinnen, hinnen
, shirted but with air.

It was enough. She pushed herself from the
bed, leaned a hand to the wall, felt for the light switch, it was five to three. She walked to the loo, ran the tap in the hand basin, rinsed her face and wrists. Her hands were shaking a little; she opened the tin-fronted cabinet over the basin, uncapped the bottle, shook the little red, blue and brown torpedoes into her palm. Two only remaining, from years ago; a searing pain, a friendly doctor. She returned one to the bottle, filled a tumbler, drank and swallowed. She walked back to the bed, twitched the covers straight, remembered the light, the drugged can snore, the thought was abhorrent to her, she remembered to turn on her side. The red and green facia lamps glowed unheeded while the Tuinal, last resort of a decadent
bourgeoisie
, drew her swiftly into unconsciousness.

The car had been the only moving object in the long, concrete-fronted street, warehouses to either side and empty office blocks; and garbage sacks piled head high, nobody seemed to collect rubbish any more. The old man appeared from nowhere, raging and purple-faced, to fling the empty dustbin with a clang. The Moscovitch screeched to a halt, wing-dented, she remembered the shouts, the uniformed figures stark against the light; the old drunk running and the rattle of shots, huge in the confining space. And the black sacks bursting as she cowered and a thin cat bolting, three-legged and squalling. She turned her face away as the bus approached the death spot but nothing stirred, the sun lay empty on the building fronts. The vehicle turned left with a grating of gears, headed down toward the river.

She had woken early, with the curious thought that for Michael this was D-day plus eight in Heaven. She showered, made herself coffee, listened to the radio news. She dressed, jeans and a jacket, tied a kerchief through her hair; she had not yet brought herself to accept the headscarf, badge of the new respectability. Then she took her voice down to the shops. It was a curious idea of Paul’s, that she was not its owner but its guardian. Curious, but persuasive; the notion had grown till her voice had acquired all but a discrete existence. For
its sake she eschewed late nights and over-tiredness; spirits were
verboten
, while Paul had even shown a tendency to supervise her wines. Though that of course had been in the days when wines were still purchaseable.

She headed first for the local Commissariat. She ate little or no meat, and usually had a surplus of coupons. She traded half a month’s supply for egg and cheese vouchers, and set out on the hunt. She enjoyed shopping, the anonymity it gave. She was a small girl, rounded and neat. No raving beauty, she had long ago decided; but there was a certain something, a
je ne sais quoi
. Or perhaps she was merely a peg on which to hang personae; Pamina, Philodel, Vaughan Williams’ wordless Siren. Her speaking voice was deeper, and she had allowed a certain huskiness to remain. By habit, she spoke softly; two tenths of power, Paul would have said. Five to six tenths for chorus work, no more than eight for solo. Always the reserve, he had insisted, over and over; there must be a reserve, a pool of strength from which to draw. Though in that as in all things he had taught by seeming contradictions; for every muscle, head to toes, must go to make the voice. The whole body in the voice, and the whole singer in the tone. She balanced irreconcilables, year by year; and her technique improved. ‘
Technique must be perfection; only then can it be forgotten, and we begin to learn
…’ As with technique, so with herself; she had become more contained, assured. That too, she supposed, was a gift from him.

She kept an appointment at eleven with Madame Baudrier. The title was a courtesy, hollow enough these days; but the old lady enjoyed it. She thought she seemed surprised to see her. She sat stiff-backed at the piano, in the high gaunt room with its north-facing mansard lights, tomb-cold in winter and ruinously expensive to maintain. On the mantel over the blocked-in fireplace a wide-mouthed vase held a delicate arrangement of buttercups and a thin-stemmed, pinkish-white flower she didn’t know. There had been a time when the shelf had trailed with roses; now the wild flowers sufficed, forget-me-nots and oxeye daisies, cerise spikes of the willow herb once more invading
London. Madame Baudrier’s elegance had a steely quality that largely defied poverty.

She worked through, swiftly, what she wished to revise; and the old tutor made no comment. She compressed her lips finally and closed the music, shook her head and laid it aside. She said drily, “
Excellent
. Now we will think about the Verstovski songs again.” But she had shaken her head. She said, “Not this morning, Madame, I am tired. I must go soon, and rest.”

The other glanced at her, bird-bright. She said, “So, you will not sing for me. Then … sit, there, sit. And
I
will sing for
you
.”

Her voice, an old woman’s voice, was clear still and precise. “Here, you see, we have the difficulty of the broad O, we have spoken of it many times. Here we must
place
to the head, we must be
sfogato
, high, light, unburdened. This the poet intends, do you not agree? And here, it is a lullabye, the children are asleep, they are in the next room, they must not wake …” She played the last bars of accompaniment, the little postlude like a tinkling nursery clock; then suddenly, “
Why
will you do this thing, why?
Ma petite, to es stupide …
Despite you, they will have their way. First it was the music of Germany; and you were his pupil, they will be watching. Now because some silly people make a trouble, and shoot with guns … Oh this country, this country, it is too much …”

She said slowly, “I haven’t been forbidden.”

Madame Baudrier made a gesture in which was all of France. She rose stiffly, crossed the room to rattle, back turned, with cups. She said, “The churches remain. And their doors are open. But only the unwise enter. They close their grip, little by little. Can you not see? Can you not understand?”

She filled two cups, set the percolator back on the little stove. The cups were bone china; the coffee would be black and bitter. She walked back to the sofa. She said, “This you have not realized. That they do what they must; and they are tired.” She sipped at the coffee, and sighed. “They did not want your country,” she said. “Not with their great Land. It was you
who willed it, your own people. It was an
embarrassment
. But the fist must close. Like an old mechanical man. So you fight nothing.” She set the cup aside, laid a hand on her knee. “It will change,” she said. “In one month, or two, you will see. They are unsure, and so very silly. Have patience, just a little patience; and all will be as before.”

But the coffin was gliding again, on its silent tracks, while the trees stood round in living green. She stared, eyes moist, at nothing; and Madame Baudrier sighed once more. “
Ma pauvre
,” she said gently. “Such a pretty head; and such a hard, hard wall …”

The bus grumbled to a halt; and she stepped down uncertainly. She had slept in the afternoon, a full three hours; but it seemed the floating sensation had not left her. She wondered if the drug she had taken had a long term after-effect. The vehicle moved away; and she began to walk, carrying her holdall, purse gripped from habit in her other hand. And there was the long bridge ahead, stretching empty, the slow broad flowing of the Thames; across the water the stained complex of concrete she had come to know so well.

She leaned on the bridge parapet and stared up toward Westminster, half lost in hazy sunlight. She was trying to remember how to hate. She must hate them, surely, for what they had done. But there was nothing; just coldness, and the memory of Paul. She was like the woman in the play, was it by Shaw, who didn’t know why she had chosen the arena. At the end, it was going to be the same. She thought I have forgotten.’

The river was low, the bare black banks of mud sour-smelling. A tug moved upstream toward the rail bridge, drawing a string of empty barges; the rumble of its engines just reached her. She started to walk, across the bridge. She had never cared for politics; so now, as ever, she failed to understand. Music of the Left, music of the Right, fascist, reactionary, capitalist, bourgeois; how could such notions be contained within a stave? It seemed impossible; as it had seemed impossible, to the child’s mind, that the sounds of an orchestra, the notes
of a piano, could all be trapped within that narrow cage. She swung the grip, wondering with part of her mind if Jack would have arrived. She was conscious, it seemed for the first time, of the great breadth of the river, the massiveness of the buildings that clustered its banks, her own tiny insignificance in contrast. The whole thing, at the last, seemed absurd. She thought, ‘They won’t even notice.’

The big metal abstract that had dominated the terrace beside the QE Hall—the Scanlon Hall, she remembered she must call it now—had long since been removed, condemned as decadent. She remembered walking beside it once with Paul. He had christened it, in a rare moment of levity, the Colossophone; and she had wondered, giggling, at the effect could it be blown. But he had turned to her, once more with perfect gravity. “The end would fall out of the Festival Hall, of course …” She glanced across, swiftly, to where the sculpture had stood; but the terracing, like the bridge, was deserted.

Outside the place she hesitated again. It still seemed somehow faintly shocking to see her name in print; and these posters were big and bold. STELLA WELLES: AN ENGLISH SONG RECITAL. She pressed on by them, now with the drying of the throat, the little wave of tension that must always come, and pass. Too early as yet for an audience; and the stage door, mercifully, was unbolted. She stepped through, into comparative gloom; the gloom of a building that, like the rest of Britain, had dispensed with one third of its electric power.

Unisex she abhorred; but the puritanism of the new order must nonetheless be respected. She had chosen a high necked dress, black-bodiced and with white satiny sleeves. She unwrapped it quickly, shook it from its creases; then she paused. There had been another time, long ago now, when she had worn it; a time when the magic of
Die Zauberflöte
had seemed to permeate the night itself, so that a car ride back to London from a Hall best not remembered had seemed a fairy progress. She remembered the chirring of insects, blue rush of the night air, up and away over the long bonnet; and honeysuckle fragrance on the lawns where she had walked, the hands gripping
the car’s wheel, a face, warm-lit by dashlights, that had seemed wild and strong and keen. Champagne then and dancing and later, much, much later, the long, slow slide to sleep. She thought, ‘Was
that
when it happened, when I fell away? When Michael began to hate?’

She covered her hair, sat at the mirror. She had understood, it seemed, a basic truth; that she had wept so bitterly because she could feel no grief.

Some makeup was permitted now, for stage performances; and she knew how to get the best from limited means. She worked swiftly, while the Hall rustled and filled, became by degrees alive; a half hour later, when they tapped the door and she stooped a last time to the mirror, it was the delicious face of Pamina that watched back.

Round the Hall the banks of lamps looked brownish; always, now, they seemed somehow too dull. The boards of the rostrum gleamed, empty and broad, and the show pipes of the organ in their plain wood frame. To stage left, beyond the lights, the motley of a modern audience, to her right the blocks of unisex blue; between them a straggling river, narrow but significant, of empty seats. From the blue, a silence; from the rest a scattering of applause, rising and richening as she walked to stage centre, bowed. She knew, or Paul had taught, the drama of simplicity; she stood still, head down and hands at her sides, and waited for quiet. The brown eyes dimmed; and she turned to Jack, and smiled.

Her palms were sweating, where she gripped the briefcase; and she wished the journey, jerking and slow though it was, could be indefinitely prolonged. She knew now, why had she not realized before, that she could not go through with what had been proposed, that she would sit the bus all day, till it finished its grinding circle at the place from which she had come. This she knew with certainty; yet when her stop was called her feet found the steps, she dropped down, stood blinking in sunlight at the strange folk, the strange pavement, the strange buildings to either side. The bus moved off; and she walked again,
mechanical, heart pounding, past the great cream frontages. She found the place she sought, impossible that it could stand here and be real, a weed growing beside the step and paint peeling under the high stone porch. The hall beyond was cooler, institutional, brown linoleum darkly polished, grey-painted walls. Somewhere a piano playing and a voice chanting, irritable and loud, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four; and a bust in an alcove, like a joke.

The staircase was broad and uncarpeted, wrought iron banisters topped by rails of shiny wood; and a tall window at the landing, like the dentists she had used while at school, and nearly with the same faint smell; tingling, antiseptic. She heard, not one instrument now, but many; a jangling confusion, all round about. On the landing a girl scurried past, hornrimmed glasses and flying hair, arms loaded with books; so busy, so self-assured, she all but shrank away. She turned right, walking in a dream, dry-throated; tapped the big door, received no answer, tapped again and opened. The room beyond, the tall, bare room, was empty; grey-painted again, an old piano, varnish chipped, standing in one corner, windows letting in a dusty flood of light, traffic hum from the road below. She crossed to stand staring down, not seeing. A clock ticked, steady; she hugged the briefcase, and the door behind her closed.