Music at Long Verney (21 page)

He raised his voice. It would be better if Terence did not hear her being so emotional. “You'll find it useful later on, too. There's always work for a typist, especially if she can spell and punctuate. Not so many can nowadays. Even if you don't learn shorthand and take an office job, there'll always be stuff you can do at home – typing people's novels and poems and so forth. It's my belief that every third person in Manchester is some kind of author. We're a positive nest of singing birds.”

He was bound to talk like that, she thought, being a parent. She knew better.

THE AUTOMOBILE ASSOCIATION
had given us a route to Cape Wrath and I was checking it with the Gazetteer of Scotland. “
DRUMOCHTER PASS
,” I read. “The main Inverness road accompanied by the railway traverses this lofty and desolate pass in the Grampians.” I saw no harm in that. On winter nights the Inverness road might like to be companioned; and if the car broke down we could wait for the next train. At that point there was a crash in the kitchen and I went off to tell the cat that all was discovered. When I got back, a breeze from the window had flapped over the page. “
DULL
,” I read, “
see
WEEM
”.

Entangled in an idle curiosity, I began turning over the alphabetical pages of the Gazetteer in pursuit of Weem. In fact, I had not the smallest wish to learn about Weem. We were going to Cape Wrath, and in spirit I had already struck root in Dull.

Dull – as I seemed to know as if I had actually been there – was a small unvisited town in East Fife. It was not even decayed. It was just small and always had been. There was a good ironmonger opposite the War Memorial (the War Memorial was a non-denominational obelisk of shiny granite, to suit all tastes), and a goodish grocer in East Street. Fish came in a van, for Dull was only seven miles from the coast. Dried fish, though, could be got at the greengrocer's, and sometimes cockles, and in July gooseberries, and potatoes and turnips and tinned
pineapple at all times of year. From Dull you could go to Cupar. A proverb expressing the philosophy of a race indoctrinated with Calvinism says, “He who will to Cupar maun to Cupar.” It is a proverb often on my lips. Even when my hearers don't understand it, they take the stern sense of it and are quietened.

I had settled, however, a couple of miles outside the town. In spring (spring took its time in Dull) the words “
DULL LODGE
” appeared – loomed, rather – in snowdrops on the bank beside the drive gate. Snowdrops multiply in course of time, and the “g” had got quite out of control. Dull Lodge was a stone-built, slate-roofed, three-storied house, of modest proportions but giving an incontrovertible impression of uprightness. It stood back from the road, and a belt of mixed beech trees and conifers sheltered it from the east wind and the morning sun. From the bathroom window (the bathroom was on the third floor) you could see the melancholy shine of the North Sea. The surrounding country was flattish. There was a pervading smell of sea in the air, mingled with a smell of turnips. Dull Lodge was built in 1850 by a retired wine merchant who had somehow got away from Cupar. It was as plain and purposeful as a ledger, but made one concession to Scottish Baronial in the shape of a small bartizan at the northeast corner. The large sash windows had been put in by the hand of a master. They were totally draught-proof, and there was not a rattle among them. Indeed, on stormy nights it could be quite eerie to sit in this impregnable stillness; but comfortable.

The windows were no trouble to keep clean because I had a gardener. He was dumb and went with the place. He lived a quiet bachelor life in a flat over the disused stables, and when his figs and his wall pears began to ripen he tied them up in small muslin bags. As I did no gardening myself, he thought quite well of me.

I did no gardening, because I had gone to Dull Lodge in order
to retire. I had furnished it with retirement in view. For once in my life, I had a sufficiency of bookshelves. I also had four black horsehair sofas, which I had bought at a local sale – a couple in the sitting room, one in my bedroom, one in the kitchen. (It is a fallacy to suppose that a kitchen is a fountain of perpetual youth and that the moment one sets foot in it energy courses through one's veins.)

There, on one or another of these admirable sofas, I put my feet up and pursued my researches into the religious life. Research fortifies retirement, which even in a house like Dull Lodge is an imperiled structure, since we are none of us wholly free from conscience: you suppress it about visiting old Miss Tomkins who would be lost without that weekly little cheerful chat on the wickedness of her relations and it starts up afresh in a compulsion to do something for Punch-and-Judy men. But with a good solid blameless piece of research in hand, conscience can howl without and good works blandish like harlots: you are safe, you are buttressed, you may disregard them and continue to lie on your horsehair sofa with your feet up and read about nineteenth-century Church of England bishops.

I had chosen these particular bishops because, except by their biographers, they are singularly unexplored. The light that plays on the
grandes vedettes,
Newman and Pusey and “Satan” Montgomery, leaves them twilit. Yet there they were. I thought a
catalogue raisonné
would not come amiss. At first sight they appear much of a muchness (and undeniably it is a muchness; if I had realised what a lot of them I was taking on, I might have turned to some other subject for research – unicorns, for instance). However diversely they may have begun, whatever vagaries they may have pursued at the university, whatever persuasions may have led them to scratch each other's eyes out, their destiny is their destiny, and by the time they are middle-aged it is pretty clear what will become of them: each in his turn
will be ordained bishop by other bishops and merge into the mitred flock. But as a good shepherd knows each of his sheep by something personal to it – a squint, a scar, a pinker nose, a more flippant gait, a more searching expression, a tendency to bloat, a pertinacity in baaing – I hoped to become so conversant with my bishops that I should end by perfectly knowing them apart. Naturally, I had my favourites. I felt a particular affection, positively amounting to approbation, for Bishop Thirlwall of St David's, who kept cats. Naturally, too, I developed preferences; I preferred Broad bishops to High ones. But High, Broad, or Low, I tried to keep an open mind about them, reading with sympathy of their unmitred domestic hours: the deaths of their wives, the disappointingness of their children, their palace chimneys smoking in a north wind.

And from time to time I found them making remarks of such acumen and humanity that one would have expected everybody to be quite charmed and to leave off snarling immediately, as the animals did when Orpheus played on his lute. Though in fact it proved otherwise.

Thus, moving from bishop to bishop, returning them to the London Library and unpacking new ones (it was extremely rare for a bishop to be unavailable), listening to the wind, watching the changing colour of the fields, admiring the snowdrops, eating quantities of ripe figs, tapping the barometer, strolling out in the wistful autumnal dusk when the gardener would not be about to suspect my intentions and even staying out long enough to see the public lighting of Dull extinguished at 10:30 p.m., I lived in contentment and self-satisfaction at Dull Lodge.

And then I turned over another page of the Gazetteer and had seen “
WEEM
”. In a flash I was out of Dull Lodge, away from the horizon of sea and the gulls and the good ironmonger and a far cry from Cupar.

“
WEEM
,” I read. “Perth. Early closing Wed. Lies on the north bank of the River Tay. 2H miles W. is the hamlet of Dull, preserving an old Cross, while in the vicinity are various prehistoric cairns, standing stones and remains of stone circles.”

No.

No, such a Dull wouldn't do. The Tay is a noble river and we shall cross it with admiration on our way to accompany the railway to Inverness. Preserving old Crosses is a laudable industry. Prehistoric remains are pleasing to the young. In short, the revealed Dull, 2H miles E. of Weem, was in every way a superior article. But it wouldn't do. It wasn't what I had in mind. And the moral of all this is, as usual, Leave Well Alone. By grasping at the substance, I have forfeited the lovely shadow. By fidgeting through the Gazetteer in pursuit of Weem – a place of no interest to me except as an adjunct to Dull (so peculiarly my own) – I have lost Dull Lodge, I no longer possess a property in East Fife, I am not even retired.

WHAT HAD BEGUN
as a lick and a promise, provoked by Mrs Bullen's telephone call (“Sorry, Miss, but I shan't be able to come today, nor the next few days, actually. My sister-in-law's been took worse, and while I'm about it, I expect I'll stay for the funeral . . .”), had hardened into a thorough turn out of the sitting room; such a thorough turn out that Leonora had broken off to dress the part, assuming one of Mrs Bullen's overalls, tying up her head in a duster, and changing into an old pair of sandals. Mrs Bullen worked on spike heels, but Leonora had been taught in her youth what is sense and what isn't. To be properly armed for the fray is half the battle – a maxim, like keeping your powder dry and not buying fish on a Monday. Those spike heels might well be accountable for the dust along the skirting and the cobwebs that clothed the back of the radiator. An element of scorn for Mrs Bullen's half-hearted purifications heightened Leonora's zeal, and sharpened her self-satisfaction as though it were the vinegar trickled into the mayonnaise. But she did not allow herself to be swept away; she imagined no rebuking conversations to take place when Mrs Bullen came back from her sister-in-law's funeral. Charwomen were non-existent in Pew Green. Mrs Bullen was a Londoner, and travelled to and fro on the Metropolitan, and you don't lightly shake the faithfulness
of someone ready to do that for love of your art.

Fifteen years before, when Leonora told other lovers of her art that she had bought a cottage in the peace and quiet of the country, and that when she had added a garage with a proper bathroom over it and replaced rhubarb and cabbages with moss roses and lavender, it would be her dream cottage come true, Pew Green was still a village on the outskirts of London, with its own pretty little slum of real cottages with working-class families in them. Post-war housing developments had changed all that; embedded among natty bungalows that were born with garages and bathrooms and had gardens foaming with floribundas, the vestigial Pew Green looked faintly comic, looked, in fact, very much what Leonora in moments of depression was afraid of becoming herself – a leftover. But she stayed on, from inertia, from prudence, thinking that when the day came when she could no longer sing for her living she would be able to sell the freehold of Bramble Cottage as a building lot and do quite well out of it. Just now that day seemed a long way off. Stimulated by virtue and housewifery, she felt as lively as a flea. Her voice, a durable contralto, was as good as ever, her genre as much in demand – more so, indeed, since she had had the foresight to build up a new repertory of songs with religious appeal, to match the new feeling for religion; and her appearance, though inevitably bulkier and bulgier, was just right for the television career of a sweet-faced motherly woman singing welcomes to prodigal sons and cajoleries to St Peter. All this she had jeopardised a few years before by giving way to an impulse to make a feature of “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-de-Ay”. This revival of a beefier past hadn't done at all, and like a person of sense she had dropped it. Yet while it lasted it had been a releasing rapture.

Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-aying sofa cushions was being quite releasing, too, and further satisfactions awaited her: the bowl of detergent suds into which she would plunge her Staffordshire
poodles, the polishing she would give to her silver ornaments, the lager chilling in the refrigerator, the slices of underdone cold beef she would eat in her fingers, the digestive repose with her feet higher than her head. It was quarter past eleven on the longest day of the year. On the longest day, every hour is as good as a day in itself; there would be hour after well-spent hour before she need get into her black and go off to Rusty's party to meet that guitar-playing fellow who might have a song for her.

At eleven-twenty someone came whistling to the door and rang the bell. Since the interruption whistled, it must be something being delivered – flowers, perhaps. She could do with some nice tributary flowers. The supply wasn't what it had been since old Mr Jameson had gone to dodge death duties in the Isle of Man. Odd, really, when you had no-one depending on you, to take such a high moral line about death duties. The whistle broke off as she opened the door. The whistler was a young man with a little bag – one of the new young men, with a coiffure and an intellectual expression.

“Morning. Is this where Miss Leonora Keeling lives?”

After all, why
should
he have recognised her? Looking a damned sight more motherly than she cared to think, and sweat-faced into the bargain, she could thank her stars that he hadn't recognised her. But she didn't want him coming in. “Miss Keeling is not at home.”

Instead of going away, he stood there smiling at her. “I've come to do the piano. I'm the new tuner.”

“Miss Keeling will be out all day.”

“Tut-tut! Never mind, I don't suppose she'd want to overhear every note of it.”

“And I'm in the middle of turning out the room.”

“That won't worry me. I can work through anything. Just
get me a clean duster and I'll be no more trouble to you. Which way do I go?”

Leonora had sometimes imagined herself saying, “Leave my house this instant!” The hour and the man had never combined to make this possible. They didn't now. She saw him take off his coat, open his bag, and begin to rip the piano to bits in the usual ruthless way – only in this case it seemed more markedly ruthless.