Take My Life (9 page)

‘Do you mean it!' he exclaimed, tears of self-pity in his voice. ‘I cannot believe it! The husband. Yes, that I understand. But what has the husband to do with art? Profession is a thing separated. What is it about? You destroy me!'

Philippa said: ‘Singing means so much and this chance is so terrific that nothing less than life and death would make me fall out.
You
know that. You know I've never let you or Arturo down before. But I can't go on like last night now that Nick's committed for trial. It's not humanly possible. I
can't
go on. If you can't get a substitute for tomorrow I'll sing then, but not afterwards.'

‘Substitute! Who is to substitute? Don't make me severe. What have you to please me? There is no one!'

‘Try Angelina. She's wasted as Suzuki. She deserves her chance.'

‘A mezzo! Not yet twenty!'

‘With a lovely fresh voice. She could do it, I'm sure.'

Giuseppi tapped the desk. ‘Look. I patronize you! I produce you! You are here! A sensation! The English for once can appreciate the English.
Contento;
I am happy. And what? Is it possible? She has lost herself. I know, I know, I
know
. It is not your mistake. You would avert this, will you tell me. But how we must all suffer for the error of this one. Oh, why do you ruin yourself with marriage!' The producer's English gave out again'.

‘You could wire for Frenetti,' said Philippa.

‘Frenetti! Nothing!
Mi sento male.
'

She got up and went round the desk. ‘Forgive me, Giuseppi. Don't you see how much I feel this myself? Dear Giuseppi, please understand. I am so unhappy. So miserable. You know Nick. How can I desert him? How
could
I go on?'

‘But how do you help him by going off?'

‘I don't know yet. I've got to think. There must be some way. It's like a heavy cloud over us all. I must feel absolutely free to go anywhere. It wouldn't be fair to you to try to sing. It's exacting. You know how exacting. In the end I should let you down. I'm sure of it. They say the trial will come on soon after Easter. Until then I can only possibly have one thing on my mind, and it won't be music. Perhaps there are things I can do that the police can't. At least I'll try.'

‘And I,' said Giuseppi, ‘am left in a ditch!'

‘I'm so very sorry. But you can get someone else. Angelina is on the spot. Maria would do it as well as her present work. Or you can get someone new from Europe. Only give me a month from the time I go off. Even then if – if all goes well there will be still two weeks of the season left.'

He took out a large handkerchief and wiped his eyes. ‘You are hard in the heart, Philippa. I can do nothing with you. I am sorry for it. You will play tomorrow?'

‘If you can't make any different arrangement.'

‘Have the goodness to know that I cannot. But think over it. Think over this chance for your life which may not come back again any more. Think over, dear girl. And don't imagine I forgive you! I am hurt!'

Philippa took a taxi back to the flat. Hurt, hurt, that was Giuseppi's last word. And it was the keynote of all these past days.

It hurt to take this step which could permanently blight her career. Until a few days ago she would have said her singing meant more to her than anything in life. It meant all the more because she had had no royal road to it. She had sold the railway stock her mother left her at slump prices to scrape enough money together to go to Italy. Often in those first years of study she had gone hungry and cold. Now that success had come to her while she was still in the early twenties she was eagerly anxious to grasp it, to build it up by quick repetition while it was still there. The striving, the climbing, were still too near to be comfortable.

Yet now she threw up this wonderful opportunity of endearing herself to the London opera-going public almost without hesitation and knowing that Nick would be as angry as anyone. She did not even know how she would come through on Saturday evening. It was as if anxiety was holding her throat.

As the taxi turned into the street where her flat was she saw two men idling outside the door. She quickly told the driver to go round to the back where there was another entrance. She remembered once in Naples seeing a well-known actor dunned by creditors. He had done just the same as she did now.

The flat when she entered was dull and lifeless. Mrs Saunders did not come on Fridays, and the place had a neglected dusty air. She went through to the jade-green bathroom, peered earnestly at herself for a moment and then rinsed her throat with some stuff prescribed by a Paris doctor. Then she stood at a window doing breathing exercises, ruthlessly pushing out of her mind the horrors of the police-court hearing. Described as it had been described, the case against Nick
did
look bad. Why deny it? Obviously the magistrate could not dismiss the case and set Nick free. Unless another man was found, the charge had to be thrashed out in the full light of a legal trial.

She finished her exercises, realizing that she had begun them by thrusting away from her all thoughts of Nick's plight, and almost at once they had come creeping in again, like herself, by the back door.

She went to the window and saw that the reporters had not gone away. They were waiting for her. Well, very soon they would know she was in. She went to the piano and began to run her fingers up and down the keys. The light from the window fell on her long fair hair. Then she began to sing her scales, rather softly at first.

Normally it was an exercise which soothed her: voice and nerves always benefited by it; there was something in the regularity, the easy long-accustomed rhythms, that calmed and refreshed her throat. Even today, in spite of everything, she began to feel easier, more confident, as she went on. Somehow these weeks would pass, this nightmare would pass. With a month's complete freedom she could do so much. Long before then everything might be cleared up, such new facts might be brought to light that the trial would be abandoned. Things would straighten themselves out. Innocent men weren't condemned. It was just a bad time to be passed through.

The front-door bell rang.

She took no notice, going through the next scale and the next, her voice soaring effortlessly, with her spirits, like the wind.

The front-door bell rang again. She stopped and went to the window. One of the reporters had disappeared. He was evidently inside. She went back to the piano.

For a time she went on with her singing, and for a time the reporter persisted with the bell. Then he gave up, and presently, her concentration gone, she gave up too. The silence in the flat suddenly became profound.

Nothing stirred, no board creaked or kettle boiled. No friendly voice or familiar footsteps disturbed the lonely day.

Philippa leaned forward on the piano and laid her head on her arms.

Four hundred and nine railway miles away. Mr Sidney Fleming was reading the London papers which had just come.

From where he was sitting he could hear C Form at their chanting, and he wondered if Mr Duncan was in one of his moods. (Duncan with his thin greying hair, his sour breath, his jealousies, his dreary Latin jokes. It was hopeless to make all the changes one could have wished with the present council of governors.)

The school clock chimed two-thirty and he folded the papers on his desk. Some Thursdays he took an extra class in the afternoons, but today he was free until four. He put on his gown and mortar-board and went out. All the classrooms were full and he met nobody, walking, a well-proportioned but unathletic figure, through the grounds of the school, past the porter's lodge and out upon the main road that ran down the hill to the village. A bone-chilling wind was blowing in from the sea.

He stopped at a grey slate house built on a corner and turning its sash windows towards the land for shelter. Asked inside, he stood a few minutes in the waiting-room, his hands behind his back, his meditative eyes fixed on the wall; then he turned to shake hands with the physician, a hearty man in the fifties.

‘Mr Fleming, I was hoping it was a social call you were paying us. I don't look for you in my consulting-room, man.'

‘I'm not expecting to trouble you a great deal, Dr Wishart. But I've been sleeping badly these last weeks and thought you might have some patent dose of your own which would help to compose me. It wears one down after a time.'

‘Aye.' Wishart gave the other a professional glance. ‘Lack of sleep's worse than lack of food, you know. D'you get any pain?'

‘Oh, I don't think there is anything organically wrong. But naturally during term-time one can't afford to be below par.'

Dr Wishart made a few tests. ‘Your heart's a bit excitable. I should cut down smoking. Apart from that … Maybe you're over-working, then can't relax. Any worries?'

‘Nothing out of the common. You've kept us uncommonly free from epidemics this year.'

Wishart smiled, and his eyes scanned the other man's face. A face full of character, full of contradictions, the long smooth cheeks, the intent eyes of an idealist, the tight uncompromising mouth: one had no farther to look for conflict than in the man himself. You could imagine him writing mystic poetry or thrashing small children; four hundred years ago he would have been a Protestant martyr or perhaps writing tracts
against
the Reformation. One sensed there was religion in him, but it was religion in revolt.

‘I'll make you up a bottle and some tablets.'

The doctor went into his dispensary, and while he was gone Fleming turned again to his gazing at the featureless wall.

‘Take this three times a day and a tablet before you go to bed. By the by, I heard from your wife yesterday.'

Fleming watched him. ‘Indeed?'

‘You know I attended her privately around Christmas – for nerves. She seems worried that she hasn't settled this account and asks me to send it in to you. It is quite needlessly kind of her to take the trouble and I must write and reassure her that we were suffering no qualms –'

‘I will save you further trouble by reassuring her on the point. But let me have both accounts some time, there's a good fellow.'

Wishart said: ‘She's not coming back yet, then? I hope she's better.'

‘I doubt if she'll be back this term. Her friends want her to stay, and the change suits her. She finds it over-quiet up here.'

‘Yes? Well, it's what you get accustomed to, no doubt. Come in and see us some evening, if you've the mind. There's much we can talk of. Friday's my best day.'

‘Thank you,' said Fleming, satisfied. ‘Goodbye.'

At high tea Mrs Wishart said: ‘Was that Mr Fleming I saw this afternoon? Nothing wrong at the school, I hope?'

‘No,' said her husband. ‘ He came for a tonic for himself.'

Mrs Wishart stirred her tea. ‘Well, I've no doubt he needs it with all they boys to be concerned about. But I hadn't thought of him as an ailing man. Eat your tea, David.'

Wishart put down his paper. ‘These kippers are a wee bit salt for my personal taste. Did you get them from MacAndrew?'

‘Aye. Did he say when Mrs Fleming would be coming back?'

‘Fleming? Maybe not this term, he said.'

Mrs Wishart buttered a piece of toast and passed the butter to her husband. ‘It's no more man what I expected. I doubt she'll ever come back to him.'

‘What makes you say that?'

‘Well, you know as well as I do that they were often on bad terms.'

‘Oh, yes, but … that was just the way things are sometimes. You've been listening to the gossips, Janet.'

‘Well, they were hammer and tongs at the end of the Christmas term. Mrs Bunce told Maggie that. Then in the middle of term she goes away to relatives in London. But when she should come back she doesn't come back, an' last week-end he goes travelling off to London, leaving Mr Grant in charge. I've no doubt that's why he's in need of a tonic if they've come to a break, for he's a right-thinking man and wouldn't take it lightly.'

Dr Wishart eyed his wife a moment. ‘Drummond told me yesterday that Lady Clunes said Fleming was in the running for Lovell's at Glasgow. But it won't improve his chances if he's separated from his wife.'

‘Och, I don't think
she
would have improved his chances anyhow. She never was the type for a headmaster's wife. Too fond of criss-crossing her legs on the platform on prize-giving days.'

Wishart pulled some bones out of his mouth and grunted in mild amusement.

‘Well I dare say there were faults on both sides – he wouldn't be an easy man to live with – but I don't like to hear of a marriage broken up for such inadequate reasons.'

‘David, what
was
the matter with her when she came to see you in January?'

Wishart grunted again. ‘Nerves and a few bruises.'

‘Bruises?' said Janet Wishart. ‘You mean –'

‘I don't mean anything. It's not my business to mean anything, my dear. No doubt she got them doing her own housework.'

‘Inadequate reasons!' said Mrs Wishart. ‘I'd no idea he was a man like that. I've a mind not to ask him here again!'

‘I've heard from that Mrs Fleming,' said Mrs MacArdle. ‘ She'll not be needing our upstairs room again.' She lifted the ring off the stove and poked the fire. A cloud of dust arose. ‘This coal.'

‘Turn up the draught,' said Mr MacArdle, moving his wheel-chair nearer the window. ‘You know it always makes me cough.'

‘She says she's leaving the district and going to live on the Clyde. Now that's imagination, for the dust rose straight up. Anyone would think I blacked my kitchen on purpose to aggravate you.'

Mr MacArdle's cough died away. ‘ Why anyone should go to live near Glasgow after living in Edinboro' is a pretty problem. What did she come here for, anyway? Who should pay good money to hire a room for the sake of playing on a violin once or twice a month? Did she not have her ain house?'