The Courage Consort (11 page)

'For God's sake, Julian, are you suggesting we sing Andrew Lloyd Webber and "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" in motet style?'

'Oh bravo, Mr. Courage:
reductio ad absurdum!
' Julian was rearing up alarmingly, balletic with pique. 'I'm merely hummmmmbly suggesting you give a
thought
to what might put some reasonably intelligent
bums
on seats. The Beatles, it may
astound
you to know, inspire greater love than Pino Fugazza and Mr. Waffle put together—if such a pairing can be imagined without an ejaculation'—he gasped for breath—'of vomit.'

'Yes, but…'

'You know what would make a great encore for us?' raged Julian, quite crazed by now. 'Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" arranged for five voices.'

Dagmar snorted loudly.

'You think I'm joking?' exclaimed Julian, fizzing with mischief. 'Listen!' And he burst into song, a snatch of "Bohemian Rhapsody" showing off his own range from horrible faux-bass to fiercely accurate falsetto: 'Bis-mil-lah! No-o-o-o! We will not let you go—Let him go-o-o-o! Will not let you go—Let him go-o-o-o! No, no, no, no, no, no, no—Mama mia, mama mia, mama mia let me go…'

Mercifully, Julian's fury dissipated before he reached the 'Beelzebub has a devil put aside' section so familiar from his answering machine, and he slumped back onto his knees.

'You are insane,' pronounced Dagmar, awed, as silence settled again on the sweltering room.

'What do
you
think, Ben?' pleaded Roger.

Ben breathed deeply, blinking as bad vibes continued to float through the thick air.

'I think one thing is not in question,' he said. 'We've been contracted to sing
Partitum Mutante
at the Benelux Contemporary Music Festival. If we do it, some people may question our judgment. If we refuse to do it, many more people will question our professionalism.'

Dagmar shook a heavy lock of hair off her face in a paroxysm of annoyance.

'You are all so British,' she complained. 'You would kill yourself so the funeral company wouldn't be disappointed. Why can't we tell the Benelux Music Festival to shove their Fugazzas and Waafels up their ass?'

'Aahh … Perhaps we should approach this from the other end, so to speak,' said Roger, with grim optimism. 'We all seem to be assuming that the fallout from this event is going to be bad for our reputation—but who's to say it won't be the best thing that ever happened to us? If
Partitum Mutante
outrages everybody and gets the press steamed up, that'll generate a lot of word of mouth about the Consort. In that sense, whatever we may feel in our heart of hearts, the whole affair may push us up to another level of recognition.'

'Oh, you slut, Roger,' said Julian.

'I
beg
your pardon?'

'I meant it good-naturedly.'

Plainly, the discussion was doomed to be all downhill from here, but unfortunately there were still many hours of the day to get through. On and on, inexorable as a body function, the argument spasmed blindly along. Catherine, though she was kneeling in the midst of the battle, watched it as if from a distance. She knew Roger wouldn't ask her opinion, not after she'd giggled; he'd be too afraid she'd disgrace him by chattering about underpants. Or he might be worried she'd just stare back at him in a soulless daze, as though he'd tried to summon her from the bottom of a deep, deep well. He didn't realise she was elsewhere now.

It didn't impress her, actually, all this bluster about
Partitum Mutante
and the Consort's future, and she took pleasure in the fact that it didn't impress Ben, either. As often as she could get away with it, short of embarrassing them both, she turned to look at him and smiled. He smiled back, pale with tiredness, while between him and Catherine the stinging voices ricocheted.

She thought:
Dare I do something that might lead to the end of two marriages?

In the end, it was Axel who came to the rescue again. Strange how this unmusical little creature, this uninvited marsupial whom they'd all imagined would meddle constantly with the serious business of singing, had left them to commune with
Partitum Mutante
uninterrupted for two solid weeks, only making himself heard when he could exercise his preferred role as peace broker.

Today, he'd allowed the Consort to argue the morning and afternoon away, content at first to impose no more ambitious restrictions than to remind them, every few hours, to take a short break for food and drink. However, when nighttime came and they were still hard at it, Axel decided that drastic intervention was needed. Screaming at the top of his lungs, his mission was to lure his mother to his feverish little body, which he'd marinated in sufficient puke and ordure to earn himself a bath. Dagmar, interrupted just as she was about to announce her defection from the Anglo-German alliance, swallowed her words, stomped upstairs—and did not return.

With her departure, some'séance-like bond of hostility was broken, and the Courage Consort dispersed, exhausted. They had resolved nothing, and the rain still hadn't come. Julian slunk off to be comforted by the murmurings of Dutch television; Roger said he was going to bed, though the expression of wounded stoicism on his face suggested he might be going to the Mount of Olives to pray.

Catherine and Ben sat in the rehearsal room, alone. Through the windows, the trees of the forest were furry black against the indigo of the night sky.

After a time, Catherine said, 'What are you thinking, Ben?'

And he replied, 'Time is short. It would have been better if we'd done some singing.'

Catherine nestled her cheek inside her folded arms, her arms on the back of the couch. From this angle, only one of her eyes could see Ben; it was enough.

'Sing me a song, Ben,' she murmured.

With some effort he raised himself from his chair and walked over to a glass cabinet. He swung open its doors and fetched out an ancient musical instrument—a theorbo, perhaps. Some sort of lute, anyway, creaking with its own old-ness, dark as molasses.

Ben returned to his chair, sat down, and found the least absurd place to rest the bulbous instrument on his bulbous body. Then, gently, he began to strum the strings. From deep inside his chest, sonorous as a saxhorn, came the melancholy lyrics of Tobias Hume, circa 1645.

Alas, poore men
Why strive you to live long?
To have more time and space
To suffer wrong?

Looking back at a lifetime devoted to warfare and music, dear old Tobias might well have left it at that, but there were many more verses; the music demanded to go on even if there was little to add to the sentiments. Ben Lamb sang the whole song, about nine minutes altogether, strumming its sombre minimalist accompaniment all the while. Then, when he had finished, he got up and carefully replaced the lute in its display case. Catherine knew he was going to bed now.

'Thank you, Ben,' she said, her lips breathing against her forearm. 'Good night.'

'Good night,' he said, carrying his body away with him.

***

A
N HOUR LATER
, Roger and Catherine made love. It seemed the only way to break the tension. He reached out for her, his strange and unreachable wife, and she allowed herself to be taken.

'I don't know anymore, I don't know anymore,' he moaned, lonely as she stroked his damp back.

'Nobody knows, darling,' she murmured abstractedly, smoothing his hair with her hands. 'Go to sleep.'

As soon as he had drifted off, she uncovered herself, imagining she was glowing like an ember in the heat. The house was perfectly quiet; Julian's relationship with the television must have run its course. Outside in the forest, the smell of impending rain dawdled over the treetops, teasing.

At the threshold of sleep, she thought she was already dreaming; there were disturbing sounds which seemed to be inside her body, the sounds of a creature in distress, struggling to breathe, vibrating her tissues. Then suddenly she was roused by a very real cry from outside herself. A child's cry, frightened and inarticulate. She was pretty sure it was Axel's, but some instinct told her that it was being provoked by something Dagmar couldn't handle alone.

Roger was dead to the world; she left him sleeping as she threw on her dressing gown and hurried out of the room.

'Hilfe!'
called Dagmar breathlessly.

Catherine ran into the German girl's room, but Axel was in there alone, squirming and bawling on a bed whose covers had been flung aside.

'Help!'

Catherine rushed into the room next door, Ben's room. Ben was sprawled on the floor next to his narrow bed, his pyjamas torn open to expose his huge pale torso. Dagmar was hunched over him, apparently kissing him on the mouth. Then, drawing back, she laid her hands on his blubberous chest, clasping one brown palm over the other; with savage force she slammed the weight of her shoulders down through her sinewy arms, squashing a hollow into Ben's flesh.

'Airway. Take over,' she panted urgently, as she heaved herself repeatedly onto where she trusted the well-hidden sternum to be. Ben's mountainous chest was so high off the floor that with every heave her knees were lifting into the air.

Catherine leapt across the room and knelt at Ben's head.

'Roger! Julian!' she screamed, then pressed her lips directly over Ben's. In the pauses between Dagmar's rhythmic shoves, she blew for all she was worth. Filling her lungs so deep that they stabbed her, she blew and blew and blew again.

Please, please breathe,
she thought, but Ben did not breathe.

Julian burst into the room, and was momentarily overwhelmed by the sight of the two women, Dagmar stark naked and Catherine in a loose gown, kneeling on the floor with Ben.

'Eh … he choked, eyes popping, before the reality dawned on him. He flew out of the room, bellowing, in pursuit of a telephone in the dark.

***

T
HE LIGHT IN THE
Château de Luth was dim and pearly on the day that the Courage Consort were due to go home. The weather had broken at last. Baggage cluttered the front room like ugly modern sculpture forcibly integrated with the archaic spinning wheels, recorders, leather-bound books, lutes.

Jan van Hoeidonck would be arriving any minute now, in his banana-yellow minibus, and then, no doubt, after the house was safely vacated, Gina would come to clean it. A couple of items in the hallway had been badly damaged by the ambulance people as they'd pulled Ben's body out of the narrow aperture, but the owners of the château would just have to be understanding, that was all. Antiques couldn't be expected to last forever; sooner or later, the wear and tear of passing centuries would get to them.

Standing at the window, blindly watching the millions of tiny hailstones swirling and clattering against the panes, Roger at last raised the subject that must be addressed.

'We have to decide what we're going to do,' he said quietly.

Dagmar turned her face away from him, looking down instead at her baby, cradled tight in her arms. She had a pretty good idea what she was going to do, but now was not the time to tell Roger Courage about it.

'The festival isn't yet,' she said, rocking on Catherine's absurdly big plastic suitcase.

'I know, but it's not going to go away, either,' said Roger.

'Give it a rest, Roger,' advised Julian softly, hunched over the piano, stroking his long fingers over all the keys without striking any.

Roger grimaced in shame at what he was about to say, what he could not help saying, what he was obliged by his own personal God to say.

'We could manage it, you know,' he told them. 'The bass part of
Partitum Mutante
is the most straightforward, by a long shot. I know a man called Arthur Falkirk, an old friend of Ben's. They sang together at Cambridge…'

'No, Roger.'

It was Catherine speaking. Her face was red and puffy, unrecognisable from crying. Before she'd finally calmed down this morning, she had wept more passionately, more uninhibitedly, than she'd done since she was seven. And, as she'd howled, the torrent of rain had dampened the acoustic of the Château de Luth, allowing her lament to take its place alongside the creaking of ancient foundations, the clatter of water from drainpipes and guttering, the burring of telephones. Her voice was hoarse now, so low that no one would ever have guessed she sang soprano.

Roger coughed uneasily.

'Ben was very conscientious,' he said. 'He would've wanted…'

'No, Roger,' repeated Catherine.

The telephone rang, and she picked up the receiver before her husband could move a muscle.

'Yes,' she croaked into the mouthpiece. 'Yes, the Courage Consort. This is Catherine Courage speaking. Yes, I understand, don't be sorry. No, of course we won't be performing
Partitum Mutante.
Perhaps Mr. Fugazza can find another ensemble. A recording might be a more practical option at this late stage, but I'm sure Mr. Fugazza can make up his own mind … A dedication? That's very kind of you, but I'm not sure if Ben would have wanted that. Leave it with me, let me think about it. Call me on the London number. But not for a few days, if you would. Yes. Not at all. 'Bye.'

Roger stood at the window, his back turned. His hands were clasped behind his back, one limp inside the other. Against the shimmering shower of hail he was almost a silhouette. Outside, a car door slammed; the others hadn't even heard Jan van Hoeidonck's minibus arrive, but it was here now.

Catherine sat next to Dagmar on the suitcase; it was so uselessly big that there was ample space on its rim for both of them.

'Thanks for travelling with us this time,' she whispered in the German girl's ear.

'It's OK,' stated Dagmar flatly. Tears fell from her cheeks onto her baby's chest as she allowed Catherine to clasp one of her hands, those steely young hands that had proved unequal to the challenge of punching the life back into Ben Lamb's flesh.

The sound of a rain-swollen front door being shouldered open intruded on the moment. A great gust of wet, fragrant, earthy air swept into the house, as Jan van Hoeidonck let himself in. Without speaking, he walked into the front room, seized hold of two suitcases—Roger's and Ben's—and began to lug them out the door. Dagmar and Catherine slipped off Catherine's suitcase and allowed Roger to trundle it away, though it might just as well have been left behind. It was full of clothes she hadn't worn and food she hadn't eaten. She would travel lighter in future, if there was a future.