The Drowning People (32 page)
On such nonsense did my imagination feed too, in a way; for such drivel was the only contact I allowed myself with Ella over the three years of my study at the Guildhall, a time I filled with the intense work that is, for some, one of the by-products of loneliness. She wrote to me, of course: long, frightened letters that grew more frightened as the weeks turned to months and I left each one unanswered, some unopened even. I missed her; of course I missed her; and with a kind of wrenching sorrow. More than once I nearly wrote. But my conscience would not allow me to see Ella; and the greater my desire for her, the more important it became for me to deny myself the comfort of her presence in my life. I had not been punished for my role in Eric’s death, you see. Punishment was impossible without the confession I dared not make. And I yearned for punishment; for in its absence my guilt could only increase. I longed for some way to expiate my crime; to purge myself through suffering; and Ella was my chief privation.
Gradually her letters stopped; and my life, devoted more and more to music and to the playing of my violin, continued without any concrete reminders of our love. The days merged into one another and I passed through them all, trying not to think, working hard to resist a secret voice which told me that my silence was cruel, that the fragile woman whose photograph I saw in the papers did not deserve to be severed so completely from my life, a life in which she had shared so briefly but so fully. Thinking of it now I can see that my treatment of Ella
was
cruel, that without adding to my own guilt—or to hers—I might have written, at least. And though perhaps it would have been wrong for me to tell her that her image haunted my dreams still, that no day went past without me thinking of her ringing laugh or of the softness of her touch, I might have said that I grieved for her, that I mourned for her, too.
But it is easy to wish that one had acted differently once the time for action is passed; it is easy to wonder and to hope for what might have been. Hindsight is notorious for its clarity, I know that; but I have no use for it. The fact is that I did not write. And my silence grew also from the fact that secretly I blamed Ella for Eric’s death more than I blamed my own naïveté, which was the true culprit. It was easier and more comfortable for me to see the root of my sin in another; to think that I had been corrupted; that I was a victim, though even I could not pretend to be a guiltless one. Lacking the insight to see the insecurity behind Ella’s cruelty, distracted by my struggles to understand my own, I oscillated in my judgment of her, unable to condemn or to forgive completely, eager only (and sometimes despite myself) for a reunion which my conscience would not grant. I wanted to see her too badly, you see; I needed her too much. And the absence of such comfort, I thought, was the least I owed to Eric.
Perhaps death will give me knowledge as well as judgment; perhaps it will reunite me with those I have loved in a way in which I never can be on earth. Perhaps … But I am rambling again. I must go on, for it is evening now. I must not be distracted by the metaphor of this darkening room and the frail old man who sits in it, alone. My sun has set; it set years ago. I have grown to be comfortable with that fact. Now I must press on. I must not move until everything has been said. One night has passed since Sarah’s death; another must not be allowed to do so or I shall lose all resolve. This is no time to stop.
I was alone in those years after Eric’s death; and without the support which only Ella could have given, the knowledge of what I had done made me secretive. Over my years at the Guildhall I learned to disguise how I felt, to shield my unhappiness from the concerned inquiries of my friends and my family; and as I learned to do this better I became more adept at deceiving myself. True, I did not become as proficient as I would years later, when Sarah’s example had shown me the means to self-deception with such unspoken clarity; but I made a valiant effort, and with that I had to be content. Try as I might, though, I could not escape one frightening truth: that human nature needs a punishment to fit its crimes. And I came to writhe under the very absence of hardship in my life; to see in every kind word and happy coincidence a reproach which could not be silenced. Separation from Ella would not suffice as my only punishment; and with no recriminating words to hurt me, deprived of the catharsis of confession, there was nowhere for my guilt to turn but in on itself. So I devised self-inflicted privations—food I liked; certain pieces of music; access to my violin—all the while knowing that they were not enough, that they never could be enough.
Frenzied in my guilt, I came increasingly to think that any joy, any satisfaction I might derive from my life or my art, was tainted by what I had done to Eric; that I owed it to him to turn my back on all which might please me, to renounce my chance of happiness since it was I who had made him renounce his. I thought that I was worthless; and I could not enjoy any feeling higher than that of earnest drudgery without thinking that I was cheating Eric further of what might have been his. I had already taken too much of what belonged by rights to another, you see; I had taken, or helped to take, that most vital and short-lived possession: life. And I dared not allow myself any pleasures save those my playing gave me, worried as I was that weakness then would lose me the last vestiges of my once prized self-respect. Frightened to confess and thus to obtain punishment from others, frightened too of remaining unpunished forever, I sought to punish myself; and in the private paying of my penance I was careful to allow myself no slack. I was a hard taskmaster, and therein lay my only relief.
But nature was too strong for me in the end; and the harder I tried the more I learned that the human spirit cannot quite be silenced, even by the sternest, most implacable foe; that I was not equal, at the last, to ridding myself entirely of my own humanity. Ella had forced me to live, you see; more than that, she had made me alive to the possibilities of life; and such knowledge is impossible to forget, however good one’s intentions may be. Mine were very good, you may be sure of that; but they failed because I tried to drive all passion from me with an ardor which was passionate in its determination: passionate and thus self-defeating even at the peak of its power. Again and again I tried; again and again I did not succeed. And slowly I came to realize, with the certainty of repeated demonstration, that what I had done to Eric had made a numb and senseless life impossible for me; that my crime and subsequent grief had given me resources of experience and sensation which most people never accumulate in a lifetime of sober contentment.
It was with this knowledge, and its consequences for my guilt, that I grappled as I worked with the furious energy of frenzied confinement. My soul—which is what I will call it until someone proposes a better word—was resisting its imprisonment, I see that now; I understand that it was struggling for release. And as my playing was its only avenue of escape, its only way to the lighter air of a world beyond my sorrow, it came out in my work with a focused intensity which is denied to happier minds. Slowly I came to realize that the extremes of joy and pain to which I had been exposed, first by Ella and then by Eric, had informed my art and had taken my talent to the threshold of genius; and such knowledge sickened me.
I do not use words like “genius” lightly; that last phrase, for example, is not my own but Michael Fullerton’s; and it is from the headline of a review he wrote of the first concert I played after leaving the Guildhall. I have it somewhere in here, part of a neat bundle of reviews tied years ago by Sarah’s tireless fingers. But there is no point in finding it or the others with it; they all say much the same thing. I need no reminding of my career; or of how much I came to dislike adulation when I received it, how much I fought against the knowledge that my music had a power which I alone could not have given it. I came to be scared of the origins of that power. Now I am less so. Time has calmed me; and it is right that I should acknowledge the debt I owe to my dead friend; right that I should admit to myself that art, though not always born of suffering, can be; and that mine was.
It requires the peace of age to admit certain things; to state them out loud. And it is only now, now that I have nothing left to prove (to myself or to anyone else) that I can give Ella’s love and Eric’s death the credit for my musical success. It was love which first tempted me from the shallows and which taught me to swim alone, I can see that now; and it was the part I played in my best friend’s death which so nearly made me drown. It is to these two experiences that I owe the riches of my later musicality. Left to myself I would have been technically impressive, nothing more; for I would not willingly have exchanged the shallows of my own mind for the waves in which I later floundered. It was Ella who threw me into the sea of life; it was she with whom I might have swum, out of my depth though I was. But I did not swim; and when Sarah offered me her hand I was only too willing to be pulled back to safety; only too relieved to regain once more the sight, if not the touch, of dry land. But my security was won at a price; and from that moment on my inspiration grew less urgent, less compelling; and I myself became less of a musician. My talent, as one of the reviews in the bundle will tell you, lay in the public translation of private passion. My only personal contribution to my art was the craft which allowed its expression; and beyond that the feeling was not mine, or at least it was not mine alone. It is something of a release to be able to say that at last.
I
GRADUATED FROM THE
G
UILDHALL
in the summer I turned twenty-five; and my next concert, as I have said, was reviewed by Michael Fullerton with much enthusiasm in
The Times.
I keep his review in my desk drawer, for sentimental reasons, I suppose; and I cannot help but look at the photograph that accompanies it, a severe but dramatic shot of me standing on the stage of the Albert Hall, tiers of empty boxes rising above me and beyond the frame. I am simply dressed, for I have been rehearsing; and although I am holding my violin as if about to play, my face is tense and slightly stern.
It is a face much more recognizably my own than the one which belongs to the boy who first met Ella, who first saw her youthful form as she sat alone on that sunny bench in the park. Only three years separate the faces, it’s true; but people can change, even in so short a time, and I had changed. Staring at my image now, the face seems older than its twenty-five years: there are lines where there used to be none; the eyes are narrower; the lips thinner; the cheekbones more pronounced. My hair was still long, of course, for my agent thought that long hair increased my stage presence and enhanced what she called my “romantic appeal.” But save the severity of my haircut now—for flowing locks do not survive middle age with dignity—I am little changed from the man who stares at me from the newspaper on my lap. Of course the passing of the years has heightened the signs of age, which is a difference between us; and naturally his lines have become my wrinkles. But I share a look with my twenty-five-year-old self which was unknown to me at twenty-two. It is a sad look; hard and reserved: a look which softens now, as then, only when I play. I was resigned at twenty-five, resigned to the sorrows of life; and I can see the resignation in my eyes.
Perhaps Ella saw it too, for by that stage I was in the newspapers almost as frequently as she had been, though for different reasons. Perhaps she looked at my image as I looked at hers, and read in my eyes the signs of a suffering which mirrored her own. Perhaps … But what is the use of wondering now? In my craze for punishment I had pushed Ella from my life; and though I cherished her memory still, though I thought still with frightening pleasure of the way she smiled, or of how she lit her cigarettes, I was separated from her by three years of painful guilt, a barrier which I, unaided, could and would not cross. Perhaps she followed the progress of my career with excitement; perhaps she bought my recordings and tried to relive the afternoons we had spent together, in my tiny attic, over the course of that golden summer we shared. All this is possible.
What is certain is that I read of her with interest in the intervals between my practice and recording commitments; but interested though I was, I could not be excited (as I hoped that she might be for me), for the news of the Harcourts was not good. Press interest in them had died down since Ella’s return from France; but it picked up again and reached new heights after the publication of Sarah’s book—a life of her grandmother—which received much public attention and a certain amount of critical acclaim.
The Times Literary Supplement
pronounced it “eloquent in its portrayal of the unstable brilliance of a remarkable woman,” according to the jacket of my copy at least; and after its launch photographers once again trained their lenses on the house in Chester Square in the hope of capturing the fragile beauty of Seton Castle’s youngest heir.
For a week or more the journalists were disappointed; but then a lucky reporter in Harley Street caught Ella in tears, emerging from her psychiatrist’s, and the newspapers leaped with glee on both photograph and story. So great, in fact, was the public interest which greeted the ensuing articles that even the broadsheets ran small columns on the Harcourts and their history, while tabloid fantasy on the subject of curses and castles knew no bounds. Throughout the summer that followed my graduation, Ella and her family assumed an importance in national gossip second only to that enjoyed by the Royal family; and the various characters in their drama were discussed everywhere with an unthinking, good-natured intrusion which it made my blood boil to hear.
Even Camilla Boardman, so indiscreet about her friends in private, felt bound in public to talk loudly about what
nonsense
it all was; thus subtly underlining her intimacy with celebrity to anyone who cared to hear, while maintaining at the same time a strict loyalty towards her friends. The years had not changed Camilla, whatever they had done to me; and as her twenties progressed she remained as perfectly curled, as flawlessly turned-out, as effortlessly confident as she had ever been. Her emphases did not decrease in frequency or in strength; her enthusiasms did not dim; her lack of punctuation remained legendary. She remained true to her promise and did not marry Ed Saunders. Instead, with a rare show of mettle, she left home and took out a bank loan; and when I graduated from the Guildhall, Camilla & Co. had already been open—in smart premises of elaborate design on the Fulham Road—for some time. Originally a dress shop, it had gradually become an outlet for Camilla’s own creative flair; and soon she had four seamstresses under her and her clothes were being worn by a wider clientele than that provided by her mother’s friends and her own.