The Song of Hartgrove Hall (12 page)

I'd promised. Now, I caught Clara's eye as she stared at me over the prostrate, weeping child. I had to concede that he wasn't easy. I didn't see the worst of him, as with me he was able to glut himself on what he loved best. I was like the grandparent who stuffed him with chocolate and then dispatched him back to his mother, only instead of a sugar buzz, I sent him home full of music.

Katy slumped on her chair. ‘Why does he always ruin everything? Can we just go home?'

‘Come on, old chap,' cajoled his father. ‘Get up.'

‘You haven't had my present yet,' I said.

Robin lifted up his head, rubbed his eyes. ‘Is it a piano?'

‘Well, no. It isn't.'

‘Can I have yours?'

I frowned. ‘You can play it whenever you like. I don't think my piano would fit in your bedroom. It's rather too big.'

Robin paused, considering. ‘Can I have it when you're dead then? You won't need it and I'll buy a house big enough.'

I caught Clara's eye and to my relief she was laughing.

‘Yes, Robin. You can have the piano when I'm dead.'

‘Say “thank you”,' said Clara.

Robin shrugged and laid his head back on the carpet. ‘Why? He isn't dead yet and I haven't got it.'

I could sense things about to unravel once again, so I pulled out two parcels and slid them towards him. He rolled over and sat up. He rattled the first box.

‘Is it a train?'

‘Why don't you open it and find out?'

‘If it is a train, then I don't need to open it.'

I sighed. Sometimes he was neither an easy nor an endearing child.

‘Try the other one.'

He shredded the wrapping paper and held at arm's length a large and battered leather book. He studied it dubiously.

‘What is it?'

I pulled over a chair and opened the book for him. ‘It's a book of songs I collected from all over England. Most of them from right here in Dorset. I've written them all out in this book. It's like a map but in songs.'

‘Can I play them on the piano?'

‘Yes, you could, although lots of them have words too.'

‘I don't like singing.'

He shoved aside the book and set his face again. I'd been quite silly in thinking for a moment that he'd be interested. I should have bought him some music CDs or a Walkman or something. Quietly, I retrieved the book and put it back on a shelf.

‘Why don't you play us something, Robin?' said Annabel. ‘Me and Katy haven't ever actually heard you.'

‘You must have,' I said.

Annabel shook her head. ‘Nope. We're always at school when he comes here.'

I looked at my twelve-year-old granddaughter and felt a ripple of guilt. She was dressed in the usual uniform of the young – a sweater and blue jeans – but like a sapling that had taken root she'd outgrown the spindliness of childhood. Now she studied me with a pair of brown eyes. I didn't know her at all.

‘I'm sorry about that. You should hear him.'

Robin had stopped crying but remained lying on his stomach, picking at a hole in the Persian rug.

‘That's quite enough, Robin,' I declared. ‘You need to decide what to play for your sisters.'

Without hesitation, he stood, wiped his nose on his sleeve and raced across the great hall, into the music room. It had once been known as the morning room, and gentlemen had lingered here after breakfast to read the papers. It faced south-west and even on dark days it was filled with light. Long ago I'd claimed it for my own; it was large enough to comfortably fit a full-size concert grand piano as well as all my other paraphernalia but really I loved it because of the quality of the light. Dusk had crept up on us; the rain-dashed hills had warmed from grey to red and now shoals of rosy clouds drifted across the sky. The white walls of the music room had been temporarily repainted in pink.

I placed several cushions on the piano stool and set Robin on top.

‘Do you know what you want to play?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you need the sheet music?'

He shook his head and sat quietly, his hands in his lap. The girls had found a spot on the window seat at the far side of the room where they kneeled, tracing their names in the condensation on the glass, only vaguely interested in their brother. Lucy, Clara and Ralph leaned against my desk – a vast Victorian monstrosity in brass and mahogany. The string players from the quartet lingered in the doorway, curious.

Robin gulped a breath, a swimmer about to dive, and then started to play. The change was instant. The girls stopped fiddling with the windows, turned and sat and listened, absolutely still. The string players edged closer, quite unable to
help themselves, travellers drawn to a fire on a winter's night. Ralph reached for Clara's hand and gripped it tightly.

Robin played a simple Chopin nocturne; it rippled from his fingers as smoothly as a stream over pebbles, as clear and cool. In those early days, I was still more technically adept than the boy, but I'd never called forth such a tone from the piano. It did what I asked of it, but Robin made it cry out; under his touch, the instrument was a thing that lived. Dusk dulled into evening and the room grew dark but Robin played on.

When at last he stopped, we listened in silence to the slow decay of the final chord. I glanced at Katy and Annabel, their faces pale in the gloom.

‘Well, shit on me,' said Annabel.

Everyone laughed, but as I looked at my family I wondered whether they understood, whether any of us understood, what Robin's talent would mean for us all.

It was the first Christmas without Edie. There was a cascade of unhappy anniversaries. The first weeks after she died, I'd been awash with grief and yet she was still so close that, if I just reached out far enough, I could still brush her fingertips. I kept her slippers beside the bed, just in case she needed them. She couldn't bear cold feet when she got up for a pee in the night. I didn't cancel her magazine subscriptions – somehow I couldn't bring myself to telephone the call centre, it was too absolute. And suppose she wanted the latest issue of
House & Garden
when she came home? I knew these thoughts were ridiculous and I certainly couldn't voice them aloud to my daughters – they'd cluck in concern and start whispering to one another, convinced I'd gone doolally.

During those early weeks and months, time slid and juddered – nothing was quite real. When I was a child of seven,
I'd had measles and I'd been kept in bed in the nursery for a fortnight with the curtains closed to protect my eyes against damage from the light. In the midst of my darkness and fever, time had stuttered and slowed, and the boundary between wake and sleep had become indistinct and unimportant. The world had contracted to my sickroom and my bed, and the burning itching in my eyes.

Each evening my father would visit. He sat on the edge of my bed; I don't remember him saying a word, but he pressed the cold circle of his gold watch against the hotness of my forehead. It was pleasanter than any flannel or compress. Then he'd remove the watch and wind it up. Ticketty-tick. Ticketty-tick. Like the crunch of the death-watch beetles in the attic beams above. In my feverish state I thought that he held time itself in that watch, and that he released a little for me each evening, the precise quantity that would allow me to manage through the night. And then one evening when I was feeling better and sitting up in bed, he allowed me to rewind the watch. I fumbled, my fingers sweaty and clumsy, but for once he gave no reprimand. It was a great boon – a treat so immense that I could not dilute it by confiding it to my brothers. After I had wound the watch and my father had refastened it on his wrist, he had opened the curtains and time had restarted.

In the first year after Edie, I was still waiting for the curtains to be pulled back and for time to resume. I lived by rote, surviving on habits. I made lists of groceries for Mrs Stroud to purchase. I paid the gas bill. I asked the gardener to plant a thousand daffodils and narcissi along the woodland walk. I declined requests to conduct concerts in London and New York and Bournemouth. But, most of all, I waited. I waited for Edie to come back and, despite knowing intellectually it was quite impossible, I waited.

I tried to write music and failed, and out of frustration continued to keep notes in the exercise book I kept on the
bedside table. Discovering it was nearly full, I purchased another in Dorchester. As I scanned the contents, I observed that I was no longer noting reminiscences, rags and scraps of memory, but also recording the events of the last year, of life after Edie. The last year, however dreadful and painful, had its own value. Grief had not yet receded, and yet I could acknowledge that at some point in the future it might. It would be a gradual retreating of the tide, a lessening that ebbed and flowed. I needed to remember the grief itself. The evidence of love.

Robin was the only new addition to my strange and airless world. The mornings that the boy came, we lived in music and there was pleasure in existence. And then he left and the quiet took hold, loneliness leavening it like yeast until it grew and smothered the house. The silence was monstrous. At the moment I needed her most, music deserted me once more.

I worried about Robin. I was concerned that I continued to teach him out of selfishness. I taught him because our lessons were my only respite but I was no piano teacher, especially for a student as brilliant as Robin.

I summoned a few old friends for advice. They arrived with a February gale. The driveway had turned into a series of puddles and a blackbird bathed on a patch of lawn that had metamorphosed into a small pond. Yet my friends braved the foulness of the weather, curious to hear my grandson play. I guessed they all wanted to discover whether grandpaternal fondness had clouded my judgement. I wanted to know it too.

We gathered in the music room, Albert, John, Marcus and I. We were a coterie of grand old men, the elder statesmen of music. Mrs Stroud had stoked the fire to a furnace and turned up the heating. Marcus, at eighty-two, was a little frail and contemplating surrendering his driving licence – although, I noted, he had still agreed to conduct one last performance of the
Messiah
at Easter.

‘It will be my last,' he said, eating a large slice of fruit cake with surprising gusto.

Albert laughed. ‘You say that each time.'

Marcus shrugged. ‘Well, one day it will be true whether I intend it or not. Now, if I should give up the ghost mid-performance, would that improve the crits or not? “Last night's concert at the Festival Hall was a tremendous disappointment. Sir Marcus Albright really let himself down in the final movement of Beethoven's Fifth by turning his toes up—”'

John poured more tea. ‘I don't see why you should retire. You can get someone to drive you to Waitrose; you can't get someone to conduct Handel on your behalf.'

‘In the spring I might just delve into Beethoven's late quartets,' Marcus added, spearing a stray currant with his fork. ‘I never really understood them before. They always seemed a bit strained, uneasy. But then, after my stroke, I listened to them and they made sense for the first time. I'm not sure that they can make sense to anyone under seventy.'

‘It's not about age,' I said quietly. ‘His late quartets are about suffering. It's acute sadness, a muscular unhappiness that provokes the music. That can happen at any time of life.'

The others paused and looked at me, presuming I was speaking about Edie. I hadn't been directly, but then everything led back to her.

We chatted on for half an hour, debating the nuances of Mozart's sonatas and the narrowness of the car park spaces at the new Tesco, until the door opened. Robin stood there. The men beamed at him.

‘Do come in, young man,' said Albert. ‘It's probably much too hot in here for you but I'm afraid we old fellows do feel the cold.'

Robin marched in, too young to feel self-conscious or abashed.

‘This is my friend Albert,' I said to him. ‘You like his recording of the Bach fugues, remember?'

This was an understatement. He had played it so much at home that Clara had limited him to only three times each day.

‘I listened to it a hundred and fifteen times,' he declared.

‘Why so few?' quipped Marcus.

Robin blinked, not understanding he was being teased. ‘I needed to know how it worked. How he put all the bits together. I get it now. It's in my head and I don't need to listen to it any more.'

I glanced at Albert to see how he was reacting to this. His mouth did not betray a twitch of humour; instead he listened with the same thoughtful gravity he would have given to an adult. Robin surveyed the faces of the celebrated men gathered by the fire and scowled.

‘I like the recording of Rachmaninov playing his own stuff even better. Is Mr Rachmaninov coming too, Grandpa?'

‘He was unavailable this afternoon.'