The Song of Hartgrove Hall (33 page)

‘Don't be such a spoilsport,' grumbled John. ‘If you give it to me, I'll show you how it should really sound.'

‘That's the problem,' I said. ‘I already know how it's supposed to sound. It doesn't need added bombast.'

Albert was rather quiet. We looked over to find that he was lying back in his deckchair, grinning emptily at the clouds. ‘Very nice,' he said. ‘Very nice. Very, very nice.' He giggled and then gave a sonorous fart. ‘F flat,' he declared and giggled again.

‘Told you it was jolly decent stuff,' said Marcus proudly.

He passed the joint to me and I inhaled tentatively, then coughed and retched, wondering why on earth I was attempting something so undignified.

Marcus handed me a glass of water. I took a sip and then, taking the joint, tried again.

‘Just a little, not a ruddy great lungful,' advised Marcus.

This time, I managed. It was jagged and sore, much as I imagined inhaling glass to be, but then came a wave of green calm. I tried another, and felt soft and boneless.

‘Off,' I said to John, gesticulating vaguely at his deckchair. He moved aside and, gratefully, I lay down.

The afternoon passed in a pleasurable jumble. Time jumped to and fro. Someone suggested we fetch the Dundee cake. Then it was gone though I couldn't recall ever eating it, but the crumbs and raisins on my lapel suggested otherwise. I heard the warble of the garden birds inside my skull and the thrum of the earthworms beneath the grass. The leaves on the climbing roses and the wisteria vibrated with revolving colour like the patterns in a child's kaleidoscope.

‘You should have a revelation for the second movement, Fox,' said John, jabbing a finger too close to my face. ‘That's what you're supposed to do. A drug-fuelled revelation.'

‘Yes,' said Marcus. ‘I agree with John so it must be true.'

‘Irrefutably,' agreed John, kissing Marcus's hand.

‘I think I'd rather have something to eat,' I said. ‘Just a little nibble.'

‘All right. A snack first. Then a revelation.'

‘Go and see if there's anything else in the fridge, Fox.'

Thus I found myself searching in the refrigerator for a revelation but succeeded only in finding half a poached salmon. Then I was sitting back on the terrace with the others, gazing at the picked bones of the fish, unable to remember either returning from the kitchen or consuming the salmon. Albert
and John were fast asleep, snoring gently. Marcus reached over and took my hand.

‘You can conduct the new work. You and not John,' I said.

‘Now, now, that sounds perilously close to pity,' said Marcus. ‘You've rightly not allowed us close to your work for nearly fifty years. Don't break your rules now.' He gave me a rueful smile. ‘Besides, when you hear how wonderful I make you sound, you'll only regret those wasted years when I could have been championing you to millions.'

I laughed. Even at eighty-three and dying, Marcus had the ego of a true maestro.

The pot did not provide me with great inspiration, only constipation. Fellows of my advanced age simply can't spend afternoons feasting furiously on all manner of things and then expect no digestive consequences. A day and a half and a packet of Alka-Seltzer later, I returned to the music room, dawdling through various ideas while trying to banish a faint headache. My flood of inspiration had dwindled to a paltry trickle and I wondered where I'd gone wrong. I fumbled at the keys, unable to hear the next passage. There was the thump, thump of Marcus's stick along the corridor and the next moment he entered the music room, sitting down heavily in a chair.

‘What did you used to do, when you reached this section? Every piece has a thorny bit. What was your trick?' he asked.

I frowned, trying to remember. ‘Well, sometimes, I'd try it in a different key. Some variations.'

Marcus thumped his stick. ‘No. Have I taught you nothing? No padding. No unnecessary passages.'

I laughed at his imperious tone. ‘I went out song collecting.
Always helped, whether it was the walk itself, or discovering an unexpected melody.'

Marcus clapped his hands. ‘Very good! Let's get going then.'

I sighed. ‘There's nothing left to find. The older singers are gone and their tunes with them. It's all pub fiddlers and careful revival now.'

Marcus wrinkled his brow. ‘I don't believe that. You just don't know where to look.'

‘No,' I agreed. ‘But anyway, I don't think that will help this time. It's something else that's wrong. Something's missing. Something terribly, terribly obvious.'

Marcus left me and I sat alone in the music room. I was irritated with myself and frustrated. I read and reread the score I'd written so far. I was pleased with it, and a little terrified – I knew this was as good as anything I'd ever done, but what if all I could produce was this unfinished movement, this fractured symphony? Perhaps this was it – the last rush of inspiration like the final rallying of a dying patient.

I laughed aloud at myself. I was being overdramatic. The truth was that it had been some years since I'd produced anything really good. My more recent works were perfectly decent and had been kindly received – the critics became more benevolent as I'd neared seventy – but I knew myself that they were ordinary. Not much more than echoes of ideas that had been fresh and exhilarating when I was in my thirties and forties. This new work was no echo. It had snuck up on me in the shower and haunted me as nothing had done for years. I was finding myself impatient with the conversation of my good friends and I longed to slope off after dinner to be alone to listen to my thoughts. I played through the theme, frustrated at the inadequacy of my playing, and trying to imagine it on a pair of flutes. The pedal on the piano was sticking and,
as I peered at it, I discovered, wedged underneath, a small bouncy ball belonging to Robin. With some difficulty, I eased myself onto my hands and knees and, groping about, managed to slide it free.

‘Grandpa?' said a voice in the doorway.

Instantly I raised my head, cracking it on the underside of the instrument, and swore. Robin slipped into the room and crept under the piano to sit beside me. Tucking his knees under his chin, he peered at me.

‘I like to sit under the piano too,' he said. ‘It's my thinking place.'

Wordlessly, I handed him his ball. He remained crouched beside me in silence for a moment, and then said, ‘Grandpa? I want a go at the thing you were playing.'

Painfully, I eased my way out from under the piano and settled back onto one of the armchairs. I hesitated, unsure whether I wanted Robin to play. It was too soon. The piece was unfinished and it was the opinion of this child that really mattered to me, more even than the esteem of my celebrated friends. I wanted him to understand it. I didn't want to be alone again.

Before I'd entirely made up my mind, Robin was sitting at the piano and playing through the sketches with more fluidity and nuance than I ever could. I grasped at once what my difficulty had been. I'd been fooling myself. The melody wasn't for a pair of flutes. This was a piano symphony. And I had to write it for Robin.

I wrote at white heat, hardly pausing to eat the meals that Mrs Stroud sent up to the music room and which Marcus insisted I finish. I was exhilarated by my work. The approbation of my chums was satisfying but most of all I was elated
by the feeling that I was in the midst of writing the best music of my career. It's all very well to be praised and acknowledged at fifteen or twenty-five or even forty, but afterwards there is the maudlin sense that one is on a downward slide.

That was why I was apprehensive for Robin. It is a terrible thing for someone to reach their peak as a child. If one scales Rachmaninov before the age of twelve, then what other mountains are left, either critically or intellectually? I believe it is worst of all for trebles, those astounding boy singers with a dizzying purity of sound who dazzle the world for a brief season before their voices crack and break. I pity those children most of all. They lose not only their career but also their instrument. They are like piano players who have lost their hands.

I didn't want Robin's gifts to take quite so long to mature as my own. I decided that I was like a pre-war brandy – remarkable both in flavour and for the sheer bloody length of time it had to reach its best. I wrote with the fervour and vim of a young man. Sometimes, too exhausted to write, I would draw the curtains and lie back on one of the vast armchairs in the music room, prop up my feet and listen to my early recordings. I found it eerie, akin to watching my life flash before my eyes.

I suppose that must be how an actor or actress must feel. I spared a thought for Elizabeth Taylor, bloated and old, watching
Cleopatra
or
National Velvet
and seeing her own radiant beauty – a desperate experience, I would imagine. For me, however, it was disconcerting in a different way; I was not struck by the sense of youth lost, more that another man was conducting those pieces. In my mind I no longer heard them that way. When I looked at photographs of my younger self, I somehow imagined I could remember more or less how I'd felt when the shutter had clicked and that in essentials I remained
very much the same – a little worn around the edges, the digestion less reliable and with markedly less hair, but otherwise unaltered. On hearing myself conduct Mahler at the age of thirty, it occurred to me that I was quite wrong. This earlier Fox was as different from Fox at seventy-odd as he was from another conductor entirely. It was an uncomfortable and dislocating sensation.

Clara brought Robin around several evenings each week to play through the latest pages. As he played, the following day's passage seemed to be suddenly illuminated like the safe course picked out by the beam of a lighthouse.

As he finished, he gave a small huff of satisfaction. ‘I like to be the first to play your stuff.'

I laughed. In this, Robin reminded me of his grandmother – the first to run across the snow, or to play across a page.

Later, when Robin had gone home, we all sat on the terrace drinking brandy. The marigolds had been nipped by an early September frost and the hydrangeas had started to burnish. This would be the last evening outside until next year. Miserably, I wondered whether for Marcus this would simply be the last time. We sat in silence, a heaviness in the air between us. Our content had dwindled as the warmth of summer gave way to the nip of autumn.

‘Come, come, this won't do at all,' said Marcus at last. ‘Surely you saw that list in
Music Maker
of twenty-first-century greats? I was listed higher than the lot of you.'

‘I was only one place behind,' grumbled John.

‘See! I knew you'd seen it,' said Marcus, triumphant.

‘And when Fox's piano symphony is performed, he'll be higher than all of us, even you, Marcus,' said Albert.

‘No doubt,' said Marcus, smiling. ‘No doubt at all.'

Albert cleared his throat. ‘It's quite something you've done, Fox. I've read the score. I've heard the snatches Robin's been playing. And I'd say that it's the music of a man thirty years
younger – it has such energy and passion but it also has the depth and sadness that come with age.'

Marcus chuckled and shrugged. ‘Well, the last Rembrandts were the best, the last Titians the most surprising.'