The Song of Hartgrove Hall (44 page)

The soon-to-be new owners of Hartgrove also agreed to let me remain in the house for one last summer. A date for moving was set for the end of October. Then in July, Mr Too-White-Teeth – who, it appeared, was still somebody in the music business – persuaded some bright young thing to include a sample passage from one of my CDs on a new recording of her own and, for the first time in some years, I received a very pleasant cheque from my agent. I decided to blow the lot on champagne and a party.

I invited the family, Albert and John, as well as, it seemed, most of the surviving members of the Bournemouth Symphony
Orchestra. I spent days fretting over the weather, but after a spell of drizzle the morning shrugged off the grey clouds like an old coat to reveal a freshly pressed blue sky beneath. I'd borrowed the marquee from the village hall and had it erected on one of the lawns, with trestle tables laid out in the shade of the lime trees. For once the lawns had been properly cut and rolled into stripes. I'd not been able to weed the borders, where wild poppies had seeded themselves but, with a sense of occasion, they all decided to pop at once and the garden was filled with scores of pink flowers, waving in the heat like dozens of chorus girls' frilly bloomers.

I left the catering firmly to my daughters, writing them a cheque and asking them to get on with it. Clara, Lucy and the granddaughters spent hours dismembering roast chickens, making cucumber sandwiches, spearing cocktail sausages, slicing up vast pork pies, buttering scones and cutting slabs of fruit cake. Albert, John and I poured gin and tonic into vats of ice and sliced lemon. The only trouble was that somebody put the empties into the recycling halfway through and so we had no idea how much gin we'd put in. Thinking of the orchestra members – retired or not – we added another litre or so, just to be on the safe side.

The musicians had offered to provide music in rotation. As I was determined that this should be a celebration, not a funeral, my only proviso was that they must not play anything in D minor – the saddest of all keys.

As the guests chattered on the lawns, half a dozen string players and a pair of flutes played a medley of my early folk-song collections. The English country garden of Hartgrove Hall was the most idyllic of settings for such music and I felt a pang at the thought of all the ghastly pop music that would make the windows rattle in years to come. I told myself sternly to stop, as this was sounding too close to regret. Annabel and Katy were dancing, teenage self-consciousness cast off in the
wildness of the music as they whirled around and around with a couple of young musicians, yelping with joy. Home wasn't a place. Home was music. As long as I had that, the bungalow beneath the hill would be pleasant enough.

As I listened to the shouts and the furious pace of the dance – the fiddlers bowing faster and faster, scaling the old modal tunes as though they could play us backwards in time – I saw the concert-goers from the first festival, sipping champagne beneath the trees. They'd come here for years and years in their dinner suits, the women in cocktail dresses, wearing their grandmothers' pearls, to listen to our music.
The Song of Hartgrove Hall
was always the final piece of the festival. We'd performed it at the end by chance the second year, and the reception was such that we continued the tradition for years. I didn't hear it the last time it was played. Edie wasn't well during that summer. She'd been keeping her illness to herself, making light of her headaches, but that night she'd fainted. As Clara and I pleaded with her to let us call a doctor, she'd confessed. After that, there were no more concerts.

‘You look dangerously close to misery,' said Albert, appearing by my side. ‘I told you that gin was a mistake. Always makes one melancholy.'

I smiled. ‘I'm feeling old, Albert. It's one thing to be old, it's quite another to feel it.'

He shrugged. ‘It will pass. Like wind. Only comes in bouts.'

We meandered over to the potting shed. Several panes of glass were broken. I supposed I didn't need to worry any more about having them mended. We sat down on a couple of overturned pots in the middle of the flower garden, where no one had planted out any seedlings since Edie had died. In years gone by, at this time of year it had been a riot of pastel-coloured sweet peas, sprouting in tangles along wigwams of willow, alongside vast floppy-headed dahlias, sprays of stocks, lupins and sweet
williams. Yet, as I looked closely, amongst the weeds I noticed that nasturtiums still clambered across the ground, while foaming white daisies and scarlet hollyhocks had all continued to bloom. It heartened me somehow.

‘Come,' I said to Albert, ‘enough maudlinness and nostalgia. Let's eat some pork pie.'

We helped ourselves to plates of food and retreated to the shade of a venerable oak. John joined us and we ate in silence, listening to the music.

‘I hope Robin's going to play,' said John when they stopped for a rest.

‘Oh yes,' I said. ‘He's going to play the piece he's chosen for the final of Young British Musician of the Year. He still gets dreadfully self-conscious in front of audiences. He's all right with an impromptu crowd. He prefers it when people stumble across him playing, then shower him with compliments when he's finished.'

Albert laughed. ‘Yes, I can appreciate the appeal of that, but it's not really a career plan, though, is it? To play the piano here and there, hoping one's audience pops by.'

‘No,' I agreed. ‘But he's still terribly young. I do worry about the competition being on television.'

We were all silent and I recalled the only and somewhat disastrous occasion Robin had played before the cameras.

Lucy hurried across the garden, stopping beside us and frowning. ‘Papa, will you come? Robin's got into rather a pickle, I'm afraid. He's very upset.'

My heart sank. ‘Oh dear. Is it nerves? It'll do him good to get them out of his system.'

Lucy shifted awkwardly, running her hands down her jeans. ‘No. It's not nerves, it's gin.'

We found him alternating between apologising and vomiting in the downstairs loo. Clara crouched beside him, stroking his back.

‘I'd be furious but I think this is punishment enough,' she said.

‘Why on earth did you do it, Robin?'

‘I'm so sorry, Grandpa—' he mumbled, breaking off to be sick again. ‘I got scared. So many amazing musicians here. I didn't want to mess it up.'

I lowered myself awkwardly onto the side of the bath.

‘Don't be silly. They're the most understanding audience you'll ever have.'

‘I know. I know.'

‘He said that he had a glass of gin and tonic to steady his nerves,' said Clara with a glare. ‘It's bloody strong.'

‘You said bloody,' said Robin from halfway down the toilet bowl. ‘You never swear.'

‘Oh bloody well shut up,' said Clara.

‘It did have a good snifter in it, but you weren't supposed to be drinking it, young man,' I said.

‘Sorry,' he said, and beached himself on the bathmat, his skin the same ghastly avocado green as the bathroom suite.

‘Well, I don't think you'll be playing this afternoon,' I said. ‘And if this is how the prospect of public performance makes you behave, then perhaps it's for the best if you don't play in the Young Musician competition. You can enter next year or the year after that. There's no hurry.'

‘I want to do it this year,' he said, anger turning him a marginally healthier shade.

‘Well, what do you think?' I said, turning to Clara.

She stared down at him, hands on her hips, her expression a blend of bewilderment and love.

‘I want perfect behaviour up to the competition. One answer back or one stray sock out of the laundry basket and I'm withdrawing your name.'

He nodded. ‘OK. Deal.'

‘And no gin or any other tipple to steel yourself,' I said. ‘It's a sign of the amateur and the hack. Are you an amateur?'

‘No.'

‘Jolly good. Then upstairs with you to sleep it off.'

Lucy helped him up and, leaning on his aunt, he swayed up the stairs.

‘His grandmother suffered from just the same stage fright. It's why she gave up singing in public in the end. She managed the spectacular pre-performance vomiting without the aid of gin.'

‘I hope he gets over it,' said Clara. ‘If he doesn't, he won't get terribly far.'

‘Oh he might, but it simply won't be as much fun.'

I put my arm around her shoulders and planted a light kiss on her cheek. She'd got rather thin after the divorce, but to my relief this last year she'd started to put on a little weight again and seemed happier. I wondered whether she'd taken a lover. I hoped so.

We returned to the garden where, to my surprise, an entire symphony orchestra had set up on the lawns. Nearly seventy musicians were perched on chairs, the brass section peering out from behind the hydrangea bushes, making their large clusters of blooms look like party hats. The percussion had chosen a spot on the loggia amongst the pots of marigolds and marguerites.

Clara squeezed my arm. ‘They're going to play
The
Song of Hartgrove Hall
. It had to be the last piece.'

I nodded and swallowed.

John and Albert joined us. ‘Would you like to conduct?' asked John. ‘I'm ready to step in, if you'd prefer to sit it out.'

I felt a wave of dizziness and glanced about for a seat. There was none. My heart began its horrible machine-gun pit-pit. I remembered the dreadful reviews last time John had performed my work. I'd never liked the way he made me sound. If this was to be the last time this symphony was going to be played here, I'd better jolly well do it myself.

‘No thank you,' I said.

‘Told you,' said Albert with a smirk at John, who to my satisfaction looked rather put out.

‘I don't mind,' said John with a shrug. ‘I'll play it after you're dead. I'm younger than you, remember.'

I patted him fondly on the arm and helped myself to the baton in his breast pocket.

As a young man I'd written this piece as my farewell to Hartgrove Hall. And yet the symphony itself, in the form of royalties and income from the festival, had helped to keep the house in the family for another fifty years. Up till now it hadn't been a farewell.

I climbed the rostrum.

Afterwards, I drifted through the gardens quite spent, and yet thrumming with so much adrenalin that I couldn't rest. Paper napkins fluttered in the grass like tropical flowers. I heard the sound of a car coming along the driveway. Shading my eyes against the sun's glare reflected off the windscreen, I saw a taxi. I walked over as it pulled up outside the front door. The driver hopped out and jogged round to help the passenger. He eased himself out and with some effort stood, leaning against the car, slowly taking in the streamers festooning the trees and the scattered glassware.

‘Hello, Fox,' said Jack. ‘I seem to have missed a party.'

We sat in Jack's old bedroom with the television, perched on the chest of drawers, displaying nothing but static.

‘Whack it again, Fox,' he said.

‘I'm trying,' I grumbled, repositioning the aerial for the umpteenth time.

The picture swam back into clarity. I settled back onto the chair. Jack lay in his bed, an oxygen cylinder beside him. Every now and again he took a puff.

‘You sound as if you're smoking a Gauloise,' I said.

‘Goodness, I do fancy a cigarette. You couldn't get me one, could you? It's not as if it could do me any harm.'

‘It would blow us up. You're sitting beside an oxygen cylinder.'

‘You always were a swot.'

‘I'm not. That's simple common sense.'

We paused, Jack to catch his breath, and me to savour the pleasure of bickering with him.

‘How long have I got?' he asked.

‘Surely the doctors told you—?'

He smiled. ‘No. How long do I have in which to shuffle off, before the movers get here?'