The Song of Hartgrove Hall (9 page)

We dawdle through the garden. Lodder lives alone and it's a man's patch – thoroughly practical, stocked solely with things to eat, the only flowers permitted to bloom here being repellents to discourage pests from devouring the vegetables. There's a village of sheds, ugly but useful. Lodder picks slugs off his lettuces between a stout forefinger and thumb, and flings them at the hawthorn hedge with some precision, where they hang on the prickles like wet grey baubles. A skinny and lonesome goat watches us from its tether in a circle of dirt. Edie makes towards it with a coo, but Lodder grunts a warning.

‘I wouldn't, if I were yoos. She'll git you something nasty.'

Edie stops short and the goat strains at its tether, horns down.

‘Lil bitch,' says Lodder with a fond chuckle. ‘If only I could 'ave kept the wife out here. 'Ere, 'ave a tomato. Lovely 'n' sweet.'

Edie eats her tomato in silence, her eyes wide, and I want to laugh. Lodder's hamming it up for her benefit and I wonder whether she can tell.

‘Miserable buggers, them songs. They're all 'bout lost things – sweethearts, youth, maidenhead—'

I shrug, conscious of the late hour and recognising that, although I'm pleased with the songs I've heard, the pleasure is starting to wear off and I'm already wanting something else but I can't properly explain to Lodder what it is since I don't know myself what I'm hunting for. Perhaps it's simply the desire for another song; there's always one more to be found.

Lodder grinds a snail under his boot and then with a grin points to the compost heap. ‘Slowworm,' he says with some satisfaction.

The tiny snake snoozes in the last of the afternoon sunshine, a perfect silver coil.

—

Edie strides along, her cardigan draped around her shoulders. I fall into step beside her, relieved she doesn't seem tired – I feel guilty about making her walk so far. The sun slinks behind the hill and it becomes abruptly cool, as if all the doors and windows of a fire-warmed room had suddenly been thrown open to the outside. The sky is clear and the earth holds no heat. We pass our former picnic spot. There is nothing to see but flattened grass. The cattle snort in the gloom. The hills are daubed with red for a few minutes and then smothered by darkness. As our eyes adjust we walk in silence, listening to a hurry of blackbirds calling evensong. A mistle thrush sings a counterpoint to their tune. At the bridge
Edie pauses. I move and stand beside her. The black water gurgles in the dark.

‘Let me catch myself, just for a minute,' she says.

‘Here.'

I pass her some cherries smuggled into my pocket from lunch, wrapped up in the magnolia petals. She eats them, spitting the stones into the river below. She spits them quite a distance and I'm impressed. Singer's lungs, I suppose, lots of puff.

‘So you can remember every song you've ever heard?' she asks, not looking at me but out into the gathering dusk.

‘I've a good ear for melodies.'

It's true. I remember every song. Well, almost every song. I stare across the flat water meadows towards the shoulder of Hartgrove Hill.

‘I discovered a whole crew of musicians this term. It was perfectly wonderful. I was a starving man. I didn't know I'd spent my whole life hungry until gorging at my first proper feast.'

‘It is a relief to be amongst other musicians. But then it can also be a relief to be away from them,' Edie says with a smile, and I wonder whether this is one of Jack's attractions.

‘I think I'm probably going to fail my exams. I'm afraid that I've ignored my studies and signed up to every music society instead. Orchestras. Quartets. I even play piano for the jazz band. I didn't much like the choirs. Too clean. Too quiet. Too lovely.'

Edie laughs. ‘Yes, I've never been fond of choirs. Unless I'm the soloist, of course. I don't mind them harmonising patiently in the background.'

I grin at this sudden and rare flash of the diva. ‘My mother used to sing to me. So I'm told.'

‘You don't remember?'

I shake my head. ‘I was so young when she died. But
sometimes I catch a tune and it feels so familiar that I wonder whether she sang it to me. I know she liked folk songs.'

She stares at me with a look of such wistfulness that I suppose I ought to feel sorry for myself but I don't. Instead, I turn away, embarrassed, conscious of talking too much, and I'm relieved she can't see me properly in the darkness.

‘I say, can I take a peep at your notes?' I ask, eager to turn the conversation.

She hands them over, nibbling at her nail as I study them. I produce a torch from my pocket. The battery's nearly spent but it's sufficient to more or less make out the scribbled lyrics. Instantly I know it's quite hopeless and if I want an accurate transcription I'll have to go back and listen to Mr Lodder again, but she's studying me with such eagerness.

‘Is it any good?'

‘It's entertaining.'

She frowns. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, you see here that you've got “the girl with the cabbage”? It's actually “the girl Will ravished”.'

‘Oh. I see. Ravished, not cabbage.'

‘'Fraid so.'

‘It's the Dorset accent.'

‘Quite. Very hard to understand.'

I'm helpless with laughter and Edie's laughing too, grabbing her notes back and swatting me with them. Before I can stop her she's chucked them into the river. They swirl for a second and then, sodden, are pulled away downstream.

‘Oh, what a shame! I was looking forward to those.'

‘Beast.'

She pulls on her cardigan, races along the path leading away from the river and scrambles up the bank of the hill towards the Hall and Jack.

We arrive at the boundary of the Hartgrove estate tipsy with laughter. It's been a glorious day and I'm calculating how many more she's likely to stay. I dawdle as we reach the long drive, reluctant to reach the others, but to my surprise Jack and George are walking out to meet us.

‘Hello, darling,' says Edie, reaching up to kiss Jack's cheek, but he hardly seems to notice. He stares only at me. I see that George is equally grim-faced.

‘Canning has given notice,' says George.

‘That is a pity,' I say, not understanding why this news has caused Jack to look quite so bereft. I turn to Edie. ‘Canning has managed the estate for thirty years. No, more. He'll be tricky to replace.'

‘He's not going to be replaced,' says George.

‘No, of course, he's irreplaceable,' I say, irritated now by my brothers' sentimentality. Canning is a decent fellow, a thoroughly good sort who managed both the estate and the General with some determination, but if he wants to retire, it's not for us to make a fuss.

‘The General is not going to replace him at all,' says George.

‘We're completely out of money,' says Jack. ‘The Fox-Talbots are utterly broke.'

‘The General is going to dynamite the Hall and auction off the land,' adds George, quietly.

My breath catches. The evening is hushed as if the wind had suddenly died. We've reached the steps of the house. We all sit and look out into the night. I'm shaking, whether with anger or grief I can't tell.

‘It would have been better if the whole bloody place had just burned down in the war. To have her back only to lose her again like this. It's beastly,' says Jack.

Edie's sobbing noiselessly into her handkerchief and I'm glad in a way that one of us is able to cry.

‘I don't want to see her go up,' I say. ‘I couldn't bear that.'

I know that afterwards I'll never come here again. The break must be clean. I can't walk these woods and sneak through these valleys as a stranger trespassing on another man's land. I don't want to stand on the ridge and look down on a handsome new house where ours once stood. No, when she's gone, I shan't come back.

‘How long do we have left?' I ask.

‘It's all arranged for next week,' says George.

I
insisted on giving Robin music lessons myself. Clara and I very nearly had a row about it.

‘Mrs Claysmore is terribly good. All the mothers swear by her.'

‘I'm sure she is, darling. But teaching Robin won't be like teaching other children. We need to be cautious.'

Clara smoothed her already creaseless skirt. We were sitting side by side in the kitchen, both of us resolutely gazing out at the rain-soaked lawns so that we didn't have to look directly at each other. We couldn't possibly have an uncomfortable tête-à-tête while making eye contact. The gardener puttered up and down on the lawn tractor, puffing out black smoke. It made a God-awful racket, leaving nasty gouges in the sodden grass. I wished he'd use the hand mower as I'd asked but that was another battle I couldn't face – my stomach for petty conflict had dwindled after Edie died. The smaller the task, the less I could bear it.

Clara frowned – a tiny furrow appearing in her forehead – and stared pointedly at the garden, but under the table I could see her knee tap-tapping in irritation.

‘I don't want to single him out. Push him. All the books say that's very risky.'

I swallowed my exasperation. As soon as I'd told her that her son had a gift for music, she'd retreated into books, desperate for the reassurance of so-called experts. I refrained from reminding her that I was also considered an expert in music, even if in nothing else. I stared at the black clouds, solid as barrage balloons, threatening more rain, and when I spoke, I made sure my voice was gentle.

‘Music lessons with his grandpa isn't pushy. We won't work any longer than he can manage. I want it to be fun. Music ought to be a pleasure.'

‘Mrs Claysmore will be most put out. I'll probably lose my deposit.'

I wanted to say bugger Mrs sodding Claysmore but I said nothing and just wrote her a cheque for the lost deposit. The truth is that I wasn't willing to surrender Robin to another teacher. I wanted to see for myself what the boy could do.

—

It was arranged that he'd come to me three mornings each week. I'd wanted five but Clara had insisted it was too much – whether for me or for him, I wasn't sure. But I supposed, begrudgingly, she was probably right. During the first weeks and months after Edie, I had seemed to drift around the house in a permanent state of tiredness and irritability. Perhaps five days with a young, inexhaustible child in constant motion would have been too much.

I found that I was nervous. I had the jitters in my belly as though I were about to enter into rehearsals with a strange and hostile symphony orchestra rather than tinkle Mozart with my own grandson. I began to fret that, in my discombobulated state of mind, I'd over-egged the boy's gift. Perhaps what had happened that day wasn't so remarkable. Or perhaps it was merely a fluke and Robin had no real interest in music. As Clara and I negotiated terms, days and then a week, then two, ticked by and I began to doubt my own memory of that afternoon.

I lay awake all night before our first lesson, wishing that I could talk it through with Edie. When she was alive, I would store up the trivial details of my day to tell her. They hadn't needed to be interesting. After a lifetime together, it's not
one's great passions that create intimacy; it's not the mutual love of Beethoven or Italian wine, but ordinary things. Without her, when I heard the first cuckoo of spring I had no one to tell. I found that sapphire earring she lost in '93 and that we claimed for on the insurance. It was wedged inside the lining of a cufflink box. No one else would be interested, nor should they be, but Edie would have been tickled. I didn't mention these things to anyone but the truth is that it's these bric-a-brac moments that make up a shared life. The grand events: the births of one's children, their first day at school or signing my first recording contract with Decca – these shine a little brighter, but they are only a tiny proportion of one's life together; a handful of stars in the night sky. It was the mundane, frankly dull things I missed the most. I missed not talking to her over breakfast. We'd ignored one another over toast and morning coffee with great pleasure for nearly fifty years.

I was adrift those first months. My memories of Edie were like dandelion clocks in the wind, winnowing in every direction. I'd lost all chronology. I missed every Edie at once. The young and terribly glamorous woman I'd met after the war. She was so private about herself. She never spoke about her family or where she'd grown up and whenever she did let a detail slip – how she'd left school at twelve or how she used to queue with her grandmother on a Sunday at the best bagel shop in the East End – I fell upon it, delighted. I'd hoarded those details to myself, feeling sometimes that she was a jigsaw puzzle but I was not allowed to know the picture on the front of the box, and it was for me to piece her together, bit by bit, until finally my reward would be to see her all at once.

When I first knew her I'd thought that she was keeping us from her family. We were too eccentric, an old family clearly in decline, brought sadly low. I didn't discover for many years that it was the other way around. She'd spent years
constructing this careful version of herself, Edie Rose, and she kept the other parts of herself scrupulously hidden. Those dreadful wartime hits played everywhere for years and years; one couldn't turn on the radio without being blasted by ‘A Shropshire Thrush' sung by England's Perfect Rose. That was the version of her we were supposed to accept.

Next I remembered how she cried for weeks after Clara was born. Just sat curled up on our bedroom floor, clasping this tiny blanketed bundle and weeping. My God, I'd felt useless. No one told you what to do about such things in those days.

And then I'd missed her when I went to the cupboard and found there was no loo roll left. She always wrote the shopping lists and purchased household things in bulk. The knowledge that I must fend for myself, even in the most trivial of matters, momentarily floored me and I'm afraid to confess that I found myself sitting on the loo sobbing – there was no loo roll and there was no Edie. There was no order to anything.

Clara gave me an advice book about grief, which claimed that the peculiar sensation of timelessness, of drifting through days, was quite normal. But why was grief normal? Grief meant that nothing would ever be ‘normal' again. Normal was Edie. Without her nothing was normal. She couldn't walk back through the kitchen door, chuck her keys on the table, sink into a chair and smile at me, asking for a gin and tonic. Normality could not be restored.

The morning before his first lesson, I couldn't stay in bed and keep my eyes shut against the light. Robin would be arriving in an hour.

I didn't have a plan as to how to actually teach him. I'd never had a regular pupil. I'd given the odd master class to
promising students at the Royal College, but they'd always been in composition rather than the piano. I'm a decent pianist – the layman would mistakenly consider me excellent. I am not. I can play most things with the utmost competence, but my playing lacks any real emotion. I play in order to hear aloud the thing in my mind, but then I'm finished with it. It's only when my idea is performed by a real musician that it is called to life. At the end of my fingers, it's merely a blueprint, a sketch of possibility to be realised in its full dimensions by someone else. I have neither the desire nor the patience to play a phrase a thousand times in order to achieve the speckle of perfection.

As I said, I'm not a real pianist. Yet, like most composers, I do become a dictator when it comes to my own work. I may not be able to achieve it myself, but I know precisely how it ought to sound. While I can listen in smiling awe to a recording of Albert Shields performing Rachmaninov, when the great man was rehearsing my own concerto at the Festival Hall I found myself stopping him after a few minutes to insist on a darker rumbling tone and then argued with some heat about his far-too-curvaceous phrasing in the wild second movement. All was well in the end – we're old friends. We fought. We yelled. He performed it as I wished. We reconciled.

But how to teach a four-year-old child? I'd half considered telephoning Clara's blasted Mrs Claysmore and asking for some tips – she did owe me fifty pounds for the deposit. In the end I'd visited a music shop and purchased several piano playbooks of varying difficulty.

Robin arrived at eight-thirty. Clara lingered in the kitchen, sipping tea, showing no eagerness to be off. Robin was oddly subdued. He made no dash for my cupboards and didn't remove so much as a single sock, but stood beside the fridge, thoughtfully chewing on a one-eared cuddly mouse and picking his nose.

‘Shall I stay?' asked Clara.

‘No,' I said, too quickly, seeing then that Clara looked hurt. ‘We're not ready for an audience yet. Let us muddle through for a bit together first.'

After she left we went into the music room. The lesson did not start well. I brought out the first book, propped it on the stand and called out the names of the notes as I tinkered through the first rather tedious tune. Robin grabbed the book and chucked it onto the floor.

‘Boring,' he announced. ‘It's a little tune. It's silly. I want a proper tune. A big one.'

‘You have to learn the little ones first. The little ones make up the big ones,' I said and entered into a simple scale.

Robin lay down on the floor in disgust.

‘But listen,' I said, aware I was losing him already, ‘I can use those notes to build something else.'

I launched into two scales at once, crashing in different directions with thundering noise and a lot of show, and then used it to put together the opening of Saint-Saëns's
Carnival of the Animals.
The piece requires two pianos to be played at once but I did my best alone, although I confess the sheer effort made me breathless and sweaty.

‘You see?' I said, wiping my forehead. ‘A boring scale can make a lion.'

‘I only want the lion. The scale can go in the rubbish bin.'

‘All right. I'll show you how to roar like a lion.'

He settled beside me and I watched with wonder as his small fingers bounded across the keys. We made the piano roar with considerable satisfaction for a quarter of an hour; then Robin stopped and put his fingers in his ears.

‘Another.'

‘Another animal?'

‘OK.'

We spent the morning hopping through Saint-Saëns's entire
menagerie. We conjured kangaroos and elephants, blue aquariums brimming with fish, wild horses and cuckoos. It was a warm September day, and beneath the music-room window scarlet Michaelmas daisies bossed pale geraniums into submission. I pictured the animals streaming out of the window and landing on the beds where they thumped, bounced and raced amongst the flowers, flattening every one. I was amazed at the speed with which Robin seized upon each new melody. He only had to hear me play a phrase a few times and he could copy with very few mistakes. He possessed at first, however, no desire to improve or perfect his performance. He was greedy for more tunes, more tricks, more animals, and whenever I dared suggest that we try to make the waters of our aquarium a little smoother, he glared at me and folded his arms across his chest.

With some trepidation I reached again for the music book.

‘The tunes for the animals and lots of new things are all in here,' I said tapping a page. ‘It's like a story book.'

Robin scowled. ‘There aren't any pictures.'

‘Yes there are. Listen.'

I played a short Mozart piece and when I finished Robin was staring at the open book. He jabbed at the notes on the page with a thumbnail nibbled down to the quick.

‘Those dots are a photograph of the tune,' he said.

‘Yes. That's exactly it. Do you want to see the pictures the way I can?'

He pursed his lips into a grim little line and gave a single nod.