The View from Mount Dog (22 page)

‘Really I was daydreaming,’ she admitted, smiling. ‘Did I look stupid? I have my mouth open when I daydream; I’ve often been told.’

‘Of course not, signora, no, no.’

‘I thought so…. But, yes, I was interested in the plaque. It’s an incomplete story as it stands, but it’s unusual to find oneself on a spot where someone once died so dramatically.’

‘Certo.
Are you perhaps a writer?’

‘I’m a librarian.’

‘Ah. It must be wonderful always to be surrounded by the wisdom of the past.’

‘Not a bit. You’ll doubtless think me mad if I say that sometimes when there is so much evidence of where and who one
wasn’t
it makes it that much more difficult to discover where and who one
is.’

This made the priest look at her quite sharply. ‘May I ask, is this your first time in our city? Not in Italy, of course; you speak the language too well.’

She explained that she was accompanying her elderly mother on a sort of nostalgic grand tour before she became ‘too decrepit to travel, like an Egyptian king’ – Mumbo’s expression, not her own.

‘How interesting,’ the priest said. ‘I was born only ten miles
away and I’ve never left the area, but it must be an experience to return to distant places one knew fifty years before. I’ve seen everything here evolve gradually so I can scarcely remember how it used to be. Except this church.’

‘Before the aeroplane crash?’

‘Exactly. I see you’ve put two and two together. Did you see the postcards?’

‘No?’

The priest led her to the main door. Just inside was the sort of table she habitually ignored with its freight of prayer-sheets, notices, collection boxes, magazines about the work of missions in Uganda. There was also a pile of sepia-tinted postcards.

‘This is how it was,’ he said, handing her one. The interior of a Renaissance church, its features oddly shaped and shadowed by the floodlights which must have been used so as to bring out the chancel ceiling which, as far as she could tell, had been magnificently painted.

‘Fra Benedetto della Croce,’ explained the priest. ‘One of the two best ceilings in this part of Tuscany. It was utterly destroyed.’

Janet had the unstoppable thought:
brilliant
boy.

‘Poor Franco. Had he known what he had done he would have been devastated. An exquisite treasure of the Tuscan
quattrocento
.’

‘You sound as if you knew him.’

‘He was my brother,’ said the priest simply. ‘His action that day has shaped all my days since. There is a shame in the story which is not written quite plainly there on the wall. Come’ – he took Janet’s arm – ‘let us sit down for a minute. There seems to be nobody else since that unhappy woman wishing to confess their sins to me, so let me do a little confession of my own. I hope I don’t presume, signora?’

Without waiting for a reply he led her back to her original seat by the memorial tablet and she sat down again, although not without thinking very briefly of her mother and wondering if she were asleep.

‘I expect you noticed, signora, that the word “glorious” does not occur in the text? But it is asking too much from a foreigner, even one so perfect in our language. These memorials are often written in a kind of code from which much may be deduced by one who knows. Now, if the word “glorious” had appeared in Franco’s inscription, it would be commonly inferred that he had
died on active service if not actually in combat. But his memory, we are told, is to be respected merely.’

‘The shame you mentioned?’

‘Precisely. The truth is that, far from being on active service, poor Franco had actually
stolen
the plane.’

Splendid
boy.
‘Stolen?’

‘More or less. He was a pilot all right and in the air force, but he had been grounded as a punishment for some misdemeanour…. I’m sorry to say it was insubordination.’

She glanced sideways at the priest and surprised a fond smile of recollection somewhat at variance with his words.
More
and
more
splendid.

‘It was a terrible January day. Right from the Alps – Milan, Bologna, Florence, even as far south as Perugia there were blizzards. So what does Franco do? Naturally, he decides it is exactly today he must go and see his girlfriend near Siena. There is a military airfield near to her at Campobasso so he will take a plane, hop across, spend the afternoon with her and hop back again. Hopping, you see, although it is a hundred and twenty-eight kilometres to Campobasso and the same back. Open cockpit, zero visibility, instrument-flying and dead-reckoning.’

‘And youth,’ said Janet.

‘That above all. A flask of coffee but five litres of hot blood.
Dio
benedetto.
So he takes the aircraft and tells the ground crew to fill the tanks but not to warm up the engine since of course he doesn’t wish to alert anyone in authority. The ground crews…. Well, in those days the pilots were like knights, you know, so dashing and glamorous; they only had to put one boot in a stirrup and the flight engineers would fall over themselves to fettle up their chargers. So there they are at Pratosammartino, the officers, standing around in the flight operations room drinking their coffee and staring out of the windows at the snow when suddenly across the airfield comes this sound of an aeroengine starting. Nobody pays much attention: engineers taking advantage of the weather to do some servicing. Then it grows and grows. It can’t be…. Everybody in the room is at the window now…. It
is
. Some crazy lunatic is taking off and no one can even see him the snow flurries are so thick. He roars overhead; he is gone. The squadron leader rushes to the telephone and cranks the handle furiously. But he’s off and away, my elder brother Franco. A complete lunatic but with great charm. People adored him.’

The priest was still smiling fondly, then shook his head at Janet’s question: ‘Did he make Campobasso?’

‘No. He was right on course, right on course. But they think the altimeter was wrong; perhaps it hadn’t been reset. He became confused, maybe he came down a little to see if he could spot a landmark….’ Unconsciously the priest glanced up at the roof. ‘They said later it was inexplicable how he could have hit this church. There are so many higher buildings all around it: the dome on the Basilica, for example, or the towers of San Sebastiano or the Palazzo Tradescanti itself. But, no’ – was there a note of pride? – ‘Franco had to destroy himself and Fra Benedetto’s masterpiece; it was destined that he should. So he did. The whole ceiling, the entire roof came down.’ The arm in its sheened black made a descending gesture. ‘Franco was killed at once. They found his body in the organ loft. By the grace of God there was nobody in the church at the time, but an old sacristan died of a heart-attack when he heard the news. I was seventeen at the time and already studying for the priesthood. Can you imagine what it was to be the younger brother of a boy whose youthful prank had gone so disastrously wrong? All Italy had heard of him by the next morning; think of it. The jokes of semi-admiration from my own peers: “How irresponsible, how
Italian
…. How beautiful was she, this girlfriend? I bet she was worth some boring old painting, anyway. And you already stuck in the
seminario,
Marco. Did Franco have all the balls in the family?” All that was bearable. But the weighty regret of their elders, the artistic world, official opinion, that was truly terrible. And in a way it still is, although it’s now just part of history. At the time the newspapers were full of phrases like “tragic and irreparable loss to our cultural heritage and to the world of art”. Nowadays if you read guidebooks or art books there is usually a single reference to Fra Benedetto’s masterpiece “The Raising of Lazarus” as “destroyed”. There are plenty of old photographs of it, of course; copies and sketches and colour reproductions. But the original is gone, just like poor Franco there.’

Janet could hardly take her eyes from the young man’s cameo face. How innocent it was; how ironic that in dying he should have become a famous iconoclast.

‘I felt the shame very much. I was confused, crushed beneath it, our family’s shame. There was even for a while a new verb,
“ciappiare”,
which meant to destroy something of far greater value than yourself. For three years this church stood in semiruins,
open to the sky while they haggled over whose responsibility it was and how it should be restored. So what could I do but beg my superiors to let me take it over, to make it my life’s work to repair the damage, to do something to make amends? And so I have.’

‘No more guilt?’

‘None,’ said the priest. ‘It was all more than half a century ago, you must remember. Franco to me is a few childhood memories and that photograph on the wall. I have no connection, either, with the teenager I was in those days. “My life’s work” as I called it then did not have the same meaning as my life’s work does today, with most of it behind me. Nowadays this church just feels to me like the place I have always worked in.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Janet said untruthfully.

‘Isn’t it? There was no point trying to restore the original roof or re-creating the painting, so I decided on this. It’s simple, that vault. It’s clean and blue like the sky. In fact to me it’s a better memorial than that plaque on the wall. Besides, I couldn’t raise enough money for anything more elaborate. This was almost all done with donations, you know. Nowadays, of course, it would have been restored as a perfect replica; no sum too great to lavish on a Renaissance church with a priceless ceiling. But this was then….’

Behind them the door opened and an elderly man came in holding his hat across his chest. The priest turned in the pew and called out:

‘Sandro! I shan’t be more than a minute. How’s the foot?’

‘I must go anyway,’ said Janet, slipping the strap of her bag over one shoulder. ‘I can’t thank you enough for your time. You’ve made my day, quite possibly my entire holiday, too.’

‘Not at all, signora. Sometimes I think it is good to make the past come alive for a bit even though it’s dead and gone. Today’s what matters, isn’t it? But it’s better there should be a little
resonance.’

‘Just one thing. Do you always tell visitors the story?’
Are
you
still
dining
out
on
it?
Doesn’t
it
disgust
you?

‘Dio
buono,
no. Not only is there not the time but it would be too boring. Do you know what it is after all these years, signora? It’s a
fable.
Good day to you.’

He said no more but squeezing her forearm hurried away to attend the old man with the hat. On her way out of the church
Janet made a decent contribution to a collecting-box and kept the postcard; out of the corner of one eye she saw that the priest did not turn round. What had he meant, a fable? Surely not an elaborate fancy concocted in order to screw more money out of visitors (an atheist herself, she had that inherited Anglican suspicion about Catholics and money)? Then just inside the door she caught sight of a notice handwritten in once-white paint on a little black board stating that the priest in charge was Father Marco Ciappi. That much, at least, was true.

‘Fabulous’ was how she quite truthfully described her afternoon when her mother asked. ‘What about yours, Mumbo?’

‘Dear, I slept and
slept.
I’d no notion I was so tired. I had such a sad dream; it must have been that fountain this morning which set me off. I dreamed about Dorothy, of course – it must be the first time in goodness knows how many years. I knew it was her but I couldn’t remember her face, and this voice kept saying “unless you get the right face she will
be
paid
by
vanishment”
– those were the words,
“be
paid
by
vanishment”
. It was horrid. I was desperately trying face after face to put on the shoulders of this shadowy figure, but none of them was right. And then she was somehow
put
away
–
I can’t describe it better than that – and the fountain, Italy, us, it was all scrumpled up.’

‘I think a pot of tea,’ suggested Janet. ‘Then we’ll go out and see how wonderfully un-scrumpled Italy is.’

‘More than I’m feeling, I should imagine.’

Janet laughed and bounced down on to the bed beside her, putting an arm around the thin old shoulders, conscious of their formidable toughness.

‘Darling Mumbo,’ she said.

Knobby hands on lap Mr Raffish sat and watched the student – assuredly a student? – throughout the overture with intentness. The boy sat out (that had to be the phrase) Mendelssohn’s ‘The Fair Melusine’ and, if the older man were right, it was nervousness rather than impatience with which he switched his gaze repeatedly from the auditorium’s ceiling to floor and stretched and stretched his fingers. The overture ended and stage-hands began opening the great Steinway which had stood like a gloss coffin beside the conductor’s podium. Now the boy was definitely nervous. He had brought out the score of the concerto and had it in readiness on his knees: not a pocket score but a soloist’s with the orchestral parts reduced for an accompanying pianist. He took out a white handkerchief, wiped his hands, glanced about him. The seats immediately on either side were empty, it being a thinnish night given the popularity of the programme and the soloist; probably it was on account of the unseasonably warm weather keeping those Londoners in the parks whom rain might otherwise have driven indoors in search of culture. As Mr Raffish watched the student their eyes met briefly, but when the boy broke contact it was surely not through shyness; the watcher understood this nervousness had another cause, a preoccupation to an unnatural degree.

The conductor returned followed by the pianist, dapper in tails. As the audience gradually fell silent the student sat in unbreathing anticipation, watching the conductor’s back and
the soloist settling himself. Was he or wasn’t he? Mr Raffish wondered again. No stalking of a sexual prey could ever be so delicious as this inspirational guessing game.

The opening
tutti
began. On the platform the pianist, a celebrated Viennese, sat staring at the keys. Among the audience the student unconsciously adopted the same pose, looking not at the open score on his knees but at the edge of the seat-back in front of him. Then as the
tutti
drew to its close both soloist and student glanced up at the conductor at nearly the same moment. Raffish, himself affected by this little drama, watched the boy at the soloist’s entry as with mouth half-open, eyes fixed, he began to shake his head with a frown of disagreement. Good, thought the older man. Excellent, in fact. As the movement proceeded he relaxed his vigilance, half-concentrating on the music which was so painfully rooted in him, half-amused to see the boy as involved as if he were himself playing. Which in some sense he was, Raffish knew. The boy’s concentration had a certain latitude to it such as one reserved for things so familiar there was scant need to follow every note – which one could have written out from memory, anyhow. Moments of pleasure made the student nod and bounce his thick brown hair; passages he disliked brought back the frown, one of impatience rather than censure as if to say,
Yes,
I
understand
exactly
why
you’re
doing
it
that
way,
it’s
simply
dull,
let’s
not
have
to
sit
through
it.

Mr Raffish rose stiffly when the boy left his seat at the interval, score tucked under one arm, and was little surprised to see him leave the concert-hall entirely and walk away across the dark promenades. He hurried to catch him up, a short, awkward figure moving without fluency and urgent none the less. ‘Excuse me!’ The boy looked round. ‘I say!’ Both figures came into a douche of light shed by a street-lamp fitted with an imitation Edwardian globe.

‘Golly,’ said Mr Raffish, breathless, ‘I say, you walk too fast for a poor old gent like me.’

The boy said nothing but waited, hair shining in the lamplight, the pale green of his score leached of its colour and glaring beneath his arm. He noticed his pursuer had a suggestion of foreignness about him, though of accent or gesture he might not immediately have said.

‘Perhaps you saw me in there?’ went on the older man, not turning back to the concert-hall. ‘I noticed you, however, indeed
I did. “Aha,” I thought,
“there
’s
one if I’m not very mistaken. That one I must speak to.” So here I am.’

‘One what?’ asked the student. ‘Oh, let me guess. A shy, lonely young man….’

‘… having difficulty coming to terms with an aberrant sexuality? Oh, bravo!’ said Mr Raffish admiringly. ‘You’re quick; we’re going to get on, I can see that. Let me reassure you here and now that your sexuality – no matter how aberrant or prosaic – is something I have no interest in. None whatever. I don’t suppose it’s much more interesting than your digestive system. No. I’m fascinated by something completely different. Now, let me guess. You’re a student? Of music?’

The boy touched his score reflexively. ‘You wouldn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that.’

‘Indeed not, but bear with me further…. A pianist, and a good one. Good enough for a career. If only.’

‘If only what?’ The boy was suddenly anxious to hear. A certain pettishness of manner left him. His halo tilted as he leaned towards the shorter man.

‘Aha. Just that.
If
only.
Now, you see, I’m not mistaken: I do know something about you. It’s your secret, isn’t it? But first forgive me, my dear fellow, how rude of me. Anthony Raffish.’ He extended his knobby hand.

‘I’m Zeb. That’s short for Zebedee’ – and it seemed to be a well-worn apologia. ‘My parents are from the sixties.’

‘My dear,’ said Anthony Raffish, ‘mine were from Poland. I was christened Antonin Raffawicz. We are both victims of circumstances beyond our control, or would be were it not for the wonderful British institution of Deed Poll. Zebedee what, though, I wonder?’

‘Hoyle.’ The young man shifted his balance awkwardly, and the lamplight cast a certain distinction across the planes of his face.

‘Zeb Hoyle. Zebedee Hoyle.’ Anthony Raffish tried the names, head on one side for a moment. ‘No,’ he said regretfully. ‘There’s no music there, is there? We’ll have to do better than that. Now, then. You’re not going to tell me you’ve got something important to do right this moment, because I wouldn’t quite believe you and, besides, we’re going to talk about your career and there’s nothing more important than that, is there? Not just at present’ – and he glanced shrewdly up into the boy’s face.

‘My career? But I….’

‘Don’t prevaricate, my dear, we’re too intelligent to have to go through all that. Yes, your career. Or, rather, its lack. You’re eaten up with worry about it, I know. You’re getting nowhere and it’s the only thing you want to do. You want to have your chance and so you shall because luckily Anthony Raffish is going to take you beneath his wing. Rather a crippled wing, I’m afraid, but one which still keeps many great talents aloft even if I do say so myself. Now, then, let us walk to my flat where I will ply you with coffee and intrigue you despite your momentary inclination to make a dash for the anonymous security of a Tube train or a
hamburger
bar
.’
He came down sardonically on the two words as an expression in a foreign language and not in a self-conscious attempt at familiarity with the habits of a younger generation. ‘Come, come, my boy, I’m going to make you famous and we start tonight. Don’t hang about. But’ – he touched the unresisting Zebedee on one elbow and turned him towards Kensington – ‘my joints are rather a trial so you’ll have to moderate that aggressively youthful pace of yours.’

‘Perhaps you should take a taxi.’

‘No, walking’s good for me. If I didn’t walk, I should seize up altogether. It isn’t far. So how did you like his Beethoven Two? Not much, to judge from your expression in there.’

‘It was very
beautiful.
Very
mellifluous.’

‘But very predictable. Exactly. Nothing jarred but neither did it excite. And the cadenza?’

‘I suppose you can’t go wrong with Beethoven’s own.’

‘And what would you have played?’

‘Something different. Anything different as long as it was not a vast piece of nineteenth-century pianism, for instance. You might stir up number three with that, but number two’s an eighteenth-century concerto. When my teacher was in Paris he met someone editing Saint-Saëns who had unearthed his unpublished cadenzas to all the Beethoven concertos. The one to the B flat is charming. I would have played that if only because nobody would have known it and perhaps they might have been jogged out of that fawning doze he makes all his audiences fall into.’

‘Bravo!’ said Anthony Raffish again, but this time thoughtfully enough to give the impression that he was commending himself for his own insight as much as Zebedee for his choice. ‘I should dearly like to hear it. You shall play to me when we get home.’

‘Are you a pianist yourself, Mr Raffish?’ asked the student.

‘Was, was.’ He hefted his arms like a pair of Indian clubs. ‘Rheumatoid arthritis. It began forty years ago when I was not much older than you are now. It was another age then, of course, another world, and I don’t just mean medically speaking. One went from one ruined city to another playing in the magnificent and unheated old concert-halls of Europe – those still standing, that is. Sometimes there would be great draperies of dust-sheets covering the bomb damage. But it didn’t matter; people didn’t mind such things then. They came only for the music because they had been so starved of it in the war. When one came out on to the platform they didn’t applaud very much by today’s standards, perhaps because they were so eager to hear the music they couldn’t bear to delay it. My God, how they listened! One night – I’m going to bore you with a reminiscence so you can’t say later I didn’t warn you – one night I was playing in Lübeck, 1946 it was. And when I went out there they all were still in their utility clothing looking half-starved but immensely serious and Hanseatic. I was going to start with something traditional – a Bach suite or a Haydn sonata, I forget what – but at the last moment I decided against it. Why? I can’t say. But I paused on the platform and announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, there is a slight change to the programme. I wish to start with something different.” Just like that. Then I sat down and played Mendelssohn’s “Variations sérieuses”. Do you know them? Of course you do; mavellous music. I didn’t say what it was, though, so some of them must have wondered what they were getting. But others knew. I could see people in the first few rows weeping.’

‘It’s a very grave theme. Plaintive and grave at the same time.’

‘Yes, but that wasn’t the reason at all. Nor was my exquisite or otherwise playing. No, it was because it was Mendelssohn. It was the first time many of them had heard Mendelssohn in nearly ten years.’ The older man might have sensed puzzlement. ‘The Nazis had decided Mendelssohn was Jewish music and shouldn’t be played, you see. Oh dear, how very young you are and how envious I am…. Quite, anyway. Be that as it may, some were meeting an old, long-lost friend again and so they wept. It was proof that civilisation was getting back to normal. And now here we are.’ He led the way into a solid Victorian block with a white-pillared portico which had been glassed in with peculiarly thick panes bound with hinges and
mountings of brass. ‘Arabs,’ he said as if that explained everything. ‘I’ve been here since 1947 and never once in all that time did I find it necessary to cut the throat of a sheep in the hall. It never crossed my mind.’ He was clumsy with a bunch of keys. ‘It’s rather shocking, you know, being made to feel conventional after a lifetime’s worship of Dionysus. Now, then.’

He ushered Zebedee into a cavernous and slightly shabby suite of rooms. The drawing room felt much larger than it can have been, giving off the splendid gloom of a canyon: high cliffs of shelving on either side plunging towards one another at the bottom in screes of books, papers and music. On the narrow valley floor stood a grand piano.

‘Oh, a Bösendorfer.’

‘For that you may have not only milk but
sugar
in your coffee,’ said Anthony Raffish on his slow way out of the room. ‘Yes, Bösendorfer with the real Viennese sound. I dislike all that American horsepower Steinways are putting into their pianos nowadays. Kindly play me your cadenza while I make the coffee. I shall be listening, never fear. If you hear cries of anguish, it will probably not be your playing but my burning myself. I often do.’

‘But surely I could make it for you?’

‘Never offer to help a cripple, he might take you up on it. My job is to make clumsy coffee and yours is to play – beautifully, mind.’

Left alone the boy sat gingerly down at the piano and gazed up at the rough slopes of bound paper which rose on either hand. Wild horses might not have dragged from him the admission that he
had
had some idea of going to a hamburger bar but he would readily have owned to being nervous, embarrassed, intrigued. Tentatively he played a few bars of the concerto’s orchestral opening and then, made confident by the instrument’s curious timbre, essayed the soloist’s entry which his teacher always referred to as one of the most difficult to bring off in all piano literature. Not the notes, of course; but the stress, the emphasis, the articulation, the dynamics – all were crucial and crucially exposed. He quickly became involved in the music, playing against the concert performance as if setting to rights something improperly done, whole passages followed by lightly sketched-in pages until he reached the cadenza, which turned out well.

‘Oh, yes,’ said his host, who appeared with a tray at the end.
‘Oh, yes, indeed. My dear boy, a little
career,
I think, should be opened unto you. How very much you disliked tonight’s performance. I do like your cadenza, incidentally.’

‘Well, not mine. Saint-Saëns’.’

‘Was it? Was it really?’ the murmur implied disbelief; the boy blushed. ‘Now, come and have your coffee and we’ll talk business.’

‘Business?’ said his guest warily. ‘I thought we were going to talk about music.’

‘We are, we are. That
is
our business. Come, we’ll talk about you and thus make it easy to forgive what you might think is a certain flirtatiousness and self-congratulation in my manner. There. Sugar
and
milk. My dear wife used to make proper coffee – she was Hungarian, by the way – but sadly she died not long ago.’