Valley of Decision (11 page)

Joan rang her son before he left for school, invited him round for lunch so they could exchange letters.

‘I oughtn't to come. I've marking by the pile.' He explained about his trial that evening with the Trent.

‘All the more reason to get out of the place for an hour. It'll save you preparing anything this evening. Dad's away again, so I'll be pleased to see you.'

He enjoyed the meal and his mother's conversation.

‘I'll write to her this afternoon,' she promised. ‘That'll set your conscience at rest. You can dash her a few lines tomorrow. You can tell she's tired.'

‘I wish to God she'd never gone.'

‘No, you don't. She's young, and she's strong. As soon as they begin to perform she'll be right as rain. Especially as she's only doing the one opera.'

‘The whole thing baffles me.'

‘I don't think it should. They always work like this, these theatre people. They seem incapable of sitting down before rehearsals and thinking out what they want.'

‘But wasn't this Gage man an academic?'

‘They're least able to make their minds up. That's why they're so violent defending their ideas once they've been forced into saying what they are. She'll be right as ninepence.'

He left his parents' house much cheered, replete and reassured. As he was on the point of driving off his mother tapped on the window of his car. He wound it down.

‘Do you know,' Joan said, brightly still, ‘I think your Dad is looking forward to retirement. I was dreading it.'

‘When's the fatal day?'

‘He keeps hinting he'll need some months to tie his loose ends. But we're freer now than we ever have been.'

‘How will he occupy himself?'

‘I'm not sure. I think we're going to travel.'

‘Don't you have any say in the matter?'

‘I'm only a poor, weak woman.' She laughed heartily, with irony. ‘Mary will be pleased about this Trent thing. But don't go knocking yourself up.'

‘No fear of that.'

‘You're too like your father. Once he's got the bit between his teeth, there's no stopping him.'

He noticed as he turned the corner of the street she was still out there on the pavement.

The afternoon's lessons went by habit, but seemed none the worse for that. After he'd picked at his tea, he tried to practise, but found himself lacking in willpower. When he had played a difficult passage, he'd little idea whether or not he'd done it well, only that he had not performed it badly. He tried to force his whole attention on the music, but failed, and turned dismally to the television. If he'd anything about him, he instructed himself, he'd write to Mary, or use the spare hour marking essays, but he attempted neither, and was unreasonably glad when he could lock up and go out.

He arrived five minutes early, but the other three were already assembled. They shook hands, and Frederick Payne mumbled through the expected welcome. David knew them all, if not intimately. The room in which they practised was upstairs, a square, thirteen by thirteen feet, without carpets, with four chairs, four stands, an upright piano and a large standard lamp the only furniture. The floorboards shone varnished, and the whole room gave the impression of a recent spring cleaning. Though the radiators were hot, David touched one, Cyril Barton, the violist, whose house this was, brought in a two-bar fire, ‘Just in case.'

‘We'll do the Mozart first,' Payne said, mildly enough. In B flat, Köchel 458. ‘We thought a quick runthrough tonight would be in order. To give you some idea.' They were all intent on their instruments, tuning, rubbing rosin on the bows, raising lowering, shifting stands, making sure they could see their books or turn the leaves. ‘Let's get the rhythm right if we can.' He was not speaking directly to David. ‘Forte.' He glanced over at Walter Wilkinson, the second fiddle, who was having trouble with final tuning. Wilkinson beamed back at him, alert.

‘New strings,' he said. He seemed not to be excusing himself.

Payne, now satisfied they were ready, lifted his head and lilted away on the anacrusis. In no time David found himself, lifted himself with them, was one with three. He held his breath, or it was constricted in his chest; tense, bound, he still managed to keep up with his colleagues.

Where he did not match them was in volume. His instrument, he knew, was superior to any of theirs, capable of a larger sound, but the others outsoared him. It was as if the whole of their bodyweight were concentrated on to their fiddles, so that these spoke with a large, steely tone, not only powerfully broad, but with a cutting edge, each note strong from the initial impact of bow on the string. This magnificent forte had nothing laboured or brutal about it; it was loud because the composer demanded it, but lucid, inherently musical. They were playing in readiness for a large hall where variations had to be made sharply. David leaned into his cello.

At the first double bar line Payne stopped them.

‘All right?' he asked David. The man seemed to be smiling. He made no mention of the cellist's slight fluff as he had moved into the C clef. Wilkinson was leaning back, testing his tuning with left hand only, his bow held out swordlike in front of him. A grin, a sneer of satisfaction was set on his bearded face. ‘We'll do all repeats,' Payne ordered. ‘Good for us. Right. Second time.'

They played without reserve, only stopping when someone asked for a repetition; Payne was immediately ready, naming the bar to which they were to return. David noticed that Cyril Barton sniffed loudly, at climaxes, whereas Payne's face was inscrutable, narrow-eyed, unmoved as if the energy of his playing came from the wide shoulders, the flexible wrists. They did not talk much about interpretation, but when they repeated a passage they built each other up, learned, taught, combined, refined in concert, in keeping.

Oddly, they had more difficulty with the Minuet than with the following Adagio which they raised so that David found fingers singing in necessary eloquence above their supportive semiquaver accompaniment. Payne's runs were free as birdflight, as perfectly controlled; his colleagues were no less technically graceful, emotionally alert. At the end of the movement the leader nodded towards his cellist.

‘Impressive,' he said. Warmth of praise clashed with a phlegmy sarcasm, and he dashed off into the Allegro assai.

No sooner had they finished the Mozart than the order was given: ‘Beethoven.' David wanted to pause, to savour the experience, to rest, to expand, but they'd dropped Mozart to the floor and were turning up op. 18, no. 2. Wilkinson, scratching his beard, he'd laid his violin for the moment in his case, raised some question of speed in the abandoned B flat, but Payne, who was frowning at the Beethoven, poking the page down with the tip of his bow, crossly surprised, David thought comically, that the composer had given the leader so full a first bar compared with the bland lengths allotted to the rest of them, wearily demurred.

‘We'll do it in detail next time,' he said, clearing his throat. ‘Mark your copies if there are snags. I've not much faith in talk, anyway,' he muttered in David's direction.

‘Strong and silent,' Cyril Barton offered.

‘This bloody fiddle.' Wilkinson was vigorously tuning again. ‘Worse than a lute.'

‘Piano,' Payne commanded, and they were away.

When they had completed the Beethoven, with very few breaks and a little discussion, Barton went downstairs to put the kettle on. Wilkinson practised an awkward passage as if the other two were not there.

‘How did it seem?' Payne asked David.

‘Reasonably comfortable. Did I suit you?'

‘Excellent, for a first time.'

‘Am I making enough row?'

‘No, but you'll come to it. When you know your part as well as the rest of us.'

Payne stood, stretching and yawning, crossed to the uncurtained window to stare out. Wilkinson concentrated on his violin bowing lightly, so that David was left, instrument alongside, to lounge in his chair. He felt he had not let them down, but recognized his faults clearly enough. Barton arrived with large steaming mugs and a tin of biscuits.

‘The only part I enjoy,' Wilkinson said, shovelling in piled spoonfuls of sugar.

‘We hardly drink alcohol,' Payne had returned. ‘God knows how we shall get on when Knighty comes. He can knock it back.'

‘You think he'll have you out at the pub?' David asked. The coffee had scalded his tongue.

‘I don't think so.' Barton, very quiet, very confident.

They inquired what David's wife thought about his turning out three extra times a week, whether she had complained, and when he informed them about her American trip they seemed not to have heard of it. This surprised him. Hadn't Anna Talbot mentioned it? Payne pursed his lips as if he ought to have known something. Wilkinson and Barton talked about proposed cuts in school music and both praised James, Anna's husband, for his support, but the conversation was dull, made as if to ease Blackwall into their company, to show the newcomer they could talk in front of him, but at the same time suggesting they found his eavesdropping slightly threatening. No remarks were directed towards him, and they were all relieved to put down their mugs and begin on the Haydn, op. 17, no. 3.

‘I like this,' Barton told David, beaming, before they began, ‘this is my style.'

Again they spoke little beyond curt, polite demands for repetitions of unsatisfactory passages. Once, in the slow movement, when Payne stopped them, the newcomer ventured to interfere.

‘What was wrong?' David asked.

The rest looked up, Payne puzzled, Wilkinson mildly taken aback and Barton with approval.

‘My fingering,' Payne answered.

‘It sounded marvellous.'

‘It felt uncomfortable.'

They lifted their instruments.

The rehearsal finished at half past ten. David, fagged out, could barely summon energy to push himself up from his seat.

‘Is it possible to start at seven o'clock on Thursday?' Payne queried, uncertainly. Now they were all on their feet. Agreement.

‘Thanks very much, David.' Barton smiled. ‘That was very good. You played that Haydn beautifully, really beautifully.'

David locked his case.

‘Thanks.' Payne. ‘Mark up any tricky passages. Is there anything now that strikes you? Before we leave?'

‘No.'

‘That's it, then. We don't talk much, but if you can't tell what the three of us want from our playing, we aren't making much of a job of it. Quartet playing's a bastard. I got an offer once when I was at college to join the Toledo. I should have accepted.'

‘The result is,' Barton said, ‘we're all being driven raving mad to make up for it.'

Wilkinson cadged a lift back and David was glad of his company.

‘Barton seems a nice chap,' Blackwall suggested.

‘There are ten thousand ways a quartet can up-end itself,' Wilkinson answered, ‘but the quickest and first and least obvious is to have a viola who's no bloody use. We're lucky in Cy.'

Just as Wilkinson was about to leave the car, David asked him, ‘Would you like to go professional?'

Wilkinson thumped back into his seat as though the question needed leisure and stillness to answer.

‘I'm a married man,' he said, ‘with two kids. Fred and Cy, and Knighty for that matter, are bachelors. It makes me expendable.' He scratched his beard. ‘Don't get me wrong. They'd like to keep me if they could, but there'll be no half-measures. Fred Payne's determined to make it if he has to wreck the Atlantic Alliance to do it.'

‘And he's good enough?'

‘You could see that for yourself, couldn't you?' He was up and out. ‘Thanks for the lift. No, I s'll have my own back for Thursday. And I need it.'

David, wearied, did not leave his armchair until after midnight and then could not sleep. The ferocity of the practice jolted phrases into his head until he wished he had his instrument to hand so that he could exorcize them. He recalled snatches of conversation, the laconic, exact words with which they had asked for a repetition, Payne's immediate command as he'd named the bar. Wilkinson's rebuke. ‘You could see that for yourself, couldn't you?' He could see, if nothing else, that he had spent three hours in the company of his superiors, and this did not please. He did not hate them, but self-concern rankled so that inability to equal their technical standard seemed a moral fault.

He spent the whole of Wednesday evening on the music, as on solo parts. Not quite sure whether this made sense, he persevered, drove himself to be ready. Thursday's rehearsal seemed less satisfactory than the first, more bitty, and once some argument from Wilkinson over a descending phrase marked crescendo for the lower instruments against a piano in the first violin. Nobody else could see what the man was getting at; he himself seemed uncertain.

‘We'll do it again.' Payne.

‘Better?' when they had tried.

‘It doesn't sound right.'

‘Outside parts crescendo earlier, piano earlier; inner, well you know. Again.'

They set to.

‘No,' Wilkinson cried sharply.

David could see little wrong.

‘Same spot then. Again.'

They did the offending bars and stopped.

‘Well?'

‘Perhaps it's me,' Wilkinson admitted. ‘But it doesn't sound right.'

‘Is it the balance?'

‘I don't know what the hell it is. Let's do it again and go on.'

That seemed typical of the evening's work. The beautiful playing, and there was much, would be interrupted unreasonably, so that they repeated a passage, were forced apart into variation for variation's sake. Perhaps this was what quartet work entailed, the practising and final discarding of unacceptable interpretations, but the whole lay fragmented, in meaningless pieces. At five to ten they called it a day, and Wilkinson immediately left.