Valley of Decision (5 page)

‘Hello, Anna.'

He had no need to turn round; he recognized her. When he did swivel he noticed she wore a light blue coat, belted tight at the waist, dragging the material into attractive pleats. She carried an untouched glass of red wine in her right hand, and in her left she swung across her leg a wide-brimmed hat, round-crowned, black, black-ribboned.

‘Hi. Isn't Mary down?'

‘Can't see her.' He went through the motions. ‘James?'

‘He's about somewhere. I thought I'd better show my face.' She'd sung, fair-haired and white-shouldered, a Carthaginian lady-in-waiting. ‘Lizzie's pleased. She made us a little speech behind the curtain. I felt personally gratified.'

He pulled a face.

‘Honestly,' she said. ‘You won't believe it, but it was as if she singled me out for congratulation. There's something about that woman.'

‘Ah, but what?'

‘I don't like her.' She looked anxiously about for spies. ‘I wouldn't trust her as far as I could throw her, but put her into the public eye and she's marvellous. She's like a cat jumping; she exerts exactly the right amount of effort, not a touch more, and yet there we are, people like me who think she's an old fraud, eating out of her hand.' Anna Talbot nodded in the direction of Liz Falconer, who was surrounded to such effect that outside her crushing bunch of courtiers there was left a whole circular strip of untenanted floor. Silver, David noticed, had joined the group, leaving lank-locks sitting disconsolately with his legs stretched long.

‘And why is it?' he asked, not seriously.

‘She just happens to be good. That's the top and bottom of it. And most of us aren't.'

‘Isn't that sad?'

‘You can say that again.' She flipped her hat against her legs, but did not cease looking over towards Falconer. ‘What's next?' she asked.

‘For whom?'

‘You, charmer. Or Mary.'

‘Concert next week for me. In the city, Wednesday, South-well, Thursday.'

‘You take your punishment like a man.'

She dipped her head. Her hair, shoulder-length, was blonde, but with an odd green and yellowish tinge both unnatural and attractive. He looked around for his wife, but as she was nowhere yet, he refocused his attention on Anna. There was pleasure to be taken merely looking at her; she was always smart, stood pertly, spoke with a freshness. They had been lovers in what now seemed a hectic few weeks in London at the college, had parted violently when he had opted for Mary; he remembered Anna's beating fists, drumming feet, the sobbing, her panting oath-racked appeals. He had, he decided, made an enemy for life, but she had gone off to live with James Talbot, there must have been something between them before, and had married him a few months later on his appointment as county music adviser at a much reported church ceremony with ostentatious white, six bridesmaids and half the county present. Towards David she now presented herself as content, a lively and valued friend who could pull his leg, chivvy him about his treatment of his wife, invite and be invited to an evening meal, speak to him in the street and become fascinating inside five minutes, with no mention of regret, no recrimination. She could touch him asexually, rib him, look him in the eye as if she had forgotten her jealousy; become his friend. Certainly he did not understand this and felt mild masculine disappointment, but Anna acted cheerfully, took Mary's side against him when it seemed proper, was the perfect foil.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I think sometimes I'm doing too much of it.'

‘Doesn't Mary mind?' The two women must have discussed it, and often enough.

‘She has things to do.'

‘She's well in with Madame, isn't she?'

‘Seems so.'

Mary appeared; David took three steps to collect her a glass of white wine. She looked tired out.

‘Where's your cello?' she asked.

‘By the front door somewhere. Tom Todd put it with his.'

She yawned, only covering the gaping mouth at the last minute.

‘Worn out?' he said. She nodded. ‘It was good tonight. Even Anna thinks so.'

Mary smiled companionably at Mrs Talbot.

‘Madame was pleased,' David told her.

‘Yes. She's not too difficult.'

The other two pulled faces of delighted and incredulous disagreement.

‘There speaks the queen's favourite,' Anna said. ‘Anything exciting on the cards?'

Mary stayed silent about the American project, but the three kept together, found chairs, were approached by notables who made a fuss of the women. For a brief time they seemed to be holding a smaller court in rivalry with Elizabeth Falconer. Colonel Tait himself made a stop. A tall man, with short grey hair and the appearance of a groomed scarecrow, he swayed on his large feet in front of them.

‘Very good,' he said, the words barely escaping his lips. ‘Very good.'

‘It's a superb place to sing,' Mary said.

‘You'll have to ask us again.' Anna simultaneously.

‘Yes.' He seemed trying to catch a train of disappearing thought, painfully. ‘Yes. The, the . . .' He put out a hand, pink like his face, well scrubbed, half finished. ‘It's a . . .'

He passed on, a reed shaken by the wind.

‘There's a zombie,' Anna said. ‘Don't know what Liza saw in him.'

‘He saw it in her,' David answered.

‘Is he married? With a family? Or what?' Mary.

Anna dug David in the ribs as he was on the point of reply. Elizabeth Falconer had broken away from her entourage, had made straight for them, but no sooner had she taken her stand than the courtiers began to re-form round her.

‘Your good health,' David said, raising his glass to her.

She acknowledged the toast with an inclination of her head, but did not lift her glass.

‘I've spoken to your husband,' she said to Mary, who looked abashed. The diva turned her attention on Anna, found nothing of interest, shifted her front. Relenting, she refaced Anna, smiling, nodding. ‘It was very good.' She consulted a minute golden wristwatch. ‘I mustn't be too late. I like to take my exercise in the morning.'

‘Some of us work,' David said.

‘It's Sunday.' Anna defended the Falconer.

‘I shall be up at exactly the same time.' It was not a rebuke, but a taking into the confidence which put the objectors into their places. She moved off and the crowd melted with her.

‘She didn't say what time that was.' Anna had recovered.

‘Come on, David. Let's go. I'm whacked.'

‘You're certainly in with All-highest,' Anna tried, but the Blackwalls had put down their glasses, were on the way to search out David's cello then make for home and bed before Sunday.

MARY CONSULTED HER
parents-in-law one evening when David was out of the way. They listened with serious faces.

‘What does David think?' Horace Blackwall asked. ‘I take it you've talked this over with him.'

‘Yes. He told me to ask you.'

‘But what was his opinion?'

‘That I should take my chance if I wanted to.'

The three then sat silent, Horace fidgeting unusually. His wife passed him a bowl of fruit, a plate and a knife, and he looked at her affronted. Joan seemed amused, superior, as if she had the answer ready if they called on her. He waved the dessert away, changed his mind, pared an apple, trying to remove the peel in one strip, failing. Now he quartered it, cut out the core.

‘I don't know what to say,' he told Mary provisionally, baring his false teeth for a first bite.

The girl was prepared to wait.

‘Do you want to go?' Joan asked suddenly.

‘I'm torn.'

‘That means you do,' Joan pronounced.

‘Not of necessity,' said Horace, apple to lips.

‘No dear.' Sweet sarcasm.

The women tittered, and Horace relaxed, waving the bitten fruit to indicate that once he had cleared his mouth, he'd sound off again.

‘Tell us,' he began. Immediately his wife whistled the witches' duet from
Dido
: ‘Tell us, tell us, how shall this be done?' The tone had impudent clarity, though Horace did not recognize the reference. Joan and Mary smiled at each other; he frowned. ‘I don't know what you two are giggling about.'

Mary, now straight-faced, explained that she did not want to leave David, that she was enjoying her job, her house, her spare time.

‘All that will have to go,' he said. ‘I see that. But what about the other hand?'

Again, soberly, Mary expounded Elizabeth Falconer's scheme. They listened intently, but Horace's right leg, cocked over the left, was kicking.

‘I know nothing about these things,' he said, ‘but it all sounds rather vague.'

‘So it is,' she admitted. ‘And until I give my agents the go-ahead, it will remain so.'

‘Remain so.' He repeated the two words softly, criticizing the phraseology, which raised the matter from sense to specious debate.

‘Nobody can tell me anything, or promise me anything specific. Not as yet.'

‘That sounds as if you commit yourself, and then leave the terms to them.'

‘I needn't sign the contracts.' She glanced at her father-in-law. ‘You don't like the look of it, do you?'

‘I know nothing about it, Mary. But don't get it into your head that I'm writing it off as unbusinesslike. Even in my line, one has to put feelers out sometimes, expose oneself to danger before anything can happen. I understand that well enough. But one has to be sure that if there's half a chance of a deal, one wants it, one's ready to exert oneself and that the signed agreement will be checked.'

Joan made wordless noises, of doubt or disparagement. Her husband pulled his half-glasses even farther down his nose.

‘It must be exciting,' the mother said.

‘In a way. Yes.'

‘I should go, then.'

Mary, suspicious, did not immediately answer.

‘I thought,' she began, ‘that you would say I shouldn't leave David, that my place was with him.'

‘Not these days. The woman's career is as important as the man's. A good number of young people live apart.'

‘But is that marriage?'

‘Goodness knows what marriage is, or means,' Joan answered. ‘But if it stops you doing something important for yourself, then I don't approve of it.'

Horace spluttered.

They discussed the few facts they had, skirmished round the effect on David's character, before both parents agreed that if the American venture was what she wanted, then she should go.

‘Don't you want to talk to David first?' she asked them.

‘By no means.' Horace, benign. ‘You do the talking with him.'

She reported this to her husband, and at her insistence they tramped over the grounds of argument again.

‘That's it,' he decided an hour and a half later. ‘You must go.' He jumped up to open a bottle of dry sherry. ‘To success,' he toasted her.

‘I don't know, David. I don't know.'

They made love to rescue them from fright, and next day Mary rang Liz Falconer.

In fact, it took three days to reach the singer, who heard the decision calmly, instructing her to inform her agent. She showed not much concern, and no understanding of Mary's dilemma. Rather sharply she advised her protégée to get back to serious practice, and at once.

‘There are no decent teachers about here. Start taking consultation lessons with Peter Reddaway. You could go up to London each Saturday.'

Mary, quite dashed, told her husband she'd a good mind to pack it all in.

‘She'd no idea,' she complained, ‘how I felt.'

‘Why should she have? You've got out of the habit of taking risks.'

Furious, she turned on him, snarled her fear. He was so unresponsive that she burst into tears. He took her in his arms.

‘There'll be as many rotten things as good. You know that. You'll have to get used to it.' He kissed her. ‘The hard nut.' She smiled, gushed again into tears, clung madly round his neck.

Mark Wentmeyer, her agent, rang after a week and arranged to see her in London. She could combine this with her first lesson at Reddaway's studios. Mark had talked to Liz Falconer's agent, and they had cobbled a scheme together that was worth looking over.

‘Cobbled?' she asked.

Mary was to go over to the States in the middle of January where she would join an ad hoc opera company for a two months' universities' tour as a trial for employment when Falconer arrived in April.

‘And the advantages?'

‘You'll be there. You'll be known. You'll be in full practice in case they want to audition you again. This whole thing of Falconer's is a mystery. She won't stay for long, because she'll be in Bayreuth all summer. It's a short season, mainly Mozart, some chance of Purcell. She's taking the opportunity to get you in on the circuit, Harold says. After that, it's up to you.'

‘And what do you think?'

‘Two things. It's a marvellous chance for you, if it comes off. This university opera's a new affair, but strongly backed. Ulrich Fenster's chief conductor the two months you'll be engaged, and he's on the up and up, if anybody is. And the producer they hope for is a real notable. Redvers Gage. If they get him. The payment's nothing to write home about, but I'm working on that.'

‘You'd advise me to go?'

‘Yes. Provisionally. But I'll know more about it by the time you come up to see me.'

David did not accompany her on the first trip to London, where Peter Reddaway heard her sing and suggested that she would need a fuller voice if she were to make a success of the American trip. He outlined a set of exercises, all of which she had heard before, ran through a song or two with her, and dismissed her on the hour. Disappointed that she had not discerned in him one iota of enthusiasm for her talents, her performance or her personality, she suspected that he had other pupils better than she who lacked the influential connections to put them on the American circuit. He even appeared loath to give her a lesson each week.