by Patrick Gale
This last declaration came out with a terrifying crackle in her voice so that nobody knew where to look. She broke the momentary harsh atmosphere with a handclap.
‘So,’ she said, ‘let’s celebrate new friendship by playing Fauré. There are several great composers who never understood the cello or any stringed instrument really, like Wagner.’ Somebody hissed theatrically. ‘Yes, quite. But Fauré understood strings intimately and wrote especially well for us cellists. This is an arrangement of the Libera Me from his Requiem. Violins and violas, there are parts for you. The rest of you, I’ll give you parts at random. Just play whatever lands up on your stand. It’s a very fair arrangement. You all get the big tune at some point!’
She handed her cello to Eustace again and swiftly distributed music across the room.
‘It will feel glorious playing together at last and your instinct will be to show off and play out. Please don’t, even when you have the tune. This week is all about chamber music and half the art of chamber music is listening to each other. If all you can hear is you, you can’t very well listen to your neighbours. So . . .’
She took back her cello with a polite, ‘Thank you, Eustace,’ then counted them in. ‘One, two, three, four.’
Once the pizzicato introduction had begun, she sat down to join in. She was playing from memory, he noticed. She had given him a part that began with the melody. Was this on purpose, so she could hear his playing? He played it confidently, knowing two or three others were on the same line, including Naomi. It lay exactly in his comfort zone, in third and fourth positions, where he could reach for the kind of resonance Carla called searing and true . At least it did at first. Glancing ahead down the handwritten page, he could see there was a middle section where it strayed into thumb position.
Jean seemed to be having fun, turning her smile this way and that across the room like a lighthouse, for all that she was paying close attention to everyone’s playing. She sang as she played – sang the Latin words in a high, girlish voice at odds with her leonine looks. He found he was transfixed by her long right leg and caramel-coloured court shoe thrust out to balance her bowing arm, presumably as she had taught Carla and precisely as Carla had taught him. He was moved and reassured by the familiar gesture as he was by her elegantly extended bowing arm and supple strength in her wrist as it flexed to begin each up-bow. It so mirrored Carla’s technique as to be like spotting a family resemblance in a relative never met until now.
Suddenly they were in the middle section, lots of them scaling in thumb position in thirds, and it wasn’t so bad because there was safety in numbers and the music was still glorious, but different, glassy and nervous. ‘Tremens, tremens factus sum ego, ’ Jean sang. ‘But hush! Yes it’s high and hard but piano , piano . We’re scared for our lives! That’s it! And here it comes again. Dum-dum. Da dum-dum. Da dum-dum. Nice rounded pizzicato hands, please. No need to be timid. It’s the relentless tread of the advancing angel. It’s the End of the World and there’s no escape. Yes. Yes! And here’s the heavenly tune again. But this time it’s bigger because you’ve prayed and there is no hope but GOD! And GO!’
And she stopped talking to play along with the melody only now she wasn’t smiling; she was in character, utterly solemn, eyes briefly closed. When they finished, she roared approval and clapped.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think there is no better composer for the cello than Fauré. Have any of you learnt his sonatas yet? Or the piano quartets and trio?’ Naomi put up her hand. ‘Naomi!’ Jean said. ‘Lucky, lucky girl. At least one group will learn Fauré this week. Why is Fauré so great? He has purity of purpose. He is a scholar yet he delights in pure harmony. So. Have we time?’ She glanced at her tiny, ladylike wristwatch. ‘Yes. So. Back to the beginning. Do you all know what Libera Me means?’
‘Save me?’ Eustace boldly suggested.
‘Yes. It is one of the prayers near the end of the Latin Requiem or mass for the dead. Spare me Lord from eternal death on that terrible day. Which day, dear Freya?’
Barely audibly, still wearing her woolly hat, Freya murmured something.
‘Yes, the end of the world. And look what Fauré does! The pizzicato is relentless. It is the thing you cannot escape. It is your fate. Dum-dum. Da dum-dum. Da dum-dum. Or perhaps it’s the beating of your frightened heart. But then the prayer!’ She played the first phrase of the melody. ‘The prayer is a melody that would unlock heaven. It’s saying sorry, sorry for all my dreadful sins but it’s also saying PLEASE! So, first the pizzicato. Let’s try it again and now we know what it is, that it’s Fate, it’s terrifying, I want it energized . Can you do that? Of course you can! And—’ She laughed. ‘One, two, three, four.’
They played it again, only this time instead of joining in, she walked among them, now conducting, now simply crying out little phrases of encouragement, now singing in Latin in that high girlish voice. She was quite mad and utterly wonderful and Eustace would have followed her barefoot into a desert.
At home Eustace always had a bath before going to bed. It would have felt quite wrong putting his pyjamas on dirty. The other boys in the room just stood around brushing their teeth at the bedroom sink then pulled on pyjamas or, in the case of Fred, got into bed in their pants. He decided to seize the chance of a bath, guessing there would be competition for it in the morning. It ran slowly, with much coughing and gurgling from the pipes, which he hoped wasn’t bothering people, and the chilly little room soon filled with comforting steam. The bath was extremely narrow, chosen to save hot water in the washing of children, or maids perhaps, so soon filled. He lay back, staring at cobwebs on the sloping ceiling nearby, feeling the chipped enamel hug his hips and, as usual, avoided looking at his body. The hot water stung where he had used the hair remover the night before.
On the wall to one side in a battered bamboo frame hung a large reproduction of Augustus John’s Madame Suggia, demonstrating her formidable swan bowing technique. Like Jean’s extended left foot, it was another family resemblance, evoking his earliest lessons with Carla, before she gave up her flat in Weston and moved to Clifton.
Quite possibly Carla had lain in this very bath at his age, though Naomi had implied that the rooms in the girls’ wing were a little less spartan, as Jean’s attitude to the differing needs of the sexes was quite conventional. He looked at Madame Suggia’s magnificently haughty pose and thought of Carla’s pretty handwriting spelling out the principles of good wrist and upper arm pronation. He remembered the curious thrill when she had first explained the term panâche .
The long evening had left him keyed up with its rush of unfamiliar people and new sensations. He was worried he still hadn’t learnt everyone’s names, and the boys his age were rather daunting, with their offhand familiarity with London and its great concert halls, the authority with which they recommended this or that brand of string or rosin and, most especially, with the casually shared assumption that they were all going to pursue music as a career. But he knew already that he wanted nothing more than to return there as one of Jean’s full time students.
He was startled by a desire to cry and let out a little silent sob before stifling the urge with a hot, wet flannel across his face. He missed home he realized, as he never had on the nights he had spent in Clifton, missed his deeply carpeted bedroom and bathroom where the bath didn’t pinch or scratch, missed his father’s nervous good humour and his mother’s casual glamour.
There was laughter in the corridor. Two of the older boys were talking quietly but their broken voices rumbled. He smelled tobacco and realized they must be smoking out of the little window off the end of the attic corridor beside the bathroom door. He tugged the flannel off his face, pinched his nose and plunged his head beneath the water. There was a large bottle of Vosene on the bath’s edge. It smelled pleasantly of hot summer roads.
This unfamiliar pang he felt was homesickness, he knew. He recognized the symptoms from William Mayne novels about children sent away to boarding school
but hadn’t realized it could affect you in your teens. It made him want to live and study here all the more; like a thumb sliced open on an A string, it was part of the necessary pain of passion.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Eustace assumed Jean assembled a programme of compositions on the basis of the number of instruments represented on the course, but it was tempting to think she cast the pieces like roles in a drama after only one evening of hearing everyone play for her, sensing whatever natural affinities emerged within the group. Ironically, given that most of them had probably neglected sport and the development of their bodies to allow more time in which to hone their technique, chamber music was just like sport. Having the wrong player on the team pulled it down while being picked for a team of a higher standard than yours could help raise your game. And just as in the worst times of school sport there was the abiding horror of not being selected or pointedly being selected only when there was nobody better on offer. At least they weren’t lined up while two captains took turns to choose their teams.
Eustace dressed and came downstairs ahead of the other boys who, as he’d predicted, were queuing up to use the one bathroom and making ribald jokes about bad smells and people taking too long.
He met Naomi in the kitchen, where she was chatting in impressively fluent-sounding German to one of the full time students, who was solemnly layering some kind of smoked fish on to toast for herself while Naomi stirred a double boiler of porridge. The student was dark and pretty but grave, which Eustace instinctively trusted.
‘Guten morgen ,’ she told him.
‘Guten morgen ,’ he replied haltingly; Naomi giggled.
‘Ich heisse Brigitte ,’ Brigitte said, tapping her chest where a little gold crucifix dangled. ‘Und du ?’
‘Er . . .’ Eustace began.
Naomi prompted him, ‘Und Ich . . .’
‘Ah, yes. Und Ich, Ich heisse Eustace .’
‘Hey, Eustace,’ she said with a brief flash of good humour.
‘Brigitte has to speak German to us at all times, even if we don’t understand it,’ Naomi explained, ‘because Jean thinks it’s good for us and because it’s the language of Bach, of course.’
She served them porridge and invited him to join her in having both demerara sugar and sliced banana on top. She explained her and Ralph’s famously unhinged mother was German and had spoken nothing but her own language with them at least until they started school. He noticed how she kept touching her hacked-off hair and wondered if she was regretting having cut it so impulsively.
Suddenly there was a rush of people for breakfast. Naomi and Eustace bunched up in a corner of the long kitchen table with a pot of tea and Brigitte fled with her fishy toast and a murmured greeting. Eustace was dying to join everyone in examining the announcement Jean and Fraser had pinned up, which he had failed to notice when he first came in, but would have had to ask Naomi to get up to do so. She saw his eyes flick towards it repeatedly and smiled.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You’re not playing De Fesch with those stuck-up girls from Cheltenham. Jean’s put you with us to learn the Schubert quintet. Just the slow movement, I think. She must have been impressed by your pizz last night. And you’ve got your lesson with her straight after lunch, which is good as it gets it out of the way. Mine isn’t until Thursday, so it’ll loom.’
Freya was still wearing her hat, although the kitchen was probably the warmest room in the house on account of the Aga on which Ralph and Fred were now making industrial quantities of toast. She granted Eustace the nearest he had seen her produce to a full smile and stirred a half-teaspoon of honey into a mug where she had poured hot water over a slice of lemon. She pulled a face when Eustace gestured to the remains of his porridge.
‘I can’t keep anything down before lunch,’ she said quietly.
‘You’re playing with us,’ Naomi told her. ‘Schubert quintet, slow movement.’
‘Oh. And I’d been looking forward to a week of playing with those . . .
‘Ssh,’ Naomi warned, glancing over Freya’s shoulder.
Eustace saw she meant a pair of tall, sharp-elbowed sisters from Cheltenham who had spent much of the previous evening telling anyone who would listen that their father had just finished recording a new Beethoven cycle with his quartet, which put all previous recordings in the shade.
‘The Alice Bands,’ he said. It was the nickname he had thought up in the bath the previous night. He was gratified when Naomi nearly sloshed her tea.
Because they didn’t need a piano, they were assigned the dining room to practise in. This lay across the way from the kitchen and similarly felt as though it was in a basement because you could only see out of the windows and across the garden if you stood up on tip-toes. It had been the servants’ hall, Ralph explained.
‘They didn’t want servants looking out too easily. Here. Give me a hand.’
Eustace helped him rumble the table against one wall to give them enough space to set five old dining chairs in a circle.
‘Jean says they’re just the right height and encourage good posture,’ Naomi said. ‘Though that’s only true if you get one whose seat isn’t collapsing. Here. The hard ones are best for cellists,’ she added, setting out two hard chairs side by side so that Eustace didn’t need the cushioned one he had just picked up.
They had just set up their stands and begun to tune when their viola player arrived. He was an older boy, tall with striking black hair and blue eyes. Eustace hadn’t noticed him the night before.
‘I’m Turlough,’ he said, with a shy smile around the circle and they all gave their names.
‘You’re Irish,’ Ralph said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Stating the obvious,’ Naomi said.
‘Yes,’ Turlough said. ‘My flight from Dublin only got in first thing. Who’s got a good A here?’
‘Perfect pitch,’ Freya muttered from under her hat and gave them all her A to tune to.
The music had been left in there for them. It was interesting, Eustace thought, that Ralph and his sister took the first violin and cello parts as though by right and equally interesting that neither he nor Freya demurred. But perhaps chamber music, all music in fact, relied on such natural hierarchies. As the only viola, Turlough sat between the two paired instruments like a referee.
‘So who’s the second cello for this?’ he asked, when they had tuned.
‘Me,’ Eustace said.
‘Much the most important line in this movement,’ Turlough said and winked at him.
Wishing he didn’t blush so easily, Eustace glanced to Naomi’s part and saw that it was a mass of long-held notes compared to his. And then suddenly Ralph was counting them in and they were playing.
As with the Fauré the night before, he sensed it was a piece he ought to know. The movement was slightly baffling. It began with one of those passages where time seemed almost to stand still. Ralph played a hesitant sort of interrupted monologue on the violin to which Eustace’s cello responded with a sequence of pizzicato phrases while the other three players sustained harmonies that shifted so slowly the changes in tonality were barely detectable. It was like watching a square of moonlight slowly move across a floor. Then came a quite different, stormy middle section, in which Eustace finally got to snatch up his bow to play a repetitive figure that seemed to power the storm along until, in a magical transition, the stillness of the opening section returned, but somehow transformed by the knowledge of darkness at its heart. The square of moonlight was no longer just that but moonlight in a prison cell or stealing across the lino of a hospital ward.
He had never played with such strong, confident musicians, apart from in his lessons with Carla and Ebrahim. They were perfectly in tune; they made no mistakes, so far as he could see. You would never have guessed they were sight-reading. They somehow found space around their playing to watch one another, to smile, to communicate. In particular the tone Turlough produced from his viola was quite unlike the rather woolly one Eustace
was accustomed to hearing from the viola player at St Chad’s.
The experience was so intense that it left Eustace a little shaky and he was relieved that everyone else had so much to say the moment they finished that it gave him time to recover and quickly to pencil in some fingering that had come to him as they played.
They made a second attempt at the first section. Eustace had his back to the door, so only heard it softly open and close as they played. Then he saw Turlough and Freya glance up. They stopped as agreed just at the transition to the middle section and he heard Jean’s voice behind him. He hadn’t realized she had been standing so close.
‘Thank you,’ she said, briefly placing a hand on Naomi and Eustace’s shoulders. ‘Isn’t it an extraordinary movement?’
They all nodded, shy suddenly.
‘Have any of you played it before?’
Everyone said yes. Eustace must have looked surprised.
‘And they didn’t tell you? Oh, that was mean. You did well, Eustace. One of the hardest things about pizzicato is that it goes downhill. Very hard to control its tempo and not rush. Ralph and Eustace, you’re already getting the hang of that exchange. Although it feels terribly exposed for you both. In a way the hardest thing is sustaining those long, long chords.’
‘We were just talking about that, Mrs Curwen.’
‘Turlough, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I pronounced it right?’
He nodded, with a grin.
‘You all call me Jean, here. Mrs Curwen sounds as though she breeds shelties and has no sense of humour. And what did you decide?’
‘I said I thought it was like staggered breathing in a choir,’ Naomi said. ‘That perhaps we should aim to change bows at different times.’
‘Hmm. Yes. And did it work?’
Freya smiled.
