Take Nothing With You

by Patrick Gale

  Turlough looked him up and down and said, ‘Just look at you,’ in that way he had that could have been nice or nasty and set off fluttering in Eustace’s stomach. And there were several faces missing – where could they possibly have preferred to go? – and a handful of new participants who looked impossibly young and vulnerable but were probably at least thirteen, but with that inward-looking immaturity Eustace was coming to see was peculiar to musicians-in-training. Placed among even the oldest of this group, Vernon and Suzanne would have seemed mature enough to start a family.

  But those who had returned wanted nothing to have changed so pretended nothing had and clung to rituals. They all called out Ancrum! as the house came into view beyond the little church and bridge, and Jean! as Jean appeared on the top of the steps, waving to them as Young Dougie’s van and Peg’s minibus crossed the park. They would drink unspiced tomato juice as a starter and eat cheese and apple salad and play Round the Table and sing madrigals and gorge on banana bread and play Fauré. Eustace joined in and was nice to the newcomers just as people had been to him, but a part of him kept sitting back, mentally, and seeing they were clinging to the comforts of repetition and tradition as some people, poor Pierre evidently, clung to the comfort of food.

  Jean hugged him, saying, ‘Dear Eustace of the Stag,’ which was mad and meaningless but sweet and she still smelled of Imperial Leather and wet walks. ‘How’s your mum?’ she asked and he said,

  ‘Better, thank you. Getting better every day,’ and realized that protecting her innocence so that she could continue to be herself and change young people’s lives was part of what made Ancrum what it was; in all probability she knew nothing of Carla’s life with Louis and, increasingly, with naughty, owlish Margit. She would pass her life without ever seeing a Tom of Finland drawing or knowing there were priests who believed they could cast out homosexuality devils from fourteen-year-olds, and that was somehow all to the good.

  He was in the same boys’ dorm, up in the attics; though Pierre was now somewhere else, perhaps because Jean had divined he was unhappy. Pierre’s place had been given to a cherubic young cellist from the Menuhin School called Solly. Solly had bee-stung lips and a quick, knowing manner. He was tiresomely, relentlessly cheeky but an extremely good player. He was good not simply with the technical flashiness of a child prodigy but seemingly with an ability to intuit the emotions behind a phrase. Even if he was simply parroting the phrasing of older players, and one suspected he must have at least begun by doing that, because he was far too young at barely twelve to understand the emotions he was conveying, you would not have known, had he been playing behind a screen to conceal his youth. There was absolutely no evidence that he had any warmth in his heart; he had the shrewd, hunter’s ear of a born mimic and tease. Within minutes of arrival he was blatantly assessing who had influence, who did not, and where the shames and pains were in anyone he encountered. Eustace disliked him intensely on sight and soon decided that his antipathy was so strong that if Solly took up an offer to study at Ancrum full time, that would make it impossible for him to do so as well. However, Solly soon loudly made it plain that he was only there for his older sister, an unexceptional violinist, as the course was good for her. Though they had barely met yet, he spoke of Jean with a patronizing familiarity as of a harmless eccentric.

  Eustace was fairly sure he was not the only one at the guesthouse table longing to see Jean take him down several pegs, though he suspected she would do this, and devastatingly, in private. There was a school report phrase he’d heard her use ironically regarding the unsuitability of fitting very self-regarding performers into chamber groups – does not play well with others – and, for Jean, it was chamber music, the creation of music with others, not pyrotechnic solo playing, that was the benchmark of true musicianship.

  When Jean gathered them all in the ballroom that night to play the Bachianas Brasilieras number five, with the higher instruments on the soprano line along with anyone who felt like singing instead of playing, Eustace managed to catch Turlough’s eye a couple of times. They were sitting almost opposite one another, with Jean playing between them in front of the big marble fireplace, and he’d thought Turlough was looking at him. Then, when Jean shifted him to one side to move an extra cello on to his line, he realized it wasn’t he who was drawing Turlough’s attention but Solly, who was showing off to cover for the humiliation of having been placed on an accompaniment line rather than the trickier first cello part.

  He watched them move off into a corner to chat when cocoa was served and slip from the room when Jean had them all sing Non Nobis Domine before heading up to bed. They didn’t slink into the dormitory until all lights had been out for a while. And their bedtime absence became a pattern in the days that followed, as did their way of sharing little jokes and smiles.

  Solly was very young, a child in fact, but Eustace didn’t feel he could approach him to check he was happy with whatever the situation was because Turlough was sure to be so unpleasant about it, and didn’t feel he could report them to anyone for fear Turlough would come out and say it was a jealous fantasy.

  Turlough ignored him, actively ignored him, had said not a word to him since his initial teasing greeting on the station platform, and this hurt as it was surely intended to, but he surprised himself at being able to regard it with the same equanimity he did when finding himself not in the group learning the variations from the first Brahms sextet – evidently that course’s lead ensemble. Instead he had a lovely time learning the top line of the fairly challenging Klengel Serenade and Humoreske for cello quartet with three lovely Scottish girls who had not been before and who seemed to think he was outrageously outspoken and funny. They were set to rehearsing in a first-floor bedroom which seemed to double as Jean’s dressing room and they had great fun daring to play while wearing various hats of hers. He chose a smart brown felt with a pheasant feather trim.

  He listened with genuine sympathy to Naomi’s tales of how Solly had insisted on pushing her onto the second cello line in the Brahms, although she knew the first already and was much older, and how he was rushing her in the tricky variation with all the scales, but he felt absolutely no envy, no wish to be worrying at her side in Solly’s place, catching Turlough’s eye and wondering if his gaze meant anything.

  His session with Jean wasn’t until the Thursday, the penultimate day. As Carla had suggested, he played her some of the second Beethoven sonata. She was impressed, said she could see how much work he had managed to put in since the summer despite everything . She asked about school and whether there were other musical outlets for him. He said Carla was putting out feelers to other teachers to see if he could form a string quartet and that he planned to audition for Weston’s Youth Orchestra which gave a couple of concerts a year.

  ‘That’s so good,’ she said. ‘What’s the standard like?’

  ‘Er . . .’ he said. ‘Actually they’re fine. Fine for Weston.’

  And she smiled. ‘The wonderful thing about your music,’ she said, ‘is that it’s hardwired into you now. It’ll never leave you. Even if you have to neglect it for a year or two for your maths or university or a job or whatever. It will be a faithful friend throughout your life, helping you meet new people, lifting your spirits like a bottomless larder. There’s far too much emphasis on music as a career but one of the glories of music, especially in this country, is its army of amateurs, many of them with professional standards of excellence like Carla has instilled in you. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ he told her.

  And that was that. He was not one of her chosen few. He would not be returning as a full time student to receive a magnificent but undoubtedly lopsided even wayward alternative education to Weston’s sixth-form college. And he would not become a professional cellist. Not even a teacher, like Carla. With one intense, compassionate pronouncement, Jean had set him free from yearning and striving. He would join the youth orchestra and enjoy it, love it even. But he would focus on other t
hings, like his maths. He would go to university. He would have the career his poor father had never quite managed.

  Stealthily the Klengel Quartet was the hit of the last night concert, perhaps because the Humoreske was one of those pieces that made everybody smile. The Brahms, which was last in the programme, of course, where expectations were always highest, was a bit of a mess because Turlough had a newly replaced A string that kept going flat despite him tweaking at its adjuster whenever the music allowed, which was rarely, and Solly rushed the scales. He didn’t play well with others.

  There had been no suggestion Eustace’s father meet the train at Bristol. Eustace was quite old enough now to cross unassisted to the little train on the branch line platform and travel to Weston and walk home on his own. But his father surprised him on Weston Station. He surprised him yet further with a quick, clumsy hug. Perhaps he was on new pills.

  ‘How was it?’ he asked.

  ‘Good. It was really good.’

  They started walking over the footbridge towards town and the car park.

  ‘Do you still want to go there full time instead of the sixth form?’

  ‘Do you know? I don’t think I do. Not any more.’

  ‘That’s a pity. Isn’t it?’

  ‘It is. And it isn’t.’

  As they emerged from the station, Eustace glanced across the parked cars to the nearby art deco houses. Mr Buck’s was still unsold, empty and beginning to be vandalized.

  His father hadn’t walked, as they usually did, but had brought the car. Eustace slung his bag in the boot and carefully slid his cello across the back seat. His father didn’t start the engine immediately. The train from Bristol had been full of people paying a weekend visit to the big shops, all laden carrier bags and flagging good tempers. The crowd dispersed slowly past them, some towards the seafront and hotels, some towards the estates and bus stops for the villages.

  ‘I told your mother to move out,’ his father said.

  ‘You told her?’ Eustace almost smiled but found himself oddly torn. ‘Where has she gone?’

  ‘Back to Grace Manor for now. I don’t think she’ll be there for long. People like that prefer their guests weak and, underneath it all, she’s very strong, as you know.’

  ‘Yes.’ Eustace thought of amber beads, the burnt cinnamon smell of toasted teacake, a locked iron gate. He knew his father was offering all this up as a tidy happy ending, or a new beginning, in a spirit of kind hopefulness. He decided to play along with him, although he knew there would be anger, tears, jagged edges still to come.

  ‘You’re safe now, old chap.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad. Will you . . . divorce?’

  His father shrugged. ‘It would make sense, although it means she can sue for half of the little I’m worth.’ A seagull dropped down to pick at something on the wet tarmac before them. A burger bun. ‘She was leaving us when she had the accident.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I found out. Doesn’t matter. Who was she in love with?’

  His father paused then distracted himself by fastening his seatbelt and starting the ignition.

  ‘You need never know,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

  He drove home by a circuitous route. He had already received a generous offer from a property developer for the house and had a mind, once he could rehome the remaining guests to their satisfaction, to buy a shop with a two-floor maisonette above and a sunny courtyard garden.

  ‘It even has a studio over the garage at the back. I thought you’d like that as you’d have your own back door and you could play your cello as loud as you liked.’

  It was a pleasant enough pair of buildings in an attractive part of town, away from the chip fat and hurly burly.

  ‘But Dad. A shop?’

  ‘I thought I could sell books,’ his father said. ‘Second-hand and new. Less bother than residential care and, I mean, how hard can it be?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  One further Geiger test and Eustace was released back into an oblivious world having duly left his brand-new bamboo outfit behind him in a special bin and dressed in the clothes that had been stored for him outside the lead-lined room.

  ‘What about the sheets?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t those radioactive as well?’

  ‘Yes,’ the nurse admitted, ‘though not as much as your T-shirt and boxers will be. It’s the sweat, you see. We wash them in dedicated machines just through that wall, where the contaminated waste water can be isolated from the rest of the system until it’s safe to release. Now remember, you’re still not entirely safe to be around. No holding children or babies for a week and, ideally, no hugging or close bodily contact with anyone else for twenty-four hours.’

  He thought of Theo, who even now must be travelling across the desert to some central army base, Eustace really had no idea, prior to flying home. He thought of kissing Theo. He thought of not being allowed to kiss Theo and having to explain why.

  ‘Really, though,’ the nurse added, ‘you’re fine so long as you keep clear of kids. Oh, and anyone pregnant.’

  He had stepped out of the lead-lined room before he remembered the little MP3 player, so discreet they had both forgotten he’d been wearing it all this while.

  ‘Oops,’ said the nurse as he dropped it and the ear buds into the bin with the clothes. ‘Seems a waste.’

  ‘It served its purpose,’ he said.

  Hospitals woke earlier than the rest of the world and it was still fairly early. He stopped at a patisserie he liked to pick up a bag of treats for a second breakfast for Naomi.

  As usual, Joyce ran into the hall to greet him, carrying her favourite hot pink toy which Naomi had long since christened the Double Ender and hid on a high shelf during teaching hours to stop Joyce presenting it to the startled parents of her young pupils. Joyce growled, her invitation to be chased, and he followed her, laughing, into the kitchen where the first thing he saw was an army kitbag. Naomi was at the table with Theo.

  In the flesh he looked reassuringly older and more solid, not willowy and certainly not innocent.

  ‘Look who got here a day early,’ she said, as Theo pushed back his chair and stood up, beaming.

  ‘She told me everything, you daft bugger,’ he said.

  ‘I did,’ she admitted.

  ‘You were right,’ Eustace told her. ‘You need to learn from the off,’ he told Theo, ‘that my best friend, Naomi, is always right.’

  He glanced her way and saw tears in her eyes, although she was smiling.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Theo asked. ‘You could have told me. How was it?’

  He stepped towards him but Eustace held up both hands to keep him away.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, wincing. ‘Not allowed to touch anyone until tonight. Well, strictly tomorrow morning, but let’s say tonight. Around the cocktail hour. It was fine,’ he added. ‘Just boring. Non-event. And lots of lovely cello music. Hello.’

  ‘I thought it was just pregnant people,’ Naomi said.

  ‘I’m not pregnant,’ Theo said, deadpan. ‘Cross my heart,’ with a look that told Eustace exactly how it would feel pulling his T-shirt over his head later.

  ‘You’ll just have to take Joyce out for the whole day,’ Naomi said. ‘It’s a beautiful morning. You can be tourists. Cross all the parks. Catch a boat to Greenwich. Cruise along Regent’s Canal. Just be absent. My first pupil arrives in fifteen minutes and she wears Alice bands and is extremely judgemental.’

  ‘I thought they came tomorrow.’

  ‘They do. But I moved or cancelled them, remember, because it was tomorrow we were expecting Pornstar Bambi.’

  ‘Who?’ Theo looked confused.

  ‘Oh, that’s you,’ Eustace admitted. ‘Doesn’t begin to do you justice.’

  ‘Get a room,’ Naomi said. ‘Oh. I forgot. You can’t!’ And she laughed wickedly as she walked through to the sitting room and started tuning up.

  ‘She was playing when I arrived,’ The
o said. ‘She’s amazing.’

  Eustace nodded. ‘She is rather,’ he sighed. ‘Christ you smell good.’

  ‘I’ve been flying for hours. Are you really not allowed near me yet?’

  ‘Really.’ They stood on either side of the hall just looking, the sound of Naomi’s scales all about them. Joyce had sensed a walk was about to begin and scratched peremptorily at the front door, where the same gesture, repeated twice a day, had removed a layer of paint slightly larger than the width of her paw. Theo grinned, revealing the fetchingly chipped tooth.

  ‘Go on,’ Eustace told him.

  Theo reached down to fasten her lead on her. He looked back.

  ‘After you,’ Eustace told him.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel would never have happened without the input of my cello teachers, Fiona Smith and David Waterman. Thanks also to Andrew Brown, who lent me a cello to set me playing again at forty.

  I’m indebted to the memory-jogging recollections of two of the lucky full time students at the real life Ancrum, Steven Isserlis and Justin Anderson and to the cellistic proofreading of Joely Koos.

  I’d also like to thank Clayton Littlewood and my old friend Nick Hay for their detailed memories of Weston-super-Mare in the 1970s, and Dan and Jon, for letting me borrow their impossibly romantic long distance courtship.

  Thanks to Richard Lingham, for his expertise on 1970s child protection procedures,

  to Ian Pitkin, Principal Physicist in the Nuclear Medicine department of Bupa Cromwell Hospital for the fascinating tour of the radio iodine suite,

  to the Corineus Quartet for inviting me to play the Schubert Quintet with them, and giving me the part with Jacqueline du Pré’s fingering in it,

  to Bertjan ter Braak for heftig ,

  to Caroline Dunn and her Bristol book group for the inspiring excuse to remind myself of the loveliness of Clifton,

  and to the librarians of Weston-super-Mare, whose hospitality a few years ago unwittingly set me wondering what it would have been like to grow up in such a place.