Ghost Variations

by Jessica Duchen

  Adila and Alec were going out that night with the Palmstiernas; Erik had taken a box at the New Theatre on St Martin’s Lane to see Richard of Bordeaux. A young actor in the leading role, John Gielgud, was the talk of the town, Adila said. ‘Come with us, Jelly,’ she pressed. ‘It’ll cheer you up.’ Jelly didn’t want to be cheered up; she preferred to stay home and get on with some work.

  She had been asked to perform a peculiar piece that had only just been issued. The score had arrived fresh off the press from the music publishing firm of Schott’s in Mainz: a concerto supposedly written by Mozart aged ten, dedicated to Madame Adelaide de France, daughter of King Louis XV. It seemed, to Jelly, too good for Mozart at ten, but not good enough for Mozart any older. Perhaps it was by someone else, passing it off as the child genius’s work. She loved it anyway; just because something wasn’t perfect, that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth hearing. Now she had to memorise it.

  Adila had a systematic way to learn music by heart; Jelly simply… remembered. Adila, who had studied for years with Professor Jenö Hubay back in Budapest, and later with Onkel Jo, was organised and analytical. Jelly, seven years younger, also went to Hubay, but never had another proper lesson after they moved to England. Her instinct seemed to carry her in the right direction. When little Madge Harvey-Webb, Adila’s pupil and Adrienne’s friend, said to her, ‘But Jelly, how do you do it?’ all she could offer was, ‘I don’t know, darling – I just do.’

  Several hours vanished into the Mozart. By 10pm, her stomach was empty and grumbling. Wondering what Anna would eat in hospital, if she were well enough to eat at all, Jelly closed her violin case and went down to the kitchen. Adila and Alec would go back to Portland Place with the Palmstiernas for supper after the theatre; Maria the maid had the day off. Sometimes, when Jelly was home on her own – which was rare – she would go to a small restaurant on Fulham Road, but tonight she felt too tired and despondent to contemplate that.

  In the pantry she found a basket of potatoes, onions, mushrooms and a cauliflower, plus some home-baked cake in a tin, made with what Adila called ‘desecrated coconut’, and on one shelf stood half a loaf of bread and a box of a dozen eggs. From the food saver – a silverish box that squatted by the pantry sink with a tray of ice and water at the bottom – she took out the butter and spread a little across two pieces of bread, which she cut meticulously into soldiers. She found a small pan on the shelf next to the stove, filled it with water and popped an egg into it. When everything was working, she stood watching the egg bobbing up and down in the bubbles.

  Jelly wasn’t sure how long an egg needed to boil – about four minutes, she thought. Did it start to cook before the water was actually boiling? You couldn’t open an egg to see how it was doing, then put it back for longer. Her wristwatch had no second hand, so she ran upstairs to the hall to time it by the one on the painted face of Alec’s family’s grandfather clock. It was wrong too, of course. Every clock in the house told a different time.

  Downstairs, the water was dancing in the pan and the egg’s shell had split, letting out some of the white. Jelly, resigned, fished it out and settled at the table to enjoy the messy yet welcome result of her endeavour.

  *

  The morning dawned foggy and Jelly found it difficult to wake up, having been more exhausted by Anna’s collapse than she’d realised. Between sleeping and waking, though, she found an idea coming into focus. She wondered why such things so often took shape in the morning, out of dreams. She did not, after all, ‘only play for rich people’.

  Adila was downing coffee. Jelly pulled on her raincoat, tied a light scarf over her hair and fetched her violin case. ‘I’m going to see Anna in hospital.’

  ‘With your violin?’ said Adila.

  ‘Definitely with my violin.’

  *

  In the smog, London had sunk into slow motion. This stinking murk would surely be enough to give anyone consumption; it was like breathing in days-old porridge. After deciding to walk the last stretch, Jelly, looking down, could see only a suggestion of her own feet. When she rounded a corner and spotted the red-brick blocks of the hospital, she slowed further, wondering if they would allow her to carry out her plan.

  The sister at the entrance desk stared at her and her violin case. ‘Miss d’Arányi?’ she echoed when Jelly gave her name. ‘I saw you play at the Winter Proms. You did the Bach Double Concerto, with Adila Fachiri. It was amazing! Please come with me, I’ll take you up to Miss Robertson.’ She scrambled to her feet. Jelly was happy to see that she had already brightened someone’s day, and she hadn’t yet played a note.

  Here, the day needed brightening. In these labyrinths, your footsteps resonated back through your head, and people passing kept their voices low, as if at a funeral. Though the windows were plentiful, the smog seemed to press in against the glass. She followed the nurse along a corridor, passing several wards where long rows of beds stood in ranks.

  At last they turned a corner into another ward and stopped beside a partially curtained booth. Anna lay on the bed within, curled into a foetal position under a starched white sheet, her light hair wispy on the pillow. Jelly, her heart cracking, hesitated, remembering how infectious consumption was. Still, it was a little late to worry; Anna had been working in their house for several years.

  She crouched beside Anna and spoke her name softly. The girl, who looked almost too weak to move, visibly brightened at her voice.

  ‘Jelly? You came to see me?’

  ‘The fog is foggy, but it doesn’t stop me.’ She sat on the edge of Anna’s bed. ‘I thought I’d play you something.’

  ‘Here?’

  Jelly followed Anna’s gaze around the ward. Some patients lay asleep or listless, others were coughing and shivering visibly despite the lack of air, while screens of buff-coloured curtains shielded the most serious cases from sight, though not always from sound. She could feel many gazes upon her as she unpacked her violin. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘here.’

  ‘Oh, Miss – Miss d’Arányi… ’ The ward matron spotted her and marched over. ‘You can’t play the violin in here. This is a hospital.’

  ‘All the more reason to do so,’ Jelly smiled.

  ‘But it’s forbidden.’

  ‘Really? Just a little music to cheer people up?’

  ‘Let her play to us?’ came a voice across the ward.

  ‘Please – we would love it,’ Anna said. A chorus of further pleas around them seemed to take the matron by surprise.

  ‘Hmm.’ She cast a sceptical eye around her charges. ‘All right. Just a few minutes.’

  Standing near Anna’s bed, Jelly played Bach for her friend, for all the patients and, inwardly, for Tom, as if it were the song of a deity. Around the beds, curtains moved aside. Submerged in her task, Jelly was half aware, yet never allowed her concentration to waver. Anna’s eyes began to shine, vivid against her fever-dimmed skin; while the music progressed, tears rose within them. An elderly woman in a corner bed, coughing convulsing her, gathered the bedclothes against her mouth to stifle the sound. Several people who had been lying flat managed to lift themselves upright against the pillows; their blank expressions had gone, replaced by a light of wonder. One young girl slumbered, motionless, throughout – but in her sleep, she began to smile.

  At the end Jelly lowered her violin and looked into the silence. The love she’d wanted to give them was gleaming back at her from the patients, some tearful, some uncomprehending, a few lost in dreams; from two nurses and the matron, who had opened her mouth and failed to close it; and from a distracted-looking doctor who had hurried in to see what was going on and stopped short, apparently as dumbfounded as if he’d discovered Johann Sebastian Bach himself waiting for treatment.

  ‘Brava, Jelly!’ Anna exclaimed, finding the strength to start clapping. Gradually, as Jelly smiled, amazement dissolved into applause.

  She considered: these people, some unable to sit up, all too ill to attend a concert – and many who wouldn’t hav
e done so even if they were well – deserved the spiritual comfort of music as much as any healthy person did, probably more. If they can’t come to the music, the music must go to them. Whoever decreed that it should only be performed in a formal venue, where people pay for tickets and aren’t allowed to speak to the musicians? If you wanted meaning in music, this was where you’d find it: in a place of suffering, where Bach’s humanity could strike home.

  ‘Miss d’Arányi… ’ The doctor came up to shake her hand.

  ‘I do hope I’m not a disruptive influence, Doctor?’ Jelly said.

  ‘Well, I’d never imagined someone could simply walk in here and start playing a violin. You need to get past matron first! But,’ he added, when they’d both stopped laughing, ‘this is extraordinary. Just look at them. You’ve done more good for these poor souls than we can manage in a month of Sundays.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go as far as that, Doctor. But I’m grateful you didn’t throw me out.’

  ‘You know, if you’d ever like to come back and do it again, we’d be overjoyed.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ Jelly promised.

  ‘Music and medicine are close, but sometimes not allowed to be close enough,’ he remarked. ‘We only treat the physical, whereas you can bring consolation – and that’s a rarity in this place. I don’t know how some of them find the will to get well again.’

  ‘Jelly?’

  She dived back to Anna’s bedside.

  Anna seemed to be struggling for words. ‘Thank you, Jelly,’ she managed. ‘I’ll never forget what you did for us all today.’

  *

  At home, the thought of the patients, their response, the doctor’s reaction, Anna’s face transfigured as she listened – none of it would leave Jelly alone. She’d once played in a children’s hospital, which nearly skinned her heart alive, but every note there seemed to mean ten times more than one anywhere else. At Exeter Cathedral recently, she had seen the evening light reflected in the eyes of her audience while she played, amid a silence more intimate than that of a salon, despite the gaping space – or perhaps because of it. Music as human goodness incarnate: that was what Tom saw in her. He knew that was the best she could give. Now she felt she had a doctor’s blessing as well. For that vision, defiant, she resolved her direction. She would set herself against the supposed spirits of the dead, towards healing the proven ones of the living.

  She hunted through Anna’s desk for her concert diary. There, at the bottom of the last drawer, lay the paper on which she had written down the message from Schumann, if Schumann it were. Her hand hovered above it, vacillating, as if to touch it would be to accept its content. Why was she keeping it if she could not do that? Why couldn’t she forget? The image of the concerto, if concerto there were, troubled her; she pictured it shut away somewhere similar to that hospital, stricken and mute. She couldn’t save Tom; she could help Anna, without being able to make her well again; but if there really were a piece of music to rescue… Jelly pushed the thought away, slammed the drawer shut and tried another.

  At last, diary retrieved, she licked her fingertips and began to turn the pages. The winter, six or eight months away, was relatively quiet and most of her concerts were in Britain. There had to be moments in which she and the largest venues she could find would be free on the same evening. She could go any time to play her violin in hospitals, in ordinary schools as well as Eton, working men’s clubs besides the Wigmore Hall. But the idea that had grasped her demanded somewhere to seat 1,000 or more. An audience of the unemployed, admitted free, plus benefactors who would pay only a donation for charity at the end – it had to be possible. In her mind one image came into focus: Westminster Abbey.

  But – only one concert in one venue? Why not several? And why wait? Why not do it now?

  Chapter 4

  Not that arranging anything at all would be easy without the best-organised person Jelly knew.

  ‘I can’t come back.’ Anna’s voice on the telephone was tearful. ‘They say I have to get away from London and out to the country, because of the air. I don’t know how I’ll live without you all.’

  Anna elected to go back to Scotland, to a sanatorium close to her family. The levels of irritability rose in Netherton Grove as the sisters tried to take charge of their own affairs. ‘It’s not the same without poor little darling Anni,’ Jelly lamented. Whenever she opened the bottom drawer, there was that piece of paper, reminding her. R-o-b-e-r-t-S-c-h-u-…

  *

  Putting together at short notice a major tour involving some of the country’s greatest cathedrals was not technically impossible. But Jelly had not anticipated how much work it would take, often requiring quick responses and a good memory.

  ‘We ought to have a manager,’ Adila grunted, hunting for a lost note on the back of a receipt.

  ‘They’d take over and make us do things we don’t want to do,’ Jelly protested.

  But she enlisted the help of a well-connected friend: Katharine Tennant, Margot Asquith’s half-sister, who was fundraising for ‘alternative employment options’. Now, whenever Katharine called her, she needed answers. How much time did she want between concerts? Would she work with the resident organist? Which pieces would they perform? Jelly muddled up her programmes and confused her dates. Her fingers itched for her violin while other concerts loomed – she ought to be practising, not spending so much time on administration.

  She took a train, alone – dismal without Anna for company – to Devon and back, to give a recital; then a train and boat to Belfast and back for a concerto. She lay awake at night, still feeling the motion of wheels and waves beneath her, exhausted beyond the point of sleep. Myra Hess always used to say that the reason there were not more female musicians was that most women are too sensible to want to spend their lives on trains. Jelly agreed, but it would have been much more fun if Myra were there too. Next, she had to play, of all places for an apolitical Hungarian, at 10 Downing Street, for Ramsay MacDonald – even though Alec had told her, in careful terms, that foreigners were starting to be excluded from British concert platforms. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she said. ‘It’s like 1913 all over again.’

  Jelly had never applied for naturalisation – she felt it would be dishonest to claim to be British when she was not. The scorn she’d experienced on arrival at some venues in the provinces before the war, as a young girl still learning English, had alarmed her: finding the right words, aged 20, to answer a stranger’s tirade – ‘Why do we have to listen to you when we’ve plenty of fine musicians of our own?’ – had not proved easy. It was around then, too, that her mother gently suggested changing their name from the Germanic ‘von’ Arányi to the French-style equivalent – and her favourite concert hall, the Bechstein Hall, soon had to change its name to the Wigmore Hall, since even German pianos were publicly loathed. Once the war struck and musicians from abroad were banned, she’d been fortunate that most concert promoters loved her so much that they somehow neglected to check her nationality. No guarantees, though, that this would be the case if it all happened again. Alec worried about Oswald Mosley’s popularity and had started to call the Daily Mail the ‘Daily Rail’, since it regularly roused its readers to decry the number of Jewish immigrants who were arriving to escape the new regime in Germany.

  After one small organisational cyclone too many in Hurricane House, Alec – perhaps guarding what remained of his peace of mind – decided to defuse the situation, encouraged by the diplomatic Erik. He suggested that they should treat themselves to a short holiday: a long weekend together in Dorset. ‘It’ll do you good, Sai,’ he insisted. ‘We need to look after you, because you’re not looking after yourself.’

  ‘You always do look after me,’ Jelly said. The last thing she wanted was a break.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Jelly knew he could see through her attempts at pretence. ‘If you and Adi want me there, then of course I’ll come along.’

  ‘And with Erik?’

  ‘It’s
fine,’ said Jelly. ‘Really, it’s fine.’

  She tried to defer to Alec, who respected the baron for his books on Swedish history and his passion for democratic politics, over which detractors used to call him ‘red outside and white beneath’. Erik in return never missed a chance to compliment Alec on his own book about the Permanent Court of International Justice. Alec’s legal work for the League of Nations and Erik’s involvement with the organisation – a priority for his government – meant the pair’s discussions were cordial at least, or, at best, of possible international significance. Now Japan had announced it would withdraw from the League, Alec feared Germany would follow suit. ‘If the League can’t even make all those countries agree on a single symbol to represent it,’ Jelly asked him, ‘and if one country can just walk out and leave if it wants to, how is it supposed to achieve world peace?’

  *

  Squeezed into the back of Erik’s open-topped car beside Adrienne and the long-suffering Alec, Jelly clasped her niece’s hand so hard that the little girl cried, ‘Ouch, Auntie Jeje!’ Jelly scolded herself: she should be grateful for a trip to a hotel at Studland Bay. She offered up a silent prayer, lest Erik’s obsession with speed should send them all to the spirit world to which he was so devoted.

  Erik’s wife, Ebba, had stayed behind, spending a few days with their daughter, Margareta, and the latter’s French husband. Ebba’s health, Erik said, would make it difficult for her to enjoy a break that involved brisk walks over sand dunes. And she would probably not approve of Studland Bay’s naturist beach.