Ghost Variations

by Jessica Duchen

  The table was heaped with delights: the best potato salad he had tasted since his mother’s, a big pot of Hungarian goulash rippled with dark red paprika; rice to go with it; a cold ham for those who preferred to avoid such exotic flavours.

  ‘I don’t know where in the world she manages to get that Hungarian paprika,’ remarked Myra Hess, smiling politely at Ulli over her plate.

  ‘It really is amazing,’ Ulli agreed. ‘Madame Hess, I am a great admirer of yours. I’m Ulrich Schultheiss from Schott’s in Mainz… ’

  ‘So I gathered.’ Myra paused, munching goulash. ‘Well, there it is, there it is,’ she said eventually. ‘I understand I can no longer go to Germany. Isn’t that strange, when here people often assume I am German myself? It seems such a shame that music and musicians must be caught up in political matters. But shall we simply hope the situation over there comes to a swift close?’

  ‘I hope so.’ Ulli cringed with embarrassment about his home country, especially since its evils could be met with such elegance; the pianist’s manner was as polished as the British royal family’s. ‘Madame Hess, I can’t tell you how… how much I love your playing.’ He wanted to say, ‘How sorry I am about what’s happening in Germany,’ yet did not dare to. At home, in a party like this – not that there were many parties exactly like this – you wouldn’t know who might overhear, or how dangerous it would be if they did. With distance, understanding struck him of how deeply this state of affairs had seeped into him.

  ‘Thank you, Dr Schultheiss. Don’t worry, Germany now is not your fault. None of us can help the accident of where and to whom we are born. Now, do please excuse me, I must say hello to Professor Tovey.’ As dignified and upright as the queen mother, Myra smiled and slipped away, out of sight.

  Still feeling the stab of mortification under his sternum, he distracted himself by listening to different voices. He identified the Swedish accent of a glamorous yet, he thought, semi-crippled baroness with a walking stick, whose husband seemed to be an ambassador; but he was defeated by his host, Alec Fachiri, whose elegant tone was tinged, as it turned out, with a mixture of Greek roots and American upbringing. What a strange milieu: famous musicians on the one hand, and the most serious, high-ranking diplomats and lawyers on the other. Like a zoo in which the tropical night creatures and the penguins had all been housed in the same enclosure. What could have brought them together?

  Adila laughed long and loud when Ulli asked how she and Alec met. It was a mystical story, she declared. She’d been sauntering past Harrods one day when she was overwhelmed by a premonition: she was about to meet her future husband. ‘So surprised I was,’ she confided, pressing his elbow with one hand and balancing the dish of sausages in the other, ‘that I looked around to see who on earth it might be!’ She had spotted a swarthy, serious-faced young man with a big moustache – and he was so unlike the type she would ever take a fancy to that she decided she’d been grievously misled.

  ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘No, nooo! But several weeks later we have a chamber music rehearsal and our cellist is ill. He doesn’t want us to cancel because of him, so he asks a friend, a fine amateur, to take his place. And into the room walks the same gentleman with the moustache! I tell you, Doktor Schultheiss, I could not believe it!’

  ‘Please, call me Ulli. Everyone does.’

  ‘He wrote me a letter afterwards,’ Adila said in a deep purr, ‘telling me he liked my voice. And you know, my voice is a little difficult, so at once I fell, crazy, in love! Then there was a wonderful fancy dress party in the roof gardens of Selfridges, and we meet and we admire the view and we walk under the pergola holding hands and we dance all night together… and Hortense, who we call Titi, our other sister, the prettiest one, danced with a beootiful man and fell in love too – ah, what magic… We both marry our beloveds that year. And presto! We are here!’

  Ulli laughed. The sheer energy about Adila was scary and warming and enchanting, all at the same time. And the voice… was quite a voice.

  ‘Fancy dress?’ he said. ‘What did you go as?’

  ‘I was a Gypsy.’ Adila gleamed like Gypsy fire itself. ‘Titi was a shepherdess.’

  ‘And Jelly?’

  ‘A savage.’

  ‘Wearing… what, exactly?’

  Adila’s laugh rang out like a trombone. ‘Wearing not very much at all!’

  ‘Herr Doktor Professor Schultheiss, darling.’ Jelly herself was at his elbow, beaming high voltage up into his face. ‘What is this about my savage costume?’

  Ulli hoped she couldn’t sense him picturing her in what little there was of it. ‘I’ve been hearing the story of how your sisters met their husbands.’

  Jelly’s skin glowed in the lamplight; he could see crow’s feet beside her eyes, and shadows beneath them, but that added complexity to her face rather than dimming its radiance. ‘Please, my dear.’ She pressed his arm with slender yet powerful fingers, like a tropical bird’s talons. ‘Let me get you something more to drink, and we must sit and talk.’

  ‘I would love something more to drink – thank you, Miss d’Arányi.’

  ‘Jelly, darling, Jelly as in yelling.’ She darted to the table and poured him the biggest glass of red wine he had seen since the stock-market crash. ‘Come with me to the Green Room? It’s quiet there.’

  Ulli followed this luminous avian creature away from the crowded dining room, up some stairs and round some corners; here the sound of the party faded to quiet. The Green Room, he saw, was a type of library; on one side its shelves spilled over with classic literature, including several volumes that sat face forward, ready to be dipped into – Yeats, Tagore, Huxley. On the other side dwelt books on law, Italian art and architecture, and a number of faded, cloth-bound tomes that turned out to be Hungarian, mainly from the last century. A sizeable Chinese antique picture, with muted gold background and black brushwork, loomed out of one book-free space. The wall coverings were grass-green silk, the curtains too, and Jelly, arraying herself and her scarlet dress on a green chaise longue, seemed to him a flame that hovered over a lawn lightly enough to leave it unscorched. She patted the velvet beside her, smiling up at him. Ulli hesitated, for the merest quarter of a second wondering exactly what sort of invitation this was.

  The answer struck him at the same moment: perhaps Jelly d’Arányi had no idea that her gesture could possibly be misconstrued by a healthy young man from a culture other than her innocent world of openness and warmth. It seemed to throw his reactions back into his face, where they demanded analysis, and told him that they’d been inspired by his own absolute, sinful, wishful thinking.

  He sat down beside her and said, ‘Tell me about the Schumann.’

  The story was bizarre, but the evidence was firm. Ulli stayed silent for a minute once Jelly had finished explaining. Tovey had mentioned the ‘spirit messages’, but he hadn’t realised how certain, how unquestioning of them the d’Arányi sisters would be. Of course, he knew people at home who would also have believed this tale without a moment’s hesitation; unfortunately some of those same people had been quick to sign up to National Socialism, filled as it was with esoteric symbols – an inverted Indian emblem, for goodness’ sake – and a system of mythology about ‘Aryans’ that, however fictional, was inducing otherwise intelligent beings to swallow its excesses. Ulli had spent summer evenings downing lager under the linden tree in the local Biergarten and listening, from a safe distance, to some of his neighbours talking in ways that made the idea of concerto-seeking messages from the souls of Schumann and Joachim seem refreshingly benevolent. But whatever implausible circumstances had brought it to light, the concerto was real and it needed someone to reach it and retrieve it, beyond the keepers of Clara’s flame.

  ‘I don’t understand how hiding it away can do any good,’ Jelly pointed out. ‘It’s as if they said: this is how it is, fin, and everybody accepts it. But it does not have to be this way. It’s their choice. If it turns out the piece is not good, that
’s one matter. But they don’t know the truth! Not to look at it, not even to see what the reality is… ’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more. People wear blinkers – sometimes it makes life easier. And we all want to imagine Frau Clara as a musical saint who must have been infallible.’

  A whiff of Jelly’s scent reached Ulli’s nostrils. His former fiancée had refused to wear any at all, saying that perfume made her sneeze. Jelly’s smelled like freshly cut grass in midsummer.

  ‘What would you like me to do?’ he said.

  ‘Ideally, fetch it from this library and publish it. Then I can be the first to play it. Ulli, there is so much pain and death and loss in this world, but here is one good thing we can do, one beautiful thing we could save. And we can save it together. We can bring it back to life! Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’

  Ulli felt embarrassed: only that afternoon – which felt a century ago – he had been thinking about matters as selfish and idiotic as the concerto’s lucrative potential and his own possible promotion. He leaned towards Jelly, whose expression resembled that of a pleading child, and said, ‘You know, I believe I can help. My employer, Willy Strecker, told me that he met your great-uncle’s son, Johannes Joachim, in an English internment camp and they became good friends. The concerto must have been in Johannes’s possession, so it must be his responsibility. And you know how it is with old friends, especially from difficult times. Perhaps, should he give permission to publish the concerto, it would naturally be to us. As for me, I will do everything I can, both for Schumann and for you.’

  A thunder of steps on the stairs and Adila was in the doorway. ‘Sai, quick! We are dancing. We need you!’

  Jelly sprang to her feet. ‘Ulli, will you dance?’

  *

  In the drawing room the Fachiris had moved aside the furniture and rolled up the rugs; now Alec was busy stacking up some fresh records. Ulli, walking downstairs with Jelly, noticed a strange ritual taking place: nobody was quite ready to begin. Instead, they were turning expectant gazes towards the stairs, even though Alec’s first record was spinning and crackling and a familiar melody – a tango – was ready to seduce them all. He felt his face grow hotter as the eyes of 50 guests all fastened on to him.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he mumbled to Jelly.

  ‘It’s the tango. We have a little tradition! Come on, Ulli – we must be the first.’

  Of course, the person everyone was waiting for was the violinist whose arm, at that very moment, was tucked through his own. He had little choice but to escort her to the centre of the floor and become her dancing partner. Not that he’d have wanted to be anywhere else.

  Thanks heavens he had learned the tango in some… well, interesting places in Berlin, when he was a student at the Musikhochschüle ten years ago, and the steps came back to him, for Jelly was easy to dance with. She trusted him. She followed where he led, yet she led him, too, signalling what she wanted to do with the intensifying of one finger’s touch on his back or the slightest insistent pressure of her palm against his. He thought up a combination of twirls and pivots and encouraged her into them; she spun and swirled as he wanted her to, head inclined over one shoulder, and watching the balletic tilt of her neck, he laughed with delight. It was almost a shock when the music finished, much too soon.

  ‘Ulli, you are a glorious dancer!’ Jelly, getting her breath, led him to a deep-cushioned sofa. Sitting beside him, legs extended forward, she changed the subject with the alacrity of a tennis player swinging into a rally. ‘So, tell me. Do you like reading?’

  ‘I love books better than anything except music,’ he assured her.

  She loosened her shoes – red satin – and shook them off her feet. ‘And who are your favourite writers?’

  ‘I greatly admire the works of Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse, in particular Hesse. Do you know Narziß und Goldmund?’

  ‘I don’t, because my German is not so good, but I would love to read it.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful book, a masterpiece… about seeking, about extremity of experience, about beauty in all its forms. It came out about three years ago and I loved every word of it. If there’s a translation I will get one for you. What about you? Who are your favourites?’

  ‘I love the ancient Greeks. Plato, Aristophanes… ’

  ‘Really?’ Ulli didn’t want to tell her he was not used to women being well versed in the classics, in case it offended her, but he was fascinated all the same.

  ‘And I love poetry.’ She was leaning back on the cushions, watching him. Her toes, divested of restrictions, were wiggling beneath her stockings. ‘I can recite you a good chunk of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam if you wish. Who do you most like among the German poets?’

  ‘Oh… ’ He was wondering if Jelly had ever taken lessons from a hypnotist, the way she was looking at him. ‘Well, I suppose my great favourite would be Heinrich Heine… ’

  ‘Recite me some. A love poem?’

  Recite poetry? She wanted him to recite a love poem to her? ‘I’ll see what I can remember,’ he said, sensing his face grow warm yet again. This woman made him blush so often that she was turning him back into a stupid schoolboy. ‘It’ll be in German… ’

  ‘The original language is always the best,’ she encouraged. ‘Keep it soft, and it will be fine.’

  Ulli cleared his throat, then began.

  ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,

  Als alle Knospen sprangen,

  Da ist in meinem Herzen,

  die Liebe aufgegangen… ’

  ‘What does it mean?’ asked Jelly.

  ‘It’s the first poem in Schumann’s Dichterliebe.’ He suspected she knew perfectly well what it meant. ‘“In the wondrous month of May, when all the buds are springing, there is in my heart, love that is bursting forth”.’

  ‘So beautiful.’ Jelly gave him the most tender, open-hearted smile he had ever seen from any woman. He returned it: sweating, terrified, doomed.

  Around them, nothing in this house ever stopped moving and whirling and ringing. Tango gave way to rumba, sausages to bowls of trifle, and at some point recorded music to live. Garlands of laughter reached them from the music room along with a thread of sound from the piano.

  ‘Let’s see what’s happening.’ Jelly bent to fasten her shoes.

  And at the back of the house, if Ulli had thought nothing more could surprise him tonight, he found he was wrong. An image faced him that he would never forget: Myra Hess in her black lace gown, lying flat on her back across the top of the Bechstein piano, reaching down to the keys beyond her shoulders and playing, from this unimaginable angle, utterly perfect Bach.

  *

  When the second-last guests left, around 3am, the Fachiris and Jelly, still chattering and singing to each other, set about tidying up. Only the Palmstiernas remained. Ebba had fallen asleep in an armchair; Erik shut the drawing room door softly so that she would not be disturbed.

  ‘How did you get along with that charming boy from Mainz?’ Adila asked Jelly. ‘I hear he’s working for Richard Strauss’s publisher.’

  ‘He’s very nice… ’

  ‘Jelly! Naughty girl, what have you been doing?’ Adila demanded in Hungarian.

  ‘Oh, just the usual,’ smiled Jelly. ‘And I think I won… ’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Erik. ‘That language of yours… ’

  ‘Never mind, never mind.’ Adila caught her sister’s eye and the pair stifled private laughter.

  ‘More seriously, yes, he’s working for the Streckers,’ Jelly said, ‘and he thinks perhaps he can help us with the Schumann.’ A shadow of anxiety crossed her with the simultaneous brightening in the eyes of her sister and the Swedish ambassador. ‘He thinks Willy Strecker knows Johannes Joachim well enough to have an influence.’

  ‘What about Elisabeth? Doesn’t she? Johannes is her brother, for God’s sake.’

  ‘She’s not a publisher,’ Jelly pointed out. ‘And after all, we are his cousins and there is nothing we
have been able to do.’

  She smiled again, this time to herself, thinking of her new friend. Ulli Schultheiss inspired confidence: a tall man, fair and open from tip to toe – face, attitude and mind all matched. Bright, direct gaze, the type she liked best. She had adored Sep’s forthright Australian nature, and Tom’s bright and breezy Irish equivalent; Ulli’s directness was far removed from that evasive, slippery Englishness that often annoyed her. She’d noticed him relaxing as the evening went on; in the Green Room he’d been so tense, goodness knows why – was it the language barrier? ‘He did well at the love poetry,’ she told Adila in Hungarian, ‘and he’s a wonderful tango dancer, too.’

  ‘Didn’t you think he was devastatingly handsome? He really likes you, I can tell.’

  ‘I’m too old for him. If only darling Anna were here – he’d be ideal for her… ’

  ‘For goodness sake! He’s a lovely boy, with a nice behind! Very round and firm. They do not grow on trees. And his job is very responsible, so he can’t be under 30. If I were you, I’d – ’

  ‘Oh Adi, do stop it… ’

  *

  In his hotel, Ulli was still awake, experiencing a form of turmoil that he’d prided himself on having avoided for a long while.

  His former fiancée, Lotte, led him on for four years – now the engagement was on, now it was off. Now she was after someone else, usually richer than he was; then she arrived back at his doorstep, hair in her eyes, wanting to weep on his shoulder; and each time she put him down only to pick him up again, he loved her still more.

  He visited her one evening and found her running a fever, but walking her dog. The next day he arrived at the same time to find the house plunged into mourning. Lotte – with whom he’d fully intended to spend the rest of his life, even if she was impossible – had been carried to a better world by a lethal strain of pneumonia.