Ghost Variations

by Jessica Duchen

  ‘I’ve been on a little journey of my own, trying to understand,’ Tovey said. ‘I’m writing you a letter about it, before I write to The Times, because I haven’t decided what I should say in print. Be totally honest: where do you think the messages come from?’

  Jelly paused. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there’s another place they come from. I mean, I don’t think that there’s a Valhalla where composers go to live after they die. I don’t know what to believe, but what I do know is that this happened. This happened to me. And I don’t see why it shouldn’t have. Why shouldn’t I believe that Schumann’s spirit wanted to contact me?’

  Tovey gave a gentle laugh. ‘Never mind, my dear. You’ll get my letter tomorrow. Then there’ll be an official version. Honestly, I find it strange enough that people can communicate with one another by any means at all.’

  The letter was on the mat in the morning. Pages and pages of it, some handwritten, some typed, then handwritten again. She marvelled at the time and effort that Tovey was putting into defending her.

  Moreover, his words made sense, in an extraordinary way. Reading them again and again, to make sure she had understood, it seemed he was telling her that human beings are all part of one another, and that an interchange between them involved not only ideas, but in some ways an actual transfer of part of their souls to each other: our inner selves can flow into the mind of everyone with whom we communicate, and theirs into ours, whether we know it or not. Therefore our existence is inseparable from everyone else’s; and that interconnection makes us what and who we are. If so, then music must be the best and the most direct way to reach and feed a shared consciousness within us all.

  Tovey’s letter to The Times was altogether more pragmatic, though replete with his acerbic humour. Yet he left no room for doubt: he believed her. He – the most distinguished musicologist in Britain – was willing to stand and be counted, publicly declaring so in The Times, with no need to justify his statement. It was a lengthy letter, exploring the concerto from many angles, but he had saved the best for the end. Having declared his personal, deep knowledge of the people concerned, now and in bygone times, he closed with the words: ‘I assert my positive conviction that the spirit of Schumann is inspiring Jelly d’Arányi’s production of Schumann’s posthumous Violin Concerto. The sense in which I make this assertion is my own private affair.’

  While Jelly rejoiced over The Times, though, Adila’s face had begun to darken over The Listener.

  ‘There’s a letter printed here from our cousin Elisabeth. She says she always knew about the concerto. She says there was never any mystery at all!’

  Jelly’s newly recovered equilibrium collapsed.

  Elisabeth stated that the manuscript, which had been in her father’s possession for some 50 years, had been given to the Prussian State Library by all six of Joachim’s heirs and that many friends knew this – Eugenie Schumann and her sisters included. She remarked, too, that a movement of the concerto had been played at Schumann’s birthplace in Zwickau by the violinist Adolf Busch, who was a close friend of Tovey’s and sometime mentor to Yehudi Menuhin. ‘Strange that the spirits should have to take such a roundabout way to reveal what was not concealed,’ Elisabeth wrote.

  Alec peered into the dining room; the sisters both began to shout about this latest misery. ‘What is she playing at?’ Jelly expostulated. ‘I went to see her and she said nothing of the sort! And what’s all this about Adolf Busch? Wouldn’t Donald have known and told us?’

  ‘Jelly, get dressed,’ Alec ordered. ‘We’re going to Oxford.’

  ‘What? Now?’

  ‘Yes, now, by the next train. The quicker you get ready, the quicker we’ll be there. I’ll send a telegram to Elisabeth and tell her we’re on the way. Chop-chop, old girl.’

  ‘I’m coming too.’ Adila jumped to her feet.

  ‘No, Adi, not you. If you come, there’ll be an almighty rumpus about spirit messages and that isn’t what we need. You may have plundered the broadsheets today, my dear, but you haven’t seen the tabloids – and I promise you, you neither want to nor need to.’

  Adila was so shocked at this rejection that, for once, she was lost for words.

  *

  Today Jelly could take little pleasure in the sights and sounds of Oxford – the bicycles purring over the cobbles, the waterbirds chattering on the riverbank. She dreaded confronting her cousin; Adila would have done it much better. ‘It’ll be fine,’ Alec promised, shepherding her towards the Banbury Road – for Jelly was so disconnected from reality through exhaustion that, left alone, she would probably have wandered halfway to Newbury.

  Elisabeth’s face showed that Jelly was not alone in feeling insecure; the Joachim glare was unmistakable. The house felt too dark on a day that was bright; an autumnal chill was beginning to intrude. Jelly conceded that her cousin might feel as uncomfortable as she did herself, which made her task a fraction easier.

  ‘Lisa, I saw your letter in The Listener and I need to know why you wrote it.’ Jelly challenged her, after ritual acceptance of tea.

  ‘I’m sick of all this talk about spirit messages.’ Elisabeth gave a shrug. ‘It has to stop. It’s ludicrous.’

  Alec caught Jelly’s eye across the sofa, silently warning her to be sensible.

  ‘But if you remembered it all, why on earth didn’t you tell me when I came to see you four years ago?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t remember it then. Johannes reminded me about the business of the library a little later… ’

  ‘But you’re suggesting in this letter that you knew all the time. This will make everyone think that you told us, and that we must have gone looking for the concerto because of that, but you didn’t. Lisa, do you have the first idea of how stupid this makes me look, and my sister, and, for goodness’ sake, the Swedish minister?’

  ‘Baron Palmstierna? I thought you didn’t like him.’

  ‘He’s my sister’s closest friend, and probably the best-respected ambassador in the country. And he’s the man who went to the library and found the actual manuscript.’

  Alec gave a nod. ‘Whatever you think of his spiritual leanings, Baron Palmstierna is a highly intelligent man and an internationally prominent diplomat. He’s not a gullible idiot. And I’m very much afraid that you have suggested, by implication, that he is.’

  ‘Oh, good heavens.’ Elisabeth drummed her fingers. ‘That was never the idea.’

  ‘What about Adolf Busch?’ Jelly asked. ‘We once met his brother, Fritz, at Glyndebourne – he’s the conductor there – and Donald Tovey knows them.’

  ‘I’m not sure… I think he played it. I am sure I heard of him playing it. If you know his brother, perhaps you can ask him. Or your friend, Sir Donald. Obviously you’re convinced you know more about it than I do.’

  ‘Elisabeth, this isn’t very helpful,’ Alec said. ‘You should see the heap of hate mail Jelly’s been sent. It’s quite terrifying. It started with that Rollo Myers article, of course, and that’s what prompted you to write your letter. And you’re right, of course: yes, the gossip is sickening and, yes, we need to stop it, so I think there is something you can do to help bring that about.’

  ‘Let me get just this right, once and for all,’ Elisabeth said. ‘Before this, none of you had any idea the piece existed?’

  ‘I certainly didn’t. I went to see Tovey. He looked it up and found it was real.’

  ‘And my father never told Adila about it?’

  ‘She insists not,’ said Alec.

  ‘And now you’re receiving threats and abuse because a report in a magazine has sensationalised the suppression of the concerto, and nobody can stomach that story about the spirits?’

  ‘That is why exactly what you do or do not remember makes a world of difference, and why your letter has, I’m afraid, possibly done more harm than good,’ Alec said, a smile gilding his words. ‘Your cousin here has been suffering an irrational onslaught enough to drive the sanest person ou
t of her mind. I think it could help if you were to write another letter.’

  Jelly watched him, admiring. What it was to have a brother-in-law who was accustomed to functioning in diplomatic circles.

  ‘Think of it as a gesture towards keeping a diffuse family flame alight,’ Alec added. ‘The problem actually is that the headline used the word “lost”. The concerto was not lost, but embargoed. But the word “lost” takes up less space on a page when an editor is composing a headline and in general it makes a greater impact on the reader’s mind. The shadings of truth tend to be of secondary concern in that context. Had this occurred to you?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Elisabeth. ‘No. I didn’t think of that.’

  ‘You see how easily a misunderstanding can arise? We can’t change what’s already happened, but I believe in sorting these matters out sooner rather than later – or else they keep festering. If we can fix the problem immediately, that’s the end of it.’

  Elisabeth glanced at her father’s portrait. Joachim had been one to fester, and when he finally let rip, the repercussions were often profound.

  ‘Don’t do as he would have. Lisa, please assist us by writing a clarifying letter and entrusting it to us today? We’ll then consider how best to use it. What do you think?’

  ‘If you really believe it will help… ’

  ‘And you? Do you believe it will help?’

  ‘Perhaps. Why… yes. Yes, I believe that it may.’

  ‘Where do you keep your letter paper, please?’ Alec stood and waited for Elisabeth’s directions. It was only when he had set a blank page in front of her and she, pen poised, was ready to start, that Jelly let herself smile at how skilfully Alec had led her cousin into doing his bidding while convincing her she was exercising her own free will.

  The letter was finished; Elisabeth completed it with a signature and a flourish. The glare fixed Jelly between the eyebrows. ‘Here. Publish it if you want to. I hope it helps.’

  Jelly read it quickly. Elisabeth, addressing the letter to Jelly herself, wrote of her intention to clear up what she had felt was a misrepresentation in The Listener; and saying that the details of the concerto’s fate had slipped her mind until she saw her brother in 1934. ‘I never for a moment intended to throw any doubt on anything that you had said about the facts which led to the publication of the Schumann concerto. I know you too well to doubt your absolute truthfulness,’ she had written.

  Waiting for the train home, Alec gave Jelly a piece of paper of her own. ‘I think you should write a covering letter.’

  ‘What? Now?’

  ‘There’s method to the madness. You’ll see.’

  Jelly pored over the paper as the train bowled eastward, trying to explain the difference between claiming to have found, via spirit messages, a work that nobody knew existed, which she had not done, and finding and wishing to play a piece that she, personally, had not known about before, which was the reality of it. It should have been so simple, she mused, reading back her text. Why all the hysteria?

  Once they’d disembarked at Paddington and were climbing into a cab, Alec ordered it not to Netherton Grove, but to Fleet Street.

  ‘The Times,’ he told her. ‘This letter is going straight in, if I have anything to do with it.’ He looked pale and tired and sounded short of breath, but his eyes were tender over his moustache. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Oh, Alec, you’re a wonderful, wonderful brother. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  ‘Steady on, old girl.’ Alec peeled her arms away from his neck. ‘It’s all for the sake of world peace… I can’t make that a reality, but this is within my power. At least, I hope it is. Let’s get it over with, Sai, before you do something impossible, like growing up. I wouldn’t like to see that happen, not now.’

  *

  Jelly woke at 2am from a dream in which her wrists and ankles were enskeined in a web like a spider’s, but many times bigger. The more she struggled, the harder the fine threads cut into her flesh. Eyes open into the night, barely able to make out the shapes of her table, wardrobes and music stand, she could still feel the pain. It was real. It was back again. Part of her longed to give way, to let the web – and presumably its outsized spider – finish her off so that the agony would be gone for good.

  The physical pain, which she was convinced was an arthritic flare-up, did her practising no good. ‘It’s fine,’ she said to her concerned sister, trying to hide her winces when she attempted to play. She didn’t want Adila to know how frightened she was. That anxiety compounded the emotional muddle, which seemed to drag her lower with every article, every letter, and soon every glance of a stranger in the street. Elisabeth’s new missive, and her own, were noted; but the ‘spook-haters’, as Alec called them, promptly decided they were a fiction devised to throw everyone off the scent of a conspiracy. These people remained convinced that Jelly was inventing the entire saga of the spirit messages in order to grab publicity, promote herself and take the concerto away from everyone else. Apparently this was so outrageous that it had to be of immense importance to the British public, even when they should be more concerned with whether Chamberlain could fend off the very real possibility of war. ‘If we were not foreign, and middle-aged women, and partly Jewish,’ Jelly mused, ‘I wonder if they would still be so angry?’

  ‘We’re lucky,’ her sister snapped. ‘A few centuries ago they’d have had us burned at the stake.’

  As Adila had pointed out at the beginning, they were never going to listen. The fact that a Schumann concerto had been lying embargoed in a library, unheard for over 80 years, was the real scandal. Why didn’t people notice that?

  Tovey, appealed to, agreed to telephone Adolf Busch and tracked him down to a hotel in the Netherlands. The violinist let off a tirade in Tovey’s ear and declared he was going to write to Eugenie Schumann. She in turn promptly told Busch that she would write a substantial letter to The Times herself, making a plain statement to insist the concerto should not be played, and that furthermore she was consulting her lawyers. A few days after what should have been Jelly’s performance, in its second potential incarnation, Busch was interviewed in a Dutch newspaper: he denied ever having performed the Schumann concerto, although he had apparently seen and assessed the music before deciding to let well alone. Then they’d asked Eugenie for her view, and printed the response: ‘No. Never have I given my agreement to the publication of the Violin Concerto, the last work of my father.’

  ‘She’s determined to stop the performances,’ Tovey told Jelly. ‘Legal advice and all.’

  ‘Would she win?’ said Jelly, horrified.

  ‘I doubt it. The German state, apparently, holds the copyright – or has decided it does – because the manuscript was in the State Library, and if those officials are intent upon doing something, there’s no law on earth they’ll allow to stop them. Anyway, I think they’ll tactfully explain that the concerto would certainly be published after she is no longer with us, so ultimately it’s out of her control.’

  Busch had not played the concerto, so Elisabeth was wrong yet again. People were on edge, afraid, lashing out at anything within reach; really, the issue was Germany. Jelly remembered the bombing, the ceaseless fear, letters from Sep, his sister Maisie arriving in tears. Why should she be attacked when she was afraid too?

  ‘Come and stay,’ Anna said, by phone from Sussex.

  ‘I can’t. It’s sweet of you, but I won’t drag you into this insanity,’ said Jelly.

  By night she sometimes fell into a fitful doze that resembled a kind of trance. She seemed to see Sep far away, in a grave; she still knew his face, riven by wounds. Then she seemed to hear him laughing as he left, and she thought he was closer to his companions, those elite young Oxford officers, than he’d ever been to her, and that he preferred their company to that of a gauche little girl who wouldn’t grow up even if she passed 20, or 30, or 40. And the dream merged into another, where he embraced her, then told her that he loved her and
he would come back. That was the worst dream of all.

  ‘Sai, it won’t do!’ Adila exploded, around 11am, when Jelly surfaced, pale and headachey. ‘Snap out of it.’

  It wasn’t that she was nervous, but when the day finally arrived, assuming the Nazis could not stop the performance in February, how could she stand up on the platform of the Queen’s Hall and play one note, wondering whether the audience might laugh at her and perhaps throw things and…

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Adila grabbed a coffee cup and filled it for her. ‘Nobody throws tomatoes in the Queen’s Hall. Nobody throws tomatoes in England. This is the 20th century!’

  ‘I should cancel it.’

  ‘Never! Come on, where is your gumption?’

  *

  The Listener reviewed Horizons of Immortality and the baron was not best pleased. ‘It’s good to have a review at all,’ Adila reassured him, ‘even if it’s hot air that belongs in a different part of their anatomies.’

  ‘Anyone would think there was nothing in this book except the Schumann concerto,’ he grumbled. ‘It’s a few pages, right at the end.’

  Reading the review – by one Harry Price, who apparently had a reputation for exposing fake spiritualists – Jelly was torn between righteous indignation and a suspicion that certain ideas of his could perhaps be worth noting. On the one hand, he declared, if the baron’s book was to be believed, here was proof that the spirit survives the body’s demise. But on the other, he suggested that a ‘sensitive’ could acquire information, forget it, then inadvertently reveal it in a trance or automatic writing. Scientists, he continued, would probably conclude that that was what had happened to the d’Arányis and friends.

  ‘Oh no, my dear,’ Erik said. ‘Don’t worry. The messages come from somewhere much, much deeper than any human mind.’

  Chapter 16

  The day of Georg Kulenkampff’s premiere of the Schumann Violin Concerto in Charlottenburg, Berlin, arrived: 26 November 1937. After an ample breakfast of toast, eggs and smoked herring in a cavernous hotel dining room nearby, Ulli decided to go for a walk.