The Ballroom

by Anna Hope

  He dug her grave himself. Made sure the sides were pared and smooth. He threw his sod on the top of the box, and when it was done they went back for the eating and the drinking. He could see his sisters inside the house. Knew they would be sweeping the floors, setting the clock going again, moving the hands from where they had been halted when his mother died. He wanted no part of that slow, silted time.

  So he walked.

  He walked away from home. Away from his father’s land. Away from his promise. Walked to Kiltimagh and to Claremorris, and from there he walked the road to Dublin. He could get to Liverpool, and America from there.

  There was a great lifting in him. There was only the road ahead.

  He wrote of this to Ella. Or parts of it. Not the women and the imaginings, or the broken promise. He wrote the things he believed she would like to hear. She was like those women, he thought – standing at the doors of their cottages, in their toughness and their loneliness. Staring out.

  He felt lighter when he had written it. He slipped the feather in the folded letter when he was done. For not all feathers were tainted with blood, were they? It was such a light thing, to have to carry so much. Could a feather not be just a feather after all?

  Charles

  CHARLES HEADED NORTH up Bishopsgate, weaving to avoid a throng of labourers outside a pub. From their manner and bearing they had just been released from their Saturday morning’s work and were drinking lustily in the afternoon heat.

  It was a fine day, radiant in the way only early June can approach, and he would have far preferred to have been walking up on the moor than in Leeds, but it was his mother’s birthday, and he had to make the obligatory visit to Roundhay for lunch.

  Many of the drinkers had discarded their shirts, and their torsos were exposed and beginning to broil, their laughter ringing out raucous on the city air.

  The sun did strange things to people. It made them regress. It was obvious from just these last weeks of heat that it was harder for everyone to concentrate on work. He was dressed in light flannel trousers, jacket and boater, and the cotton of his shirt felt deliciously cool against his skin. Such a relief! The asylum staff were forbidden to take off a layer of their stiff black uniforms, however hot it was. These last days Charles had taken to noting the temperature on the thermometer that was nailed to the wall of the kitchen garden. As the column in his notebook grew, the figures remained remarkably steady; the mercury had hardly dipped below seventy-nine for the last two weeks.

  If he approached it scientifically, it helped to quell his own irritability with the heat: once the temperature veered towards eighty, ordinarily quiet people became fractious, less biddable. Troublemakers were more extreme. The stench on the wards was noisome. Surely the weather must break soon?

  How few great empires had sprung from the places where the sun shone? The African, the Indian, the Aboriginal in Australia … what did these races have in common? They were less guided by reason. Surely it must follow that the closer you were to the sun, the more your animal nature was uppermost? It certainly seemed so in Leeds today, where these men, drinking, with their rough voices and their skin so flagrantly displayed, seemed little more than cattle, brawny and red.

  Work on his paper continued, although a little less urgently, he had to admit, in the heat. He had sent away for a copy of Dr Sharp’s publication On the Sterilization of Degenerates, thinking to acquaint himself with the arguments for sterilization that he might the more fully refute them in his own work. Dr Sharp was the chief medical officer of the Indiana Reformatory, a man who had already sterilized many hundreds of patients. It was said that Home Secretary Churchill held him in extremely high regard. But the pamphlet – slim as it was – had lain on his desk unopened for a week.

  Charles pulled out his pocket watch as he headed up Kirkgate – there was a little time in hand, and he’d had the idea that he’d like to visit Spence’s music shop. Since making his list in the spring he’d had no time to address the relentless round of Strauss.

  The bell rang as he entered, but the shop appeared to be deserted. The interior was welcome and cool though, all dark-brown wood and shaded blinds. He stood for a moment in the entrance, letting his eyes become used to the dim light. One side of the shop was taken up with instruments, violins mostly, while the other walls were lined with racks of music. There was no one behind the counter and only one other customer, an elderly gentleman bent over some sheet music on the other side of the room. A dark passage led through to the back. Charles wandered over to the music stands and set himself to browsing, but it was with a distracted manner that he fingered a stack of piano music – Mozart, Chopin, Liszt – before putting them peevishly aside. Whatever he was looking for, it was not that. Not today.

  A soft call came from behind the desk, and he turned to see a young man, not more than twenty, with a head of improbably thick, sandy hair.

  ‘Hello there,’ the young man said. ‘Can you see all right? I closed the blinds for a bit of cool.’

  Charles nodded. ‘Quite all right, thank you.’ He recognized the sound of an educated Yorkshireman, an accent not unlike his own. Upon regarding him, the strangest thought slid into his head: that this man was the opposite of Mulligan, the light to his dark; where Mulligan, despite his relative youth, was hewn from something old and hard, this young man was made from something softer, newer altogether.

  The young man said that he was sorry, he had just been sorting through a delivery. Could he help with anything at all? He had a wide, easy smile. There was the sound of a bell, and Charles turned to see the door being shut behind the other customer.

  He felt suddenly, unaccountably nervous now they were alone, stammering a little over his request, which was simply to say that he played in a small orchestra and wondered if there was anything new to dance to.

  That smile again. The young man thought he had just the thing. They had been sent a fresh batch of tunes from America, the very consignment he had been unpacking when Charles arrived. Perhaps he would like to see?

  Charles followed him into a small, untidy room at the back, stacked floor to ceiling with musical scores, with an upright piano at the far end.

  ‘You’ll think us very messy. It’s a family business, you see, but my uncle is quite as disorganized as I am, so that’s all right.’

  The young man moved towards a bundle wrapped in brown paper, chattering all the while, saying there was one tune in particular that was already something of a hit in London. He pulled a folded sheet from the bundle, took it over to the piano and started to play.

  Charles stood in the doorway, half in, half out of the room, holding on to his hat. He felt his breath change. The music was extraordinary: like hearing something from a dream. Where Strauss was airless, this was oxygen. It bubbled with life. The time signature was fractured, but what should have been disturbing was intoxicating, fresh.

  When the young man had finished, he swivelled round in his seat. ‘Do you like it?’ For a moment he looked even younger, unsure.

  ‘I do,’ Charles managed, taking a step towards him. ‘Very much.’

  The smile was back, wider now. ‘Why don’t you try?’ He jumped up, vacating the seat, indicating that Charles should sit.

  ‘If you’re sure.’ Charles placed his hat on top of the piano and saw that the straw had made painful grooves in his palm where he had gripped it. He took his place on the stool. He could feel the young man behind him, could smell tobacco, but sweetly, and something else, brighter than that. He thought of the sea.

  A little light-headed, he lifted his hands and tried a few bars, but his fingers were clumsy; the young man had played a syncopated rhythm, but Charles seemed stuck in a regimented four-four. He gave a quick, embarrassed laugh as he pulled his hands away. ‘I can’t seem to get it.’

  He twisted, as though to stand up, but the young man touched him gently on the shoulder, gesturing that Charles should make room for him on the stool, which he did, inching to the left,
until one buttock was all but hanging off, hardly daring to breathe, unable to decide whether the experience was pleasurable or painful, as the young man played through the first few bars again. ‘There are lyrics too,’ he grinned, and began, rather unselfconsciously, to sing:

  Oh ma honey! Oh ma honey!

  Better hurry and let’s me-an-der,

  Ain’t you goin’? Ain’t you goin’?

  To the leader man, ragged meter man …

  ‘You have to swing, you see.’ The young man lifted his hands and turned to Charles. ‘They say that Negroes play it best. Down in New Orleans.’

  This last was spoken in an approximation of an American accent, and Charles, understanding it was supposed to be amusing, nodded and laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose they do.’

  The young man wrinkled his nose, as if to show that he was no actor and he knew it, and Charles found himself smiling back.

  Just then the bell rang in the front of the shop, and Charles scrambled to his feet, banging his knee on the underside of the piano.

  ‘Gosh. All right there?’ As the young man reached out, his hand grazed Charles’s arm.

  ‘Yes, I’m …’ He took a step away. ‘I’m fine.’

  The young man nodded. ‘Well, it seems I have a customer. Please.’ He gestured to the piano. ‘Do stay. Take your time.’

  He disappeared into the front room, from where his voice soon sounded, alongside those of a woman and a child. Charles stared at the sheet music, his knee throbbing, hands stinging. The air felt rearranged. The young man’s laughter sounded behind him. The woman’s then too. Whatever he had said she sounded pleased. He was nice. A nice young man. Good at his job. That was all.

  He made himself breathe. Stayed there, swaying a little, until he felt he had mastery of himself. Then he lifted the music from the stand and took it through to the front of the shop.

  The woman and her child were bent over, the child testing out violins for size. The young man was standing close.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ said Charles.

  ‘Very glad to hear it.’ The young man looked up with a smile. He took it back behind the counter, where he slid it into a brown paper bag before ringing it up on the till.

  ‘What do I call it?’ asked Charles. His palms were slippery as he handed over his coins.

  ‘Ragtime. It’s a rag. Perhaps you could come back and let me know how you get on?’

  Charles nodded, half tipsy as he made his way back out on to the street.

  He could feel that rag burning a hole in his music bag as he took a tram across the city to his parents’ house. Oh ma honey! Oh ma honey! Better hurry, and let’s me-an-der. It was as though he were smuggling something colourful and rare and contraband.

  He could hardly sit still as he endured a particularly long and tiresome lunch. He was seated across from his mother, who picked at her food, reaching up and plucking repeatedly at the collar of her dress. It occurred to him that in those repetitive, unconscious movements, she looked for all the world like one of their patients. She could not hide her perspiration, only took out her handkerchief from time to time and dabbed at herself. Her smell, of which Charles caught occasional wafts over the table, was a miasma of the female body and lavender water – as far from the fresh scent of the young man at Spence’s as it was possible to get.

  His father, dressed as usual in a suit of black stuff, looked lumpy and uncomfortable, his skin the colour of steamed suet. Even the meat on Charles’s plate seemed offensive, everything redolent of death and decay: the room itself, the corner table, the aspidistras, the endless ornaments that covered every spare piece of surface – china dogs and china girls, with tiny china parasols – and china, china everywhere and none of it of any practical use at all.

  Purge.

  ‘Purge,’ said Charles.

  ‘What was that?’ His father’s head snapped up.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You said something.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Sounded like “purge”.’

  Charles shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.’

  Silence fell, punctuated by his father’s rigorous chewing and his mother’s softer, more troubled endeavours.

  Charles tugged at his tie. He could hardly breathe. It was true: he wished for something to come and cleanse this house, to get into the corners and shine a light. He imagined a great electric light in the middle of the ceiling, imagined the young man in Spence’s holding it up: how all of the darkened, murky, female corners would be lit by the certain, unblinking light of the future. How his parents would shade their eyes and shrink away.

  His mother was saying something.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Charles dragged himself back to the room.

  ‘The Coronation?’ she was saying. ‘What are your plans? At the … asylum. Will it be marked at all?’

  He pulled a piece of cabbage over his half-eaten meat and placed his knife and fork together on the plate. ‘Of course. I have no doubt that there will be a special tea. A Sports Day too. We’ll be having a tug of war. Patients against the men. I believe I might be pulling myself.’

  This last was not true. Indeed, it was a flagrant lie. The team had been picked, and Charles had been extremely disappointed to see his name was not on the list. He was down for ‘referee’ instead.

  His father snorted. ‘I’d like to see that.’

  Charles’s skin flared.

  His mother gave one of her special rictus smiles. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Won’t that be nice?’

  Charles said nothing. In other times, very recently even, he might have dug in his heels at this juncture, given ever more florid descriptions of the day to come, the splendid cakes and pies that would come forth from the kitchens, made by the patients’ hands, the fancy-dress costumes the staff would labour over, but today was different, today was … rearranged. Today, he saw he would be wasting his breath to gain nothing. Today, all he could hear was a tune in his head: ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’.

  When the dessert spoons had been cleared, he leapt up, went over to the old upright piano in the corner, lifted the lid and picked out a few choice chords of ‘Alexander’, humming the tune over the top.

  ‘Stop!’ His father banged the table. ‘Stop that infernal noise!’

  But Charles did not stop. He played as much as he could remember, drowning his father out. When he had finished, he turned, breathless, back to the table and saw his father had left the room.

  ‘What,’ said his mother, the expression on her face for all the world as though the family cat had deposited a dubious-looking parcel at her feet, ‘was that?’

  ‘Ragtime, Mother!’ said Charles, jumping up, almost knocking the aspidistra from its perch on the occasional table. ‘Ragtime!’

  And then it came to him in a great golden rush: he didn’t care if his father disapproved. Didn’t care what his mother thought. They would see what he could do soon enough. He thought of the letter from the Society, waiting for him in his room at the asylum, tucked into his drawer. He thought of their faces when they learnt of that. He thought of the paper that he was to write, how he was to persuade Churchill of the merits of segregation, and music, and dancing, and work; how he was to save Miss Church from herself and from her books and deliver her to her family, and then – best of all – he thought of John Mulligan’s face in the ballroom, when the orchestra played ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’. Because it was that very thing, in that very moment, that he had decided to do.

  His paper.

  The music.

  The future.

  He left the house humming ‘Alexander’, and the tune carried him all the way back, by tram and train and then by foot, through the bosky, scented evening lanes to Sharston.

  It was late on Wednesday evening, towards the end of orchestra practice, when he brought out the music to the rag.

  On his appointment as bandmaster he had made sure that the orchestra gathered for their rehearsals in
one of the more pleasant of the spaces available – a large, airy meeting room with an aspect over the grounds to the west. As the evening had progressed, the men discarded their jackets and now sat in their shirtsleeves, doors flung open to the summer evening air. The last of the sun was lighting the tops of the wood beyond, turning the green to gold.

  Their rehearsals followed a similar course, each of them taking turns to suggest a number, which they would then stagger through. Tonight they had begun, as usual, with a few bits of Strauss and Lehár, stopping after the first few numbers for a break and a smoke. Jeremy Goffin had taken it upon himself to light candles, forgoing the usual gas lamps, and now the whole scene had rather a timeless, enchanted air.

  Charles brought his music bag on to his lap, fingering the papers inside. During the week he had copied out each instrumental part for ‘Alexander’. They had been pleasingly taxing to transpose; it had been satisfying to watch the dots cluster across the page and to imagine the sounds from each instrument combining to make a whole. He had heard the young man’s voice in his head as he did so: You have to make it swing. That odd little accent he had put on, as though performing a show just for Charles. They say that Negroes play it best. Down in New Orleans.

  He had tried to swing, moving forward and backward in his chair:

  Oh ma honey! Oh ma honey!

  Better hurry and let’s me-an-der.

  It made no sense – and yet it made a delicious sort of sense all the same. And it suited the weather too, something about the laziness of great heat: meander. What a wonderful word that was!

  Ain’t you goin’? Ain’t you goin’?

  To the leader man, ragged meter man?

  Ragged meter man – this surely meant the time signature, a ragged meter, not strict, not straight-edged.

  Let me take you by the hand,

  Up to the man, up to the man,

  Who’s the leader of the band!