by Sue Gee
Margot’s memories of her mother faded. The great deep house remained. When she came home for the holidays she jumped down from the trap and ran over the flags. She kissed the brass knob above the letter box, stood looking about her as Barrow led the pony back to the stable yard. The branches of the cedar rose and fell in the wind; the swing swung to and fro. To the right of the door, at the corner of the house, stood a huge old forsythia, which tossed in the long wet spring, shaking yellow flowers all over the flagstones, floating in pools in the hollows. Her mother had painted a watercolour of it: windy sky, grey stone, lemon-bright flowers and shining water. It hung on the landing now.
Indoors, Margot put down her schoolbag and kissed the case of the grandfather clock. She stood in the shadowy hall, feeling suddenly very alone, and watched the rose-pink smiling sun above the face move infinitesimally to the right. She waited for the chime to welcome her. Her own grandfather had listened to it, when he was a boy: her father had told her that.
‘You’re back!’
He came out of the library to greet her, his dog behind him, as the clock began to strike. She flew into his arms.
2
And now the pale profile of the moon rose slowly behind the faded numerals, trailing his dusky-mauve clouds. Half-past six on this October evening, the whirr of cogs and wheels, before the chimes began. ‘Dah-dah-dah-dah,’ as Margot and her mother used to sing it, climbing the stairs to the candlelit nursery, and Nanny. ‘Dah-dah-dah-dah!’ Next morning it was Miss Renner, putting out the school books at a quarter to nine: ‘Dah-dah-dah-dah, Dah-dah-dah-dah! Dah-dah-dah-dah . . .’
‘Bong! Bong!’ Frank and Diana and George, arriving on the stroke of nine for lessons.
That was a long time ago, before Miss Renner became too sad to sing; and now the half-closed eyes of the moon appeared, smiling his secret smile as the clock began to strike. Already people were arriving. ‘Dah-dah-dah-dah!’ sang Margot, churning with nervous energy, running downstairs in her long dark dress and jacket.
‘All right, darling? All set?’
‘Yes, thank you, Father.’
He stood with his back to the hall fire, the dog beside him. Firelight played over the hearth. A car swished up in the wet. Old Barrow’s daughters were on duty as usual: Grace at the door, and Nellie in the kitchen, setting glasses on trays, smoothing back her hair. Footsteps came hurrying over the flags, and umbrellas were shaken out in the porch, a Victorian addition to Newton’s plain facade. The doorbell rang commandingly.
‘Good evening, sir, madam. May I take your coats?’ Little Grace Barrow, soon to be married and saving hard, carried wet wool and tweed to the stand. The dog left Thomas Heslop’s side and nosed his way to the cold hands of every guest. Wag wag, pat pat.
‘Hello, boy, hello, hello. Good evening, Tom.’
‘Good evening! Good to see you.’
A Hillman, a Rover, then a purring Bentley, slowed and turned in from the streaming road. The cedar tossed above them and the swing swung wildly.
‘A terrible evening!’ Umbrellas dropped in the big brass stand.
‘But lovely to have a concert to look forward to.’ A little cloche hat starred with raindrops was lifted carefully off a glossy bob. ‘Thank you, Grace.’
The Lindsays, the Gills and the Rutherfords, driving through the dark from Coquet Bridge, Wallington, Morpeth, Fenrather.
‘Look at that fire!’
The doorbell again. The Liddells, bringing old friends.
Then: ‘Nanny!’
Diana pressed forward, took her old hands.
‘Hello, pet.’
Then: ‘Miss Renner – how lovely of you to come.’
‘You’re looking very well, my dear.’
Miss Renner herself was looking as straight and composed as ever – but perhaps the lines round her mouth had deepened, thought Diana, as Grace took the long brown coat. All on your own, for twenty years! How could anyone bear it?
‘Emily.’ Thomas Heslop straightened up from the log basket. ‘Come and get warm. And you, Nanny, that’s it. We’ll go through in a minute.’
‘I hope the fire’s stoked up in that drawing room.’ Nanny held out her hands to the blaze. ‘Where’s my Margot?’
‘Here I am!’
Into her arms, still so warm and strong.
‘Remember me?’ asked George, swanning up in his bow tie.
‘I wouldn’t forget a scamp like you, Master George.’
‘Mr Liddell, thank you, Nanny. Mr Liddell!’ He shimmied away.
Ring ring.
The Embletons! Diana greeted her parents with a kiss.
‘You look lovely, darling.’ And she did, thought her mother, stroking the soft fair hair, so pretty against concert midnight blue. ‘Nervous?’
‘Just a bit. Hello, Frank. Having a good half-term?’
‘Very good, thanks. Let me introduce you—’
Yes: who was this, standing tall and so pale beside her brother?
‘My friend, Steven Coulter,’ Frank announced, and to Steven: ‘My little sister.’
And then there was talk of how Diana and Steven knew one another’s names, and of course, he taught with Frank, didn’t he, and how nice of him to come. Was he musical?
Stephen shook his head. ‘Not at all, I’m afraid.’
‘But I twisted his arm,’ said Frank, as the clock began slowly to strike the hour. ‘I dug him out of his lair.’
‘I say!’ George was beside them. ‘Anyone remember we’re giving a concert? Hello, Frank. Hello, whoever you are. This way!’
A snow-white programme on every chair, the shutters closed against the rain, the room lit by lamps and candles. A buzz, as people took their seats. Sitting down next to Frank, Steven looked about him: at plaster moulding, pictures, a table heaped with books and copies of The Field, a silver cigarette case shining beneath a lamp. The room smelled of logs and candle wax and expensive scent: he knew it was expensive, though no woman he had ever known had ever worn anything like it. Soap. Lavender water. That was what he knew. There was also the smell of dog: leaning forward, he saw the black Labrador, flopped before the fire with its marble mantelpiece. It felt like the one thing here he could connect with. A boy with a dog, out walking through the past.
The musicians had taken their places at the far end of the room, were opening their scores.
‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ Frank, beside him, was bending back the programme, and Steven opened his own. Piano trios. Of course he knew the composers, but these pieces meant nothing to him. Brahms: Piano Trio No. 1 in B major, Op. 8 – he had no idea. Would he even be able to absorb it? Beyond hymns sung at church in childhood, and now at school assembly; beyond an occasional concert at Durham, he knew so little of music. And though Frank had said he didn’t know much either, that couldn’t be true. His usual kind modesty was surely at work: he’d grown up with it, through his friends and his sister, even if he didn’t play.
It was Margaret who had been musical, who sang about the cottage, and on their walks together.
‘We shall have a family, a girl for you, a boy for me . . . ’
Her hand swung in his. The words blew away across the windy moor.
Illness had reduced that high clear voice to a whisper.
Someone was tinkling a fork against a glass: the room fell silent. Then Margot Heslop stepped forward from the piano, and gave her welcome – such a dreadful night, so good of you all; Brahms and Schubert, do hope you enjoy. She sat down again with the others: the tuning-up began.
Steven watched them: on the right, Diana Embleton, so pretty and fair in a full dark dress, bent over the cello between her knees; on the left, George Liddell, the eager little violinist, whose name Frank had told him as they came through, now tightening a string. Between them, in profile, Margot Heslop was composed, graceful, straight-backed. She stru
ck a note or two; George and Diana drew their bows across the strings. A girl he hadn’t noticed stood up from her chair beyond the piano, and stepped forward.
‘The little page turner,’ Frank murmured. ‘One of Margot’s pupils.’
‘She teaches?’
‘They all do – family support only goes so far. And it’s good for them.’
The tuning-up was over. Somebody coughed, and was silent. The Hepplewick Trio glanced at one another, and Steven saw a connection, a swift understanding run between them. That same sense of a team seen out on the cricket pitch. And then the Brahms began.
Nothing could have prepared him for its effect. The gentlest tune, something instantly inviting, so lyrical and tender that he felt tears prick his eyes, and at once—
Oh, Margaret. Oh, my love . . .
He hadn’t written to her for weeks. With the start of the autumn term he’d made himself concentrate: up at first light, striding down the track, his mind on the Lower Fifth: Henry VII, Wolsey, the Star Chamber. At night, when yearning and solitude filled him, he murmured her name, drew her to him, but soon fell exhausted to sleep. No letters, no river of love on the page.
But now—
The cello was taking the lead, repeating that lovely phrase, and now the violin began to soar.
I want you here, I want you beside me. I want you listening to this . . .
At the interval, they all poured across the hall to the dining room. A fire burned here too, beneath another marble mantelpiece, with a portrait of a horse hung above it.
‘Thank you, thank you.’ Everyone had warmed up now; they took drinks from the trays which Nellie and Grace grasped tightly, moving through the throng. ‘Well, wasn’t that good?’
They all knew each other, it seemed, all talking away. Steven was used to boys, and the staffroom; he couldn’t remember when he’d last been at a gathering like this, knowing no one. Frank said, ‘I’ll get you a drink. And you must meet my sister.’ And he stood there waiting, like a new boy on the first day of term.
‘You’re a big lad now,’ he heard his mother say suddenly, at the gates of his infant school. ‘Be off with you.’ But then came his father, a man of few words, liking best the long quiet hours in his workshop, with its sweet smell of sawdust and planking. ‘If you’ve nowt to say, say nowt.’
Steven had nowt to say now: he was still full of the music, which he had no idea how to talk about; still so full of longing that for a moment he almost saw her, moving easily through the crowded room, her loose red-brown hair glinting in the lamplight, talking and laughing with a teacher’s confidence; then coming to stand by his side, slip her hand in his.
Oh, darling . . .
‘Hello.’
Diana Embleton was suddenly before him: he took in a cloud of pale hair and light scent, pink-and-white skin above rustling taffeta. ‘My brother’s not looking after you, he’s so naughty. I hope you enjoyed that.’
‘Very much.’ He cleared his throat, gave a smile. ‘I’m afraid I don’t really know about music, but—’
‘There are a million things I don’t know about,’ she said.
‘I can vouch for that.’ Frank was back, glasses in hand.
‘Oh, you. What have you been doing?’
‘What does it look like?’ He gave Steven a glass, and his sister another. ‘Well done, Di: that was lovely.’
‘How kind.’
Frank put a hand on Steven’s arm. ‘You must meet some more people.’
‘He’s only just met me.’
Listening to this banter, not really knowing how to match it, Steven glanced away. That was a very fine horse, above the fireplace, a fine black hunter whom someone must once have ridden at a gallop. A little knot of people was gathered by the fire beneath it: a stout, middle-aged couple and a tall greying man in a grey silk tie. Beside him stood Margot Heslop, and he saw that she had the same brow as this man, who must be her father, and the same dark eyes.
He sipped his drink. And he noticed the sombre eyes of her father in particular, because although Heslop appeared to be listening attentively to the talk, his gaze was often not on Margot, nor on their companions, but directed across the room – to his own little group, in fact, where Diana and Frank Embleton stood laughing together, two young people so attractive, so at ease with one another, you might almost have thought them a couple.
The rain beat on against the windows. Back in the drawing room, the Trio was tuning up once more as everyone took their places. Steven opened the programme again.
Schubert: Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat major. He thought Schubert might have been played at Durham, in one of the concerts he’d gone to, as he’d gone to exhibitions now and then, to broaden his mind. It had needed some broadening. On the whole, looking at paintings had moved him more.
The windows shook in their casements. Margot turned from the piano, and the delicate precision of that glance between the three of them caught at him again. Their heads went down. They began to play.
The opening was so strong and energetic that at first he felt overpowered. He sat gazing at Margot’s hands, the extraordinary speed and control with which they ran over the keyboard, her arms outstretched. And then, as the piece developed, he became fascinated by all of them: by George’s complete authority, and immersion – the way he lifted his bow at the end of a phrase, almost flung it; how he bent to the violin once more, as if they were in the deepest relationship – which, beginning to listen more attentively, Steven realised they were. As for Diana: she was transformed from the laughing, bantering young woman he’d just met to someone serious and intent. She frowned, she bent low. Once, when she took the lead, she raised her eyes from the music as if listening to something else, something beyond her own playing. Then she turned once again to the score.
He’d been too full of emotion in the Brahms to take in what he began to understand a little now: that the whole piece was a conversation between their instruments, a move from question to answer, from gentle enquiry to passionate response. He realised that he was never unaware of the piano, and that the physicality of such playing was extraordinary – for all of them, hugely demanding; but when he watched Margot’s slender body half lift from the stool in a fast, dramatic passage, as if she couldn’t stop herself, he began to wonder at what it must do to you, to play like this. And at who you must be, to want to make it your life.
The mood of the music was changing. What had been forceful and emphatic was all at once offering a theme which tore at him: soft, enquiring, oh, so sad.
And now he couldn’t look at any of them. He put his head in his hands.
‘You’re not well?’ Frank asked him, as the applause broke out at a triumphantly dramatic finale. He was full of concern.
‘I’m fine.’ Steven straightened up, feeling dazed. ‘Sorry. That was wonderful.’
Before them, the Trio were making their bows, and someone called out ‘Bravo!’ They bowed again, then stood before their audience, faces alight. ‘Bravo!’
You would love this, darling—
He made himself stop – Pull yourself together! He joined in the clapping as Diana Embleton bowed low, like a flower bent by the wind. Margot was smiling at her father, who was on his feet, with others rising behind him. And though he had been so moved, so swept up by feeling, for the second time this evening Steven now noticed something: George Liddell, energy and emotion crackling off him, was raking the audience intently, clearly looking for someone, until he smiled quickly, flushing, and looked away.
Supper, and they returned to the dining room, where the long mahogany table, china and glass on snowy linen, had been pushed up towards the far wall. Another portrait hung there, above the heads of the Barrow girls, serving in white aprons: a couple in eighteenth-century dress beneath a feathery tree, a long-nosed hunting dog at the man’s side, two children leaning against their mother. A
landscape stretched mistily away behind them.
Steven nodded towards it as he and Frank took their places in the queue.
‘Who are they?’
‘That’s the first Thomas Heslop and his family. He looks like a landowner, doesn’t he, but he made all his money in coal.’
‘Like a lot of old families,’ said Steven, wondering how the Embletons had made theirs. Coal, shipbuilding, tanning, engineering: mighty Northumbrian industries, something to be proud of, as Straughan told the boys in Assembly every year; and every one of them now in decline.
‘Me uncle’s on National Assistance.’
Around them the talk was of the concert, but not only of that, and Steven sensed that perhaps he wasn’t the only person here who didn’t know a great deal about what they had heard; that friends and neighbours were glad of an evening out, but had other things on their minds once it was over. Hunting. Politics. He heard ‘Mussolini,’ and turned to see a large fair-haired man holding forth, and then his pretty wife protest: ‘Oh, Charles, please not now.’
Someone was lightly touching his arm. He turned to see Margot, dark and straight as an arrow, almost as tall as he was. After all she had given to the music, her composure, it seemed, was recovered.
‘May I introduce you to my father? Father, this is Steven Coulter. He teaches with Frank at Kirkhoughton.’
Beside her, Thomas Heslop held out his hand. ‘How do you do.’
‘How do you do, sir.’
Small talk followed. Yes, Heslop knew the school, or rather its reputation. Harry Straughan was a good man, it seemed. And Steven taught history?
‘Frank’s my Head of Department.’
Frank gave a bow beside him. ‘I try to keep the place in order.’
‘You’ve done well,’ said Heslop. ‘We always knew you would.’
‘Unlike the rest of us,’ Margot said drily, and he patted her arm.
‘You know I didn’t mean that.’ He turned back to Steven. ‘You enjoyed the concert, I hope. Good, aren’t they?’
