The Songs

by Charles Elton

  After the curtain call, as the lights came up, she turned round to leave when suddenly a sepulchral voice boomed over the loudspeakers: “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Kevin Lever.”

  And there was Kevin walking slowly out onto the stage and there was another round of applause as if this was part of the show. He held his hand up and the clapping began to die out.

  “I’m Kevin Lever,” he said. “I am the producer of this show, our wonderful Taste of Honey. I have to tell you something that will break your hearts.”

  Shirley gasped in shock. She knew what Kevin was going to do.

  “Our friend Joseph Carter, the writer of the extraordinary book and lyrics for our show, has been the victim of an appalling attack. His head injuries are very serious indeed and he is being monitored around the clock but our brave friend is hanging on. I know that quite a few journalists are here from London today. Please treat what has happened sensitively. Just concentrate on the show. It meant everything to Joseph.”

  As the news sank in, everyone onstage looked confused for a moment. Then Michelle’s hand went up to her mouth, and she gave a little scream. The cast, which had been in a perfectly composed line behind her for the curtain call, began to dissolve into chaos. People began to weep. Gasps spread through the auditorium.

  Kevin put his hand up again. “Ladies and gentlemen, keep him in your thoughts. A Taste of Honey is like our child. We want it to go to London, we want everyone to see the brilliance that is Joseph Carter.”

  Then he bowed his head and put his hands together as if in prayer. Michelle threw herself into his arms as the cast circled them. The audience were staring open-mouthed as if this was the climax of the show.

  Kevin stepped down from the stage and walked slowly up the aisle followed by the cast. A few people sitting on the edge clasped his hand as he passed. Nobody appeared to want to leave the theater. Kevin stood in the middle with a throng of people around him — not just the cast, but other people who were staring at him in awe. She pushed through the crowd until she reached Kevin’s back. She grabbed his shoulder and he turned round.

  “Shirley…” he said nervously.

  She could hardly move. Her legs felt like concrete. First Joseph and then Alan, and now this cheap publicity stunt. It was as if someone had swept their arm across a mantelpiece and a lifetime of ornaments had crashed to the floor. She was trying to contain her fury so hard that her voice came out as little more than a whisper.

  “You are beneath contempt, Kevin,” she said, and then she did something she could never have believed she would do in a million years: she spat in his face.

  Rose

  I WAS ALWAYS INTERESTED in etymology. The Latin word evitabilis means “evitable”—capable of being avoided. Adding the prefix “in”— meaning “not”— turns it into the antonym: “inevitable.” I liked Latin: it had such a logic to it. Even though I had every reason to be, I was not particularly pessimistic but I thought it significant that the word “evitable” was almost never used when “inevitable” was used all the time. Did that imply that more things in life were unavoidable than avoidable? Certainly Huddie’s death was not going to be unavoidable. I did not know whether what had happened to Joseph was unavoidable or not.

  I normally only read the political and scientific articles in the newspaper because I didn’t want to waste time on the other things: I was not interested in celebrities and show business and sport. That day, I looked at the paper while I was having breakfast before I went into Huddie’s room to get him going for the day, not that his day involved much going.

  When I saw the article, I initially passed over it, but for some reason I went back. It was headed “West End Songwriter Assault — Man Arrested.” Although I knew our half brother was called Joseph, I could not remember his last name so when I saw the reference to him being Isaac Herzl’s son I almost gasped.

  “Huddie!” I shouted.

  The sun was streaming into his room. He never wanted the curtains closed and he left the lights on. I couldn’t have slept like that, but he said that if he woke up in the night, it was easier if the lights were on because he could find the glass of water by the bed. The truth was, I left the glass of water there, filled with fresh water every night, more for old time’s sake than for anything else: he was beyond stretching his arm out for it now. I thought I knew the real reason for leaving the lights on. The drugs he had to take made him groggy and he slept very deeply: he could not bear slowly rising to the surface of a silent dark room and not knowing whether he was alive or dead.

  I touched him gently to wake him up. I didn’t want to shake him too aggressively because he might wake up in a panic and think something awful had happened like the house being on fire and we would not be able to get him out of his room before the place burned down.

  He opened his eyes slowly. “I was dreaming,” he said. Someone else might not have been able to understand what he was saying, but I had got used to it. It was like a language I had learned. It’s hard to talk without being able to move your mouth and tongue much and all conversations with him took a long time.

  “What about?” I asked him.

  “I was dreaming about a cat. A big ginger one. It was climbing up me and I was worried it would lie on my face and suffocate me. But then Placido Domingo pulled it off and brought me a plate of curry.”

  Someone more conventional who had Huddie’s disease would have been dreaming about running or climbing a mountain. Huddie was too original for that.

  “We need Dr. Freud,” he said, and made the little noise he did in his throat when he was trying to laugh.

  “You have to see this,” I said, holding the newspaper up.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s about Joseph.”

  “Joseph?”

  “Yes. He was attacked. He’s in hospital and they’ve arrested someone.”

  “What does it say?”

  I skimmed through it for him: “He was in Manchester doing some musical…He came back from the theater…went to his room…then got beaten up.”

  “Was it a robbery?”

  “I don’t know. Did you know he was fifty-eight?”

  “What? I knew he was older than us.”

  “That’s old enough to be our grandfather!”

  “Well, Iz is old enough to be our great-grandfather.”

  “Someone called Gavriel O’Donnell has been arrested.”

  “What sort of name is Gavriel?” Huddie said.

  “Maybe it’s a misprint for Gabriel.”

  “People called Gabriel don’t beat people up. It’s the name of an angel. Go on.”

  “He was unemployed from Walthamstow. Everything in the article is ‘alleged.’ ”

  “What do you mean?”

  “ ‘It is alleged that unmarried Joseph Carter knew his alleged attacker…It is alleged that Mr. Carter and his alleged attacker had been seen together in the hotel before the alleged attack in Mr. Carter’s hotel room. And it keeps going on about their ages: Joseph Carter, fifty-eight; Gavriel O’Donnell, twenty-two.”

  “I think that’s called subtext,” Huddie said. “It’s silly grown-up code. They’re gay but the paper doesn’t want to come out and say it.”

  We let it sink in for a moment and then I said, “Joseph doesn’t sound much like the kind of child Iz would have had.”

  “Are we like Iz? Anyway, Joseph writes songs, doesn’t he? That sort of runs in the family.”

  “Yes, but he writes musicals. Iz hates that kind of thing. Didn’t he refuse to let us go and see Mamma Mia because he said it would rot our brain?”

  “I suppose being gay is different from Iz. He’s had three wives. Maybe four if he was married to Joseph’s mother.”

  “Do you think Iz knows about him being beaten up?” We looked at each other.

  I heard Carla in the hallway, and I went out to see her. She was with Joan, of course.

  “Have you seen this?” I asked her, holding up the paper.
>
  “Yes, what a shocking story,” she said in her cool way. “I saw it a few days ago. I’ve made sure Lally keeps the papers away from Iz, not that he ever reads them these days.”

  Joan shook her head as if the whole thing was too distasteful. That seemed to be all the discussion I was going to get out of them, because they were getting their coats.

  “Sorry, Rose, we’re late for the demonstration,” Carla said.

  “What demonstration?” I asked, not that I was very interested.

  “To get the council to do more rubbish collections,” Joan said.

  “Rubbish collections?” I said. “Aren’t there any totalitarian regimes to demonstrate about today?”

  Joan gave me an icy stare and then they were out of the door.

  When Lally came in to see us later, I asked her if she knew. She looked rather shifty.

  “Well, yes, I did see it actually. What a horrible story.”

  “Does Iz know?” Huddie said.

  “I’m sorry, dear, I can’t hear what you’re saying. I’m a bit deaf this morning.”

  Lally tended to be deaf when she wanted to be.

  “He’s saying, does Iz know?”

  Lally looked amazed that we might be asking. “No, Rosie, I haven’t told him. We’ve still got a long way to go with the archive. I don’t want him to be distracted.”

  My voice rose in indignation: “Lally — ‘distracted’ isn’t what someone might feel if their son was badly injured. He’d be upset, wouldn’t he?”

  “Well then, I’m certainly not going to tell him,” Lally said. “If he heard about it, he would think back to what happened with him and Joseph all those years ago.”

  “I thought he didn’t look into the past. He ought to know what’s happened.”

  “Maybe if the man was dead, but he isn’t. Of course it’s upsetting, but it would be just as upsetting if it was a stranger. Which he was in a way, really. I don’t mean I’m not sympathetic, of course, but the stories about him…He’s obviously one of the gay ones.”

  “So what? Anyway, you don’t know anything about being gay.”

  “No, you’re right, I don’t, Rosie. There are so few of them in the folk world.”

  “The folk world is not representative of the whole world, Lally!”

  “And all the better for it. He was obviously having some kind of relationship with that boy. So young! What do you think about that?”

  “What about Iz with Molly and Carla? He was thirty years older than both of them!”

  “There’s really no comparison,” Lally said primly. “He has so much to teach a young person. The boy certainly didn’t learn anything from Iz when we met him.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Well, only once.”

  “When?”

  “Oh years ago. He must have been fifteen or so. You know, I didn’t entirely take to him, though I suppose he was just trying to do his best. He was a bit stuck-up, to be honest. The name Iz had given him when he was born was Joe Hill Herzl — such a distinguished name! — but he said he preferred to be called Joseph, which I thought was a bit rude to Iz. And, what’s more, he used his mother’s surname, Carter.”

  “Who was his mother?”

  “Well, it was before my time, dear, but I think she was a bit of a middle-class girl pretending to be radical. She just wanted a piece of Iz, like so many people did. I think she might have tricked him into getting her pregnant. Anyway, Iz never saw her after the baby was born. I think she died later. Her parents brought him up. Iz tried to see the boy, but they refused to let him. They thought he was a communist activist, which of course he was in a way. The grandparents obviously poisoned the child. And the boy did something horrible to Iz later, a sort of betrayal, really.”

  “What did he do?” I asked, intrigued.

  “You’ll have to ask Iz. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  “Well then, there’s no point asking him, is there?”

  “Of course children always find fault with their parents,” Lally went on. “Iz did — but he had a very bourgeois upbringing and he was right to rebel against it. It’s different for you and Huddie. Don’t stray from Iz like that boy, Joe, has done. Writing songs for musicals — what a waste of Iz’s legacy. Don’t you two waste it as well. You must celebrate Iz and everything he is.”

  Maurice

  MAURICE FIRST SAW Isaac Herzl on the lane that ran round the back of his uncle’s farm a few weeks after he had arrived in Kent. A boy roughly Maurice’s own age was trying to ride an old nag which was resolutely refusing to move. There were some others who were cheering him on, sprawled in the back of the cart the horse was meant to be pulling. The boy on the horse was the one who seemed to be the leader and he was the one Maurice watched, even though the two girls on the cart might have drawn his eye more, particularly the one who had short curly hair and breasts you could see beneath her baggy dungarees and T-shirt.

  The boy was leaning forward and slapping the horse’s neck with his hands, but it just stared ahead, motionless. Trying to stay upright without a saddle, gripping the horse’s sides with his thighs, he kept slipping off to one side and when someone in the cart suddenly jiggled the reins and one of the others shouted, “Get a move on, Iz!” the horse was startled into a jerky canter that dislodged the boy and left him doing the splits, one leg over the horse and the other dragging along the ground. When he finally came off and hauled himself to his feet, he was almost weeping with laughter, bent over holding his sides trying to catch his breath.

  Watching from the other side of the gate at the corner of the field, Maurice had been very still but as he edged forward to get a better view his movement caused one of the girls in the cart to catch sight of him. In an instant, like an animal sensing danger, she shot a warning glance over to the others and they suddenly fell silent. Iz took a moment to pick up the signal but then his eyes found Maurice. He stared warily and then did something strange: he winked at him and burst into laughter. Maurice, suddenly embarrassed, spun on his heels and hurried up the track even though that was not where he planned to go and he had to pass through the boggy mess where the stream had overflowed.

  Later, when he asked his uncle Jack who they were, he called them “the Jew-boys next door” even though the farm they were on, apparently owned by a Jewish organization, was at least a mile away. With a look of distaste on his face his uncle said he hoped the police were keeping an eye on them, they were up to no good.

  It was like that in the country, Maurice thought: people were suspicious of anyone different, although these ones just seemed to be getting on with their work like everyone else — the deadly slog of farming that seemed grimmer to him every day. It was not like this on Levin’s farm in Anna Karenina or in Far from the Madding Crowd where workers, although poor and exploited, found some measure of dignity through their labor. Of course, they might have had more if exploitative land barons had not owned the land they worked on.

  His uncle had three hundred acres, but Maurice found it hard to think of him as a land baron and, if the truth was told, was a little disappointed that he did not fit more obviously into that category. His uncle seemed just as downcast as the workers: none of the swagger you might have expected from a grandee, no sable coats or stovepipe hats or silver-tipped canes.

  After a few days on his farm, Maurice realized why his parents did not see his uncle very often. For his mother, her brother must have been a grim reminder of all the reasons she had left this shabby farm in Kent to reinvent herself as a Godalming matron. She would not have liked to have their elegant summer parties or one of her animal charity fund-raisers in the filthy, damp farmhouse with the stained ceilings that she had grown up in. Nor would a party tent have looked good in the yard with its cracked concrete and broken fences and cow shit everywhere.

  Her brother was clearly much better for her in the abstract where her description of him as the local squire would not be contradicted by his grubby appearance. Mor
e than that, he was not very pleasant to be with. He was a silent, gaunt figure who limped around the farm because there was something wrong with his leg. Whatever it was, it looked painful. Sometimes Maurice would find him in the kitchen taking soiled bandages off his leg and putting new ones on — there seemed to be a lot of pus and blood. It must be hard to be a crippled farmer, Maurice thought. He suspected that his uncle had been swayed by the idea of free labor rather than any desire to forge links with his nephew.

  Every evening, when the light began to go, Maurice came back to the farmhouse and his uncle would give a grunt and a nod of his head that was probably a greeting. There was food on the table for him — bread and soup from vegetables that had been grown on the farm, sometimes a little fatty meat or scrawny chicken. It was always the bony bits. What happened to the breast? Maybe his uncle kept it for himself — it was typical of a landowner to give the workers the worst rations and eat the best — but Maurice never saw him eat. He did see him drink, though: when he went upstairs after supper his uncle was usually sitting in a tattered armchair in the kitchen with a bottle of gin beside him listening to the radio.

  Maybe his uncle stayed up all night floating dreamily like people did in opium dens in China: Maurice hardly ever heard him come up to bed, nor did he ever hear him use the squalid bathroom either. A faint smell came off him — a mixture of old sweat and cow shit.

  Several times a week his uncle sharpened his knives on a strap with fevered intensity. They were his meat knives, and he used them to cut up great haunches of flesh on the kitchen table, most of it to be sold but the scraggy bits kept for them to eat. There were gashes on the table stained with dark blood which his uncle never seemed to clean. You could probably catch some horrible disease, but Maurice did not give it much thought: he was always too hungry to worry. Sometimes he found his uncle counting his money, the earnings from selling farm produce for cash, and he would hurriedly turn his back if Maurice came in unexpectedly. He thought that Maurice had not seen him stuffing the notes in a saucepan, putting the lid on and pushing it to the back of the cupboard under the sink.