Music, in a Foreign Language

by Andrew Crumey

  Duncan was running around now looking for more pieces of tree branch.

  ‘Do you think they’ll want to interview you again, Robert?’

  ‘I expect so. Look Charles, it’s you I’m worried about. If they want to do anything about Flood, then they may be after you.’

  Charles was biting at his lip. ‘How the hell could they have found out? Do you think they knew about it all the time, and this book of yours has brought it to a head?’

  ‘Oh, that’s lovely Duncan. Go and show it to Mummy. Charles, I don’t know. There was nothing they could have found when they searched my office; I destroyed everything to do with Flood a long time ago. I think the only explanation is that someone has given them some information.’

  ‘But who?’

  ‘Someone close enough to one or other of us to be able to find something out. Strange, isn’t it, that it all coincided with Jenny’s arrival here last weekend.’

  ‘Oh Robert, don’t be stupid.’

  Behind them, Anne was looking at some red flowers which Duncan had pulled up by the roots. ‘Do you come to Cambridge every weekend, Jenny?’

  ‘This is only the second time.’

  ‘You haven’t known Charles very long?’ More than two months, Jenny told her. ‘The beginning is always the best time,’ said Anne, ‘isn’t it?’ She was twirling the red flowered stems between her fingers. Duncan had lost interest in them now, and was looking for something else.

  Sitting on the edge of Charles’s bed; reaching down to open the drawer. Missing your body. Anne. A card from the Fitzwilliam. No date.

  The two men were still far ahead.

  ‘Charles, think hard. Is there anything you might have told Jenny about me, or about Flood?’

  ‘It’s not the sort of thing I would discuss with her, Robert. I hardly know her, really.’

  ‘Has she ever been alone in your flat?’

  ‘No. She was there last night … but you were interviewed on Monday.’

  ‘She was with you all of last weekend, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes – hardly out of my sight. She spent most of the time typing my paper.’

  ‘Where was she when she was typing?’

  ‘In the sitting room, at the dining table. I played piano for her.’

  ‘All day?’

  ‘No, not all day. We did other things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Use your imagination, Robert.’

  ‘But not all day, Charles. Was there any period of time when she was in your flat and you didn’t know what she was doing?’

  ‘Well, I could hardly be watching her the whole time – but Robert, what could she have found?’

  ‘Have you still got a copy of Flood somewhere?’

  ‘I don’t know – oh, Robert, you can’t honestly expect me to begin suspecting Jenny; she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Do you want me to start spying on her?’

  ‘We don’t know that she isn’t already spying on us. She happens to get nosy in your flat. She happens to find something – she gets frightened, she realizes there’s a side to you she doesn’t know; that you once wrote subversive pamphlets. She wonders what she’s getting involved with – it frightens her, Charles. Makes her aware how little she knows you. It works on her imagination – the next day she takes it to the police.’

  ‘No, she couldn’t have taken it to the police.’

  ‘Did you see her off at the train station?’

  ‘For God’s sake Robert, what are you talking about? What evidence … ?’

  ‘Charles, they know about Flood. They can do what they like with us now. They had to find out somehow.’

  Further behind, Jenny and Anne were talking about Duncan, who was trotting along beside them.

  ‘He starts school next year. I might go back into teaching then.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll have any more?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’m happy enough with things as they are.’ But Anne didn’t strike Jenny as a happy woman.

  ‘You met Robert through Charles, didn’t you?’

  Anne’s face flushed. ‘Is that what Charles told you?’

  ‘He only mentioned it – that he was a mutual friend.’

  The two men had stopped ahead at a gate. Duncan ran to them, and then the women caught up. The gate was fastened with a padlock and chain. Charles offered to help them over.

  ‘Are we allowed?’ said Anne.

  ‘Don’t see why not.’ Charles had already climbed over it. ‘Do you want to take my hand, Anne?’ Jenny watched as the other woman reached out for Charles’s grip; his free hand reaching for her side as she swung over the top of the gate. Then Robert helped Duncan over, and now it was Jenny’s turn. It was alright, she told Charles, she could manage.

  ‘Perhaps we should only go a little further,’ said Anne; ‘Duncan’s looking a bit tired. Then we could go back to the car and drive on for lunch.’

  ‘I’m not tired, Mummy!’

  ‘But I’m sure you’d like some lunch, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  They carried on. Robert and Charles now lagged behind.

  ‘So what do you want me to do, Robert?’

  ‘Be very, very careful. Make sure there’s nothing that could be used against you – search your flat from top to bottom, before someone does it for you.’

  ‘Do you really think they’ll take any action?’

  ‘It’s up to them. There still might not be much hard evidence – even if they had a copy of Flood from your place, there’s no proof that either of us was involved. It would only be possession – a fine, perhaps.’

  ‘But it was you they questioned about it; how did they know you were in it too?’

  Robert slowed down a little. ‘I’ve got a theory about that. When I went for the interview, they said it wasn’t about the vetting; they wanted me to help them find someone else – as if it was a completely separate inquiry. Then they asked me all about Ganymede. I think they might want me to give them information about you. If they had a copy that Jenny found in your place, then they’d want to know where it came from; who wrote it, distributed it and so on. And so they would want someone close to you to find out as much as possible. To inform on you. I think that’s what they wanted from me. Though of course they’ll get nowhere with me.’

  ‘But then there’s Jenny.’

  ‘They can use all sorts of pressure, Charles. There must be God knows how many ways they could blackmail her into helping them. Is she married?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  The women had stopped again. Duncan was saying he was tired, and he wanted his lunch now. Anne suggested they turn back.

  Duncan sat on Robert’s shoulders while they walked back to the car. He had a long piece of grass in his fist, which he used to tickle the heads of the others. Only Jenny seemed interested in this game; she would walk in front of Robert, and from his high position Duncan would play the stem of grass on Jenny’s hair, until she would pretend that there was some unknown irritation on her head which she would reach for blindly. The walk back to the car went quickly. Nobody said much.

  PART THREE

  13

  The train journey from Cremona to Milan takes me nearly an hour each way, Monday to Friday. A long time to spend on a train every week, but better than having to live in Milan. And it gives me ample time to do my writing – already we have reached Chapter Thirteen, and I’ve been at it barely a month! At this rate, it will all be finished before summer.

  I have always loved trains; my earliest memories are of my father taking me to watch the steam locomotives puffing along the tracks which must have been near the house we lived in then. Of that house, I have only the barest of recollections; a pattern on the stair carpet, or the scrolling plumes of steam once from an unattended kettle (which made me think the house and our belongings might all be burned to the ground). But the visits to the railway line are much clearer in my mind. We would watch from a hill the line below
us, within view of the signal further up the track. All would be quiet, and I would wait, like an angler watching his float, for the twitching of the signal blade. ‘Singal! Singal!’ I would shout, then soon afterwards an engine would come chugging past. I would wave with the hand that wasn’t held by my father, and I would see the driver look up and wave back. I see them still, those drivers – or perhaps it’s only a single engineer that my mind has preserved, then repainted with a dozen different faces and gestures – but the one I see most vividly had blue overalls and a cap, and even from the distance at which we stood, I could see the dirt and grease on his face and waving arm. And perhaps this is part of the attraction of trains for little boys – that the job of engine driver is one in which not only are you allowed to be dirty, but it is your duty to get as dirty as you possibly can.

  Precisely what my father did during these visits, I do not know. For me, he was at those moments nothing more than a mute anchor, holding me at the crest of the hill in case I should slip or decide to run in my excitement. The trains, I see now, could have held no interest for him; his only delight could have been my own pleasure. I wonder if he stole those moments by the railway track in order to be alone with his thoughts. Perhaps if I had ever had children of my own, I might have been able to discover an answer.

  But Eleonora made it clear from the start that the role of mother was something for which she was no more suited than I was to be a priest. And it’s not the sort of thing you can get round by arguing and debating. Sometimes I felt as if I had won her over; I would watch the way she admired the children of others, or spoke about pregnant friends. But the charm of others’ children, I realized, was precisely that – that they weren’t hers.

  I first met Eleonora on a train not unlike the one on which I am now sitting. It was not long after I had first settled here; still my foreignness and bad Italian made the smallest things a great effort requiring a good deal of thought. It was a relief to me to find myself sitting alone on the train, not having to try and make myself understood. But when Eleonora came and sat on the row of seats opposite mine, and politely acknowledged my presence, I felt a greater than usual desire to put my thoughts into words – those, at least, which I wished her to hear.

  I talked to her about the state of things in Britain, and my reasons for giving up my life there for exile in Italy. And I explained to her that whereas in my home country I had been a lecturer in mathematical physics, I now earned my living by giving English lessons.

  She said she lived in Milan, and could I take her as a student, and I decided that although I was already committed to more teaching than I would like, I could still fit her in – say, on Friday evenings. She found a scrap of paper and wrote down her details for me, and this was when I learned her name: Eleonora Cosini. Like Zeno, I said (I had once attempted Svevo’s masterpiece), but she didn’t pick up the allusion, and so I made nothing more of it, since my aim was to seem sophisticated rather than clever. And then I said it reminded me of cosine, and she agreed it was the sort of name to appeal to a mathematician.

  I shan’t tire you with a lengthy description of Eleonora. Imagine a woman who seems striking and intelligent rather than conventionally beautiful, and whose manner manages at once to beckon and to forbid, and you will have as good a picture of her as I can paint. I didn’t think at the time she was the sort of woman I could love in the warm sense, but her coolness came to fascinate me. And the years we had together before she passed away proved to be a time of happiness – only now that she’s gone do I realize quite how happy I was.

  But now we’re already at the first stop, and some people are getting on. Perhaps my habit of writing only on the train is not such a good one – the constant interruptions mean I’m forever losing the thread. I want to carry on the story of Duncan and Giovanna, but already I’m forgetting what was happening to them, because I always begin each journey with a sheaf of blank paper (otherwise I might lose everything one day, which would be very unfortunate after so much work), so it’s difficult for me to go back over what I’ve already written. Under such conditions, a certain amount of repetition or self-contradiction is inevitable. But this needn’t be a cause for too much inconvenience; is life not full of anomalies and contradictions? It was only in mathematics that I was ever able to find any degree of consistency with which to console myself, but I gave that up twenty years ago.

  Most other travellers use the time to read – newspapers or books. But I never read newspapers, and with books I have always had an uneasy relationship. I’m attracted by a good title, or an attractive cover. And I’m particularly careful to check the number of pages before I part with any money, because if there’s more than three hundred there’s little chance of me ever getting to the end. Although, of course, the end is always the first part I look at; being left-handed, my way of flicking through a book is to begin by opening it at the last page then leafing back to the start.

  If I find a page or two which seem interesting, and if the book satisfies all the other requirements, and if I have enough money at the time (I often fall at this final hurdle) then I buy it, and spend an hour or two in the evening totally engrossed in the fictions which the author chooses to parade before me. Taking the book with me on the train next day would be futile – I know I would end up gazing out of the window, or else reading the same page from top to bottom a dozen times or more – none of it making the slightest impression on my imagination – while my mind would slip away of its own accord towards some more interesting topic. And so I leave the book at home, patiently awaiting my return, when I pick it up and try to get back into the state of excited involvement with which I had lain it down.

  But getting back into a book is rather like crawling into your unmade bed – what was warm and inviting, and fitted perfectly your needs, now seems cold and stale. You twist and turn, you writhe and fidget; the book now has lost some of its appeal. Still I persevere, but the following night I perhaps decide to take the evening off; the book lies forlornly on the arm of the sofa with the marker hanging limply from somewhere near the front. Eventually, after a few more evenings of desultory page turning, I will put the thing out of its misery, and consign it to its grave on the shelf. In this way, I must have read the beginnings of a thousand novels, and never managed to persevere with more than a dozen of them.

  And this life of literary promiscuity – constantly hopping from the pages of one writer to those of another – has its effect on my own attempts to write. Because always when I sit myself on the train with the paper wedged against me in defence against the jolts of the carriage, it’s the voice of the writer who last spoke to me which fills my mind, more so than whatever I put on paper during my previous journey – and this, coupled with my natural tendency to seek approval through imitation, inevitably leads me to try and modify my own voice accordingly; each day a new act of ventriloquism, as one book after another is sent to the sagging shelves and forgotten.

  Eleonora, on the other hand, was an avid reader; she consumed books with all the passion and enthusiasm that I might bestow on a good steak – and just as I am with food, so was she with her reading; she could never leave a book without digesting every word, to the very end. Sometimes I would find her sitting with her feet up (in those awful slippers) and she would tell me what a dreadful book it was that she was currently immersed in. A day or two later and she would still be there, wading uncomfortably through the pages, until at last she would pass final judgement on it – the opinion which she had already formed before reaching the second chapter.

  I think often of Eleonora – I’m surprised by the memories which choose to appear, at the most inappropriate moments; things I had totally forgotten about. But it’s difficult to take the train each day without sometimes remembering what it was like when we first met. The thing which prompted our initial conversation was the book I was reading – the Racconti Impossibili of Alfredo Galli. In those days, twenty years ago, I still made the pretence of reading on trains sinc
e I felt it was somehow good for me. I had already read Galli years before in Britain; it was one of the few books which I actually wanted to finish, and – having finished – begin again.

  Eleonora sat down opposite me, and although I had been happy to sit in silence, I now felt a strong desire to express myself as fluently as I could. She smiled politely to acknowledge my presence, and I wished her good day. I could see at once that my foreign accent had made some kind of impression; her eyes flickered like the pointer on a sensitive instrument. But she said nothing more. Her eyes flicked down to register the cover of the book I was reading. Later I was to realize that she had chosen to come and sit in this compartment – which was occupied only by a solitary man, myself – because she had noticed that I was reading Galli, and this aroused her interest. I like to think that what she really meant was that she found me attractive, and felt she would be able to use the book as the pretext for a conversation. In any case, the book was responsible in one way or another for the fact that I met Eleonora, and she became my student, and then later my wife. What, I wonder, might have been the outcome if I had been reading Moravia, for example?

  But the infinite chain of accidents by which the world proceeds are not a great cause of wonder for me. There are those who regard the chance events which shape their lives as indicative of some kind of destiny; as if, for example, it had been ordained that Eleonora and I should meet in that particular train on that particular day. More reasonable, though, to take the view that the pinnacle of random happenings on which we sit only means that we ourselves are accidents of fate. The train on which I was travelling when I first met Eleonora was simply what I caught when I missed the previous one by a couple of minutes – and my emigration to Italy was itself more or less an accident. Going further back, was it not mere chance that should have chosen me as the offspring with which my parents should have been blessed? How many other human beings might equally well have been produced by them with equal probability (considering the myriad thousands of seeds which each would attempt, with every coupling, to lead to the creation of a new life)? There must have been enough possible alternatives to my own existence, I don’t doubt, to populate a small town. Add to this the fact that my parents didn’t even want another child, and it becomes clear to me that it’s surprising that I’m here at all. And given that I do exist, it’s equally clear that my life could have taken any number of directions, but the countless nudges which have pushed it one way or the other have for the most part been insignificant, and are now impossible to recall.