The Second Strain

by John Burke

  Facing the fireplace were two battered leather armchairs. And beyond them, a grand piano with a standard lamp, its neck tilted to throw light on the music desk. No television set anywhere you might expect to find one. No telephone in view — but then, he already knew that Erskine wasn’t on the phone. Writing to his amanuensis and playing on old acquaintanceship had been the only way of making contact.

  Mairi waved him towards one of the chairs and pushed a small coffee table between them. ‘Coffee? Or something stronger?’

  ‘Coffee, yes. It’s a bit early for the other.’

  ‘Daniel won’t agree with that, when he manages to totter in.’

  ‘He drinks a lot?’

  ‘After what he’s been through, do you blame him?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  She went out with that lithe, unselfconscious swing of the hips he remembered. She was an incongruous, alien creature to be caged out here, so far from her old haunts: too exotic for an audience to be denied any glimpses of her.

  Nick got up and went to glance at the music propped open on the piano.

  There was about three-quarters of a sheet of manuscript covered with an untidy but legible piano part, blotched by a few corrections and some conflicting expression marks. Instinctively he slid on to the piano stool and began playing. The rhythm was baffling. After a few bars he went back to the beginning, and counted a few steady, disciplined beats before starting again. Again the music fought against the beat. Discords unravelled and then struggled through another cadence, like a swiftly flowing burn plashing into a barrier and seeking another outlet.

  Behind him, Mairi put a tray down on the coffee table and said: ‘You’re counting sevens instead of four-plus-three.’

  ‘Ah, I get you.’ He played the unfinished bars on the last stave. ‘And what comes next?’

  ‘We haven’t worked it out yet.’

  ‘Sounds way beyond the sort of music you used to play in the old days. But there is a sort of folk rhythm — something going way back.’

  ‘Daniel has sunk himself in old music to produce . . . well, new music. A new language.’

  ‘But you have to transcribe it all for him.’

  ‘Being laird of Kilstane, you’ll know why.’

  ‘Before my time, but yes, I know.’

  That had been the reason for Daniel Erskine finally quitting his home town. Although it had happened years ago, Nick still came across resonances of it in the town. Like all the Border families, with their rivalries and ancient grudges, Kilstane folk did not forget easily. For every Adam Lowther who revered the image of Daniel Erskine as a great composer with local roots, there were far more who gloated over him getting the comeuppance he so richly deserved. Those hands he used for playing the piano and for writing music had strayed into too many other places, and hardly anyone disapproved of the jealous husband who had smashed both those hands with a sledgehammer. Most of them deplored the sentencing of the attacker to five years in prison. No wonder Erskine had fled in despair and shut himself away.

  Mairi said: ‘Did that bastard go back to Kilstane after he was released?’

  ‘Not that I know of. It’s not something I’ve thought of asking.’

  ‘Before your time,’ she echoed. ‘And they wouldn’t be likely to tell an incomer.’

  ‘So that’s what I am?’

  ‘You may be the laird by inheritance, but from what Daniel tells me about his fellow townsfolk, you’ll always be an incomer.’

  ‘Do you suppose, if you bring Erskine back —’

  ‘I told you when I wrote, that’s a very big if. Ten to one you’ve had a wasted journey.’

  ‘But you didn’t actually forbid me to come.’

  ‘No. We don’t welcome a lot of visitors. I thought you’d be an exceptional one. And I did put your ideas to Daniel, so at least he’s prepared.’

  She sipped her coffee and stared into the fire as it stirred and settled, releasing a lazy drift of sparks. The smell of the peat was soporific. Nick, studying her almost aquiline profile above that incredibly graceful neck, wondered whether the whole atmosphere of this place acted as a sedative, damping down memories of another world, a dangerous past, out there.

  ‘Where did you meet Erskine?’

  She hesitated for a moment, then said briskly: ‘At a folk concert. When he was trying to put as big a distance between himself and Kilstane as possible.’

  ‘You were playing there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He thought of her impassioned fiddle playing and the heat she generated by her sheer presence and the way her head shook fiercely, rhythmically as if urging herself on to yet another chorus, another wild improvisation.

  ‘And you gave up your own career just to become Erskine’s handmaiden?’

  ‘Nick, you make it sound like some terrible sacrifice. Don’t you realize, the folk circuit was just that: a circuit. Couldn’t even say it was coming to a dead end, because there wasn’t any end — just going on and on, round and round, playing what they expected you to play. If I’d written a violin concerto, who’d have listened? With Daniel . . . it’s a real quest, a challenge every day. Never knowing where we’re going to end up. At last I’ve been able to contribute to bringing something real to life.’

  He looked over his shoulder towards the music on the piano.

  ‘And that’s waiting there for him to tell you how to proceed — how to work out at the keyboard —’

  ‘The second strain,’ she said.

  ‘Second strain?’

  ‘All part of the old fiddling tradition. Most of the old folk songs ran to only eight bars. After you’ve played the melody once and then repeated it, you need some contrast. Insert a new melody of your own — a second strain.’

  ‘Like the middle eight in an old pop song?’

  ‘Only more so. Leap off into a different key, change the mood. Often a conflict between the old theme and the intruder.’

  She slid out of the armchair and moved past the piano to a violin case propped against the wall. Taking the violin out, she did a quick, impatient tuning, tucked it under her chin and began improvising, more along the lines of an old reel, with a dancing rhythm and some showy double-stopping. Nick pushed himself up out of his chair and went back to the piano stool, intuitively picking out a chord here, a chord there, to supplement the pentatonic theme. As she approached the end of the second repeated phrase he waited, sensing that this was where the second strain would come in. And she was off into an unrelated key without any modulation, leaping as if from a springboard into the air — a totally different air.

  ‘And what’s that supposed to be?’

  The voice was gravelly, discordant even within itself, grating harshly enough into their music to bring it to an abrupt halt.

  Daniel Erskine stood in the inner doorway.

  *

  He was a hunched figure of a man, stooped but with his large head jutting forward as if to ward off any possible attack. His hair was a great grey mop, but his lowering eyebrows remained startlingly black. His shirt and slacks were expensive but crumpled and greasy. Having issued his rasping challenge, he stood waiting for someone else to make a move.

  Nick took a step towards him and automatically put out a hand to shake hands. Then his gaze fell towards fingerless gloves, and he froze, wondering how to retreat, how to get himself out of the faux pas. But Erskine extended his right hand, and let the kid-glove softness linger for a few seconds between Nick’s fingers.

  ‘Shall I make some more coffee?’ Mairi asked.

  ‘A large malt would be a damn sight more acceptable. Or two large malts, hm?’

  Erskine settled himself in the armchair which Mairi had been occupying a few minutes earlier. The sun, moving slowly across the world outside, cast a fuzzy halo across the back of his head and made a dark silhouette of it, staring facelessly at his visitor.

  ‘You’ve come a long way, Sir Nicholas, on what is almost certainly a fruitless mission.’
/>   ‘I hope that won’t be so. We want to see you in Kilstane and celebrate your music, where so much of it must have begun.’

  ‘We?’

  Nick explained the concept of the Kilstane Gathering, interrupted by little intakes and expulsions of breath which might have been half repressed sniggers. He leaned forward in the hope of seeing more of Erskine’s face.

  ‘You know there were two programmes of your work on Radio 3 two months ago?’

  ‘We don’t have a radio.’ Suddenly his voice rose and he jerked his head so that Nick got a glimpse of his huge profile and the thrust of his chin. ‘Damn it, where’s my bloody dram?’

  Mairi put a large crystal tumbler on the coffee table. The glow of the fire made tiny flames dance in the amber liquid. ‘About bloody time.’ Erskine slowly clenched both gloves round the tumbler and lifted it as if testing its weight before risking moving it too far. He managed a long gulp and let the tang of the spirit run along the back of his lips before lowering the tumbler as carefully as he had lifted it.

  Nick continued warily. ‘It would certainly be better to hear the music live. Which is what we all want.’

  ‘We?’ said Erskine again, ‘All my dear old friends and admirers in that shithouse of a town?’

  ‘Times have changed. People have begun to appreciate —’

  ‘That lot? Appreciate? The world really has changed.’

  ‘You obviously don’t get many opportunities up here to hear what your music really sounds like.’

  Erskine’s right hand strayed on to his knee, and twitched briefly as if there was still some life in the shattered fingers to reach out for a keyboard and play what had just come into his head. But he scowled and said: ‘And don’t want to. If I can’t perform it myself, I don’t want to hear it. And I don’t much want to hear even myself performing it. Once I’ve conceived a piece, I hear it in my head better than anyone can possibly play it.’

  Mairi put her hand on his shoulder — in reproof, or affection, it was hard to guess. ‘Daniel, don’t say more than —’

  ‘Maybe it’s time to say a hell of a lot.’ Erskine went through the slow ritual with his glass again.

  ‘Ernest Newman would have agreed with you,’ said Nick. ‘Towards the end of his life he said he would rather read a score and hear a perfect performance in his mind than attend a concert or opera.’

  ‘Newman? Fond of Wagner, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘Bloody fool.’

  A shrill but faint stuttering began in Nick’s pocket. With an apologetic nod he pulled out his mobile phone. All he could hear was a blurred to-and-fro of crackling. ‘Seem to be in a real dead area here.’

  ‘Those damn things,’ Erskine exploded, dribbling whisky between his mouth and the tumbler. ‘Either turn it off or get out of here.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was just hoping for a brief —’

  ‘I don’t give a damn what you were hoping for. I won’t have one of those abominations nosing its way into my house. Damn glad to hear this is a dead area. I intend to keep it that way. One good reason for my staying put. Not going out if I can help it. Damn stupid things like that bleating away.’

  Nick switched the mobile off before slipping it back into his pocket. Hastily he said: ‘Sorry about that. But I promise we’ll shield you from any annoyances of that kind when you come to Kilstane.’

  ‘Who said I was going to Kilstane? And what for?’

  ‘As a conductor, possibly? Or simply as an honoured guest.’

  ‘Honoured? By those barbarians?’

  Mairi said: ‘I did warn you, Sir Nicholas, that your ideas wouldn’t appeal.’

  Erskine emitted an evil chuckle. ‘Hoped to play the old pals’ act, eh? Wheedle your way in through the good offices of an old . . . er . . . acquaintance. Wasting your time. Accept it, and run off home.’ Then he glanced from one to the other, and chuckled again. ‘Tell you what, Torrance. Take the girl out for lunch. She doesn’t stand many opportunities like that with me around. Give her lunch, and then clear off.’

  ‘Could I persuade you to join us?’

  ‘Like hell. That hotel will be just as bad as everywhere else nowadays. Wherever you go, there’s canned rubbish blasting out from speakers. Mind-numbing. Numbing the faculties so persistently that in the end the ear is unable to take in and appreciate real music of any kind.’

  ‘Even up here?’

  ‘Yes. Even up here. Another reason for staying where I am.’

  Erskine saw Mairi and Nick to the door. There was an impatience about him that suggested he could hardly wait to get them off the premises before stumbling back towards the bottle and the tumbler.

  With his hand on the passenger door of the Laguna to let Mairi in, Nick made one last attempt. ‘Please think about it. About all the people who really do want you to be a part of the Gathering.’

  ‘I’m in no mood to become a circus act at my time of life.’

  Mairi waited before ducking into the car. ‘We won’t be long.’

  ‘No need to rush. I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.’

  As Nick swung the car away from the house on to the cinder path and then the single-track road, Mairi said: ‘I truly mustn’t be too long. He’ll grope about until he can get the bottle open. Maybe he’ll drop it, or spill half of it. And one day I’m afraid he’ll manage to set fire to the place.’

  ‘Our friend is certainly set against the world outside. Telephones, radios —’

  ‘Mozart managed without a radio. Even as late as Sibelius, I think one could sit in the forests and not give a damn for a lot of chatter on the airwaves.’

  In the hotel they sat in the bar, waiting for the menu.

  ‘He’s pretty far advanced as an alcoholic, isn’t he?’

  ‘He likes his malt. People in these parts are used to it.’

  ‘If he drinks heavily —’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘If he does,’ Nick persisted, ‘how do you get the music out of him?’

  ‘Eric Fenby got it out of Delius when he was blind and paralysed by syphilis. Alcohol’s nothing compared with that.’

  He looked at the swell of cashmere over her breasts. And looking down the menu, she was half secretively mouthing the names of the dishes. Her lips were as full and sensuously slack as ever. He remembered her impassioned performances of old Romanian melodies she had discovered, old songs from the Hebrides, and the bend of her head over the violin bow, just the way it was now bent over that menu. And he wondered if she remembered rooms they had shared, beds they had shared. Wondered if she was wondering about his hotel room upstairs, and whether he was intending to do anything about it this afternoon.

  He wasn’t going to do anything about it.

  ‘I still don’t really understand,’ he said, ‘why you’ve given up your career to wait on that old crock. He’s a boor. How you can coax music of such significance out of him, the way you have done, rather than pursue your own career —’

  ‘Come off it, Nick. I’ve told you already, I’d got tired of going round and round with what I could do. Nowhere to go. No way to break out.’

  ‘Why should you have to? Lots of folk artists go on repeating themselves and making a fortune. The public like them to churn out the old favourites, with just a few new pieces not too —’

  ‘Not too adventurous. Not too new. Stuck in the same old rut. Like I said, nowhere to go.’

  ‘But you had other lines you could have developed.’

  ‘Never quite good enough. And nobody was ever going to take an ex-folksinger seriously as a composer. Or even as a violinist. Or anything much else. If I’d really tried to set myself up in a different field, can you imagine the reviews? Imagine the sneers, the clever-clever critics.’

  ‘So you’re content just to transcribe somebody else’s work?’

  ‘When it’s someone like Daniel Erskine, yes.’

  ‘Look . . . what is there about his music? One of
my committee members is utterly hooked on it. As if it was some new world — or at least a very different and exciting country.’

  ‘Yes. Another country. Not open to everybody. No tourist visas available.’

  The waiter approached. Mairi hurriedly focused on the menu. But he had not come to take their order. ‘Sir Nicholas?’

  Mairi smiled to herself, and seemed to be mouthing the title in a silent, mocking echo.

  ‘There’s a phone call for you, sir. Along the passage, first on the right.’

  Nick went to take the call. Adam Lowther had found his number from Mrs Robson. It took him time to take in the news. At first it seemed grotesque, way outside his ken. But then he knew there were things which really had to be dealt with. He hurried back to the bar. ‘Sorry. Something rather disturbing. I’ve got to leave. Right now.’

  ‘Oh, so I’m being stood up?’

  ‘Mairi, I’m awfully sorry. Bloody catastrophe. Our main concert venue has collapsed. I really must start back right away.’

  ‘So you won’t be needing Daniel anyway.’

  ‘I won’t know just what the situation is until I get back and can sum up just where we stand. Cancel some bookings and God knows what else. Look, give me a minute to pick up my things and settle the bill, and I’ll drop you off at the house on the way.’

  At the house he got out, held her door open, and kissed her briefly as she got out. Her familiar crooked smile tugged again at his memory.

  She said: ‘Sorry you’ve had a wasted journey.’

  ‘It was great seeing you again,’ he said banally.

  ‘Was it?’ She walked towards the house, looking back once over her shoulder. ‘I think it’s just as well you couldn’t tempt Daniel to go back to Kilstane, anyway. From what I’ve heard of the place, I wouldn’t have fancied being around there for too long.’

  The veiled withdrawal, almost antagonism, in her hazel eyes struck a chord in him that could only have resonated between people who had known one another intimately and were now ill at ease but still intimate.