Music at Long Verney

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Yet a wastepaper basket, however much Mr Tilbury might dislike its disorderliness, would seem an essential adjunct to calligraphy. Professional scribes (French, Burgundian, what you will) must sometimes have spoiled a copy – duplicated a word, misplaced a twiddle. With parchment, this was easily put right: they scraped off the error with a sharp penknife. But when progress drove them onto paper, they must have wanted to discard a faulty page – crumple it and throw it away. Into what, if not a wastepaper basket? When did that essential adjunct to calligraphy come into use? I ransacked my memory for works of art recording it: St Jerome in his study – in his numerous studies – Petrarch sonneteering, usurers calculating . . . Nowhere a trace of the wastepaper basket, not even among the Pre-Raphaelites. I forgot my place and broke into the conversation. “When was the wastepaper basket invented?”

  Edward emerged from calligraphy, laughed, and said, “God knows.”

  Mr Tilbury, too godlike for such an admission, impaled me on a glare and said, “That would take too long to answer, young lady.”

  I realised that I had foxed them both.

  Some time later – it seemed like hours – Mr Tilbury opened one of his cupboards and took out three pony glasses and a bottle labelled “Ketchup.” Ketchup contained a home-made sloe gin. He filled the three glasses with a steady hand, impartially. We drank the stirrup cup and took our leave.

  When we had gone a little way, Edward asked what I had made of old Hugo. I praised his sloe gin, adding that it was magnanimous of him to give me a fair share of it, since it was plain he disliked women, more especially young women who went about with young men as though they were married to them but weren’t. He disliked anything he couldn’t be sure of, Edward explained. The Hunter’s Moon, which follows on the Harvest Moon, had risen, blackening and brightening the path. I could not believe it was the path we had come by earlier. Nothing was the same, till we came to the rubbish bin, implacably itself even by moonlight. On the track across the heath, where we could walk side by side, it was as though we were freed from a constraint to remember the afternoon’s visit. We planned how we could contrive a spring holiday in Portugal. Edward hoped that Mrs Hooper of the Fox Inn would give us something hot for supper.

  Yet that night he reverted to Mr Tilbury, speculating about why he had secreted himself and his learning in that comfortless Ortygia. Some shock, some personal disaster, some scandal must have driven him there, for in conversation old Hugo revealed a livelier past, when he was sociable, knew all sorts of people, went to the opera, supped at the Café Royal (still fashionable in those days), had a top hat. It couldn’t have been a religious bolt; Hugo had no more piety than a ferret. It couldn’t have been money: Hugo didn’t mind what he spent on something he wanted; he was poorly off for wants but not for means. And when it came to his private fortune of scholarship, he had some of the usual expert’s niggardliness; from the day Edward, following the clue of a savage retort to an ass showing off in a learned periodical, had tracked him to his den on the heath, Hugo had been a most generous teacher.

  Exhausted with so much exercise and open air, I kept falling asleep and reawakening with a sense of guilt that I should have taken such a dislike to the old man who had given Edward so much pleasure. In one of my wakenings I heard Edward say, “I could never repay him for all he has done for me – even if I could bring myself to give him my Kepler letter.” He gave a deep sigh. The letter by Johannes Kepler was his dearest possession. He had found it in a Birmingham auction room, in a folder labelled “Letters Various and Curious.” Mr Tilbury had approved and authenticated it, and though no such vulgar phrase as “stroke of luck” had been spoken, Edward felt himself considerably advanced in his mentor’s esteem. I was going to suggest he might tell Mr Tilbury that he meant to leave it to him in his will when the sigh was followed by a contented yawn. Edward was asleep.

  Five months later Edward was killed in a car crash. He died intestate. Had I told his mother that he would have wished the Kepler letter to go to Mr Tilbury, my word would have counted for nothing, so I waited for the hour of his funeral, let myself into his flat, and stole it. It was not so easy to part with it. Not that I needed anything to remember him by, but his hand had warmed it, he had made the parchment case that held it. Eventually I brought myself to write to Mr Tilbury, telling him of Edward’s death, that he had meant to give him the Kepler letter as a token of gratitude, and that I would prefer to bring it rather than risk it in the post. The reply was brief and businesslike: he was sorry to hear of Edward’s death, and would expect me on March the 10th, at 4 p.m. I took a taxi from the local station to the Fox Inn, where Mrs Hooper exclaimed and sympathised, and gave me a drink out of hours against the cold, saying that the wind on the heath would perish a Londoner.

  It was an east wind, shrill and searching – a spring-cleaning wind, I thought. From time to time, it tore rents in the cloud cover; shadows hurried over me, a distant stretch of grass suddenly became a brilliant, watery green. As I turned into the path, I looked at my watch. It was quarter to four. Everything was going to plan. The path that had been so much changed by moonlight was as much changed by bursts of sunlight; leafless thorn brakes were silver-plated with lichen, bramble patches had a smouldering richness of purple and russet.

  The door of Ortygia was closed. There was a push button on it. I pressed the button, and a bell – the kind of bell that works by battery – responded with a loud jarring sound, so instantly I flinched, as if it had spat in my face. No-one came. I waited and rang again, and again, for a third time, and a fourth. The door faced east, and the spring-cleaning wind pinned me to it; when I gave it a push, I found it was barred. It was the tenth of March, I had arrived at the hour Mr Tilbury had appointed, and I did not recollect that he was deaf. If not deaf, perhaps he was dead? If so, he must be newly dead, for his patch of ground was freshly weeded; some plucked-up nettles blown against the wire fence were barely wilted. He had weeded, gone indoors, secured his door against the wind, opened a cupboard for a drink of sloe gin, had a heart attack, fallen dead, or palsied with one eye closed in a ghastly wink. That would be very awkward. I looked in through the sitting-room window. The heather had been removed from the fairground vase, and a fire of fir cones and neat billets of wood burned in the grate. Otherwise, the room was exactly as I remembered, except that Mr Tilbury was not in it. He was not in the water butt, either – a frantic supposition, but now my imagination was keeping my courage up – for he could not have bolted the door behind him before going out to drown himself, and in any case he was not the sort of man to act without due consideration. So I went back to the door, rang the bell again, knocked, whistled, shouted his name, felt increasingly silly, wondered if I would go away – and waited on.

  At twenty to five I decided I would wait till five, return to the Fox Inn, and from there ring up the police. Mr Tilbury, I would say, had asked me to be at his house at four o’clock without fail, as I had a valuable parcel to hand over. He did not seem to be there. I was afraid something had happened to him. Etc. A flicker of amusement warmed me at the thought of loosing the police on Mr Tilbury, who, if he retained any consciousness – perhaps he was just drunk, lying comatose with a ketchup bottle beside him – would resent this incursion on his private life. If dead, there would be headlines in the local papers – mysterious death of woodmell heath hermit – and later a respectful obituary in The Times. If drunk, local merriment. Either way, he would give pleasure.

  Meanwhile, I had my errand to attend to. I was about to make a last attempt on the bell when I heard a sound of life overhead: a loud, irrepressible sneeze, and another, and another – the sneezes of a man in perfect health but with imperfect control of his nose. I laid the Kepler letter on the doorstep and walked away.

  A moment later I heard the door open. There was no need to look back; my mind’s eye saw Mr Tilbury, D.Litt., F.R.S.L., dart out, seize on his prey, and carry it into his den.

  I told myself as I hurried up the path that i
t was the insult to Edward that made me weep tears of rage. But it was also the insult to myself. Edward was unscathed, safe dead, with his illusions intact, with his intention carried out, with nothing to revenge. I had been summoned, slighted, left to kick my heels in the cold, while Mr Tilbury sat warming his malevolence; and no possible revenge was in my power. Attaining the rubbish bin, I gave it a kick. It answered back with a multitudinous light rattle. I took off the lid. Inside was an accumulation of emptied tins that had contained a brand of ready-made rice pudding known as Lotus. The tins were spotlessly clean, as if a rat had licked them – a sturdy rat with a trim beard, a rat who in better days had supped at the Café Royal, a rat who for some reason, some personal disaster, some hounding scandal, had fled to a hiding place on the heath. Looking round on the darkening landscape, I remembered his words: “A protective custody”. Even so, I could feel no pity for him.

  Maternal Devotion

  “I WAS TAUGHT how to make tea by professor Abernethy in Dresden. He always used an egg cup. Not that his name was Abernethy, or anything like it,” Mrs Finch said to the young man who had come to call on her daughter. “It was more like Euston or Thompson.”

  As kittens bring in the mice that are too much for them to be finished off by the cat, Cordelia Finch had a habit of depositing any inconvenient suitors with her mother and leaving the rest to nature. When the Finches moved from London to Kent and their new neighbours hastened to call on them, the number of deposited suitors rose sharply. This one was a Mr Weatherby, who was locally expected to become a Member of Parliament when he had matured. Mrs Finch had told him that Cordelia was not at home, adding, with equal mendacity, that she hoped he would stay and have tea.

  “I can’t think why I should so persistently call him Abernethy,” she continued. “He wasn’t in the least like a biscuit.”

  “Some association of ideas, perhaps,” Mr Weatherby suggested.

  “I don’t see how it can be, for I detest Abernethy biscuits, and he was such a kind old man. He used to be followed about by a cab.”

  After a slight pause, Mr Weatherby said, “Really?”

  “His wife had an idea that his legs might give way suddenly,” Mrs Finch said. “He was well over ninety. Do you come of a long-lived family, Mr Weatherby?”

  Mr Weatherby said guardedly that he had had an aunt.

  “Do tell me about her,” said Mrs Finch warmly.

  “There isn’t much to tell, really. She lived to be eighty and died of a stroke.”

  “What would you like to die of?” Mrs Finch asked. “I think, myself, there’s a great deal to be said for a general atrophy, for if one has to be a nuisance, it’s better not to be an active nuisance. Or would you prefer a sudden death? You might fall off a horse and be carried home dead on a five-barred gate. Do have some more cake.”

  “Thank you,” said Mr Weatherby. “Why a five-barred gate?”

  “It’s usually the gate that’s nearest, I believe. ‘Do the thing that’s nearest, Though ’tis dull at whiles,’ you know. ‘Helping when you meet them –’ That always seems to me such an extravagant piece of advice. Why should one help mad dogs over stiles? Why shouldn’t they be able to run through underneath, as dogs in their senses do? I don’t believe that even a mad dog would lose touch with reality to that extent. Or do you suppose that it really applies to idiot dogs who have lost the use of their legs, unlike Professor Abernethy? Scansion makes poets very servile. Though with a little ingenuity, and if you don’t scorn classical diction, why not ‘Helping when you meet them Idiot dogs o’er stiles’?”

  “I should think it would be rather a waste of time. Besides” – Mr Weatherby’s eye gleamed with the acumen of debate – “how could one help dogs if one didn’t meet them?”

  “Exactly! Or if there wasn’t a stile? Must you drag the poor creature along till you find one? I’m so glad you agree with me about poetry not interfering with one’s behaviour. Poets should never give good advice unless it’s of the most placid description, like not turning aside to view the braes of Yarrow, or ‘Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui le cou.’ I suppose chairmen at political meetings never read Verlaine.”

  Mr Weatherby looked up as one who sees a momentary lighthouse through the storm. Mrs Finch smiled at him and swept on. “If I were a poet, I would keep myself entirely to sonnets and advise no-one. There are still a great many subjects without sonnets. Have you ever considered writing a sonnet sequence on the non-conforming churches? ‘Stern Muggleton,’ one of them might begin. And then you could have ‘Equestrian Wesley’ and ‘Leave thou the babe unsprinkled till the work of grace has something-or-othered.’”

  “Well, to tell you the worst, you know,” Mr Weatherby said, “I don’t read much poetry. I don’t seem to be that sort of man.”

  “I expect you are influenced by it, all the same,” Mrs Finch said. “Everyone is. Do you know that during Wordsworth’s lifetime the population of England more than trebled itself?”

  Mr Weatherby said that he supposed Wordsworth lived a long time.

  “He died,” said Mrs Finch, “at exactly the same age as your aunt.”

  There was a pause. Mrs Finch broke it. “In Russia, when there is one of these awkward silences, people account for it by saying that a fool has been born.”

  There was another pause. Mr Weatherby broke it. “Will your daughter hunt?” (Mr Weatherby, who had recently put on weight, had a horse to dispose of.)

  “I assure you, Mr Weatherby, any hunting in this family will be done by me. I spend my life hunting. At this moment, I am hunting for –” Mrs Finch broke off and rummaged among the sofa cushions. “I had the list but I seem to have mislaid it,” she said. “But I remember it began with a black bishop – do you play chess? – and Mr Harley’s hat. Do you know Mr Harley? He tunes pianos. Such a nice, sombre man. If you met him in a pink dressing gown, you wouldn’t know him from an El Greco, and it was so unfortunate that he lost his hat somewhere about the place. And then there was my husband’s briefcase. It had a corkscrew in it and some other things. And the last thing on the list was the fire extinguisher. It’s one of those clever chemical ones – you give them a smart blow and they burst into spray. Are you afraid of fire? Fire breaking out in a lunatic asylum is one of my terrors. I wonder if you are sitting on it. No, no, please don’t trouble. It will be none the worse, and anyhow by the time I find it, it will be out of date. Do you think this tea was made with boiling water? I don’t.”

  Looking wistfully towards the window, Mr Weatherby said, “I suppose you garden quite a lot.”

  “I’ve got a little watering pot. But whenever I find time to use it, it’s always raining. Are you good at gardening?”

  “Well, no,” Mr Weatherby said. “I spud up daisies sometimes. But my mother’s frightfully keen on gardening. So was my old aunt. She gardened right up to the end.”

  Mrs Finch nodded sympathetically. “I’m always alarmed when I see people plunge into gardening. Still, if your mother enjoys it . . . Besides, there is the Fifth Commandment. I read right through the Ten Commandments the other day, and I was surprised to find how many of them I agreed with. But it would have saved a lot of talk, as well as being much lighter to carry, if Moses had just boiled them down to one compact little commandment – ‘Thou shalt not interfere.’ I knew a Mrs Prothero who was perfectly devoted to gardening, and one day when she was being shown around a friend’s garden she saw a weed and tried to pull it up. It happened to be a tight-rooted wolfsbane, and while she was tussling with it, something snapped and she went blind in one eye. Could you have a plainer warning against meddling?”

  While Mrs Finch was relating this story, noises, strongly suggestive of the dangers of meddling, had broken out in the front hall – a crash, an urgent sizzling, angry words, and hurried footsteps. These were now followed by a steady swishing sound, apparently proceeding from the neighbourhood of the doorstep.

  “I say –” said Mr Weatherby. Mrs Finch looked at him devoutly, as thou
gh the lightest word from him meant more to her than any of the noises, indoors and out.

  “I say!” he repeated. From where he sat, Mr Weatherby could see a jet of high-pressured spray sweeping across the lawn.

  The noises died away. A strong chemical smell remained, and grew stronger.

  “I always feel so sorry for Angelo Domodossola,” Mrs Finch said. She had given up waiting for Mr Weatherby’s communication. “He, of course, was born blind, so he got about quite easily. One day, he went to see a friend. He walked right in and called, and as there was no answer, he sat down to wait. It was midwinter, and that bitter Neapolitan cold – you know how it gets into one’s bones. At last, he decided to wait no longer. He put down his hand to grope for his hat and gloves and felt something clammy. It was a pool of blood. The friend had been there all the time. He had cut his throat half an hour or so before. I’ve never felt easy going to call on anyone since, for it is absurd to say that these coincidences never happen twice, and though I am not blind, I am very inattentive. I am sure I could sit in a room with a corpse for hours before I noticed anything was wrong.”

  Mr Weatherby saw that where the spray had fallen, the grass was turning yellow.

  “I suppose if one were really observant,” Mrs Finch said, “one would constantly notice that something or other was a little wrong.”

  “‘Where ignorance’ –” Mr Weatherby began.

  The door opened and a voice said, “Of all the damned, confounded places to put the damned thing in! Elinor!” Mr Weatherby rose to his feet as Mr Finch burst into the room.

  “Sit down, sit down, Mr Weatherby,” Mrs Finch commanded. “An old man’s curse will do you no harm. Henry, this is Mr Weatherby.”