Music at Long Verney

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

That bedroom was in Cambridge, England. The biscuit box had gingerbread nuts in it; the presence of my host’s top hat in its leather hermitage made me feel I was one of the family; there must have been at least a thousand books on the shelves that occupied one wall – books of the utmost miscellaneity (I had taken Mary Wilkins from between a Bohn Tacitus and Marvels of Pond Life); there was a magnifying glass, a bottle of ink, and a bootjack; and at intervals I heard chiming bells conversing in amiable voices about the passage of time. But as I was now in Connecticut and did not wish to grow uncivilly homesick, the best thing I could do was to fall asleep.

  When I woke it was broad day. I dressed and went downstairs, reflecting that if I was late for breakfast, this was not an establishment where it would be held against me. It was not I who was late. There was no sound of life, there were no intimations of breakfast. Perhaps this was a house where breakfast was unlikely. In the large room that had been so noisy the night before there were plates and tumblers and bottles and ashtrays; but the curtains had been drawn back, so someone must be about. After a while a young woman came in. She was small and swarthy, and obviously I was a surprise to her. At first she pretended not to see me, and when I said, “Good morning,” she clattered her trayful of glasses and did not hear me. I said I was down too early, and realised that she found me difficult to understand, for, smiling anxiously, she waved her hand towards the window and said, “Nice!” and then burst into a speech I couldn’t understand at all. But we communicated in the language of the heart, for, beckoning me through the swing door, she took me into the kitchen, where we drank coffee and ate some leftover canapés.

  The sun had come out, so I decided I would go for a walk. I followed the road through some woods and on into a landscape of lifeless snow-covered fields. I knew I was not enjoying myself and had decided to turn back when I caught sight of a house about a quarter of a mile farther on. A house standing alone calls to the imagination. I walked on. However trite it might be – and it looked trite – it was a house I had not seen before and would never see again. I began to walk slower – because if you change pace when you come close to a dwelling the people inside will think that you are prying or canvassing. As I approached, I felt certain the house was empty. It was smaller than I thought – a frame house of two stories, lean and high-shouldered, standing a little back from the roadside. It had an air of obstinately asserting its verticality against the indifferent, snow-covered horizontality all around. A fence guarded its own small portion of snow.

  I drew level with it, and saw how very empty it was and how forsaken. The grey paint was scaling off it, streaks of damp ran down from its guttering, the windows were bleared with dust and their glass tarnished. They were too large for the house, and this emphasised the disproportion of the door, which was too narrow. A single trail of footprints led from the gate to the door. They were recent, but not new. They might have been made a week ago, three weeks ago. A week ago or three weeks ago someone had gone into the house and not come out again. I stood for a while registering this in my memory – so well that I can see it to this day. Then I turned back, walking briskly because I had grown cold. I did not speculate at all. This was no business of mine. I had come on a story by Mary Wilkins – a story she did not finish.

  Four Figures in a Room. A Distant Figure.

  THEY HAD SAT down to rest.

  Both women were tall and physically eloquent. They appeared to have been engaged in an exploit that taxed them to the uttermost, and they laid by their violin bows as though they were rapiers.

  The six-year-old boy lying under the grand piano drawing an alligator glanced out, saw that Fanny’s small red velvet bolster lay on her lap unharmed, and went on drawing. All was well. “I can’t play without it,” she had explained to him. Sometimes – not very often and only if his hands were clean – he was allowed to stroke it. Enabled by the bolster, Fanny played such difficult music at concerts that people gave her a great deal of money. Ludovica also played and also got money but hadn’t a bolster.

  They began to talk.

  “But what are we to do about him? Wouldn’t he even listen when you’d gone all that way to see him?”

  “He listened – as if he were listening to Clementi. He even patted my hand and said, ‘Dear child’. I might as well have talked to the waves. They come much closer to the house than they used to.”

  “But you could do nothing with him?”

  “Fanny! How long is it since anyone could do anything with Father?”

  “You did, once – when you got the better of him about the cello.”

  “And that was forty-three years ago.”

  “Almost to the day. He had given you a larger one for your birthday present; it had been unpacked and lay on the sofa. Your twelfth candle had just been lit. You took the cake in both hands and banged it down on the bridge.”

  By the time Donald Gillespie had hoisted himself up in the world and owned the Bonnie Charlie Marine Stores it was too late for him to study the violin. His daughter Fanny was put to do so in his stead – a promising pupil. It followed his second daughter should learn the cello. Ludovica learned quickly, was inherently more musical than her sister; and studied with contempt. Fanny’s violin bewitched her; she would have nothing but the violin. Life had not prepared Donald Gillespie to be worsted. He fell into a granite rage and went for a voyage round the world. Pride compelled him to have them well taught even while he taunted himself with rearing a circus act, the fiddling Gillespie Sisters. They made their debut together in an unaccompanied Duo Concertante by Spohr. Constructed from their aquiline noses to their sturdy insteps to the ideal specifications for concert violinists, their vocation was plain.

  Prompted by the story of the birthday cake, the boy under the grand piano gave the alligator chocolate and pistachio stripes.

  “But what does he do with himself on that pocket island?”

  “It’s not really an island, you know, except at high tide. And he does a great many things and all to a regular timetable. He’s got a weather vane and a rain gauge and several barometers and keeps a weather diary. Twice a week he bakes. Every day he goes out and gathers driftwood. He washes and irons and keeps the house like a new pin. He knits. He sings.”

  “Sings?”

  “Ye banks and braes.’ He catches fish and snares rabbits and dresses their skins and reads Paradise Lost. Never an idle moment.”

  “Does he see anyone?”

  “The oil van comes out once a week with letters and groceries.”

  “Does he look older?”

  “A great deal older.”

  The room was warm and smelled of chrysanthemums, and from the street, far below, the growl of traffic swelled up into their silence. Alligators live in swamps. But he had used up all the best greens. This should be a sea alligator, sitting on an island like the very old man they talked about – for as he was their father he must be very old indeed.

  Ludovica took up a sheet of manuscript music and made a face at it. “I don’t know how he thinks I’m going to get a mute on in the time. You’ll have to hang on to your harmonic.”

  “He has no notion how to write for strings. But one must be grateful for small mercies; there’s not much written for two violins nowadays. One has to keep up. And he’s got some ideas. We can do something with it – if he’ll let us.”

  “He seemed a meek enough little MacRabbit when Klaus introduced him.”

  “Meek? With that dedication? ‘For Fanny and Ludovica’. Our Christian names and not so much as a by-your-leave.”

  “The young are like that. No surnames. No key signatures.”

  “No manners. How much longer is he going to keep us waiting?”

  “Well, while he does, let’s get on with Father. We can’t leave him there through another winter. There must be some way of persuading him.”

  “Do you know any way to persuade a limpet off a rock? That’s what he was like, Fanny. A limpet.”

  “Limpets must come o
ff occasionally. When we were children we used to pick up their shells.”

  “Dead.”

  “What’s a limpet?” asked the boy.

  They took up their instruments and went back to the opening, which was tricky. Without ceasing to play, Fanny said, “One has to admit it, he’s brave.”

  Julius Morley stepped out of the lift into a world of his own music. The Dialogue for Two Violins was proceeding, and this was the first time he had heard it. He was overwhelmed by its beauty, its fitness; appalled by its fleetingness. Performance did that, then? – made actual and dismissed? He had not thought of it so. It had seemed boundless, a totality. But it would be over before its hearers had time to admire it. Occasionally passages disconcerted him; it was as if they had got in by accident from an earlier composition. And then it was beautiful again, infallibly logical, going its mysterious way.

  Suppose I were run over on my way back to Hammersmith, he thought. I might never hear it again. He unboxed the tape recorder he had brought with him and began to record. Immediately, all his pleasure went; he could hear nothing except the defects of the performance. He rang the bell. The music ceased. The door was opened by a small boy, and he went in.

  His heart did not sink; he felled it. They were impossible – professional circus horses, pillars of the Establishment. They advanced on him, capability personified, and were delighted to see him. They thought his music so original. They hoped he wouldn’t mind if they made one or two small suggestions, just for technical reasons, reasons of performance. How could he have imagined these worldly harpies matched to his music, administrators of his treasure – cooked them up into his destined Fanny and Ludovica, fatally dedicated the Dialogue to them? A spring evening, an empty stomach, the skirl of gulls as he crossed the river to the Festival Hall, the grieving-seabird fifths falling through the close of the Overture to Idomeneo, two women distanced on a platform – two porpoises in bags could have overthrown him that night, playing the Bach Concerto.

  “This scale passage would come out with more effect if it were divided between the two violins, for instance, and –”

  “Shall we deal with them as we come to them?” he said.

  From his lair under the piano (it had become a lair) the boy watched the clock. If his Miss Belton got back in time to take him down to the restaurant for tea – But she had gone on a bus to visit her mother, who lived in Greenwich; she might be late. The minute might have arrived.

  They had been playing this piece over and over; he knew quite well when the minute was coming. First they grunted, loudly and mournfully, one contradicting the other. Then Ludovica was left grunting alone, while Fanny squirmed up – and up – and up, and arched her eyebrows, and produced an unearthly squeal like a sweetened gimlet, and Ludovica said, “Blast his eyes!” and snatched her mute. And then it would have arrived: his throat would stiffen, ice would form on his skin, he would begin to cry.

  This afternoon it seemed that the bus from Greenwich was bound to win. Their MacRabbit man did nothing but interrupt and disagree and say they had not understood. And then they played the bit over again, loudly and neatly, and asked if that was what he wanted; and he said it wasn’t. Their voices grew crosser and haughtier, and his grew quieter; and if it had not been for what lay ahead if Miss Belton did not come in time, it would have been fun to watch Fanny and Ludovica having to do what they were told. Checked and goaded, the music was driven on. They had got to the growls, Fanny had squirmed upward, attained her squeal –

  “Excuse me. No rallentando.”

  They argued and argued. Then Fanny went over to the enemy.

  “Get it on somehow, Ludovica! We can’t stay fooling about till midnight.”

  The squeal hung on the air, brightened like a soap bubble, thinned, turned downward like a sigh, and was gone. Beneath it the muted voice had set out on its ghostly wandering. He felt his throat stiffen, ice form on his skin. It was the voice of something eternally lonely and destitute and blind. It probed his flesh. Tears streamed down his face as he wept for joy.

  It was because of this coda with its swaying five-beat ground bass that Julius Morley had at one time thought of calling the work Full Fathom Five. The Ludovica one did not play too badly, and the mute obscured her professional alacrity. He waited uneasily for the entrance of the unmuted Fanny, who had to slide in on an offbeat (slide, not collide) and thread her shifting tonalities through the ground bass. He scarcely noticed how she did it, for a moment earlier he had been transfixed by a conviction that another listener had come into the room. Covertly glancing round for another pair of legs he saw the boy under the piano and that his face was rigid with ecstasy and glittering with tears. “Another of us,” he said proudly to himself. “Poor brat!” The unmuted violin began to take its farewells of the ground bass, which after the seventh farewell would go on its way alone, senza diminuendo, till it stopped, insignificantly, like a clock.

  The fifth farewell vibrated with emotion.

  “Excuse me –”

  They ignored him and went on to the end.

  “You were going to say –”

  Ignoring them, he got up and walked across to the piano. The boy saw him stoop, almost as though he meant to get under, too.

  “Do you like it?” His voice was serious; at first sight he looked just as a Mr MacRabbit should – snub-nosed, with furry cheeks and an innocent expression. On closer view, his face was savage and anxious, as all grown-up faces are.

  QWERTYUIOP

  The days draw out, the days draw in

  (Chop-cherry, chop-cherry, black within),

  When will my endless night begin?

  URSULA PUT DOWN her hairbrush and stared at her face in the glass. It was a plump, smooth face, with nothing remarkable about it except a resolute chin. Its reflection assured her that she had made another poem – the first in five days, just when she was beginning to despair. She took the block of lined paper, wrote it down, and considered it. It was one of her best – sarcastic and passionate. But did it say everything as emphatically as it should? Should there be a thump? She wrote it down again and changed the last line.

  O God, when will my endless night begin?

  With the impetus of a postscript, another poem, cynical this time, darted into her head:

  I gave up God when I was nine

  (Gooseberry, gooseberry, gooseberry wine)

  But put my trust in his name to weigh down a line.

  This took a little longer. Finally she copied the one and the other in the careful printing hand she kept for poetry, added the date, and put them in the casket-shaped box that had once held expensive chocolates. She finished dressing and went downstairs to confront her twelfth birthday.

  December 31st was a hopeless day to be born on – ten days before she went back to school, ten days before she had anything worth attending to. It was dregs; no-one would give her a typewriter so soon after Christmas. There was nothing much to be said for St Sylvester, either, whose day it was. She had looked him up in the Calendar of Saints in the school library. He was a pope, he tried to establish a general peace, he was venerated at Pisa. She intended to go to Pisa, but it was Shelley she would go for, not poor old Sylvester.

  Father was in the hall, putting on his raincoat. He gave her a kiss, and said, “Many happy returns, my pet. I must be off.” The door slammed behind him. Mother and Uncle Terence were sitting at the breakfast table, killing time with toast. A bulging parcel in Ursula’s place held the woollen jersey Mother had been knitting and hiding for weeks, and a coral bracelet. Uncle Terence handed her a shop-tied oblong. Inside was a manicure set. Mother flushed. Uncle Terence gave her a look and grinned. He was her brother, old enough to be her father, and lived with them as a paying guest. Among her school friends Ursula referred to him as P. G. Pig.

  Presently Mother got up and began to collect the dirty china. Ursula also got up. Sooner or later on this ghastly day she would have to make her bed. But Mother intercepted her, saying, “Come and
help me wash up.”

  She stood at the sink, rinsing and re-rinsing a coffee cup, biting her lips and arranging her expression. When she spoke, it was in her holy voice. “Darling, there’s something I must tell you about –”

  “Yes, I know. Judy Hollins has got hers already.”

  The coffee cup slid under the suds. After a pause, Mother began to laugh. “So I’ve put a packet in your underclothes drawer. Funny sort of birthday present.”

  Escaping to her bedroom, Ursula sat on the rumpled bed. Life was like that. An hour ago, the four walls had enclosed a kingdom, hers by right and unassailable. Now they gaped on shabbiness and familiarity, and they were papered with those interminable old pink rosebuds. There would be more pink rosebuds on her birthday cake. Year after year Mother had decorated them with pink sugar rosebuds. Sometimes they were quite successful, at other times smudged. She looked at the alarm clock – another of Uncle Terence’s hateful presents. She had forgotten to wind it. But the whole house was an alarm clock. There was Mother, drudging with the Hoover; there was Uncle Terence, turning off the radio at the beginning of the Morning Service. How was she to get through this interminable dreary day – drearier now, because it had begun to rain.

  There was a knock on the door, and a voice saying, “Am I disturbing you, Miss Ursula?”

  “It’s Arkie, my darling Arkie!” Ursula leaped up and flung herself into a damp embrace.

  “I had to look in on you, Miss Ursula, to wish you your happy returns. So I caught the early bus –”

  “Oh, Arkie, you must have got up at dawn!”

  “– happen a bit earlier – so as to have a sight of you before I go on to the lady I work for now. There’s a poodle dog there, too – pedigree – but not to compare with old Dragon. Stand back, love, and let me have a look at you.”

  Ursula stood back, remembering not to stoop.

  “To think you’re a year older this very day. You’ll be a lady in no time. But don’t study too hard, ducks, lying awake all night with your book-reading. Take life easy while you have the chance.”