Classical Music

by Cowley, Joy

  Classical Music

  Joy Cowley

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 1999

  Copyright © Joy Cowley 1999

  The right of Joy Cowley to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.

  Digital conversion by Pindar NZ

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

  www.penguin.co.nz

  ISBN 9781742287133

  For Anne McCormick who edited my first novel, in celebration of 34 years of friendship.

  Acknowledgements

  Writing, paradoxically, is a form of communication which takes place in solitude. As such it can be a lonely occupation. I owe more gratitude than I can express to the English faculty of Massey University, New Zealand, who have given me warm encouragement and support for many years.

  Gratitude also to Tom and Linda Krueger of The Maple Inn, Chautauqua, NY, who gave me place and space in which to write this book, and to dear Terry who read the whole thing over my shoulder, as it emerged.

  1

  Delia

  My father is dead and it is raining.

  There was rain at my mother’s graveside service, a great symphony of a storm played from dark cloud. I remember the air full of violin bows, timpani and woodwinds, and I was held by the thought that all music came from a hollowness. The emptiness of the instrument was essentially its voice and its beauty. I wanted to apply that to life as some kind of philosophical balm for grief but it didn’t work. The words too, were as empty as the vast New Zealand sky, which poured itself out on our black umbrellas and drummed without respect against the lid of the casket.

  But today there is a small Manhattan sky, comfortable, contained by towers, a patchwork quilt of even grey. You don’t feel threatened by a sky packaged like this. At no time do you get the feeling that the entire universe is about to suck you up like a vacuum-cleaner. The towers hem you about with the reassurance of a well-structured fort and even forty-three floors up, all you see of infinity is a few squares of security blanket softened by mist. It has been raining all day, gentle but persistent. There is more mist below, shredded across the East river, which is as dark as old aluminium.

  The desk phone is humming, my sister Beatrice calling from New Zealand.

  I still say aluMINium. I still say aDRESS and windscreen and occasionally, in self-defence, petrol. The old New Zealand English is hoarded like a collection of childhood toys in the attic and although they are not particularly attractive toys, I will not be rid of them. In the honesty of middle age I claim a fondness for some security blankets, along with the right to discard others.

  Hum-hum, hum-hum. The answering-machine is not turned on, no tinkle of J S Bach and a welcome to the home of Delia Munro and Associates, Interiors. The phone is white, faintly opalescent and its call is pitched at the mother tone of the human voice. That was Lal’s idea. He says that sound should massage the soul. If he had his way, all the phones in the office would be chanting Om.

  I stand at the window and wonder how they will manage without me. There are several big jobs coming up, including the complete makeover of the 34th Street brownstone, the redecoration of Sporting Life 2000, the Poughkeepsie apartments, and I will definitely have to go, probably tomorrow morning.

  Forty-two floors beneath my feet, bugs crawl through wet canyons, escaping from the afternoon, yellow taxis, limos, a weaving ambulance frantic with lights. Hum-hum. Okay, Bea. Hum-hum. Okay.

  ‘Diddy? Is that you?’ Her voice is close and very small.

  ‘Hello Bea.’

  ‘Diddy, it’s Dad. He’s gone.’

  I already know, Bea. I knew forty, no, forty-three minutes ago. Should I tell you? I’d gotten half way through Waddison Fabrics’ new price list, when the office was full of him, his energy, his sweat, tobacco breath, the sour mud of his socks. Not the old man in the nursing home, Bea, but him, out of the rain from feeding hay to the sheep and holding us one in each arm against his tartan jacket, his face and hair dripping on us. I could actually feel him, Bea. I could breathe him in.

  ‘Diddy, are you there?’

  ‘Sure, Bea. When did it happen?’

  ‘This morning. Not long, about a quarter past eight, we think. I wasn’t there, Diddy, I’d been with him all night and I’d just gone out for a cup of coffee. The doctor said that sometimes happens. They slip away when the family. Diddy, they lost his teeth. How could they do that? He hasn’t got any and his face. Well, there’s no point in getting new dentures now is there? When are you coming home?’

  ‘As soon as I can get a flight. Tomorrow, probably. Have you spoken with the priest and the funeral director?’

  ‘When would I have talked to the funeral director?’ Her voice gets thinner. ‘I’m on my own here, Diddy. Father O’Donnell’s gone and the doctor. I mean they’re all so busy. Frank’s in Sydney. He hates me calling him Frank. He hasn’t been home since last Christmas and I believe she’s expecting again. She doesn’t call me Mum, you know. I wouldn’t ask her to but it’s the way she says Beatrice as though it’s got a rotten taste. Well, that’s the way it is and you’re in New York. Aunty Em’s just had a pin put in her hip and anyway she’s. They didn’t call it Alzheimer’s when we were young. It was second childhood. The Rawiris have been a tower of strength but really there’s a limit. Diddy, it’s been so long, five and a half years.’

  ‘I know. I know, Bea.’

  ‘No, you don’t. The last time you saw him at least he could recognise you. You don’t know. You’re worse than Frank. A postcard when you feel like it. When you think you’ve got time but find out you haven’t.’ Her words are scratched with tears. ‘They don’t know where they put his teeth. You know what I reckon? Someone else is wearing them. Rammed in some poor old soul’s mouth.’

  While she talks about the nursing home, I shuffle words, trying to select something that will fit my experience, the visitation if you like to call it that. I want to tell her but I must be careful, otherwise she’ll blow it up like a Macy’s parade balloon and paint religion all over it. Maybe it wasn’t my father’s spirit in the office, but a trick of memory. Maybe the moment of death broke some genetic linkage which sent a ripple through me, a small fracture in time the moment the clock stopped ticking, and my imagination picked up on it. I knew my father was dead.
That is certain. But I don’t know with the same certainty that his spirit was in my office. I lean into the phone and her weeping, picking up the role of older sister. ‘I’m on my way, Bea. Promise. I’ll book a flight as soon as I hang up and then it’s only forty-eight hours.’

  ‘How long will you stay? Three weeks?’

  ‘We no, no, I’m afraid –’

  ‘You always say next time it’ll be three weeks. Why do you keep saying that? In twenty-six years it hasn’t been three weeks, hasn’t –’

  ‘Bea, I think I can manage to get away for a week. When’s the funeral?’

  ‘Father O’Donnell’s suggested Saturday but that’s got to fit in with the undertaker. I’m seeing him at ten o’clock. I’ve got to make all the decisions, Diddy, so I just hope you don’t think. When can you get here?’

  ‘Friday morning, if I get on the flight. You’ll do fine, Bea. Before you know it, we’ll be talking over a bottle of wine instead of the phone. Do you still drink cabernet merlot?’

  She sniffs. ‘It gives me a headache. What time is it over there? I forget.’

  ‘Ten after four, Tuesday.’

  ‘It’s Wednesday morning here. Tuesday he was still breathing. Funny, his hands were cold but not his face. His cheeks were rosy pink like a baby’s and his breath was warm, sort of slow and empty. What flight did you say?’

  ‘I’ll call you back as soon as I know. Where are you staying? I suggest you go to bed. I can leave a message on your answering machine.’

  ‘I can’t, Diddy. There’s too much to do.’

  ‘You won’t be able to organise anything in a state of exhaustion. Let it wait. Take a tablet. Switch on the electric blanket.’

  ‘Diddy, it’s midsummer!’ She laughs wetly. ‘You forgot that, didn’t you? I’ll bet it’s cold over there right now. Snow a metre deep.’

  ‘Well, no, just a chill misty rain. Look, Bea, I’ve got to finish this call and do some planning.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Diddy. I didn’t mean to go on at you. It’s just that. Well, you were here when Mum died. There were the three of us. You and me and him. This time. But the Rawiris have been simply marvellous. Did I tell you? And Molly Gleave who does the flowers. The staff of course. But it’s not the same as a partner, Diddy. It’s funny but I miss Barry. He was the one so good at legal and technical thingies.’

  ‘What about Ralston?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ralston? Rawson? Your chef?’

  Silence. Sometimes she holds her breath to think. Then comes the sigh full in my ear. ‘You’re so lucky, Diddy. You’ve got Lal to do things for you.’

  Lal a doer? I smile and cup my hands around the phone. ‘Bea, I have to call the airlines. There are a million things to organise.’

  ‘You will pray for his soul?’

  I lift the Waddison fabric list and put it down again. ‘Hey, you know –’

  ‘Diddy, it’s what I believe. It’s what he believed.’

  ‘Sure, Bea. Will you give me your number?’

  When the call is over, I move back to the windows and realise that the city has turned its lights on. The shawls of mist are dyed orange, pink and green, and streams of traffic, as dense as Christmas tree garlands, barely ripple the colours in the big puddle that covers the intersection of 48th and Lexington. The sidewalks and crosswalks blossom umbrellas.

  It’s not so much a prayer as an apology for the lack of it, the absence of any kind of feeling, religious or otherwise. I tell the city, ‘You’re okay, Dad. Everyone dies. That’s life. Trust it.’

  In the outer office my new secretary Momo is leaning over some blueprints on her desk. Her hair falls over her face like a black silk curtain. Her skin, unmarked by expression, has the fragile glow of porcelain. In that whiteness, her eyes seem very dark, her mouth redder than blood. In the six weeks she has been here, she has caused seismic vibrations amongst some of the staff.

  ‘Momo, please, some airline reservations for myself, United first flight tomorrow morning to LA and then Air New Zealand tomorrow night to Auckland. From Auckland it’s the first flight to Napier.’

  She opens her phone pad with a jab of a long black nail and says, ‘Round ticket?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. To return on the tenth, six days from now.’ I have been tempted to suggest that she exchange her attorney boyfriend for a poet with a briefcase full of fresh metaphor. But I suspect that she despises sentiment, even as a gift.

  ‘Is it a family matter, Delia?’ she asks. Her eyes are cool, offering conventional politeness.

  ‘Yes.’ I smile at her. ‘My father died tomorrow.’

  Pink, black and silver. I designed our suite of offices before Lal joined us. Every room but mine has glass walls and mirrors so that there is an illusion of vast floating space in what is actually a small area. In the foyer near the elevators, black flamingoes and silver palms decorate a pink marble pool with a fountain. At one time, the fountain was barely audible. The first thing Lal did was to change the flow so that the water now pings precisely on a series of small bronze drums. The effect charms clients but drives new receptionists mad until they manage selective deafness.

  Sylvie makes coffee and we sit at the conference table, Sylvie, myself, Mark, Antwan, Philippa, Momo and Aaron, going through the schedule for the next week. Lal is in Poughkeepsie today and won’t be back until the late train.

  ‘You want I should call him?’ Mark offers. He is a gifted wood designer and in love with Lal. He suffers deeply. I sometimes wonder why he torments himself by working in this place although I suppose if you can’t have the pleasure of love, the pain is better than nothing.

  ‘Thanks, Mark, but I left a message already on his voice mail. Now, the Brewster contract. The lighting is all concealed except for the Tiffany in the lounge.’

  ‘Tiffany?’ Philippa screws up her mouth and nose into a yeech.

  ‘The client is always right, darling,’ says Mark. ‘Delia, I’ll try him again. I just know he would want to be here with you.’

  ‘Sure,’ agrees Sylvie. ‘It’d be number one priority. The Poughkeepsie job’s in the bag anyway.’

  I shush them. ‘It’s not exactly a personal tragedy. He’s been bedridden for nearly six years.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’ Aaron asks.

  ‘Two. Two and a half years ago. I stopped off on my way to Cape Town. Remember we were all big on Africana? Fetish dolls, and bamboo chairs?’

  ‘Elephant shit incense,’ says Aaron. ‘Everyone wanted their apartment to look like a game reserve.’

  ‘I was in New Zealand for a couple of days. I thought then he wouldn’t last more than a month. It’s too bad when you want to die and you’ve got a heart like a Pratt and Whitney engine.’

  ‘Why sure, Delia,’ says Antwan. ‘It might be a blessing and all for him, but it’s still a loss for the rest of you. Your sister’s a restaurateur in Wellington New Zealand, right? You got other family?’ Antwan is the firm’s expert on family trivia. He heads a team of painters and paper-hangers and knows all their birthdays, the ages of their children, the status of their parents. It’s a hobby that says much about his generosity but I frequently find it invasive.

  ‘Beatrice has a married son Francis. The Munros are not known for prolific breeding. Now, where were we?’

  ‘I was going to call Lal,’ says Mark, half-rising.

  Momo taps her pen on the table. ‘The Brewster’s Tiffany lamp.’

  ‘Right!’ I say. ‘It should be in Foss and Hillman’s new shipment of Mexican stained glass. Philippa, will you check that? Now, the marble for the lobby of the brownstone on 34th. The samples were the wrong colour. Someone has to go down and sort this out. Don’t listen to any old hard-luck story. It’s a big job. If they haven’t got it, we go elsewhere. Sylvie, will you –’

  ‘No, I won’t!’ Sylvie pushes back her chair. ‘Delia, it’s past five and we’ve got a home to go to. Don’t worry! We’re all big boys and girls and you’re away six days, not si
x months.

  I look at the faces around the table and realise that I’ve been talking to them the way I talk to Beatrice. Do we ever grow beyond the relationships of childhood? I close my planner and laugh. ‘I love you guys!’

  51st Street between 2nd and 3rd is a narrow aorta clogged with traffic, garbage, chained bicycles, construction materials, illegally parked vehicles and jostling umbrellas. Under a wet awning, buckets of flowers do heroic battle with street smells. Pizza is spilled over the sidewalk. The subway breathes into the street and car exhausts throb the grey smoke of impatience.

  It was a long dying, Dad. What did you have to learn from it? Acceptance? Fortitude? Surely, they were already yours.

  In a doorway, someone is sleeping under a tent of cardboard and plastic. Only the feet are seen, wrinkled socks, worn slip-ons of an indefinable colour resting on an open newspaper. A blue neon sign blinks Tarot Readings, Palmistry and ESP, the Answer to all Your Problems. Further along, outside the Pickwick Arms Hotel, Lubov is pounding his hands, shaking his grey head like a dog. ‘Wo Delia! You look friz, gal. How come you ain’t got no coat?’ Past the steamed windows of the café and the smell of wet pigeon droppings, I see a styrofoam cup wobbling down the flooded gutter. It becomes stranded on a grating as the water falls away.

  That’s the human condition, a styrofoam cup to be filled, emptied, filled, emptied, filled again, and constant confusion between container and content. Not that it matters. I expect that it’s all part of the one comic cosmic concerto.

  Lal says that one day there’ll be computer programmes that will analyse the energy vibrations of matter and convert the unheard sound of things to audible music. An interior decorator will be able to compose a kitchen or bedroom like a concerto or nocturne, selecting the right vibrations for the occupier so that we will all be able to live in chosen harmony with our surroundings. I like the idea but doubt its practical application. Lal’s great gift is contagious beauty. He is not the most practical of beings. Still, I warm towards his notion that we subconsciously choose an environment that is sympathetic to our personal energy field. I know the symphony of this street just as surely as Beethoven heard the music of the moon. I know the fortissimo of the ambulance, the mezzo-forte of the garbage truck, the leggiero of pigeon wings and sniffing dogs, the glissando of falling leaves. I know the brass, the woodwinds, the timpani of traffic, the heavier percussion of the subway, the violin and cello voices of the sidewalk, the harp-playing morning sunlight between the trees in the Greenacre Park. The street fills me with the richest music and when I am away from it for any time, I hunger.