The Best British Short Stories 2013

by Nicholas Royle

  Her opening was superb, the wistful sognando beautifully caught. But she had some difficulty with the lilting theme halfway in, due, I guessed, to nerves, poor love. I suggested we redo the passage. She wanted to replay the whole movement. I had to gently explain that although that was a luxury we could afford in the sonatas, with just a pianist to pay, orchestral time cost money.

  Foolishly I told her of Klemperer’s remark to his daughter when asked to put down some patching for a live recording – Lotte, ein Schwindel. She often thereafter used that against me, laughingly mostly. But I explained that we were all after perfection, engineers too. She took the point.

  We did some more patching in the fiendishly hard second movement, but by the last movement she had relaxed, and I decided to allow the first take to stand.

  I had thought of her doing the Walton sonata as coupling, but I decided to wind her down gently, like a racehorse, so I kept on the orchestra and we did Portsmouth Point and Scapino, Eleanor playing on the first desk.

  After I had finished the master tape I asked her to listen to it with me. She refused. She said she was afraid of all the mistakes she’d pick out. She always preferred live performances where the mistakes would be carried by the inspiration of the moment, forgotten.

  She asked if the patches were discernible. I answered that they weren’t, that I was as much a perfectionist as she, and, dare I say it, as talented in my own field. She then said simply, ‘Are you satisfied, Cecil?’ I said I was. That was enough for her. She never, to the end, played her recordings.

  She trusted me, do you see? And that trust made my betrayal possible.

  When I think back, remember her talent, the frailty of her talent, of all talent . . .

  To celebrate the release of the recording I took her to Fortnum and Mason’s for tea. Eleanor, bless her, insisted on buying me a new tie, as the one I was wearing somehow got wet as I poured the tea. I still have both ties in my rack.

  The record had some gratifying reviews, and sold over the months. Our only sadness was that May was now long dead; Eleanor could no longer repay her encouragement with her own success.

  But she had friends aplenty, all pleased with her. We began to plan further recordings, plan her career, as they’d say today, although in those days it was just a case of getting on with the next job. And there were plenty of them now, on the strength of her acclaim.

  She was widening her repertoire all the time – the Szymanowski First, his Mythes for violin and piano (new to me), the Fauré sonatas. And I was introducing her to some of the overlooked English works I felt it my vocation to champion.

  Then came one of those serendipities that change everything.

  I mentioned, apropos Delius’ The First Cuckoo in Spring, the story of May’s sister Beatrice and her nightingale.

  Beatrice used to invite friends and organise weekends for deprived children at her Surrey cottage, and give outdoor cello recitals in the evenings. At one such, a nightingale responded and a duet ensued.

  This happened again and again, in fact became a reliable occurrence. Word got to the BBC, who sent a van and recording engineer to tape it. It was the first outside broadcast, and later relayed round the world, at popular request.

  Eleanor was utterly enchanted. She wanted to do likewise. She obtained a score of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux, and transcribed some of them for violin.

  With some misgiving, I loaded a recorder and spare battery into the car boot, with a hamper, and we trundled down to Windsor Great Park.

  A lovely hazy summer evening. She played and played but no bird sang.

  Just as we were going to call it a day, a robin flew down and perched on her bow. She was childlike in her delight. Alas no song, then it flew away. But she was happy.

  We had a half bottle of wine and sandwiches on the grass, in the setting sun.

  We got back to the car only to find that with the weight of the recorder and the unmade road, we had had a puncture. I set to changing the wheel.

  It took longer than I expected. I explained to Eleanor that being a recording engineer is not the same as repairing a car or designing the Forth Bridge. Luckily she seemed to have a knack with spanners, so, despite a little oil on her dress, it didn’t spoil the trip.

  On the way home I hit on the idea of getting hold of some bird identification recordings, overlaying them with Eleanor’s playing in call and response duets, and issuing them on EP.

  But I felt a record needed something substantial, so I decided to have her do Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending and issue it with the bird duets on a ten-inch LP.

  She was wonderful in the VW, strong and agile in the soaring notes, fragile in the climb.

  In preparing the recording, I had the inspired idea of adding some snatches of actual larksong after the closing bars. I worried about complaints from the VW Society, but in the event they seemed happy. Unfortunately I did have complaints, from Messiaen’s publishers over the transcriptions. The whole situation became – if I may risk a pun in a mea culpa – a messy ’un, but we eventually came to an agreement on royalties. Messiaen himself, I later heard, was charmed.

  In the meantime, the record sold, sold like hot cakes, as you may remember, sold to all sorts and across the board. Apart from the money, it also made Eleanor’s name, and meant she could record more substantial fare.

  With the proceeds from that and an LP of a negro choir doing arrangements from My Fair Lady I decided to treat Eleanor to a new violin.

  I had heard through contacts of one going, by William Robinson of Plumstead, an admired name in the trade. I telephoned the dealer and went down to Guildford.

  Nothing has ever given me greater pleasure than presenting her with that violin. A beautiful thing, pure-toned, crackle-free varnish. It’s the instrument you hear on all her recordings from then on: the Szymanowski First, the Bax, the Elgar/Walton sonatas . . .

  But that is to anticipate. Before those records came that silvered cloud that changed my life. Our life.

  I had promised to attend a recital she was giving in Dorking, and arrived a little dishevelled. I had contrived to lock myself out some days before, and as the landlord was away, was reduced to sleeping in my mixing studio. My cheque book being with my keys, I had sufficient readies for a pair of clean socks and a vest. My shirt I had washed in the basin and hung on a cable (it was still damp round the collar).

  That was the occasion, and probably the reason, for Eleanor’s proposing. What she proposed was not so much marriage as ‘taking me in hand’ but who was I to argue semantics?

  You can imagine perhaps, though I doubt it, how I felt.

  We planned the quietest of register office weddings, but somehow her friends found out and as we left the office they were waiting, armed with confetti they had made from an old orchestral score. We were showered with minims, crochets and quavers.

  They told us later the score was Bluebeard’s Castle. I said I had never been married before.

  Then they dragged us to a makeshift reception in a scout hall; cold buffet with white wine and cider and impromptu performances of Mendelssohn and Bach, culminating in improvised csardas in which Eleanor, after several ciders, proved astonishingly uninhibited.

  I know all this sounds too jolly, too joyous, for a confession, but it’s important that you understand, understand what came later.

  From then on we were inseparable. I was there at every concert, every curtain call, awaiting every flushed return. That year we recorded the Szymanowski, coupled with Wienawski to follow the Polish theme. Then she started learning the Bax, by way of tribute to May Harrison. But I still cherished my original ambition, and decided to fulfil it for our first anniversary.

  By then Beatlemania was in full spate, but there were still sufficient middle-aged music lovers to appeal to. I managed to secure the Joe Loss Orchestra for an album of arrangements
from Bandwagon. I called it Losst In Transit, which I like to think helped it strike a chord, and it sold steadily for some months.

  With weeks to spare I popped the surprise to Eleanor – a commissioned work of her own – and asked her for suggestions.

  We deliberated for some time. Neither of us had any idea whom to approach. We had recently heard a concerto on the wireless by Malcom Williamson, liltingly elegiac, indeed written as an elegy to Edith Sitwell.

  We duly wrote to him care of the BBC. Unfortunately he had by then embarked on an operatic follow-up to his Covent Garden success the previous year, didn’t want the distraction.

  Then Eleanor was told of a Polish composer living in England, living in fact on a houseboat at Twickenham, who had in his Polish past won the Szymanowski Prize. It seemed an omen.

  We motored down to Richmond and walked along the towpath to Twickenham, hoping to locate him. Eleanor seemed to think if we could see a houseboat with a piano we had found him. I was dubious.

  Eventually we gave up, visited Marble Hill House, and walked the twilit towpath to Twickenham Bridge.

  Luckily a friend of Eleanor’s who had played under him in Birmingham gave us the name of his publisher and we wrote.

  His reply was charming but a little evasive. Could we specify what we had in mind? He had several works he needed to finish or revise, and didn’t wish to stray far from their sound worlds.

  We specified only that the violin be prominent and the forces small, a chamber work, ideally, but otherwise he had carte blanche.

  What resulted was Peripeteia for violin, bassoon and triangle.

  I must admit my heart sank when I first saw the score, but from such unpromising materials a masterpiece had been written, poignantly exploiting the contrasting timbres. In the first movement (there were only two) the contrast was between the violin’s kaleidoscopically changing three-note motif and the almost static, tethered range of the bassoon’s four notes; between the stridently lyrical, mercurial violin and the bassoon’s phlegmatic gruffness, punctuated by the triangle’s rills. I liked to liken it to Cassius Clay versus Sonny Liston, the triangle acting as timekeeper-cum-referee. But at least one of Eleanor’s friends saw in it a portrait of our marriage, which rather upset her.

  In the second movement (I take it you haven’t heard the work), a palindromic reversal of the first also reverses the roles, the bassoon gaining a dour, conciliatory eloquence, the violin now muted, wistful, the triangle chiming metronomically throughout. And this, this – premonitory, though we did not know it – proved the more accurate portrait. But that again is to anticipate.

  Eleanor, poor angel, set to and learnt her part. How hard she struggled at first, the idiom being so outside her usual range. But she mastered it. And we had found an excellent bassoonist, not the least phlegmatic himself, in fact most rehearsals ended in hi-jinks over a bottle of wine. (It was the triangle player who was somewhat dour, dry at least – a Euclidean temperament, Eleanor said.)

  They premiered the work in Windsor and we recorded it the following day with, I’m glad to say, very little patching – ‘quilting’ as Eleanor called it.

  We coupled it, for contrast, with Malcolm Arnold’s Sea Shanties for Violin and Accordion. It didn’t sell as well as we hoped, but it brought her heightened respect as an adventurous artist. I felt immensely proud, of her and of myself.

  Perhaps that pride was hubris? For soon after, tragedy, as they say, struck. Actually less of a strike, more a gradual attrition.

  We were trying to decide on a follow-up to the Szymanowski. Eleanor at length chose the Prokofiev First, for its similar fairy-tale quality, and I booked the orchestra and venue.

  No problems showed up in the rehearsals, but the recording . . .

  She was exquisite in the hushed, magical opening, agile in the pizzicato. But when the first theme returns softly on solo flute (you know the passage, I’m sure) her accompanying ornamentation was marred by a succession of sharp intakes of breath. I put it down to nerves or indigestion, or the fact that she was more closely miked than usual, and we were able, after several attempts, to patch it.

  I detected it again in the scherzo, but as that is more raucous, it didn’t intrude. The last movement gave me a few problems, and Eleanor seemed unusually tense, but determined to come up with a perfect take. Eventually we succeeded.

  I was then taken up with the usual post-recording work, and Eleanor always made a point of practising alone, so we made no mention of it all.

  But at her next concert a few months later – she was doing the Bax – I thought I heard, from the front row, the same wince. The audience hadn’t seemed to notice so I shrugged it off.

  A week later she gave a chamber recital of Fauré and Grieg. Then it was unmistakeable.

  They say every marriage is a secret to those outside it. But to one inside it too, especially one as ill-prepared for marriage as I.

  And that tragedy brings you closer. The closeness was an embrace across barbed wire. I became more solicitous, but had to work hard to hide it. Eleanor had perhaps the harder part, of pretending not to know that I knew, although in point of fact I knew very little. I tried to put it down as my over-reaction to an undeserved happiness.

  Eleanor carried on her fiercely independent self-hood, practising alone behind locked doors. So we kept up that embrace. Until the day I noticed the door unlocked.

  I listened outside for a while to her playing, then peeped inside to catch unawares, perhaps, her hair being tossed in concentration.

  The room was empty.

  Full, rather, of her presence, emanating from a tape recorder. From the spool I could tell she hadn’t been gone long, but could afford to be away for an hour or so. I closed the door and leant against the wall.

  Driven after several drinks to the despicable, I found her diary. For that day, just a time. I traced back, those similar bald entries over several months, back to the first, of both name and time. Appointments with her doctor.

  I cried in both relief and worry.

  That was when the strain began in earnest. Unable to confront her with my compromised knowledge, yet not knowing exactly what that knowledge was, save from a glimpsed bottle of painkillers in her handbag, I was forced to second-guess her decisions, make tactful suggestions . . .

  It was clear from her whimpers and grimaces, clear to me at least, that concerts were proving a trial, that she couldn’t keep them up. How to tell her, or rather, enable her to tell me?

  I put it to her that I still had so much repertoire I wanted her to ‘put in the can’ for me that perhaps, for my sake, she could forego live performances for a while. She finally agreed.

  I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Those whimpers of pain, of which I think she was quite unaware, would necessitate endless takes, tactful patching. Her views on that hardened. Needing the recording sessions as surrogate concerts, she craved whole, unblemished takes, the sweep of perfection. I had to defend the endless fiddle, the stop-and-start, the cumulative piecemeal perfection. I realised how unsatisfying that type of perfection is for an artist.

  I had to argue that she was being selfish, that there is the subjective perfection of the artist, but also that of the listener, that there is the need to create, sustain, a momentary perfection to redeem the ramshackle, humdrum life of contingency that most of us live. That, ultimately, it is the achieved artifact that is important to the world, whatever the means.

  We were recording the Lennox Berkeley at the time. The endless battles with the cantus firmus in the lento, the tears of frustration as I rejected what to her were perfect takes, wore us both down. Eventually I cobbled together a reasonable tape and we called it a day.

  I insisted on her taking a break for a while, but she soon fretted to get back to work, so we started on the Prokofiev Second, to complete the set.

  On the second night she went straight to bed,
taking a painkiller, for a headache, she said. I went in later, watched over her bed. One hand under her cheek, the other arm thrown back, her hair floating on the pillow, she was sleeping fitfully, her lips shaping little soundless cries.

  That was when I thought the unthinkable.

  Next morning I stopped her a few times in the run-through of the andante, then gave her her head in the take.

  At the end she looked up, waiting for the retakes. No, it’s fine, I said, ‘in the can’. Let’s press on.

  On the way home I said quietly, I’ve capitulated.

  That evening I got out the Schwann catalogue.

  It’s a bit like horsebreeding, a question of pedigree. Tracing the lineage, the stables, who had studied with whom. Eleanor had studied with Warburg who had studied under Enescu who also taught Menuhin . . . And so forth.

  It was, I suppose you would say today, like getting a DNA match. Not exact, but near enough to tweak.

  So I obtained a recording of the work (I won’t tell you whose) and, with some judicious adjustment of the balance, I spliced in the necessary passages, altered the speed a little so the graft ‘took’. I would always be aware of the grafts, but I was confident that the results were no more artificial than the usual patching. It was the nearest to perfection I could achieve under the circumstances.

  But what next?

  Our original intention had been to record neglected works of the English repertoire – the Havergal Brian, the Britten, Holst’s Double Concerto, Rubbra’s sonatas. That was no longer possible. For where would I obtain the grafting stock?

  I had to tactfully steer Eleanor away from that idea, persuade her of the need to prove her mettle in the standard repertoire.