The Song of Hartgrove Hall

by Natasha Solomons

  I sag, about to apologise and concede that that would have been a jolly good idea, when I remember Jack bloody well left us to it. I’m ready to snap back and ask him what I was supposed to hire a band with, since the General is hardly awash with cash, but Jack’s already turned away and is pleading quietly with Edie.

  ‘Go on, darling, be a doll. Just one.’

  ‘It’s never just one, Jack, you know that.’

  ‘All right, two then.’ He grins and strokes her cheek. ‘It would mean the world to young Fox here.’

  Jack’s trying to persuade Edie to sing. I’m torn. I want to hear her sing, I really, really do, but she looks exhausted. She wrinkles her forehead and chews her fingernail in a sudden, childlike gesture, then gives a little sigh.

  ‘Yes, all right, I’ll do it. But one short set and that’s all. No requests. No encores.’

  I’ve never heard a girl speak so firmly to Jack. He places a solemn kiss on her lips.

  ‘Agreed, madam.’

  ‘And now, you lured me here with promises of champagne. Are you all talk, Jack Fox-Talbot?’

  With playful remonstration he leads her away and presents her with a glass of the General’s best pre-war Veuve Clicquot. I can’t help but stare after them. Edie might be the one who’s famous but the same aura of glamour shines on Jack. When we were children our grandmama played several games with us but her favourite was to pluck a buttercup and hold it under our chins. If it cast a yellow glow, she’d declare, ‘Yes, Little Fox likes butter very much indeed,’ and we’d squeal, perfectly delighted. My brother lives permanently in that buttery glow.

  As I watch Edie and Jack colluding by the fire, they seem set apart from everyone else – like figures in an old master in a gallery full of amateur works – and I feel a pulse of envy, hot and sharp. George perceives the direction of my gaze. George always does.

  He chuckles. ‘Forget it, Fox. Not a chance.’ I look away, pretending not to understand.

  I don’t pay attention for the rest of the party. The minutes drift by. Edie Rose will sing us into the New Year. This soggy failure of a party is transformed into a triumph. Everyone will talk about it for years to come. The church bells boom the half-hour and I look around for Edie but I can’t see her.

  ‘Hello. Harry, isn’t it?’

  She’s beside me.

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’

  I notice that she has a dot of a mole on her left cheek. I want to reach out and brush it with my fingers. I wonder whether Jack already has.

  ‘Jack tells me that you can sing and play the piano.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Silently I curse myself. I want to appear dashing and sophisticated and yet in her company I’m apparently unable to stutter more than monosyllables.

  ‘Will you play for me, Harry? I’m frightfully tired. I don’t want to sing alone tonight.’

  ‘I would. But – the piano. She’s not in tip-top condition. She’s had rather a hard war, I’m afraid.’

  Edie laughs. ‘She?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I always think of her, it . . .’

  Edie reaches out and touches my arm. ‘It’s terribly sweet of you.’

  I’m nettled. I don’t want her to think I’m sweet. I’m not a child.

  ‘The army moved the piano into the mess bar. Goodness knows what’s been poured over the keys. Not to mention the general damp. When I tried to tune her – it – one of the strings just snapped.’

  ‘Please play for me, Harry.’

  ‘Fine. But—’ I remember she said no requests.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Will you sing one of your early pieces? “The Seeds of Love” or “The Apple Tree”? Not that I don’t like the wartime songs, of course.’

  This isn’t true. I dislike Edie Rose’s wartime hits intensely. They’re patriotic guff. Tunes in one shade of pillar-box red. I walked out of a café once when ‘A Shropshire Thrush’ came on the wireless, even though I’d already paid.

  Edie gives me an odd look. ‘They won’t like it.’

  She glances at the assembled crowd and I’m pleased that she’s no longer counting me amongst them. Jack bounds over and kisses her on the cheek, tucking a curl behind her ear with easy familiarity.

  ‘It’s time, old thing. Or do you want this first?’

  With a flourish he produces from his pocket a disintegrating fish-paste sandwich. Edie shakes her head and I point mournfully at the hog squatting on the table. ‘What’s wrong with my pig? No one seems to want it.’

  ‘It’s splendid, Fox. Just not really Edie’s thing.’

  She turns to me. ‘Well, Harry? Shall we?’

  —

  Edie doesn’t sing my song. I sit at the rickety piano and cajole the keys into some sort of accompaniment, feeling as if I’m riding shotgun on an unsteady, half-dead nag that might either bolt or flop into the hedgerow at any moment. Edie’s a true professional and doesn’t let the screwball sideshow rattle her. She lulls the county set with that honeysuckle voice as she floats through the wartime hits that made her famous but which I cannot abide. I’m sweating from the effort of forcing the piano to obey and I have a headache. It’s past midnight and we’ve slid into 1947 and I haven’t even noticed. I need a drink and a clean shirt. The guests cheer and toast Edie and then me as she hauls me to my feet. They holler and even the General raises a glass.

  ‘Shall we get out of here?’ she whispers through her teeth, giving them a playful curtsey.

  ‘Dear God, yes.’

  We race outside before the crowd can smother her with well-lubricated enthusiasm. She lights me a cigarette and I take it, somehow too embarrassed to confess I don’t smoke. I can’t stop staring at her. She smiles at me, and it’s slightly lopsided as though she’s thinking of a mischievous and inappropriate joke. It’s horribly attractive.

  ‘So how come when all three of you boys are Foxes, you are the only one called “Fox”?’

  I swallow smoke, trying not to cough, grateful that in the dark she can’t see my eyes water.

  ‘I was always “Little Fox” but somehow now that I’m eighteen and nearly six foot, it seems, well, silly. So now I’m just Fox.’

  ‘I see. Fox suits you. Although I’ve always liked the name Harry.’

  I wonder whether she’s flirting with me, but I’m so unpractised that I can’t tell.

  ‘You need a new piano,’ she says.

  ‘And a new roof and a hundred other things. But I thought I played her valiantly.’

  ‘With absolute chivalry. A lesser man would have chopped it, sorry, her, up mid-performance for kindling.’

  ‘Are you trying to charm young Fox here?’ asks Jack, appearing at my side so clearly unperturbed by the prospect that I’m thoroughly put out.

  A trio of girls and their beaus step out onto the terrace in Jack’s wake. Oblivious, he pulls people along as if they were the trail behind a shooting star. They say he was one of the best officers in his battalion, that his men would follow him anywhere, do anything for him. I believe it.

  The low balustrades of the terrace are smashed, but spread with frost they catch in the light and glisten.

  ‘I didn’t get my song,’ I complain. Drink has made me bold.

  ‘You first,’ says Edie. ‘It’s only fair and Jack says you can sing.’

  ‘He can, he can. He’s splendid,’ says Jack. My brother has the kindness and generosity of the utterly self-assured.

  ‘Fine. What shall I sing?’

  ‘That one you do for me and George. I like that one. He’s terribly clever, he wrote it himself.’

  I wince at his enthusiasm. Jack’s referring to a bawdy and frankly filthy ditty I made up to amuse him and George, but it’s too late and Edie’s turning to me expectantly.

  ‘In that case I demand a Harry Fox-Talbot original. I
won’t accept anything less.’

  I rack my brains for something neither too simple nor too rude. Others have gathered on the terrace, but I don’t mind. I never mind an audience for music. According to my brothers, before Mother died I used to come downstairs and sing for dinner guests in my nightie. I hope Jack hasn’t told Edie this. I can’t ask him not to because then he certainly will. I clear my throat.

  ‘All right. Here you go. This isn’t strictly written by me, but I heard it once upon a time and this is a tidy variation on a theme.’

  I’m not a distinguished singer, but my voice is pleasant enough and, I suppose, expressive. I can make a few instruments say what I’m thinking – pianos, church organs and my own voice. I’m not quite six foot and not quite handsome. My eyes aren’t as blue as my brothers’ but I’ve observed that when I sing girls forget I’m not as tall as they’d thought and not as handsome as they’d hoped.

  I sing without accompaniment. I don’t look at Edie or the other girls. The frost is thick as snow and I watch the song rise from my lips as steam. I’ve never seen a song fly before. The words drift over the lawn. It’s one of Edie’s old songs from before the war. I sing the names of the flowers and they float out into the darkness – yellow primroses and violets bright against the wintry ground. I sing a verse or two and then I stop. I can fool them for a short while, but I know if I go on too long my voice can’t hold them. That takes real skill, and a real voice. A voice like Edie Rose’s.

  ‘Jolly good. Bloody marvellous,’ shouts Jack and claps me on the back.

  The others applaud and the girls smile and, for the first time that evening, try to catch my eye. I should make the most of this – it’s a temporary reprieve from invisibility. The effect of a song is much like that of a glass of champagne and lasts only as long. I glance at Edie. She doesn’t look at me and she doesn’t clap with the others.

  May 2000

  I knew the girls were worried about me. I could always tell when a lecture was coming. Clara would telephone and inform me that they were coming round for tea, so I would check the cupboards for the good biscuits. Dinner or lunch with the assembled grandchildren and Clara’s harassed, distracted husband was a social call but tea with both daughters could mean only one thing.

  On this occasion, they sat down side by side on the Edwardian sofa, a little too close together, as both of them avoided the place nearest the fire, Edie’s spot. No one could bear to sit there. I was tempted to because then she’d have to come in and shoo me away as she always did, but I knew that was daft. They perched there, two birds on a branch, Lucy, my little chaffinch, small and dark with fluttering, uncertain hands. I copied that movement once, when conducting Debussy and I wanted a ripple to run through the strings. I didn’t tell Lucy. She wouldn’t have taken it as a compliment.

  Clara settled against the cushions with studied ease, ankles tidily crossed, expensive handbag on the floor beside her. Edie bought those cushions from Liberty on a spree a hundred years ago and I never liked them. A bit gaudy if you ask me. Though of course she hadn’t and now I’d never part with them. Ridiculous how ugly snatches of household bits and bobs suddenly become precious and imbued with sentiment.

  Both girls sat facing me with porcelain teacups perfectly balanced on their knees (I never know how they do this; it’s one of the many things their mother must have taught them) and informed me that I needed a hobby. Distraction. I needed To Make Friends. They were brimming with suggestions – I could join the bridge club, I could grow my own vegetables. When I suggested joining the local Women’s Institute as an honorary gentleman member and trying my hand at treacle sponge, I gained a stern look from Clara who clearly didn’t think I was taking this seriously enough. So I listened politely to their advice (I always listen carefully before doing precisely what I want – children, even when over forty, don’t like to be ignored).

  ‘Are you managing to write at all?’ asked Lucy, her forehead notched with concern.

  ‘Not at the minute. Another biscuit?’ I thrust the plate at her and took a biscuit myself, shoving it into my mouth all at once so that I couldn’t possibly answer any more questions. She didn’t take the hint.

  ‘You’re playing the piano, though, aren’t you, Papa?’

  I pointed to my bulging cheeks, but the girls smiled politely and waited until I’d finished.

  ‘No, darling, I am not playing the piano.’

  I’ve never been good at lying to Lucy. Even as a child she’d stare at me with those huge guileless grey eyes, believing every word I uttered to be a fixed and unalterable truth, so that in the end I couldn’t bear to tell her the tiniest of fibs. I wanted to be as truthful as she believed me to be.

  I hadn’t played the piano since the day Edie died. I’d tried. I’d opened the lid when I arrived home after the funeral. I’d slunk away from the visitors and their pocket recollections of Edie that they were all too eager to share over the sandwiches and vol-au-vents, so that in the car on the way home they might console themselves that they had done their duty and given a pleasant memory to the poor old sod. I’d disappeared into the music room with a glass of decent Scotch and a cigar, and closed the door, grateful for solitude, but when faced with the keys, I hesitated – my hands suddenly unsure where to land. I’d never had to think about playing, any more than I have to think about forming words with my mouth when I speak.

  My fingers were terribly cold, and I couldn’t fix on which was the appropriate piece for the occasion. Since I was playing for Edie it needed to be the perfect choice performed just so, but my joints were clumsy and stiff. When I reached into my memory for Bach he wasn’t there, nor was Schubert. Even the little Chopin nocturne I’d played as a joke when she couldn’t sleep was hiding somewhere in a recess of my brain. I’d ended up closing the lid of the piano and announcing to the empty room that tomorrow I’d play. I’d compose something especially for Edie and play it for her. However, when tomorrow arrived I discovered that even though my fingers were no longer cold and unwieldy, my mind remained stiff, and all melody eluded me.

  Lucy took my hand in hers: warm and small – pretty yet useless for a piano player, but then neither of my daughters had ever shown the slightest inclination towards music. No, that’s not true. When Clara was fifteen we had a handsome young trumpeter staying with us for the July concert series, and Clara declared that she wanted to learn the trumpet. Her passion for both boy and trumpet waned with the long summer nights.

  It would have been nice if the girls had displayed even an amateur interest, a casual talent. I had offered each of them lessons upon a variety of instruments. Always more willing to please than her sister, Lucy had worked her way through the entire woodwind section with utterly astonishing ineptitude until neither I nor her teacher could stand any more. One Saturday morning when she was about twelve, instead of dropping her at the music teacher’s house, I deposited her at tennis lessons at which, to everyone’s profound relief, she was rather better.

  It was Clara’s turn to fix me with a steady look.

  ‘Well, Papa, if you’re not writing and you’re not playing, then it’s even more important for you to have a hobby.’

  The thing is that I did have a hobby of sorts, although probably not one my daughters had in mind. I’d taken to visiting doctors. I’d seen all different kinds. I’d tried each of the partners at my own practice and I’d gone up to town to see a specialist on Harley Street at great expense (I told the girls I was going to the opera, which would have been significantly cheaper). I needed a diagnosis. There was clearly something very wrong. I was always cold even when I sat huddled in front of the fire. I couldn’t eat. I could neither write nor play. If they’d only give me a pill, then maybe I’d be whole again. However, every doctor had said the same thing – I was perfectly fine, nothing was physically wrong. I should eat a little more and drink a little less, and at that I’d known each one was yet another quack. The bl
asted doctors knew nothing.

  In the end I’d gone to see a new partner at the local practice. I tried to explain.

  ‘A huge piece of me is missing,’ I wanted to say. ‘I’m more holes than man.’ But it had come out all wrong. ‘I’m a Jarlsberg,’ I declared. The young, weary-looking doctor stared at me. Starting to sweat, I’d tried again. ‘I’m full of holes like a Jarlsberg.’

  The doctor smiled and sat back in his chair with a practised air of patience. ‘Ah, yes, that Swiss cheese. I know. My daughter has it in her lunch box. My wife buys it in slices from Marks and Spencer.’

  I’d stared at the doctor for a moment, then reached for my hat, wondering how it was that we were now talking about cheese instead of whatever cataclysmic ailment I had. Surely it was cancer. At that moment I’d been quite sure of it and had decided it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing. I couldn’t have fought it for long, not without Edie. It would be hard on the girls, but they were grown up and in the end it would be for the best, although I preferred not to suffer. I was definitely against suffering. I was about to start considering the most suitable pieces for my funeral – Bach, there would definitely have to be Bach – when the doctor put down his pen and removed his spectacles. He had pale blue eyes and he looked to be about the same age as Clara.

  ‘You’re not ill, Mr Fox-Talbot. You’re sad.’

  I’d inhaled sharply, affronted. ‘Sad’ was the wrong word. Sad was watching an old weepie when it was raining outside or taking down the Christmas tree on the first day of January or listening to the last concert of the season knowing that afterwards all the musicians would depart and the house would be much too quiet. I’d wanted to rise to my feet and inform the young doctor that I took offence at his most inappropriate use of language but for some reason my legs wouldn’t move, and my tongue was dry and fat, and it stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  All I’d managed was, ‘This wasn’t the plan. Women live longer than men. Everyone knows that. This wasn’t the plan at all.’