The Song of Hartgrove Hall

by Natasha Solomons

  I was adrift those first months. My memories of Edie were like dandelion clocks in the wind, winnowing in every direction. I’d lost all chronology. I missed every Edie at once. The young and terribly glamorous woman I’d met after the war. She was so private about herself. She never spoke about her family or where she’d grown up and whenever she did let a detail slip – how she’d left school at twelve or how she used to queue with her grandmother on a Sunday at the best bagel shop in the East End – I fell upon it, delighted. I’d hoarded those details to myself, feeling sometimes that she was a jigsaw puzzle but I was not allowed to know the picture on the front of the box, and it was for me to piece her together, bit by bit, until finally my reward would be to see her all at once.

  When I first knew her I’d thought that she was keeping us from her family. We were too eccentric, an old family clearly in decline, brought sadly low. I didn’t discover for many years that it was the other way around. She’d spent years constructing this careful version of herself, Edie Rose, and she kept the other parts of herself scrupulously hidden. Those dreadful wartime hits played everywhere for years and years; one couldn’t turn on the radio without being blasted by ‘A Shropshire Thrush’ sung by England’s Perfect Rose. That was the version of her we were supposed to accept.

  Next I remembered how she cried for weeks after Clara was born. Just sat curled up on our bedroom floor, clasping this tiny blanketed bundle and weeping. My God, I’d felt useless. No one told you what to do about such things in those days.

  And then I’d missed her when I went to the cupboard and found there was no loo roll left. She always wrote the shopping lists and purchased household things in bulk. The knowledge that I must fend for myself, even in the most trivial of matters, momentarily floored me and I’m afraid to confess that I found myself sitting on the loo sobbing – there was no loo roll and there was no Edie. There was no order to anything.

  Clara gave me an advice book about grief, which claimed that the peculiar sensation of timelessness, of drifting through days, was quite normal. But why was grief normal? Grief meant that nothing would ever be ‘normal’ again. Normal was Edie. Without her nothing was normal. She couldn’t walk back through the kitchen door, chuck her keys on the table, sink into a chair and smile at me, asking for a gin and tonic. Normality could not be restored.

  The morning before his first lesson, I couldn’t stay in bed and keep my eyes shut against the light. Robin would be arriving in an hour.

  I didn’t have a plan as to how to actually teach him. I’d never had a regular pupil. I’d given the odd master class to promising students at the Royal College, but they’d always been in composition rather than the piano. I’m a decent pianist – the layman would mistakenly consider me excellent. I am not. I can play most things with the utmost competence, but my playing lacks any real emotion. I play in order to hear aloud the thing in my mind, but then I’m finished with it. It’s only when my idea is performed by a real musician that it is called to life. At the end of my fingers, it’s merely a blueprint, a sketch of possibility to be realised in its full dimensions by someone else. I have neither the desire nor the patience to play a phrase a thousand times in order to achieve the speckle of perfection.

  As I said, I’m not a real pianist. Yet, like most composers, I do become a dictator when it comes to my own work. I may not be able to achieve it myself, but I know precisely how it ought to sound. While I can listen in smiling awe to a recording of Albert Shields performing Rachmaninov, when the great man was rehearsing my own concerto at the Festival Hall I found myself stopping him after a few minutes to insist on a darker rumbling tone and then argued with some heat about his far-too-curvaceous phrasing in the wild second movement. All was well in the end – we’re old friends. We fought. We yelled. He performed it as I wished. We reconciled.

  But how to teach a four-year-old child? I’d half considered telephoning Clara’s blasted Mrs Claysmore and asking for some tips – she did owe me fifty pounds for the deposit. In the end I’d visited a music shop and purchased several piano playbooks of varying difficulty.

  Robin arrived at eight-thirty. Clara lingered in the kitchen, sipping tea, showing no eagerness to be off. Robin was oddly subdued. He made no dash for my cupboards and didn’t remove so much as a single sock, but stood beside the fridge, thoughtfully chewing on a one-eared cuddly mouse and picking his nose.

  ‘Shall I stay?’ asked Clara.

  ‘No,’ I said, too quickly, seeing then that Clara looked hurt. ‘We’re not ready for an audience yet. Let us muddle through for a bit together first.’

  After she left we went into the music room. The lesson did not start well. I brought out the first book, propped it on the stand and called out the names of the notes as I tinkered through the first rather tedious tune. Robin grabbed the book and chucked it onto the floor.

  ‘Boring,’ he announced. ‘It’s a little tune. It’s silly. I want a proper tune. A big one.’

  ‘You have to learn the little ones first. The little ones make up the big ones,’ I said and entered into a simple scale.

  Robin lay down on the floor in disgust.

  ‘But listen,’ I said, aware I was losing him already, ‘I can use those notes to build something else.’

  I launched into two scales at once, crashing in different directions with thundering noise and a lot of show, and then used it to put together the opening of Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals. The piece requires two pianos to be played at once but I did my best alone, although I confess the sheer effort made me breathless and sweaty.

  ‘You see?’ I said, wiping my forehead. ‘A boring scale can make a lion.’

  ‘I only want the lion. The scale can go in the rubbish bin.’

  ‘All right. I’ll show you how to roar like a lion.’

  He settled beside me and I watched with wonder as his small fingers bounded across the keys. We made the piano roar with considerable satisfaction for a quarter of an hour; then Robin stopped and put his fingers in his ears.

  ‘Another.’

  ‘Another animal?’

  ‘OK.’

  We spent the morning hopping through Saint-Saëns’s entire menagerie. We conjured kangaroos and elephants, blue aquariums brimming with fish, wild horses and cuckoos. It was a warm September day, and beneath the music-room window scarlet Michaelmas daisies bossed pale geraniums into submission. I pictured the animals streaming out of the window and landing on the beds where they thumped, bounced and raced amongst the flowers, flattening every one. I was amazed at the speed with which Robin seized upon each new melody. He only had to hear me play a phrase a few times and he could copy with very few mistakes. He possessed at first, however, no desire to improve or perfect his performance. He was greedy for more tunes, more tricks, more animals, and whenever I dared suggest that we try to make the waters of our aquarium a little smoother, he glared at me and folded his arms across his chest.

  With some trepidation I reached again for the music book.

  ‘The tunes for the animals and lots of new things are all in here,’ I said tapping a page. ‘It’s like a story book.’

  Robin scowled. ‘There aren’t any pictures.’

  ‘Yes there are. Listen.’

  I played a short Mozart piece and when I finished Robin was staring at the open book. He jabbed at the notes on the page with a thumbnail nibbled down to the quick.

  ‘Those dots are a photograph of the tune,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. That’s exactly it. Do you want to see the pictures the way I can?’

  He pursed his lips into a grim little line and gave a single nod.

  I was astonished at how quickly the boy learned. Within a month he understood the musical notation system – even though he remained quite unable to read or write his letters. He was a small starving man; no matter how much I fed him – Mozart, a touch of Handel, a sprinkle of M
endelssohn – he wanted more. I suppose I ought to have been more restrained, I was the adult after all, but I was greedy too. I wanted to know what more he could do – the child appeared almost limitless in his abilities.

  And yet he was a child. One of the farm cats strolled into the music room and he was instantly down from his seat, crouched on all fours, dangling bits of string and roaring at it. When he was too tired to pick up a melody instantly, or if a complex sequence of fingering required effort and concentration, he’d lie on the floor and sob. With my own fervour interrupted, to my shame I’d huff with irritation and I’d be ready to tick him off, much as I would have done a third-desk violin during rehearsal, when suddenly I’d catch myself. I’d notice the littleness of the creature prostrate on the carpet, the hiccuping sobs. When he got into such a state, I’d try to persuade him down to the kitchen for a cup of cocoa or a walk around the garden, but he never wanted to come. All he wanted was to play the piano. Once or twice he fell asleep mid-rage. I felt ashamed for pushing so hard and forgetting that he was not some impetuous music student from the academy but my own grandson.

  October was tipping towards November and during our time together I’d kept the poor child inside. I’d told myself it was because the weather had been poor and he liked to spend hours in the music room at the piano but I heard a voice in my mind, Edie’s voice, insisting that children also want to watch hours of television and eat chocolate until they’re sick, and it’s the adult’s task to moderate such excess. Guiltily, I recognised that I’d kept Robin at the piano out of selfishness. During his lessons Edie drifted into the background. Her loss remained a chronic pain, but one blunted by a powerful analgesic. The boy’s talent was a luminescence that rippled outwards, and I followed it like a man overboard grasping at a light in the dark.

  I still could not sleep but in the long hours before dawn, instead of huddling in the cold, feeling the shape of silence beside me, I made lists of pieces to play for Robin. I’d started with the usual children’s tunes – Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel or Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and the candy-cane waltzes that my own daughters had enjoyed, but like the unusual child who prefers olives to sweeties, Robin preferred Bach to Strauss. As I lay awake, dawn crept in at the windows to the call of a woodlark. I decided to start the day with Vaughan Williams and his Lark Ascending.

  Robin listened to the cadences of soaring sound, his mouth ajar and his eyes half closed – an indication of intense pleasure. He had the same expression when eating vanilla ice cream.

  ‘A lark’s a bird?’ he asked at the end.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like a chicken?’

  ‘No. Not like a chicken.’

  ‘Like a duck then?’

  ‘A lark is a wild bird. She’s nothing like a chicken or a duck.’

  He stared at me, puzzled. He didn’t understand the concept of a songbird. I was filled with an energy I hadn’t felt for months.

  ‘I think we should go out and hunt for a lark this morning.’

  ‘I want to play on the piano.’

  He stuck out his bottom lip, which trembled, threatening tears.

  ‘You can’t play a lark until you’ve heard one in our woods.’

  ‘I’ve been a lion and I didn’t heard one of those in our woods.’

  I was about to argue further when I remembered Edie’s caution – never enter into a debate with a child which you cannot win.

  ‘Let’s start by listening for a woodlark. You never know, we might get lucky and find a lion too.’

  —

  By the time I’d bribed him into his coat (a clear violation of Edie’s rules – but her resolve was always much stronger than mine) and both wellington boots, I was exhausted, almost ready to telephone Clara and ask her to come early to collect him. Sternly, I told myself that I wasn’t being fair to the boy. He must know green woods and lost love and a thousand other things, or his music will be an echo without a soul. I glanced down at Robin with his twin channels of yellow snot beneath his nose and his mis-buttoned red raincoat, and wondered whether I was being overambitious. No, I must hold firm. The boy must know more than music. We’d start with a lark.

  The ground was wet from the morning’s rain, but the clouds had cleared into dirty drifts like roadside snow, leaving glorious streaks of blue sky. The effect of the light made all the colours brighter; the green of the grass appeared to glow, while the huddles of woodland conspiring on the hillside stood out in relief like illustrations in a pop-out book, the treetops glazed in red and brown. I smelled autumn in the air.

  ‘I want a biscuit.’

  ‘In a minute.’

  ‘My legs hurt.’

  ‘Nearly there.’

  ‘No we’re not.’

  I clutched Robin’s hand tightly, and half dragged, half cajoled him up the hill, slip-sliding in his rubber boots. We entered the hush of the woods, the light smeared with a yellowish hue. We’d planted more than ten thousand trees over the last half-century, and the copse that had survived the war had spread long fingers of oak and ash across the shoulders of the hill. Robin sunk into silence and stuck close to my side. He glanced about, alert. Moss and lichen coated the upper branches of the rowans, which twisted in creaking spirals towards the sunlight. I led him deeper into the thicket, past a pile of stones. Robin stopped.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing.

  ‘It’s a grave marker. Your great-uncle George is buried there.’

  Robin squatted down and scrutinised the stones. An earwig mountaineered across the uneven heap. Rotting leaves coated the topmost pebbles with brown sludge.

  ‘Why isn’t he in a churchyard? Isn’t that where you’re supposed to put dead people?’

  ‘Yes, well, George wasn’t much for God. And, in fact, you’re quite right. We really oughtn’t to have buried him here. They’re quite strict about those sorts of things. But they can’t really send him to prison now, can they?’ I said with a smile – it was a line I’d delivered many times since the small and somewhat illegal funeral in the woods.

  Robin did not laugh. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘They won’t put him in prison. But they might dig him up.’

  ‘I won’t let them,’ I said with some resolve. ‘George liked it here. These woods were his favourite place in all the world. He loved Hartgrove. This was his home and he never, ever wanted to leave it. Now he doesn’t have to.’ I picked up a fallen stone and slotted it back onto the heap. ‘I like coming to visit him. One day, I expect I’ll be buried here too.’

  Robin wiped his nose with his sleeve, smearing a glistening streak of mud across his face. ‘I’ll come and visit you,’ he announced magnanimously. ‘But not often. It’s a very long walk.’

  ‘That’s terribly kind of you, darling. I’m sure I’ll appreciate it,’ I said.

  ‘Did you dig the hole for Uncle George?’ asked Robin, after a moment.

  ‘I didn’t do it myself. Is that what you mean?’

  Robin nodded.

  ‘A man dug it for me,’ I said, intrigued as to why he wanted the details.

  ‘Good,’ said Robin, relaxing ever so slightly. ‘I don’t think you would have digged it properly, Grandpa, and I wouldn’t like it if bits of Uncle George were poking out.’

  He glanced about warily, clearly uneasy about the close proximity of George, eyeing the odd twigs lying on the woodland floor with great suspicion as though they were really finger bones.

  ‘There’s really nothing to worry about, darling. A dead person is no more horrid than a dead tree.’

  ‘Or a spider.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I don’t like spiders.’

  I didn’t feel that my introduction to the pleasures of the countryside was progressing terribly well.

  ‘Shall we walk a little, and try to find our lark?’

  Robin n
odded and allowed me to lead him deeper still. We listened for an hour or more to the music of the wood. We picked out the bright note of a robin, the ever-cheery soul who knows only one song and a jolly one at that. After a while we detected our woodlark.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ I whispered.

  Robin nodded. ‘Can we chuck it bread now?’

  He still thought that the woodlark was like a duck in the park. Fat and idle and waiting for scraps of mouldy crusts.

  I sighed. This child wasn’t as I had been. He was a creature of modernity and suburbs. He was used to fenced-in gardens and rows of uniform houses neatly addressing one another across the street like maiden aunts over the tea-table. He was driven everywhere in an air-conditioned, temperate box that neatly sealed him off from the untidiness beyond.

  ‘I’m cold, Grandpa. I want to go home.’

  Subdued and tired, we turned back. The rain started up again, a gauze of drizzle that dripped from my cap and down my neck. And then a gunshot rang out.