The Song of Hartgrove Hall

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘A house like this should provide work for the village. We should be self-sufficient. The restoration needs to be careful. She needs to be nursed back to health but we have to listen to what she’s telling us. And we need money for more sheep.’

  ‘And some cows.’

  ‘Definitely some cows. Lots of cows.’ He smiles, not minding our ribbing any more.

  The moon is full and high, its light weird and blue, making the lime trees cast shadows on the grass. We all lie back on the lawn, which is now cool and damp. Sal’s head rests on my thigh and I see Edie curled against Jack. We smoke cigarettes and whisper. I watch the coil of black woods on the hillside; in the gloom they look like the fur of an animal, crouched and waiting.

  ‘Sing something, Fox,’ says Edie, reaching over to me.

  I choose an old song about grief and faithless lovers and the foggy, foggy dew. After a line or two Edie sings with me and our voices drift through the dark. When we stop she sings another. It’s an unfamiliar tune, and I listen acutely, memorising it. I don’t recognise the words but I feel the sadness in the melody, sharp as wild mint.

  —

  George shows Jack and me how to drive the aged and cantankerous tractor around the yard. We take on another labourer from the village for the month and, between us, we manage pretty well. I like best to work at night, trundling up and down the fields, the tractor put-putting beneath the stars, the sliced soil glistening like broken glass. The harvest moon is like something from a painting, huge and orange, strung too low. On these nights we need no other light and I drive without headlamps, jolting across the ground, the wheels spitting up dirt and flint, jagged as splinters of bone.

  Once we’ve gathered in the wheat, separated the chaff and baled up the straw, we start to burn the stubble at night, making the darkness crackle and turn red. George gets too close and singes his eyebrows.

  The summer fades. As if a great door had been left open, the heat disappears in a rush, and one morning we rise to find the grass powdered with early frost. Golden leaves line the garden paths and freckle the lawns. Next comes the rain, turning the churned soil into mud. Edie and Sal evidently decide that they’ve had enough: they take a train to London for the afternoon but don’t come back. A cable arrives before supper: REDISCOVERED JOY OF HOT BATHS STOP STAYING IN TOWN STOP SORRY STOP.

  I should be glad that Edie has gone for a while – without her, Jack is almost his old self with George and me – but I am not. The house is the wrong kind of quiet. When she leaves so does any chance of music. The gates at the top of the hill by Ringmoor are rotten and need replacing but I can’t help Jack with them as I promised. I’m a drunkard who needs a tipple.

  In desperation I go to church for evensong. Not because I believe that God will grant me a reprieve or the strength to endure these cravings but to listen to the organ. It’s a decent instrument, installed by a musically inclined rector at his own expense fifty years ago. The building itself is small, the grey stone smudged with lichen and moss. Part of the wall surrounding the churchyard has fallen down and sheep meander irreverently amongst the tombstones. The graveyard is crowded with residents past – much busier than the village, which is inevitable, I suppose, as we all finish up there in the end.

  If the vicar is surprised to see me, he’s sensible enough not to comment, and I slide into a pew in the middle where I hope the acoustics will be best. But after three bars I realise that it doesn’t make any difference where I sit, since the organist is astonishingly bad. It takes me the entire piece to grasp what it is that he’s attempting to play. I’m desperate to leave. The vicar mumbles a greeting to the congregation and I stand, ready to slip away – but then the choir starts singing the first hymn. They’re not really a choir: four large men piped like sausage meat into straining woollen suits. The hymn is unremarkable although the tune is strange. It’s not from the accepted hymnal but something older. Even though the organist tries to keep up, he’s the fat boy playing at tag.

  ‘Stop. For God’s sake, just stop,’ I shout to the organist.

  He stops with a crash of chords but the vicar, outraged, scrambles to his feet, opening and closing his mouth like a fish. I ignore him. The choir has faltered, unsure whether my complaint was directed at them.

  ‘Do go on,’ I say, with a wave.

  They glance at one another and then at the vicar who gives a pained nod. They start again to sing. At first I’m distracted by the trite and pious Victorian lyrics, presumably written by some bespectacled parson in his tidy parsonage, but lurking beneath, like flagstones under linoleum, is a rare Lydian melody with flowing arpeggios. The men sing it well, until I don’t even hear the words. I close my eyes, drunk at last.

  Afterwards, I retreat quickly, in no mood to listen to the vicar’s objections to my behaviour. I hurry to the pub, presuming that the chaps from the choir will be along. I’m quite correct and they appear after a few minutes.

  ‘Drinks for these gentlemen,’ I call to the barman.

  The choir nod their thanks and withdraw to a corner of the pub to drink in peace, but I pursue them.

  ‘You sing jolly well.’

  They grunt in acknowledgement, then wait for me to leave. I do not take the hint.

  ‘Will you sing me something else?’ I ask.

  The men laugh, perfectly appalled, as if I’d asked them to strip naked. I’ve had a drink or three and I’m not willing to give up.

  ‘I collect songs. Old songs from these parts. I bet you chaps know some.’

  The oldest and fattest of the men looks at me properly for the first time. He releases a tiny sigh – I’m going to be tricky to dislodge.

  ‘Aye. We might know some.’

  ‘Dad’s right. We’ve one or two.’

  The son is only marginally less round than his father. Coaxing reluctant singers into performing is an art. I can’t push too hard, yet I need to show them how much I want to listen. It’s a delicate balance between enthusiasm and patience. These fellows mustn’t be rushed. I take out a pipe: I learned to smoke one for precisely this purpose. Slowly I fill it with tobacco and sit back on the settle. I wave the pipe with feigned ease.

  ‘Well, I think you’re rather special and I’d love to hear you sing some of your own songs, not those religious bits and bobs, but your own music.’

  They glance at one another and I know I’ve caught them. The fat man breaks out in a grin. ‘I’m a cup too low ter sing.’

  I signal to the barman to bring another round. They drink in steady silence. I let the smoke from my pipe drift and chew the stem. It’s a disgusting thing, but it helps me focus my impatience.

  ‘Now, how do you feel about a song or two?’

  ‘Aye. Best have it now, otherwise we’ll be a cup too many.’

  The pub is half empty but the other drinkers are quite still, all listening even though they’re pretending not to. The rotund man beats a rhythm on the table. They take a breath and they sing. The walls of the pub fall away and we’re out on the bare back of the hill, the black trees behind us. I recognise this song and it’s an old one, older than Hartgrove Hall. Feet stamping on stone smash through the dark.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘yes,’ when they’ve finished. I close my eyes, draining the last drop of sound.

  The fat man laughs. ‘Yer the youngest of the Fox-Talbot boys, ent yer?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ I say.

  ‘Knew yer mother,’ he says. ‘She wis just like yer. Fair hair and potty about music. Used ter play that organ in church.’

  I’m still, I can’t breathe for listening. ‘My mother? You remember her?’

  No one speaks of her. Not the chaps I know. The large man nods again and squeezes a hand into his waistcoat pocket. ‘Them others are too young ter remember. But I knew her. Nice lady. Good organist. Better than that awful feller we ’ave now. I still miss Mrs Fox-Talbot.’
>
  He looks at me for a moment, slowly recollecting things he hasn’t thought about for years.

  ‘She used ter bring you with her sometimes. In a basket like a kitten. Yer’d sleep by her feet while she played. I thought that racket would wake a baby. But no, she said yer liked it.’

  I want to know what she played. Every piece. Every note. He can’t remember – ‘Oh, the usual stuff. Hymn tunes and that.’

  This is a picture of my mother I’ve never seen before. I won’t tell it to my brothers. This is mine. I have so little of her and I’ve been given another piece, an unexpected, blissful fragment.

  As I sway home, I warble to myself, only slightly off-key. I kick a tin can, which bounces into the hedgerow. The tunes circle in my mind, round and round in a noisy carousel. I’ll go home and I’ll write them down before I fall asleep in a pleasant cider haze. And then certainty runs through me, cool as a winterbourne. I have the theme for the third movement of my symphony. These old folk tunes have taken root inside me, and caused something new to grow in my imagination. I hum the theme. Damn and blast – I need a piano. I wonder whether Edie knows where I can find one cheaply. With a hiccup of cider, I realise I haven’t thought about her for several hours.

  ‘We need a milking machine, not a piano,’ says George.

  ‘Why do we need a milking machine? We don’t have any cows.’ Frustration is making me belligerent.

  ‘We can’t afford to buy cows. So we definitely can’t afford a piano.’

  I swallow my irritation. ‘I’m not buying one. Edie’s persuaded someone in London to give it to me, but he wants to meet me first.’

  I’m tired of the struggle. I simply can’t manage without a piano. Jack has remained quiet throughout the squabble. He’s torn. On the one hand, he doesn’t think I should leave the farm and go off to London, but it’s Edie who’s arranged the loan of the piano and he can’t show disloyalty to her.

  ‘I’ll be gone one day and one night.’ I glance at George. ‘I’ll be back before you can say “Dorset longhorn”.’

  He grunts but doesn’t laugh. Jack’s trying not to smile. He winks at me.

  ‘I’ll nip down to the village and telephone Edie to let her know you’re coming up to town.’

  Jack knows how I feel about Edie, and yet I’m clearly such a pathetic rival that he’s perfectly easy at the thought of my squiring her around London for a day or two. I’m both wounded and grateful, and my gratitude causes a bow-wave of self-loathing to wash over me. After he’s gone, I decide to dedicate the rest of the evening and a bottle of Scotch to getting properly sloshed. Two glasses in, I decide with the absolute clarity of a drunk that I simply must persuade George that my collecting folk songs and writing music will be a good thing for all of us.

  ‘The piano’s not only for me, George.’

  ‘Thing is, old sport, Jack and I don’t play.’

  ‘No, but I need it to play through the old songs I find. I can’t transcribe them properly without a piano. The old songs I find are remarkable, George. They’re going to save this place.’

  ‘If you say so, Fox.’

  ‘Whenever I’m lost, musically, I listen to these old tunes and they show me the way. They’re like route maps.’

  George glances at me dubiously over the top of the latest issue of the Western Gazette. ‘I’m not lost, Fox. I’m in my pleasant, if draughty, sitting room.’

  I sigh, take another swig of whisky and try another tack. ‘So we don’t know what’s the best thing for the land on the hill? Well, we simply need to listen to some old songs from around here. If we listen properly, they’ll tell us what to do.’

  I can tell from his expression that George remains sceptical but I’ve drunk enough whisky to believe in my own extrapolations.

  ‘The memory is in the melody. If we find songs gathered from right here we’ll find out what the farmers used to do on the hillside.’

  ‘So if they sing of sheep, we keep to sheep. If it’s a vineyard they mention, we plant grapes.’

  ‘Exactly. Well. Grapes might be more of a metaphor.’

  ‘We’ll plant metaphorical grapes, then. White or red?’

  ‘You can rag me all you like, but you say that you want to listen to the land. So listen to the music. These songs are from here and are about here and they’ve been sung for longer than there’ve been bloody Fox-Talbots in Hartgrove Hall.’

  George surveys me with amusement, which thoroughly incenses me.

  ‘I can’t think why you’re being so obstinate about it. You’re the one trying to find out how everything was done a hundred bloody years ago. Everyone else is tipping on sodding nitrates and maximising yields while we’re raking up chicken shit.’

  ‘And cow shit.’

  ‘And pig and horse. But my point is that you don’t want to increase mechanisation. You don’t want fancy tractors and sprays. You say that the connection to the land matters and without it something is lost.’

  ‘I do,’ says George, eyeing me curiously.

  ‘Music is the same thing. The songs are connected to the land. They’re all part of the great dance.’

  I’m feeling quite pleased with myself when I give an enormous hiccup, which I fear rather undercuts the impact. George smiles. ‘I would like to bury that government leaflet on fertilisers and whatnot under the chicken coop.’

  I jump to my feet. ‘Yes. Let’s do it. Let’s bury the bloody thing.’

  Five minutes later, we’re shoving the latest government-issued whatnot into the midst of the vast, wobbling muckheap, a veritable Eiffel Tower of dung. I reach for a match but George holds back my arm.

  ‘Steady on, old thing. Methane. Horribly flammable. Don’t need to blow the place sky high after all.’

  ‘No. Perhaps not.’

  Swaying, I grasp the whisky bottle. I sip and pass it to George.

  ‘I hear you at night, you know,’ I say. ‘Your room’s above mine and I hear you walking about.’

  ‘Oh, sorry about that, old chap. Always been a bit restless in the wee hours.’

  ‘No you haven’t. We used to share a room, remember.’ I take the bottle back from him. ‘When I can’t sleep, I focus on a tune and sing it in my head. Over and over. You should try it.’ I warble a simple ditty to George. ‘Sing that when you can’t sleep. It’ll help block out anything else.’

  Whether his sleeplessness is caused by thoughts of Edie or something else, I do not enquire.

  I don’t remember how I found my way back inside. I wake up on the sofa and the fire has petered out but beside me there’s an envelope with a little cash. On the envelope George has written, ‘Find us some songs then and a piano to bloody play them on. But I’m sure as hell not singing them.’

  Edie meets me from the train. This version of her is a stranger. In her trim navy suit, curled hair and crimson lipstick she’s more like the picture postcards of wartime sweetheart ‘Edie Rose’ than the girl I’m used to. I’m afraid to shake her hand. She kisses me on the cheek, smearing it with lipstick that she then tries to scrub away with her handkerchief.

  ‘Stop, please,’ I say. I don’t want her pawing at me like an aunt. This isn’t how I want her to think of me.

  She withdraws. ‘You’re not meeting Mr Kenton until six. I thought we could go and have some lunch.’

  ‘Splendid,’ I say.

  She takes me to Claridge’s. It’s supposed to be a great treat but I’ve already decided that I want to pay and Edie’s pre-lunch martini costs most of the cash George has given me. I glance down at the menu. I’m hungry but everything is horribly expensive. The room is mirrored, every surface glints and an infinite series of Harry Foxes stare back at me, foreheads glistening. I’m wearing Jack’s tweed jacket but it doesn’t quite fit; he’s slimmer than me with shorter arms and my wrists stick out of the cuffs. By mistake I catch sight of mysel
f in the mirrors again and see that the ill-fitting suit is worn by hundreds of fidgeting Harry Foxes.

  ‘This is one of Jack’s favourite places to come when we’re in town,’ says Edie, with a hesitant smile. ‘I thought you’d probably like it too. You boys seem to have very similar tastes.’

  I can’t tell whether she’s being arch but I doubt it. Edie’s not that sort of girl. She’s brought me to one of their spots and I’m still on Jack’s turf even though he isn’t here. I’m not surprised that Jack is so fond of it; he’ll see only glittering versions of himself laughing back at him in all the blasted mirrors. I stop myself. I’m being unfair. My brother is not vain.

  ‘Do you come here with your family?’ I ask, fishing again for titbits.

  Edie roars with laughter. ‘Goodness, no.’

  ‘Not their scene?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  Her smile is still twitching; I can’t think why my question was so frightfully funny. The tablecloths are perfect white snowfields. I want to put on my boots and tramp across them. Somewhere a piano plays. I relax just a little. A waiter appears.

  ‘May I take your order, madam?’

  ‘The soup and then the sole.’

  ‘And for you, sir?’

  ‘The soup.’

  ‘And to follow?’

  ‘Just the soup.’

  It’s the only item on the menu for less than half a guinea.

  ‘What a good idea,’ says Edie. ‘Cancel the sole. I’ll just have soup too.’

  The waiter makes an elaborate crossing-out.

  ‘Would you like some wine?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ says Edie quickly.

  The waiter disappears. And Edie sighs and raises an eyebrow. ‘I wanted to treat you.’

  ‘Does Jack ever let you treat him?’

  Edie gives me a look.

  ‘Well then.’

  The waiter reappears, clutching a bottle of champagne. ‘From the ladies in the corner – “With thanks for keeping their spirits up when the chips were down.”’