The Novel in the Viola

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘Miss Land? Miss.’

  I shut my eyes and sank under the water, letting it wash over my face and hair. If only it was cold – then it could empty my mind like that last swim on the beach. I could be as blank as Julian’s pages.

  The water was no longer hot, only warm. I stared at the peeling flock-print wallpaper and a smear of toothpaste beside the sink. Condensation dripped down the windowpane.

  The tepid water grew cool. Then cold.

  ‘Miss Land. I’d be most obliged if you would open the door,’ said Mr Wrexham.

  ‘Alice, dear,’ called Mrs Ellsworth. ‘Please let me in.’

  I did not move, just drained the champagne bottle and sank under the water once more.

  I shivered in the cold bath, knees tucked up beneath my chin. If only I could cry. It would be better if I could cry. Hammering on the bathroom door. Mr Rivers’ voice calling to me.

  ‘Alice. Alice, unlock this door, or I shall come in myself.’

  I did not move. The sound of a key clicking into a lock. The door opened and then closed again.

  ‘Alice,’ he said. ‘Alice? What is it, little one? What has happened?’

  I sat in the bathtub and stared up at him. All around the bathroom lay sheets of carbon-copy paper. They littered the floor and clung to the damp windows and drifted in the bathwater along with my sodden letters. In the corner of the room lay the broken viola. Everywhere pages spilt out onto the ground, yellow as old bone. I pointed to Margot’s letter, propped upon the soap dish. ‘They’re dead. They’re both dead.’

  He knelt beside the bath and I saw his eyes were wet with tears.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘You’re not allowed to cry. I can’t, so neither can you.’

  He swallowed. ‘All right. I shan’t.’

  He slid his hand into the water and recoiled. ‘It’s cold. Get out before you catch a chill.’

  I sat quite still, somehow unable to move. He watched me for a second and then crouched over the tub, sliding his arms beneath mine and lifted me out, setting me down on the floor. I stood before him naked, making no attempt to cover myself. I shivered and my skin prickled, nipples blown to beads. Beneath my feet I felt crumpled pages. I looked at him without flinching and his breath quickened. He stooped to pick up a towel and offered it to me. When I did not take it, he began to dry me, rubbing the fabric across my skin.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

  I backed away.

  ‘Don’t. Don’t you see, Daniel? Everyone is dead. No one is left who loves me. Not like Anna loved me. Not like—’

  Kit’s unspoken name lingered in the air between us. I looked at him and it was a challenge. I dared him to look at me. I dared him to say it and save us both. He stood and walked across to me.

  ‘Not everyone who loves you is dead.’

  I lay on his bed where he had carried me, my hair still damp from the bath. The room smelt of him. A red wine decanter, half full, rested on the dressing table and beside it a photograph of Kit as a laughing boy. Daniel’s jacket was slung over the back of a chair and the wind shrilled from the empty grate. He lay fully clothed beside me, close but not yet touching. He leant over me muttering, ‘I’m much, much too old for you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Definitely too old. It’s obscene. You’re how old? Seventy-five? A hundred?’

  He laughed; a low chuckle in his throat. ‘Old enough to know better.’ He bent to kiss me. ‘Alice. Elise.’

  I held him back and shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Elise has gone. With you I am only Alice.’

  ‘All right then Alice, but I’m still going to kiss you.’

  Daniel was only the second man I had kissed in my life. His lips tasted of salt and suddenly I realised I was crying. His face was slippery with my tears and my mouth stung with saltwater. I remembered that Passover long ago and I heard Julian’s voice: A man who has experienced great sorrow and then has known its end, wakes each morning feeling the pleasure of sunrise. But it had not ended. I felt sorrow and pleasure rushing at me all at once and I could not breathe and I knew that if Daniel stopped kissing me I should dissolve into a blank, like the novel in the viola, but he did not stop. His fingers trailed down my cheeks to my breasts and the soft skin of my belly and I unfastened his shirt with steady hands and pressed my lips against the rough grey hair. I felt his mouth on my thigh and then his tongue, delicate as a snake’s. I was breathless as though from running as he pushed my knees apart and then he wrapped himself in me, a tangling of limbs and loves and lives. As he moved inside me, I felt a sob build in my chest and I cried out. I broke apart and he held me. I was new and warm and naked. I lay in his arms and I understood. I am two women and I love two men. Elise will always love Kit and Alice loves Daniel. This was not the life or the love I had expected but it was love all the same. We must leave Tyneford, but we would not leave alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Novel in the Viola

  I am Mrs Rivers after all. Alice Rivers. Our wedding photograph sits on my dressing table, and next to it is the photograph of Kit and me, taken the summer we were engaged. I am happy in both pictures.

  I don’t remember very much about the wedding itself. It was before we left Tyneford, but I wouldn’t marry in the church, so it took place in Dorchester register office. It was a bright December day, the ground carpeted in frost thick as snow, while shining icicles hung from the trees. I wore Anna’s pearls and Mrs Ellsworth made me a corsage with greenery from the garden. Daniel and I waited our turn, queuing along a linoleum corridor filled with soldiers and their sweethearts. We had no guests. A young lieutenant and his soon-to-be bride acted as our witnesses. I forget their names now. We ate our wedding breakfast in the kitchen at Tyneford, Wrexham insisting on serving us the tinned asparagus omelette in his white cotton gloves and Mrs Ellsworth dabbing her eyes. We gave champagne to the WAAFs but I did not drink, as champagne made me think of Anna.

  The only cloud was Margot. She did not answer my telegram. She did not wire or write. I knew she blamed me for the blank novel. For the next three years I sent her long letters and presents for the baby, pleading with her to understand but she never replied. After the war, my letters were returned, stamped ‘no such person, address unknown’ and I no longer wrote.

  I have had so much time over the years to think about our rift. At first I believed she was angry and unable to forgive me. Once we stopped writing to each other we receded from one another’s lives. The conversation had faltered, and after a while neither of us knew how to begin again. And yet, I also wonder if the silence was something else. We had lost almost every part of our old lives. I became Alice and I suspect that Margot similarly became another version of herself. We were the only things tying one another to our lost family and it was simply easier to try and forget, to hide the past in silence and busy ourselves with the present. I thought of her often. I could not eat her favourite rose creams or listen to Berlioz’s viola concerto. And, as I grew older, I thought more and more about my niece, Juliana.

  I always hoped that we would be allowed back to Tyneford, and we were, one last time. The Ministry of Defence decided that the land was essential for armed forces training and informed us that they were compulsorily purchasing the entire estate. Tyneford would no longer belong to the Rivers family, even in name. We returned one afternoon in early March 1963. A light wind blew from the east, and a fine film of drizzle obscured the vista of the bay. I was glad of the rain. I was not sure I could have borne to see it dazzle in the sunshine. We parked some distance down the now gravelled road, and walked the last mile to the village. I didn’t see the houses at first; the trees had crept forward and embraced them in a mass of spring green as though they wanted to pull them deep-deep inside the woods. Cottages lurked among silver birch, hazel and tangles of blackthorn like drawings in a fairy tale. Everything was green – the springy moss clinging to the boughs of the trees, the bright lichen spotting the bark and the leaf shadows on the stonework.
We walked closer, and saw that the roofs had caved in and the timber upper floors rotted away so that fireplaces sprouted from halfway up the walls. Fingers of ivy poked through the stonework and forget-me-nots trembled between the flagstones. The walls were pockmarked with bullets, some of which had rusted and bled during the rain, leaving brown-red smears.

  From the village we walked up to the house. The army had pulled down the Tudor wing some years before, and it stood half naked, the bare timbers exposed to the daylight like ribs. We picked our way inside; the doors had long since been wrenched from their hinges. The hall was open to the sky and it rained onto the stone floor, the parquet having been stripped out and shipped away to America by GIs years before. The drawing room held the reek of fox, and I saw that one had made his lair in the great fireplace. He hadn’t noticed us and dozed on, his scarlet brush poking out between the discarded fire irons.

  Hand in hand, Daniel and I wandered onto the terrace and looked out over where the garden used to be. All that remained were the stone steps leading down to the lawns. The lawns themselves had reverted to meadow grass and weeds tore through the lavender and thyme borders. Then the sun slunk out from behind a cloud, casting a watery light across the valley and catching a treasure-hoard of golden daffodils and the red flash of a kite’s wing. The song of a Dorset warbler punctured the stillness, and in a shaft of pale sun I glimpsed clusters of buttery primrose speckling the path leading to Flower’s Barrow.

  We walked down to Worbarrow Bay in silence, scouring the beach for Burt’s cottage. It had slunk back into the strand, pebbles washed away in the tide so that only a tumbledown pile of brown and white stones remained. There were no boats in the bay, but the gulls shrieked and a black cormorant dabbled and fished. As the sun sank into the sea and dusk gathered on the hills, we left the shore and walked back to our car, knowing we intruded upon the stillness. Mankind did not belong here anymore.

  The next journey home happened later, in the autumn of 1984. We stood in the hurry of the Vienna Westbahnof, knocked by suitcases and the jostle of other people’s farewells. Daniel took my hand. ‘Are you all right, darling? Shall I get you some water?’

  I shook my head and held onto the crook of his arm. I glanced up at the station clock. Eleven fifty-nine. The train would arrive in one minute – at least in Austria they ran to time. I couldn’t bear even a minute’s delay. My heart thundered in my ears and I forced myself to breathe. I gripped the viola case even tighter. Twelve o’clock. There was the shriek and stutter of a train pulling up to the platform. Doors slammed open. Luggage was handed out and a flurry of travellers hurried towards me. Standing on tiptoe, I peered through the crowd for her – a slim girl with blondish hair, doubtless very smartly dressed. People rushed me on both sides, and I swivelled and stared but could not see her. The crowd thinned and I choked back a sob. How could she miss the train? How could she?

  ‘Elise.’

  I turned around. I saw not a girl of twenty but a woman with white hair standing before me. The green eyes were the same. She smiled and I stepped forward into her arms, the viola case sandwiched between us.

  ‘Margot. Margot,’ was all I managed for a minute or two. ‘I forgot. It’s been so long, I was looking for a girl.’

  She gave a short laugh. ‘You’ll make me wish I’d dyed my hair.’ She appraised me with that look of old, head tilted to one side. ‘You’re just the same.’

  I flushed as though I were still nineteen. ‘Yes, well, I was thinner for a while in between.’

  Margot laughed. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  There was so much to say and it hadn’t been said for so long that we stuttered on small talk. I admired her brooch; she liked my ring. We spoke in English, and silently I marvelled at her American accent, those glamorous vowels. Our husbands had discovered one another and discussed the weather and the inconvenience of foreign travel. After a few minutes Margot interrupted.

  ‘Is this the viola?’

  I nodded, my mouth dry. ‘Yes. I had it mended and re-strung.’

  I offered it to her, and she took it in silence. She swallowed and then opened her mouth as though to speak, but said nothing. It was suddenly very quiet in the station, as though the din had been smothered and Margot and I stood alone on platform twelve.

  From outside, the Opera House looked almost the same, an island of light in the middle of the Ringstrasse. Men in black tuxedos and women in long dresses swarmed up the steps to the colonnade. A rope of lanterns glimmered above the bronze statues poised on the first floor loggia, the light pooling about them like halos. Above us, a pair of winged horses reared, heads thrown back, metal manes streaming. Daniel and I edged forwards, absorbed into the throng, and I listened to the once familiar chatter, the air humming with the excitement of opening night. I’d been here so often with Julian and Margot and the trio of aunts – Gretta fussing over whether she’d forgotten her opera glasses and wouldn’t be able to spy on her friends (she liked to be able to give Anna a minute report of the audience’s reaction; a single yawn in the balcony was noted and divulged). Gerda used to hurry us, tripping over the train of her old-fashioned skirts. Poor Margot was always quiet and a little pale, imagining too clearly her mother’s nerves. Julian and I, not being musicians ourselves and never having known the terror of performance, merely simmered with pride. Anna was going to sing! Our Anna. But that was many years ago and Anna had not sung here for a long time. I glanced at the grey and white heads in the crowd and wondered if any of them remembered her.

  Daniel and I lingered outside in the cool of the loggia, he wondering at the exquisite frescos of The Magic Flute and I listening to the car horn concert from the street below. We were both strangers here. My home was the Vienna of 1938, not this shrieking modern city. I was relieved to speak in English. I was not forced to have waiters and the maître d’ sneer at my museum German. Daniel sensed my reluctance and it was he who told the taxi driver the name of the hotel and ordered our linzertorte and coffee. I could wear the mask of a British tourist, an Englishwoman able only to stammer and smile, ordinarily ignorant.

  I watched the crowd, spying at last Margot and Robert. They came over to us and the men exchanged pleasantries, while I watched Margot, noticing that she was quiet and a little pale. Catching my eye, she smiled. The five-minute bell summoned us to our seats, and then somehow the four of us were sitting in the auditorium. I found that I was shaking and Daniel reached out to squeeze my hand. It was not an Opera House but a palace, a cathedral to music – crimson and gold and bright with light. The audience clapped and hushed. I fidgeted and fanned myself with the programme, almost hearing Gretta’s goose-hiss of disapproval. The lights dimmed and the theatre filled with familiar faces. There in the stage box was Herr Finkelstein, still thrilled at being mistaken for the balding Baron, and Frau Goldschmidt sweating in her fur, but refusing to surrender it to an unknown fate in the cloakroom, and there, at last, was Julian, leaning forward in his seat, listening. He scarcely seemed to breathe, taut with anticipation. We clapped the conductor, and then little Jan Tibor strode onto the stage. Only he wasn’t little Jan any longer. This was no phantom, but a slight, white-haired man with that hush of authority possessed only by dictators, lion-tamers and conductors. He beckons the soloist onto the stage and out strolls Anna. She looks exactly as she did when I last saw her – a beautiful woman of forty-five – but in her hand she clasps a viola. This is not Anna. This is my niece, Juliana.

  I glance down at the programme open on my knee.

  World Premiere

  The Novel in the Viola: Concerto in D minor for Viola and Orchestra

  Music: Jan Tibor

  Conductor: Jan Tibor

  Viola: Juliana Miller

  This music belongs to my family. Little Jan Tibor, who used to feed lettuce to the tortoise and played parlour concerts for the aunts, making Anna’s piano sing and cry out in pleasure at its own beauty, has written this for us. I inhale with the orchestra and the world pauses on the upb
eat: then the baton lash and sound swirls. Green and blue waves of strings whirl and soar. A flute, clear as a water trickle, is echoed in a deeper stream of cellos and then, at last, Juliana’s viola, deep and sweet and rich as honeyed wine. Her music fills my ears and lungs. The allegro moves into the waltz and I am dancing at the Opera Ball with Kit as Anna sings and I am dizzy with champagne and there is the tinkle of breaking glass. Jan conducts the orchestra with taut fury, pulling from them a spiralling kaleidoscope of sound and Juliana bows higher and higher and then, on the edge of the precipice, Jan holds them back with a twist of his finger and soothes the strings into sighing diminuendo.

  Now the slow movement. The audience waits. This is what they’ve all come to hear. Juliana sets down her Stradivarius and picks up a small rosewood viola. The audience scrutinises this pedlar’s fiddle – a collective wrinkling of noses. It’s more suited to a schoolroom or a subway than the grand Opera House. Jan raises his baton and brings it down in a whiplash and it begins, a melody muted and strange, a song of a white page.

  I reach for my sister’s hand and listen to my niece draw music from the strings. She sings of the novel inside the viola and its unwritten story. Only I know that the novel in the viola is not blank. I dried the pages and before I sealed them back inside, I filled them one by one with my story. Those pages are covered in words and the novel in the viola is now a palimpsest. After the concert tonight, I shall write the last page and slip it into the viola.

  Somewhere a clock ticks backwards and midnight is un-struck. Juliana plays and plays and it is every time at once. Burt is fishing in The Lugger on the Danube at dawn, and Mrs Ellsworth and Hildegard bake a game pie together in the small kitchen of our old apartment. And always I love two men.