Ellen and I read together in the living room for an hour, in silence, like a long-married couple. Ellen is sitting on the other side of the room, with a stash of Janina’s magazines. Tranquillised by drugs and sunlight, I fall asleep on the sofa. Am woken by Ellen, shaking me. ‘What on earth did you do that for?’ I shout. ‘I was skiing.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. She’s short of breath and her eyes are wet. ‘I thought you—’ she begins.
‘Patience, girl.’
‘Don’t, Daniel,’ she says.
In the bedroom of teenaged Charlie there were two large laminated maps of Britain, the sort of maps you might find displayed in a school classroom. One showed the geological sub-structure of the land, while on the other were marked the larger towns and the prominent features of the terrain. For three or four years these maps were pinned to the wall, side by side. The former remained in pristine condition, but the latter was extensively modified by Charlie, who applied to it scores of small yellow stickers, each bearing a number inscribed in black ink with a very fine nib. These stickers marked the location of quarries, and the numbers corresponded to entries in a card-index file, in which Charlie made note of the type of stone that was cut from each of the identified locations, along with summaries of whatever additional information he had managed to find: the volume of material removed annually, for example, or the longevity of the quarry, or notable buildings in which the stone had been used (Beer Stone: Exeter Cathedral, St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, Tower of London, Hampton Court, Windsor Castle), or some technical data (Aberllefenni slate: weathering – excellent; resistance to pollution – excellent; resistance to delamination – excellent; colour retention – excellent; porosity – nil). Under his bed he kept cardboard trays of stone samples (numbered, naturally), some the size of bathroom tiles, others no larger than dice. Most of these scraps were obtained by his father, but several were garnered by enterprising young Charlie, who between the ages of ten and fourteen (or thereabouts) was in correspondence with dozens of stone-cutting companies from Portland to Sullom.
One might reasonably conclude that young Charlie’s maps and documentation were indicative of his appetite for order and completeness. It is Janina’s belief that this enduring appetite lies at the root of her husband’s success as a businessman – no rival can match his knowledge of the suppliers and their products, and none offers so thorough a customer service. Furthermore, she believes that commerce alone cannot satisfy this appetite, and that this is the major reason for his obsession with the acquisition of recordings of terrible folk music. (In passing we might note that Janina thinks all the Brennan men have the mentality of collectors: Charlie has his music; I have my books; Freddie has his computer games; and Peter crams his head with information that nobody else in the family can begin to understand.) It’s true that the acquisition of recordings might sometimes seem to be more important to Charlie than listening to them, and that his expenditure on CDs is immoderate. Go into the loft and you’ll find racks and racks of them, and most, as Charlie knows, will never be played again.
Let us have an example of Charlie’s assiduousness as a collector. Stephen recommends volume two of Alan Lomax’s Southern Journey (Ballads and Breakdowns – Songs from the Southern Mountains), and Charlie duly buys it. He likes it very much. One track in particular – ‘Fly Around My Blue-Eyed Girl’ – he plays so often that you’d think (says Janina) it was some kind of coded key to the meaning of life instead of just some toothless yokel hammering the hell out of a busted piano. The next step is to buy volume one of Southern Journey (Voices from the American South), and volume three (Highway Mississippi). Pleasure is had from both, as it is from volume four (Brethren, We Meet Again), and from every subsequent CD in the thirteen-disc Southern Journey series, but even Charlie has to admit that not every disc affords pleasure in significant quantities. Volume ten (And Glory Shone Around – More All Day Singing From the Sacred Harp), for example, is a record to which he has never returned, having had his fill of the 1959 United Sacred Harp Musical Convention in Fyffe, Alabama, with volume nine (Harp of a Thousand Strings – All Day Singing From the Sacred Harp). And yet, even though he had known that a second instalment from the convention in Fyffe would prove to be a surfeit, it was never a possibility that he would suffer an interruption in the series.
There’s no doubting, then, that Charlie has a mania for completeness. And there’s no doubting either that he has a passion for the collected objects as objects. As Celia has more than once remarked (and Charlie has never demurred), this passion has an element of fetishism. He relishes the lustre of obscurity that radiates from a recording of some long-dead backwoods farmer sawing away at a fiddle in an Appalachian shack. When he unwraps a new CD, he partakes of the labour that the shiny little disc embodies – the effort, say, of hauling equipment heavier than two grown men up and down the hills of Mississippi, to get on record the sound of an ancient blind man who has never in his life played in public. Whenever Charlie takes delivery of a package from a New York record store, his expression is precisely that of young Charlie opening a box from Bavaria and lifting from its bed of cotton wool a polished slice of Jura limestone with a perfect little ammonite embedded in its centre.
(Charlie’s fascination with stone may have lost some of its ardency with the passing of the years, but arcane recordings are not the only artefacts that can fascinate him. Items manufactured to the highest standards can similarly inspire – Janina’s kitchen implements, for instance. Ask him to show you one of her Tojiro Senkou knives. ‘The blade has more than sixty layers of steel,’ he’ll tell you, and he’ll angle it under the mini-spotlights, so you can appreciate the Damascene effect. ‘It’s called kasumi-nagashi or “floating mist”,’ he might say, turning the blade over and over in the light, entranced by the misty grain of the steel. Janina, on the other hand, will say that a Japanese wonder-knife is not a work of domestic-industrial art but simply an instrument. She’s not – she’ll insist – a collector of high-end kitchenware, not in the way that Charlie is a collector of CDs. The new German coffee machine, the French copper pans, the Italian gadget that’ll whisk the rind off any citrus fruit in three seconds flat – these and the multifarious other pieces of restaurant-grade equipment are all functional devices that perform their function better than any other devices you can buy, nothing more and nothing less. And yet, I’d say, there was a hint of the sacerdotal in the way Janina handled a newly acquired knife and passed it over to Celia, so she could experience for herself the perfect balance of it. This was during Celia’s last spell in London, when Janina had come to think, for a while, that carefully rationed exposures to the satisfactions of domesticity might rescue Celia from her rudderless life. Celia took the knife and went through the motions of testing the blade on the air. ‘It really nestles in your hand, doesn’t it? Somehow it seems to weigh nothing,’ suggested Janina, like a mother letting her daughter hold an expensive violin, in the hope that the feel of it would be a more effective way of persuading the child to take music lessons than nagging would.)
To resume: Janina has an understanding of what drives Charlie, in common with so many men, to collect and organise (it goes without saying that the CD archive is rigorously ordered; Charlie’s system observes a triple hierarchy: region – genre – artist), and she can understand how one might find the folk music of America an absorbing subject, in the abstract. It’s interesting that there were families in which not one person could read or write but everyone could play the banjo. It’s interesting – laudable, even – that people went to such lengths to tape their playing. Actually listening to it, however, is an entirely different matter. It is beyond her comprehension that her husband can derive the enjoyment he claims to derive from a churchful of worshippers screaming hymns to the accompaniment of a piano that hasn’t seen a tuner in twenty years, or the screeching of a fiddle that sounds like a hundred fingernails scrabbling at a blackboard. Her ears are attuned to music that’s performed professiona
lly and recorded to the highest standards, and she can’t retrain them to accept the catterwauling of amateurs, any more than she could force her skin to tolerate the scratch of hessian.
Janina tends to characterise Charlie’s music as an oddball hobby, his loveable streak of eccentricity, but at times, I think, she’s envious of it. One afternoon at their house in London, for instance, she and I passed the door of the living room and glimpsed Charlie, slumped in his favourite armchair, aghast at the voices of the Louvin Brothers. ‘Having one of his moments,’ she remarked. The smile and accompanying shake of the head were for his incorrigibility, but there was something else in her face, for an instant, that said she wished she could share the experience that Charlie was having at this minute – more than that: she was saddened that there was no equivalent in her life to what his music is for Charlie. This is not to say that Janina suffers from a sense of being unfulfilled – far from it. She loves Charlie and their sons. The garden is a delight: she gains a deep gratification from it, as she does from what she creates in the kitchen. But these things do not take her out of herself in the way that Charlie is transported by his music, if only for a minute or two, and I am certain that there are times when she wishes this were not so. And I am certain, furthermore, that Janina would be a shade happier if Celia – who otherwise is more or less incapable of seeing the world as her brother sees it – weren’t a little more closely attuned to Charlie’s obsession than Janina will ever be.
It is not the case that Celia likes the stuff that Charlie likes – in fact, she generally finds the fiddlers and banjoists as much of an ordeal as Janina does. But it’s when Charlie says to Celia ‘Just listen to this for a minute’ and, sliding a CD into the player, urges her to take the chair on which the speakers are trained, that Celia is most vividly returned to the time when she and Charlie were as fond of each other as one could reasonably expect a young girl and her four-years-older brother to be. Seeing Charlie so enthusiastic, she is changed briefly into someone who resembles closely a former self, and it’s an intensely pleasurable thing for her, she says. It feels more like a self-contained little enclave of anachronistic time than a memory of a time in which they were closer to each other than they are now, and when it’s finished she rarely feels any regret for what has gone. It doesn’t matter that it’s unlikely that she’ll be able to partake of his enthusiasm for whatever it is he wants her to hear – their musical tastes were never similar. Whenever, as a preteen girl, she wandered into Charlie’s room to ask him about the LP he’d just bought, it was in the expectation of hearing something grim – Popol Vuh, perhaps, or Amon Düül II. She’d take the bean-bag and Charlie would lie on the bed and close his eyes while a twenty-minute free-for-all meandered nowhere. They wouldn’t talk, and she’d usually tiptoe away long before Side One was over, but Celia never felt a stronger attachment to her brother than when she was sitting in his room, listening to the portentous maunderings of a band of German hippies, because this was a special favour that he was granting her (Charlie preferred to listen alone, with the lights off), and her very inability to understand the appeal of these excruciating albums imparted to the quiet and generally unmysterious Charlie an aura (albeit a thin and temporary aura) of the enigmatic.
(This aura soon evaporated for ever. Having assumed that progressive rock was one of those things that suddenly would make sense when she reached a certain age, Celia found instead that it became more irritating. Charlie, she saw, was simply in error in liking this crap. Charlie himself arrived at a similar opinion not much later, and by the time Janina arrived on the scene his record collection had been completely purged of the pretentious. Not a single Tangerine Dream LP was allowed to remain for old time’s sake; unimpeachable classic rock now ruled the shelves. His discovery of American folk music might therefore be seen as a kind of recidivism.)
Talking to Janina on the phone this evening, Charlie raises his voice in a way that suggests she’s standing in a call box – this is not a good sign. Brevity of conversation supports this analysis. And the fact that he can’t give her a call, but has to wait for her to ring, further indicates some tension in the situation. ‘How’s it going?’ I ask him, and he says it’s going OK, all things considered. ‘Never going to be plain sailing, though, was it?’ he adds. Ellen knows no more than I do.
A packet arrives. ‘Another one,’ says Ellen, shaking her head as if at a manifestation of gluttony. It’s a book on the moon landings. ‘Not the sort of thing I’d have thought you’d be interested in,’ she says. This irritates; my reply is patronising, inexcusably. ‘Everything is interesting,’ I say to her. I think I might sometimes have spoken to my mother this way. Ellen flinches. Later, by way of penance, I watch An Officer and a Gentleman with her. Manage to fall asleep promptly; when I wake up she’s not there and the TV has been turned off.
At about three o’clock it starts to rain; by four the sky is plum-coloured from pole to pole and the rain is making the windows hum. The gutters can’t cope with all the water: the clattering on the terrace is so loud I have to turn the radio up high to hear it properly. I put on Charlie’s cagoule and grab his golfing umbrella. ‘Coming, El?’ I enquire, when she comes into the kitchen. She’s surprised, pleased, and (taking note of the downpour) appalled. Janina’s wellingtons are too tight; she makes do with Charlie’s. Arm in arm, we clump and squelch to the gate. Visibility is almost zero; the rain is coming down like one of those deluges you see in films, where there’s obviously a gang with fire hoses standing just out of shot. We’re the only people out of doors.
The long grass twitches in the rain and the stream is so battered and brown it looks more like wood than like water. The noise under the umbrella becomes intolerable; I hobble out from under it, and move away until all I can hear is the seething of the stream. On the opposite bank there’s a willow, quivering, and within the foliage there’s a heron, standing on a tongue of silt. Only when I reach the lip of the bank, no more than twenty feet away, does it take flight. Ellen, unaware of its presence until now, emits a strange little wail of surprise.
I watch the bird disappear into the murk. After it has gone there is nothing to see except the rain, but I stay where I am for a few minutes more, looking towards where the hills would normally be.
‘What are you thinking?’ asks Ellen.
‘Nothing,’ I tell her, which I think is true. I was listening to the sound of the rain. ‘What about you?’ She says she was thinking that the heron was such a spectacular bird that it didn’t seem quite right that it lived in England.
The horizon is starting to reappear, and within a few minutes there’s a crack of light underneath the clouds. ‘Time to go,’ I declare. With every step, bubbles appear around my lace-holes. I make her hurry when we come to the road. ‘I need to lose some weight,’ she says; I call her a nice big lump of a woman. Within half an hour I’m asleep in an armchair. I’m sleeping too much. Before I nod off, Ellen tells me that when she was seven or eight she and her parents went for a picnic one afternoon, by a river. As she was watching some ducklings pass by, the edge of the riverbank collapsed, depositing her in a bed of thick grey sludge. She tried to clamber out, but every step was like lifting a manhole cover with her foot. Her shoes were pulled off; she sank to her knees in the slime. Her father jumped down to pull her out, but he began to sink too, and for a moment there appeared on his face a look of alarm which in an instant changed the way she thought of her father – never before had she seen him in a situation in which he did not know what to do. And ever since that day, she says, she’s been nervous of going close to the edge of rivers and streams. Sometimes, the mere sight of a certain grey-brown colour is enough to give her a funny turn. Janina has a coat that’s almost that colour.
Celia calls with good news: Petru has a job, mowing grass in the grounds of an unspecified hotel in the vicinity of Florence. I put two and two together and she admits that Mauro is one of the people – many people – she rang on behalf of her step-sweeper, but
denies that Mauro is Petru’s employer. ‘It’s a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend,’ she says. ‘You know how it works here.’ Well, I have an idea, but I know my sister better than I know how things work in Italy, and I know she’s not telling the truth. Mauro is back on the scene, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that sex is occurring. And now it’s obvious: the anonymous potential backer of Celia’s hypothetical school – that must have been Mauro too. ‘You’re being evasive,’ I tell her; she says, evasively, that she wants to speak to Charlie. She’s given up on the idea of starting her own school, having finally realised she’s not cut out for capitalism. Charlie reports her surrender with no more than a hint of smugness.
It is curious, some might say, that Celia should regard Charlie’s value system as being irredeemably besmirched by its emphasis on the accumulation of material goods, and yet be so attracted to a man who appears to be more thoroughly devoted to material self-enrichment than her brother. Charlie has his music, whereas Mauro Pascolato has no artistic leanings, unless one is using the adjective in the broadest sense and allows the development of expensively equipped holiday accommodation to be classified as a species of aesthetic activity. ‘The Armani barbarian’ Celia once nicknamed him. The first part of the description is accurate: soft jackets from Armani are his favourite upper-body garments, usually navy blue, teamed with a white shirt (no tie), navy blue or sand-toned trousers (the unconscionably expensive belt is a crucial detail), and shoes from Loake or equivalent long-pedigree English footwear manufacturer. As for the other element of the epithet, it’s true that, left to his own devices, Mauro would never set foot in an art gallery or museum, and would rather eat chalk than sit through a single scene of an opera. His preference is for life unmediated, yet Mauro is no barbarian: he is a smooth man, more gourmet than gourmand. He does nothing to excess, but appreciates all things that make a body buzz: fine food, fine cars (last time we heard he was driving a vintage Maserati), fine clothes, holidays in exotic locations, the company of women. The last of these pleasures is, according to some, of paramount importance to Mauro.
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