Song Cycle (Warrender Saga Book 8)

by Mary Burchell

  “For one thing, Mr. Delawney, I haven’t been asked.” She smiled a little wryly.

  “Don’t call me Mr. Delawney. It sounds ridiculous now we’re more or less family friends. Call me Rod. Most of my friends do.”

  “Very well, then — Rod.” She turned her head and smiled at him with genuine warmth, for his friendliness was welcome after Jonathan Keyne’s coolness and Teresa’s mixture of patronage and command. “It’s very kind of you to be exercised on my behalf. But even with a family festival, as you might say, casting isn’t done on a purely friendly basis, I feel sure. You don’t know anything about my artistic standing, and anyway, your sister has very definite views on what she wants. Her ideas are good ones, too. I could tell that, even from a preliminary discussion. I don’t think she would welcome any friendly interference, even by you.”

  He laughed reluctantly.

  “Teresa doesn’t welcome any sort of interference with her plans on any basis,” he observed, though without rancour. “And she rates me as no more than a cheerful Philistine — which I am, up to a point, of course. But I tell you one thing — I’d like Jonathan to hear you. He really does know.”

  “He has heard me,” said Anna before she could stop herself.

  “He has?” Roderick Delawney looked interested. “And what did he think of you? Do you know?”

  “Rather well — I believe.”

  “Then why not — ?”

  “No, no, let it ride,” she said urgently. “Whatever he thought of me, I had occasion to annoy him professionally, I’m afraid. It wouldn’t be good tactics to — push myself at this point. I’d rather be overlooked than noticed by him at the moment.”

  “You’re a funny girl,” he declared as he stopped the car before the small white house where Anna and her father lived. “I never knew anyone so diffident about pressing her claims. In my limited experience professional performers just can’t wait to let you know how good they are.”

  “Perhaps,” Anna said with a smile, as she got out of the car, “it’s because I’m not exactly a professional yet. But thank you, Rod. Your appreciation has done me a lot of good. Only don’t talk to Jonathan Keyne about me, will you?”

  “Not if you say not.” He laughed a little vexedly before he waved to her and drove off, leaving her to enter the house in a state of mind curiously balanced between excitement and dejection.

  Her father immediately came out into the passage to enquire anxiously about her long absence, having evidently begun to link this in his mind with possible bad news from the hospital. But Anna hastened to reassure him and then explained that she had spent most of the afternoon at Coppershaw Grange, discussing the local Festival with Teresa Delawney.

  “Really?” Her father looked relieved, but again seemed inclined to brush off the Delawneys’ excursion into the arts as little more than childish posturing. “Was there anything serious to discuss?”

  “Well, yes, I’m bound to say there was.” Anna smiled, but there was a note of respect in her voice. “You won’t believe it, but Teresa Delawney has some quite astounding ideas, and a very capable — not to say ruthless — way of pursuing what she wants. Frankly, Dad, if I’m any judge, she’s going to make a success of this thing.” And she proceeded to give some details of Teresa’s plans.

  “Well, unlimited money can do a great deal, of course,” her father admitted good-humouredly. “Particularly if it’s allied to a certain degree of judgment. Jonathan Keyne should supply some real professionalism. What part is he playing exactly?”

  “I’m not quite sure. She said she had been tremendously lucky to have his friendly co-operation. I suppose he’ll act in an advisory capacity of some sort. And then obviously he would be able to pull strings when it came to engaging some eminent artists.”

  “Is there any suggestion that you should sing?” her father asked.

  “None at all.” Anna’s tone was crisp and decided. “I’m simply on the organising side.”

  “What made you take that on?” her father looked curious.

  “I liked the idea of being in it somewhere, I suppose,” she said with a smiling little shrug. But she added nothing about Teresa’s faintly patronising attitude and nothing about the way Jonathan Keyne’s thoughtful glance had made her feel that she must be in this Festival somewhere, somehow.

  Instead, she went on to explain that Teresa seemed to think there should be something included in connection with the church and choir. And here again she suppressed any reference to Teresa’s slighting remarks in this direction.

  “A concert of church music, you mean?” her father looked considering. “Well, the setting would be exceptionally beautiful, of course, and the choir is unusually good this year. As for solo singing, Tommy Bream may be a limb of Satan, but he is the best boy soprano for miles around. Given the right choice of anthem, he can give the impression of being one of God’s chosen angels. Local people are used to him, of course. But if Miss Delawney is expecting people from other parts of the country—”

  “We want something really unusual as the centre point,” Anna interrupted eagerly. “Dad, haven’t you something among your many compositions that could be included? I know your hearts in opera, but you have done other things, haven’t you? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a local composition as well as local performers?”

  “No, no—” Her father shook his head with unexpected emphasis. “No question of it.”

  “Don’t turn it down without considering it!” Anna exclaimed.

  “But I’m afraid I must, my dear. You see, I’ve come to the conclusion lately that I have been deluding myself all these years—”

  “Dad, what nonsense!”

  “No.” He spoke without bitterness but with finality. “You come to a time, Anna, when — however optimistic you may be — you have to accept the verdict of practical experience. I’ve done a lot of thinking lately. Particularly since your mother has been away and so ill. And it’s gradually come to me that I’m probably not a composer at all. I’m just a church organist who loves music and can play rather effectively with notes.”

  “That simply isn’t true,” cried Anna indignantly. “You may have thought on too vast and grandiose a scale.” The truth came rushing out without any tactful attempt at checking it. “But you are a true music-maker, I know you are. The ideas are there, but not the practical form. That lovely thing you were playing that evening after choir practice—”

  “This, you mean?” Her father went to the piano and began to sketch in the melody which had so entranced Anna before.

  “Yes! That’s it! Then you did remember what I meant?”

  “I recalled it after you’d gone.” Her father ran his hands lovingly over the keys. “It modulates into the minor key here — or I think that’s how it should go.”

  “Of course it should.” She sang a few phrases along with the piano accompaniment. “It’s much too good to lose. Couldn’t you use it in some way? Surely you could?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact,” he said unexpectedly, “I have.”

  “You have?”

  Her father nodded and suddenly he looked almost bashful, like a boy instead of a tired, elderly man who had suffered more anxiety than he could well bear during recent weeks.

  “I began to develop the theme after you mentioned it. And it seems to me that, as the central melody of a song cycle—”

  “What song cycle?” Anna’s question was sharp enough almost to make him wince. But she was suddenly desperately afraid that, even now, the elusive loveliness of his musical thought might be smothered beneath an over-weighted form of words.

  “Well —” her father went over to his desk, rummaged about and presently came back with a few typewritten sheets of paper at which Anna gazed in growing alarm. “I suppose —” he was still smiling that slight, shy smile — “it’s astonishing and even embarrassing for young people to find that their parents ever wrote poetry. But years ago I used to indulge myself that way.”

>   He held out the sheets of paper to her and she took them with a reluctance she could hardly conceal. How awful! He wrote poetry in addition to those turgid opera libretti. And now she was going to have to argue for the life of that lovely air against the weight of uninspired words.

  As she resentfully scanned the first few lines they seemed to run together, conveying nothing to her resistant mind. And then something clicked in her mind and she gave a sort of gasp of relief.

  The verses were charming! She had to admit that. Not great poetry, of course, but singularly lilting in an unpretentious way. Eminently singable, for one thing. As a singer herself, she sensed that immediately. And, as she read on, she felt almost certain that, set to the right music, these conventional but rather beautiful verses could have an extraordinary appeal.

  There were four poems dealing, predictably enough, with reactions to the four seasons. But though there was a pastoral tranquillity about some of them, in others there was an unexpected touch of human passion. Hardly able to associate all this with her father — for, after all, which of us associates passion, or even pastoral tranquillity, with a familiar parent? — Anna read on until the end.

  Then she put down the sheets and said with conviction, “You know, it’s good I and it’s singable. Do you mean that you’ve been setting all this to music in the last few weeks?”

  “I did some work on it earlier,” her father admitted. “But somehow, when I was so worried and unhappy about your mother, it was a way of expressing my hopes and fears — and my fondness for her. It sounds silly in an elderly man, I daresay—”

  “It does nothing of the sort!” stated Anna, hugging him. “It sounds lovely and touching and worthwhile. And Mother will be overjoyed about it.”

  “Well, well—” her father kissed her and laughed in a deprecating way — “it should make at least an acceptable song cycle for organ, choir and soprano. And some of those higher passages lie beautifully for young Tommy, if I can drill them into him.”

  “It’s going to be wonderful,” Anna declared. “Finish it as soon as you can. And we’ll make it the sensation of the Festival!”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  But she realised that, for the first time since her mother had been rushed to hospital, her father was looking eager and lively again.

  No one had made any suggestions about how she should reach Coppershaw Grange by nine-thirty the following morning. But Anna knew that a somewhat infrequent bus passed within ten minutes’ walk of the Grange and, having checked the timetable at the bus stop near her home, she saw to it that she and her father breakfasted quite early. Then she set off to her first morning’s work with mixed feelings, but a general sense of starting on something exciting.

  She had walked only a few yards up the road, however, when she realised that an open car was parked near the kerb and, as she came towards it, Jonathan Keyne got out of the driving seat and came round to open the nearside door.

  “Why, what brings you here at this hour?” she exclaimed.

  “You do,” he informed her. “Get in and I’ll drive you up to the Grange.”

  “But surely you didn’t come on purpose to fetch me?” She was impressed, even faintly embarrassed, by the thought.

  “Not entirely,” he assured her. “It is, as you see, a wonderful morning. I wanted to get something of the feel of the place. Also to have a look at the church, in case we include a church concert. At the same time, I hadn’t heard of any plans to get you to the Grange in time for what Teresa calls an early start. How were you proposing to come, by the way?”

  “By bus, of course. One passes fairly near the gates of the Grange.”

  “Quarter of an hour’s walk away, so the butler assured me.”

  “Perhaps,” Anna said demurely, “I walk a little faster than the butler. In any case, a walk on such a morning isn’t going to harm anyone.”

  “Agreed. But I hope you find the lift a good idea instead.”

  “I do. And thank you very much. But now I am going to be rather too early.”

  “No, you aren’t,” he assured her. “We’re going to drive around the lanes a little, and you’re going to explain the ridiculous way you behaved to me when we last met in London. You’ll need to make it good too. I don’t easily forgive people who make a fool of me.”

  “I didn’t make a fool of you!” she exclaimed distressfully.

  “Of course you did. How much eloquence do you suppose I had had to spill on a knowledgeable old bird like Warrender in order to convince him that it was worth risking an absolute beginner as one of the central props of my company?”

  “Were you — were you thinking of me as one of the central props of your company?” she asked, awed.

  “I was,” he said grimly. “I didn’t know then that you were totally unreliable, of course.”

  “I’m not totally unreliable!”

  “What else? You let me stake my personal judgment on you, right up to the point of my offering you a contract. And then you threw a ridiculous emotional scene of refusal and rushed away, leaving me to tell Warrender that I’d backed someone who didn’t want the chance after all, thanks. You even told me to ‘leave you alone’ —” he reproduced her exact tone of distracted protest with some cruelty — “as though I’d made some improper proposal to you. If that’s not making a fool of someone, what is?”

  “You don’t understand.” She was trembling, but she managed to keep her voice steady. “I’d just had an upsetting phone call and—”

  He pulled the car to the side of the lane and stopped it with such a jerk that her sentence was bitten off in the middle.

  “She’d had an upsetting phone call!” he said to the countryside in general. Then he raised his hands and dropped them back on the steering wheel. “You were being offered the kind of chance any young artist might ask God on her knees for — and an upsetting phone call put you off your stroke. What was upsetting about it, for heaven’s sake?” His tone was almost savage. “Had your unimportant boyfriend stood you up for another girl or something?”

  “No,” Anna said coldly and distinctly. “My mother was thought to be dying.”

  “Oh—” he did look taken aback at that. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t mention it,” she retorted icily.

  And after a moment he said, rather sulkily, “Did she — die?”

  “No. She recovered, after all, I’m thankful to say. She is very slowly recovering completely, we’re daring to hope. But that’s why I’m down here now, looking after my father and expecting to look after my mother when she comes from convalescent home in some weeks’ time.”

  “And meanwhile—” his tone sounded reasonable but somehow slightly dangerous — “what happens to your career?”

  “It must wait, I’m afraid.”

  He started the car again after that. And after a few minutes he said, “I feel bound to tell you, my dear, that is not the way careers are built. If you allow yourself to be put off by every family crisis —” He stopped, evidently sensing he was going a little too far.

  “Do go on,” said Anna sweetly.

  “Look, I don’t want to sound callous. But if you’re going to make a name for yourself in what’s possibly the most competitive profession in the world, you’re going to have to get your priorities right from the very beginning. I’m sure you were badly scared, but — your mother did recover, didn’t she?”

  “She might not have.”

  “But she did,” he insisted obstinately. “And because you panicked unnecessarily you missed the chance of a lifetime. These chances don’t tend to come again,” he added deliberately.

  “I take your point,” she said coldly. Then she glanced pointedly at her watch and added, “Isn’t it time we made for the Grange? It’s twenty past nine.”

  He reversed the car and, with a rather heavy silence between them, they made for Coppershaw Grange. Only when they were in sight of the entrance did he speak again, and his tone was almost re
flective as he said,

  “Anthea Warrender — she was Anthea Benton then — once faced a decision very similar to yours. Her mother was ill and she wanted to drop everything and rush home. But Warrender had just arranged for her to appear, as a substitute for someone else, at Covent Garden for the first time. He insisted on her staying — and that was the start of her great career.”

  “The point of this cautionary tale being, I suppose, that the masterful male must always be listened to,” said Anna drily. “What did Warrender do — pat her on the head?”

  “No. He married her,” replied Jonathan Keyne with a grin, as he stopped the car in front of the house.

  “Would you call that reward or punishment?” said Anna rather pertly. “Thanks for the lift.” And she got out of the car and ran up the steps to the house, while he looked after her with a slightly intrigued expression.

  Teresa Delawney was waiting for her in a pleasant room which was obviously half office, half sitting room. It looked out on the front drive, which meant she had probably seen Anna arrive in Jonathan Keyne’s car. But she made no reference to this. She was very business-like this morning, with quite a stack of routine correspondence ready for Anna’s attention. And she made it clear that she expected the same standard of efficiency from others that she herself displayed.

  Anna, who made no pretensions to being a secretary, was hard put to it in the first hour and a half to live up to these expectations. After that, however, she began to get the hang of what was required of her and, since she was genuinely interested in almost every aspect of the work, she found herself enjoying it. There was little sign of the previous friendly way of involving her in discussion, but Anna accepted the fact that work must come first, and it was not until they were relaxing over excellent midmorning coffee that she said, “I spoke to my father about a concert in the church, and he seems to think that something quite interesting could be arranged.”

  “Oh, well — we’ll have to see.” For the first time, Teresa sounded almost vague. “It’s so difficult to get anything unusual within that framework. What sort of novelty, for instance, can one have in a church concert?” Anna bit her lip, suppressed her irritation and said quietly, “My father is something of a composer, and he has done a lovely song cycle which—”