The Courage Consort

by Michel Faber

  'Good morning, darling,' she said, as her husband appeared. He looked a bit nonplussed, padding down the stairs in his herringbone-patterned socks. (All the men were in socks, actually, caught between the château's house rule against wearing shoes and their own reluctance to wear the leather clogs provided for them.)

  Julian, bleary-eyed and elegantly dishevelled, was nursing a coffee without drinking it. As soon as Catherine mentioned the silence, he said he'd noticed it too, and that it wasn't natural. He'd lain awake all night because of it.

  Catherine shuddered; the thought of her and Julian lying awake at exactly the same time in the same house, with only a wall between them, was disturbing somehow. It wasn't that she disliked him really, but she was so thin-skinned nowadays, so hypersensitive, that this simultaneous insomnia in a shared darkness was like unwelcome intimacy.

  'And the way there's hardly any birdsong, in this big forest: that's a bit unsettling, don't you think?' she suggested hesitantly, wary of stepping into the spotlight of mental frailty but enjoying the idea of communication with her friends.

  Dagmar was cutting fresh bread on the kitchen worktop, her snoozing baby lying swaddled in a blanket on the same surface, right near the breadboard, as if she meant to slice him next.

  'That silence is what you get if you climb a mountain,' she said, referring to her favourite pastime. 'I like it.'

  Having failed to get any joy from womankind, Catherine looked back to the men. Ben was now busy with the havermout, however, spooning it through his big soft lips, and Julian had turned his attention to his coffee, so that left only Roger.

  Her husband searched his soul briefly for some appropriate observation.

  'A vocal acoustic as silent as this must be very rare, when you think about it,' he said. 'I mean, just think of that recording of Hildegard songs by Gothic Voices … There you have Emma Kirkby singing like a lark, and in the background you can hear cars accelerating along the road!'

  Julian had to disagree.

  'That's because the sound engineers placed the microphones such a long way back from the singers,' he said, 'to try and get that monastery acoustic. They should have miked the singers close up, and put some reverb on later.'

  'You can't mean that,' protested Roger. Catherine had ceased to exist, forgotten as she tried to make toast for him under the oven grill. 'The acoustics of a place are unique and precious.'

  'For a live performance, yes,' agreed Julian. 'I've never sounded better than in that cellar in Reykjavik, with the stone walls and everything. But Gothic Voices weren't performing, they were making a record. Who needs the Church of St. Jude-on-the-Wall in Hampstead if at the flick of a switch or the push of a fader you can have a churchy acoustic, without the bloody Volvo vrooming up the road?'

  A smell of burnt toast started to pervade the kitchen. Little Axel coughed uneasily and started flapping his arms gently on the kitchen worktop, as if trying to fly away to a fresher square of air.

  'Sorry,' said Catherine.

  ***

  PARTITUM MUTANTE was sheer pleasure for at least one of its performers: Benjamin Lamb. Pino Fugazza was obviously very taken with the sonorous chanting of Tibetan monks, and had written oodles of something very similar for the bass parts of his own piece.

  While the other members of the Courage Consort had to learn complicated and athletic melodies in perverse keys, Benjamin was required to hum like an organ for bar after bar after bar. At the very beginning of the piece, his vocalisations were intended to convey the birth of the universe, no less, and he tackled this with an eerie resonance worthy of a holy Hi-malayan—indeed, of several.

  'Mwooooooiiiinnng, mwooooooiiiiinnng, mwooooooiii-innng,' he sang, from deep within his huge belly.

  Pino Fugazza was cunning, though: he'd timed low baritone swoops for Roger to cover Ben's pauses for breath, creating the illusion of a ceaseless foghorn of bass. And, just when it seemed that the music was going to remain abyssally dark forever, Julian came in with a high, pure voicing of the first articulate word: 'God'—pitched in G major, of course.

  The real trouble came with the entry of the females, a reflection no doubt on the Italian's philosophy of human relations as filtered through Judeo-Christian tradition. The manuscript became alarmingly complex at this point, the notes crowding the bar lines like dense troops of ants squashed wholesale on the way to something irresistible.

  Dagmar and Catherine sang till the sweat was falling off their brows onto the pages. They sang until their throats ached. They sang until they both felt moved to stare at each other imploringly, like two plantation slaves willing each other not to collapse, for that would be to invite a far worse fate. The hours were passing, not in linear flow, but in endless repetitions of two minutes here, five minutes there, and then the same two minutes from before, over and over and over.

  Finally, as night was again falling, the Consort reached the end of the piece, and, one by one, each of the singers faded away, leaving Catherine to bring Partitum Mutante to its close. The very last note was a very high C, to be reached over several bars from two octaves below, then sustained for fifteen seconds, increasing in volume, then diminishing to nothing. Ecstatic that the end was in sight, Catherine sang it with the purity and sureness of a fife.

  For several seconds after she had ushered the last traces of the note into oblivion, the rest of the Courage Consort sat mute. In the extraordinary quiet of Martinekerke forest, they breathed like babies, no one wanting to be the first to speak.

  'I was worried about that one, I must confess,' said Roger, finally. 'Well done.'

  Catherine blushed and concealed her throat behind one hand.

  'I just seem to be able to hit higher and higher notes all the time,' she said.

  The silence moved in again, as soon as she'd finished speaking, so she pressed on, making conversation to fill the void.

  'Maybe if I'd had one of those fearsome Svengali mothers pushing me when I was young I could have been a coloratura by now.'

  Dagmar was uncrossing her lotused legs with a wince of discomfort, wiggling her naked feet—her own solution to the house-slipper dilemma.

  'So what sort of mother did you have?' she asked.

  Catherine looked up at the ceiling, to see what might be written there about what sort of mother she'd had.

  'She was a cellist, actually,' she replied meditatively, 'in the BBC Symphony Orchestra.'

  'But I meant what sort of person was she?'

  'Umm … I'm not really sure,' murmured Catherine, her vision growing vague as she stared at the delicate mosaic of cracks in the paint overhead. 'She was away a lot, and then she committed suicide when I was twelve.'

  'Oh, I'm sorry,' said Dagmar.

  It sounded odd, this effete Britishism, coming at robust volume from the German girl. The sharpness of her accent made the condolence sound like something else altogether, and yet there was nothing insincere in her tone: in fact, it was Dagmar's sincerity that really struck the discord. The phrase 'Oh, I'm sorry' must have been composed by the English to be softly sung in a feminine cadence.

  'Not your fault,' said Catherine, lowering her gaze to smile at Dagmar. A ghostly blue after-image of the ceiling lamp floated like an aura around the German girl's face. 'It was me who found her, actually. Me or I?—which is it, Roger?' She glanced at him, but not long enough to notice his frowning, eyebrow-twitching signal for her to stop talking. 'She did it in her bed, with sleeping pills and a polythene bag over her head.'

  Dagmar narrowed her eyes and said nothing, imagining the scene and how a child might have taken it in. Julian couldn't contain himself, however.

  'Did she leave a note?' he enquired.

  'No,' said Catherine. Roger was getting up, rustling papers at the periphery of her attention. 'Though the polythene bag wasn't a plain one. It was a UNICEF one, with pictures of smiling children all over it. I always wondered about that.'

  Even Julian couldn't think where to take the conversation from there. />
  'Tragic business,' he said, getting to his feet to follow Roger into the kitchen.

  Dagmar wiped her forehead with one arm. As she did so, the fabric of her top was pulled taut against her breasts, alerting her to the fact that she had leaked milk from her nipples.

  'Excuse me,' she said.

  'How long has it been, do you think,' enquired Roger in bed that night, 'since we last made love?' Leading a singing group, he'd learned to hide his fault-finding under a consultative guise.

  'I don't know,' she said truthfully. 'Quite a long time, I suppose.' It would have been … undiplomatic to suggest otherwise, obviously.

  The spooky silence of Martinekerke forest was back with them in the inky-black bedroom. Catherine wondered what had become of the moon, which she could have sworn was almost full last night. There must be clouds hiding it just now.

  'So, do you think we might have a problem?' said Roger after a while.

  'I'm sure it's nothing that won't come good,' said Catherine. 'The doctor did say that the antidepressants might suppress … you know … desire.' The word sounded cringemakingly romantic, a Barbara Cartland sort of word, or else a throwback to William Blake.

  What is it that women do require?

  The lineaments of gratified desire.

  It was partly to save her from having to figure out what such terms as 'lineaments' could possibly mean that Catherine had originally allowed Roger to pluck her out of St. Magdalen's College.

  'Are you still listening to me?' he prompted now, in the vacuum of the noiseless night.

  'Yes,' she assured him. 'I was just thinking.'

  'Thinking what?'

  'I can't remember now.' She giggled in embarrassment.

  Roger lay still for another few seconds or minutes, then rolled onto his side—facing her. Not that she could see his face, but she could feel his elbow digging into the edge of her pillow and could sense, in the centre of the bed near her own thighs, the warmth of his … well, his desire.

  'You're still a good-looking woman, you know,' he said in a quiet, deep voice.

  Catherine laughed out loud, unable to control herself. The faint praise, offered so solemnly, so seductively, at a time when neither of them could see a bloody thing, struck her as unbearably funny somehow.

  'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' she whispered, mortified lest Julian hear them through the wall. 'It must be the antidepressants.'

  Roger slumped onto his back with an emphasis that rocked the bedsprings.

  'Maybe you should stop taking them now,' he suggested wearily. 'I mean, have you felt suicidal lately?'

  Catherine stared out of the window, relieved to see a pale glow of moonlight seeping into the sky.

  'It comes and goes,' she said.

  Hours later, when he was asleep, Catherine began to weep in the silence. She wished she could sing to herself, something sweet and tuneful, a little Schubert lied or even a nursery rhyme. 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' would do fine. But of course it wasn't possible. Her throat was sore from singing Partitum Mutante, and she lay in dread of waking her husband, in a strange bedroom in a forest in Belgium, with that wicked Julian Hind listening through the wall for her every snuffle. Oh my God, how had things come to this?

  Suddenly, she heard a short, high-pitched cry from somewhere quite far away. It wasn't Axel, she didn't think; that boy slept like an angel all night through and, during the day, hardly uttered a sound unless you set fire to a slab of Belgian bread right near his nose.

  Catherine's skin prickled electrically as the cry came again. It didn't sound human, or if it was, it was halfway toward something else. She wished she could slide across the bed, into the big protecting arms of someone who could be trusted to do nothing to her except keep her warm and safe. Such people were hard to find, in her experience.

  Instead, she drew the bedclothes up to her mouth and lay very still, counting the cries until she fell asleep.

  ***

  IN THE MORNING, she didn't manage to make an appearance at breakfast. She'd hoped to be there, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, each morning before Roger, but the previous night's insomnia caught up with her and she slept till midday. Roger was long gone by the time she awoke. Score—Roger: one; Catherine: zero, then.

  The sun was pouring in through the window, its heat boosting her body's metabolism to an itchy simmer. Just before waking, she'd been having a nightmare of suffocation inside a humid transparent sac; anxiously conscious at last, she fought her way out of the clammy bedclothes and sat up, drenched with sweat.

  She showered and dressed, hearing nothing except the sounds she was making. Perhaps the others were sitting around downstairs, waiting to sing, but lacking their soprano. Perhaps they'd gone exploring together, leaving her alone in the Château de Luth with its spinning wheels and antique recorders and a bed she didn't know if she could bear to lie in again.

  She needn't have worried. Arriving in the kitchen, she found Ben still in his XXL pyjamas, looking slightly sheepish as he sat alone at the sunlit bench, browsing through a four-year-old Times Literary Supplement.

  He was such a strange man, Catherine thought. The oldest of them all, he was as baby-faced at fifty-five as he'd been when the Courage Consort first formed. He'd always been immense, too, though perhaps marginally bigger now than a couple of decades ago. Quietly competent and poised in every sphere of life, he had just this one area of weakness, his Achilles' stomach. Each concert tour brought more surprises from his store of hitherto unsuspected talents—last year he'd dismantled the engine of a broken-down tour bus and got it going with a necktie and two wedding rings—but he just wasn't terribly good at feeding himself.

  'Hello,' he said, and a rumbling noise not a million miles removed from the moans he contributed to Partitum Mutante issued from somewhere inside him.

  Catherine had no doubt he could have solved whatever physical and intellectual challenges a cooking pot and a box of oats might pose, but, plainly, there was some reason why he couldn't bring himself to tackle them. He looked at Catherine, his eyes sincere in their supplication. He was telling her, with that look, that he loved his own wife dearly, but that his wife was in London and Catherine was here with him, and what were they going to do about it?

  'Would you like some porridge, Ben?' she asked him.

  'Yes,' he immediately replied, colour rising to his great cheeks.

  'Then I'll make us both some,' she said.

  It turned out that the Courage Consort had already been lacking its contralto even while its soprano slept the morning away. At first light, Dagmar had cycled off into the forest with Axel, and had not yet returned. Perhaps she'd gone to Mar-tinekerke or Duidermonde to fetch more supplies; perhaps she was merely exercising. She was gone, anyway, so Roger was typing correspondence on one of the computers, Julian was reading a paperback in the sitting room, and Ben had been waiting around for someone to offer him breakfast.

  'Say "whoa,"' said Catherine as she began to pour the milk.

  'Whoa,' he murmured regretfully, when the bowl threatened to overflow.

  Overhearing the sounds of nurture, Julian found his way back to the kitchen, where he'd fed himself on tinned rice pudding and coffee a few hours earlier. He was dressed in black jeans, a black T-shirt, black socks. From the top of his blow-dried head to where his ankles began, he looked like a French film star.

  'Morning,' he grinned, still holding his book aloft, as if he'd just glanced up from his reading and noticed the kitchen had sidled up to him.

  'Hello, Julian,' said Catherine, trying not to be sour-faced as the moment of benign simplicity—the bowl of hot oatmeal, herself as provider, Ben Lamb as mute recipient—was ruined. As Julian stepped casually between herself and Ben, she noted that the book spreadeagled in his elegant hands was some sort of thriller with a frightened female face on the cover, and she suddenly thought, I really, really dislike this man.

  'Julian, would you like some porridge?'

  During the first five words of
her question his eyes lit up, but they dulled in disappointment when she reached the end.

  'No thanks,' he said. 'There's nothing … ah … more substantial is there?'

  'I don't know,' said Catherine, gazing wistfully at Ben spooning the steaming havermout into his mouth. 'Porridge is quite filling, isn't it?'

  'I was thinking of eggs, actually,' confessed Julian.

  'Perhaps Dagmar will bring some back with her.'

  'Mm.' Plainly, for Julian, the prospect of asking Dagmar to share food with him was not a realistic one.

  Scraping the remnants of the havermout into a bowl for herself, Catherine asked Julian how he'd slept.

  'Lay awake half the night again,' he grumbled, settling himself on a stool. His paperback nestled on his lap, its glossy image of a wide-eyed beauty staring up from between his slim black thighs.

  'You heard the cries, then?' said Catherine.

  'Cries?'

  'Cries, out there in the forest somewhere.'

  'Probably Dagmar's baby,' he suggested. 'Or bats.'

  She could tell he hadn't heard anything really.

  'I definitely heard them,' said Catherine. 'Human. But terribly forlorn and strange. Just cries, no words.'

  Julian smiled indulgently.

  'An infant crying in the night, / an infant crying for the light, / and with no language but a cry, eh?' he said, deadpan.

  Catherine stared at him in uneasy puzzlement. Julian often came out with this sort of thing: a tantalising quote from one of her favourite Victorian or Romantic poets, delivered with a shrug as if it were an arch soundbite from a TV commercial or an election slogan of yesteryear made tacky, or poignant, or poignantly tacky, by hindsight.

  Elsewhere in the house, a telephone rang.

  'Ghostbusters,' quipped Julian.

  The call was from a young woman called Gina. She wanted to know if it was convenient for her to drive over this afternoon and clean't Luitspelershuisje, change the bed linen, that sort of thing.