The Courage Consort

by Michel Faber

  It was a tense discussion, at least among those of the Consort who had an opinion on the matter. Julian felt the tenor-rich passages were most underdeveloped, while Dagmar was sure that the contralto and soprano harmonics were far short of ideal; Roger tended towards the view that these weaknesses could be improved at leisure within a binding framework woven by a clean and confident baritone line. An impasse was reached with no singing done. Julian went to the toilet, Roger went for a breath of fresh air, and Dagmar went to look in on Axel.

  Left alone with Ben, Catherine said, 'I've still got the briefs, actually. They lasted superbly. I might even have them on right now.'

  Ben rested his massive head on his hands and half closed his eyes, smiling.

  In bed that night, Roger finally allowed himself to be badly behaved.

  'You don't love me anymore,' he said, as Catherine cringed beside him, rolling herself up into a ball.

  'I don't know, I don't know,' pleaded Catherine, her voice strangled to a squeak by tears and too much singing.

  'Have you given any more thought to stopping the antidepressants,' he enquired tonelessly, tugging at the blankets to cover the parts she had exposed.

  'I've already stopped,' she said. It was true. It had been true for days. In fact, despite Roger's frequent gentle reminders, back in London, about all the items she should make sure she took with her to Belgium, she had somehow managed to leave those little pills behind. The cardboard box they lived in had got beetroot and mayonnaise soaked into it somehow, and she hadn't been up to fixing the problem. The box of pills, the spilled food, the handbag in which all this had happened: she'd left the whole caboodle under her bed at home. The bed she slept in alone, in the spare room.

  'Really?' said Roger, lying right next to her in Belgium. 'So how are you feeling?'

  She burst out laughing. She tried desperately to stop, mindful of Julian in the next room, but she couldn't; she just laughed louder, sobbing until her sides were aching.

  Later, when the fit had subsided, Roger lay with his head and one hand against her back.

  'We have a big day tomorrow,' he sighed, heavy with loneliness on the brink of sleep.

  'I won't let you down,' Catherine assured him.

  No sooner had his breathing become deep and regular than the first cry echoed eerily in the forest outside.

  ***

  'COME FOR A CYCLE WITH ME,' Dagmar invited her next morning after breakfast.

  Catherine blushed, her hands trembling up to her throat. She could not have been more nonplussed if she'd just been asked to go skinny-dipping in Arctic waters with a bunch of fervent Inuits.

  'Ah … it sounds lovely, Dagmar, really, but…'

  She looked to Ben for help, but he was busy spooning up the havermout, content as a … well, a lamb.

  'I haven't got a bicycle, for one thing,' she pointed out gratefully.

  'I found one at the back of the château,' said Dagmar. 'It's an old one, but sound construction. A good Dutch bike. But if you think you can't ride an old one, you can use mine.'

  Defeated, Catherine allowed herself to be led out of the house. The German girl's thighs and buttocks flexed like an Olympian's as she walked, the shiny aquamarine of her tights contrasting sharply with the pastel blue of Catherine's evenly faded jeans. There were the two bicycles already parked, side by side at the edge of the road, gleaming in the sun. There was no escape except to say No, I don't want to, which had always been impossible for Catherine.

  'They say you never forget how to ride a bicycle,' she said, approaching the machines warily, 'but I've forgotten the most amazing things, you know.'

  'It's all right, we'll take it easy,' said Dagmar, preoccupied with strapping on the Axel rucksack.

  Catherine examined the seats of the two bikes, feeling the leather curves, trying to imagine how hard or soft each might be between her legs.

  'Erm … which of these is better for someone who hasn't … you know…'

  Dagmar shrugged, quite an achievement for a woman with a six-kilo human being on her back.

  'One bike has about a hundred gears, the other has none,' she said. 'But travelling slow on a totally flat road, it makes very little difference.'

  And so it began. Catherine's anxiety turned to relief as she discovered she could still ride perfectly well. Her other fear, that Dagmar would speed ahead of her, was equally unfounded. The German girl cycled at a slow and even pace—not because she was making any special effort to be considerate, but because she had simply sent an instruction down to her legs to rotate at a certain number of revolutions per minute. Whatever the reason, Catherine was able to keep up, and, to her growing delight, found herself cycling along the dark smooth road, forest blurring by on either side, a breeze of her own creation blowing through her hair.

  After a mile or two, she was even confident enough to speak.

  'You know, I really am enjoying this terribly much,' she called across to Dagmar.

  Axel, nestled against his mother's back, his face barely distinguishable under a woollen cap, opened his eyes wide. He wasn't used to fellow travellers.

  'You will sing better tonight,' Dagmar asserted confidently. 'It's good for the lungs, good for the diaphragm, good for everything.'

  'You'll have me going mountain climbing with you next!' It was the sort of comment you could make in the Low Countries, without fear.

  'Great idea,' called Dagmar. 'There are some OK mountains just over the German border, in Eifel. Three hundred kilometres' journey, maximum.'

  Catherine laughed politely, possibly not loud enough for Dagmar to hear over the whirring of the wheels. In the distance, a church spire gave advance warning of Martinekerke.

  It was a proud and glowing Catherine who cycled up to the front door of the Château de Luth an hour later. She had been exploring the big wide world, making a bit of a reconnaissance of the local facilities. Now she and Dagmar were bringing back the goodies.

  The three men watched them mutely as they, two flushed and sweaty women, carried groceries into the kitchen.

  Mind you, Catherine hadn't actually been able to carry much on the bicycle with her, having neglected to bring along any sort of bag. But she'd taken responsibility for the eggs, wrapping them up in a sweater she was too hot to wear, and nestling them safely in the basket of her strange Dutch bike.

  'You may need another shower, dear,' Roger suggested sotto voce as she was pouring a big glass of milk down her glistening throat. 'Pino Fugazza will be here soon.'

  Abruptly, for no apparent reason, little Axel started bawling.

  Of all the composers that the Courage Consort had ever met, Pino Fugazza proved to be the least charming. Perhaps they ought to have been forewarned slightly when they'd found out that his sizeable fortune derived not from the honest popularity of avant-garde music but was inherited from the family business of automatic weapons. However, in a spirit of not blaming the child for the sins of his parents, they reserved judgment. In any case, as Ben pointed out, Tobias Hume, a favourite composer of the Courage Consort's seventeenth-century repertoire, had actually been a professional killer in his time, and that didn't detract from the merit of the songs he'd written for the viol.

  The image of a dashing Tobias Hume laying sword aside to pen the immortal 'Fain would I change that note' was rudely extinguished by the very real arrival, in a black Porsche, of Pino Fugazza. He swanned into the château wearing a red Galliano shirt with dozens of little black ears printed on it, black Armani slacks jingling with loose change, and shoes with tassels on them. His smile was startlingly unappealing.

  'How do you do,' said Catherine, playing hostess, though she could tell at a glance that she had no desire to know the answer.

  'Prima, prima, exclaimed the composer, bounding into the house with a lightness of step possibly achieved by the feeble claims of gravity on his four-foot-eleven frame. Already bald at twenty-nine, he had a face like a macaque. Even Ben Lamb, who was usually most careful not to gape at pe
ople with physical peculiarities, couldn't quite believe what Fate had delivered.

  Pino had parked his Porsche as close to the front door as possible without driving it into the house, and, as Signor and Signora Courage strove to make him welcome, he kept glancing through the window, as if worried that some delinquent forest animal was liable to drive off with his splendid vehicle.

  Calmed at last, he spread his arms beneficently and invited the music to begin.

  The Courage Consort sang Partitum Mutante—all thirty-one and a half minutes of it, without a break—and they sang it rather well, all things considered. As always, when it came to the challenge of a real performance to an audience—even an audience of one—they moved Heaven and Hell to overcome their differences. Julian managed nuances of some humility, Dagmar conformed for the greater good, Roger slowed his tempo when his wife faltered at one point, gathering her back into the fold. And, at the finish, Catherine sang the last notes with even greater virtuosity than she had before.

  Arboreal silence settled on the house as the Courage Consort slumped, exhausted, on the farther shores beyond conventional harmony. They had swum a long way in turbulent sonic waters with barely a pause for breath. Rather disconcertingly, as they struggled up from the sea, they felt themselves being looked down on by a macaque in an infant's pyjama jacket.

  'Bravo,' the macaque leered.

  Pino Fugazza was, briefly, lavish in his praise, then, at length, lavish in his criticism. As he spoke, he left the score unconsulted at his side; matters of mere pedantic detail did not seem to trouble him. Instead, it was larger issues that he felt the Consort were failing to grasp. Issues like the very essence and spirit of the piece.

  Gesticulating balletically, Fugazza swayed before them, his slacks jingling as he strove to make himself understood in his own avant-garde version of English.

  'It shoot be more extrème, but more soft also,' he exclaimed after many abortive attempts. To illustrate some sort of sublime paradox, he threw his stubby claws violently up into the air, then let them float languorously down like dying squidlets. 'Like somesing very lo-o-o-ost, from ze bottom of a well.'

  There was a pause.

  'Quieter?' Roger attempted to translate.

  Fugazza nodded, pleased that progress was being made at last.

  'Yes, very much quieter,' he said, 'but wiz no losing of … of psychic loudity, you understand? Quiet, but loud inside ze ears … Like ze sound of water dripping from a … a…'

  'Tap?'

  'Faucet. Dripping in ze night, when everysing is quiet. So it's loud, yes? Silence, amplificated.'

  They all pondered this a moment, then Roger said:

  'You think we should sing extremely quietly, but have microphones amplifying us?'

  'No! No! No microphones!' cried Pino, plucking invisible offending objects from the air in front of him and casting them straight into a lake of fire. 'Ze loudness comes from ze … ze intensity, yes?'

  'Intensity of emotion?'

  'Intensity of … of concentration. Concentrated like… like…'

  'Chicken stck cubes?' suggested Dagmar in a poisonous murmur as she played with a strand of her hair.

  'Like a bullet,' affirmed the composer in triumph. 'A bullet is very small, yes? But ze effect is … is…' He grimaced, betrayed yet again by a language so inferior to Italian.

  Catherine, resisting the urge to leave her body and float up to the ceiling after her big exertion, tried hard to help him find the right word. She imagined the effect of a bullet entering someone's flesh—someone who didn't want to die.

  'Dreadful,' she said.

  'I hate him,' hissed Dagmar when he had driven away.

  'It's probably a communication problem,' said Roger spiritlessly.

  'I hate him,' repeated Dagmar, intently flicking her damp hair with her thumb and index finger. 'That's what I'm communicating to you.'

  'Well,' sighed Roger, 'he has his idea of the piece, we have ours…'

  Ben was padding around the house like a bear, going from window to window, opening them all wide. It wasn't until he was opening the biggest, nearest window that his fellow Consort members noticed the whole château stank of the sort of perfume probably derived from scraping the scrotums of extremely rare vermin.

  ***

  UNITED IN THEIR DISLIKE of the composer, the Courage Consort devoted the next week to getting on top of Partitum Mutante. By day, they did little other than sing. By night, they slept deeply. Even Catherine was less troubled by insomnia than ever before. No sooner had the piercing, plaintive cry of the creature in the forest woken her up than she was drifting off again.

  In the Château de Luth, she was developing a kind of routine, to which, amazingly for her, she was able to adhere religiously. She who had always seemed programmed to disappoint, abandoning the best-laid late-night plans in the suicidal torpor of dawn, was now getting up early every morning, cooking porridge for Ben, going off for a bike ride with Dagmar, then freshening herself up for a long afternoon's singing. Looking down at herself in the shower as the misty water cascaded over her naked flesh, she wondered if she was merely imagining a more youthful appearance, or if it was real.

  Roger was retreating into a hard shell of professionalism, a state he tended to go into whenever a deadline was growing too near. It was by no means unattractive: Catherine liked him best this way. He focused utterly on the task at hand—in this case, the fiendish Partitum Mutante—and strove to understand the nature of his fellow singers' difficulties, keen not to dissipate their precious energy or fray their raw nerves. Rather than demanding endless repetition, he was tolerant when things went wrong. 'Let's not waste our breath,' he'd quip gravely, whenever an argument loomed. Afterwards, he'd lie flat on his back in bed at night thinking up ways to make the next performance run more smoothly. Catherine almost felt like embracing him when he was like this. If she could have been sure he'd stay flat on his back, she would have rested her head on his shoulder and stroked his frowning brow.

  She wondered if Ben was happy. He was such a mountain of poise, but was he happy? Every night at 11:00 P.M. sharp, he would retire to his little room, to a bed that could not possibly be big enough for him. What did he do to make himself comfortable? Did he miss his wife? Was his own body, when he was horizontal, intolerably heavy, like an unwanted other person bearing down on him?

  Before this fortnight in Martinekerke, it would never have occurred to Catherine to wonder about such things. Each Consort member had his or her separate life, mysterious to the others. Their personal happiness or unhappiness was irrelevant to the purpose that brought them together—at least, that was the way it had always been in the past. They would rendezvous at the Lambs' place in Tufnell Park, like five football fans who were going to sit down and watch a televised match together, and with barely a word spoken they would start singing a Josquin Miserere or whatever was on the agenda. Ben's wife would make herself scarce, cooking what smelled like very large quantities of Asian food in the kitchen. In all the years the Consort had been doing this, Catherine had never even got around to asking what nationality Mrs. Lamb was. She looked Vietnamese or something, and dressed like an American hair-care consultant. At intervals, she would serve her guests coffee and cake: apple and cinnamon slices subtly impregnated with stray aromas of prawns, turmeric, garlic, soy sauce. Now and then Catherine got a hankering to ask Ben a few questions about his wife, but as the years passed she tended to feel she might have missed the right moment to raise the subject.

  Julian was an unknown quantity too, although there were signs that he might inspire complex emotions in more people than just his fellow singers. Once, while the Consort were rehearsing at the Lambs' house, a drunken man, shouting unintelligible abuse, had kicked dents into Julian's car parked just outside. Julian went white and sat waiting stoically as the characteristic bimff of breaking windscreen resounded in the night air. Again, no one in the Courage Consort asked any questions. Julian's extramusical activities were his
own affair. He could sing the pants off any tenor in England, that was the important thing.

  Even Catherine's mental frailties were tolerated, as long as they didn't interfere with the music. Last year, she'd even been able to show up for rehearsals with both her wrists wrapped in snowy white bandage, and nobody had mentioned it. By contrast, if she dared to spend a few minutes too long in Heathrow's toilets when the Consort had a plane to catch, she was liable to hear an admonitory summons over the airport PA.

  As for Dagmar, the most recent addition to the group, she'd stuck with the Courage Consort because they gave her fewer hassles than any of her many previous liaisons. After walking out on the Dresden Staatsoper because the directors seemed to think she was too sexually immoral to sing opera (her last rôle for them was Berg's prostitute Lulu, for God's sake!) she'd been a bit wary of these smiling English people, but it had turned out OK. They allowed her to get away with tempestuous love affairs, even illegitimate pregnancy, as long as she showed up on time, and this she had no trouble with. For nine months of ballooning belly she'd never missed a rehearsal; she'd given birth, prudently, during the lull between Ligeti's Aventures in Basle and the 'Carols Sacred and Profane' Christmas concert in Huddersfield. That was good enough for Roger Courage, who had sent her a tasteful congratulations card without enquiring after the baby's name or sex.

  This strange fortnight in Martinekerke, though, was making them so much more real to each other as human beings, at least from Catherine's point of view. Living together as a family, cooking for each other, seeing the stubble on each other's faces—well, not on hers, of course—watching each other's hair grow, even … Catherine was finding it all really quite exciting. She could definitely see herself, before the fortnight was over, asking Ben about his wife, or cycling all the way to Duidermonde.