The Courage Consort

by Michel Faber

  Catherine and Ben sat in the rehearsal room, alone. Through the windows, the trees of the forest were furry black against the indigo of the night sky.

  After a time, Catherine said, 'What are you thinking, Ben?'

  And he replied, 'Time is short. It would have been better if we'd done some singing.'

  Catherine nestled her cheek inside her folded arms, her arms on the back of the couch. From this angle, only one of her eyes could see Ben; it was enough.

  'Sing me a song, Ben,' she murmured.

  With some effort he raised himself from his chair and walked over to a glass cabinet. He swung open its doors and fetched out an ancient musical instrument—a theorbo, perhaps. Some sort of lute, anyway, creaking with its own old-ness, dark as molasses.

  Ben returned to his chair, sat down, and found the least absurd place to rest the bulbous instrument on his bulbous body. Then, gently, he began to strum the strings. From deep inside his chest, sonorous as a saxhorn, came the melancholy lyrics of Tobias Hume, circa 1645.

  Alas, poore men

  Why strive you to live long?

  To have more time and space

  To suffer wrong?

  Looking back at a lifetime devoted to warfare and music, dear old Tobias might well have left it at that, but there were many more verses; the music demanded to go on even if there was little to add to the sentiments. Ben Lamb sang the whole song, about nine minutes altogether, strumming its sombre minimalist accompaniment all the while. Then, when he had finished, he got up and carefully replaced the lute in its display case. Catherine knew he was going to bed now.

  'Thank you, Ben,' she said, her lips breathing against her forearm. 'Good night.'

  'Good night,' he said, carrying his body away with him.

  ***

  AN HOUR LATER, Roger and Catherine made love. It seemed the only way to break the tension. He reached out for her, his strange and unreachable wife, and she allowed herself to be taken.

  'I don't know anymore, I don't know anymore,' he moaned, lonely as she stroked his damp back.

  'Nobody knows, darling,' she murmured abstractedly, smoothing his hair with her hands. 'Go to sleep.'

  As soon as he had drifted off, she uncovered herself, imagining she was glowing like an ember in the heat. The house was perfectly quiet; Julian's relationship with the television must have run its course. Outside in the forest, the smell of impending rain dawdled over the treetops, teasing.

  At the threshold of sleep, she thought she was already dreaming; there were disturbing sounds which seemed to be inside her body, the sounds of a creature in distress, struggling to breathe, vibrating her tissues. Then suddenly she was roused by a very real cry from outside herself. A child's cry, frightened and inarticulate. She was pretty sure it was Axel's, but some instinct told her that it was being provoked by something Dagmar couldn't handle alone.

  Roger was dead to the world; she left him sleeping as she threw on her dressing gown and hurried out of the room.

  'Hilfe!' called Dagmar breathlessly.

  Catherine ran into the German girl's room, but Axel was in there alone, squirming and bawling on a bed whose covers had been flung aside.

  'Help!'

  Catherine rushed into the room next door, Ben's room. Ben was sprawled on the floor next to his narrow bed, his pyjamas torn open to expose his huge pale torso. Dagmar was hunched over him, apparently kissing him on the mouth. Then, drawing back, she laid her hands on his blubberous chest, clasping one brown palm over the other; with savage force she slammed the weight of her shoulders down through her sinewy arms, squashing a hollow into Ben's flesh.

  'Airway. Take over,' she panted urgently, as she heaved herself repeatedly onto where she trusted the well-hidden sternum to be. Ben's mountainous chest was so high off the floor that with every heave her knees were lifting into the air.

  Catherine leapt across the room and knelt at Ben's head.

  'Roger! Julian!' she screamed, then pressed her lips directly over Ben's. In the pauses between Dagmar's rhythmic shoves, she blew for all she was worth. Filling her lungs so deep that they stabbed her, she blew and blew and blew again.

  Please, please breathe, she thought, but Ben did not breathe.

  Julian burst into the room, and was momentarily overwhelmed by the sight of the two women, Dagmar stark naked and Catherine in a loose gown, kneeling on the floor with Ben.

  'Eh … he choked, eyes popping, before the reality dawned on him. He flew out of the room, bellowing, in pursuit of a telephone in the dark.

  ***

  THE LIGHT IN THE Château de Luth was dim and pearly on the day that the Courage Consort were due to go home. The weather had broken at last. Baggage cluttered the front room like ugly modern sculpture forcibly integrated with the archaic spinning wheels, recorders, leather-bound books, lutes.

  Jan van Hoeidonck would be arriving any minute now, in his banana-yellow minibus, and then, no doubt, after the house was safely vacated, Gina would come to clean it. A couple of items in the hallway had been badly damaged by the ambulance people as they'd pulled Ben's body out of the narrow aperture, but the owners of the château would just have to be understanding, that was all. Antiques couldn't be expected to last forever; sooner or later, the wear and tear of passing centuries would get to them.

  Standing at the window, blindly watching the millions of tiny hailstones swirling and clattering against the panes, Roger at last raised the subject that must be addressed.

  'We have to decide what we're going to do,' he said quietly.

  Dagmar turned her face away from him, looking down instead at her baby, cradled tight in her arms. She had a pretty good idea what she was going to do, but now was not the time to tell Roger Courage about it.

  'The festival isn't yet,' she said, rocking on Catherine's absurdly big plastic suitcase.

  'I know, but it's not going to go away, either,' said Roger.

  'Give it a rest, Roger,' advised Julian softly, hunched over the piano, stroking his long fingers over all the keys without striking any.

  Roger grimaced in shame at what he was about to say, what he could not help saying, what he was obliged by his own personal God to say.

  'We could manage it, you know,' he told them. 'The bass part of Partitum Mutante is the most straightforward, by a long shot. I know a man called Arthur Falkirk, an old friend of Ben's. They sang together at Cambridge…'

  'No, Roger.'

  It was Catherine speaking. Her face was red and puffy, unrecognisable from crying. Before she'd finally calmed down this morning, she had wept more passionately, more uninhibitedly, than she'd done since she was seven. And, as she'd howled, the torrent of rain had dampened the acoustic of the Château de Luth, allowing her lament to take its place alongside the creaking of ancient foundations, the clatter of water from drainpipes and guttering, the burring of telephones. Her voice was hoarse now, so low that no one would ever have guessed she sang soprano.

  Roger coughed uneasily.

  'Ben was very conscientious,' he said. 'He would've wanted…'

  'No, Roger,' repeated Catherine.

  The telephone rang, and she picked up the receiver before her husband could move a muscle.

  'Yes,' she croaked into the mouthpiece. 'Yes, the Courage Consort. This is Catherine Courage speaking. Yes, I understand, don't be sorry. No, of course we won't be performing Partitum Mutante. Perhaps Mr. Fugazza can find another ensemble. A recording might be a more practical option at this late stage, but I'm sure Mr. Fugazza can make up his own mind … A dedication? That's very kind of you, but I'm not sure if Ben would have wanted that. Leave it with me, let me think about it. Call me on the London number. But not for a few days, if you would. Yes. Not at all. 'Bye.'

  Roger stood at the window, his back turned. His hands were clasped behind his back, one limp inside the other. Against the shimmering shower of hail he was almost a silhouette. Outside, a car door slammed; the others hadn't even heard Jan van Hoeidonck's minibus arrive,
but it was here now.

  Catherine sat next to Dagmar on the suitcase; it was so uselessly big that there was ample space on its rim for both of them.

  'Thanks for travelling with us this time,' she whispered in the German girl's ear.

  'It's OK,' stated Dagmar flatly. Tears fell from her cheeks onto her baby's chest as she allowed Catherine to clasp one of her hands, those steely young hands that had proved unequal to the challenge of punching the life back into Ben Lamb's flesh.

  The sound of a rain-swollen front door being shouldered open intruded on the moment. A great gust of wet, fragrant, earthy air swept into the house, as Jan van Hoeidonck let himself in. Without speaking, he walked into the front room, seized hold of two suitcases—Roger's and Ben's—and began to lug them out the door. Dagmar and Catherine slipped off Catherine's suitcase and allowed Roger to trundle it away, though it might just as well have been left behind. It was full of clothes she hadn't worn and food she hadn't eaten. She would travel lighter in future, if there was a future.

  Oh Christ, don't start that again, she thought. Just get on with it. And she hurried out into the pelting rain.

  The yellow minibus was roomier than she remembered, even though, with the addition of Dagmar and Axel, there were more passengers than there'd been last time—in number, if not in mass. Roger sat next to Jan van Hoeidonck as before. The director pulled away from the Château de Luth, tight-lipped, concentrating on the view through the labouring windscreen wipers; the chances that he and Roger would take up the threads of their discussion on the future of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw seemed slim. Julian sat at the back of the bus, gazing at the cottage as it dwindled into perspective, a picture postcard again, misty behind the deluge.

  They had not been driving five minutes when the sky abruptly ran out of rain, and the forest materialised into view as if out of a haze of static. Then, dazzlingly, the sun came out.

  Radiating through the tinted glass of the minibus window, the warmth bathed Catherine's face, soothing her cheeks, stinging the raw rims of her eyelids. With the rain gone, the world's acoustic was changing again: the gentle thrum of the engine surfaced from below, and birds began to twitter all around, while inside the bus, the silence of Ben's absence accumulated like stale breath. It was awful, deadly.

  Instinctively, to fill the void, Catherine began to sing: the simplest, most comforting little song she knew, an ancient round she had sung before she'd even been old enough to learn its meaning.

  Sumer is icumen in

  Loude sing cuckoo,

  Groweth seed and bloweth mead,

  And spring'th the woode now.

  Sing cuckoo…

  Catherine's soprano came out of her hoarse throat shaky and soft, barely in tune. She stared out of the window, not caring what the others thought of her; they could brand her as a nutcase if they needed to. The terrible silence was receding, that was the main thing.

  Beginning the second verse, she was bewildered to find herself being joined by Julian, a delicate tenor counterpoint offering its assistance to her faltering lead.

  Ewe bleateth after lamb,

  Low'th after calfe cow,

  Bullock sterteth,

  Bucke verteth,

  Merry sing cuckoo.

  Roger had joined in by now, and Dagmar, though she didn't know the words, improvised a strange but fitting descant sans paroles.

  Cuckoo cuckoo

  Well singst thou cuckoo,

  Ne swicke thou never now.

  Sing cuckoo now,

  Sing cuckoo,

  Sing cuckoo,

  Sing cuckoo now…

  On and on they sang, not looking at each other, heading home.

  The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps

  So word by word, and line by line,

  The dead man touch'd me from the past…

  —TENNYSON, 'In Memoriam'

  THE HAND CARESSING HER CHEEK was gentle but disquietingly large—as big as her whole head, it seemed. She sensed that if she dared open her lips to cry out, the hand would cease stroking her face and clasp its massive fingers over her mouth.

  'Just let it happen,' his voice murmured, hot, in her ear. 'It's going to happen anyway. There's no point resisting.'

  She'd heard those words before, should have known what was in store for her, but somehow her memory had been erased since the last time he'd held her in his arms. She closed her eyes, longing to trust him, longing to rest her head in the pillowy crook of his arm, but at the last instant, she glimpsed sideways, and saw the knife in his other hand. Her scream was gagged by the blade slicing deep into her throat, severing everything right through to the bone of her spine, plunging her terrified soul into pitch darkness.

  Bolt upright in bed, Siân clutched her head in her hands, expecting it to be lolling loose from her neck, a grisly Halloween pumpkin of bloody flesh. The shrill sound of screaming whirled around her room. She was alone, as always, in the early dawn of a Yorkshire summer, clutching her sweaty but otherwise unharmed head in the topmost bedroom of the White Horse and Griffin Hotel. Outside the attic window, the belligerent chorus of Whitby's seagull hordes shrieked on and on. To other residents of the hotel (judging by their rueful comments at the breakfast tables), these birds sounded like car alarms or circular saws or electric drills penetrating hardwood. Only to Siân, evidently, did they sound like her own death cries as she was being decapitated.

  It was true that ever since the accident in Bosnia, Siân's dreams had treated her pretty roughly. For years on end she'd had her 'standard-issue' nightmare—the one in which she was chased through dark alleyways by a malevolent car. But at least in that dream she'd always wake up just before she fell beneath the wheels, whisked to the safety of the waking world, still flailing under the tangled sheets and blankets of her bed. Ever since she'd moved to Whitby, however, her dreams had lost what little good taste they'd once had, and now Siân was lucky if she got out of them alive.

  The White Horse and Griffin had a plaque out front proudly declaring it had won the Sunday Times Golden Pillow Award, but Siân's pillow must be immune to the hotel's historically sedative charm. Tucked snugly under the ancient sloping roof of the Mary Ann Hepworth room, with a velux window bringing her fresh air direct from the sea, Siân still managed to toss sleepless for hours before finally being lured into nightmare by the man with the giant hands. She rarely woke without having felt the cold steel of his blade carving her head off.

  This dream of being first seduced, then murdered—always by a knife through the neck—had ensconced itself so promptly after her arrival in Whitby that Siân had asked the hotel proprietor if … if he happened to know how Mary Ann Hepworth had met her death. Already embarrassed that a science postgraduate like herself should stoop to such superstitious probings, she'd blushed crimson when he informed her that the room was named after a ship.

  In the cold light of a Friday morning, swallowing hard through a throat she couldn't quite believe was still in one piece, Siân squinted at her watch. Ten to six. Two and a bit hours to fill before she could start work. Two and a bit hours before she could climb the one hundred and ninety-nine steps to the abbey churchyard and join the others at the dig.

  A bath would pass the time, and would soak these faint mud stains off her forearms, these barely perceptible discolorations ringing her flesh like alluvial deposits. But she was tired and irritable and there was a pain in her left hip—a nagging, bone-deep pain that had been getting worse and worse lately—and she was in no mood to drag herself into the tub. What a lousy monk or nun she would have made, if she'd lived in medieval times. So reluctant to subject her body to harsh discipline, so lazy about leaving the warmth of her bed…! So frightened of death.

  This pain in her hip, and the hard lump that was manifesting in the flesh of her thigh just near where the pain was—it had to be bad news, very bad news. She should get it investigated. She wouldn't, though. She would ignore it, bear it, distract herself from it by concentrating on her work,
and then one day, hopefully quite suddenly, it would be all over.

  Thirty-four. She was, as of a few weeks ago, over half the age that good old Saint Hilda reached when she died. Seventh-century medical science wasn't quite up to diagnosing the cause, but Siân suspected it was cancer that had brought an end to Hilda's illustrious career as Whitby's founding abbess. Her photographic memory retrieved the words of Bede: 'It pleased the Author of our salvation to try her holy soul by a long sickness, in order that her strength might be made perfect in weakness.'

  Made perfect in weakness! Was there a touch of bitter sarcasm in the Venerable Bede's account? No, almost certainly not. The humility, the serene stoicism of the medieval monastic mind—how terrifying it was, and yet how wonderful. If only she could think like that, feel like that, for just a few minutes! All her fears, her miseries, her regrets, would be flushed out of her by the pure water of faith; she would see herself as a spirit distinct from her treacherous body, a bright feather on the breath of God.

  All very well, but I'm still not having a bath, she thought grouchily.

  Through the velux window she could see a trio of seagulls, hopping from roof tile to roof tile, chortling at her goose-pimpled, wingless body as she threw aside the bedclothes. She dressed hurriedly, got herself ready for the day. The best thing about hands-on archaeology like the Whitby dig was that no one expected anybody to look glamorous, and you could wear the same old clothes day in, day out. She'd have to smarten herself up when she returned to her teaching rounds in the autumn; there was nothing like a lecture hall full of students, some of them young males, scrutinising you as if to say, 'Where did they dig her up?' to focus your mind on what skirt and top you ought to wear.