by Patrick Gale
His only confusion and slight disappointment was that his mother was to come along too. He assumed this meant she had told his father after all about Ebrahim and Louis sharing a bedroom, despite having hinted that she needed discretion in the matter. He would have enjoyed the adventure of going there by train without her.
‘Couldn’t I have gone on my own?’ he asked experimentally as they set off on the first of their Friday nights away.
‘Out of the question,’ she said. ‘Even though you’re quite capable of catching the train and the bus, it still means hanging around in some pretty rough neighbourhoods and you can’t run away from trouble with a cello on your back. Quite apart from your safety, I’m terrified of someone grabbing it off you.’
This sounded like a speech she had composed in anticipation and it was unanswerable. ‘Not every mother would do this, you know,’ she added. ‘It’s not exactly convenient and you know how your father frets when he’s left to fend for himself.’
‘I know,’ he told her. ‘I do appreciate it,’ although he suspected his father rather enjoyed the prospect of a night on his own when he could watch what he liked on the television and sleep like a starfish, rather than on one side of the bed. And there was no fending to be done since Mrs Fowler cooked his supper and would probably make him a special treat if she knew he was on his own. Neither did his mother seem especially burdened by the sacrifice, for she hummed along to Radio 3 as she drove and bought him a Crunchie when she stopped for petrol, which was quite unlike her as she had a tendency to mutter about cutting back his sugar intake.
A pattern to these nights away was tacitly established from that second visit. They arrived at about six o’clock and his mother went for a little lie-down as driving always threatened to give her a headache, while Eustace shut himself in the basement music room to practise for an hour or so. Invariably Ebrahim joined him after about half an hour to work on his pieces – he was full of useful ideas about phrasing and balance – while Louis and Carla made supper. Then they ate much later than he tended to at home and he was sent back down to bed once the grown-ups reached the coffee stage. After a delicious breakfast, Carla gave him the first lesson of the day while his mother enjoyed a lie-in and a late breakfast with the boys as she took to calling them, though Ebrahim came downstairs in the lesson’s last third to work on the pieces with them. Carla seemed subtly different on these Saturday mornings, compared to during the lessons in Weston, a little dreamy, melancholy even, the music a constant, beautiful challenge for her. The room was much larger than her other teaching space, and she walked around him as he played, interrupting him to adjust his posture in small ways she said were crucial, left foot further out, right upper arm rolled inwards when the bow reached the tip so as to maintain strength and take the strain off the flexing wrist, back straighter. With the trace of percolator coffee and buttered toast still about them, and the occasional waft of shampoo from her still damp hair, she had never seemed more beautiful to him and his wish to please her had never been so strong. When Ebrahim joined them, she became at once more playful and more focused, teacherly, and their joint attention on his playing, two gifted professionals with a mere schoolboy, was almost overwhelming.
On the first Saturday, she began to express doubts about the Rachmaninov slow movement. Eustace thought it the saddest, loveliest thing he had ever heard, especially when Ebrahim added in the rocking then passionate piano part. But Carla sighed and frowned.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’re just too young still. It’s like Chopin. It can’t be simply pretty.’
‘She means you have to fall in love and suffer,’ Ebrahim told him with a wink and she gently cuffed the back of his head in passing.
‘We can fake it,’ she said at last, ‘and Ebrahim can help you. And no, it’s not just love and sex, it’s . . .’
‘Regret?’
‘Exactly.’ She turned on Eustace. ‘Regret. The whole movement expresses regret. One day you’ll understand the kind of thing he means but for now just, well, think of how you feel when you remember a perfect day you can never, ever have again.’
Eustace must have looked blank because she shrugged and took up her cello too and played it with him. ‘Just copy my phrasing,’ she said. ‘It’s all in the rubato, those moments where he seems to be looking over his shoulder even as time and the piano are driving him on.’
Playing together was amazing. They seemed so loud, and the sound brought his mother in to stand in the doorway. Carla ignored her, watching Eustace closely as she played from memory. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘He looks back. You see? And again here! And as we go up the final scale, you can really take your time before the last two notes. And . . . take your time. Yes!’
Eustace nodded, glancing at his mother. Carla swooped forward with her pencil and marked each of the points where she wanted rubato with a short wavy line above the stave. She wrote Regret! in her distinctive handwriting at the start of the movement. You want it all again!
All too soon the second pupil of the day appeared. When Carla taught him in Weston he felt no possessiveness towards her so he was surprised to feel an odd thrill of jealousy at the skinny girl in a tartan skirt coming down the area steps. He consoled himself with the knowledge that, unlike him, she had not spent the night there. And he fancied she was similarly taken aback, used to being the first pupil of Carla’s Saturday.
Carla’s goodbye was bright and professional – she had the other pupil waiting, after all, so didn’t see them out – but Louis and Ebrahim gave his mother a hug and a cheek kiss on the doorstep. She softly whistled the minuet of the Brahms as she wiggled the car back and forth out of a tight parking space, so he could tell she was in a good mood. Normally parking manoeuvres made her cross.
‘They’re nice, aren’t they?’ he said.
‘Louis and Ebrahim? Yes. Very. Louis is incredibly wise, like a very old man in a younger body.’
‘What about? Painting?’
She laughed. ‘Love. He’s wise about love.’
This was a little unnerving; his mother never discussed emotions, especially not with his father, and Eustace wasn’t sure what he thought of her discussing them with a near-stranger. She carried on whistling, tapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel so that her bracelets jangled. The bracelets were new.
‘We should take a look at Clifton College on our way out,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘that might jinx it!’
‘Course it won’t. You’ll sail in. Come on. Just the outside.’
She drove them as near to the school as the road would take them. He saw dignified Victorian buildings, a copper roof, a chapel, a sports field and a gang of tall boys in smart uniforms moving from building to building, some with briefcases like businessmen, others with their books under their arms. He spotted one boy with a cello case. It might have been him in the future, though the boy was tall and thin and had the chiselled features and tidy blond hair of Janno in The Trigan Empire .
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
He thought it looked amazing, after the streets of Weston, like a glimpse of a world purified, a world of rationality, where they’d let him concentrate on maths and his cello and never mind the other subjects. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Keep driving, though, or someone might see us.’
‘Funny man,’ she said, swiftly brushing his hair out of his eyes with cool fingers.
As well as working on his two pieces every day without fail, he recruited Vernon. Vernon invariably had his transistor radio about him because he liked irrelevant soundtracks to his reading, like ball-by-ball cricket commentaries and the shipping forecast. As well as testing Eustace on the long list of Italian terms, he began to carry around a copy of Radio Times so that he could test him on the composer of pieces thrown up when he switched on the radio at random intervals through the day.
Eustace couldn’t get over his shock that Vernon was not sitting Common Entrance that summer. He realized he couldn
’t say he had assumed from Vernon’s occasionally lordly manner and the rumours about his mother, that his family rejoiced in Old Money , that he’d had his name down for Eton or Winchester from birth. Vernon admitted his father had been to Westminster and his mother to Cheltenham Ladies’ College but said his father was a bit of a Tony Benn. ‘I’m rather looking forward to it actually. There’ll be nothing like the homework we get now and no more being chased down the street because of the uniform.’ Vernon had always been remarkably self-sufficient – it was one of the qualities that had first drawn them together – but it was hard to imagine Broadelm Comprehensive readily absorbing his quaintly Edwardian dress and manner even to the extent St Chad’s had done. Vernon, he decided, was putting on a brave front and it would be a kindness not to discuss the matter.
Meanwhile, when a letter was sent requesting Eustace be granted a day off school for the music scholarship exam, the headmaster told him he was to be spared all games until the day so as to have yet more practice time. He was not let off gym, however, as that was somehow beneficial.
Because of the pattern set by the regular Friday nights in Clifton, Eustace had assumed that his mother would come with him for the scholarship exam and that they would spend the night before it there but Carla had a concert engagement in Edinburgh so couldn’t be there. She hadn’t liked to tell him earlier, she said, in case it made him nervous but he was well prepared now and would have Ebrahim to give him confidence from the piano, so he’d be fine. Besides, his father had had words with his mother on the subject apparently and suddenly announced that he was taking him, since it was his old school, and his father’s before him, which was the sort of thing that might make a difference.
‘So your mother’s going to stay home and hold the fort for a change and it’ll just be us chaps together. You do your playing in the morning then we get time out for some lunch then you have your theory and interview bit then they give us the results and then we come home. It’ll be quite jolly.’
Eustace thought it sounded excruciating. As he got older and his body began to change in various unwelcome ways, it made him peculiarly sensitive to things about his father he found hard to bear: his nervous joking that never seemed to be funny any more and possibly never had been, the way his hair was thinning surreptitiously at the back, so that he wondered if his father had noticed, the hair on the back of his hands that was somehow different from the hair on Louis’ wrists. Eustace caught himself watching him sometimes, when he was reading the newspaper or watching television, looking with a sort of horrified intensity for any similarities they might share. People often said they were alike – not least Granny, who so often gloomily remarked that he reminded her of his father at the same age that it must be true – but as yet he was glad to say he couldn’t see the resemblance. He most wanted to resemble his mother, but she persisted in seeming quite apart from her menfolk, like a reluctant visitor from a distant, naturally elegant race.
She seemed quite oblivious to his concern about the big day. ‘Being just you boys will be fun for a change,’ was all she said. ‘I’ll organize something a bit special for supper and you can tell me all about it.’
Since his grandfather’s death, Granny had gone into a decline, though no relation to him, and was refusing almost all food beyond Complan and digestive biscuits and the occasional mashed banana. She never left her room and now often elected to stay in bed all day despite cajoling to at least sit in her armchair. Eustace would visit her. There were times when her extreme gloom could feel bracing, even restorative, and the death of his grandfather had raised her value to him. He had overheard his father say he suspected she would slip away one night, which made Eustace conscious that every short visit to her might be his last.
After he had finished his third practice of the day on the evening before the scholarship exam, he went down to see her. Her eyes were closed when he came in but she opened them slowly as he sat in her bedside chair. There were seagulls making a racket on the flat roof below her window. She hated seagulls.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Did I wake you?’
‘I never sleep now,’ she told him. ‘Not properly. There’d be no point, not unless it can be the rest from which we never wake.’ She stared at him then realized she didn’t have her spectacles on, so reached for them slowly from her bedside table before staring at him some more, eyes greatly magnified. Half a digestive and the last two spoonfuls of a mashed banana lay beneath her lamp on a tray. He was just thinking he’d make himself useful by carrying them down to the kitchen when she began to speak. She coughed first. She always coughed first these days because she spoke so little it was as though a sort of skin formed over her voice in the silent intervals.
‘Big day tomorrow,’ she said.
‘I didn’t know you knew,’ he told her.
‘If you keep as still and as quiet as I do, not much escapes you,’ she said. ‘Will you get it?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said truthfully. ‘But I’ve worked very hard. I don’t think I could have worked much harder without stopping school to fit it in.’
‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘Regret’s a terrible thing, and you’ll know you gave it your best shot.’ She stared at him in heavy-breathing silence for a minute, as though seeking out the hard work on his face. He thought of the Rachmaninov. She was the only person who could stare at him like that and not make him self-conscious. She had always done it, since he was little, and he had always broken the rules and stared right back. It was almost like a game between them and the chance really to examine the pouches, spots, hairs and discolorations of old age was compelling and instructive.
She broke off staring finally and raised a hand to the big chest of drawers behind him. He thought she was going to offer him a barley sugar but she directed him to the top drawer on the left; barley sugars, along with her antique passport, Kirby grips and corn plasters, were in the little drawer of her long-redundant dressing table, before the window. The top left drawer contained much complicated underwear and Eustace hesitated when he started to open it in case she was confused. She was, after all, confused most of the time.
‘Go on,’ she commanded impatiently. ‘I left them on the top so I wouldn’t lose them.’
He tugged the drawer a little farther open, releasing a strong smell of lavender bags and the Yardley’s Sea Jade soap she favoured. There were two old photographs inside. One showed his father posing robustly with Clifton’s Under 15 rugby team.
‘He never made it to the seniors,’ she said dismissively. ‘Weak knees.’
The other showed the grandfather he had never known, looking rather surly in cricket whites. ‘He was much better-looking than that,’ she said. ‘I married for love, which was possibly foolish. Go on,’ she added. ‘I don’t need them. You take them, for luck. Neither of them amounted to much, really, but I think you might surprise us. Off you go, now.’
The audience was at an end. By the time he had closed the drawer again, gingerly tucking in a stray strap of some kind, then picked up her supper tray, she had removed her glasses and closed her eyes.
CHAPTER EIGHT
His mother had calculated correctly in sending him with his father. She would have fretted about timing, parking, petrol, what to wear, whom to speak to, which would have transferred to him as nervousness. His father, by contrast, was as bluffly cheerful as though they were off to watch a new James Bond film together. He knew exactly where to park near the school and where Eustace could find him when he’d finished the first of his two ordeals. Ebrahim met them outside the music department, smartly but not too smartly dressed, so that he looked just like all the masters and not a man who lived with another male. He shook Eustace’s father’s hand and said what a pleasure it was to meet him again.
Eustace’s father then shook Eustace’s hand and said, ‘Good luck, old chap, but it’s been sounding fantastic so I don’t think you’ll need it.’
‘No,’ said Ebrahim. ‘He’s worked really hard. Ca
rla says the crucial thing today is to enjoy the music and convey your enjoyment to your audience. And to remember they’re an audience first, not examiners.’
And that was it. He led Eustace to register his arrival with the school secretary then they joined a little clutch of boys and their accompanists or on their own, in the case of the two playing piano and organ, in a kind of waiting room. A couple of the boys were in the uniform of the junior school, the rest, like Eustace, were in uniforms from elsewhere. One boy, with too much unfortunately curly hair, who was nervously fiddling with his clarinet, had brought his mother as his accompanist, and she was tremulous with nerves and kept clearing her throat as though registering disapproval, which made Eustace appreciate Ebrahim’s total calm.
‘Should we give you his compositions now?’ she asked abruptly, holding out a large portfolio to a passing teacher who assured her that later would be fine.
He didn’t have to endure hearing too much of the brilliant competition before he was summoned. There was a burst of Chopin from one boy, and some extremely confident unaccompanied Bach violin from one of the junior school boys, all audible through the one intervening door.
After the Bach, the nervous mother cleared her throat and said, ‘Well, the rest of us might as well all go home now,’ at which everyone smiled a little tightly as it was just what they were thinking. Her poor son made an awful hash of a work Ebrahim murmured was by Schumann then played one of his own compositions, a piece of such chortling banality that smiles of relief were exchanged in the waiting room, although Eustace felt desperately sorry for him. At least candidates left by a different door, so were spared having to pass through their unofficial audience.
And then, all too soon, Eustace was called. Ebrahim stopped him with a gentle tap on the elbow as the school secretary disappeared back through the doorway. He smiled, said, ‘Look at you,’ and straightened Eustace’s tie swiftly. ‘Play for me,’ he muttered. ‘And remember you’re not just playing, you’re telling me a story.’