by Patrick Gale
‘So what’s Mrs Curwen like?’ he asked Ralph.
‘We don’t call her that. We all call her Jean,’ Ralph said. ‘Honestly.’
‘Jean’s amazing,’ Naomi added. ‘Nothing matters to her more than music. Not food, not housework, not gossip, not clothes.’
‘Music is a religion,’ Ralph cut in dramatically, ‘and Jean’s a priestess. She can be a bit terrifying.’
Freya looked tearful at that so Naomi added swiftly, ‘But only if she thinks you’re not taking music seriously. Or if you’re rude about Haydn.’
Once they’d passed beyond the outskirts of Berwick, Peg followed Dougie’s van through several miles of beautiful, rolling countryside dotted with mature oaks and handsome houses. It was not how Eustace had imagined Scotland. From films and shortbread tins, he had expected gloomy lochs, towering mountains and romantically ruined castles, but Ralph assured him that was the Highlands.
‘This is the Borders,’ he said, in a tone that summoned up Vernon. ‘Walter Scott country. It’s Scotland but completely different to the rest. You won’t see much countryside beyond the park, in any case. Jean keeps us pretty busy.’
They drove in at the gates of a wooded estate. Angus cattle grazed alongside sheep. There was a little estate church then a bridge over a river and then, on a rise in the land, a handsome Georgian house with big white windows, and rambling extensions out to its rear. There was a pretty double-sided flight of steps up to a sort of terrace by glazed doors on the first floor but they drove around to a more serviceable entrance off the crowded courtyard at the rear. There was palpable excitement from Ralph and Naomi and the others who had been before. Eustace felt his own first-day-of-school apprehension was matched in Freya’s expression as she pulled her hat even lower over her brow.
Jean came out to greet them, leading a small cluster of men and women. She gave an impression of height though that was probably an illusion created by good posture. She had thick, unruly dark hair tinged with grey and the lines of someone whose feelings were never hidden. As the other grown-ups ranged behind her, she laughed and began to hug anyone making a return visit.
‘Welcome back,’ she told them and Eustace decided she made him think of a lioness. She gave that impression of nobility and of coiled strength. ‘And to the rest of you, welcome to Ancrum. I’m Jean and this is my husband, Fraser and two of our full time students Magda and Brigitte, all of whom you’ll be meeting and working with. We need to settle you all in quickly before we take you to supper. Give your name to Magda here.’ She indicated a grinning young woman with very straight blonde hair. ‘She’ll tell you which room you’re in and which of us will be leading you there. All cellos into the ballroom please, where I promise they’ll be perfectly, perfectly safe. There just isn’t room for them and you and your suitcases in the bedrooms. But we make an exception for violins because we know how you worry!’ This was said with an affectionate stroke to Ralph’s cheek, which brought on a blush.
They queued to give their names to Magda to look up on her clipboard. Each adult was collecting a different cluster of them for a different part of the house. As he gave his name and Magda was examining her list, Jean called out, ‘Eustace? You’re with me!’
He turned and she shook his hand.
‘I’ve heard all about you from dear Carla,’ she said. ‘How is she?’
‘Oh,’ Eustace said, uncertain. ‘All right, I think.’ And he was briefly unnerved by the directness of her stare. This was not a woman from whom you could have secrets or for whom you would ever dare not to practise.
He was happy to find he was in the same room as Ralph and a tall boy called Fred who played the viola and seemed dauntingly grown-up. They were joined by one of the pianists, Pierre, and Jean marched them at speed through the house. They went via the huge ballroom, so Eustace could leave his cello there, then up an uncarpeted back staircase – what Jean called the Maids’ Staircase in a tone that implied she might once have been used to maids – to a long room in the attic with five beds in it.
‘Ralph can lead you both back to civilization in a moment,’ she said. ‘The boys’ bathroom is just back along the corridor – girls are up a different staircase entirely – and we’ll be off to supper in—’ She glanced at her little gold wristwatch. ‘Six o’clock. All right? Happy, Eustace?’
Eustace smiled and nodded and she briefly beamed back.
‘Good boy.’
They deferred to the tall boy, Fred, who was clearly the oldest and let him take the bed slightly apart from the others and nearest the window. Eustace took a bed in the farthest corner, which, he was pleased to see, had its own reading light. Pierre, who had an accent, so was presumably French, immediately set about carefully unpacking his suitcase into a chest of drawers. Nobody else bothered.
Ralph led the way back down the Maids’ Staircase. The family’s rooms, he explained, were on the first floor, where a stuffed bear with raised paws warned against trespassing. They were staying where the rest of Jean’s lucky handful of full time students lived during term times.
‘Do they do nothing but cello?’ Pierre asked. ‘Surely there are laws about needing to learn other subjects?’
‘Oh yes,’ Ralph explained airily. ‘They study maths and languages and they can do A levels in history of art and music, of course.’
‘But Jean teaches them the cello,’ said Fred a bit mournfully. ‘And everyone knows that’s what matters most.’
‘Is there somewhere like this just for violas?’ Eustace asked him and Fred seemed to notice him for the first time.
‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘Unlike cellists, we tend not to draw attention to ourselves.’
The others jeered kindly. Jokes at the expense of viola players were a musical tradition.
They came through a big panelled hall where a mounted stag’s head looked down on a rocking horse and an array of wellingtons, walking boots, walking sticks and an old side table where a framed, signed photograph of Pablo Casals stood amidst a welter of unopened letters, including some bills marked URGENT in red letters.
At every turn there seemed to be rooms cluttered with music stands, standard lamps and antique dining chairs. There were oil paintings, many of them battered and even torn and patched, of horses, dogs, country houses and the men and women who lived in them. A deerhound the size of a pony emerged from her lair under a piano to nibble Ralph’s ears and was introduced as Rowena.
Immediately breaking the group down into clusters of three or four to settle them in was good psychology. By the time Jean was striking a tam-tam to summon them down to the back door, tentative alliances had formed and there was chatter and laughter as they climbed into a succession of more or less filthy household cars. Jean and Fraser stayed behind but Peg and the younger tutors drove them to a large Victorian guesthouse a couple of miles away where, in the formal dining room, Magda led them in singing a grace in German. Then softly spoken local girls in uniform served them. There was a choice of three dishes for three courses but all of them, at Jean’s insistence, were vegetarian. Pierre, who had sat with Eustace, Ralph and Freya (who was still in her woollen hat but seemed marginally less unhappy) was aghast.
‘I have steak twice a week usually,’ he said. ‘Not this . . . rabbit food.’
But Eustace thought it sounded rather good. He had a glass of tomato juice to start then grated Double Gloucester with slices of Bramley apple on a bed of lettuce. Freya’s nut cutlet and roast vegetables looked rather more sustaining. Ralph assured him the puddings were excellent and said the menu never varied so one could work one’s way through all options. Fred was at a different table, Eustace saw, where his height and good looks had left him surrounded by girls, including Naomi, but she saw him watching and gave him a private smile that seemed to say, ‘I know. We’re ridiculous.’
In the course of the meal it emerged that Eustace was the only one at his table not attending or about to attend a school noted for its music department. Even Freya’s eyes widened when, pr
ompted by Pierre, he told the sad story of his music scholarship.
‘A comprehensive?’ she murmured, her voice much richer and deeper than her wan expression led one to expect. ‘You poor thing.’
‘It’s really not that bad,’ he said, instantly warming to the kindness in her tone. ‘I’ll still have lessons with Carla Gold – she’s a pupil of Jean’s – and I can join the local youth orchestra once I’m fourteen.’
‘But it’s the practice. When will you practise?’
Eustace told them he would practise after school, the way he always had, but both Pierre and Ralph pointed out that their schools made both solitary and supervised practice a part of the daily timetable. Freya rather boldly added that practising outside school hours required more discipline.
‘Half of us would probably grind to a halt,’ she said, ‘if we didn’t have parents or teachers pushing us.’
‘What would you do if you stopped?’ Eustace asked her.
She looked at him owlishly, scratched an itch on her scalp through her hat. ‘Climb trees?’ she suggested. ‘Read books? Get a boyfriend?’
The other two laughed at her.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ Ralph said. ‘She’s easily the strongest player in our year,’ he told Eustace. ‘You know you are,’ he added when she flicked a pea at him. ‘You’ll play the Britten concerto next term. You’ll be in the Royal College at eighteen and you’ll go and do postgrad abroad then become a soloist.’
She shrugged and returned to picking at her food. ‘It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t rather climb trees and read books,’ she muttered.
‘Does your mother push you?’ he asked Pierre.
Pierre pushed away his plate with a pout. ‘She’s a tyrant and a bitch,’ he sighed. ‘And completely unreasonable. But I happen to love what she makes me do. Yours?’ he asked Ralph.
‘Oh,’ Ralph said. ‘Ours is famously unhinged. She played Casals recordings to Naomi in the womb. Jean taught her, you see, and she never got over Jean’s disappointment when she stopped playing to get married. Naomi didn’t stand a chance. I’m just along for the ride.’
‘So not true,’ Freya said.
Once again Eustace felt himself singled out for not having a mother who pushed him relentlessly or even at all. He did not admit this however, covering up by making the others laugh with an entirely untrue story of how his mother used to go through his weekly practice book and quiz him to check he had done everything listed there.
‘Have you done D minor? Well, have you?’ rapidly became a catchphrase the others repeated to each other as supper progressed and he felt guilty for turning his mother into a joke.
After supper, because apparently it was some kind of tradition, those who had been before led all the others down to a recreation room in the basement where there was a ping-pong table. There were only two bats but they played an elimination game called Round the Table. This involved everyone squeezing into a circle revolving around the table, hitting the ball just once then slamming the bat back down for the next person behind them. It was easy enough to start with but, as people were eliminated for failing to snatch the bat in time or wildly mis-swiping the ball, the atmosphere became hysterical. Eustace surprised himself by staying in quite long. The last two, reduced to having to spin once on the spot between hits, were Naomi and Freya, both experts and briefly savage in their determination to win. When Freya caught Naomi out with an especially fast return, Naomi shouted, ‘Did you do the D minor? Well, did you?’ so that Eustace knew his joke about his mother had spread to other tables. They played twice more until Magda fetched them out via the door into the garden.
Girls his own age were a rarity, something Eustace had not known since the primary-coloured idyll of his Walliscote kindergarten class before starting at St Chad’s. He realized half-way through the furious, clattering progress of the third game that girls on the course had been a source of dread to him. He had worried their presence would expose or test him, that, being male, he’d be expected to approach them in some peculiarly male manner. He had foolishly made no allowances for their being free agents and was surprised to find them approaching him, talking to him and, strangest of all, finding him funny. He had never thought of himself as funny before, apart from privately with Vernon, thinking himself strange and intense. Perhaps girls’ humour was different to boys’, relying more on words and less on physicality?
As they took their seats in the minibuses he found himself surrounded by girls as Fred had been on the way from the station and at supper. They were very inquisitive, he discovered. He had thought the conversation at Ancrum would be all of music, but they wanted to know where he lived, if he had siblings, what he did for pleasure. As he tried to answer them in ways he hoped would hold their interest or make them laugh or like him, he realized he was shaping a persona, a version that was and wasn’t quite himself. It was at once protection and another source of worry. Could these girls, from unhappy Freya to the two contrasting sisters who lived in a very grand public school where their father was organist, tell he was not like other boys? Could they sense it off him, like a sweet, unmanly smell? Was that why they seemed so immediately confiding and comfortable with him as they weren’t, say, with the older boys? Perhaps they were unconsciously treating him as another girl?
When they returned to the house they were directed to the ballroom where chairs and music stands had been set up, not in a conventional orchestral layout but in two generous semicircles facing another chair, which, in its emptiness, radiated a kind of power. Like most of the furniture he had glimpsed in the house, the chairs were antiques, an array of dining chairs, many of which seemed still to have their original upholstery on them, the silk rotten from sunshine, with horsehair and wadding showing through in places. They all took their instruments and bows and clustered the cases together in a big bay window. Suddenly Jean was among them, also holding her cello and bow. She was smiling. It was as though the palpable excitement in the room and the simple presence of young players keen to play gave her joy.
‘Sit wherever you like,’ she called out. Her voice was quite high but commanding, her accent evocative of the past, like that of an old BBC announcer. She wore brown leather court shoes, a tweed skirt and a pink silk blouse. With her thick, unruly hair and lack of make-up or jewellery, and her craggy bird-of-prey profile, she could not have been less like Carla. She would have looked quite at home serving tea and slices of cake at the Women’s Institute. And yet something in her voice, in her effortless authority, made him want to please her any way he could. Suddenly she pointed to the chair nearest her.
‘Sit here, Eustace, so I can hear you.’
She sat in the central chair, facing them all, rapidly tuned her cello then played an A for them all to tune to. She smiled around the room as they tuned. Her posture was extraordinarily upright. He couldn’t help but notice the way she stuck out her left foot just as Carla had taught him to do from the start.
‘Chord of C major,’ she called out. ‘Any note in the triad you like.’ Lots of people started on a bottom G or a C then changed their minds. Eustace picked the E above middle C as it was easy to tune.
She looked around her as the chord hummed and buzzed. He noticed she was playing a high C, in thumb position. She had found it without so much as a glance.
‘And listen. And tune to each other. Good. Now C minor.’
Eustace obediently shifted down a semitone to E flat, again a note he felt confident finding and tuning.
‘Everyone who’s on the fifth, sharpen it. That’s better. Now for something fairly unrelated. F major.’
There was a momentary hesitation then a blurring as people chose their notes, then a condensing of harmony so pleasing he couldn’t help but smile. Jean looked around the room and smiled back at him.
‘Now. Anyone born in January, add in an E flat.’ She unerringly took in that Eustace and Freya had each added the dominant seventh. ‘Only two of you! So. Quieter. If you can’t hear Eustace and Fr
eya, you’re too loud. Balance to them. That’s it. So. Good.’ She held up an eloquently bony hand and they all fell silent. ‘Hello Rowena,’ she said to the deerhound, who had briefly come to look in from the doorway. ‘Later.’ Rowena walked away with a sigh. ‘So. I am Jean Curwen, for those of you who don’t know me, and this is my calling: the cello is my life. I happen to think music, not money or being clean and tidy, or doing brilliantly at exams or being pretty, is the single most important thing in life. Music knits. It heals. It is balm to the soul but it is also the refiner’s fire. It requires rigour and application and although you’re only with me for this one precious week I expect rigour and application from you all while you’re here. But we will also have fun.’ And her face was wreathed in a mischievous smile.
‘Now, before we play anything, I notice that two of you have steel strings.’ There was some glancing around to spot the guilty parties – one of the older boys on viola and a girl cellist who looked about ten but was possibly just very small. ‘I’ll find out your reasons for playing with these later, but let me just demonstrate something. Eustace?’ She stood, gave Eustace her cello to hold then held out her hand for the girl’s instrument. ‘May I?’
Blushing, the girl passed it to her. Jean sat again and played a little half-scale on the A string.
‘Thank you.’ She handed the cello back.
‘Now listen.’ She took her cello from Eustace and played exactly the same figure with exactly the same bowing pressure and speed. ‘Do you hear the difference? Yes, gut strings are harder work, because there’s a natural friction there that forces you to seek out the tone with your bow. And you can always compromise and use silver on gut, which speaks more readily than gut alone. The steel string lets you sound those notes more easily but there’s a natural pulse to the gut resonance, which the steel lacks. And steely players are obliged to confect a pulse through too fast a vibrato or by gushy bowing and the effect is falsely passionate. In the worst cases it becomes hysterical. You probably think I’m quite mad. Eustace certainly does.’ This with a glance at Eustace. ‘But I know what I’m saying as the cello is my life, and I have been crucified for my truth.’