by Patrick Gale
‘By you lot? Of course. You’re all so good. But you sort of swept me along with you.’
Then Turlough just looked at him without speaking so that Eustace rather wished he hadn’t stupidly sat himself on the floor like a child and could just stroll on his way like an adult. ‘You kept looking at me as though you wanted something from me,’ Turlough said at last.
Eustace laughed and picked at some hard skin that was cracking painfully beside his left thumbnail. It would hurt if he had to play thumb position tonight but he knew better than to let it show or to risk bad tuning by wearing a plaster on it.
‘Don’t be daft,’ he muttered, mortified at having his thoughts so easily read.
‘It’s a cruel truth,’ Turlough told him, ‘but you’ll find the boys who get kissed the most tend to be the ones who want it least. Wanting is never sexy.’
He retuned and began to play the first minuet from the same suite, turning aside slightly as he did so as if to release an unwelcome supplicant from an audience.
Eustace scrabbled to his feet and continued to the bedroom. Luckily there was nobody else in there so he could flop on to his narrow bed and clutch the pillow for comfort. That morning the bed across from his had not been claimed but now, he saw, there was someone’s holdall and coat dropped on it. The holdall handle had an airline tag attached so he guessed the things belonged to Turlough.
He rolled over, clutching the pillow again but facing the wall now. The sound of Turlough’s viola was inescapable, warm, insistent. Why had he felt the need to say anything? It was simple cruelty. Somehow Eustace felt far more vulnerable to sharp words there, in a house full of glorious music and more sensitive, interesting company than he had ever had at St Chad’s, but perhaps that was because he had always faced school on the defensive, expectations low and pre-armed against cruelty. He wished he had not come upstairs. He wished he had stayed safely by the fire with the deerhound and the girls. But then he fell sound asleep.
When he woke the viola had fallen silent and the light had changed. Quite unused to falling asleep in daylight, he was disorientated and took a moment or two to remember where he was and why. Then he sat up abruptly, worried it was late and he had missed supper.
Turlough was sitting on the neighbouring bed watching him. He smiled perfectly kindly. ‘I was about to wake you,’ he said, ‘but you looked so peaceful.’
‘Is it suppertime?’
‘Uh-huh. Time for another pear and cheese salad or whatever. I’m sure Jean puts us all on vegetarian diets because she thinks meat arouses passions. That woman has a deep mistrust of sex.’
It was the first time Eustace had heard anyone speaking disrespectfully of Jean and he was shocked. He sat up fully, swinging his feet on to the narrow stretch of old carpet between them.
‘I quite like salad,’ he said, which made Turlough smile.
‘Do you want that kiss now?’ he asked.
Eustace was trying to think of some suitably cool retort when Turlough abruptly took his head between his hands and kissed him full on the mouth. Once, twice, then a third time more lingeringly, pressing Eustace’s lips apart with his tongue. He withdrew a little, gazing at him then rubbed his rather rough thumb across his lips, as though to wipe the kiss away, and said, ‘Come on. Supper.’ He jumped up and hurried out, leaving Eustace to compose himself and follow.
The week was at once so repetitive – in the unvarying routines of working on the Schubert in the mornings and playing en masse in the evenings and the equally unvarying menus at lunch and supper – and so rich in its content, that Eustace could not have looked back with any certainty and said what happened when every day something new was thrown into the mix. One day Jean made everyone lie on the floor of the darkened ballroom and Listen. Really listen to one of the new Philharmonia Hungarica recordings of the Haydn symphonies. Another afternoon he found himself roped into sight-reading a Dvorˇák string quartet just for fun. Although he was shy of them, behind his attempts to play the clown, he found he loved the novelty of spending time with the girls either flopped sleepily on sofas around the fire or talking intently at the kitchen table or, when the sun shone, on the flight of stone steps at the house’s front.
It was odd, perhaps, to have travelled so far without seeing anything of the local countryside and its buildings but he felt he was exploring in his head, through the company of bright, gifted people and the great luxury of being somewhere where music was not a hobby or a mere accomplishment.
He experienced two instances of Jean’s furies. One came the morning after his lesson with her. It wasn’t late – perhaps five to eight – and they were all awake but enjoying just lolling in bed reading or chatting about nothing in particular when there was a sudden thunder of feet along the corridor, the door flew open and Jean marched among their beds with a face like thunder.
‘Dairymen, nurses and miners have all been at work for hours,’ she said. ‘What on earth do you think you’re all doing?’
The other instance involved Haydn, with whom she was currently obsessed. It was an afternoon and, on a whim, he and Pierre and one of the Alice Bands had stumbled on the so-called Gypsy Rondo and Pierre was driving them into playing it ever faster, which was fun: music as sport. The cello part was extremely simple, so it was easy enough for Eustace to keep up and join in the fun. And suddenly Jean burst through the library doorway and stood there glaring.
‘How dare you?’ she asked. ‘How dare you play like that? Men and women were taken out of Viennese and Hungarian orchestras and sent to their deaths simply for being Romany or Jewish or communist, many of them great musicians. The Nazis made some of them play in the camps to cover the cries from the gas chambers, and still you have the . . .’ She was so furious her thick hair seemed to be crackling and she was having trouble finding the words. ‘You have the vulgarity to play like that! No more Haydn for you this afternoon.’
She scrabbled the music off their stands and then, aware perhaps that she had made a spectacle of herself, strode out with it under her arm and slammed the door behind her.
In neither case did any trace of her anger show when they saw her next. It rose and spent itself like a summer storm and left only her usual smiles and intensity behind it. But in both cases it left Eustace only wanting the more abjectly to please her.
As for their morning sessions on the Schubert, he would not have thought it possible to work on one movement in such detail, day after day, and not become bored. But he was far too intent on perfection for boredom. He was particularly fascinated by their discussions about bowing, their experiments with trying a shared phrase now this way, now that, until they settled on unanimity. And as a fellow cellist, Naomi made him see how his fingering choices affected the sound of a phrase as much as his bowing ones, the same notes played in fourth position on one string could sound mellower but less confident than in first on the next string up, just as his first finger could lend an unwanted strength to a note better sounded with his weaker fourth. The course wasn’t a competition; they were all friends on the same voyage of discovery.
‘But it is a competition, of course,’ Turlough said. ‘It’s inevitable. One group will play better on the last night and everyone wants it to be theirs.’
‘We’ll win,’ Naomi said. ‘We’ve got the best piece.’
It was impossible not to catch snatches of the other groups at work, especially as unofficial pressure mounted and some groups began to rehearse in the afternoons as well, casually demoralizing one another with a cascade of Vivaldi or a lush serving of Klengel’s purple harmonies. But theirs was the only piece on the programme that could be described as intense. It had a compelling inwardness to it they felt sure would give them an advantage if they could only achieve perfection. Ralph practised on his own so hard that the girls began to speak of him in hushed tones as of some martyr and Eustace found himself fretting about things that had never especially bothered him until now, like how to maintain a smooth pressure at the very tip of the
bow or how much vibrato to use on his pizzicato to be resonant without being, dread words, vulgar or hysterical .
As for his feelings for Turlough, these lurched between elation and humiliated despair because Turlough could go within a minute from smiling on him like the sun to blanking him out entirely. Just when he began to suspect Turlough gained some pleasure from treating him cruelly, Turlough would make a discreet gesture to follow him from a room and would lead him to a store cupboard or the cellar or a remote corridor to kiss him again.
Eustace was quite prepared, after his explorations with Vernon, to do more but all they ever seemed to do was kiss. And because Turlough, at nearly sixteen, was so much older, he didn’t feel he could take the lead. And he began to sense Turlough liked him to be utterly passive, childlike, innocent even. Just once he let his hand touch the front of Turlough’s jeans as they kissed in the chilly bathroom after the others had gone to bed. Turlough immediately pressed him against the wall so tightly he suspected he was taking his own private pleasure. He tried not to dwell on the fact that Turlough showed no curiosity about exploring Eustace’s body in turn.
He was interested that none of the girls seemed to have the least idea about Turlough, although one or two of them knew him quite well from other courses and youth orchestras. Naomi clearly had a crush on him, as she reddened whenever she spoke to him or he to her, even in rehearsal, where she was normally so bossy. And Turlough flirted with the girls, or teased them at least. Certainly his regular absences with Eustace seemed to have aroused no suspicion among the other boys in their room but then, Eustace was coming to realize, he was more aware than most of them; taking their music so seriously seemed to have put the usual preoccupations of adolescence on hold. Looking around the room as they were brought together to sing madrigals or to play arrangements from Bach or Purcell of an evening, he couldn’t imagine any of them doing anything so perverse as buying a porn mag and giftwrapping it in order to seduce a school friend.
Despite being married Jean retained this same purity and, one sensed, encouraged it in others. When they had discussed various musicians, not just cellists and conductors but composers as well, it was clear that she frowned on anyone associated with love affairs or scandal. Wagner one would expect to be disapproved of by her, and Carl Orff, as an enthusiastic Nazi, was not to be named, but her condemnation of Jacqueline du Pré came as a surprise. For her, it seemed, a preoccupation with sex or a prioritizing of it overlapped in her mind with that other crime against music: hysteria.
Prompted by Naomi and Ralph phoning home from the guesthouse after their penultimate supper there, when everyone else had gone down for the traditional minutes of noisy release afforded by the ping-pong table, he remembered guiltily that he had done neither of the things he had promised to do: send a postcard or call his parents to reassure them he had arrived safely. He waited a polite distance from the little telephone booth in the guesthouse lobby, pretending to read Horse and Hound but observing the constrained politeness with which the siblings spoke to their parents. Then he took their place and rang home.
He let it ring and ring but there was no answer. This was odd as they rarely went out, or not together. He thought about calling the number that went through to downstairs, as this would be answered by whichever nurse was on evening duty, but decided it might give the impression that he was in trouble or homesick, so he decided against it and went to join in a last session of Round the Table. By sheer fluke, he did well and ended up facing Turlough, who made him lose concentration by smiling.
When they were sent to bed later he contrived to stay awake reading until the others had turned out their lights. Turlough, who ignored bedtimes, appeared silently in the bedroom doorway, framed in the wash of light from the corridor, and gestured with his head to summon him. Running a bath by way of cover, he kissed him up against the sink, sliding hands under Eustace’s pyjamas this time while firmly pushing Eustace’s hands back to his sides whenever he tried to touch him in return.
‘Do you want me to lie you on the floor now and fuck you?’ he muttered.
‘Yes,’ Eustace told him, though in truth he was not at all sure, being fairly certain that it would hurt and that Turlough would not be gentle and wouldn’t care.
Turlough pulled back in a way he had, to look at him, examine him almost. ‘No,’ he said with a teasing smile. ‘You want it too much. Now run back to bed so I can have a quiet wank in peace.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Eustace tried to stay awake after returning to bed. He even had a mad thought of getting into Turlough’s bed in the darkness to wait for him. The day had been as full and stimulating as all the days at Ancrum however, and sleep soon stole over him without his noticing. When he woke the next morning, Turlough had already dressed and gone downstairs to practise in the stables before breakfast.
The kitchen was busy and noisy by the time he came down. With grinning ceremony, Fraser pushed through to the noticeboard where the various timetables hung and pinned up the running order for the evening’s concert, mischievously aware of the fuss it would cause in his wake.
‘We’re last,’ Naomi told Eustace. ‘Oh my God, we’re last!’
Freya tugged her hat down tighter for comfort. Ralph brought them over a plate of toast he’d just made. Naomi was buttering it for them all except Freya, who preferred it dry and even then only broke it into pieces, when Ralph said,
‘Who’s that?’
Eustace looked up to see his father getting out of his car in the courtyard and being met by Jean, who shook his hand and led him around to the front of the house.
Eustace’s mind raced. ‘That’s my father,’ he admitted.
‘How cool. He’s come to hear us! He’s come all that way to hear us!’ Freya had rarely been so animated as she was by this idea of parental devotion.
Eustace tried to pretend this was the likely, touching explanation but found he couldn’t swallow his toast. He sat on for a few minutes, willing himself back into the moment of excitement and anticipation he had been in before glimpsing his father inexplicably alone, looking pinched and drawn, and in quite the wrong place, then gave up and, with an unconvincing shrug, said he’d better go upstairs to say hello.
When he reached the hall he found Jean there with his father and, bizarrely, Turlough coming down the stairs to join them with Eustace’s suitcase. The smell of burning toast around them all felt as intimately domestic as the fug of a morning bedroom. Eustace’s cello was standing at his father’s side already.
‘Thank you, Turlough, dear,’ Jean said as he set the suitcase down beside her and slipped downstairs. Turlough caught Eustace’s eye as he passed. He winked but his expression was tense and unsmiling.
Jean touched an arm to Eustace’s shoulder and drew him briefly to her. She had on a Norwegian jersey, which smelled of nothing more feminine than fireplaces and Rowena.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ she said. ‘You’ve done so well.’ She held him back from her to meet his eye. ‘I’ll take your line in the Schubert tonight,’ she told him. ‘Keep in touch and I hope we’ll see you at Easter.’
She let go of him and looked at his father.
‘He’s a strong player,’ she said. ‘With good instincts. Thank you for encouraging him.’
The noise of young voices from the kitchen was swelling, presumably as Turlough passed on whatever he knew.
Eustace’s father finally spoke to him. ‘Your mother’s been in a car crash,’ he said. ‘She’s in hospital and . . .’
‘I think,’ Jean put in quietly, ‘it would be best just to slip away now. Goodbyes can get so very overwhelming and everyone’s wound up pretty tightly because of tonight’s concert.’
‘I thought you’d come to hear us play,’ Eustace said.
‘Sorry,’ said his father and picked up the suitcase as Jean walked to the front door to let them out on to the terrace. Eustace took up his cello to follow.
‘Goodbye,’ she said as they passed. Eustac
e looked at her to say goodbye and she touched his shoulder again. ‘Come back.’
Maybe she didn’t voice the last but simply mouthed it; he was in a state of shock where his normal senses seemed withheld.
Jean might have hoped to see everyone tidily shepherded off to the last morning of rehearsals but had not realized his father’s hire car was visible from the kitchen. As Eustace opened the back door to slide in his cello and suitcase, Naomi, Ralph and Freya came out to say goodbyes in which the emotion was muffled by the inability to ask all the questions clearly in their heads, and by the inhibiting presence of his shattered-looking father. Ralph gave him a manly handshake. Naomi gave him a swift hug and said she’d find out his address from Jean and write to him. Freya merely stood, adjusting her hat and silently weeping. And then, realizing his father had already climbed into the car and started the engine, Eustace took his stammering leave, climbed in too and suddenly they were speeding out through the park over the little bridge, past the church and away.
‘That’s the guesthouse where we have all our vegetarian suppers,’ he pointed out as they drove past. ‘Had.’
He became aware his father smelled – which he never did usually – and had a dark spangling of bristles across his jaw. A terrible thought occurred to him, as his father sped away from some traffic lights and followed a sign for Berwick and the A1.
As always, his father had the radio tuned to Today . Men – it always seemed to be men – were discussing concepts that were all but meaningless to Eustace. They spoke of the economy, strikes, the Common Market, trades unions and sport: the great drift of clotted, uninvolving subject matter Vernon referred to with withering dryness as current affairs . He usually suspected his father only played it to cover the awkwardness of otherwise having to make conversation, especially when driving, an activity that could invite dangerous confidences. Sometimes, however, he worried that he really listened to and understood it, and that current affairs, like shaving or gardening or carving a chicken or wiring a plug, were among those things he was going to have to embrace as part of the ghastly business of becoming a man.