Ghost Variations

by Jessica Duchen

  The pointer bowled off again, faster. The letters spelled ‘Gad you’.

  ‘Glad? Who is it you are glad to see?’ said Mary. ‘Is it Jelly?’

  The arrow meandered towards ‘Yes’.

  Jelly pulled her hand away as if from spilled acid. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not happy doing this. I’ll go to bed now, if you will please forgive me.’

  ‘I will, too, if that’s all right,’ Anna said quickly.

  ‘But – ’ Mary hesitated. Jelly seized the opportunity to throw her arms around the Southerns in turn, to bid them goodnight and to thank them profusely for taking such good care of her and her ailing assistant.

  ‘Now the mystery will remain,’ Charles said, as she made for the stairs. ‘Who knows what message might be waiting in heaven for Jelly d’Arányi?’

  *

  Anna paused on the landing.

  ‘Do you really believe in that glass game, Jelly?’ she asked.

  Under her discomfort, Jelly pondered. ‘To be perfectly honest, no. And you?’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t believe in God. But I don’t think I believe in this as well.’

  ‘Good. Let’s get some sleep.’ Jelly kissed her assistant on both cheeks, then retreated to her guest room and welcome solitude. Was it not simply wrong to disrupt the heaven-set boundaries of our living dimension, and wrong to disturb the dead, even if they sometimes seemed willing to be disturbed? Supposing the spirits were not who they claimed to be, but demons waiting to misguide or destroy you? And if a spirit was communicating – in truth – how was she supposed to accept such a notion? How was anyone?

  She had grown extra-resistant to the glass game since a message arrived purporting to be for her from Sep Kelly. If Sep wanted to speak to her from beyond the grave, she didn’t want to know. It would not bring him back. Besides, she couldn’t bear to imagine his bullish and uncompromising Australian spirit buzzing around someone’s dining table like an invisible mosquito. Sep had been blown up in the Battle of the Somme. If he were still present, if he loved her after all, precious little good it could do them now.

  At first, in the aftermath of the war, she added her tears to the outpourings of grief among her equally bereaved friends; for a time, they yearned to attempt reunion through any means there might be, glass or otherwise. With the passing years, the futility of it began to creep up on them; life grew harder and bodies older, but nothing would bring back the departed. Now, trying in vain to sleep, Jelly was wishing she had gone straight home.

  *

  Jelly, Adila, Adila’s American-Greek husband Alec Fachiri, their little girl Adrienne and their yappy fox terrier named Caesar lived on a Chelsea cul-de-sac – off the Fulham Road by St Stephen’s Hospital and what used to be the workhouse – in a graceful Victorian villa with a fake Italian bell-tower and tripartite windows. From within, the sky appeared to divide into three like a Renaissance altarpiece. Their friends dubbed the place Hurricane House: you’d understand why as soon as you went in and faced the piles of books, magazines and sheet music, along with the ornaments spilling off the shelves – vases, tea sets, photographs, Hungarian dolls, Dresden china figurines, musical boxes that no longer worked. And the sound of instruments being practised simultaneously in different rooms would blend now and then with the chime of clocks that never struck together. Here, Jelly felt as much at home as she could anywhere, now that their parents were dead.

  The three sisters and their mother, Antoinette, arrived in Britain when Jelly was 16, bringing with them little more than talent, charm, the good name of their great-uncle Joseph Joachim, and a handful of concert dates in Haslemere. Jelly still remembered Wesselényi Street in Budapest where she spent her childhood: a dark chimney of a road, snaking into town just behind the Great Synagogue of Dohány Street. How precarious life there must have been, and with what care their mother had concealed this; Jelly had been aware that times were growing tougher, with no idea why, and if Antoinette had had her own reasons for wanting to leave her husband behind, she kept them to herself. These days Jelly sometimes wondered what had passed between them, how much her mother had had in the bank, if anything, and whether the concerts that she and Adila gave with their pianist sister Hortense had been out of volition or out of necessity. It was too late to ask.

  She could not pass the former workhouse without imagining how it must have felt to be its inmate. Though she earned well, relatively speaking, for her performances and recordings, she knew she would have commanded still higher fees had she been a man and that her imminent 40th birthday, had she been a man, would be seen as the start of her prime, not the end of it. Once she had dreamed about having her own house, but those earnings were not what they were ten years ago, before the Depression, and Adila and Alec would not hear of her leaving them in any case. Still, she was well aware that she remained an unpaying guest in their home – in her darker moments, perhaps a ‘maiden aunt’. Joking about her nomadic concert life, declaring, ‘I’m a Gypsy,’ she could never quite escape the sensation of glassy surfaces under her feet: slippery to walk on, easy to shatter.

  *

  It was nearly lunchtime when Jelly arrived home from Eastbourne via Victoria Station. On the steps in her old mink coat, juggling suitcase, violin case, handbag and keys, and listening with delight to Caesar’s piercing welcome-home bark, she caught a glimpse of Mrs Garrett next door, slipping away from an upstairs window. The Garretts did not consider the foreigners at No. 10 entirely suitable people, especially not Jelly, whom they knew was unwed, went on the stage, sponged off her brother-in-law and kept peculiar hours. Jelly smiled and waved. Then came the skittering of Adrienne’s feet on the hall floor and her little niece hurtled out into her arms. ‘Auntie Jeje!’

  ‘Hush, sweetheart, you’ll scare the neighbours,’ Jelly laughed, dropping everything and lifting her to cover her face with kisses. ‘Oof, what a big girl you are.’ Adrienne gave a giggle, smoothing her cheek against the fur of her aunt’s coat. Caesar charged through the doorway a second later, slobbering with joy all over Jelly’s stockings.

  ‘Ach, Sai darling, you’re home. Today, I know, there will be a miracle!’ Adila stumped out in her house slippers, calling Jelly by her family nickname – pronounced ‘shy’. Her hair stood out in intense curls around her head. To judge from her look, she had surfaced within the hour.

  Jelly put down Adrienne and the sisters swamped each other with hugs and greetings, Adila’s preternaturally dusky. She insisted that when she’d had diphtheria, aged nine, it had affected her voice, pushing it down to the tenor register. ‘Tenor?’ Alec would joke. ‘Baritone, my dear.’ He always insisted he’d fallen in love first with her voice – it resembled his chosen instrument, the cello.

  ‘You’ve obviously been up for hours,’ Jelly teased her.

  ‘We had a late dinner after the concert.’ Adila pushed the door open to usher everyone inside. ‘I made boeuf bourguignon. Apron over concert dress, musician to mama in moments, and we danced until two. We missed you, darling – the dancing is never so good without you.’

  ‘Last night? But Adi… What time was your concert?’

  ‘So, everyone arrived about 7 for drinks, we began at 7.30, the singer and the pianist did the first half, I did second half with… Sai, have you seen a ghost?’

  Jelly’s guts were twisting into a knot out of all proportion to yesterday evening’s minuscule significance. ‘It wasn’t in the afternoon?’

  Adila raised an eyebrow. ‘Why?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing… ’ She changed the subject, fast. ‘Did you hear what happened to me in Hastings? The local conductor had appendicitis, so guess who conducted instead? Adrian Boult!’ She gave a gurgle of laughter. ‘I know it’s not funny really, but I was so pleased to see him.’

  ‘He is the best of them all.’ Adila scooped Adrienne up into her arms. ‘Adri, darling poppet, come along. Auntie Jeje has to unpack. Let’s take Caesar to the park.’

  In Jelly’s room, above the studio extension, a
music stand perched between a silver-gilded writing table in the corner and antique wardrobes crammed with concert gowns, cloaks, coats, hats and a rickety tower of Chinese silk boxes containing ostrich-feather fans – mostly broken now – that she and Adila had collected as girls. While Jelly emptied the suitcase in her usual post-tour routine and chattered with Maria, Adila’s new maid, she fought to regain her equilibrium.

  It was a normal weekday, normal as can be. Adila’s husband Alec was at his chambers in the Inner Temple. The house’s sounds were pattering about in their usual sequences of cleaning and, as far as possible, tidying; a piano tuner had arrived to attend to the Bechstein in the music room; and from the window she spotted her sister and niece in their hats and coats making their way up the road, Caesar on his leash padding beside them. Everything was normal. Soon she’d forget about Eastbourne, the Southerns and that smallest yet most uncomfortable of coincidences.

  Chapter 2

  Even if Jelly did not forget, she allowed her incoming tide of concerts, practising and travel on slow trains and wave-buffeted ferries to submerge the incident. Until, that is, she and Adila found themselves at odds over a party that Baron Erik Palmstierna was holding at his Swedish ambassadorial residence on Portland Place. There’d be dignitaries galore and members of the Society for Psychical Research, too – occasionally one and the same.

  ‘I don’t think I can go,’ Jelly told Adila. ‘I have too much work to do.’

  ‘I may have to stay home and work as well,’ said Alec. The women of the house sometimes forgot how demanding his job was, so discreet was he about it.

  ‘Fine,’ said Adila, ‘then don’t go. But I shall be there to support Erik.’

  ‘I hope he hasn’t asked you to play, Adi?’

  ‘Darling, he has not, but of course I shall play if they want me to. A little Bach, perhaps.’ Nothing would deflect her. ‘It would be quite wrong not to go.’

  ‘Yes, given the amount of time you spend with him,’ said Jelly. The comment was as barbed as she was capable of being.

  ‘It will be worthwhile soon, even to you,’ Adila growled.

  ‘But these drives… what are you doing?’ Jelly said, then regretted it, lest her sister misinterpret this as a different kind of suspicion. Perhaps part of it was. At the notion that Adila might ever part company with Alec, Jelly’s slippery surfaces began to tip under her feet.

  ‘We talk about the questions we should ask,’ said Adila. ‘Then we go back to the glass and we ask them. You’re welcome to join us. But no, you don’t believe in it… so don’t be a Caesar in the manger.’

  On any quietish Sunday when they were at home, after they had been to Mass and enjoyed a family lunch, the stocky and dapper figure of Erik Palmstierna would materialise outside in his car. If the day were fine, he and Adila would go for a drive – Erik loved driving, the faster the better; she would trot out to meet him in a flurry of hat, fur and bead necklaces, as eager as a young girl on a first date. Later they would have a session with the glass, for which Alec might or might not join them. Jelly was always relieved when Adila’s musical commitments interfered with the baron’s plans, for her sister’s career as violinist remained almost as busy as her own.

  Adila refused to accept Jelly’s resistance to their ‘psychical research’, eager to point out that concern with the esoteric was part and parcel of artistic life, whether in the form of spiritualism, Theosophy or both. Jelly knew by heart the decades-long list of Theosophically inclined artists: Alexander Scriabin, Paul Gauguin, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, D.H. Lawrence, Khalil Gibran, Gustav Holst, for a start. ‘And I need hardly mention the Yeatses,’ Adila added. ‘But it’s so simple. It’s the heart of religion, without the mumbo-jumbo.’

  Jelly did not see why, just because it was fashionable, just because Willy Yeats was involved along with his wife ‘George’ – one of her dearest friends – that meant she should be too. She had read, many times, pamphlets declaring that Theosophy, or Ageless Wisdom, represented the unifying thread behind all the world’s religions: the same truth illuminating the various beliefs, rituals, symbols and myths. That was already quite enough mumbo-jumbo for her. She hated arguments, and she knew Adila would never budge. Therefore she would kiss her sister and let her win.

  Feeling mortified, she began a hunt in her room: somewhere she was sure she had a photograph of herself and George in their twenties, glowing with joy at the top of Garsington’s sloping lawn, Jelly with hair plaited and coiled around her ears, George with a long dress and a cascade of loosened tresses. Together, post war, they had made up their minds: in art alone one finds salvation. Her cupboards held box upon box of old letters, postcards, concert programmes and photos, but the one she wanted now was eluding her.

  She felt a tug of loneliness; George, Willy and their children had moved away to Dublin. ‘Without you,’ she said to an imagined George, ‘none of this would be happening. Why did you have to introduce us to Erik?’ George used to participate enthusiastically in the esoteric practices of salons like Eva Fowler’s, those regular gatherings at which the literary met the musical, the artists met the patrons, the curious met those who intrigued them, and the glass game and table-tapping were as likely pastimes as listening to a poetry recitation or a performance by Jelly, Adila and their friends. Jelly remembered George explaining the ‘automatic writing’ from ‘messengers’ that she insisted she’d learned to channel in order to fuel her husband’s creativity. No wonder she and Erik became friends when he arrived in London as envoy. Jelly could still hear George’s voice across party chatter – ‘Sai! Adi! Come and meet this wonderful man… ’ Moments later Erik’s bright gaze was locked with Adila’s, and Jelly, to whom most men gravitated, turned away to find another drink, sensing her own superfluity. Perhaps because George was her friend, Erik’s implantation in their life seemed her own fault.

  A blackbird was singing on the window ledge. Jelly slid open the casement and, making birdish noises, reached out a finger. The creature stared at her, head tilted, before springing away into the air. Jelly decided to escape the house by walking Caesar in Battersea Park, where she could look at a new sonata. She enjoyed learning music by reading the score in the sunlight, under the trees. Once a piece was in her head, it was easier to transfer it later to the violin.

  She was fastening Caesar’s lead when the telephone rang. Anna answered it in the study. ‘Jelly, come quick – it’s Tom Spring Rice, he’s in Dublin.’

  Jelly experienced a brief rip in the fabric of time, along with an immediate awareness that something was wrong. She flew up the stairs; Anna tactfully left her to talk alone.

  ‘Tom? Darling! How are you? What are you doing phoning all the way from Ireland? When can we see you?’

  ‘Ah, Jelly, you never change. Still the warmest welcome in all of England.’ Tom’s voice sounded different – not that she had spoken to him for several weeks, but she knew his tone almost as well as she had once known Sep Kelly’s.

  Tom could have become a professional pianist, had he tried, or so Jelly thought. Like Sep, he won a music scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford; like Sep, too, he had lessons with Donald Francis Tovey, the d’Arányis’ oldest friend in Britain. Still, it wasn’t easy to be a musician if you also had to please your family. Tom neither expected nor wanted to inherit the baronetcy in Ireland, but when it happened he went obediently into the diplomatic corps. There, he’d been as lucky as a tomcat, landing on his paws: when the Twenties were about to start roaring, he was posted to Paris.

  Jelly remembered his apartment in the rue de Seine: sunshine on the glass, the smell of fresh baking from the patisserie across the street, and waiting for her on Tom’s piano, her black tango shoes with red heels. Her circle had vested interests in living as hard as they could, trying to swamp with fresh sensations the involuntary flashbacks to roaring guns or the arrival home of loved ones’ books from the trenches, their torn pages splattered with mud or worse.

  This time, though, Tom sounde
d distant: a reed of a voice, echoing from another world.

  ‘I’ve got some news, Jelly – ’

  ‘– and what are you doing in Ireland?’

  ‘Sai, do please listen.’

  Tom began to explain. He had been very ill in hospital. Now he had decided to resign his post and return to County Kerry. Sometime, he didn’t know when, he would probably have to go into a nursing home. And that would be the end.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Tom’s dear, warm tenor cracked slightly. ‘There was so much I wanted to say to you… things I wanted to tell you and ask you… but now there doesn’t seem to be very much point.’

  Jelly couldn’t get her breath. If only she could rewind time to five minutes earlier when there was no phone call, when she thought Tom was perfectly well. ‘But there must be something someone can do? Have you been to Harley Street? You must see the best specialists.’

  ‘I’ve seen them, my darling.’

  ‘A second opinion. A third. A fourth! You must try everything. I’ll help you, I won’t rest until we find someone who can make you better.’

  ‘It’s too late, Jelly. An operation or two might give me longer, but ultimately there’s nothing to stop it.’

  ‘But what is “it”?’ Something secret, silent, of which nobody dared speak? If this were the same ‘it’ that had destroyed her mother, eating away at her until only morphine could ease the pain and only death could end it –

  ‘It is what you probably think it is,’ he said, sounding perfectly good-humoured.

  ‘But you are too young to die!’ Jelly cried out.

  ‘I’m 50 – hardly your average spring chicken. Besides, nobody is ever too young to die… Look, I’ve been lucky. I’ve had a wonderful life, wonderful friends – and wonderful you – and on balance I prefer the idea of a short life, but a fine one. Who wants a life that’s long but horrible?’