Ghost Variations

by Jessica Duchen

  At the top of a long climb, the sea spread before them, Old Harry jutting up from the water like a snowman on blue satin. Erik stopped the car; Adila sprang out and made for the cliff edge, Adrienne and Caesar cantering behind. ‘Adri,’ shouted Alec, ‘be careful!’ All around rose the sweetness of incipient honey in the heather and the contented rumble of bees. ‘Oh, what air!’ Adila boomed.

  ‘Adi, they can hear you in Poole,’ Alec teased her.

  ‘There’s something of eternity and consolation about the sea,’ said Erik, who had started his career in the Swedish navy.

  ‘Didn’t you find it dull?’ Alec asked.

  ‘I read a lot of spiritual philosophy.’ Erik gave a grin. ‘Unless it was night in the crow’s nest, when you could only watch the stars and feel the swell of the ocean. You sense your own insignificance within that immensity.’

  The hotel, in a hollow sheltered from the coastal winds, soon slid the newcomers into place. Adila disappeared into the bathroom for a while, as her stomach sometimes insisted she must, then took a nap. Adrienne and Caesar made for the bottom of the garden; a scattering of other guests smiled to see the little girl in lilac playing with her dog. Relaxing on the terrace, the baron offered Alec his finest tobacco.

  ‘I’m not supposed to smoke,’ Alec admitted, twirling his pipe in one hand. ‘My doctor says it’s bad for my lungs. But this smells amazing.’

  ‘First class,’ said Erik. ‘Riff cut, blended with whisky and made in Sweden. Come on, Alec, live a little. It’s tosh about tobacco damaging the lungs. On the contrary, it helps to aerate them and soothes away any possible infection.’

  Jelly, outside to keep half an eye on Adrienne and the dog, watched the men from a safe distance. Erik was more Mediterranean in appearance than any other Scandinavian she knew; the intensity of his heavy-lidded eyes, she thought, could make him virtually glow in the dark. Beside his aristocratic Swedish drawl, Alec’s still-detectable American twists and pointed vowels sounded less subtle than usual, but the baron had built much of his career through his skill at public speaking, while Alec’s was founded upon quietness and concentration. The most obvious thing the two had in common was sizeable moustaches.

  The second most obvious thing was Adila. Her vitality seemed to rub off on Erik; her energy fed him like an addictive substance.

  ‘There you are!’ came her dark voice, and she strode out onto the terrace – her figure as lavish as her cooking, her periwinkle gaze direct between strong, level brows, giving a smile that would be visible from the back of the largest concert hall – and Erik’s face shone like a Christmas tree set with a hundred candles.

  ‘I’m all right here, Auntie Jeje,’ Adrienne called. ‘I don’t need watching.’

  Jelly blew her a kiss, then wandered upstairs to take out her violin: if in doubt, practise.

  *

  The inevitable began soon after dinner.

  They’d enjoyed roast chicken and a fine Bordeaux; now a long marine twilight set in that seemed to concentrate the scents of mown grass, heather and Swedish pipe tobacco. Adila coaxed Adrienne upstairs for a bedtime story; and while the men took cognac in the smoking room, Jelly settled at a table in the lounge to write to Tom. She summoned a cheery tone for her letter that concealed her disquiet at the idea that she should, and could, have been there to look after him herself.

  She was on a sixth page, telling him about the dunes, the baron’s fast car and the fact that there was a naturist beach a five-minute drive away, when Erik came in: ‘Jelly, do join us – we have a private salon for our research.’

  In a quiet parlour draped with brocade curtains and lit by one lamp, Erik had set up a round table with his own set of letters and a tumbler borrowed from the kitchen. Jelly paused in the doorway. This was the last thing she wanted to do; the dinner had been good, the wine even more so and after that tiring drive she’d have preferred to go to sleep. She’d managed to avoid such sessions since her secret effort with Anna. ‘Where’s Adi?’

  ‘She’s upstairs with Adri – we wait for her.’ Erik’s face softened. ‘She galvanises our friends beyond.’

  ‘She galvanises real people too,’ Jelly said pointedly.

  ‘Reality has many facets.’ The baron did not flinch. ‘Eventually, I hope, there will be a book, thanks to Adila – it will change the way mankind regards the world of spirits. It may change world consciousness for ever. Look at all this.’ He picked up his notebook from the table and rustled through the pages; Jelly glimpsed paragraph after paragraph in his curled, thick-inked writing, the words close yet clear.

  ‘Can I see?’

  The baron, smiling, handed it to her. She read: ‘Progress advances from the lower towards the higher, until perfection is reached, evil being the lowest stage.’

  ‘Don’t we have enough trouble in this world without worrying about the next?’ she remarked.

  ‘But the messengers can help us – they can give us guidance in troubled times. People are confused, Jelly. We’re so insecure, we’re so lost.’ Erik, arms behind his back, started to pace up and down; she couldn’t help wishing he’d keep still. ‘Everything we knew, everything we took for granted, it’s all turning into fairy dust. We need the advice of those who know better. Can you imagine what problems we could solve with their wisdom? Read this, received by your sister, letter for letter, word for word: these are teachings for daily life, answering the questions we all want to ask… ’

  Jelly ran her gaze over lines and more lines: about the importance of individuality and the ridiculous tendency of human beings to wish to be alike. The spirits, it seemed, had the impression they were watching a world of dummies, growing dumber by the day because of their fear of being different, killing off the very essence of what each of them could otherwise have offered to life and art. It was pompously expressed – as it might well be, coming from Erik’s pen – while the sentiments were worthy of Adila at her most extreme. This was the perfect book-child of its creative parents: one eloquent Swedish ex-MP and one determined, impassioned Hungarian artist who adored being different. Jelly smiled, more to herself than Erik; strange that he and Adila should need prompting from spirits in the beyond to pen something so evidently in keeping with their own beliefs.

  ‘But Erik, isn’t that human nature, wanting to fit in?’ she ventured. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean people are “dummies”. Especially now, don’t you have the feeling that people don’t want to… stand out? The way things are?’ She knew too well how it felt to be thought different, therefore a threat – for matters as innocuous as a foreign accent, a darkish complexion, Slavic cheekbones, an artistic profession.

  ‘That’s the whole point.’ Erik sounded too patient. ‘It shows us that this is nothing but illusion. Fear, doubt and insecurity spawn unnecessary problems, and can stop us from finding solutions to them… Come and join us now?’

  ‘Please excuse me, Erik, but I must finish writing to Tom. He’s having an operation next week and we hope it may save him, at least for a while… I’m so worried about him, but all I can really do is write to him and pray.’

  He let her go; she retreated to the lounge while the team set to work. Each minute that went by she thanked Providence that she was still there, still writing; nothing untoward had taken place and an hour had passed…

  It was as if part of her knew what was going to happen.

  Adila was in the doorway. ‘Jelly! Come here, quick!’

  In the parlour, Erik and Adila had taken the glass while Alec was transcribing the incoming messages. Jelly looked over his shoulder. He had written down: ‘Tell Jelly remember concerto.’

  ‘What concerto?’ said Alec.

  ‘Wait, there’s more coming – I can feel it.’ Adila, with a dramatic shiver, pressed her finger to the base of the glass. Erik rushed to join her; heads bowed in concentration, they watched it glide. Did the centre of Adila’s palms grow hot? Jelly didn’t want to ask.

  Powerless, she hovered in the shadows beyond t
he lamplight so that nobody could see her face while the apparently spirit-loaded glass pounced upon letter after letter.

  ‘Schumann. Museum Weimar. Tell Tovey,’ Adila interpreted. ‘What on earth does that mean? Why Weimar? What’s it got to do with Tovey?’

  Three pairs of astonished eyes turned towards Jelly. ‘Sai, what in the name of Beelzebub is going on?’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Stop pretending! A concerto? Schumann? Nothing?’

  ‘I didn’t take it seriously. I mean – Adi, I’m no good at this, you know I’m not.’

  ‘What didn’t you take seriously? Out with it! I won’t stop asking until you say, so you might as well tell us now.’

  Jelly, trapped, moistened her lips. Two minutes later Adila, Alec and the baron knew everything she had been trying to forget while she plotted her cathedral tour.

  ‘Adi, did Onkel Jo ever say anything to you about a Schumann violin concerto?’ she finished, pleading.

  ‘Not that I remember. I am certain, no. A hundred per cent, definitely, certain he did not.’

  ‘If anyone knew about it, it would have been him,’ Alec agreed. ‘It might have been written for him.’

  ‘This is crrrazy,’ Adila growled. ‘Oh, Sai! How could you hide such a thing? A missing Schumann concerto! Imagine if you found it and played it. It would be yours, all over the world. You’d go down in history as the woman who rediscovered it.’

  ‘Why me?’ said Jelly. ‘Why not you? You were Onkel Jo’s pupil, not me. And whatever does Schumann know about Tovey?’

  ‘Schumann didn’t know him, but Onkel Jo did, very well,’ Adila pointed out. ‘And Jo loved you, you know. He tells me, on his deathbed he tells me, “Make sure little Jelly’s doing her bowing properly, as I showed her… ”’

  ‘It’s incredible!’ Erik was ecstatic. ‘Jelly, you are chosen by the angels. How can you refuse their summons?’

  ‘I do wonder what the music would be like,’ she admitted. ‘If there is some… ’

  ‘Jelly, these messages do not come from nowhere. There will be a concerto, and you will play it. You will bring an unknown Schumann work to the world, at the composer’s own request. We will all help you. Try and stop us!’

  ‘Supposing it isn’t real?’ Jelly felt outnumbered, shouted down by people stronger – or at least louder – than she was. Nobody was present to back her up; Alec, inscrutable behind his moustache while his wife and her friend assailed Jelly, took no sides. ‘Supposing these spirits are not who they say they are, and they’re misleading us, giving us information that’s false?’ she said. ‘And then we ask everywhere and it’s not true. Imagine how silly we’ll look.’

  ‘Not nearly as silly as we will if someone else finds it first,’ Erik pointed out. ‘Supposing we had the chance, but we didn’t take it? That’s the one thing that people truly come to regret: losing an opportunity for no reason other than self-doubt and fear. Don’t be afraid, Jelly. Grasp this with both hands – you won’t regret it. We must make enquiries. Promise me you will start writing to people who might be able to help.’

  ‘But if it is real – surely we wouldn’t tell people how we heard about it? We wouldn’t tell them about… this?’ The glass sat motionless amid the letters.

  ‘Of course we would,’ Adila countered. ‘An amazing story, and evidence that the spirits are real.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be… rather dangerous? Not many people believe in this kind of thing, not any longer.’

  ‘They will have to then. And we would be so proud… Sai, you must investigate. And if you find it soon, you can play it for your cathedral tour – imagine the impact! Wouldn’t that be amazing?’

  As the youngest of three siblings, Jelly had spent much of her life feeling that other people were bigger than she was. Her habitual response was simple: she let them have their way so that she could get back to her violin.

  She concealed her sense of defeat behind her brightest smile, her warmest goodnights, and a silent recognition that on the final point – the cathedral concerts – Adila was right. Now it would only be possible if she could find the piece fast.

  *

  After many sleepless hours despite the countryside tranquillity, Jelly got up early and took Caesar for a walk. He had spent the night in a strange kennel and deserved a treat. She wandered with him up the hill to the headland and there perched on a rock close to the edge, listening to the waves below.

  Jelly could rarely hear the sea without imagining Sep Kelly crossing it – whether in life, towards the killing fields of northern France, or perhaps equally, in death. She had dreamed, that night in 1916, of a ship setting out into the ocean with no destination. She thought nothing of it; someone had written to her, telling her that Sep was fine and that he was writing her a new piece. He was already dead, as she heard ten days later when his sister, Maisie, came to the house to tell her, weeping and incoherent. Jelly wept with her, then scarcely stopped crying for a month.

  Nobody knew what to say to her. Sep had never spoken one word of love, let alone proposed marriage, yet everyone thought them virtually engaged. They’d spent much time together, but as duo partners, never lovers; when they met, out came her violin, up went the piano lid and off they went to work. They communicated better through music than most couples do through touch. She would signal a nuance with a breath, an inclination of her head or a slowing of her bow arm and he, despite looking straight ahead at the music on the stand, would sense her need and meet it at once. They never played anything the same way twice; if conversation was fun, musical dialogue was even more so, transforming a Mozart sonata into mutual teasing, or Brahms into a shared moment of emotional eloquence that they never tried to replicate in real life. At least, Sep did not, however much Jelly wished he would.

  He was still at the piano: on the Bechstein at Netherton Grove stood the John Singer Sargent sketch showing the broad forehead and forthright gaze of a scholar, plus the thickset neck of a rowing champion. She wasn’t sure what had happened to Sep’s gold medal from the 1908 London Olympic Games; perhaps Maisie had kept it, or sent it home to their parents in Sydney.

  She’d had admirers, suitors, lovers, though never Sep; he’d never even tried to touch her. Perhaps he didn’t want to; Adila thought he preferred men, but Jelly tried to stop her ears to that notion. Instead, she’d had to deal with Tovey, who once uttered a painful declaration, awkward and red-faced, making her squirm, much as she adored him; anyway, she was sure he spent longer pursuing Maisie. There was Bartók, who first fell for Adila and later for Jelly and came to their Budapest house almost every day for five years, which mightily embarrassed them; the cruel young girls they were then thought only that he had no sense of humour. Elgar, who termed her his ‘tenth muse’, tried to kiss her after taking her to the British Museum, which she was too young and innocent to know was a popular den for assignations – and he was 35 years her senior, and an Order of Merit, too! In one stroke he’d wrecked any chance that she would ever play his interminable violin concerto. And poor, dear, Tom – the best of them, if she could have felt as strongly for him as she had for Sep.

  She could still hear the first sound of Sep’s arrival in her life: his fancy car pulling up outside Donald Tovey’s home in Surrey, one glorious May morning full of shouting birds and lilac blossom. Cars were uncommon in those days, so the arrival of a noisy engine on a sleek machine meant that every schoolboy in Englefield Green came running out to stare and point.

  You know at once when you meet someone who will change your life, even if you have no idea how it will happen. Jelly knew at one glance that Sep would, but the first thing he did was to laugh at her. People did, then, before she was famous enough to be more than one of ‘those darling Hungarian sisters’. Hortense, sweating with nerves at her piano, was the fragile beauty; Adila, the eldest, was the powerhouse violinist, pupil of the great Joachim; but Jelly was the baby, the one with the Gypsy looks and the silly name.

  ‘Where did you get
that name, then?’ Sep challenged her, sipping Tovey’s tea. Most English people were too polite to ask outright, but Sep, for all his Eton schooling and Oxford scholarship, was an outsider, as Jelly was herself. His Australian accent clung to him like bathing trunks – despite, or perhaps because of, the English high society into which he’d tumbled, by design of his father’s money, but distinctly by accident where his own nature was concerned.

  ‘I was named after an African princess.’ Jelly raised her chin, trying to look taller. ‘Someone my father met when a group from Dahomey came to Budapest.’

  ‘There was an African princess called Jelly? That’s a trifle unlikely, isn’t it?’ Sep teased her, those 50-carat blue eyes sparkling into her teenaged face.

  ‘I’ve heard all the jokes before, you know. Jelly, trifle, ice cream, getting my just desserts. It is very tedious.’

  ‘Then I shall just have to be more original, shan’t I? Tell me more about this African princess.’

  ‘I think it was originally spelled J-E-L-I, but our father wanted to make it look English. I don’t think he had the first idea what it meant. And it’s “Yelly”, not “Gelly”. Though I must say I am not in the habit of yelling very much.’ She saw the corners of Sep’s eyes crinkle and his teeth glimmer as she battled with the Hungarian twists of her vocal cords. They seemed to be stronger than she was.

  ‘You could change it, you know. You could choose any name you like.’

  ‘But I do like it! I have a name nobody else in this country has ever had. Why would I want one that belonged to someone else first? It would be – how do you say in English? Second-hand!’

  Sep laughed, a deep, raucous, Australian laugh, his head on one side; he evidently thought she was a poppet, as everyone seemed to. Jelly was furious that she wasn’t even two years older, which could have made all the difference. He was nearly 30 and awfully venerable.