‘Tell me about yourself, then,’ he said. ‘Start with your name and tell me something I can’t guess about what you think and feel.’
Jelly pondered. ‘My name is Jelly von Arányi. And… ’
‘Go on,’ he prompted. ‘“And I know that… ”?’
‘My name is Jelly von Arányi and I know that nobody has ever had my name before.’ She was emboldened. ‘Nobody else has ever had my name. Nobody else has ever lived my life.’
‘And live it you do and you shall!’ he laughed. ‘I can see that in the way you set your jaw.’
‘That’s probably from the violin… ’
‘Of course, you play the violin, don’t you?’ He stopped laughing. ‘The Tove’s been yelling Jelly’s praises. Come on, let’s see what you can do. What shall we play?’
‘Brahms.’
‘Brahms? You play Brahms? That’s no music for little girls.’
Jelly fumed. ‘Try me.’
‘All right, then.’ He suggested the second sonata – the most concentrated and supposedly straightforward of Brahms’s three. Jelly refused. She plumped for the third, in D minor, the last, loudest and most violent. Best of all, it had a pig of a piano part. Jelly flung herself into the melodies and gave Sep, at the keyboard, a run she hoped he would never forget.
‘Wait for me!’ he shouted as she galloped into the finale. He was an Olympic champion; he should be able to keep up. She flew on, gaze unbendable, challenging him. By the end he was sweating more than she was. A crash of applause surprised them: getting their breath, they found Tovey, Hortense, Adila and their mother, all watching with widened eyes and mouths. Jelly laughed; Sep joined her. She’d made him follow her lead, thus far.
‘Come on, Sep, take a breath,’ Tovey advised, clapping a hand onto his shoulder. ‘Let me have a go.’
‘Game of chess?’ Sep suggested.
‘Absolutely.’ Tovey sat down at the piano and began to play the first prelude and fugue from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Sep grabbed the chess set from the bookcase – an inlaid board full of mother-of-pearl and contrasting bright woods – and set out the pieces. He flipped a coin. ‘Heads!’ shouted Tovey from the piano without missing a note.
Jelly stared, amazed. ‘You can’t play the piano and chess at the same time!’ she exclaimed.
‘Nuff and stonsense,’ said Tovey. ‘Watch me.’
‘It’s tails. I’ll take white,’ said Sep. Tovey started on the C minor Prelude and Fugue as Sep made his first move and called it out to the professor, who considered deeply, Bach rattling out under his fingers, before responding: ‘Pawn, G–four!’
‘They might do this for hours,’ Adila whispered to the startled Jelly. ‘Let’s go outside.’ Jelly could have stayed and watched the slope of Sep’s neck and shoulders, muscular from rowing, and his beautiful hands while he controlled both ends of the game, shouting his moves to Tovey and receiving decisions back while the professor played, from memory, through the entire first book of the Bach 48 Preludes and Fugues, then started on the second.
Since Sep, she had never felt the same about anybody else, and she saw no reason to compromise. Probably Tom had never married because he was waiting for her; and she had waited, too, waited for her emotions to fasten upon him for sure and for all time. They both kept waiting and waiting – when, if it were going to happen, it would probably have done so the first day they met.
*
About a week after she heard that Sep had been killed at the Somme, Jelly, who had sunk into an arid subterranean world of mourning, woke around 2am. Suspended in a state of semi-dream, as if she were hovering as a spirit over her own body, curled alone in her bed, she thought she heard… What? She knew it. What was it? The opening melody of Sep’s violin sonata? He’d written it for her in his head, in between digging trenches and dodging Ottoman ammunition; then he’d written it down on the boat, leaving Gallipoli after the horrors of battle. It began with a strong theme, full of nobility and poise. But what she heard in her mind’s ear now seemed to reach her from the other side of a distant sea, as if in the scraping of a beginner violinist, as Sep, a pianist, would have been: the sort of valiant try that goes straight for the nerves under your teeth.
Sep had not said goodbye to her before he left for France. Was that his farewell? Jelly came to, the sounds scratching away inside her head. She felt exhausted even before she could stand.
*
Back at the hotel, after breakfast, Jelly resumed her place at the desk overlooking the lawn to begin writing to people who might help her start hunting for the Schumann manuscript, notably Tovey. Taking time to ensure that language and handwriting were logical and legible, and would not frighten away her targets, she scarcely noticed the hours pass. It was only when a bark reached her – high-pitched, officious, unquestionably Caesar’s – that she realised her companions were nowhere to be seen. Beyond the window she glimpsed the flash of Adrienne’s lilac dress and the gleam of her mahogany hair, while the dog galloped by, chasing a ball.
‘Adri?’ Jelly went onto the terrace. ‘Where are Mummy and Daddy and Uncle Erik?’
Adrienne shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand. ‘They went to the beach.’
‘Without you?’
‘Mummy said it’s a beach that children and dogs can’t go to, so we should stay here and you’d look after us. Not that we need looking after, you know, but that’s what she said. She didn’t want to disturb you, because you were busy.’
‘Oh,’ said Jelly. ‘I see… ’
So Adila, Erik and Alec had gone together, à trois, to… that beach, leaving her to babysit. And without telling her, because they thought she was too busy to listen – or perhaps because they didn’t want to explain. Jelly felt briefly floored, but this was not something to tell the blissfully innocent and dog-focused Adri. She placed her outgoing letters on the hotel’s post pile, then went into the sunshine to play with her niece.
Chapter 5
Myra Hess, cigarette smoke curling around her, listened long and well after Jelly burst into tears in the middle of the Brahms Sonata in G major.
In the pianist’s Carlton Hill studio, lined with gold-hued hessian and gleaming with sunlight that slanted in from the garden, they were rehearsing for a Wigmore Hall Brahms centenary concert at which they would play all three of his sonatas. Jelly had been fighting back a longing to tell her duo partner about the visitations through the glass. Many years of working together had taught her that of everyone she knew who understood Schumann and how to play his music, Myra was by far the best; but that of everyone who would ridicule the notion of messages from beyond the grave, she would laugh longest and loudest.
Dotted around the studio stood photographs of her family – her parents and siblings, that is. No husband or children for her, any more than for Jelly. She turned down her first love, a violinist named Aldo Antonietti – Italian, yet hailing from Kingston-upon-Thames – because she intended to devote her life to music. Nothing should interfere with that. ‘You can’t be earnest about more than one thing in life,’ Myra insisted, ‘and I’d need to be earnest about marriage as well as music, and I can’t do that.’ Aldo wanted her to marry him and stop playing the piano. ‘Balderdash,’ said Myra. Neither she nor Jelly could understand why a man would fall for a woman with a vocation, only to insist she must give it up; music was, after all, a sizeable part of who they were. Yet if rejecting Aldo had caused Myra pain, Jelly accepted that she’d never know about it; her friend, sociable though she was, kept such feelings under strict lock and key. Later, Benno Moiseiwitsch proposed – but they’d have been two pianists together in the same home. ‘God help us, never mind the neighbours!’ Myra joked.
Here in St John’s Wood, Myra shared a house with two sisters, friends who didn’t mind her practising, and she identified in silence with the great rip in the fabric of their lives, having lived through all of it with them. They were the only survivors of five siblings. Their brother was killed in the war; aft
erwards their two younger sisters, grief-stricken, died together of a joint overdose. Nobody knew for certain whether it was accidental or deliberate; perhaps nobody wanted to know. Myra eventually adopted as her bedroom the one in which the girls’ bodies had been discovered. Jelly wondered how she could stand it, but the pianist, throwing open all the windows and applying paint, curtains and music of her own, wasn’t one for hauntings. Jelly could scarcely bear to set foot in there, so Myra confined their meetings to her studio.
A critic once commented, in the nicest possible way, that Myra resembled a solid, modern, reliable wristwatch fashioned to the latest design, while Jelly was a golden antique pocket watch, ‘the best that money can buy’. The pair derived much hilarity from that. ‘There we go, ticking away like time bombs!’ Myra said.
They looked, nonetheless, as different as those imaginary watches would be. Myra was the shorter and rounder of figure, her dark hair draping like angel’s wings from a centre parting above a direct gaze that missed no detail. Jelly was taller, indeed taller and darker than her own sisters, bony and flexible – Sep used to tease her about being double-jointed; her posture was open, her movements generous and impulsive, and her laughter as ready as her tears.
This time the tears were sparked by her increasing awareness of another difference between her and Myra: for the pianist, life was a photo, not a drawing, and she could manage it with commensurate clarity. She was tougher than Jelly, more practical and astute; a woman of this century, not the last. Was Jelly what the critic had said: an antique, admired for her old-fashioned beauty, but created in the past and for the past, useless beyond it? The Brahms sonata’s slow movement seemed filled with mourning, chiming so strongly with hers that it felt almost too painful to play.
‘You have to go to Tom,’ Myra said, when Jelly had explained everything that was going on – except, of course, for the mysterious concerto. ‘You mustn’t think you’re being disloyal to Sep. He’s in another world, perhaps, and he won’t care. He’d mind if you didn’t, I think.’ She, too, saw Sep as Jelly’s unofficial fiancé.
‘Tom keeps telling me to concentrate on work and not worry about him,’ Jelly said, ‘and I just… don’t know how I… ’
‘… would say goodbye?’ suggested Myra gently. ‘That I can understand very well.’
‘What would you do, if you were me?’
‘I don’t know. It seems to me that you want to be with him, but the prospect of that pain is stopping you, and no wonder. In the end perhaps you have to trust your instinct… ’
Sep had died without her being able to tell him that she loved him; now Tom might, too; and she could save neither of them. Her instinct was telling her something different: that she might instead save, even resurrect, another entity. A Schumann concerto.
Myra’s fingers moved softly across the keyboard, tracing a chorale-like theme that Jelly didn’t recognise. ‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘It sounds like Schubert.’
‘Funny you should say that. Actually it’s a little theme by Schumann that nobody knows, used for some variations by Brahms.’
Jelly tried not to show the shockwave.
‘It’s for four hands. I’ve been looking at it with Irene Scharrer.’ Irene was Myra’s oldest friend, a fellow former piano pupil of Tobias Matthay. ‘Rumour has it, according to Uncle Tobs, that Schumann thought this theme was being dictated to him by the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn. Of course, the poor man was losing his mind at the time. Brahms wrote these variations after Schumann died. Isn’t it lovely?’
The music stood open on the piano beside the violin sonata; Jelly peered over Myra’s shoulder at the notes. Extraordinary to think that Schumann himself had believed in such things. If she told Myra her own Schumann story, Myra might think that she, too, was losing her mind. Yet Jelly had seen the words forming, with her own eyes, and she knew she hadn’t pressed on the glass, and she knew she had never heard before of a violin concerto by Schumann.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Do you think it really was dictated by spirits?’
Myra burst out laughing, then twirled into a jokey cadence that neither Schumann nor Brahms would ever have written.
*
Jelly’s letters from Dorset began to bring her some returns around the time of her birthday in late May – though not all were happy. Armed with her best hat, a sleek black suit and several layers of necklaces, she took up invitations to coffee, tea and sherry. The first of the latter was with the friendliest critic from The Times. He owned a copy of the first edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and looked up Schumann for her. ‘No mention of a violin concerto,’ he said. ‘None at all. Admittedly, this edition may be out of date. Don’t you think, though, that if there was a concerto, I’d know about it?’
Jelly thanked him and went to morning coffee with another critic – James Gambrell, whom she respected yet feared a little; in his study he adopted the stance of a tutor interviewing a student across a college desk.
‘My dear Jelly, how nice to see you… but why the devil are you looking for a missing violin concerto by Schumann? Or, indeed, any missing work by Schumann? You are surely aware of the situation vis-à-vis his suppressed compositions?’
Jelly blinked. Suppressed compositions, plural? ‘Actually, I wasn’t,’ she said, keeping her eyes wide and innocent, trying to let charm make up for her pitiful ignorance. ‘Please tell me?’
Gambrell took a long inhalation from his pipe. A number of Schumann’s late works, he explained, were unpublished, assumed ‘missing’. The truth was more awkward.
Schumann, he related, spent his last two years in a mental asylum at Endenich, near Bonn, the culmination of his long illness. All his life he had worked in a ferment of intensity, his highs bringing flurries of inspiration in which he might compose obsessively in one medium for weeks, months or more, turning out masterpiece after masterpiece; as for the lows, these lay beyond agonising and often rendered him unable to write at all. He fell in love with Clara Wieck when she was still in her teens; her father tried to separate them, on the grounds that the unstable Schumann would make a thoroughly disreputable husband for his Clara – a prodigy whom he had raised to be a great pianist, not housewife to a manic-depressive composer whose music was too interesting ever to make much money. The young couple took him to court and won the right to marry, which they duly did, the day before Clara’s 21st birthday. The passing years brought them many children, musical glories, great friendships, but then – Gambrell lowered his voice – calamity.
‘Schumann was quite, quite mad, possibly because he had a malady of, er, unfortunate origin that resulted in this, namely syphilis, or possibly because he had an inherent instability – or, I suspect, both. Whatever the truth, he went stark, raving nuts. People do say, of course, that a tendency towards these dual extremes is very common among our great artists and can fuel their output, which may well be the case here. But if that was what caught up with him in the end, it was tragic. He himself asked to be sent from his home in Düsseldorf to the asylum, because he was afraid he might harm Clara or the little ones. Poor Clara was left with seven children to bring up on her own.’
‘My great-uncle adored Clara,’ Jelly remarked. ‘We always revered her memory.’
‘Of course you would, as your great-uncle Joachim was one of Clara’s inner circle of confidants, together with his close friend Johannes Brahms – who was himself in love with Clara, or so we believe. They were a true triumvirate, a triangle of power over the legacy of the unfortunate Schumann. All three of them went to Endenich when he was dying. Imagine, Miss d’Arányi, they stood by his body together, mourning, after his soul departed. Thereafter they kept together and closed ranks. It is perfectly possible that Clara discussed with Joachim, and with Brahms too, whether to suppress some of Schumann’s more dubious late compositions: those they considered might betray the fact that his mind was no longer entirely coherent.’
‘But surely Onkel Jo woul
dn’t have… ?’
‘Well, put yourself in Frau Clara’s shoes. One does not want one’s husband’s memory sullied by a work that doesn’t do him justice.’
‘But why do you think these pieces wouldn’t have done him justice?’ Jelly protested. ‘How can we know, if nobody’s ever heard them?’
‘The chances of there even being a violin concerto are exceedingly slim. Look, he only met Joachim in the early 1850s – as you know, Joachim and Brahms were respectively only about 22 and 20 when they got to know Schumann, so any concerto he wrote for your Onkel Jo would indeed be a late work. It is eminently possible that Clara would have burned it. And if it does exist, it will have been hidden for a reason – namely, that it is probably not very good. Best let sleeping dogs lie.’
Jelly thanked the critic and drank the rest of her coffee, hoping its strength was the only reason she felt so tense. Fancy saying a work must be no good when there was no proof it even existed! Supposing it did exist, and it was a treasure, and she might find and play it and prove its worth, whether or not ‘spirits’ had any part in it? Going home in a cab, she closed her eyes and pictured ecstatic audiences, a new recording contract, a bestselling set of 78s, an American tour, some of which had been elusive of late… but above all, a resurrection, the only one that she could accomplish.
At home, she was battling frustration – an increased chance of the piece being real, but no indication of how to follow its trail – when the telephone rang, bringing to her the one person in the world who might know something concrete. Tovey had been off work for a year with health problems, so in her letter she had intimated merely that she wanted to consult him, should he be well enough.
‘Jelly!’ came the high trumpet tones of Tovey himself. ‘What a plate greasure! How are ye?’
‘Donald, how wonderful to hear you! Something astonishing has happened… ’ Unlike the two critics she had spoken to, Tovey had been close to Onkel Jo in person. ‘It’s so peculiar I need to talk to you about it properly,’ she said. ‘Please can I come up and see you?’
Ghost Variations Page 7