Ghost Variations

by Jessica Duchen

  ‘Tough day ahead, Ulli,’ Wagner’s bust seemed to warn him this morning. ‘Hold on and keep your strength. You’re going to need it.’

  Fräulein Kammerling tapped on his office door minutes later. ‘Dr Schultheiss, I have a call from Herr Doktor Professor Donald Tovey at Edinburgh University. He wanted Dr Strecker, but please could you speak to him?’ Willy was away in Munich, meeting another composer, Carl Orff.

  ‘Tovey? On the phone? Of course – please put him through.’

  While he was Schott’s representative in London, before the Great War lobbed him into the indignity of the Alexandra Palace internment camp – which was not palatial at all – Willy Strecker served as Tovey’s unofficial concert agent and business manager, as well as his publisher. Schott still published his compositions.

  Ulli listened as Tovey explained the developments at the d’Arányi and Fachiri family home, his incredulity growing with every word. A Schumann violin concerto? Messages from a glass game? The whole thing had to be a joke.

  ‘A Schumann concerto turning up would be astonishing, but who in the name of heaven is going to believe this? And from Joachim’s great-nieces? Professor Tovey, these ladies may be amazing musicians – I remember hearing Jelly play when I was a boy – but they are having you on.’

  He’d been barely eleven, visiting family friends in Surrey a year or so before the war broke out; he retained a faint image of a slender, scarlet-clad, flame-like presence whirling through Beethoven, Brahms and something very Hungarian. He’d thought her beautiful, but a little weird, as if she had landed on the earth from a distant world; perhaps a bird changed into a woman via some inverted Ovidian metamorphosis.

  ‘I’d love to tell you this is one big jest,’ said Tovey. ‘But… Jelly and her sister are not like that. In a funny kind of way, they’re innocents. They don’t know how to be dishonest. They grew up with a ferocious father – can you imagine, head of the police in Budapest… ’

  ‘So, you’re convinced they are not making it up and they haven’t just stumbled upon something Onkel Jo once said over the palinka?’

  ‘There is a concerto, and its existence is noted in at least one very good book. And no matter how it has come to our attention, it’s time to find it. Here is my question: do you think the doctors Strecker might consider helping to track it down, on the premise that they may then publish it?’

  Ulli thought fast. It would be an amazing stroke of fortune to lay hands on such a work, especially if it turned out to be as good as Schumann’s Piano Concerto. ‘Perhaps Willy could write to Joachim’s son. I’m sure he mentioned he was interned together with him in England during the war… ’ Odd, he reflected, that bonds forged in deprived communal conditions, over scant meals, or at unthinkable toilet facilities, could be stronger by far than those made over champagne cocktails at the Hotel Adlon. He had never had friends as close as those he made in childhood, stealing apples and pears from the orchards and gorging on them by the brook through the meadows. They were all hungry, they all had nothing to lose, and they would never forget one another’s parlous state in those days, no matter how well subsequent fortune might treat them.

  ‘Ulli, I’d be most grateful if you could run this by him, or at least the existence of the piece – there’s no need to mention the, er, spirit aspect. I’ve had to almost physically restrain Jelly from jumping on the first boat to go and look for the manuscript herself.’

  ‘Perhaps she should.’

  ‘Awkward and potentially dangerous. Joachim… ’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘At least they’re in Britain,’ said Tovey. ‘At least they’re safe.’

  A circuit connected in Ulli’s mind: Tovey’s tone was tremulous enough to tell him that the d’Arányi sisters’ safety meant the light of the sun and moon to this revered academic.

  ‘Jelly is playing the supposedly Mozart “Adelaide” Concerto in November. I believe you’ve published it, so why don’t you come over for the concert? Then you could meet her and see for yourself.’

  ‘Thank you, Professor Tovey,’ said Ulli. ‘I might just do that.’

  *

  Katharine Tennant, who was organising Jelly’s charity tour, had lined up more than the three or four cathedrals Jelly had envisaged. The project grew like an orchid in a hothouse; now it had blossomed into nine events. If anyone tried to say no, Katharine, her determination and tenacity veneered with charm and her Asquith accent, simply wouldn’t listen, and her targets would find sooner or later that they had said yes, even if they hadn’t meant to.

  ‘Darling, you’re a miracle worker,’ Jelly beamed at her over tea. ‘I dreamed this up at the end of March, and you’ve made it all happen by June!’

  ‘It’s been easy,’ Katharine smiled. ‘People are only ever reluctant to take on a great musician if they actually have to pay them, which in this case is not a concern.’

  ‘You’re much too modest.’ Jelly gave her a hug.

  She was convinced that the rapid take-up must reflect a genuine appetite for the concerts. At each, she would play for free, welcoming all comers, with a collection afterwards. Every dean leapt at the chance of a charity performance by Jelly d’Arányi. They recognised the longing for order and beauty in this pea-souper of a depression; music was the quickest way to achieve it – and though local music societies could offer live concerts to those in the know, provision of them in large venues at no cost seemed a godsend. Jelly might be delighted, but now she had to work, work and work. And as if York Minster were not an intimidating enough place to begin, in a magnificent coup Katharine had managed to book her and Adila to play together on 10 July at the venue Jelly most wanted, Westminster Abbey. The one thing they could not do was to find the Schumann Violin Concerto in time for the tour; Jelly had no choice but to watch that part of the dream evaporate. She simply had no time to pursue it.

  To say the cathedral tour was the most demanding thing she had ever attempted would do it an injustice. The cycle of exhilaration and exhaustion swelled around her, as if she’d swallowed Alice in Wonderland’s potion and found herself dwarfed by her own dream. At York she began to understand the scale of her task. A place’s essence, she knew, can seep into your body as if by osmosis and coerce a response more physical than rational. Still, she wasn’t prepared for the malevolence in the air. Tom had told her often that she was too sensitive for her own good, sometimes too imaginative as well; but Jelly remained convinced that places carry the energy of lives that are played out there, and that atmospheres can change irrevocably when they house intense suffering. So it was in York.

  She had thought unemployment severe in London; here it was worse still. ‘For those of us who are fortunate to have gainful work, things are perfectly all right,’ the driver from the Minster’s Deanery remarked, collecting her from the station and watching her casting about as they drove, taking in the surroundings. ‘There are picture houses springing up absolutely everywhere. But you do have to be, so to speak, from the right side of the tracks.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Industry – or lack of it. Everything has collapsed in these parts. This county was the powerhouse for textiles and coal mining, but no longer. You might see some truly appalling slums, which we hope will be demolished. One wouldn’t wish to house one’s animals in such squalor. Ahh, here we are – this is the Deanery. Let me take your bags… ’

  The house was tranquil and pleasant, clambered upon by roses in full bloom; it would have been easy to stay in, enjoy chatting with the dean and his wife, practise, and ignore everything beyond her room and the Minster. Once she might have done so, but no longer. She wanted to see beneath the surface.

  ‘I might go for a little walk,’ she told her hosts. ‘I need to stretch my legs… ’ And she gently dissuaded them from their well-intentioned offers to go with her.

  It did not take long to find what she was looking for. Beyond the glories of the Minster and the generous streets close by, the atmosphere sank stil
l further. The foggy air reeked of lingering smoke and coal dust; her stockings were turning black. She wandered down a side road and found herself in a warren of unkempt terraces, which summer seemed to have left untouched. Passing a dark stone building that looked like a hostel – a dosshouse, mental asylum, or combination of both – she heard moans and muffled shrieks through an open window, and a group of four children ran out and surrounded her, pointing at her suit and hat and pleading for money. One of the girls, muddy-legged, her dress little more than stitched-together rags, was the same height as Adrienne.

  ‘Where are your mummy and daddy?’ Jelly asked them.

  ‘Our father’s dead in the mines and Mam’s got a cough and she’s on the drink,’ said the smallest boy, who couldn’t have been more than five. His shins, beneath the end of his short trousers, were covered in purple bruises and red, scabby scrapes, unwashed and untended. He wore no shoes – and Jelly was horrified to see shards of broken glass scattered around the street, as if someone had thrown a bottle out of the nearest window.

  ‘Where do you live?’

  The eldest girl pointed at the house where Jelly had heard the screaming. ‘There since last week, but Mam can’t pay t’rent, so we have to get out before t’collector comes.’

  ‘But where do you go to school?’ she asked. They laughed in her face. The older boy had just today found some work pushing a barrow. The two girls went out begging. They’d come from Darlington, they told her, walking all the way, looking for some uncle or cousin to help them, but he wasn’t here after all.

  Jelly couldn’t bear it. She emptied her whole purse into their upturned hands.

  ‘Come to my concert in the Minster,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t cost anything.’

  ‘What? In there?’ They couldn’t believe her. One of them noticed her accent and scowled. ‘Are you German, Miss?’

  ‘No, Hungarian.’ She brushed it aside. ‘Really, come to the concert, and bring your mam. I’d love it if you did.’

  Surprised and a little subdued – whether by the cash or the concert idea – the children mumbled thanks and ran away through the murk towards the dosshouse. Jelly turned to go back, wondering whether music really could do anything for people in such desperate circumstances.

  The Minster glowered out of the fog; when she went in to explore, the lighting was dim and the place so gigantic that the tops of the pillars vanished into sepia shadows. She’d been here several times: previously, in the pre-Depression days, it seemed to embrace her, its transepts spreading like affectionate arms. Now it sat still, impassive, while Jelly’s playful heart seemed paralysed. ‘There’s no need to worry,’ the dean assured her. ‘You are undertaking a pilgrimage of compassion, so everything will go well.’ After the interval, he told her, he would make an appeal for the Northern Industries Workrooms and centres for the unemployed in the Cleveland district.

  She tried to turn her attention back to her playing. She’d chosen the programme with care; almost an hour and a quarter of music, most of it slow, since rapid pieces full of twirls would be swallowed like plankton in the whale-belly cavern of a cathedral. The result: the slow movements of the Mozart D major, the Beethoven and the Mendelssohn concertos; a complete Handel sonata; and the immense solo Chaconne by Bach, from his Partita No. 2 in D minor.

  After scant sleep, she spent the morning rehearsing with the organist, Dr Edward Bairstow; everyone encouraged her, praised her and brought her cups of tea, Dr Bairstow exclaimed in delight at the contrast she was bringing them from what he called the ‘poisonous materialism’ of their times, and Mrs Bairstow came bustling in to press upon her the loan of a jersey, since it was so chilly inside, even though it was the middle of June. Jelly’s mouth felt dry while her hands were damp with sweat. She had begun to doubt that anyone would have the slightest inclination to listen to violin music in any case, free or otherwise. By the time the bells had struck 7 and she was in the vestry preparing, she was wondering why this escapade had ever seemed a good idea.

  She fastened her simplest brown and white concert dress and dabbed on just a little lipstick and face powder; she did not want to emphasise the embarrassing gulf of privilege between herself and the audience she sought. She wanted to be as close to them as she’d been to those patients in the hospital. All she could do was play her best and hope it was good enough. If nobody turned up, then nobody turned up and there’d be nothing she could do about it.

  And then the doors of the Minster were opened with a great creak that echoed up to the roof; and peering round the vestry door, she could see them arriving, people streaming into the Minster, row upon row; the volume of talk, swirling around the arcs of the building, rose moment by moment. She watched, incredulous. Was the whole of York here?

  Side by side with Dr Bairstow, hearing her own heart thudding and the ringing rush of blood behind her ears, she stepped out into the vast space. Applause surged towards them. She glanced around the pews; to one side, some well-heeled listeners: a silk scarf, a glimmer of jewellery. These people would contribute to the collection. At the back, those who would benefit: people who could pay nothing, yet would enjoy the performance in just the same way, possibly more. Music has no respect for bank accounts. Jelly thought of the children she’d met the day before, and prayed that they, too, might be there, somewhere at the back, though she’d prefer them to sit at the front. The crowd was so large that she could scarcely take in the faces; families huddled in the distant pews, elderly couples came in with walking sticks, and at the end of one row she spotted a tall man, one of whose legs was missing below the knee – an ex-serviceman, she was sure. A makeshift wooden crutch was propped beside him.

  Once silence fell, Dr Bairstow started the Mozart Andante cantabile from the D major Concerto; Jelly was staring down at the stone under her feet, trying to absorb herself in the music’s tranquil atmosphere. Drawing out her first phrases, reaching up to a high note that seemed to last for ever, suspended in ecstasy above the shifting harmonies, a welcome sense of security took her, the knowledge that nothing could go wrong tonight after all. The acoustic nourished her sound, letting it sail out to the rapt audience; and between the pieces the clapping pounded and pleaded: more, more, give us more… Lowering her violin after the Mendelssohn Concerto slow movement, she spotted the one-legged veteran wiping his eyes with his sleeve.

  At the end she greeted well-wishers in a daze of hope and a certainty that what she had decided to do was, after all, necessary beyond doubt, even if it might provide only a drop of comfort compared to the amount needed. But there, in the throng making for the door past the collectors, wasn’t that the little girl who was Adrienne’s age? Jelly tried to catch her eye and wave. The child gave her a lopsided grin, then took a coin out of her threadbare pocket – it must have been from the money Jelly gave them yesterday – and to Jelly’s astonishment, deposited it with a flourish in the collection bucket.

  *

  Time to move on; the next day it was Hexham, and after that, Durham, which to Jelly was the most beautiful of all, yet which brought even more pain than York. You can perform the Bach Chaconne at sunset by the altar of a holy site more than ten centuries old, while a thousand people drink music through golden dusky light; but when they come to you afterwards and tell you their stories, the reality begins to hit home.

  Two women came up to Jelly to thank her, each with several children in tow. She asked them a few gentle questions and their stories came tumbling out. Nearby Newcastle, once thriving with shipyards and coal mines, lay with its wheels stilled and its furnaces cold. Their husbands had not worked for two years. She looked down at the little boys, who were pulling on their mothers’ hands, itching to get away from this dull grown-ups’ conversation. Their toes were popping out at the ends of their cracked shoes.

  What prospect was there for the children, the women demanded, watching their fathers losing the dignity work gave them? All they had left was dole; and everyone looking over their shoulders to see who was worse
off than themselves; and the Means Test men who would march into the house and force them to sell their chairs before allowing them a farthing of government support. The mothers talked, sentences falling over one another. Nobody was hiring, but the government, in faraway London, still blamed the unemployed for not wanting to work. Of course they wanted to work. No one would choose to raise a family on a handout of a few shillings a week. ‘But us, we can’t change the world,’ said the younger woman. ‘We can’t change anything.’ Jelly, clasping the neck of her violin, listened and didn’t know what to say.

  She wanted to understand why; so did they. Was this the paying-off of debts incurred by the war that finished 15 years ago? The knock-on effect of the stock-market crash – the poor forced to fund the greed of the rich? Or something even worse: a loss of faith? And in the middle of that – an angel, a violin, the music of Bach.

  ‘Thank you, Miss d’Arányi. We’ll never forget you. We’ll never forget what you did for us tonight.’

  Jelly could barely answer; she was in tears. ‘I am so moved. I am speechless… I had no idea it would be like this.’

  A headline in The Times seized on the York Minster dean’s remark about ‘a pilgrimage of compassion’. That wasn’t her idea. She wanted to play for nothing to people who had nothing, because she had something to give. Their response was more precious to her than any financial return. This should be commonplace for a musician, she told Adila – but apparently it was extraordinary.