I remember, however, that I made you a promise. I will do everything in my power to keep that promise.
I remain yours, etc.,
Ulli
Jelly re-read it three times to make sure she had understood. The depositor wished to change the conditions of his library deposit. And the library would not implement the change because it went against his original request. This made no sense. Something more had to be behind it. It should have been so simple for Ulli, sanctioned by his respected publishing house, to enter that library, find the manuscript and photograph it. He could only be stopped if someone wanted to stop him. Who could that be? And why?
‘I have every confidence in you, dear Ulli,’ Jelly wrote.
‘I will find a way to come to London again soon,’ he wrote back. But months went by; letters flowed; progress did not.
*
The Fachiris saw in 1934 with champagne and trepidation. Jelly and Adila gave concerts and lessons, Erik worked on his book and Alec sweated over the intricate legal paperwork entailed by the upheavals at the League of Nations. Germany had indeed given its notice to leave, as he had feared; the rest of the League wished to talk about limiting armaments, but Hitler seemed hell-bent on doing the exact opposite. Expansionism was on the German cards, and while the League argued, Hitler used the time to his own advantage. If Germany and Japan could simply walk out of an organisation – one that was set up after the Great War to ensure it never happened again – once it no longer suited their purposes, then the whole ethos of its existence came into question; it could be fatally weakened, which might prove catastrophic for everyone else. ‘The League has been too nice,’ Alec, exhausted, remarked one evening to Adila and Jelly, over a whisky. ‘Far too lenient. Trying to be sensitive instead of calling a spade a spade.’
‘Can’t you do anything about it?’ Adila challenged.
‘Me? All I can do is deal with the legal fallout afterwards. Anyway, did you see this?’ Alec fetched a newspaper from his briefcase and placed it on his wife’s lap. It was the Daily Mail. ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ read the headline above a front-page article by Viscount Rothermere, which asserted that the notion of a ‘permanent reign of terror’ in countries under ‘Blackshirt’ control had evolved solely from the ‘morbid imaginations’ of their opponents. ‘This paper’s feeding us nothing but lies, lies, lies,’ Alec said, ‘yet people gulp it down without questioning it, while there’s real suffering, real danger out there – and we could help, but we won’t because of these mendacious, self-serving… It makes me sick.’ He downed the rest of his drink in one. Adila and Jelly stared at him, unused to such outbursts.
Jelly shunned the glass game, infuriated by the stalemate over the manuscript and terrified at the thought of the marching Blackshirts. Anybody could be drawn to them, Alec said, from the unemployed to Eton lads, some believing they had the answer to keeping out the communists, others determined to restore the glory of British imperialism, or some such guff, which meant reasserting their superiority over filthy foreigners. Beside this, Erik and Adila’s glass game sessions seemed oddly disconnected from ordinary life. Don’t forget the concerto, the glass pleaded. Jelly hadn’t forgotten. She simply didn’t know what to do next. The spirits might be positive, but the humans were not.
Erik had yet another idea. ‘Perhaps we should ask Ulli to look more closely at the embargo – there might be a legal loophole,’ he said. ‘And also we might consider asking the British Ambassador in Berlin to raise the matter with Herr Hitler himself. I hear he is fond of music.’
*
When time allowed, reading offered the single best escape Jelly knew. Aldous Huxley sent her a copy of Brave New World. She took it up to the Green Room to begin.
What horror emanated from her old friend’s prose: the portrait of a society that denied family, destroyed love, grew babies in bell jars and made certain that anyone different – raised with the old values of ineluctable ties between mother and child or man and woman – would probably face execution or suicide. How and why had he conceived such a vision?
‘You saw Metropolis, didn’t you?’ Adila remarked. ‘It’s in vogue to be clever like that, to conjure up nasty futures for fun.’
‘That was years ago… ’ This is more than fashion, Jelly wanted to protest. Something in Aldous must have prompted him to envisage that Hatchery and Conditioning Centre that had ‘only’ 34 storeys.
Myra sent a postcard from New York, addressed to Jelly as ‘Darling Gut-Scraper’, signed ‘Hyra Mess’, and showing the tallest building in the world, which had many more storeys than that; it was a little over three years since Herbert Hoover had pressed a button to switch its lights on for the first time. The New York Jelly used to love would lie in the Empire State Building’s shadow from now on.
Myra’s increasing celebrity in New York had turned into a long, intense love affair with the city. Jelly wasn’t certain why her own fortunes in the US had not expanded too; she had not been invited back after touring there with Myra two years previously. Perhaps she needed to engage a manager to make such things possible. She and Adila preferred to employ a PA, preferably the much-missed Anna; but besides having an assistant of her own, Myra swore by her managers. Jelly had none, and her administrative skills had never extended to making calls on her own behalf to concert promoters, orchestras and music clubs. That – as she knew from the cathedral tour – would take time away from working on the music. And so the dates in her diary were starting to seem sparser than of late. Each week she promised herself that next week she would do something about it. But recently she’d noticed that when she and Myra went out together, admirers often approached them, wanting an autograph. Myra’s autograph.
‘It’s because of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,’ Adila insisted. ‘Everyone’s crazy for it.’ Myra’s piano transcription of the Bach piece was selling by the lorry-load. ‘You need something like that to help you out of this – this – ’
‘I need the Schumann Violin Concerto,’ said Jelly. ‘And the word you want is “rut”. Oh, if only Anna were here… ’
She thought of writing to Myra in America for advice, but before she could, a letter arrived from Myra’s assistant, Anita, reporting that the pianist was in hospital in Boston. Major surgery was required, with a long recuperation time; she would not be well enough to return to England for some while. Practising on automatic pilot, Jelly smarted with loneliness, terrified for her friend.
It was October 1934, with the leaves dropping from the trees and the whiff of early northern snow on the wind, when the telegram from Ireland that Jelly had been dreading finally arrived.
‘Go, darling,’ said Adila. ‘Don’t worry about us. Go to him.’
Jelly, numb, called the operator to book a call to the nursing home to which Tom was now confined. She must go to Dublin.
*
The house stood on a side street, set back from the road and overshadowed by plane trees. It seemed peaceful enough, more so than any London hospital, with those rows upon rows of orderly beds; but when Jelly was shown into the hall and up a wide staircase towards the room that had become Tom’s final home, she understood that he might never see the outside world again – he who had travelled so widely and so well.
When the nurse opened his door, though, an unexpected sound reached her. Laughter. And a familiar voice, strong, musical and slightly Scottish. There, sitting by the bed in an armchair, drinking coffee and telling jokes to his ex-pupil, was Donald Tovey.
‘They told me you were on your way.’ Tovey bumbled to his feet and wrapped her in his tweedy wingspan.
‘Hello, Jelly.’ There came a depleted voice behind her.
She bent to kiss Tom. His face was skeletal; his eyes, huge in that surround, seemed to pop out from his shrunken cheeks and brow; what remained of his hair, which had been tousled and light, had turned straggly and grey. She could see the ridge of his skull beneath his skin, yellowed against the white pillowcase. His glasses lay abandon
ed on the bedside table beside a dog-eared copy of one of his favourite Thomas Hardy novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
He took her hand; she felt for the strength in it she used to know, but this mix of bone, tendon and skin did not really amount to flesh; the only energy belonged to her. She closed her fingers around his. ‘Bit off colour,’ he mumbled. ‘Dosed up. Sorry.’
Tovey caught Jelly’s eye: ‘Morphine.’
‘You’re not in pain, darling?’
‘No. Happy to see you. Jelly. So happy.’ The words were an outline, no more. Jelly cursed her own cowardice: she should have come sooner. She hesitated to ask Tovey to leave them alone together, since he had travelled all the way from Edinburgh to be here.
‘We were going over old times.’ Tovey, his gaze full of empathy, glanced from one to the other. ‘The Wigmore concerts. Do you remember, Jelly, Sep was there?’
‘Of course. And we brought Ravel over.’
‘And Elgar tried to kiss you.’ Tovey smiled, but Jelly did not. Elgar, too, had died this year.
‘Now Elgar’s gone, everything’s different. As if he was the last of it all.’
‘I’ll say hello,’ Tom tried to joke. ‘Perhaps I’ll meet them. I’ll greet them for you, Jelly, yes? Schumann, Brahms, Onkel Jo… ’
‘Don’t talk like that. We’ll get you well.’
‘Sweet Sai.’ Tom tried to prop himself up on his pillow, but to no avail; soon he had slipped into deep-drugged sleep. Jelly and Tovey sat silent while his breathing became intermittent – a long pause followed by a deep, rapid lungful, then a barrage of short, gasping intakes, as if each could be his last. His hand lay chilly and grey within both of hers.
‘This happens,’ Tovey said. ‘Don’t be alarmed. He is peaceful and has no pain, which is all we can hope for.’
Jelly picked up the Thomas Hardy book. It fell open in her hand. ‘“Experience is as to intensity”,’ she read, ‘“not as to duration”.’
She felt tears welling up. ‘Darling Donald,’ she said, to distract herself. ‘How are you? How’s Edinburgh? How’s Clara?’
‘Edinburgh is enduringly exuberant,’ Tovey smiled, ‘and Clara is charismatically cherishable. As for me – I’m all right, I think, but my hands hurt. I fear I’m not playing as well as I’d like.’
‘Nor am I. My hands hurt too, and my elbow.’
‘We should all emigrate. We should follow Sep’s memory back to Australia, where it’s warm and dry. Our bones wouldn’t suffer as they do here.’
Jelly lifted the unconscious Tom’s fingers to her lips and felt the icy ridges of his knuckles against her face. His breath was immobile. All she could hear was the staccato of raindrops on the window and the legato of Tovey humming as if to comfort them all. In Tom’s vanishing frame: nothing. For a moment she thought he was gone. She was about to call out in alarm when his torso gave another effortful shudder. The body clings to life, sometimes even after the spirit wants to let go.
Death, Erik said, should be something beautiful, according to the messengers. That did little to help Jelly, watching him, choking back the agony of it from her throat.
His eyes opened a slit. ‘Sai, dear,’ he whispered, ‘play to me?’
She kissed him. Nothing but Bach would do. She stood by the window, letting the D minor Partita speak the thoughts she could not voice. Outside, rain spattered through the trees and the clouds breathed above them; a normal day on which someone would be born and someone else would die, someone would conceive and another would divorce, someone would win some triumph and another would lose a lover, all in one fragment of time, yet Bach lived on to talk of eternity through four strings, a bow and a strange-shaped wooden box with curled orifices to let the music out.
She finished the Partita and its Chaconne. Even that didn’t feel enough, so she played the E major Partita as well. Perhaps it would cheer everyone up. It was only after an hour had passed, in which the sun broke through and made the damp windowpanes shine, that a nurse tapped on the door.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have to give him a check, so would you please excuse us for a few minutes?’
‘Of course.’ She put her violin back in its case; Tovey draped her coat over her shoulders. His hand rested briefly on her elbow. His joints appeared more gnarled than she remembered, and the skin rougher – the hand of a man moving too rapidly onwards from middle age.
Downstairs, a lounge was designed for visitors, a space draped with autumn-hued curtains, each wall set with brown armchairs and sofas and, dominating everything, a grandfather clock with an overwhelming tick. Jelly wished it would keep quiet. An upright piano stood in one corner, lid closed.
Tovey, gazing about the room, clapped his hands to test its acoustic, singing out loud the while. ‘It could be better if they took out the curtains and some of those rugs. Then we could have a house concert for everybody.’ He clapped and hooted again. A puzzled staff member looked in to remind him, tactfully, that it was afternoon and the patients might be sleeping.
‘But you want Jelly’s music here,’ Tovey said. ‘This lady’s violin playing has healing properties.’
The nurse looked embarrassed. ‘Perhaps at teatime, sir.’
Jelly chose a soft armchair and curled up in it. Silence, but for that interminable clock with its pendulum: swing and clonk, swing and clonk, on and on. If she gave a concert in here, they would have to stop the clock. You can’t stop a clock in a place where people have come to die. She closed her eyes and at once images assaulted her, showing her yesterday and today, this century and the last; Tom, Sep and her mother; Bartók, Ravel and her father; Hungary, England, Paris; George Yeats, at whose house she was staying in Rathfarnham, last night sipping red wine and showing her 4,000 pages of old mystery automatic writing; and –
‘Jelly?’ Tovey was crouching by her chair. ‘You’ve been asleep for an hour.’
‘What happened?’ She heard the infernal ticking again.
‘The nice nurse, the little one with the blue eyes, came in to say that our Tom is not in a very good condition at the moment. She thinks we should go now and have a nice cup of tea, and she will telephone me at my hotel and you at George’s house when he’s stable enough for us to come back. How does that sound?’
Jelly nodded an assent, sick at heart.
*
She spent all evening at the Yeatses’ with one ear attuned for the telephone, which stayed mute. Willy Yeats was away in London. George, who was overjoyed to see her, though horrified by the circumstances, cooked a comforting stew; her son Michael chattered away about school, and her daughter Anne, perhaps hoping to distract Jelly, brought out a book of sketches she had made on an academy trip to County Cork. Anne, though only 15, was at art college. Jelly examined page after page, praising the deft curve of a hillside, the balance of perspective and structure in the whole. This young girl had the eye and hand of a woman. Jelly remembered, as if it had all happened to somebody else, that at Anne’s age she herself was on the point of leaving Hungary and stopping her official studies altogether.
‘What does “Sai” mean?’ asked Anne.
‘It’s a little nickname that my family and some close friends use. It’s “shy”, spelled phonetically in Hungarian.’
‘Sai is also a Sanskrit word,’ George told her. ‘It’s hard to explain, but it means something like the divine mother and father rolled into one. So it’s a divine presence. Someone who seems to have – well, something extra.’
‘You’ve gone purple, Auntie Jelly,’ Michael declared, with satisfaction.
‘Well, I’m hardly a divine presence, am I! Anne, Michael, darlings, have you noticed we never choose our own nicknames?’
‘But perhaps that’s how your sisters saw you? How fascinating,’ said George.
‘Nicknames stick,’ Jelly said. ‘It doesn’t matter. Really, it doesn’t mean anything at all.’
*
The telephone screamed, waking Jelly in the spare room, catching George st
irring porridge for the children’s breakfast. Jelly heard her answer and utter a few monosyllables. She knew what it meant. Part of her spirit wanted to split off from her body and fly out after Tom’s departing soul to embrace him one last time.
The rest of Jelly pulled a jersey over her nightgown and hurried downstairs. George was leaning on the banister, waiting to tell her that Tom had passed away at the break of dawn.
*
George went with Jelly and Tovey this time. Together they walked under the trees into the house where yesterday Tom was alive, yet today he was not.
‘I’d like to be alone with him for a moment, please.’ Jelly asked for the favour she should have sought when he was actually there.
Now that he was laid out under the sheet, the silent room seemed frozen, as if dead itself. He lay face up, eyes closed, arms straight by his sides, his features unchanged and now unchangeable.
Yesterday he was speaking to her, listening to her play, asking her for music. Today: a shell, its pearl gone for ever.
And there was the rub. Adila and Erik would declare that the soul lives on – it’s still here somewhere, and can be contacted, and can speak through the glass or automatic writing. It is one with the universe; perhaps it waits to be reborn. Jelly, try as she might, couldn’t feel that supposed truth. She listened and listened, yet could hear no comforting whisper in her inner ear and feel no caress of a ghost bidding her farewell. Only silence and stillness. The rain was back; through the window she could see the sheen of dampness on nearby roofs. What if, after all, there were nothing? No spirits moving the glass, no advice from messengers in the beyond; only a delusion at best, a fraud at worst. What price then Erik’s certainty, Adila’s devotion, the strange word of ‘Schumann’?
Part of her had wanted to be there when the moment came and life turned to afterlife: to hold him as he faced the ultimate mystery. Now she was glad she had arrived too late. Despite everything, was this the reality? Stillness – silence – peace?
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