Jelly kept still and met his gaze. ‘Would you save a beloved friend’s life only to see him taken prisoner? I know Yehudi will play it well, but that concerto is not home again until it is here with me.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Then I’ll put it plainly. I will not cancel my concert. I will never give up my Schumann.’
*
When Adila opened the front door, despondent after seeing the Palmstiernas’ packing cases piled high in the library at Portland Place, all was quiet. Jelly’s coat and hat were on the stand. Upstairs, her suitcase lay open on her bed. She must be home; she’d unpacked. She’d changed her shoes.
‘Sai?’
Adila strode down to the kitchen. An egg – boiled – stood uneaten in a porcelain cup. The pantry door was open; the lid was off the cake tin and a chunk of cake had gone.
‘Sai! Where are you? What’s going on?’
She stumped back to the ground floor. Jelly wouldn’t have gone out without her coat. The drawing room and dining room were deserted. In the Green Room, on the velvet chaise longue, she found nothing but an upturned book, which belonged to Alec.
Only the music room was left. Two cups sat abandoned on the coffee tables. The picture of Sep Kelly was in the wrong place. A figure in a brown skirt and fawn blouse lay prostrate on the rug.
Adila plummeted down beside her. ‘Sai! Speak to me!’
‘Adi?’ Her voice was weak.
‘You’re alive! Darling, what happened? Did you faint?’
She half helped, half hauled her sister towards the sofa, where Jelly slumped with her head down over her knees.
‘Menuhin,’ Jelly muttered.
‘Sai, you are raving. You think Menuhin was here?’
‘Not Yehudi. His father. He sat just there.’
‘What did he say to you, this man?’
‘I’m not sure. I can’t remember… When he’d gone I took some of my painkillers, the really strong ones. Several. They calm me down.’
Adila made for the telephone.
‘Adi, I’m all right, I don’t need a doctor.’
‘What did he say to you?’
‘I don’t know… he wants me to give up my concert… he says I’m washed up, no good anymore and apparently it’s all my fault – the scheduling, the Nazis, Schumann being – I don’t know, Schumann being imprisoned by the devil… All because of something I said or did to try and save him and myself, and – ’
‘Hush, you’re talking gibberish. When did he leave?’
‘I don’t know what happened until you came in.’
‘Let’s put you to bed and I call the doctor. Come, now.’
Jelly managed the stairs and crumpled onto her bed the moment Adila had flung her suitcase off the covers. It couldn’t be clearer: she was finished. Tipped over, all washed up, fit for nothing but incarceration. Scenes flew behind her eyelids. Schumann, seeking oblivion in the Rhine, then buried alive in the asylum at Endenich; his concerto, passing from Robert to Clara to Jo and then, abandoned, into the library; and her old self, everybody’s darling little Hungarian, now ailing and vilified in a world she could no longer recognise. She thought of the concerto, alone and on the fringes, with a last chance to prove its worth. And if that image was what had made her reach for the painkillers, she could no longer remember.
The doctor decided against sending Jelly to hospital. She had not taken a serious overdose; most of the problem was simply that she was overwrought. She needed a good rest.
‘I can’t,’ Jelly said. ‘It’s the Schumann on the 16th… And I’m meant to work with Myra this week.’
She closed her eyes. Never had she longed so much for silence; never had silence seemed so loud. The quieter her surroundings, the stronger the roar from the gathered forces within.
Adila placed something on the pillow by Jelly’s right ear. Her free hand closed around it. Silk, buttons, wool. Odd shape, strangely familiar. A doll, one of Adi’s, that she’d stitched clothes for as a little girl. Brought all the way from Budapest, long, long ago.
Chapter 18
Myra’s concession to Jelly’s crisis was to come to Chelsea to rehearse a few days later, which should give Jelly a chance to pull herself together. ‘The show must go on,’ Myra declared. ‘Nothing like good hard work to take your mind off things. Are you feeling a little better about the Schumann?’
‘I think the broadcast is going ahead, at least.’ Jelly tried to stay positive.
‘You couldn’t have a finer orchestra or conductor, and I’m sure it will be an astonishing evening,’ Myra encouraged. ‘It’s almost sold out, I hear.’
Jelly decided to sit down for their rehearsal. She needed to lower the music stand to the right level; it took her three goes because her right arm hurt so much when she tried to twist the keys.
‘Did you perhaps fall on that elbow?’ Myra asked. ‘The time you hurt your back?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘And you still don’t know what’s wrong?’
‘Not really. I’ll do my best,’ Jelly assured her. The bigger problem, which she did not want to explain, was that sometimes her arm hurt, sometimes it didn’t, but even if it was working she still felt afraid that it might not; and the effect of that diminished confidence could be almost as bad as the physical pain. ‘Sometimes I don’t know where my brain stops and my body begins,’ she admitted.
They were working on Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata. In the opening bars, the violin plays unaccompanied.
‘Try again,’ said Myra.
Jelly tried; then shook her head.
‘Shouldn’t you be seeing somebody about the arm?’
Jelly rubbed her elbow. ‘Every doctor I see says something different.’
‘Yes… well, if it’s any comfort, I feel fairly awful myself.’
‘You do?’ She had rarely heard Myra admit discomfort. ‘Whatever is the matter?’
‘Down and out in London over Berlin. Every time I see a news report, I sink one more notch.’
‘Do you think we’ll have a war?’
‘My fear is that we won’t have one soon enough. Do you know, Sai, if I were still myself, but I’d been born in Germany instead of here, I’d have lost my citizenship. I wouldn’t be permitted to vote. There’d be a J stamped on my identity card. I might be thrown in jail on some trumped-up charge, or they might force me to emigrate. The fact that I have a brain, or that I can play the piano, or that people like my concerts, or that I am a good citizen – none of that would count.’
‘But none of that’s happening to you,’ said Jelly. ‘You’re not German, you’re English.’
‘I’m not English English, am I? I have a German name. People are noticing that today. They’re suspicious. And I’m Jewish; they’re noticing that too. I fear there would be plenty of support here for the Reich’s racial policies.’
‘They accuse me too, because I’m foreign and I have a strange accent and name. But you are of course English!’ Jelly insisted.
‘And supposing I wished to be both English and Jewish, as I always have been and as I feel I am?’
‘But can’t you choose, then, that you’re English rather than Jewish?’
Myra exhaled, leaning forward against the piano. ‘I think you’re missing the point. Look, if this can happen in Germany, the most cultured country in Europe, then it can happen here as well. There are signs. You’ve seen them too.’
‘Perhaps some, but… ’ The local restaurant in which she had lunched with Ulli had redrawn its ‘No foreign produce’ sign: it was now three times the size, written in black block capitals. ‘It all adds up.’
‘Yes indeed, and if this vile philosophy takes hold, or if Hitler invades and we can’t repulse him, I don’t think I wish to live to see that day.’
Jelly rushed to hug her. ‘You mustn’t say things like that! I don’t see why you should ever say you’re Jewish if you don’t want to.’
‘Jelly
, sometimes I don’t know if you’re actually anti-Semitic or just impossibly naïve.’ Myra extricated herself from Jelly’s embrace.
‘But I’m almost Jewish myself,’ said Jelly, stung. ‘I wanted to go to Berlin to find the manuscript and Donald wouldn’t let me.’
‘Tell me, are you still seeing that German boy?’ Myra’s expression was contemptuous.
‘I was never seeing him… I’ve only ever met him a couple of times. And he is not a Nazi.’
‘You’re still in touch?’
‘Only by letter, and sometimes we speak on the telephone, but… actually I don’t know where he is. He was going to phone me, but he has not… ’
‘I don’t know how you could even contemplate a relationship with a German now.’
Was she not hearing Myra properly, or was her pianist the one refusing to listen? Picking up her violin, Jelly pretended she wasn’t smarting within. How could Myra ever think her anti-Semitic? And Ulli would never espouse this madness, would he?
‘Let’s play.’ Myra opened her volume of Schubert on the first page of the Duo in A major. A few pages in she stopped. ‘No, you’re late! Listen to my left hand here. You need to be together with the bass line. You can’t just drift about up there like a bumble bee.’
‘Sorry,’ said Jelly. ‘Once more again.’
‘Listen, Jelly. You’ve got ears. Use them!’
‘My arm… ’
‘Oh, my dear, this isn’t like you. Is your arm affecting your brain, or is it the other way around? I’ve never known anyone’s playing to tumble down so quickly.’
Jelly’s innards crumbled. She was sure Myra had no intention of hurting her. Indeed, her words were all too true.
Myra fetched a handkerchief for her. ‘You must get the better of this. You can’t give in. You’re not the only person in the world with a sore arm or vultures in the press – it will all pass, you know… You don’t need to panic. Breathe deeply.’
Jelly tried; it was harder than her friend seemed to think, especially since the Schumann performance was nearly upon her and her arm had to be better in time, and supposing it was not?
‘It’s all right,’ Myra soothed her. ‘I know it’s difficult, but you need to get a grip. I do wonder why your sister and her friend insisted on pushing the “spirit messages” source forward to such a degree. That’s what’s really upset you, and surely there was no need. An unknown concerto by Schumann is quite big enough news by itself.’
‘I wish I’d never heard of it. I wish Clara had burnt the manuscript while she could.’
‘Don’t let it get out of proportion. Remember, Sai, it’s one piece. Of course we revere great music. Of course it’s what we live for. But think how lucky you are, Jelly, and I too. Most single women with artistic careers are living on the margins of things. We are both unusually successful and unusually fortunate. So let’s be clear: in the end, it’s just a piece of music.’
A line from one of Ulli’s letters came to Jelly. Nothing is ever ‘just’ a piece of music.
‘In a way, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘I know it sounds strange, but it feels like our last chance, the Schumann’s and mine together. In a way, the concerto is me.’
Myra was quiet, shoulders bowed. Jelly could sense her mix of concern and exasperation. Myra the woman was worried about her friend; but Myra the musician had work to do.
‘Now, look,’ said Myra. ‘I’m going to go home and leave you to get some rest. That’s what you need most. Call me when you feel better.’
She gathered up her music into its case and gave Jelly a kiss. Jelly, immobile, watched her reach up for her raincoat on the stand, fasten it, then disappear into the day. There came a brightening of light as the front door opened, and a darkening as it closed behind her.
*
Jelly was lying on the music-room sofa an hour later, drifting in and out of consciousness, when she heard Adila’s step on the front stairs and the clink of a key in the lock. With Myra’s departure, her panic had quietened; she wept, then slept. And in that space of her awakening, through the brief clarity of her mind, something began to take shape. Something prompted by Myra’s words, reinforcing the review of Erik’s book in The Listener: an understanding that she’d always rejected because she relied on nobody more than her sister.
Adila’s certainty, her conviction – with Erik, of course – that the ‘glass game’ was all it seemed. Adila’s pride as she told everyone they had been receiving messages from Schumann. Adila bringing over the crassest of journalists to meet her at the book launch, convinced that only good could come of it. She meant to help; she was so genuine and guileless that she could see no alternative agenda to her own, whether or not it bore any relation to empirical fact. Had Jelly perhaps depended too much on her for guidance, and trusted to excess her confidence on daily matters and glass-game messages alike? She could stay silent; it would be kinder. Yet if she only wondered and worried, nothing would be aired, resolved or changed.
‘Myra’s been and gone?’ Adila surmised now, glancing at the open piano.
‘I’m not playing well, so she went home.’
‘Oh, what rubbish. She’s in a bad mood. I’m sure it’s nothing to do with you.’
Jelly tried to begin her question, and faltered.
‘What’s the matter?’ Adila planted herself down beside Jelly.
‘Adi… Erik’s book review – ’
‘That bloody nonsense in The Listener?’
‘He said these messages might come from our subconscious, from things we’ve forgotten we knew.’
‘Rubbish. How would this reviewer man know? He wasn’t there.’
‘You were close to Onkel Jo. You lived in his house. Are you absolutely sure he never said anything to you about a Schumann violin concerto?’
‘I told you, he never said a word.’
‘But are you sure? Because perhaps he did, and you forgot.’
‘The first message didn’t come to me. It came to you.’
‘But supposing you told me, when I was still a little girl, and I forgot too? People do forget. Even Donald forgets sometimes. Look at Elisabeth and the trouble we’ve had with her forgetting.’
‘Yes, yes, of course people forget. But I would have remembered. I would.’
‘Can you be certain? It’s 30 years since he died.’
‘You want me to remember now whether in 1907 I forgot something I didn’t know I had to remember?’
‘Can you be sure?’ Jelly swung herself upright and made for the shelf where Alec kept the family Bible. She slid it out and, grasping it with both hands, extended it towards her sister. ‘Adi, swear to me, hand on this, that there is no chance Onkel Jo ever told you anything about a Schumann concerto.’
The gold-embossed words HOLY BIBLE shone up at Adila. ‘Jelly, are you insane?’
‘Perhaps, but I need you to do this. Go on.’
‘Darling… ’
‘You can’t do it, can you?’
‘It’s more than 30 years ago.’
‘You can’t swear.’
‘How can I? It’s too long ago.’
‘Oh, Adi… so, you can’t be sure?’
Adila breathed. ‘No, Sai. I can’t be sure. I wish I could.’
Jelly lowered the book. ‘Then how will we ever know if the messages were real?’
‘Of course they were real. You saw them come through, with your own eyes.’
‘But how will we ever know if they’re from spirits, or from our subconscious, or some form of both, which is what Donald thinks, or if there’s some completely different explanation… ?’
‘You’ve read Erik’s book. You know every word is true. I took down the messages and I interpreted them. What do you want me to do? Pretend I’ve not experienced anything because it suits the newspapers? Or – ’ A glint of understanding crossed Adila’s face. ‘Is this really about you hating Erik?’
Jelly recoiled. ‘I don’t hate Erik. But I’m not sure how much I trust him.�
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‘What is this all about? Jealousy?’
This wasn’t where she’d wanted this talk to go. Now that it had, she must see it through. ‘Adi, what is it with Erik, really? Are you in love with him?’
Her sister kept her cool – as if, Jelly thought, she had worked out her response long ago for just such an eventuality. ‘We are friends. Colleagues. We share this project; he depends on me for it. You of all people know what it’s like when you work with someone who is on the same wavelength.’
‘I think you’re in love with him and you can’t admit it. I think the whole project – the messages, the book, the concerto – it’s so you could have something to do together, something to work on that was yours and his.’
Adila, her eyes wide, surveyed Jelly, then began to laugh. ‘Oh, Sai… What do you want me to do? Give him up?’
‘I don’t know.’
Her sister stopped laughing and turned ferocious. ‘Many things I don’t know. I don’t know where the messages come from. I don’t know why I can channel them. I don’t know why people scorn one’s experience, when one has more experience than they have. But one thing I do know: Erik is non-negotiable.’
‘Only people you love are that important,’ Jelly said.
‘And supposing I do love him? Supposing he loves me? What does that mean?’
‘It means – ’ Jelly felt her face flaming.
‘The messengers have told us all we need to know about love. You know what they say? Love has nothing to do with sex. It’s beyond that.’
‘You ask them about this?’
‘Yes, we do, and about true love, and about soulmates.’
‘And Erik is your soulmate?’
‘I have no idea,’ Adila declared, her jaw set.
‘But what about Ebba?’
‘Ebba is going back to Sweden, alone.’
‘She’s leaving him?’
‘Don’t look so horrified. It’s the right choice for them both and will make Erik freer to follow his research. Our research.’
‘But Adi! What about Alec?’
Ghost Variations Page 26