Giant's Bread

by Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott, Agatha

  He sat down at Jane’s piano and began to play – queer rhythmic monotonous notes …

  ‘It is the snow, you comprehend – the northern snow. That is what your voice must be like – the snow. It is white like damask – and the pattern runs through it. But the pattern is in the music, not in your voice.’

  He went on playing. Endless monotony – endless repetition – and yet suddenly the something that was woven through it caught your ear – what he had called the pattern.

  He stopped.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It will be very difficult to sing.’

  ‘Quite right. But you have an excellent ear. You wish to sing Solveig – yes?’

  ‘Naturally. It’s the chance of a lifetime. If I can satisfy you –’

  ‘I think you can.’ He got up again, laid his hands on her shoulders. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Thirty-three.’

  ‘And you have been very unhappy – that is so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many men have you lived with?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘And he was not a good man?’

  Jane answered evenly:

  ‘He was a very bad one.’

  ‘I see. Yes, it is that which is written in your face. Now listen to me, all that you have suffered, all that you have enjoyed, you will put it into my music not with abandon, not with unrestraint, but with controlled and disciplined force. You have intelligence and you have courage. Without courage nothing can ever be accomplished. Those without courage turn their backs on life. You will never turn your back on life. Whatever comes you will stand there facing it with your chin up and your eyes very steady … But I hope, my child, that you will not be too much hurt …’

  He turned away.

  ‘I will send on the score,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘And you will study it.’

  He stumped out of the room and the flat door banged.

  Jane sat down by the table. She stared at the wall in front of her with unseeing eyes. Her chance had come.

  She murmured very softly to herself:

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  3

  For a whole week Vernon debated the question of whether he should or should not take Jane at her word. He could get up to town at the week-end – but then perhaps Jane would be away. He felt miserably self-conscious and shy. Perhaps by now she had forgotten that she had asked him.

  He let the week-end go by. He felt that certainly by now she would have forgotten him. Then he got a letter from Joe in which she mentioned having seen Jane twice. That decided Vernon. At six o’clock on the following Saturday, he rang the bell of Jane’s flat.

  Jane herself opened it. Her eyes opened a little wider when she saw who it was. Otherwise she displayed no surprise.

  ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I’m finishing my practising. But you won’t mind.’

  He followed her into a long room whose windows overlooked the river. It was very empty. A grand piano, a divan, a couple of chairs and walls that were papered with a wild riot of bluebells and daffodils. One wall alone was papered in sober dark green and on it hung a single picture – a queer study of bare tree trunks. Something about it reminded Vernon of his early adventures in the Forest.

  On the music stool was the little man like a white worm.

  Jane pushed a cigarette box towards Vernon, said in her brutal commanding voice, ‘Now, Mr Hill,’ and began to walk up and down the room.

  Mr Hill flung himself upon the piano. His hands twinkled up and down it with marvellous speed and dexterity. Jane sang. Most of the time sotto voce, almost under her breath. Occasionally she would take a phrase full pitch. Once or twice she stopped with an exclamation of what sounded like furious impatience, and Mr Hill was made to repeat from several bars back.

  She broke off quite suddenly by clapping her hands. She crossed to the fireplace, pushed the bell, and turning her head addressed Mr Hill for the first time as a human being.

  ‘You’ll stay and have some tea, won’t you, Mr Hill?’

  Mr Hill was afraid he couldn’t. He twisted his body apologetically several times and sidled out of the room. A maid brought in black coffee and hot buttered toast which appeared to be Jane’s conception of afternoon tea.

  ‘What was that you were singing?’

  ‘Electra – Richard Strauss.’

  ‘Oh! I liked it. It was like dogs fighting.’

  ‘Strauss would be flattered. All the same, I know what you mean. It is combative.’

  She pushed the toast towards him and added:

  ‘Your cousin’s been here twice.’

  ‘I know. She wrote and told me.’

  He felt tongue-tied and uncomfortable. He had wanted so much to come, and now that he was here he didn’t know what to say. Something about Jane made him uncomfortable. He blurted out at last:

  ‘Tell me truthfully – would you advise me to chuck work altogether and stick to music?’

  ‘How can I possibly tell? I don’t know what you want to do.’

  ‘You spoke like that the other night. As though everyone can do just what they like.’

  ‘So they can. Not always, of course – but very nearly always. If you want to murder someone, there is really nothing to stop you. But you will be hanged afterwards – naturally.’

  ‘I don’t want to murder anyone.’

  ‘No, you want your fairy story to end happily. Uncle dies and leaves you all his money. You marry your lady love and live at Abbots – whatever it’s called – happily ever afterwards.’

  Vernon said angrily:

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t laugh at me.’

  Jane was silent a minute, then she said in a different voice:

  ‘I wasn’t laughing at you. I was doing something I’d no business to do – trying to interfere.’

  ‘What do you mean, trying to interfere?’

  ‘Trying to make you face reality, and forgetting that you are – what – about eight years younger than I am? – and that your time for that hasn’t yet come.’

  He thought suddenly: ‘I could say anything to her – anything at all. She wouldn’t always answer the way I wanted her to, though.’

  Aloud he said: ‘Please go on – I’m afraid it’s very egotistical my talking about myself like this, but I’m so worried and unhappy. I want to know what you meant when you said the other evening that of the four things I wanted, I could get any one of them but not all together.’

  Jane considered a minute.

  ‘What did I mean exactly? Why, just this. To get what you want, you must usually pay a price or take a risk – sometimes both. For instance, I love music – a certain kind of music. My voice is suitable for a totally different kind of music. It’s an unusually good concert voice – not an operatic one – except for very light opera. But I’ve sung in Wagner, in Strauss – in all the things I like. I haven’t exactly paid a price – but I take an enormous risk. My voice may give out any minute. I know that. I’ve looked the fact in the face and I’ve decided that the game is worth the candle.

  ‘Now in your case, you mentioned four things. For the first, I suppose that if you remain in your uncle’s business for a sufficient number of years, you will grow rich without any further trouble. That’s not very interesting. Secondly, you want to live at Abbots Puissants – you could do that tomorrow if you married a girl with money. Then the girl you’re fond of, the girl you want to marry –’

  ‘Can I get her tomorrow?’ asked Vernon. He spoke with a kind of angry irony.

  ‘I should say so – quite easily.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By selling Abbots Puissants. It is yours to sell, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but I couldn’t do that – I couldn’t – I couldn’t …’

  Jane leaned back in her chair and smiled.

  ‘You prefer to go on believing that life is a fairy story?’

  ‘There must be some other way.’

  ‘Yes, of course there is another. Probably t
he simplest. There’s nothing to stop you both going out to the nearest Registry Office. You’ve both got the use of your limbs.’

  ‘You don’t understand. There are hundreds of difficulties in the way. I couldn’t ask Nell to face a life of poverty. She doesn’t want to be poor.’

  ‘Perhaps she can’t.’

  ‘What do you mean by can’t?’

  ‘Just that. Can’t. Some people can’t be poor, you know.’

  Vernon got up, walked twice up and down the room. Then he came back, dropped on the hearth-rug beside Jane’s chair, and looked up at her.

  ‘What about the fourth thing? Music? Do you think I could ever do that?’

  ‘That I can’t say. Wanting mayn’t be any use there. But if it does happen – I expect it will swallow up all the rest. They’ll all go – Abbots Puissants – money – the girl. My dear, I don’t feel life’s going to be easy for you. Ugh! a goose is walking over my grave. Now tell me something about this opera Sebastian Levinne says you are writing.’

  When he had finished telling her, it was nine o’clock. They both exclaimed and went out to a little restaurant together. As he said goodbye afterwards, his first diffidence returned.

  ‘I think you are one of the – the nicest people I ever met. You will let me come again and talk, won’t you? If I haven’t bored you too frightfully.’

  ‘Any time you like. Good night.’

  4

  Myra wrote to Joe:

  ‘Dearest Josephine, – I am so worried about Vernon and this woman he is always going up to town to see – some opera singer or other. Years older than he is. It’s so dreadful the way women like that get hold of boys. I am terribly worried and don’t know what to do about it. I have spoken to your Uncle Sydney, but he was not very helpful about it and just said that boys will be boys. But I don’t want my boy to be like that. I was wondering, dear Joe, if it would be any good my seeing this woman and begging her to leave my boy alone. Even a bad woman would listen to a mother, I think. Vernon is too young to have his life ruined. I really don’t know what to do. I seem to have no influence over Vernon nowadays.

  ‘With much love, Your affectionate

  ‘Aunt Myra.’

  Joe showed this letter to Sebastian.

  ‘I suppose she means Jane,’ said Sebastian. ‘I’d rather like to see an interview between them. Frankly, I think Jane would be amused.’

  ‘It’s too silly,’ said Joe hotly. ‘I wish to goodness Vernon would fall in love with Jane. It would be a hundred times better for him than being in love with that silly stick of a Nell.’

  ‘You don’t like Nell, do you, Joe?’

  ‘You don’t like her either.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I do, in a way. She doesn’t interest me very much, but I can quite see the attraction. In her own way, she’s quite lovely.’

  ‘Yes, in a chocolate box way.’

  ‘She doesn’t attract me, because to my mind there’s nothing there to attract as yet. The real Nell hasn’t happened. Perhaps she never will. I suppose to some people that is very attractive because it opens out all sorts of possibilities.’

  ‘Well, I think Jane is worth ten of Nell! The sooner Vernon gets over his silly calf love for Nell and falls in love with Jane instead, the better it will be.’

  Sebastian lit a cigarette and said slowly:

  ‘I’m not sure that I agree with you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, it’s not very easy to explain. But, you see, Jane is a real person – very much so. To be in love with Jane might be a whole-time job. We’re agreed, aren’t we, that Vernon is very possibly a genius? Well, I don’t think a genius wants to be married to a real person. He wants to be married to someone rather negligible – someone whose personality won’t interfere. Now it may sound cynical, but that’s what will probably happen if Vernon marries Nell. At the moment she represents – I don’t quite know what to call it – what’s that line? “The apple tree, the singing and the gold …” Something like that. Once he’s married to her, that will go. She’ll just be a nice pretty sweet-tempered girl whom, naturally, he loves very much. But she won’t interfere – she’ll never get between him and his work – she hasn’t got sufficient personality. Now Jane might – she wouldn’t mean to, but she might. It isn’t Jane’s beauty that attracts you – it’s herself. She might be absolutely fatal to Vernon …’

  ‘Well,’ said Joe, ‘I don’t agree with you. I think Nell’s a silly little ass, and I should hate to see Vernon married to her … I hope it will all come to nothing …’

  ‘Which is much the likeliest thing to happen,’ said Sebastian.

  Chapter Two

  1

  Nell was back in London. Vernon came up to see her the day after her return. She noticed the change in him at once. He looked haggard, excited. He said abruptly:

  ‘Nell, I’m going to chuck Birmingham.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Listen while I tell you …’

  He talked eagerly, excitedly. His music – he’d got to give himself up to it. He told her of the opera.

  ‘Listen, Nell. This is you – in your tower – with your golden hair hanging down and shining … shining in the sun.’

  He went to the piano, began to play, explaining as he did so … ‘Violins – you see – and this is all for harps … and these are the round jewels …’

  He played what seemed to Nell to be a series of rather ugly discords. She privately thought it all hideous. Perhaps it would sound different played by an orchestra.

  But she loved him – and because she loved him, everything he did must be right. She smiled and said:

  ‘It’s lovely, Vernon.’

  ‘Do you really like it, Nell? Oh, sweetheart – you are so wonderful. You always understand. You’re so sweet about everything.’

  He came across to her, knelt down and buried his face on her lap.

  ‘I love you so … I love you so …’

  She stroked his dark head.

  ‘Tell me the story of it.’

  ‘Shall I? Well, you see, there’s a princess in a tower with golden hair and kings and knights come from all over the world to try and get her to marry them. But she’s too haughty to look at any of them – the real good old fairy story touch. And at last one comes – a kind of gipsy fellow – very ragged, with a little green hat on his head and a kind of pipe he plays on. And he sings and says that he has the biggest kingdom of anyone because his kingdom is the whole world – and that there are no jewels like his jewels which are dewdrops. And they say he’s mad and throw him out. But that night when the princess is lying in bed, she hears him playing his song in the castle garden and she listens.

  ‘Then there’s an old Jew pedlar man in the town, and he offers the fellow gold and riches with which to win the princess, but the gipsy laughs and says what could he give in exchange? And the old man says his green hat and the pipe he plays on, but the gipsy says he will never part with those.

  ‘He plays in the palace garden every night – Come out, my love, come out! and every night the princess lies awake and listens. There’s an old bard in the palace, and he tells a tale of how a hundred years ago a prince of the Royal house was bewitched by a gipsy maid and wandered forth and was never seen again. And the princess listens to it, and at last one night she gets up and comes to the window. And he tells her to leave all her robes and jewels behind and to come out in a simple white gown. But she thinks in her heart that it’s as well to be on the safe side, so she puts a pearl in the hem of her skirt, and she comes out, and they go off in the moonlight while he sings … But the pearl in her dress weighs her down and she can’t keep up. And he goes on not realizing that she’s left behind …

  ‘I’ve told this very badly – like a story, but that’s the end of the first act – his going off in the moonlight and her left behind weeping. There are three scenes. The Castle hall – the market-place, and the palace garden outside her window.’

  ‘Won’t that be v
ery expensive – in the way of scenery, I mean?’ suggested Nell.

  ‘I don’t know – I hadn’t thought – oh! it can be managed, I expect.’ Vernon was irritated by these prosaic details.

  ‘Now the second act is near the market-place. There is a girl there mending dolls – with black hair hanging down round her face. The gipsy comes along, and asks her what she’s doing, and she says she’s mending the children’s toys – she’s got the most wonderful needle and thread in the world. He tells her all about the princess and how he’s lost her again, and he says he’s going to the old Jew pedlar to sell his hat and his pipe, and she warns him not to – but he says he must.

  ‘I wish I could tell things better – I’m just giving you the story now – not the way I’ve divided it up, because I’m not exactly sure myself yet about that. I’ve got the music – that’s the great thing – the heavy empty palace music – and the noisy clattering market-place music – and the princess – like that line of poetry “a singing stream in a silent vale”, and the doll mender, all trees and dark woods like the Forest used to sound at Abbots Puissants; you know, enchanted and mysterious and a little frightening … I think you’ll have to have some instruments specially tuned for it … Well, I won’t go into that, it wouldn’t interest you – it’s too technical.

  ‘Where was I? Oh, yes, he turns up at the palace – as a great king this time – all clanking swords and horse trappings and blazing jewels, and the princess is overjoyed and they’re going to be married and everything’s all right. But he begins to get pale and weary, worse every day, and when anyone asks him what is the matter, he says “Nothing.”’