Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  That of course was not really true—not yet, by any means. What had really caught and moved her was his devotion, whether real or assumed, and his extraordinarily gentle loverliness. The strange magic of physical tenderness, too, had prompted her to one or two small confidences, which had given unspeakable relief to her sore and solitary heart. She had admitted to disagreements with her husband, to being unhappy, in their last two or three walks—and had received comfort. Henry showed few signs of scruples, but in this reckless mood she felt it as well to let him know that he need have none.

  She woke, refreshed and cheerful, about 4.30. Lovely to wake cheerful, she thought, putting on a cool short-sleeved frock of green silk; and lovely to have someone to notice again what one wore. Her mirror told her that she looked very charming in the soft cool colour. She went out onto the verandah in search of tea—Anastasia, she knew, had gone to play Mah Jongg with Miss Boggit; Antony was already there, drinking it—he and his music had resumed their occupation of the dining-table, where he sat with his cup at his elbow. He got up, however, when she appeared; called “Lai”, and ordered a fresh pot of tea for her. What a lovely sight she was, he thought, fresh from her rest, in that cool watery-looking frock. Impossible to wonder at Henry—impossible not to wonder at Charles! And he wondered himself, a little, what was going on behind that charming quiet exterior. Something, certainly—she looked extraordinarily happy.

  “Have a good sleep?” he asked.

  “Marvellous, thank you. Did you?”

  “No, as a matter of fact I didn’t—I worked. I wanted to finish this thing.”

  “And have you?”

  “Not quite, no.”

  “What exactly are you doing?” she asked, rising and coming over, cup in hand, to where he sat—she knew Antony composed, but had been a little shy of asking him about it. She was not on nearly such an intimate footing with him as she was with Anastasia; during all the time when she was still in England, after her marriage—the rather important time when the relationships of youth adjust themselves, and with any luck settle down into something more mature and permanent, Antony had already been in China. And though they had met again on an assumption of intimacy and ease, as cousins and old friends, it was actually an assumption—the reality had not been rebuilt yet.

  Antony began to explain to her about setting a tune in four parts. There was the air itself, which automatically went to the soprano, in most cases—that was simple. Next came the alto. “There are a lot of things you can do with the alto. Sometimes it comments on the soprano part, the air, and supplements it—or it argues with it, as it were. The Elizabethans often have quite acrimonious disputes between the alto and the soprano.”

  Rose laughed. And the tenor?

  Oh, the tenor—Antony waved his hand, in a large gesture. The tenor was extremely important. “You can do all sorts of things with it. It can be a sort of counterpart of the air, its opposite number, and meet it and marry it, as it were, and yet be whole in itself. Sometimes it takes the air from the soprano; that’s supposed to be a frightfully vulgar thing to do, but there are cases where it’s very beautiful—one or two. But one of the most satisfactory ways of using it is—how can I explain? Well, when the air itself is firmly sustained by the soprano and the bass, the alto and the tenor can as it were combine, and play about on the air between the other two, giving it the most incredibly lovely connections.”

  And the bass? Rose wanted to know.

  “Wait a bit—we haven’t done with the tenor yet. Do you know about descants?” Rose didn’t think she did, and Lydiard proceeded to explain that lovely device whereby a related melody floats above the actual air, carrying it off to unexpected heights and distances. “Often the tenor part is used for the descant, only taken above instead of below.”

  “A sort of Vox Angelica?” Rose asked, thinking of the organ in Tewkesbury Cathedral.

  “Something like that,” Antony said, smiling.

  And what about the bass, Rose again asked. “You said something just now about the bass and the soprano both carrying the air—does the bass ever have the actual tune?”

  This led Lydiard off into a long dissertation; he went right back to the old “figured bass”, and tried to make Rose understand how by the inversion of the chord, harmonies and variations had been elaborated out of the bass itself. She was not very good at taking it in. “Anyhow, it’s still, really, the rock on which the whole thing is built,” Lydiard said, finally. “And it’s the key to every sort of beauty and value in a setting. It ought to open fresh doors, and give new connections, new possibilities of every sort in the music—the bass asks questions, the sort of question you must answer for yourself.” He had got quite carried away—his dark thin face had an almost visionary expression, as if he were hearing divine harmonies, and yet that concentrated, mathematical look of one who faces a problem in number. Rose was interested—a little in what he said, a good deal in him and his interest. Though all this about figured basses and inverted chords was quite above her head, she wanted him to go on, so she asked him about the actual thing which he was doing. Lydiard went into the drawing-room, sat down at the upright Blüthner which he had carted down from Peking, which looked so elegant and solid among the rather gimcrack hired furniture of the bungalow, and played the tune of the hymn he was setting over to her, and then the parts, separately.

  “I can’t see that the bass has anything to do with the others,” Rose said, perching on the edge of a table and watching him, a cigarette in her hand.

  “Can’t you? Well, can you hear how the tenor fits?” He played the two themes, one with each hand.

  “No, they seem to me just two tunes,” she persisted.

  “Oh come, Rose, don’t be vacuous. Listen—no, this is all strange to you, of course; do you know the tune of any song? To sing it yourself, I mean?”

  Rose thought she knew the air of “Drink to me only”.

  “Of course you do—we used to sing it at Ildenham. Very well, sing that.” She did so, and he brought in the tenor of the setting, which does really match and marry the melody, making a richer whole. “Go on—second verse,” he said, when they came to “I would not change for thine”.

  “Do you see now?” he said, when they got to the end.

  “Yes, more.”

  “Still not quite? Well, you can sing the First Nowell, can’t you?” She nodded. “All right—no, run through the words first, or you’ll muddle it.” Between them they got the words of two verses. “Good—go ahead.”

  Rose went ahead, and again he added the tenor. On the four Nowells of the chorus it rises right up to the level of the soprano, carrying the music to heavenly heights—Antony had rather a good voice, and poured the splendid notes out with a will, while Rose held on with all her might to the air.

  “Oh, that was lovely,” she said, as they finished.

  “Yes—that shows you what a tenor part can be. Now we’ll use it for the descant. Come on; you’ll have to learn it, as I haven’t the music.” He tapped the notes out on the piano, and Rose stood by him, humming and repeating, till she had got it firm. “Now I shall sing the air, and you must put in the descant. But I must have it down a bit.” He hummed again, striking a note or two. “All right—I can manage that. Now there’s your note; are you ready?”

  Away they went, Rose faltering a little at first at the unaccustomed sound of the familiar melody below her; but she stuck to it, and in the second verse, feeling more sure, she sang out with vigour. Antony broke off, laughing.

  “No no, not like that, Rose—you’re simply bellowing! The descant wants just to float, lightly, lightly, above the rest—you’d drown a brass band! Remember your Vox Angelica—let it come from far away. Again.”

  They tried again, and gradually Rose got confidence enough to sing piano, and then pianissimo against the air. They went on then from song to song, Antony wishing at intervals that Anastasia was there to put in an alto. Rose became quite absorbed in the delicate difficul
ty of it, the intricacy of learning and holding a part, especially in the descants. When Henry Hargreaves came in about seven, to ask if she would bathe before dinner, she had almost a sense of being dragged back to earth from another sphere.

  “No, she doesn’t want to bathe,” said Lydiard firmly. “Here, Henry, you can sing tenor—I’ve heard you roaring away sometimes at the Zero Club; come and put in a tenor or two, and then I can take the bass, and show Rose what three parts sound like together.”

  “But you’ve got no music, my dear fellow,” objected Hargreaves, peering about.

  “No, but you can pick it up—besides you know ‘Drink to me only’ and ‘The First Nowell’. Come on.”

  Henry in turn had his part tapped out for him—hummed, checked, hummed again, and finally sang out with a remarkably pure and delicate tenor voice. It was a surprise to Rose Pelham—she had somehow expected him to bellow like a bull. They sang all three together then—first the carol and the song, and then whatever else she and Henry knew or half-knew—a rather hackneyed repertory, including, inevitably, “Sweet and Low” and “O who will o’er the downs so free”. Just before eight Anastasia came back, and Henry looked at his wrist-watch, said “My God!” and hurried away. Rose watched him go contentedly—it wasn’t for long. Then she turned to Antony, who was closing the piano.

  “It is fun doing that,” she said—“I feel quite stretched.”

  He looked at her. “Stretched?” he said, questioningly.

  “Yes, somehow. It takes you a little way up above yourself—not far, about a foot above your head.” She put up her bare arm, flattening her hand inwards, in a surprisingly beautiful gesture. “That’s where I believe part-singing happens!” she said gaily.

  Lydiard continued to look at her in surprise. At last—“I believe you’re right,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  The long hot days slid by, as summer days slide by at Pei-t’ai-ho. The Lydiards and Mrs. Pelham bathed in the mornings, sometimes from their own mat-shed at the foot of the green-clad bluff, sometimes from the ministerial bathing-boat at Legation Point, which boasted a diving-platform; in either case they sat about afterwards on the sand, wearing bath-robes to protect them from the merciless sun, and drank cherry brandy and ate ginger-snaps. Henry bathed wherever they did, or rather wherever Rose did. In the afternoons they lay and sweated on their beds, behind lowered lienzas; after tea they played tennis, or went for walks out into the green country behind the village—up to the Lotus Hills, the two curious tree-crowned knolls which rise above the coastal plain, or along the stony ridge that emerges like a reef from the green waving sea of maize and kaoliang. Anastasia did her shopping and her embroidery, and read some rather solid books, and wrote letters. Antony wrote away at his music. But Mrs. Pelham apparently did nothing but bathe and walk and play tennis. She bathed sometimes as much as three times a day: before breakfast, the usual prolonged morning performance at eleven, and again before dinner. This mindless physical life of sun and water suited her extraordinarily—her parchment-coloured limbs turned a deeper shade, a warm stain of colour crept into her face; her eyes shone. When she came up from the beach before dinner, her rubber cap dangling from her hand, her dampened hair swinging loose, and perched in her green bathing-suit on the verandah railing, sipping a cocktail, she made Antony, in spite of himself, think not so much of a Luca Signorelli boy as of the old legends, the Undines and Aphrodites who rose in beauty from the waters.

  Antony, in fact, altogether began to notice Mrs. Pelham more after Anastasia’s talk with him about her, and the afternoon of singing which followed it. He had been struck by her remark about part-singing. It seemed to indicate that she was aware of an aspect of things that he had not credited her with being aware of. Also she had quite a handy little soprano—not large, and not properly trained, but clear and sweet, and an almost uncanny knack of learning by heart—if he played a tune over to her three or four times, she could sing it with perfect accuracy, and apparently for ever; she never seemed to forget. This was useful and pleasant, and they sang a good deal. He tried out some of his settings on her—sung in another voice, he got a sharper sense of them. Antony was not a professional musician, and knew that he was not quite good enough ever to become one—besides, he had to make at least half his living, and that is not easily done by music. But music was the world in which he lived by preference—it seemed to him more orderly, more habitable and more beautiful than most other worlds.

  He was not an escapist about it. He was quite good at daily life and human beings—but he was good at them in his own way. He was too contented with his music, and with Anastasia’s company and care of him, to bother much about society as such; that Lydiard contentment with Lydiards operated strongly in his case. And though he could not be said to shun women, he certainly did not bother much about them, either. There are men, and Antony was one of them, to whom women are not important as women, but merely as persons; he did not feel the need for female society particularly, and very few women were as satisfactory, as persons, as his sister Anastasia. Where he was drawn to anyone, man or woman, he put his own peculiar thoroughness into the relationship. He was drawn, by some curious attraction of opposites, to Henry Hargreaves, and dealt with that relationship in a way which was not only thorough, but peculiar to the point of being comic.

  But Antony also held very strong views about the folly, indeed wickedness, of letting people’s lives run to waste for lack of a certain amount of thought and honesty—and where his friends were concerned he was something of a missionary about this. He went further here than Anastasia; the missionary spirit did not flame very high in her small round body. Perhaps for that reason, her judgements of people were apt to be clearer than his; they were remorselessly clear. But this feature of her character was concealed, till one knew her very well, by a quite immense vagueness about the details of everyday life. She would come into a room with some definite intention, to deliver a message or to take away a faded vase of flowers; but the sight of some book, or some new aspect striking her of the person she was to speak to, or merely some sudden thought of her own would deflect her intention, and she would poise on a chair-arm or the window-sill, look vaguely about, break into a gentle humming, and go singing away—her mission, whatever it was, still unfulfilled. For this reason faded flowers were frequently to be seen on her tables, letters and money were strewn about everywhere, and messages, in her household, frequently remained undelivered. She showed such a complete gentleness and vagueness in all ordinary contacts and arrangements that when people heard her, for the first time, speak one of her inner judgements, concise, penetrating and relentless, they had something of a shock.

  It had surprised Lydiard a good deal to learn that his cousin had not confided much more fully in Anastasia. The bare facts, as thrown out by Rose at the beginning, Asta had of course reported to him at once; he was sorry, and felt something ought probably to be done about it, but he happened to be very busy just then, and anyhow Rose was Asta’s “pidgin” (i.e. business)—he supposed that she would gradually go into it all, and find out how matters stood. He had imagined this typically Lydiard process to be well in train, and it struck him, now that his attention had been focused on Rose, as slightly odd that it was not. She was rather going it with H.H., too; they were always together, and Henry’s state was perfectly evident, must be perfectly evident to Rose. In fact Lydiard, in his turn, began to wonder what Rose was up to.

  The fact was that Rose Pelham herself was beginning to wonder why she had not been more open with Anastasia, and to wish that she had. It had been a succession of tiny hesitancies, slowly piling up, and gradually making a barrier of past silences which it required some effort to break down. Actually Rose was a shy person about herself, and this shyness had been at war with her natural longing for someone to confide in. On the journey out she had looked forward thirstily to the relief of pouring the whole wretched business out to Asta, and getting the comfort of her warm and generous u
nderstanding. But when she got to Peking, after that one bald statement, she had not found it so easy to go on. She was perhaps too sore and bruised. Then she began to enjoy herself, a little—the interest and beauty of Peking itself, the excitement of being in China, among real Chinese, raised her spirits, and she shrank childishly from disturbing this newly-won enjoyment by raking up her own misery. Also she had a slight, a very slight fear of her cousin’s remorseless lucidity being applied, not to the past, but to her own attitude towards it. Rose was quite aware of carrying moral and intellectual guns of very light calibre compared to Anastasia’s, and she had an uncomfortable feeling that all the psychological business, on which for the moment she was trying to re-build her inner life, would not go down too well with Asta. She was of course perfectly well aware of Anastasia’s previous relation to Charles, and in some ways this had always made things easier—she counted absolutely on her cousin’s impartiality. But all these things together had induced a subconscious obstructiveness, which made her put off from day to day what she called having it all out.

  That had been before Henry came into it—and now that he had come in, it made things a good deal more difficult. She was distinctly self-conscious about Henry where her cousins were concerned, and wondered what they thought of it all. That they must notice a certain amount, and therefore think something, she realised quite well. Though she and Henry were pretty thorough about pretexts for their various afternoon walks and evening strolls, it was impossible to camouflage the fact that they spent a great deal of time together. If only she had got all the business about her and Charles tidied up with Asta before Henry began! Because by now she was beginning to want rather acutely to discuss Henry with Asta, and she couldn’t very well do that until she had done the other.

  She came to want this still more about a week after the day when she had first sung with Antony. She had been invited, as had Captain Hargreaves, to what the latter described as “a gramophone hop” at the Betettis’. The Betettis were a lively Italian couple in the Salt, who had a large and rather unusually comfortable bungalow about half a mile along the bluff towards West End: they assembled numbers of young people around them, gave good drinks, and had the floor of their verandah waxed for dancing, an uncommon luxury at Pei-t’ai-ho. Rose and Henry had arranged to go separately, but she was to pretext a headache from the sun—she was playing in a tennis tournament at the Club in the afternoon—and leave early; and Henry, since he lived in the same direction, with the Boggits at Legation Point, thought that he could reasonably volunteer to see her home, and they could have an hour together on the deserted path along the bluff before going in. Henry usually thought out these small stratagems, at which he was a past master; the new reckless side of Rose was generally amused by them, but sometimes, in a sudden revulsion of feeling, she found them odious and humiliating.