by Bel Mooney
And, pressed through the winter, immortal shall prove.
It shall last, the forget-me-not blue!’
The American postgraduate who had lifted up the catalogue volume for Conrad, slouched by. He was feeling ill-tempered, corroded by disappointment, having heard that morning that his almost-completed thesis on ideas of the dance in seventeenth century poetry, was duplicated in a newly-published Harvard tome. His girlfriend had sought to console him with the thought that nothing can be new, but had failed. Now he glanced sideways at the old man in the crumpled, old-fashioned cream linen jacket, and recognised him. For a second he stopped, and stared at the expression on his face, a smile at once of such wide radiance and such acute pain, that it transfigured Conrad Hartley from a shambling old man into an image of fierce, proud beauty. And the young man walked on, cheered, despite himself. He felt convinced that the old boy must be a scholar, who at last had managed to discover something truly original.
It was the evening of the Winterstoke Village Concert, and Daphne Ryan had decorated the little hall with foliage from her own garden, and multi-coloured flowers supplied by Jack Ainslie from the gardens all around. The schoolchildren had mounted a display at the rear of the hall: ‘Winterstoke Old And New’ said the card pinned to the front of a paper-covered table covered with old photographs, open exercise books, and drawings of vintage cars and tractors.
Next to it was a trestle covered with coffee cups for the interval, and plates of plain biscuits covered with shiny, transparent plastic wrappings. Though the concert was not to begin until seven, the hall was already half full when Jack and Margaret arrived at six-thirty; old ladies crammed the first three rows, their handbags on their knees. Sheila Simmonds sat in an empty row, having scattered articles of possession over all the chairs, and warned off anyone who approached with the news that she was saving the seats for friends. At the very front, low benches for the children were the source of a steadily increasing volume of noise; high-pitched laughter, whispers, small scuffles amongst boys in jeans and tee shirts, and the premature rustling of sweet papers. Pete Orton was on the door, sitting at a card table which bore a tin box, a book of tickets, and the usual assortment of raffle prizes: talcum powder, sweet wine, boxes of bath cubes, a pair of tights, a gift ashtray in a box, bearing the words ‘A Present from Paignton’, chocolates, a sponge cake decorated with sifted icing sugar, and an enormous box of fruit, sheathed in cellophane.
‘Ooh, I feel really nervous,’ Margaret said, clearing her throat and picking at the lace on her sleeves.
‘Don’t be silly, Mags, you’ve done it every year, and it’s only the same people,’ Jack replied, looking happily round the room.
‘She told me she’d come,’ Margaret said.
‘It’ll do her good,’ he nodded. Increasingly now they spoke aloud to each other cryptically, as if continuing a silent, mental conversation that had been going on for a long time; no need to explain details or to supply names any more.
Once a year Jack Ainslie transformed himself from the quiet, almost-mournful figure familiar to everyone in the village, into a performer, a joker, a clown. Each year the volume of laughter increased, not so much because of the quality of his script (jokes culled laboriously from his collection of paperbacks, and scribbled down from the television) but due to the incongruity, which grew as he grew in stature in the eyes of those around him, of his appearance. He swapped his usual tweeds and corduroys for a jacket of dogstooth check, pale grey trousers with flared bottoms, and a red bow tie. But he did not arrive in his ‘costume’; with a fine sense of theatrical effect he brought it in a carrier bag, and went backstage now to change.
Gradually the hall filled up. Brian Simmonds arrived noisily with a group of friends, and Sheila’s mouth tightened, but they took their places around her with loud exclamations about her appearance (the pink trouser suit was new; she had bought it in a sale in Newtonstowe because it matched last year’s high-heeled sandals), so that she was mollified despite herself, her ingrained sense of injury dispelled. She jumped up with an air of authority as Enid Ryan was led into the room, leaning heavily on her walking frame and dragging her feet with painful slowness. As the doctor’s receptionist Sheila sometimes liked to lend to herself the status of a nurse, even though she averted her gaze from farmers’ small injuries and children’s runny noses. ‘Let me give you a hand, Miss Ryan,’ she said with respect, leading the old woman to the front of the hall to the reserved seat near the piano. All around greetings were being called, for though people might see each other every day, the ordinariness of that contact was dispelled by this event; the shared excitement of the Evening Out which made men and women view even their neighbours anew.
When Eleanor entered the hall there was a tremor of excitement: she could sense it and it embarrassed her. She had encountered Conrad at the entrance, so that they entered together, and found themselves being led down the central aisle as a pair, the object of little smiles and waves. ‘Evening, Mrs Anderson’, ‘Are you feeling better now, Mrs Anderson?’, ‘Nice to see you out and about again, Mrs Anderson,’ they said, and she smiled first on one side then the other, tentatively, then with more assurance.
A small table had been placed on the floor to the right of the stage, and covered in a dark red chenille cloth. At this sat the rector, his hair slicked back from a centre parting, and wearing a shiny black evening suit that looked as if it had belonged to his grandfather. In fact Daphne Ryan had taken it from the chest in the attic that still contained her father’s uniform and some of his clothes.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen!’ he bellowed at last, when the hall was full, and Pete Orton had closed the door, ‘I give you welcome to this evening of festivities. Your eyes and ears will be delighted, your hearts will be touched, and old and young, you will go home veritably transfixed by the talent we shall parade before your eyes in this our village Variety Show!’
‘I knew they’d have to get that in somewhere,’ Eleanor murmured.
‘Oooh, isn’t he good?’ the woman behind her murmured to her neighbour. ‘You wouldn’t have thought it, to see him in church, would you?’
‘And first, let me proudly present to you, the greatest trumpet of them all, Mr Adrian Wright’ The publican’s surname was pronounced in a drawn-out wail, and on the ‘t’, the Reverend Dunn’s saliva was visible in the lights from the stage, a fine spray that made the children in the front row laugh and duck.
‘Well, he’s certainly entering into the spirit,’ Eleanor whispered dryly to Conrad. ‘You’d almost imagine he’d taken some.’ Her voice was drowned by the publican’s harsh trumpet; Conrad thought it best to nod in agreement all the same. He smiled his simple smile at her, noticing the lines around her mouth when it opened, wordlessly. The school headmistress had taken her place at the piano, and Margaret Ainslie stood timidly centre stage, in pale blue, and white lace, but Conrad did not hear the first unsure bars of ‘Summertime’; he was thinking, for the first time, how brave Eleanor seemed now, making this concert her first step into public life alone. He thought she must be moved by all that she saw and heard, as he was.
Ranslavia lived many years alone, as he had; Conrad was consumed with frustration now, at his inability to find out more about the man who had written the poem for his Alice. The house he lived in, the room in which he worked, the books he read, whether he ever spoke to his son again-all this he had revolved in his mind all day, lying in his bed exhausted by the journey of the day before. Again and again he read phrases from Ranslavia’s Introduction, copied into his notebook, and ‘The Forget-Me-Not’. It no longer seemed poor verse to him; already it possessed the efficacy of a sacred text.
‘One of these mornings
You’re going to rise up singing.
Gonna spread your wings,
Fly away to the sky …’
Margaret Ainslie had a pretty, light soprano; David Anderson had rarely heard it rise above the noise of the vacuum cleaner, but when once he did he made her
blush by switching off the machine and voicing enthusiasm. Conrad listened now as well; and it was as if the delicate sound threaded its way into his subconscious, weaving together the strands of his thought; ‘And who will fly away to the sky? None of us; we shall fly away to the earth, I’m afraid, me and Ranslavia, his son, my daughter; but at least he had children, and from those children came Alice … the blue, the colour of the sky, the colour of the flower… my sweet little Alice-blue gown. Yet what a comforting song this is; the idea that nothing will harm us with Daddy and Mummy standing by, as if two mortal people had such power, in the face of it all, and yet why not believe it for a while? It does no harm …’
They were clapping Margaret. Jack Ainslie was half visible in the wings, his huge hands beating each other, his face split in two by pride. Men whistled and stamped their feet; the children set up an exaggerated cheering which made Margaret flustered and pleased. She followed with Tonight’ from West Side Story, and nobody minded that she faltered on the high notes, nor that the piano parted company with her at the beginning of the second verse. They did not mind either, that Ray Tilley twice forgot the words of his first monologue, and had to be prompted in a loud voice by Jack Ainslie, who had himself lost the place, so that Ray stood in agonised silence as the little titters of the children rustled all around him. The children were silenced by the ferocity of his delivery of ‘Albert and the Lion’, cowering with wide eyes as he leaned forward vengefully and hissed, ‘And swallered the litt’l laaad whoooooollle.’
Eleanor laughed, feeling her tightness dissolve. Nobody was looking at her now: she had taken her place here, and could imagine that all was as it had been before, with Brian Simmons breathing beer and whistling, just the other side of the aisle; and Mrs Hughes-Haven, from Sealsham Holt, ready to draw the raffle and already wearing on her features the large, pleased look of country gentry who still possess, in their Queen Anne houses and Georgian rectories, the particular power of feudal beneficence, rewarded by deference and gossip. Her seat had been reserved, as Eleanor’s had; Daphne Ryan had a conviction about hierarchies which would have been echoed by most inhabitants of Winterstoke. It meant too, that although most people dreaded meeting Alex Cater in the High Street or the pub, and suffering his wartime reminiscences, the farm worker and his wife were honoured to have him sit beside them at the concert because, after all, he had been an officer in the ‘Raff.’
A sketch, called by the rector ‘A terrifying, titillating, towering Victorian melodrama’, had the audience laughing helplessly, bending over, repeating lines to each other, pointing out familiar faces beneath the twirling moustaches and bonnets. Daphne stood at the back of the hall with her arms folded, grateful to have persuaded local members of Newtonstowe drama club to do it, even though (strictly speaking) the concert was traditionally given by Winterstoke residents only. ‘Hmmm, I’m not sure about this,’ Eleanor was whispering to Conrad, ‘although I suppose they come from round here, roughly speaking. The man playing the Squire bought Sealsham Manor last year; I think he’s a businessman.’ Somebody behind hissed ‘Shhh’, not seeing who was talking, and Eleanor was silent again, affronted. ‘How can they laugh at this rubbish?’ she thought angrily, twisting her hands in her lap. ‘Oh God, can I stay here? Can I go on coming to this thing, year after year, until I have to be helped into the hall like Enid, grateful that somebody, anybody, will look after me? (‘Go, and never darken my doorstep …’ said the Squire) Living alone in a poky cottage, Paul ringing up with yet another excuse not to come down, friends dying … Oh David, you were right, but how could you be so selfish as to leave me here alone, surrounded by all this?’
She did not clap, but nobody noticed except Conrad, who shouted ‘Bravo’ to compensate, his voice lost in the tumult of applause. ‘Good, weren’t they?’ said a man behind them. ‘They were too!’ replied his wife. ‘And really professional. Could be on the telly, most of them.’
At that moment, a hundred and fifty miles away, Paul Anderson switched off his television set, draped a grey sweatshirt around his shoulders, because it was a warm evening, and went out. The weekend loomed, lengthened by the Bank Holiday, and he cursed the fact that he had made no plans, preoccupied as he had been with the escape from Winterstoke. He walked aimlessly; the streets were full of couples walking hand in hand, and crowds of youths, and middle-aged couples entering restaurants for their Friday night out. Smells of spices hung on the air outside Indian restaurants, making Paul’s mouth water. The flat had been depressing to return to: empty cupboards and fridge, an unmade bed, and the bewildering sense that a stranger had lived there before, one who had no knowledge of death.
He stopped by a pub, smelling the beer, hearing the noise of a juke box from inside which almost drowned, with its tinny rhythm, the hum of conversation. He pushed open the door. The bar was crowded; at first he could not find a space, but stood in the middle of the room, amongst the couples and the crowds, wishing that he smoked cigarettes, for the act of lighting one would give his thin arms and hands a purpose. In the corner near the juke box two youths stood playing a fruit machine, and the steady ‘crash, rattle, pause, crash, rattle, pause’ conflicted with the beat of the pop song, so that Paul wondered why everyone in that room did not leap up screaming, blocking ears, fleeing from the savagery of the sound. But they drank, talked, listened, flirted, laughed, ate crisps, ordered more, argued about whose turn it was to pay (wanting to, for on Friday night it is possible and pleasant to be generous), and encircled Paul as the sea surrounds an island, gradually wearing away the shore, yet restoring it too.
After a few minutes he managed to elbow his way to a corner of the bar and order a lager. Cradling it, as if in defence, he stared around at the faces, white, open-mouthed, that hung about the room like masks. Someone who should be alive is dead … The juke box sobbed another song, the door banged, loud laughter all around; and how can I bear this going on? that was what he thought.
It was when someone asked him for a light, and he half-turned to apologise for his lack of matches, that he saw the man across the room, a shock of recognition chilling him suddenly. It was a half-back view, but the shoulders, the way he carried his slightly angular body, and above all the thickness of the greying hair at the nape of his neck … all of it was his father. For a wild second he thought he would rush across to him, knocking people aside so that a torrent of beer, whiskey, gin, lager, and acid red wine would spill in a careless torrent of happy inebriation, swilling him towards the man who had gone, but now returned – his father. Then the figure turned, and he saw that it was not David. Similar age, same build, but a softer, fleshier face … two seconds later he wondered how he could ever have made the mistake.
He crouched over the bar once more, finishing one glass, then a second, and a third. Someone who should be alive is dead … and it was all so careless, so wasteful, like the pool of lager on the surface of the bar, spilt. Moments passed. He was waiting.
‘You look as if you’ve lost ten pounds and found a parking ticket. Can I buy you a drink?’
Lines around the eyes, thick, greying hair, wide shoulders held rather apologetically in a manner that would change to a stoop later … Paul recognised the man. But the face, that softer, fleshier look, he recognised it too. The face was smiling at him, waiting for his reply, yet with no anxiety; there was a confidence about the man’s expression which filled Paul with a mixture of shame and relief.
‘OK; it was a lager. Thanks.’
‘You look as if you’re by yourself.’
‘I am.’
The suit was well-cut, Paul noticed, and the tie silk; he looked like a businessman, but of course, it would all be discovered, as all things are, after the questions are asked and the replies given, and the actions taken according to ancient rules. ‘Cheers,’ said the man, holding out his glass of neat whiskey. ‘Oh … cheers,’ Paul replied, and with a sickening sense of inevitability, he raised his glass.
It was Enid Ryan’s moment. She had been u
ncompromising in her choice of Mozart’s Sonata in C Minor. (‘Isn’t it rather long, dear?’ Daphne had asked, hearing her practise.) The Allegro made people in the audience nod their heads with the sheer chirpiness of the music, but not for long: the notes became almost frantic and the movement came to a sudden stop, as if all that liveliness had been a sham. Then Enid bent her head towards the keyboard (she had given up cursing the poor church hall piano, and no longer worried about its tone) and moved into the Adagio, so that the heads were stilled, the music flowing around them with majestic repose, making even the children on the benches keep still, just for a while. Enid’s interpretation was severe, almost warning in tone, and this mood was intensified when she came to the magnificent, puzzling finale. It was not a dance, not so happy, but a ritual cavorting in the face of destiny. (‘Isn’t it rather long, dear?’, and yes, Enid had thought, flexing her fingers and raging against their growing stiffness, the encroachment upon her skill.) The left hand’s dark resonance plunged downwards, as if in argument with the angry torrent from the right; then the music stopped, hesitated, before continuing its agitation. It was as if someone were stepping out into the darkness, wondering what might be there waiting … then drawing back fearfully into the light, the familiar remembered pain. There was anguish in the drawing-back, not relief; for it is (Enid thought) merely a postponement, not an escape.
Standing at the back of the hall, her arms folded and her mind on the raffle, Daphne heard the mysterious halts in the flow of music, tense with expectancy and fear, and wondered at the energy of her sister’s body over the keyboard. Enid seemed so young, frenetic and fluid again. It worried Daphne, who could not hear what lay beneath the light, formal pattern of notes, so failed to understand her sister’s absorption, and imagined that the pauses were wrong, that Enid had lost her way. ‘It’ll tire her, too much for her, I won’t ask her to do it next year,’ she thought, as the torrent broke again, and Enid’s face was contorted with an expression of intense concentration. (Rather long … rather long … long, long, long, …) Enid could always hear the human voice singing out within the bleak flow of Mozart’s music; and Conrad was listening to it too, moved by the passion of the outburst.