2002 - Wake up

by Tim Pears; Prefers to remain anonymous

  Refreshments This Way →

  They took turns to hold the posts steady while I thumped the tops with a sledgehammer: neither of them could quite raise the hammer with ease and I certainly wasn’t going to trust them swinging it. I was reminded how weak a boy is, how enervated by adolescence, until all of a sudden the testosterone kicks in, muscles are defined, and one feels oneself to be strong. A young man, at last. And after that you think you’ll get ever stronger, this is something you assume, and you will for a while, for ten, twenty years. Until one day you’ll go to lift a familiar weight—a sack of spuds, say—and find it’s a heave, a strain to accomplish. In middle age you experience again the weediness of puberty.

  §

  I bathed and changed into black trousers, anemone-blue silk shirt and jacket and was looking out of our bedroom window at the garden when my wife came up from behind and hugged me. “It looks great,” she said, though I could tell she was leaning her head against my back, and probably had her eyes closed, too. “Everything’s ready. Beryl’s here.”

  Our cleaning lady was going to supervise the catering operation. Lily wasn’t quite naive enough to leave our nephews and their fellows entirely in charge of themselves.

  “How’s our boy?” I asked.

  “I just fed Jacob,” she said. “He’s gone to sleep. Sonia’s here to keep an eye on him.”

  “You’re happy to leave him?” I asked. “The first time.”

  “I’ll sit in a pew by the door,” she said. “I’ve got your bleeper. It’ll be fine. I don’t want to miss it, especially the Chopin.”

  “I know. Well, let’s stroll over.”

  “Hey,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’m glad you’re not wearing a tie.”

  I hadn’t thought about it. “You don’t want me to, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’m OK like this?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You’re happy I’m not in cords and tweed? You know, I said I didn’t want to go rural.”

  Lily laughed, shaking her head.

  “You look stunning,” I told her. She was wearing her Nicole Farhi black slacks, a charcoal cardigan, and she’d painted her face. My wife does the abracadabra women do, this metamorphosis into painted elegance. Lily smiled graciously at my compliment. She kissed me, lightly, so as not to disturb her lipstick.

  “You know I love you,” she said. I think she maybe even believed it.

  “We’re doing OK, aren’t we?” I said.

  We walked hand in hand round to the church. People greeted us, I was surprised at how many folk we’ve got to know here already. The choirmaster was at the door, presiding in a regal way, and why not? He deserves it. The Rice-Wallingtons were there, the old moneys in the village, decrepit aristocrats: they both look worn out by the effort of a lifetime spent affecting aloofness. Jeff Flyme, who calls himself a farmer, though I can’t see him on a tractor, somehow, with his young partner, his catamite really, Shay, a chap with whom my wife falls into instantly profound conversations whenever she sees him.

  The Rector, Justin, caught my eye, and winked. I was surprised to see him—and his wink included acknowledgement of this—because I know music doesn’t do much for him, and this little parish is one of six he covers, so he was under no obligation to come. He wasn’t wearing a tie, either, never mind a dog-collar. I like Justin. He’s barely thirty, and he seems to be one of a generation of whom even the clerics seem to feel no need to profess faith in an outmoded religion. But, Justin told me, the church still provides not only a social function, but also a legitimate forum to discuss ethical issues; it’s just that today priests need no longer justify opinion with, “Jesus tells us this,” or “According to scripture.”

  Last time we met, Justin collared me and said, “Tell me, what is it with this GM thing?”

  I blanched. “What do you know about it?” I asked him.

  “Only what I read,” he said. “But you’re in the food business, aren’t you? These suicide seeds. This terminator gene. I mean, is it really going to feed the starving, or what do you think?”

  §

  Of course there were many strangers amongst the audience. As they filled the pews I sat down near the front next to Jo Bingle, Lily’s best new friend in the village, a young spinster who has her own shop in town selling funky kitchen equipment, and a cottage along the lane here with a stable and paddocks; she’d offered a field for tonight’s car parking. Jo asked where Lily was and I nodded over my shoulder.

  “By the door, just in case,” I told her. “The baby. She said to me to sit here and say hello. How are the horses?”

  “Pony. Fine.”

  “You looking forward to this?”

  “Of course. It’s the occasion as much as the music, isn’t it?”

  “I guess,” I agreed. “The Chopin should be good.”

  It was almost seven-thirty. I closed my eyes, let my mind listen to the sing-song cacophony and the peculiar hushed bustle of secular concert-goers in a country church. I inhaled the scent that Jo was wearing, concentrated my attention towards the barely discernible contact of our beclothed thighs—my trousers, her skirt and glossy tights—and idly wondered whether we’ll ever have sex together. Not vividly enough to encumber myself with a substantial hard-on; just, you know, with that semeny feeling flowing to and fro in my prick.

  Then there was a sinking towards silence, as people’s voices drained away: I opened my eyes, to see the choirmaster mounting the chancel step. After a short introduction he gave us Bjorn Lungstrom, who entered from the vestry to enthusiastic applause. Justin, I fancied, must have envied him this reception.

  Lungstrom played our Bechstein beautifully, so far as I could tell. I mean, I’m no judge. I had a good view and, to be honest, my appreciation was as much of his athletic as his musical achievement. His feet drew my attention: stepping on and off the pedals with what looked like involuntary, reflex movements. Self-obsessed little feet. Their hiccuping dance seemed to bear scant relation to the music.

  Lungstrom started with a piano transcription of Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain. I’d read the programme notes, I knew the quadruple forte and daring harmonic figures were inspired by hellish Russian fairy tales. But what it made me think of were silent movies—whose piano accompaniments were of course prompted by just such nineteenth-century music as this. As if, due to my ignorance, Mussorgsky ripped off the music he inspired, when I closed my eyes I saw blurry black and white characters running around and over-acting furiously. Keystone Cops, The Perils of Pauline.

  That’s what I do in concerts. I let the music lead me into whatever daydreaming narratives it will, conjure whatever images appear. I envy people who can concentrate on the music itself. Sometimes the music virtually evaporates from my awareness altogether and does no more than seal me off within an unrelated stream of thought. So it was after the Mussorgsky. Bjorn Lungstrom began playing Schumann, and my mind drifted.

  §

  When Lungstrom finished the first half of the programme I glanced round and saw, through a storm of applauding people, Lily slip out. Feeling no need to hurry myself, I strolled home in the midst of the procession, as if I too needed to follow signs on the stakes I myself had embedded. Delegation is one of the first rules of leadership. Once an event is organised, you sit back and relax; you don’t fret. Worry helps no one. Confidence reassures.

  To my surprise, a light rain had begun falling. Scattered individuals put up umbrellas, or pulled a small square of transparent plastic from a pocket and kept unfolding it until they had one of those superlite macs to put over their clothes; I’m always impressed by people who are prepared for unexpected weather. One or two ladies held programmes above their hairdos. Most of us, however, put up with damp head and shoulders as we ambled in the warm evening around to my house. Now that we were walking, I was struck as I had not been in the church by how many of the audience were elderly, stuttering along lea
ning on walking sticks or companions’ arms.

  Everything was under control in the garden. My wife had had the bright idea of persuading the lads to adopt some kind of uniform by suggesting they wear their Manchester United replica shirts. There were two or three dissenters who vowed they wouldn’t be seen dead in strawberry-coloured red, so they wore their own teams’ colours. The boys were all impeccably polite. I was amazed to see this Chelsea hooligan help a decrepit gentleman to a seat and that Newcastle lout guide ladies in the direction of our lavatories, as well as a phalanx of Red Devils doling out the booze and the fruit efficiently. You could tell it went through everyone’s mind: What a novelty, these pleasant yobs. You have to hand it to Lily.

  Spotting Jeff Flyme smoking by a rose bed, I grabbed a glass of wine and went and cadged a fag off him. We chatted, but I let Jeff’s words float by and savoured instead the wine and smoke succeeding each other on my palate; the alcohol and the nicotine sneaking into my bloodstream, along the arteries, around my brain, while two hundred and fifty guests stood on our lawn, partaking of our hospitality, eating deliciously ripe strawberries with castor sugar and whipped cream. The rain ceased altogether, and the sky cleared.

  §

  Having successfully breastfed our boy upstairs, Lily rejoined me, and we returned to the church. Again the slow shuffle along the lane, like a column of refugees seeking sanctuary.

  Bjorn Lungstrom (having, it was whispered, spent the interval meditating in the vestry) began the second half of the programme with Chopin’s Piano Sonata N°3 in B Minor, op 58. “The first great B Minor Sonata of the Romantic era,” Lily had told me earlier, “but also Chopin’s last great work.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “The defining monument of the Romantic imagination.”

  I tried to concentrate. It was pretty wonderful. Like that surprise you get at Hamlet or Macbeth as you’re reminded how many epigrams in current usage come from Shakespeare: whatever thematic integrity Chopin might achieve, almost every phrase conjured a new, exemplary stream of gorgeous notes.

  My attention was distracted when I glanced at the programme and saw that Chopin died at thirty-nine. Six years younger than me—and, according to my wife, he’d completed his best work five years earlier than that. All of them—Mozart, Chopin, Schubert—died younger than I am now. Schumann had already gone insane.

  I watched Lungstrom play: I could just see his hands from where I was sitting. He wasn’t reading the music, no, he knew it by heart and he was inside this sonata of Chopin’s. He had the courage of a swimmer who plunges into a water-filled quarry from a steep rock face, knowing that to get out again he’s got to swim right across to the other side. So Lungstrom in striking the first note dived into the music, and there was no turning back: he was trapped inside the sonata and the only escape was to play his way out of it. The music possessed Lungstrom. And it possessed us, too, but Lungstrom would free us all. If only he could remember the notes and play them in the right way, the most expressive, the most liberating. It looked to me like he could, this young Norwegian. He was magnificent. The more I watched him, the more handsome he seemed to be.

  Which is something I’ve noticed before: music makes musicians beautiful.

  At this point in my musings—still in the first movement of the sonata—I became aware of a noise behind me, the sound of human movement. A minute later, the same; and then again. I glanced around and saw Mrs Grane, the church-organist, walking out. Then, over here, someone coughed. Soon, over there, another person stirred. A moment later a chap sitting in the pew in front of me lurched forwards and sideways and propelled himself to the side aisle and out: he was bent double, discreet as possible, true, but still it seemed extraordinarily rude. Surely Lungstrom wasn’t that bad? Maybe he was. Or maybe the aficionados amongst us had been spoiled by recordings, by listening to too much perfection, to the Ashkenazys and Brendels in a favourite armchair with speakers situated just acoustically so. In clean, digital surround sound.

  I don’t know enough about music. Not nearly enough. Maybe Lungstrom was murdering Chopin’s Third Piano Sonata, he was committing some cardinal sin that the true connoisseurs amongst us recognised. I didn’t know. We’ve got used to being a placid, passive audience, haven’t we?

  In the days of early modernism people cared enough about art to throw insults and objects at musicians; members of Stravinsky’s orchestra hid behind their cellos and chairs. Perhaps a revival was taking place right here, right now, music lovers stalking out of our village church in high dudgeon. The rest of us philistines were lapping up what was actually an insane affront from this Nordic nutcase engrossed in his playing a few yards in front of me. Maybe he wasn’t even playing Chopin any more! Maybe he’d gone off into his own lunatic doodles along the keyboard!

  Lungstrom was seated at the piano side on to us, and so possibly unaware of what was happening in his audience. But it continued: the piano notes interspersed, interrupted, by people pushing their way out of crowded pews, by urgent footsteps across the stone floor. Did Lungstrom realise people were leaving? Maybe he did, but it didn’t matter, he couldn’t stop. He knew he had to carry on playing that piece of music note by perfect note in order to release us all from that church. If people seemed to be leaving, that could only be an illusion, one devilishly created, precisely to tempt him to stop.

  Next thing I knew, Jo beside me put a hand over her mouth. I looked at her and saw her eyes, above the horizontal fingers, were horrified. Like a silent-movie heroine. Had Lungstrom just played some infernal note? She was sat at the end of our pew, beside the centre aisle. She sprang out of her seat, and I watched her scuttle down the aisle and out of the door, which was no longer being opened and closed between individual exits: too many people were leaving; from all corners of the church they were rushing out. Lily got up as Jo reached the door, and left with her.

  It struck me suddenly that perhaps there was something wrong in the atmosphere of the church, a gas leak or some such. I sniffed the air, but detected nothing.

  Lungstrom was still playing, still seemingly unaware of the anarchy erupting in his steadily depleting audience. He did stop, but only to take a deep breath, before embarking upon the second movement, the Scherzo. His fingers fluttered across the keys.

  At this point I decided to act. The capacity for leadership involves a readiness to take command of a situation, whatever it is. One recognises that leadership is required. I got up and walked, straight-backed, down the aisle. Even during those few seconds another two or three people rose from various pews and, still attempting to do so unobtrusively, bent double and fled.

  Outside, dusk had fallen. What is called in cinema, I believe, the magic hour was drawing towards its end: that uncanny light after the sun has gone down, but before darkness settles. I saw Lily in the middle of the graveyard, and I hurried over. She was kneeling beside Jo, with a soothing hand on her back and words in her ear. Jo was bent forward and vomiting the reddened contents of her stomach on to the ground.

  I looked around. Mrs Rice-Wallington tottered out of the church, clutching her guts, stumbled across the grass, reached a gravestone and collapsed behind it. Justin, the Rector, came dashing out of the porch, unbuckling his trouser belt as he ran. When he had, evidently, to stop, he stopped, pulled his trousers down and squatted, and gave himself over to the diarrhoea that poured from his arse. Old Major Rice-Wallington followed his wife outside, reached a clear piece of grass, lay down, curled up on his side, and with a sad groan both threw up from one end and let the seat of his white flannel trousers fill at the other.

  Strangers followed them. I wanted to help but I hardly knew where to start, beyond calling for an ambulance on my mobile. Having done so, I stood and stared. Some people managed to crawl behind gravestones to shit or spew with some semblance of privacy, but most, way beyond caring, were content to reach an open space, which became ever harder to do for those still rushing out of the church. A bottleneck built up along the path.
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  A pretty young girl, seven or eight years old, took one neat step to the side of the path, pulled down her knickers and quickly crouched, her skirt falling discreetly around her. Shay, Jeff Flyme’s partner, floated past—almost over—other people like a sleepwalker, then was promptly jerked sideways like a puppet and let loose a stream of red projectile vomit over the prone, semi-naked body of a large, elderly lady. I registered that the body was Mrs Crane’s, the organist, at about the same nanosecond it struck me that it was the strawberries. Arsenic, as an illegal preservative, is still sprayed, in some parts of the world, by unscrupulous bandit growers. On fruit delivered by one spiv of a supplier called Bob Canman. On the strawberries that those lazy, insolent, useless little bastards had, once my back was turned, not bothered to wash.

  The worst thing was the sound: the involuntary groans of people as they began to puke. Yet in the background, one could still hear Bjorn Lungstrom’s piano, Chopin issuing from the church. He was into the Largo now. I was able for a moment, through an instantaneous act of will, to shut out the sound of groaning and vomiting and, I swear, increase the volume of the Chopin. Good God, it’s splendid music.

  The choirmaster emerged: he stumbled towards a grave with a stone bed above it filled with chips of blue quartz or crystal. He knelt as if to pray there and, for a few moments, looked as if he was sobbing—until you realised he was retching, before he brought up the red-stained vomit on to the blue grave. It seemed like a terrible sacrilege was being committed; but whether to the dead or to the living, I wasn’t sure.