The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  David’s girls, by contrast, were frankly sexy; less handsome but clearly as knowing in the bedroom as Jonathan’s were knowledgeable in the stables. Sounds of strenuous exercise would penetrate David’s door and reverberate through the small flat while from Jonathan’s room could be heard only the murmur of conversation, outbursts of laughter and soft classical music. Over Nescafé on Monday mornings David would rub his eyes and shake his tawny mane ruefully, the loose knot of his tie resting on his chest and his shirt collar still undone. ‘These keep-fit classes of ours’ll be the death of us,’ he used to say as the early rush hour traffic sizzled slowly past in the streaming grey street outside. ‘I couldn’t hit you for a quid fifty, could I, Jon? I’m skint until I can get to Holborn and visit those apple-cheeked cottagers, Mr and Mrs Barclay plc … What a pal. Allow me to do the same for you at the start of the financial year.’

  In order to reconstruct a rationale for what happened next one would probably have to presuppose some glum calculations on Jonathan’s part. No guarantee they would be correct, of course, because we have no way of knowing how introspective he really was. What he did, in the middle of this matey domesticity, was abruptly announce his engagement to Van (Vanessa being the second of his large girls.) He stood one evening in David’s room, his back to his friend, poking at a saucer of loose change on top of their landlady’s atrocious marble mantelpiece. His face, reflected in the mirror hanging above it, was bemused, as if hearing his own words emerge was as much a shock to him as it was to David. Since it is anyone’s guess, too, how analytical David was capable of being about such things, it may be fanciful to imagine that at that moment there flashed across his fledgling legal mind the image of somebody’s being simultaneously defendant and judge; of entering a momentous plea while pronouncing his own sentence.

  ‘Well,’ he said in the fallen silence, ‘I must admit you fair take a chap’s breath away. Amazing news! Congratulations and all that. Golly, the whole route, eh? Bells, cakes, hand-held videos?’

  ‘Hang on, Dave. I only said “engaged”. It’s that well-known statutory period. If the product fails to satisfy it can be returned and the cheque cancelled without loss of customer’s rights.’

  ‘That sounds like true love, all right.’

  ‘Just realistic. Nobody ever said anything about renouncing one’s intelligence in order to marry.’

  ‘But it helps.’

  Both were smiling now, collapsing back into the easy repartee of so many years. One of them put on a record of Mozart overtures. They watched some desultory television together, the cold glow making their faces a little older and more anxious.

  ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever actually get married,’ said Jonathan at length. ‘Van and me, I mean.’

  Several glum days passed.

  In the mind, famous for wanting total contradictions – celibacy and a devoted marriage, total freedom and absolute security, easy friendship and exacting intimacy – the confusion is absolute. It is therefore impossible for us (as for him) to decide whether Jonathan thought he loved Van more than he loved David, or whether he even knew that he loved David. What could three months have over nearly ten years? Everything, of course, provided one agreed with conventional notions of romantic love and sexuality; provided you really believed that after several weekends spread over sixty days you knew and were well enough known to brave the next sixty years even before you’d tried doing anything slightly stressful with your new partner, such as sharing a tent on the plains of Anatolia. Maybe Jonathan imagined that since sooner or later David would announce his own engagement the blow could be softened if he himself precipitated the ending he most dreaded. On the other hand the reason might have been that Van was quite a powerful gal who’d decided that Jonny would do very nicely provided he was treated with a firm hand.

  Any of this, or none. All we can tell is from looking at the friends’ faces as they sat in front of their television, as they chose a record, Klemperer versus Karajan, as they came and went in the days following Jonathan’s announcement: a faint poutiness as if resenting some oaf who had muscled in from nowhere and was managing to turn one against the other by an illegitimate trick whose effects neither could yet see how to annul. On the surface, of course, the badinage was as it always had been, though now studded with references to something never directly mentioned.

  ‘With a feather is how you could have knocked me down, Jon me old lad.’

  ‘You and me both.’

  ‘Real grown-up stuff.’

  ‘I know. Not too good, that part.’

  ‘At least you’ll still be a Bachelor of Arts.’

  ‘Yes … Apropos of nearly nothing, Dave, how’s old Fisty these days?’

  ‘She’s apparently selling futons in Banbury with this strange woman she’s found. I’m beginning to suspect our Fisty may not be quite as other girls are. I know the mater thinks so.’

  ‘Just as well we’re not planning to marry, then. She and I, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know what you did to the poor girl back in the Dordogne but I fear that’s a non-starter these days.’

  ‘I don’t remember doing anything much.’

  ‘Perhaps that was the trouble.’

  ‘Bugger work. Let’s go down The Castle and shoot some pool.’

  The process, once blurted, wouldn’t stop. It had its own inertia even as the friends laughed and joked and looked on helplessly. Van’s family were no less determined than Van herself. One weekend Jonathan told her father in an elderly tone of voice that ‘after due reflection’ he thought the engagement ought to be longer rather than shorter because he wished to qualify first and at least have a salary on which they could live. Van’s father, who had made a great fortune out of something or other, laughed and said how charmingly old–fashioned of him, that nowadays it was considered almost de rigueur for the woman to keep the man. ‘All you have to do, Jon lad, is think of yourself as Van’s permanent toyboy. Ask me, that’s exactly what she needs.’

  This light and depressingly accurate dismissal of Jonathan’s most thoughtful delaying tactic made the whole thing inevitable. It wasn’t that he didn’t love Van. He did/believed he did/knew he would eventually. Like everyone else, he had grown up with the knowledge that sometime about now The Wife would appear and by some mystical process he would recognise her when she did. And the day had dawned and here she was and it turned out to be a bit like the doctor telling you out of the blue that he was going to have to take your leg off. Nothing a fit young fellow like him couldn’t adjust to; it would mean a few changes to his lifestyle, of course, but it didn’t do to slummock along indefinitely in the never-never world of student life. It might feel a bit strange at first but it would unquestionably be a broadening and deepening experience.

  And as the young patient half believes all this is happening to somebody else, so Jonathan watched in paralysis as his casual declaration to a saucer of pennies took on the force of a promise, and his promise (which may or may not have been made with crossed fingers) hardened into an announcement in The Times of an impending wedding. All this while David was unable to help his closest friend. David, it was obvious, could never have been stampeded into marriage in such a fashion. He was far too planned, too considered. He would sow his oats until well after his exams, maybe until he took silk. He would have a lot of fun and then do the right thing by some girl he really liked and that would be that. He realised all was not well with Jonathan. He was also troubled by his suspicion that no matter how long he, David, knew her he would never warm to Van. There was a hard streak in her which was not so much determined as plain ruthless. Old Jon, by contrast, had a quality of gentleness you could spot a mile off. Sometimes people took it for weakness but anyone who had known Jon as long as he could recognise it as an endearing strength. Three months – well, four now – weren’t anything like long enough for somebody of Van’s steamroller delicacy to appreciate a person as complex and tenacious in his affections as old Jon.

 
; But the longer things were left unsaid the less possible it became to say them, so that at last there remained little between the friends but their fond jocularity. At which point, of course, it is open to anyone to speculate that David’s inability to head Jonathan off his course or even to say ‘Stop me if you think this is none of my damned business but …’ was because a knowing part of him (about which he knew nothing) had already worked out what the score was. It would only take a reasonable, innocent question like ‘But why now, Jon? That’s what I don’t get. Why not in a couple of years’ time?’ to risk a potentially traumatic outburst of truthfulness. Real reasons. Hidden agendas. Cans of worms. Confessions. And the confessions might be considerably worse than the possibility (which had once occurred to David, affording him a brief-lived reassurance) that canny old Jon was marrying Van for her loot. But Jon, while having his wits about him, wasn’t canny in that sense. No, it was altogether darker than that, and there were limits to what a chap could be expected to deal with … Back at the level of old pals David watched his old pal with glum concern. And in due course he found himself robed in morning dress being the best man, his cheery repartee sounding to his own ears more like gallows humour as it tumbled efficiently out.

  The episode which stuck most in David’s mind had occurred some weeks before, when the two friends had been obliged to have a conversation about The Future – specifically, what was to be done about the flat they were jointly renting. Not even bluff humour could disguise the unspoken sense of a marriage being brought to an abrupt and unsatisfactory end in order that another might abruptly and unsatisfactorily begin. Suddenly the mortar of a shared life had to be raked out, exposing unwanted joins of possession. Their extensive record collection, in particular, belonged to neither of them. It dated from their sixth-form days and had grown ever since. Hopeless trying to remember now who had bought what, though Jonathan had probably (had anyone been counting) contributed two-thirds. What mattered was their coincidence in taste, the long history of its broadening. With the brusqueness of atonement Jonathan on the spur of the moment told David the records were all his. For an awful moment David glimpsed tears in his friend’s eyes which made it impossible to do anything but accept, even as he knew he didn’t want them, not at such a price. Jonathan seemed no less upset that because of him David would be obliged to go through the vile process of searching for accommodation in mid-term, to move all these books from the shelves they’d put up, hide another landlady’s lime-green candle-wick bedspread, drop coins into a different gas meter, memorise a new phone number. At this sign of his friend’s conscience David was obliged to turn away to conceal his own emotion, although that might have been pure self-pity: he was moving out because he knew nobody else with whom he could bear to share the flat.

  Of course, both would have been vehement that a ten-year friendship would naturally survive marriage – proper friends were friends for life – even as both were filled with an apprehension that this was actually its end, here in this room of this flat on this particular rainy evening. Neither could think of a decent reason for any of it. The collapse and upset felt wholly unnecessary, yet that thought could never be spoken. It went equally unsaid that while no-one in his right mind relished spending Saturday afternoons watching his washing swirl and churn in a launderette’s fungoid atmosphere, there would soon come a time when such amiable domestic rituals would be deeply missed. Pubs would seem emptier too, and games of pool become so rare as to be self-consciously nostalgic and hence not worth risking. By being suddenly rendered impossible, a version of the future which had hitherto remained properly vague now took on the weightiness of something denied.

  So there it was. And at first it was David who was the harder hit since Jonathan was kept so busy with the new life Van’s father was buying them, with generally making a go of things so he might safely feel his decision had, after all, been wise. On the surface David’s own life went on pretty much as before, once he had installed himself off the Gloucester Road, except that he could never remember London weather being this dreary, life so unfunny and uncompanionable. His fellow law students were mostly useless at snappy one-liners. The girls he brought home did all the right things; but a weekend’s passion lacked the sturdy resonance of ten years’ companionship and Monday mornings were uncommonly hollow and grey. The record player remained perpetually silent. He and Jonathan rang each other up, of course, but something dense and opaque squatted on the line between them. There was no casual way for either to say ‘I miss you’ without awful impropriety.

  Eighteen months went by. There was a baby. Jonathan still looked too boyish to be a credible father. He had grown quite thin. From time to time David came to dinner and tried to practise the love that has no name. What could it be called, this commonplace, dutiful, genuine attempt to feel affection for your closest friend’s spouse with whom one otherwise wouldn’t care to spend five minutes? The love that grits its teeth, perhaps? This, David might have reflected, was maybe what Christians had in mind when they emphasised loving your neighbour despite a deep and instinctive dislike. And as in that case, one had to fall back on doing it for the sake of a third party. (It was still too early in his life to acknowledge that most of the people we wind up loving are faute de mieux, though it was not too early in Jonathan’s.) For Jonathan’s sake, then, David strenuously tried to love Van – so hard, indeed, that it never occurred to him to wonder if he were succeeding. Enough that she was old Jon’s wife. Van, too, made valiant attempts not to write David off as a dubious hangover from Jonny’s trivial, bachelor past.

  Three more years went by; a second child. At last David, too, announced his engagement and asked Jonathan to be best man. Jonathan, by now quite gaunt, of course agreed. Like David before him he conducted himself with obligatory light-heartedness. He gave a little speech about having known Dave intimately for, golly, it must be fifteen years now, it doesn’t seem possible – although the word ‘intimately’ should not of course be misconstrued. (Laughter.) He looked at this elegant and promising young barrister standing here in Moss Bros.’s best and realised most people might have some difficulty imagining him lying face down in mud dressed in nothing but a tent. (More laughter.) He had been privileged to see this by lightning’s fitful gleam one stormy night in the Turkish badlands. But he’d better let further details of this – and even less repeatable – episodes remain decently shrouded. About certain matters old friends’ lips are loyally sealed. (General mirth.)

  A wedding guest, closely observing, might well have beaten his breast on noticing how, from time to time, Jonathan was casting the strangest look at David’s bride, shafts of purest haunt. Provided the guest wasn’t too drunk for greater accuracy he might have seen in these looks the covetousness of someone who would have given his very soul for the last few years to evaporate, to watch the woman evaporate, to find himself standing there in her place, booked for a honeymoon in Tobago. Certainly the wedding guest might later have gone his way reduced to pondering those endless imponderables about what made people do the things they did, the unhappiness they shouldered because they thought they ought to, the losses unwittingly laid up on those boyhood plains of Anatolia. By then, of course, the wedding guest would have been pretty drunk. He might have beaten his breast with true fervour had he also been able to see five years hence and know that Jonathan was to become a quite bad-tempered man, an easily irritated father who, each Christmas, sent a record token to his schoolfriend David for old times’ sake.

  Frank’s Fate

  I’D BEEN OUT of touch with Frank for many months when his agent, Charlie Stedall, rang me one morning to tell me he was dead. After the first downsinking shock a kind of mellow merriment seized us both, as it so often does the middle-aged on hearing the Reaper’s tread pass close by before it fades temporarily into the distance again.

  ‘Well, poor old Bewley,’ Charlie and I repeated to each other in fondly reminiscent tones until he became an agent once more and reminded me that I was Fran
k’s literary executor.

  ‘So I am,’ I said. I couldn’t have forgotten but until that moment I hadn’t remembered. One of those duties blithely undertaken years earlier when we were all young and only old people died. The prospect was not cheering. Frank Bewley had been famously drunk, famously careless, famously itinerant for most of his life. He had lately settled in Italy and now had died there. My immediate glum thought was that the undoubted chaos of his literary estate would be compounded by undreamed-of complications in a foreign language. I foresaw having to deal with Italian lawyers, publishers, bureaucrats – even, possibly, the very tax inspectors who had probably helped drive him to his early grave (he was forty-six). I’m not myself fond of travel.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ said Charlie unconvincingly. ‘I’ll try and come out at the end of the week to give you a hand. It might be an absolute riot. I don’t see why old Frank in death should be any less colourful than he was alive. He’d have loved an opportunity like this. “Now there’s an article or two for the talented hack.”’

  His imitation of Frank’s voice had the effect of saddening us both. Our friend was suddenly and irretrievably gone.