“Did that happen in Gudlaugur’s case? Did he say, “This is where I draw the line”? Did he rebel?”
Gabriel waited before replying.
“Have you met Gudlaugur’s father?” he asked.
“I spoke to him this morning,” Erlendur said. “Him and his daughter. They’re full of some kind of anger and antipathy and they clearly didn’t have any warm feelings for Gudlaugur. They didn’t shed a tear for him.”
“And was he in a wheelchair? The father?”
“Yes.”
“That happened several years afterwards,” Gabriel said.
“After what?”
“Several years after the performance. That dreadful performance just before the boy was due to tour Scandinavia. It had never happened before, a boy leaving Iceland to sing solo with choirs in Scandinavia. His father sent his first record to Norway, a record company there became interested and organised a concert tour with the aim of releasing his records in Scandinavia. His father once told me that his dream, nota bene his dream, not necessarily Gudlaugur’s, was for the lad to sing with the Vienna Boys” Choir. And he could have, no question about it”
“So what happened?”
“What always happens sooner or later with boy sopranos; nature intervened,” Gabriel said. “At the worst imaginable time in the boy’s life. It could have happened at a rehearsal, could have happened while he was alone at home. But it happened there and the poor child …”
Gabriel looked at Erlendur.
“I was with him backstage. The children’s choir was supposed to sing some songs and a crowd of local children were there, leading musicians from Reykjavik, even a couple of critics from the papers. The concert was widely advertised and his father was sitting in the middle of the front row, of course. The boy came to see me later, much later, when he’d left home, and told me how he felt on that fateful night, and since then I’ve often thought how a single incident can mark a person for life.”
* * *
Every seat in Hafnarfjordur cinema was occupied and the audience was buzzing. He’d been to that charming building twice before to watch films and was enchanted by everything he saw: the beautiful lighting in the auditorium and the raised stage where plays were performed. His mother had taken him to Gone with the Wind and he had been with his father and sister to see a Walt Disney cartoon.
But these people had come not to watch the heroes of the silver screen, but to listen to him. Him singing with the voice that had already featured on two records. Instead of shyness, he was beset by uncertainty now. He had sung in public before, in the church in Hafnarfjordur and at school, in front of large audiences. Often he was shy and downright scared. Later he came to realise that he was sought-after by others, which helped him overcome his reticence. There was a reason that people came to hear him sing, a reason that people wanted to hear him, and it was nothing to be shy about. The reason was his voice and his singing. Nothing else. He was the star.
His father had shown him the advertisement in the newspaper: Iceland’s best boy soprano is performing tonight. There was no one better. His father was beside himself with joy and much more excited than the boy himself. Talked about it for days on end. If only your mother could have lived to see you singing at that place, he said. That would have pleased her so much. It would have pleased her indescribably.
People in other countries were impressed with his singing and wanted him to perform there too. They wanted to release his records there. I knew it, his father said over and again. I knew it. He had worked hard on preparing the trip. The concert in Hafnarfjordur was the finishing touch to that work.
The stage manager showed him how to peep through into the auditorium to watch the audience taking then-seats. He listened to the murmurings and saw people he knew he would never meet. He saw the choirmaster’s wife sit down with their three children at the end of the third row. He saw several of his classmates with their parents, even some who had teased him, and he saw his father take his place in the middle of the front row, with his big sister beside him, staring up at the ceiling. His mother’s family were there too, aunts he hardly knew, men holding their hats in their hands waiting for the curtain to open.
He wanted to make his father proud. He knew how much his father had sacrificed to make a successful singer of him, and now the fruits of that toil were going to be seen. It had cost relentless training. Complaining was futile. He had tried that and it made his father angry.
He trusted his father completely. That was the way it had always been. Even when he was singing in public against his own wishes. His father drove him on, encouraged him and had his own way in the end. It was torture for the boy the first time he sang for strangers: stage fright, bashful-ness in front of all those people. But his father would not yield an inch, not even when the boy was bullied over his singing. The more he performed in public, at school and in church, the worse the boys and some girls too treated him, calling him names, even mocking his voice. He could not understand what motivated them.
He did not want to provoke his father’s wrath. He was devastated after their mother died. She contracted leukaemia and it killed her within months. Their father was by her bedside day and night, accompanied her to the hospital and slept there while her life ebbed away. The last words he said before they left home for the concert were: Think about your mother. How proud she would have been of you.
The choir had taken up its position on the stage. All the girls in identical frocks paid for by the town council. The boys in white shirts and black trousers, just like he was wearing. They whispered together, excited at all the attention the choir was receiving, determined to do their best. Gabriel, the choirmaster, was talking to the stage manager. The compere stubbed out a cigarette on the floor. Everything was ready. Soon it would be curtain up.
Gabriel called him over.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Yes. It’s a packed house.”
“And they’ve all come to see you. Remember that. They’ve all come to see you and hear you sing and no one else, and you ought to be proud of that, pleased with yourself and not shy. Maybe you’re a bit nervous now, but that will wear off as soon as you start singing. You know that.”
“Yes.”
“Shall we start then?”
He nodded.
Gabriel put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“It’s bound to be difficult for you to look all those people in the eye, but you only need to sing and everything will be all right.”
“Yes.”
“The compere doesn’t come on until after the first song. We’ve rehearsed all this. You start singing and everything will be fine.”
Gabriel gave a sign to the stage manager. He gestured to the choir who immediately fell silent and lined up. Everything was in place. They were all ready.
The lights in the auditorium dimmed. The murmuring stopped. The curtain went up.
Think of your mother.
The last thought that crossed his mind before the auditorium opened up in front of him was his mother on her deathbed the final time he saw her, and for a second he lost his concentration. He was with his father, they were sitting together on one side of the bed, and she was so weak she could hardly keep her eyes open. She closed them and seemed to have fallen asleep, then opened them slowly, looked at him and tried to smile. They could not speak to each other any longer. When it was time to say goodbye they stood up, and he always regretted not having given her a farewell kiss, because this was the last time they were together. He simply stood up and walked out of the ward with his father, and the door closed behind them.
The curtain rose and he met his father’s gaze. The auditorium vanished from his sight and all he could see was his father’s glaring eyes.
Someone in the auditorium began laughing.
He came back to his senses. The choir had begun to sing and the choirmaster had given a sign, but he had missed it. Trying to gloss over the incident, the choirmaste
r took the choir through another round of the verse, and now he came in at the right place and had just started the song when something happened.
Something happened to his voice.
* * *
“It was a wolf,” Gabriel said, sitting in Erlendur’s cold hotel room. “There was a wolf in his voice, as the saying goes. Straight away in the first song, and then it was all over.”
14
Gabriel sat motionless on the bed, staring straight ahead, transported back to the stage at Hafnarfjordur cinema as the choir gradually fell silent. Gudlaugur, who could not understand what was happening to his voice, cleared his throat repeatedly and kept on trying to sing. His father got to his feet and his sister ran up onto the stage to make her brother stop. People whispered to each other at first, but soon the occasional half-smothered laugh broke out, gradually growing louder, and a few people whistled. Gabriel went to lead Gudlaugur off, but the boy stood as if nailed to the floor. The stage manager tried to bring down the curtain. The compere walked onto the stage with a cigarette in his hand, but did not know what to do. In the end Gabriel managed to move Gudlaugur and push him away. His sister was with him and shouted out to the audience not to laugh. His father was still standing in the same place in the front row, thunderstruck.
Gabriel came to earth and looked at Erlendur.
“I still shudder to think of it,” he said.
“A wolf in his voice?” Erlendur said. “I’m not too well up on…”
“It’s an idiom for when your voice breaks. What happens is that the vocal cords stretch in puberty, but you go on using your voice in the same way and it shifts an octave lower. The result isn’t pretty, you sort of yodel downwards. This is what ruins all boys” choirs. He could have had another two or three years, but Gudlaugur matured early. His hormones started working prematurely and produced the most tragic night of his life.”
“You must have been a good friend of his, if you were the first person he went to later to discuss the whole affair.”
“You could say that. He regarded me as a confidant. Then that gradually ended, the way it does. I tried to help him as best I could and he continued singing with me. His father did not want to give up. He was going to make a singer out of his son. Talked about sending him to Italy or Germany. Even Britain. They’ve cultivated the most boy sopranos and have hundreds of fallen choral stars. Nothing is as short-lived as a child star.”
“But he never became a singer?”
“No. It was over. He had a reasonable adult voice, nothing special actually, but his interest was gone. All the work that had been put into singing, his whole childhood really, turned to dust that evening. His father took him to another teacher but nothing came of that. The spark had gone. He just played along for his father’s sake, then he gave up for good. He told me he had never really wanted any of it. Being a singer and a choirboy and performing in public. It was all his fathers wish.”
“You mentioned something before that happened some years later,” Erlendur said. “Some years after the concert at the cinema. I thought it was connected with his father being in a wheelchair. Was I mistaken?”
“A rift gradually developed between them. Between Gudlaugur and his father. You described the way the old man behaved when he came to see you with his daughter. I don’t know the whole story. Only a fragment of it.”
“But you give the impression that Gudlaugur and his sister were close.”
“There was no question about that,” Gabriel said. “She often came to choir practice with him and was always there when he sang at school and in church. She was kind to him, but she was devoted to her father too. He had an incredibly strong character. He was unflinching and firm when he wanted his own way, but could be tender at other times. In the end she took her father’s side. The boy was in rebellion. I can’t explain what it was, but he ended up hating his father and blaming him for what happened. Not just up there on the stage but everything.”
Gabriel paused.
“One of the last times I talked to him, he said his father had robbed him of his childhood. Turned him into a freak.”
“A freak?”
“That was the word he used, but I didn’t know any more than you what he meant by it. That was shortly after the accident”
“Accident?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“I suppose Gudlaugur would have been in his teens. He moved away from Hafnarfjordur afterwards. We really had no contact by then but I could well imagine that the accident was caused by his rebellion. The rage that had built up inside him.”
“Did he leave home after this accident?”
“Yes, so I understand.”
“What happened?”
“There was a high, steep staircase in their house. I went there once. It led upstairs from the hall. Wooden stairs with a narrow well. Apparently it began with an argument between Gudlaugur and his father, who had his study upstairs. They were at the top of the staircase and I’m told Gudlaugur pushed him and he fell down the stairs. It was quite a fall. He never walked again. Broke his back. Paralysed from the waist down.”
“Was it an accident? Do you know?”
“Gudlaugur alone knew that. And his father. They completely shut him out afterwards, the father and daughter. Cut off all contact and refused to have anything more to do with him. That might suggest he went for his father. That it wasn’t a simple accident.”
“How do you know this? If you weren’t in touch with those people?”
“It was the talk of the town that he’d pushed his father down the stairs. The police investigated the matter.”
Erlendur looked at the man.
“When was the last time you saw Gudlaugur?”
“It was just here at the hotel, by sheer coincidence. I didn’t know where he was. I was out for dinner and caught a glimpse of him in his doorman’s uniform. I didn’t recognise him immediately. Such a long time had passed. This was five or six years ago. I went up to him and asked if he remembered me, and we chatted a little.”
“What about?”
“This and that. I asked him how he was doing and so on. He kept fairly quiet about his own affairs — didn’t seem comfortable talking to me. It was as if I reminded him of a past he didn’t want to revisit. I had the feeling he was ashamed of being in a doorman’s uniform. Maybe it was something else. I don’t know. I asked him about his family and he said they’d lost touch. Then the conversation dried up and we said goodbye to each other.”
“Do you have any idea who could have wanted to kill Gudlaugur?” Erlendur asked.
“Not the faintest,” Gabriel said. “How was he attacked? How was he killed?”
He asked cautiously, a mournful look in his eyes. There was no hint that he wished to gloat over it later; he simply wanted to know how the life of a promising boy he had once taught came to an end.
“I honestly can’t go into that,” Erlendur said. “It’s information that we’re trying to keep secret because of the investigation.”
“Yes, of course,” Gabriel said. “I understand. A criminal investigation … are you making any headway? Of course, you can’t talk about that either, listen to how I carry on. I can’t imagine who would have wanted to kill him, but then I lost touch with him long ago. I just knew that he worked at this hotel.”
“He’d been working here for years as a doorman and sort of jack of all trades. Playing Santa Claus, for example.”
Gabriel sighed. “What a fate.”
“The only thing we found in his room apart from these records was a film poster that he had on his wall. It’s a Shirley Temple film from 1939 called The Little Princess. Do you have any idea why he would have kept it, or glorified it? There was almost nothing else in the room.”
“Shirley Temple?”
“The child star.”
“The connection’s obvious,” Gabriel said. “Gudlaugur saw himself as a child star and so did everyone around him. But I can’t see a
ny other significance as such.”
Gabriel stood up, put on his cap, buttoned his coat and wrapped his scarf around his neck. Neither of them said anything. Erlendur opened the door and walked out into the corridor with him.
“Thank you for coming to see me,” he said, offering his hand to shake.
“It was nothing,” Gabriel said. “It was the least I could do for you. And for the dear boy.”
He dithered as if about to add something else, unsure exactly how to phrase it.
“He was terribly innocent,” he said eventually. “A totally harmless boy. He’d been convinced that he was unique and he’d become famous, he could have had the world at his feet. The Vienna Boys” Choir. They make such an awful fuss about small things here in Iceland, even more now than they used to; it’s a national trait in a country of under-achievers. He was bullied at school for being different; he suffered because of it. Then it turned out he was just an ordinary boy and his world fell apart in a single evening. He needed to be strong to put up with that.”
They exchanged farewells and Gabriel turned round and walked down the corridor. Erlendur watched him leaving with the feeling that telling the tale of Gudlaugur Egilsson had drained the old choirmasters strength completely.
Erlendur shut the door. He sat down on the bed and thought about the choirboy and how he found him in a Santa suit with his trousers round his ankles. He wondered how his path had led to that little room and to death, at the end of a life paved with disappointment. He thought about Gudlaugur’s father, paralysed in a wheelchair, with his thick horn-rimmed glasses, and about his sister with her hooked eagle’s nose and her antipathy towards her brother. He thought about the fat hotel manager who had sacked him, and the man from reception who pretended not to know him. He thought about the hotel staff, who did not know who Gudlaugur was. He thought about Henry Wapshott who had travelled all that way to seek out the choirboy because the child Gudlaugur with his lovely voice still existed and always would.
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