Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Frank Baker

  I shall never know whether I actually saw the body, dead or alive, in that place. I only know that the place smelt of death by violence, that the steam was fouled by coiling wreaths of the lust to kill, and that the hands of the killer pressed down upon my own body. The horror of the minutes I spent under the hands of the attendant never really leaves me.

  And when I think, as I often do, of how my end might come, I tell myself I am certain of only one thing: it will not come, at the hands of a masseur, in the steam room of a Turkish Bath.

  VIII

  Flowers I Leave You

  The piano, her husband’s wedding present to her, was good company during most of the years of a frustrated marriage. Accompanying herself often alone, she would sing the popular songs of those Edwardian days. ‘Down in the Forest,’ ‘Thoughts have Wings,’ ‘Where my Caravan has rested.’ She was not a very competent pianist. E flat major was the key which best suited her florid style, and her fine, slender fingers were capable enough for the simple accompaniments of her songs which she would nearly always end with an arpeggio flourish. In defiant passion her rich contralto voice would ring out in the many suburban houses they rented in London during the hard years when post-war depression sent thousands on the dole, and her husband, an insurance broker, fell into the ranks of those who searched the columns of the ‘wanted’ in the papers. He had started work at the age of fourteen. By the time he was forty, when the Great War had stolen his best years, he was redundant. That security which the Edwardians had seen as the great goal of life was not to be his. None the less, with the wife’s small inherited income, they managed. And with only one child, a son away at a Choir School, there was no real hardship.

  But, for Lilian, there was loneliness, as the husband drifted from job to job, coming home every evening, delicately Micawberian in his manner, always hopeful for the better times which never came. The little French upright in its walnut case would fill the gap, as nothing else could. As the son became a more competent musician than his mother, he would accompany her, and urge her to sing Brahms, Schubert or Schumann. But lieder was beyond her, and they would return to the hackneyed ballads.

  ‘No, son. It’s no good. I can only sing the old songs.’

  ‘But, Mother, these are the old songs. This sentimental stuff – can’t you see how feeble it is in comparison with Schubert?’

  ‘What’s wrong with being sentimental? I am sentimental.’

  Philip would sigh; his father look up from the pages of John Bull, the weekly magazine, where he worked at ‘Bullets’, a word competition which was then the rage. ‘It won’t hurt you to do what your mother asks, old chap.’

  So, yet again, from Lilian’s voice thoughts would take wing and the caravan would rest down in the forest. And as Philip grew older and his mother sang less frequently, retreating more and more into a defensive inner world, the ‘old songs’ seemed to come from the piano of their own accord, whether she sang or not.

  When she died, another war had passed. The piano, now in Philip’s possession, became as precious to him as it had been to the singer. Living now in Cornwall where he brought up his family and eked out a precarious existence as a painter, he would go to the keyboard in moments of doubt. Extemporising, he would recover faith in the life he had chosen – a life which had dismissed the idea of ‘security’ as pointless. Always he found that the piano gave him courage to go on with his work.

  During the years, there were many moves, and the piano went with the family. Always kept tuned, the tone was still beautiful, although the walnut case was split. Serene and resonant, it sang of past days as remote as Cornwall was from London. Then came times when Philip had often to be away from home, and the piano was hardly touched. He would return, open the lid, play a few chords, then close it abruptly. Nobody in the family really needed the piano, and it became a reproach to Philip. When the house had to be let furnished one winter and he came back to find it had been moved into a damp room with a window left open to the sou-westerly drive of scudding rain, he felt that the end had come. For no tuner had been during the long wet winter, and what notes sounded were now wildly out. The hammers would not respond, the walnut veneer was peeling badly, some of the ivories were loose. It was only a mockery of music that came now from the little Bord. Who could want it, in its present condition?

  The time came for the house to be sold, and the future was too uncertain to move the piano yet again and have it restored. Some old friends who lived in an ancient farmhouse above the western sea offered to store it for him. ‘Somebody may be glad of it one day,’ they said.

  But seven more years passed, and now the piano, never played, stayed lodged away in a corner of a room already overpacked with furniture. Yet there was usually a fire here, so the room itself was kind to the piano. Whenever he visited the farmhouse Philip would open the lid, play a few out-of-tune notes, never daring to sound a chord. It pleased him to find that at least the piano had not suffered from its long exile in the home of his friends, two widowed sisters. ‘Give it to anyone who needs it,’ he said.

  One day, the right person turned up – a young American girl, whose mother was a cousin of the sisters. Leila had left California longing to see Europe and research her Cornish background; and in the process, she found a husband. Julian, a long-haired Adonis who had ditched his university after two dry years of mathematics, had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. But he knew, the moment he saw Leila, deeply engrossed in a book at a café table in Montparnasse, that he wanted her. When he saw, over her shoulder, that she was reading Mozart’s letters, he knew that they would have a common interest in music. It was an easy opening. With his guitar and husky voice and her to collect the money, they spent the summer and early autumn busking in Paris. But when the leaves drifted down from the planes and chestnuts it was time to leave.

  ‘You must take me to Cornwall,’ she said.

  ‘Cornwall? That’s way out of anywhere. We shall never earn any money there.’

  But she was insistent. ‘I must go. It belongs to my past. I’ve got to meet those sisters. They’ll help us.’

  So they presented themselves, out of the blue, at the farmhouse; and when Leila spoke of her mother in America, they were immediately given royal treatment. A meal spread out on the huge kitchen table, blackberries and rich yellow cream, freshly baked heavycake, saffron buns, a fire blazing in the slab. The two old sisters bustled around the young couple and talked of their cousin from memories of her, long ago. Leila was entranced by it all. The place was older, more dense with the warm harmony of family treasures, in furniture, ornaments, glass paintings, clocks and cats, than she could have imagined. And in their crowded parlour, as the October rain slashed at the little windows, she saw the forlorn piano, tucked away in its corner, with framed photographs and stacks of magazines on top of it. It was the one thing that seized her attention.

  ‘Do play something,’ she asked. Then the sisters told her that neither of them played, and were only storing the piano for an old friend. And when they added that he would give it to anyone who needed it she was filled with excitement.

  ‘We must have it, Julian. We must have it.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid, Leila. We haven’t even got a place to live.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. The piano was meant to come to me. Don’t you see?’

  The sisters were greatly concerned when they realized that the young lovers had nowhere to set up home. ‘If it’s any use to you,’ they said, ‘there’s a hut down in the Cott Valley. It belonged to a brother of ours who went to Australia. We’ve been letting it to summer visitors, but it needs so much doing to it and – ’

  So it was that through the piano, they found a home. For weeks Julian and Leila worked at the place, adding another room to it, using timber from a huge demolished chapel in the village, piping water from the valley stream, hacking out the fur
ze and bramble up the hillside. Living very sparely on the money they had earned in Paris, they resorted to the unfailing hospitality of the farmhouse as funds began to run out. They were not really worried about the future, even when Leila became pregnant. Now was the time to get married, they decided. They did, and social security came to the rescue.

  One day in early spring an old van lumbered slowly along the narrow rutted lane leading to the hut, which had now been transformed into a three-room chalet, bearing the name, painted on it by Julian: Van Cara. The name had been found after great deliberation between them, and it was Leila who had hit on it. ‘It sounds kinda Spanish. And we always said we wanted a caravan. I bet you nobody’ll get what it means.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Julian. ‘Anyway, your name is Persian. And so is caravan. Van Cara. Yes I do like it.’

  With the help of two friends Julian dragged the piano up the last bit of hillside, fixing planks under it, pulling on ropes, heaving, pushing, swearing and sweating, while Leila watched. It was a tricky operation. Once, balanced on a slant sideways, only held by the exertion of six strong arms, the little Bord was tired enough to crash down through gorse and bramble to the rushing stream far below, and there say farewell to music. Leila wanted to help, but Julian would not let her; he was too anxious for the baby. So she stood aside, and watched them as they urged it upwards, inch by perilous inch, while Julian shouted desperate instructions. At last the piano came to its new home.

  A blind tuner was found, who at once realized that he had a fine old instrument to restore. From then, day by day, the little Bord came to new life under Leila’s fingers. Down the bracken-dense hillside where the stream trickled to the valley the sound of music mingled with the sound of water. The child quickened within Leila. As her time came nearer so did she play the more passionately. Sometimes she would sing, and Julian would sing with her, songs they had sung in Montparnasse where it had been easy to earn two days’ food in an hour. But here there were no people ready to drop coins into a hat. Only the rustling stillness of the water, the barking of foxes at night, the cry of the curlew, the distant bourdon of the sea – and music.

  ‘It’s so lovely here, Julian,’ she cried, one night. ‘I never want to be anywhere else – never. Van Cara! I want always to be here with you, and our baby safe inside me, and music, music to keep out all the bad things in the world.’

  When she spoke like this, in a kind of ecstasy, he would think – how long can it go on? For gradually he began to know that he must face up to the future. He was twenty-three, she was nineteen; and there were many days to come, days when the child would be born and grow and demand from him what he could not at present give. They could be frightening thoughts, and he would attempt to dismiss them, marvelling at his beautiful young wife, as she played. He would put his own life aside, as though it did not exist, and watch her, listening, wondering.

  ‘Gosh, Leila! You’re really together. I never knew you could play like that.’

  She hardly heard him. She did not need an audience. Her mother had sent a parcel of the music she had abandoned, and now she was trying to struggle through Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. But her small hands could not encompass the stretched chords, and she threw the music aside.

  ‘I can’t play at all,’ she said. ‘I need years of study. It’s awful. Oh Julian, if we can just stay here – not think about the world, and earning a living, all that kind of thing, I think I could make it as a proper pianist.’

  He was troubled. ‘Play something quiet. Tender. Simple. Just anything out of your funny little mind.’

  But that evening she would not play any more. They went to their bed, and while Julian slept she stayed awake, hearing owls in the gnarled thorns. The wind whistled round the chalet, and while it was still dark she got up, made tea, and went to the piano.

  ‘Play something . . . anything out of your funny little mind.’ Did he think she was an idiot? Why couldn’t he earn money and leave her alone? She did not touch the keys but went back to their bedroom and looked down at her husband, asleep in their bed. He looked happy. Why was she so disturbed in her being? The child of their love seemed already to be asking questions: what am I to be? Do you both need me? Will you love me, forever, always? Whatever happens?

  She went back to the piano and touched one note; and from that, another note. She realized that she had fallen into the key of E flat, the major key of Chopin’s most loved Nocturne, which she could play passably well. But it was not this she wanted to play. Without any harmony, a flow of slow melody emerged as her fingers moved over the old ivories, gleaming now from the milk-wash Julian had given them.

  Abruptly, she stopped, and slammed down the lid. Something other than the dawning life of the child had stirred her being; something she could not explain to herself, or even understand. A tremor ran through her body, like the ripple of water when a flat stone skims along it. She returned to their bed, got in, touched her lover, and felt his arm come over to her breasts. He had not woken, but she could hear him murmur through his sleep,‘Leila, Leila, lovely Leila. . . .’

  She was lovely. She knew that. In the morning, when Julian had walked the four miles into the market town to draw the weekly dole which kept them, she looked at herself in a long mirror Julian had fixed to the wall, near the bed. Her skin was ivory, her limbs were shapely, even though with the child in her there was something grotesque about this body of hers. Grotesque – yet so richly filled, she felt as though the whole blossoming valley, now creamy white with blackthorn, was a part of herself. Into her mind then came a melody, a melody that was new to her, yet one she seemed to remember. Had it been in the night . . . ?

  She smoothed her hands over the lid of the piano, which Julian had revarnished and polished. He had made a beautiful job of this. The wood gleamed in the light of the sun streaming from above the hillside straight on to the piano. It was late in March now, and the valley seethed with new life. In so short a time the sun would be ascendant, midsummer would torch the bonfires along the hills of Cornwall. And their child be a living creature, beginning to live a life of its own.

  As she opened the lid of the piano, she trembled. Her fingers fell into the same tune she had found in the night. She made no attempt to add harmony to this flow of melody. But by now she knew the tune. It had become a part of her. It spoke to her from the piano itself.

  The day passed in a strange agony of mixed feelings. She both wanted the future, and did not want it. Almost she dreaded the birth of her child. She tried to induce methods of meditation she had begun to practise; to discover a way of existing here, and now, with no reference to past or future. To lose the troubled ego and float into the great space of pure life. Yet her own mother, far away in California, got in the way. Julian got in the way. Even the unborn child . . . but there she broke off her meditation. The unborn child could not be ignored. This unknown, this unique entity, was here, was present. All that was demanded of her was patience; and this she did not possess.

  In Penzance, Julian collected his money, and after a session at The First and Last pub with some friends, was driven part of the way home. Now it was late afternoon and a drizzle of thin rain in the air. He realized that he had been too long away from Leila, and that he had drunk too much. He had promised to be back by mid-day; and he had broken his promise.

  Lighting a cigarette, he walked up and down the high-hedged narrow winding lane going towards the valley. He wanted to call in at the farmhouse, talk to the old sisters, warm himself at their fireside. But this would be to make a false and useless escape. He asked himself angry questions. Why had he married Leila? What did ‘marriage’ mean? What had those ‘vows’ meant? How long would he be able to honour them? He wanted Leila; he still needed her. But in years to come – would he still need her, or she need him?

  It was a moment of truth for him, and he did not know how to return to the c
halet with the ridiculous name. Van Cara – Van Cara! It was absurd. He ought to fix wheels on the thing so that they could go from place to place, again earn their living from the streets. Then he reproached himself as he took in the beauty of the valley. So much of life’s richness lay before and around him; and he did not know how to use it, how to become fused into it. Van Cara suddenly seemed like a prison.

  In the chalet, the piano was alive with music. Leila had thrown aside the pieces her mother had sent and was letting her fingers do what they would. She was making music out of her ‘funny little mind,’ letting florid sweeps of sound fly out in chaotic arpeggios, up and down the keyboard. Never had the piano been more fluent.

  Sixty-five years earlier, over the same keyboard, in a London suburb, slender fingers had moved. And Lilian had sung:

  Where my caravan has rested

  Flowers I leave you on the grass . . .

  It was the same tune that came now from the piano. As Julian slowly climbed up the hillside pathway, he stopped, unable to take another step forward. The sound of this music filled him with joy; yet despair threatened this joy. The present moment was so wonderful; how could one black out the future? Leila’s music expressed it all – his feelings of elation and guilt, of joy and despair. The world was both wonderful – and horrible. What part had he to play in it? Must he be ‘up and doing’ – and if so, doing what?

  Diminuendo. The music had rushed away from arpeggios to a single thread of melody, supported now by a simple harmony. Leila had made the foundation for the tune. And as she played, she began to sing, without words, in a low quiet voice.