The Bellwether Revivals

by Benjamin Wood

  ‘Do you remember that time at prep when the House Parents made us clean the boarding house, so we selotaped ham under Ian Ashbee’s bed?’ Eden said to Marcus, laughing. ‘For weeks, nobody could figure out where the smell was coming from. Ha! The look on his face!’

  ‘Why did they make you clean the boarding house?’ Jane said.

  ‘Marcus stole a box of KitKats from the tuck shop.’

  ‘For you. I stole it for you.’

  ‘Yes, and we both got punished.’

  ‘Hey, what about the time you Tipp-Exed the whole of “Kubla Khan” on the common room wall?’ Yin said. ‘That was classic.’

  ‘You could’ve got expelled for that,’ Iris said. ‘Dad didn’t think it was so funny.’

  ‘He has no sense of humour. They were never going to kick me out.’ Eden leaned back, satisfied with himself. ‘I was practically running the Oratorio Choir for them, I seem to recall.’

  ‘And anyway, what kind of idiot thinks Coleridge is graffiti?’ said Marcus. ‘They should have thanked you for elevating the décor.’

  ‘My point exactly.’

  One school story was regaled after another, and for the first time all night, Oscar began to feel genuinely excluded. He was drawn to the urbaneness of their lives, their refinement and culture, but he just couldn’t find a way into their discussion, no matter how hard he tried to interject. They were pulling memories from a private source, from some reservoir of experiences they’d all shared. All he could do was sit there and listen, and watch Iris as she laughed along, telling her own anecdotes about ‘midnight bridge club’ and swimming regattas. For a while, she barely even looked at him. If she asked him a question directly, it was only to confirm something she already knew: ‘Isn’t that the most hilarious thing you’ve ever heard? Oscar, isn’t that just brilliant?’ The more they talked, the more disconnected he felt.

  They were like a family. They called each other pet names: ‘Edie’, ‘Iggy’, ‘Yinny’, ‘Janey’ (only Marcus seemed left out in this regard, though Yin once called him ‘Em’). They teased each other, correcting Marcus when he mispronounced a word, and goading Yin by asking which country was most doomed: one with a flagging NHS, or one with a thriving NRA? Oscar knew he couldn’t compete with this kind of friendship. He had never been as close to anyone as they were with each other. It gave him a despairing feeling in his stomach, like stumbling on a crowded pavement. His attention began to wander.

  Iris must have noticed. She turned to him and said: ‘Oh, this is probably so boring for you. I’m sorry.’ Her smile seemed to lighten the space between them all at once. ‘We always do this—end up talking about the old days. And then we wonder why nobody wants to spend any time with us.’

  ‘I’m a bit lost, that’s all,’ he said. ‘I mean, it sounds like some of you were at school together and some of you weren’t. How do you all know each other?’

  It was Jane who spoke up. Her voice was prim, gravelled. ‘Marcus and Eden met at prep—the King’s school. They were both in the chorister programme until they were, what, twelve, thirteen? It’s such a demanding programme they have there; every boy has to learn about five instruments and rehearse with the choir eight hours a day. Can you imagine? I’d go spare.’

  ‘It wasn’t so bad really,’ Eden said.

  Jane continued: ‘They met Yin later, at Charterhouse. The three of them were Gownboys.’ Yin raised his glass and nodded proudly. ‘And I boarded with Iris at St Mary’s. I’m sure we didn’t mean to end up at Cambridge together, but here we all are. The Bellwethers and the flock.’ Jane smiled, revealing a small gap between her front teeth.

  ‘I think you just called us all sheep again,’ Marcus said. ‘I hate it when you do that.’

  Eden reached for one of the wine bottles that were standing at his feet and went about uncorking it. ‘Alright, I’ve got a better story for you, and not about the old days,’ he said. ‘This one’s about Oscar.’ He began filling up everyone’s glasses, and when he reached Oscar, he tilted his head and winked. ‘You should tell them how we came to meet.’

  Oscar shifted in his seat, head still woozy. ‘God, I don’t think I can remember.’

  ‘I heard it already,’ Marcus said. ‘You were flirting with Iris outside the chapel.’

  ‘He wasn’t flirting,’ Iris said.

  ‘Alright then, he was talking to you perfectly innocently outside the chapel, with no lurid thoughts in his mind whatsoever. Along comes Eden, blah blah blah.’

  ‘That’s not the whole story,’ Eden said. He looked at Oscar. ‘Do you mind if I tell them?’

  ‘Go ahead. I don’t even know what you’re on about.’

  Oscar listened as Eden relayed the events of Wednesday evening in detail. ‘… and I was sitting up in the organ loft, and noticed him straight away. Picked him out as a heathen like that. He looked so bloody awkward, so unsettled. He was just staring at the choir like he could see the words coming out of their mouths. Afterwards, Iris tells me the only reason he went into the chapel was because he’d heard the organ. Ask him, he’ll tell you. He hasn’t been to church in years.’

  ‘Well, he’s hardly the only non-believer in the world,’ Jane said.

  ‘Yeah, big deal,’ Yin said. ‘My uncle Sun Fat is practically a Satanist. Who cares?’

  Oscar got the feeling he was being examined. His mouth was going dry.

  Eden sat back and folded his arms. ‘You’re missing the point. I wasn’t supposed to be playing on Wednesday. The other organ scholar, Barnaby—it was supposed to be his night. But he’d sprained his wrist, so, like a trooper, I covered for him. And I thought, sod it, I’m not going to stick to Barnaby’s boring old programme—Krebs, Gibbons, Bruna—we’ve heard it all before. The Director won’t care if I change the voluntary. So I played something different, something by Mattheson.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ Marcus said.

  ‘Too bloody right I did. And look—’ Eden grinned, gesturing towards Oscar with outstretched arms. ‘It worked. Living proof.’

  Oscar was having difficulty following their discussion; his mind was clouded with drink, bleary with tiredness. But his head was just clear enough to know that he resented being talked about this way, as if he were something Eden had found flattened on the street and brought inside for the others to prod with a stick.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Jane said.

  ‘He played the Mattheson piece, Jane. Keep up,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s really quite extraordinary.’

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ she said.

  Oscar finally spoke up: ‘Who the hell is Mattheson?’ It came out rather bluntly.

  Silence fell in the room.

  ‘Johann Mattheson,’ Eden said. ‘He’s my fixation du jour. I could talk about him all day, every day, for the rest of my life, and I still wouldn’t tire of talking about him.’

  ‘Oh God, please tell me you’re not going to do your big Mattheson spiel,’ Iris said.

  ‘He wants to know,’ Eden replied. ‘Who am I to deny him?’

  ‘Oscar, listen to me, there’s still time.’ Iris looked at him with a pitying sort of expression—mouth pursed, brow lifted. ‘You should get out of here before he bores you into a slow death.’ Oscar didn’t respond. He needed to know what point Eden was trying to make. ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ She rose from the chesterfield and picked up a few stray glasses. ‘I’m going upstairs to lie down. There’s only so many times a girl can hear the same story.’ She carried the empties into the kitchen and didn’t return.

  When Eden started to talk, a certain glee stretched over his face. Johann Mattheson, he told them, was a German composer and theorist. He’d once been a musical prodigy, playing the organ at churches in Hamburg from the age of nine, and singing in the chorus of the Hamburg opera. Handel was one of his contemporaries, and they were close friends for most of their lives, until rivalry eventually got the better of them, ending in a duel. ‘It was a proper sword fight outside a
theatre—the real McCoy,’ Eden beamed, ‘and Mattheson nearly killed him, so they say, but a button on Handel’s coat stopped the blade and saved him.’ He was a prolific composer, writing mostly church music—’What they like to call sacred music. He was a master at it’—and several operas—’Okay, his operas are tedious, I’ll admit it, but there are some incredible ideas in there, some really profound musical things happening.’ Most of his compositions, Eden said, were lost during the Second World War. But it was Mattheson’s theories about music that he was most interested in—in particular, a book called Der Vollkommene Capellmeister.

  Oscar kept hearing Iris’s footsteps through the ceiling. He wondered what she was doing up there, if she’d be coming back down.

  ‘Mattheson and Descartes go together like cheese and wine,’ Eden went on. ‘I’ve really become quite enraptured with the man’s ideas. I’ve read everything he’s written, everything there is to read about him—diary extracts, letters, postcards—anything I could get my hands on. I’ve even started to collect things—anything he might’ve touched.’

  ‘A man needs a hobby,’ Marcus said.

  ‘Yes, true, but it’s more than that. He was really onto something in Capellmeister but he never quite followed through with his ideas. I think he got rather scared by what he could achieve. Oh dear, I’m not explaining this very well …’ Eden paused, looking up, as if the answers were somewhere in the gilded swirls of the light fixtures. Then he landed his gaze on Oscar. ‘Remember what I was telling you in the cab, about Emotivism?’

  ‘Some of it,’ Oscar said. He mostly recalled the warmth of Iris’s hand on his knee, how well she’d endured her brother’s sermon on the failings of her chamber group.

  ‘Well, let’s extend that line of enquiry …’ Eden sipped his wine. ‘If I told you there is music that makes you happy, and some that makes you sad, you wouldn’t disagree with me, right?’

  Oscar shrugged. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Well, Mattheson believed—and I believe—that composers have the power to affect and manipulate your emotions, your passions, as Descartes put it. When they’re writing music, they have the potential to make you feel whatever they want you to feel. Sort of like a chemistry experiment: if certain elements are put together in a certain formula you get a certain reaction. Would you say that’s a big leap to make?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Oscar said. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Well, Descartes didn’t think so. He said even those with the weakest souls can acquire an absolute command of their emotions, if—and I quote—if art and industry are used to manage them. And Mattheson believed the same thing. He said that, in some structural way, music and emotions resemble each other. The man was a genius, and I don’t use that word lightly.’ Eden waited. There was a glimmer of something in his expression that made Oscar feel uneasy, a slightly manic thrill in commanding the whole group’s attention. ‘Mattheson took Descartes’s ideas and applied them to music. In Capellmeister, he basically lays down a set of instructions for composers, to show them how to induce certain emotions through their work—to achieve that empire over the passions Descartes was talking about.’

  There was a long moment of quiet. Everyone looked at each other.

  ‘Don’t mean to be dim,’ Jane said, ‘but what does any of this have to do with Wednesday night?’

  Eden put his hands together and set them on his lap. He recrossed his legs. ‘It’s simple. The piece I played for the voluntary, which Oscar heard, was by Mattheson. It was a piece he composed for a Lutheran church in Hamburg—I’m talking centuries ago. Marcus and I found the notation in a little antique shop in Heidelberg. We only paid fifty euros for it. They didn’t even realise what they had, but we’ve had it verified. It’s the real thing.’

  ‘So?’ Jane said.

  ‘So this piece, as far as I can tell, is something he wrote towards the end of his life. Back then, he wanted to see if he could prove his theories in his compositions—to write music that could make people feel a love for God. Sort of like revival music.’

  ‘That’s exactly what Oscar felt,’ Marcus said. ‘Amazing.’

  ‘Come on,’ Jane said. ‘That’s a pile of nonsense and you know it.’

  Eden shook his head. ‘He said so himself—the only thing that took him inside was the sound of the music. He was lured in. Mattheson lured him in.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Oscar said. ‘I just liked the sound of the organ, that’s all. It didn’t make me find God or anything. Not even close.’

  ‘You liked the sound of the organ because Mattheson designed it that way. He gave you those emotions—curiosity, hope, safety, love. It’s all in there. You heard it and you couldn’t help but go inside.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Oscar said. ‘But, trust me, I’m still an atheist.’

  Eden laughed—a short exhalation of breath. ‘Alright, fine. I admit it didn’t make you believe in God. I’m not sure such a thing is possible, and I don’t think Mattheson thought so either. But it brought you into his house. You came into church and sat down, which is precisely what that piece of music was intended to do.’ Eden leaned forward. ‘I’m just saying you didn’t have an arbitrary compulsion to attend evensong on Wednesday. You were guided there.’

  ‘If that were true,’ Jane said, ‘the whole chapel should’ve been full of people like Oscar.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Yin said.

  ‘You know. Heathens. Heretics. Non-believers.’

  They all laughed.

  ‘Maybe he was the only heathen who happened to be walking by,’ Marcus said.

  Jane stood up, straightening her skirt. ‘When did you both go to Heidelberg anyway? I don’t remember that.’

  ‘In August,’ Eden said. ‘It was just for a weekend. You were in Italy.’

  ‘Did Iris go with you?’

  ‘No. She stayed behind. What does it matter?’

  ‘It doesn’t.’ Jane shrugged. She seemed to let the subject drop, but then picked it back up again. ‘I don’t remember you saying anything about going to Heidelberg, that’s all. I might have wanted to go to Heidelberg myself.’

  ‘You were in Italy. With your parents,’ Eden said. He stressed each word like he was punishing a dog.

  ‘Yes. And if I’d known you two were going antiquing in Heidelberg, there’s no way I’d have gone anywhere with my bloody parents.’ She went to the far end of the room and returned with a crystal decanter. ‘Would anyone care for some port? It’s just about late enough.’

  ‘Not for me, thanks,’ Oscar said.

  ‘It’s the good stuff,’ Jane said. ‘That’s one of the best things about Eden—he can drivel on and on, but he’s always got a decent port in the house. Come on, have a glass.’

  ‘Thanks, but I really should be going. I’ve got work in the morning.’

  ‘Oh. Right you are,’ Jane said. ‘More for the rest of us then.’

  The sound of Iris’s footsteps above them had stopped now, and Oscar was already regretting his decision not to follow her. It felt like they’d hardly had a chance to speak since they’d finished dancing. He got up and made for the hallway.

  As he neared the door, Eden called out: ‘I could prove it, you know.’ His voice sounded like dry, distant thunder in the quiet of the room. ‘We could have a demonstration, right here in the parlour.’

  Oscar turned. ‘Prove what exactly?’

  ‘That Mattheson knew what he was talking about. That he was really onto something.’

  ‘It makes no difference to me.’

  Eden shrugged. He seemed a little hurt. ‘I’m just saying, I could prove it. If you came back tomorrow night, we could have a demonstration, and then you’d believe me.’

  Oscar lingered by the doorjamb. ‘Why does it matter if I believe you or not?’

  ‘Because,’ Eden said, his tone softening, ‘because my sister likes you. And it would do her good to know we agree on something.’ He looked away, as if the mention of Iris bore no significance, but Oscar
heard it for what it was: a tentative endorsement, an invitation to spend more time with her. And Oscar could see no better reason to come back tomorrow than the prospect of getting close to her again, even if it meant indulging Eden for a while. ‘Okay. I’ll come,’ he said. ‘If it means that much to you.’

  Eden gave a faint smirk. ‘I was thinking eight o’clock?’

  ‘My shift might run over.’

  ‘That’s alright, we’ll wait for you.’ Eden accepted a glass of port from Jane and gestured towards the ceiling. ‘Tell Iggy to come back and drink with us.’

  Oscar said goodnight and headed into the hall. He went up the cold wooden staircase to look for her, expecting the old boards to creak under his feet, but every step was close to soundless. The bathroom door was open at the top of the stairs and a shaving light was on above the washbasin. He nearly walked straight past, but then he noticed a pale arm drooping over the side of the bath, an ashy cigarette between two of its fingers. Iris was laid out in the empty tub, asleep. She was still wearing her recital gown and looked impossibly comfortable, her neck lolling towards the tiles, a peaceful look upon her face. He didn’t want to wake her. Down in the hallway, he wrote his number on the pad by the telephone, tore it off. The others were still talking in the next room, and he imagined the cheery rumble of their voices lasting until dawn. He found her brown coat hanging by the door, slipped the note into the pocket, and went out into the night.

  THREE

  A Reversible Lack of Awareness

  The next day, things were quiet at Cedarbrook. Oscar spent his breaktime in the conservatory with The Passions of the Soul. It was an awkward translation and he made slow progress to begin with. The language was dense, arrhythmic, old-fashioned (relying heavily on words such as ‘thither’ and ‘oft’), and a significant percentage of Part One seemed to focus on the digestion of meat in the human body. He put the book away and vowed to try again during his next break.

  He wanted to speak to Dr Paulsen about it, but the old man was not in a talkative mood. His first attempt at communal dining had gone smoothly, in that he’d managed to eat breakfast with the other residents without catapulting poached eggs at them, but his second attempt, an evening dinner of boiled ham and potatoes, had not been a great success. Oscar had reported for his shift at eight, only to be informed by Jean, the staff nurse, that there had been a ruckus in the dining room the night before: ‘Your friend Paulsen tried to pull off the whole tablecloth.’ Jean was a big woman; when she got upset, her jowls shook and her ID badge flapped against her breast. ‘He was spitting at everyone, throwing mustard, potatoes. It was ugly.’ Oscar had gone up to Paulsen’s room to see if he could find out what the problem was, but the old man wouldn’t speak.