The Bellwether Revivals

by Benjamin Wood

  He didn’t think there was anywhere else for the sound to go. Surely the building wouldn’t be able to contain it. Surely it would shatter the roof. But then Iris struck a high, trilling note on her cello, which cut through the dense breath of the organ. Her left hand slid along the neck, and she began to saw out quick, punchy chords with her bow—one two three four, one two three four—and they found their own place amid the rising clamour. Soon, Marcus, Jane, and Yin were singing.

  They sang as if they were playing a game of catch, batting notes back and forth to each other over Crest’s head. Short puffs of melody bounced off the chords of Iris’s cello—pah, pah, pum, pah, pah, pum—and locked onto the unrelenting music of the organ. It went on like this for a good while, until they stopped to take deep breaths, eyeing each other. They flipped the pages of their notation. As the drone of Eden’s organ began to fall away, they started to sing again with long, stretching notes in perfect harmony, as if to beckon the music down from the rafters. Yin’s deep voice pierced the air, pouring out of his chest like one sad sigh; Jane’s voice was the highest, the sweetest, the most fragile; and Marcus, the anchor between them, had a voice so sure and stable, never wavering with the beat of his arm as he kept them all in time. It was a smouldering lullaby. They sang no words, just sounds. The music was its own language.

  Oscar remembered the camera in his hands. When he turned back to check that it was still pointed at Crest, he found that his grip had loosened and the lens was steering itself towards the floor. Quickly, he lifted it, zooming and focusing it again on the old man’s face. He saw that Crest’s eyelids were closed. There was nothing different about him other than that; he was still holding the tuning fork between his teeth and his neck seemed stiff and steady. The muslin was still wet upon his skull, glossing his forehead. His pale skin glistened in the sickly hue of the oil lamps.

  The music stopped. There was not quite silence: it took a few moments for the organ’s voice to leave the space around them. Though the pipes had no voice left in them, there was still the memory of their sound, and when it finally cleared, nobody spoke, nobody moved. Crest didn’t open his eyes.

  Oscar didn’t know what else to do but keep on filming. The silence gathered. The mechanics of the camera kept on turning over. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, and Eden leaned down to whisper: ‘Turn it off.’ And he did—he cut the power and, hoping that Crest might blink his eyes open and tell him not to, he handed the camera to Eden.

  ‘I need you all to leave now,’ Eden said softly. They all looked at each other, shrugging. Still, the old man’s eyes stayed shut.

  ‘So that’s it?’ Marcus said. ‘Fun’s over?’

  ‘Fun’s over,’ Eden said. ‘Go.’ He threw something and Yin caught it. ‘All yours. Take anything but the Pétrus. Now go.’

  Marcus and Yin sprang up, letting their notation fall to the floor. They hurried off, and Jane skipped to catch up with them. ‘You’re not opening anything without me!’ she called out.

  The old man didn’t twitch. He seemed to be passed out cold in the chair.

  ‘I’m not leaving him like this,’ Oscar said.

  Eden stared at him. ‘If you don’t go, I can’t do what needs to be done. You’ll ruin everything and we’ll have to start all over again tomorrow.’

  ‘Come on, sweetheart,’ came Iris’s voice from behind him. She’d already placed her cello back into its case and was standing there waiting. ‘It’ll be okay.’

  ‘But he’s unconscious.’

  ‘Of course he is,’ Eden said, sounding almost affronted. ‘What exactly did you expect?’

  ‘If anything happens to him, Eden, I swear—’

  ‘Oh, I’m not going to harm the man. He’ll be wide awake again in a few minutes. Just go. Let me do what I need to do.’

  Oscar felt Iris tugging at his sleeve, lightly at first, then more insistent. ‘Come on. Herbert would want you to leave him,’ she said. ‘You know he would.’

  She was right. No getouts.

  He let himself be ushered away.

  Out in the garden, the night sky was dusted with stars. The elms stood rigid as back bones and the countryside noises sounded mysterious, hard to identify. Iris leaned against the wall, lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke. The lights were still on in the main house and Oscar could see the silhouettes of the others moving against the sheer kitchen curtains. From the foot of the garden, it seemed almost unreal, like some theatre set: a trick house made of paper and paint, with nothing behind it but the brick walls of the stage. He felt cold, unsettled. ‘What was that thing he just gave to Yin?’

  Iris tapped a column of ash from her cigarette. ‘Key to my father’s wine cellar. They’re probably tearing it apart as we speak. I should really go up there and make sure they don’t cause too much damage.’

  ‘You go. I’m staying here.’

  She took a small step forward. ‘He’s really not going to hurt him, Oscar.’

  ‘You don’t know that for sure.’

  ‘My brother’s got his problems, but he wouldn’t harm a fly.’

  ‘Like he wouldn’t put a nail through my hand, you mean? Like he wouldn’t stab you with safety pins?’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘You’re being dramatic,’ she said. ‘Herbert will be fine.’

  Just then, Jane came out onto the patio, calling: ‘Iggy! Iggy! You need to come up here! Yin just dropped something expensive!’

  ‘Be right there!’ Iris turned to Oscar, softening her expression. ‘Why don’t you come inside? There’s no point waiting out here in the cold.’

  He could hear no sound coming through the organ house doors. There was no music any more, no footsteps, not even a rumble of voices. Everything around him seemed placid and safe. Maybe he was just being dramatic. He went with Iris, back into the main house, where it was warmer, more comfortable. It was already getting on for ten o’clock; the time had passed in a blur.

  Yin was in the kitchen, studying a mess of broken glass he’d swept into a dustpan. He carefully picked out the label with his thumb and forefinger, lifting it up close to his face to read it. ‘Château Lafite,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry, I was trying to pull out a cheaper bottle and this one just kinda gave way. I’ll replace it, I promise.’

  ‘Forget it, Yinny. He won’t even know it’s missing.’

  ‘Not if I destroy the evidence.’

  In the drawing room, Marcus was pouring a syrupy-looking wine from a dusty black bottle into three glasses. When he saw them coming, he began to fill two more. ‘I was wondering when you’d be coming back.’

  ‘It’s all gone quiet out there,’ Iris said.

  Oscar could see the organ house through the French doors. He watched for signs of movement, but there were none. He took a seat close to the window, keeping the building in his line of sight.

  ‘We were all just saying—’ Marcus handed Iris a glass. ‘Wasn’t that the strangest thing you’ve ever done in your life?’

  ‘I’ve got to admit, there was something amazing happening in there,’ Jane said. ‘I mean, I could really feel something. It was like, I don’t know, a pressure, right here.’ She put her hand to her sternum.

  ‘Yeah, totally,’ said Yin from the doorway.

  ‘We all felt it,’ Iris said.

  Oscar had felt it, too. The music had a weight, an energy he wasn’t expecting. It had rattled through him. But until he knew for sure that Crest was okay, he wasn’t going to admit it. ‘How long did he have you all practising it?’ he asked.

  They looked at each other, confused.

  ‘Practising?’ Yin said. ‘Man, we were just sight-reading in there. That’s why the whole thing sounded so sketchy. Didn’t you notice? My timing was way off. I had Marcus treading all over my harmonies. And we were all kinda presto with the counterpoint. A little practice and we could have that thing nailed.’

  ‘Didn’t matter anyway,’ Jane said. ‘The piece had so
much power to it.’

  ‘I may have hit a few sharps that weren’t sharps,’ Marcus said.

  Iris sat down beside Oscar on the settee, pulling her legs up underneath her. ‘What about me? My fingering was appalling.’

  ‘You all sounded fine to me,’ Oscar said.

  Jane took a seat on the other settee and discarded the cushions, one by one. ‘Well, if we hadn’t developed half an ear for each other after all these years, it’d be a sad indictment of our friendship.’

  They stayed there in the drawing room for a long time, sipping their wine, until they fell into silence. Oscar wasn’t in the mood for drinking; he didn’t take a single mouthful. Iris rested her head on his lap, and he stroked her hair absently. All he could think about was what was happening in the organ house. He had a picture of Eden holding Crest’s skull in his hands, squeezing it until the old man cried out in pain and the tumour fell out of his mouth like some hunk of meat that had been caught in his teeth.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s unusual?’ Jane said. Nobody responded, but she went on anyway. ‘I mean, here we all are, most of us best friends who’ve known each other all our lives, and as soon as Eden’s out of the room we hardly have anything to say to each other. Don’t you think that’s strange?’

  They all seemed to ponder the question.

  Jane continued: ‘Don’t get me wrong—it’s nice just to be in the flock—but I do wonder what it says about us that we get all tongue-tied when Eden’s not around.’

  Oscar felt Iris sighing against his lap. Then Marcus piped up: ‘Actually, I think it’s the opposite. We know each other so well there isn’t anything left to say. Sometimes it’s nice just sitting here with you all, thinking. It’s only best friends who can be comfortable with silence, wouldn’t you say?’ Everyone sounded their agreement. ‘And I include you in that too, Oscar. You’re a part of the furniture like the rest of these degenerates.’

  ‘Now why’ve you got to go and do that, Em?’ Yin said, throwing a cushion at him. ‘You’ve always got to ruin a nice thing with an insult.’

  Marcus cackled. ‘Ich bin wie ich bin.’

  Oscar had a warm sensation in his chest. He felt, perhaps for the first time since he’d known them, genuinely welcome in their company. They talked with greater ease after that. They spoke about the silly things that bothered them about the world: nose hair, tracksuits, airport tax, vegetarianism. Simple things. Bad films they’d seen, new books they’d read, tasteless jokes they’d overheard. Oscar started to relax. He didn’t know how much time had passed, but there had been no movement outside the organ house, just the sullen flaming of lanterns in the garden.

  Jane was telling them a limerick her father had written in a recent letter from Italy (‘There once was a young man named Wyatt, who ate paperclips on the quiet; but his shits were belated, and badly collated, so he changed to an all-staple diet’) and they were still giggling at the punchline when Crest appeared in the drawing room doorway. The laughter dropped away. Everyone stood up at once.

  ‘Don’t let me interrupt you,’ Crest said.

  Eden was behind him, clutching at the old man’s forearm, steering him under the lintel the way Oscar often did with residents at Cedarbrook. It was the accepted method for guiding wanderers back to their rooms when they’d lost their sense of direction, sleep-walked, or just plain forgotten where they lived. Crest seemed confused. He walked with reluctant baby-steps.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Oscar asked.

  The old man nodded. ‘Let’s just go, huh?’

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Iris said.

  ‘No, honey, that’s okay.’ Crest dismissed her with a wave of his hand. ‘You wait here with your friends. Enjoy yourself.’

  There was no fanfare, no round of goodbyes. Oscar took the old man straight out to his car, where he found Andrea sleeping in the passenger seat—he had forgotten all about her. She stirred when he knocked on the glass, checking her watch, opening the door. ‘What the hell time do you call this? I been waiting in here for you all night, mister.’ She helped Crest into the car without allowing him to answer. ‘God Almighty, you look like death on a plate. I told you not to do this to yourself, didn’t I? I told you. But oh no, you knew better. Well, now look at you, you silly stupid man.’

  ‘I think she’s mad at me. What do you think?’ Crest sounded groggy.

  ‘She’s right, though,’ Oscar said. ‘You don’t look very good.’

  ‘Well, I feel pretty great.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I’m all spaced out. Feels like I’ve had a long soak in the tub. Quite pleasant.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Don’t look so worried. I’m not saying I’ve been healed or anything. I’m not claiming any miracles. But my jaw’s still tingling with that damn tuning fork. I definitely felt that.’

  ‘What happened after we left?’

  ‘We talked a little, that’s all,’ Crest said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Oh, come on now. I promised I wouldn’t tell.’

  ‘I thought we were in this together.’

  ‘We are. It’s like a doctor-patient thing. Bad ethics to break my word.’

  Andrea tutted. ‘Listen to you. You should be ashamed of yourselves.’ She directed her words to the footwell as she fastened the old man’s seat belt across his waist. ‘I don’t know what you got up to in there, but I was hearing all kinds of strange noises. I almost came running in to get you.’

  ‘That’s a sure way to get fired,’ Crest said.

  Andrea looked a little hurt. ‘Well, it seemed like a lot of noise for a sick old man.’

  ‘Is that all I am, a sick old man? A wife of the above.’

  ‘A what now?’

  Crest ignored her and beckoned Oscar closer. ‘I’ll have you know I learned a lot about myself in there tonight. There’s something very exciting about that boy. He’s a complex personality. Strange as hell, in my opinion, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s very exciting from a psychological standpoint to be around complex personalities. I’m a pretty complex guy myself.’ He mumbled all of this with the lazy drawl of a town drunk and with the same glassy, desperate look in his eyes. Pulling Oscar down to his sight-line by the scruff of his sweater, he added, in a lowered voice: ‘Listen, I’m going to be back here tomorrow. Same time. He wants me to do this every night for a week. A course of treatment, he said. I told him I’d stick around, stay in a hotel somewhere. What do you think?’

  A few hours ago, Oscar would’ve thought the idea was ludicrous, but now he wasn’t so sure. He’d definitely felt something in the organ house—a pressure, like Jane had said. He could still feel it now, the way you can still sense the gentle sway of a boat in your legs when you step back onto land. And even though the old man would probably never own up to it, Oscar thought he’d noticed a change in Crest as well. Maybe it was just his guard lowering. There was a new glimmer in his eyes, a deeper interest in his voice that he hadn’t been expecting. ‘If you think it’s a good idea, then so do I,’ he said.

  ‘So I’ll call you tomorrow?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He shut the door. As Andrea turned on the engine and pulled the car away, he realised he’d forgotten to ask the old man about the music, whether he’d felt anything more than just the tingle of a tuning fork. Perhaps something as remarkable as hope.

  When Oscar returned to the drawing room, Eden was leaning against the piano, pulling petals from the flower arrangement. The others were constellated on the furniture around him, and Marcus was talking about how wonderful he thought the music had been, how he hadn’t enjoyed singing quite as much for a long time. Sliding Eden a glass of Pinot across the piano lid, Marcus said: ‘I presume it was yours—your own composition, I mean.’

  Eden nodded. He let another petal fall from his fingers. ‘The entire arrangement came to me over the course of an evening. It was all rather hurried, but it’s more or less perfect.’


  Marcus said: ‘The melody in the last movement, it reminded me of Mattheson, the opening of his first oratorio.’

  ‘It was an homage,’ Eden said.

  ‘Oh, clearly it was an homage—very deliberate. A lovely touch, I thought.’

  ‘Thank you, Em.’

  ‘Please, stop it,’ Iris said, burying her head under a cushion. ‘Spare us the sycophancy.’

  ‘Weren’t you impressed, sis? I think you’re the only one who wasn’t moved by it. Even Oscar said he liked it.’

  ‘Actually, I thought my cello line was rather basic,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, and deliberately so. Don’t think I didn’t notice you trying to spice it up with extra glissando.’ Eden pulled at the neckline of his shirt, as if it were bothering him.

  ‘I’m just saying it wasn’t very challenging.’

  ‘My concern was for the architecture of the piece as a whole, not to entertain your ego.’ There had always been a wilful exuberance about Eden, but that night Oscar watched it grow into something that was difficult to witness: sheer, unhinged reverence for his own ability. Eden paced around the room, gesticulating with his glass, telling stories about his great hero, Johann Mattheson, sharing the details of his grandiose theories, whether anyone was interested in these theories or not. ‘… because music doesn’t need any rules for its own sake,’ he got to saying. ‘It’s only us that need them. I tried to override those rules tonight. I tried to write something without restrictions. Something to elevate the spirits, just like in the Baroque days. Mattheson said we impose rules and restrictions on music because of our own weaknesses and limitations. Because without rules, we wouldn’t be able to comprehend music at all, we wouldn’t even be able to discern a love song from, from—from a death knell. Music’s a heavenly art so we have to find some way to harness it, to understand it, make it something earthly. You see what I’m saying? We can only understand music through our senses. Nihil est in Intellectua, quod non fuit in sensu.’ He didn’t seem to care whether anybody in the room was listening or not. He was talking at them, ranting as if he needed to get the whole thing off his chest, stopping only to refill his wine glass, or open another bottle.