The Bellwether Revivals

by Benjamin Wood

  She said that her mother wanted to involve the police, that she was starting to think Eden wasn’t going to come back at all. ‘I suppose technically he is a missing person by now, so she has a point. But Dad wouldn’t have it. He’s convinced he’s coming back. He said, Can you imagine how that would look? Police cars in the driveway? No thank you … Still, my mother seems worried. It’s true what she says—a month is a long time, and he’d normally have been in touch by now. But I’m trying not to get caught in the middle of it. I’m trying to get my head down and study. I feel bad for saying this, but—’ She trailed off. ‘I feel awful for saying it, but I’m sort of glad my brother isn’t around at the moment. It’s taken the pressure off a little bit.’

  Every day was another cross on the calendar.

  On the morning of 23rd May, Iris had her first exam, and Oscar went to meet her later that afternoon at Jesus Green. He came straight from Cedarbook and was still in his uniform, and the sight of her there on the grass before him, the way her face brightened as he approached her, only made him more aware of how much he’d missed her. Her hair was longer, nearly back to blonde. She was happy and relaxed, lying on a plaid blanket that she’d spread across the grass, and it seemed as if the sun had come out just for her. ‘Ask me,’ she said, ‘ask me how it went.’

  He lay down next to her, kissed her mouth softly. The ground was damp and spongy beneath the blanket. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Wonderfully. If the next five go as well as that, I’ll be delirious.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘We need to celebrate,’ she said.

  ‘Okay. Let’s do something tonight. Dinner?’

  ‘No, I can’t, I have to go back and study. Another test in the morning.’

  ‘Well, whenever you want then.’

  It was the oddest feeling: when Eden wasn’t around, they were so much freer. They could make plans that didn’t revolve around him; they could do things on a whim, without any regard for what a certain somebody might say about it. So then why did everything feel so uncomfortable? Why didn’t life seem the same without him? Somehow Eden’s absence had given him a greater presence. He was an unspoken word that underscored every conversation. A face that flickered behind every shopfront. A punter’s shadow gliding away along the Cam. And though Iris did her best to cover up the moments where she’d zone out as they were talking, though she busied herself with revision so Oscar wouldn’t think she’d fallen apart completely, he knew that she missed her brother. How could she not?

  ‘I was thinking we could go to the May Ball at St John’s,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a Japanese theme this year. It’ll give us a chance to dress up. Exams will be over by then—we can get Jane and Marcus and Yin to come, really let our hair down. It’ll be fun.’ Her words came out in monotone. She looked across the green, towards a group of shirtless men playing volleyball over a badminton net. ‘And besides, I’ve only ever been to the ball at King’s, which isn’t the same thing. I could never find anyone to take me. Eden always said the fancier parties were a big waste of effort.’

  Oscar noticed the past tense. ‘Maybe he was right,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but for once in my life, I’d like to find that out for myself.’

  She lay on her back, brushing the hair out of her eyes. ‘My mother says you were talking to her after the Easter service. I don’t know what it was that you said to her, but you made some kind of impression. In a good way, I mean.’

  ‘I did?’

  She nodded. ‘We had one of those difficult, silent dinners last night—the type you just want to crawl under the table and hide from. My dad wasn’t saying much, and everyone was messing with their food, not eating, and I suppose I must’ve looked depressed or something, because my mother put her fork down and said—I can’t do her voice—So, darling, when are you next seeing Oscar? Took me completely by surprise. She never asks me about you, not really. And I said, well, I don’t know, soon I hope, it’s hard with my leg and everything, and she starts gathering the dishes up. Then—this is the best part—she says to me: Well, I think you should make more of an effort. He’s good for you, that boy. So there you go. Seal of approval. How do you do it, Oscar?’ She smiled at him. ‘How do you make people like you without even trying?’

  ‘Oh, there are plenty of people who don’t like me,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not true. Name one.’

  ‘Your brother for starters.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong about that. He liked you.’

  There it was again, Oscar thought: the past tense. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just know.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. You’re the only Bellwether I want to love me.’

  She raised his hand to her mouth and kissed it, holding her lips there, warm and dry. He felt two long exhalations upon his skin before she released it. ‘I do love you,’ she said. ‘You’re the only good thing to come out of all this mess.’

  They lay there for a while in each other’s arms, watching the grey clouds trawling the sky. It was good to be close to her again, to have her breathing quietly beside him, her chest rising and falling, her fingers gripping his. But he knew her mind was a long way away. She was glaring at clouds, never blinking, and he could tell by her soft, persistent sighs that she was thinking about Eden. The whites of her eyes seemed to dance with her every thought, nervously twitching. ‘I was going through some old study notes the other day,’ she said, stretching to retrieve her bag, rooting through it. After a moment, she pulled out a spiral-bound notepad, leafed through the pages, and presented it to him. ‘Look what I found.’

  Oscar struggled to read her messy handwriting. He remembered the night when she had copied out the passage from Herbert’s book: Sometimes, NPD sufferers are trapped in an endless cycle of trying to prove their abilities; they may set themselves impossible challenges to solve or overcome, only to battle with the feelings of failure and ineptitude that these self-imposed challenges create. The last part of the quote, she had underlined several times: If this rage is held inside, directed inward, it can lead to self-harm and suicidal ideation.

  She looked at Oscar now, squinting into the sun. ‘I can’t stand waiting any more,’ she said. ‘I need to be doing something.’

  ‘But your dad said—’

  ‘Forget about my dad. He’s being so bloody obtuse. Everyone can see Eden’s not coming back by Monday. We need to start looking for him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I can’t do it on my own, not in this condition.’ Her voice had a defeated tone, as if she were tired of its sound. ‘Oscar, he’s going to lose everything—his scholarship, his place at the college—it’s all going to be wasted. We can’t just sit here letting it happen. He’s got to know we’re trying to find him.’

  ‘Then let’s start.’

  She turned her head sharply. ‘You mean it?’

  ‘Just tell me where to look.’

  There was a familiar cold pressure upon Oscar’s neck when he got to the landing. He had switched on every light on his way upstairs, but it only made the furthest reaches of the house seem darker, and even though Iris had given him the keys, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had broken in. There wasn’t much furniture amongst the clutter of Eden’s room: a double bed and a small chest of drawers, a dressing table and an antique wardrobe with a streaky mirrored door. He decided to start with the drawers. There were plenty of clothes left inside: vests and thermals, white sports socks, silk boxer shorts, ties and cummerbunds. He slid the bottom drawers out, emptying them onto the bed. There was nothing of interest, only musty corduroy, denim, polyester. But then, as he was putting the last drawer back in place, he noticed something—a strip of black electrical tape on the bare insides of the unit. He ran his fingers over it, feeling a bump, and peeled the tape away. A small key fell into his hand. It was brassy and tarnished and didn’t seem to fit any lock he could find, so he put it into his pocket, and s
lid the rest of the drawers back in.

  There were so many books and papers on the floor that he could hardly see the carpet. He had to skim-read his way through them: pamphlets and pamphlets of sheet music; anthologies of classical notation; single foolscap pages with Eden’s scrawls and doodles; brand-new books with shiny dustcovers that looked as if they’d hardly been opened; frayed hardbacks with torn jackets or no jackets at all; whole chapters ripped from unknown paperbacks, held together by hard yellowy glue; old newspaper after old newspaper; worn-out copies of the Spectator, the New Statesman, the New Yorker, the Sunday Times Magazine, the British Medical Journal; outdated university prospectuses; journals in which essays had been mapped out, and musical compositions sketched, and self-portraits drawn in blunt pencil. Inside every book, inside every newspaper and magazine, there were corners folded over to mark pertinent pages. Sometimes a single word was underscored in biro, sometimes a sentence or a whole paragraph. Though there seemed to be no particular system to the way that all of the books and papers had been assembled, Oscar knew they’d been arranged exactly how Eden wanted them. Where the rest of the world saw chaos, Eden saw logic and order. His room was an atlas of his mind.

  It took Oscar an hour just to get halfway through the stacks. He felt like he was in the archives of some abandoned library. He leafed through essay collections on art history, architecture, economics, philosophy; language textbooks on Anglo Saxon, Norse, Medieval German, Latin, Ancient Greek; journal articles on engineering, materials science, geology; simple instruction booklets on pyrotechnic displays, set design, landscape gardening. There were many different books on Descartes, and by Descartes—from early French editions to modern translations—and fat, daunting texts with their titles embossed in gold letters: Mesmerism and Other Forsaken Arts. The Awakening of Memory. Animal Magnetism: The Genesis of Hypnosis.

  He wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. By the left foot of the bed, there was a pile of books that seemed to share a single theme: music. His eyes studied their spines, starting with Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music, reaching thicker books like Sacred Music: An Anthology of Essential Writings, 1801–1918, and The Organ: Its Evolution, Principles of Construction and Use, and theoretical volumes on the works and lives of great composers, from Francesco Landini to Guillaume Dufay; from Henry Purcell to Benjamin Britten; from Tchaikovsky to Bartók. He had to take a breath when he stumbled upon a copy of Der Vollkomenne Capellmeister by Johann Mattheson. It was a well-thumbed German paperback, and Eden’s jottings in the margins were mostly in German too—apart from one section in the text, numbered 59, by which he’d written in ballpoint: ‘59. Hope is caused by an elevation of the spirits. Despair, on the other hand, is a casting down of the same. These subjects can be well represented by sound …’

  Oscar wasn’t sure if this was a translation or just an idle note, but the handwriting was different: inkier, less hurried. He picked up the next work in the pile. Johann Mattheson: Spectator in Music by Beekman C. Cannon. He flicked through it, not really sure what he was expecting to find. The pages stopped turning at 107, where there was a highlighted paragraph of text:

  The year before his death he presented all his books and manuscripts, totaling one hundred and twenty-eight volumes and Convolute, to the Hamburger Stadtbibliothek. Thus were spent the last few years of his life, and on April 17, 1764, in his eighty-third year the valiant old gentleman, ‘der wohlgebohrne Herr Legationsrath,’ died. He was buried according to his wishes in the St Michaelis Kirche five days later. His epitaph, recently discovered in the church, bears the inscription:

  Ruhe Kammer

  für Herr

  Johann Mattheson

  weyland

  Grosfürstlicher

  Holsteinischer

  Legations Raht

  und dessen

  Ehe Genossin

  Zu ewigen Tagen

  On April 25, a special service was held in the church in his honor, as a leading citizen of Hamburg. For two-and-a-half hours, the bells of all the chief churches were tolled.

  He flicked back a page and found this:

  In June, 1753, Mattheson made his second will, which left a sum necessary for the construction of a proper organ in this church (should he die before it was finished). According to his records, Mattheson’s chief concern in the last ten years of his life were the ordering of his material affairs and the progress of the St Michaelis organ.

  St Michaelis sounded familiar.

  St Michael’s?

  He remembered Eden mentioning something about a St Michael’s organ back at his parents’ house. It was a lead, or the closest he’d come to one. He read more highlighted passages from the book, and the more he read, the stronger the feeling built in the reaches of his gut—not exactly a certainty, but an optimism—and the louder the voice grew in his mind that kept on saying Hamburg. It wasn’t so far beyond reason that Eden would go there: somewhere his hero had been laid to rest, where he could speak a different language, be somebody else for a while. It was perfectly possible that he’d gone to visit Mattheson’s grave, to commune with his headstone, to see the famous organ Mattheson had paid for, to feel those centuries-old keys under his fingers. Maybe all of this had been in Eden’s mind when he’d gone speeding off in Jane’s Land Rover. Maybe he hadn’t been thinking he was running away, but heading for home.

  The wardrobe was the only place left to look. Oscar tried to open the door but it was locked, and for a moment, he almost gave up on it, until he remembered the key that was still in his pocket. It was a perfect fit in the tiny, intricate lock, and it turned with an easy click. There were no clothes inside, just a column of identical black storage boxes—eleven of them, maybe twelve. He slid out the top box and found it was filled with handwritten notation, bound with green ribbon. There must have been fifty different scores in there, and though none of them was titled, each page bore Eden’s name and his angular signature. The marks on the staves were wild, drawn freehand, and they swept from left to right in exaggerated waves, dense and complicated. There was more of the same in the next couple of boxes—more sheet music, more of Eden’s own compositions—and the one after that held labelled photocopies of works by Beethoven and Mozart and Handel that had been cut out and pasted together, reassembled into an awkward medley of paper. In the next box, there were photographs of musical notation, and folders of slides that showed nothing but ancient-looking sheet music when he held them up to the light. The music in these pictures seemed more balanced, written in a steady, almost clinical hand, as if each crotchet had been drawn with a ruler. Right at the bottom of this box, he found two very old editions of Der Vollkommene Capellmeister, their covers preserved with clear polythene wrappers, and there was a large plastic wallet that contained letters and envelopes, the paper jaundiced and brittle, bearing German words in faded black ink, and signatures too intricate to make out.

  Oscar felt his heart clenching as he opened the next box. He could hardly breathe. Inside, there were ten first editions, wrapped in tissue paper.

  Engines of Grief

  Distant Relations

  The Predatory Instinct

  Selfhood in the Modern World

  The Fraudulent Mind

  Solitude and the Self-Image

  The Psychic Policemen and Other Case Studies

  Towards Yesterday: The Meaning of Memory

  Unpopular Mechanics

  The Girl With the God Complex

  Every book that Herbert Crest had ever published was right there before him. Their pages were stiff and clean. There were no marks or comments in the margins. Some of them still had the shop receipts tucked inside the back flap: at 4:36 p.m. on 04/28/96, Eden had paid $35.00 for The Girl With the God Complex, at Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon.

  Oscar opened another box. He found lever-arch folders with photocopies and printouts of every article Herbert Crest had ever authored; there were copies of every article that had ever been written a
bout him, each one in its own plastic sleeve. Only the old man’s obituaries seemed to be missing. As he leafed through them, Oscar saw images of Herbert Crest he’d never seen before, watched him ageing before his eyes like stop-motion footage of a plant growing from seed to flower. His hands paused on a small, single-column article. The headline caught him by surprise:

  Cambridge Daily News, 5 NOVEMBER 1966

  PROFESSOR SUES STUDENT OVER HOUSEBOAT THEFT

  by Leda Cotter

  KING’S COLLEGE RESEARCHER, Dr Herbert Crest, 32, appeared before magistrates this morning charged with causing damage to a houseboat owned by eminent literature professor, Dr Abraham Paulsen, of Clare Street, Cambridge.

  The plaintiff stole the houseboat, which had been moored on a stretch of river near the Victoria Bridge, and sailed it as far as Ely, where it was left abandoned for several weeks and damaged by local vandals. Dr Crest was arrested in June on suspicion of theft, and later convicted and sentenced to 72 hours community service by the Magistrate, Mr Franklin Hulme.

  Now Dr Paulsen has brought a civil proceeding against the plaintiff—a postdoctoral researcher in the Psychological Laboratory, Cambridge—to reclaim repair costs amounting to £300.

  At Cambridge Magistrates’ Court this morning, the plaintiff stated that the boat was bought for him as a birthday gift by the 51-year-old King’s College professor; the two men had been close friends but had fallen out over Dr Crest’s career plans. Therefore, ownership of the houseboat is still being disputed.

  ‘This is a nuisance case,’ said solicitor James McAnthony of Bronwen Boyle Solictors. ‘My client was wrongly convicted of theft in the first place, but he has served the sentence handed down to him. He cannot now be held accountable for the senseless actions of hoodlums, and should be remunerated for the undue stress this action has caused.’