The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  “He thinks he’s coming to hear Donovan,” said Regina lightly. Donovan, I took it, was the protégé recently discovered, who had promised to play and now could not. “Michael’s writing a piece on rising English talent,” my hostess went on. “And I see no reason why you shouldn’t be the rising talent instead of Donovan, who seems to have risen quite nicely without Michael’s help.” She smiled benignly upon me. “Of course we needn’t say anything about the change of program,” she added archly, “until the last moment. You know what these critics are like.” I nodded, though I had no idea. She beamed at me encouragingly. “If you’d like the chance to play, it’s yours.”

  I had one reservation. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to hear me before you put the success of the concert into my hands?”

  “Oh darling,” she said, laughing, “what do I know about music? If you’re good enough for the Guildhall, you’re good enough for me.”

  “In that case,” I said, “I’m yours.”

  “But that’s marvelous. Thank you so much.”

  “And when is it?”

  “The concert?”

  I nodded.

  “Next Friday,” she said, breezily.

  So, I thought, I am your last hope. Aloud I said, “I see I’ve not got much time to practice, then?”

  “But aren’t the sonatas on your Guildhall list? Don’t you know them already?” She looked up at me in consternation. “It’s just that the programs and everything have already been printed and … Of course there’ll be a card insert with your name on it, if that’s what’s concerning you.”

  In a few words I set her mind at rest.

  “I am so relieved. Thank you so much.”

  We shook hands. As I walked down the steps onto the street she called to me. “Excuse me, James,” her voice rang out, high and clear. We were already on first-name terms, for immediate intimacy was the key to Regina’s technique. “I haven’t told you who your accompanist is to be.” She smiled at me. “How silly. His name is Eric de Vaugirard, a really delightful young man. Very French. Very artistic. He was at my ‘morning,’ in fact.” Hastily she produced a pen and paper from her voluminous handbag. “Here is his telephone number,” she said. “I shall give him yours too so that you can contact each other and rehearse over the week.”

  “Thank you,” I said, pocketing the paper.

  “The thanks are all from me,” she replied, kissing me firmly on both cheeks.

  And waving me down the remaining stairs she went back into the house, closing its gleaming door briskly behind her.

  CHAPTER 10

  IT IS COLD IN THIS ROOM NOW; the fire is dying and the radiators are useless. This place resists all heating. But I shall stay here until I have the events of my life in some kind of order that I can understand. For not only must the strands of experience be unraveled and distinct; they must be twisted into place again and understood. It is a laborious process, but a rewarding one, though I am continuously distracted by the poor quality of the tools at my disposal. If you spend fifty years trying not to remember you eventually succeed; if you spend fifty years talking of little that matters you eventually forget how to do so when you want to. Words are powerful weapons and once I was quite adept in my handling of them; but that is a skill so tied up with my guilt—for it allowed me to disguise my naïveté with such success—that I have consciously allowed it to fall into a state of disuse. It has been a struggle to learn how not to remember, how not to think, how not to speak of important things; but it is a challenge to which I have risen with success. With so much success, in fact, that now, when I try to remember, when I try to think and to express those thoughts, my faculties fail me. The frustrating thing about recollection, even once its wheels have been coaxed into motion as the wheels of mine have been, is its sketchiness. About some things, some of them inconsequential, my memory is complete. About others there is hardly anything at all.

  Ella was burned into my mind; remembering her has not been difficult. And Sarah lived with me for almost fifty years; I could not forget her. It is Eric who has fallen away. My guilt—my sin—obscures him. It is to him that I would make amends, if only I could. But he is dead; and I hardly remember what he looked like. That is an ugly thought.

  I know that I must have met him at some time in the week which followed my attendance at that first Boardman “morning.” He was, after all, to be my accompanist for the concert at St. Peter’s. And I know also that as I walked down Sloane Street on that blazing August day, whistling, I had his telephone number on a piece of paper in my pocket. I suppose I must have telephoned him and that our rehearsals together must have gone well, for the concert itself was a success; and as the first quasi-professional performance of my career it will always have a special place in my affections.

  I have played at many concerts since, in concert halls far grander than the dank church I played in that night and to audiences far more receptive than the one which gathered to hear me then. But viewed from a distance of fifty years, and at the end of a career which has seen a certain amount of success, I find myself thinking of that evening with nostalgia, for the chill of nerves and the thrill of applause grow more commonplace as the years pass. I see the dark columns of the church; I feel its cool, damp air; I hear the expectant hush as I take my place by the piano on an improvised stage in the nave. And now, looking over to him as I signal that I am ready to begin, I see Eric. In this memory, though I do not know him well—perhaps because I do not know him well—I see him unobscured. He is a dignified figure in evening tails and white tie, his unruly hair tamed for the occasion. Oh yes I see him now, and in seeing I remember. Eric was tall, not so tall as I but tall. He was more thickly built than I, with a strong neck. His skin was almost olive— there was a touch of the Spaniard in him—and his eyes were dark. They and his hands distinguished him from the line of gentleman farmers who had tilled the Vaugirard lands for centuries. Large and dark, almost black, his eyes danced; they flashed; they were joyful.

  I remember the applause that night. I remember Ella’s face, glowing with pleasure, in the front row beside her father and stepmother. I remember bowing and motioning to Eric to bow also and I remember … But what is the use of all this memory? Remembering that concert will not help my understanding of the events I wish to explain. My career is not a mystery to me. I talk not to chronicle my life but to come to terms with what I have done; I wish to face my crime and to try, if not to explain at least to understand. But search though I might I con find no sign in the happy pride of that evening no glimpse of an oracle who might have whispered silently and told me that in three months—or was it four?—Eric would be dead.

  No, I find no sign. And as I look for one my mind fills instead with the memory of that first interview with Michael Fullerton. It is his face—so meaningless to me now—which returns to me, not Eric’s; it is his bulging belly I see; his whisky-reeking breath I smell.

  Regina Boardman was detailed and frank in her instructions. “Michael Fullerton,” she told me the day before the concert, “is an old queen. An absolute dear,” she hastened to assure me (for Regina Boardman had nothing, absolutelynothing against homosexuals, as such), “but let’s just say that he doesn’t bat for our team. So the fact that you’re a good-looking young man isn’t going to do your chances of getting written about any harm. Make sure you look dashing, and don’t mind if he flirts with you. A little judicious smiling—it’s all that’s required, on top of an inspired performance, of course— and you never know what he might do for you. He’s an influential man, knows lots of people. Lots of the right people. He’s certainly someone to get on your side. So do try. Make sure you do.”

  I did. When Michael told me that I really should be photographed for a feature he was writing, I smiled; when he praised my control of my instrument (“very masculine, Mr. Farrell, but so sensual; quite erotic”) I smiled; when he asked me to tea at the Ritz the following day to talk further, I smiled also and accepted. When he had go
ne, I told Regina verbatim what he had said.

  “But James that’s marvelous,” she cried. “You know that means a real interview, not one of these ‘quick chats’ he has with everyone after the concerts he goes to. He’s obviously taken a shine to you, my boy. You won’t need my help any longer. Once Michael Fullerton thinks you’re good, things start happening of their own accord. He told me,” she added confidentially, “that he wasn’t a bit upset I didn’t tell him about the change in soloist. He told me you had raw talent. Those were his precise words.”

  And so Regina Boardman went home delighted and I, delighted myself, was free to keep the clandestine appointment in Eaton Square gardens which Ella and I had made the afternoon before. I have no recollection of saying good-bye to Eric or of thanking him, though I must have done both before I left the church. He is as yet a shadowy figure, but as I watch him in memories retained without thought of him I remember more. As others have done with photographs, so have I with memories: I have censored them. But one cannot destroy recollections as one can photographs; one can only bury them in the dust of a lifetime’s mental trivia. The details of my friendship with Eric and its conclusion are dusty, for I buried them well; but they grow clearer now; their outlines are filling.

  I have no difficulty in remembering my tea with Michael Fullerton, however; or how on expenses I drank tea and ate strawberries and talked to him of music and passion and the uncertainties of youth. A photographer from The Times appeared and took photographs of me, windswept in the breeze, in Green Park. That was that. It was not until a week later that any results appeared, and it was not I who saw them first but Camilla Boardman, who came in person to show them to me and who arrived on my doorstep, waving a sheet of newspaper, at half past nine one warm morning.

  “Hello darling You splendid boy.”

  A little groggy from sleep, for it was I who had opened the door, I looked at her in confusion.

  “Morning, Camilla,” I said, wondering what she was doing on my doorstep; then I saw the newspaper in her hand. “Give me that.” I was awake at once.

  “Uh, uh, uh. What’s the magic word?”

  “Don’t be coy. Give it to me.” Morning irritability mixed with excitement made me impatient of Camilla’s social games.

  “I shan’t show you at all if you insist on being so rude. I think the least you could do is ask me in and offer me a cup of tea. I’ve come halfway across London to show you this article.” This was not strictly true, but details of geography had never troubled Camilla. “Oh all right, then,” she said, giving in with a pout, as I remained impassive in the doorway. She handed me the newspaper. And on seeing the look of pleasure on my face she hugged me, with a sincerity which reminded me why I liked her and told me that I was fantastic.

  I certainly felt so. Michael Fullerton’s feature on me, entitled “One to Watch,” offered an end to the war with my parents over my future; and the victory was mine. Our struggle had lasted almost two years and had grown bloody in the two months since I had left Oxford. I had explained, cajoled and finally insulted. They had told me, calmly at first and then frostily, that I was an impulsive boy who did not know his own mind. I ran into the breakfast room with Camilla behind me and showed them the article, whooping with schoolboy joy. I have it still today; I have kept it all these years. But there is no need to read it: a few phrases, plucked from memory, will suffice to show that once, at least, I was promising and carefree. “This passionate young man,” Fullerton had written, “seems set to take London and the world by storm. At times controlled, at times abandoned, frequently inspired, his playing belies his years.” My mother, to her credit, cried. My father shook my hand. The war was over.

  But it was Ella whom I most wanted to see, Ella by whom I most wished to be praised. I was like a dog with a pheasant So I telephoned the house in Chester Square and asked her to meet me on the steps of the National Gallery in half an hour.

  “You’ve got it haven’t you? He wrote it, didn’t he?”

  I was silent.

  “I’m off to buy The Times right this minute. Oh God this is wonderful. What’s he said? What’s the photograph like?”

  But I was enigmatic to the last. “Meet me in half an hour,” I said again.

  “Okay sweetheart. In half an hour.”

  Hearing Ella call me sweetheart made up for all my anxieties over our future. She still was not free. We had returned from Cornwall, locked in discussion for six hours on the train, and parted, as decided, with the restrained politeness of virtual strangers. It would not do for us to be seen or for our hands to be forced.

  “It’s better like this,” she had said. “I have to ease myself out of this slowly. There are a lot of people I’ve got to consider before myself. Charlie, Sarah, my parents, my family. No one must see us. No one must suspect about you and me.”

  And I had agreed with her.

  I number the few weeks of illicit meetings which followed as amongst the happiest of my life. Ella and I snatched our kisses in art galleries; we shared our souls on park benches; we touched in the furtive dark of cinemas. We were living in the calm before the storm; and the difficulty of our meetings only added to their pleasure. There was intrigue, beauty, passion; the stuff of novels. In real life such romance happens rarely; and when it does it is fleeting. That is its nature. For Ella and me, as for all who experience the first rush of illicit love, the enchantment was in the present. It had no future in its first, unaltered state; but it bound us nevertheless with a force that has lasted to this day, despite all that has happened. Oh yes, it has bound us. I might talk of guilt; I might be bowed by sin; but I shall go to my grave with the memory of those few, thoughtless weeks, when we cared for no one but each other and happiness made us selfish. If it was wrong, then it is negligible by comparison with the wrongs which followed it. If it was sinful, then it is a guilt that I can bear. In those weeks I came truly to life, as I had never done before and would not do again. I was not a fish in a school; or if I was then Ella and I had made a school for ourselves alone, and we swam the ocean together.

  It was a time of manifold consummations, for love was a varied catalyst; and it came particularly to be the time of my music’s real flourishing. I remember now the hours Ella would spend on the floor of my cramped attic, listening to me play. I remember now how she would sit always in the same position, half curled, half upright, on a cushion in the corner where the eaves came almost to the floor: a delicate crumple of limbs, one hand occasionally brushing the fine golden hair from her eyes. I remember now how she would sit completely still, believing that I played best when hardly conscious of her presence. And although the reverse was true, her quiet exhilaration—all the more felt for her stillness—first calmed me and then dared me beyond the technical shallows in which I might otherwise have lingered. Ella would sit, hardly moving, for two or three hours at a time; she would follow me through my scales and exercises; through the seemingly endless repetition of certain phrases; and then she would open the grimy windows and fill the room with the fresh breeze of summer, smiling and laughing and telling me that I was wonderful, that I made her happy in ways I could not dream. We would drink tea together perhaps, or wine, as the sinking sun filled the room with dusty warmth; and then she would smoke a cigarette, resume her former position in the corner and listen to me, eyes closed, as I played to her: pieces I had grown up with; the Beethoven sonatas I was preparing for the Guildhall; snatches of the violin lines from orchestral works that she loved.

  Her tastes were diverse but she had her favorites, and I spent many hours playing them to her, watching the glow of her cheeks as she leaned her head, unseeing, on one bare, folded knee. Bach’s fourth sonata for harpsichord and violin was frequently called for, I remember; so too was the waltz from Act I of Swan Lake. And it was at Ella’s suggestion, and under her encouragement, that I began to learn the Mendelssohn E Minor, though I had no way of knowing then that it would ultimately prove to be the making of my career. Ella heard
me with a delight that taught me the joys of performance. She transformed my natural shyness into a certain delicacy of presence; she taught me to rise to the challenges of my chosen art; and she helped me to rejoice in the power it gave me to move others.

  Relationships grow: their pleasures change and their struggles progress. That first rush of joy, as pure as anything human can be, is never repeated: it develops; it grows; it becomes, I suppose, more real. But in doing so it loses some of its power to intoxicate, for magic must fade in the grim reality of a world beyond the control of lovers. Throughout those balmy weeks Ella and I were intoxicated, I see that now; and for many reasons our intoxication did not fade of its own accord, for it had no time to do so before we were overtaken by its consequences. We could not lay foundations; our love could not develop as other loves have developed; it could not grow as other loves have grown. The joys of a later, more stable age were stifled before they could begin.

  Ella blew open my notions about life, my preconceptions about how one might live; and I did the same to hers. Together we detonated all history and watched, exhilarated, as worlds of experience and possibility opened in its place and expanded with the frantic energy of romantic fusion. Our nights together—snatched, secretive and few—were eternities. Our days we filled with debate and exploration and music and laughter and…. But why do I try to relive them?