The Song of Hartgrove Hall

by Natasha Solomons

  Bang. Bang. The echo cracked through the trees. I grabbed Robin’s shoulders and pressed him close against my legs, my heart thundering in my chest.

  ‘Get out here and show yourself!’ I shouted. ‘How dare you shoot in my woods? How bloody dare you!’

  I must admit that there’s nothing like an unauthorised gun to make me come over all feudal. There was a rustle and then a pause. I could tell he wasn’t far off – probably just assessing the level of threat to his own skin. Presumably upon seeing that we were an old man and a small boy, he stepped out from behind an oak and sauntered towards us, stopping thirty yards off. He was short, bundled into a dark waterproof jacket, woollen hat pulled low. He held a rifle. A proper huntsman’s gun. This was no local youth taking a furtive pop at a pheasant.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here? I certainly didn’t give you permission.’

  He studied us for a moment in silence, clearly deciding which version of the truth to recount. ‘There’s no problem, mister. I’ll go. No trouble.’

  ‘Damn right you will. I should call the police. This is trespass.’

  He held up his hands. ‘Whatever you like. Was an honest mistake. Jon Bentley hired me. I’m out looking for a stray dog that’s been worrying his sheep on the hill. Lost twenty ewes this week, he has. I followed it into the woods. I thought this here were Bentley’s woods. My mistake.’

  ‘Well, they’re not. Twenty ewes, you say?’

  ‘Aye. Them that was killed outright. There was another ten what had to be shot.’

  ‘Good grief. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Said he didn’t want ter bother you with it. That you had enough on yer mind.’

  I was unsettled. Beside me Robin fidgeted and squashed a beetle with his heel.

  ‘Can I carry on now? I wouldn’t have hurt you. I heard you a mile off and I were shooting the other way.’

  I hesitated. ‘A dog, you say?’

  ‘Aye.’ He shifted the gun into his other hand.

  ‘Must be the size of a bloody wolf to need that calibre gun. So, no. I’m sorry for Bentley but I don’t like it. I won’t have a man with a rifle on my land. You need to leave, and if I catch you again, I will call the police.’

  The man swore and spat but he turned and headed away, towards the edge of the woods and the open back of the hill. Robin tugged on my arm. ‘Come on, Grandpa.’

  ‘Just a minute. I want to make sure he’s gone.’

  ‘Are you going to shoot him if he comes back?’ For the first time that morning, he sounded enthusiastic.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Because I won’t tell Mummy, if you do.’

  I laughed and we started back down the hill, and yet I couldn’t shake the sensation that beneath the rain-soaked scrub something crouched, watching.

  Robin’s behaviour improved. With his energy and interest channelled into music, he no longer bit and scratched his sisters or tore the pages out of picture books. He remained a quiet child. Clara fretted that he was withdrawn but I tried to reassure her that he never seemed quiet with me.

  ‘Yes but does he talk, Papa?’ she asked.

  I thought and realised that, while he did speak to me, he mostly spoke through the piano. I felt that I knew him rather well, but through his other voice. I tried to explain this to Clara.

  ‘He does communicate. He has a great deal to say, darling, but he says it using the piano.’

  ‘I can’t speak music. Not like you. I want him to talk to me.’

  ‘He is talking to you,’ I said. You simply don’t know how to listen. I succeeded in not saying that out loud. Edie would have been proud.

  It was the twelfth of December – Robin’s fifth birthday – and I was hosting a party. This was the first family gathering since the funeral. I’d asked Mrs Stroud, my housekeeper, to light fires in the drawing room and in the great hall. Usually when the children visited, we never lit one in the vast inglenook in the hall – too dangerous without a fireguard, Clara complained. I decided that all the children were now old enough to be trusted – and I must say that when Clara and Lucy were small, we never fussed about such things. We didn’t have central heating then and it was either light the fires or freeze.

  Rain was driving against the windows while a gale stole in through the gaps beneath the mullioned panes. Yet it was warm in the great hall – a huge log in the hearth blazed red and spat out orange sparks. As I gazed upon the flames, I could almost believe that the heart of the house was beating once again.

  I had Mrs Stroud set out glasses of champagne for the adults in the hall – a party is still a party even if the guest of honour is only five. On the minstrels’ gallery, I’d installed a string quartet for the birthday boy. Clara had suggested a magician but I’d ignored her – I knew Robin would prefer musicians. I didn’t confide my plans to Clara, choosing to surprise them all.

  Lucy was the first to arrive – alone. Over the years, I’d rarely been introduced to Lucy’s chaps and they never seemed to last. About ten years ago I’d wondered aloud whether she was a lesbian but Edie had laughed at me, informing me that lots of women nowadays meet a partner later in life and not all unmarried women were lesbians. I thought that was all well and good, but I would have liked Lucy to have a partner of some kind. Well, that isn’t quite true. I’m an old-fashioned man. Some may not approve of this, but I would have enjoyed walking Lucy down the aisle to her future husband and I would’ve liked her to be a mother. Lucy would have been a splendid mother. As the years went by, I was aware that Edie worried she was lonely and had left it all a bit late. When Edie told me that girls often didn’t get on with things until their forties, I knew she was reassuring herself rather than me. I think I would have liked Lucy’s children.

  I hoped rather than believed that she was happy. She had many friends up in London and made it all sound interesting and full but still I worried. She worked as a graphic designer for an advertising company and sometimes sent me cuttings of things she had done that had appeared in the paper. I’d always rather hoped she’d be a painter. She’d made wonderful drawings as a child. Those delicate fingers that were so useless for the piano were skilled at creating pictures. I’d given her the Not-Constable on her twenty-first birthday, but when she’d come to understand that the original painting had once been in the family and been lost, she’d wept; the copy painting had seemed paltry and the gift thoughtless. I hadn’t dared confess that once there had also been three Romneys, two Stubbs and a Gainsborough.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ I said, kissing her. ‘Have some champagne.’

  She took a glass and peered about the hall.

  ‘All this is for Robin?’ she asked.

  ‘He needed a treat. He’s been working terribly hard.’

  I glanced around the hall – it was looking super. Mrs Stroud had given everything a thorough spring-clean. The flagstones had been swept and scrubbed; the dark panelling had been rubbed with beeswax so that it gleamed; and the room smelled faintly of honey. Soft winter light filtered through the stained glass in the high mullioned windows, forming puddles of green and red on the sandstone floor. From the antlers of the mounted stags Mrs Stroud had draped banners declaring ‘Happy Birthday’. I’m sure they’d never been used for such an ignominious purpose before, and I did wonder whether their glass eyes were gazing at me with reproach. Streamers dangled from the still somewhat dusty and unlit chandelier – the thing is an absolute devil to clean. We’d never had it converted to electricity. Too expensive. Now that I thought about it, I ought to have lit five of its candles – but it was too late.

  ‘Hello, Papa. Goodness, you’ve been busy,’ said Clara, sailing across the room, trailing her daughters, Katy and Annabel, in her wake like a pair of small tugboats. Both girls were china-doll copies of their mother, so like her that sometimes I wondered whether their dour and red-faced father had had any part
in them at all.

  ‘Where’s the birthday boy?’ I asked.

  ‘Waiting in the kitchen with his father as instructed.’

  ‘Jolly good.’

  I gave Clara a glass of champagne and presented each of the girls with sparkling apple juice in plastic cups decorated with treble clefs and sprays of quavers.

  ‘Where shall I put his cake?’ asked Clara.

  ‘Oh. I bought one in town already.’

  ‘I told you I was making him a cake,’ said Clara.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Clara did not smile.

  ‘Well, never mind.’

  But I grasped as I said it that she did mind very much and I had made some kind of faux pas. I was hit with a gut punch of longing for Edie. Life without her meant navigating family waters without a pilot.

  ‘Well, he’s a lucky chap. Two birthday cakes.’

  She set hers down on the table. It was a lopsided marbled sponge with a robin stencilled in icing, the red of his breast bleeding into his white feathers. On a whim, I had purchased a gateau in the shape of a piano, the tiny keys slivers of white and dark chocolate, the lid propped open with a spear of chocolate. When you pressed a button on the miniature piano stool, it piped ‘Happy Birthday’. Edie never approved of shop-bought cakes, but when I saw this in the bakery window in Dorchester, I couldn’t resist ordering one for Robin. Apparently this had been a mistake.

  ‘Shall we call in the birthday boy?’ I asked, wishing that I could retire to the music room, put on a little Mahler and abandon all my guests. I’d done it before.

  As Robin entered the hall, I signalled to the musicians concealed in the gallery, and they started on a jaunty little Mozart march in D major – one of Robin’s current favourites. I conducted from my spot beside the birthday table out of habit rather than necessity – they would have managed perfectly well without me. Robin stood motionless in the middle of the room. He listened with his hands held out before him, fingers spread as though catching notes like snowflakes. The hall glowed with sound. It poured down upon us from the gallery in reds and gold and yellow. I’d forgotten how superb the acoustics were in this room. When they’d finished the piece, Robin remained quite still while the rest of the family clapped with more politeness than enthusiasm. I shouted my approval – I must admit that I can’t abide stingy applause after a good performance.

  ‘Jolly good show!’ I called.

  ‘More,’ said Robin.

  ‘Manners, Robin,’ reminded his mother.

  ‘More, please,’ said Robin. ‘Now.’

  The musicians laughed and launched into a Haydn gavotte. I’d given them a playlist consisting mostly of pieces that Robin had been practising on the piano. I wanted him to learn that each performance is unique. The melodies he’d been rehearsing on the Steinway in the music room could be caught and reshaped on a violin or a cello. Music isn’t like Plato’s world of ideals – there isn’t a perfect version of Bach’s Sarabande in G, which all fiddle players attempt to emulate. Rather, there is an infinite variety of interpretations – as many as there are Hamlets or Othellos. One might prefer Laurence Olivier’s performance to Richard Burton’s but, like the words of a play in the mouth of an actor, the notes on the page are conjured to life by the musician and they contain a cosmos of variations.

  I was too busy watching Robin to notice the rest of the family. Clara nudged me.

  ‘Papa, let’s eat. We’ve been standing here for nearly an hour. The girls are hungry.’

  I looked round to see them studying the cakes and trays of sandwiches. They looked completely bored.

  ‘No,’ said Robin. ‘More music.’

  ‘Perhaps they can play while we eat,’ said Clara.

  I opened my mouth to object – I can’t bear background music – but I conceded. It could be part of his treat – like having one’s supper on a tray in front of the television.

  As we sat in the dining room, eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches, strands of Handel fluttered about us, light and bright as garden butterflies. Robin sat between his sisters. Three shining gold heads, like polished coins. The girls nibbled and whispered to each other, ignoring their brother.

  Ralph, the children’s father, lounged at the head of the table with his back to the fire, a sheen of sweat across his face as though he’d been wrapped in cellophane. I didn’t much like Ralph. He was rather clever and so reserved he appeared disdainful of everything and everyone. Edie always told me that he was a nice man – merely quiet. I’ve often noticed that we’re ready to believe the best of taciturn people as though, if they did speak, what they’d say was bound to be pleasant and amusing. I didn’t believe it with Ralph. Not for a moment did I think that the words he did not say were amiable. And he’d once declared that he disliked Bach. Cold, he said, and tedious. The accountant of music. That, I could not forgive.

  To my bafflement, no one apart from Robin seemed to be enjoying the party. He was suffused with happiness – his cheeks shone pink – but the rest of the family were subdued. Clara and Lucy ate little and spoke less. I had the uneasy sense once again that I’d done something wrong.

  Without waiting for Mrs Stroud, I took some glasses into the kitchen. Lucy followed with the dirty plates.

  ‘Darling, am I in trouble? I tried to make the party nice.’

  ‘Oh, Daddy,’ said Lucy, kissing me, and I knew instantly that it was worse than I’d thought. ‘It’s too nice. That’s the problem.’

  I stiffened, my feelings stung. ‘What on earth does that mean?’

  ‘Daddy, you never even gave me and Clara birthday parties.’

  ‘You always had parties. There was a spy party, a witches—’

  ‘Mummy did everything. Mostly you came in for ten minutes. Complained that it was terribly noisy and retreated back to your study.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘It’s all right. You weren’t all bad.’

  ‘Pleased to hear it.’

  I placed the glasses in the sink and stared out across the lawns to where the ground sloped down towards the river. The wind buffeted the bare willows, so that the fronds flew up into the air, tangling like a girl’s hair. I supposed it was true that I’d sometimes pleased myself. I liked my own children. Loved them. But I never understood those who declared that they adored children as a species. That was like saying one adores people. Children, like people in general, are all different – one prefers some to others. Only a simpleton likes everyone.

  Lucy was still talking.

  ‘And a string quartet? For a fifth birthday party? I mean, come on, Daddy. You didn’t even get one for my twenty-first.’

  ‘Because you wanted some God-awful disco.’

  ‘So I did.’

  ‘And the musicians are old friends of mine. They’d never ask me to pay.’

  This was partly true. They didn’t ask but I paid anyway. It’s bad luck to cheat musicians or taxi drivers.

  I wanted to say to Lucy that it’s lonely here. The house is still. Your mother sang until the end and now I find yellowed and silent songbooks strewn around the music room like desiccated wedding confetti. The boy brings noise. Good noise. We hear the same things, he and I.

  ‘Shall we go back to the others?’ I said.

  —

  Robin sobbed when he saw the train set his parents had bought him. It was a gleaming, remote-controlled engine that raced around an aluminium track.

  ‘I don’t want it. I want a piano.’

  Clara was trying to be patient. ‘It’s good to enjoy lots of things, Robin. Pianos are very expensive.’

  Katy and Annabel tried to help. They cooed around the train, feigning enthusiasm, and pleaded with Robin to help them race it but he remained sullen, folding his arms and lying face down on the floor. I’d wanted to buy him a piano to practise on at home but Clara w
ouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘He’s too fixated already. If he had one at home, I don’t think I could ever even get him to eat. I’d have to feed him like a baby bird, dropping titbits into his mouth as he sat at the keyboard. Promise me you won’t buy him one?’

  I’d promised. Now, I caught Clara’s eye as she stared at me over the prostrate, weeping child. I had to concede that he wasn’t easy. I didn’t see the worst of him, as with me he was able to glut himself on what he loved best. I was like the grandparent who stuffed him with chocolate and then dispatched him back to his mother, only instead of a sugar buzz, I sent him home full of music.

  Katy slumped on her chair. ‘Why does he always ruin everything? Can we just go home?’

  ‘Come on, old chap,’ cajoled his father. ‘Get up.’

  ‘You haven’t had my present yet,’ I said.

  Robin lifted up his head, rubbed his eyes. ‘Is it a piano?’

  ‘Well, no. It isn’t.’

  ‘Can I have yours?’

  I frowned. ‘You can play it whenever you like. I don’t think my piano would fit in your bedroom. It’s rather too big.’

  Robin paused, considering. ‘Can I have it when you’re dead then? You won’t need it and I’ll buy a house big enough.’

  I caught Clara’s eye and to my relief she was laughing.

  ‘Yes, Robin. You can have the piano when I’m dead.’

  ‘Say “thank you”,’ said Clara.

  Robin shrugged and laid his head back on the carpet. ‘Why? He isn’t dead yet and I haven’t got it.’

  I could sense things about to unravel once again, so I pulled out two parcels and slid them towards him. He rolled over and sat up. He rattled the first box.

  ‘Is it a train?’

  ‘Why don’t you open it and find out?’

  ‘If it is a train, then I don’t need to open it.’

  I sighed. Sometimes he was neither an easy nor an endearing child.

  ‘Try the other one.’

  He shredded the wrapping paper and held at arm’s length a large and battered leather book. He studied it dubiously.