The Song of Hartgrove Hall

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘What is it?’

  I pulled over a chair and opened the book for him. ‘It’s a book of songs I collected from all over England. Most of them from right here in Dorset. I’ve written them all out in this book. It’s like a map but in songs.’

  ‘Can I play them on the piano?’

  ‘Yes, you could, although lots of them have words too.’

  ‘I don’t like singing.’

  He shoved aside the book and set his face again. I’d been quite silly in thinking for a moment that he’d be interested. I should have bought him some music CDs or a Walkman or something. Quietly, I retrieved the book and put it back on a shelf.

  ‘Why don’t you play us something, Robin?’ said Annabel. ‘Me and Katy haven’t ever actually heard you.’

  ‘You must have,’ I said.

  Annabel shook her head. ‘Nope. We’re always at school when he comes here.’

  I looked at my twelve-year-old granddaughter and felt a ripple of guilt. She was dressed in the usual uniform of the young – a sweater and blue jeans – but like a sapling that had taken root she’d outgrown the spindliness of childhood. Now she studied me with a pair of brown eyes. I didn’t know her at all.

  ‘I’m sorry about that. You should hear him.’

  Robin had stopped crying but remained lying on his stomach, picking at a hole in the Persian rug.

  ‘That’s quite enough, Robin,’ I declared. ‘You need to decide what to play for your sisters.’

  Without hesitation, he stood, wiped his nose on his sleeve and raced across the great hall, into the music room. It had once been known as the morning room, and gentlemen had lingered here after breakfast to read the papers. It faced south-west and even on dark days it was filled with light. Long ago I’d claimed it for my own; it was large enough to comfortably fit a full-size concert grand piano as well as all my other paraphernalia but really I loved it because of the quality of the light. Dusk had crept up on us; the rain-dashed hills had warmed from grey to red and now shoals of rosy clouds drifted across the sky. The white walls of the music room had been temporarily repainted in pink.

  I placed several cushions on the piano stool and set Robin on top.

  ‘Do you know what you want to play?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you need the sheet music?’

  He shook his head and sat quietly, his hands in his lap. The girls had found a spot on the window seat at the far side of the room where they kneeled, tracing their names in the condensation on the glass, only vaguely interested in their brother. Lucy, Clara and Ralph leaned against my desk – a vast Victorian monstrosity in brass and mahogany. The string players from the quartet lingered in the doorway, curious.

  Robin gulped a breath, a swimmer about to dive, and then started to play. The change was instant. The girls stopped fiddling with the windows, turned and sat and listened, absolutely still. The string players edged closer, quite unable to help themselves, travellers drawn to a fire on a winter’s night. Ralph reached for Clara’s hand and gripped it tightly.

  Robin played a simple Chopin nocturne; it rippled from his fingers as smoothly as a stream over pebbles, as clear and cool. In those early days, I was still more technically adept than the boy, but I’d never called forth such a tone from the piano. It did what I asked of it, but Robin made it cry out; under his touch, the instrument was a thing that lived. Dusk dulled into evening and the room grew dark but Robin played on.

  When at last he stopped, we listened in silence to the slow decay of the final chord. I glanced at Katy and Annabel, their faces pale in the gloom.

  ‘Well, shit on me,’ said Annabel.

  Everyone laughed, but as I looked at my family I wondered whether they understood, whether any of us understood, what Robin’s talent would mean for us all.

  It was the first Christmas without Edie. There was a cascade of unhappy anniversaries. The first weeks after she died, I’d been awash with grief and yet she was still so close that, if I just reached out far enough, I could still brush her fingertips. I kept her slippers beside the bed, just in case she needed them. She couldn’t bear cold feet when she got up for a pee in the night. I didn’t cancel her magazine subscriptions – somehow I couldn’t bring myself to telephone the call centre, it was too absolute. And suppose she wanted the latest issue of House & Garden when she came home? I knew these thoughts were ridiculous and I certainly couldn’t voice them aloud to my daughters – they’d cluck in concern and start whispering to one another, convinced I’d gone doolally.

  During those early weeks and months, time slid and juddered – nothing was quite real. When I was a child of seven, I’d had measles and I’d been kept in bed in the nursery for a fortnight with the curtains closed to protect my eyes against damage from the light. In the midst of my darkness and fever, time had stuttered and slowed, and the boundary between wake and sleep had become indistinct and unimportant. The world had contracted to my sickroom and my bed, and the burning itching in my eyes.

  Each evening my father would visit. He sat on the edge of my bed; I don’t remember him saying a word, but he pressed the cold circle of his gold watch against the hotness of my forehead. It was pleasanter than any flannel or compress. Then he’d remove the watch and wind it up. Ticketty-tick. Ticketty-tick. Like the crunch of the death-watch beetles in the attic beams above. In my feverish state I thought that he held time itself in that watch, and that he released a little for me each evening, the precise quantity that would allow me to manage through the night. And then one evening when I was feeling better and sitting up in bed, he allowed me to rewind the watch. I fumbled, my fingers sweaty and clumsy, but for once he gave no reprimand. It was a great boon – a treat so immense that I could not dilute it by confiding it to my brothers. After I had wound the watch and my father had refastened it on his wrist, he had opened the curtains and time had restarted.

  In the first year after Edie, I was still waiting for the curtains to be pulled back and for time to resume. I lived by rote, surviving on habits. I made lists of groceries for Mrs Stroud to purchase. I paid the gas bill. I asked the gardener to plant a thousand daffodils and narcissi along the woodland walk. I declined requests to conduct concerts in London and New York and Bournemouth. But, most of all, I waited. I waited for Edie to come back and, despite knowing intellectually it was quite impossible, I waited.

  I tried to write music and failed, and out of frustration continued to keep notes in the exercise book I kept on the bedside table. Discovering it was nearly full, I purchased another in Dorchester. As I scanned the contents, I observed that I was no longer noting reminiscences, rags and scraps of memory, but also recording the events of the last year, of life after Edie. The last year, however dreadful and painful, had its own value. Grief had not yet receded, and yet I could acknowledge that at some point in the future it might. It would be a gradual retreating of the tide, a lessening that ebbed and flowed. I needed to remember the grief itself. The evidence of love.

  Robin was the only new addition to my strange and airless world. The mornings that the boy came, we lived in music and there was pleasure in existence. And then he left and the quiet took hold, loneliness leavening it like yeast until it grew and smothered the house. The silence was monstrous. At the moment I needed her most, music deserted me once more.

  I worried about Robin. I was concerned that I continued to teach him out of selfishness. I taught him because our lessons were my only respite but I was no piano teacher, especially for a student as brilliant as Robin.

  I summoned a few old friends for advice. They arrived with a February gale. The driveway had turned into a series of puddles and a blackbird bathed on a patch of lawn that had metamorphosed into a small pond. Yet my friends braved the foulness of the weather, curious to hear my grandson play. I guessed they all wanted to discover whether grandpaternal fondness had clouded my judgement. I wanted to know it
too.

  We gathered in the music room, Albert, John, Marcus and I. We were a coterie of grand old men, the elder statesmen of music. Mrs Stroud had stoked the fire to a furnace and turned up the heating. Marcus, at eighty-two, was a little frail and contemplating surrendering his driving licence – although, I noted, he had still agreed to conduct one last performance of the Messiah at Easter.

  ‘It will be my last,’ he said, eating a large slice of fruit cake with surprising gusto.

  Albert laughed. ‘You say that each time.’

  Marcus shrugged. ‘Well, one day it will be true whether I intend it or not. Now, if I should give up the ghost mid-performance, would that improve the crits or not? “Last night’s concert at the Festival Hall was a tremendous disappointment. Sir Marcus Albright really let himself down in the final movement of Beethoven’s Fifth by turning his toes up—”’

  John poured more tea. ‘I don’t see why you should retire. You can get someone to drive you to Waitrose; you can’t get someone to conduct Handel on your behalf.’

  ‘In the spring I might just delve into Beethoven’s late quartets,’ Marcus added, spearing a stray currant with his fork. ‘I never really understood them before. They always seemed a bit strained, uneasy. But then, after my stroke, I listened to them and they made sense for the first time. I’m not sure that they can make sense to anyone under seventy.’

  ‘It’s not about age,’ I said quietly. ‘His late quartets are about suffering. It’s acute sadness, a muscular unhappiness that provokes the music. That can happen at any time of life.’

  The others paused and looked at me, presuming I was speaking about Edie. I hadn’t been directly, but then everything led back to her.

  We chatted on for half an hour, debating the nuances of Mozart’s sonatas and the narrowness of the car park spaces at the new Tesco, until the door opened. Robin stood there. The men beamed at him.

  ‘Do come in, young man,’ said Albert. ‘It’s probably much too hot in here for you but I’m afraid we old fellows do feel the cold.’

  Robin marched in, too young to feel self-conscious or abashed.

  ‘This is my friend Albert,’ I said to him. ‘You like his recording of the Bach fugues, remember?’

  This was an understatement. He had played it so much at home that Clara had limited him to only three times each day.

  ‘I listened to it a hundred and fifteen times,’ he declared.

  ‘Why so few?’ quipped Marcus.

  Robin blinked, not understanding he was being teased. ‘I needed to know how it worked. How he put all the bits together. I get it now. It’s in my head and I don’t need to listen to it any more.’

  I glanced at Albert to see how he was reacting to this. His mouth did not betray a twitch of humour; instead he listened with the same thoughtful gravity he would have given to an adult. Robin surveyed the faces of the celebrated men gathered by the fire and scowled.

  ‘I like the recording of Rachmaninov playing his own stuff even better. Is Mr Rachmaninov coming too, Grandpa?’

  ‘He was unavailable this afternoon.’

  There was a pause, while we pretended to drink our tea and tried not to smile.

  ‘Would you like to play us something?’ asked John.

  Robin nodded and moved quickly to the piano, piling up his cushions. The men settled back into their chairs by the fire. Robin hesitated for a few seconds, fingers poised over the piano, and then he began.

  —

  ‘Something a little stronger than tea, I think,’ said Marcus after Robin had finished, been collected by Mrs Stroud and taken to the kitchen in search of chocolate biscuits. I produced a bottle of Scotch from my desk. We sat in silence for a few minutes, drinking and somehow still hearing the swell of music swishing through the stillness. Albert was the first to speak.

  ‘I’m sorry, Fox. But you can’t continue to teach him piano. You’re simply not good enough. He’ll pick up all manner of bad habits from you, thinking that’s the way it should be done.’

  Miserably, I nodded and took a long swig of whisky. My eyes burned but I hoped they’d put it down to the fumes. It was true. These fellows knew that my playing was serviceable at best.

  ‘What ought I to do?’ I asked when I could speak.

  Albert wrinkled his brow in thought. ‘I can give him the odd master class, but that’s really for later on. In a year or so when he’s mastered a bit more technique. He has a real instinctive emotionality that needs to be nurtured carefully. His playing is highly personal – and that’s rare in such a young player. More often than not, prodigies are miraculous chameleons, borrowing other players’ styles but lacking their own voice. Robin is himself.’

  He paused and rubbed his forehead. ‘You need a teacher who’s not only a brilliant pianist himself but experienced in teaching the very young. One mustn’t interfere too much. He requires very gentle guidance.’

  Marcus glanced at me. ‘You’ll have to take him to London.’

  Albert nodded in agreement. ‘It will almost certainly have to be London. Probably every week. Perhaps twice. There needs to be regular lessons and a stringent practice schedule. An older student I’d expect to do eight or nine hours each day. Since he’s so young, it will be less but still probably three or four.’

  John had said nothing but now he got to his feet, grabbed the poker and started rooting around amongst the coals. I swallowed my irritation – a man’s fire is his own. No one should interfere with his host’s hearth.

  ‘Are you quite certain that he wants that?’ he asked. ‘Do his parents? Most child prodigies are washed up by the age of twelve. It’s rarely worth it.’

  Albert leaned back in his chair. ‘I’m afraid John’s quite right. The boy is clearly exceptionally gifted. It’s remarkable what he can do after a few months with frankly a rather ropy pianist as his teacher.’ He smiled but only for an instant and then gave a tiny sigh. ‘But the odds are stacked against him. Even with everything we’ll try to give him, he will probably never be a concert pianist. It’s a shame that his passion isn’t for the violin.’

  We all grunted in agreement. Even if a violinist doesn’t conquer the Everest of becoming a concert soloist and a virtuoso, he can still make a life of music as part of an orchestra. The pianist has no such alternative. His career opportunities are either at the summit, with world concert tours and recording contracts, or giving piano lessons to recalcitrant children. The music departments of most schools reverberate with the spoiled dreams of talented pianists who came close but not close enough.

  ‘I’ll make some calls,’ said Albert. ‘But in the meantime, you need to talk to his mother.’

  I asked Clara to come for a walk. It was late February and although the morning’s frost still lingered in the shade, patches of snowdrops and hordes of crocuses had emerged in compact puddles of colour. The months of dreary rain and sleet had turned the hillside a muddy brown, the grass uneven and yellowed. The trees remained bare, the fine patterns of branches against the sky reminding me of drawings of capillaries in old anatomy books. The startling purple and vivid yellow of the crocuses adorned the colourless world, reassuring me, just as I was heartily sick of the cold and rain, that spring wasn’t far off. I’ve never been like Edie. I’m a summertime man. I hanker for blue skies and dawns lively with birds.

  Clara and I walked briskly across the estate and towards the Wessex Ridgeway along the spine of hills, the trees echoing with the squabble of wood pigeons. As we climbed, the county was spread out below us in miniature, the fields a tone poem in browns and greens, here and there the flooded water meadows catching in the sunlight like molten aluminium. By silent accord we made for Ringmoor, emerging onto the hilltop like swimmers surfacing into the open air. The wind sang in the telephone wires, a perfect C sharp.

  No matter how still the day, it’s always windy up at Ringmoor. It’s a strange
place, echoing with millennia of footsteps. Iron Age workings crease the grassy downland like folds in a blanket alongside the raised outlines of a Roman village. At the boundary lie the tumbledown remains of a Victorian cottage, the assorted settlements lying on top of one another as though time has been compressed at a single point, every period in history existing all at once. The wind is loud and the boundary between the ages insubstantial.

  We perched for a rest on the ruins of a flint cottage wall and Clara passed me an apple. In a habit inherited from her mother, she never ventures anywhere without pockets bulging with treats.

  ‘Didn’t you collect songs once from the shepherd who lived up here?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, you’re quite right. So I did. That was long ago. Before you were born.’

  We were silent for a while, eating our apples. After a few minutes Clara hurled the core into a tangle of scrub that at some time must have formed part of the cottage garden, and said, ‘I liked the story of you coming up here and listening to his old songs. He’d sing them to you only at the right time of year. Wasn’t that it? A song for summer? Another for winter?’

  I chuckled. ‘Yes. Peculiar old fellow. I attempted to hack up here in the snow to hear his winter song. I caught a foul cold. Was in bed for a week.’

  Clara studied me for a moment. ‘Do you still collect songs?’

  I closed my eyes and felt the sting of bright light against my lids. ‘Not really. I can’t remember the last time I collected something new. It’s terribly hard nowadays. The ancient and the wild retreat to the edge of things. The countryside is teeming and too bright at night. I remember coming up here years ago after dark when I was only a little younger than you and it was black. You have no concept of a proper—’

  ‘— a properly dark night. Yes. I know. You’ve said.’

  I smiled. ‘I’m sorry, darling. You’ve heard all my stories before.’