The Song of Hartgrove Hall

by Natasha Solomons

  An elderly woman in a fur coat blows Edie a kiss. Her lavender-haired companion claps her kid-gloved hands in mimed applause.

  ‘That is too kind. Please be sure to tell them “thank you”.’

  We drink the champagne and eat the soup. It’s a consommé, clear as glass. I eat the entire basket of bread but even then champagne bubbles are popping in my head.

  ‘So does this happen often?’ I ask, gesturing to the bottle.

  Edie shrugs and I realise that it does. I’d forgotten that she’s famous. Her cheeks are flushed and I see that she’s tipsy too. She starts to giggle.

  ‘Shall we go somewhere else?’ she says. ‘Something more your scene?’

  And at once I wish I had a scene. I wish I knew some down-at-heel dive where as we walked in the black piano player would nod to us without pausing in his Duke Ellington riff while the regulars all slap me on the back and my usual whisky is waiting for me on the bar.

  ‘Yes, let’s find another place,’ I say. Through the pleasant fog of champagne I’ve almost convinced myself that my jazz joint does exist.

  I call for the bill but the waiter explains that our lady benefactors have taken care of everything.

  ‘Blast it,’ I say, ‘I ought to have had the beef fillet after all.’

  Edie giggles. ‘So they’re allowed to treat you.’

  I tell her to shush and she laughs again. I like making her laugh. Edie goes across to thank the ladies for their kindness, and after a minute she beckons for me to join her.

  ‘She’s so terribly clever and such a pretty girl,’ says the lady with the lilac tint in her hair. She hasn’t taken off her fox fur, even though it is stifling in the dining room.

  ‘Will you sing us a little something?’ asks her friend, in a voice that rustles like dry paper.

  ‘It would be a pleasure. Mr Fox-Talbot will accompany me.’

  She grabs my arm and leads me to the piano, whispering, ‘Now you can find out what it’s like to sing for your supper. Well, luncheon.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can play after all I’ve had to drink,’ I murmur.

  ‘Nonsense. Now, we’ll have to play one or two of the hits to keep them happy but afterwards – you choose. Surprise me.’

  We play and sing for an hour. The other diners are bemused the moment we depart from the wartime medley but we don’t care; we’re not playing for them. Someone sends over another bottle of champagne. I’ve not been near a decent piano for months and I’m sloppy with joy. We try out variations of the songs I’ve hunted down. Sometimes I sing along and sometimes I just listen to Edie. Oh, why did Jack have to find you first?

  We tumble out into the street, happy and brimming with laughter. Edie checks her watch.

  ‘Goodness me, it’s nearly five. We need to sober you up and get you to your interview with Mr Kenton.’

  She tries to straighten my tie but succeeds only in unfastening it entirely, so she drapes it over my shoulder and then has to lean against the railings, overtaken by another fit of giggles.

  ‘Food,’ I say. ‘We need to eat something.’

  ‘Soup!’ says Edie. ‘I’ll have the soup. Nothing but soup.’

  ‘Now, soup was once considered by the great French chefs to be the epitome of epicurean excellence.’

  ‘Say that again.’

  ‘Epicurean excellence.’

  ‘I like it when you say that.’

  She’s laughing up at me, teasing me, and I wonder for a second whether she’s daring me to kiss her, but I know that she can’t possibly be, and then she’s away, running along the street. A street vendor is hawking small orange cakes.

  ‘I want a cake!’ she says. ‘You have to buy me one.’

  I buy her one and she eats it in two bites. I buy her another and she wolfs that too.

  ‘What I really want is a bagel but you can’t get those in the posh parts of London.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A bagel,’ she says. ‘They’re what we ate at home. The best thing in the world. My grandmother and I would wait for hours in a queue for them at the bakery on Finchleystrasse. During the war I’d take her back nylons and packets of smoked salmon. After the first time, she told me to leave the nylons and bring more salmon. That’s what she said she missed about Russia. Proper winters and smoked fish.’

  I don’t say anything, hoping she’ll carry on, but she doesn’t, just grins and says again with a groan, ‘I could murder a bagel.’

  ‘It sounds wonderful.’

  ‘You’re such a classy fellow, you don’t even know what a bagel is.’

  ‘A classy fellow who couldn’t afford to buy you a proper lunch.’

  ‘You’re posh but poor. Poor for now. People like you are never poor for long.’

  ‘People like me?’ The champagne is wearing off and I’m a little put out.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have nothing. To be invisible. Either you’ll save your nice house or you won’t. If you don’t, your father will sell it and Jack will inherit any cash his father doesn’t run through. And even if there isn’t any left, Jack will end up all right. The Jack Fox-Talbots of the world always do.’

  There’s a bitterness in her voice that I don’t recognise. I wonder whether she’s as drunk as she seems, or whether she’s using it as an excuse to express how she really feels.

  ‘Is that why you’re marrying him?’ I say quietly.

  She looks at me quizzically, her head on one side. ‘What a thing to ask, Fox.’

  We walk slowly to the tube, neither of us speaking for a minute or two.

  ‘You don’t know what it is, to be someone like me and to be loved by someone like him.’

  I want to ask her what the devil she means and then I feel a trickle of hope: she hasn’t said she loves him.

  —

  I’m more nervous than I like to admit. I really want this piano. The last of the champagne bubbles have burst on the walk to Cecil Sharp House. I’ve refastened my tie and attempted to smooth my hair, and I take long gulps of cool, late-autumn air but here in the city it tastes gritty and unclean. We skirt Regent’s Park. The air-raid shelters haven’t been dismantled and squat amongst flower beds brimming with bedraggled geraniums and dahlias. Cecil Sharp House is a large red-brick building on the edge of Primrose Hill; it’s streaked with soot and the window frames are flaking, flecks of paint falling to the ground like dandruff. Edie ushers me inside. It’s colder inside than out and the place smells familiarly of damp.

  ‘Mr Kenton did say that he’d be here,’ says Edie, peering around the brown-painted hallway.

  It’s deserted. This building is the repository of English folk songs, and I picture them huddled in the library like a vast host of sparrows, all poised to sing. We open doors but the place is quite empty. Edie opens the final door to reveal a vast wood-panelled room with a great vaulted ceiling, again painted in shades of brown. The last of the evening light streams through the double-height windows, setting the walls aglow. A man sits alone at a single desk, manuscript paper spread before him.

  ‘Mr Kenton?’ says Edie.

  He looks up with a start. ‘Yes? Ah, Miss Rose. A pleasure to see you as always. I hope you’re well?’

  ‘Very well, thank you. This is my friend, Harry Fox-Talbot.’

  He looks blank for a moment and then quickly rises to his feet, spraying manuscript papers in every direction.

  ‘Yes, of course. Mr Fox-Talbot, the aspirant song collector and composer. Please.’ He gestures towards a low wooden seat.

  ‘I’m going to find a cup of tea,’ says Edie.

  Mr Kenton gathers up his papers and settles back in his chair.

  ‘So I understand that you’ve been collecting Dorset songs.’

  ‘Yes, I have. I’ve been making transcriptions of local songs—’

&nb
sp; ‘I’ve looked over the ones you forwarded to the archive. Not the worst I’ve seen, although you do have a tendency to overcorrect. You need to transcribe what they’ve actually sung, not what you think they ought to sing or what you believe they actually meant. The older the piece, the stranger it can sound to our ears. Harmony is a relatively modern invention.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And are you a song collector or a composer, Mr Fox-Talbot?’

  ‘May I not be both?’

  ‘Not usually. Composers are always “fiddling” with the melodies, trying to make them sound right to our modern ear. Spoiling them, in my opinion. If a thing isn’t broken, then don’t turn it into something new.’

  I wonder why this resolute, grey-haired man wanted to meet me. It doesn’t seem likely from his tenor that he’s intending to arrange the loan of a grand piano.

  ‘Mr Kenton, sir. The folk song has stopped evolving in the traditional way. No one gathers around the fire to sing in the evening, coming up with variations on the tunes and lyrics. I have to persuade people to sing the songs and they dig them out like old photographs from a dusty drawer. They’re relics. But in the hands of a young composer, the dust can be shaken off. In my hands, folk songs and old melodies can become a real living thing once again. Part of modern life. Music can’t be preserved in tissue paper, Mr Kenton, however much you may wish it. Music must be a thing that lives.’

  Mr Kenton leans back in his chair and laughs. ‘You’re very passionate, Mr Fox-Talbot. But I’m surprised that you have much time for either composition or song collecting. I understand from Miss Rose that you and your brothers are attempting to keep possession of your family estate. Surely that keeps you rather occupied?’

  I study the slight, harassed figure opposite. He is too thin, as if he chooses music over meals.

  ‘It does. But music is part of the same thing.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘We want to restore Hartgrove Hall and her estates. The land is exhausted. The soil is poor after years of being sown with the wrong crops. The house has been left to decay. The place needs to be restored. But we want to do it in the old way. George wants cows from Thomas Hardy and to repair the fields with dung, not nitrates and fertilisers.’

  Mr Kenton raises an eyebrow. ‘You want to wassail the apple trees?’

  I smile. ‘If we must. It might work. I’d rather sing to a tree in order to induce it to produce more fruit than spray it with all sorts of junk as the government would have us do.’ I take a breath. ‘I want to restore our patch of Dorset with music as well as cow muck. Folk songs connect us with the land; we’ve just forgotten how to listen.’

  Mr Kenton chuckles. ‘All right then. I know of a chap not too far from you in Dorchester with a Steinway. It’s a jolly nice concert grand.’

  ‘He doesn’t want it any more?’

  ‘No room, I’m afraid. He has to turn his house into flats. He wrote to me asking whether I knew someone who might look after the piano for a while. Doesn’t want to sell it in case he can take it back one day. I’ll recommend he gives it to you. You’ll need to arrange for the transport and pay the associated costs—’

  But I’m not listening. I’m getting a piano. A Steinway concert grand.

  I walk outside into the cool, yellow dark. Even here in the city, the harvest moon is big and London is lit by its glow, transformed into something less ugly, less broken.

  The piano arrives the same day as the first snow. She is to live in the morning room with a splendid view of the white lawns sloping down to the lake and the frozen river beyond. The piano is a beautiful thing of shining black lacquered wood and ivory keys and I wonder what she makes of the shabbiness of her new surroundings. Despite the journey, she is barely out of tune. The tuning required is so minimal that I manage it myself. I smother her in blankets and insist on a constant fire in the morning room. When I’m working outside, my thoughts return to the piano. I feel almost guilty – she’s a better instrument than I deserve. A real pianist would bring out all her colours and shades. Instead, I’m using her to batter out my compositions, her glorious tones making them sound, in all honesty, much better than they really are.

  It’s only November but the ground freezes hard and the hill disappears. None of us has decent gloves and soon we all have painful and throbbing chilblains, which infuriate me as it makes playing the piano almost impossible. The house is never warm. Ignoring the General, we keep the fire in the great hall blazing all day but even so the condensation freezes on the inside of the lead glass. Edie returns to the house after we have a new electric water heater installed above the bath. She’s adamant that cold weather outside is enchanting but cold water inside is not. Oddly, I’ve never seen her so content. Working out of doors in the frigid temperature, she alone never complains. She brings down with her an enormous, luxuriant fox-fur coat and wears it out on the farm to our profound amusement but she ignores the laughter.

  ‘Say what you want, I’m the only one who’s perfectly warm.’

  ‘You’ll wreck it,’ says George.

  Edie shrugs. ‘Spoiling something through wear isn’t anything to be ashamed of. Besides, if it gets too grubby, I shall shampoo it like a dog.’

  She’s the most glamorous farmhand anyone has ever seen, but as the freeze continues we stop laughing and eye her with envy. When we climb up the hill to Ringmoor to see Max about buying more sheep, he calls her ‘the wolf’ even though the fur is fox, and tells her to keep away from his flock.

  ‘Sheep can sense big teeth an’ it makes ’em act funny. Start doin’ stupid things. Drown ’emselves in ponds ter git away. You stay away now,’ he tells Edie.

  The hilltop is coated with snow several inches deep, which hides the rumps of the barrows, although wiry black grass pokes through the thinner layers like coarse hair through a boar hide. It’s much colder up here on the top of the ridge and the wind rushes at us, snatching away my breath until my teeth ache and my face is numb. The ground creaks and snaps, as if restless. I don’t know this place. Its unfamiliarity twists its way inside me. The Iron Age grave mounds are transformed into great white humps, like the back and hip of a sleeping giant. A hare sits quite still on top of one with a perfect upright carriage, poised and listening, and then he’s off, bounding noiselessly across the ground.

  Max brings us cups of milky tea and we sit outside, clutching the mugs to warm our hands.

  ‘You owe me a song,’ I remind him. ‘A song for winter.’

  Max chuckles. ‘So I do. You want ’im now?’

  ‘No. Tonight. We’ll come up in the tractor.’

  I want to listen to him here in the darkness with the big wind buffeting us and the strange cracking in the trees. Up here on the hillside with tracks criss-crossing the snow, that’s where the song will hold its potency, not beside the fire at the Hall.

  Max nods to Edie. ‘Yer’d best come too. Keep ’im from being too foolish.’

  Edie agrees.

  —

  We leave after dinner. I’m not adept at driving the tractor in this weather. It’s ancient and as pernickety as an old man, grumbling and wheezing up the hill. We rattle and bounce. Edie sits beside me in her fur, small and silent, her lips pursed.

  ‘You don’t have to come,’ I say.

  ‘Neither of us has to. This is a ridiculous thing to do.’

  I don’t reply. The truth is that I want to chase this song. I’m not like the others for whom life on the farm is everything. They take a grim physical pleasure in the daily work. To my amazement, George has started to go out for runs, naked, each day, wearing nothing but his old army boots. Some mornings I wake at dawn to spy him at a lick across the ridge, an upright figure moving amongst the trees and scrub. At least Jack hasn’t joined him in this particular pursuit.

  George and Jack spread their delight at life out of doors like the clap,
but I haven’t caught it. I find it tedious and repetitive. For a day or two there is some pleasure to be had in hard manual work, the acid ache in my arms and back in the evening. The tearing, animal hunger in my belly, followed by the satisfaction of baked apples and slabs of roast pork with jugs of thick, jellied gravy. I’m aware of my body as a piece of machinery that gets easier with use, but after a few days boredom seeps in. Every day the work is the same.

  The landscape changes; the gorse blooms yellow and clashes with the brush of purple heather, while a barn owl watches us in the afternoon, his feathers dirty against the iridescent snow. Yet even these delights are insufficient to stop my restlessness and growing irritation. I think of my Cambridge chums. I even miss the jazz band. If only I could have the college orchestra for a day, a week. But each day as I’m coated in mud and sweat and slime, I promise that tonight, tonight I’ll write. Every night I’m too tired and slide into bed, sore and exhausted, while the piano sits silent in the morning room, covered in her rugs and hot-water bottles like an old woman. The work takes everything and I’m scraped down to the marrow. I’ve not written a note for a week. I need a song to fill me up. I want a song to open that door that leads down and down into the dark and unknown.

  Before me, all I can see is white and I can’t tell whether the ground is rising or falling. The moon and stars shelter behind a blanket of clouds. I steer the tractor around a tree stump and straight into a ditch.

  ‘Blast,’ I say, and then again, ‘Damn and blast,’ when it doesn’t seem enough. ‘Are you all right?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m not hurt. I’m cross,’ says Edie.

  The tractor is at a strange angle, two of its wheels in the ditch. Foul smoke chugs out of the chimney. I leap down, landing in a heap of wet snow. It’s not freezing tonight and the tractor is sinking into a wall of sludge. I’m relieved it has not overturned.

  ‘Here, ease your way out and I’ll lift you down,’ I say.

  Edie wriggles forward and I wrap my arms around her. I’m engulfed in the warm, animal smell of her fur coat. I hold her for a moment, feeling the weight of her in my arms, before setting her down on the top of the rise.