The Song of Hartgrove Hall

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘It’s simply heavenly to see you, Edie, darling.’

  ‘You too, Fox,’ she says and unthinkingly glances about her. I wonder whether she’s anxious about being seen with me. The thought thrills me. Surely there’s nothing in the least to be ashamed about in meeting her brother-in-law?

  ‘Have you eaten?’ I ask. ‘I know it’s horribly late but on concert nights I never get the chance to have supper until a ridiculous hour.’

  ‘I haven’t eaten,’ says Edie, ‘but I’m not hungry.’

  I discover suddenly that neither am I. She’s staring at me with an odd look, at once wary and eager. I’m not sure that I understand but on impulse I reach out and take her hand. It’s so small, almost a child’s hand. She does not pull away, merely looks at me, her expression terribly sad. I can’t bear it, I want to make that ghastly look disappear, and at first, more out of a desire to distract her than actual desire, I kiss her hand and stroke her knuckles, and then to my delight, she shivers and squeezes my fingers. We stare at one another, each trying to read the other. Is she? Is this? Are we?

  ‘What brings you to town?’ I say, eventually, still holding onto her.

  ‘I’m in town for a day or two each week. I’m helping a friend who’s planning the Bolshoi’s first English tour. You know I speak a little Russian.’

  ‘Of course.’ I didn’t know.

  The silence stretches again, threatening to engulf us both.

  ‘Who was the soloist tonight?’ she asks at last.

  Her knee encased in water silk is touching mine and I’m almost giddy from wanting her, hardly able to think at all.

  ‘Albert Shields. The pianist.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘He’s a pal of Marcus.’

  She slides further away from me so that we’re no longer touching, and instantly my head clears.

  ‘I like Albert very much,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t stand for any of Marcus’s usual guff. They argue vociferously over the score but Albert stands up to him. I came into rehearsal yesterday to find them both shouting at one another so loudly that, this morning, the dispute continued in whispers, both men having shouted themselves hoarse.’

  Edie laughs, and perhaps it’s the alcohol, but she looks a good deal more at ease. A rosy flush suffuses her cheeks. Good God, she’s attractive. I order another round of martinis.

  ‘Why do any of you put up with him, if he’s so dreadful?’ she asks.

  ‘Well, I asked Albert that. I mean, he’s the star pianist of the moment, he can play with any conductor he chooses. And he said, “The man’s a blighter, but he’s a brilliant blighter. Afterwards I’ll tell myself that it wasn’t worth it. But it is. I’ll decline to play with him for six months or a year but after that I’ll start hankering to sound like that again.” And the thing is, Edie, he’s right. Marcus is a perfect genius at coaxing genius out of other people.’

  ‘You have a knack for it yourself.’

  I’m desperate to ask what she means, but I don’t want her to think I’m fishing. She shifts on her seat, and then looks up at me.

  ‘I liked the way I sounded when I sang with you conducting. I want to sound like that again.’

  She swallows and her hand darts to her throat. She reaches into her bag, pulls out a cigarette and, after fumbling with a match, puts it away again, unlit.

  ‘I’m trying to stop. It plays havoc with my voice. But if I’m not singing your songs, I’m not so sure that it matters.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Of course it does.’

  I study her, perspiration trickling down the small of my back. She sips her martini and then places it back on the bar, asking with sudden resolve, ‘Why won’t you come home?’

  ‘I will soon. It’s simply—’

  She waves at me to be quiet. ‘The thing is, I’m not even sure if I want you to come.’

  ‘Oh?’ I say, hurt.

  ‘No,’ she says steadily. ‘I like the thought of seeing you every day. I like that. But everything else—’

  I take her hand again, running my fingers across the ridge of her knuckles.

  ‘You are so horribly young,’ she says, half to herself.

  I recoil, offended. ‘I’m twenty-one.’

  She laughs. ‘God help me. It’s thoroughly absurd. Do you even know how old I am, Harry?’

  I shrug, feigning nonchalance. I want to appear knowing, but I also don’t wish to offend her. ‘Twenty-nine? Thirty?’

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  I’m surprised. I’m still a novice with women and I can’t hide it. She laughs at my discomfiture but I can tell she’s wounded by the way she won’t meet my eye.

  ‘It doesn’t matter in the least,’ I say.

  ‘Of course it does.’

  ‘I’m only glad that you told me. I like it when you tell me things.’

  Finally she looks at me. There are faint shadows like bruises beneath her eyes.

  ‘I really ought to go,’ she says.

  She doesn’t move. She frowns and I lean forward to kiss her but she turns away. ‘Not here.’

  But somewhere.

  My heart raps against my ribs. I’ve wanted her so much for so long. Then I’m stricken with the intrusion of practicalities. I’m trying not to think of Jack but, of course, by trying not to, he’s already here. Besides, I can’t possibly afford a room at Claridge’s, and I certainly can’t have Edie back to my digs with its typed sign declaring ‘Absolutely NO overnight guests by order of the Management’, but she’s tugging my hand and I’m leaving cash on the bar and following her out into the street where, to my immense surprise, she runs to the kerb, places two fingers in her mouth and whistles loudly for a cab. One pulls up and she slips in.

  ‘Come on! I don’t know where we’re going.’

  Neither do I.

  Somehow we end up outside my Knightsbridge digs, which to my relief are perfectly dark. Giggling, we creep up the stairs, Edie in her bare feet, trying not to make a sound, which is tricky as we’re both sloshed. And then we’re alone in the dingy bedsit with its nasty, none-too-clean linoleum floor that sticks to our feet and the thin, faded curtains flapping. The only decorations on the walls are mounted jigsaw puzzles of London landmarks. I shut the door and tuck a chair beneath the handle as I don’t trust the landlady’s assurance that I possess the only key. The room smells faintly of old soup.

  ‘May I get you a drink, madam?’ I say, producing a bottle of whisky from the bedside table.

  ‘How kind,’ says Edie with an arch smile.

  As I watch her, I feel again how little I know her, as though she’s a broken mirror and I glimpse her image only in fragments.

  She sighs and looks perfectly wretched, saying, ‘I keep telling myself that you’re just a boy. That this is the silliest of crushes. That if perhaps we make love once, then we’ll get it out of the way and we won’t ever need to do it again. Things will simply go back to how they were.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’ I ask.

  ‘No.’

  I splash some whisky into a mug that smells a little of toothpaste and hold it out to her. She pads closer, but ignores the proffered mug and instead reaches up on tiptoe to kiss me. I’m tentative, but for no more than a moment. The whisky spills over the floor. Our teeth clink but we don’t care and we don’t stop and I wrap my arms around her and lift her up onto the bed, vaguely aware of my relief that in the dark she won’t see the dubious cleanliness of the sheets. She lies on her back, propped up on her elbows, dress rucked up to show the smooth whiteness of her thighs above her stockings, and I lean over her, but she holds me back.

  ‘Wait, Fox. Wait. Are you sure? Are we sure? We can’t take this back. It’s a terrible thing to do.’

  ‘A terrible thing,’ I say, sliding next to her, quite unable to stop.

  She kisses me.

&nb
sp; ‘It’s unforgivable, Fox.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looks so sad and I know I should stop but I don’t.

  August 2002

  I want to know whether it’s something or nonsense,’ I said.

  Marcus sat across from me on the terrace and laughed. ‘If you don’t know . . . then it’s probably nonsense.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ I snapped.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ he said, reaching for a biscuit. His hand was thin, the skin papery and yellow revealing the bones beneath, fragile as a bird’s.

  ‘I don’t think it’s nonsense but it’s the first time I’ve written anything in a while and I’m worried my radar’s off.’

  ‘All right. I’ll take a look after luncheon. There is luncheon?’ He glanced about, pretending concern.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  During the previous week, I’d lived off sandwiches and Pot Noodles – a young man’s diet that had played havoc with my insides, but knowing Marcus’s fastidiousness I’d asked Mrs Stroud to cook for a few days. Until I’d finished writing the opening theme, I’d been quite unable to do anything else. Even poor Robin had been banished, rationed to an hour a day at the piano while I had an afternoon snooze.

  We took lunch on the terrace. I’d invited John and Albert to join us and it was a pleasant, lazy affair. I brought out rather a good Chablis and another when the first turned out to be insufficient. It was nearly September and the hill had ripened to a dull gold; the flower beds in the garden were studded with lurid pink and yellow dahlias while the sticky, sweetshop scent of late summer roses drifted across the terrace. A squadron of wild ducks squabbled as they flew in formation overhead, managing to fire white squirts of shit across the paving stones on the terrace.

  ‘Ah, countryside delights,’ said John, helping himself to more blackberry fool and another glass of wine. ‘I must say, you look better, Fox. More like your old self.’

  ‘I feel better.’

  I couldn’t express the relief that, after two years of silence, my head was once again full of music. I hadn’t appreciated how much I’d missed it, how appalling its absence had been. I felt as if I’d been freed unexpectedly from solitary confinement long after having abandoned any hope of release.

  ‘How’s that rather wonderful grandson of yours?’ asked Albert.

  ‘Brilliant. Tricky.’

  Albert smiled. ‘That’s the way of it, I’m afraid, with these young musicians. It’s much easier to be like me – a late bloomer. I had my first lesson at ten. Wasn’t really much cop until I was twenty.’

  ‘And now you’re past it,’ said John with a grin. ‘Short window.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Albert, unperturbed. ‘Still, I can listen to recordings and marvel at myself.’

  ‘Right then,’ said Marcus, who was beginning to look tired. ‘Shall we all listen to your latest efforts?’

  I hesitated. After Edie, Marcus had always been my second pair of ears but he inevitably made me nervous. No one was more brutal than Marcus.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘It’s just sketched for now. You’ll need to imagine the melody played by a pair of flutes.’

  ‘Are you going to play it for us?’ asked Marcus.

  I shook my head. ‘I’d rather not. Albert? Will you do the honours?’

  They followed me into the music room, arranging themselves on chairs with much shuffling of cushions. I went to the piano, set out the pages for Albert and then, before he’d had a chance to start, I slipped out of the room. I paced outside in the corridor, anxious as an expectant father. If they were horribly tactful and kind at the end, I’d know it was rubbish and I would be done with composing. But I’d not had a bad run. I was a jolly decent footnote in British musical history. My footnote might even have to run into a second column.

  The playing stopped. The door didn’t open. I heard mutterings. I was filled with dread. There was shuffling and a moment later the door opened. Marcus beamed at me.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said at last. ‘You’ve found your second wind.’

  They all decided to stay for a few days, which stretched into a week and then longer. Marcus usually lived alone and ill health had forced his retirement, but the speed with which Albert and John, who were both married and still working, cancelled their plans both surprised and gratified me. By good luck, neither had any professional engagements until the end of September and they seemed perfectly unconcerned at the prospect of missing the lunch parties or drinks or garden visits their wives might have organised. But by then both women were much like ship’s widows, resigned to a life where their husbands’ watery mistress called them back time and again. Music could be as much of a temptress as the sea.

  Mrs Stroud arrived each morning to cook for us all. I wrote and showed pages to Marcus, who offered suggestions and, for old times’ sake, the odd complaint about the thickness of my orchestration. Mostly he slept. I realised that over the last year, he’d grown frail. He pretended to still have his vast appetite but the heap of potatoes he’d help himself to would be pushed around his plate and thrown away, uneaten. At night, I could hear him pacing, restless and in pain. His laugh remained the same, filthy and undimmed. John and Albert lazed in the garden and played through snatches of what we all agreed was the opening movement to a symphony. Their suggestions were always interesting but inevitably it was Marcus to whom I really listened.

  Robin was thrilled by the influx of musicians. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that this was a pathetic imitation of festivals past. This gathering was more like a summer camp for the geriatric. Yet, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I was perilously close to happiness. It was tinged with loss and I often slept badly, but there were moments of stillness and peace. I took pleasure in walking around the garden, Marcus’s arm in mine as he prodded at the geraniums with his stick. Later, as I sat at the piano, not writing but watching bands of mist and rain roll down the hillside, I experienced a ripple of contentment. Up till then I’d lived on memories of Edie and better times but now I could see that there might be a possibility of enjoyment in the present; in smaller and fleeting doses perhaps, but spoonfuls of joy all the same.

  Along with endless advice on composition, the cooking of pears and the steeping of sloes, Marcus also brought with him a prodigious quantity of pot. Marcus liked to share good things – whether a restaurant recommendation, a new recording of Beethoven or, in this case, some astounding grass given to him to help with his pain by a forward-thinking and kindly GP. I’d smoked a little back in the 1970s, but not since. Albert, we soon discovered, was the best at rolling joints. As a pianist he had tremendous dexterity in his fingers.

  One morning I telephoned Clara and, pleading a summer cold, asked her not to bring Robin round to the house. She was irritated – informing Robin he could not play the piano for a day was a ghastly task – and she was suspicious because I sounded insufficiently unwell.

  ‘Are you sure it isn’t just a touch of hay fever? I could bring him later on, and you wouldn’t even have to see us.’

  I forced a cough into my handkerchief, feeling a buzz of exhilaration at my subterfuge. ‘No, no. Best not. Wouldn’t want the little chap to catch anything.’

  I rang off quickly before she could make any further helpful suggestions. I could tell that she didn’t believe me but I knew she would never suspect the real reason – I wanted to get absolutely blotto with my old pals. I certainly didn’t want Clara stumbling by with her drab disapproval and prim tut-tutting.

  It was a warm day, stray licks of cloud only further setting off the bold blue of the sky. A tractor grunted along the slope of the hill, baling hay, and the air was filled with the scent of cut grass and wild flowers. I wished the farmers had a stronger sense of the picturesque and would stop parcelling their bales in black plastic – the effect was less Bruegel and more giant black bin bags litterin
g the hill. Yet nothing could really disturb the gleam of the morning. A flotilla of white butterflies, wings like tiny sails, skimmed across the lawn as though part of a miniature regatta. We lunched late and then, having thanked Mrs Stroud, we gathered on the terrace.

  John perched on the edge of a deckchair, peering at Albert, who, on his second attempt, was succeeding in rolling a fat and firm joint, as pale and long as one of the young slow-worms I sometimes discovered basking in the vegetable patch. John frowned and I knew that he was struggling to hold back from offering advice. John, I was utterly confident, had never even smoked a joint before, much less rolled one, but like Marcus he was a conductor to his soul and had advice to bestow on all matters. He dispensed it as he would nicely rotted compost, shovelling it liberally everywhere.

  ‘Are you quite sure that’s how it’s supposed to be done?’ he asked at last.

  Albert shrugged. ‘Well, it’s how I’ve done it. You’re welcome to have another go.’

  ‘No, no,’ said John, who preferred to instruct others, not risk failure himself. ‘I’m sure it will be splendid.’

  ‘How do you usually do it?’ asked Albert, turning to Marcus.

  ‘I don’t. The girl who cleans for me rolls a nice supply in exchange for taking one or two home with her. She also brings me excellent Cornish pasties.’ He put on his reading glasses and inspected Albert’s attempt with the air of a connoisseur. ‘Not bad for a beginner. Not bad at all.’

  Understanding from watching films that we might be hungry afterwards, I’d ensured that Mrs Stroud had left us a good supply of cheese scones and a Dundee cake. There was also a leftover cold salmon and some potato salad but I was unsure whether that was appropriate fare.

  Albert struck a match and took a long suck on the joint, as though it were a cigar. Marcus chuckled. ‘Not like that. You have to breathe in the smoke. Here, give it to me.’

  Like furtive and decrepit schoolboys, we all watched the more experienced Marcus with considerable interest. He puffed away, blowing elegant smoke rings and smiling, a little smugly, at John. The two men had been cheerful rivals for nearly half a century, meticulously sending one another copies of any poor reviews they claimed to have chanced upon.