The Song of Hartgrove Hall

by Natasha Solomons

  I knew, certainly in Marcus’s case, that this claim was quite untrue. After John had conducted a concert in New York, I’d sat with Marcus in a hotel room, watching while he pored over every single newspaper, discarding with contempt the praise and effusions, until with a shout of triumph he came across the single line of measured criticism. I had watched with astonishment as he’d carefully cut it out from the surrounding compliments and placed it happily in an envelope to post to his friend, declaring, ‘It’s always good to know what people are saying about you.’

  I’d pointed out that mostly people were saying jolly nice things and Marcus wasn’t sending those to John.

  ‘One learns only from one’s mistakes,’ he’d said, humming with pleasure as he affixed the stamp.

  Albert absolutely refused to perform the same pieces with them – he had a repertoire he played with Marcus and another with John. He complained that, otherwise, his performance was a tug-of-war – each maestro trying to yank him into a different interpretation, more dramatic than his rival’s.

  As I was predominantly known as a composer, and any renown I had as a conductor was mostly for interpretations of my own work, I was exempt from their competition. In fact, the one thing that both John and Marcus agreed upon with any unanimity was that they were both far superior in this field to myself, viewing my talents with benevolent disdain. I had my revenge, though, in politely declining them permission to publicly perform my works – however much they cajoled and pleaded over the brandy.

  John had evidently decided this was a choice moment for renewing his petition. ‘When are you going to let me at this latest piece, then, old chap?’ he asked.

  ‘Precisely when I let you at the others.’

  He perked up and shot a glance at Marcus to see how his rival was taking this promise. Marcus chuckled. ‘Don’t be so chirpy. He means that he won’t let you. We’re both barred.’

  ‘Don’t be such a spoilsport,’ grumbled John. ‘If you give it to me, I’ll show you how it should really sound.’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ I said. ‘I already know how it’s supposed to sound. It doesn’t need added bombast.’

  Albert was rather quiet. We looked over to find that he was lying back in his deckchair, grinning emptily at the clouds. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘Very nice. Very, very nice.’ He giggled and then gave a sonorous fart. ‘F flat,’ he declared and giggled again.

  ‘Told you it was jolly decent stuff,’ said Marcus proudly.

  He passed the joint to me and I inhaled tentatively, then coughed and retched, wondering why on earth I was attempting something so undignified.

  Marcus handed me a glass of water. I took a sip and then, taking the joint, tried again.

  ‘Just a little, not a ruddy great lungful,’ advised Marcus.

  This time, I managed. It was jagged and sore, much as I imagined inhaling glass to be, but then came a wave of green calm. I tried another, and felt soft and boneless.

  ‘Off,’ I said to John, gesticulating vaguely at his deckchair. He moved aside and, gratefully, I lay down.

  The afternoon passed in a pleasurable jumble. Time jumped to and fro. Someone suggested we fetch the Dundee cake. Then it was gone though I couldn’t recall ever eating it, but the crumbs and raisins on my lapel suggested otherwise. I heard the warble of the garden birds inside my skull and the thrum of the earthworms beneath the grass. The leaves on the climbing roses and the wisteria vibrated with revolving colour like the patterns in a child’s kaleidoscope.

  ‘You should have a revelation for the second movement, Fox,’ said John, jabbing a finger too close to my face. ‘That’s what you’re supposed to do. A drug-fuelled revelation.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marcus. ‘I agree with John so it must be true.’

  ‘Irrefutably,’ agreed John, kissing Marcus’s hand.

  ‘I think I’d rather have something to eat,’ I said. ‘Just a little nibble.’

  ‘All right. A snack first. Then a revelation.’

  ‘Go and see if there’s anything else in the fridge, Fox.’

  Thus I found myself searching in the refrigerator for a revelation but succeeded only in finding half a poached salmon. Then I was sitting back on the terrace with the others, gazing at the picked bones of the fish, unable to remember either returning from the kitchen or consuming the salmon. Albert and John were fast asleep, snoring gently. Marcus reached over and took my hand.

  ‘You can conduct the new work. You and not John,’ I said.

  ‘Now, now, that sounds perilously close to pity,’ said Marcus. ‘You’ve rightly not allowed us close to your work for nearly fifty years. Don’t break your rules now.’ He gave me a rueful smile. ‘Besides, when you hear how wonderful I make you sound, you’ll only regret those wasted years when I could have been championing you to millions.’

  I laughed. Even at eighty-three and dying, Marcus had the ego of a true maestro.

  The pot did not provide me with great inspiration, only constipation. Fellows of my advanced age simply can’t spend afternoons feasting furiously on all manner of things and then expect no digestive consequences. A day and a half and a packet of Alka-Seltzer later, I returned to the music room, dawdling through various ideas while trying to banish a faint headache. My flood of inspiration had dwindled to a paltry trickle and I wondered where I’d gone wrong. I fumbled at the keys, unable to hear the next passage. There was the thump, thump of Marcus’s stick along the corridor and the next moment he entered the music room, sitting down heavily in a chair.

  ‘What did you used to do, when you reached this section? Every piece has a thorny bit. What was your trick?’ he asked.

  I frowned, trying to remember. ‘Well, sometimes, I’d try it in a different key. Some variations.’

  Marcus thumped his stick. ‘No. Have I taught you nothing? No padding. No unnecessary passages.’

  I laughed at his imperious tone. ‘I went out song collecting. Always helped, whether it was the walk itself, or discovering an unexpected melody.’

  Marcus clapped his hands. ‘Very good! Let’s get going then.’

  I sighed. ‘There’s nothing left to find. The older singers are gone and their tunes with them. It’s all pub fiddlers and careful revival now.’

  Marcus wrinkled his brow. ‘I don’t believe that. You just don’t know where to look.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘But anyway, I don’t think that will help this time. It’s something else that’s wrong. Something’s missing. Something terribly, terribly obvious.’

  Marcus left me and I sat alone in the music room. I was irritated with myself and frustrated. I read and reread the score I’d written so far. I was pleased with it, and a little terrified – I knew this was as good as anything I’d ever done, but what if all I could produce was this unfinished movement, this fractured symphony? Perhaps this was it – the last rush of inspiration like the final rallying of a dying patient.

  I laughed aloud at myself. I was being overdramatic. The truth was that it had been some years since I’d produced anything really good. My more recent works were perfectly decent and had been kindly received – the critics became more benevolent as I’d neared seventy – but I knew myself that they were ordinary. Not much more than echoes of ideas that had been fresh and exhilarating when I was in my thirties and forties. This new work was no echo. It had snuck up on me in the shower and haunted me as nothing had done for years. I was finding myself impatient with the conversation of my good friends and I longed to slope off after dinner to be alone to listen to my thoughts. I played through the theme, frustrated at the inadequacy of my playing, and trying to imagine it on a pair of flutes. The pedal on the piano was sticking and, as I peered at it, I discovered, wedged underneath, a small bouncy ball belonging to Robin. With some difficulty, I eased myself onto my hands and knees and, groping about, managed to slide it free.

 
‘Grandpa?’ said a voice in the doorway.

  Instantly I raised my head, cracking it on the underside of the instrument, and swore. Robin slipped into the room and crept under the piano to sit beside me. Tucking his knees under his chin, he peered at me.

  ‘I like to sit under the piano too,’ he said. ‘It’s my thinking place.’

  Wordlessly, I handed him his ball. He remained crouched beside me in silence for a moment, and then said, ‘Grandpa? I want a go at the thing you were playing.’

  Painfully, I eased my way out from under the piano and settled back onto one of the armchairs. I hesitated, unsure whether I wanted Robin to play. It was too soon. The piece was unfinished and it was the opinion of this child that really mattered to me, more even than the esteem of my celebrated friends. I wanted him to understand it. I didn’t want to be alone again.

  Before I’d entirely made up my mind, Robin was sitting at the piano and playing through the sketches with more fluidity and nuance than I ever could. I grasped at once what my difficulty had been. I’d been fooling myself. The melody wasn’t for a pair of flutes. This was a piano symphony. And I had to write it for Robin.

  I wrote at white heat, hardly pausing to eat the meals that Mrs Stroud sent up to the music room and which Marcus insisted I finish. I was exhilarated by my work. The approbation of my chums was satisfying but most of all I was elated by the feeling that I was in the midst of writing the best music of my career. It’s all very well to be praised and acknowledged at fifteen or twenty-five or even forty, but afterwards there is the maudlin sense that one is on a downward slide.

  That was why I was apprehensive for Robin. It is a terrible thing for someone to reach their peak as a child. If one scales Rachmaninov before the age of twelve, then what other mountains are left, either critically or intellectually? I believe it is worst of all for trebles, those astounding boy singers with a dizzying purity of sound who dazzle the world for a brief season before their voices crack and break. I pity those children most of all. They lose not only their career but also their instrument. They are like piano players who have lost their hands.

  I didn’t want Robin’s gifts to take quite so long to mature as my own. I decided that I was like a pre-war brandy – remarkable both in flavour and for the sheer bloody length of time it had to reach its best. I wrote with the fervour and vim of a young man. Sometimes, too exhausted to write, I would draw the curtains and lie back on one of the vast armchairs in the music room, prop up my feet and listen to my early recordings. I found it eerie, akin to watching my life flash before my eyes.

  I suppose that must be how an actor or actress must feel. I spared a thought for Elizabeth Taylor, bloated and old, watching Cleopatra or National Velvet and seeing her own radiant beauty – a desperate experience, I would imagine. For me, however, it was disconcerting in a different way; I was not struck by the sense of youth lost, more that another man was conducting those pieces. In my mind I no longer heard them that way. When I looked at photographs of my younger self, I somehow imagined I could remember more or less how I’d felt when the shutter had clicked and that in essentials I remained very much the same – a little worn around the edges, the digestion less reliable and with markedly less hair, but otherwise unaltered. On hearing myself conduct Mahler at the age of thirty, it occurred to me that I was quite wrong. This earlier Fox was as different from Fox at seventy-odd as he was from another conductor entirely. It was an uncomfortable and dislocating sensation.

  Clara brought Robin around several evenings each week to play through the latest pages. As he played, the following day’s passage seemed to be suddenly illuminated like the safe course picked out by the beam of a lighthouse.

  As he finished, he gave a small huff of satisfaction. ‘I like to be the first to play your stuff.’

  I laughed. In this, Robin reminded me of his grandmother – the first to run across the snow, or to play across a page.

  Later, when Robin had gone home, we all sat on the terrace drinking brandy. The marigolds had been nipped by an early September frost and the hydrangeas had started to burnish. This would be the last evening outside until next year. Miserably, I wondered whether for Marcus this would simply be the last time. We sat in silence, a heaviness in the air between us. Our content had dwindled as the warmth of summer gave way to the nip of autumn.

  ‘Come, come, this won’t do at all,’ said Marcus at last. ‘Surely you saw that list in Music Maker of twenty-first-century greats? I was listed higher than the lot of you.’

  ‘I was only one place behind,’ grumbled John.

  ‘See! I knew you’d seen it,’ said Marcus, triumphant.

  ‘And when Fox’s piano symphony is performed, he’ll be higher than all of us, even you, Marcus,’ said Albert.

  ‘No doubt,’ said Marcus, smiling. ‘No doubt at all.’

  Albert cleared his throat. ‘It’s quite something you’ve done, Fox. I’ve read the score. I’ve heard the snatches Robin’s been playing. And I’d say that it’s the music of a man thirty years younger – it has such energy and passion but it also has the depth and sadness that come with age.’

  Marcus chuckled and shrugged. ‘Well, the last Rembrandts were the best, the last Titians the most surprising.’

  When I reached the end of the second movement, I hesitated. I wanted to introduce another theme. As I sat in the dusk, watching the pale underbellies of the poplars’ canopies shiver and shake in the wind, I found myself thinking of Edie. She adored those trees, calling them the winter trees; even in summer their silver leaves appeared to be perpetually frosted.

  I closed my eyes and, for the first time in many months, I allowed myself to remember her singing. I listened to her sing a Yiddish refrain, a lilting, rhythmic tune of swaying bodies and sliding notes. I pulled out a sheet of manuscript paper and started to sketch the melody, varying it here and there, writing the song for Robin’s piano instead of Edie’s voice. I knew both instruments so well. They could share this symphony, grandmother and grandson. I’d call it Piano Symphony in G: Edie and Robin.

  In a year or two, he wouldn’t remember her. He’d been so young when she died, but through this music he would discover her. I’d write a breadcrumb trail for him to seek out his grandmother, a song path leading through the hills and barrows of Hartgrove and then eastwards towards the cold, the Russia of long ago. He’d find her there, singing in the snow.

  June 1952

  The whole nation is eager for music and we spend the year touring, performing to packed houses. At least Marcus is allowing me to conduct. I take several rehearsals and even the odd performance at the lesser venues. He’s so exhausted by the regimen that he puts up only a token resistance. Wherever we go it’s the same: queues of shining, eager faces. Everyone’s caught coronation fever. The entire country has been put through the wash one too many times and is a dreary shade of grey; the exchequer is flat broke, but at last we have something to celebrate. A new Elizabethan age is coming and we’re overcome with fervour for Elgar.

  The programme varies very little from city to county town: Vaughan Williams, Handel, Elgar, Elgar, Elgar and ‘Jerusalem’. There’s something very English about the fact that our national hymn isn’t called ‘London’ or ‘Hastings’ or ‘Cambridge’ but ‘Jerusalem’.

  Edie is once again at the apex of national sentiment. If Queen Elizabeth is the face of a nation, then Edie Rose is its singing voice. In something of a coup, Edie is touring with us. All the orchestras want her, but inexplicably – to the outside world anyway – she’s chosen the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. It’s delightful and excruciating to be in such extended proximity to her. After two years of snatched moments in grubby digs and the occasional provincial hotel, here she is with me. But as always, there’s Jack. And Sal.

  The guilt is monstrous. Each time we tell one another it is for the last time. We shan’t meet again. But we do. Sometimes I wonder whether
Sal suspects the affair, but in reality I know she doesn’t. I’m fooling myself. If I can tell myself that she knows and hasn’t left me, then I can pretend that I have her tacit consent. I know Edie’s remorse is as agonising as mine. We both try to buy it off. Edie is making money again, lots of it, and I know without needing to be told that it is all being poured into Hartgrove Hall. My royalties, although less handsome than Edie’s fees, are split between my twin shames: Jack and Sal. I send money home and I’ve bought Sal everything I can. Everything except that which I know she really wants: a wedding ring. It would be the final hypocrisy and I simply can’t do it, even when I hear her weeping at night when she thinks I’m asleep. It’s a dreadful thing I’m doing. I must stop. I must. I shall.

  I don’t. I watch as Edie wearily pulls on her stockings. We’re in her hotel room. Bristol, I think. It takes me a moment to remember – there have been so many hotels, so many cities. I’ve told Sal that I’m running errands for Marcus. I’m exhausted with the lies.

  ‘We have to end this,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t,’ snaps Edie. ‘We lie about everything else. Let’s not lie to each other about this. We’re never going to stop. I can’t imagine not seeing you, not sleeping with you. Can you?’

  I shake my head. I never knew that love was so terrible.

  ‘Then let’s stop pretending. We simply have to live with knowing the kind of people we really are. People who can do this to people they proclaim to love.’

  I know that Edie still loves Jack. I don’t know what kind of love it is and how it differs from her love for me. I don’t ask. She doesn’t ask about Sal. It’s harder for Edie, I suppose, since she has to see Sal. Eat luncheon with her and see her in the theatre and chat about pleasantries, all the time knowing. At least I don’t have to face Jack. It’s much easier to betray him in the abstract. Every now and again, I have unconscionable fantasies, where he’s killed in a car crash or in some desperate, tragic accident, and I can weep and mourn for him and recite a heartfelt eulogy, and then, quietly, respectably, marry Edie and everyone will admire our fortitude, and he will never discover our betrayal.