The Song of Hartgrove Hall

by Natasha Solomons

  —

  Clara came downstairs in Edie’s old dressing gown, her face flushed from the bath, and curled up in the chair beside the fire in the drawing room. The firelight and the rosiness of her skin made her look closer to fifteen than forty. She tucked her knees beneath her chin and stared absently at the flames. The two of us had sat here together much like this the night before her wedding. I hoped she didn’t remember.

  ‘We sat here just like this the night before my wedding,’ she said.

  ‘You were dreadfully nervous,’ I said.

  ‘With good reason, it turns out.’ She sighed. ‘I asked you whether you were nervous before marrying Mummy and you said, “No.” That you’d never been less nervous of anything in your life. Only the thought of not marrying her had ever frightened you.’

  ‘Did I really say that?’

  ‘Yes.’ She turned to me, her eyes glistening once more. ‘You don’t know what it’s like, Papa. I wanted what you and Mummy had. You made it look easy. No, not easy, inevitable. That’s it. I thought my happiness in marriage was inevitable. And it wasn’t.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, darling. We didn’t mean—’

  ‘Of course you didn’t. It’s not your fault that you were happy. It was wonderful. Just quite a lot for us to live up to. It’s why Lucy’s never bothered to marry, you know.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘She’s not as silly as me. She wants what you had and won’t settle for anything less. She always knew it wasn’t easy or inevitable.’

  I felt a horrible gloom descend upon me. I never imagined that my own happiness would compromise my daughters’.

  ‘Stop it,’ said Clara.

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Looking so bloody dejected. I told you, it’s not your fault. You and Mummy were terribly lucky. Anyone else’s bad luck is not your fault. It’s nothing to do with you at all.’

  This was an opportunity for confession, for me to confide that, yes, some of the unhappiness inflicted over the years had been entirely due to me and to Edie. Clara gazed at me with such frank love, such sadness and exhaustion, that I couldn’t bear to tell her. There was no need for her to know that her father wasn’t quite the man she’d thought. That he wasn’t worthy of such esteem.

  Robin spent even more time at Hartgrove than before. While his sisters flocked around their mother, proffering both anger and consolation, Robin retreated. He wanted neither comfort nor conversation. He wanted music. I allowed him to play the piano for longer than usual, and I temporarily lifted the ban on Beethoven – accepting that Robin needed to play through his loss and his fury. His childhood had slipped from a major into a minor key.

  I tried not to listen to the music swilling through my own thoughts. I was drained from writing and needed to pause; I no longer had the stamina I once possessed. Nonetheless, melodies nagged at me, calling for me to come and play, much as my daughters had done when they were children and I was trying to work. Then, I had turned from the girls, irritated by their plaguing, and I had shut the music-room door, retreating into music. Now, I attempted the reverse. I ignored the tunes pulsing in my forehead like a headache and attempted to focus solely on Clara and her children. I invited them all around for supper after Robin’s piano practice, taking care to choose the seat between Annabel and Katy, much to Robin’s surprise. I attempted to engage them in conversation, but I had scant idea of what to say. I didn’t recall struggling to engage with my own daughters but my granddaughters remained little strangers – polite, pretty and distant as dollies.

  I hacked at a roast chicken and distributed plates.

  Annabel shook her curls. ‘I’m a vegetarian, Grandpa.’

  ‘You are? Since when?’

  ‘Since, like, for ever.’

  Both girls stared at me with wounded bewilderment.

  ‘Oh, there’s probably some cheese or smoked salmon somewhere in the fridge. You can have that if you want.’

  ‘I don’t eat fish. Is it vegetarian cheese?’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know, darling. I can’t imagine it eats many steaks.’

  I glanced across the table at Robin who smiled at me with some sympathy. Perhaps supper had been a mistake. Discussing Brahms with Robin was infinitely less taxing than being interrogated on the contents of my fridge by two visitors in pink-and-white-striped jeans and fancifully coloured trainers. I tried gamely to ask the girls about school and clubs and netball practice but the unpleasant truth was that I wasn’t terribly interested in the answers.

  Afterwards Clara and I washed up the dishes.

  ‘It’s good that you made an effort with the girls. They’ll appreciate the attempt.’

  ‘Will they? Seemed rather futile to me. I’m afraid we don’t have a great deal in common. I don’t know what to say to them. I’ve become one of those tedious elderly relatives I dreaded as a child.’

  I did not add that I found the girls somewhat tedious myself.

  Clara looked at me oddly and then gazed out of the kitchen window, where clouds glowed crimson like a coal fire, improbably beautiful.

  ‘Half the time I don’t know what to say to Robin. He’s my own child and yet I sit there in the car with him on these endless drives to and from London and I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘You can talk about music.’

  ‘I can’t. I don’t know how. Not in the way that he does or that you do. I’d sound like an idiot. And, anyway, I don’t hear music the way the two of you do.’

  She fumbled with a cup and dropped it so that it smashed on the tiled floor with a xylophone crash.

  ‘Damn it.’

  She began to cry. Those days, Clara’s tears were always close to the surface.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Clara. It’s only a cup. Here.’ I dropped another, which shattered on the tiles with a satisfying tinkle.

  She laughed. ‘It’s not the stupid cup, Papa. It’s Robin. You don’t know what it’s like, not knowing what to say to your own child. I don’t know how he’s coping with it all. He must be missing his father. He saw Ralph last week and afterwards he wouldn’t talk about it.’

  ‘I think he’s all right. He’s angry. Lots of Beethoven at first but he’s returning to Mozart again and I think that’s a good sign. As long as he’s not reaching for Schoenberg, I think we’re in the clear.’

  She gave a weak smile. ‘You see? You get him. I can’t decipher him at all and he thinks I’m an idiot.’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t.’

  ‘Last week I told him I liked the Debussy he was playing. He gave me a reproachful look and said, “That was Delius. Don’t you know anything, Mummy? You have very stupid ears.”’

  ‘That was very rude of him.’

  It was also true. Clara did have stupid ears. It wasn’t her fault but there it was.

  She bent down to pick up the fragments of china.

  ‘He’s supposed to love me most. He’s supposed to want to share things with me. I’m his mother. It’s lovely that the two of you are so close. But sometimes it’s hard not to be a little jealous.’

  She stood up and stared out across the lawns at the sky, fading from red to black, her expression unconscionably sad.

  Marcus died in the spring. He sloped off to a hospice to die, surrounded by strangers. He refused to see me. We spoke regularly on the telephone but he did not relent: he would not allow me to visit.

  ‘No, dear boy, I want you to remember me as I was. Strikingly handsome and debonair.’

  I admired him immensely: eighty-three, dying and vain till the end. During our telephone calls we discussed music. Marcus liked to play games, asking me to choose between two pieces: ‘Which should I die listening to if it’s a choice between Prokofiev’s War and Peace or Shostakovich’s Fourth? Quick, quick. First answer.’

  Invariably, I selected the w
rong one.

  ‘Really? That. Well. Goodness. I thought you were a man of taste. It’s a good thing that this friendship is shortly coming to an end.’

  I was not permitted to ask whether he was in pain. ‘Dying’s not much fun, Fox. Take my advice and don’t ever try it yourself.’

  We spent a good deal of time planning his funeral. Marcus was terribly concerned about both the turnout and the programme.

  ‘John Godbolt had better come and he’d better look bloody sad about it, even if the New York Phil have just offered him my old position. I think I’ll have the Bach fugue before the first prayer. And at least one of the Beethoven sonatas. They’re about death but not too depressing, which is important for a funeral. I’m not sure who should conduct – someone competent, or the audience won’t be able to lose themselves in the music and remember me as fondly as they ought. But he mustn’t be too good, as I want the audience to be reminded of my superior talent. Hello, now that’s a thought. Will you do it, Fox?’

  ‘With such an invitation, how could I refuse? And, technically, they’re not an audience, Marcus. They’re mourners.’

  ‘Oh yes, so they are. Jolly good.’

  After that we spent a good deal of time considering the selection.

  ‘I think a little Rachmaninov or would that be too sentimental?’ he wondered.

  ‘One’s allowed a little sentiment at a funeral, Marcus. We will all be very sad.’

  ‘Of course you will. I can hardly bear thinking about it. Now, will Albert play the piano or will he be too overwhelmed by grief?’

  ‘He’ll be terribly upset, but he’ll manage – through the tears of course – since it’s what you really want.’ I could tell by the ensuing silence that he was satisfied.

  ‘And I do want a little Mozart. Don Giovanni, I think. Perhaps Don Pedro’s statue coming out of the tomb to cart Giovanni off to the underworld. Playful or too macabre?’

  ‘It simply isn’t you. You should have Don Giovanni’s list of lovers.’

  ‘Of course! Perhaps we could alter the libretto . . . pop in one or two of my liaisons amoureuses.’

  ‘Certainly not. Some secrets must be kept.’

  I heard Marcus smiling in the pause.

  I said nothing and, after a moment or two, Marcus started adding another half-dozen pieces to his programme until at last I cried out, ‘This is ridiculous. Your funeral’s going to require a full symphony orchestra, a choir, two tenors, a pianist and an intermission. It isn’t a funeral, it’s a concert.’

  ‘What a splendid idea! A memorial concert.’

  I hoped that planning the concert distracted him from the nastiness of those last days. We bickered agreeably over the programme and he insisted on dispensing endless notes as to how he wanted the pieces performed, until I’d had quite enough. I was steeling myself to tell him that if he wanted me to conduct, then I really must do it in my own way, for better or for worse, only to be informed by the duty nurse when I telephoned that he’d died that afternoon.

  ‘Just slipped away at ten to three, listening to his CD player,’ she said.

  ‘What piece was it?’ I asked, when my voice was steady.

  ‘I’m really not sure. I could try to find out for you.’

  ‘Yes please, if you would.’

  She called me back after a few minutes.

  ‘It was Mahler’s Fifth.’

  ‘And the conductor?’

  ‘Sir Marcus Albright.’

  Of course. How could it have been anybody else? I wanted to share with someone my sorrow and amusement over the aptness of Marcus Albright, great maestro and egotist, dying while listening to himself conduct, but the two people who’d find it the most diverting – Edie and Marcus himself – were now both gone.

  I hung up the telephone, sat down on my bed and cried.

  July 1954

  The hall table is set with a hundred vases of flowers. The house smells like a florist’s shop. We discovered during last year’s festival that it’s quite remarkable how many allowances will be made for shabbiness and sporadic hot water when every room is filled with flowers. Edie similarly insists upon splendid food – most of the produce coming from the estate itself – starched sheets aired with lavender and fires lit in every grate on chilly days. George tends the flower seedlings in early spring, mixes a special potting mixture and plants them out in May in the cuttings garden, so that now Edie has enough pink and white sweet peas, striped dahlias the size of dinner plates, scented stocks and roses.

  I hear the grind of tyres on the gravel outside.

  ‘The first lot are here,’ I say.

  Minutes later, members of the Bournemouth Symphony assemble for lemonade and gin on the front lawn, yawning and stretching and picking clean the plates of sandwiches that have been set out for twice their number – it’s always a marvel how much an orchestra can eat. I don’t think the biblical plague was one of locusts, merely a symphony orchestra.

  It’s the first performance of the festival and the première of the heavily revised Song of Hartgrove Hall. I’m all a-fidget with excitement. I’ve rewritten the second movement for a solo piano and to my delight (and Edie’s, who’s in charge of the box office receipts) Albert Shields has accepted our invitation to perform. The chaps from Decca fiddle with cables and microphones, ready to record the performance for release as an LP. My first recording contract. The advance and any royalties will inevitably be ploughed back into the estate. It’s peculiar how a piece of music imagining the loss and destruction of Hartgrove Hall has ended up helping to save it instead. I suppose that now, rather than a farewell, it’s become a portrait. I picture the notes seeping into the soil, rich as dung.

  The General and Chivers retreat to the library and close the door against the gaiety of the musicians, put out by all the noise and kerfuffle. The two old men are perfect curmudgeons, profoundly annoyed by the invasion of strangers and conveniently ignoring the fact that those strangers are enabling us to keep possession of the house.

  —

  Two hundred concert-goers picnic upon the lawns, eating cold salmon and strawberries and drinking champagne. I notice the General and Chivers peeking out from the library, barricaded inside against the evening sunshine and the onslaught of other people’s pleasure. I meander amongst the picnickers, nodding greetings but avoiding conversation. I spot Edie in the flower garden, cutting yet more sweet peas, a basket brimming with candy-coloured blooms resting on her hip. She smiles to see me.

  ‘Hello, darling.’

  We have few moments alone during festival season, so those we do share are heavenly. I no longer ask her when or if we can confess to Jack. I suppose that this is to be our lives – a furtive ménage à trois.

  ‘I’m looking forward to tonight. The rehearsal sounded wonderful,’ she says.

  ‘It wasn’t bad. Albert’s a super pianist but’ – I reach for the words, trying to explain – ‘it doesn’t sound right. It sounds good. Very good, but somehow it’s not quite how I imagined it.’

  Edie glances over her shoulder, then draws me into the shadow of the greenhouse and kisses me slowly. She smells of garden flowers and sunshine.

  ‘I ought to go,’ I say at last, reluctantly.

  ‘Give Marcus my love. Tell him I’ll see him after the concert.’

  ‘I will. And have you met that new chap, John something or other? Wants to come to the festival and conduct next year. Frightfully pushy. Keeps cornering me to talk about Bach.’

  Edie laughs and brushes a leaf from my shoulder. ‘I’ll keep an eye out for him. Is he any good?’

  ‘Marcus can’t stand him, which is always a good sign.’

  We edge towards the lawns and see Jack move easily amongst the guests, as handsome as a film star. Even the young girls watch him, eyes wide. He’s the perfect host – friendly but dusting glamour upon the evening.<
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  ‘Righto. I’m going. I need to talk to Albert,’ I say.

  ‘Good luck,’ says Edie.

  The concert has started – Brahms – conducted by Marcus. We still need the draw of his name to pull in the crowds. I’m not on until after the interval. I see George walking through the orchard, tending to the beehives. He wears only the lightest of masks and long gloves, insisting the bees know him too well to sting. As he moves amongst the hives he croons in a pleasant baritone. The tunes are familiar folk songs, ones I’ve heard all across the country. I sit on the gate and watch him. He reaches into one hive, and I’m concerned that he’ll be stung, but I stay silent and watch. He sings a song that I’ve not come across during my travels and yet it is familiar to me, one I so nearly remember, that I feel he’s singing back to me a piece of myself. The bees drift about him, as though drugged by the music, allowing him to retrieve a piece of honeycomb and place it in a bowl. He spots me and stops singing.

  ‘Do carry on, George,’ I say. ‘Sing me the chorus.’

  ‘I don’t remember any more,’ he says, and for some reason I think he’s fibbing.

  I worry about George. He remains on the edge of things, uncomfortable amongst so many people. Out of obligation he attended last year’s concerts but, seeing how ill at ease it made him, we quietly suggested that he was much too busy with the farm and the bees to be distracted with such trifles and he retreated, relieved.