The Song of Hartgrove Hall

by Natasha Solomons

  He appeared to fall asleep for a few minutes and then woke again, coughing. I helped him to some water.

  ‘Did you videotape Robin’s bit?’ he asked after a minute.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Play it again.’

  I rewound the cassette, then we sat and listened again as Robin created a world out of the void. From silence, followed by the static of the television set, came his glorious piano playing, conjuring order and magnificence. I saw the woods outside, both real and imagined through my music, one imposed upon the other, and I felt time stretch like a rubber band. I heard the layers in the music and, within Robin’s playing, I listened to other melodies as well as the memories held within them. I heard the ghosts in the music of our other, younger selves.

  ‘You’ll bury me in the wood next to George, won’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  He closed his eyes. ‘I can’t understand why Edie didn’t want to be there too. It’s where she ought to be. We all loved her, in our way. Even George.’

  ‘I know. I was cross about it for a long time. But the thing is, Edie wasn’t quite one of us. She felt the call of home, but hers wasn’t here. Or not entirely. I like to think that she’s in the woods anyway in the voice of the birds.’

  I adjusted Jack’s pillow, trying to prop him up to make his breathing easier.

  ‘The soul is said to fly north, after death,’ I said. ‘That’s without doubt the direction Edie’s would have taken, flying into colder and colder realms, towards the creak of ice and the quiet snow.’

  Jack coughed. ‘Bloody hell. Mine’s not. I’m going south. Back to Florida.’

  The music stopped and I looked across at Jack, still and white.

  ‘Do you need more morphine?’

  ‘I can manage. I am cold, though. All that talk of ruddy ice.’

  I pulled back the covers and slid into bed beside him, reaching for his hand, feeling its thinness. We lay there side by side in the dark, our ears ringing with music. Tomorrow I would be alone but that was tomorrow and not tonight.

  July 1959

  A row of dancers sleep under the beech trees. I’m not entirely sure whether their exhaustion is due to the sunshine, last night’s performance or the party afterwards, strains of which floated up to our bedroom until after four. The General was aghast to discover several empty vodka bottles amongst the marigold pots on the loggia this morning. It’s taken all of Edie’s gentle diplomacy to soothe him and settle him back in the library with yesterday’s newspaper.

  The General can no longer cope with surprises. He reads yesterday’s copy of The Times, reassured that it contains nothing so terrible that civilisation will not continue tomorrow. He misses Chivers and, since his old friend’s death, he appears to have shrunk, bemused at the passing of his world. The modern one – filled with musicians and dancers who carouse and fill his flowerpots with empty bottles and who fail to understand the proper deference due to a man such as he – puzzles and frightens him. We keep him away from the concert-goers and the performers as much as we can. He enjoys visits from his granddaughter but can’t fathom how Edie manages without a nanny, nor can he condone the fact that Clara is permitted to live downstairs when there is a perfectly decent nursery in the attic – which there is, although it is currently filled with most of the Bolshoi corps de ballet.

  It’s nearly five o’clock and the sun has dried the ground so that the edges of the lawns are cracked and hard, as threadbare and brown as worn carpet. The purple buddleias fill the afternoon with the scent of honey so that the garden smells like a Parisian patisserie. A smooth grass snake lies coiled on the path, its skin liquid and gleaming like molten metal. I step around him, unwilling to disturb his snooze.

  I like this moment, this lull before the flurry of the evening’s preparations. Soon someone will be unable to find her costume for Act Three, and Edie will search for half an hour until we discover it was sent to Wardrobe to be mended, and then one of the violins on the third desk will be found sobbing in the potting shed, lovelorn for a cellist.

  ‘Here you are,’ says Edie. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

  ‘Oh dear. What now?’

  ‘Oh nothing really. George says the strawberries are nearly over. He’s brought some from the patch at the bungalow but we’ll need to buy them in for next week.’

  ‘Shall we have a drink? I think there’s time before the chaos is scheduled.’

  Edie smiles, creases appearing by her eyes, and she sits heavily in a chair. Her feet are noticeably swollen. She’s almost seven months pregnant. I kiss her on the forehead, which is slightly damp.

  ‘Wait here, darling, you look absolutely fagged.’

  I reappear a minute later with two glasses. Gratefully she takes a sip and glances at me suspiciously.

  ‘There’s the merest dash of gin. Medicinal.’

  She laughs and closes her eyes. ‘I ought to bathe Clara and find her some supper.’

  ‘I’ll do it. You have a rest. Go and lie under the trees with the dancers.’

  She frowns. ‘I feel like the matron of a boarding school. They’re constantly switching bedrooms. I’ve absolutely no idea what’s going on up there.’

  There’s a shriek and then Clara appears on the terrace, hands on her hips. She’s a sturdy girl of nearly four, bossy and buzzing with opinions.

  ‘I was looking for you and you weren’t there,’ she says to Edie, full of accusation.

  ‘Here I am, darling. Did you want something?’

  ‘Yes. You need to watch me. I’m a sylph.’

  Edie and I do not meet one another’s eye in order not to laugh. Anything less sylphlike than our podgy-legged, round-cheeked daughter is hard to imagine. A kindly member of the corps de ballet has neatly braided her yellow hair into two fat plaits. From the house, we hear the orchestra rehearsing snatches of the overture from Giselle. We sit back on the terrace and watch as Clara bounds across the lawn, twisting and flopping utterly out of time with the music.

  ‘It’s remarkable. She has no sense of rhythm at all,’ says Edie, quietly, smiling.

  ‘Absolutely none. It’s a wonder to behold.’

  Clara thuds to a stop and squats in a curtsey.

  ‘Well done, darling,’ says Edie.

  Clara beams at us, her eyes the same summer blue as her uncle Jack’s. I gaze at her and I can’t help but wonder for a moment. I shake away the thought.

  ‘Look, a dragonfly!’

  She points with a short finger at the hovering insect, its wings beating. In the sunlight it glints green and blue like a ribbon of spilled petrol. She pursues it through the rose beds, trampling fallen petals into mush.

  ‘Come on, darling, suppertime,’ I call.

  The orchestra strikes up again and Clara is whirling round and round on the lawn, a blonde blur amongst the white daisies.

  ‘One more song, Daddy,’ she shouts as she spins. ‘There’s time for one more song.’

  A Note on Song Collecting

  The history of Britain isn’t just written in books or notched upon the landscape in holloways and long barrows, it’s also contained in song. Parents and grandparents passed their songs down the generations, the words, melodies and rhythms shifting with each performance. They were sung on windswept hillsides and in muddy fields, around the fire and in the pubs, along the ice droves and the cattle droves; they were sung by carters and milkmaids, shepherds and shopkeepers, grandmothers and gypsies. Some were published as song sheets and sold at fairs by pedlars, while others survive only in memory. Some are centuries old with strange modal melodies, their origins unknown and mysterious, while others are more recent, recounting events such as the Napoleonic wars, which in time have become absorbed into the broad repertory of songs, their sources mostly forgotten too.

  The subjects of folk songs are as varied as life itsel
f: they are about love and death and murder, the passing of the seasons and of youth, of men lost in battle and at sea. Some are downright silly, and others tragic. Often the same tunes are sung to different words and vice versa. These variations are sometimes geographical – the version of ‘The Foggy Dew’ sung in the west of Scotland is quite different from that sung down in Somerset. The songs live with each singer and, as they make their journeys across Britain, they grow and change along the way.

  By the nineteenth century, folk songs were already fading out of common life. Thomas Hardy complained that within a week of the railway arriving in Dorset, the hillsides and pastures no longer reverberated with traditional West Country songs but with the hits of the music hall. Soon ‘The Lambeth Walk’ was hummed in Langton Matravers and Batcombe, while the older songs started to be forgotten. The era where the singing of folk songs was an everyday pastime was vanishing, and with it many of the songs themselves.

  Cecil Sharp was at the forefront of the first folk revival at the beginning of the twentieth century. The legend goes that while he was staying in Headington, a mile or so east of Oxford, a troop of Morris dancers appeared at the cottage on Boxing Day. They were a peculiar snow-covered procession, all the men dressed in white and carrying coloured sticks, with one dressed up as the fool. They danced and leaped to an odd-sounding tune that Sharp had never heard before. He was captivated. He wrote down the melody and declared that he must venture out across England to hunt out more. While staying with friends in Somerset, he overheard the gardener singing ‘The Seeds of Love’ as he mowed the lawn.

  Sharp’s song hunt led him across England and, later, America, accompanied by his devoted assistant, the evocatively named Maud Karpeles. Sharp and his contemporaries, along with almost every song collector since, gathered up folk songs as a way of preserving them from extinction. Yet folk songs have proved to be remarkably resilient. Even in the digital age, where it seems logical to assume that all songs must have been gathered and recorded, or long since lost, more are still coming to light.

  Contemporary Song Collectors

  The musician and folk singer Sam Lee is at the forefront of song collecting in Britain today. I met Sam one winter’s night in a pub in Fitzrovia. He blew in and we huddled by the electric fire as he told me about song collecting – how he’s light-footed as he walks through the woods, trying to leave no trace even as he searches for hidden things. Even though, like me, he’s Jewish and was born in London, there was something Puckish about him; he was full of melody and charm. I was sure that, despite being in W1, I caught the scent of the woods.

  Until I met Sam, I’d thought that song collectors were a vanished breed, but I was quite mistaken. He mostly gathers songs from the traveller community, the last custodians of ancient songs in the modern world. And he’s always searching for one more song.

  Benjamin’s Book

  When I moved house, I learned that our cottage had been occupied during the eighteenth century by a singer, song collector, alehouse keeper and mischief-maker called Benjamin Rose. In 1820, Benjamin sat down to write out all his tunes in a manuscript book. It contains a wonderful repository of tunes from the period – some are traditional West Country songs and dances; others chronicle great events like the Battle of Waterloo – all transcribed in Rose’s beautiful, cursive script. Many years later the book found its way into the hands of the folk musicians Tim Laycock and Colin Thompson, who understood the significance of the find.

  I’d heard that Tim was performing Rose’s music, and so I pursued him, hoping to invite him to come to our cottage to sing it here once again. I finally tracked him down, aptly enough, at Max Gate, Thomas Hardy’s Dorchester house, on a soggy autumn day. After issuing my invitation, I ventured into Hardy’s rain-soaked orchard and scrumped a few apples, deciding that this must be good fuel for the imagination before embarking upon my new novel, The Song Collector.

  A few weeks later, Tim came round to our house, bringing Benjamin Rose’s book with him. We ate supper and then gathered by the fire to listen as Tim sang. The Rose family had lived in our cottage for several generations. Two of Benjamin’s great-grandsons had drowned when their ship HMS Good Hope was sunk in 1914, and there is a small memorial to them in the village church. Tim selected a sailor’s lament, ‘The Blackbird’, in memory of the two lost boys, and we sat and listened as he sang Ben’s songs beside the hearth where they had been transcribed nearly two hundred years before. The boys had been lost, but the songs had been found again and returned home.

  —

  If you want to try your hand, or ear, at song collecting, Sam Lee runs the Song Collectors Collective, which also contains a repository of folklore and recordings of folk singers: http://songcollectorscollective.co.uk/

  Song collecting is not a British phenomenon. Probably the greatest and certainly the most prolific song collector of all was American, the legendary Alan Lomax. He collected songs from all across the USA, recording the nation from the 1920s until the 1990s. He recorded the history of America in song. Lomax also travelled to Europe and recorded extensively in Scotland, close to where Fox, Sal and Marcus stay in the novel. If you want to listen to Alan Lomax’s song recordings from the USA or the UK please visit: http://research.culturalequity.org/audio-guide.jsp.

  The Great British Song Map

  I’m still not finished with song collecting and I now want to create a portrait of contemporary Britain in song. Together with some friends in the folk community I have started a communal project to map as many songs as possible, put them up online freely available so that people can both listen to the music of their town, and if they like, learn their own local songs.

  If you want to post or listen to a song please go to:

  www.songmap.co.uk

  Acknowledgments

  I’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness and enthusiasm of the folk music community while writing and researching this novel. My profound thanks to Tim Laycock for singing lessons, impromptu concerts, friendship and apple cake. I’m indebted to Sam Lee, artist and song collector extraordinaire – this book was written to his music. My friends Hélène Frisby and Lea Simpson have been endlessly supportive, providing patient advice and support, and when all else failed: gin. Huge thanks to my parents, aka Mushki and Bup-Bup, and their unwavering confidence and childcare provision. I’m not sure how I would have managed without you. I realise that it’s a gift to be able to sit down and write content in the knowledge that one’s small son is happily dangling for tadpoles and hunting for trolls in his grandmother’s garden.

  Thanks to David Julyan, composer and friend, for checking the manuscript so carefully. I’m glad that in fiction I was able to help you fulfil your true ambitions on the bassoon. I’m extremely grateful to Kearn for sharing his extensive knowledge of vintage explosive techniques. Thank you to Stan for being the best of agents and of friends.

  Huge thanks to my fabulous editors, Carole Welch and Tara Singh Carlson, and the respective teams at Sceptre and Plume. Lastly, my gratitude and love to David and Luke for understanding that stories are sometimes more important than unburned suppers or tidy houses.

  Chapter One

  General Observations on Quadrupeds

  When I close my eyes I see Tyneford House. In the darkness as I lay down to sleep, I see the Purbeck stone frontage in the glow of late afternoon. The sunlight glints off the upper windows, and the air is heavy with the scents of magnolia and salt. Ivy clings to the porch archway, and a magpie pecks at the lichen coating a limestone roof tile. Smoke seeps from one of the great chimneystacks, and the leaves on the unfelled lime avenue are May green and cast mottled patterns on the driveway. There are no weeds yet tearing through the lavender and thyme borders, and the lawn is velvet cropped and rolled in verdant stripes. No bullet holes pockmark the ancient garden wall and the drawing room windows are thrown open, the glass not shattered by shellfire. I see the house as it was then, on that first afternoo
n.

  Everyone is just out of sight. I can hear the ring of the drinks tray being prepared; on the terrace a bowl of pink camellias rests on the table. And in the bay, the fishing boats bounce upon the tide, nets cast wide, the slap of water against wood. We have not yet been exiled. The cottages do not lie in pebbled ruins across the strand, with hazel and blackthorn growing through the flagstones of the village houses. We have not surrendered Tyneford to guns and tanks and birds and ghosts.

  I find I forget more and more nowadays. Nothing very important, as yet. I was talking to somebody just now on the telephone, and as soon as I had replaced the receiver I realised I’d forgotten who it was and what we said. I shall probably remember later when I’m lying in the bath. I’ve forgotten other things too: the names of the birds are no longer on the tip of my tongue and I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t remember where I planted the daffodil bulbs for spring. And yet, as the years wash everything else away, Tyneford remains—a smooth pebble of a memory. Tyneford. Tyneford. As though if I say the name enough, I can go back again. Those summers were long and blue and hot. I remember it all, or think I do. It doesn’t seem long ago to me. I have replayed each moment so often in my mind that I hear my own voice in every part. Now, as I write them, they appear fixed, absolute. On the page we live again, young and unknowing, everything yet to happen.

  When I received the letter that brought me to Tyneford, I knew nothing about England, except that I wouldn’t like it. That morning I perched on my usual spot beside the draining board in the kitchen as Hildegard bustled around, flour up to her elbows and one eyebrow snowy white. I laughed and she flicked her tea towel at me, knocking the crust out of my hand and onto the floor.

  “Gut. Bit less bread and butter won’t do you any harm.”