The Paradise Engine

by Rebecca Campbell

  Mr. Penney explained: “There’s something, Mr. Manley, we call blasting. Often a note like your C, there in the fifth bar, overwhelms the diaphragm, and the mechanism that cuts the groove in our master disk. The effect is quite unpleasant on playback, though it is a common mistake. Perhaps we could pitch you a little lower? Then the song will lie in the best part of your voice.”

  Liam knew the C lay at the very margins of his talent, but he had always fancied that his audience felt a certain gallantry in his approach to that particular mountain. Gallantry was a fine thing in a performer, he always thought, especially when they faced the C. Drysdale played the opening bars again, at a lower pitch, and Liam joined him, self-conscious to find that a thing like “blasting” existed, and that he might be guilty of it. He concentrated, but despite his care, one by one the muscles down either side of his spine clamped tight, though he knew he must be a hollow reed, and let his breath build from his belly.

  “Yes, I think that’s better,” said Drysdale. “I think we may be able to use that.”

  “But, I was expecting a rehearsal—”

  “I wouldn’t worry much, Mr. Manley. This isn’t Berliner Phonograph.”

  Drysdale nodded as well. “Not Berliner Phonograph,” he said.

  Penney said, “I should add, you were quite right about the new spring,” and flipped some switch in the wooden base of his pet Morning Glory. Then, his voice suddenly sonorous and his accent more refined, Penney said, “Mr. Liam Manley, tenor, singing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”

  Drysdale thumped through the opening bars and when the moment was right, Liam began to sing.

  That afternoon Mrs. Kilgour sang her “Ave Maria.” Her eyes were closed. Liam had withdrawn to the windows at the opposite end of the room, only sparing the barest thought to what Mrs. Kilgour or Mr. Goshawk might think of his inattention as he watched the street through a crack in the curtains. Behind him, Drysdale thumped away at his accompaniment, and Penney managed his machine, eyebrows beetled as he watched the needle carve a thin thread of wax from the recording disk. When she finished, Mrs. Kilgour stood a moment longer than necessary before the electric Morning Glory that topped Mr. Penney’s recording device.

  “Well,” began Mr. Goshawk. “Well, I think we may call that finished. Mr. Manley, what do you think? Do you think our Euterpe has completed her task?”

  Liam did not answer.

  “Our Euterpe, Mr. Manley,” Goshawk said again. “But perhaps you remain entranced? You should break the spell, Mrs. Kilgour! You should break the spell you have cast on your poor, trapped Orpheus!” Here Goshawk laughed his horrible false laugh. But it was too late, for now Mrs. Kilgour covered her mouth and looked up at him through her lashes.

  “Have I done, Mr. Manley?” she asked.

  “Yes. I believe you have,” Liam said, keeping his eyes on the street outside.

  “Then we must celebrate! Goshawk—send a message that we will have late dinner for eight. Tell Nora to pick my good November family menu! Only I want hollandaise for the sauce. Mr. Manley likes hollandaise!”

  Liam could not stand to think that he was a man who liked hollandaise. After an afternoon of six songs, each recorded once—so perfect was the first performance we need not trouble you for a second! Goshawk had told her, and neither Penney nor Drysdale argued— Liam could not face dinner at the Castle. There would be buckets of hollandaise, and Mrs. Kilgour would describe her afternoon, turning to Goshawk for confirmation, and to Liam. And she would talk of their mission in her low, serious voice, and Euphemia would say, oh yes, especially after her triumphs on the stage, such work could only contribute to the moral improvement of the whole province!

  Defeated far in advance, Liam said, “Oh, Mrs. Kilgour, I don’t think I’ll join you tonight. I think I should take an early night, and rest.” He smiled while he said it, but he thought that if he saw his own smile he would not like it much. He thought it would remind him too much of Goshawk.

  Goshawk gave him a look that made Liam wonder what the man was like with Mrs. Kilgour’s chauffeurs and skivvies and upstairs maids, and how he might treat his dog. But then Mrs. Kilgour spoke again: “Oh, my dear, go back to your room and order bread and milk—no, you must! I think I’ll order it for you. Goshawk—see that bread and milk is sent to Mr. Manley’s room. And honey, send honey, too!”

  Then they were gone, and he was alone in the room with Penney, who stood over the machine, rubbing it with a soft cloth, while Drysdale looked at his watch. Liam searched their faces for smiles, but Penney was intent on his machinery and Drysdale picked up his Illustrated London News.

  A month later it was mid-March, and he was again at Craiglockhart (a blue-grey suit, a new green silk tie, and indigo socks). He was standing before the wide windows that overlooked the rose garden, but now there were leaves covering the ugly, thorny stems. Behind him Goshawk did something with the phonograph.

  “I think the ‘Ave Maria’ will be our finale. Yes. The zenith of her art, she called it. She will like to hear it last. What do you think we should begin with, Mr. Manley? I think we should begin with the pretty one about the little sleepwalker. Mrs. Kilgour likes singing that one a great deal, and she will like to hear it first, to set her mood for all the others, don’t you think Mr. Manley? You will, I think, have to wait to hear your own work.” Mr. Goshawk did not pause for breath or conversation until Mrs. Kilgour joined them, accompanied by Nora, her current niece-secretary and Euphemia—all the older children being away with husbands and wives, or attending to Kilgour interests in California and Toronto.

  Alive to the occasion’s gravity, Mrs. Kilgour had prepared a little speech. “I will take this moment,” she began, “before we hear the fruit of our labours, to say thank you, thank you Goshawk, and Liam, and dear Nora and Euphemia!”

  Goshawk led the applause, followed by Liam and Nora, and finally Euphemia.“What can a simple man say? No, I think it best to let your own voice speak for me, and ask you to listen to this first printing, which will carry the work of your voice farther than you can imagine!” He was about to speak again, but Euphemia had already set the phonograph going, and Liam’s fingernails dug into his palms.

  Drysdale was not as he remembered. In person the man had a lazy left hand and a heavy foot on the pedals that was more sentiment than sensibility. In the large horn of the phonograph he was much cleaner. While he noticed that initial discrepancy, he doubted his ear and it wasn’t until the vocalist embarked upon those first coquettish notes of “Ah! non giunge uman pensiero,” that he realized that it was not the suetty coloratura of his rehearsals with Mrs. Kilgour. The woman whose voice floated from the large, elaborate horn—though she sang Mrs. Kilgour’s song, and though the label bore Mrs. Kilgour’s name—was not the dog-eared, red-faced lady. The woman was talented, disciplined, a prima donna, though not one he recognized.

  Liam looked at Goshawk. Goshawk did not return his look. Nora listened as though she heard nothing, her face as always so plain and virtuous that Liam ignored her on principle. Euphemia listened as though she had taken a slug from some ancient bottle of medicinal laudanum, and only the occasional roll of her eyes betrayed the daughterly contempt Liam had often seen in her face. She did not care. Goshawk, however. Goshawk. Liam looked again to the man, but he had turned away to the windows. His hands were knotted behind him. He beat time inaccurately on the small of his back.

  After “Non giunge” it was “By Yon Bonnie Banks.” Here the anonymous prima donna seemed utterly fresh, with none of the insipidity he found so repulsive in Mrs. Kilgour’s interpretations. This woman executed the ballad with a grief Liam thought of as refined—another mot juste that made him proud. He would have liked to discuss it with her, whoever she was. Perhaps she was tall and aristocratic and blonde, with grey eyes. After that it was her “Queen of the Night,” in English, and even in English it was lovely.

  The first four sides having been considered, Mrs. Kilgour rose again, and Goshawk stopped fussing by the phonog
raph. Euphemia crossed her arms tightly over her chest, pushing her breasts forward and up against the fine white fabric of her afternoon dress. Liam looked, then looked away.

  “Mrs. Kilgour,” Goshawk began, “Mrs. Kilgour, I hope you are not disappointed! This machine cannot hope to capture your voice in truth, but you must not be downhearted, and expect that it—”

  “Yes, Goshawk. It is not my voice—there is a delicacy but also a vibrancy missing in the recording. You had told me that it would not be quite as I had done it. It does very well, though.”

  Late that evening, after family dinner (with hollandaise) and a short program of hymns from Mrs. Kilgour, Liam saw Goshawk slip out through the French doors and stand smoking on the terrace above the roses. Seeing the red spark of Goshawk’s cigarette he, too, slipped out the door and stood beside the man, among the splashes of yellow light from Craiglockhart’s windows. They looked into the gloomy park, past the roses to the trees and the shrubbery, and through their branches, city lights below them to the north.

  Well, he began in his head, these devices transform their subjects more than I had imagined! He thought he would say it with a delicately nu-anced irony, perhaps when Goshawk had finished that cigarette and then Liam could offer him another from his new silver case, which would be both generous and worldly enough to show Goshawk he was not taken in, only amused. Then he thought he might be blunt and say, Who was it you recorded?

  As he weighed the different approaches, Goshawk spoke first. “The woman was not, of course, our Mrs. Kilgour. In the most rigourous sense, at least.”

  “Oh—yes?”

  “No. She is an Englishwoman, a singer of popular opera and ballads with a quality of voice not unlike our Patrona, though hardly known to Canada. I heard her once in Toronto when I was travelling there on Kilgour business.”

  Liam said nothing, but then Goshawk had finished his cigarette. He squatted and carefully stubbed it out in a planter, digging a little hole with his right forefinger and pushing the remains under the earth. Liam wondered if it was some holdover from another house, where one was not allowed to smoke and must hide one’s evidence. Perhaps his mother took a hard line on smoking. As the man rose, Liam opened his silver cigarette case and held it out. Goshawk took two.

  “When I heard the recordings for the first time, I knew that Mrs. Kilgour would not find them an accurate representation of her own voice—you saw how she reacted this afternoon. Which left me to wonder how I could satisfy my employer’s need for veracity with a technology that so changes the things it purports to reproduce. It was then that I remembered something the technician told me—you remember the young man named Drysdale?—he told me that often they must replace familiar instruments in recording because the process so distorts sound. For instance, he told me of something called a Stroh Violin. It sounds quite vulgar in life, but its vulgarity is softened by the process of recording into something like the sound of a true violin. And thinking on what that young man had told me, I considered that I should find the equivalent of a Stroh Violin for our Mrs. Kilgour. That is, a voice which sounds—in recording—like what Mrs. Kilgour hears within her own head. And then it was only a matter of engaging this woman to record the same compositions. It was very simple. Well, once I had exchanged a few telegrams with our Toronto Office.”

  Liam threw away his cigarette, which had burned close to his fingers while he listened. He found Goshawk looking at him, though his face was nearly lost in the gloom.

  “Of course, but it wasn’t her.”

  “You will find, Liam, that men in our line of work must learn to read not only our Patrona’s stated wishes, but her unspoken desires. It is not wise to expose them to ridicule, Liam.”

  Our line of work? Liam wondered. Then he asked, “But have you thought about the next tour? About her plans for distributing these recordings—have you thought about the duets?”

  Goshawk sighed. He seemed to shrink, as though at his margins he had given in, a little, to the darkness of the evening, and of Craiglockhart Castle.

  “I trust that Mrs. Kilgour’s fascination with music will be shortlived—”

  “She has extensive plans for the spring.”

  “All the same, I trust that it will be short-lived.”

  “But the duets—”

  “Then we will find a way to direct her from such plans. And I suggest that you, also, find ways beyond music to keep yourself in Mrs. Kilgour’s thoughts. I trust her fascination will be short-lived.” This last time when he spoke, he intoned the words as though they were the terminal phrase of some incantation, and Liam did not press. Behind them the doors opened and the curtains parted, spilling light on both their faces—Nora calling them back into the close, hot room.

  When they were inside again, Goshawk looked at his watch and said to Liam, “Would you like to hear your own work? I think we have time for one little song.” Before Liam could speak, Goshawk had selected “Auld Lang Syne” and set it on the disk.

  There was the soft whirr of the machine, then what had been an aggressive accompaniment rendered almost subtle by the recording process. The first time Liam heard his own voice detached from his body he wondered who the man was, and for a moment he supposed that some amateur’s work had been sent in place of his own. How else could he account for the hissed sibilants, the flubbed K and G? The stranger’s voice filled the room with an uncomfortable urgency, as though he was running away from something and singing over his shoulder, so that the sustains faltered and fell a fraction sooner than the notation required. As instructed, he had avoided the C, but now he heard his own throat strangle the A. He had always felt his A was adequate.

  “I am surprised,” said Mrs. Kilgour when the last, flannel-tongued sustain had faded away. Liam hoped she was about to say it was not Liam’s voice at all, coming from the shellac disk, but some imposter. But instead she went on, “that your recording is so accurate. Perhaps your voice is better suited to reproduction than mine.”

  “I think it’s lovely,” said Euphemia.“It is so much like him! It is magical to think that his voice will exist long after we are dust!”

  It was only one day, Liam reminded himself, one wet afternoon in a stuffy room, with an accompanist he’d never met and whom he disliked. It was less than a single day, it was four minutes, and had nothing to do with all the other good afternoons before it or to come.

  Mrs. Kilgour’s fascination with music was short-lived. Not through any work of Liam’s or Goshawk’s, but by the sort of chance event Goshawk depended upon. The event so redirected Mrs. Kilgour’s life that, when Anthea came to write about it, she put it like this, and then deleted it: Mrs.Kilgour’s musical ambitions were short-lived. The day she was to enter the recording room again, she received a telegram from the Imperial War Graves Commission informing her that they had found her son’s body, and that it had been interred in a small cemetery outside Reims. She left that day in a private railcar with Nora, Euphemia, and Goshawk, and sailed for France a week later. (68)

  MRS. LAYTON AT HOME

  In the afternoon of the fourth day of her haunting, Anthea left work early to visit the Aquarian Centre. At two o’clock she opened the door on the entrance hall, and stood alone among the Arts and Crafts furniture and green Turkish carpets. Visiting for the first time in daylight, without a crowd, she had time to examine the walls, covered with lithographs of ancient monuments, and rites observed by nineteenth-century occult travellers. Curious apparatus—shamanic, alchemical, mesmeric—lay on shelves among books: Beck, Blavatsky, Burgess, The Great God Pan. The room was cool though it was warm outside, and quiet under the hypnotic tick of the clock on the mantel.

  “Hello?”

  No one answered. Mrs. Layton had said two o’clock would suit, and just let herself in the front door when she arrived. She sat down on a club chair and smelled the lamb stink of the leather. It was hard to sit still, so she turned to the locked bookshelf beside her. She made out titles under glass: The Necronomicon,
and A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. She craned her neck to see the black and silver spines on the top shelf, bigger than church Bibles. Some were attached to the cabinet with fine, bronze-coloured chains.

  Then the sliding doors opened and when she turned toward the sound, she again faced Mrs. Layton’s original and surprising loveliness. She was as she always had been: cashmered, moonstoned, her hair upswept in gray waves, her expression benign but uninviting. Anthea stood up. As she did she felt a sudden, vertiginous self-consciousness, and knew that Mrs. Layton saw the missing button on her blouse, the place where her elbow poked through her cardigan, her shaggy, untrimmed hair, the roll where her stomach spilled over the waistband of her jeans. Her eyebrows ungroomed, her fingernails clean but ragged. She had looked in the mirror once when she brushed her teeth, but could not remember if she had also brushed her hair.

  But unbrushed hair hadn’t ever stopped her talking. “I just sat down the door was open so I just came in and I sat down.”

  “Please, sit down again.”

  “You said two o’clock,” she said, then returned to the club chair and the lamb-scented leather.

  “And it is two o’clock.”

  Anthea pulled a notebook and a pen out of her bag, scattering three candy wrappers on the carpet. “Okay, like,” she said and picked up the wrappers, trying to remember what she had planned to say next.

  The first thing she noticed when she looked up from the wrappers was that Mrs. Layton didn’t seem to blink as often as other people. She fixed her pale eyes on Anthea’s face for a long time before she spoke. Anthea remained very quiet during the staring, though it provoked her to compose, in her head, a long list of questions that ended with what are you looking at, anyway?

  “Anthea,” Mrs. Layton asked, “why are you here?”

  “Because of Jasmine.”

  “Why now, though? Why today?”

  “Because I want to know.”

  This seemed to temporarily satisfy Mrs. Layton, and she returned to her contemplation, now with her eyes closed. When she spoke again her voice was warmer. “Often the things I see are indistinct, but this is quite clear. I don’t understand it, though, so you will have to help me. I see a strange place. I see a building, and I see a payphone. If you wanted to help me, you could tell me what these things mean to you.”