Rogue's Gallery

by Robert Barnard

  ‘This will need tuning,’ I said. Mr Pickles was outraged.

  ‘I assure you it is just as it came from the makers.’

  ‘That is the problem. Pianos go out of tune.’

  ‘But the finest singers and pianists have used it,’ he neighed, like a child wailing. ‘My musical soirées are famous.’

  ‘Mr Pickles, I played for King George III when he was a young man. I know when a piano needs tuning.’

  He backed away at once.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. But we haven’t gone over the cond—the safeguards.’

  ‘For a fee of two thousand pounds I accept those without question. If I understand Mr Cazalet, they are that you will own the piece absolutely, my name will not be attached to it, nor will I verbally lay claim to it. I suggest you might like to call it the Pickles Requiem, and state on the title page that it is “by a gentleman”.’

  Mr Pickles almost purred.

  ‘Yes, yes. That has a ring to it. “The Pickles Requiem”. In memory of my late wife, of course.’

  ‘Of course. I didn’t realise that your wife had died since I talked to Mr Cazalet.’

  ‘She has not. I refer to her proper designation when the great work comes to be performed.’

  ‘I see.’ (But I didn’t).

  ‘I want the piece to be sung within a week of her death, as a direct statement of my grief and sense of loss.’

  ‘Of course, I quite understand … You might find it advisable to let the orchestra and choir rehearse as much as possible in advance.’

  ‘Ah yes, I see. Well spoken, Mr Mozart. It must be done in the most tactful way possible.’

  ‘Totally secret, I would suggest. The public prints take any opportunity for ridicule … Now I think our business is over?’

  ‘You accept my conditions? And will compose the work entirely in this house, and leave the manuscript and any notes here always?’

  ‘I do accept, and will write the piece as you stipulate.’

  We shook hands on it. I had not thought it necessary to mention that nothing in the ‘safeguards’ prevented me from writing out a second copy at home when I was satisfied with a movement.

  On the following evening a message arrived from Pickles Palace (as I called it in my mind) with the news that the Danish couple I had recommended, Herr Bang and Dr Olufson, had been and tuned the piano. No expense spared, obviously. I felt quite sure Mr Pickles noticed no difference.

  I began work next day. An anteroom next to the drawing room was assigned entirely to me – the lowly room being chosen not to downgrade my position and purpose in the household but to give easy access to the piano. I say ‘began work’, but I had begun work on it in my heart before Mr Cazalet had closed the front door. It was to be a work not full of grandeur, still less grandiloquence, with no trace of suffering or hell fire. It was to be gentle, gracious, kind on the ear – a feminine requiem you might say, for the wife of a wealthy industrialist who must surely be his superior in manners, knowledge of the genteel world, and kindness.

  On my third day of working in Pickles Palace, when I was just completing the Sanctus, which I had decided to write first, I had the honour of a visit. I was sitting in the great drawing room with welcome spring sunshine coming through the high windows, and trying things over on the piano, which was now a superb instrument and sounding like one. I was conscious after a time that I was not alone. I looked round in the direction of the door towards the hall, and saw a figure standing near the fire.

  ‘Very beautiful, Mr Mozart. Very lovely.’

  The voice came as if from a great distance. It was genteel – no, aristocratic – and it proceeded from a slim, graceful yet commanding woman of perhaps thirty-five or forty, elegantly dressed in a loose-fitting day gown. What a contrast she made to the mighty Pighills himself!

  ‘I am honoured by your approval. Do I have the pleasure of—?’

  ‘Mercy Pickles,’ she said, distaste creeping into her tones. ‘I hope you will create one of the great ecclesiastical musical works. It should have a life beyond the immediate one marking the death of my husband’s mother.’

  ‘Mo—?’ I pulled myself up. ‘I suppose all composers would like to think their works will last.’

  ‘He is very fond of his mother,’ she said, in the same distant tones she had used hitherto. ‘She used to make the mill-children’s gruel and beat them when they went to sleep. Naturally he’s devoted to her, but I found her less than charming.’

  ‘A wife seldom gets on with her husband’s mother,’ I said.

  ‘When my father sold me, at the age of sixteen, to a man more than twice my age, his mother made it her business to make my life an endless swamp of misery. When she suffered the onset of senility I made it my business to return her treatment in kind. It palled after a time. There was little joy in mistreating someone so far removed from the world that she could not appreciate the fact that she was being mistreated. Now all I wish is that she would hurry up dying.’ She stopped, possibly feeling she had said too much. ‘And then we can all hear your wonderful requiem.’ She thought for a second, then said: ‘Take care, Mr Mozart.’

  She glided from the room. ‘Take care’ is a popular form of farewell that sat ill with her aristocratic air. But perhaps she meant it to be taken not as a courtesy but a warning.

  My first encounter with the Pickles sons was no less confusing, but even more thought-provoking. I was playing over a first sketch for the Libera Me section – a grand, sweeping theme with a hint of yearning – when the doors of the drawing room opened and two young men began a progress across the great expanse of the drawing room, talking loudly. I went on playing. The voices rose to a crescendo. I was intrigued and stopped playing to listen. The voices immediately ceased. I was impressed: they knew enough about music to notice when it stopped. They turned round and saw me.

  ‘You must be Mr Thingummy.’

  I waited. I am not a Mr Thingummy.

  ‘Mozart.’

  It was the taller of the two. He pronounced it Mo-zart instead of Moat-zart, a deplorable English habit. However I bowed – a reward for a good try. They began over towards me.

  ‘You’re the johnny who’s teaching my father composition.’

  ‘Well, not—’

  ‘You’ve got a hard job on your hands. You’re starting from scratch.’

  ‘Typical of my father,’ came from the shorter boy. ‘Wasting our inheritance on futile projects. Who will believe that he wrote it?’

  ‘And who would believe,’ chimed in the older boy, ‘that he’d lavish all that money and time on a damned librarian?’

  ‘A damned what?’ I couldn’t stop myself saying.

  ‘Faithful servant and all that. But a piece of music? Choirs and solo singers, orchestral johnnies, the whole caboodle. For a book-duster? It should be a case of, when he dies, slipping a ten pound note to his widow.’

  ‘He’s not married, Jimmy,’ said the other. ‘Not at all, if you get me.’

  ‘Well, in that case you’re ten pounds to the good.’ The pair turned and resumed their marathon.

  It was around this point in the execution of the contract that Mr Pickles began to take a more active interest in the progress of my composition. I found one afternoon when I went to play over the day’s inspirations that cups and jugs of chocolate had been set out on a small table, and I had no sooner began playing than a footman came in with napkins and biscuits (biscuits are my weakness but the servants so far had not remembered to offer me any), followed a second or two later by Mr Pickles, who sat himself down and – to be fair to him – listened. At the first pause in the playing he called me over.

  ‘Mr Mozart, you must be in need of refreshment.’

  I bowed my head briefly, and made my way over. He had poured into my cup some of the fragrant refresher, while pouring himself a cup from the other jug. Made with the finest Brazilian coffee beans, he explained. It was a country with which his mills had strong financial links. The drink wa
s slightly bitter-tasting but acceptable.

  ‘So how is it going, then? Are you well on the way?’

  I had the reputation for extreme facility in the writing of my scores. It was a reputation fully justified when it concerned my pieces written to order for members of the aristocracy or the theatre. Still, four weeks for a full-scale requiem was ridiculous.

  ‘I have five movements well advanced, either on paper or in my head,’ I said. ‘I have fragments of ideas for the other nine sections. Time will tell which are usable.’

  ‘Ah yes. This question of time—’

  I was so daring as to interrupt him.

  ‘Great work is not done in days. Remember, sir, I have strong connections with Kensington Palace. If the princess on whom all our hopes turn hears this is a workaday piece that anyone could have written, she will not attend. But if it is a work worthy of Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, then she will come if I persuade her, and I will not need to say anything about my participation in the piece.’

  ‘Oh my!’ said my patron, as if he could barely comprehend the joyful possibility. ‘A magnificent prospect! A wonderful culmination to our mutual collaboration.’

  What a mutual collaboration was I could not guess. All we had was a willingness to pay money on one side and an eagerness to accept it on the other, a purely commercial transaction.

  So things went on. Now and then Mrs Pickles came in, usually listened for a time, then went out, possibly with a banal compliment, sometimes with a barbed remark about her husband or his family, depending on her mood. The boys (James and Seymour were their names, the second being his mother’s family name) came either singly or together, greeted me with ‘Hi’ or ‘Good morning’, and sometimes added a sarcastic comment, such as ‘Earning your daily crust, eh, Mr Mozart?’ I didn’t like them. Their father was at least fond of music, even if he knew nothing about it. The boys were simply vessels, without learning or achievement. I heard from the servants that they were both very deep in gambling debts.

  The course of my time with the Pickleses changed one afternoon at the beginning of May. I had been forced, on my way out of Pickles Palace, to make a quick visit to the privy, the nature of which I won’t go into. I was just washing my hands in the bowl of lukewarm water renewed every hour by a lower footman, when I heard two voices passing along the corridor outside. One was Mr Cazalet, whose work in the library prevented my having much to do with him while I was in the house, and the other was his, and temporarily my, employer, Isaac Pickles.

  ‘The uncertainty is playing on your mind I fear, sir.’

  ‘Oh, I’m perfectly all right. Masterpieces are not made in days, or even months, as Mr Mozart says. But I worry a little about him. He is not a young man. He looks increasingly ill every time I see him.’

  ‘I see him very little,’ said Mr Cazalet neutrally.

  ‘Just so long as he lasts long enough to complete the great work,’ came Mr Pickles’s voice fading down the long corridor. Then I heard him laugh – a silly, childish laugh. I stayed in the privy, frozen to the spot, looking at my reflection in the glass.

  I was not looking ill, not ‘increasingly ill’ every time I came to the Pickleses. If I was, the princess would have noticed and been concerned. She is very conscious of the great gap between my great age and her little one. She has so few congenial souls around her that she is desperate not to lose one of them. No, I was not looking more and more sickly.

  On the other hand, there was the bowel trouble that had taken me to the privy in the first place.

  There was another thing that troubled me: the foolish laugh as the pair disappeared from earshot. It sounded not just silly, but less than sane. Senile. And I thought of the fearsome mother now apparently sunk into imbecility for many years. Was senility heritable? Did that explain the multitude of reasons given for the requiem’s composition: to me it was for his wife; to his wife it was for his mother; to his thoughtless and senseless sons he gave the least likely explanation of all – that it was for his librarian. It all sounded like a foolish jape. It suggested softening of the brain.

  I told all this to the Princess Victoria at the beginning of her next lesson. Her performances that day were more than usually inaccurate and insensitive, and I drew her attention to this several times. Finally, as the lesson ended, she pulled down the piano lid and said: ‘I’m sorry to play so badly, Mr Mozart. The truth is, I am worried.’

  ‘Oh dear. Your mother and Sir John again?’

  ‘Not at all. Well yes, they are at it, but it’s you I am worried about, and what you told me about Mr Pickles. Has it occurred to you that, if he is so concerned to hide the authorship of this requiem, the most convenient death for him would be your own?’

  I fear I was so surprised that I could make no adequate response. I took my leave, made for the door, and turned to bow my farewells. The princess had not finished with me.

  ‘What was the nature of this little room from which you overheard this interesting conversation, Mr Mozart?’

  My mouth opened and shut and I scurried out to make my escape.

  Arsenic. That’s what it was. I wondered at the princess’s knowledge of the ways of the criminal world, but then I remembered she had grown up surrounded by plots and conspiracies. Threats on her life (usually involving the Duke of Cumberland, the next in line to the throne) had been the staple of society and newspaper gossip. Arsenic, the poison that is best administered first in small doses, leading up to a fatal dose. Illness of an internal kind is first established, than accepted as the cause of death. Simple.

  And who, after all, questions the cause of death of a seventy-nine-year-old man? I was a sitting duck. And my murderer, insultingly enough, was a brain-softened vulgarian from the north of England!

  On the next occasion, later that same week, that Mr Pickles came to hear my latest inspirations, I put into action a cunning but simple plan. Standing by the small table with the chocolate already poured out, I remarked to Mr Pickles that the magnificent proportions of the room were remarkably similar to those of St Margaret on the square, one of the churches we had considered for the first performance of the requiem. I suggested he go to the far end of the room to hear how my latest extracts, from the Benedictus, would sound. He was childishly delighted with my proposal. As he walked the length of the room I changed our cups around. The biter bit! I played some of the Benedictus and Mr Pickles expressed his delight: the music penetrated to the far end of the room and was wonderful. We resumed our discussion over chocolate and I looked closely to see if a grimace came over the Pickles face when he tasted it, but I could see nothing.

  My next conversation with a member of the Pickles family came two days later. I was sketching a crucial moment in the Rex Tremendae when the door to my little anteroom opened and the younger son, Seymour, put his head in.

  ‘I say, Mr Mo-zart.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This requiem you’re writing and pretending my Dad did it all – who is it supposed to be for? I mean who is it commemorating if that’s the right word. Eh? Who is dead?’

  ‘I believe it is to commemorate your mother.’

  ‘Well, she’s alive and blooming and if she’s ill she’s quite unaware of it. And we’d – that’s Jimmy and me – heard it was for Cazalet the book johnny. Damned unlikely, what? And now I’ve heard it is for Gran, who is alive but not so you’d notice and there won’t be much difference when she finally goes over the finishing line.’

  ‘I couldn’t comment. Maybe your father is confused. Many people who have lived exceptionally active lives do get … brain-tired earlier than most of us. Or perhaps he has just been joking.’

  ‘Pater doesn’t joke. And a requiem’s a pretty funny thing to joke about. But you think senility, maybe? I think I ought to talk to a lawyer. He could be declared non compos. Stop him throwing his money around.’

  ‘I doubt it. I have seen no signs of it except for the stories about the requiem. His condition would have to be much further adv
anced before you could start trying to jump into his shoes.’

  ‘I say, you make it sound unpleasant. I mean, I’m deuced concerned—’

  I got up and shut the door on him.

  A crisis in an affair such as this should not be too long delayed. In a comedy it would come in the third act, with the outcome in the last. Two days after my conversation with Seymour, Isaac Pickles and I had one of our afternoon meetings. We talked first, I explained my aims in the Tuba Mirum, he got up of his own accord and by the time he reached the end of the room the jugs had been shifted round and I was at the piano ready to play and add a sketchy vocal performance as well.

  ‘Enthralling, Mr Mozart,’ he said, when he returned to the table. ‘You have excelled yourself – as I always say because you always do.’ He took up his little jug of chocolate, poured it into his cup, added sugar, stirred, and then took a great, almost a theatrical gulp at it.

  It was as if his eyes were trying to pop out of his face with astonishment – he let out a great, flabbergasted yell, then cried out in fear and outrage. As he weakened he bellowed something – a command, a query, a protestation of innocence. I could only assume he had put a hefty dose of arsenic in my chocolate jug, and was now really getting the taste of it for the first time. I ran to the door, but before I got there Seymour had appeared through the door at the room’s other end, and before I could shout servants were running into the room from all quarters. When I got back to the table the butler was trying to induce vomiting, others were banging him on the shoulders or trying to put their fingers down his throat. Soon two footmen came with a stretcher and said the doctor had been sent for. He was taken, crying out and retching, to his bedroom. The family physician arrived twenty minutes later. By six o’clock in the evening he was dead. The doctor, though he had not been consulted recently, heard from servants and family Isaac Pickles’s complaints about an upset stomach. The lower footman who serviced the privies gave more specific evidence. The doctor signed the certificate. I was left to ponder what in fact had happened.