by Patrick Gale
Sometimes a chosen madrigal would go unperformed entirely, deferred until the reappearance of some absent singer who was the lone holder of certain high or low notes in a part, or because a composer called for more voice lines than the group could confidently fill out that night.
As the sun set on Molly’s garden and the Jack Russells took themselves indoors, Eliza found the ninety minutes flew by, reunited as she was with old and intimate friends. She knew these pieces so well it startled her to realise how many of them she had never actually sung. Conscious of her outsider status, she kept her learning hidden and frequently bit her tongue rather than correct the stiflingly slow speeds at which some madrigals were taken or the mistaken pronunciation of certain words like July, heart and honey.
Only once, when there was needless consternation that a bar suddenly contained six beats where its neighbours had all contained four was she unable to restrain herself.
‘The bar lines were added later, by the editor,’ she said, aware as she did so that it was the first time she had spoken and that all eyes were on her. ‘Elizabethans didn’t use a bar line system. I used to study this stuff,’ she added apologetically, appalled at how entirely unCornish her accent sounded in such company.
‘However did they keep together?’ the silent woman asked her.
‘They counted, unlike us,’ a man said and everyone laughed. He was older than Molly but a bit younger than the other men, a weather-beaten early-forties, Eliza guessed. He had said nothing until now and seemed abashed of the attention his words commanded. He dropped his gaze to his lap where his hands were so broad his book seemed smaller than everyone else’s.
‘No, but how?’ Molly asked her, gently smacking his leg by way of reproof.
‘You really want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well…’ Eliza thought. ‘A lot of this is conjecture but judging from contemporary pictures and how things were done in Italy the madrigal came here from Italy – er…they didn’t have more than one singer a line and they sat close together. A bit like a string quartet or a viol consort. It was more like chamber music too in that each singer only had their line of music, in a separate book, which would have forced them to listen hard to what the others were singing.’
‘She’s saying we’re too loud, lads,’ Toby said and all the men laughed.
‘Well you are!’ Molly put in, at which the women joined in.
One of the men joked that he had learned to sing with the Sally Army on street corners and didn’t do quiet.
‘Time you chose one,’ Molly told Eliza. ‘Visitor’s privilege,’ and everyone murmured assent and looked at Eliza expectantly.
‘Number thirty-two,’ she said. She did not need to look in the book to check. ‘Roger Trevescan: Go, Dissembler, I Care Not.’
‘Now there’s a lady with taste,’ said Toby and they found their places and sang.
It was a diplomatic choice; she had already heard two of the men enthusing about an entire evening of Thomas Merritt at a Redruth Chapel so knew they would favour a Cornish composer, however minor. But it was also a personal experiment. It had struck her afresh how amazing much of this music was, how daring its harmonies and sophisticated its texts. Now she wanted to see if Trevescan’s lone surviving madrigal, having once been familiar to the point where she could have penned its six lines out from memory, would sound commonplace or stale after such an absence from her life and mind.
Certainly she had never heard it sung so slowly or so loud but it had lost none of its arresting force.
The text – assuredly Trevescan’s own, for it had been used nowhere else – was a derivative piece of Elizabethan erotic fatalism. Stung by a betrayal, the poet bade his uncaring lover to leave him to die of his spiritual wounds. The charm of the piece lay in its second verse, complete with startling key change, where the poet dropped his pretence of sang-froid to say that, of course, if the lover could bring themselves to remain at his side just a little longer, to die in their arms were infinitely preferable to dying alone, for the one led straight to ‘Hell’s hotte caverne’ but the other afforded ‘a verie glimpse of Heavene’.
As Eliza had expected, some of the women sighed afterwards about how sad the song was. She did not think it her place to point out that the death sung of was, in all likelihood, a poetic euphemism like le petit mort and that the madrigal was a sly comparison of solitarily to mutually induced orgasms.
Hearing and singing the little piece again, she wondered at how she had allowed her thesis to drag on for so long unfinished. Not only did the fascination of Trevescan and his story present itself afresh before her with the notes but, as was often the case, the perfect logic of music, its notation and dissolving and mutating harmonies, created the sensation of a perfectly cogent argument in her mind.
Perhaps, she thought, as Toby announced number seventeen and they all turned their pages and waited for another chord from Molly, the problem was that she had begun to cast the net of her thesis too wide? With the insecurity bred by delay, insecurity which in turn engendered further prevarication, she had felt the need to research deeper and deeper into her chosen period and to include more and more musical comparisons and historical context, until the slender proposal with which she had set out was quite bowed by a freight of citations. Perhaps, she thought, as they began to sing again, it would have been both wiser and bolder to answer a miniature with a miniature and instead of spreading her argument wider and wider to move in as close as possible to the madrigal in question and make its scant nine hundred notes the whole world of a revealingly myopic enquiry.
‘Well,’ Molly said, glancing at her watch. ‘Better make that it for a week. Peggy’s got to drive all the way back to Marazion.’
As books were closed and pushed into bags or jacket pockets, Eliza reluctantly closed hers and began to stand but Molly played another chord, a G major triad. Then everyone breathed and sang from memory.
Because of the opening chord, Eliza had assumed that someone’s birthday was being honoured but she realised at once it was another madrigal, one she had never heard before yet one whose style seemed instantly familiar to her. Was it a translation from the Italian? Something by Monteverdi or Arcadelt, perhaps? But no, the cadences were as English as clipped yew. Again she thought or the Sacred Harp choir she had heard. She remembered an interview with its director in which he described how their singers took it in turns to sit out in the middle of the great circle in which they rehearsed, to be sung at and to bathe in the notes. Were they singing anything else, Eliza would have been profoundly uncomfortable at being so singled out and sung to. But she too was bathing now. No matter that some of the singing was off-key or that this group was so poorly balanced; her mind raced as she tried to take in every detail of the familiar yet unfamiliar piece.
The words, insofar as she could make them out, spoke of exile in the country when one’s heart lay with an absent lover in the town. What was so startling a reminder of Trevescan’s madrigal was the second verse. There, far from offering to pine away or die quietly, the poet announced that ‘country goodness and a second, quieter love’ had provided balm for his wounded spirits and that he was schooling himself to the enjoyment of ‘softer pleasures and a sweet obscurity’.
‘You all right?’
They had finished and people were saying their goodnights and walking through the garden. Eliza tuned back to reality to find Molly staring at her.
‘It wasn’t that bad!’ Molly joked.
‘No, no,’ Eliza said. ‘Not at all. That last piece, though. What was it?’
‘Country Goodness. That’s what we call it. We always end our sessions with it now. It used to be The Silver Swan but Country Goodness sort of took over. I think the old boys like the fact that it goes so low for a change. Don’t you, old boy?’
Once more she flapped a hand against the knee of the only remaining man, the younger one with the big, calloused hands.
‘I like the words,’ he said
sheepishly and pushed Molly gently in return. Eliza heard that they had the same voice – a low, patient murmuring version of Cornish without the querulousness the accent so often carried with it.
Before Molly said, ‘This is my brother, Pearce,’ Eliza had guessed they were related.
‘I’m Eliza,’ she said and he shook her hand with unexpected gentleness.
‘Eliza’s staying up at Thorpe’s Lane. In the caravan.’
‘Kitty’s place? What’s that like, then?’ he asked.
‘Er…I don’t know yet,’ Eliza said. ‘We only got here this afternoon.’
She was going to ask again about the mystery madrigal but he looked at her in a way that momentarily addled her brains and then the girls came racing down from upstairs, Lucy loudly relieved that the awful noise was over, Dido trailing in her wake, girlish by comparison. Dido was wearing the red cap now so they must have made friends. Lucy punched her uncle in the stomach, failing to wind him, and told Dido,
‘This is Pearce. He sings, but he’s all right.’
‘How d’you do?’ Pearce held out his hand for Dido to shake but she was overcome by a yawn.
‘Long day. We’d better ride home,’ Eliza said, but Molly insisted Pearce drive them.
‘He can sling the bikes in the back. Can’t you, Pearce?’
‘No worries,’ he said. He slipped outside and when they joined him he was leaning into his Land Rover thrusting fertiliser bags and bales of barbed wire aside to make room. He lifted the bikes inside like a couple of toys then held open the passenger door so Dido could scramble up and Eliza get in beside her.
‘So how long are you down for?’ Molly asked through the open window.
Eliza shrugged but Dido shouted, ‘Two weeks!’ over the sound of the engine.
‘Good,’ Molly said. ‘We’ll see you next week then, if not before.’
Even in such an old vehicle it was a short drive, Eliza knew, through the little town and up the steep hill to their track, and the labouring engine was too loud to speak over without shouting. Having Dido placed between them was also somehow inhibiting. Still smarting from their spat that afternoon, perhaps, she could not afford to let slip even a hint that her old enthusiasm was reviving.
‘Tell me about that last madrigal,’ she wanted to ask him. ‘Why wasn’t there any printed music? Who wrote it? Why haven’t I heard it before? Sing me the last line! Tell me the words!’ But instead she stared out at the passing cottage windows and hedges and enjoyed the rare pleasure of Dido leaning in heavy contentment on her shoulder. Evidently their spat had been forgotten and forgiven.
‘Just here’s fine,’ she called out as she suddenly recognised their turning but he had already swung the Land Rover onto the heavily pitted track and was soon bumping them to a halt in Kitty’s little field.
Ask him now, she thought. Just ask him. But he had already climbed out, leaving the engine running while he retrieved their bikes as carefully as if they had been so much Faberge. Dido called out, ‘Night’ to him and hurried to find the hidden key and let herself in.
‘Thanks,’ Eliza said, unable to shake hands now because hers were full of handlebar. ‘We could have ridden home all right but…’
‘You don’t have any lights,’ he pointed out. ‘People drive like maniacs over that hill at night.’
‘Oh?’
‘Would you…?’ he started then fell silent.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Dinner,’ he managed. ‘Would you come out for dinner?’
‘With you and your wife?’
‘Er. No. Just me. Tomorrow. But she could come too.’ She saw him work to remember the name. ‘Dido.’
‘Oh. Yes. Yes, please.’
‘Good.’ He smiled for the first time since he had dared to crack a joke in the madrigal group. ‘How about tomorrow at about seven?’
‘That would be lovely.’
‘Good.’ He smiled again. ‘I’ll pick you up about seven, then.’
A date. She had just been asked out on a proper, old-fashioned date. And said yes! Bewildered, she watched him climb in and start to drive off. He leant over to shout something through the passenger window which she had left open but the engine noise was too great so she simply smiled in reply.
It was only as he drove off that she realised they had been talking in moonlight. His headlamp beams had bounced off into the darkness but the night was barely darker without them. There were stars too. Hundreds of them. She shivered as though the lights were points of ice.
‘Look,’ she pointed out to Dido, who had come to see if she wanted cocoa. ‘It’s night but we’re still casting shadows!’
23
A reprieve of sorts was waiting on Giles and Julia’s answering machine when he came in, shattered, from the day’s rehearsal.
‘Mr Easton? Sue Stokes again from St Saviour’s and I owe you a huge apology. I’ve only just been handed the note Mrs…your wife wrote me last week. Dido gave it to a friend to hand in and it had gone in the wrong pigeon-hole. Anyway it says they’ve had to go to Cornwall because her granny’s ill in hospital. So sorry to have caused you unnecessary anxiety.’ She laughed nervously. ‘Just thought you’d like to know. Bye.’
Perhaps she was used to such poor communication in the many divided and realigned families she had to deal with. Perhaps not. But she conveyed a certain gossipy satisfaction in knowing more of his wife’s movements than he did. He noted her sensitivity in backing off from calling Eliza Mrs Easton at least.
Giles had only met his mother-in-law a few times, when she came to babysit Dido during the honeymoon and during the few brief visits she paid after their move to London. When Eliza described her as a Latin teacher he pictured a Classics don, dry of wit, essentially unshockable, the begetter, presumably, of Eliza’s bookish detachment from worldly affairs. It was a shock to meet, therefore, a tight-buttoned, rather shy churchgoer whose strict views were all the more startling for being shyly presented. Mrs Hosken was the sort of person his mother would cattily have described as a funny little woman but Giles found himself charmed by her, perhaps because she made no attempt to please unless it could be done while telling the truth.
She admitted to finding opera unsettling and counter-tenor voices not right, somehow. Whenever she stayed he made a point of escorting her to the church her advance researches had deemed suitable. He even wore a suit for her. She opened out to him a little. Confessing she thought his looks wasted on a man, she claimed to understand perfectly why Eliza never revisited Camborne. Their hometown was culturally limited, she said, unable even to support a Latin teacher any more. He suspected he touched on her real motive the one time he tried to draw her out, apropos Dido, on the subject of Hannah. She said, with characteristic soft-voiced firmness, ‘Oh no. I’d rather not talk about that. Not really’, the conversational equivalent of a handbag clasp clicking shut. Giles understood secret torments so pried no further.
Eliza hated her mother’s visits. ‘She looks at me as if she’s just waiting for me to fail in some way. She does it to Dido too. She hates women. Her church hates women. She actually refers to us as the Weaker Sex – I’ve heard her!’
Hearing Mrs Hosken talk when Eliza was not around to goad her, however, Giles gained the contrary impression, that she loved Eliza deeply and would do all she could to keep her in the wealthy south, which she regarded as the sphere of fulfilment as well as sin, rather than back in Cornwall, which she spoke of as the land of failure, even if she had to make her hate her to do it.
Just once he thought Eliza might have been right. He and Mrs Hosken had taken Dido to a local playground and were watching her play boldly on the slide with other children when quite suddenly Mrs Hosken sighed, ‘The sins of the mother. That little girl is a time bomb,’ and he caught something like grim relish in her expression before she resumed her customary respectable blankness.
He did not love the woman, but his relief that Eliza had a good, unthreatening reason for removing D
ido so suddenly was such that he felt a corresponding rush of nostalgic concern. He kept a list of names and addresses in an old desk diary of all the people who ever sent him Christmas cards, many of them, like Mrs Hosken, people he rarely saw.
Mrs Hosken was predictably upset when Eliza left him. He had to break the news to her when she made one of her rare phone calls and, being upset himself, probably furnished her with more details than was kind. He was at a loss to understand, certainly, but he blamed himself and did not mean to sound vindictive. He felt terrible when she said, ‘If she doesn’t come to her senses, I shall have nothing more to do with her,’ because were he to plead Eliza’s case it would only make him rise the higher in her mother’s esteem.
She sent Christmas and birthday cards, usually with a short letter tucked into them. He assumed these would stop once she heard about Julia, but she must not have heard because the cards continued to come, addressed only to him, and made no mention of his wilful plunge into sin after her daughter. Secretly he reciprocated, even remembering her birthdays, which Eliza almost certainly forgot or ignored, and guiltily penned her little reassuring notes about his news and Dido’s progress from which Julia was carefully excised. Challenged, he might have said he did it for Dido’s sake, keeping open a channel of untroubled communication with her grandmother in case the child should ever have need of it but actually he did it because he loved the idea that there was someone out there, someone of stern judgement and high morals, who believed he was good and sinned against and who prayed for his welfare.
Mrs Hosken’s address was near the beginning of his Christmas card list because she had never moved house. Presumably Eliza and Dido were staying there. He glanced at his watch and rang the number but reached only the number unobtainable tone. He dialled again. Same response. It was certain Mrs Hosken was not as feckless as Eliza about remembering to pay bills. This was a remote woman who despised the world, however, who saw no need for a car or a television and in all probability no longer bothered with a telephone when she had neighbours who could ring people for her in an emergency. He tried to imagine life without a telephone, imagined Julia’s reaction if he had theirs disconnected out of moral principles.