The Novel in the Viola

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘I hope you like mackerel,’ he said.

  His arm brushed mine but I was too tired to obey decent etiquette and did not push him away. His skin felt so warm and I wondered that in all her lectures upon proper behaviour, Anna had failed to mention that behaving improperly was much more fun.

  Later that evening the village held a feast upon the beach. The air grew cool but the dappled stones retained the heat of the day, and even as the light dimmed we walked barefoot across the warm pebbles. Small boys pelted to and fro gathering armfuls of wood and piles of dry sea-grass and, under Kit’s direction, built a vast bonfire on the shore. In the darkling light, he lit the fire, pushing a discarded cigarette into a cocoon of dead leaves. Within a few minutes, orange flames licked the sky and sparks flew into the waves, like vermillion fireflies.

  ‘Don’t dawdle, Elise; come and help,’ called Mrs Ellsworth.

  I padded across the stones to the edge of the dunes, where she and a small army of women had set up a field kitchen. Red coals glowed in the rocks, and resting directly on top of them were dozens of cast-iron pans filled with mackerel. The fish had been scaled and gutted, but that was all. They squeezed together, eyes unseeing, sizzling in spoonfuls of butter, handfuls of dark green samphire and hunks of peppered fennel. I knelt down between Poppy and Mrs Ellsworth and took over a frying pan, turning the gleaming fish as the sun sank into the sea. A crowd gathered around the bonfire, several of the children clutching bunches of flowers: ragged robin, honeysuckle, lavender, rosemary, ladies bedstraw and burnet rose. Burt and Art helped them decorate The Lugger with the flowers, until the battered fishing-boat was transformed into a fairy tale craft, more suited to Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott than a stubbled fisherman with mismatched boots. Art, Will and Kit bore The Lugger down to the shore and out into the shallows. Burt picked up a small girl, not older than seven or eight, and carried her in his arms, placing her tenderly on the sail covers in the bow. As we all watched, they sailed towards the mouth of the bay.

  ‘It’s an old custom,’ said Poppy, leaning over and turning my fish with a fork. ‘We must give thanks to the sea. After the first catch, we make a sacrifice of flowers. Though, personally, I’d be quite happy to see Sally Hopkins go overboard as well. That child’s a menace.’

  ‘Don’t say such a thing,’ scolded Mrs Ellsworth.

  ‘Sorry, Aunt Florence,’ said Poppy.

  I looked up at them in surprise.

  ‘Oh, she’s not my real aunt. She’s from Bristol. I grew up in the bungalow on the cliff.’

  She pointed with her fork to where a yellow light twinkled on the headland.

  ‘Aunt Florence has known me all my life, that’s all. Tyneford’s an odd place, you know. It’s not like anywhere else.’

  We ate the fish with our fingers, picking out the bones and discarding them onto the strand, where they would be eaten by gulls or washed away by the tide. Poppy, Will, Kit and I all sat together on a large driftwood log, eating in contented silence. I realised that for the first time since I’d left Vienna, I was happy. The fishermen drank beer and sang dirty songs to the moon, while the children shouted and played in the dunes.

  ‘Have you ever seen a saltwater log burn?’ asked Kit.

  I shook my head and instantly he jumped to his feet and jiggled our log, knocking the rest of us onto the ground in a tangle of limbs.

  ‘Stop it.’ Poppy tried to sit back down, holding fast to her fish.

  ‘Wretched dung-squab,’ said Will, sending a pebble whizzing past Kit’s ear.

  ‘Elise needs to see,’ said Kit, apparently unconcerned that he had nearly lost a piece of his ear.

  He dragged the giant piece of driftwood onto the bonfire. It crackled and flared and tongues of bright blue flame rose up hissing. The fire was quite unreal, like a magician’s furnace, and I half expected a fishtailed genie to emerge from the sapphire flames. The blue was almost as bright as Kit’s eyes. He was so different from the boys I had known in Vienna – not that I had known very many. There was little Jan Tibor, small for his age, bespectacled and terribly clever at playing the piano, according to the chorus of great-aunts. Sadly he never gave me the opportunity to marvel at his musical intellect myself, as whenever we met he stammered with nerves, his eyes bulged behind his thick spectacles and he looked like he wanted nothing more than to be sick, let alone play a little Chopin. Great-aunt Gabrielle was quite convinced he was going to be a famous composer one day. Nonetheless, he was too short for romance. Margot’s Robert was handsome enough, but more serious than the dour ancestors on the wall in the Tyneford dining room. And I did not like men who scolded me. Robert, I decided, would make an excellent butler, austere and disapproving. He and Mr Wrexham could have a scintillating afternoon, comparing my shortcomings.

  Kit was different. He had confidence, but lacked the preposterous swagger of some of the Austrian boys. I liked it when he laughed. I found myself wanting to do things that would make him laugh again.

  ‘Are you in love with Kit?’ said Poppy, suddenly appearing at my elbow.

  ‘I’m begging your pardon.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right. Everyone is in love with him. I used to be too. Until I was fourteen and then I grew out of it.’

  ‘You’re not in love with me anymore?’ said Kit, returning from the bonfire to perch beside her.

  ‘No,’ she said, turning her back on him and facing me. ‘Well? Are you?’

  I stared at her, too shocked to speak. Will fiddled with his boots, suddenly very busy with his laces, while Kit was seemingly mesmerised by two small boys cheerfully toasting snails on sticks in the bonfire flames.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Poppy. ‘He likes it. Kit needs all women to be in love with him. I think it’s because of his mother. She died when he was very young.’

  I looked at Kit, who smiled back at me with good-natured ease, apparently unconcerned at Poppy discussing him and his dead mother as though he were not here. I recalled the photograph in Kit’s bedroom of the blonde girl with the shy smile, and wondered how she had died.

  ‘I am very sorry,’ I said.

  Kit smiled. ‘It’s all right. I don’t remember her.’

  I wasn’t sure how not remembering her made it all right. To me, that made it worse.

  ‘That psychoanalyst. Mr Freud. He’s from Vienna. Did you know him?’ asked Poppy.

  I exhaled a tiny sigh of relief at the change of topic. ‘No. But once I seeing his daughter Anna in a stationery shop.’

  ‘Oh, really. What did she buy?’

  ‘I cannot remember. Envelopes I think.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Poppy did not conceal her disappointment, clearly hoping for some unique insight. She spied an upturned barrel and climbing upon it, sat swinging her legs in the moonlight; her pale skin was speckled with golden freckles, like biscuit crumbs on a white tablecloth. The sea glinted beneath the stars, and lights on a ship far out on the channel blinked in the darkness. The fishermen’s song grew frantic, they stamped and clapped as they chanted, the grind of the pebbles beneath their feet like a growl coming from the earth. I found myself swaying to the rhythm of their melody, and imagined Anna singing with them, a silver song to their chorus. The ship on the horizon disappeared around the curve of the earth, and I waved, pretending it was Margot on her voyage across the sea. Art jumped upon an upturned boat and began to play a melancholy tune on a fiddle to accompany the singers. The strings had a rich dark tone, and in my mind it became Margot playing on the vanishing ship, the sound muted and strange because of Julian’s pages stuffed inside the belly of the rosewood viola.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Diana and Juno

  Kit and I sat on the bluff in the cool November dawn. Summer had bloomed and withered into autumn. We huddled side by side on the pinnacle above Flower’s Barrow, staring down at the churning sea. I shivered and wrapped my arms around my waist as the weak sun rose behind the hill.

  ‘Come on. You’re being mean now. It wasn’t that b
ad,’ said Kit.

  ‘No, all right. I still like the Forsyte Saga best, though. It’s more elegant.’

  Kit snorted. ‘Nonsense. Just your English was so bad then, you didn’t notice how hammy it is.’

  ‘Perhaps. But, I tell you – I’ll always have a place in my heart for them. They’re the first English family I ever knew.’ I smiled and blew onto my hands. ‘Come on, I’m getting cold and I have a thousand glasses to polish.’

  Kit clambered to his feet and then pulled me up beside him, so that I staggered and fell into him, laughing. Whenever he was home from Cambridge he’d been giving me early morning English lessons. With all our reading and his tutelage, I was now fluent. I still stumbled over the odd word and when I got excited or upset my sentence structure became a little eccentric, but conversation was effortless. With a pang, I realised that I now dreamt in English, even while dreaming of Vienna. I wasn’t the girl with the python plait who had arrived in Tyneford all those months ago – I was someone new. If history hadn’t forced me across Europe, would I have discovered that I loved the sea and big sky and fields of grass? It must have been hidden inside me like an oak tree in an acorn, or bluebells beneath the soil. Once upon a time, my ancestors had lived in the shtetls and farmed in the east. Perhaps this love of the wild was a folk memory, buried within the heart of every bourgeois city Jew. I tried to imagine Anna striding across the top of the tout, dressed as a picturesque peasant. I suspected that her love of countryside and wild things (‘dirty and foul-smelling things, darling’) was buried rather deeper than mine. Something must have shown on my face.

  ‘Have you heard from them yet?’ said Kit.

  ‘No. Still nothing. I don’t understand it.’

  ‘I thought they were leaving for New York.’

  ‘They were supposed to. Months ago. But the visa never comes.’

  ‘It will be all right, Elise,’ he said.

  ‘Will it?’ I said, thrusting my hands inside the warm wool of my coat. I started to trudge down the hill.

  ‘I hope you’ve got me a decent birthday present,’ said Kit, hurrying after me.

  ‘No. I’ve nothing.’

  ‘Good. Because there’s something I want from you.’

  ‘Oh?’ I looked at him suspiciously. Kit’s favours inevitably ended up with me being scolded by Mr Wrexham.

  ‘Don’t look so worried. Meet me, Poppy and Will in the yard after supper.’

  ‘All right.’

  We hastened down the hillside, picking our way along the sloping ridge. The hedgerows had been battered by centuries of ocean gales, and the branches on the hawthorn and blackthorn grew only on one side of each tree, the bare twigs streaming out like a girl’s windswept hair. The bushes were studded with crimson berries, not yet stripped by the greenfinches or pied wagtails flitting across the grey skies. Ropes of black bryony lay tangled between the bushes, while triangles of stinking iris lurked at the bottom of the hedgerows. The damp grass had faded to a dull green, dappled with patches of dark mud.

  ‘Let’s run,’ said Kit, grabbing my hand.

  He tore across the ridgeway, hauling me alongside him, scattering stray sheep out of his way, the bells around their necks chiming in the wind. The bitter air slapped against my cheeks, numbing them, and my lungs burnt with exertion and cold. Kit could run for hours. He was usually so sedentary – he liked nothing more than to nestle in a padded armchair, one leg slung over an armrest, cigarette in one hand and book in the other, chatting idly as I dusted or cleaned out the grate. He could barely stir himself to fetch another glass of sherry or empty his ashtray. But when he decided to run, he would hurl himself across the hills like one of the golden roe deer with the hounds behind, and he’d sprint tirelessly for an hour or more. I’d watched him from the drawing room window, running for the sheer exhilarant pleasure of it, and then he’d return spent, and flop into his usual battered leather armchair in the sitting room, light a cigarette and then not stir again for a day or two.

  ‘Kit! Slower. I can’t,’ I said, trying to get the words out between gasps.

  My skirt was too tight for his bounding strides and unless I stopped to yank it up, I would fall. There was a loud rip, as the seam tore.

  ‘Kit!’

  He took no notice and continued to pull me along beside him as we began the steep descent into the village. A speckled kestrel hovered overhead, wings motionless, as it glided above some invisible prey. The scree path was slippery and I bounced and slid, terrified every moment I would tumble. We reached the bottom and Kit turned to me laughing, but I was furious.

  ‘Don’t ever . . . do . . . that . . . again,’ I shouted, between gasps. ‘I . . . thought . . . I’d . . . fall.’

  ‘But you didn’t,’ he said, not riled in the least. ‘And now you won’t be late for Wrexham.’

  I clasped Kit’s wrist and turned it over so that I could see his watch. It was not yet seven, and I had time to go and start my daily tasks. The elderly butler had agreed to Kit’s English lessons, as long as they did not interfere with my duties. ‘The girl is a maid, not a houseguest, I don’t care if she was a royal countess in Vienna.’ This was the strongest language Mr Wrexham had ever used with Kit; in his own surly way the old man adored him. Kit took the proviso seriously, and ensured that my lessons took place before the lighting of the household fires. This was all very well in summer, but by the beginning of November it meant that I was up before dawn, and a full hour before May hammered upon my bedroom door.

  ‘I think we can have no more lessons until after the party,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t you try and manage? Just get up a little earlier, lazy-bones.’

  He gave me a gentle nudge in the ribs.

  ‘No.’ Contradicting Kit was almost impossible. Especially when denying him something that he wanted. ‘I’m already having to get up at five.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘Yes. And then you sleep all morning. I have to work.’

  ‘My poor Cinderella.’

  I picked up a burr and lobbed it at him, so that it lodged in his golden hair. He tugged at it for a second, then, realising it was stuck, shrugged and gave up, letting it dangle. Kit was not vain.

  ‘You have friends arriving this morning.’

  The following day was Kit’s twenty-first birthday and his coming of age. Mr Rivers had agreed to a house party at Tyneford, a full three days of celebrations with half the young ladies and gentlemen of Dorset in attendance. Mr Wrexham and Mrs Ellsworth had existed in a state of acute anxiety for several weeks. They tried and failed to hire extra staff; endless plans had been drawn up and distributed by the butler, only to be discarded in disgust a few hours later. Mrs Ellsworth and a girl from the village had spent the best part of a week baking endless cakes and preparing jams and pickles and marinades. For his part, Kit ordered crates of liquor from London, along with stainless steel cocktail shakers, and took time each evening before dinner to teach Henry, Art and Mr Wrexham the art of cocktail making. The butler did not approve. Cocktails were an American abomination, but it was the young master’s coming of age and he must be denied nothing. So, when he was not busy poring over the staff plan, Mr Wrexham could be found studying with excruciating care the technique for the ‘Tom Collins’, the ‘Gin Sling’ and the ‘Harvey Wallbanger’, like a schoolboy swotting over Latin verbs.

  The first guests arrived after lunch. I was busy arranging flowers or, more precisely, being told by Mrs Ellsworth that my arranging was hopelessly inadequate, whilst she tugged teasels, ivy and a rosy spray of herb robert into an appealing posy.

  ‘Did your mother never teach you?’

  I shrugged. Anna loved to buy flowers, armfuls of them from the market every week – bouquets of black roses, white lilies or orange blossom, which she spread out across the kitchen table in glorious patterns, cooing over the colours and scents with childish glee, all the while humming Delibes’ Flower Duet. The practicalities of arranging she left to Hildegard.

  ‘
There. You see?’

  Mrs Ellsworth thrust at me a pretty china vase decorated with blue swimming fish, and now filled with the precisely disarranged flowers.

  ‘Put them upstairs in Lady Diana Hamilton’s room.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Ellsworth.’

  Taking the vase, I hurried along the corridor and up the back stairs to the blue guest room. For the week I was to act as lady’s maid for the Hamilton sisters. They were titled but not rich, or not sufficiently rich to travel with a maid. Mr Wrexham was quite determined that I must fulfil this role. He claimed that my Viennese past qualified me for the task – ‘you have been to balls and operas or assisted your mother in her preparations I am sure’ – but Henry confided that after a Parisian lady’s maid, an Austrian was considered the most fashionable. Apparently, Mr Wrexham took great pleasure in the fact that Tyneford House was to provide an Austrian lady’s maid for Mr Kit’s privileged guests. I had no idea that my nationality made me so exclusive. I wondered if my appeal would be diminished if they realised Austria no longer classed me as a citizen.

  I set the vase down on the dressing table and glanced around the room. The soft blue curtains matched the November sky and through the windows the grey sea glinted and thrashed. I wondered what it would be like to stay here as a guest rather than as staff, to have Kit pull out my chair at dinner and call ‘Wrexham, another soda and lime for the lady.’ When I remembered the Elise in Vienna with her easy life of concerts, scented baths and familial love, I felt that I remembered someone else. Outside there was the sound of tyres on gravel, then a minute later voices in the hall and the flurry of arrival. I slid out of the blue room and watched from the shadows at the top of the staircase. Two girls with cherubim cropped blonde curls prowled the hallway below. I knew they waited for Kit. They wore pale fur coats and Mrs Ellsworth took their gloves, but the taller refused to let the housekeeper help her with her mink.