by Patrick Gale
Gradually old forms re-emerged. A stagnant pond with a broken statue at its centre. Rope-shaped terracotta edging surrounded what was now recognisable as a rose garden. A sundial. There was a rosemary bush tall as Sally’s shoulders and a colony of chives that had become a miniature lawn. Two curls of wrought iron were all that remained of a long-rotten garden bench. Edward spent a short-tempered day teasing out the old bolts and fitting the frames with new wood. They placed the bench down by the river and when one of her new mothers gave her a big bag of daffodil bulbs in gratitude for an easy delivery, Sally waded across the water to plant them in the bank on the other side. Edward took an old scythe to the long grass and, watching his rhythmic motion, his trousers streaked with grass juices and his shirt plastered to the sweating skin beneath, Sally ached for love of him and suddenly realised how badly she wanted to bear his child. She laughed at herself and later turned the moment to high comedy in one of her regular bulletins to Dr Pertwee.
‘We’re quite the new Adam and Eve,’ she wrote. ‘It’s a good thing I have A Husband’s Love to keep my feet firmly on the ground amid all this honest toil and newly-turned earth.’
Left alone in the cavernous hall after Sally drove off to work in the mornings, Edward started to make preliminary sketches for an opera. It had begun life as a symphony. Great blocks of sound in his head, which he had to scribble down in a rush before they evaporated. Then he found that strings, wind and brass were not enough. He wanted voices. He wrote pages of wordless singing – a rhapsodic soprano and a chorus – well before he came up with a suitable subject for the opera. He wracked his brains but it seemed that every story – King David, the Fall of Troy, Mary Queen of Scots – had been done before. Finally, he put it to Thomas, who came over for lunch one day when Sally was at the surgery.
‘A subject for a libretto. A new subject. That’s hard.’ Thomas pondered. He walked over to the kitchen window, chewing on a lamb chop he had taken between finger and thumb. He turned, leaning against the old belfast sink, and stared at Edward for a moment. His eyes twinkled.
‘Job,’ he said. ‘Do the Book of Job.’
‘Vaughan Williams.’
‘That’s just a ballet.’
‘No soprano role,’ Edward pointed out.
‘He had daughters, a wife – his sons were probably married. Besides, the gender of the comforters isn’t specified! Lucifer too, perhaps? The Shining One as coloratura soprano – or perhaps that would be a little much …’
All that afternoon, while Sally was visiting children with measles and mothers with morning sickness, Edward sat, hunched over her school Bible at the kitchen table, reading the Book of Job. He scarcely knew Sunday school stories, let alone the more obscure passages. But as he read, he understood Thomas’s faintly mischievous smile as he made his suggestion. The tale of the man stripped of happiness, caught in a torrent of distresses, who yet praises God, could not have been more ironically apposite for a post-war German Jew. Sadly it could not have been less operatic either. Something in the tale held him however. Perhaps it was the shock of finding words familiar from The Messiah – ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ – nestling like a jewel at the story’s leprous centre.
He would begin his task by expanding the opening sentences, to establish Job’s massive wealth, glory and earthly happiness. He decided to focus on the daughters, whom the text specifically named as Jemima, Keziah and Kerenhappuch, while leaving the sons as anonymous as the slaughtered sheep and servants. The opera could open with Job a kind of Lear, lapping up the adoration of the three girls – a convenient soprano-mezzo-contralto trio, with Kerenhappuch inevitably the contralto. It would end with a subtly altered reprise, but now the resurrected three would be giving their praise to their heavenly father, not their earthly one. It would become both cautionary tale and consolation.
Thomas’s intention in his suggestion might also have been therapeutic. Reading and re-reading the text over the weeks that followed unlocked memories of Edward’s boyhood, happy memories, of his mother, grandmother and sister. Suddenly his dream life grew crowded as a family album.
Aware how harshly secretive he must have appeared in the past, he found himself telling Sally everything there was to know about his childhood. Encouraged by her interest, he allowed himself to feel Jewish for the first time since he left his homeland. He allowed himself to be German. Sally found frames for some battered photographs he had of his parents and Miriam and he arranged them on the piano lid like so many witnesses to his new pleasures. He even taught her some Yiddish words and phrases and laughed at her Saxon difficulty in mastering them. With this final laying of the ghosts that had troubled him, it seemed that the seal was being set on his unalloyed happiness.
13
Edward’s first string quartet, In Memory of Lost Parents, received its premiere at a concert in the hall at Tompion. An ensemble formed by some near contemporaries of his had wanted something new to sandwich between a Beethoven Rasumovsky and the Schubert Quartettsatz. Tipped off by Thomas, they had approached Edward. His piece was not easy to learn, and there were only three weeks in which to practise, but the musicians seemed confident.
It was the sort of concert Edward might well have taken Sally to anyway, but this time she felt as anxious as if she herself were expected to perform. It was an unusually formal affair, since the university chancellor was to be present and the Master of Tompion had invited some of the concert-goers for dinner afterwards.
Sally wore an old hand-me-down of her mother’s in midnight blue crushed velvet and black, elbow-length gloves. She had to sit with Edward in the front row, within bowing distance of the chancellor. She was introduced to his wife by Thomas during the interval but her mind was entirely on Edward, who was so nervous he had wandered off to stare balefully at the portraits around the panelled walls. Thomas tapped her elbow and pointed out two former college men who had come down to review the concert for The Times and some highbrow arts quarterly.
Edward had never played her any of his music properly. Once or twice, when she had begged him, he had started, but each time, abashed, he played the buffoon, breaking off, after a few impenetrable wanderings on the keyboard, into a jokey rendition of a Glenn Miller dance number or some corny Ivor Novello hit. Once he had mocked her ignorance, slyly launching into a delicious piece and only telling her after she had exclaimed at its loveliness and his genius, that it was by Mozart. She had eavesdropped, of course, sitting in a room off the gallery, and keeping very still for as long as she could bear. On his own, however, he never seemed to play anything through, contenting himself with snatches and chords in between scribbling, making noises more like the piano tuner who called in once a month and drove her half-mad with his nagging repetitions.
They resumed their seats and the quartet returned to the platform. As the applause died down – even she could tell that the Beethoven had been excellently played – she reached over to touch Edward’s hand. He smiled at her but returned her hand to her lap as though she were an overly demonstrative child. Someone coughed. The four bows were raised in expectation and, with them, the four players’ eyebrows.
With the first chords she honestly thought there had been some mistake. Someone was playing the wrong piece, perhaps, or had their music upside down. But the strident cacophony continued its angry way and was met with the same complacent welcome as had greeted the Beethoven, only now it was punctuated by the occasional gathered brow or fine-minded wrinkling around the eyes at a particularly startling harmony. Sally realised, with a sickening finality, that she hated her husband’s music. Perhaps hate was too emotive a word for something she felt she altogether failed to understand. The sounds he had written had no discernible melody, no comforting sonority. He had composed in an entirely alien language and she felt a mounting panic that he would expect her to understand it simply by virtue of their being in love.
With each successive movement, her hopes were raised then dashed on hearing more of the same. When he
glanced at her, she smiled reassuringly back, but she felt that a crude wedge had been driven between them. The last movement came as a relief. She seized on its demonic gaiety and whistlable tune as something she could enthuse about later, but as the room filled with polite applause and the musicians took their bows, faces shining from effort, she knew she would always have to lie to him.
Bird-watching she could have handled, or a sudden bizarre demand in bed, a consuming interest in cacti or Victorian industrial architecture, but this music that was so central to his very being she knew she could never appreciate, never honestly admit to liking. When the concert was over, she clasped his arm as he received congratulations and she smiled proudly, in spite of the splinter of iron in her soul.
14
After an exceptionally mild December, the first frosts had come, filling the garden with browned and twisted foliage. Under torrential rain, part of the dome had begun to leak again. Until they could persuade the glazier back to remedy his shoddy repair work, a tin bucket noisily caught the drips in the hall. Eyes smoked pink by a comfortless fire of damp wood, they had retired early in an effort to stay warm.
Mrs Banks had been admitted to hospital for a series of cancer tests. The young-old woman had a horror of illness and was the sort to keep quiet about a pain for weeks rather than face the grim prospect that her body might be about to turn against her. When the telephone suddenly rang out in the darkness, Sally started as though a gun had gone off and rushed from the bedroom to reach it, tugging her dressing gown about her as she went, convinced it was bad news about her mother.
Edward’s work on Job was progressing well by now. Just before the ringing shattered their peace, she had been asking him about it and he had felt her recoil from his unglamorous choice of story. He had also felt her discreet dismay at the prospect of him undertaking such a large-scale work with no commission, not even advance promise of a performance.
‘Shouldn’t you stick to smaller, cheaper things to start with?’ she had asked, but she had gone to the telephone before he could answer, leaving him turning this unattractive piece of common sense indignantly over in his mind.
She must see that he could only write what he was moved to write? He would not, could not tailor his art to fit a household economy. He heard Sally talking in the hall, heard her steps on the uncarpeted stairs. As she circled the landing back to the bedroom, he was thinking scornfully to himself that if Brahms were still alive he would doubtless be working for the BBC composing incidental music for radio plays.
Sally pushed open the door and stood, a well-wrapped silhouette, against the light from the landing. He couldn’t make out her face. Her voice was hesitant, perplexed.
‘Edward? It’s a call from London. I didn’t quite understand, he had such an accent. Someone called Ivan? Ivan Airingson?’
‘Aaronson,’ Edward corrected her, jumping out of bed and pulling a jersey over his pyjamas for warmth. ‘A friend of Rosa and Isaac’s. You remember Rosa, surely? At the wedding?’
‘How could I forget?’
‘I’ll go and speak to him.’
‘Edward,’ she stopped him, a warning hand on his arm. ‘Darling. He thinks they’ve found a woman who might be your sister. Edward?’
He hurried past her, ignoring her protest. The hall floor was freezing beneath his bare feet. He took refuge on the rug by the piano.
‘Ja, Ivan? Wie geht’s?’
He noticed the bucket was full of rain water and needed emptying. By the time the conversation was over, Sally had come downstairs and was hunched up, worried, on the sofa, her knees tucked up before her. The water had started to trickle down the bucket’s edge. When he hung up, she simply held out her hands to him. He took them and she pulled him into a tight embrace. He heard himself sobbing as she ran feverish fingers across his back and up through his hair as though searching for the source of his hurt.
‘You must go,’ she said at last. ‘Where is she?’
‘Paris. In the suburbs,’ he said, thinking how innocuous that sounded. ‘I don’t think I could face it.’ A tear ran down over his upper lip with a little shock of salt.
‘You must. She’s your sister, Edward. Don’t be childish. You must go!’
‘We can’t possibly afford it.’
‘No. But Thomas can,’ she said simply. ‘He’d pay your fare. You know he would.’
It was impossible to sleep. He lay for hours with Sally curled in seemingly heartless slumber beside him. Repeatedly he started when it seemed to him that the low door to the barred room beside theirs had suddenly swung open in the blackness, releasing unimaginable horrors.
Far from being happily laid to rest by Sally’s redeeming love and the honouring of new family ties, the unquiet dead were thrusting back their tomb-lids. The nightmare had begun, or rather, the unquiet dream that had started years before was now becoming a reality, rattling forth from his subconscious to cavort in baldest sunlight. Shut his eyes, clamp tight his mouth, halt his own progress as he might, the evil continued unstoppably around him. And so, the following day, he found himself back in the quiet, glistening chic of Thomas’s study, pushing aside friendly enquiries about the opera’s progress with a blunt request for money.
15
He had been in England for over a decade without leaving. He had grown used to her great tracts of uncultivated countryside which reeked of immobile privilege, her bland unvarying food and the pervasive insincerity of good manners. It was only as the ferry juddered out through the drizzle on to a brown, untrustworthy sea that he appreciated how efficient a shelter England had been for him. However much her natives strove against it – with their incomprehensible traditions, private languages and cheerfully confessed mistrust of all that was foreign – he had become a party to the island’s mentality.
The Continent, of which his English hosts spoke as a place of inefficiency, bad smells, worse water and insidious, dangerous seductiveness, embraced him like a neglected but forgiving friend. He had forgotten the frank odours, good and bad, of crude cigarettes and bodies, the nakedly assessing stares, the sudden shifts from shrugging unconcern to bonhomie. Waiting to board the train to Paris, he made an instinctive, fetishistic collection of the most Continental things he could find: a packet of Gauloises, a paper-wrapped sandwich of crisp French bread and garlic sausage, a buttery pastry oozing crème patissière and a magazine dripping scandal.
The cigarettes were a mistake, of course. His lungs were in a better state when he had last smoked and one drag left him wet-eyed and helplessly coughing. The other self-indulgences were all too soon exhausted and he had a long journey on the stopping train from Calais to Paris, then across the city and out into the grimy suburb to a hospital which held a woman who might be his sister. A long journey in which to think and to worry.
He had known there was a network of more or less unofficial Jewish agencies operating across Europe. Ironically, the effects of Nazi propaganda had made a reality of malicious lies, although the Jewish purpose was not world domination but the innocent desire to keep in touch. Built from the remains of large, now splintered families and numerous Resistance cells, and wringing what grudging co-operation they could from post-war governments keen to sweep the recent horrors aside, these agencies went about the Sisyphean task of tracing survivors and putting them in touch with lost family. Ivan Aaronson did a certain amount of research for them at the British and German ends – under the cover of his import/export business. It was Ivan who had come to Edward’s internment camp to confirm that Edward’s parents had been traced to their end. Ivan himself was free to come and go, having taken out British citizenship, like Isaac, some time before in the early thirties.
‘But we can’t find Miriam,’ he had confessed, wizened brow wrinkling further with distress at his own helplessness. ‘They don’t keep all families together, you see. She may have been separated for another purpose.’
‘She may have got married,’ Edward suggested, clutching at straws. ‘She was
seeing a … a goy when she last wrote to me. Lorenz’s family were rich, well connected – he may have helped her.’
‘Maybe,’ Ivan said. ‘Maybe.’
But no record of a marriage was traced. Or of a death. And with the war and its bombings many such records had gone up in smoke, reducing personal histories to chaos.
Someone who might be Miriam had at last been found in a psychiatric hospital. By a long, drawn-out process as complicated as the demonic bureaucracy which had engulfed her to start with, a tattoo on her arm had been traced to those given at one of the camps. Records still existed to show who had died there and who had lived to tell the tale. Some of the survivors had obsessively retentive memories for names and family details of fellow inmates; details they intoned, rehearsed, perfected as a puny defence against the systematic destruction of all else that made them human. Those who, like the woman who might be Miriam, were too ill to speak, had to be presented to a succession of hopeful, dreading families. Edward’s family was one of the last possibilities in her case. With both parents dead, the search for her family had not been widespread, until someone, a former colleague of his mother’s from Tübingen now working in Versailles, remembered the boy sent away to England and Ivan was contacted.
‘We are not certain she is your Miriam,’ Ivan told him on the telephone, ‘She … Apparently she is not responsive.’
Time and again since then, Edward’s mind had examined the phrase, wondering just what degree of horror the cool words ‘not responsive’ might veil.
The slow train shuddered into another drab suburban station with another pompous name honouring another long-forgotten battlefield. Crossing the short platform, Edward turned up his collar against the drizzle. He was the only passenger to get off. Pale faces stared out at him with bored impudence as the carriages were dragged out again. He summoned his schoolboy French to ask for directions from a station official, but had to ask a passing man a few streets later because his unpractised ear had only retained a third of what it heard.