by Patrick Gale
Alison slid to the edge of her seat, leaning on the worn velvet parapet of the box and clapped too. In the arena below the orchestra the few promenaders not already standing had leaped to their feet and, as Grenfell returned to the platform leading her grandfather triumphantly by the hand, a great cheer went up. Alison always loved this moment, could never quite believe it was her grandfather, hers, they were cheering. She stopped clapping for a while, looking down at the thin, familiar figure in the crumpled, dandyish clothes, then she lifted her hands to her mouth and added her voice to the crowd’s. He still looked faintly aghast at the vigorous response his work could arouse. His darting eyes dancing over the players, his little gasp when a young woman in sandals thrust herself up onto the front of the stage to hand him a clutch of flowers, were not yet insincere with use. He was still, Alison knew, a little frightened of the public’s enthusiasm. He had not always been famous. It was quite a recent phenomenon.
When she was a child he had still been primarily a film composer, well-known only among cognoscenti. He used to encourage her and Jamie to wander in and out of his studio in the garden, the space where he lived and worked beside the stream, away from the chaos Miriam had drawn about herself in The Roundel. The only music in the main house came from incessantly played rock and folk records and a guitar which one of the Beards used to twang of an evening when drugs and alcohol had left their ears too sensitive for anything louder.
The studio had been a place of enchantment and astonishing order to the children. It still was to Alison, now when her own life was little more orderly than her mother’s had been. Back then, her grandfather would always make time to sit her on his lap at the piano to see if she had remembered what the notes were called – which she never had – and he would let her tap on bells and blow gingerly down strange foreign pipes which smelled of spice and made noises like mice or wood pigeons. Then, when her brother began to follow her, her grandfather discovered that Jamie could remember what the notes were called, could remember tunes, could sing. Slowly, bitterly, Alison had found herself ousted from pride of place, as her grandfather began to shush her or even send her from the studio the better to coax Jamie towards a place in the supreme orderliness of a choir school.
He had been respected, of course, ever since he had won his second Oscar, but as a girl Alison had never quite believed it when Miriam had clutched her hand and pointed to a strange, foreign-looking name during the title sequence for a film and said, ‘Look, Angel! That’s him. That’s Gramps!’
His real fame came later, when Alison had escaped her mother’s marriage by leaving home to read Comparative Literature at Sussex. It began quietly, with a modest but intensely fashionable Scottish revival of his second opera, Jacob’s Room, which toured to several European music festivals before receiving the recognition of being welcomed into an English National Opera season. The work had been dismissed at its first unveiling at the 1963 Trenellion Festival as impressionistic to the point of being unstageable. The revival, twenty years on, was a hauntingly designed production, and the work’s plangent repetitions and strings of ironically corrupted melody – his equivalent, it was authoritatively stated, of Woolf’s prose evocations of memory – attracted an audience the London opera management had rarely seen before. These new enthusiasts were young, restless and fashion-conscious, people prepared to queue for admission to nightclubs.
Eager to cash in on the success, a record company signed Edward up and began speedily to issue trendily packaged recordings, not just of his ‘serious’ music – the chamber pieces, Jacob’s Room, the two symphonies written in the early ’sixties – but of his film scores too. These, it was now perceived, were actually serious music disguised, out of commercial necessity, as something more frivolous. A bondslave to the cinema, he had yet managed to satisfy two masters simultaneously, for his amour propre. Played without interruption, the famous score to 4.15 to Bucharest was revealed to be a symphonic set of variations on a disguised Balkan theme, the score to Room with Yellow Paper, a piano concerto, and that to What Maisie Knew, a sinfonia concertante for cor anglais and french horn. Selling unexpectedly well – albeit in the fire of envious references in the press to ‘dubious facility’ and ‘sterile, crowd-pleasing architectonics’, these in turn led to concerts, well attended by the same enraptured young crowd who had so unpredictably detected sympathetic chords in the dreamily pacifist Jacob’s Room.
By the time Alison was asked to come for her second interview at Pharos, she found that a slipped-in reference to her now celebrated grandfather made all the difference to Cynthia and the board’s perception of her.
All Edward’s works had now been recorded and many were finding comfortable niches in the orchestral repertoire. Retired from the film studios for ever, he was entering an Indian summer. The piece played that evening – Debate for Strings and Harp – was one of several new works directly inspired by his delight at finally finding an audience, and such a young, open-minded one. Only the score of Job remained on a high shelf in his studio. He had meticulously destroyed all orchestral and vocal parts and, despite repeated overtures from the record company and a prominent opera producer, he refused to release the work from the outer darkness into which he had cast it. His mysterious insistence, of course, only fascinated the interested parties the more. Accounts of the work’s long-distant Rexbridge première were tantalisingly thin on detail. Alison had looked at the score once in an inquisitive moment, brushing thick dust off its handsome, tooled cover. The stylised libretto by Thomas Hickey – the ‘Uncle Thomas’ her mother referred to with such fondness – had struck her, but the notes on the pages told her nothing.
The stage was suddenly aswarm with furniture movers and extra players as a larger orchestra assembled for a Mozart piano concerto. Violinists stepped aside, fiddles protectively clutched to their chests, to clear a path for the Steinway that was being trundled into their midst like a great black insect queen among lesser attendants. As Alison came down a staircase into one of the hall’s entrance lobbies, she could hear applause for the soloist and returning conductor.
Her grandfather was waiting for her beneath a street lamp, on his own. One would never have guessed he had just been the centre of so much attention. He had perfected a technique for politely giving hangers-on and well-wishers the slip. Though he remained a softhearted prey to autograph-hunters and zealous student musicians, he had an unconscious way of looking not quite like his public self when going about his private business. Sitting at restaurant tables or in theatre seats beside him, Alison would often see people begin an approach, then halt a few yards away, their progress checked by an indiscernible wall of doubt and indecision. She smiled, looked down again and waved, a small, familiar squeeze of love in her chest. He was more father to her than any man had ever been.
His dress sense had stopped developing somewhere in the early ’seventies, so he favoured down-at-heel velvet jackets, full, white shirts and a series of richly coloured waistcoats. Fashionable now, all over again, these had become his trademark, worn on the concert platform in place of evening dress. Tonight’s waistcoat was a glowing shade of plum that set off his sleek silver hair to advantage and made his dark eyes bright. She thought again how handsome, how ungrandfatherly he could look, and wished she could have known his wife.
‘It was so good!’ she exclaimed as she hurried over. Always precise in her admiration of fine writing, she remained lost for epithets to encompass the intangible pleasures of music. ‘So good!’
‘Angel.’
In his mouth, the nickname was a courtly blessing, not the irritant her mother had made of it. He kissed her cheek and handed her his bouquet. She saw at once his disappointment that Jamie was not with her.
‘Jamie sent his love,’ she lied quickly. ‘He couldn’t make it after all. That creep he works for threw a load of extra paperwork at him just when he was about to leave the office. He was furious at having to miss seeing you.’
But it was she who was fu
rious. Jamie knew how much his coming meant to his grandfather. He understood musical language. He was the more favoured of the two, probably because he was the less solicitous. And he had given his word. She had not seen him since the march, two days before, and each day her sense of injury gained in focus. First he had left the park without so much as a goodbye. It took no mastermind to deduce that he had left with Sam in tow. Sam’s unexpected interest in him had been evident, to her at least, from the start and it irritated her that Jamie felt the need to slope off with him like a poacher. Then, when Saturday stretched into Sunday and there was no sign of Sam, and Jamie still didn’t call, she found herself manipulated into feeling a jealous resentment she could not logically justify. Then Monday dawned and Sam had still not returned. He had vanished before, of course. She knew better than to expect any explanation. It was quite possible that the silence of one man and the nonappearance of the other were quite unrelated. Possible but, something told her, unlikely.
On the second night, a ghastly possibility had struck her – that Sam, of whom, after all, she knew so little, might have turned violent. Through her own misplaced sensitivity, she had let her brother disappear with a dangerous man. Jamie might be unconscious in hospital. He might even be lying on the floor of his flat, dead or dying. Her mother’s words echoed sinisterly through her head: ‘If he disappears, you wouldn’t know where to get hold of him.’
Ashamed and worried in equal parts, she had swallowed her pride and called Jamie’s office that afternoon. There was a long pause before the telephonist connected them.
‘I was going to call you,’ he said at once, without greeting.
‘Sorry,’ she said, flustered with relief at hearing his voice. ‘I’ll be quick. You’re not meant to get personal calls in the office any more, are you?’
‘Oh sod that,’ he breathed. He sounded exhausted, strained. Burning to question him, she found herself only hastily checking he was coming to the concert and he gave her his promise.
‘You vanished after the march,’ she blurted at last.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘You didn’t worry? Something came up.’
‘Ah,’ she said and hung up moments later, blood boiling at his casual use of the time-honoured evasion even though she knew it was impossible for him to talk openly in his office. She was wounded that both men could so easily neglect her and irritated for having given herself occasion to feel so wounded.
Waving aside his disappointment with a sweet compliment about enjoying the rare opportunity it gave him to have her all to himself, her grandfather walked her to a small, expensive restaurant in a narrow lane off Gloucester Road. The management and cuisine were French, so he could rely on the waiters not to recognise him.
‘So,’ he said, after their wine had arrived. ‘Tell. How’s work?’
‘Oh. All right,’ she told him. ‘I’m in Cynthia’s good books at the moment because Aldo Maclnnes is already looking like a certainty for the Booker shortlist and he’s one of my babies.’
‘That’s good. Worth reading?’
‘Not really. Well. Yes, of course it is, but I know what you like, and you wouldn’t like Aldo.’
‘Ah.’
‘And it looks as though I may have got us the next Judith Lamb but there’s no skill in that – even authors with a high moral tone have their price.’
He frowned for a second at the streak of bitterness in her voice.
‘But you’re happy there?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose so.’
‘You must come down for a weekend again soon. The house misses you.’
‘I will. I was – I was busy this weekend and the weekend before that I was being dutiful in Essex.’
He raised an eyebrow as he tore a chunk off his roll. The territory of her mother’s marriage was well mapped out between them so that much could be conveyed in shorthand.
‘Oh he’s not so awful when you’re patient with him,’ she said, taking as read his unspoken comment on his son-in-law. He only snorted in reply then sat back to make room for the arrival of soup. ‘Why’s she so angry about that writer asking questions about you and Myra Toye?’
He tasted his soup, salted it, then took another spoonful, pondering the question. His hand shook slightly as he replaced his spoon. When he answered, it was elliptically.
‘Your mother’s never really forgiven me for sending her away,’ he sighed.
‘When?’
‘She was nine. No. She was ten.’
‘But she liked her school,’ Alison insisted. ‘She always talks about it as if she did.’
‘That’s because she’s since decided it was something of a status symbol to have been sent there. It was a very, very good school. Better than anything she found for you. I didn’t want to send her away, but it wasn’t much of a life for a little girl. She was only a baby when your grandmother died, not even a toddler yet.’ He paused in tearing another piece off his roll and raised his brows, shrugging off his words in a way that yet failed to conceal lingering pain. Alison knew at once that these were memories with which he rarely tampered. ‘She stopped crying for her long before I did,’ he said. ‘I was earning quite well by then, so I found a nanny. Molly.’ He smiled to himself at the recollection. ‘Molly,’ he said again, enjoying the name’s pillowy sound. ‘Haven’t thought of Molly in years. Very strong, devoutly Christian and an even worse cook than your grandmother. Anyway, Miriam adored her and I felt safe leaving them together for days on end. But eventually Molly’s father was widowed and she had to go back to Somerset to look after him.’
‘She must have been heartbroken,’ Alison said dispassionately.
‘Who? Molly?’
‘No. Mother. Miriam.’
‘She was. Molly was all the mother she’d known. There was Sally’s mother, of course, but she wasn’t well and couldn’t see her that often. I’ve … I’ve never seen a child as angry as she was after that. All the sadness came out as a quite extraordinary spell of rage. She broke things. She took scissors to her dresses. She was sweet and clinging with me – it was all directed at things – but I got the message. I tried a couple of other nannies but Miriam’s trust had gone and, I suppose, in a way, so had mine. I didn’t want to hurt her again – how could I tell how long the next one might stay? I thought at least in a school she’d have a stable group about her. And I’d be sure she was getting a good education. I promised myself I’d make a special effort to be with her during her holidays. I told myself she’d have friends of her own age at last instead of some choked-up, ageing virgin. I bought her presents. Dolls. Dresses. Books. It was terrible.’
Alison finished her soup, watching him carefully. He had never talked with her like this before and she was not entirely sure she wanted to be the recipient of such confidences. Not right then.
‘I’d had such a bad time away at school,’ he continued. ‘I’d always sworn no child of mine would go through that, but what option did I have?’
Alison shrugged supportively, then saw he was not looking to her for a reaction but was facing some jury of the mind.
‘I drove her there,’ he said. ‘It was a beautiful place. Early Victorian I think – I’ve always been hopeless at knowing things like that. A park dotted with follies. A lake. Horses. I decided maybe girls’ boarding schools were not the same as boys’ ones. Mine hadn’t been like this! She seemed excited too at first, but then she found her way to a telephone and used to ring me up and cry. I spoke to the headmistress. Perhaps it wasn’t working out? I said. Perhaps I should take Miriam away, but she said it was all perfectly normal and she’d soon settle down. And she was right. There weren’t any more phone calls and I started getting little Sunday morning letters from her instead. Two sides, tidily written, perfectly cheerful, asking for money and so on. She made friends. She found she was good at art.’ He paused and looked directly at Alison. ‘I should never have done it.’
‘But if she was happy …?’
‘Happy without m
e –’ He broke off as a waiter took away their empty bowls and topped up their wine glasses. ‘I pushed her away,’ he continued, brushing his crumbs into a tidy heap on the tablecloth. ‘I showed her she could thrive on her own. I made myself redundant. When she came home in the holidays I could see the school’s effects. She was growing up. She was almost poised. She brought friends home to keep her company and she sat at the dinner table with them and made conversation to me. It was enough to curdle the blood.’
‘Is that why you made such an effort with me and Jamie?’ she asked and realised she had been too open, too obvious from the way he answered with only a cursory, wordless nod.
‘Now she’s decided I sent her away so I’d be freer to have affairs.’ He curled his lips at the word. ‘Probably some stupid self-help book she’s been reading has put the idea into her head.’
‘She doesn’t, Grandpa. Honestly. Only the other day she said you hardly knew Myra Toye. She was quite angry at the suggestion you might –’
‘What your mother believes,’ he broke in, ‘and what she says don’t always tally. She’s quite pathetically respectable in her way. It’s all my fault. When she went to art school in London, I thought there might be hope for her. When she moved back home and brought all those hopeless, long-haired boys and chickens and looms and things, when she started that wretched market stall in Rexbridge, when she had you without getting married, I thought, yes, she’ll be all right. I didn’t fool myself we’d ever be close, but I thought at least she wasn’t lost. I thought she’d at last have a life. An original life. Then when she stopped all that it was the triumph of education over nature. I’m not such a monster of self-centredness as to believe she married that … that amoral cipher of a man just to get back at me, but I can’t help feeling I ended up with the daughter I paid for.’