Dead, Mr Mozart

by Bernard Bastable

  He was quite unusually polite. That should have worried me, and I should have manufactured some excuse and left – as Bradley Hartshead immediately did with the tact and delicacy with which he did everything. But the prospect of perhaps doing a favour for Lord Hertford, to whom I am indebted, persuaded me otherwise, as doubtless it did Betty Ackroyd. We allowed ourselves to be led along the corridor into Popper’s office.

  Lord Hertford was sitting in a chair, once more his usual easy yet commanding self. But our eyes were drawn to the other figure. Huddled on the sofa, the cloak now open and revealing the full extent of her grubby clothing, was a scrap of a girl – not short, but thin, weaselly of feature, and pathetic. Her face, already dirty, had come to resemble a relief map through the runnels of tears. She was snivelling now, then looking up at us beseechingly as if craving protection.

  ‘This is Jenny,’ said Lord Hertford.

  There was silence. Eventually I looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘And Jenny is—?’

  ‘A most important person,’ said Lord Hertford, smiling at her and trying to reach her on her own level. ‘Someone whose presence here needs to be concealed from the mob.’ A sob came from the bundle on the sofa. Lord Hertford cleared his throat, conscious he had made a false step: ‘There is therefore no question of her being installed, however secretly, in any of my houses, or my wife’s. Each has a large staff whose loyalty, though considerable, cannot be guaranteed or absolute. There is always one who, for money or out of misplaced enthusiasm, will betray their master. Do I make myself understood?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Mr Popper.

  ‘So I bethought me of the theatre, where she might both live – her wants are modest – and serve her turn usefully, perhaps as a dresser, until she is required. She need never, in fact, go out into the streets, and rarely be seen outside a single dressing-room. Now I thought that Miss Ackroyd, for example, who is starting on the lower rungs of the theatrical ladder, has not yet got a dresser of her own…’

  ‘No …’ said Betty Ackroyd doubtfully, as if this scrap of humanity was hardly what she would freely have chosen, left to herself. A dresser is a protector and defender, a safe haven from storms. This pathetic specimen of humanity looked as far from a protector as it was possible to get. But of course if Lord Hertford suggested it … She nodded her agreement.

  ‘You say until she is required —’ I interjected.

  ‘Ah yes. That is a matter which we must keep entirely between ourselves. She is – but perhaps she can tell you herself.’ He looked a mite dubious though, as he gazed at his charge. ‘Tell the lady and gentleman who you are, Jenny.’

  After a long pause a tiny squeak emerged from the meagre bundle of rags on the sofa.

  ‘Jenny.’

  ‘Yes – Jenny what?’

  ‘Jenny Bowles.’

  ‘And tell them where you’ve worked up to now.’

  That seemed quite beyond her, but after a long wait there came tiny sounds that I interpreted as ‘Mr Woods’. Lord Hertford looked at us, but only saw us looking bewilderedly at each other.

  ‘At Alderman Woods,’ he said significantly.

  Now our looks were charged with dawning comprehension. Alderman Woods – where the Queen had stayed when she first arrived back in London, before she moved to more suitable accommodation in Brandenburg House, in Hammersmith. Lord Hertford turned back to Jenny Bowles.

  ‘Now tell the lady and gentleman – no, wait: I’ll tell them myself, and you nod if I’m getting it right.’ She nodded feebly, and he looked at her intently as he resumed. ‘Jenny is a scullery maid at Alderman Wood’s house in South Audley Street. She is sweet on one of the gardening boys there.’ (Impossible to imagine!) ‘One night, while the Queen was staying as Alderman Wood’s guest Jenny went out of the house late at night to meet her sweetheart in the garden.’ Jenny hung her head, gazing fixedly at her lap. Lord Hertford became avuncular. ‘No need to be ashamed of that, Jenny! Perfectly natural. Look at me, Jenny, to see that I get this right. When you and your sweetheart parted you were at the front of the house, in fact in an alleyway opposite. You were about to make your way along the street and round to the back of the house, to let yourself back through the kitchen entrance, which you had a key to, when you heard voices approaching the house along the street. Right? You stayed there in the alley, because you recognised the voice of your master and you didn’t wish to be seen by him. Will you nod if that’s right? … Good. He came up to the door with two men. Will you tell the people what sort of men they were, Jenny?’

  The scrap said squeakily: ‘Big.’

  Lord Hertford suppressed a sigh.

  ‘Yes, that’s right: big men. You learned from the talk what they were, didn’t you?’

  There was a long, long pause for thought, then one word came:

  ‘Watermen.’

  The watermen man the ferries and harbours of London, conveying passengers, humping cargo. They are big, tough men whose work is hard, unremitting, insalubrious toil. They are also men who seem to regard washing as detracting from their manhood. They omit, consequently, an extremely strong odour of masculinity.

  ‘But what on earth could—?’ I began. I was pulled up by a suppressed burst of laughter from Betty Ackroyd behind me. ‘You can’t mean that—?’

  ‘It is, I agree, all but incredible,’ said Lord Hertford, managing to keep a straight face. ‘Even of the Queen I could hardly have imagined it possible. Unfortunately the conversation of Alderman Wood with the two men renders the matter quite incontrovertible: it was all too painfully clear.’

  I have to say that My Lord did not actually convey any sense that he found the idea painful. In fact I had the feeling that, underneath his frigid exterior, there was a sense of triumph.

  ‘The watermen have always been great supporters of the Queen,’ I said thoughtfully.

  ‘They would be, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘They have cheered her wherever she has gone. I did not detect any irony in the cheers.’

  ‘They are hardly masters of irony. I have no doubt the story has got around them. It may well be that those two were not the only ones. Even if they were, the stories they could tell…’

  ‘Of course we would not want to hear details,’ I began tentatively.

  Lord Hertford nodded.

  ‘Suffice it to say that a three-to-a-bed arrangement was mooted, with some detail which I could not go into with ladies present as to what … er … should subsequently take place in that bed.’

  ‘But the young lady, Jenny, has been able to report the exact words spoken on this occasion?’ I probed.

  ‘She has. Without, of course, precisely understanding their significance.’

  This time Betty Ackroyd managed to keep a straight face. Lord Hertford paused for a few minutes, deep in thought.

  ‘It is now the first week in October. We have a brief pause before the Queen’s supporters present their case to the Lords,’ he said pensively.

  ‘That is a point,’ said Mr Popper, who I rather thought did not like his present situation. ‘The “Case for the Prosecution”, if we may call it that, is complete.’

  ‘It can be reopened,’ said Lord Hertford, with a wave of his hand. ‘That was allowed for when the case was closed, so many of the witnesses having been intimidated. So we have an unexpected, last-minute witness, and one whose testimony will be all the more telling since the matter concerns the Queen’s conduct not in Italy but in this realm; and not in the past, but now … The defence witnesses start to give evidence next week. Rumour has it they will be unimpeachable. Rumour has it they are a gang of scoundrels. Rumour has whatever you want to hear and whatever you don’t want to hear. We must wait and see. No one can be more conscious than I that the prosecution witnesses were not impressive. I have a hunch that the defence ones will be still less so. They will have to be questioned remorselessly. I would think it will be a month at the very least, and more probably two, before we can produce our trump ca
rd.’

  As he talked my mind – and no doubt Betty Ackroyd’s mind, and perhaps even Mr Popper’s feeble apology for a mind – had been bubbling over with questions: how had this girl and her story come to Lord Hertford’s attention? Was her story true? How could she be given the confidence to testify before the Lords? At his last words our eyes inevitably, but unfortunately, strayed to the figure on the sofa. It was impossible to imagine a human being who looked less like a trump card.

  5. Mlle Silberklang

  In the days that succeeded the advent of Jenny I found myself going more and more often to the Queen’s Theatre. Not, you understand, to see that particular fragment of humanity, but to register how the secret of her identity was being kept, and to wonder what was the likely effect of her testifying before the enquiry into the Queen’s conduct at the House of Lords.

  It was impossible to imagine her testifying. Absolutely impossible. Even in a court of law, with a kindly and encouraging judge – not, in my experience of insolvency proceedings, a common phenomenon – one could not imagine her giving comprehensible evidence. Even before three or four of us Lord Hertford had had to lead her through her experience – or rather take the major part of the telling on himself. Imagine her in that Chamber, facing the full panoply of state, the country’s nobles in serried ranks, their bejewelled and overdressed wives in the galleries – no: it was simply impossible.

  Of course I wondered how Betty was getting on with her. If I called in on her in her newly-acquired dressing-room there would be Jenny in a corner, ironing or darning in what looked like an inexpert manner. One day Betty got rid of her by sending her to borrow a scarf from a fellow singer.

  ‘How is she progressing?’ I asked, in a conspiratorial whisper.

  Betty shrugged.

  ‘She does what I tell her if I show her how.’

  ‘Does she get any better?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so, though she’s far from bright and not a needlewoman. That’s not the problem.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘She will never in a million years be a dresser,’ said Betty, as if she’d been twenty years in the theatre. ‘A dresser is a personality, a force. Can you imagine Jenny being a force?’

  Exactly what I had expected.

  ‘No I can’t,’ I said. ‘Do you and she talk?’

  ‘Oh yes. Or rather I talk a lot to her. She answers a little. But talking to me is not like giving evidence to the House of Lords, is it?’

  I agreed it was not. Betty began talking to Jenny while I was there in the dressing-room, but she seldom got more than monosyllabic squeaks in reply. What could the Lord Chancellor do with monosyllabic squeaks? I noticed that Betty watched and listened to Jenny most intently, and I formed the notion that she was thinking of using her as the basis for a comic performance – I could not think in what: no piece that I know of has a character of such embarrassing inarticulateness.

  The theatre was jumpy. This should not have been so, since the secret was known to only three people who were regularly there: Betty, Mr Popper and myself. What must have been happening was that nervousness was being communicated outwards, like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. It was not difficult to guess which of the three was giving rise to the ripples.

  One day, five or six days after Jenny’s arrival, and before the hearings on the Queen’s adultery – and hence her treason – were resumed, I was talking about repertoire with Edward Clarkson, who directs performances most of the evenings when I am not there myself. Repertoire is not really my business: I compose, and I direct from time to time the pap I and others have composed. But he respects my judgment, and indeed calls on the vast knowledge I have built up over the years of the endless feeble burlesques English composers have thrown together to fill the two hours’ traffic of the English musical stage.

  ‘We will need three new pieces to fill the time before the opera season,’ Clarkson was saying. ‘Or rather old pieces, because nothing I have been shown recently could conceivably be thrown on stage.’

  I considered.

  ‘If the audiences can’t have novelty, perhaps they could have a piece they have forgotten, or are too young to have known. One of the older Dibdin pieces, for example.’

  ‘It’s a thought,’ agreed Clarkson. He meditated for a moment. ‘One of the early ones with the dialogue freshened up, perhaps. What about The Waterman?’

  ‘WHAT?’

  It was Mr Popper, who had been passing. He had sprung round all red, as if a bee had got into his britches and stung his bottom. I jumped, so to speak, into the breach.

  ‘The old Dibdin piece,’ I said, with affected casualness. ‘Before your time, I expect: The Waterman – quite a jolly affair, and with one or two pleasant tunes.’

  He spluttered for a few more moments.

  ‘I know The Waterman perfectly well. An impossibly feeble piece. We will not do The Waterman.’

  And he went on with such dignity as he could muster.

  Mr Clarkson raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I’ve always thought it one of Dibdin’s stronger works,’ he said, but made no further comment.

  Was rumour getting around? That was what worried me. Why did I worry? Simple self-interest. If the Queen’s reputation was destroyed by Jenny Bowles, and if the Queen’s Theatre played its part in concealing and protecting her, then the opera season, and my delightful contribution to it, were assured of royal patronage. Prinny would steam in to opera after opera, dispensing his own brand of graciousness, buoyed up – if it is possible to imagine so heavy a human load buoyed up – by the public approbation of the fickle mob.

  But if the rumour got out …?

  I was accosted one evening in the vestibule of the Queen’s Theatre before a performance of my – something or other – one of my dribbled pieces – by Lord Harewood.

  ‘Hear you’re putting something together for the opera season, Mr Mozart.’

  I do not regard myself as indebted to Lord Harewood. What is more, he has no ear for music at all. He is dedicated to Acquisition, and music cannot be acquired.

  ‘I am composing an opera, My Lord,’ I said coldly.

  ‘That’s the ticket. Time we had another by you. Something along the lines of Il Matrimonio Segreto, eh? That was a capital piece – one of your best.’ His elephantine attempts at ingratiation over, he pointed to the other side of the crowded vestibule. ‘Something going on over there, eh?’

  He was pointing, in fact, towards the door into the auditorium, where Mr Popper was deep in murmured conversation with Lord Hertford. Mr Popper had assumed his air of turkey-cock self importance – a ludicrous stance to those who knew his indecisive character and general incompetence – while Lord Hertford, though never losing his air of somewhat distant affability, nevertheless had an undoubtedly conspiratorial air. I saw Betty Ackroyd, who was not performing that evening, watching them both and setting her body into the ridiculous strutting posture of Mr Popper. I knew by now that the basis of her acting skills was in observation and mimicry.

  ‘Undoubtedly something is up,’ I said, still very chilly. ‘Lord Hertford is the principal patron for the Coronation opera season you alluded to.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Lord Harewood, with a funny sort of smile. ‘Think that’s it, do you?’

  ‘Of course. An opera season demands a great deal of planning.’

  ‘And a great deal of money. Hmmm. Perhaps you’re right. But in my experience of recent weeks, when people are talking like that they’re always talking about the Queen.’

  He was right, of course. Lord Harewood, though unmusical, was far from a fool. But was he right from a general worldly wisdom, or because rumours had reached his noble ears? And if they had, I doubted whether Mr Popper – from sheer fear – would be the one who had talked. That left Betty Ackroyd. But I discarded that thought immediately. I knew Betty: if she was sworn to silence she would be silent. It must be Popper’s damned jumpiness giving rise to rumours.

  The day that
the Queen’s defence began at the Palace of Westminster was in any case – I mean even without the event I am about to narrate – a day of tension and excitement. It became clear subsequently as the days of evidence proceeded, that the witnesses for the Queen’s probity and purity were every bit as unimpressive as the witnesses for her flagrant immorality had been – perhaps more so, for they were on occasion so awed by the majesty of their surroundings that they actually spoke the truth. ‘It is fortunate that the place never affects the Lords themselves like that,’ said Lord Hertford wittily. ‘Otherwise party government would become impossible.’ But on that first day of the defence no one knew the names or the quality of the witnesses, so everyone was more jumpy than ever.

  It was late in the afternoon, as the theatre was buzzing with rumours brought back from Westminster by Lord Hertford and others, when a particularly fine carriage drew up outside the Queen’s Theatre. It was, I learned later, one of the carriages of the Fitzroy Hotel, and it had been put at the disposal of one of the hotel’s guests completely free of charge by an enraptured hotel manager. Why are such gestures only made to beautiful women? If they were made to elderly, infirm gentlemen I should be relieved of the necessity of defaulting on payment. But to return to our muttons. The smart coachman leapt down and whipped quickly round to pull down the step and open the carriage door, standing so stiffly to attention that one might imagine the figure to emerge would be one of the royal dukes. But no such ill luck.

  She was beautiful in the manner of all beautiful German women – that is, more beautiful than any other nation’s beautiful women. She was fair, her hair luxuriant and immaculately coiffed; her skin was fair too, a creamy white, and her features were regular and charming. Her figure was in every way imposing – fuller than the English like, but in every way enticing. How did I know she was foreign, that she was German? I do not know, but I did. Perhaps it was like speaking through the air-waves to like. Perhaps it was just because she was not ordinary.

  ‘What has such a creature to do with Mr Popper?’ I said to Andrew Masters, the tenor, who was standing beside me.