‘I don’t really know, David. I wish she hadn’t said anything. I was quite settled yesterday, and enjoying the chance to sing the Purcell, and now. I don’t want to change.’
‘But you want to try it.’
She shook her head. Her bewilderment touched him, more deeply than his own anxiety, his self-interest. He held out his hand and she took it; the contact of flesh on flesh meant nothing in that it did not allay foreboding. They sat there, hand in hand, as if in a charade, parading the action of love to themselves, ingraining the habit.
‘I wonder why she rang up just this morning,’ Mary asked. She could not, he thought, let it go.
‘She wanted to hear you first.’
‘Rehearsals. We’ve been at it for weeks.’
‘In performance. And she’d have her friends here, and they’d perhaps say something. There’ll be pieces in the Sundays, I tell you. She doesn’t sing, even in a small concern like this, unnoticed. Her agents will have notified everybody.’
‘I’m surprised,’ she said, ‘that she’s been allowed to sing. She must be under contract to half the operatic managements in the world.’
He shrugged. ‘Three nights. In an out-of-the-way place. Professional help to be hired. I wonder she did it at all. She could have given an equivalent to the profit they’ll make and not notice it. Don’t know. Can’t fathom her.’
‘She’s a marvellous voice, hasn’t she?’
‘Sure. Even at half throttle. And personality.’ He laughed, dropping her hand. ‘She must think highly of you. There’s no need for her to make moves on your behalf, is there? You must have impressed. Her or somebody else.’ He laughed again, a chuckle in his throat, poor acting. ‘She’s not got the reputation of a wrecker, has she?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘She wouldn’t want to do you and me one in the eye, split us apart, just out of mischief, would she?’
‘Why would she want that?’ Mary asked.
‘Mischief, I suggested, or to get her own back on Edward. It is just possible, my sweet, that she envies you, with your little house and your little schoolteacher . . .’
She stared, then frowned before her face cleared. He was making fun of her.
‘Let’s go to bed.’ He put his hand out again. She took it, but made a revolver with her other, pointing it at him.
3
THE DRESSING ROOMS, formerly servants’ quarters, for Dido and Aeneas were scattered; the men replaced jeans and pullovers by dinner jackets or sailors’ kilts, courtly togas, hunting brown and green in a disused kitchen, while the ladies prepared themselves in bedrooms along a corridor two storeys above the hall itself. Elizabeth Falconer changed from twentieth-century flamboyance to a more restrained royal purple or white in some distant chamber, but already messages had been dispatched to the lower orders that she was displeased with Friday’s performance. The conductor, an up-and-coming young man from Covent Garden, had been sent for during the day, when he had been handed a typed list of errors to be set right. He could not disagree, la Falconer had her musical wits about her, but with an amateur chorus, however good, a partly amateur orchestra, an unsuitable cramped stage, inadequate lighting, he hardly expected otherwise.
He ventured to say as much.
Elizabeth Falconer did not argue.
‘Mr Silver,’ she said. ‘It will be right this evening.’
‘There are no . . . I can’t call another rehearsal.’
‘You can let them know what you think. The performance was not a patch on Wednesday’s.’
‘With amateurs . . .’
‘You are not an amateur. I may say with confidence that I am not an amateur.’
His attempts at argument were met with direct orders. ‘It will be better tonight. As musical director it is your duty to see to it.’
She had influence, he knew. Her husband, Sir Edward Brook-Fane, escorting him from the presence, offered no comfort.
‘Why’s she so upset?’ the conductor had asked.
‘She has her standards.’
‘That performance was no better and no worse than I expected. Given the . . .’
‘Make it known to your people.’ Sir Edward seemed almost biblical conveying his wife’s tablets of stone.
‘And have them flustered?’
Sir Edward opened a door, closed it behind the departing visitor and said not a word more.
Leonard Silver was no fool; he knew the value of a hate figure, and Elizabeth Falconer would do. He gathered male chorus with female and made the criticisms he would in any case have levelled, but associating them with the prima’s anger. The orchestra he dealt with differently in that most of the violins were professionals, and his imports, so that his strictures were closely technical, and noted. To the other principals he offered a suggestion or two, mentioned la Falconer’s dissatisfaction, and left them to it; he went down to his cubbyhole and cigarettes, congratulating himself on his diplomacy. A shrewd young man, he’d make his way in the world.
The performance began on time, again it was rumoured at Elizabeth Falconer’s ukase. The hall was uncomfortably crowded, but the heat or hardness of chairs or lack of legroom or thoughts of the cost of tickets transformed the audience, who keenly attended, lifted performers, made themselves worthy of Purcell. These middle-class lay figures swooned with shy love, vigorously hunted, did not quite hiss the witches but frowned a displeasure across their ready faces, reeled with the boozy sailors, and in finality at Dido’s lament were locked forward in their seats, held, mastered as Falconer’s mellow pain-racked voice took on the steadiness of the falling ground bass, moved against it, over the bar lines in a frozen ecstasy of grief, that dissipated high living, gorgeous array and evening wear, unhurriedly but with immediacy spoke the sorrow that sooner or later cuts all humanity to the bare bone.
David Blackwall in the orchestral enclosure watched his colleagues; their faces did not reflect the rapt grief of stage or audience, but they were intent, responsive to the end of Silver’s baton, which itself held emotion in check, in exact obedience to that golden plea of voice. ‘Remember me, but, ah, forget my fate.’ Purcell’s heavenly invention soared, against logic, against expectation with the, the complacency of achieved supremacy. Liz Falconer seemed outside, unlike herself; nothing of pride intervened; she became faultless, the channel of Purcell’s genius, both plangent and restrained, in a laceration of grief that grew keener because of the order by which hurts were expressed. ‘When I am laid in earth.’ She begged them to forget her fate, the rejection of love, the lover’s flight, but to recall her, her goodness or generosity to them in music that wrote her death across the heated air of the hall and into the spirits of a cramped and food-plumped audience.
The strings completed the chacony; the chorus gathered in a half-circle to sing their farewell in restraint, scattering roses on her and all tombs before the orchestra took on the repeat without voices as the lights were dimmed, the rosy twilight became bleaker, the statuesque figures held in stonily cold light for a time, faded, were visible, disappeared, were gone with her to the shades on the final bare fifth as the curtain fell.
The audience, released, cheered, stood, stamped, shouted, hardly aware of themselves, distracted by what they had heard, by each other. They sweated as they clapped. Someone forgot himself so far as to let rip a piercing yobbo’s street whistle as the diva bowed low, taking with her Aeneas and Belinda, dominating witches and courtiers, dwarfing the Carthaginian pillars, the temples, the blue and cloudless North African sky. Silver, next to them, modestly incongruous in evening dress, beamed, stood his orchestra up; Elizabeth Falconer led their applause. There was no doubt of the triumph, either side of the footlights.
Word was given that the cast, the orchestral players, the backstage crews were to meet some chosen cognoscenti or affluent backers for a self-congratulatory glass of wine and sandwich in the dining room.
Sir Edward Brook-Fane, in evening
dress with frilled shirt front, his few faded hairs exactly in place, appeared amongst the orchestra.
‘Elizabeth would like to see you,’ he said to David Blackwall.
‘When?’
‘Now.’
His cello was packed away and locked; his white shirt was open at the throat over a woolly pullover, but he shrugged and followed the baronet up deeply red-carpeted stairs.
‘Is your wife pleased?’ David asked, trailing behind.
‘You could say so.’ Sir Edward’s voice brayed; he was the descendant of squires and generals who bawled over hunting fields and barrack squares, of admirals blasting from the quarter deck. He stooped slightly, even decorously from his six feet five, as he ascended, and his hands and shoes moved prominently. He rapped at a door. A distant voice asked his business. He announced himself.
In the brilliantly lighted room a grey-haired woman dealt with Dido’s dresses, smoothing them, spreading tissue, returning them to a wicker basket. She left that immediately the men entered the room and attacked a wig with a brush, motioning towards a closed door with her head.
‘David Blackwall, darling,’ Sir Edward howled. The woman pushed past him, still at work on the wig.
The inner door opened an inch or two.
‘Sit him down, Thora.’ The imperious Dido in prose. ‘Go and make yourself pleasant, darling.’
‘Anything you want?’
‘A quarter of an hour. I’ll be with you.’
Sir Edward pointed David to a chair, and wrapping the rags of authority about him, nodding at Thora as if giving some significant signal, left them to it. The grey-haired dresser chased about her chores, with speed, deftly, as Blackwall was left to watch her. She said nothing to him, hummed and now and then whispered some caution to herself or the costumes she tidied away.
The door of the inner room was opened, and the diva appeared, in a man’s silken dressing gown. She seated herself immediately at a mirror and consulted her features, touching eyes or cheekbones with her fingers as if she needed further evidence of her obvious and gigantic beauty.
‘I’m glad you’re here.’
She did something to her mouth which necessitated the champing of teeth and thus inauspiciously grimacing spoke her sentence. He muttered a reply, but was forced to wait while she made up, however slightly, eyes and face, a process which required the withdrawal of her magnificent head a metre back from the mirror and then, as she leaned forward, returning it to within six inches. The operation, though intense, was silent and occupied five minutes, which seemed interminable.
‘You know why I’ve asked you to come?’ She spoke at last not to him but to the looking glass.
‘I can guess.’
Elizabeth Falconer suddenly stood, swept off her golden dressing gown, dropping it on to the chair she had left. She was not naked, she wore white bra and panties, but the effect was almost as startling as nudity. Her shoulders, her limbs were munificently large, marvellously shapely, shining. The brassière was a considerable construction, the word ‘outworks’ suggested itself, to control the fullness of her breasts, lifting them, the cleft reduced, no gorge now, no deep valley, but a controlled and shapely division. She stretched her arms to reveal the shaven armpits and her head was perfectly pitched, balanced on the pillared length and strength of her neck. The whole body matched, supported the grandiloquence of features under her short curls. The cheekbones were high, mounts of Venus, her eyes almond-shaped and large with thin brows, the mouth capacious and full-lipped, nostrils haughty under an imperious nose. She smiled, perhaps noticing his expression, and her teeth were perfection, larger than life, on her scale.
Thora silently handed her a pair of tights which she drew on, sitting again for seconds on the dressing gown.
‘It’s about Mary,’ she said, taking a white shift to cover herself except for head, high chest and the naked gleaming power of her arms. ‘She’s spoken to you?’
Thora passed her mistress a dress, multicoloured, a kaleidoscope of dazzling but matching lozenges which flowed, spun, flashed silkily even when she belted it at her shapely waist. She lifted her feet high, he noticed, athletically, to ease on her shoes; high-heeled, these shone, dwarfed.
‘Yes.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘I want to know what’s in it for her.’
‘Of course. That’s sensible. But if that side were right, how would you feel?’
‘I should want her to take her chance.’
‘Want?’
‘That’s what I said.’
Elizabeth Falconer was seated again in front of her mirror, inspecting her flawless features, testing the skin with long, scarlet nails.
‘You’re angry with me, aren’t you?’
Her voice had nothing of theatrical power, was delivered with a sweet clarity at the glass, modestly, like a nervous swimmer dipping a toe into cold water.
‘No. Not really.’
‘But I don’t realize what I’m doing?’
‘Yes. Something like that. It’s a temptation to Mary; you’d call it a challenge. If it comes to nothing, or she doesn’t make a success of it, she’ll be in trouble.’
‘And if she does, there’s danger there?’ She looked at him, the great eyes open wide, devouring him. ‘For you? Your marriage?’
He did not reply.
‘But,’ steadily, ‘you are still willing to let her go.’
‘I don’t think I could stop her. But certainly when she takes off from Heathrow she won’t see the smoke from my funeral pyre. No.’
She rose; Thora, prepared for the movement, draped a shawl over her shoulders. Elizabeth looked now into distance.
‘Do you know I never connected the two things. I am stupid. But it’s changed round. She’s off to found an empire, and he’s left behind.’ She conveyed her enormous pleasure at the comparison with these straightforward sentences. As she made her way towards the door she put out her left hand, blind, to lay on Thora’s wrist denoting thanks. The gesture was operatic and utterly successful. The dresser stood at transformed attention. Blackwall himself dashed doorwards to open it, to expedite the progress, to offer her to the world.
As they descended the stairs she turned her head back to him.
‘I just wanted to speak to you,’ she said. ‘To hear what you felt. There’s no hurry for a week or two, but after that she’ll have to commit herself one way or the other. Will she talk to your father about it? Edward says he’s got his head screwed on the right way.’
‘It’s a bit outside his orbit. But they get on well, and she can have a word with him.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Will she make it, do you think?’ he asked desperately.
‘Nobody can say that. It doesn’t depend entirely on talent. Luck or opportunity are important. I don’t think she’ll ever be top of the operatic tree, because her voice isn’t big enough for one thing, but I was impressed by her when she was a student, she shaped well with Omnium in Germany, and learned. She’s been very good in these last,’ a hand flew out, ‘performances,’ and then a sudden stop, a turn so that the full-frontal power of the woman, perfume, shape, colour, mien slapped him down. ‘I did think, good as she was, that she hadn’t been doing enough practice. It’s now or never.’ She said the last quietly, sedately, almost as if apologizing or asking him to question the judgement. ‘She has a voice and a musicianship and a personality strong enough to make her a career in singing. But it won’t wait.’ Now she swept on. ‘It won’t wait for ever.’
‘You’re sure you can get her work in America?’
‘As sure as one can be at this distance in space and time. My agent and hers will put it together.’
‘Why do you do it?’
‘There are some people too valuable to be lost.’ She had no hesitation or difficulty with the answer. ‘Even minor characters.’
These last sentences were spoken as she stood back to let him open a door on to a wide, picture-hung corridor
; it was as though one had stepped from the servants’ humdrum to the lordly. There was about this place an aristocratic darkness; the stairs they had descended though substantial might have been, in suitable reduction, found in a suburban house, with bright bourgeois lights, a comforting carpet. Now the pair walked, voices clashed at a distance, amongst ancestors, walls meant for arras, a place where blood had stained the floor. Immediately he had seen her through the pair of doors, caught out in that he had not expected the second much heavier barrier, they were joined by people who must have been waiting for them. These figures, men, they had the appearance of footmen, inclined heads, signalled silently as if la Falconer might suddenly divagate from the thirty yards’ straight, scuttle into side rooms.
They emerged into brightness through high doors into a brilliance of chandeliers, tables, chattering people all of whom ceased talking, lifted heads to greet her coming. A footman appeared with a tray of wine; she paid no attention. Her husband brought the correct offering, a tumbler of iced water, was received smilingly, and allowed a few seconds’ private consultation before a crowd knotted round her.
David Blackwall looked for Mary, could not find her.
A yard or so away some young man with rimless glasses and long thin hair was quizzing Leonard Silver, now in a denim suit ready for his drive back to London. Blackwall listened, could not make out what they were saying because both talked fast, one interrupting the other, yoked in running duet. He heard ‘Janáček’ and wondered; ‘Ligeti, Penderecki’ and was satisfied. The conversation grew animated and softer, hands pointed. Suddenly he noticed that Silver was watching him, coldly, forgetting the companion, the exchange; the careful intensity of the stare seemed unwarranted, as if he had been a solicitor about to announce large but uncertain legacies.
He stared back, then nodded companionably, demotically. Silver disregarded the overture, as if the power of his stare brought no result, as if he looked because he could not see. Blackwall, experimenting, raised his glass. Nothing came of the gesture.
‘Where’s Mary?’
Now he was caught out, the voice at his back jolting him.
Valley of Decision Page 3