‘Away from my husband.’
‘If you get into the big league you’ll be able to afford to tote him around with you, and get tax-relief on him as your consultant for historical research.’
Mary enjoyed the lunch because she realized that Wentmeyer saw advantage in his contact with the Falconer agents and the American end; he’d take something out of this for himself in any case, but it would do him no harm if she made a good showing. They laughed; he was excellent company; the wine calmed her trepidation and he covered his lack of information by bursts of praise.
‘You’ve actually sung with Falconer,’ he said, ‘and so well that she’s recommending you about the world. There won’t be too many of them in that position.’
‘If not her, somebody else.’
‘There aren’t too many Falconers, I’ll tell you. And they don’t fall over themselves to give a lift up to rivals.’
‘You think over what you’ve just said,’ Mary answered him. ‘She only praises those who are no good, and won’t stand in her way.’
‘You won’t be a Falconer. Ever, ever.’ He laughed, his small beard flashing, his hair bouncing about his ears. ‘And to the best of my knowledge you’re the only one she’s done anything for. Or taken the initiative over. “Oh, Mary, this London’s a wonderful sight”.’
She returned in euphoria, but the mood changed swiftly, darkly enough.
‘I don’t want to go, David,’ she wailed, clinging.
‘You do.’
‘It’s ridiculous. I’ve a job and a home and a husband I love. When I get over there I’ll make a hash of it, and come back with my tail between my legs. I’m a fool, David. Don’t let me go.’
He hugged her.
‘If I stopped you from going,’ he told her in her calmer moments, ‘you’d never forgive me.’
She eyed him then.
‘Sometimes you’re a wise man,’ she said.
‘Yes, but not often.’
They laughed, embraced, with more than a month to go.
Mary worked hard at voice production and her study of the operas. Twice a week they had dinner with the senior Blackwalls so she could practise for an hour or two with Joan as accompanist. The men were not allowed to listen.
‘Go and puff your cigars,’ she ordered them. Neither man smoked. ‘This is work in progress, not fit to be heard.’
‘I’d listen to you gargling,’ Horace told her.
She fell into a tête-à-tête with her father-in-law quite often, at work and at the weekends. He supported her powerfully.
‘I shouldn’t want you to go,’ he said. ‘Splitting up the partners of a new marriage is dangerous, but it has to be done in my sort of world. I know that. Neither shall I see much of you myself, and we shall miss you. Joan and I really like you.’
The voice ground out its sentences, impressing her.
At Christmas the departure seemed close enough to warrant a fervid gaiety in the festivities. David played in a concert or two, conducted a makeshift Messiah, and the pair attended parties, where she deliberately stayed sober.
‘I’m going to drive you back,’ she told her husband, who had drunk sufficiently to stroke her buttocks in public. She did not care; she needed all the reassurance she could find. ‘I didn’t know it would knock me about like this,’ she would confess, ‘or I wouldn’t have taken it on.’
‘You’ll be as right as rain once you’re there.’
‘And you?’
‘I shall have to grin and abide.’
‘Does that appeal then?’
‘It does not.’
‘Where’s your puritan ethic?’ she mocked.
Her own unease was demonstrated by her complaints about the lessons with Peter Reddaway.
‘He’s an egomaniac,’ she told her husband. ‘Everlastingly demonstrating what he can do. I hate wasting the whole of a Saturday going to London just to hear him boast. I learn as much from your mother in ten minutes as I do from my hour with him.’
‘Give it up, then.’
‘I may need him later. And it does keep me singing.’
‘Joan would do that.’
‘I know. But he’s the outside world. I pit my arrogance against his. I’ve got to learn to be the sort of bighead he is.’
‘Oh, dear.’
David dreaded the tension in his wife’s lips, the dark round her eyes.
No word came from the agent; whenever they rang he’d heard nothing, not even the place to which she had to report for rehearsals.
‘Really,’ Mary argued, ‘they must know by now.’
‘I’m not sure about that. This is the initial shot at a one-off, experimental affair, and though I guess that the first few ports of call are fixed, in fact, I’m certain they are, the venue for the preliminary rehearsals will be a matter for negotiation. They’ll rehearse in some school hall or barn or something.’
‘You make it sound very attractive, I must say.’
‘This is something out of the ordinary run of things.’
‘So I shall be living in a tent?’
‘Oh, no. But they’ll be collecting their wits. Honestly. There’ll be a fortnight’s intensive chaos after which you’ll be fit to sing at Bayreuth. This boy Gage is terror, they tell me, but he won’t mind if you rehearse in the street.’
‘Find something out, will you?’
‘I’ll ring my New York end and instigate inquiries.’ His jokey choice and stress of words did nothing to allay anxiety, any more than the blank silence which followed.
A week before her departure she sang Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben at a charity gathering with Joan Blackwall as her accompanist. This had been half-arranged for six months, then seemingly forgotten and revived just before Christmas. Mary complained bitterly, but she knew the songs well enough; David remembered her singing them at the Royal College, and she had looked them through carefully enough once this performance had been mooted.
Joan, out of character, was uncertain even of the place at which they were to appear.
‘This is the story of my life,’ Mary said in public, laughing. ‘Plenty to sing, but no idea where,’ and to David, ‘I can’t understand your mother. She must be off her head.’ He understood the desperation of the statement.
The chosen venue turned out to be an Edwardian mansion in the park, the town house of a business magnate. The event was for cancer research; Mary sang and a violinist played a Tartini sonata. For the rest, drinks were served, raffle tickets and donated gifts sold, one or two competitive paper games were played and for this people paid good money, and promised more. The uncertainty about this happening was due to an enormous sale of expensive tickets by an energetic couple who had access to radio and newspaper publicity, and who found that they could not cram in the expected crowd and had to look at short notice for a larger space. They were never despondent, because they knew exactly what it was that they were after: a huge private house, preferably owned by somebody of note. Through friends they worked on Sir Harold Fitch, the managing director of a pharmaceutical complex, who opened his grandee’s palace, Kenilworth, for the evening.
David bought a ticket, five pounds for admission only and the opportunity to purchase expensive alcohol. A television announcer auctioned toys, and then pretty trinkets. People talked at the tops of their voices, drank and seemed pleased with themselves. Many of the men wore evening dress as they wandered about the four large reception rooms and the foyer at their disposal; wives sounded as satisfied, as flashbulbs registered promised appearances in future issues of the local snob magazines if not the national. Nothing happened quickly; it took an age to dragoon an audience into the right place for the fiddler, and even as he played the voices at bars in the distance interrupted his powerful flow.
Mary did not sing until after ten o’clock; David thought that by that time the drink-happy audience would never assemble itself, but by 10.10 the concert hall was packed, more standing than sitting as the television personality sile
nced all clamour, David admired the man’s iron charm, to announce Miss Mary Stiles, who next week was to make her American debut in opera, and whom they were lucky to have persuaded here tonight, but who out of her magnificently large generosity had put aside other commitments to sing these eight songs which he would paraphrase. They must offer her a fit welcome. They did. And her accompanist, Miss Joan Blake, formerly of the Royal Academy of Music, London. The announcer straightened his face.
Mary’s entrance stunned her husband, though earlier he had watched her dress.
She had chosen white, which she wore with stately beauty, enhanced by the pallor of her face, the dark short shining curls. As she bowed, she smiled diffidently, but to them all, on the rows of chairs or behind a pillar, glass in hand. Her mother-in-law, trailing her, looked what she was, a well-to-do provincial lady in her best dress, who had been wrongly convinced by some back-street coiffeuse that a confection of grey waves would add to her attraction. Her turn would come, at least for the few listening to Schumann rather than Mary, when her fingers touched the keyboard.
In the earlier songs Mary Blackwall stood radiantly, her voice vivid with delighted love, the freshness of attraction, the brilliancy. The practice of the last weeks had provided power, and Schumann’s melody compelled the audience, enlivening bodies to the fingertips, setting them on the edge of expectation in ‘Er, der Herrlichste von allen’. The room, jammed tight, with heads at all angles, the colours of dresses clashing or blending with the darkness of men’s suits or the blackness of tall windows, seethed with excitement, David thought, so that people lost themselves in the genius of new love, marriage, childbirth and finally in the sustained sorrow of death. He said as much to his father later, and the old man nodded, at this mystery, life’s passing, its bright fixing by this young man under womanly guise and voice, but David noted that as the audience walked out they spoke of gin, raffle tickets, chiropodists. That perhaps did not matter, he decided, in that for some minutes ordinary people had been allowed to climb, levitate above everyday concerns.
Mary herself, swamped with congratulation, surrounded by admirers, had lost the supple beauty she commanded on stage, had replaced it by a stiller, more composed version. She shook hands, said the right thing, charmed but stood away. For the first time she convinced her husband that her success in America was assured, that she had the social strengths to complement the musical. This sudden confidence warmed him, stiffened him, made it clear that he had done right in encouraging her to go. And yet in this paradigm he barely recognized the wife he had married.
‘Are you tired?’ he asked. ‘Do you want to go home?’ He had finally got near enough to speak.
‘No, not yet.’
She enjoyed every second of her triumph, grew larger with it, picturesque.
‘Well, what do you think of that, then?’ Horace Blackwall had taken his son aside.
‘She sang beautifully. She really did. She’s a different woman from what she was three months ago.’
‘Oh? How?’
‘Her voice has come on since she started practising Dido. I didn’t think it possible. The change is extraordinary.’
‘You said “a different woman”.’
‘That’s right. It, musical enlargement, can’t help altering the personality.’
‘So if she becomes a big star . . .?’
‘I don’t think that’s possible. She’ll never have Liz Falconer’s tremendous vocal equipment. Or, at least, I don’t think so. She’ll improve, but not in that . . .’
‘You’re not sure, are you?’ Horace snapped his false teeth together.
‘Tolerably.’
‘Tolerably.’ Horace mocked his intonation. ‘Are you frightened she will?’
‘Not frightened, no.’ He answered the fool according to his folly. ‘I hardly consider that. I don’t like the idea of her leaving me.’
‘I see.’
His father patted his shoulder in comfort, an awkward, dry movement, though David, once he was able to dissociate it from the dark-coated stick figure, saw it for what it was, and felt warmed.
‘Joan played absolutely beautifully,’ he said in return.
‘Yes.’ Horace brushed his chin. ‘She could have made her way as a professional.’
‘Did she want to?’
‘I don’t know. She played a great deal after we were married, in good amateur circles. At least until you were born. Even then she kept her practice up.’
‘Do you think . . .?’
‘Go on.’ Horace rebuked his son’s hesitation. Truth bettered tact in his view.
‘Has she regretted it?’
‘I’d think so. Sometimes. She doesn’t say much. She’s a remarkable woman, your mother. There’ll be days when she’s sorry she didn’t take her chance. Just as she might have envied those with stable family lives and comfort if she’d been flitting about the world. Nobody’s ever satisfied.’
‘And has Mary’s trip opened it up again?’ David pursued.
‘It hasn’t crossed my mind, but then I’m a selfish devil, as well you know.’
Joan Blackwall crossed towards them.
‘Now, then, you two.’ She smiled, lifted out of herself by the occasion, younger than her years. ‘What are you so serious about?’
‘David’s wondering if you ever regret not having a professional career in music.’
A stab of anger reddened the son’s face. Joan pursed her lips, lifted her eyes to a large Victorian painting of The Eve of the Flood. The sky stretched blood-streaked as an illustration in a textbook of anatomy over a diminutive ark and Noah’s dwarfed family. She seemed faintly amused.
‘You played marvellously well tonight,’ David said.
‘We’ve done quite a bit together these last few weeks. It helps.’
‘You have the hands,’ he answered.
‘Thanks.’ Now she touched him, but more lightly than her husband, more prosaically, as if she were about to straighten his jacket. ‘I enjoyed it. She really has come on. I have to open up to keep with her.’ She had returned to her scrutiny of Linnell’s liverish clouds. ‘She was superb.’ An ecstatic whisper now changed to mundane power. ‘This other thing. Because Mary’s going to America, you think . . .? You think . . .?’ Another trailing away as if sense could not be exactly conveyed or attempted.
‘He wonders,’ Horace’s voice croaked, ‘if it’s made you regret you never took your chance.’
She considered that, much at ease.
‘No. Not really. A professional life’s awful. You know that, David. All the air travel and hotel rooms and being pleasant to the world. And that’s when you’re outstandingly good. Otherwise you’re sitting at home fretting yourself to death that no engagements are coming your way. No. I did the best thing by letting your father make the money.’
Her son looked over to where a group of men surrounded his wife, whose face seemed alight.
‘But you played like an angel,’ David said.
‘There’ll be five or six hundred people in this country who’d do it as well given the practice I had. Oh, I did it respectably, I grant you. But I’m in no way unique.’
‘I married an honest woman,’ Horace said.
‘Is that good?’
‘I do think he’s beginning to learn,’ Joan gibed.
‘But what?’ Horace.
They all laughed, insecurely, but joined the social round, chattered until the early hours, imagining they enjoyed themselves.
5
THE DAY BEFORE Mary left for America David met Anna Talbot in the street. He was returning from school, on foot, because his wife had borrowed the car.
‘Hello. You’re in a hurry,’ she greeted him.
‘It’s cold, dawdling about. Besides, I want my tea.’
‘Husbands.’ She grimaced. ‘When’s Mary due to go? Can’t be too long now?’
He was surprised, again, that friends, who had been told often enough, still could not remember this date. To them its in
terest was peripheral. It was like reading of the death of an acquaintance in the newspaper: what stopped the heart for one was for another an item of casual conversation.
Now he told Anna.
‘God,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t be hanging about the streets talking to me. Are you going down with her?’
‘Yes.’
‘The school’s given you the day off, have they? Good for them.’
That tore his breath for him when he remembered how he’d had to ask Kenneth Reeve, the head, for the time off.
Reeve had frowned, tapped his desk, picked up a packet of cigarettes and put it down.
‘Well. I can’t, er, can’t, er . . .’ The man sat locked in some trance, will-less, aphasic.
‘It’s Wednesday,’ David said. ‘I can easily organize my absence from games. In the morning I’ve two sixth forms and a string group. I’ll set work. They’ll get on.’
‘Yes. I’m sure.’
‘So?’ One felt always that one pushed this distinguished and silver-haired figurehead into a position he hated to occupy.
‘You see, it’s an inconvenient time of the year. January. There are always people absent with colds and flu. Classes, junior classes, have to be minded.’
‘I can’t have it, you mean?’ Anger, reddening cheeks.
‘I can’t give it to you. The governing body would have to countenance the decision, and they have been known to be awkward. No. Take the day off. Make what arrangements you will about your commitments here, I think I can trust you, and then have, oh, a convenient bronchial catarrh.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You did not hear me say anything.’ Reeve fiddled again with the golden cigarette packet, twisting it in his fingers with extraordinary dexterity. ‘What was it your wife was going to sing? Opera?’ The headmaster frowned again, willing recalcitrant fact from his memory, acting it out like a schoolboy on the front desk pleasing his masters with assumed puzzlement.
David offered a few sentences of explanation to which Reeve gave the appearance of listening keenly, as if to catch the speaker out. Though there was probably nothing in the attitude, David knew that he would leave the room feeling not only that he had been judged and found wanting but that he owed the headmaster a favour. None of the staff liked Reeve, but then the man did not look for warmth from his subordinates.
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