‘We’ll do it in detail next time,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘Mark your copies if there are snags. I’ve not much faith in talk, anyway,’ he muttered in David’s direction.
‘Strong and silent,’ Cyril Barton offered.
‘This bloody fiddle.’ Wilkinson was vigorously tuning again. ‘Worse than a lute.’
‘Piano,’ Payne commanded, and they were away.
When they had completed the Beethoven, with very few breaks and a little discussion, Barton went downstairs to put the kettle on. Wilkinson practised an awkward passage as if the other two were not there.
‘How did it seem?’ Payne asked David.
‘Reasonably comfortable. Did I suit you?’
‘Excellent, for a first time.’
‘Am I making enough row?’
‘No, but you’ll come to it. When you know your part as well as the rest of us.’
Payne stood, stretching and yawning, crossed to the uncurtained window to stare out. Wilkinson concentrated on his violin bowing lightly, so that David was left, instrument alongside, to lounge in his chair. He felt he had not let them down, but recognized his faults clearly enough. Barton arrived with large steaming mugs and a tin of biscuits.
‘The only part I enjoy,’ Wilkinson said, shovelling in piled spoonfuls of sugar.
‘We hardly drink alcohol,’ Payne had returned. ‘God knows how we shall get on when Knighty comes. He can knock it back.’
‘You think he’ll have you out at the pub?’ David asked. The coffee had scalded his tongue.
‘I don’t think so.’ Barton, very quiet, very confident.
They inquired what David’s wife thought about his turning out three extra times a week, whether she had complained, and when he informed them about her American trip they seemed not to have heard of it. This surprised him. Hadn’t Anna Talbot mentioned it? Payne pursed his lips as if he ought to have known something. Wilkinson and Barton talked about proposed cuts in school music and both praised James, Anna’s husband, for his support, but the conversation was dull, made as if to ease Blackwall into their company, to show the newcomer they could talk in front of him, but at the same time suggesting they found his eavesdropping slightly threatening. No remarks were directed towards him, and they were all relieved to put down their mugs and begin on the Haydn, op. 17, no. 3.
‘I like this,’ Barton told David, beaming, before they began, ‘this is my style.’
Again they spoke little beyond curt, polite demands for repetitions of unsatisfactory passages. Once, in the slow movement, when Payne stopped them, the newcomer ventured to interfere.
‘What was wrong?’ David asked.
The rest looked up, Payne puzzled, Wilkinson mildly taken aback and Barton with approval.
‘My fingering,’ Payne answered.
‘It sounded marvellous.’
‘It felt uncomfortable.’
They lifted their instruments.
The rehearsal finished at half past ten. David, fagged out, could barely summon energy to push himself up from his seat.
‘Is it possible to start at seven o’clock on Thursday?’ Payne queried, uncertainly. Now they were all on their feet. Agreement.
‘Thanks very much, David.’ Barton smiled. ‘That was very good. You played that Haydn beautifully, really beautifully.’
David locked his case.
‘Thanks.’ Payne. ‘Mark up any tricky passages. Is there anything now that strikes you? Before we leave?’
‘No.’
‘That’s it, then. We don’t talk much, but if you can’t tell what the three of us want from our playing, we aren’t making much of a job of it. Quartet playing’s a bastard. I got an offer once when I was at college to join the Toledo. I should have accepted.’
‘The result is,’ Barton said, ‘we’re all being driven raving mad to make up for it.’
Wilkinson cadged a lift back and David was glad of his company.
‘Barton seems a nice chap,’ Blackwall suggested.
‘There are ten thousand ways a quartet can up-end itself,’ Wilkinson answered, ‘but the quickest and first and least obvious is to have a viola who’s no bloody use. We’re lucky in Cy.’
Just as Wilkinson was about to leave the car, David asked him, ‘Would you like to go professional?’
Wilkinson thumped back into his seat as though the question needed leisure and stillness to answer.
‘I’m a married man,’ he said, ‘with two kids. Fred and Cy, and Knighty for that matter, are bachelors. It makes me expendable.’ He scratched his beard. ‘Don’t get me wrong. They’d like to keep me if they could, but there’ll be no half-measures. Fred Payne’s determined to make it if he has to wreck the Atlantic Alliance to do it.’
‘And he’s good enough?’
‘You could see that for yourself, couldn’t you?’ He was up and out. ‘Thanks for the lift. No, I s’ll have my own back for Thursday. And I need it.’
David, wearied, did not leave his armchair until after midnight and then could not sleep. The ferocity of the practice jolted phrases into his head until he wished he had his instrument to hand so that he could exorcize them. He recalled snatches of conversation, the laconic, exact words with which they had asked for a repetition, Payne’s immediate command as he’d named the bar. Wilkinson’s rebuke. ‘You could see that for yourself, couldn’t you?’ He could see, if nothing else, that he had spent three hours in the company of his superiors, and this did not please. He did not hate them, but self-concern rankled so that inability to equal their technical standard seemed a moral fault.
He spent the whole of Wednesday evening on the music, as on solo parts. Not quite sure whether this made sense, he persevered, drove himself to be ready. Thursday’s rehearsal seemed less satisfactory than the first, more bitty, and once some argument from Wilkinson over a descending phrase marked crescendo for the lower instruments against a piano in the first violin. Nobody else could see what the man was getting at; he himself seemed uncertain.
‘We’ll do it again.’ Payne.
‘Better?’ when they had tried.
‘It doesn’t sound right.’
‘Outside parts crescendo earlier, piano earlier; inner, well you know. Again.’
They set to.
‘No,’ Wilkinson cried sharply.
David could see little wrong.
‘Same spot then. Again.’
They did the offending bars and stopped.
‘Well?’
‘Perhaps it’s me,’ Wilkinson admitted. ‘But it doesn’t sound right.’
‘Is it the balance?’
‘I don’t know what the hell it is. Let’s do it again and go on.’
That seemed typical of the evening’s work. The beautiful playing, and there was much, would be interrupted unreasonably, so that they repeated a passage, were forced apart into variation for variation’s sake. Perhaps this was what quartet work entailed, the practising and final discarding of unacceptable interpretations, but the whole lay fragmented, in meaningless pieces. At five to ten they called it a day, and Wilkinson immediately left.
‘How did you find that?’ Payne asked David. They sat downstairs.
‘I didn’t feel so comfortable.’
‘No. Walter had it on him tonight.’
‘Is he often like this?’
‘Well. It’s his wife. She doesn’t want him to turn to professional quartet playing. When he was in the BBC Symphony, she wasn’t happy until she had him out. I don’t blame her. She had full responsibility for the children, and he had to be away often. It’s a pity. He’s a marvellous player. He keeps me on my toes.’
‘Will he go with you?’ David asked.
‘Yes, I think he will.’
‘It’ll be a loss if he doesn’t,’ Cy Barton said. ‘It’s this awkwardness of his that makes us. He rubs us up the wrong way. That makes us better, because he’s such a good player. Not like Jon.’
‘He just annoyed us.’
&nb
sp; ‘He wasn’t anything but a good sight-reader,’ Cyril said. ‘You give us more after two rehearsals than he gave us after two hundred. I think that’s why Walter’s on edge. He thought this might put the evil day off.’
They laughed.
‘What’s his wife like?’ David asked.
‘We’re bachelors. She’s an attractive girl. Met her in the music library here. Like your wife. A singer. In the local choirs. Or was, till the family started. Trouble with Walter is that he thinks she hasn’t had the opportunities he has. And she hasn’t. He feels guilty. Walter’s what you’d call a good man. He bothers about being fair.’
‘And that will never do,’ Payne added.
‘Not in this game.’
8
MARY’S ONE LETTER in the next week said she had been unwell.
She did not write at length about her illness, just that she felt off colour, and took up the rest of the letter with a satirical outline of preparations for the first performance and sourly with the constantly changed proposals about the itinerary. Simple as the scenery was, it took some moving, as anyone in his right mind could have foreseen, and yet this college, that theatre was allowed to cry off performances or demand more or call for alterations. Getting the show on the road made lunatics of the most sensible; she had had one desperate day in bed away from it all. People had been most kind. They were to spend an extra three days in New York, she added in a PS, before they made for Boston and their next longest stay. Redvers Gage was now superb.
Her first performance took place on the same day as his, but he worked it out that the Trent’s concert would be finished by the time Semele began.
David consulted his mother, who had heard nothing from her daughter-in-law, but who had been in touch with their friends in New York. On Saturday the senior Blackwalls would listen to the quartet’s concert, would drive down at leisure to London on Sunday, stay the night with a cousin, fly to New York on Monday morning and attend performances on Tuesday and Thursday. A letter to this effect had been dispatched to Mary.
‘I hope you’re writing regularly,’ his mother warned.
‘I add a bit every day and send it off every third.’
‘It could be worse.’
‘The playing takes up such a time. I’ve started on the Shostakovich, no. 8, C minor. It’s tricky, especially as I’ve never seen it before. It’s for the third concert.’
‘Have you done it together yet?’
‘No. That’s part of the trouble. It doesn’t make sense to me.’
‘I’ve got a record.’
It would be reasonable to listen, even if the performance misled, but he felt bound to refuse, to be awkward, to do a Wilkinson and cite moral grounds, musical integrity. Joan laughed at him.
‘They’ll make you as bad as they are,’ she told him.
‘I’ve not far to go.’
When he asked what she thought about Mary’s illness, she refused to be dogmatic.
‘It could be a chill or something of the kind.’
‘You don’t think she’s fed up with it all?’
‘I don’t see why I should think that, but by a week on Monday evening we’ll be back with an eyewitness account.’
‘“How pleasant it is to have money”,’ he said, grudgingly.
‘I hope so.’
Kenneth Reeve stopped him in the corridor to inquire about Mary’s progress. Taken by surprise, David explained that the first performance had yet to take place.
‘Keep me informed,’ Reeve said. ‘My wife is always worrying me about it.’
‘That’s kind of her.’
‘It’s her nature.’ Reeve coughed drily and stalked quietly off, on his toes.
On the Saturday of the concert, David rose early, completed the weekend shopping by 9.30 and did an hour’s playing, not at the quartets, before coffee. He had decided to lunch out, and then make his way to Newark for their rehearsal at three o’clock. Without haste he decided on a walk in the park; the air stung crisp, small pockets of frozen, sooty snow piled in shadowed hollows; middle-aged women walking their dogs were muffled up to the eyebrows. He met no one he knew; such a morning ought to have exhilarated him, but though he walked smartly only children seemed cheerful among the black trees. The concert nagged at his nerves, but he could do nothing to settle himself; his breath came short and, he reminded himself gloomily as he emerged through the cast-iron gates into the main road, he had not once thought of Mary and Semele.
He chewed his way through a boring expensive steak and, deciding against alcohol or coffee, sipped mineral water. The meal was not enjoyable, but he comforted himself that he would not be hungry again that day. Back at home, he checked that he had spare strings, that his music was complete, that he had three bows packed. To fill in time, he rang his mother to make sure she knew the venue of the concert; she went there, it appeared, quite often. The hall was shabby, an ex-cinema, but magnificent for chamber music, and she was looking forward to the evening. She sounded cheerful and confident, unperturbed by the imminent flight to America, more concerned, he guessed, that he looked smart than that he played well.
‘We’ll see you in the interval or afterwards, I expect.’
He wished time would melt as he kicked around the house from room to room, finding nothing to occupy him.
At five minutes to three when he parked his car outside the Fine Arts Centre in Newark he found Cyril Barton stamping about, slapping his overcoat. The sun had gone; an east wind harried every corner. Cyril tapped his window, slipped in alongside.
‘I hope it’s warm in there,’ David began.
‘That’s one thing about this place. They do know what they’re about.’
‘What was it? A cinema?’
‘Combined cinema-theatre. The stage is still there, though we shan’t use it. But it’s been an arts centre for ten years, more, now. It’s a nice size, good high ceiling and no draughty windows. It’s big enough for a small orchestral concert. Haven’t you ever played there with the Symphonia?’
Payne and Wilkinson had arrived in the same car and seemed in no hurry to disembark. A hatless man, with beard and glasses, in a navy anorak, waved hard from the small door above six brick steps and an iron rail.
‘Oh, Harry’s here,’ Barton said. ‘We can get the kit out.’
Inside in a yellow corridor, streakily discoloured, dampish, they were led into a room with four canvas chairs, two deal trestle tables and a hat rack. Harry led them, then Wilkinson, David, Barton, Payne last.
‘By God, it’s cold,’ Wilkinson said.
‘Not in here.’ Harry filled a pipe, with fingers too large for the task, but made no attempt to light it, after he had shaken hands with David. ‘We’ve got a full house for you tonight.’
‘Why’s that?’ Wilkinson again.
‘The programme for one thing. And a bit of cooperation between two music societies. For once.’
The hall was large, barn-bare, its walls a faded orange decorated with swirls and knobs of lifted plaster. The stage stood curtainless and in front of it a raised platform, four rostra with chairs and a shaded lamp, which Harry immediately tested out.
‘No trouble seeing with that,’ he said, pulling at the switch. He and Payne wandered towards the auditorium, which sloped upwards. The cinema seats had been removed, replaced by modern metallic chairs. The two men perched with their backs to the others, heads down in earnest consultation.
‘Good place to play in,’ Barton told David.
‘It’s warm.’
‘It’s bloody ugly, but the sound’s superb – really bounces off the walls.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Pure chance. It always seemed too loud and too blurred for me in the old picture palaces. Let’s go and hang our glad rags up. Fred’ll be gassing to Harry for twenty minutes.’
‘Who’s Harry?’ David asked once they were outside in the corridors.
‘Harry Owen. A solicitor. President of this place. Runs culture, but
he keeps the books and turns the heating on. I don’t know whether he likes music or just dragooning his fellow citizens. Wouldn’t be the only one.’ He let David into the changing room, closed the door behind him. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. There’s an agent coming to listen. Fred said not to say anything to you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Not fair on you. We argued. He said you’d give your best whether you knew or not, but it might knock you off your cool, that it was our concern, not yours.’
‘I don’t know that I like that.’
‘Don’t say anything. You’ve not heard a word.’ Barton laughed, open and sunny, losing something of his diffidence, as he stroked his suit straight on its hangar. ‘We’re divided as it is. Wilko’s got this wife, and I’m too comfortable. We shall play well, in spite.’ He now picked up a top programme from a pile, perused it. ‘At least they’ve spelt us properly.’ He handed it over. ‘There you are, in print.’
Looking round this stripped place, David wondered how Mary felt at 10.30 in the morning, in the bright American snow. A depression nagged, because he could do nothing for her, she for him. He wanted to risk a prayer, dared not for self-scorn.
‘Well, let’s get back,’ Barton warned, ‘before Fred flogs your cello.’
‘How long shall we practise?’
‘Dunno. That’s one thing Fred won’t make up his mind about. He’s a marvellous leader, but he can’t be sure whether we take the edge off things scratching away all afternoon. And you worry him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re new. If you were Rostropovich he’d be wondering. But it makes him play better. You wait till you hear him tonight. He’s like an angel.’
‘You terrify me,’ David said, only half laughing.
‘Wait till you catch Wilko doing his yoga.’
Wilkinson was fiddling hard, bow elbow energetic, whiskers bristling, but Payne turned from Harry Owen, they both stood watching the second violin, immediately the others entered.
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