‘How old’s this paragon?’ David asked.
‘Thirties.’
‘And he’s impressive.’
‘He’s a genius.’ No mistake. Joan described the dark velvet jacket, the subfusc trousers, boots, the sober cravat, the pale, dry skin, his thinning black curls brushed and flattened but not quite covering a colourless pate, the high cold forehead over the violet eyes, the mouth adrift with new truths.
‘What’s Mary say about him?’
‘Didn’t take to him at first. He smokes. But he was always kind to her, she thought, but quiet, not assertive enough. He was making his mind up, she thinks, deciding how her qualities could be employed, or changed. But once he’d decided and rehearsals started, he assaulted the cast. He’s frightening. His standards are sky-high. He’d go raving wild at the conductor, and he’s no nonentity, over a few bars of introduction.’
‘Didn’t this put them at loggerheads?’
‘Fenster crumbled’, she said. ‘He’d met his match. Red can be satanic. And yet he speaks so quietly. He’s striking to look at, well, at second glance, but he doesn’t rail. But if once you get across some principle, he’s a tiger. His face sets.’
Joan attempted to explain, not successfully, why the opera gripped with dramatic power. It was as if the essence of Handel’s music had been transfused into formalized action so that the one sharpened, deepened the other. The listener was embroiled, musically. The original code had been broken, or employed contemporaneously for the first time, shatteringly. Yes, they decorated repeats. No, they did not use authentic instruments or pitch, but Fenster obviously had studied eighteenth-century techniques.
While his wife enthused, Horace sat with pinched lips, intervening once in the half-hour to ask for more coffee. He did not support her account, and his prim mouth suggested reservations.
‘And Mary herself?’ David asked. ‘How did she seem?’ His mother had already told him that the girl said she was well.
‘Ah, that’s it,’ Horace snapped.
David jerked his head; the unexpected remark struck abruptly for all its dryness. His father’s lips were wet, red, his mouth slightly open under the bristle of moustache. Silence met, spoilt the tick of the coffee-heater, the creak of woodwork, a sniffle of draught; three human beings sat motionless, the mother with chin to chest.
‘What do you mean?’ David forced himself to clothe anxiety with the humdrum.
They did not answer, but Horace twisted in his chair.
‘Are you saying, then, that she isn’t very well?’
Again, nothing. His father rapped the arm of his leather chair with a tattoo from the middle finger.
Joan spoke first, having blown breath out.
‘We’ve talked about this,’ she said, and stopped. Her eyes were wide; she was a different woman from the one who had struggled to express Handel’s genius. Before, conviction underlay her hesitation; like a mystic she had lacked exactitude of words, not experience. Now she was about to fumble again, but without trust in herself. ‘I don’t know whether we ought to mention it. It may be us.’ She looked across at Horace, who avoided the glance.
David waited, not shortly.
‘She didn’t seem pleased to see us,’ Joan said at length.
All looked glum.
‘We saw her on the Tuesday night after the performance. She was tired, then. We didn’t stay too long, but we took her to lunch on Wednesday, and we spent three hours with her. On Thursday, the fifth performance was that night, our second, she came to the Feinsteins’ for a meal, stayed a part of the afternoon. We didn’t see her that night, but called in on her just before we left on Friday.’ Joan stopped again.
‘And?’
‘I’ve talked to your father about this. We both had come to the conclusion that she wasn’t pleased to see us.’ Again the agony of search. ‘I think I know Mary pretty well now. We used to talk a lot when she came up here to practise. She’s had this great success. And it’s in a strange place, with different habits and faces . . . Everybody’s making a tremendous fuss of her, and rightly. She’s being invited out here and there and everywhere. But she’s a modest sort of girl. It won’t turn her head.’
‘Did she seem ill?’ David had had enough of his mother’s indirection.
‘No. Not at all. She looked well. But we asked her about this. She felt a bit off in the morning, that’s all. It was as if she resented our coming.’
‘Wouldn’t she talk to you?’
‘Not easily. As if she’d forgotten all about you, and this house, and yours. I mean, I’m not saying she didn’t ask any questions. She did. But she wasn’t very interested in the answers. It didn’t seem like her at all. I mean, she wasn’t rude, or anything like that. If she’d had some terrible accident, or operation, or trauma, I could have understood it. She’d not lost trace of her life here, or us, or you, but it didn’t concern her.’
‘She’d be concentrated on the opera,’ David objected.
‘Well, yes. I can see that, but . . .’
‘Nothing like that at all,’ Horace interrupted.
‘Of course she was interested in her work; we expected to find that.’
Horace drew in a lungful of breath, noisily, as a prologue, an announcement that he was about to speak.
‘She did not want us there. That’s the long and short of it. It took her all her time to talk to us.’
‘She wasn’t impolite,’ Joan interrupted.
‘She didn’t show us the door, certainly. But her mind wasn’t on us. I remember my father telling us once,’ Horace’s voice warmed, ‘how he’d met some man, on a cruise, I think, he was a literary fellow, well known, a knight, a poet and magazine editor, something of the sort. They’d been very friendly, and this man pressed my dad to call in any time when he was in London. Well, he did. He phoned, was invited, but it didn’t take him five minutes to see he wasn’t wanted. He said the man wasn’t busy, but he could hardly bring himself to remember the holiday. My dad had the photographs he’d taken, but he never got round to showing them. He upped and out. This man wasn’t rude, but his interest in the holidays and the Blackwalls was minimal. It was embarrassing. My dad, well, you remember your granddad, wasn’t exactly gushing, but he must have liked this chap or been impressed to have bothered to go round, and then, pooh, nothing. I’ve never forgotten him telling us this. It didn’t exactly upset him, and he knew better than most that time’s valuable, that if you’re preoccupied or hard at work you don’t want idiots in with their holiday snaps. This was different. And it embarrassed Dad, as Mary embarrassed us.’
Joan nodded. The anecdote had evidently already been tried out on her.
‘We’re not psychic, you know.’ His mother trundled her hands apologetically in the air. ‘Or at least your father’s not.’
‘Was she worrying about something?’
‘She didn’t say so. It was hard to pin down. We thought we might be at fault, that we’d got off on the wrong foot, and not recovered.’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘I’m not surprised. The nearest I can describe it, David, is this. It was as though we’d, we’d met her once in England, casually, after a performance, casually, I mean that, and then tried to presume on the acquaintance. She was preoccupied, and tired, I dare say, but she hardly asked us a thing, and sometimes didn’t listen. It was hard work, I can tell you.’
‘She gave me a kiss the first time we met,’ Horace said, ‘but you know how she used to pull my leg a bit. There was none of that. She didn’t seem to want to talk about you, or music, or anything else. I couldn’t understand it.’ His father coughed his quandary away. ‘Give him another cup, Joan.’
‘I don’t know what to make of it.’ David, truculent, about to blame.
‘We thought hard and long about this, David. We didn’t know whether we ought to say anything. I wondered if it was me, until your dad asked, “What’s gone wrong with Mary?” It may be nothing. The opera or a quarrel, a bad per
iod. We saw it would worry you if we did come running back with tales. We didn’t know what to do for the best.’
His mother’s face wrinkled with pain, doubt.
‘Has she been writing regularly?’ Joan began again, tentatively.
‘I had two long letters about auditions and first rehearsals on the Monday you left. They’d been written, oh, a week and a half before. And on the Sunday, the night after the first performance, she telephoned.’
‘How did she seem?’
‘Much as I expected.’
‘That’s good, then.’
‘She talked mostly about how the opera had gone, and she seemed pleased. I didn’t notice anything out of the way. She said she hadn’t felt very well, but she didn’t make a song and dance about it. I thought, guessed, if you like, that she was excited, but that didn’t surprise me.’
‘Well, that’s not so bad, then, is it?’ his mother asked. ‘Perhaps it’s our fault. We went with the wrong idea. We’d forgotten she’d been away from home a month, and working herself to death.’ Joan smiled broadly, sat comfortably.
‘Is that right?’ David wheeled on his father.
‘Don’t ask me. Probably.’ Horace irascibly cleared his throat. ‘She didn’t seem the same girl who’d left us here a month ago.’
‘Thanks, anyway.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Joan said. ‘It may be nothing, and it’s bound to worry you, isn’t it?’
‘I can’t let my wife go away and not feel it,’ he answered, awkwardly.
‘No.’
They talked, Joan leading, for the next ten minutes about Handel and about the Trent Quartet’s plans, before the son left to mark essays. All three were apprehensive, blaming each other.
10
DAVID HEARD NOTHING from Mary.
The promised letter with details of the extra week at New York State and the proposed Harvard performances did not arrive. Each morning before seven David lifted a corner of the bedroom curtain to follow the postman’s flashlight along the street, and though the bills, the advertisements, the holiday brochures, interesting declarations from friends clapped through the letterbox, each day began with a disappointment that six days quickly taught him to expect.
There must have been some hold-up. If Mary said she had written to him, she was telling the truth. He fetched out the letters he had received, three airmail forms, two more substantial accounts of the audition and initial rehearsals. Five letters in five weeks; he must have sent ten. One only to the senior Blackwalls.
He reread the letters, not carefully because he could without trouble reconstruct the contents, but with an anger of speed, anger at his own weakness in returning to these pieces of paper which had now become more important than at their first glad arrival. Mary’s writing was what it had always been; she used the little silver Parker, with two hearts on the clip, and the strokes were upright, well formed, bold, readable. She missed him, these notes claimed, she wished he was there; her sharp eye in the two long missives watched the vagaries of conductor, of fellow singers, of Red Gage, of academics or students she ran across. For all the change and excitement, she had her head screwed on straight. She represented the English Midlands, the shrewd shopkeeper class, the professionally trained craftsman out there in the welter of pretension, and cleverness, and kindness, and oddity. At the end of each letter she said, plainly, that she loved him; the third letter began with a three-word paragraph, ‘I love you.’
The letters were kept behind the wedding photograph on the mantelpiece, but as each sad clack of the letterbox added its tithe of disappointment, David put the five into the drawer of his desk, at the back, out of sight, but safe.
He could not convince himself now that the postal services were responsible; he knew there was serious reason why his wife was not writing to him. He mentioned his unease to no one, for no one asked any questions, and oddly enough his parents maintained silence. Rehearsals with the Trent Quartet occupied him; when he played with them, he forgot his distress, as he did sometimes in his lessons, but always at the back of his mind this malaise nagged, rankled. He did not sleep badly, but woke half a dozen times each night uncomfortably, and though tiredness usually ensured he could drop off again, occasionally he prowled the upper floor of his home, staring out at darkened houses, the outlines of apple trees, hearing the wind, the scutter of rain.
Perhaps he was less disturbed than he ought to have been. Unreasoning optimism prompted, lifting his spirits. He remembered Mary’s straight back as she marched off towards her plane. He remembered their first meeting.
He had been introduced to her at a party, where they had easily fallen into facetious talk. Neither had realized that the other was a student at the Royal College; when they did they compared notes about teachers, teachers’ stand-ins, prospects, concerts. This dark striking girl from Derby had won two prizes in her first year, was highly regarded, was preparing to sing a leading role in the college concert, had taken principal parts in oratorios round London already, had been approached by the BBC for some schools’ programme on the recommendation of her teacher and had acquired an agent on la Falconer’s say-so, and he was on the lookout for operatic openings for her. David had seen her name about the college but had not set eyes on her before. She had never heard of him.
They laughed, drinking punch.
On the next evening she was due to sing a Messiah at a church in north London, and he offered to drive her over in his car.
‘I have to be there for three for a rehearsal.’
‘I can listen.’
‘Well, if you’re sure.’
She made no great show of refusal or gratitude, but quietly outlined arrangements for meeting. In a diffident, strong way she was sure of herself. Later she laid a hand on his arm, to say, ‘You’re drinking too much, if you’re driving tonight.’
‘I live here.’
‘With Sue and Francis?’
‘Yes. I knew him at Cambridge.’
Mary nodded gravely, impressed. She hardly drank, he noticed, and was in no hurry to quit his company. He explained why a comparatively rich man like Frank was willing to make houseroom for him. Mary listened; the friend with whom she had come, an oboist David knew slightly, left them to their tête-à-tête.
He was in love almost at once. When at eleven she said she must go, must have her beauty sleep, he offered to escort her.
‘It isn’t worth it. Two stops on the Underground. Iris will be ready.’
‘Does she live with you?’
‘The whole house is full of students.’ She beckoned her friend over. ‘Be on time tomorrow, there’s a good boy.’ She had drawn him a map earlier. She leaned forward, kissed him on the cheek, lightly, incredibly briefly, and had walked off. For the first time he saw that straight, retreating back.
He remembered that evening three years ago both sharply and vaguely. The poignancy of both expectation and surprise rang strongly still, though he could not exactly recall how Mary had done her hair, or what she was wearing. He had sat in his car ten minutes early, and had rung her doorbell two minutes only before the appointed time. When Mary appeared, she seemed quite sober, pale and apprehensive, eyelids vivid blue. She carried an enormous portmanteau.
‘Can you get it in your car?’ she asked, laughing. Reassured she said, ‘This is just right for my evening wear, but it’s too big for carting round the Underground on Saturday afternoon.’
‘You’ve acquired a porter.’
‘It’s not heavy,’ she answered. ‘Just awkward.’
She spoke quietly, but easily, with this confidence, not trying to impress. Of course she was beautiful, with the dark, neat head, the blue eyes, the flawless skin, the figure, her aristocratic carriage. She was somebody. At the rehearsal she made the same mark, knowing seemingly exactly what she could demand from the conductor, prepared to make it clear, but never hectoring, reasonably, without nerves. Again the power and beauty of her voice underwrote her certainty, seemed becoming, proper.
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The young couple were invited to tea at the home of a local organist. The best china had been set, three sorts of bread, cheeses, ham and tongue, home-baked buns, a dark fruit cake.
‘I come from Yorkshire,’ the organist’s wife said. ‘I like tea as a real meal. It was always so when I was a girl before the war.’
They were treated as an engaged or a married couple, intriguingly, and accordingly offered family confidences. Mrs Banks’s daughter had wed the son of a famous pianist; she had met him at an out-of-the-way training college. Another daughter had been a prizewinner at the FRCO examinations.
‘You should see her play Bach trios,’ her father enthused. ‘She sits there as if she’s buffing her fingernails. Hardly moves, and she doesn’t make fluffs. “Allegro di molto.” She loves it.’
‘So do you.’
Mary was ushered upstairs to dress.
Then she astounded. Her dress, in azure and navy blue, was heavily skirted to suit her height, the pride of neck and shoulders, the tilt of the head. When they went out she wore a white fur stole she had borrowed. David wanted to express his admiration, could only gape, then say foolishly, ‘That will lay them in the aisles.’
‘That’s not quite the idea.’
Her speaking voice, unchanged, suited the finery, was its equivalent, lifted out of his class. She seemed unaware of her effect, not only on David but on their hosts, on everybody else, but her every move, sentence, glance strengthened it. This shopkeeper’s daughter, not yet twenty, could assume regality, deserve it, carry it as a right.
The performance was good, he remembered, with a small, well-drilled amateur choir and a semi-professional orchestra. The youngish tenor and contralto soloists were at the beginnings of what would be, David decided, undistinguished but successful careers; the bass, a man of fifty odd, had been one of the best-known oratorio singers in the country and showed why, with each note in a run accurately placed, each accent perfect, each phrase shaped inside a pattern, though the compelling power of his voice had now gone. None rivalled Mary; she abode with shepherds, sang with angels, rejoiced, apostrophized the beauty of the messengers’ feet, knew that her redeemer lived with a perfection of formality that left no room for doubt. Her interpretation had drama without rhetoric. ‘And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.’ She tuned the notes with a purity of conviction that brooked no denial; hearing her, only the fool now said in his heart that there was no God. At twenty, a student, she outstripped them all.
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