David driving her home past midnight, they had returned to the organist’s house for a further celebration, tried to come out with something of this. He was sober on three glasses of tonic water, but drunk with the evening’s revelation. Mary listened; she leaned on him slightly, there was contact, and said after consideration that she wouldn’t mind a few lessons from Terence Duckworth, the bass.
She was pleased, and yet steady, recognizing limitations. This frightened David, in that anyone of her age ought to be knocked off balance by the success, the congratulations, the glasses of wine. She was not, and yet her balance seemed not unnatural, in itself part of her gift.
During the next few months they met regularly, but not frequently. He dropped Anna Monckton-Mason, later Talbot, without qualm. Mary Stiles worked hard at her course, her engagements, and encouraged him to do likewise. When they ran across each other in the college, not often, they would talk for no more than a few moments; they exchanged notes, they attended concerts together, went out once for a meal, spent a spring Saturday in the Regent’s Park zoo amongst the packs and crocodiles of schoolchildren from the provinces.
There, standing on a path, near the aviary but looking at nothing, they had stopped in a daffodil burst of sunshine. Mary wore a ridiculous waterproof hat, matching her coat, but on her the garments looked impeccable above washed-out jeans, scuffed shoes. As usual, she appeared both pleased and preoccupied, glad to be released but still running over some tricky song, or emotional scenario.
‘I hate to tell you,’ David began. He had positioned himself behind, at her shoulder, felt emboldened. She turned her head, laughing.
‘Well?’
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘Is that all?’ Her voice was flat; the large eyes did not discourage.
‘It’s enough to begin with, isn’t it?’
‘That’s all right, then.’
He took her hand, which was warm. They stood close; he kissed her mouth. She returned the kiss, but quickly drew away, squeezing his hand violently, wrenching almost.
‘Steady,’ he said, ‘you’ll have my fingers off.’
‘I think I love you,’ she answered.
Joy jumped in him, like the sunshine, the dart of wind that blew sweet wrappers in scraping, wild somersaults. They began to walk.
They spoke of marriage, as a fairy tale. Mary, having a third year to complete, said that it was useless to discuss the date yet, and convinced him that she meant it. When at Easter he was appointed to his teaching post, he suggested again that they marry during the summer, but again she refused.
‘But we’re going to get married, aren’t we?’
‘In time. Yes.’ Her answer did not discourage him; such common sense seemed second nature to her, overrode her passion. She was, he discovered, a virgin, and again that was typical. She guarded her career, totting pros and cons as her mother and father counted pound notes, the nuts and bolts, the buckets and lightbulbs in their hardware store in Derby.
Once, in her final year, she came in her one free weekend before Christmas to stay with his parents. She had been, at first, shaken and suspicious that his people were so well-to-do, but now made herself a great favourite. It was at this period she had begun to practise with Joan, tentatively at first, but once she realized how good a pianist Mrs Blackwall was she made enthusiastic use of her. She and Horace had started to establish the jokey, loving, cautious relationship; in a way, and David laughed making the comparison because one could hardly envisage such a different pair of human beings as his dry father and this beautiful tall young woman, they were alike, both warily perched behind the counter, one eye on the till, the other on the customer.
Mary, on this occasion, had appeared uncertain, almost unhappy. She had taken the first audition for the German opera tour at her agent’s importunity and had done, she was convinced, badly. David questioned her about the ordeal; she had had a slight cold, a bad period and nobody knew what she was supposed to sing. Her agent and her professor made suggestions widely at variance. She’d taken some Purcell, Handel, Bellini, Verdi, Smetana, Britten to a dusty studio at a music publisher’s, where two men and a competent woman pianist had been waiting. One of the men, she thought she half recognized him, but they had made no attempt to introduce themselves, looked through her pile of songs showing no interest, and had picked out two at random, or desperation at the poverty of choice. She had been instructed to stand over by the piano and perform. The pianist, inquiring about tempi, had been the only one to demonstrate humanity, and that was grudging enough. The piano clanked like chain, but she sang to her judges, at them rather, from a distance in the dry air. Neither man watched her; both sat staring down in embarrassment at the floor. One had placed a brown trilby on the chair next to his; Mary offered the detail with no attempt at humour. When she had finished they asked her to choose a song for herself, and she had to walk over towards them, pick up her pile, sort through it without any idea how to impress. In the end she chose Handel’s ‘Let the Bright Seraphim’, announced this to them with an interrogative lift, but as they did not respond, she made a glum way back to the piano and waited until the accompanist was sure that the copy was complete.
‘Did you feel angry?’ David asked.
Mary shook her head. ‘They didn’t care.’
‘At least they asked you to sing another song.’
She shrugged her despondency. He guessed that what had been a sad walk, scuffle among music, vacillation to her had seemed poised to the adjudicators, pulling them into their dull place with aristocratic detachment. They had thanked her without warmth, seemingly in a hurry for her performance of the ‘Seraphim’ had been interrupted by a knock and the nervous entrance of a young man with a music case, presumably the next for audition. She was asked to fill in a duplicated form, to give information they already possessed.
‘You’ve got an agent?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who is it?’ They knew that; the audition had come through him.
‘Mark Wentmeyer.’
‘Thank you.’ Unimpressed.
Mary packed her case, had to return to the piano for her copies and there she expressed gratitude to her accompanist, who nodded nervously, afraid perhaps to spoil the dusty silence. The two men were already leafing through the copies the next client had provided. Mary wished them good afternoon, and both looked up in surprise. One cleared his throat, but the other, the man with the hat, raised a hand. She closed the door without noise.
David trying to cheer her wasted his time. It was the first time that he had ever known her in such despair. In a bout of violent kissing as they lay across his bed, she burst into tears.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
She could not reply, her cheeks drenched, her shoulders shaking. True, she quickly recovered, and even when she was crying the features under the tears were composed as if the bone structure did not allow her to express grief. As she apologized, she mended her face with a small crumple of tissue; her eyes were unswollen.
‘We should get married,’ he said.
‘You’re nice to me.’ She put her arms round him, laid her head on his chest, but she was calmer than he, though now he began to sense the insecurity that fed her competitive spirit, drove her to excel. She would never explain.
Her parents loved her, she was the only child, had encouraged her to sing. When she as a schoolgirl had entered and won festivals, they had put her to lessons under the best teacher in the district. It was he, William Morton, who had trained her to the distinction in Grade 8, the scholarship at the Royal College, to her first engagements.
‘He was the first real musician I’d met,’ she told David.
‘Were you in love with him?’
‘Yes. I’d do anything for him.’ She laughed. ‘He was a nervy creature, lived with his mother. He kissed me once or twice, and blushed scarlet. And once he put his hands on my breasts.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing. Let
him. I was terrified and delighted. He seemed ancient.’
‘How old?’
‘I know for certain. He was thirty-eight. I looked him up. Thirty-eight on the day I had my third lesson with him.’
‘Did you wish him many happy returns?’
‘No.’
‘Did he say anything?’
‘He did not. I wonder if he’d remembered, himself.’
David, who was slightly acquainted with Morton, the head of music in a teacher-training department, thought that that sounded about right.
‘He was marvellously good for me. He was scholarly, quick, and lent me his books. He helped me no end with my A-level music, got me an A. Miles better than anybody I have at the college. He educated me.’
David felt jealousy.
‘Did he know anything about voice production?’
‘He was sensible. And didn’t bore me with exercises like Charles Trotter. And Liz was too fond of that sort of thing for my liking. But William showed me through songs how well I could do.’
‘You didn’t think you could before?’
‘I liked singing. My first teacher was decent. But William taught me in those two years that it was an art.’
‘Did you always want to beat other people?’
‘I suppose so. I was always fierce. But mainly at running and high jumping. I was junior champion of Derby at a hundred and two hundred.’
It was during this weekend, not much later than the conversation about Morton, that he suggested, suddenly, to restore his spirits. ‘Let’s take our clothes off.’
She did not sit up, they lay still across his bed, but stared at him, levelly, as if he’d said something of real interest. He did not like the scrutiny; under it his suggestion appeared childish.
‘We shan’t make love,’ she answered, steadily, condemnatory.
‘Forget it.’
She stood, pulled him upright.
‘Take your things off,’ she ordered. Her blouse and skirt were already gaping from their previous exchanges. ‘Beat you to it.’
The laughing, infantile challenge encouraged him, and they stripped.
He had never seen her stark naked before. Here in this not overwarm bedroom she stood at a short distance from him, slim, magnificently beautiful and yet not his. She did not appear embarrassed, rather more composed than he, but so different that he was taken aback. His fingertips knew this body, his eyes had learned it in parts, but now the completion caught at his throat. He clasped her to him; they tippled down to the bed again, staggering, because they could not bear to release the other even for a few steps. They touched, stroked, kissed but did not commit themselves to the final act, even briefly. He tried; she refused, fighting him off. When they had dressed, they were going that night to the theatre with the parents, he said, ‘By God, I wanted you.’ His voice withered in his throat.
‘I wanted you.’ Her answer had a baffling purity.
‘Why didn’t we then?’
She did not reply, but dabbed a very little unnecessary powder on her face.
He had not forgotten that day, when she stood in the middle of the room, the light of early winter behind her, straight, shoulders high, in a composition both perfect and submissive. Her nipples were proud, the navel exquisite in the belly’s smoothness, the pubic triangle on the high mount of Venus of a different, electrical yet deader texture from the hair of her head, the legs shapely, powerful, yet nowhere disfigured by muscular bulges. And above, the blue eyes watched him, at judgement, a modest and strong intelligence playing there and about her mouth while the hands he knew so well from ordinary commerce, at a keyboard, or table, or stove, with a pen or a sheet of music, were perfect appendages to the naked length of arms, the breasts, the womanhood.
When he could divorce his powerful sexual urge from the memory, what remained, and it was a remnant compared with the shaking of his lust, was the girl he did not know, who had served behind the counter, won at local festivals, outrun athletes, in her dark blue shorts, white numbered singlet, spiked shoes, had loved, carefully against explosive uncertainty, the nervous music teacher putting his lips to hers, fingertipping her school blouse, drawing away.
After they had married, on a mad Saturday afternoon in London when she had almost immediately disappeared to sing in Così, the remembered figure touched and moved him, and on her return as they lived together, man and extraordinary wife, in their new house, 5 Station Road, it lost nothing as he learned more about her. He had married a woman who at her most naked and vulnerable could distance herself from him, assume her discrete self, take him in her arms to remind him that most of her life had been spent out of his company. Even their later sexual intimacy, their everyday exchanges, pleasures, their small quarrels at hearth or board only deepened for him the strength of the symbol. David realized that this was his fiction not her fact, but felt the power no less. I have married a beautiful, talented woman whom largely I do not know, who does not know me and who makes at present only minor adjustments to alter this. He felt proud, both of achievement and conclusion, worked to alter it.
Now that she was silent in America, the remembrance, vivid again in the first few weeks of her absence, faded, dried, became nothing. Convinced that something between them was grievously wrong, he needed no specious boosts to imagination. When she had loved him, was close, he could bear to consider her separateness.
At this time he knew nothing else.
11
DAVID WAITED EACH morning for the postman, hurried home in the lunch hour to see if the second delivery had broken drought, backed, dashed away from the door. He said nothing about his trouble, and his mother, oddly, where was she?, made no inquiries. Shostakovich occupied him, a new Haydn; one Friday evening the Trent had a savage play-through of Beethoven’s op. 127, Britten’s Third. Their second concert, in Northampton, same programme as the first, went well, though to a smaller audience.
The headmaster, on life’s common way meeting him in the corridor, asked how Mary was shaping.
‘Very well, so far as I know. I haven’t heard for a bit.’
‘You’re lucky. When Dorothea’s away she does nothing but ring up and issue orders.’
Both smiled, men who knew the world. The exchange between two liars had been easy.
One evening he left early for his quartet rehearsal to call in on his mother. She made him welcome, sat him down, sprang the brutal question early.
‘How’s Mary?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t heard.’
‘Not a phone call even?’
‘No.’
‘But it must be three weeks now. We’ve been back a fortnight.’
Awkward, uncouth silence stalked between them.
‘It’s a long time,’ she said.
‘I’ve not heard from you,’ he ground out, ‘for over a week.’
‘We were away Friday to Monday. In Hereford, with the Wilders. I told you, I’m sure.’
‘Who are they?’
‘An old family friend. She is. We were at school together. We’ve kept in touch, intermittently. He’s just retired from the Civil Service, and they’ve bought a house there. She’s been pressing us to go, and your dad agreed.’
Old, vague acquaintances wrote letters, pressed. For the life of him he could neither recall any mention of these people nor of the visit. He had no grip; his own name would elude him next.
Again the damned silence, packed with unspoken openings.
‘There must be something wrong,’ he said at length. The words came out like phlegm cleared by an induced cough.
‘David,’ Joan asked, ‘was there anything, er, amiss between you before she went off?’
‘No. Not at all.’
‘It’s not my place to ask, but your marriage seemed, seemed all right?’
Yes. At least as far as I was concerned. We were on an edge about her going, but she was as bad as I was. She didn’t want to go, with one part of her. She said as much, but we both knew she had to tak
e her chance, and felt excited about it.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes. I suppose I’d lie about it if there had been a row. But there hadn’t. That’s what I can’t understand. Mary’s level-headed, much more so than I am.’
‘What do you think has happened, then?’ His mother made no bones about it.
‘I just don’t know. If there had been an accident or illness then my address would be about, in her bag, on her cases. They’d, surely somebody would let us know.’
‘Have you tried ringing her?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did you get through?’
‘To some office. They knew nothing. They tried to put me on to somebody connected with the opera, but couldn’t. The opera was still playing there. At least, the woman, secretary whatever she was, thought it was. I said I hadn’t heard and wondered if Mary was ill, and she promised to make inquiries. I rang again the next day, but it was a different voice, knew nothing about it, as usual, but this time she’d been to see Semele the night before, and Mary had sung beautifully. She promised she’d see to it that a note got through about my call.’ He rubbed his head. ‘I’m sure she meant it. Well, both of them. They seemed kind.’
‘When was that?’
‘Five days ago.’
‘And you’ve heard nothing since?’
He did not answer that.
‘Will you try again?’ Joan continued.
‘I suppose so.’
‘Have you been writing all this while?’
‘Not so much this last week or ten days.’
‘Not at all?’
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