‘In what way?’
‘Sly.’ Joan waited for his comments and, receiving nothing, continued. ‘She wouldn’t say anything outright, but I had the impression that she thought you were to blame, that Mary wouldn’t have acted like this unless you’d given her cause.’
He explained Mrs Stiles’s present position about this, and Joan fell momentarily silent.
‘Are you going to write?’ she asked, recovering.
‘When she writes to me.’
‘Why wait? You know what’s happening. Perhaps if Mary heard from you, it might make her realize what she’s doing.’
‘Don’t you think she knows, then?’
His mother tried consolation, haltingly. He listened, without optimism.
‘We’ll wait and see,’ he concluded.
Joan offered meals, advice; he said he’d survive. Both wished the conversation had not taken place.
13
A DAY OR two later David crossing the schoolyard on the way to his car passed Dick Wilson, who was standing, overcoat unbuttoned, staring upwards, his case leaning against his legs.
‘Going home?’ David inquired.
‘Yes.’ Wilson dragged his attention earthwards with difficulty.
‘Want a lift?’
‘That’s kind of you. My car’s in for repair. But it’s out of your way.’
‘Not much. Not now I’m a bachelor.’
They spoke about the weather, wishing it was warmer. Wilson had to be told to fasten his seatbelt.
‘Oh, yes, yes. I mustn’t break the law.’
‘I was sorry to hear about your father,’ David muttered as they emerged through the gates. His occupation with busy traffic seemed to cover a risky interference.
‘Yes.’
‘Was it unexpected?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘He wasn’t very old, was he?’
‘Sixty-three. He was still at work. Wouldn’t retire.’
Wilson’s voice carried a heavy confidence; he laid down velleities or hesitations with the same strength as his certainties. His legs might twitch, his gaze drop uncertain, but his speech never lacked assurance.
‘It’s bad, really.’ They were now on the main road, edging round buses. ‘It’s left my mother in an unenviable position.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘The truth is that he was an inveterate gambler.’ Wilson might have been making a judgement on some historical statesman. ‘Horses. The stock exchange. The pinball machine. The casino. It all came alike.’
‘Oh.’ Wilson watched David skilfully manoeuvre his car across two traffic lanes.
‘He got through a considerable fortune, one way or another. He always claimed that’s why he had to stay at his teaching. I don’t think that’s exactly true, but it salved his conscience. My mother has a little private money, thank God.’
‘I see.’
‘She’s thinking about going back to Sweden. She was born there.’ David recalled Wilson’s Christian names: Richard Henry Sellberg, pronounced Sell-berry.
‘How long has she been in England?’
‘She came over as a language student after the war, and met my father in Oxford. They were married in 1947.’
‘And she’s not been back since?’
‘Only for holidays.’
‘What does she think about it? Going back, I mean.’
‘It’s difficult to tell. She could have stayed where she is, or moved nearer to me, or to my sister. There are friends in Manchester, but not close enough to detain her. Janet wouldn’t want her here at our place, and Eleanor moves about. I think she’d quite like to be Swedish again.’
David stopped outside Wilson’s house, a Victorian semi-detached villa on a steep tree-lined avenue.
‘It’s worrying, though,’ Wilson said, not hurrying. ‘I’ve no idea what she really thinks. She’s relieved now that my father has died. She knows where she is financially, and she realized that he’d only a year or so at most to live. The bad thing is that he wasted so much money. She ought to be well-to-do on his account now, and she isn’t. On the other hand she thinks she’ll be her own woman for the first time in thirty-five years. At the age of fifty-six.’
‘She hasn’t been happy?’ David asked.
Wilson drew in a huge breath, shifted heavily in his seat.
‘Who’s to say?’ he replied. ‘She married a comparatively wealthy man, but then they have, or rather she has, never been certain where the next hundred pounds is coming from. She couldn’t leave him. I believe she admired my father. He was an impressive man in some ways. And then there were the children. She couldn’t desert us. By the time we were off her hands, it was too late.’
‘Does she regret . . .?’
‘I shouldn’t think so, for a minute. She kept the home together, saw to it that we had enough money while we were at school and university.’
‘She doesn’t think she’s wasted her life?’ Impudent and imprudent.
Wilson considered this, rasping his left hand over his throat, which was badly shaved compared with the chin.
‘If she’d returned she’d have married some Swedish businessman or academic. No, her life wouldn’t have been so markedly different.’
Still he didn’t open the car door.
‘Mary’s thinking of staying in America.’ David blurted it out. The sentence had been rolling in his head like a dried pea in a matchbox, but now he had said it he regretted the confidence, a more than just return for Wilson’s confessions.
‘To continue with her musical career?’ Wilson asked, politely, distant.
‘Yes. The opera’s been a great success.’
‘And she wants you to go over there to live?’
‘Well. No. It’s not been . . . I don’t think it’s possible.’
‘No.’ Wilson tapped the dashboard with a fingernail. He seemed incapable of sitting still. ‘That’s not good, is it?’ He shook his head too vigorously, like a dog clearing its wet coat. ‘Not good at all.’ He blew breath out, noisily again, clasped the lapels of his overcoat, released them to pull his case to his chest. ‘Well, must show my face. Thanks for the lift. Very good of you. Many thanks.’
He heaved himself out, crossed the pavement, pushed open his front gate but did not turn to wave. Already David guessed, he had forgotten about Mary. And now Mother Wilson knew she could return home, lose her Englishness, take up the rusty language of her childhood because her husband was dead and her children did not much mind what she did, provided she did nothing to impede them. That was her reward for thirty-five years of exile, fidelity to a gambler, making ends meet for respectable children. Put like that it almost seemed a justification for Mary’s decision to cut and run. Or a minatory parable.
Though he still slept badly and lacked energy David surprised himself by his perseverance at work, and the amount he got through. Depression, unrelenting as it was, could be beaten down by his teaching, his practice, his rehearsals. He found he began to resent his mother’s daily telephone calls and her muted insistence that he contact America. The idea of writing before his . . . before Mary wrote angered him so that he would thump a fist incontinently down on his desk, and once scattered a pile of exercise books with a wild, back-handed blow. He rang the Stiles household on Sunday but they had heard nothing.
On Easter Saturday morning as he sat at coffee, having arranged cheap bunches of daffodils in the lounge, he was disturbed at the front door by a young man with music under his arm.
‘David Blackwall?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you free to play with us tonight?’
‘You?’ The man seemed afflicted with St Vitus’ Dance.
‘The London String Players.’
‘Where did you get my name?’
‘James Talbot.’
He invited the man, Barry Przeslawski, inside, poured coffee, listened. David had intended to go to the concert that evening; the London Players, an ad hoc professional group, were sometimes v
ery good and their programme, Purcell, Elgar, Richard Strauss, Barber, Tchaikovsky and Britten would, he had thought, occupy him gainfully through a dead hour or two.
Przeslawski, the first cello, said that one of his group, a girl, had come up overnight to visit friends and had fallen at breakfast and now had her wrist in plaster. ‘We might get away with playing one short, but Jim Talbot suggested you to Malcolm King, he’s staying with them, and he dispatched me round here pronto.’ Talbot had apparently rung earlier, but without answer. ‘Will you do it for us?’
David agreed; Przeslawski lifted music from the settee beside him to the table, in triumph.
‘Can I use your phone to let Malc know?’ He dialled from a slip of paper, delivered David’s agreement, rushed back, announced the rehearsal at two, said Heather would have conscientiously marked her copies if he’d like to look through them. They had had, it appeared, only one full rehearsal in London for this concert, but King could draw blood from stones, and they all had done these things often enough. Przeslawski gulped down his coffee, refused more, said he was grateful, leaped with flying arms and legs from the settee, grumbling he had hoped for a lie-in at his mother’s in West Bridgford. He banged out, but before he left the front steps said, ‘You’ve got an Amati, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not thinking of selling it, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t blame you. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to buy it.’
David enjoyed the rehearsal; it stimulated him to become one with these gifted young people, to learn from them. The evening’s performance in the new concert hall was only adequately attended; he saw some of his sixth form, one of his colleagues from his place at the back desk of the cellos. King, the conductor, who would be fortyish, had this slightly old-fashioned, battered, contemporary face, a Mick Jagger, Julian Lloyd-Webber, a Martin Amis, and was good. A string man himself, he knew every part, and with short left-hand jabs, under finger extended, ruled entries while the right with baton swept the orchestra on. They played the Purcell G minor Chacony to open, then the Tchaikovsky Suite and ended the first part with an eloquent, plangently emotional reading of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen for twenty-three solo strings, which arched, and reached, shouted, demanded, wept, compelled. King stood proud and Strauss’s lament stretched their bow arms, fired vibrato, bounced the weaving sounds, the cliffs of grief heavily down from the ceiling. David had never felt so engaged; he had no time for show, even for emotion; he had to match his colleagues in attack, in rhythm, in sustained declamation, to make his instrument the conduit of Strauss’s command. As King brought them to their feet for applause, David sweated.
In the orchestra room Przeslawski nodded approval at him, before David took a seat out of the way, in a corner, by the bull-fiddle cases. Anna Talbot looked round the door, made straight for him though greeting one or two on her way, found herself a chair, began congratulations. He had swilled hands and face and felt calmer, equal to the formality of his white cuffs. As Anna chattered her praise, he watched two of the violins carefully sharing out the contents of a thermos into plastic beakers. He felt at ease for the first time for weeks, and with a contentment which he had earned, and he leaned back to concentrate on Anna. One or two looked enviously at him.
‘How’s Mary?’ she was asking.
‘Well, as far as I know.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Harvard, I think.’
James apparently had spent a year at Harvard, she said, after he’d finished at Oxford. He thought it marvellous. He hadn’t been too keen on returning home.
‘Mary’s not coming back,’ he said dully. Exhilaration deserted him; the decision to confide in her had left him drained, but he had spoken, clearly, on cue.
‘You mean she’s staying in America for good?’
‘Yes.’
‘She wants you to go over there to live?’
Exactly like Wilson she had not envisaged Mary’s rejection of him. In their limited view Mary was his, belonged to him, whatever vagaries her artistic progress dictated.
‘No.’ He spoke so strongly that he seemed to himself to shout, but no one turned or took notice.
‘What do you mean then, David?’ Anna was trying to wrinkle her forehead into bewilderment.
‘She says she’s not coming back.’
‘Ever?’
He shrugged.
‘Did she write and tell you this?’
‘No. She wrote to her parents.’
‘And you’ve not heard from her?’
‘Not for nearly two months.’
‘Oh, hell.’ He could smell her perfume; see her beautifully tamed hair, her smoothness of face, lipstick, the flash of rings on her hands. Her mouth was slightly, attractively open; she breathed quickly, girding herself to say the right thing. She could manage nothing, sagged back into her chair, rallied. ‘Oh, God, David. I’m so sorry. I’d no idea. It must have been awful for you.’
He looked around him. People moved about, or talked as the two bent forward in this corner whispering.
‘You say she hasn’t written?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all?’
‘Not after the first few weeks.’
‘That doesn’t seem like her.’ Anna struggled to speak. ‘I kept thinking I ought to send her a line, but I hadn’t got the address, and I never got round to phoning you for it. You know what I’m like. Don’t do it if you can put it off.’
‘She has fallen for the producer.’ He spoke every banal word with sour clarity, and Anna drew back from him, silenced. She examined her fingernails or the backs of her hands.
‘Up in three minutes,’ the manager shouted from the door. ‘Thank you.’
David and Anna faced one another, but their eyes did not meet.
‘I shall have to go,’ she said, making the effort. ‘I’m so sorry, David.’ She waited, fruitlessly. ‘I’ll be in touch.’ She whirled towards the door, but one of the violinists detained her. David heard her laugh, loudly, socially. He lifted his cello from its case, and with the rest made his way outside. There was a temporary hold-up in the small foyer; from one platform entrance the manager jovially advised them to go easy because the audience was still drinking. King suddenly appeared, minus frock coat, shouting thanks. ‘Great,’ he said, ‘great.’ David stood there, in the mini-queue, noticing nothing, seeing nobody, his head heavy, not with pain but with vacancy, as if the ache had been removed but not the discomfort.
‘Come on, come on,’ the man next to him muttered to himself. David raised eyebrows. ‘It’ll be past midnight before I’m home.’ The colleague grinned. ‘Even if I drive like the clappers.’
They filed in eventually and David tuned, settled himself, checked his music, all by habit. He noticed nothing but the given A; when he looked out to the hall he had difficulty in focusing on or remembering the as yet restless audience. The buzz of undiminished conversation tangled with the unconstructed chaos in his brain. The partner, tapping the score, spoke.
‘Sorry.’ David had not caught the meaning.
‘They’re in no hurry.’
‘No.’ It did him good to speak the word.
‘They never are. Nice instrument you have there.’
‘Yes. An Amati.’
The young man, still prodding in front of him with his bow, slowly swivelled his head round the hall, in contemptuous surprise at what he saw.
‘Could be anywhere,’ he said.
‘How’s that?’ David made himself speak.
‘Same faces, same clothes, same noise, same smell.’
The audience transformed one noise to another to applaud the leader, and then King glided on to bow from the hips. He looked across his players, as if baffled by some last-minute question, opened his score, lifted the baton and as one they cut throbbingly deep into the first chord of Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro. Playing at this intensity with such confreres left David no time for himself. Within minutes
he was wholly occupied in the music, and by the end of the concert uplifted by the audience’s enthusiasm. He could throw his shoulders back, but as soon as he reached his car fatigue numbed him. At home he sat downstairs catnapping over a television film, disregarding the whisky bottle at his elbow. On Sunday he woke at eleven, read the papers in bed without much interest in their spies, literary confrontations and inside reports on imminent elections or waste of public money. He shaved and dressed with care to lunch with his parents.
His mother had done him proud: marrowbone soup, roast beef, gooseberry fool, blue Stilton. Both David and his father refused second helpings of each course, making martyrs of themselves. The son carried the dishes out while his father loaded the washing-up machine, but Joan refused to allow either near the coffee mill or percolator. David, awkward, would not accept either brandy or port.
They had questioned him whether he had heard anything from Mary or from the Stileses, seemed unsurprised by his answer. Now his father coughed, and asked, ‘Have you written to her?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m waiting for her to get in touch with me.’
‘We think you should write first.’
‘I know you do.’
‘But don’t you see any sense in it?’
David waited, searching. Though he was certain that his mother had put Horace up to this catechism, he would give him, if he could, a fair answer.
‘It’s not so much a matter of seeing sense,’ he began slowly, ‘it’s that I can’t bring myself anywhere near doing it, emotionally.’
That quieted his father.
‘We liked Mary very much,’ Horace asserted, but without much conviction.
‘I know.’
‘And if anything could be done, I’m not saying it could, we’d like you to do it.’
‘If you think writing letters is so effective, why don’t you write to her yourself?’
‘First,’ his father cleared his throat, ‘a letter from us is nothing like the same thing as one from you.’ David marked that one up to the old man. ‘Secondly, we have, or rather, your mother has. I added a postscript.’
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