by Adam Thorpe
He was not fit and the effort had him feeling sick and exhausted. He clambered up the low dunes and lay on the top amongst the marram grass, which was sharp against his face and hands. It was almost hot, but the sun was fitful and the wind chilled him. I am neither warm nor cool, nor do the birds feel chill; we are flung as the foam is flung upon the weather and the wind of ill.
This is awful, Hugo thought to himself: I am depriving my soul in some way.
Yet he knew that if he were to sit up and see, as in a dream, Dorothea standing in her long cream dress below him on the Jutland beach, he would shout out her lines to her and probably run down and fling himself upon her loveliness. He liked the idea of this, and turned it over in his mind, conjuring it from the empty sand of the beach below him, changing the angle of his viewpoint so that the extraordinary scene loomed up very close, his fingers searching for the ribbons and the cloth buttons at the poet’s throat, his mouth gnawing at her neck, the breasts appearing through the rent bodice like two treasures he had travelled for years to touch and admire.
He shook his head suddenly and rose. It was disgusting, he thought. I am disgusting.
He explained to himself, buffeted by the wind off the sea as he stood upon the heights of the low scruffy dunes, that it was natural to hate as much as love the subject of one’s dissertation.
He would study art and become a painter, he decided, gazing upon the complexity of light and colour that the sky had ushered from the moving surface of the water below and beyond. He would buy a hat with a wide brim, like Augustus John, and paint real pictures as opposed to the rubbish he’d seen on a visit to Tate Modern with Julia, who loved all that childish fakery.
He walked back to his shoes only to find them gone from the place he had imagined them to have been. He could not identify any salient point around him and walked further, judging the distance as too long. The tide had risen and had taken his shoes. His father’s shoes.
He laughed, without meaning to. Denmark was a place one could walk in bare feet and not be noticed. Had Dorothea felt the wet touch of the sand on her toes, the swirl of the water graze her ankles? A sober place, where the women are muffled in black crinoline as if the whole coast is in mourning for the lost gods of the fishermen, the lost souls themselves swallowed by the deadly sea and its cold. Letter to Frank Garnett, 1898. The use of the word deadly. Make connections. Spin the web until the fly is caught.
He missed his father. But he did not miss the shoes.
He lay awake that night, wondering if he should indeed become a painter. He imagined himself with a wife and children, a wife vaguely chestnut-haired (not like Julia), and children vaguely dark, running about a daisy-spattered lawn vaguely in the country.
Perhaps he should run an art shop, selling expensive, top-quality oils and brushes and so forth, for the discerning.
The room’s heating system seemed to be unseasonably on, ticking quietly in the pipes, the sunlight beating on the glass in the day and running through the pipes into the radiator at night. The window was open and he drew the curtains and leant right out. The moon was almost full. He thought he could hear the sea crashing and booming, but it might have been the wind in the straggly Scotch pines fringing the garden.
He had evidently been born a lifetime too late.
He would never own a car or a television or a computer, although he was conscious how hollow youth’s vows are. He wondered if he should try to look up Julia when he got back. She wasn’t chestnut, and not as lovely as Dorothea, but that didn’t matter. She worked for a foreign publishing house and was, much to his regret, Australian.
He would run to her in his new shoes.
They sat by the door, just there. They were the kind of shoes he would never have bought, in normal circumstances: a pair of fat trainers, bright green, with a silver flash and clashing red laces. They were the only pair of shoes that fitted him in the whole of Harboor. They made him feel odd, but not altogether unpleasantly so. It was preferable to walking about barefoot.
Who was it said about someone that they were very alive from the feet down? Max Beerbohm, probably.
He would run to Julia in his trainers the colour of artificial grass. He would astonish her. Sometimes it was the only way.
The one and only way, Hugo thought, chuckling at himself in the night breeze and in the radiant moon.
THE CONCERT INTERVAL
Rob had had no idea that Madge was at the concert until he saw her in the green room. He was holding his stick caddy, which she’d call his handbag. He didn’t like to leave his sticks on the stage, not since Toronto when he’d got back from the interval to find the caddy stolen. He’d left it tucked under one of the tymps’ cross-stands, so that to pull it out you’d have to be careful not to send the drum rolling over the stage. He’d all but broken down in tears, bereft of his tymp sticks, but then someone had fished out some xylophone sticks from a cupboard and he’d managed to soften the plastic heads with band-aid and lint from the First Aid box. His solo (it was the Messiah that time, too) had sounded like a kid on a primary school kettledrum. Just before the final aria, the band-aid came unstuck and the lint flew off onto his beard. It was the worst moment of his life.
He’d not yet married Madge, back then.
She was with Tonia and Sophie, old school friends of hers he’d never liked. The green room was already crowded but they’d found places at one of the long Formica tables. They must have been sitting in the seats very close to the exit, and been one of the first lot down. As he made his way towards them, pretending to be pleased, Rob thought he heard the second bassoonist, Naomi Wallis, saying rude things about his pitch. Naomi Wallis was quite capable of it, especially talking as she was to first viola – the spitting image of Sean Penn. Rob couldn’t picture Sean Penn, in fact, but that was what the rest of the orchestra maintained. It was a game they all played on long coach journeys between venues: finding their twins in the world of the famous. Because of his beard, Rob’s twin was Rolf Harris. Rolf Harris back in the sixties, he hoped. It could have been worse: second viola’s was Myra Hindley. And second viola was a bloke.
‘Surprise surprise,’ said Madge, as Rob took the chair they’d saved for him.
‘I’m the one who’s supposed to say that,’ said Rob. ‘I thought you were eating at Julia’s.’
‘Julia’s got the flu. Anyway, we wanted to hear ourselves cough on Radio Three.’
‘Famous for a second,’ said Sophie. ‘You look quite nice in black tie, Rob.’
‘Thank you, Sophie.’
The other two giggled, of course. They always ganged up on him, these three, that was the trouble. It started subtly, and then got obvious. Madge was thirty-eight, and yet still went puerile in the company of her old school friends. She never did this with anyone else. He asked if they’d used the comps.
‘Of course. You don’t think we’d pay to hear Rob Barlow on drums, do you?’
‘Thank you for that one, my love.’
‘I thought he did it very well,’ said Tonia. ‘I couldn’t do it.’
‘It would be a bit odd if you could,’ said Rob, already irritated. ‘I’ve had years and years of training and practice.’
In fact, he’d only played about a minute before the interval. That was Handel’s doing, not his.
‘But you just bang ’em,’ said Sophie.
‘Bang them?’
‘Your drums. It can’t be that hard to learn.’
‘You have to know when to bang ’em,’ Madge pointed out, raising her painted eyebrows. This feature was a recent thing, to do with her age: she’d plucked each eyebrow and replaced it with a thin line of purple. Rob thought it made her look like Lady Macbeth.
The word ‘bang’ was gathering colour to it. Rob tried to change the subject.
‘Are you interested in attacking the bar? We’ve got about fifteen minutes.’
‘We were hoping for some drinks down here,’ Madge said.
‘You must be joking.’
>
‘Don’t you get free drinks and fancy grub?’ asked Tonia, surprised.
Rob pointed out the thermos flasks and plastic sandwich boxes and miniature fruit juice cartons appearing the length of the table.
‘It’s DIY, for an orchestra. Otherwise it’s head down at the bar, with General Public. Even at Christmas.’
Sonia nudged Madge. ‘Isn’t that the gorgeous hunk who was singing solo?’
Rob looked. It was Silvio Rocchetti, the baritone. He was laughing, as usual, showing large white teeth, his slick black locks bouncing just above his collar. His sung English was a lot better than his spoken, but not perfect enough to convince the orchestra that he had been chosen to do this Handel for any other reason than to draw the crowd. He’d appeared on the empty stage while Rob was tuning up a couple of hours before the concert, and had started on this long and tedious anecdote about the time he’d had a go on Keith Moon’s drum-kit in Rome some twenty years back. Rob was adjusting the tuning screws and tapping the calfskin with the hard, 33-mill wood-headed stick, straining his ears through the deep, broken English to get the perfect pitch, the precise colour, bending his head towards the drum like a doctor listening for a heartbeat, the tips of his fingers feeling the vibrations on the membrane, the correct frequencies growing like ripples in a bowl of water until they lapped inside him and he knew it was done.
Rocchetti had gone on talking while Rob was strapping the protectors onto the heads and pulling the leatherette covers over the two drums, having given the copper on the bowls a final polish, the church interior curved behind his distorted face and Rocchetti converted into a fat dwarf. Rocchetti’s stories were famous, the man was a celebrity, he slept with every soprano in sight – but Rob was bored. He was bored by Rocchetti’s stories, and yet they made him feel boring and inadequate in turn. They made him feel like a little bearded tympanist who looked like Rolf Harris – when in his heart of hearts, somewhere in the terrific depth and resonance of his soul, he knew he was something else much greater and more startling.
And now the girls – his wife and her two old school chums from Letchworth High – were ogling Rocchetti, mentally goosing him. It made Rob feel sick. He was in a sensitive state, for some reason. The first half of their Messiah had not gone terribly well – you could tell this from the way the woodwind bods were now fiddling with their reeds and looking tense. A young, fresh-faced second oboist had opened her case next to him and there again was that smell of pad grease, cork and humid velvet that always conjured up those miserable childhood hours struggling with the flute, his mother standing over him and yelling until the day he fell in love with the tympani during a concert at the Albert Hall.
He was thirsty. He could’ve sunk a pint, but instead he got out his camper’s bottle and took a swig of its lime cordial.
‘It’s very squashed in here,’ said Sophie.
‘You should try some other venues,’ said Rob. ‘Smith Square, for instance.’
‘What’s Smith Square, when it’s at home?’
‘St John’s Smith Square. The green room’s the crypt, it smells of toilets and cooking from the restaurant and it’s minuscule. Then to get on stage you have to go up this narrow spiral staircase into the back of the church and walk along right in front of the audience. We all hate this, being musicians. It’s OK for experimental actors, I suppose.’
‘Oh, you’re so sensitive,’ mocked Tonia, flapping a hand.
She was a high-dependency nurse in Basingstoke, and this always made Rob feel futile. He scratched his beard and ignored her. It was hot and stuffy and the oboes were shrieking in little spurts and everyone was talking too loudly. Rob wanted to be anywhere but here. He was happiest in a big, empty concert hall with a decent acoustic, a chamois-headed stick in each hand, beating out his beautiful sounds. He was happiest when no one was listening but the gods.
His wife was saying hello to Frank Taylor, the principal trumpet. Frank had been in the orchestra even longer than Rob, and Rob had once reckoned that Frank Taylor fancied Madge and vice-versa. He’d even played with the idea that Frank and Madge had had an affair. Rob didn’t like Frank Taylor, but was obliged to pretend he did. Now Frank was settling down next to him, in the chair vacated by the oboist. Frank’s lips were distorted by forty years of trumpet-playing into a moue, which made him look camp.
‘Rob,’ he said, winking at the girls, ‘has the nicest pair of baroque bowls this side of Watford.’
‘Thank you, Frank. I think my wife knows that already.’
‘I’m not sure I do, actually,’ said Madge, pulling a knowing face.
Rob caught her glance and, for a split-second, saw the ferocity in it. This was unpleasant; this was getting serious. He could do without this in the middle of a big concert, in the middle of the glory of the greatest oratorio in the world.
‘I thought little men were the best in bed,’ said Frank, patting Rob on the back.
‘Little men and fat trumpeters,’ Rob smiled, keeping it light, though his heart was pummelling against his throat.
‘I did used to wonder,’ said Sophie, grinning, her drink problem wafting across the table.
‘Wonder what?’ asked Madge.
‘About you and Rob, the height difference and that.’
Tonia gave a dirty chuckle. Rob shook his head as if he found it all rather sad, which in fact he did. He couldn’t ever take on Madge and her two chums from school; together they formed an invincible trio of mockery. His wife sort of crossed to the other side each time and he just had to wait until she was back with him again. It was a matter of sitting it out. She always did come back. It was very hot and crowded, the green room. Even the one Christmas garland looked as if it had been forgotten from last year.
‘Oh, I always sat down for it,’ he heard Madge say, or almost shout, over the hubbub, and this made all of them laugh – laughter which Rob pretended to go along with.
In fact, he was repelled. He looked at Madge across the table, there in the suffocating room crowded with faces too familiar for comfort, and felt repelled. He was repelled by her high, painted eyebrows and her sour mouth. This was his wife, and he felt repulsion. He was sure the repulsion was originating in her, in fact – that he was merely feeling the beat of her repulsion in the air in the same way that he felt the shiver of the membrane in the tips of his fingers, edging towards the precise intonation on his drums. She was repelled by him, seeing him through the eyes of her disappointed, messed-up old school friends. The blurts and squeals of the oboists and bassoonists testing their reeds, unable to relax, soaking their fine reeds in their spittle, started to send out sharp glass-like pieces in his head, scattering the depth and resonance of his inward mind, to which the sounds he made on his drums were always attuned.
‘Poor old Rob, it’s not fair,’ said Tonia. ‘Is it?’
‘I couldn’t care less.’
‘That’s it,’ said Madge, with a fierce edge to her tone. ‘As long as he’s got his drums, he doesn’t care. The drums are his children.’
The drums were to blame. One marriage, no kids. And unto them no child was born. Her old refrain.
‘It’s my job. I care about my job.’
‘See how I care,’ said Madge, producing a turkey roll from a plastic sandwich box. Rob took it with a nod. She handed out chocolate reindeers, bleeding into their wrappers. He was the only one with a turkey roll. He wasn’t even hungry. The pre-sliced turkey was dry.
Frank rested his elbow on Rob’s shoulder.
‘The point about Rob is that he’s totally bloody reliable. Without this little man, the orchestra would be bloody amazing.’
‘Thank you, Frank. Your solo was terrible in the run-through, by the way.’
‘O man of sorrows,’ said Frank. ‘One can only do one’s best. The trumpet shall sound, nevertheless.’
Rob picked at his turkey roll. Frank had now started on his usual loop tape about Moscow. He’d spent three months in Moscow last year, teaching the baroque trumpe
t. He’d known one of the musicians in the theatre siege. He’d seen amazing things. The Russian male was an endangered species – murder, alcohol and suicide. Yet Russians were so creative! They built their own houses in the country, because the country was so enormous, there was room for everyone. Everyone had to build their own dacha, Frank said, with a guttural, cod-Russian accent that was infuriating. Ah yes, so creative! He had seen an experimental theatre piece in which white-gloved gestures emphasised certain themes – love, the family, death – in a ritualistic manner. It was difficult to describe. The actor wore the glove on his left hand. It had been performed in a cellar. And their music was much more emotional, if less precise. Even Handel was fuzzy but superbly emotional, played by the Russians. Passionate, that was the word. Frank was making his own gestures, impressing the girls with his tales of Moscow, his faux accent.
Rob started to feel peculiarly small and enraged. Frank was needling him, under the surface, because the orchestra’s tympanist was famous for his precision. He was always precise, yes – but that didn’t mean he wasn’t also seeking a strong tonal colour. ‘Emotion’ was a totally meaningless term. It could only be transmuted through the instruments at your disposal. Anyway, Rob loved Russian cinema – at least, he had once attended a Russian film season at the South Bank years ago and been bowled over by a twenty-minute Russian film about two runaway soldiers in the last war, sheltering in a ruin with classical paintings on the shattered walls, like something from a dream.