A Note in Music

by Rosamond Lehmann

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  A Note in Music

  A Novel

  Rosamond Lehmann

  To Wogan

  ‘But the present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.’

  W. S. LANDOR

  Part One

  She was dressing for dinner. Next door, she heard Tom splashing in his bath, and singing over and over again the refrain of one of his three tunes:

  “Oh, lucky Jim,

  HOW … WI … EN-VY—HIM.”

  Each time she heard the mournful bellow, the same memory cut across her exasperation. She remembered August, and her home, hundreds of years ago; and the garden fête on the sunny lawn. She saw the Parish Ladies sitting on the imported cane Parish Room chairs, and sinking too far into the grass, for it had been a wet summer. She saw her father the vicar standing upon a platform and booming: “Oh, lucky Jim …” She had watched from her secret perch in the apple tree; and suddenly, seeing that melancholy black figure, mild brow, open mouth, she had blushed painfully for him, had known he was being ridiculous, and wanted to giggle, to implore him to stop, to protect him from the Parish Ladies.

  Since those days she had come a long way; yet where were the milestones, or the turning-places? There seemed nothing to look back on save a few freakish and capricious gleams assailing her at unexpected moments; and certainly, she thought (pulling on her stockings), there was nothing before her.

  At the Rescue and Preventive Bazaar last year, Norah had laughingly urged her to consult the fortune-teller, saying: “She’s too uncanny, my dear. She’s told me the most astounding things. All my past.” She had refused with a scoff and escaped from Norah, and gone back quickly to her cake stall: for the truth was she was afraid of the fortune-teller. She had had a vision of the woman, scrutinizing her palm and saying finally:

  “This is a most curious case. There is nothing here: nothing­ in your past, nothing in your future. As for character­—lazy—greedy—secretive—without will or purpose.”

  That was a year ago. And to-day she would be even more afraid … infinitely more afraid of one to whom the secrets of the heart might be laid bare. She paused in the buttoning of her old-fashioned cambric petticoat, and bit her nail, pondering this.

  The song from the bathroom ceased, and she heard the tremendous roar, gurgle and bump which meant that Tom had heaved himself from the water and landed with a swoop upon the bath-mat.

  He would be late as usual. Tom’s unpunctuality was a curious phenomenon, considering how closely, in nearly all other ways, he conformed to type. She thought of his daily agonized, and sometimes vain struggle not to be late for the office, and her mouth relaxed in contemptuous indulgence. To the end of his life he would never cease to wrestle half-heartedly with his unpunctuality, and be vanquished by it.

  They were a couple of slipshod characters, she thought, opening the cupboard and taking down her old black crêpe-de-chine from its peg. He hid behind precise attention to detail, behind unimpeachable personal tidiness, and the saving of brown paper and bits of string, and an engagement-book, and the multiple-column account book in which not even the weekly two-pence to the pavement artist could blush unseen, but was carefully set down every Friday night under Charities … And this dressing for dinner every evening—that was his idea. “Keeps one up to the mark,” he would say.

  His favourite word, she thought (plunging clumsily into her frock and hearing the shoulder-seams crack), was gentleman. A dinner-jacket, however tight and unbecoming, was the mark of a gentleman, and proclaimed nightly that he was a public-school man, had played cricket, was fond of a day’s fishing; and that but for these hard times since the war, and not being so young as he was after four years’ service, he would now be in a very different position. The Fairfaxes had never been in business, he would say. But the family estates had passed most unfairly to another branch. He often said this when he met a stranger. The war had beggared all the old families, he would add: no money nowadays to fight a law-suit. Otherwise…

  His pedigree was assuming alarming proportions in his conversation, she thought (hitching up her petticoat where it dropped at the back). Her petticoats were always too long; and yet, goodness knows, her skirts were long enough. She had ignored the short-skirt fashion when it came in, partly because she always did ignore the fashion, partly out of dislike for her legs; but mostly because she could not be bothered to shorten her petticoats. These stout cambric ones with a border of broderie anglaise had been part of her trousseau. Nobody wore petticoats nowadays, Norah was always severely telling her—but that did not trouble her. Her lips twisted again into a half-smile, as she remembered how Norah had been forced to admit, at her suggestion, that a petticoat of this type was an integral part of her old-fashioned physical personality: just as, she thought, flesh-coloured silk stockings were necessary to Norah’s modernist form.

  “A couple of slipshod characters,” she muttered, half aloud; and noted that the habit of talking to herself was growing on her—just as all Tom’s habits were growing on him. … How, without being both rude and incomprehensible, did one stop one’s husband talking about gentlemen?

  As for her, she thought, attempting vaguely to hook her cuffs, she was a muddler, she cooked her housekeeping accounts, she mended neither her stockings nor his socks, she had forgotten for the past two days to ring up the plumber about the plug that would not pull (and Tom would be justifiably annoyed); she wallowed in novels instead of taking exercise … but … but … and she looked at herself in the glass … she was not weak; no, she was not weak. She saw her neck springing strongly up from wide shoulders; her deep bosom, her firm thick ankles. Motherly, she thought, smiling her crooked faint smile—solidly planted as a tree-trunk, imperturbable. She would not look so uncomely dressed in some peasant costume—round-necked, short-sleeved white muslin vest, black velvet laced bodice fitting snugly into the waist, bright-coloured ample skirts swinging out from her hips. It was these four-guinea crêpe-de-chines with jumper tops accentuating her breadth at top and bottom, which were so fatal. She wished she were a peasant woman toiling all day long in the fields of some far country. When evening came the men and women would cry out her beautiful, mysterious, many-syllabled name, telling her to cease from her labours and come home; and one would smile at her, and slowly walk beside her in the dusk, matching his long step to hers.

  She took a deep breath and tightened the muscles in her arms. … No, she was not weak, and Tom knew it. Somewhere inside her there was power.

  Her hat fell out of the cupboard, and she gave it a kick before picking it up. … With a shawl over her head, or a wide-winged bonnet, instead of these tight, drab soul-withering felts—no, she would not be so uncomely.

  She muttered: “Oh, fool, fool.” There was nothing to look forward to. Why could she not feel it as indubitably as she thought it, and so be done with this restlessness? “Skittish,” she said, quite loud this time, in her deep, rough voice.

  Tom broke a prolonged pause in the bathroom by roaring “Wi-i-ill ye gang …” and then was silent again.

  Part the hair, brush it, do the side-bits, then put on powder; then coil the back hair into the nape. The side-bits were short. She had experimented with them one day when the periodical hatred of her hair assailed her; but the result had not inspired her with sufficient zest to remove the remainder. As it was, it looked merely vulgar, with those straight flaps over the ears. The truth was, Tom made too much fuss about short hair t
o make it worth while to put the matter to the test. He was that sort of husband. The Daily Mirror had once been full of letters about shingled wives from husbands just like Tom … A Woman’s glory. … He had quoted the passage at her a hundred times; for he was not sensitive about repeating himself, and brought out the stalest quotation, especially from Scripture, again and again in his loud, self-satisfied reciting voice; as if he had thought of it himself, and were saying it for the first time.

  And she went on letting herself look vulgar—letting herself go, that was it—because every effort had become irksome. She was fairly comfortable, she told herself (putting in the last hairpin)—quite comfortable really, embedded thick and flat now in her life. Nothing mattered, nothing would ever happen for her again.

  She wished for a moment that she were very unhappy—a piercing pain, she thought, or better still, a blinding sin: to feel as she had felt in her tenth year when she had violently wished to discover, in order to commit, the sin against the Holy Ghost; or when she had called the garden-boy Raca because he teased her: to feel the sense of being set apart, alone beneath the shadow of the appalling dignity of certain doom.

  But why not wish rather to be piercingly happy, transported with pure ecstasy; or merely, gay as a lark? How far indeed from gay was this life! Happiness came in a warm sluggish tide of well-being when Annie drew the curtains, heaped the fire, and left her with a great cup of coffee and a toasted bun, and a new novel from the library; or dreamily, wistfully, shot through with points of question and flickers of regret when Norah took her in her little car for a drive in the country.

  And yes,—she had felt happy once looking after a mongrel puppy with weak eyes and a tender, foolish furry face, bought for five shillings in the market. That puppy had been gay. His tiny spark of life had warmed her heart, and he had taught her to play games with him, and lain in very sudden sleeps along her shoulder, with his ice-button nose on her neck. But in spite of all her care he had not thrived. Within a month he had sickened; and after lying in her lap for a day and a night, dressed in a little flannel jacket, had died with unbearable resignation. It had been worse, incomparably worse than when the baby was born dead eight years ago. She had taken his death for a sign that nothing would ever come right for her now; that whatever she touched would wither without blossoming. She had been, she supposed, very morbid. He had made everything worse, not better for her. His small person, stamped with the early neglect, disease, and suffering against which her love had been powerless, had become the symbol for the whole colossal ignorance and brutality of the town. Tom had not comforted her, and she could never confess to him her unconquerable dread of the streets on market-days—the men with an armful of puppies for sale, and all the anguish assailing her afresh. Tom had not comforted her; but then she had not given him the chance. She had made herself like stone. She imagined Tom’s face if she had said to him:

  “I shall never get over this, Tom. I shall never try for anything for myself again.”

  It was true; but she could no more have said it, she thought, stabbed for one moment with a memory, than she could have asked him what he had done with that small form when he took it away, still clad in its unavailing jacket.

  She shook out her powder-puff. … It was the only thing left worth doing, she thought—to be like stone before the world; to tell no one “I also suffer,” and by that admission be exposed to pity and the easy exchange of confidences. She was friendless, she supposed, except for the single odd relationship with Norah, who chaffed her and made rude personal remarks and looked in on her way to or from shopping; and treated her with something of the same brusque affection she bestowed on her two plain little boys.

  Tom had no friends either, she thought: only people he went fishing with on Saturdays, or played golf with on Sundays. Mercifully he hardly ever brought them back to the house now: they were so boring. During the first year or so he was always bringing them. He had liked the feeling of keeping open house—of being the sort of chap people dropped in on without ceremony. And she herself, she supposed, had found them less boring in those days. There had generally been some trifle to laugh at, something one could say without much effort. Nowadays she could not be bothered with people to meals.

  She supposed Tom felt the same. Or if not …

  Do I make Tom happy? she thought, and paused for a second at her dressing-table while the words flashed through her mind and were gone again, leaving no tremor of question, but only a passing faint surprise; as if a trivial memory long buried had returned to her for a moment.

  She brushed a ridge of powder off her chin. It fell on her skirt, and she left it there. Tom had views about powder too—declared he preferred a healthy shine. Not that her face ever shone, she thought, scrutinizing it in her ivory hand-mirror. She had one of those rather thick skins that always looked cool and dry, and of an even pallor. No colour ever came into it save when she blushed; and that, she told herself with irritation, was all too frequently. One could not be like stone before the world with such a flush creeping up uncontrollably to betray a secret confusion or shame. At thirty-four, it was too ridiculous.

  Now she was ready. She looked in the long glass, but, as usual, without seeing herself, because her figure, especially in this black shiny case, made her feel depressed and uncomfortable.

  Seven-thirty. Fish pie and chocolate shape for supper. She had been looking forward to chocolate shape ever since ordering it this morning. There was no sound from Tom. He must be struggling with his collar.

  She parted the curtains and leaned against the window, looking out. The January full moon stared down upon a back street, a row of back yards, blank windows and irregular patterns of roofs and walls. Nothing but town and moon petrified in the frozen night.

  She thought suddenly of a smooth hillside crowned with a coppice of young beeches, and moonlight drenching the turfy slope; but where or when, if ever, she had seen this, she could not remember.

  The country haunted her still, she said to herself: not a day passed without bringing some picture remembered or imagined. Dawn and sunset were not in these skies, behind the slate roofs and red brick chimneys of the residential quarter—but in her mind’s eye, over country spaces; and spring and autumn still made her sick for home. How many times had she not thought of the summer evening when a bird had sung in the poor lilac tree in the front patch? … But that would never happen again, now that the trams came to the end of the avenue.

  She let the curtain drop, and stood listening. A stillness had dropped suddenly upon everything. There was not a sound in the house, or from the streets.

  She thought “I shall soon be middle-aged”; and it seemed as if some one beside her had broken the silence to whisper the words in her ears.

  The gong rang. She opened his dressing-room door and looked in. He was cutting his nails.

  “Ready in a moment,” he said. “Go on down and begin.”

  But she lingered at the door.

  “I forgot about the plug,” she said.

  “Mm. I reminded you three times this morning, I think.”

  “I know.”

  He gathered up money and watch-chain from the dressing-table.

  “I might have known it wouldn’t be done,” he said. “I ought to have seen to it myself. But I should have thought you might have … Nothing to do all day and yet … However, it’s always the same.”

  “I’ll ring up in the morning,” she said, thinking with loathing of the telephone.

  She left him and went out along the passage. He caught her up on the stairs, and they went on down together, side by side, two strangers.

  For ten years he had made a point of keeping up appearances by conversation on general topics whenever Annie was in the room. As a rule, when Annie went out, silence fell; but to-night he talked on, and she saw that with his usual aptitude for forgetting grievances, he was trying to put the evening upon
an agreeable footing.

  She thought how this facility, so admirable a quality in itself, did but make him contemptible to her. Everything that was difficult or disagreeable slipped off his consciousness. He would be clouded for a moment, and then shake himself and come back smiling, a little apologetic, appealing: “Let’s all be comfortable and jolly again.”

  And she would go on sulking, sulking—unresponsive, knotted inwardly like a skein of grey, harsh, tangled wool.

  He said:

  “There’s a new chap come into the office. The old man’s nephew, or rather grand-nephew. Come to learn the business for a bit, I believe. I should say he was just down from the ’Varsity by the look of him. Long hair and some queer sort of tie. More like an artist.”

  He laughed heartily, and added: “Seems a decent sort of chap, though. I had a word with him: just shook him by the hand and told him I’d be glad to tip him the wink if anything stumped him. He thanked me very civilly.”

  “Civil,” she thought: another of the words that did not match old family estates. She glanced at him—at the thick commonplace shape and texture of him, crowned with sparse oiled hair, and wondered for a moment how he had looked to the eyes of the old man’s nephew, the artistic young man from the University. She wondered if Tom had already told him that his father’s financial misfortunes had obliged him to renounce Oxford at the last moment, and start in business at the age of seventeen.

  He told her he had had a slack day, and trade looked worse than ever. He told her he had arranged to play billiards with Potter to-morrow evening. He remarked that Annie made a jolly good fish pie.

  How this room could still depress her! Though the curtains were drawn, the blank brick wall which was the view oppressed her to-night, as if it were visible.

  The last tenant had papered the walls in dead blue with an orange frieze. The electric light over the table glared out hideously beneath a contrivance of steel hoops, salmon-coloured frills, and beaded fringe. She had meant to change it all long ago; but she had forgotten, or never had the money, or the energy.