by Adam Thorpe
In the interval they ate ice creams and looked out on the river. The boys had not been allowed to bring any computer games; they knew Auntie Milly disapproved.
Lance said: ‘Did you know that Shakespeare lived above a Froggy making wigs? In a flat.’
‘A French wig-maker,’ Rex mumbled, losing a dollop of ice cream to his brand-new chinos.
‘Really?’ said Milly. ‘You do learn some interesting things at school.’
‘He was a workaholic,’ nodded Jack, feeling the need to add to their fund of facts, although he didn’t know a lot about Shakespeare. He would hive off to Bounds Green and back and Mill would never know. ‘Lived in the Barbican, and worked himself to death.’
The twins had already lost interest, watching a man mouth-drumming into a mike by the river. The river was really flat and uninteresting, today. London was incapable, Jack thought, of rising above the mercantile. Look what you can get! it screamed. And then the sun would come out and she would give you a dazzling smile. Hive off and what, once there? He’d work that one out in situ.
He heard a sort of squeal from Milly and he turned round and it was Andrew Beak, the young and very brilliant cellist with the ENO, kissing her on both cheeks. Andrew was with his new girl, an up-and-coming composer who, Jack knew from someone else, thought Jack Middleton was old rope.
‘Are these your boys?’ she asked, gauchely.
‘My nephews,’ said Milly.
The composer’s name was Abigail Staunton, Jack remembered, beaming politely. She was wearing a denim shirt over a low-cut dayglo-pink T-shirt, and the denim’s cuffs hid her hands. She might have been an assistant in Top Shop. These two were almost ten years younger than he was, devouring his heels, wanting him out of the way, revering only those old enough to be their grandfathers or great-grandfathers: Webern, Kurtág, Cage, Ligeti, Messiaen.
Jack raised his hand as if he was warding them off. ‘Hi! Great to see you, Andrew! How are things? Cool. Cool. We’ve met, yeah. Hello, Abigail. Good stuff. Really? Wow. When’s that for? Brilliant!’
Jack felt a kind of nauseous panic seize him: Abigail had received a commission from Sir Simon Rattle for a piece to be played by the Berlin Philharmonic for a concert of new music by composers under thirty, to be broadcast on international television and radio. Andrew Beak would be the guest cellist.
‘What are you working on these days, Jack?’
‘Oh, small things.’ It was best to play dead dog and over-modest rather than reveal how very small his commissions really were. ‘Do you know the score?’
‘About what?’
‘The cricket.’
‘Oh, I’ve never been interested. I’m a rugger-bugger.’
‘Ugh.’
A smart woman in her sixties, with extremely short grey hair, came up with a faint scent of the WC remaining on her. Andrew introduced her as his mother, Geraldine. ‘This is Milly and this is Jack, Mummy. Jack Middleton.’ He didn’t bother with the twins.
Mummy?
She frowned at Jack as if from a great height, although she was smaller than him. ‘Do I know you?’
‘You might have heard his music.’
‘Are you a composer, too?’
‘On good days,’ Jack smiled, the bottom knocked out of him.
‘I’m very bad on names, of course. Do you know Thomas Adès? I think Tom is brilliant,’ added Andrew’s mother, as Jack knew she would.
She asked him who he sounded like.
‘Myself.’
‘Oh, come on. Everyone sounds like someone else but with a discernible difference which is what we call their identity.’ Andrew’s mother blinked at him. He recalled someone saying that she was a lecturer in something like culture studies, and a long-term widow.
‘Arvo Pärt,’ said Andrew Beak – which infuriated Jack. Andrew’s mother’s face flinched and turned away. Yes, she was definitely an academic.
‘Andrew darling, do get some tea. There’s less of a queue now.’
Andrew’s mother revealed a plastic tub in which three slices of her home-made flan were nestled. She all but wiped Andrew’s nose when he came back with the tea, but Andrew didn’t seem to notice. This was what had made him one of Britain’s top cellists. Abigail was talking to Milly about alternative green housing in Berlin. Then she and Andrew started talking schools, inevitably, having asked the twins where they were. Andrew had a little girl from a previous partner, which Jack hadn’t known about before.
‘She’s done an entrance interview already,’ said Andrew. ‘Six years old. Good training for life, though. The uniform alone’s gonna cost a fortune.’
‘Parents need very sharp elbows when it comes to education,’ said his mother.
‘Education begins at home,’ said Andrew. ‘They’re magic, kids, if you don’t let them get on top.’
‘What’s it like having twins?’ asked Andrew’s mother, turning to Jack. ‘Double trouble?’
Jack glanced at Milly. She looked stricken, very pale, under the smile.
‘They’re not ours, exactly,’ Jack joked. ‘My wife’s nephews.’
‘Oh, you don’t have any of your own?’
‘No,’ said Milly. ‘We lost one at eight months.’
Andrew’s mother winced unconvincingly. ‘Oh, how ghastly.’ Abigail managed a soft groan of sympathy.
‘We’ve tried like hell, since,’ said Milly, on one of her steam-rolling trips now. ‘We’ve gone the whole hog, zero result, and it’s bloody awful.’
Andrew’s mother looked genuinely taken aback, which was very gratifying.
‘Adoption?’ queried her son, masking his embarrassment with a callous-seeming coolness.
‘Maybe,’ said Milly, not looking at him. ‘But we haven’t actually given up. I don’t like chemicals. IVF, you get pumped silly with drugs. My insides may not be designed to have triplets. It’s totally unnatural.’
Andrew’s mother was frowning. ‘Well, if taking the drugs helps people …’
‘So do cars help people, and look what they’re doing!’
Mill was talking candidly because she was cross. Jack felt proud of her, but also conscious that she was not doing a thing for his professional reputation. Andrew’s mother pretended to study the theatre-going fauna through the strained silence, which was broken only by Andrew digging away at his lunch. Abigail Staunton was examining the large black programme. A seagull mewed overhead, as it would have done five hundred years before. Thankfully, the bell rang. Elderly Americans called to each other like hoopoes.
The second half hooked the twins, especially the business about the statue. Its paint still wet. Jack was too busy thinking. Kaja had waited six years to creep up on him. Frozen, she’d been, like the statue. But in fact – like grandmother’s footsteps – creeping up the whole time. Now he’d turned round too late and been touched. He’d lost the game. He glanced up at Milly sitting in the top rows of seats among the well-dressed tourists. She gave him a little wave, still looking pale and somehow lonely. He gave her a thumbs up. Maybe he hadn’t lost the game, not yet. Maybe it was all coincidence, Kaja getting Howard to teach her son the viola. Maybe it was sheer chance and not calculation. In that case, he still had time to act.
Hermione stepped off her pedestal and there was wonder and tears and then some jolly period dancing and then the applause.
They waited for Milly at the door. The others had gone. She thought it was quite good. He put on his involuntarily plummy voice and pointed out how like a Greek play the first act was, with long speeches instead of the chorus (he’d recently heard this on a Radio 3 interval talk).
‘Where did you get that from? Radio 3?’
‘No, I did not.’
‘Anyway, I can’t believe anyone would just explode with jealousy like that, for no reason.’
‘People aren’t jellyfish,’ said Jack.
The Thames muscled its way past its own truculent currents. A couple of armed policemen strolled past, ready to rub out another innocent B
razilian on the Tube. Milly went on about this, educating Lance and Rex, who liked guns a lot. They walked to Bank and then took the Northern Line to Hampstead. Milly disapproved of taxis, these days, as she disapproved of planes. Jack wanted to query her candid behaviour in front of his so-called colleagues, but didn’t have the heart. It bit away at him, though. He felt it would take him a notch down.
They sat on the rocking, noisy train and most of the time they forgot to be frightened, but when the fear came back it felt absurd. The train was emptier than it would have been before the bombings. The young guy opposite was reading El Código Da Vinci with his brain wired to an iPod, turned up loud enough to hear its hissing, maddening beat, like something corrosive.
It began to corrode the shining metal of Shakespeare in Jack’s head. The waste of the human gift, blended into brown gunk by society’s mixer. It was polluting the effect of Shakespeare. If a bomb hit, that’s what he would go out on: a stressed-up sensation of gunk. He smiled at the twins, and then at Milly, as their bodies were messed about by the hurtling little shifts and sways of the train.
He thought about the absurdity of the idea of the carriage turning into a fireball, and then about the ice caps. Melting, carelessly almost, splitting and tumbling as if they couldn’t be bothered to make an effort. What was the word for ice doing that? Cleaving? Calving? That seemed equally off the cards. Floods, the end of things. Mass extinction. But both happenings were as real as his own hands. He studied his hands as the train roared and clattered through the depths. These fingers had touched Kaja, intimately and everywhere. But that didn’t seem real, not here, not now. Not a trace left on his fingers.
That’s because it was in the past, it was finished, and even the applause had lost its last echoes to the silence.
The point, he thought, was to feel and think at the same time, at the highest pitch of value, without one cancelling out the other. But there was so much interfering and so much interrupting. There was so much destruction. Because Pärt was popular, the academics had gone off him. The universities were crippled by theory, postmodern or otherwise (Howard, for one, disagreed with this). Nobody admitted to feeling anything any more: feeling was suspect. Theoreticians, like surgeons, didn’t feel.
At the same time there were respectable composers selling themselves to populist trash. By trash, Jack meant anything that was fake, that was surface glitter, that was diluted or industrialised or plain tosspot rubbish. A good rock melody could touch the depths, it wasn’t to do with complexity or difficulty. His favourite music, which he would play repeatedly, was an ethnologist’s tape of ‘Thinking Songs’ from the Nigeria–Cameroon border, made back in the early seventies. This was human music. Its humanness rolled out under the stars. Beyond the voices and the primitive plucking instrument, you could hear the crickets and the weight of the night. But between that music and the music of here and now lay a labyrinth of technique, of signs, of self-conscious history, of people like Andrew’s mother, guarding the exits.
What he needed to do was to stand many times in a wood or on the top of a mountain.
What he needed to do was to help Kaja and her son. But he was very scared. He was scared to spill what he had. So it was out of the question.
What can you get? screamed everything around him, here. What can you get?
And he really didn’t want to know.
Last night, in fact, he’d dreamed again about Kaja. She was no longer sinister. They’d gone to the Kenwood concert, alone together without the boy; there had been some kind of mistake and the Thinking Songs were being performed by a few tribal elders on the stage, naked but for loincloths. The lawns started filling with people and cool boxes and the chattering got louder and Jack rose to his feet and started screaming at everyone to be quiet. His parents were there, shaking their heads. Milly appeared on the path, with Howard and a teacher Jack remembered from his primary school in Hayes, who’d had a furry boil on her chin. Now the boil had gone. They were all arm in arm and drunk.
Kaja had disappeared. He waded into the lake and woke up thinking, just for a moment in the half-light of their bedroom, that he was on Haaremaa and hearing the pinewood tick in the sun.
It was now nearly a fortnight since he had seen the boy.
Howard didn’t phone again. So the boy couldn’t have mentioned him to his mother, or maybe he had but she hadn’t sensed that it might be Jack Middleton.
When he wasn’t working on his pieces, or teaching, or listening to the cricket and its soft, suspended silences and cries, its wood-block percussives between the genial, detached commentary, he felt bewildered. When he wasn’t right in the flow of his composing, hearing the music inwardly, and playing with what he heard on paper or just leaving it as it was, he did not know what to do with himself.
Milly was suddenly busy with, among other things, an important client whose certified wood delivery turned out to be warped and who had to be appeased down in Suffolk on the summer bank holiday, despite the traffic and the last thrilling day of the fourth test. Jack’s viewing was interrupted only by his lesson with Yeh.
He made her laugh, to make up for his lack of concentration on the Chopin nocturne.
‘I’m your Zywny,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘Zywny, Chopin’s first piano teacher. And the last entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’
‘Are you in the Encyclopaedia Britannica?’
‘Not yet,’ he joked, secretly hoping he would be. And Yeh laughed with her fingers in front of her mouth.
Sometimes Jack wished he could just do good in the world in a practical way, like Milly. Pulling sounds out of the air – out of himself – to be planted on paper and to flower eventually in some half-full concert room maybe once or twice, to be revived now and again over the following years, all this seemed crazy.
Once the cricket was off, he saw no point in anything, even in breathing from one moment to another, and realised he might be clinically depressed.
He emailed a couple of composer friends along these lines, and they were extravagantly kind in their swift replies, each telling him that he must not waste his incredible gift to the world, et cetera. Needless to say, they were not English: one was Italian, the other from the Ukraine. The three had met in The Hague as graduate students, and performed together. They had felt they were going to conquer the world. He wasn’t sure they had heard any of his recent pieces (available on CD – entitled The Barbed Wire Grows – for the last three years), but their hearts were in the right place. They both had full-time posts at prestigious universities, which he half envied and yet knew must have damaged their talent.
Milly got in latish each evening that week, stressed out, and he had a problem ratcheting himself up to her speed. On Wednesday, spent in Datchet, all she’d had was a cheese-filled baked potato in Spud-U-Like.
‘Spud-U-Like? You’re slipping, Mill.’
He’d gone to the Proms alone on the Tuesday, and had been disappointed. The performance of the Beethoven never stretched itself. Compared to the last hours of play the previous day, which saw England in the lead for the first time in yonks, it was pure flab.
He read in the newspaper about someone or other aged forty-three and realised with a start that he was the same vintage: he’d pictured someone bald, middle-aged and boring. He was not seriously balding, or he’d have to do as others did and shave his hair to the scalp and put up with rib-ticklers about Lawn Grow. All his hair had done was lose its glossy black; the dye he used was natural, smelt like compost. One day he knew he would let his hair go, turn as grey as that theorbo player next to Kaja. The guy had not looked that uncool. There was hope. There was hope for the Cyclops.
Kaja’s son must have taken up the viola under his mother’s influence, choosing the woodier sound of the viola instead of the violin because that’s what he was sensitive to, that’s what he liked and responded to. At five years old! This was always happening in the art world. The amateur in one generation, the genius in
the next. Not in his own case, though. In his own case, it came from the sky. At eighteen he had reckoned he was the Messiah, pretty well. Most people did, at eighteen. Now he was nothing. A mortal after all.
Lying in bed with Milly, who was reading (Milly had just had to start wearing glasses to read, which had enticed him for some unknown reason to slip his hand under her nightie), he admitted he was feeling a little low. Milly was enjoying what he was doing with his hand, but not showing it. He could tell she was enjoying it because she didn’t complain, even though she was deep in her book. She didn’t say anything when he said he was feeling a little low, so he left it.
‘You OK, Mill?’
‘Ace, baby,’ she said, flatly.
‘I love it when you say words like ace and baby, it turns me on.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you went to Roedean and it sounds so bizarre.’
‘Bizarre things turn you on?’
‘I guess.’
His fingers were on her belly, around the belly button, at the dangerous frontier between skin and the down feather of hair. All the information was coming through his fingers, like a blind alto he knew who read scores in Braille, holding the sheets against his stomach and shifting his fingers mysteriously over the white, blank paper as the voice soared. It was amazing information he was getting, in fact, to do with the softness of skin and the silkiness of hair that no one else, as far as he knew, had the right to touch unless for medical reasons. She had put on a bit of weight in her mid-thirties and mostly lost it again. He felt the little pit of her belly button and then crept a bit further down and he started stiffening.
‘No,’ she said, reading.
‘No?’
‘Just in case.’
‘I’ll touch myself then.’
‘If you want.’
He started touching himself.
‘Good book?’
It was a book about the industrialised horrors of British food.
‘Oh, really jolly,’ said Milly. ‘Tesco’s and the rest are just evil. You’ll never want to eat again unless you’ve grown it yourself.’