The Dwarves of Death

by Jonathan Coe

  And that evening, the evidence started to pile up. It started with her being late. This in itself was unusual: she had never kept me waiting for more than about five minutes before, but this time she was more than half an hour late, and it was past nine o’clock by the time I spotted her threading through the crowds from Piccadilly Circus.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘My watch must be slow.’

  ‘You aren’t wearing a watch,’ I pointed out.

  Madeline pulled her coat tightly around herself.

  ‘Don’t snap at me when I’ve just arrived,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do, anyway?’

  ‘I thought we could go to a film, but it’s too late now, they’ve all started.’ I expected her to apologize again at this point, but she didn’t. ‘So, I don’t know… I suppose we might as well get something to eat.’

  ‘Don’t sound so enthusiastic.’

  ‘It’s just that I’ve hardly got any money.’

  The sheer predictability of my feelings for Madeline never ceased to surprise me. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow. In her absence, a simple longing; as soon as we were together again, irritation, petulance, angry devotion. Whenever I saw her I was immediately struck by how beautiful she was, and then immediately devastated by the thought that I had known her for six months and still not even come close to making love to her. And yet, just when I was dying to give vent to my emotion, I was expected to be cool and level-headed, to look around me and to choose, from the hundreds of restaurants on offer in the Leicester Square area, the one where we were to go and have dinner. French? Italian? Greek? Indian? Chinese? Thai? Vietnamese? Indonesian? Malaysian? Vegetarian? Nepalese?

  ‘How about going to McDonald’s?’ I said.

  ‘Fine,’ she said.

  We went to the one on the Haymarket, and sat upstairs. I had a quarterpounder with cheese, regular fries and a large coke. All Madeline would have was a cheeseburger. We ate in silence for a while. She was clearly depressed about something and her moroseness didn’t take long to spread in my direction. I thought of all the evenings we had spent together in the last six months, all the hope and excitement I had felt at the start of the relationship, and it seemed cruel and pathetic that we should be sitting there, not even talking, just picking at junk food in these bland surroundings on a freezing winter’s night. When I finally dared to speak, it seemed to require enormous effort.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘what have you been up to, the last few days?’

  ‘Nothing much. You know me.’

  I pointed at her cheeseburger.

  ‘Is that all you’re going to eat?’

  ‘I’m not very hungry. Anyway, I hate this food.’

  I must have made some gesture of frustration, because she took pity and said: ‘I’m sorry, William. We’re both in a bad mood, that’s all.’

  I could have pointed out that I hadn’t been in a bad mood, until she kept me waiting for half an hour, but it seemed more constructive to take her up on her attempt at friendliness.

  ‘We recorded a new song on Tuesday,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’ Naturally, she sounded bored.

  ‘Took us all day, in fact. Six hours’ studio time.’

  ‘This is turning into quite an expensive hobby, isn’t it?’

  ‘You know perfectly well it isn’t a hobby.’

  She took one of my fries and said, absently, ‘You still think you’re going to make a career out of this, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t think of it in those terms.’

  ‘Why do you do it then, this music? What’s the point?’

  ‘I do it because I have to.’

  Her stare was blank, uncomprehending.

  ‘I do it because I’ve got all this music, locked up inside me, and I have to let it out. It’s… what I do. It’s what I’ve always done.’

  ‘Sounds most inconvenient: like a bowel problem or something. I’m glad I don’t have it.’

  ‘No, it’s not like that at all. It’s a gift. It’s a way of expressing feelings – putting them into permanent form – preserving them. Feelings which would otherwise just be dead and forgotten.’

  ‘What sort of feelings?’

  Bravely, I said: ‘Feelings about you, for instance.’

  ‘You’ve written songs about me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How embarrassing.’

  There was a short silence, during which I wondered whether she realized how wounding this had sounded. Then I said, ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked – picking up on my sarcasm, for once.

  ‘You know something that really pisses me off?’

  ‘If you’re just going to be rude to me tonight,’ she said, ‘I don’t have to sit here and listen.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what pisses me off. It’s how nice you are.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How nice you are to everybody but me. God, you’re so polite, and gentle, and considerate, and generous, you’re so brimming over with good feelings for everyone: and not a scrap of it comes my way. Not a bloody trickle.’

  ‘I think you’re being unfair. Very unfair.’

  ‘No I’m not. Why should you treat me differently from anyone else? Just because I’m your boyfriend, that doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to a bit of courtesy now and again. Jesus, you keep me waiting for half an hour, you’re sulky, you won’t talk to me. You won’t even tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong.’

  I took hold of her chin and forced her to look at me.

  ‘Yes there is. Isn’t there?’

  She looked away.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  My fingers had been covered with pickle and tomato sauce. She took one of the paper serviettes and wiped her face clean.

  I sighed. ‘Tell me, will you? You owe it to me.’

  She tried to meet my gaze but had to look away as she said, brokenly, ‘I want… a change.’

  ‘A change?’

  ‘In this relationship.’

  I frowned.

  ‘What sort of change?’

  ‘You know what sort,’ she said, looking up again.

  ‘No I don’t.’

  For several seconds we stared at each other, two pairs of eyes in angry, hopeless deadlock, straining to communicate and yet straining to block each other out. Finally Madeline broke away.

  ‘God, you’re stupid,’ she said. ‘I’ve never known anyone as stupid as you, William.’ She stood up and put her bag over her shoulder. ‘I’m going.’

  ‘Going where?’

  ‘Home.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m not being silly. I’ve had enough and I’m going home.’

  ‘I’ll come with you to the bus-stop.’

  ‘Forget it. I don’t want you to. I’d rather go on my own.’

  I stood up, too.

  ‘Will you stop messing around? Are we going to talk about this properly, like two – ’

  She pushed me back down into my seat.

  ‘Shut up and finish that cheeseburger.’

  And before I had time to stop her, she was off, running down the staircase and disappearing from view. I sat there, baffled. In front of me was a plastic carton containing a half-eaten cheeseburger: a potent symbol of a failed relationship if ever I saw one. After a few moments I pushed it into the waste-bin and left the restaurant myself.

  There was no sign of Madeline out in the street. I knew which bus-stop she would be walking to, but there seemed no point in following her: better to let this mood subside, and maybe call her tomorrow. The evening was turning colder, and there was a damp mist in the air. I buttoned up my thin old raincoat, thrust my hands deep into the pockets, started to wander aimlessly up the street and then struck out in the direction of Samson’s.

  It was a long shot, but it paid off: Tony was there. I didn’t want to speak to him right away, though, so I sat at a table in the corner and ordered a bottle of
wine, which I began to drink on my own, slowly and methodically. The next thing I knew, it was three-quarters empty. The place was practically deserted, so there wasn’t much in the way of distractions – conversation, clinking glasses, the scraping of chairs – to prevent me from listening to his piano-playing. We had ‘Night and Day’, ‘Some Other Time’, ‘Blue in Green’ and, finally, ‘My Funny Valentine’. Though I say it myself, it wasn’t as good as the version I had played for Madeline that night. It was more polished, but less emotional. It got to me, all the same, prompting me to wander over to the piano, before Tony had a chance to start his next number.

  ‘Hi.’ He seemed genuinely pleased to see me. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘When’s your break?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I could take one now.’

  ‘Come and have a drink, then.’

  We ordered another bottle of wine, even though he didn’t seem to drink much of it, and I filled him in on the argument with Madeline. I don’t know what I expected to gain from confiding in him in this way. Men don’t tend to be a great deal of use to each other at times of emotional crisis, and I found myself wishing that there was some woman I could have gone to, someone who wouldn’t have felt embarrassed about hugging me, to start with, and then discussing the whole thing openly. Tony, I could see, was also suffering from the temptation to say something along the lines of ‘I told you so’. I wasn’t going to let him do that.

  ‘Well, I might as well try to forget it,’ I said eventually.

  ‘I think that’s a good idea.’

  ‘I’ve got other things to think about. Lots to get on with.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Besides, I can phone her in the morning.’

  He looked at me, smiled and shook his head.

  ‘You don’t think you should leave it a bit longer than that?’

  It occurred to me that what he was saying was something in the nature of a final break: a prospect which, as soon as I contemplated it, plunged me into fear and panic. I had a momentary sensation of falling and weightlessness, like you get in a lift when it descends too quickly. I shivered.

  ‘We’ll see. I’ll think about it’. To avoid discussing the matter further, I said: ‘I’ve written a new piano piece.’

  ‘Really?’ said Tony. ‘How does it go?’

  I had indeed completed ‘Tower Hill’ only the previous evening. The last four bars of the middle eight had turned out to be rather complicated, involving further modulations and a more elaborate approach to the melody, but I liked them and felt that they fitted. I had got, you may remember, as far as an F major seven, held for a whole bar. Well, for the second half of that bar I had now added an F sharp diminished, with a little linking figure on top which went like this:

  This now led into a G minor (picking up on the one two bars earlier), an unexpected B flat minor, and then on to a strong A flat major from which, by descending thirds, I quickly progressed to a D flat. From there an E flat seven was the obvious way to get back to the beginning of the piece, although it seemed to need a little help by having some extra harmony voiced in the right hand:

  I liked the patterns of thirds in the penultimate bar of this section, and I liked the momentary sense of fullness in the fourth, as you poised on that last chord before returning to the main tune. But naturally, now that the piece was finished, it was open to interpretation in all sorts of different ways, and a performer was under no particular obligation to follow my voicings. I was already keen to hear what another pianist would make of it.

  ‘Do you have any paper with you?’ I asked Tony.

  ‘Sure.’

  He always carried a slim leather briefcase with him, full of song-copies. From this he now produced a sheet of blank manuscript paper which he handed to me, along with a pen. Within a few minutes I had written it out. I pushed it back across the table towards him and his dark, intelligent eyes scanned it keenly, picking out the highlights and constructing, in his mind, a sound-picture of the total effect.

  ‘Very interesting,’ he said. ‘Quite nicely done, that.’

  He tried to return it to me but I stopped him.

  ‘Will you play it?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yes. I’d like to hear it.’

  He considered it; and then handed me back the paper.

  ‘No. You play it.’

  If I hadn’t been slightly drunk, and if the place hadn’t been so empty, I would never have had the nerve. Apart from anything else, I’d never even played it on a piano before, only on an electric keyboard, which isn’t the same thing at all. Be that as it may, I found myself walking over to the piano, sitting down on the stool, and trying to prepare myself by breathing deeply. A couple of seconds later I had hit the first chord.

  Some musicians will tell you that alcohol can improve your playing by helping you to relax. This is not true. The only real relaxation comes from feeling confident about your material. The sort of relaxation offered by alcohol is nothing but a blurring of perception, which means that faults in your performance never distract you because you don’t even notice them. I was too drunk, that evening, to play a respectable version of ‘Tower Hill’. Exactly how it would have sounded to an objective listener I don’t know: all Tony would tell me afterwards was that I had made some mistakes. At least, that’s what he told me about the first half of what I played. The rest could perhaps best be described as an excursion into free improvisation.

  The fact is that after a few minutes I lost all concentration on the music and became absorbed, instead, in the associations which it brought to mind. My fingers played on, quite independent, while I thought of all those long, tired walks home from the tube station; how hopeful I’d felt, at first; how dogged and blind I had been more recently. I couldn’t find it in me to be bitter, though. My mind went back more and more to those early evenings with Madeline: the fun of going to new places together and the easy flow of our conversation; the sight of her looking out for me at some meeting-point, the way her face would light up at the first glimpse of my approach. Meanwhile, on the keyboard, I must have been going through impossible key changes and dissonances, and I didn’t come back to my senses until a familiar phrase struck my ear and I realized that, for some reason or other, I was playing (albeit softly and out of time) the plangent theme from ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’.

  I stopped in mid-flight; and there was a deadly hush, all around me, as the customers – none of whom were talking, any more, but all looking in my direction – stared, puzzled and hostile, wondering who I was and why they were no longer listening to their regular pianist.

  Hastily I got up, pushed through the tables and rejoined Tony in the corner of the room.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I must be drunk or something.’

  He nodded, and looked at me with worried eyes.

  ‘Will you be OK?’ he said. ‘Getting back, I mean? Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘I’ll be OK.’

  ‘All right then.’ Just as I was leaving, he added: ‘Oh, and don’t forget about Sunday.’

  ‘Sunday?’

  ‘Not this one, the week after. You’re supposed to be looking after Ben for us. Yes?’

  ‘Oh, sure. Next Sunday. Fine.’

  I staggered out, and the next thing I can remember, I was standing by the ticket barrier at Leicester Square station. I don’t know whether it was by mistake or half-formed design, but instead of getting a train to Embankment, I found myself travelling north. I got out at Euston and stood on the platform long after the other passengers had left it. I needed to talk to someone. There was someone I very badly wanted to see, and this was why I had taken the northbound train. Who was it? I couldn’t concentrate. What was I supposed to do next – turn around and go back home? Karla. I wanted to see Karla. What for? Was I going to tell her about this evening, about the argument, about Madeline? What time was it. Quarter past eleven. The White Goat would be closed by the time I
got there. Closed, but not deserted. She would still be inside, cleaning the tables, washing the glasses, locking up. I crossed over to the City Branch platform and took a train to the Angel. I would knock on the door. She would come to the door, open it, see my face, let me in without a word. Without a word. She would be expecting me, almost. Without a word.

  ‘Can I help you in any way, sir?’

  My fist was sore and I was looking into the face of a gigantic policeman. I was standing in a back street and everything was very quiet, now that I had stopped hammering on the door of the pub.

  ‘The pubs close at eleven o’clock, sir,’ said the policeman. This was an accusation, not a helpful statement of fact, and he wielded the word ‘sir’ like a blunt instrument.

  ‘I think I must have left something in there,’ I stammered. ‘My wallet.’

  ‘I see, sir. Well, you’ll have to wait until the morning to get it back.’

  He was about forty, with a moustache, and didn’t seem too threatening. I murmured something by way of thanks and started to back away. ‘Have you got enough money to get home, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, it’s all right. I’ve got a card.’

  ‘Good night, sir.’

  He watched me as I turned the corner. Five minutes later, when I came back round the corner, he was gone. The pub was dark, the door was bolted. I leant against it, my legs gave way, and I slid to the floor.

  Probably I wasn’t asleep for very long. I woke up shivering, but it wasn’t cold that woke me. It was a sound. The street, as I have said, was quiet. I mean quiet, and not silent, because London is never silent. You don’t realize this at the time, while you’re living there: lying awake at four in the morning you might mistake what you are listening to for silence, but you’d be wrong. You only have to go somewhere else, out into the country, even to another town, to realize that in London there is always a hum, a rumble, a buried murmur of restless, indefinable activity. It was against this backdrop, this perpetually tense atmosphere of distant noise, that I could hear something distinct and surprising. It was a voice: a high, clear, woman’s voice, singing a tune so strong and lovely that it already sounded familar, even though I knew I had never heard it before. The voice was coming from above my head, from the sky, like an angel’s.