Music & Silence

by Rose Tremain

  The previous evening Charlotte’s suitor, Mr. George Middleton, had come to see the Reverend Claire to ask for her hand in marriage.

  George Middleton is a Norfolk landowner with a large estate at Cookham, near Lynn, and an income of a thousand pounds a year. A boisterous man in his thirties with a loud laugh and rough handshake, he is a good match for the daughter of a vicar. What is more, Charlotte has declared that she loves him “more than any being in Norfolk or beyond” and when James Claire gave his blessing to the match, Charlotte flung her arms round his neck and declared she was “the most fortunate girl in England.” Her cheeks were pink and her eyes shining. George Middleton whirled her, laughing, into his arms.

  The wedding will take place in the autumn. Already, Anne Claire has begun upon a quantity of lists. The business of the wedding will occupy the minds of both women from dawn to sunset. And James Claire is happy for them, doesn’t begrudge them one second of their contentment. Yet, in his own heart, he feels a misery so deep that, as he walks along, it almost causes him to stumble.

  He has seen his future.

  He has seen the mornings empty of Charlotte. He has seen the afternoons passing in unaccustomed silence. He has seen his congregation assembled at Evensong and, though he searches for his daughter’s face among them, he knows that she is not there. He has seen himself grow old in mourning for his departed children.

  While Charlotte remained, there was yet some distraction, some compensation for the absence of Peter. Sometimes James Claire has cruel dreams of his son lost in a storm, drowned in a frozen northern sea, or simply falling into an icy forgetfulness so that all memory of England and his former home seeps silently from his mind.

  But, with his daughter near him, reminding him that Peter’s love for music always did and always would triumph over his father’s wish that he follow him into the Church, why then James Claire could endure his absence. Only now, in the certain knowledge that, when next winter comes Charlotte will no longer be part of his household, does the loss of Peter, stretching into a future the duration of which no one can predict, feel intolerable.

  He and Anne will be alone with the hens and the apple orchard and their daily prayers. Charlotte and George Middleton will visit them from Norfolk from time to time, but the era of the family is past. Long ago, before either Peter or Charlotte was born, James Claire wept over a child which lived a single day and died without a murmur as night fell. Now, although he feels his misery to be a selfish, unwarranted thing, he cannot rid himself of the notion that a second dramatic darkness is about to fall.

  With the bread baked and the butter and preserves set out on the table, Anne and Charlotte wait for James Claire to return from the quayside. They are hungry and their servant, Bessie, waits obediently by the stove, ready to coddle the eggs, but they do not particularly notice their hunger nor the time passing as they sit at a bureau and write the wonderful words Trousseau List on a plain piece of paper.

  “Mother,” says Charlotte, “when we have done this, you know we must send a letter to Peter informing him that I am to become Mrs. George Middleton.”

  “Yes indeed,” says Anne Claire. “And I wonder if he will have leave to come home. That he should play at the wedding would gladden all our hearts, especially your father’s.”

  “I hope he will like George,” says Charlotte, “and that George will see eye to eye with him.”

  “Eye to eye,” remarks Anne. “A strange choice of expression, my dearest, for do you not remember how Peter’s eyes, so blue as they are, seem to reflect in them some other place, where it has always been hard to follow him?”

  Charlotte thinks for a moment, imagining her brother, whose beauty she used to envy with ferocious pain, standing at the window, with sunlight falling onto his hair, and telling her that he was leaving for Ireland, and then later returning and announcing that his time in Ireland was over and now he was going to Denmark to join the royal orchestra.

  At first she had been glad, then sorry at last, finding that she missed him. Later, after she had met Mr. George Middleton, she was indifferent to Peter’s absence and all she hopes for now is that he will come home for her magnificent day. “Yes,” she says to her mother, “of course I remember that. But it is only a look. It doesn’t mean that he couldn’t take part in a game of bowls with George on the lawns of Cookham, does it?”

  Under Trousseau List, Anne Claire has already written:

  12 pair silk stockings 12 pair linen thread stockings 5 plain linen petticoats 2 plain stuff jackets for morning wear

  She pauses and says: “Bowls at Cookham? Why, no, Charlotte. Not at all.”

  FROM COUNTESS O'FINGAL'S NOTEBOOK, LA DOLOROSA

  On the day that Peter Claire arrived in our household I heard larks in the heather. I knew that spring had returned.

  I had sent for a musician, following my father’s advice, but the musician I imagined was elderly with a slow gait, wearing a black coat. When I saw Peter Claire standing in the hall, he took away all my breath.

  It was as if he belonged to some world beyond time where all living things had at last attained perfection. At certain moments in my former life I had glimpsed other inhabitants of this divine place: a grey horse that stood in a meadow a few miles from Bologna; a ragged child watching me from behind a market stall in Florence; a young woman seated by a fountain, combing her hair. And I had always been certain that their habitation among us here on the earth would be brief, that God would be jealous of their absence and reach down His hand and take them to Him again before they had grown old or known unkindness or truly seen what alteration suffering can bring to a living countenance.

  When Peter Claire had rested from his journey from England, I made known to him the bare facts of our tragedy. “Believe me, Mr. Claire,” I said, “when I tell you that my husband was once a good and honourable man. Now he will appear to you as cruel, as violent, as a lunatic soul . . . Yet I cannot believe that the person he once was is lost for ever. He will return, if only you will be patient and help him with all the musical knowledge and skill I have been told that you possess.”

  Peter Claire looked at me kindly. This look of kindness was so troubling to me that I felt a blush come to my face and I lowered my head, pretending to search for my fan in the folds of my skirt, so that he would not see how much I was affected by him.

  “Countess O’Fingal,” he said, “I am more glad than you can know to learn of the task that I am to accomplish. Always, since childhood, have I loved music and yet I have never been able to say precisely why I feel this love. My father, who is a minister, tells me that what it expresses is a reaching out, in the soul of man— and in my soul therefore—towards God, and indeed it is this, I am sure.

  “Yet the ‘Why' lingers. It is joined very frequently by a ‘^What.' ^What is music and Why do I neglect all other things so that I may give my life to this alone? But now I see that if by some miracle I may return your husband to the paradise he glimpsed in his dream, then all my work until now will not have been in vain, but on the contrary will have been but a preparation for this extraordinary moment of revelation.”

  “Oh, pray,” I said fervently, looking deeply now into the blue of Peter Claire’s eyes. “Pray this may be so.”

  Hope is a strange commodity.

  It is an opiate.

  We swear we have relinquished it and, lo, there comes a day when, all unannounced, our enslavement to it returns.

  So it was with Johnnie O’Fingal and with me.

  On the evening of Peter Claire’s arrival I persuaded Johnnie to go into the library, where he saw at once that the padlock on the virginals had been removed and the instrument cleaned and made ready to be played upon.

  Without a word he sat down and I told him gently that there had arrived a young man who held the key to the ending of all our sorrows. “Tonight,” I said, “he is going to play for us on the lute. We shall hear music again in this silent house! And then, tomorrow, you and he will recomme
nce your work. Mr. Claire is very skilled at composition and he will be the means through which you are returned to happiness.”

  Johnnie looked up at me and it was at that moment that I saw rekindled in his clouded eyes the sudden flicker of hope. It trembled there. I stroked his exhausted head and laid his hands gently one upon the other in his lap. I sat beside him, and we waited while Peter Claire entered the room, bowed to us, paused to fine-tune his instrument and then began to play.

  I do not know what song it was that he played. It was a fragment of great sweetness, seeming sweeter no doubt because of the quiet and loneliness in which we had existed for so long. Johnnie did not take his eyes from Peter Claire all the while that the song lasted, seeming transfixed by the sight of his hands that drew from the lute this patterning of sound for which, in nature, there is no equivalent or model and for the true understanding of which the young lutenist had told me he was still searching.

  When the playing ceased, Johnnie sat very still. I saw that his eyes were brimming with tears. These tears he let fall, and did not wipe them away.

  The following day the two men began work.

  I gathered the children to me and asked for the pony cart to be brought. With Maria, Vincenzo, Luca and Giulietta, I set forth in the April sunshine to make a tour of the estates and tell the people that I believed their sufferings and ours would soon be at an end.

  As always, the tenants received us with kindness, yet beneath that kindness I knew there was justifiable anger, for the ruin that we saw that day on the farms and in the dwellings was so very visible to me and to my children that, out of cowardice and fear, we abandoned the tour and drove instead to the river, where we ate the simple picnic I had brought for us and where we remained until evening, playing games with sticks and stones, telling stories, watching the moorhens at work upon their nests and the coots diving for fish, and the first gnats and flies of the summer hatch out among the sunbeams.

  We returned at dusk. We crept into the house, listening for the one sound we longed to hear—an ayre so strange and magical we would recognise it as the divine composition of Johnnie’s dream. But the house was as hushed as the tomb. We stood in the hall, not daring to go anywhere in case we might be disturbing that fragile moment of silence that precedes some great epiphany. “Mama,” Giulietta whispered, “perhaps Papa’s lost music is of the kind that no one can hear?”

  I stroked her hair. “Perhaps it is, my dearest,” I said. “I had not thought of that.”

  At this moment we heard the library door open. Giulietta put her hand in mine. Johnnie O’Fingal strode into the hall. On finding us there, he paused a moment to stare at us—as if we were visi-slaughtered. Up from the cellar have been brought four barrels of wine.

  Pregnant with Count Otto’s child, Kirsten is prone to frequent bouts of sickness and does not wish to have any nausea brought upon her by the sight of the greedy nobles and their wives stuffing themselves with wine and meat. Yet she knows that the King likes to have her by him at such events and that her survival at the palace depends upon her behaviour towards him now. “What am I to do, Emilia?” she asks. “These banquets are like plagues, with all the air smelling of foul matter and foul mutterings against me. How am I to endure it?”

  “All I can think, Madam,” says Emilia, “is that you choose this as your moment to advise the King of your pregnancy, and . . .”

  “No. It is too soon. I must conceal it for one more month, so that the dates realign themselves with what has occurred since his return.”

  “How are you to conceal it?” asks Emilia, looking at her mistress’s body, which has expanded to a milky ripeness.

  “I can,” says Kirsten, “because the King sees what he wants to see and lies to himself about the rest.”

  So, on the day of the banquet, a dress of pearl-stitched satin is chosen, with a skirt very full and stiff, and Kirsten’s body is pressed and squeezed into it and the laces pulled as tight about her waist as Frederika, Vibeke’s replacement as Woman of the Torso, can draw them, and Kirsten, hardly able to breathe or walk correctly, is led into the Long Hall by her adoring husband.

  She is seated next to Sir Mark Langton Smythe and they converse in German, which language Sir Mark has striven to perfect, liking as he does the way the verb withholds itself from its own completion until the last moment in almost every sentence, thus imparting to all linguistic constructions a hanging thread of mystery.

  He finds Kirsten Munk mysterious, seductive, strange. She wishes to know about the island of Tortuga where Samuel and Emmanuel were born. As he tells her tales of beaches of white sand, bread trees, flying monkeys, witchcraft, and tornadoes lifting wooden houses into the heavens, he sees her become rapt by his words. What he does not know is that, as he talks about these faraway places, Kirsten has begun to be aware of something that she has never noticed before, and that is the s'mallness of her life.

  As the stuffed chickens are served, she pushes the food away and begins to day-dream of a new existence, far from Denmark, miles and miles away from this ancient watery kingdom, in a new place where the sand is the colour of pearl, where animals fly overhead, where cinnamon cakes grow from bushes and where her only companions are her Otto and her sweet friend Emilia. Everybody else has been snatched into the sky by a tornado. Oh, thinks Kirsten, how beautiful this would be—how beautiful and how perfect!

  Ambassador Langton Smythe notices that his table companion has gone pale and he offers her a goblet of water, but his ministrations are too late. Kirsten feels herself begin to disappear from the banquet and arrive somewhere else. She does not recognise where this “somewhere else” might be, yet perhaps, she muses, she is floating on the clouds and is going to land in a bread tree? She can hear the wind sighing above her, or is it the sea that sighs underneath her, calling to her to come down?

  She falls sideways, her head momentarily striking Sir Mark’s elbow, then hitting the cold marble of the floor.

  Now the audience is assembling for the concert. They blink in the sunlight. They feel drowsy and full. Most of them know that once the music starts they will fall sound asleep, but still they bicker to get the best places, shouldering each other out of the way, spreading themselves and their belongings across whole lines of chairs.

  Once seated, with the orchestra in place on a dais in front of them, they soon become restless. The concert cannot begin without the King, but the King left the banquet when Kirsten fainted and has not returned. His gilded chair in the front row is empty.

  The audience yawns, stretches, gossips, admires the roses, yawns again and begins to doze.

  Among the drooping and nodding heads, Peter Claire (who was not at the banquet and so did not witness Kirsten’s collapse) is searching for Emilia Tilsen.

  He supposes that Kirsten will make an entrance with the King and perhaps then he will see, in the shadow of the royal couple, the girl who, in a matter of a few minutes, has taken hold of his imagination.

  He is tired because he has been awake all night in his room above the stables composing a piece of music. It is called “Emilia’s Song.” It’s not yet finished, let alone perfected, but he thinks he has found a melody which is right for it: graceful and uncluttered. And words for the song have begun to come to him. They embarrass him, then delight him, then embarrass him again. He knows he is not a poet. What he feels, nevertheless, are sentiments that seem to crave some kind of expression more heightened and more true than ordinary speech can render them. This is the first time in his life that he has attempted to write a love-song and he suspects that the writing of love-songs is never the easy, effortless task that others such as Shakespeare contrive to make it seem. Indeed, not being Shakespeare appears to him, at this moment, as a not inconsiderable burden all Englishmen are forced to bear. And he wonders whether it would be better not to try to compose words to his song but merely to set to music some of the great poet’s lines:

  O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem By that sweet ornament
which truth doth give.

  The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem For that sweet odour which doth in it live . . .

  For these words surely express—far better than any of his own— the very thing that strikes him about Emilia Tilsen: that, although she is pretty enough, the real magic, the real fascination of her, lies in her nature, which, being serene, reflects back at those who love in her the traits in themselves which they most long to perceive.

  While these thoughts meander round Peter Claire’s mind, Emilia is sitting by Kirsten’s bedside.

  The pearled satin dress lies fallen across a chair. A compress has been applied to Kirsten’s head and still visible among the mass of her chestnut hair is some dark blood. The scent of attar of roses lingers in the chamber.

  Kirsten refused to let the King’s physician examine her. He revived her with salts and was attempting to scrutinise her head wound when she fought him off and sent him away. She told him the heat of the hall and the strong smell of roast swan were quite enough to make any sensitive woman fall down in a swoon. Emilia made up the compress and helped her mistress into bed, where Kirsten remained awake until she saw the King arrive at the bedside, when she seemed to fall instantly into a deep sleep.

  The King still stands there, looking down at his wife. He knows he is being impolite to the English Ambassador by holding up the concert, but suppose God were to take Kirsten away from him now, just as He seems to have given her back? Suppose the wound is deeper than it looks and her skull is broken? “Do not leave her for one moment, Emilia,” he orders. “If her sleep begins to appear to you to be too deep, to have about it something not ordinary, send a servant to fetch Doctor Sperling and send another to fetch me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” says Emilia, and then she adds: “I saw death come to my mother, Sir. I declare I would recognise it if it were anywhere near, but I do not think it is.”