For a long time there was silence in the room. After a few moments, Kitty’s eyes moved from Professor Davidson’s face to the manuscript, and began to trace the first few bars of the piece. And then that curious thing happened, something like hearing words in your head when you’re reading a book: the music lifted from the page and came alive, the notes she’d written weeks before. The melody flowed tentatively at first and then with greater conviction, finding its feet over the distinct colours of the chords. Kitty followed the staves down the first page, onto the next and the next, bewitched by the mystery of the process. When this happened, she could almost believe there was something to it – to Professor Davidson’s belief in composition, and even perhaps her belief in Kitty. She knew it was just a trick, like an optical illusion that seems to mean more than it really is, but it gave her a strange pleasure. A tickling of possibility that she knew wouldn’t last beyond the hour she’d spend in this room, but which she felt, nonetheless, a temptation to explore.
And then the music stumbled, somewhere in the middle of page three, losing its balance and setting off again in the wrong direction, and Kitty frowned. Without thinking, she brought her hand down onto the sheet, cutting off the flow of the notes. Professor Davidson turned her head towards her. She said nothing, but raised her eyebrows in query. Kitty could hear the troubled passage in her head, reshaping itself, trying a new tack in a new rhythm – 9/8, Kitty registered – elongating into a change of mood, and then – oh, she could do something different there, a whole new section, which would . . .
She didn’t realise she was thinking aloud, humming phrases, shaping chords with her fingers, until Professor Davidson’s expression changed again. She picked up a pencil and made a quick addition at the side of the page.
‘Oh!’ said Kitty. ‘You mean . . .’
She was slower with the pencil, the process of transcribing thought into notation still inexpert, but after a moment or two Professor Davidson nodded, took the pencil back, made another amendment. Kitty could see the shape of the piece changing now, becoming tighter and denser than she’d anticipated. Somewhere just beyond her grasp there was a meaning, a feeling, a significance in the patterning of repetition and variation, development and flow.
For almost an hour the two of them worked side by side, turning the pages by mutual assent when they had finished with each one. From time to time one of them moved over to the piano to try out a harmony or a rhythm. Now and then a few words were spoken, but most of the time they worked in silence, the music flowing through their heads and spilling out onto the staves. More and more alterations and revocations; more and more new pages filled with notes like scurrying stick figures. Eventually, sitting back in her chair, Professor Davidson nodded again.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You see? It’s all there.’
Kitty glanced down at the manuscript, but Janet Davidson shook her head.
‘Not there,’ she said, ‘although that’s coming, that’ll be fine. It’s all in your head. Limitless amounts, Kitty. I don’t say what I don’t mean. You have talent, if you want to use it.’
Kitty felt jittery now, something like the feeling after a conversation in which you’ve said more than you intended to. Her head was still ringing with sound, and she shook it gently to settle the fragments of melody back into quiescence.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘You don’t know if you can do it, or why you might want to?’
‘That,’ said Kitty. ‘What it’s for.’
Professor Davidson smiled.
‘That’s a question for your father,’ she said.
Kitty expected tears, or anger, but neither came. Prof Davidson wasn’t invoking Henry, allying herself to him as a persuasive tactic. Kitty understood that. Nor was she saying, exactly, that Kitty was on her own now, and must find answers for herself. There was, somewhere, a grain of consolation.
Kitty looked at her for a moment longer, just in case there was more to be said, even though she knew a concluding phrase when she heard it. Then she smiled and stood up. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Try it this once,’ Janet Davidson said, as she opened the door. ‘You won’t regret it. I feel certain you won’t.’
PART II
Greville Auctioneers, Friday 12th December 2014
Paintings and drawings by Nicholas Comyn, from the collection of the late Henry Jones
Lot no. 2: View of a garden, 1990
Like several other works in the collection, this painting has a direct connection to Henry Jones: it represents the sitting room at Orchards, the Jones family home, which Comyn visited frequently. Indeed, Comyn’s presence is indicated here by his own paintings on the walls of the room – a tribute, perhaps, to Jones’ importance to Comyn as both patron and friend. All the paintings shown in this scene are included in the present auction.
The garden of the title is visible through open French windows. It has a dreamlike quality that contrasts sharply with the meticulous rendition of the room from which it is seen. This effect is achieved through the use of a complex tonal palette: the exterior light creates a shimmering ethereality among the greens of trees, lawn and shrubs, whereas the muted light of the interior affirms a more sober reality. Firelight is suggested in the reds and golds of walls and carpets, although there is no fire in the hearth. An acute observation of surface – the deep gloss of mahogany, the sheen of slipware – contrasts with the quotidian clutter of objects, including books piled on top of bookshelves, sheet music on the point of slipping off the piano, wilted flowers in a vase. Several details suggest that someone has recently left the room: a pair of shoes left tidily by the back door; an empty glass on the table.
This work, above all others, demonstrates Comyn’s resistance to modernism. The composition, and especially the inclusion of his own paintings, refers clearly to Matisse, whom Comyn much admired. But although it clings to an older, more nostalgic world-view, it is also an uncomfortable portrayal of this domestic scene. In the tension between order and chaos, light and dark, serenity and agitation, this image reveals far more than is immediately apparent. Despite the absence of human figures, Comyn has created a mise-en-scène expressive of the lives lived in this room and of the occupants’ interior states of mind.
September 1978
The blue TR6 slips along the narrow lanes as smoothly as though it knows its own way. There’s certainly no map, and no discussion of the route. Flora tips her head back and shakes out her hair in the wind. It’s a beautiful day, and the Triumph’s top is folded down, the autumn sun gleaming on the flawless bonnet.
Henry glances across at her and smiles. He smiles easily: it’s one of his distinguishing features. He looks relaxed and confident, his honeymoon tan as yet unfaded. As they plunge through tunnels of overarching trees and pass fields bleached to white gold, Flora wonders whether – and how – Henry knows his way through these back roads. Something in her makeup, some predisposition she’s a little appalled by, holds fast to practicalities even in the grip of bliss, or its opposite.
*
The last month has been a switchback ride between those two extremes. The wedding – so fiercely argued over – passed off brilliantly. Flora and her mother shared, for once, a sense of triumph, and almost, almost, at the very end of the day, a moment of solidarity. She’d done what her mother wanted and what she wanted, and they were, they seemed to be, the same thing.
Then there was the honeymoon in Italy: Flora leaning over the hotel balcony with her cropped hair and tailored blouse, the spit of Audrey Hepburn, according to Henry, out of step with the 1970s but in step – oh, how wonderfully in step, at last – with herself, the young doctor-wife-lover-traveller. And the student of culture, following Henry wide-eyed around galleries full of Titians and Caravaggios, into palazzi where husbands had murdered lovers and wives had murdered husbands, and no one slept easy in their beds. Together they gazed at frescoes flung wide across ceilings; touched, furtively, the sleek wood of anc
ient bedposts; held hands in loggias built for noble families.
On the aeroplane home, with the Italian sun still warming her skin and the memory of long honeymoon nights still perfect in her mind, she thought how easy it would be to do what everyone expected: to give up her job and let Henry provide for her. His career – a ragbag of writing and broadcasting, a little mysterious to Flora – seemed to be flourishing. Was it pure stubbornness to insist on going back to work? Stubbornness and greed: the delicious excess of knowing she had more than other women? Not quite, she thought, glancing down through a gap in the clouds as the plane crested the Alps. Not quite. There was the thrill of surgery too, the pleasure of the physical competence she felt in the operating theatre.
If she’d been born two hundred years earlier, Flora sometimes thought, she might have been one of those young women whose embroidery drew admiration. As it was, she had proved herself adept at another kind of needlework. She hadn’t really meant to go into surgery – she’d applied for her first SHO job in the professorial surgical unit simply because it was what would most horrify her mother – but it didn’t take long to be sure that she had found her métier. The exhilaration of literally mending people, the risking of knife and needle in human flesh. If she gave all that up now she’d never show the world how good she was. And navigating the political maze of a career in surgery was at least as much of a test as perfecting her craft.
It wouldn’t be an easy ride, she thought, reaching across the armrest to take Henry’s hand, but she knew she could manage it, and sustain a marriage. Hadn’t she married Henry because he wanted her to be her own person? For that reason among others, she reminded herself, letting her hand run up over his wrist and feeling the hairs on the back of her own arm rise in anticipation.
And so, the first day back in London, she kissed him goodbye and set off for the hospital. The luck of the rota meant she was on duty that night, and as she drove through Islington and Clerkenwell, grimmer and grimier than Rome, she felt a pang of regret, stronger than she expected, about sleeping apart from Henry. A premonition, perhaps – but she would never allow superstition to colour her judgement about her marriage. And there was certainly no premonition when she learned that the rota had been changed: there was simply the glory of a stay of execution, and the prospect of surprising Henry that evening.
*
‘Nearly there,’ Henry says, and Flora realises she has lost track of time. Has she been asleep, or just daydreaming?
Before she can reply he brakes suddenly, and she sees the house they have come to look at, a glimpse of it through wide gates and the remains of a wooden sign declaring its name: Orchards. Long and low beneath a tiled roof whose patchy appearance strikes her only as characterful, its façade is a medley of flint and red brick and its windows all different in shape and size. The garden – still half farmyard – sprawls comfortably around it, enclosing outbuildings in various stages of decay. It couldn’t be more unlike the Georgian townhouse she grew up in.
Flora feels something shift inside her – a life settling into place, and a sudden understanding of adulthood. She knows at once that they will live here, she and Henry. She can see exactly how it will be: her new job at the Radcliffe Infirmary, their children growing up in the countryside, Henry travelling to London for concerts and lunches and editorial meetings. Each of them, she thinks, making their way to a kind of prominence. Among the broil of emotions she feels relief, and vindication.
12
The house lay round a curve of the road that concealed it from view until you were almost upon it. Lou’s first view of it – now, as always – came almost as a shock: the unruly beech hedge giving way abruptly to the wooden gate, and then the house suddenly before her.
Orchards was beautiful in its way, a brick-and-flint farmhouse shaped into a zigzag by a series of mergers and extensions over the centuries, set in grounds that had always looked neglected: a lawn grown to moss, fringed by half-hearted borders, and a drive made up of equal parts gravel and weeds, though weeds of the kind that stay low and flower often and might almost pass for rockery plants.
Lou stopped her car just inside the gates. The house stood empty now, its squat, rambling form looking strangely defenceless against the blank sky. She was conscious of a familiar curdle of ambivalence. Returning to her childhood home had always been complicated, even when she was young, but that was more true than ever today. She was grateful that the estate agent hadn’t arrived yet, so that she had a few moments alone.
She hadn’t been back here since Flora went to France – only a matter of weeks, but it seemed much longer. It was more disconcerting than she’d expected to see the house uninhabited. Installing a tenant felt like the baldest acknowledgement of how life had changed: it made sense, of course, if Flora was going to be away all summer, but even so . . . It was a surprise, Lou thought. Another surprise.
There was nothing left of the outbuildings that had once enclosed the farmyard except for a barn which had once housed teenage parties and broken lawnmowers and was now full of things Lou and Kitty had persuaded their mother not to throw on the skip after Henry died: a rocking horse, the cheap kind made from pine planks; chairs with missing spindles; a bedside table that Alice had planned to strip and paint. Perhaps she might take that home today, Lou thought. Would that please Alice, or would it look too much like a petition?
It still made Lou’s heart race to remember the night she’d broken the news about her pregnancy. ‘Broken’ was about right, she’d thought the next morning. She’d felt – she still hoped – that things couldn’t help but right themselves in the end. Surely it wasn’t possible for two people who loved each other, who were going to be parents together, to fail to rescue themselves from the muddle they’d landed themselves in? Each morning since then, she’d woken hoping to find the air had cleared. But she and Alice still seemed to be marooned on some desert island where communication was all but impossible. Scrupulous politeness was their only tactic – or perhaps, Lou thought sometimes, their weapon of choice.
Was there any part of Alice, Lou wondered now as she gazed up at Orchards’ familiar façade, that accepted some of the blame for their predicament? Had she entirely written off her secrecy about the Bacchus sculpture? It seemed to Lou that among the muddle of missed turnings and bad feelings and misunderstandings it was hard to say who was responsible for what. It was like unravelling the threads of a kite, the kind of tangle you could only solve by cutting the threads free. Perhaps the simple truth was that their relationship would never fly again; certainly wouldn’t stand the challenge of parenthood.
That thought was especially painful here, thrown into sharp focus by the recollection of her childhood. The years, the memories, could be traced through the mismatched windows in front of her: her bedroom, her parents’, Kitty’s little attic room. Inside the old kitchen where she’d eaten pizza baked dry by an au pair; from the half-landing she’d watched for car lights up the lane, wondering which of her parents would be home first and whether the evening would be calm or stormy.
But she remembered now, with a gush of relief, the story of her parents’ first visit to the house, and how they’d fallen in love with it at once. That had always been one of their favourite tales, a piece of family folklore untainted by anything that came afterwards. Tell us about buying the house, Daddy, they’d asked – she and then Kitty – rejoicing in the excitement of that first glimpse and the way their parents had counted out bedrooms for the babies to come, although they’d only been married a few weeks. Odd to think that her mother had been younger than her, then. Twenty-five to her thirty-one: closer to Kitty’s age, in fact. Already a doctor but barely more than a girl, in the photographs. When had she – how had it begun, Lou wondered, her father’s infidelity? She contemplated for a moment the irony that he had been a good father, a kind man; the central irony of her childhood. Life would have been simpler in many ways if he hadn’t.
A crackle of tyres on gravel interrupted he
r train of thought, and a silver BMW slid into view in the wing mirror. The man who emerged from it was younger than Lou expected.
‘Hello, Miss Jones,’ he called, hastening towards her.
‘Lou.’ She held out her hand and he clasped it for a moment.
‘Simon Phillips. I’m sorry I’m late.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I’ve been doing a valuation up at Woodlands Hill. One of those huge houses, you know?’ He pulled a face, at once apologetic and mock-awed. ‘Saturdays are always busy, I’m afraid.’
Lou smiled. ‘Let’s go in,’ she said. It had been sunny earlier, but it was cold now she was out of the car. She’d forgotten how the wind barrelled along this valley.
*
It was very odd, showing the house to a stranger. Lou felt another twinge of treachery as she opened the front door. My mother’s swanning around France, she wanted to say, to explain herself, but she didn’t. He knew that, presumably. It was her mother who’d asked her to show him round.
‘The hall,’ she said, unnecessarily.
The bulb had gone in the main light and it felt smaller, lower-ceilinged than usual. No pictures on the walls, of course: her father’s collection was in a storage vault, waiting for someone to decide what to do with it. All those paintings by Nick Comyn; the ones that were mostly of the house and the family. They’d been amazed by the preliminary valuation when the man from Greville’s had come to take them away. Flora clearly hadn’t realised how valuable they were, but that begged the question of why she’d been so keen to get them out of Orchards. Looking at the bare walls now, Lou wondered about that. The pastel sketch of Henry had always hung at the bottom of the stairs, and the one of her and Kitty on the beach had been over there on the right. She didn’t remember Nick Comyn well – he’d died when she was eleven or twelve, in some vaguely mysterious way – but he’d been a friend of the family. A friend of Henry’s, at least, but he’d spent more time with them than most of Henry’s friends. He’d come on holiday with them that summer when he’d done the beach scene. The painting was rather gloomy, the sky lowering as it often did over the Welsh coast, but Lou had liked the idea of the two of them crouching there always, building up the defences of their sandcastle against the creep of the tide. The hall looked strange without it, as though they had gone from the house too, she and Kitty.
The Things You Do for Love Page 9