Cloud Atlas: A Novel Read online

  Had his wife told him what state she’d found me in? Had Lucille mentioned my half-packed valise? Waited until I was sure my voice was purged of relief and told him, nobly, nothing was wrong in speaking his mind.

  “I’ve been far too negative about your proposal, Frobisher. It won’t be easy extracting music out of my noddle, but our partnership stands as good a chance as any. Your musicianship and character seem more than up to the job. My wife tells me you even try your hand at composition? Plainly, music is oxygen for us both. With the right will, we’ll muddle along until we hit upon the right method.” At this, Mme. Crommelynck knocked, peered in, sensed the room’s weather in a trice the way some women do, and asked if a celebratory drink was called for. Ayrs turned to me. “That depends on young Frobisher here. What d’you say? Will you stay for a few weeks, with a view to a few months, if all goes well? Maybe longer, who knows? But you must accept a small salary.”

  Let my relief show as pleasure, told him I’d be honored, and did not out of hand reject the offer of a salary.

  “Then, Jocasta, tell Mrs. Willems to fetch a Pinot Rouge 1908!” We toasted Bacchus and the Muses, and drank a wine rich as unicorn’s blood. Ayrs’s cellar, some twelve hundred bottles, is one of the finest in Belgium, and worth a brief digression. It survived the war unlooted by the Hun officers who used Zedelghem as a command post, all thanks to a false wall Hendrick’s father built over its entrance before the family’s flight to Gothenburg. The library, and various other bulky treasures, also spent the war down there (used to be the vaults of a monastery), sealed up in crates. The Prussians ransacked the building before Armistice, but they never rumbled the cellar.

  A work routine is developing. Ayrs and I are in the music room by nine o’clock every morning his various ailments and pains let him. I sit at the piano, Ayrs on the divan, smoking his vile Turkish cigarettes, and we adopt one of our three modi operandi. “Revisionals”— he asks me to run through the previous morning’s work. I hum, sing, or play, depending on the instrument, and Ayrs modifies the score. “Reconstitutionals” have me sifting through old scores, notebooks, and compositions, some written before I was born, to locate a passage or cadenza Ayrs dimly remembers and wants to salvage. Great detective work. “Compositionals” are the most demanding. I sit at the piano and try to keep up with a flow of “Semiquaver, B-G; semibreve, A-flat—hold it four beats, no, six—crotchets! F-sharp—no no no no F-sharp—and … B! Tar-tatty-tatty-tarrr!” (Il maestro will at least name his notes now.) Or, if he’s feeling more poetic, it might be “Now, Frobisher, the clarinet is the concubine, the violas are yew trees in the cemetery, the clavichord is the moon, so … let the east wind blow that A minor chord, sixteenth bar onwards.”

  Like that of a good butler (although you can be sure, I am better than good), my job is nine-tenths anticipation. Sometimes Ayrs will ask for an artistic judgment, something like “D’you think this chord works, Frobisher?” or “Is this passage in keeping with the whole?” If I say no, Ayrs asks me what I’d suggest as a substitute, and once or twice he’s even used my amendment. Quite sobering. People in the future will be studying this music.

  By one o’clock Ayrs is spent. Hendrick carries him down to the dining room, where Mrs. Crommelynck joins us for luncheon, and the dreaded E., if she’s back for the w/end or a half holiday. Ayrs naps through the afternoon heat. I continue to sift the library for treasure, compose in the music room, read manuscripts in the garden (Madonna lilies, crowns imperial, red-hot pokers, hollyhocks, all blooming bright), navigate lanes around Neerbeke on the bicycle, or ramble across local fields. Am firm friends with the village dogs. They gallop after me like the Pied Piper’s rats or brats. The locals return my “Goede morgen” and “Goede middag”—I’m now known as the long-term guest up at the “kasteel.”

  After supper, the three of us might listen to the wireless if there is a broadcast that passes muster, otherwise it will be recordings on the gramophone (an His Master’s Voice table model in an oak box), usually of Ayrs’s own major works conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. When we have visitors, there will be conversation or a little chamber music. Other nights, Ayrs likes me to read him poetry, especially his beloved Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine. At breakfast, he has me read from The Times. Old, blind, and sick as Ayrs is, he could hold his own in a college debating society, though I notice he rarely proposes alternatives for the systems he ridicules. “Liberality? Timidity in the rich!” “Socialism? The younger brother of a decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed” “Conservatives? Adventitious liars, whose doctrine of free will is their greatest deception.” What sort of state does he want? “None! The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.”

  Irascible as Ayrs is, he’s one of few men in Europe whose influence I want my own creativity informed by. Musicologically, he’s Janus-headed. One Ayrs looks back to Romanticism’s deathbed, the other looks to the future. This is the Ayrs whose gaze I follow. Watching him use counterpoint and mix colors refines my own language in exciting ways. Already, my short time at Zedelghem has taught me more than three years at the throne of Mackerras the Jackass with his Merry Band of Onanists.

  Friends of Ayrs and Mrs. Crommelynck regularly visit. On an average week, we can expect visitor/s two or three nights. Soloists returning from Brussels, Berlin, Amsterdam, or beyond; acquaintances from Ayrs’s salad days in Florida or Paris; and good old Morty Dhondt and Wife. Dhondt owns a diamond workshop in both Bruges and Antwerp, speaks a hazy but high number of languages, concocts elaborate multilingual puns requiring lengthy explanations, sponsors festivals, and kicks metaphysical footballs around with Ayrs. Mrs. Dhondt is like Mrs. Crommelynck but ten times more so—in truth, a dreadful creation who heads the Belgian Equestrian Society, drives the Dhondt Bugatti herself, and cossets a powder-puff Pekingese called Wei-wei. You’ll meet her again in future letters, no doubt.

  Relatives thin on the ground: Ayrs was an only child, and the once-influential Crommelynck family evinced a perverse genius for backing the wrong side at decisive moments throughout the war. Those who didn’t die in action were mostly pauperized and diseased out of existence by the time Ayrs and his wife returned from Scandinavia. Others died after running away overseas. Mrs. Crommelynck’s old governess and a couple of frail aunts sometimes pay a call, but they stay quietly in the corner like old hat stands.

  Last week the conductor Tadeusz Augustowski, a great champion of Ayrs in his native Cracow, dropped by unannounced on a Second Day of Migraine. Mrs. Crommelynck was not at home, and Mrs. Willems came to me all of a lather, begging me to entertain the illustrious visitor. I could not disappoint. Augustowski’s French is as good as my own, and we spent the afternoon fishing and arguing over the dodecaphonists. He thinks they are all charlatans, I do not. He told me orchestral war stories, and one indescribably smutty joke that involves hand gestures, so it must wait until we meet again. I caught an eleven-inch trout, and Augustowski bagged a monster dace. Ayrs was up when we got back at twilight, and the Pole told him he was lucky to have engaged me. Ayrs grunted something like “Quite.” Enchanting flattery, Ayrs. Mrs. Willems was less than enchantée with our finny trophies, but she gutted ’em, cooked ’em in salt and butter, and they melted on the fish fork. Augustowski gave me his visiting card when he departed the next morning. He keeps a suite at the Langham Court for his London visits, and invited me to stay with him for next year’s festival. Cock-a-doodle-doo!

  Château Zedelghem isn’t the labyrinthine House of Usher it seems at first. True, its west wing, shuttered and dust-sheeted to pay for modernization and upkeep of the east, is in a woebegone state, and will need the demolishers before v. long I fear. Explored its chambers one wet afternoon. Damp disastrous; fallen plaster hangs in nets of cobwebs; mouse, bat droppings crunch on the worn stones; plaster escutcheons above fireplaces sanded over by time. Same story outside—brick walls need new pointing, roof tiles missing, crenellations toppled to the ground
and lying in piles, rainwater runneling medieval sandstone. The Crommelyncks did well from Congo investments, but not one male sibling survived the war, and Zedelghem’s Boche “lodgers” selectively gutted whatever was worth looting.

  The east wing, however, is a comfortable little warren, though its roof timbers creak like a ship when the wind’s up. There’s a moody central-heating system and rudimentary electricity that gives one crackling electric shocks from the light switches. Mrs. Crommelynck’s father had enough foresight to teach his daughter the estate business, and now she leases her land to neighboring farmers and just about makes the place pay, so I gather. Not an achievement to be sniffed at in this day and age.

  Eva still a prissy missy, as hateful as my sisters, but with an intelligence to match her enmity. Apart from her precious Nefertiti, her hobbies are pouting and looking martyred. She likes to reduce vulnerable domestics to tears, then flounces in, announcing, “She’s having another weeping fit, Mama, can’t you break her in properly?” She has established I am no soft target and embarked on a war of attrition: “Papa, how long is Mr. Frobisher to stay in our house?” “Papa, do you pay Mr. Frobisher as much as you pay Hendrick?” “Oh, I was only asking, Mama, I didn’t know Mr. Frobisher’s tenure was a delicate subject.” She rattles me, hate to hand it to her, but there it is. Had another encounter—confrontation more the word—on Saturday just gone. I’d taken Ayrs’s bible, Also sprach Zarathustra, to the stone slab bridge over the lake to the willow-tree island. A scorching hot afternoon; even in the shade I was sweating like a pig. After ten pages I felt Nietzsche was reading me, not I him, so I watched the water boatmen and newts while my mind-orchestra performed Fred Delius’s Air and Dance. Syrupy florentine of a piece, but its drowsy flute is rather successful.

  Next thing I knew, found myself in a trench so deep the sky was a strip high above, lit by flashes brighter than day. Savages patrolled the trench astraddle giant, evil-toothed, brown rats that sniffed out working-class people and dismembered ’em. Strolled, trying to look well-to-do and stop myself breaking into a panicky run, when I met Eva. I said, “What in hell are you doing down here?”

  Eva replied with fury! “Ce lac appartient à ma famille depuis cinq siècles! Vous êtes ici depuis combien de temps exactement? Bien trois semaines! Alors vous voyez, je vais où bon me semble!” Her anger was almost physical, a kick in your humble correspondent’s face. Fair enough, I had accused her of trespassing on her mother’s estate. Wide awake, I stumbled to my feet, all apologies, explaining I had spoken whilst dreaming. Quite forgot about the lake. Plunged right in like a b. fool! Soaked! Luckily the pond was only navel-high, and God had saved Ayrs’s precious Nietzsche from joining me in the drink. When Eva eventually reined in her laughter, I said I was pleased to see her do something other than pout. I had duckweed in my hair, she answered, in English. Was reduced to patronizing her by praising her language skills. She batted back, “It does not take much to impress an Englishman.” Walked off. Couldn’t think of a snappy response until later, so the girl won the set.

  Now, pay attention while I talk books and lucre. Poking through an alcove of books in my room, I came across a curious dismembered volume, and I want you to track down a complete copy for me. It begins on the ninety-ninth page, its covers are gone, its binding unstitched. From what little I can glean, it’s the edited journal of a voyage from Sydney to California by a notary of San Francisco named Adam Ewing. Mention is made of the gold rush, so I suppose we are in 1849 or 1850. The journal seems to be published posthumously, by Ewing’s son (?). Ewing puts me in mind of Melville’s bumbler Cpt. Delano in “Benito Cereno,” blind to all conspirators—he hasn’t spotted his trusty Dr. Henry Goose [sic] is a vampire, fueling his hypochondria in order to poison him, slowly, for his money.

  Something shifty about the journal’s authenticity—seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t ring quite true—but who would bother forging such a journal, and why?

  To my great annoyance, the pages cease, midsentence, some forty pages later, where the binding is worn through. Searched high and low in the library for the rest of the damn thing. No luck. Hardly in our interests to draw Ayrs’s or Mrs. Crommelynck’s attention to their unindexed bibliographic wealth, so I’m up a gum tree. Would you ask Otto Jansch on Caithness Street if he knows anything about this Adam Ewing? A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

  Find enclosed an inventory of the oldest editions in Zedelghem’s library. As you see, some items are v. early, early seventeenth c., so send me Jansch’s best prices as soon as ever, and keep the tightwad on his toes by letting it slip you’ve got the Parisian dealers interested.

  Sincerely,

  R.F.

  CHTEAU ZEDELGHEM

  28TH—VII—1931

  Sixsmith,

  Cause for minor celebration. Two days ago, Ayrs and I completed our first collaboration, a short tone poem, “Der Todtenvogel.” When I unearthed the piece, it was a tame arrangement of an old Teutonic anthem, left high and very dry by Ayrs’s retreating eyesight. Our new version is an intriguing animal. It borrows resonances from Wagner’s Ring, then disintegrates the theme into a Stravinskyesque nightmare policed by Sibelian wraiths. Horrible, delectable, wish you could hear it. Ends in a flute solo, no flutter-bying flautism this, but the death-bird of the title, cursing the firstborn and last-born alike.

  Augustowski visited again on his way back from Paris yesterday. He read the score and shoveled praise upon it like a boiler man shoveling coals. So he should! It’s the most accomplished tone poem I know of written since the war; and I tell you, Sixsmith, that more than a few of its best ideas are mine. Suppose an amanuensis must reconcile himself to renouncing his share in authorship, but buttoning one’s lip is never easy. But best is yet to come—Augustowski wants to premiere the work under his own baton three weeks from now at the Cracow festival!

  Got up at crack of dawn yesterday, spent all day transcribing a clean copy. Suddenly it didn’t seem so short. My writing hand came unscrewed and staves imprinted themselves in my eyelids, but finished by supper. We drank five bottles of wine between the four of us to celebrate. Dessert was the best muscatel.

  Am now Zedelghem’s golden boy. Been a v. long time since I was anyone’s golden boy, and I rather like it. Jocasta suggested that I move out of my guest room into one of the larger unused bedrooms on the second floor, furnished as I pleased with whatever catches my eye from elsewhere in Zedelghem. Ayrs seconded the motion, so I said I would. To my delight Prissy Missy lost her sangfroid and mewled, “Oh, why don’t you just write him into the will as well, Mama? Why not give him half the estate?” She got down from the table without being excused. Ayrs croaked, “First good idea the girl’s had in seventeen years!” loud enough for her to hear. “At least Frobisher earns his damn keep!”

  My hosts wouldn’t hear my apologies, they said Eva should be apologizing to me, that she has to lose her pre-Copernican view of a universe revolving around herself. Music to my ears. Also re: Eva, she and twenty classmates are bound for Switzerland v. soon to study at a sister school for a couple of months. More music! It’ll be like having a rotten tooth fall out. My new room is big enough for badminton doubles; has a four-poster bed from whose curtains I had to shake last year’s moths; centuries-old Cordova peels off the walls like dragons’ scales, but it’s attractive in its way; indigo witch ball; armoire inlaid with burr walnut; six ministerial armchairs, and a sycamore escritoire at which I write this letter. Honeysuckle laces abundant light. To the south one looks over the grizzled topiary. To the west, cows graze in the meadow, and the church tower rises above the wood beyond. Its bells are my own clock. (In truth, Zedelghem boasts a good many antique clocks, whose chimes go off some early, some late, like a Bruges in miniature.) All in all, a notch or two grander than our chambers in Whyman’s Lane, a notch or two less grand than the Savoy or the Imperial, but spacious and secure. Unless I do something clumsy or indiscreet.

  Which
brings me to Madame Jocasta Crommelynck. Damn my eyes, Sixsmith, if the woman hasn’t begun, subtly, to flirt with me. The ambiguity of her words, eyes, and hand brushes is too consummate to be chance. See what you think. Yesterday afternoon, I was studying rare Balakirev juvenilia in my room when Mrs. Crommelynck knocked. She wore her riding jacket and her hair pinned up to reveal a rather tempting neck. “My husband wants to give you a present,” she said, moving in as I gave way. “Here. To mark the completion of ‘Todtenvogel.’ You know, Robert,”—her tongue lingers on the t of “Robert”—”Vyvyan’s so very happy to be working again. He hasn’t been this spry for years. This is just a token. Put it on.” She handed me an exquisite waistcoat, an Ottomanstyle silken affair, too remarkable in pattern to be ever in fashion or out. “I bought it on our honeymoon in Cairo, when he was your age now. He won’t be wearing it again.”

  Said I was flattered, but protested that I couldn’t possibly accept a garment of such sentimental value. “That’s precisely why we want you to wear it. Our memories are in its weave. Put it on.” Did as urged, and she stroked it, on the pretext (?) of removing fluff. “Come to the mirror!” Did so. The woman stood just inches behind me. “Too fine for moths’ eggs, don’t you agree?” Yes, I agreed. Her smile was double-bladed. If we were in one of Emily’s breathy novels, the seductress’s hands would have encircled the innocent’s torso, but Jocasta is a more canny operator. “You have exactly the same physique Vyvyan had at your age. Bizarre, isn’t it?” Yes, I agreed again. Her fingernails freed a strand of my hair that had got caught in the waistcoat.

  Neither rebuffed nor encouraged her. These things shouldn’t be rushed. Mrs. Crommelynck left without another word.