The Music Read online

  The Music

  Stories

  JAMES HAMILTON-PATERSON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  The Music (1)

  The Last Picnic

  Jaro

  Anxieties of Desire

  Records

  Frank’s Fate

  The Dell

  Knight

  The Last of the Habsburgs

  Bambi Bar

  People’s Disgrace

  Baḥḥ

  Sidonie Kleist

  Farts and Longing

  The Music (2)

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  An earlier form of ‘Frank’s Fate’ appeared in London Magazine, February/March 1990; ‘Anxieties of Desire’ appeared in Obsession, published by Serpent’s Tail, 1995; ‘The Last Picnic’ was commissioned by the BBC, broadcast and published (in BBC Music Magazine) in 1994.

  The quotations from British Medical Journal in ‘Farts and Longing’ are taken from BMJ vol. 305 (19–26 December 1992).

  ‘I’ve never been to me’ words and music by Ken Hirsh and Ronald Miller © 1975, Stone Diamond Music Corp, USA. Reproduced by permission of Jobete Music (UK) Ltd, London WC2H 0EA.

  The Music (1)

  ONE OF THOSE sharp moments which feels like a jab of sanity: standing at the supermarket checkout and suddenly being overwhelmed with fear. Something to do with the grey coat of the man up ahead, with the way he’s gazing down into his wire trolley, with the numb bustle, the Saturday throng, the throughput of it all. The torrent of shoppers, the torrent of money, the torrent of goods, most of which last will have turned within days into a torrent of shit; then back again next Saturday to repeat the process. The sheer emptiness of having to maintain ourselves. Hunter-gatherers at a vacant shuffle. The grey-haired man in his neatly brushed coat. Why can’t we all just agree to die now? Lie down and let the centuries roll us back into the turf.

  From loudspeakers set invisibly among the acoustic tiles of the ceiling’s white cloudbase falls The Music. The spongy sound is adhesive; we want to make peeling gestures like tearing off a pair of unbearably hot rubber gloves. But it affects no locatable part of the body and the urge persists as an itch unsatisfied. Anxiety levels escalate as though from a fear of choking. Possibly The Music neutralises oxygen. In any case it’s closely associated with the supermarket smell which permeates clothing like ether or nicotine. Yet there is something not entirely man-made about either the smell or The Music. Hard to believe a man in a van could account for it all by delivering fragrance cylinders and tapes once a week. Maybe there’s a clue in the way The Music keeps interrupting itself with random messages about special offers and staff calls to Till 9. It’s a reminder that all forms of public address, from the bullying to the fatuous, tap an atavistic response. A supermarket loudspeaker announcing that a car is blocking one of the car-park exits is, however vestigially, the Voice of God speaking from a cloud. The foam-rubber music oozing down behind it is the sound the world turns to, the true Music of the Spheres. These voices come to us from above, from overhead, utterly null yet with associations of authority. In this celestial cantata the litany of car registration numbers is set to The Music’s elastic waves, the one designed to grab your attention, the other to suppress it.

  Everything of interest is elsewhere; we are here. Suddenly it’s no longer foam rubber leaking from the ceiling but sand. The entire supermarket is a gigantic egg-timer and our time is racing through the holes in the acoustic tiles overhead and filling up the aisles with dunes which slow our feet to a weary trudge. Still we follow the sheeplike progress of the grey man ahead, pushing our wire trolleys meekly as between cemetery gates or through fireproof doors straight into a crematorium’s blazing heart.

  By the time we’ve reached the checkout we’re knee-deep in death, and panic is building. That moment of sanity, the clear vision, has jolted us through the roof. Looking down, we see in ourselves an unknown species queuing for its life, its ears stuffed with foam-rubber music. Not so zombified that we don’t notice a sudden gap at the next till, though; so when at last our trolley noses out into fresh air and sunlight and the foam rubber falls from our ears, there’s the elderly man in the mohair coat just reaching his car. People are standing around it in stylised attitudes of ruffle and tetch which they can only have learned by watching television. This is how you stand, this the right expression of ill-concealed truculence when somebody’s car blocks yours. For it is this charming, dignified, sane old creature whom the Voice from the Clouds had been addressing every few minutes: this his car, that its number.

  ‘Stupid bugger!’

  ‘Don’t you care about anybody else, then?’

  ‘I hope they’ve sent for the police.’

  These are adults speaking, not their children. It’s the absence of The Music that does it. Once we’re out into the fresh air with our wire trolleys and The Music stops we’re hit by the raw ache of wastage, by the whiff of crematorium smoke, by a panic to retrieve some of that sand and stuff it back into the timer. We don’t know that’s what it is, of course. What it is, is some daft old git blocking the exit with his potboiler car.

  How wrong we were to patronise the back of his tall grey coat at the checkout! He elects not to notice these people, carefully puts his packages on to the rear seat, slowly opens the driver’s door with a faraway glance at the air above the supermarket. It quivers with the heating system’s thermals so a line of bare trees beyond dances in fake summer. The sunlight reveals he has two hearing aids.

  ‘Deaf twit!’

  ‘Shouldn’t be on the road!’

  He drives away, dignity personified. He was immune after all. He never heard The Music. He leaves those he momentarily discommoded furiously telling each other over and over again things they already know.

  The Last Picnic

  I SUPPOSE IT SEEMS strange now – contrived, even obsessive – that after our mother died my father used to take us children each year for a picnic on the same spot. He wasn’t a religious man but maybe this ritual had about as much of the sacramental as he would allow himself, commemorating our last family holiday together.

  From a summery backdrop one year suddenly emerged a small man in stained trousers and, despite the heat, a Fair Isle sweater with many holes among its jigsaw patterns. Sitting around our tablecloth spread on the ground, glasses of ginger beer balanced between tufts, we resentfully watched his approach.

  ‘I am Dr Schumann,’ this gentleman announced, looking at us in turn. ‘I’m so happy you’ve found my favourite spot.’ He extended his hand.

  My father, half rising, took it courteously on our behalf, caught in mid-role between the paterfamilias put out by the intrusion and the experienced GP who smells derangement and opts for prudence. ‘And I am Dr Sanders. Yes indeed, a lovely spot. Er … we’ll have finished with it by-and-by.’

  ‘Ah, a medical man? I’m afraid I’m only a musician. You may perhaps have heard of me. Schumann? Robert Schumann?’

  My sister Caroline and I saw an expression cross our father’s face. It was the look when, in the middle of Christmas lunch, the phone rang and called him away to a bedside: noble, martyred, apologetic, and perhaps with the tiniest fraction of relief.

  ‘You can’t be the Schumann, the composer.’ Caroline was the family’s pianist. ‘He’s dead, you know. Yonks ago.’ Maybe she caught the fierce glance our father shot at her but at thirteen, my elder by a couple of years, she was not so easily squashed. ‘Why did you make everything you wrote so difficult, then?’

  Our visitor looked very tenderly at her and said: ‘You remind me of my darling Clara.’ I could sense my father stir uneasily. ‘She was a wonderful pianist, better than I ever
became. I wrote nearly everything for her. What, in particular, are you thinking of?’

  ‘Well, how about Carnaval? That’s awful. I’m supposed to learn some of it this holiday.’

  ‘But that’s the very subject of a story I have to tell you,’ cried the self-styled composer, leaning forward and plucking up our last sausage-roll with a squirrel’s agility. ‘Listen. You have to imagine I’m nineteen and already embarked on a career as a concert pianist. I was even celebrated enough to have demonstrated Harrods’ Steinway collection. I played there an hour each tea-time for a week in between engagements. On the last day a lady approached me and said: “Maestro, this weekend we’re having a masked ball. You’re going to play Schumann for us, I’ve quite decided. You may name your own fee, but in return you must agree to obey my instructions to the letter. I’m determined you shall come. Dear, divine, maestrino that you are – handsome, cheeky thing in private, though, I daresay.” She squeezed my hand. “You shall dress as Schumann, of course. And – Clara awaits you. Such a Clara, too. Dangerously young. Tomorrow you will receive your instructions.”

  ‘What could I say? I was myself young, excitable, easily beguiled by mystery. Promptly the next morning a messenger arrived with a sealed envelope and a box containing my costume. “Prepare yourself to play Carnaval,” the letter said, “even though we already know you play it beautifully. Dress at five; drink nothing; the carriage will call for you at six.” I did as instructed. All day I practised music which I’d long known by heart until I could have played all twenty pieces in my sleep and –’

  ‘I bet you had a hard time with “Sphinxes”’, interrupted Caroline in that slightly-too-casual voice of hers which generally meant a trick question.

  Our uninvited guest was not in the least discomfited. ‘“Sphinxes”, of course, is not written to be played. It’s more symbolic: anagrams of the German musical notes A, S, C, H. Asch is the name of a town in Germany where Ernestine, another little friend of mine, lives. The piece can be heard in the heart, my dearest, and you’ll never play Carnaval well until you can hear my “Sphinxes” in your heart … So anyway, at five I dressed and waited with a strange excitement. At six the doorbell rang and I was ushered into the back seat of a tall Rolls-Royce whose windows were thickly curtained. A man in black handed me a blindfold which he respectfully asked me to put on. Thus, doubly blind, I was driven away. I was thrilled, apprehensive. I felt quite powerless, for in addition to everything else my costume was stiff and unyielding as though it hadn’t been worn for a century and was rigid through lack of use. Yet there was no panic in me, for no sooner had we started than the servant in black said in a quiet voice: “I’m instructed to tell you, sir, that Clara is waiting for you with calmest joy.” And those were the only words he would speak throughout the journey.

  ‘Eventually,’ said the little man through a mouthful of sausage-roll, ‘I felt the carriage stop and the door open. “Now you may take off the blindfold,” said my escort. I did so, and what a spectacle met my eyes! A country house with all its windows lit up. There were glimpses of a ballroom with people moving about beneath the twinkle of chandeliers. Liveried footmen were standing in the porte-cochère; one held my door for me as I climbed out in astonishment. Oh, I can’t hope to convey to you here in broad daylight the magic which seized me that soft summer dusk before a great house sparkling with lights and breathing out its sound of chatter and the distant strains of music. Have you never felt at the same time happy and melancholy, not quite knowing what the moment means? The music I could hear was sad and remote. It spoke of all the things we’ve never had but still have managed to lose. How can that be? As I turned my head slightly I was no longer sure it was coming from the house. It took me a few moments to recognise my own Carnaval, the piece called “Chopin”, but arranged for instruments. In its new disguise I found something missing from the piano original. It said to me: “You may never leave this place, Robert. Can’t you feel its spell? Now you’ve been here and heard this music your life has already changed and your future begins anew.” And just for an instant I shivered.

  ‘In the doorway a lady was standing, waiting for me. She was dressed as though clasped with blossoms and wore a mask of petals. “I’m Columbine,” she said, and I knew her voice as that of the woman in Harrods. “Welcome, Maestro,” and she curtseyed slightly. “The night is yours. The house is also yours. And everyone in it is yours – for this one weekend. We are all masked. You alone are yourself, unmasked.” “And Clara?” I asked. “How shall I know my Clara?” “How do we any of us know our Claras?” she replied. This was more enigmatic than helpful, I have to admit. But never mind – the excitement of it!

  ‘I was shown into the ballroom and a footman announced in a loud voice: “Mr Robert Schumann!” I had yet to become a Doctor of Music, you see. At once a hush fell and the whole room turned towards me. And what a company it was! Everyone was in the most fantastic costumes, faces hidden behind masks which came down to just beneath their noses so they could eat and drink and … and kiss. It was very thrilling to me, quite sinister, especially their eyes, a wet glitter behind holes cut in metal and cardboard and cloth. Lady Columbine took me firmly by the wrist, led me over and introduced me to them one by one – “This is Pierrot; this is Harlequin; you really must get to know Estrella.” They bowed and curtseyed and I noticed that one or two held my hand longer than was strictly necessary. And all the time I was wondering: Which one of them is my Clara? Is it she, with the small extra pressure of those gloved fingers? Or that one? Or that, with almost a child’s teeth bared by her smile?

  ‘Lady Columbine clapped her hands. “We shall all go through to the music room and, when our young maestro has collected himself after his long journey and these introductions, he will I hope play for us with his usual magic. From now on, the other world has ceased to exist.” And at that moment, happening to glance through the french windows, I saw that the lights in the drive outside had been turned off, that the tall Rolls which had brought me had vanished, that nothing but darkness pressed up against the panes. Footmen now moved from window to window closing the shutters, drawing curtains, sealing the house. Yet all the time, from which room I couldn’t tell, I seemed to hear the same melancholy tune I’d heard on my arrival. I never thought my own music could sound so wistful. Did you ever play that, dearest?’ the little man broke off to ask my sister, who started as if in a trance. ‘Did you ever play “Chopin”?’

  ‘I’ve learned some Chopin,’ said Caroline warily. ‘Bits.’

  ‘No, no, my “Chopin” from Carnaval.’

  ‘Oh, that one. Yes, that’s not too difficult. It’s lovely. Really.’

  All this while I had been aware of my father’s unease. His silence was eloquent to us, as were his small movements which represented the tension of good manners struggling with anxiety about what this weird fellow would say next. The unbidden guest at our tablecloth had an oddly compelling way of speaking so that my father’s reluctance to interrupt was understandable for reasons other than politeness. Even as I stared at the flakes of pastry caught among the patterns of the Fair Isle sweater I almost believed I, too, could hear distant music and see the costumed figures.

  ‘Eventually,’ the little man resumed, ‘I sat down and played Carnaval. I played without music, of course. Two tall candles stood on either side shedding their soft yellow glow. It was a remarkable instrument and I did things that night I’d never done before, found things in my own music I hadn’t known were there. As I reached “Chopin” a sigh went around as if at last everyone was hearing what until then had been only half heard, not quite audible. And I knew that none of us there would ever forget it.

  ‘When I’d finished the whole work everyone was all over me, I can tell you. I’m not being immodest. I never bettered that performance and I doubt that anybody ever has. Servants went around with champagne and bonbonnières containing little sugared balls which had a positively magical effect on us. Sated with music, we all began to
sparkle. I can’t remember the dishes I ate, the glasses I drank, not even – I have to say it – the lips I kissed. For how else was I to find my Clara? She was there somewhere, that divine child; I could feel her presence all the time I was playing. The house was full of her elusiveness, mask upon mask upon mask. I pursued her all over it, from one dark bedroom to another, in closet and passageway, in attic and on back staircase. And after each encounter – no! Exquisite, but that wasn’t her. A little too old, a fraction too knowing, not completely sincere about the music … My music, which after all must have gone straight to her heart.

  ‘Time no longer existed. For all I knew day had long since dawned outside the shuttered windows, midday come and gone, another night fallen. There was nothing in the world but the golden pursuit of masked figures and all the while this faint music. Until finally, in a forgotten servant’s room in a disused wing, I came to the end of my search. From behind the door I could hear her voice, a child’s voice since she was barely thirteen, singing my haunting melody. I –’

  ‘– wonder if you’d like a cup of tea?’ my father broke in, getting to his feet and pulling the thermos out of the basket. ‘And then I suppose we’d better think about a move. The traffic, you know. The Leatherhead by-pass especially.’ His firm, professional voice and the sound of Bakelite and unscrewing and pouring tore us back to a normality which felt most peculiar. The little man was rocking mutely on his birch stump, red in the face with the agitation of his story. There was a feeling that something awful had been headed off in the nick of time.

  ‘So,’ said my father, handing him a mug of tea, ‘do you still compose, Dr Schumann?’

  ‘Oh … oh, thank you. Oh yes, yes, I do. The tunes won’t let me alone.’

  Sympathy must have prompted my sister’s surprising intervention. ‘I’d like to learn some of your new pieces so long as they’re not too difficult,’ she said encouragingly. I noticed she was gripping the toe of my father’s shoe.