The Philosopher's Pupil (58 page)

Father Bernard emerged and helped Diane out from behind the tree. He put his arm round her and led her away. Valerie, coming through the gate on to the quay, now saw the other two and watched them depart. Then she turned the other way and walked past my place of concealment. I saw her face as she passed. She wore a strange expression, very sad, weary, grave, even stern, and yet with a twist in the mouth which was almost like a smile, though it might have presaged tears. It struck me at the time that this expression very well expressed what, at the end, the very end, if that can be imagined, someone, perhaps God, might feel about George.

At a distance, for I knew where she lived, I followed Valerie to see her home safely. As she walked she seemed to lose a certain tragic exaltation which had possessed her. Her head drooped, she stumbled over her long besmirched white dress and picked up the skirt impatiently in one hand, drawing it upwards with a graceless movement. Now the comfortless tears would be coming. She began to hurry. I followed her until I saw her put her key into the door of her father's house, one of the ‘better' detached houses in Leafy Ridge, and disappear inside. The most beautiful girl in Ennistone.

‘Well, how are the old sinuses?' said Mr Hanway.

‘All right, sir,' said Emma.

‘I trust you have been practising as much as you should?'

‘No. Not as much. Some.'

‘Why? You can use the college music rooms? And I've told you you can come here.'

‘Yes, well, I do use the college music rooms and I sing in my digs when there's no one else there, but somehow — '

‘I sometimes feel,' said Mr Hanway, ‘that you are ashamed of your great gift and want to keep it a secret.'

‘No, no — '

‘Perhaps you feel that you counter-tenors have still to make your way in the world and fight to be accepted?'

‘Not particularly.'

‘You're not troubled
by foolish
worries?' Mr Hanway had a prudish delicacy which Emma greatly liked.

‘No, of course not.'

‘You seem so timid about it all.'

Emma, not used to regarding himself as ‘timid', engaged indeed in the not less than heroic operation of sacrificing one of his gifts to the other, flushed with annoyance. ‘I'm not timid, I'm just embarrassed. One can't always be forcing people to hear a loud resonant piercing rather unusual noise!'

‘My dear Scarlett-Taylor, what a way to describe your exceptionally beautiful voice!'

Emma thought, I ought to tell him
now
that I'm going to give up singing. I'm going to give up serious singing, and that is for him,
and
for me, the same as giving up singing. But looking into Mr Han way's gentle diffident grey eyes it seemed impossible to utter. Also, in a yet more terrible way, even the touch of Mr Hanway's fingers on the piano (he was an excellent pianist) struck a resonance deep in Emma's soul which made him wonder: am I not irrevocably bound to music?

‘I think it is time for you to come out.'

‘I'm not ready.'

‘Have you heard of Joshua Bayfield?'

‘Vaguely. He plays the guitar.'

‘He plays the lute, also the guitar. He asked me if you would perform with him. The B B C are interested and there is a possibility of making a record. And there is that flautist I told you of - you know how well your voice accords with the flute — '

‘Oh I don't think anything like that yet - I do occasionally perform after all. I've been asked to sing in the college
Messiah -
' Emma did not add that he had refused.

‘You sound quite panic-stricken! You mustn't be so modest. Shall I ask Bayfield to write to you?'

‘Please, no.'

Emma, who had just arrived, was sitting beside the piano which his teacher was idly touching as an accompaniment to his admonitions. Mr Hanway, once a moderately well-known operatic tenor, was a corpulent man of over fifty, with coarse straight grey hair and grey eyes. He looked like a teacher, more like an economics don than a musical man, but without self-assertion. His face, not wrinkled, had a greyish sad used look, drooping under the eyes and chin. Something vastly poetic and romantic seemed to stray lost and grieving within him. He had been married, but his wife had left him childless and long ago, and his once promising career as a singer was over. He lived in a dark little flat high up in a red brick mansion block in Knightsbridge. Emma liked the flat which reminded him (perhaps partly because of the particular sound of the piano) of his mother's flat in Brussels, though her flat was large and full of big Belgian furniture which Emma's ‘I like it!' when they first arrived there many years ago had kept unchanged.

Emma felt no retrospective satisfaction about his two musical triumphs at the Slipper House. He was ashamed at having got so drunk. He had not wanted to go out with Tom and Tom's old friends, of whom he felt jealous. He had seriously proposed to himself an evening of study. But after Tom had gone he felt so depressed that he decided to have a shot of whisky. After that it was necessary to continue drinking. Then he had gone to look at Judy's clothes, and had found the long-haired wig in her cupboard and tried it on. Then it seemed a shame not to try on a dress or two. The effect was so funny and so charming, the transformation so complete, that he felt bound to share the joke and, emboldened by whisky, set off for the Green Man where Tom had said he would be after the rehearsal. In Burkestown he had been told about the ‘Slipper House party'. He could not clearly remember the whole of the evening, particularly the later part which seemed to be full of black patches; but once back at Travancore Avenue he had realized that Ju's pretty dress was torn completely apart at the shoulders and irrevocably stained with red wine.

He did remember putting his arms around Tom, and then, not at all long afterwards, around Pearl. This was the effect of drink. It was not how he usually behaved. Yet it was not false or unreal. Had he just transferred the kiss he could not give to Tom to Pearl, who looked so bisexually angelic with her hard straight profile and her thin upright grace? No, that was Pearl's kiss, not Tom's; and he recalled with a kind of guilty gloomy pleasure her quiet acceptance, at least tolerance, of the kiss. He recalled how positively he had
noticed
Pearl on the first occasion when he saw her. But how stupid and pointless it all was. Tom appeared to be half in love with Anthea Eastcote, and was in any case framed by God for women's joy. And this ambiguous ‘maidservant' figure, what did he know about her? He had only had one conversation with her in his life. In any case, what was this about except his capacity to get drunk? It would end, if it had not already ended, in muddle, and he hated muddle, and in rejection, and he hated and feared rejection. He was frightened too by his inability to remember the evening, and ashamed to ask Tom about it. Supposing something disgraceful and absurd had happened? Supposing he were to become an alcoholic? He had seen terrible alcoholics in Dublin. His father, a moderate drinker, had always warned him against alcohol. Had his father, for himself, feared this fate? Had Emma's grandfather, whom Emma could scarcely remember, been an alcoholic? Was it not hereditary?

And now he had to tell Mr Hanway that he was going to give up singing and would come no more. The end of singing would be the end of Mr Hanway. They were only close in this place, in these roles, in the benign and sacred presence of music. He would never see Mr Hanway again. Could that be, was it needful? Yes. He could not divide his life, he could not divide his
time.
He was between two absolutes and he knew which one he loved best. His history tutor, Mr Winstock, who cared little about music, and to whom Emma had once vaguely spoken about ‘giving up the singing', could not understand his hesitation; and when he was with Mr Winstock Emma could not understand it either. But now he was with Mr Hanway.

The sun never shone into Mr Hanway's flat, but it sometimes slanted across the window illuminating the white window sills and reflecting on to the gauze curtains which, never drawn back, concealed Mr Hanway's life from windows opposite. It shone so now, reminding Emma of sunrise in Brussels illuminating lace. He thought, and will I sing no more for my mother, who so loves to hear me sing? Could I
get used
to singing less than very well? That would be impossible.

‘It's not that I want to tempt you with visions of fame,' Mr Hanway went on, ‘I know I can't and wouldn't anyway! Fame will undoubtedly come to you, but that does not concern us now. It is time for you to move to another shelf, to face new challenges. As a teacher I have always encouraged your natural modesty. But it is time for you to realize, to acknowledge to yourself, what a remarkable instrument you possess. You must not neglect what God has been pleased to give you, the voice for which Purcell wrote. Your counter-tenor must be heard, the music must be heard that was written especially for you!'

‘There isn't much of it,' said Emma gloomily. He was sitting on an upright chair beside the piano. There had been no singing yet. Perhaps there would not be any.

‘Bach, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Cavalli, to say nothing of Handel and Purcell and some of the divinest songsters who ever wrote, and you say that isn't much! In any case a little of what is perfect should suffice a purist! You have the most austerely beautiful, most purely musical of all voices, like no other sound in music, to honour which the most beautiful words were wedded to the most perfect music by a century of geniuses. Besides, you owe it to music now to let your talent speak. More composers will write for the counter-tenor voice. A contrived voice they may call it, but art itself is a contrivance. We are already witnessing a musical revolution. An old voice, a new voice, wherewith to sing unto the Lord a new song!' (Here Mr Hanway raised his arms.) ‘You must give
more time,
Scarlett-Taylor,
more time,
time is the fuel. Of course you will soon have finished your university studies and be able to concentrate on music, but you should now be singing with a group, and having experience of working with old instruments - you must stop playing the lone wolf. Well, we will talk of these things - now let us sing. What shall we limber-up with, something playful? A folk song, a love song, some Shakespeare?'

Automatically Emma stood up. He blew his nose (an essential preliminary to singing). Mr Hanway touched the piano, suggesting several songs. He sang three of Mr Hanway's favourites,
Take, oh take those Lips Away, Woeful Heart with Grief Oppressed
and
Sing Willow.
(‘What a gloomy unsuccessful lot they were, to be sure!' said Mr Hanway.) After that they sang together. Mr Hanway's famous Glee Club, flourishing when Emma first made his acquaintance, had, like many pleasant things in the teacher's life, ceased to be, but Mr Hanway retained, together with all his musicological pedantry, a strong sense of music as fun. They sang
Fie, nay, prithee John
in round, then
The Silver Swan
with Mr Hanway producing a remarkable soprano, then
Lure, Falconers, Lure,
then the
Agincourt Song,
then
The Ash Grove
in improvised parts. And as soon as Emma began to sing he could not prevent himself from feeling very happy.

‘Good, good, but don't feel you have to stand so still, I've told you before, you're a singer not a soldier, all right, some singers jig about too much, but you're
too
afraid of making faces and moving your hands, don't be so
dignified,
too great a sense of dignity can hinder an artist, it's an aspect of selfishness,
give
yourself,
relax,
let
it
sing through you as the Japanese would say! And keep the sound well up, well up, don't think of your vocal cords, put yourself right up in your brow, feel it as a vast area full of empty caverns where free spiralling columns of air vibrate! Vibrate! You still haven't got that
absolute
high
pianissimo
which moves away into the distance into a thin whisper of pure sound like a thin thin tongue of faintly trembling steel. Ah, you have much to do — sometimes I think you are just coasting along.' Mr Hanway's exhortations, often highly metaphorical, were always accompanied with elaborate mime. ‘Now, dear boy, let us have special exercises and then on to the Bach
Magnificat,
I shall hear your beautiful
Esurient es
…'

As Emma came out into the bright sunshine after his lesson, having failed once more to ‘say anything' to Mr Hanway, he felt that dazed giddiness again as he shielded his eyes, the vertigo of an abomination of loneliness and loss, where silent endless streaming snowflakes blinded him and obliterated all meaning. He remembered a dream where he had wandered in vast vibrating caverns, realizing with despair that they were caves of ice deep underneath a glacier where he was destined soon to fall to his knees and die.

‘Must we have all the light shut out by those bloody plants?' said Brian.

‘I like to have a living thing near me,' said Gabriel.

‘Aren't I a living thing? Do you want me to squat on the window ledge while you wash up?'

‘Sorry, I'll move them.'

‘And I wish you wouldn't smoke in the kitchen, you smoke over the sink, it gets everywhere — '

It was two days since the events at the Slipper House (which had occurred on Saturday, it being now Monday). Gabriel and Brian were having breakfast in the kitchen at Como. Brian was cross this morning because it was Monday and because Gabriel, reaching out in the night for the glass of water she always kept beside her, had tapped her wedding-ring upon the glass top of the dressing-table and woken him up, after which he was unable to go to sleep again.

Sitting on a chair in the corner, Adam was holding Zed on his knee and murmuring to him almost inaudibly. This ritual occurred every morning. Gabriel knew without being told that Adam was explaining that he was only going away to school and would very soon be back and that Zed was to be a good dog and not to worry. Zed listened to these comforting admonitions on each occasion with an air of alert bright-eyed interest, occasionally thrusting forward to lick Adam's nose. This scene filled Gabriel with the old familiar mixture of intense love and intense fear, each emotion as it were jacking the other up.