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.