‘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.
Adam was dressed in his prep school uniform, the ‘togs’ which had pleased Hattie, blue jersey, brown corduroy knee-breeches, and blue socks. Last night Brian and Gabriel had been arguing again about where Adam was to go to school next. Gabriel did not want him to go away from home, but she thought the Comprehensive School was ‘too rough’. There was a small private secondary school with quite a good reputation not far away on the road to London, and could he not go as a day boy, there was a school bus which ran in and out of Ennistone. Brian said this was out of the question, it would be far too expensive, especially as he would soon be out of a job. Gabriel said, good heavens, this is the first I’ve heard. Brian said he just meant everyone would soon be out of a job. Anyway what was wrong with the Comprehensive, it was a good school, the maths were excellent under Jeremy Blackett. Gabriel said what about his French and Latin which he was doing well at, the Comprehensive didn’t start French till fourteen and had never heard of Latin. Brian said he was exhausted and was going to bed.
Looking at Adam and Zed, Gabriel thought about the awful scene at the seaside, and about her adventure with the fish. She had not talked to anybody about the fish. This connected in her mind with something weird which had happened last week. By herself in the house in the afternoon, washing some saucepans at the kitchen sink, she had heard Zed barking in the garden, and looking out between the potted plants had seen the amazing sight of a completely naked man hurrying across the lawn. She did not see him soon enough to see where he had come from, whether over the fence or down the side passage from the road. He seemed to be concerned with getting out of the garden by climbing one of the fences, either the one on the right or the one at the end, both of which he attempted in a helpless perfunctory way. Both fences were made of upright wooden slats about five feet high; the one at the bottom had two horizontal beams nailed along it, the one on the right had not, but had branchy shrubs growing against it which would afford footholds. Gabriel saw that the runner was wearing brown laced-up shoes with no socks. He had greasy longish grey hair, and a look of preoccupied anxiety on his face which she could see clearly as he tried to climb into an old rosemary bush, breaking the brittle branches with loud cracks and trampling them down. After the first moment of shock Gabriel felt no fear of the man, only pity and fear for him, for the pathetic pale soiled vulnerability of his flabby unyoung flesh, as he now struggled at the bottom of the garden, gripping the top of the fence (which Gabriel knew to be jagged and full of splinters) with two hands, and trying to lodge his awkward shoes upon the sloping transverse beams off which they kept slipping. All this time Zed was continuing to dance round the man’s heels barking fiercely. Gabriel imagined him astride upon that sharp jagged fence and covered her eyes, not knowing what to do. She wanted to run out into the garden, to soothe him (for she did not doubt that he was mad, this was no youngster’s jape), bring him inside, give him clothing and a cup of tea. But at this point she did feel frightened. Suppose he were violent? Should she not telephone Brian, telephone the police, get help somewhere? Oughtn’t she to lock the doors? She ran out into the hall, then ran back to lock the garden door, then ran back into the hall and lifted the telephone, then set it down again. She decided she ought to go out into the garden. She hurried back to the kitchen window, but now the garden was empty and Zed had stopped barking. Gabriel unlocked the door and went out. Zed trotted towards her beaming with the satisfaction of duty done. Gabriel searched around, looking over the fences and into the shed, but the man was nowhere to be seen; he had vanished like a hallucination. Gabriel went slowly back to the house. She decided not to telephone the police. The police might arrest him, be rough with him, charge him, imprison him, whereas if he were left alone he might recover and find his way home, or someone might befriend him and look after him as she might have done if only she had had more courage! Then she remembered the Indian man at the Baths, whom she had never seen again. In the evening she told the story to Brian, but making light of it, laughing a bit, then suddenly crying. Brian got the impression that she was being brave about a terrible experience. (And in a way it had been a terrible experience, an ordeal of helpless and frustrated pity.) He said that she ought to have telephoned the police, but now there was no point. (Brian was reluctant to get in touch with the police, because he hated ‘trouble’ and anything to do with publicity, which might get his name mentioned in the papers.) The next day however at the office he changed his mind and rang the police but without alerting Gabriel. Confronted by a policeman on the doorstep, Gabriel was instantly certain that either Adam or Brian was dead. When the policeman solemnly made clear the reason for his visit she was incoherent with relief. ‘Oh, I didn’t mind that at all!’ ‘Are you telling me, madam, that you don’t mind finding a naked man in your garden?’ ‘I don’t want him to be hurt!’ Tears. ‘I can see, madam, that the episode has upset you very much.’ And so on. It turned out soon after that the poor man was a patient of Ivor Sefton’s and was now in hospital. Brian, that evening, positively forbade Gabriel to go and visit him. That night she dreamed about fishes suffocating.