That didn’t scan at all well. She was upset. Interesting, though, that she’d taken to iambic pentameter. A very cultured lady, Faye. She’d been making her bed in his ear, pouring her lovable poison into it now, for longer than she’d actually lived on this earth.
Ironic, Mark said out loud. Actually very sad.
The couple along the railings exchanged worried looks and shifted a little further off. It didn’t do to speak to yourself, or your dead, out loud. It was inappropriate. Mark turned towards the grassy slope where, historically, for centuries, the boys had dragged the girls up to the top only to drag them down the steepness of it at the kind of full speed that threw clothes and modesty into disarray and called for a lot of screaming. Over the centuries spectators had gathered at the top and the bottom of the slope just to watch this happen.
This world, Mark said under his breath, is insane. I’m sorry. Here’s something you might prefer to hear. The song called Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow was actually written in the hottest days of August. But it’s not a great story because I’ve forgotten the names of the people who wrote it. Here’s another one. This is how Jerome Kern came to write I’ve Told Every Little Star.
(Mark knew, obviously. He knew she was dead and gone, bone and dust in a box in the ground on top of the boxes of dust and bone that were what was left of her own parents, in a grave he never visited any more, in a pretty spot in Golders Green cemetery.)
So Jerome Kern was in bed, Mark said under his breath. It was early in the morning, he’d woken early, and so had his wife, her name was Eva. And lying there in the early morning light they heard a bird outside their window sing a tune over and over. It was a really pretty tune, they both thought so, and Kern told his wife that when they got up he’d compose a song round it. So he hummed it to himself to memorize it and went back to sleep. But when he’d wakened, and breakfasted, and sat down at the piano, of course the tune was completely gone, he couldn’t remember it at all.
(Mark knew that probably the rhyming, which was new, was because this summer he’d looked out some of his old books from back then, the books she’d given him. Possibly it was also because he’d bought online and had been playing on repeat the Ella Fitzgerald / George and Ira Gershwin collection. Faye had had the original LPs. He remembered, now, the shine of them, their paper sleeves, even the feel and the smell of the big square hard-paper box they came in.)
So, Mark said under his breath over the fine view of old / new London. The next morning Kern got up early. He sat in the dark at the window with a piece of paper and a pencil and waited for the bird to come back. And he waited and he waited, as the morning light came up, because he knew that if that bird had come once there was a chance it would come again. And then, sure enough, he heard it again, the bird was there. The bird sang the tune and Kern wrote it down. Then when the bird had finished singing and flown away Kern went downstairs, closed all the doors between his sleeping family and the piano room and roughed out, there and then, the main body of what would become I’ve Told Every Little Star.
(Mark had woken one spring day in his late twenties, on the folding bed in his Kensington basement flat, to a voice in his ear.
Though he hadn’t heard her voice since he was less than thirteen years old, he’d known immediately. Though she was saying very unlikely stuff, as if from a really bad script, or as if she were a posh person pretending to be cockney or were playing the role of a clichéd angry-young kitchen-sink character of the 1950s, it was definitely her. Well, old man, wake up, I mean I don’t mind and I know you’re a queer one pardon my French but even a lah-di-da layabout who thinks the world owes him a living’s got to make ebloodynough to pay the rent, and I mean just look at my fingers, worked and to the bone are the words for it, d’you hear me?
I hear you!
He’d opened his eyes, overjoyed.
No one.
There was no one in the room but him.)
The bird was a Cape Cod Sparrow, Melospiza Melodia. It spawned not just a song but a musical too, about some people who, yes, write a song inspired by hearing a bird sing. Music In The Air; he wrote it with Oscar Hammerstein. And they all lived happily ever after, until they died. And when Jerome Kern was in hospital dying, Oscar Hammerstein came to his bedside, Kern was in a coma, they knew he’d die very soon, and the song Hammerstein sang to his dear friend Kern in the last minutes of his life was I’ve Told Every Little Star, because Hammerstein knew how very fond, among all his compositions, Kern was of that song.
The end. Oh, no, wait. Interesting fact about Melospiza Melodia, and it’s that if it is well fed, the bird, and hasn’t had to worry too much about finding food, it actually produces offspring that sing less than the offspring it produces if the parent bird has been hungrier. And the other thing about songbirds I was remembering to tell you is that it’s now thought by some experts that they sing in their sleep as well as sing while they’re awake. As if their sleeping selves are a kind of being awake, or their wakened selves are a kind of being asleep.
There. That’s it.
The end.
Mark nodded to himself. Then he nodded at the couple and the child to show he wasn’t mad and he’d meant and taken no offence, both. He didn’t wait to see if they’d nod back. He pushed himself off the railing, turned towards the Observatory building and the ragged line of tourists and schoolkids in the yard waiting to straddle the meridian line, and all the people, one after the other, doing just that and having their picture taken by people holding cameras or phones well away from themselves. That was how people focused these days.
I’m standing on time! a girl said and toed the line. How cool is that?
I’m standing on not-time! her friend said jumping backwards away from the meridian.
Someone was talking, a youngish man in a T-shirt and fleece. He was a teacher, presumably, from the words he was using: last warning, confiscate, crisps.
If you take them off her, are you going to eat them yourself, do you know what I’m trying to say sir? a girl said.
No, Melanie, because crisps are sprayed with chemicals then fried in huge vats of fat, and I like to eat healthily, the man said.
These are healthy, sir, the girl with her hand in the crisp packet said. It says on the packet less fat and natural ingredients in it sir innit.
The three girls standing with the crisp packet girl all burst out laughing. In it innit! they said. Innit in it!
Because we learned on Tuesday, didn’t we, the teacher said, that it’s random. And about longitude and latitude and fixed points, he said. To know where you are when you’re at sea and there are no landmarks. But who can tell me why it was decided to put it here? Jacintha, mobile off. Off. Off or confiscated. You choose. Thank you. Someone tell me why the experts at the time chose Greenwich. Rhiannon? Why Greenwich?
Because they had to put it somewhere so they could get on with the other important calculations about time and, and things like time and the sea and that, cause they needed something better than the thing called reckoning with that throwing logs tied to rope off moving ships, and on land too because like, that, Yarmouth being ten minutes ahead of Greenwich and in other places it could be noon in London and half past eleven in the place you’d just travelled to on a train, a girl said.