Fearful Symmetry (9 page)

How tiresome of it not to attract him. He wondered whether he would bother to lie to Sara about it and agree that it was special in some way, since it was she who had described it to him in the first place with an enthusiasm that seemed less forced than her appetite for work. He thought not. She might as well know from the outset that he was not to be drawn in the ordinary way to ordinary beauty, nor was given to displays of enthusiasm. He closed his fists in his pockets and hunched his shoulders against the morning cold. It did not register with him that he was feeling the first nip of autumn because he did not think about seasons beyond taking the usual precautions, depending on where he was, against the extremest effects of weather. Most points between sunburn and snow-blindness he tended not to notice. He dressed for interiors, acquiring his outer layers of clothing only as the need arose, and his thin indigo jacket was not quite warm enough now.

Out of habit he walked on with his head down, before realising that this would not accomplish the object of his visit. Without altering his stride he looked up and dutifully scanned the façade, puzzled that the round-headed window in the dead centre, the only central feature, should be so inconsequential as almost to escape notice. It added to his dissatisfaction. Was there some point to all this architecture? He considered why this so celebrated city sat ill in his perception, not noticing that it was a necessity with him to look for, and if necessary to create, some complication in his responses to most things. Other cities that he knew provided him more obligingly with a sense of unease. To urban ugliness of the ordinary kind he could, indeed often did, respond in his music with strangulated screeches of alienation. It appealed to him, the picture of himself set against a barren cityscape, his music articulating the latest in the tragedy of the human condition, his the potent but lonely voice of a lost, post-industrial generation. All this pleasantness made that difficult here. It was all so understandable.

In the middle of the crescent he stopped. He could see right to the far end from here and it was obviously exactly the same as the end from which he had just come. Anyway, he was cold. He crossed the road and turned back in the direction of Brock Street. As he entered the Circus he could see that people were on the move, brisk ones with shoulder bags and mobile phones, and older, sleepier others with poop scoops and plastic bags, who shambled on the kerb while their vile dogs in the gutter made it worth their while. Herve hurried past and made his way down Gay Street and into George Street where the traffic was already heavy and the shops were open. Here the city’s heart beat with a vigour that exhausted him. He was in no mood for the uncomplicated thrum of daily lives. Everywhere he looked he saw people purposefully engaged in their transparently innocuous business, going in and out and passing up and down in front of uniformly pleasant buildings. A mild optimism seemed to gleam from the stone itself and these unresisting people soaked up its message on their way and went about looking on the bright side. And Herve found this unsettling, being so much more at home with futility. Bath provided too little to complain of, as did Sara Selkirk herself, and that in itself amounted to a complaint.

He turned away, back into the ordered claustrophobia of the Circus with its inward-looking windows. Selkirk was a puzzle. When he’d heard a recording of hers he had been certain he was listening to a woman of depth, yet Sara herself was turning out to be quite frivolous. He was disappointed, too, that he was not having on her the effect that he usually had on women. In fact, he seemed not to be having any effect on her at all. It was most odd, not to say irritating, as was that unshakeable pleasantness of hers. They went together, she and the city, and burdened him with weariness.

This time he left the Circus by Bennett Street. He wandered up Russell Street and from the top of it saw almost what he had been hoping to find. Not a Catholic church, of course, but one which he hoped would provide the same kind of dark stillness where he could talk privately, if not in peace, to his mother. The door latch was heavy and noisy but he proceeded into the church as quietly as he could, in fear of being greeted by anyone. It was lighter inside than he had hoped and the noise of traffic reached him here as a high drone. He sat on the back pew, sensing with relief that he was alone.

Edesanya! Mother
. If he closed his eyes he could imagine her kinder than she had ever been in life, as if this place were her natural home and he would be sure to find her here.
Mother
, he whispered.
Bocsasd meg a mi vetkeinket
. But would she, were it even in her gift to do so, forgive him his trespasses? Silence lay like dust across the wooden pews and rafters. She would not. Why would she forgive in death, having judged him with unvarying harshness in life? If he could only light a candle, would it help her to hear the sincerity in his confession?
I do try, Edesanya
, he pleaded.
I keep trying, but I need a little help. I am so alone!
Tears escaped from his closed eyelids and his shoulders convulsed in self-pity.
And I do no harm!
he whispered aloud, suddenly feeling petulant and reproachful. If she had not died in the first place none of this would be happening. Everything would be as it had been until two years ago, except that by now, had she lived, Mother would surely no longer be able to treat his achievements with her customary faint incredulity. By this time, he would not still be failing to impress her with his successes. She would not still be throwing him watery congratulations and then turning back to her beloved Brahms and Beethoven, leaving him still starving for her praise. By dying, she was not only still withholding her good opinion but had robbed him of the hope of ever deserving it:
You certainly do not deserve it now, do you?
He could almost hear her voice. Herve rubbed his eyes and sniffed.
I do what I have to,
he hissed rebelliously.
What else can I do, if you have gone? It was all for you. How can I do anything now?
A self-righteous silence—either his or his mother’s, he could not be sure—descended and filled the space around him. He got up and made his way down the aisle. At the open door he sniffed again. He was definitely going down with something.

As he made his way along Julian Road, Herve continued to fret enjoyably about his chill. He needed whisky and some proper sleep. With his hands jammed in his pockets and his arms pressed close into his sides he climbed the short distance up Lansdown Hill back to Camden Crescent. But because his eyes were fixed firmly on the pavement as he reached number 11, he felt no particular pleasure in his return from the unsatisfactorily empty church, and did not notice the troubled face of the woman with untidy red hair who entered the building just ahead of him.

CHAPTER
11

A
NDREW WAS TOO
busy feigning his own surprise to be more than peripherally aware of Valerie’s reaction, seated next to him on the piano stool in Helene’s drawing room. He replaced his coffee cup in its saucer and looked round at the others, grateful that he need not find anything to say. With Helene in full flight, none of the other seven people in the room would be required or indeed able to say anything either, at least not for some time.

‘I’ve got a teensy bombshell, everyone,’ she had announced. Adele had finished her mantra of ‘Phil milk half sugar. Jim black no sugar. Valerie milk no sugar. Mama milk two sweeteners. Adele milk no sugar. Poppy milk no sugar. Cosmo extra milk two sugars,’ and was doggedly taking the cups and biscuits round. Phil, as usual, was helping. Poppy and Cosmo, after nearly five weeks, were now on Adele’s coffee list but Andrew, whose attendance at rehearsals had been sporadic, was still not included in her computations. Like all people, events or physical facts which were new or at variance with what she recognised, the presence of Andrew had yet to be accommodated somewhere in Adele’s understanding, and until such time as it might be she would behave as if he simply were not there. He had risen quietly and poured his own.

‘Never fear, it’s a nice bombshell,’ Helene went on encouragingly. ‘And it is, tan-ta-ra—there will be no rehearsal tonight!’ Feeling herself illuminated by the beam of everyone’s attention, she went on, ‘I thought that instead of yet more
preliminary discussions
about our own little creative enterprise’—she glanced at Cosmo—‘we should have an outing. The minibus will be here in quarter of an hour. I am taking you all to Iford Manor for a very special evening. You could call it a reunion!’

Again she glanced at Cosmo. ‘At Iford Manor this evening, there is to be an open rehearsal with
Herve Petrescu,
our own dear Cosmo’s inspiration and mentor, and the cellist Sara Selkirk. And we will all be there, to celebrate our own
creative selves
and the universal language of music that we all share! So, if anyone wants to spend a penny before we go, you know where it is, everyone!’

Andrew leaned towards Valerie. ‘Or in other words,’ he whispered, keeping his eyes on Cosmo and Helene, ‘ “we’ve been coming here for nearly a month to start work on a non-existent opera but the guy who I’m paying to compose the thing hasn’t yet written a note. So let’s at least bugger off and have a good time instead of sitting around here and spending another bloody rehearsal talking about possibilities.” Am I right?’ Cosmo was sitting alone in an armchair and his face, cupped in one hand, revealed that his own interpretation of Helene’s words might not be very different from Andrew’s. It had changed colour from maggot white to earthworm pink. He was staring at the carpet, frowning.

Valerie tightened her lips into an exasperated line. ‘Can’t you just be positive for once? Can’t you just try? I do—I try a lot.’ She rose crossly and joined Helene. Andrew watched her go, feeling guilty but no less cynical. So she wants positive, does she? Good idea. Let’s all go off to a nice posh house in the country and listen to some pretentious bullshit presented by some megastar groovy composer, who’s bloody moved in and taken over. Taken over Sara.
My
Sara. He swallowed most of his coffee in one gulp and made his eyes water.

He had not seen Sara since the evening he had stormed out eleven days ago. He had not mentioned to Valerie that he had seen her at all, never mind twice, and Valerie had mentioned her about a week ago, only to ask with studied casualness if she was home safely. Andrew, knowing how closely he was being watched, had carried on wiping the sink, looking bored and said that yes, Sara had rung the police station to thank him for checking the house, and now, was there anything else for washing up.

The thought of Sara made him feel like a foreign plant, stuck in the wrong garden and just managing to hold on with the wilting conviction that his own wife was a slow toxin which he was being forced to ingest through the roots. Sara was quite simply his climate, pure, exhilarating and utterly necessary for his survival, yet she seemed to be happily casting her healthful light elsewhere. On that pretentious Hungarian bastard, to be precise.

Valerie suddenly reappeared. ‘Isn’t she marvellous?’ she asked with determined friendliness, standing over him with her cup and saucer. ‘She’s marvellous, isn’t she?’ Just then she caught Helene’s eye and smiled toothily. ‘
She’s
always positive.’ She turned back to Andrew. ‘Did you know that Sara was playing at Iford tonight?’

Her scrupulously casual, gimlet eyes were upon him.

‘She may have mentioned it when she rang about her house check. I didn’t think we’d want to bother.’ He smiled insincerely. ‘Oh, but I’m meant to be
positive
. So sorry.’

‘L
ISTEN.
“T
HERE
was a Roman settlement at Iford and there are still traces of Roman occupation on top of the hills. Iford, under the name of Eford, is mentioned in the Domesday Book.” The Domesday Book, Herve, that’s this er . . . book, you see . . .’ Sara was trying to interest him in bits out of the visitors’ leaflet, anything to shut him up about how this provincial audience would not appreciate his work unless he talked to them about it first. He had been fretting all afternoon. She had said, feebly, that she was sure that what they would want would be to hear some of his music, and perhaps ask questions. But they will not understand it, they must learn a little first, Herve insisted, so first he would talk. Not for long, perhaps only for forty minutes. Sighing, she had abandoned any attempt to talk him out of it. In a little over a week of working with him every day she had failed to discover any instance, important or trivial, in which he could be talked into or out of anything. Trying to admire his firmness of purpose, she stabbed at the leaflet again with one finger.

‘Listen, this is fascinating. You see, we’re standing in what is essentially an Italian garden, only it’s in the middle of Wiltshire. Well, not the middle, it’s almost in Somerset. In fact,’ she said, looking back at the map over the page, ‘it’s nearly, but not quite, in Avon. It’s right at the join, imagine.’

She looked up and around her, rather desperately. They were standing at one of the highest points of Harold Peto’s garden at Iford Manor. It was five o’clock on a glorious autumn afternoon. It was so beautiful, or rather it would be so beautiful if she were here with someone just marginally interested in anything other than his own worries. Could he not at least pretend? But, she remembered, that would mean compromise, the diluting of his concentration on matters of trivia, and that would be true agony for him. Herve was not like other people and she had no right to expect him to be.

‘Peto. Harold Peto,’ she persisted. Herve was looking at her sadly. ‘Peto the architect, a friend of Edward Lutyens. This was Peto’s house, you see. He designed the garden. All the paths and plants, the statues, the follies—all this. The little . . . er . . . garden buildings . . .’ As she tailed off inadequately Herve smiled politely, not having heard of either Peto or Lutyens and considering the idea of follies not worth the intellectual effort of grasping.

‘The audience, they are arriving when? Ah yes, at seven, still two hours to wait,’ he said. ‘I will talk first, yes, and then we play. Please we will check again the sound equipment. The tape I have here, yes. All is fine, but we check again, please.’

He looked down at her with intense, nervous eyes and Sara smiled. When he looked like that, so troubled, so brilliant, yet vulnerable enough to need her, funny things happened to her insides. She touched his arm.

‘You’re ready. Everything’s ready. We’ve worked hard, we know what we’re doing and there’s nothing to worry about.’ She turned and set off up the path towards the cloisters, then turned back. ‘Oh, come on then. We’ll check it all again if you like. We’ll check it all again and then we’ll give ourselves a little walk in the garden, to calm ourselves down, all right?’

He followed. ‘You are interesting woman, Sara. Always so calm, as if nothing is important. How is this, that you can be calm, now? Okay, we check, afterwards we walk.’

But after the checking Herve declared himself in need of solitude. He needed a quiet time alone to prepare mentally, and perhaps run over some of the percussion sketches again. Sara had smiled, nodding seriously, supposing she must make allowances for his nerves. He was a composer first and a performer only second and by necessity, since much of his work was deeply unplayable by anyone other than himself and the people with whom he would work to create it. It would then be recorded, usually at its première, and by a combination of listening to the CD and industrious study of the ‘score’, other musicians, ambitious for their reputations as interpreters of contemporary repertoire, would labour to learn it. Sara had observed that Herve’s CV listed an impressive number of prestigious commissions and world premières, but fewer
deuxièmes
or subsequent performances. And she knew that the list of Petrescu pieces that had found a place in the repertoires of soloists, ensembles and orchestras, except those few who chose to totter on the cutting edge of late twentieth-century music, had tailed off into insignificance. Reserving judgment, she reflected that in his day Beethoven had been reviled by all but a few, and that Herve still sold respectable numbers of recordings to a young, mainly European, university-educated following. Her trouble was she just lacked vision. And if she lacked a certain conviction about the music itself, there were other things, as a professional, that she would have to contribute: at the very least she would work to convey to her audience the pleasure she felt in performing. She could share that, even if the music itself remained a little puzzling to them all.

She had done several of this sort of open rehearsal, where the musicians work at a piece of music in front of an audience, talking to one another, stopping, discussing, trying it another way, all in the cause of demystifying the process. Sometimes it worked, if the players knew one another well and if they could put into words what they were trying to achieve in their playing and when, despite its being a rehearsal, they never quite forgot the audience’s presence. Then the audience could leave stiff with new insights and feeling slightly superior, like the privileged observers they were. Sara thought that she would still rather have her audiences leave feeling at the very least uplifted and restored in spirit, on a good night touched by joy, even ecstasy, but Herve seemed to want them to leave edified and better informed. Perhaps she was rather shallow, but she would rather delight than educate. She had begun to slip into the habit of wondering if she was rather shallow.

Leaving Herve to his mental preparation, pacing the floor in Peto’s miniature cloisters at the east side of the garden, in which chairs, lighting and sound equipment were already installed for the evening’s event, Sara wandered out along the high gravel walk that ran from the cloisters to the little summerhouse, past the chestnut trees on the lawn. She looked out towards the south, beyond the garden’s boundary to the river below, tumbling under the grey bridge. On the parapet of the bridge stood a life-sized statue of Britannia, gazing down into the water as if incongruously frozen in a mid-eighteenth-century moment of personal desperation, in the very act of gathering enough courage to jump. In the field on the far side of the river the bowed heads of a few Jacob’s sheep swung languidly in the grass.

The high ground of the garden where she stood overlooking the field reminded her of her garden at Medlar Cottage. Here, too, at Iford, the garden rose up the hillside behind the house, embracing it like a collar. In this garden, too, were peaceful walks, shining ponds, purple autumn crocuses in the grass and dwarf cyclamen under the trees. Here, too, glancing up from any point in the garden, you looked out and felt the secret safety of a valley, hiding and holding all the low houses, narrow lanes and slow-moving animals within the diocese of its hills.

As she stared out, a sudden slight wind gusting out of the north shook the leaves of the trees behind her with a sound like thin applause. She turned her gaze from the river and the sheep in the water meadow back to the garden and the direction of the wind, the steep hanging wood behind her where a staircase made of logs rose up and was lost in the quivering foliage. Her own garden had hidden corners, beloved secret places and paths which disappeared into thick shrubs, but here Sara could not be quite sure if these log steps were an invitation to venture into the high wood, or a malevolent dare. The steps might fade into a harmless nothing on the bark floor between the dark trees or they might bring her to a new delight, another stone figure, a pool graced with waterlilies. But they might lead her on, away, out of the garden, where she would be lost. She could not see to the top. As quickly as it had arisen the wind subsided, and Sara wandered further along the gravel walk while the returning silence came to her almost like a voice through the garden, making promises and whispering of beneficence. Ahead of her, the low evening sun behind Peto’s ruined columns cast daggers of shadow across the stones.

This is Italy, whispered the voice. Look, there’s the bronze of Romulus and Remus with the she-wolf, between the colonnades of the Great Terrace. Nearby is a Renaissance figure of a prophet, and there’s a Roman sarcophagus. Here are two pink marble Verona columns. Everywhere, by the walks and ponds, on the edges of the steps and across the terraces, Sara’s eyes were beguiled by roundels, reliefs, urns, columns and figures, all speaking of the faded, mellow Italy of vineyards and villas, poets and emperors. She was wilfully escaping Herve’s digitalised, minimalist, slate and chrome world and finding a wistful, slightly guilty comfort in noticing how the first fallen leaves of autumn were drifting in little piles on the paved terrace outside the pretty, low-roofed
casita
. She knew that the
casita
, like the cloisters, was another illusory Edwardian folly of Peto’s, which looked reverently back to Italy and the time of the Renaissance, when people had been in turn looking further back still, to the classical, ancient world. She recognised a dubious, exquisite sadness about it and wondered about the psychological health of all this backward-looking melancholy. Must Utopias lie always in the past? Then reality will always push us forward and further from them. Our yearnings, impotent and unrealisable, descend into rootless nostalgia.