Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (24 page)

‘Goodbye!' she said. ‘Love to the Longmores,' and her voluptuous handsome laughter rolled to the end of the lagoon, echoing in the mountains.

‘Au revoir, Tereu,'
the captain shouted.
‘A bientôt. Au revoir, princesse.'

‘Happy girl,' I said.

That evening, at the Longmore house, we ate a curry of fresh-water shrimps, with red wine, on the edge of a lagoon, under a sky full of soft Pacific stars.

‘Yes,' Longmore said. ‘Tereu is a princess.'

‘A very handsome one too,' I said. ‘A happy girl.'

‘Not happy.'

‘With all that laughter?' I said. ‘I've never heard such laughter.'

‘It's possible to laugh too much.'

Across the dark lagoon, among the stars, islanders were fishing with little flares, like roaming fire-flies.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘she laughs too much. She never laughed like that. Not before she went away.'

After dinner I stood alone for some time and looked down across the lagoon where, in the afternoon, shoals of little fish had leapt for their lives like birds. Everywhere the stars were clear and splendid above the mountains.

‘Very stupid of me, Tereu,' I said. ‘Too stupid. Too, too stupid.'

All across the profound stillness of the lagoon I fancied I could hear, once again, the throaty, sumptuous, rolling, handsome laughter.

‘All or nothing,' I thought.
‘Au revoir, princesse.'

First published in the Fortnightly in 1936, ‘The Grace Note' is a humorous tale of the Chipperfields, a family of brass players devoted to music, but whose jealousy and stubbornness dashes their dreams of a Chipperfield band and tears the family apart

The Chipperfields lived next door to us. Besides Sep and his missus, there were eight sons. At that time Sep was almost fifty, and the boys ranged from fifteen to about thirty. They were all musicians. Every one of them played instruments in a brass band.

To the Chipperfields the playing of instruments was a religion, a kind of creed. Their perfect heaven would have been an eternal bandstand in which there was an eternal playing of angelic cornets and trombones. The whole of their spare life was dedicated to it. They began as soon as they could puff. They were fairly suckled on trumpets, and somewhere about the age of eight or nine they had their first cornets. After that nothing could hold them. They rushed home from school to get in a little practice before tea. It was second nature; cornet-blowing was in their blood.

They were not only in the band, but they were the band itself. It was a good band, and without them it would have been nothing. And they knew it. Because they had other things in common besides instrument blowing. They were all proud and they were all jealous. They were clannish to the same point of intense enthusiasm as they were over the practising of scales.

That was their spirit: to do things wholesale and go on doing them no matter what happened and no matter who was upset. And at one time or another a good many people were upset by the Chipperfields. They were touchy. They were like cats. They had to be smoothed the right way or there was trouble.

And finally there was trouble. The Chipperfields left the band. It was an absolute sensation. It was like a congregation suddenly walking out of a church. And it all happened over nothing. The band was practising for a contest and a crack conductor had been hired from Manchester.

The test place was Tchaikovsky's ‘1812' and suddenly the conductor stopped the whole band and as good as said that there was no chance at all for them at the contest if the trombones went on rag-timing.

It was an insult. What the conductor did not know was that the trombones were all Chipperfields. To say that they were rag-timing was an insult to the whole family. And when the band tried out the piece again the Chipperfields all did their worst, on purpose. It was chaotic.

The conductor was furious. But it was no use. The Chipperfields simply blew the spit out of their instruments and walked out.

And that was the beginning of the formation of the Chipperfield brass band. It was in reality the fulfilment of a dream of Sep himself. It had always been his heart's ambition to see a band formed of his own flesh and blood. Besides his own family he had two brothers, both euphonium players, and, though at that time only Alf and Harry were married, they both had sons. In a year or two they would be blowing their first cornets, and Sep had visions of a Chipperfield band that, in a few years, would be famous.

It was exactly the sort of thing the Chipperfields liked. They got together at once. They were altogether eleven of them, with the two brothers, and they roped in a second cousin or two until, by the mid-summer of that year, they could start practice with a band of fifteen, all Chipperfields.

Alf, the eldest, was conductor. There was no doubt that he was just the man, a fine musician, a fine critic and the tallest of a tall family. All the Chipperfields stood as straight as trombones, and gathered together for practice they looked magnificent.

At the end of the first practice Alf made a short speech in which he said that hitherto brass-band playing in their district had been about as sleepy as a rotten pear, and that he felt they could knock anybody else into next week. There was still time to enter for the late summer contests, and he suggested they go in for the best of them.

They all agreed. The same night they appointed Harry secretary, and within a week they had entered their applications for two top-notch contests in August and two others in September.

‘Next year we'll bust the Crystal Palace,' Sep said.

In another week they were really practising. They hired a school-room for three nights a week and they were like men at devotion. One of the test pieces was Mendelssohn's overture to a ‘Midsummer Night's Dream,' and it was pretty tricky. But they got the spirit of it at once. It was Alf who was responsible. He dinned it into them never to play a single note without the words of the title burning in their minds: that it was midsummer, that it was night, that it was a dream.

‘Play it,' he said, ‘just as if you'd had a pint or two, like that. Sweet and dreamy and about half-drunk.' And the way they responded was masterly. They got all the sweet dreamy intoxication of the dream into it wonderfully. They made it ethereal and unreal. There was no doubt at that time that they were going to knock spots off everybody.

Then something happened. At the third practice, about half-way through the Mendelssohn, when they already knew the thing inside out. Alf suddenly stopped them.

‘We'll go through that again. First bar, second line down the right hand page.'

They played it and he stopped them again.

‘Somebody's playing a grace note in the third line, second bar,' he said.

‘There's no grace note there, and whoever's playing it can't see straight. If Mendelssohn had wanted a grace note there he'd have put one in. Now again. And no grace note.'

They played it again, and Alf nearly lost his temper.

‘Who the devil's playing that grace note?'

Nobody spoke.

‘It's a cornet, somewhere. Who is it?' Nobody answered. It was an insult to suggest any of them couldn't read, and in his mind everybody blamed everybody else. ‘Well,' Alf said ‘we'll try it again.'

They tried it again, and the cornet played the grace note.

‘Who played it?' Alf shouted. Nobody answered. ‘Come on, who played it?'

‘I did.' Sep said.

Alf nearly broke his baton. ‘Then by heavens you ought to know better.'

‘It's here all right. It's marked in the copy.' Sep said ‘D'ye think I can't see?'

‘Where? Where's it's marked? Let me see.'

Alf stormed round behind the cornet and looked over his father's shoulder.

‘That's a fly muck!'

‘Who is? What is? Fly muck! That's a grace note. Think I can't read?'

‘It's a fly muck. I tell you. Here, Harry, Charley! Is that a fly muck or is it a grace note?'

Harry and Charley came to look and both said it was a fly muck. Then gradually the whole family crowded round, and everybody said that it was a fly muck. The old man was absolutely humiliated. He felt disgraced before his on brothers and his own sons. But still he would not have it that it was a fly muck and not a grace note. He was like all the Chipperfields: too proud to admit a fault, and he kept saying:

‘It's there and I shall play it. It's there and I shall play it.'

‘In that case,' Alf said, ‘the band goes smash.'

‘Smash? What? What– –'

The idea almost smashed him himself. The thought of the band going wrong was unthinkable, and suddenly the old man did, for a Chipperfield, a very magnanimous and wonderful thing.

‘All right,' he said ‘I give in. I won't play it.'

‘You'd better change copies with somebody,' Alf said, ‘or you'll be reading the fly muck again.'

‘No,' he said stubbornly. ‘I'll stick to my own. I ain't saying the note ain't there, but I won't play it. That's all.'

And, when they tried the piece again, he didn't play it. It was a great effort of will, but he succeeded. All the time everybody felt a little strained, and much of the dreamy, drunken spirit of the thing was lost. And all the Chipperfields felt that the old man was to blame. He, in turn, felt them against him. It depressed him. For the first time in his life he felt a crack in the family unity.

Then, for a time, things went very well. The Chipperfields got to know the Mendelssohn inside out. They played it like angels. They were a small band, but they were so beautifully balanced and sure in understanding of the music and each other that nobody ever noticed that.

But all the time the old man was worried. He couldn't get the grace note out of his mind. Every time he came to the page showing the fly muck he went through a small agony of indecision and distress. It needed a constant effort of will and self-denial not to play a note which he was still sure in his own mind was there.

Anybody else would by that time have forgotten it, but the Chipperfields were like that. Even about music they were as proud as horses and as stubborn as donkeys. All his life Sep had worked as a finisher in a shoe factory, and when he came home sometimes, in the evenings mucky and dishevelled, he looked rather like a tired, grizzly old dog who has had enough. The grace note wouldn't let him rest.

And when the contest day came it was still on his mind. The rest of the Chipperfields had forgotten it long since. But he was obsessed by it. He had begun to see it out of all proportion. And all that afternoon he kept wiping his grizzly moustache with the back of his hand in nervous distress. The Chipperfields played late in the afternoon. Even before they played there was something of a sensation: a whole band of one name, almost of one single family. And they were as cocksure as fowls on their own muckle

They began the Mendelssohn wonderfully, exactly as Alf had always directed, half-drunkenly, dreamily, almost ethereally. They could have played it standing on their heads. And then, about halfway through, it happened. Tolstoy has related how learning to ride a bicycle he kept his eye on a lady in a frenzied effort to avoid her and succeeded at once in knocking her down. Sep Chipperfield did the same thing.

Having striven for so long not to play the grace note, he only succeeded in playing it. And that afternoon, in the big concert hall he not only played it, but played it well and truly revengefully, with a kind of stubborn defiance against his sons and Mendelssohn and all who were listening. The minute the Chipperfields heard it they knew that they were lost. They were furious. They went straight to pieces. They finished up like a lot of demoralised rag-timers at a circus.

Afterwards they went for the old man like dogs. Alf threatened to bust his cornet. The spit coming out of fifteen instruments was like acid.

‘He played the damn thing a-purpose! Played it a-purpose. My lord,' Alf said. ‘I'd pawn my instrument and lose the ticket.'

The old man could say nothing. He just stood in the middle of them with open mouth, broken up, dumb.

‘You wanted to smash the band,' Harry said ‘and now you've done it. Well, I'm finished.'

‘And me,' Alf said.

They were all finished. It was the last time the Chipperfields played together as a band. Their pride was smashed. It was almost the last time they came together as a family too. Both Alf and Harry said they were never going home again and gradually, one by one, the rest of the sons got married and gave up going too. In a year or two the family unity was broken as surely and irrevocably as the family pride had been.

And Sep could not bear it. It was a little thing, but it broke him up. Within a year it killed him. Any other family would have laughed at a little thing like a grace note. But not the Chipperfields.

It was no joke at all.

H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.

Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.

His first novel,
The Two Sisters
(1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.

During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym ‘Flying Officer X'. His first financial success was
Fair Stood the Wind for France
(1944), followed by two novels about Burma,
The Purple Plain
(1947) and
The Jacaranda Tree
(1949) and one set in India,
The Scarlet Sword
(1950).