Strange Music (9 page)

‘Has he talked to you about it?'

‘Sometimes. Not often. But yes, he has talked about it. I tell him I hardly ever think of it now. When I do, it seems like it happened to another person . . . or a previous existence. Like now I only do maths
en français
. I dream in English.' She laughed. ‘I even discuss French novels in English, with a French couple we know in Welwyn Garden City. She lends me French books and I am happier discussing them in English. French is too vague, too abstract. English is concrete. Sorry! I only wish to show—'

‘Exactly. I think Marianne would generally feel the same, and she, too, risked her life, day in and day out, during the war, as you said. But she has also built a new life and put all that behind her. I think – in fact, I know – that Felix believes Angela should be able to do the same. She has gone back to a wonderful job, with a crêche for Pippin, and no loss of seniority. But there's this
bloody
man at the
BBC
who somehow has access to the war-crimes archives . . . oh, I don't know. This is super wine.'

‘Have some more.' Nicole held out the bottle.

‘No, thanks all the same. I'd better go up and see how Felix . . . If he's simmered down.'

Casually, carefully busying herself with returning the bottle to the tray beside her, Nicole said, ‘Do you still carry a torch for him – just a little bit?'

‘Yes,' Faith admitted, rising to go back upstairs. ‘But in a motherly sort of way. Felix is like a lot of artists, and I've met quite a few – there's an eternal child within him.'

‘Dangerous people,' Nicole commented. ‘For any woman with a motherly streak!'

Faith hesitated, laughed, and went on up the stairs. She had reached the top of the flight before she said, ‘Actually, that lets
me
out.'

‘It must be over by now.' Faith spoke while crossing the threshold into the Johnsons' drawing room, which had been their workshop when they first moved in. Now it was the Scandinavian showpiece Marianne and Willard had intended to build from the start – the room whose functional elegance and superb craftsmanship (actually, more crafts
woman
ship in this case) would seduce all inquirers and waverers into the blessed state of clienthood. Unfortunately, for Marianne that seduction now tended to happen at the Garrick Club, the Lansdowne Club, and the Royal Automobile Club, all of which august institutions had strict rules against the transaction of any business on their premises, even though their very existence was designed for no other purpose than to ensure that good chaps gave preferment to other good chaps whom they knew and trusted. It was an ambiguity Willard might have been born in order to exploit. He was certainly one of the
good chaps
these days – ‘our starchitect,' as Eric had started calling him after that business with the Festival of Britain lavatories.

Felix was sitting on the sofa, staring into the fire; Marianne was squatting on the floor by his left leg but hunched forward over a magazine, turning the pages as if searching for a particular image. ‘
Hej
Faith!' she said. ‘The coffee's still hot. Help yourself.'

‘You didn't stay to the end?' Felix asked.

‘I endured two of them and then fled. But I stopped by Nicole's on the way.'

‘
That's
what you should have in your studio!' Marianne held up the magazine. ‘We call it
kakelugn
– I don't know the English. A ceramic stove?'

‘
Kachelofen
,' Felix said.

‘What would it be in English?' Marianne passed the magazine to Faith as she sat down on the far side of Felix.

It was a photograph of an elegant – eighteenth-century? – drawing room, clearly Swedish, with a tall, highly decorated pillar of porcelain tiles.

‘It's an oven,' Marianne explained. ‘Or stove. The fire door is outside the room – in the passage on the other side of the wall. The servants fill it from there and there's about a kilometre of flue inside the pillar . . . well, ten metres, anyway. And if you take the wood we use just for
kindling
a fire here and light it in that, it will burn out in fifteen minutes and stay warm all night.'

Faith looked at the caption to the illustration. It was all in Swedish but among the sea of incomprehensibility she saw . . .
slosset har ägts av von Ritters sedan 1652
. . . ‘Your family home?' she guessed, flipping the pages and admiring something like a domestic version of Versailles.

‘Yes,' Marianne said impatiently. ‘What would you call it?'

‘Words almost fail me, but you're obviously slumming it here in the Dower House.'

Felix laughed but Marianne was not amused. ‘The ceramic stove!' she insisted.

‘Oh. Yes, well . . . ceramic stove . . . porcelain stove. We don't have them in England but if they ever caught on, I suppose we'd annexe the foreign word and plant the Union Jack on it. What's the German word for schadenfreude – which is what I came up here hoping to discuss?'

Felix's expression darkened at once; Marianne reached behind him and wagged a finger out of his sight.

But Faith was undeterred. ‘You can't just run away like this, Felix. That's your
wife
who's flirting with . . . with . . . with
mental breakdown
over there.'

‘I tried to stop her,' he said in a voice suddenly hoarse and unsteady; tears were forming, too. (
Good!
Faith thought. His turn-the-other-cheek brand of stoicism was out of place here.) ‘The first time we ever met – or, rather, got talking – we went for a walk in Regent's Park and she told me how the
BBC
was full of Secret Service people and she said one of them thought he'd be able to get copies of those films for her. It was probably just bait to get her to sleep with him but he obviously had no idea what she's like once she sinks her teeth into something. Anyway, he has – at long last – delivered.'

The obvious question hung in the air:
Is
that
why he's
‘
livid
'
?

Faith saw that a big change of tack – and tact – was needed. ‘Well, that's the
history
bit,' she said. ‘What about the psychology? She's risking some kind of crisis with that film over there and—'

‘I don't think so,' he said. ‘You're too melodramatic.'

‘Oh, really? You should have been there to see it . . .' And she went on to describe how Angela had screamed at the flickering ghosts on that bedsheet – and that
particular
bedsheet, no less. ‘I don't know if she's doing the right thing,' she went on. ‘I do know it's risky but if it helps her . . . I mean, I cannot even begin to imagine (and believe me, I have tried) but I cannot have the first idea what it was like to survive in those camps, one day at a time . . . Camps? My God, the very
word
is an insult. Scouts have camps. Those places were . . . gaping
wounds
opened into hell itself. But you do, Felix. You
know
! You were there, too. So if it helps her cope with the aftermath, you should be there to celebrate. And if it doesn't . . . well . . . she's your wife.'

Felix sprang to his feet, spilling Marianne's coffee as he ran to the door and vanished. He muttered something that might have been ‘sorry' but outside they heard him give a cry – a howl – that sounded barely human. Then his feet on the stairs. Then . . . silence.

‘God in heaven,' Faith murmured. ‘Have I done the right thing? Have I even the
right
to do the right thing?'

She sought for reassurance in Marianne's eyes but there was none. Nor was there any censure, either.

‘Perhaps I should be there, too?' Marianne said, little above a whisper. ‘Me and Nicole.'

‘No!' Faith was quite firm. ‘That was two hours ago. Now it's different. Now it's for Felix and Angela.' After a pause she added, ‘And, oddly enough, Eric.'

Marianne looked up sharply. ‘Eric?'

‘Yes. I know we all think he's just flippant and tries to make a joke of
everything
– which shows he's got no deep feelings about
anything
. . . but . . . I'm not so sure. I've got to know him a lot better since he started writing for us. I think he had even less stomach than me for Angela's picture show but he knew she shouldn't be alone.'

‘But to choose the same sheet where she and Felix conceived Pippin and then show those . . .' Marianne shook her head. ‘
Herrrrre Gud!
'

The rain had stopped, leaving a noisy memory of itself among the bare branches of the weeping ash in the centre of the courtyard. Felix hesitated before the cottage door; the fire that Faith's words had lighted within him expired somewhere on the three flights down to the ground, as the enormity of his wife's symbolic use of their bedsheet sank more deeply home. He lifted the latch silently and silently let himself in.

‘Mine certainly isn't a fraud,' Angela was saying. ‘If any marriage in this community is a fraud, it's yours and Isabella's. From the moment you came here – even before you got out of the car – you were arguing with each other even then. And so it has been ever since.'

Eric laughed. ‘How do you know? You weren't even here then.'

‘Nicole told me – but that wasn't all. She said she caught the pair of you looking at each other when you thought no one could see you, and it made her quite jealous. So there!'

‘I can't imagine why,' Eric said loftily and, Felix thought, slightly uncomfortably, too.

‘Because of the love she saw between you. You can't fool Nicole in things like that.'

‘Well . . . love can lead us into strange, dark places. We must all learn to forgive it if we possibly can.'

‘Ha ha. that's just the whisky talking. And look – you've drunk it all! Never mind, there's another bottle on the top shelf in the larder.'

Eric rose, and was pointing out that
his
glass still held half the portion he had first poured into it when Felix appeared, holding the bottle Angela had mentioned.

‘Hey, Felix!' Eric called out. ‘Jewish joke for you: never serve calamari at a bris! Good, eh?'

Felix almost dropped the bottle. Fumbling to retain it, he stared from Eric to Angela and back to Eric again. ‘You told him!' he accused her.

Eric resumed his walk toward the kitchen, now intent on leaving the house. ‘Time for the truth all round, old chum,' he said. Then, gripping Felix by the arm: ‘Rewind the film and watch it. I was surprised how quickly I grew accustomed to repetitive sudden deaths but I suppose that won't surprise you at all, eh?'

Angela lay in his arms and they watched the rerun of the film in stillness and in silence. When the last pathetic body dropped into oblivion –
SS-
Aufseherin Gertrud Schreiter,
20 Sept 1948
– Angela closed her eyes and whispered ecstatically, ‘It's over,
Liebling
. I never want to see this film again.'

Felix rose without replying, jerked the plug from its socket, went to the curtains, unpinned the bedsheet, turned off the lights, and came back to the couch. Wordless, he spread the sheet on the air, slipped beneath it, let it fall to shroud them both. There they squirmed out of their clothes and made slow, uncomfortable, ecstatic love.

When they awoke in their bed next morning, still beneath that same sheet, she said, as if no time at all had intervened, ‘But it's not the same for you. It's still not over for you.'

Felix sighed but offered no argument.

‘Maybe,' she went on in that same speculative tone, ‘it would be better if you never resolved it? I think each time you start a new sculpture something in you says,
This is it! This is where I finally get out from under that
. . . whatever it is that's overhanging your life. Not a cloud. Something heavier, darker, more active than that. Like a devil riding the cloud and throwing down bolts of lightning. Is that right?'

These images were so alien to her that Felix knew immediately where they came from and what sort of conversation she and Eric must have had before he burst in upon them. ‘I used to joke that Art saved me from death for her own inscrutable reasons,' he said. ‘If you're right, then I got it precisely the wrong way round. Art had nothing to do with the preservation of my life back then but it has everything to do with the preservation of my sanity now. Well, you could be right. In which case, why not leave well alone. Remove the devil from the thundercloud and what becomes of me? A sculptor who is no longer
driven
. A sculptor who can turn out nothing but kitsch versions of his former glorious works.' He gave a sudden, delighted laugh. ‘By God, that's exactly what's happened to old Picasso! That's why he's just turning out kitsch these days!' He calmed down and added, ‘But you didn't need to tell him I'm interested in Judaism, all the same.'

‘Are you afraid he'll tell everyone? He won't even tell Isabella – honestly. If you think anything else, you don't know him at all.'

He chuckled glumly. ‘Oh, I know him only too well. He'll try and argue me out of it – that's what I'm afraid of. Help a lame dog over a stile.'

‘What's that mean?'

‘It's an old English saying. Eric once told me that English people are so good at helping lame dogs over stiles that they'll often not only build the stile in order to prove it – they'll bloody well lame the dog, too! And he has such an abiding distrust of all religions, he'll be unable to resist the chance to try and convert me. What's a “bris,” by the way? Some sort of Jewish festival, I'm sure. And he could tell I didn't understand it, so he'll think he starts off with a good chance. Oy-veh!'

Thursday, 15 December 1949 – January 1950

Eric knocked at the cottage door and opened it without waiting for Angela's ‘Come in!' ‘Only me!' he cried.