The Bellwether Revivals (45 page)

They lay there for a while in each other’s arms, watching the grey clouds trawling the sky. It was good to be close to her again, to have her breathing quietly beside him, her chest rising and falling, her fingers gripping his. But he knew her mind was a long way away. She was glaring at clouds, never blinking, and he could tell by her soft, persistent sighs that she was thinking about Eden. The whites of her eyes seemed to dance with her every thought, nervously twitching. ‘I was going through some old study notes the other day,’ she said, stretching to retrieve her bag, rooting through it. After a moment, she pulled out a spiral-bound notepad, leafed through the pages, and presented it to him. ‘Look what I found.’

Oscar struggled to read her messy handwriting. He remembered the night when she had copied out the passage from Herbert’s book:
Sometimes, NPD sufferers are trapped in an endless cycle of trying to prove their abilities; they may set themselves impossible
challenges to solve or overcome, only to battle with the feelings of failure and ineptitude that these self-imposed challenges create
. The last part of the quote, she had underlined several times:
If this rage is held inside, directed inward, it can lead to self-harm and suicidal ideation
.

She looked at Oscar now, squinting into the sun. ‘I can’t stand waiting any more,’ she said. ‘I need to be doing something.’

‘But your dad said—’

‘Forget about my dad. He’s being so bloody obtuse. Everyone can see Eden’s not coming back by Monday. We need to start looking for him.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. But I can’t do it on my own, not in this condition.’ Her voice had a defeated tone, as if she were tired of its sound. ‘Oscar, he’s going to lose everything—his scholarship, his place at the college—it’s all going to be wasted. We can’t just sit here letting it happen. He’s got to know we’re trying to find him.’

‘Then let’s start.’

She turned her head sharply. ‘You mean it?’

‘Just tell me where to look.’

There was a familiar cold pressure upon Oscar’s neck when he got to the landing. He had switched on every light on his way upstairs, but it only made the furthest reaches of the house seem darker, and even though Iris had given him the keys, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had broken in. There wasn’t much furniture amongst the clutter of Eden’s room: a double bed and a small chest of drawers, a dressing table and an antique wardrobe with a streaky mirrored door. He decided to start with the drawers. There were plenty of clothes left inside: vests and thermals, white sports socks, silk boxer shorts, ties and cummerbunds. He slid the bottom drawers out, emptying them onto the bed. There was nothing of interest, only musty corduroy, denim, polyester. But then, as he was putting the last drawer back in place, he
noticed something—a strip of black electrical tape on the bare insides of the unit. He ran his fingers over it, feeling a bump, and peeled the tape away. A small key fell into his hand. It was brassy and tarnished and didn’t seem to fit any lock he could find, so he put it into his pocket, and slid the rest of the drawers back in.

There were so many books and papers on the floor that he could hardly see the carpet. He had to skim-read his way through them: pamphlets and pamphlets of sheet music; anthologies of classical notation; single foolscap pages with Eden’s scrawls and doodles; brand-new books with shiny dustcovers that looked as if they’d hardly been opened; frayed hardbacks with torn jackets or no jackets at all; whole chapters ripped from unknown paperbacks, held together by hard yellowy glue; old newspaper after old newspaper; worn-out copies of the
Spectator
, the
New Statesman
, the
New Yorker
, the
Sunday Times Magazine
, the
British Medical Journal;
outdated university prospectuses; journals in which essays had been mapped out, and musical compositions sketched, and self-portraits drawn in blunt pencil. Inside every book, inside every newspaper and magazine, there were corners folded over to mark pertinent pages. Sometimes a single word was underscored in biro, sometimes a sentence or a whole paragraph. Though there seemed to be no particular system to the way that all of the books and papers had been assembled, Oscar knew they’d been arranged exactly how Eden wanted them. Where the rest of the world saw chaos, Eden saw logic and order. His room was an atlas of his mind.

It took Oscar an hour just to get halfway through the stacks. He felt like he was in the archives of some abandoned library. He leafed through essay collections on art history, architecture, economics, philosophy; language textbooks on Anglo Saxon, Norse, Medieval German, Latin, Ancient Greek; journal articles on engineering, materials science, geology; simple instruction booklets on pyrotechnic displays, set design, landscape gardening. There
were many different books on Descartes, and by Descartes—from early French editions to modern translations—and fat, daunting texts with their titles embossed in gold letters:
Mesmerism and Other Forsaken Arts
.
The Awakening of Memory
.
Animal Magnetism: The Genesis of Hypnosis
.

He wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. By the left foot of the bed, there was a pile of books that seemed to share a single theme: music. His eyes studied their spines, starting with
Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music
, reaching thicker books like
Sacred Music: An Anthology of Essential Writings, 1801–1918
, and
The Organ: Its Evolution, Principles of Construction and Use
, and theoretical volumes on the works and lives of great composers, from Francesco Landini to Guillaume Dufay; from Henry Purcell to Benjamin Britten; from Tchaikovsky to Bartók. He had to take a breath when he stumbled upon a copy of
Der Vollkomenne Capellmeister
by Johann Mattheson. It was a well-thumbed German paperback, and Eden’s jottings in the margins were mostly in German too—apart from one section in the text, numbered 59, by which he’d written in ballpoint:
‘59
.
Hope is caused by an elevation of the spirits
.
Despair, on the other hand, is a casting down of the same
.
These subjects can be well represented by sound
 …
’

Oscar wasn’t sure if this was a translation or just an idle note, but the handwriting was different: inkier, less hurried. He picked up the next work in the pile.
Johann Mattheson: Spectator in Music
by Beekman C. Cannon. He flicked through it, not really sure what he was expecting to find. The pages stopped turning at 107, where there was a highlighted paragraph of text:

He flicked back a page and found this:

St Michaelis sounded familiar.

St Michael’s?

He remembered Eden mentioning something about a St Michael’s organ back at his parents’ house. It was a lead, or the closest he’d come to one. He read more highlighted passages from the book, and the more he read, the stronger the feeling built in the reaches of his gut—not exactly a certainty, but an optimism—and
the louder the voice grew in his mind that kept on saying
Hamburg
. It wasn’t so far beyond reason that Eden would go there: somewhere his hero had been laid to rest, where he could speak a different language, be somebody else for a while. It was perfectly possible that he’d gone to visit Mattheson’s grave, to commune with his headstone, to see the famous organ Mattheson had paid for, to feel those centuries-old keys under his fingers. Maybe all of this had been in Eden’s mind when he’d gone speeding off in Jane’s Land Rover. Maybe he hadn’t been thinking he was running away, but heading for home.

The wardrobe was the only place left to look. Oscar tried to open the door but it was locked, and for a moment, he almost gave up on it, until he remembered the key that was still in his pocket. It was a perfect fit in the tiny, intricate lock, and it turned with an easy click. There were no clothes inside, just a column of identical black storage boxes—eleven of them, maybe twelve. He slid out the top box and found it was filled with handwritten notation, bound with green ribbon. There must have been fifty different scores in there, and though none of them was titled, each page bore Eden’s name and his angular signature. The marks on the staves were wild, drawn freehand, and they swept from left to right in exaggerated waves, dense and complicated. There was more of the same in the next couple of boxes—more sheet music, more of Eden’s own compositions—and the one after that held labelled photocopies of works by Beethoven and Mozart and Handel that had been cut out and pasted together, reassembled into an awkward medley of paper. In the next box, there were photographs of musical notation, and folders of slides that showed nothing but ancient-looking sheet music when he held them up to the light. The music in these pictures seemed more balanced, written in a steady, almost clinical hand, as if each crotchet had been drawn with a ruler. Right at the bottom of this box, he found two very old editions of
Der Vollkommene Capellmeister
, their covers preserved with clear polythene wrappers, and there was a
large plastic wallet that contained letters and envelopes, the paper jaundiced and brittle, bearing German words in faded black ink, and signatures too intricate to make out.

Oscar felt his heart clenching as he opened the next box. He could hardly breathe. Inside, there were ten first editions, wrapped in tissue paper.

Every book that Herbert Crest had ever published was right there before him. Their pages were stiff and clean. There were no marks or comments in the margins. Some of them still had the shop receipts tucked inside the back flap: at 4:36 p.m. on 04/28/96, Eden had paid $35.00 for
The Girl With the God Complex
, at Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon.

Oscar opened another box. He found lever-arch folders with photocopies and printouts of every article Herbert Crest had ever authored; there were copies of every article that had ever been written
about
him, each one in its own plastic sleeve. Only the old man’s obituaries seemed to be missing. As he leafed through them, Oscar saw images of Herbert Crest he’d never seen before, watched him ageing before his eyes like stop-motion footage of a plant growing from seed to flower. His hands paused on a small, single-column article. The headline caught him by surprise:

The name Abraham Paulsen had been underlined in red. Oscar stared down at the page, his mind turning like a carousel. The text began to blur at the edges, spreading and connecting in the blank spaces. He turned through more of the articles, scanning each line for the old man’s name, and when it came, he almost missed it.

At the back of the folder there was a small square of newsprint. It seemed like nothing—a picture from the local paper, a group photo. But when he looked closer, he recognised the building in the background, the shape of the wisteria growing thickly on the walls. And he recognised the face of a young Jean squinting back at him, posing in a clean white uniform. Beside her, two men in business suits were holding up a certificate in a frame. On the far right, there was a thin-faced old man in tweed with spectacles hanging from a cord around his neck and a cane in one hand. Oscar didn’t have to read the caption to know who it was: