The Courage Consort (2 page)

Catherine looked aside at Julian. It had been three months since she'd seen him, or so Roger said. It seemed more like three years. In profile, his heavy-lidded, supercilious face, superbly styled black hair, and classic cheekbones were like a movie star's, with the same suggestion of jaded, juvenile naughtiness. He might have been the older brother she never had, contemptuously running ahead of her to the haunts of grownup vice but never quite escaping her memories of him in short trousers and shopping-centre haircut. Yet he was only thirty-seven, and she was ten years older than that.

As the bus pulled away from the station, Catherine reflected that she almost always felt much younger than other people, unless they were clearly minors. This wasn't vanity on her part; it was inferiority. Everyone had negotiated their passage into adulthood except her. She was still waiting to be called.

Jan van Hoeidonck was talking to her husband in the front. The director spoke as if he'd been facilitating cultural events since World War II. But then they all spoke like that, Catherine thought, all these cocky young administrators. The chap at the Barbican was the same—born too late to remember the Beatles, he talked as if Peter Pears might have cried on his shoulder when Benjamin Britten died.

Self-confidence was a funny thing, when you thought about it. Catherine squinted out the window, stroking her own shoulder, as the bus ferried them into a surreally pretty forest. Chauffeured like this, towards a nest prepared for her by admirers, she still managed to feel like a fraud; even under a shimmering sun, travelling smoothly through placid woodland, she felt a vapour of fear breaking through. How was that possible? Here she was, an artist of international standing, secretly wondering whether she looked dowdy and feebleminded to Jan van Whatsisname, while he, a fledgling bureaucrat with the pimples barely faded from his pink neck, took his own worth for granted. Even Roger listened respectfully as Jan explained his plans to steer the ship of Benelux art into new and uncharted waters.

'Of course,' Jan was saying, as the minibus delved deeper into the forest, 'multimedia events are not so unusual with rock music. Have you seen Towering Inferno?'

'Ah … the movie about the burning skyscraper?' Roger was more of a Bergman and Truffaut man himself.

'No,' Jan informed him, 'they are a multimedia music group from England. They have performed a piece about the Holocaust, called
Kaddish,
all over Europe—and in your own country also. The piece used many video projections, an orchestra, the Hungarian singer Marta Sebestyén, many things like this. I hope this piece
Partitum Mutante
will do something similar, in a more classical way.' The director slowed the vehicle and tooted its horn, to scare a pheasant off the road. They had encountered no other traffic so far. 'Wim Waafels,' he went on, 'is one of the best young video artists in the Netherlands. He will visit you here after a week or so, and you will see the projections that you will be singing under.'

Julian Hind, listening in, remarked, 'So, we'll be the Velvet Underground, and this video chap will be Andy Warhol's
Exploding Plastic Inevitable,
eh?'

Roger glanced over his shoulder at Julian in mute incomprehension, but the director nodded and said 'Yes.' Catherine had no idea what any of this was all about, except that Roger didn't like being shown up on matters musical.

Catherine's chest tightened with disappointment as, true to form, her husband took his paltry revenge. She tried to concentrate on the lovely scenery outside, but she couldn't shut her ears to what he was doing: moving the conversation deftly into the area of European arts bureaucracy, a subject Julian knew next to nothing about. He reminisced fondly about the French socialist administration that had made the 1985 Paris Biennale such a pleasure to be involved with, and expressed concern about where the management of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw was heading just now. Catherine's irritation softened into boredom; her eyelids drooped in the flickering sunshine.

'So,' interrupted the director, evidently more concerned about where the conversation was heading than the fate of the Concertgebouw. 'This Consort of yours is a family affair, yes?'

Catherine's ears pricked up again; how would her husband handle this? Nobody in the ensemble was actually a Courage except her and Roger, and she tended to cling to her maiden name as often as she could get away with it, for sheer dread of being known as 'Kate Courage'. She couldn't go through the rest of her life with a name like a comic-book superheroine.

Suavely, Roger more or less evaded the issue.

'Well, believe it or not,' he said, 'the Consort is not specifically named after me. I regard myself as just one member of the ensemble, and when we were trying to think of a name for ourselves, we considered a number of things, but the concept of courage seemed to keep coming up.'

Catherine became aware of Julian's head tilting exaggeratedly. She watched an incredulous smirk forming on his face as Roger and the director carried on:

'Did you feel maybe that performing this sort of music needs courage?'

'Well … I'll leave that to our audiences to decide,' said Roger. 'Really, what we had in mind was more the old Wesleyan adage about hymn singing, you know: "Sing lustily and with good courage."'

Julian turned to Catherine and winked. '
Did
we have that in mind?' he murmured across the seats to her. 'I find myself strangely unable to recall this momentous conversation.'

Catherine smiled back, mildly confused. While meaning no disloyalty to her husband, she couldn't recall the conversation either. Turning to look out the window of the minibus, she halfheartedly tried to cast her mind back, back, back to a time before she'd been the soprano in the Courage Consort. Hundreds of neat, slender trees flashed past her eyes, blurring into greeny-brown pulsations. This and the gentle thrumming of the engine lulled her, for the third time today, to the brink of sleep.

Behind her, Benjamin Lamb began to snore.

For the last couple of miles of their journey, the château was in plain, if distant, view.

'Is that where we're going?' asked Catherine.

'Yes,' replied Jan.

'The wicked witch's gingerbread house,' murmured Julian for Catherine to hear.

'Pardon?' said the director.

'I was wondering what the château was actually called,' said Julian.

'Its real name is't Luitspelershuisje, but Flemings and visitors call it Château de Luth.'

'Ah … Château de Luth, how nice,' repeated Catherine, as the minibus sped through the last mile—or 1.609 kilometres. When the director parked the car in front of the Consort's new home-away-from-home, he smiled benignly but, again, left them to deal with their own baggage.

The Château de Luth was more beautiful, though rather smaller, than Catherine had expected. A two-storey cottage built right next to the long straight road between Duidermonde and Martinekerke, with no other houses anywhere about, it might almost have been an antique railway station whose railway line had been spirited away and replaced with a neat ribbon of macadamised tar.

'Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian stayed here, in the last year they were together,' said the director, encouraging them all to approach and go inside. 'Bussotti and Pousseur, too.'

The house was in perfect condition for its age, except for the artful tangle of stag horns crowning the front door, which had been eaten away somewhat by acid rain in the late eighties. The red brick walls and dark grey roof tiles were immaculate, the carved window frames freshly painted in brilliant white.

All around the cottage, lushly tasteful woodland glowed like a high-quality postcard, each tree apparently planted with discretion and attention to detail. Glimpsed among the straight and slender boughs, an elegant brown doe froze to attention, like an expensive scale model of a deer added as a pièce de résistance.

Catherine stood gazing while Roger took care of her suitcase somewhere behind her.

'It all looks as if Robin Hood and his Merry Men could trot out of the greenery any minute,' she said, as the director ambled up.

'It's funny you say this,' he commented. 'In the sixties there was a television series filmed here, a sort of French Robin Hood adventure called
Thierry la Fronde.
This smooth road through the forest was perfect for tracking shots.'

The director left her deer spotting and hurried off to unlock the front door, where the others stood waiting. They were arranged in a tight trio around their bags and cases, Ben at the back and the shorter men in front, like a rock group posing for a publicity shot.

Jan worked on the locks, first with a massive, antique-looking brass key and then with a couple of little stainless-steel numbers.

'Presto!' he exclaimed. Never having seen a conjurer at work, Catherine took the expression as a musical directive. What could he want them to do
presto?
She was in a somewhat
adagio
state of mind.

The château's magnificent front room, all sunlight and antiques, was obviously the one where rehearsals would take place. Julian, as he was wont to do, immediately tested the acoustic with a few
sotto voce
Es. He'd done this in cellars and cathedrals from Aachen to Zyrardów; he couldn't help it, or so he claimed.

'
Mi-mi-mi-mi-mi,
' he sang, then smiled. This was a definite improvement on Ben Lamb's rather muffled sitting room.

'Yes, it's good,' smiled the director, and began to show them round.

Catherine had only been inside a couple of minutes when she began to feel a polite unease finding a purchase on her shoulders. It wasn't anything to do with the atmosphere of the place: that was quite charming, even enchanting. All the furniture and most of the fixtures were dark-stained wood, a little sombre perhaps, but there was plenty of sunlight beaming in through the many windows and a superb smell, or maybe it was an
absence
of smell: oxygen-rich air untainted by industry or human congestion.

All conveniences, both mod and antique, were on offer: Giraffe upright piano, electric shower, embroidered quilts, microwave oven, fridge, a concert-sized xylophone, an eighteenth-century spinning wheel, two computers, a complete prewar set of Grove's
Dictionary of Music and Musicians
(in Dutch), an ornate rack of wooden recorders (sopranino, descant, alto, tenor, plus a flageolet), several cordless telephones, even an assortment of slippers to wear around the house.

No, it wasn't any of these things that troubled Catherine as she accompanied her fellow Consort members on their guided tour of the château. It was entirely to do with the number of bedrooms. As the director escorted them from one room to the next, she was keeping count and, by the time he was showing them the galley kitchen, a burnished-wood showpiece worthy of Vermeer, she appreciated there wasn't going to be any advance on four. One for Ben, one for Julian, one for Dagmar, and … one for herself and Roger.

'The shops are not so accessible,' the director was saying, 'so we've put some food in the cupboards for you. It is not English food, but it should keep you alive in an emergency.'

Catherine made the effort to look into the cupboard he was holding open for their appraisal, so as not to be rude. Foremost was a cardboard box of what looked, from the illustration, exactly like the vegetation surrounding the house. BOERENKOOL, it said.

'This really is awfully sweet,' she said, turning the almost weightless box over in her hands.

'No,' said Jan, 'it has an earthy, slightly bitter taste.'

So there were limits to his ability to understand his visitors from across the channel, after all.

***

I
T WAS AROUND NINE O'CLOCK
in the evening, almost nightfall, when Dagmar finally showed up. The director had long gone; the Courage Consort were busy with unpacking, nosing around, eating cornflakes ('Nieuw Super Knapperig!'), and other settling-in activities. It was Ben who noticed, through an upstairs window, the tiny cycling figure approaching far in the distance. They all went to stand outside, a welcoming committee for their prodigal contralto.

Dagmar had cycled from Duidermonde railway station with a heavy rucksack on her back and fully laden baskets on both the front and rear of her bicycle. Sweat shone on her throat and plastered her loose white T-shirt semitransparently against her black bra and tanned ribcage; it darkened the knees of her electric-blue sports tights and twinkled in the unruly fringe of her jet-black hair. Still, she seemed to have plenty of energy left as she dismounted the bike and wheeled it towards her fellow Consort members.

'Sorry I took so long; the ferry people gave me a lot of hassles,' she said, her huge brown eyes narrowing slightly in embarrassment. Like all colourful nonconformists, she preferred to zoom past awed onlookers, leaving them gaping in her wake, rather than be examined at leisure as she cycled towards them over miles of dead flat road.

'Not to worry, not to worry, we've not started yet,' said Roger, stepping forward to relieve her of the bicycle, but it was Ben she allowed to take it from her. Despite his massive size, unfeasible for cycling, she trusted him to know what to do with it.

Swaying a little on her Reebok feet, Dagmar wiped her face with a handful of her T-shirt. Her midriff, like all the rest of her skin, was the colour of toffee.

'Well, childbirth hasn't made you any less of an athlete, I see,' commented Julian.

Dagmar shrugged off the compliment as ignorant and empty.

'I've lost a hell of a lot of muscle tone, actually,' she said. 'I will try to get it back while I'm here.'

'Toning up!' chirped Julian, straining, as he always did within minutes of a reunion with Dagmar, to remain friendly. 'That's what we're all here for, isn't it?'

The thought of Dagmar's eight-week-old baby roused Catherine from her daze. 'Who's taking care of little Axel?' she asked.

'It's not a problem,' Dagmar replied. 'He's going to be staying here with us.'

This revelation made Julian's chin jut forward dramatically. Accepting delivery of Dagmar had already sorely taxed him; the prospect of her baby coming to join her was just too much to take.