The Facts of Life (38 page)

After a few angry speeches, a raucous, all-woman rock band began to play on the stage – archly melancholic songs of heartache and betrayal. Beer cans flashed in the sun and little puffs of cannabis joined the scents of cigarettes and sunblock on the breezeless London air. Everywhere people were beginning to stretch out on the grass, exposing pale bellies and sunburned shoulders. As if this reminder of the interminable navel-gazings of his boyhood were not enough, Jamie found himself obliged to watch as Sam slowly unbuttoned his shirt to the waist then casually raised his head off the grass and onto Alison’s lap so as to sunbathe and watch the stage at the same time. She, heedlessly lucky, stroked Sam’s hair without even looking down at him.

Accepting defeat, Jamie excused himself, muttering about needing to take a leak. The queues for the temporary gents were long, however, and their chatter began to set his nerves on edge. He followed the example of some mustachioed Germans and peed in the crowded privacy of some municipal laurel bushes. Rather than pick his way back over the countless bodies to Alison and the others, he wandered for a while around the impromptu market that had been set up in the other half of the park. He drifted aimlessly past stall after stall of things he had no desire to buy and groups he had no desire to join and found his mood sliding uncontrollably from grey to blue. The more linked hands and puckered lips he saw, the more hugs he witnessed and wittily brazen declarations he found himself reading on passing chests, the more out of kilter he felt with the proceedings seething around him. Earlier, on the tube train and crossing Covent Garden, he had felt a certain subversive elation, but now that had evaporated, and in its place he felt no pride, no solidarity, only a dim anger and encrusting sense of isolation.

He had been walking back onto the main lawn where the others were lying, but impulsively he turned aside to a path and began to stride towards an exit and the first taxi that would take him home to the private security of his Battersea flat. Alison would understand. She’d be pleased that he had at least joined her on the march, been there for the important part. He would tell her he had begun to find the crowd overpowering. This was, after all, a part of the truth. He need not upset her pointlessly by voicing his political heresy. Or his sibling envy.

Reaching a park exit, where local children jostled with marchers in competition for service at two ice cream vans, he fancied he heard her calling his name, but pressed on.

Sam caught up with him at a zebra crossing. He had obviously been running and, in his eagerness to catch up with Jamie, had not planned what he was going to say once he did.

‘Hi,’ he panted. ‘Are you going, then?’

‘Er. Yes,’ Jamie said. ‘Looks like it.’

Sam furrowed his brow as though this were momentarily incomprehensible.

‘But you didn’t say goodbye.’

‘No. Sorry. I’ll ring Alison later, tell her.’

‘I thought we were going to, you know, talk some more.’

‘Oh.’

Once again, he had Jamie feeling uncharacteristically at a loss. Jamie was aroused by the suggestion that he was interested, yet shy in the humiliating face of a possible misunderstanding. From urban instinct, he had waved at a vacant taxi, which was now pulling over from the middle of the road, causing cars in the nearside lane to swerve, tooting, around it.

‘I couldn’t face much more of that crowd,’ he explained.

‘Where d’you live, then?’

‘On the river,’ Jamie told him. He glanced at the taxi, which had now reached the kerb ahead of them. The driver shouted something impatiently. ‘I can wait for another one,’ Jamie started to say.

‘No I –’

Sam faltered. Jamie looked back into his face and was surprised by an expression he recognised from other faces, other times. He stared for a moment, startled, feeling his spirits quicken, then murmured, as he had said many times before, with a flicker of a smile he knew was infallible because he had watched it on himself in countless bar and lavatory mirrors, ‘So let’s go.’

The conductor, Peter Grenfell, slowly beat the last few bars. It was hard to see how such a quantity of strings playing simultaneously could produce so magically quiet and glassy a sound. He pointed to the harpist, drawing from her one last, funereal statement. The sound grew thinner, thinner, then faded into nothing. Grenfell left his plump, white hands in the air to a count of eight, holding the players’ attention and the audience’s rapt silence – he was a consummate showman – then let his arms fall to his sides. Applause surged up behind his back.

Alison slid to the edge of her seat, leaning on the worn velvet parapet of the box and clapped too. In the arena below the orchestra the few promenaders not already standing had leaped to their feet and, as Grenfell returned to the platform leading her grandfather triumphantly by the hand, a great cheer went up. Alison always loved this moment, could never quite believe it was her grandfather,
hers
, they were cheering. She stopped clapping for a while, looking down at the thin, familiar figure in the crumpled, dandyish clothes, then she lifted her hands to her mouth and added her voice to the crowd’s. He still looked faintly aghast at the vigorous response his work could arouse. His darting eyes dancing over the players, his little gasp when a young woman in sandals thrust herself up onto the front of the stage to hand him a clutch of flowers, were not yet insincere with use. He was still, Alison knew, a little frightened of the public’s enthusiasm. He had not always been famous. It was quite a recent phenomenon.

When she was a child he had still been primarily a film composer, well-known only among cognoscenti. He used to encourage her and Jamie to wander in and out of his studio in the garden, the space where he lived and worked beside the stream, away from the chaos Miriam had drawn about herself in The Roundel. The only music in the main house came from incessantly played rock and folk records and a guitar which one of the Beards used to twang of an evening when drugs and alcohol had left their ears too sensitive for anything louder.

The studio had been a place of enchantment and astonishing order to the children. It still was to Alison, now when her own life was little more orderly than her mother’s had been. Back then, her grandfather would always make time to sit her on his lap at the piano to see if she had remembered what the notes were called – which she never had – and he would let her tap on bells and blow gingerly down strange foreign pipes which smelled of spice and made noises like mice or wood pigeons. Then, when her brother began to follow her, her grandfather discovered that Jamie
could
remember what the notes were called,
could
remember tunes,
could
sing. Slowly, bitterly, Alison had found herself ousted from pride of place, as her grandfather began to shush her or even send her from the studio the better to coax Jamie towards a place in the supreme orderliness of a choir school.

He had been respected, of course, ever since he had won his second Oscar, but as a girl Alison had never quite believed it when Miriam had clutched her hand and pointed to a strange, foreign-looking name during the title sequence for a film and said, ‘Look, Angel! That’s him. That’s Gramps!’

His real fame came later, when Alison had escaped her mother’s marriage by leaving home to read Comparative Literature at Sussex. It began quietly, with a modest but intensely fashionable Scottish revival of his second opera,
Jacob’s Room
, which toured to several European music festivals before receiving the recognition of being welcomed into an English National Opera season. The work had been dismissed at its first unveiling at the 1963 Trenellion Festival as impressionistic to the point of being unstageable. The revival, twenty years on, was a hauntingly designed production, and the work’s plangent repetitions and strings of ironically corrupted melody – his equivalent, it was authoritatively stated, of Woolf’s prose evocations of memory – attracted an audience the London opera management had rarely seen before. These new enthusiasts were young, restless and fashion-conscious, people prepared to queue for admission to nightclubs.

Eager to cash in on the success, a record company signed Edward up and began speedily to issue trendily packaged recordings, not just of his ‘serious’ music – the chamber pieces,
Jacob’s Room
, the two symphonies written in the early ’sixties – but of his film scores too. These, it was now perceived, were actually serious music disguised, out of commercial necessity, as something more frivolous. A bondslave to the cinema, he had yet managed to satisfy two masters simultaneously, for his
amour propre
. Played without interruption, the famous score to
4.15 to Bucharest
was revealed to be a symphonic set of variations on a disguised Balkan theme, the score to
Room with Yellow Paper
, a piano concerto, and that to
What Maisie Knew
, a sinfonia concertante for cor anglais and french horn. Selling unexpectedly well – albeit in the fire of envious references in the press to ‘dubious facility’ and ‘sterile, crowd-pleasing architectonics’, these in turn led to concerts, well attended by the same enraptured young crowd who had so unpredictably detected sympathetic chords in the dreamily pacifist
Jacob’s Room
.

By the time Alison was asked to come for her second interview at Pharos, she found that a slipped-in reference to her now celebrated grandfather made all the difference to Cynthia and the board’s perception of her.

All Edward’s works had now been recorded and many were finding comfortable niches in the orchestral repertoire. Retired from the film studios for ever, he was entering an Indian summer. The piece played that evening –
Debate for Strings and Harp
– was one of several new works directly inspired by his delight at finally finding an audience, and such a young, open-minded one. Only the score of
Job
remained on a high shelf in his studio. He had meticulously destroyed all orchestral and vocal parts and, despite repeated overtures from the record company and a prominent opera producer, he refused to release the work from the outer darkness into which he had cast it. His mysterious insistence, of course, only fascinated the interested parties the more. Accounts of the work’s long-distant Rexbridge première were tantalisingly thin on detail. Alison had looked at the score once in an inquisitive moment, brushing thick dust off its handsome, tooled cover. The stylised libretto by Thomas Hickey – the ‘Uncle Thomas’ her mother referred to with such fondness – had struck her, but the notes on the pages told her nothing.

The stage was suddenly aswarm with furniture movers and extra players as a larger orchestra assembled for a Mozart piano concerto. Violinists stepped aside, fiddles protectively clutched to their chests, to clear a path for the Steinway that was being trundled into their midst like a great black insect queen among lesser attendants. As Alison came down a staircase into one of the hall’s entrance lobbies, she could hear applause for the soloist and returning conductor.

Her grandfather was waiting for her beneath a street lamp, on his own. One would never have guessed he had just been the centre of so much attention. He had perfected a technique for politely giving hangers-on and well-wishers the slip. Though he remained a softhearted prey to autograph-hunters and zealous student musicians, he had an unconscious way of looking not quite like his public self when going about his private business. Sitting at restaurant tables or in theatre seats beside him, Alison would often see people begin an approach, then halt a few yards away, their progress checked by an indiscernible wall of doubt and indecision. She smiled, looked down again and waved, a small, familiar squeeze of love in her chest. He was more father to her than any man had ever been.

His dress sense had stopped developing somewhere in the early ’seventies, so he favoured down-at-heel velvet jackets, full, white shirts and a series of richly coloured waistcoats. Fashionable now, all over again, these had become his trademark, worn on the concert platform in place of evening dress. Tonight’s waistcoat was a glowing shade of plum that set off his sleek silver hair to advantage and made his dark eyes bright. She thought again how handsome, how ungrandfatherly he could look, and wished she could have known his wife.

‘It was so
good
!’ she exclaimed as she hurried over. Always precise in her admiration of fine writing, she remained lost for epithets to encompass the intangible pleasures of music. ‘
So
good!’

‘Angel.’

In his mouth, the nickname was a courtly blessing, not the irritant her mother had made of it. He kissed her cheek and handed her his bouquet. She saw at once his disappointment that Jamie was not with her.

‘Jamie sent his love,’ she lied quickly. ‘He couldn’t make it after all. That creep he works for threw a load of extra paperwork at him just when he was about to leave the office. He was furious at having to miss seeing you.’

But it was she who was furious. Jamie knew how much his coming meant to his grandfather. He understood musical language. He was the more favoured of the two, probably because he was the less solicitous. And he had given his word. She had not seen him since the march, two days before, and each day her sense of injury gained in focus. First he had left the park without so much as a goodbye. It took no mastermind to deduce that he had left with Sam in tow. Sam’s unexpected interest in him had been evident, to her at least, from the start and it irritated her that Jamie felt the need to slope off with him like a poacher. Then, when Saturday stretched into Sunday and there was no sign of Sam, and Jamie still didn’t call, she found herself manipulated into feeling a jealous resentment she could not logically justify. Then Monday dawned and Sam had still not returned. He had vanished before, of course. She knew better than to expect any explanation. It was quite possible that the silence of one man and the nonappearance of the other were quite unrelated. Possible but, something told her, unlikely.