The Pyramid (21 page)

And then the noises were in the room like cannon shells. The shells burst all around me. Bounce was awake and glaring at my music as if the gunner had been part of the score.

“Henry,” I shouted fatuously, “Henry working late!”

“So am I working late!”

She swung her feet off the pedals, jumped up and flung the door open.

“Mary! Mary!”

There was a pause, in which the noises went on.

“Mary! How am I to attend to my music with that hideous noise going on? He must stop it at once!”

I could hear Mary whine her answer, but not what she said. Bounce’s voice, used to competing with choirs, came through strongly despite the cannonade.

“You must go and speak to him at once!” Then,
appassion
ata
—“I won’t have it!” There was a brief, ragged duet in the hall which ended with two slammed doors as Mary whined back to bathing the baby and Bounce stamped on to the cobbles with a final fortissimo “I won’t have it!”

I stood waiting, as numbers added up to sixty, to a hundred and twenty, to three hundred at last—and silent evening returned to Stilbourne. Six hundred seconds. Bounce came back, breathing heavily, her face shining, hair draggling from the bun. The cannon fire started again so that she had to shout the explanation.

“It’s the Ewans’s car. He has an emergency call and Henry’s hired out his own. Mine’s in dock. There’s nothing to be done about it. You’ll have to go, Kummer. I can’t teach in a noise like this.”

So off I went, pursued by cannon fire.

More and more Henry worked late. His noises were always unavoidable. Since most of Bounce’s pupils had their lessons in the evening the collision was head on. I took my lessons in a house torn with quarrels, loud with mechanical noise, and hot with resentment. I began to notice how readily the lines on Bounce’s forehead could turn into deep grooves. There was an utter exhaustion in her gruffness and her sleep on the organ seat. Then, between one lesson and the next, the noises stopped and Mary was all “Dear Auntie Cis!” again.

I learnt the reason at the tea table. My mother dropped a remark into our ruminative silence, which as usual, was a sign she had news for us.

“He’s got what he wanted at last, then.”

I looked up.

“Who?”

“Henry Williams. It makes me want to stamp my foot!”

My father looked over his cup.

“What’s Henry Williams got?”

“Everything he wants. He’s going to take over the shop her father left her—and the cottage next to it—and build a garage!”

I reflected on this for a while. No more cannon fire; and in consequence, a full thirty times sixty times sixty.

“Bounce’ll be pleased, at any rate.”

My mother clattered the teacups testily.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s using her own money to re-build her own property. He’ll have her last penny!”

My father peered at her through his pebble glasses and wiped his grey moustache with both hands.

“Young Williams works hard. She’ll get her money back.”

My mother laughed with a bitter irony, that strangely enough seemed to include my father with Henry.

“A likely story!”

“Now come, Mother. She’s not a child. There must have been an agreement drawn up.”

“Kiss me leg!” snapped my mother, using a childhood expression, the euphemistic nature of which always seemed to escape her, “Kiss me leg! You know old Wertwhistle’s half-seas over all the time!”

“Well I don’t know, Mother—”

My mother was remarkably angry.

“Well I
do
!”

We were cowed, both of us—he, perhaps, understanding her anger as she watched him plod back to the dispensary.

So now there was a new thing to watch in the High Street, halfway between our Square and the Old Bridge. There was a forecourt of concrete where old Mr. Dawlish had lived and lunged, there was a garage and a pit for
inspecting
the entrails of cars. There was a tall, thin structure next to the road, by means of which Henry hand-pumped petrol. It was here, too, that I first saw the most remarkable and indeed significant notice of the twentieth century;
FREE AIR
. When I made a habit of having my bicycle tyres replenished at this machine I did not grasp the delicate economic
implications
; but Henry, who never objected, understanding my innocence, was well on the way to affording all sorts of generosity. Sometimes he wore a suit at work and was
cloistered
in the little office. Then he was no longer Henry, but Mr. Williams. Very shortly after the move, he installed a Combine Harvester—the first in our area—on half the
forecourt
and hired it out to doubting farmers. They were
converted
. Behind the garage, in what had been long gardens running down to the river, the concrete spread.

In the beginning, however, while the paint on the garage was still fresh, I got some idea of how the transaction seemed to Bounce. I had walked round and round our tiny lawn, thinking and wishing. I had pushed between the fruit trees in the vegetable part and stood facing a corner of brick wall, in the place which always seemed most private to me. It was as if I had to come here to make a decision, here to this privacy where nothing but the spiders between the bricks could influence me—where I was not only away from people, but as nearly as possible away from the pressure of them. I had had a cloudy illumination. All my feelings had run together. The names of pianists were better known to me than the names of footballers. Here, I could wrestle with my sense of rank indecency at wanting to play the piano seriously, play it properly the way Myra Hess and Solomon did. Already I knew the delight of finding that my fingers could get round music I had thought impossible for them. Yet next year I should begin to work for a scholarship at Oxford. Physics and Chemistry were the real, the serious thing. The world, my parents implied, was my oyster, by way of Chemistry and Physics. I went from the angle of brick wall to Bounce’s music room with a breath-taking purpose. I initiated a
conversation
! I talked about a career. I adopted the self-mocking tone I used when discussing anything with her that was important to me—a precaution that allowed me to leap on her side of the fence and treat the whole thing as a joke if she disapproved of it. Jeeringly then, I suggested that I might become a musician—a pianist, perhaps.

To my surprise, Bounce didn’t laugh. She leaned back her head, drew the last thread of smoke in, then carefully stubbed the cigarette out. She kept her eyes solemnly on the keys.

“Your father would never agree.”

Of course. Away from the angle of brick, and in cold
daylight
, his agreement was absolutely essential.

“Oh I don’t know, Miss Dawlish—”

She was silent for a while.

“What does your mother think about it?”

All at once the
obscenity
of erratic, unpensioned music presented itself to me.

“Honestly, Miss Dawlish—I hadn’t thought seriously about it—honestly, Miss Dawlish!”

Bounce folded her hands in her lap. When she spoke, there was a curious, flat bitterness in her voice that I had never heard there before.

“Don’t be a musician, Kummer, my son. Go into the garage business if you want to make money. As for me, I shall have to slave at music till I drop down dead.”

I nodded, soberly, servilely. Bounce swayed, and went off to sleep, her mouth making little chewing movements. Then her cheeks twisted, her mouth sucked in, and she jerked awake.

“That great boy still sleeping in the same room as his sister—it’s disgusting! But you can’t tell her. Can’t tell her anything. What do they expect?”

A kind of personalized chill crept over my skin. I waited in the silence, glancing nervously at the brown photograph of the young man who stared perpetually past me—glanced from him to the brown photograph of the lady in cap and gown. But Bounce had seen my feet. She looked up and up, till her eyes reached my face. Suddenly there was recognition in them.

“It’s old Kummer! What are you waiting for? Start
playing
!”

The next time I appeared with Mary’s tonic, hoping against hope to get past the music room and into the yard without meeting Bounce, I went through the hall on tiptoe, opened the door into the yard and stepped straight into a family hurricane. Mary was defending the scullery doorway and facing Bounce. Henry had his back—very broad in an
overcoat
—had his back turned to me.

Bounce shouted suddenly.

“Well, I won’t have him in my house!”

Henry was calm, but with both hands up to appease and quell.

“Look, Auntie Cis, Mary’s got a headache—”

“And I don’t have headaches, I suppose?”

“He’s
my
boy, Jacky is, and I’ll do what I like. He’s none of your business!”

“Now Mary—don’t speak to Auntie like that!”

“You’d better go, all of you. Go!”

Then they were aware of me. I went forward at last, shambling over the flagstones, and held out the bottle. Mary put back her fallen hair with one hand and took the bottle with the other.

“Kew.”

I got away on my hot, adolescent feet as quickly as I could.

But of course they did not go. A week later, and relations between Bounce and Mary were saccharine again. After that, there was another row, and so on; but still they did not go. Was it in some confusion of my dreams, or listening to her as she slept on the organ seat that I remember her moaning—“Oh Henry, Henry my dear! What’s to become of me?”

My own musical future was decided with nothing but a token resistance from me. If I could not be a professional musician, at least I thought I might take a piano examination. When I braced myself and put this point to Bounce, she sat for a while, thinking, then laughed with a flash of gold teeth.

“Be careful, Kummer—be very careful!”

“Well. I really want to, Miss Dawlish.”

Bounce shook on the organ seat.

“You’re not too highly strung?”

“I want to take an ARCM.”

“What does your father say?”

“He’s willing—provided it doesn’t interfere with my work of course.”

“We’d have to start from the beginning. You’ve just been picking about at the piano, haven’t you?”

“Yes, Miss Dawlish.”

Bounce turned to the keyboard. She pulled a dusty and dog-eared volume out of the mess on the piano, flicked over the pages, arranged them on the music rest then began to play. When she had finished she lit a cigarette.

“There you are. Now you know what you’re up against.”

I hope she took my mutter for awe. But the truth is that I was stunned. What she had played was a Chopin Impromptu. The night before I had heard Cortot play it.

“I’ll work hard.”

“You’ll have to. There’ll be theory too. And ear tests. We haven’t tested your ear out for a long time, have we? Not since you were—
that
high. Turn round, Kummer.”

I turned away from the piano and faced the yellowing muslin curtains. She began to strike intervals, then groups of more and more complex dissonance. In my mind’s eye, I saw where she put down each thick finger. It was like reading very large print. She finished, and I turned round.

Then she said a curious thing.

“Your father must be proud of you.”

I had no answer to this. Presently she began to talk.

“My father took endless trouble over ear tests. If I couldn’t pick the middle note out of—say—that lot, Crack! would go his ruler over my knuckles—”

She was staring towards the wall, so I looked the same way. I saw the faded sepia photograph of the young man who had hung all those years by the lady in cap and gown, as overseer of the music room. So great was the shock that I did not hear what Bounce was saying. For I had suddenly recognized the hairless eyes and brows, the high cheekbones. The young man—I saw now that he was hardly older than I—was old Mr. Dawlish, his hair flying, his eye already fixed on the absolute.

“—very cold sometimes in the morning. But he knew what it was about. He’d say ‘You go on practising, my girl. That’ll warm you’. Still, heaven is music, isn’t it, Kummer?”

“Yes, Miss Dawlish.”

So now there began a time for me of peace and delight, in which the sky over Stilbourne lifted to infinite distance. Music, music, music, all no longer shady, obscene, but wholly legal—what everybody agreed I ought to be doing. Now the quarrels in the old house were an irritation rather than a way of passing some of my lessons. I would stand restlessly in the hall, wondering where Bounce had got to, and whether I should get my full thirty minutes. Then I would hear her furious voice from the yard.

“Then why don’t you go? Go!”

Their crazy relationship staggered on, Henry holding some sort of balance, understanding both parties and battered from both directions. Then Bounce would come into the music room, her vast bosom heaving, and I would have what was left of the lesson. Nevertheless, the end of music was nearer than I supposed. I had battered too long and too devotedly at our ancient piano. As the disapproving remarks came in from the chemistry and physics masters who had once been so pleased with me, my parents took notice.

“Well I know you’ve got a piano lesson tomorrow; but you’ve also got a chemistry lesson tomorrow!”

“Look—Father. Didn’t you learn the violin?”

“I never let it come between me and the
Materia
Medica
—Oliver, don’t you really
want
to go to Oxford?”

“’Course I do.”

“These last months are so important, dear,” said my mother pleadingly. “You know we only want what’s best for you.”

The old shame, inculcated year after year, at the idea of becoming a professional musician kept me silent. As if he was reading my mind, my father peered kindly at me across the table. If he had been angry, I could have withstood him; but he sounded understanding and sympathetic as if we were both face to face with iron necessity.

“You’ll have to keep it as a hobby, the way I did. Anyway the gramophone and wireless are going to put most
professional
musicians out of business. Good Lord, Oliver, don’t you understand? With opportunities like yours, you might even become a
doctor
!”