The Song of Hartgrove Hall (14 page)

Despite the brightness of the morning I feel dreary and grim. My shoelace snaps and I curse, profoundly irritated as I try to knot the frayed pieces back together. I cast about for Max Coffin, the shepherd, and I spy him resting at the top of the field, half concealed by the hedge, but as I draw closer I see that he's not resting but crouched over the bloodied body of a dead sheep. It's been badly mauled and a tangle of red guts spews out across the grass, early flies gathering.

‘Dog,' says Max miserably. ‘Third bloody sheep lost this week. Sat up all night wi' a shotgun but seen nothin'. Mus' be a dog blacker 'n hell an' quieter.'

‘I'm sorry,' I say.

Max shrugs. ‘Weren't your dog. See, she's still warm. If we get 'er to the house quick like, I can cut her up and still git sommat for her.'

I grab the forelegs and help Max heave the body into a wheelbarrow he's conjured from somewhere. The sheep's legs stick up in the air, stiff and ungainly. We wheel the unlikely load along the track at the top of the ridge, jolting in the deep ruts so that once or twice the corpse is thrown out and we have to haul it back in. After ten minutes we reach the dewpond marking the entrance to Ringmoor. The air is cool but I'm sweating from the exertion, though to my shame I see that Max isn't even out of breath. He's a slight man, somewhere between forty-five and sixty – his face aged and weathered but
his arms revealing tight coils of muscles. His hair was once red but is mostly fading to white.

I sit on the garden wall while he discards his shirt, brings out a knife and starts to butcher the sheep, nimbly slitting the belly and letting the rest of the guts tumble out into a bucket, before starting to peel back the fleecy skin. He works quickly and cleanly, grunting a little with the effort, his hands slippery with blood.

‘Right, you can help me string 'er up in the shed.'

Hoisting the remains over his shoulder, he leads me into a small flint shed beside the cottage. It's chilly inside, cold as a larder, with the wind blowing through the holes in the walls and under the corrugated-iron roof. A rope is strung up across the joists from which dangle socks and a few shirts. Max motions to me to make space and we hang the sheep upside down, fastening its hind legs to the washing line. It looks mighty strange, swinging there amongst the laundry.

We retreat outside and I sit on a tree stump as Max disappears to wash. I wonder vaguely where he gets his water – I expect with buckets from the spring. He reappears, clean and proffering a tin mug of tea. I take it, grateful. It's sweetened with ewe's milk and has an odd, sour smell, not unpleasant.

‘You're wanting songs, you say.'

‘Yes. I'm hoping you'll sing me something.'

‘Well, since yer helped me wi' the sheep. Sure yer wouldn't like a few chops better?'

‘I'll take them too.'

He chuckles. ‘What you going ter do wi' the songs, once you got them?'

I dislike this question immensely and I swallow a sigh. A headache ticks in my temple. ‘For now I write them down in a book.' I hold out my pad to him, realising as I do that it's streaked with brownish blood. ‘Sometimes I send copies off to London and they add them to a bigger collection there.'

Max frowns. ‘If yer lookin' fer new songs, yer bang out o' luck. I ent learned nothin' new fer years.'

‘No, no – those are exactly what I do want to hear. I want old songs. Maybe even ones that haven't been collected before.'

‘So there are other such—' he pauses, hunting for the appropriate description, ‘other such “gentlemen” as yourself?'

He says ‘gentlemen' but his tone implies ‘perfect idiots'.

‘Yes, there are others like me. Not many but a few. We're all folk-song enthusiasts. Song collectors, I suppose.'

‘Song collectors?' He nods and slurps his tea to hide a smile. I have an image of how he sees us – as tweed-clad fools, rushing around the countryside with nets like butterfly hunters and specimen jars stuffed with songs.

‘Will you sing?' I ask.

He shrugs. ‘You can have a song fer summer. A song away from its time and place is jist a purty ditty. Something for little girls ter warble. This is a song calling fer rain ter come before autumn. I need more sun and a bit o' rain or these 'ere lambs will starve out 'ere on the hillside come winter. This ent no parlour tune. My father sang it ter me, and his father ter 'im. And I ent got no son, so I suppose I'll 'ave ter sing it ter you. Collector or not. But don't jist pin my song in a book, so he curls up at the edges like a dead thing.'

‘All right,' I say, ‘I won't.'

He closes his eyes and starts to sing. He calls to the wind and curses the rain and the sky and the cruelty of fate that leaves him out on the bare hillside while rich men snooze by their fires. His voice shakes with fervour, and there's an anger, raw and fierce, and he is both the singer and the song. This isn't a sentimental lament ruing some idealised past but a personal cry. The sound, which seems to grow from the soil itself, is somehow familiar, as though I've heard it before and
forgotten. I want to catch hold of it, to fix this moment, and then he stops and it's lost, but so am I.

‘Come back in the snow, and I'll sing yer another,' says Max, laughing, pleased at the effect his singing has had on me and I nod, dazed as a drunken man.

I stumble down the hill, ears ringing with music, both remembered and remade, as Max's melody starts to re-thread its way into another piece, something symphonic, a shout of horns and then the shrill of a flute. It comes to me with a mixture of wonder and relief. I swear I hear a trumpet blasting brightly through the woods. The pleasure is rich and dark. It's almost as I imagined sex would be. I've an idea at last and I think it might be something. I shout at the heather with great whoops of joy. I've boasted to girls in Cambridge bars that I'm a song collector and a composer when I've never written anything other than the odd ditty to amuse my brothers – the musical equivalent of a dirty limerick, not exactly a great symphonic work. But, oh God, this is different.

I shudder. Max's melody moves through me like a pulse, already changing into something else. It has the heart of the shepherd's tune but it catches in the wind and is blown wide. There's a ripple of harps and beneath that a syncopated rumble of strings like river water moving through reeds.

I need to write it down. I run.

I don't see Jack and George until I nearly bash into them. Jack grabs my arm.

‘Steady on,' he says. ‘Where are you going in such a hurry?'

I shake him off, angry, not taking in the fact that George has returned. ‘I have to write,' I say and walk away.

‘You can't,' he says. ‘You have to wait.'

‘Listen,' says George, and I want to tell him that I can't listen, my head is too full of music, there's a crowd in there and there simply isn't room for anyone else.

‘Five minutes,' says George.

‘Please,' says Jack.

—

We sit at the edge of the lake. Willows dip their fronds into the water like girls washing their hair. It's cold and a fine film of rain starts to fall but we stay right where we are.

‘It's possible we can save the house,' says George. ‘We'll certainly have to sell a couple of the larger farms but we must be careful not to sell too much acreage. I've done all the sums. We'll work on the land – all three of us. We can't afford to employ more than one or two other chaps to help. After Canning goes we can't possibly afford a new estate manager so we'll have to do that ourselves. And then we might make the thing work. I talked it through with Canning and he agrees it's possible. Unlikely but possible.'

Canning has never been unfairly accused of being an optimist. If he concedes that it's possible, it must be true. I allow myself to hope. I'll have to change the music. The first movement won't be so dirgelike. There'll need to be something greener in the strings. Instead of a symphonic lament, it will be a portrait of a great house and her family. The melody will be fragmented at the start, and then gradually piece together, a section at a time.

Jack stretches out his legs, kicking idly at a log. ‘It's all right for me. I don't really know what else to do. I'm brilliantly inept at most things. I'm far too stupid for the law and too ungodly for the Church. I think farming will suit me.'

Silently I agree. Most things suit Jack.

‘What does Father say?'

Jack grimaces.

‘We haven't spoken to him yet. We'll do it together.'

This has always been the agreement. We approach the General united. No matter who broke the greenhouse window with the cricket ball, or dared me to jump off the barn roof so that I broke my arm; even when Jack decided to leave Cambridge after a term, we all faced the General as a battalion. George skims a pebble over the smooth surface of the lake. It bounces half a dozen times and sinks.

‘You understand what this means, Fox? You'll have to come down from Cambridge. We need you here. We'll all have to work here. It'll be jolly hard. Bloody. There won't be time for anything else.'

I can't meet George's eye. I say nothing. I understand perfectly, better than George does. It means there will be no time for music. They're asking me to choose the life of a farmer instead of that of a musician. He can't understand the cost of what he's asking. I've the idea for my first real symphony, something grand and orchestral, and they tell me there is no time for music.

My brothers are watching me and I know they're bewildered by my silence, my lack of enthusiasm. They want only to save the house. They want nothing else. I see the roof of Turnworth House rise and linger in the air for a moment that stretches and then breaks.

Max's song buzzes in my ears. I've not written it down yet and a headache in shades of purple and white is building behind my eyes.

‘And what about Edie?' I ask. I want them to stop scrutinising me with leery disappointment.

Jack colours, a real hot pink. ‘We're getting married,' he says. ‘She's putting up her money to help save the house. I said I'd let her only if she agreed to marry me.'

And the axe falls. It was always going to but, as it does, I'm winded, as breathless as if Jack had slammed into me full
force. I lie back on the wet ground, feeling the earth ooze beneath my fingers.

‘Of course I'm game,' I say. Not because I care more about the house now it's to be Edie's home too, but because nothing matters at all.

The melody in my head changes key again. The green in the strings fades to grey.

They slap my shoulders and holler, and I somehow remember to congratulate Jack, but I'm perfectly numb and weightless. As their shouts bounce across the lake like George's skimmed stones, the drizzle thickens into rain, dimpling the surface of the water.

Chivers summons us into the study, where he lingers behind the General's chair. He's promised to put in a good word. I watch the two of them as Jack talks. They're perfectly at ease together. This union has been happier and longer-lived than most marriages. It's certainly lasted longer than my father's marriage to my mother.

‘And you all agree?' says the General. ‘Even you, Little Fox? Always thought you'd do something with music or whatnot. You seem an unlikely farmer. More unlikely than the others, if that's possible.'

I'm taken aback by his solicitation. I nod. ‘I want to save the house, Father. I'm needed here.'

‘We do need him, if we're to have a hope,' says George.

‘And what does Canning say?'

‘He believes it is indeed possible, Father. He's hopeful.'

We are careful not to upgrade the dour Mr Canning's declaration too far into optimism or it will cease to be believable.

‘Harrumph,' says the General, or at least that is what I think he says. It's possible he's merely clearing his throat.

‘Will you at least think on it, Father?' asks Jack.

‘This house, this land, it belongs to all of us,' says George, veering dangerously from the script.

The General looks up sharply and settles on George with a grim expression, close to dislike.

‘No it doesn't. Don't think that for a moment. It belongs in its entirety to me. And, if there is anything left to inherit, it will pass in its entirety to Jack. And, when he has a son, it will go to him.'

George shakes slightly and there is a tiny tic in the corner of his left eye, but then he swallows. ‘My apologies, sir. I misspoke.'

Are George and I quite superfluous to him? Jack is his heir and we are merely insurance policies. The light catches the gold of the General's watch. I can't believe it of him. It's cold in the study. The General never allows a fire to be lit in his room in the afternoon. Warmth breeds softness in a man. And softness, like buggery after Eton, is a sin.