Strange Music (38 page)

‘He only talks scribble,' Hannah said impatiently.

‘All the time,' Sam added. ‘Come on!'

‘All right. But you'll have to be very quiet when we get near the bestest tree because if he's asleep, I'm not going to wake him up – poor old fellow. He's soooo tired these days.' He laid his wide-brimmed hat and wanderer's staff aside, took Freddy on his shoulders, and gave a hand each to the other two.

Their mother ran to join them as they threaded their way through the creaking wrought-iron clapper gate, one at a time. ‘Have they pestered you into doing this again?' she said. ‘I'm so sorry. You two really are awful.'

Her accent surprised Felix – ‘for two reasons,' as Bruno was wont to say: first, that it had modulated so far up the social scale since 1947; and second, that his own ear was now fine-tuned enough to notice it. ‘I like your costume,' he said, trying not to stare too pointedly at the generous display of bosom . . . trying to focus instead on the outsize knitting needles and what looked like the start of a tricolor scarf. ‘
Une tricoteuse, peut être?
'

‘
Mais oui!
' She laughed. ‘I'd love to have heard the thud of all those precious royal heads falling in the basket. But then, I always was something of an idealist.'

‘Freddy's never not been in the bestest tree,' Sam explained, tugging at her urgently.

‘Ah!' Felix said. ‘So we'll put just him inside it on his own this time, eh? You two have been there so often you must be bored to tears by now.'

‘No!' they shrilled in unison.

They drew close to their goal. Felix held up a hand, put a finger to his lips, and leaned forward, listening toward the tree. After a while he assumed a deeply sorrowful, apologetic, sympathetic sort of face and whispered, ‘Oh, children dear – I'm so sorry. He's managed to get off to sleep at last. We mustn't disturb him. It wouldn't be fair. He—'

‘No!' the two elder ones cried in disappointment but he frowned and shushed them angrily, whispering fiercely, ‘Do have a bit of sympathy! We'll tiptoe away and come back in an hour. Perhaps he'll be awake again by then.'

As they dragged their feet back the way they had come, Felix turned toward the tree and gave out the groan he always used for the tree's voice.

‘Hurray! Hurray!' The three children barged past him and ran up to the tree. Hannah put her arms around its ancient trunk – or, actually, around about a fifth of its ancient trunk – and said, ‘Thank you, Bestest Tree. We'll be very quick and then you can go back to sleep.'

Sam, now nine, was half-scornful, half-envious that, at seven, she could still hold this game in the shadowlands of her belief. And Freddy, Felix noticed, was watching his brother intently and copying every fleeting emotion in his face. ‘Up you go!' He lifted them inside the tree, one by one, starting with Sam.

Then he went round the side, near the hole through which he projected his voice, and waited. And waited. May stood a little way off, leaning against the fence, watching him.

‘Bestest Tree?' Sam ventured uncertainly.

Felix gave a little groan.

‘How are you today?' Hannah asked. ‘It's midsummer.'

‘I'm soooo oooold,' Felix moaned.

‘Don't you like midsummer?' Sam asked.

‘I've already lived through four hundred and seventy-two midsummers,' Felix wheezed. ‘I can't get excited about one more. What's good about them, anyway?'

‘Party! Party!'

‘What's the bestest bit of the party?'

‘The maypole!' the two elder children cried together. ‘Betty and class seven are doing a maypole dance.'

Freddy began to cry – and it was a cry of fear, not of boredom.

‘Oh, dear!' Felix groaned as May sprang forward to rescue her little boy. ‘The sound of children crying . . . [yawn] . . . always makes me . . . [yawn] . . . so . . . [snore].'

When Freddy, who was lifted out first, of course, saw Felix leaning against the tree and speaking the last of his speech, he stopped crying and burst into laughter. All the same, he showed no inclination to return to the hollow heart of the tree.

‘That sounds like the music for the maypole,' he told them when they were all out. ‘You'd best cut along if you don't want to miss it.'

He and May set off at a more leisurely pace in their anarchic wake. To his surprise, she took his arm and slowed him even more. ‘That was well done,' she murmured. He thought she meant his game with the children until she added, ‘Getting rid of them so smartly.'

Was she aware she was rubbing her breast against his arm? He turned to look at her and was dismayed to see a tear rolling down her cheek. ‘Oh . . . May . . .' he mumbled.

‘Stupid!' She shook her head crossly and the tears fell away. ‘I'm going to miss this place.'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘And I'm going to miss you, dear Felix, more than all the others.'

‘You're going away?'

She nodded and sniffed back a noseful of tears. ‘I don't want to. But Arthur's been offered a very good position with the
BBC
in Plymouth. We can't really say no. He's sorry to leave here, too, of course, but he's also got the satisfaction of this new job. I suppose I ought to feel more . . . I should be happy for him . . . but all I can think of is losing the Dower House and all our friends here.' The tears flowed again before she added, ‘And you! I think you're a marvellous man and Angela and Pippin and Andrew are so lucky.'

‘Well . . .! Um . . .' An unwelcome erection was starting to hamper his gait; in trousers it would have been safely confined but in the flowing, Bedouin-style sheet of The Wanderer, the horizontal waggle was embarrassingly obvious.

Fortunately, they had reached the narrow clapper-gate stile by now, so he was able to disengage and push her ahead. But . . . too late. As her arm fell to her side, her hand snaked back and closed gently round the tip of that awkward protrusion. Just for a second. Then, as he negotiated the stile, she let go, smiled at him over her shoulder, and said, ‘
À toute à l'heure,
eh? The cellar – round midnight.'

‘One of the many mysteries connected with Blake,' Bronowski was saying to Chris as they edged their way over the big lawn toward the bonfire, ‘is that, for an artist who rose so high in esteem not too long after his death, and who is still highly regarded today – indeed, today more than ever – he is not actually very good!'

‘Didn't he sneer at the idea of drawing from nature?' Chris asked. ‘There was something about if an artist couldn't see things more clearly in his mind's eye than in nature, he might as well pack it in.'

‘He certainly said something very like that. But that was where he let himself down, you see. Brandon! Join us – we're discussing Blake-the-artist not Blake-the-poet.'

‘Excellent!' Eric grinned. ‘Could we sort-of-accidentally drift over near Willard? He says he greatly admires Blake but it's clear he has no idea what a fearful communist old Billy was.'

‘We
were
being serious,' Chris informed him.

‘Oops! Sorry. There's an excellent book on Blake, by the way –
A Man Without a Mask
. Have you read it? In my view (despite a lamentable confusion between defining and non-defining relative pronouns), it's the last word on Blake between now and the end of time. So anything I might contribute would be a poor distillation of that. Let's just listen and learn, because, dear Chris, we stand here in the shadow of its author.'

Bronowski stared at him evenly – an awkward long time – before murmuring, ‘
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes!
I was about to say that Blake's inner eye – ha! The eye of
his inner self
! How appropriate to this day! It let him down constantly. His poetry called for Titans and mighty-muscled gods but his inner eye served up nothing more than some half-remembered hackwork he did for
Grant's Cyclopedia
– engravings after Michelangelo and Praxiteles and unknown Roman sculptors. He remembers engraving a biceps by Michelangelo but he has no understanding of the form and tension of a living muscle. So he gives us a . . . a stocking stuffed with rolled-up tissue.'

‘I was always afraid to say things like that at the Slade,' Chris said. ‘But it's the truth. I've seen better drawings in tattoo parlours. Me, I'd go for Sam Palmer any day. Back in May when the blossom was out, one night when the moon was full, I walked all night round the bridle paths, up round Queen Hoo . . . Bramfield . . . Tattle Hill . . . Thieves Lane to Hertingfordbury . . . then back through Panshanger and all up the Maran valley – just me and the owls – and it was like strolling through one giant Sam Palmer all the way. I tell you – this is the most beautiful country anywhere.'

‘But, on the other hand, Blake's poetry . . .?' Eric prompted.

‘Ah!' Bronowski was off again, with an impish smile at Eric. ‘No question. He was, indeed, one of the greatest poets in the English language. In any language. To me it raises interesting questions about the validity of the many arrangements by which the arts are governed today. If Blake's genius as a poet was so blind to his failings as a visual artist, how can we expect these hybrid committees – one painter, one novelist, one orchestral conductor, one theatre director, and so forth – to make fruitful decisions about the state's patronage of all the arts? I don't yet know where the solution lies, but—'

‘The answer's clear,' Eric cut in. ‘Ban all state patronage. If any politician dares suggest throwing a penny of public money at a living artist, hound him out of office. But give a hundred per cent tax write-off to all private patrons.'

‘Ah . . . gotta go. Sorry,' Chris cut in. ‘I see Debbie . . . er . . .' A vague gesture added nothing to the vagueness of his words.

Bronowski fixed Eric with an accusing stare. ‘I suspect you've been reading Wyndham Lewis, eh, Brandon?
Time and Western Man
?'

Eric conceded with a dip of his head. ‘Or
Spice and West End Women,
as Joyce renamed it. That was a right old ding-dong. Funnily enough, I called at Lewis's house last month, in Kensington Church Street. I wanted to offer to read to him a couple of hours a week, because he's almost completely blind, you know. But there are two old harridans there who guard him like their own personal crown jewels. They just shooshed me off the threshold. Wouldn't let me near him.'

‘How would you prevent the Duchamp or Dada effect?' Bronowski asked.

‘Why prevent it? If Lady Docker wants to spend a small fortune on some artist who picks up a second-hand lavatory bowl and sells it to her as a piece of art for ten-thousand quid and she gets a ten-thousand-quid tax break, people would boo and hiss at her in the street.'

‘With you to lead them!'

‘Who else! And she'd soon stop doing it. But these anonymous back-room committees that hand out
hundreds
of thousands of taxpayers' money to artworks every bit as daft – they get away with it because no one knows who they are.'

‘So the patrons would go for
safe
choices, eh? Before the war, Bristol City Council spent six thousand pounds on a safe choice – a history painting that showed John Cabot, a son of Bristol, embarking for Newfoundland. It is so bad that they dare not now exhibit it. Before the war they could have bought a Cézanne for the same money. I think that even the hybrid committee I mentioned would have chosen the Cézanne.'

‘Food for thought, Bruno!' Eric gave his arm a squeeze. ‘As always!'

‘So tell me about this Dower House community of yours . . . this capitalist kibbutz, as Fogel calls it.'

Debbie passed her home-rolled to Chris, who took a deep drag, inhaled ecstatically, and passed it back. ‘So what d'you think?' she asked.

‘It's
commercial
,' he said.

‘I know, but there's commercial and commercial. And there's the baby to think of.'

‘You're not going to have a baby, pet. It's just . . . you'll see.' Last time he said ‘hysterical' she had hysterics.

‘I had a look at Bateman Artists in Soho but I couldn't work there. Now that
is
commercial art. They showed me the artwork for a car ad – shiny car, happy family, dog, stockbroker-Tudor house in the country, strong sunshine – and every one of those components had been done by a different artist. So-called. There was even one man – “our skiagrapher,” they called him – who drew the outlines of all the shadows for the others to follow. He told me I'd be mad to work there. Either be mad or go mad, he said. I'd die from the inside outwards.' She took another drag and passed it to him again. ‘But medical illustrator in a proper hospital – that would be
something
.'

Faith, who was passing at the time, paused. ‘Did you say medical illustrator?'

Debbie explained.

So did Faith. ‘We're doing dummies for a book on human anatomy at this very moment. For laymen, not doctors. We've got some artwork from a man who did the illustrations in the latest
Gray's Anatomy
. They're good, of course, but there's something airless and sterile about them. And he charges a small fortune. Would you like to try out – no promises, no strings?'

For reply, Debbie thrust the remaining half of her cigarette between Chris's lips and ran back into the house to fetch her anatomy sketchbook – and her anatomy prize certificate.

‘Is that what I think it is?' Faith asked Chris.

He took another deep drag and passed it to her, crying, ‘Whee!' He assumed an intentionally stupid grin and made his eyes vanish upward in their sockets.

‘Is that your little farm down beyond the old pigsties?'

He became serious again at once. ‘For God's sake!'

‘You're all right. Nobody knows what it looks like, growing.'