Valley of Decision (14 page)

‘It'll be the middle of the afternoon, now. I hope she's fit.'

‘She's very strong, physically.' Joan scraped her bottom lip with her front teeth. Anna Talbot came across, dressed in a short fur coat and wide, electric-green trousers. She wore a hat, a green half-walnutshell shape with red jewels and a dyed feather. Cyril's lady? David began to introduce them.

‘I know your parents,' Anna smiled powerfully. ‘James and your mother are practising together. St Anthony Variations for good causes.' She congratulated David, asked after Mary, ribbed Horace about gentlemen of leisure. ‘I got your son into this outfit.'

‘Have it mentioned on the programme next time.' David's father, expansive.

They talked easily together, enjoying themselves, until Owen clapped his hands, announcing that the second half wasn't too far away and that he'd like them to clear the room to give the players a couple of minutes. People, surprisingly to David, obeyed. Joan said she would give him a ring as soon as they returned from America, kissed him, and led Horace out. The father gave a stiff nod of approval. Anna, who had been brilliantly there one minute, had vanished. James her husband raised a hand to David as he left the room.

Owen removed the last few, laying a large right hand across shoulderblades to speed the departure.

‘Five minutes,' he fog-horned to the quartet. ‘I'll be back to fetch you. I'll drop the catch.'

The ugly room hung heavy with quiet, with perfume, with disappearance. Payne stood near the middle, still in his shirt-sleeves, his thin hair rumpled.

‘Can we do the Shostakovich tomorrow morning?' he asked.

‘Bloody hell,' Wilkinson.

‘Can you, though?'

‘Suppose so.'

‘David?'

‘Yes.'

‘Anstey seems to think we might do. He's offered us three dates this year, cancellations. Must have old Shosto for the second half. All mid-week. Tell you tomorrow.' He tucked his chin in apologetically towards David. ‘He's an agent, who came up to listen to us.'

The Mozart went without hitch, was well received, but by this time David Blackwall was blind to the outside world, beaten by concentration, fatigue, his forced attention to colleagues, score and instrument; as he thought about it later, even Mozart, the essence of the composer, had vanished, in that the player no longer created, merely repeated what he had practised. Perhaps he did that well, but he felt nothing of the joy of cooperation with a musical genius; he was an efficient tape, going over its one track. Payne and his mother told him later how beautifully he had played, and this led him to wonder whether his height of performance could only be reached by a series of creative rehearsals and a lack of energy sufficient to hamper even minor experiments. This seemed unsatisfactory, but one, he, was as one was.

Again the congratulatory session took up half an hour. He shook hands, signed three autograph books, heard breathlessly, succinctly from Wilkinson that they hadn't played so well for the past two years, was questioned gently by Barton, touched on the shoulder by Payne, kissed by Anna, who said that now this part of the Blackwall family had covered itself in glory, it was to be hoped that the other wouldn't come short. He glanced at his watch; Mary would be on stage within three hours. He felt sentimentally towards her, a weakness that did not lack power, but could do nothing for her, not even detain his thoughts on her ordeal. Tiredness pained his shoulderblades, even as he blamed himself.

He changed, checked on the time of the morning rehearsal, and went out into a yard that was dark, lit in one corner by a high, oddly placed lamp, and by the yellow of the distant streets. The east wind ripped clouds into rags; people had not lingered and the park lay almost empty; the top of his car showed a thin grey rug of snow, ugly and unsymmetrical.

His engine started reluctantly, on the fifth try. A man quite different from the cello player of an hour before drove home.

MARY TELEPHONED ON
Sunday night.

She sounded elated, the first evening's performance had been superb. Though she in no way praised herself, but chattered with feverish speed about the quality of the orchestral playing, the brilliance of the scenery, the almost frightening enthusiasm of the audience, Red Gage's unalloyed pleasure, the speech made to Fenster by a most influential critic, the delight of the university bigwigs, it was clear to David that she had done herself proud.

‘How did you sing?' he asked.

‘Quite nicely.'

‘Were you satisfied with it?'

‘I'm not grumbling.'

Redvers Gage, the producer, had been walking on air; there had been nothing to touch this; the money had been spent to marvellous advantage; it was possible that they might be taken up commercially, but there was another two months to do on circuit. They were here for an extra week, she had explained in a letter, and then they were off to Boston, to Cambridge for their next run.

‘Is that far?'

‘I've no idea. A hundred, two hundred miles, is it?'

He asked if she had learned anything about Elizabeth Falconer's tour. She had not. She had heard nothing from anybody. She had been busy twenty-four hours a day. Excitement and defiance crackled in her voice across the transatlantic telephone wires.

‘And are you any better?' he asked.

‘I'm still a bit off.'

‘What's that mean?' It seemed a shame to blot her copybook happiness.

‘I just feel run down, especially in the mornings. No appetite. Backache. By the evening I'm normal again. I don't know. Strange food or hard work or a combination.'

‘It doesn't stop you singing?'

‘Not so far, touch wood.'

Comforted, he took instant pleasure in her enthusiasm, encouraging her to expand. It was the first time since she had left that he had heard her voice, which sounded as clear as if she had rung from the next room. After they had finished, he recollected that they had mentioned neither his parents' visit to the States nor his joining the Trent Quartet. It did not matter. He had listened to her in her delight, and with his last words he had promised to toast her health. Fetching out the gin and tonic, icing it, he had strutted about the room, twice the man he had been; he lifted her photographs from the mantelpiece and his drink to them. He was not himself, but grew glad about it.

When he had finished the gin, he knew he had to settle to dull piles of exercise books which would occupy him till midnight or beyond, but the chore no longer daunted. By 10.30 the glow would have disappeared, but now, beside himself, he kissed the cold glass of the photograph of newly-weds in the porch of St Saviour's.
Prosit
.

During the week he received two long, out-of-date letters from her. The Shostakovich, his classes occupied him to the full; sometimes he was tired, he could barely drag himself from one lesson to the next, but his energy revived, and he took pride in these little resurrections, trusting their recurrence, certain of his own vitality.

On the Friday morning as he was teaching the lower history sixth, the real historians, the medievalists, the headmaster knocked at his classroom door, sidled in, waited for the group to scramble to their feet.

‘I'm sorry to interrupt,' Reeve began, signalling the class to be seated, ‘but could I have a word with you?' He waited, to David's puzzlement. ‘Outside?'

Reeve rarely disturbed people at their teaching; even then he sent for them. He looked up and down the corridor suspiciously and spoke in a whisper.

‘Have you noticed Dick Wilson?'

‘No. What about him?'

‘He hasn't seemed, well, urrm, strange?'

‘No. Not really.'

‘I see.' Reeve marched three or four long steps away, rubbing his mouth with the flat of his hand, holding back eruption of speech. There he stood, six yards away, with his back to his subordinate, the grey hair haloed.

‘Yes. Yes.' He loosed the two words lengthily, breathily upwards, towards the top of the high window lighting the end of the corridor. He did not turn, but thrust his clenched hands into his jacket pockets.

David was nonplussed, mildly amused at the headmaster's antics. Presumably he was about to say something he did not consider concerned his function in the school, and feared the consequences. The man of timetables, requisitions, factual notes, marks, lists, statistics was about to venture beyond his safe territory. The Richard Wilson he had mentioned was David's immediate superior, the head of history, a bright, nervous, aggressive, posh character, looking nothing like his thirty-eight years.

‘He's not made,' Reeve had turned about, locked his fingers behind slim buttocks, bounced on his toes, ‘untoward demands on you? Has not acted unreasonably?'

‘No.'

‘I see. You don't mind my asking this?'

‘Not at all.'

‘Good, good. I thought I'd inquire.'

‘Is there anything wrong?' David pressed him. ‘He wasn't in assembly this morning.'

‘No, he wasn't.' Reeve made a convulsive movement as if to flex every muscle in his body, or dislocate each joint. ‘His father is dying. Last night he went off to see him.'

‘I thought his father was still at work?' A master at Manchester Grammar School.

‘He was until recently. It is all very sudden.'

‘How long has Dick known?'

‘I've no idea.' Reeve looked affronted. ‘Anyhow, he's gone. I'd be grateful if you didn't mention this conversation. Thank you very much.'

And he stepped away almost at a run.

David returned to the economic consequences of the Black Death puzzled. He had no idea how close Wilson's relationship stood with his father, and had heard nothing of any illness. Wilson certainly let his department know, in his unhurried far-back voice, just what it was he wanted from them, and made it clear when they did not come up to scratch. He was never impolite, could argue a case with plausibility and weight, but did not suffer the unreasonable or the fool gladly. At present he had annoyed a young colleague who had taught a fourth form carelessly.

‘It's at this stage we catch our sixth form historians,' he had said. ‘I don't like to see you queering our pitch. We have enough competition from other departments for bright individuals, without your help. As well you know.'

Seddon, the rebuked master, had reported this to David and one other friend in a corner of the common room.

‘What did you say?'

‘Oh, I made it clear that to start specializing at that age was lunacy.'

‘And?'

‘While he was running the department he would remain the judge of that.'

Seddon was, David thought, idle if clever, and had not done his job properly. Next year, and the man could complain or rant as he liked, he would not be allocated 3A or 4A.

Yet Dick Wilson making, as Reeve hinted, untoward demands had seemed out of character. The man said what he wanted, not cheerfully but plainly; he knew, moreover, what it was he required, and in that his strength resided. ‘Untoward' did not enter into it.

On the other hand, the headmaster was quite devoid of imagination, so that his breaking of routine set in itself a poser. Why should he consider it important enough to cross the courtyard, when a note asking for his junior's presence would have been as effective? If it was that Reeve merely wanted to make a foray into the sixth form block to check on smoking or alcohol or damage, then why had he asked this baffling question? David grimaced. It was as if the old man had barged into his classroom to ask if David believed that the world was flat or about to end inside the next quarter of an hour. Perhaps Reeve was socially so uncertain that he had drummed up these unlikely questions about Wilson merely to cover some other pretext for the interruption, a check on David himself, on the presence of some as yet unnamed delinquent in the class or the state of the cupboards or shelves. That seemed improbable, for however gauchely the head acted in his dealings with pupils and colleagues, he had a sharp eye for his own peace of mind and would by no means put himself at a disadvantage.

Perhaps Reeve himself was going round the twist.

On Monday morning, after disappointing silence from his parents the previous evening, he sought out Wilson during break.

‘All well?' David began.

‘Yes. Why do you ask?'

‘You were away Friday. I thought you might be ill.' Duplicity in innocence.

‘No, I went to visit my father. He's in hospital.'

‘I'm sorry. Is it serious?'

‘I shouldn't think so. He's the worrying type. And a bad patient. But he'll recover. And it gives my mother a rest.'

Wilson straightened his pile of books, picked them up, smiled as if the exchange had eased him and made off for his next class, terminal illness unmentioned. David, not knowing where he stood, sat down, quashed.

On the same evening his mother telephoned.

She spoke with enthusiasm of Mary's performance and of the production, which had been brilliantly successful because it seemed designed to demonstrate the powerful beauty of Handel's music. She and Horace had been twice, and only on the second occasion had she understood how much of the success was due to the stage direction of Redvers Gage. At the first performance singers appeared merely to deliver their recitatives and arias, which they did with touching skill, though nobody matched Mary's consummate, delicate art, and it was not until Joan had watched it again, had known what to expect, that she realized how great a part movement, lighting, unobtrusive grouping or shifting, use of dress, gesture, even facial expression had played in this effect. Simplicity had been achieved by considerable art and, she guessed, unremitting discipline and practice.

‘And Mary?'

‘She was superb. They all think so. The newspaper critics have been very flattering. I'm not telling you that I think it's set the whole of America on fire; it's a campus event, but it's attracting full houses and quite a bit of outside publicity. She's been on one breakfast show already.'