Cross Channel, Page 2

  It was not permitted to be an artist in England. You might be a painter, or a composer, or a scribbler of some kind, but those foggy brains did not understand the essential precondition behind all these subsequent professions: that of being an artist. In Continental Europe they did not laugh at such an idea. He had had fine times, brave days. With Busoni, with Sibelius. His walking tour in the Tyrol, when he had read his beloved Nietzsche in the German. Christianity preaches death. Sin is the invention of the Jews. Chastity produces as much foulness of soul as lust. Man is the cruellest animal. To pity is to be weak.

  In England, the soul lived on its knees, shuffling toward the non-existent God like some butcher boy. Religion had poisoned art. ‘Gerontius’ was nauseating. Palestrina was mathematics. Plainsong was ditchwater. You had to leave England to find the upper slopes, to let the soul soar. That comfortable island dragged you down into softness and pettiness, into Jesus and marriage. Music is an emanation, an exaltation of the spirit, and how can music flow when the spirit is pegged and tethered? He had explained all this to Adeline when first he had met her. She had understood. Had she been an Englishwoman, she would have expected him to play the organ on Sunday and help her bottle jam. But Adeline had been an artist herself at the time. The voice had been coarse but still expressive. And she had seen that if he was to pursue his destiny, her art would have to be subordinate to his. You could not soar if manacled. She had understood that, too, at the time.

  It was insistently important to him that she admire the ‘Four English Seasons’. She was becoming ever more conventional and foggy between the ears: such was the penalty of age. She had at last spotted before her the great immensity of the void and did not know how to respond. He knew. Either you lashed yourself to the mast or you were carried away. He therefore kept ever more sternly and deliberately to the rigorous principles of life and art which he had spent so long enunciating. If you weakened, you were lost, and the house would soon enough contain the priest, the telephone, and the collected works of Palestrina.

  When the telegram from Boult arrived, he ordered Marie-Thérèse not to mention the fact to Madame, on pain of dismissal. Then he placed an additional pencil cross against Tuesday’s concert in the Radio Times. ‘We shall listen to this,’ he informed Adeline. ‘Alert the village.’ As she looked over his fingers at the paper, he could sense her puzzlement. A Glinka overture, followed by Schumann and Tchaikovsky: hardly the preferred listening of Leonard Verity. Not even Grieg, still less Busoni or Sibelius. ‘We shall discover what my young champion does with this old stuff,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘Alert the village, do you see?’ ‘Yes, Leonard,’ she replied.

  He knew it was one of his masterpieces; he knew that were she to hear it truly, she would recognise this. But it must come upon her suddenly. That opening enchantment of the remembered bucolic, with a pianissimo cor anglais wrapped in the quietest rustle of muted violas. He imagined the soft transformation of her face, her eyes turning towards him as they had done in Berlin and Montparnasse … He loved her enough to see it as his task to rescue her from her own later self. But there must be truth between them, too. As she straightened his blanket he therefore said, abruptly, ‘This business won’t be cured by le coup du chapeau, you know.’

  She scurried from the room in tears. He could not judge whether they were caused by his acknowledgment of death or by his reference to their first few weeks together. Perhaps both. In Berlin, where they had met, he had failed to arrive for their second rendezvous, but instead of taking offence, as other women might have done, Adeline had come to his room and found him prostrate with an influenza cold. He remembered her straw hat, worn despite the lateness of the season, her full, clear eyes, the cool chord of her fingers, and the curve of her hip as she turned away.

  ‘We shall cure you with le coup du chapeau,’ she had announced. It was apparently some medical practice, or, more likely, superstition among the peasants of her region. She declined to elucidate, but went away and returned with a wrapped bottle. She told him to make himself comfortable and to put his feet together. When they formed a soft puy in the bed, she found his hat and placed it over his feet. Then she poured him a large tumblerful of cognac and told him to drink. At the time, he had preferred beer to strong liquor, but he did as he was told, marvelling at how improbable such a scene would be in England.

  After two deep glasses, she asked if he could still see his hat. He replied that of course he could. ‘Keep watching it,’ she had said, and poured him a third glass. He was forbidden to speak, and had no memory now of what she had chattered on about. He merely drank and watched his hat. Finally, midway through his fifth glass, he had started to giggle and announced, ‘I can see two hats.’

  ‘Good,’ she said with sudden briskness. ‘Then the cure is working.’ She had played the same spread chord on his forehead and left, taking the bottle with her. He fell into a coma and awoke twenty hours later, feeling much better. Not the least reason for this was that when he opened his eyes and looked down towards his feet there was no hat to be seen but only the profile of his already beloved Adeline, sitting in a low chair reading a book. It was then that he told her he was going to become a great composer. Opus I, scored for string quartet, flute, mezzo-soprano, and sousaphone, would be called ‘Le Coup du Chapeau’. Using his newly discovered method of Kinetic Impressionism, it would depict the travails of a suffering artist cured of influenza and lovesickness by a beautiful helpmeet and a bottle of cognac. Would she accept the dedication, he had asked. Only if she admired the piece, she had replied with a flirtatious tilt of her face.

  ‘If I write it, you will admire it.’ The statement was not vain or authoritarian but, rather, the reverse. Our destinies, he meant, are now joined, and I shall consider worthless any composition of mine that fails to please you. This is what his words intended, and she had understood.

  Now, downstairs in the kitchen, stripping the fat from some beef bones to make Leonard’s bouillon, she remembered those first few months in Berlin. How jolly he had been, with his cane, his sly wink, and his repertoire of music-hall songs; how not at all the stiff Englishman of racial stereotype. And what a different patient he had made in those days when she had given him le coup du chapeau. That had been the start of their love; now she was tending him once more, at the end of it. In Berlin, when he was recovered, he had promised that she would be a great singer and he would be a great composer; he would write his music for her voice and together they would conquer Europe.

  It had not happened. She had doubted her own talent more than she doubted his. They made instead an artists’ pact. They bound themselves together, twin spirits in life and in music, though never in marriage. They would fly free of the constraints that governed most people’s existences, preferring the higher constraints of art. They would rest lightly on the ground so that they might soar the higher. They would not entangle themselves in the pettinesses of life. There would be no children.

  And so they had lived: in Berlin, Leipzig, Helsinki, Paris, and now in a softly scooped valley north of Coulommiers. They had rested lightly on the ground here for over two decades. Leonard’s fame had grown, and with it his reclusiveness. There was no telephone in the house; newspapers were forbidden; the high-powered wireless was used only for listening to concerts. Journalists and acolytes were denied entry; most letters went unanswered. Once a year, until Leonard became ill, they would travel south, to Menton, Antibes, Toulon, incongruous locations where Leonard would fret for his damp valley and the lonely rigour of his normal life. On these journeys Adeline would sometimes fall prey to a sharper lamentation, for the family she had quarrelled with all those years ago. In a café her glance might pause on the face of some lyrical young man, and she would briefly consider him an unknown nephew. Leonard dismissed these speculations as sentimental.

  For Adeline the artistic life had begun in gregariousness and warmth; now it was ending in solitude and austerity. When she had nervously suggested to Leonard that the
y might secretly be married she had implied two things only. First, that she would be better able to protect his music and watch over his copyrights; and, second, selfishly, that she would be able to live on in the house they had shared for so long.

  She explained to Leonard the inflexibility of the French law in respect of concubinage, but he did not want to hear. He had become irate, banging the fire-tongs on the boards, so that Marie-Thérèse came running. How could she think of betraying the very principles of their life together? His music belonged to nobody and to the whole planet. Either it would be played after his death or it would not, depending upon the intelligence or stupidity of the world; that was all there was to be said. As for herself, he had not realised when they had made their pact that she had sought pecuniary advantage, and if that was what exercised her, she should take what money she could find in the house when he lay on his deathbed. She might as well return to her family and pamper those imaginary nephews she was always bleating about. Here, take the Gauguin off the wall and sell it now if that is your concern. But do stop your wailing.

  ‘It is time,’ Leonard Verity said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We shall see what my “young champion” is made of.’

  ‘Oh, Leonard, let us have the Oboe Fantasy again.’

  ‘Just turn it on, woman. We are nearly at the hour.’

  As the wireless slowly warmed and hummed, and the rain played a soft pizzicato on the window, she told herself it did not matter that she had failed to alert the village. She doubted he would persist beyond the overture to ‘Ruslan and Ludmilla’, which in any case had sufficient stridency to pierce most atmospheric disturbance.

  ‘Queen’s Hall…Invitation Concert … Musical Director of the British Broadcasting Corporation …’ They listened to the normal litany from their normal positions: he aloft in the bed, she in the low basketwork chair, close to the gramophone in case the tuning needed adjustment. ‘Change to the programme which has been previously announced … Glinka … new work by the English composer Leonard Verity … honour of his seventieth birthday later this year…“Four English …” ’

  She howled. He had never heard such a sound emerge from her before. She fought her heavy way downstairs, ignored Marie-Thérèse, and ran out into a wet dark afternoon. Below her, the village jangled with light and flashed with noise: gigantic motors turned and thrummed. A kermesse had started in her head with traction engines and flood-lamps, the comic frippery of the roundabout organ, the tinny clatter of the shooting range, the careless blast of cornet and bugle, laughter, fake fear, flashing bulbs, and stupid songs. She ran down the track to the first of these orgiastic sites. The old boulanger turned inquisitively as the wild, wet, under-dressed woman irrupted into his son’s shop, gave him a mad stare, howled, and ran out again. She, who for years had been so practical, so swift and necessary with the village, now could not even make herself understood. She wanted to strike the whole countryside into silence with fire from the gods. She ran into the butcher’s, where Madame was driving her mighty turbine: a throbbing belt, a tormenting scream, blood everywhere. She ran to the nearest farm and saw feed for a hundred thousand cattle being churned and sluiced by a hundred electric pumps. She ran to the American house, but her knocking could not be heard above the antic flushing of a dozen electric water closets. The village was conspiring, just as the world always conspired against the artist, waiting until he was weakest and then seeking to destroy him. The world did it carelessly, without knowing why, without seeing why, just thumbing a switch with a casual clack. And the world didn’t even notice, didn’t listen, just as now they seemed not to hear the words in her mouth, these faces gathered round, staring at her. He was right, of course he was right, he had always been right. And she had betrayed him in the end, he was right about that, too.

  In the kitchen Marie-Thérèse was standing in awkward conspiracy with the curé. Adeline went upstairs to the bedroom and shut the door. He was dead, of course, she knew that. His eyes were closed, either by nature or by human interference. His hair looked as if it had just been combed, and his mouth was turned down in a final sulk. She eased the fire-tongs from his hand, touched his forehead in a spread chord, then lay down on the bed beside him. His body yielded no more in death than it had in life. At last, she fell quiet, and as her senses returned she became loosely aware of Schumann’s piano concerto stumbling through the static.

  She sent to Paris for a mouleur, who took a cast of the composer’s face, and one of his right hand. The British Broadcasting Corporation announced the death of Leonard Verity, but since they had so recently given the first performance of his final work, further musical tribute was judged inessential.

  Three weeks after the funeral, a square parcel marked ‘Fragile’ arrived at the house. Adeline was alone. She chipped the sealing-wax from the two fat knots, unfolded layers of corrugated cardboard, and found an obsequious letter from the recording manager. She took each of the ‘Four English Seasons’ from its stiff manila envelope and sat them on her knee. Idly, methodically, as Leonard would have approved, she ordered them. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. She stared at the edge of the kitchen table, hearing other melodies.

  They broke like biscuit. Her thumb bled.

  JUNCTION

  SUNDAY WAS FOR hair-cutting and dog-washing. The French party who drove out from Rouen were at first disappointed. Mme Julie had heard tell of gypsies, banditti, wandering Israelites and locusts devouring the land. She had enquired of her husband whether they should not carry instruments of protection; but Dr Achille had preferred to rely, for both guidance and possible defence, upon one of his medical students, Charles-André, a sturdy, shy youth born out on the great chalk plain beyond Barentin. The shanty-town, however, proved quiet. Nor was this calm, as they initially suspected, consequent upon the stupefaction of drink, for the men would not be paid until the end of the month, and would only then go on a randy, fighting Jack-come-first, spending their wages in cabarets and low taverns, swallowing French brandy as they would English beer, getting drunk and then diligently sustaining that drunkenness so that by the time all had been rounded up the horses at the workface would have been rested a full three days. Rather, what the French party discovered was the calm of orderly repose. A ganger in scarlet plush waistcoat and corduroy breeches was having himself shaved by an itinerant French barber, courteously shifting his short pipe from one side of his mouth to the other in order to facilitate the task. Nearby, a navvy was soaping his lurcher, which whined at the indignity and made as if to bite its master, receiving a hard-palmed cuff in reply. Outside a squat turf shanty, an old witch stood before a stock-pot, into whose grey and turbulent waters a dozen or so thick strings mysteriously disappeared. Each string bore at its dry end a large brown label. Charles-André had heard from one of his fellow students that an English navvy might eat up to five kilogrammes of beef in a normal day. But they were unable to verify this speculation, their nearer approach being discouraged by the witch, who beat her ladle against the stock-pot as if to drive off demons.

  Yorkey Tom was proud to be a Brassey man. Some of them had been with him from the start, like Bristol Joe and Ten-ton Punch and Hedgehog and Streaky Bill and Straight-up Nobby. With him since the Chester and Crewe, the London and Southampton, even the Grand Junction. If a navvy fell ill, Mr Brassey supported him until he was fit to work; if one died, he relieved his dependants. Yorkey Tom had seen some deaths in his time. Men crushed by falls of rock, blasters sent to kingdom come by the rash use of gunpowder, boys cut in half under the wheels of soil wagons. When Three-Finger Slen lost his other seven fingers and both forearms too, Mr Brassey paid him forty pounds, and would have paid sixty had Three-Finger not been drunk at the time and nudged the brake with his own shoulder. Mr Brassey was mild in his manner but firm in his decisions. He paid good wages for good work; he knew that ill-paid men took things slow and worked to a lower standard; he also recognised weakness where he saw it, and wouldn’t allow tommyshops, or let tr
avelling beer-sellers trade amongst his men.

  Mr Brassey had helped them through that devil’s winter three years ago. Hungry navvies crowding the boulevards of Rouen; work on the line from Paris stalled, and nothing on offer back in England. Charity and soup kitchens had kept them alive. It was so cold that the game had gone to ground; Streaky Bill’s lurcher scared up hardly a hare all winter. That was when young Mr Brassey the contractor’s son had come out to witness the excavations and seen nothing but starving navvies on the idle. His father had forcefully and often repeated the opinion that philanthropy was no substitute for brisk work.

  And they had had brisk work in the main, ever since the spring of 1841 when they’d started the 82 miles from Paris to Rouen. Five thousand British labourers brought out by Mr Brassey and Mr Mackenzie had proved insufficient; the contractors had been obliged to hire a second army of Continentals, another five thousand: French, Belgians, Piedmontese, Poles, Dutch, Spaniards. Yorkey Tom had helped train them up. Taught them to eat beef. Taught them what was expected. Rainbow Ratty had the best method: used to line them up, point at the work to be done, stamp his feet and shout D—n.

  Now he was being examined by Mossoo Frog and his Madame and a boy who trailed behind, peeking and peering. Well, let them look. Let them see how carefully Mossoo Barber went with his razor: everyone knew what had happened when Pigtail Punch was made to bleed by a clumsy cut. Now they were commenting on his Johnny Prescott and his breeches, as if he were some specimen in the zoological gardens. Perhaps he should growl and bare his teeth, stamp his feet and cry D—n.