Dressing Up for the Carnival (15 page)

She feels herself grasping the handle now and testing the blade against her arm. It is surprisingly sharp, so sharp she decides to hack at the savage purple grass rising up around her, clearing a path for herself, making her way forward.

NEW MUSIC

She was twenty-one when he first saw her, seated rather primly next to him on the Piccadilly Line, heading toward South Ken sington. It was midafternoon. Like every other young woman in London, she was dressed from head to toe in a shadowless black, and on her lap sat a leather satchel.

It was the sort of satchel a girl might inherit from her adoring barrister father, and this was the truth of the matter (he found out later), except that the father was a piano teacher, not a barrister, and that his adoration was often shaded by exasperation—which one can understand.

After a moment of staring straight ahead, she snapped open her satchel, withdrawing several sheets of paper covered with musical notations. (
He
was on his way to Imperial College for a lecture on reinforced concrete;
she
was about to attend an advanced class in Baroque music.) He had never before seen anyone “read” music in quite this way, silently, as though it were a newspaper, her eyes running back and forth, left to right, top of the page to the bottom, then flipping to the next. The notes looked cramped and fussy and insistent, but she took in every one, blinking only when she shifted to a new page. He imagined that her head was filled with a swirl of musical lint, that she was actually “hearing” a tiny concert inside that casually combed head of hers. And
his
head?—it was crammed with different stuff: equations, observations, a set of graphs, the various gradients of sands and gravels, his upcoming examinations, and the fact that his trousers pocket had a hole in it, leaking a shower of coins on to the floor as he stood up.

“I think this is yours,” she said, handing him a dropped penny.

“Whose music is that?” he managed. “The music you’re looking at?”

“Tallis. Thomas Tallis.”

“Oh.”

She took pity on him as they stepped together onto the platform. “Sixteenth-century. English.”

“Is he?”—inane question—“is he good?”

“Good?”

“His music?—is it, you know, wonderful? Is he a genius, would you say?”

She stopped and considered. They were in the street now. The sunshine was sharply aslant. “He was the most gifted composer of his time,” she recited, “until the advent of William Byrd.”

“You mean this Byrd person came along and he was better than Thomas What’s-his-name?”

“Oh”—she looked affronted—“I don’t think better is quite the word. William Byrd was more inventive than Thomas Tallis, that’s all. More original, in my opinion anyway.”

“Then why”—this seemed something he had to know, even though his reasoning was sure to strike her as simplistic and stupid—“why are you carrying around Thomas Tallis’s music instead of the other chap’s—the one who was better?”

She stared at him. Then she smiled and shrugged. “Do you always insist on the very best?”

“I don’t know,” he said, not being someone who’d experienced much in the way of choices. He was conscious of his hideous ignorance and inability to express himself. “It just seems like a waste of time. You know, taking second best when you could have the best.”

“Like reading, hmmm, Marlowe when you could have Shake speare?”

He nodded, or at least attempted to nod.

“It’s
because
I believe Tallis is second best that I prefer him,” she told him then. Her chin went up. Her voice was firm. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

“I do, I do,” he exclaimed in his awful voice. And it was true, he did.

He loved her. Right from that instant, the way she opened up her mouth and said
because Tallis is second best.

 

 

Imagine a woman getting out of bed one hour earlier than the rest of the household. What will she do with that hour?

Make breakfast scones for her husband and three school-age children? Not this woman, not scones, banish the thought. Will she press her suit skirt? clean out her handbag? ready her attaché case for a day at work? No, this woman works at home—at a computer set up in what was once, in another era, in another incarnation, a sewing room. It’s a room with discolored wallpaper, irises climbing on a sort of trellis, which doesn’t make sense for a non-climbing, earthbound flower. Against one wall is her writing table, which is really a cheap plywood door laid flat on trestles. She has been offered, several times, a proper desk, but she actually prefers this makeshift affair—which wobbles slightly each time she puts her elbow on the table and stares into the screen.

That’s where she is now. At this hour! Her old and not-very-clean mauve dressing gown is pulled tight against the chill. It is not a particularly flattering color, but she doesn’t know this, and besides, she’s as faithful to old clothes as she is to inferior wallpaper. It’s as though she can’t bear to hurt their feelings. She’s tapping away, without so much as a cup of coffee to cheer her on. It’s still dark outside, not black exactly but a brew of streaked gray. You’d think she’d put up a curtain or at least a blind to soften that staring gray rectangle, but no. Nor has she thought to turn on the radio for a little musical companionship, she of all people. She’s tapping, tapping at her keyboard, her two index fingers taking turns, and for the moment that’s all she appears to need.

 

 

Is she writing a letter to her mother in Yorkshire? A Letter to the Editor complaining about access ramps for the handicapped? A suicide note full of blame and forgiveness and deliberate little shafts of self-pity? No. Today she’s writing the concluding page (page 612) of a book, a book she’s been working on for four years now, the comprehensive biography of Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, ca. 1505-1585. The penultimate paragraph is already on the screen, then the concluding paragraph itself, and now, as a scarf of soft light flows in through the window and lands on her shoulders, she taps in the last sentence, and then the final word—which is the burnished, heightened, blurted-out word: “triumph.” The full sentence reads: “Nevertheless Tallis’s contribution to English music can be described as a triumph.”

Nevertheless?
What’s all this
nevertheless
about, you’re probably asking?

Squinting into the screen, she taps in “The End,” but immediately deletes it. My guess is that she’s decided writing “The End” is too self-conscious a gesture. Did her husband write “The End” when he finished his monograph
Distribution of Gravel Resources in Southwest England
? Yes, certainly, but then he’s not as fearful of self-indulgence as she.

She’s spent four years on this book. I’ve already said that, haven’t I?—but to be fair, the first eight months were passed listening to Tallis’s music itself. The Mass for Four Voices,
Spem in alium, Lamentations of Jeremiah,
nine motets, and so on. She lay on our canted, worn sofa—the kids at school, the husband at the office—and listened with notepad and pencil on her sweatered chest, waiting for the magnetic atoms of musical matter to come together, one and one and one, and give shape to the man who created them. There’s so little known about him, and what is known is made blurry with
might have, could have, possibly was
—all the maddening italics of a rigorously undocumented life. The only real resource is the music, which, curiously, has come down to our century intact, or so I’m told, and that is why this woman spent eight months absorbing each separate, self-contained, cellular note.

Occasionally she fell asleep during those long sofa days. I’m no expert, but I’ve been told that Tallis is not particularly interested in counterpoint as such, and that the straightforward way he develops his musical ideas produces a sense of serenity which can be an invitation to doze. She admits this, but insists he can be experimental when he wants to be and even mildly extravagant. (
In nomine
she gives as an example.)

Tallis’s ghost lives in our house, his flat, hummy, holy tones and the rise and fall of Latin phrasing; it’s permeated the carpets and plaster; it clings to the family hair and clothing and gets into the food. And for several months now an inky photocopy of his portrait has been stuck on the fridge, a little wraith of a man with a small pointed beard and abundant shoulder-length hair brushed back from his forehead. He is vain about his hair, one can tell.

It’s not easy to calculate overall height from a head-and-shoulder image, but clearly he’s got the alarmed, doubting eyes of a short man. (I am not a particularly tall chap myself, and so I instantly recognize and connect with a short man’s uneasy gaze.) The children are forever asking their mother how Tom Tallis is getting along, meaning is she going to finish her book soon. They miss her rhubarb crumble, they miss the feel of ironed clothes and clean sheets and socks sorted into pairs. Her husband—he’s in the sand and gravel business—he misses waking up beside her in the morning. By the time the alarm goes at half-past seven, the bed is cold, and she’s already been working for an hour or more at her secondhand word processor. “There’s cornflakes,” she calls out when she hears footsteps in the kitchen, not for a moment lifting her eyes from the screen. “There’s plenty of bread for toast.” Well, sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t.

But because this is the final morning in the writing of her book, with the book’s closing word “triumph” winking at her from the screen, she rises and stretches and makes her way to the kitchen, a sleepy, mauve-toned phantom. There she finds them— two sons, daughter, and spouse, gathered about the toaster. She stares as though we are strangers who have entered her house sometime during the last four years and are now engaged in a mystical rite around this small smudged appliance. We’re not exactly unwelcome, her look tells us, but the nature of our presence has yet to be explained.

 

 

Two months later Thomas Tallis is still on the fridge door. No one in the family has quite the courage to take him down, but the manuscript, all 612 pages, has been mailed to the publisher. This is a reasonably distinguished publishing house—though certainly not the best—and the editor is delighted to have the Tallis book on his fall list. He would much rather the author had written about William Byrd, of course, that goes without saying. There would have been
great
interest in a book about William Byrd, whereas there is only
considerable
interest in Thomas Tallis. Tallis, if the truth be known, must always be identified along with his famous student who, according to tradition, overshadowed him. Part of Tallis’s essence, in fact, is that he is stuck in an inevitable frame of reference. He also ran. Ran a good race, but . . .

Imagine what a woman does who has suddenly, after four long years, completed an arduous task. She cleans her house, for one thing, not perfectly, but competently. She remains in bed an hour longer in the morning, and for this her husband is ecstatically grateful. They wake together, his lips trace the pearled curve of her spinal column. He is a man who stumbles about all day dealing with the exigencies of gravel production, gravel deliveries, gravel prices per cubic meter, but thinking every other minute of his wife’s soft limbs, her bodily clefts and swellings.

For her clever daughter she buys tickets to the ballet, and they return from the performance drunk with pleasure, and enact mock, foolish pirouettes on the hall carpet, bumping into the walls and giggling like a pair of teenagers.

For her younger son, a boy of exceptional beauty, she spends a whole day sorting through the debris of his bedroom. She does this tactfully, tidily, thoroughly, and the child is conscious of an immense sense of relief. All those buried socks, books, pencil ends, wads of paper, coins, dust—he was unable to deal with it, but now all is order and ease.

Her middle child is neither clever nor exceptional in appearance, but she loves him best; she can’t help it; he touches a spot of tenderness in her that only music has been able to reach. She kisses the top of his head while he eats his cereal. She straightens the collar of his coat before he leaves for school. She has gone back to listening to Tallis in the afternoons, a remarkable recording by the Tallis Scholars, and as she listens something like a kite string reaches down and pulls at her thoughts, which are not quite ready to be thoughts. It might be that she’s putting her own heart beside itself, making comparisons. What does it mean to be better or best?

One of the new, young music gurus, writing in the weekend papers, believes Tallis is actually a better composer than Byrd. What had been considered simple in his work is now thought of as subtle. What struck earlier critics as primitive is really a form of understated sophistication. Perhaps these judgments boil down to mere fashion. Or perhaps the recent Tallis biography has upped his reputation.

 

 

Imagine a girl just twenty-one years old—I’m aware that I probably should say “young woman,” but there is so much girlishness in her face and in the way she sets off from home each morning, running a quarter of a mile to the Tube station, swinging her leather satchel at her side. She is probably in love or at least drawn to the possibility of love. Undoubtedly she thinks about the new clenched knot of ardor in her chest, thinks of it all day long, coming and going to her classes, while seated at the piano and also at the harpsichord, which she has recently taken up. Her head may be swarming with Latin, with choral efforts, with the rising and falling and patterning of sound, but her body presses against this new, rapturous apparition.

Then one day, late in May, she meets a young man. They collide on the Tube, not the most romantic of venues. This man is awkward, he has holes in his pockets, he is ungainly in his appearance. He is really rather ordinary, as a matter of fact, immersed as he is in the drainage capability of compacted gravel, and so lacking in perception that he will never understand why she agreed to have a coffee with him instead of attending her class. He’s a lad, that’s all, just another face, though he flatters himself that she sees something in him. Why, otherwise, does she go to the cinema with him on that first afternoon, and then out for fish and chips, and later, only a week later, does she end up in his flat, in his bed?