The Facts of Life (13 page)

In their previous brief weekends away, even during their honeymoon, Sally had managed to keep a part of herself undisclosed out of a sweetly old-fashioned desire, Edward assumed, to sustain some romantic illusion of feminine perfection. But now that they shared the same antiquated bathroom day in, day out, the illusion was crumbling. He grew to know her smells – many of which, since they now shared a diet, were amusingly identical to his. He encountered and recorded as precious shards of knowledge, her favourite soap, her shampoo, the space above the bathroom cabinet where she hid a razor. He teased her delightedly when, in a fit of ostensible altruism, she bought him a shaving brush and foaming stick to change his old, monastic habit of using a meagre lather of Lifebuoy. ‘It’s what Dad uses,’ she explained.

On her birthday he went shopping in Rexbridge, sniffing at countless scent bottles until his head was spinning and his nostrils raw. At last he frittered precious savings on a bottle of something floral and French which delighted her. When he related the difficulty of his quest and confessed that she had been bewitching him with mere vanilla essence at a fraction of the price, she seemed utterly charmed. However delicious, the new scent was perplexing on her skin, as if it were not entirely her lying beside him, only a near-perfect, over-ambitious replica.

‘You sniff me like a
dog
!’ she protested, playfully cuffing the side of his head as he ran his inquisitive nose across the side of her neck. But she divined what was disturbing him and began to wear vanilla again when she was alone with him, happy to save the French concoction for her sorties alone into the world outside, stepping into the alien aroma as into a protective shell.

Sally had tracked down the local GP and found that he had an invalid wife and badly needed someone to take over from him on a regular basis, but had so far been unable to persuade anyone to work somewhere so remote and for so little pay. He was a kind, careworn man, tormented by his fractious spouse, and initially Sally felt he would be taking bread from his own mouth to feed her. She hardened her heart, however, reminding herself that she now had a husband to support, and did not let on that the pay would be riches after her scant salary at the hospital.

In the evenings, they worked in the garden by the last of the sunlight. The fenland sky hung huge around them, with few interruptions – no hills or trees and no tall buildings save the tower of St Oswald’s down the road. Town skies were a mere overhead strip compared with this dome which stretched to the far horizon. Even after the sun had set, the sky retained a glow strong enough to light the end of their labours. Neither had gardened before. Edward’s childhood home in Tübingen had been inside a great, dark mansion block without so much as a balcony. For flowers and greenery, the family had taken walks in the public parks around the castle and ramparts, where all but the daisies were tidied tantalisingly out of reach. Sally’s gardening experience stopped at growing mustard and cress seeds in a hollowed-out potato half. The space behind the Bankses’ house had always been consecrated to precious vegetables, coaxed from the soil by Ida Totteridge and thus forbidden territory to her. Edward found a stash of garden tools in the heterogeneous disorder beneath the kitchen staircase. He oiled the secateurs and took them and a saw to be sharpened by the knife grinder in Rexbridge market. Then he and Sally set to work taming the small jungle that surrounded them. Roses that had become whippy trees were reduced to unpromising stumps. The Virginia creeper and jasmine that had engulfed one side of the house were hacked back from windows and carefully teased away from the roof and gutters. The ivy on the other side was killed off altogether, as it seemed to be damaging the masonry. The work was slow. Defeated by hunger and encroaching darkness, they retired each evening, bloody, mud-smeared, their skin burning and itchy with drying plant juices, and when they began again it seemed as though the previous day’s work had been undone by foliage creeping in the night.

Gradually old forms re-emerged. A stagnant pond with a broken statue at its centre. Rope-shaped terracotta edging surrounded what was now recognisable as a rose garden. A sundial. There was a rosemary bush tall as Sally’s shoulders and a colony of chives that had become a miniature lawn. Two curls of wrought iron were all that remained of a long-rotten garden bench. Edward spent a short-tempered day teasing out the old bolts and fitting the frames with new wood. They placed the bench down by the river and when one of her new mothers gave her a big bag of daffodil bulbs in gratitude for an easy delivery, Sally waded across the water to plant them in the bank on the other side. Edward took an old scythe to the long grass and, watching his rhythmic motion, his trousers streaked with grass juices and his shirt plastered to the sweating skin beneath, Sally ached for love of him and suddenly realised how badly she wanted to bear his child. She laughed at herself and later turned the moment to high comedy in one of her regular bulletins to Dr Pertwee.

‘We’re quite the new Adam and Eve,’ she wrote. ‘It’s a good thing I have
A Husband’s Love
to keep my feet firmly on the ground amid all this honest toil and newly-turned earth.’

Left alone in the cavernous hall after Sally drove off to work in the mornings, Edward started to make preliminary sketches for an opera. It had begun life as a symphony. Great blocks of sound in his head, which he had to scribble down in a rush before they evaporated. Then he found that strings, wind and brass were not enough. He wanted voices. He wrote pages of wordless singing – a rhapsodic soprano and a chorus – well before he came up with a suitable subject for the opera. He wracked his brains but it seemed that every story – King David, the Fall of Troy, Mary Queen of Scots – had been done before. Finally, he put it to Thomas, who came over for lunch one day when Sally was at the surgery.

‘A subject for a libretto. A
new
subject. That’s hard.’ Thomas pondered. He walked over to the kitchen window, chewing on a lamb chop he had taken between finger and thumb. He turned, leaning against the old belfast sink, and stared at Edward for a moment. His eyes twinkled.

‘Job,’ he said. ‘Do the Book of Job.’

‘Vaughan Williams.’

‘That’s just a ballet.’

‘No soprano role,’ Edward pointed out.

‘He had daughters, a wife – his sons were probably married. Besides, the gender of the comforters isn’t specified! Lucifer too, perhaps? The Shining One as coloratura soprano – or perhaps that would be a little much …’

All that afternoon, while Sally was visiting children with measles and mothers with morning sickness, Edward sat, hunched over her school Bible at the kitchen table, reading the Book of Job. He scarcely knew Sunday school stories, let alone the more obscure passages. But as he read, he understood Thomas’s faintly mischievous smile as he made his suggestion. The tale of the man stripped of happiness, caught in a torrent of distresses, who yet praises God, could not have been more ironically apposite for a post-war German Jew. Sadly it could not have been less operatic either. Something in the tale held him however. Perhaps it was the shock of finding words familiar from
The Messiah – ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth
’ – nestling like a jewel at the story’s leprous centre.

He would begin his task by expanding the opening sentences, to establish Job’s massive wealth, glory and earthly happiness. He decided to focus on the daughters, whom the text specifically named as Jemima, Keziah and Kerenhappuch, while leaving the sons as anonymous as the slaughtered sheep and servants. The opera could open with Job a kind of Lear, lapping up the adoration of the three girls – a convenient soprano-mezzo-contralto trio, with Kerenhappuch inevitably the contralto. It would end with a subtly altered reprise, but now the resurrected three would be giving their praise to their heavenly father, not their earthly one. It would become both cautionary tale and consolation.

Thomas’s intention in his suggestion might also have been therapeutic. Reading and re-reading the text over the weeks that followed unlocked memories of Edward’s boyhood, happy memories, of his mother, grandmother and sister. Suddenly his dream life grew crowded as a family album.

Aware how harshly secretive he must have appeared in the past, he found himself telling Sally everything there was to know about his childhood. Encouraged by her interest, he allowed himself to feel Jewish for the first time since he left his homeland. He allowed himself to be German. Sally found frames for some battered photographs he had of his parents and Miriam and he arranged them on the piano lid like so many witnesses to his new pleasures. He even taught her some Yiddish words and phrases and laughed at her Saxon difficulty in mastering them. With this final laying of the ghosts that had troubled him, it seemed that the seal was being set on his unalloyed happiness.

Edward’s first string quartet,
In Memory of Lost Parents
, received its premiere at a concert in the hall at Tompion. An ensemble formed by some near contemporaries of his had wanted something new to sandwich between a Beethoven Rasumovsky and the Schubert
Quartettsatz
. Tipped off by Thomas, they had approached Edward. His piece was not easy to learn, and there were only three weeks in which to practise, but the musicians seemed confident.

It was the sort of concert Edward might well have taken Sally to anyway, but this time she felt as anxious as if she herself were expected to perform. It was an unusually formal affair, since the university chancellor was to be present and the Master of Tompion had invited some of the concert-goers for dinner afterwards.

Sally wore an old hand-me-down of her mother’s in midnight blue crushed velvet and black, elbow-length gloves. She had to sit with Edward in the front row, within bowing distance of the chancellor. She was introduced to his wife by Thomas during the interval but her mind was entirely on Edward, who was so nervous he had wandered off to stare balefully at the portraits around the panelled walls. Thomas tapped her elbow and pointed out two former college men who had come down to review the concert for
The Times
and some highbrow arts quarterly.

Edward had never played her any of his music properly. Once or twice, when she had begged him, he had started, but each time, abashed, he played the buffoon, breaking off, after a few impenetrable wanderings on the keyboard, into a jokey rendition of a Glenn Miller dance number or some corny Ivor Novello hit. Once he had mocked her ignorance, slyly launching into a delicious piece and only telling her after she had exclaimed at its loveliness and his genius, that it was by Mozart. She had eavesdropped, of course, sitting in a room off the gallery, and keeping very still for as long as she could bear. On his own, however, he never seemed to play anything through, contenting himself with snatches and chords in between scribbling, making noises more like the piano tuner who called in once a month and drove her half-mad with his nagging repetitions.

They resumed their seats and the quartet returned to the platform. As the applause died down – even she could tell that the Beethoven had been excellently played – she reached over to touch Edward’s hand. He smiled at her but returned her hand to her lap as though she were an overly demonstrative child. Someone coughed. The four bows were raised in expectation and, with them, the four players’ eyebrows.

With the first chords she honestly thought there had been some mistake. Someone was playing the wrong piece, perhaps, or had their music upside down. But the strident cacophony continued its angry way and was met with the same complacent welcome as had greeted the Beethoven, only now it was punctuated by the occasional gathered brow or fine-minded wrinkling around the eyes at a particularly startling harmony. Sally realised, with a sickening finality, that she hated her husband’s music. Perhaps hate was too emotive a word for something she felt she altogether failed to understand. The sounds he had written had no discernible melody, no comforting sonority. He had composed in an entirely alien language and she felt a mounting panic that he would expect her to understand it simply by virtue of their being in love.

With each successive movement, her hopes were raised then dashed on hearing more of the same. When he glanced at her, she smiled reassuringly back, but she felt that a crude wedge had been driven between them. The last movement came as a relief. She seized on its demonic gaiety and whistlable tune as something she could enthuse about later, but as the room filled with polite applause and the musicians took their bows, faces shining from effort, she knew she would always have to lie to him.

Bird-watching she could have handled, or a sudden bizarre demand in bed, a consuming interest in cacti or Victorian industrial architecture, but this music that was so central to his very being she knew she could never appreciate, never honestly admit to liking. When the concert was over, she clasped his arm as he received congratulations and she smiled proudly, in spite of the splinter of iron in her soul.

After an exceptionally mild December, the first frosts had come, filling the garden with browned and twisted foliage. Under torrential rain, part of the dome had begun to leak again. Until they could persuade the glazier back to remedy his shoddy repair work, a tin bucket noisily caught the drips in the hall. Eyes smoked pink by a comfortless fire of damp wood, they had retired early in an effort to stay warm.

Mrs Banks had been admitted to hospital for a series of cancer tests. The young-old woman had a horror of illness and was the sort to keep quiet about a pain for weeks rather than face the grim prospect that her body might be about to turn against her. When the telephone suddenly rang out in the darkness, Sally started as though a gun had gone off and rushed from the bedroom to reach it, tugging her dressing gown about her as she went, convinced it was bad news about her mother.