2002 - Wake up (23 page)

§

When Lungstrom finished the first half of the programme I glanced round and saw, through a storm of applauding people, Lily slip out. Feeling no need to hurry myself, I strolled home in the midst of the procession, as if I too needed to follow signs on the stakes I myself had embedded. Delegation is one of the first rules of leadership. Once an event is organised, you sit back and relax; you don’t fret. Worry helps no one. Confidence reassures.

To my surprise, a light rain had begun falling. Scattered individuals put up umbrellas, or pulled a small square of transparent plastic from a pocket and kept unfolding it until they had one of those superlite macs to put over their clothes; I’m always impressed by people who are prepared for unexpected weather. One or two ladies held programmes above their hairdos. Most of us, however, put up with damp head and shoulders as we ambled in the warm evening around to my house. Now that we were walking, I was struck as I had not been in the church by how many of the audience were elderly, stuttering along leaning on walking sticks or companions’ arms.

Everything was under control in the garden. My wife had had the bright idea of persuading the lads to adopt some kind of uniform by suggesting they wear their Manchester United replica shirts. There were two or three dissenters who vowed they wouldn’t be seen dead in strawberry-coloured red, so they wore their own teams’ colours. The boys were all impeccably polite. I was amazed to see this Chelsea hooligan help a decrepit gentleman to a seat and that Newcastle lout guide ladies in the direction of our lavatories, as well as a phalanx of Red Devils doling out the booze and the fruit efficiently. You could tell it went through everyone’s mind:
What a novelty, these pleasant yobs
. You have to hand it to Lily.

Spotting Jeff Flyme smoking by a rose bed, I grabbed a glass of wine and went and cadged a fag off him. We chatted, but I let Jeff’s words float by and savoured instead the wine and smoke succeeding each other on my palate; the alcohol and the nicotine sneaking into my bloodstream, along the arteries, around my brain, while two hundred and fifty guests stood on our lawn, partaking of our hospitality, eating deliciously ripe strawberries with castor sugar and whipped cream. The rain ceased altogether, and the sky cleared.

§

Having successfully breastfed our boy upstairs, Lily rejoined me, and we returned to the church. Again the slow shuffle along the lane, like a column of refugees seeking sanctuary.

Bjorn Lungstrom (having, it was whispered, spent the interval meditating in the vestry) began the second half of the programme with Chopin’s Piano Sonata N°3 in B Minor, op 58. “The first great B Minor Sonata of the Romantic era,” Lily had told me earlier, “but also Chopin’s last great work.”

“Really?” I asked.

“The defining monument of the Romantic imagination.”

I tried to concentrate. It was pretty wonderful. Like that surprise you get at
Hamlet
or
Macbeth
as you’re reminded how many epigrams in current usage come from Shakespeare: whatever thematic integrity Chopin might achieve, almost every phrase conjured a new, exemplary stream of gorgeous notes.

My attention was distracted when I glanced at the programme and saw that Chopin died at thirty-nine. Six years younger than me—and, according to my wife, he’d completed his best work five years earlier than that. All of them—Mozart, Chopin, Schubert—died younger than I am now. Schumann had already gone insane.

I watched Lungstrom play: I could just see his hands from where I was sitting. He wasn’t reading the music, no, he knew it by heart and he was inside this sonata of Chopin’s. He had the courage of a swimmer who plunges into a water-filled quarry from a steep rock face, knowing that to get out again he’s got to swim right across to the other side. So Lungstrom in striking the first note dived into the music, and there was no turning back: he was trapped inside the sonata and the only escape was to play his way out of it. The music possessed Lungstrom. And it possessed us, too, but Lungstrom would free us all. If only he could remember the notes and play them in the right way, the most expressive, the most liberating. It looked to me like he could, this young Norwegian. He was magnificent. The more I watched him, the more handsome he seemed to be.

Which is something I’ve noticed before: music makes musicians beautiful.

At this point in my musings—still in the first movement of the sonata—I became aware of a noise behind me, the sound of human movement. A minute later, the same; and then again. I glanced around and saw Mrs Grane, the church-organist, walking out. Then, over here, someone coughed. Soon, over there, another person stirred. A moment later a chap sitting in the pew in front of me lurched forwards and sideways and propelled himself to the side aisle and out: he was bent double, discreet as possible, true, but still it seemed extraordinarily rude. Surely Lungstrom wasn’t that bad? Maybe he was. Or maybe the aficionados amongst us had been spoiled by recordings, by listening to too much perfection, to the Ashkenazys and Brendels in a favourite armchair with speakers situated just acoustically so. In clean, digital surround sound.

I don’t know enough about music. Not nearly enough. Maybe Lungstrom was murdering Chopin’s Third Piano Sonata, he was committing some cardinal sin that the true connoisseurs amongst us recognised. I didn’t know. We’ve got used to being a placid, passive audience, haven’t we?

In the days of early modernism people cared enough about art to throw insults and objects at musicians; members of Stravinsky’s orchestra hid behind their cellos and chairs. Perhaps a revival was taking place right here, right now, music lovers stalking out of our village church in high dudgeon. The rest of us philistines were lapping up what was actually an insane affront from this Nordic nutcase engrossed in his playing a few yards in front of me. Maybe he wasn’t even playing Chopin any more! Maybe he’d gone off into his own lunatic doodles along the keyboard!

Lungstrom was seated at the piano side on to us, and so possibly unaware of what was happening in his audience. But it continued: the piano notes interspersed, interrupted, by people pushing their way out of crowded pews, by urgent footsteps across the stone floor. Did Lungstrom realise people were leaving? Maybe he did, but it didn’t matter, he couldn’t stop. He knew he had to carry on playing that piece of music note by perfect note in order to release us all from that church. If people seemed to be leaving, that could only be an illusion, one devilishly created, precisely to tempt him to stop.

Next thing I knew, Jo beside me put a hand over her mouth. I looked at her and saw her eyes, above the horizontal fingers, were horrified. Like a silent-movie heroine. Had Lungstrom just played some infernal note? She was sat at the end of our pew, beside the centre aisle. She sprang out of her seat, and I watched her scuttle down the aisle and out of the door, which was no longer being opened and closed between individual exits: too many people were leaving; from all corners of the church they were rushing out. Lily got up as Jo reached the door, and left with her.

It struck me suddenly that perhaps there was something wrong in the atmosphere of the church, a gas leak or some such. I sniffed the air, but detected nothing.

Lungstrom was still playing, still seemingly unaware of the anarchy erupting in his steadily depleting audience. He did stop, but only to take a deep breath, before embarking upon the second movement, the
Scherzo
. His fingers fluttered across the keys.

At this point I decided to act. The capacity for leadership involves a readiness to take command of a situation, whatever it is. One recognises that leadership is required. I got up and walked, straight-backed, down the aisle. Even during those few seconds another two or three people rose from various pews and, still attempting to do so unobtrusively, bent double and fled.

Outside, dusk had fallen. What is called in cinema, I believe, the magic hour was drawing towards its end: that uncanny light after the sun has gone down, but before darkness settles. I saw Lily in the middle of the graveyard, and I hurried over. She was kneeling beside Jo, with a soothing hand on her back and words in her ear. Jo was bent forward and vomiting the reddened contents of her stomach on to the ground.

I looked around. Mrs Rice-Wallington tottered out of the church, clutching her guts, stumbled across the grass, reached a gravestone and collapsed behind it. Justin, the Rector, came dashing out of the porch, unbuckling his trouser belt as he ran. When he had, evidently, to stop, he stopped, pulled his trousers down and squatted, and gave himself over to the diarrhoea that poured from his arse. Old Major Rice-Wallington followed his wife outside, reached a clear piece of grass, lay down, curled up on his side, and with a sad groan both threw up from one end and let the seat of his white flannel trousers fill at the other.

Strangers followed them. I wanted to help but I hardly knew where to start, beyond calling for an ambulance on my mobile. Having done so, I stood and stared. Some people managed to crawl behind gravestones to shit or spew with some semblance of privacy, but most, way beyond caring, were content to reach an open space, which became ever harder to do for those still rushing out of the church. A bottleneck built up along the path.

A pretty young girl, seven or eight years old, took one neat step to the side of the path, pulled down her knickers and quickly crouched, her skirt falling discreetly around her. Shay, Jeff Flyme’s partner, floated past—almost over—other people like a sleepwalker, then was promptly jerked sideways like a puppet and let loose a stream of red projectile vomit over the prone, semi-naked body of a large, elderly lady. I registered that the body was Mrs Crane’s, the organist, at about the same nanosecond it struck me that it was the strawberries. Arsenic, as an illegal preservative, is still sprayed, in some parts of the world, by unscrupulous bandit growers. On fruit delivered by one spiv of a supplier called Bob Canman. On the strawberries that those lazy, insolent, useless little bastards had, once my back was turned, not bothered to wash.

The worst thing was the sound: the involuntary groans of people as they began to puke. Yet in the background, one could still hear Bjorn Lungstrom’s piano, Chopin issuing from the church. He was into the
Largo
now. I was able for a moment, through an instantaneous act of will, to shut out the sound of groaning and vomiting and, I swear, increase the volume of the Chopin. Good God, it’s splendid music.

The choirmaster emerged: he stumbled towards a grave with a stone bed above it filled with chips of blue quartz or crystal. He knelt as if to pray there and, for a few moments, looked as if he was sobbing—until you realised he was retching, before he brought up the red-stained vomit on to the blue grave. It seemed like a terrible sacrilege was being committed; but whether to the dead or to the living, I wasn’t sure.

“For Christ’s sake,” a voice jarred in my head. I turned. It was Lily. “Are you going to help, or what?”

I must have gaped at her. She’d grasped Jo’s shoulders, was helping her stagger along the path out of the churchyard.

“Run to the house. Get everyone there to drop what they’re doing. Find blankets, bring them here. Have hot water and flannels and towels ready over there.”

I gazed back at the scene. I just needed one more second of the spectacle before me. One more minute to discern its meaning. It was so beautiful, somehow. This virulent disgorgement in a country churchyard. Sea-sick, strawberry-sick, music-sick Christians, feeding the fishes. Manuring the graves of our ancestors.

Resurrection.

“Go!” Lily said.

I ran.

§

Face it, man, you’re not going to work today, are you? The afternoon rush hour’s building up. It’ll be getting dark soon. Where’s that phone? Simon, I have an idea.

Black Dot

Dark brownish-grey surface blemish of tubers.

Sclerotic dots give a sooty appearance, often developing a silver sheen in store.

Occasionally stems, roots and stolons affected, leading to wilt, wilt, wilting.

Y
ou have to think laterally, that’s what you have to do. I told Simon, I said, “Simon, these villagers are fierce warriors, everyone knows that. They’re rain forest hooligans. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out our volunteers were killed by enemies from another tribe. What do you think?”

Mobiles have their own cramped acoustic, their own silence, in which you could hear Simon’s brain swooning. “John, I’m on to it,” he said, and cut me off.

§

And now it’s good to get back in the car: we’ve spoken on the phone a great deal these two days since, but now I’m driving to Cambridge. On to the M6, then the A14 all the way. Simon says a battle took place yesterday. The scientists were unhurt.

He says we’ll start a new trial, in this country, with full medical supervision.

“Good,” I said. “Let’s keep calm. There’s no need to begin tomorrow.”

We’re going to discuss it when I get there.

Lily was mortified after the concert last weekend. I promised her we’d sue Bob Canman. We’ll sue the Israelis. Hell, we can sue Clint and his cohorts: we’ll take those kids for every penny they’ve got. Lily still said she didn’t know how she was going to be able to show her face in the village again. But then in the morning she announced that she was going to go to church, which shows the kind of spunky character she is. So after I’d made her breakfast, she took John J. and went.

I was worried she’d come back crushed, ignored by idiots unfit to act as her prayer stool. In which case we’d be leaving this village. And who’d give a damn? We’re OK. We’re a family, and we’d just drive out of here.

Instead she returned buoyant, told me what so and so said, and such and such was wearing, and what Justin, looking somewhat drained and unsteady in the pulpit, preached in his sermon.

§

It’s spring. Smells rise from the earth. All along the bank of the ring road leading to the roundabout daffodils have bloomed. Old men cycle through town in slow motion. Yesterday was positively warm, layers of winter clothes were divested and it was as if overnight there’d been a female influx, a fresh population of women imported into our town.