Cloud Atlas (8 page)

“There, finished!” he proclaimed. “Got it? Hum it back, Frobisher, and then let’s see how it sounds.”

Asked what key we were in. “B-flat,
of course!”
Time signature? Ayrs pinched the bridge of his nose. “Are you saying you’ve lost my melody?” Struggled to remind myself he was being totally unreasonable. I asked him to repeat the melody,
much
more slowly, and to label his notes, one by one. There was an acute pause that felt about three hours long while Ayrs decided whether or not to throw a tantrum. In the end, he released a martyred sigh.
“Four-eight
, changing to
eight-ei
gh
t
after the twelfth bar, if you can count that far.” Pause. Remembered my monetary difficulties and bit my lip. “Let’s go all the way back, then.” Patronizing pause. “Ready now?
Slowly …
Tar! What note is that?” Got through a hideous half hour with me guessing every single note, one by one. Ayrs verified or rejected my guess with a weary nod or shake of the head. Mme. C carried in a vase of flowers and I made an SOS face, but V.A. himself declared that we call it a day. As I fled, I heard Ayrs pronounce (for my benefit?), “It is desperate, Jocasta, the boy cannot take down a simple tune. I might as well join the avant-garde and throw darts at pieces of paper with notes written on ’em.”

Down the passageway Mrs. Willems—housekeeper—laments the damp, blustery weather and her wet laundry to some unseen underling. She’s better off than I am. I’ve manipulated people for advancement, lust, or loans, but never for the roof over my head. This rotting château stinks of mushrooms and mold. Should never have come here.

Sincerely,
R.F.

P.S. Financial “embarrassment,” what an apposite phrase. No wonder the poor are all socialists. Look, must ask you for a loan. The regime at Zedelghem is the laxest I ever saw (fortunately! My father’s butler’s wardrobe is better supplied than my own at present), but one needs to set some standards. Can’t even tip the servants. If I had any wealthy friends left, I’d ask ’em, but truth is I don’t. Don’t know how you wire money or telegram it or send it in packets or whatever, but you’re the scientist, you find a way. If Ayrs asks me to leave, I’ll be scuppered. The news would seep back to Cambridge that Robert Frobisher had to beg money from his erstwhile hosts when they threw him out for not being up to the job. The shame would kill me, Sixsmith, it truly would. For God’s sake send whatever you can immediately.

CHÂTEAU ZEDELGHEM
14TH—VII—1931

Sixsmith,

All praise Rufus the Blessed, Patron Saint of Needy Composers, Praise in the Highest,
Amen
. Your postal order arrived safe and sound this morning—I painted you to my hosts as a doting uncle who’d forgotten my birthday. Mrs. Crommelynck confirms a bank in Bruges will cash it. Will write a motet in your honor and pay your money back soon as I can. Might be sooner than you expect. The deep freeze on my prospects is thawing. After my humiliating first attempt at collaboration with Ayrs, I returned to my room in abject wretchedness. That afternoon I spent writing my sniveling lament to you—burn it, by the way, if you haven’t already—feeling v. anxious about the future. Braved the rain in Wellington boots and a cape and walked to the post office in the village, wondering, frankly, where I might be a month from now. Mrs. Willems bonged the gong for dinner shortly after my return, but when I got to the dining hall, Ayrs was waiting, alone. “That you, Frobisher?” he asked, with the gruffness habitual to older men trying to do delicacy. “Ah, Frobisher, glad we can have this little chat alone. Look, I was rotten to you this morning. My illness makes me more … direct than is sometimes appropriate. I apologize. Give this cantankerous so-and-so another chance tomorrow, what d’you say?”

Had his wife told him what state she’d found me in? Had Lucille mentioned my half-packed valise? Waited until I was sure my voice was purged of relief and told him, nobly, nothing was wrong in speaking his mind.

“I’ve been far too negative about your proposal, Frobisher. It won’t be easy extracting music out of my noddle, but our partnership stands as good a chance as any. Your musicianship and character seem more than up to the job. My wife tells me you even try your hand at composition? Plainly, music is oxygen for us both. With the right will, we’ll muddle along until we hit upon the right method.” At this, Mme. Crommelynck knocked, peered in, sensed the room’s weather in a trice the way some women do, and asked if a celebratory drink was called for. Ayrs turned to me. “That depends on young Frobisher here. What d’you say? Will you stay for a few weeks, with a view to a few months, if all goes well? Maybe longer, who knows? But you must accept a small salary.”

Let my relief show as pleasure, told him I’d be honored, and did not out of hand reject the offer of a salary.

“Then, Jocasta, tell Mrs. Willems to fetch a Pinot Rouge 1908!” We toasted Bacchus and the Muses, and drank a wine rich as unicorn’s blood. Ayrs’s cellar, some twelve hundred bottles, is one of the finest in Belgium, and worth a brief digression. It survived the war unlooted by the Hun officers who used Zedelghem as a command post, all thanks to a false wall Hendrick’s father built over its entrance before the family’s flight to Gothenburg. The library, and various other bulky treasures, also spent the war down there (used to be the vaults of a monastery), sealed up in crates. The Prussians ransacked the building before Armistice, but they never rumbled the cellar.

A work routine is developing. Ayrs and I are in the music room by nine o’clock every morning his various ailments and pains let him. I sit at the piano, Ayrs on the divan, smoking his vile Turkish cigarettes, and we adopt one of our three modi operandi. “Revisionals”— he asks me to run through the previous morning’s work. I hum, sing, or play, depending on the instrument, and Ayrs modifies the score. “Reconstitutionals” have me sifting through old scores, notebooks, and compositions, some written before I was born, to locate a passage or cadenza Ayrs dimly remembers and wants to salvage. Great detective work. “Compositionals” are the most demanding. I sit at the piano and try to keep up with a flow of “Semiquaver, B-G; semibreve, A-flat—hold it four beats, no, six—crotchets! F-sharp—no no no no
F-sharp
—and … B! Tar-tatty-tatty-tarrr!” (
Il maestro
will at least name his notes now.) Or, if he’s feeling more poetic, it might be “Now, Frobisher, the clarinet is the concubine, the violas are yew trees in the cemetery, the clavichord is the moon, so … let the east wind blow that A minor chord, sixteenth bar onwards.”

Like that of a good butler (although you can be sure, I am better than good), my job is nine-tenths anticipation. Sometimes Ayrs will ask for an artistic judgment, something like “D’you think this chord works, Frobisher?” or “Is this passage in keeping with the whole?” If I say no, Ayrs asks me what I’d suggest as a substitute, and once or twice he’s even used my amendment. Quite sobering. People in the future will be studying this music.

By one o’clock Ayrs is spent. Hendrick carries him down to the dining room, where Mrs. Crommelynck joins us for luncheon, and the dreaded E., if she’s back for the w/end or a half holiday. Ayrs naps through the afternoon heat. I continue to sift the library for treasure, compose in the music room, read manuscripts in the garden (Madonna lilies, crowns imperial, red-hot pokers, hollyhocks, all blooming bright), navigate lanes around Neerbeke on the bicycle, or ramble across local fields. Am firm friends with the village dogs. They gallop after me like the Pied Piper’s rats or brats. The locals return my
“Goede morgen”
and
“Goede middag”
—I’m now known as the long-term guest up at the
“kasteel.”

After supper, the three of us might listen to the wireless if there is a broadcast that passes muster, otherwise it will be recordings on the gramophone (an His Master’s Voice table model in an oak box), usually of Ayrs’s own major works conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. When we have visitors, there will be conversation or a little chamber music. Other nights, Ayrs likes me to read him poetry, especially his beloved Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine. At breakfast, he has me read from
The Times
. Old, blind, and sick as Ayrs is, he could hold his own in a college debating society, though I notice he rarely proposes alternatives for the systems he ridicules. “Liberality? Timidity in the rich!” “Socialism? The younger brother of a decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed” “Conservatives? Adventitious liars, whose doctrine of free will is their greatest deception.” What sort of state
does
he want? “None! The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.”

Irascible as Ayrs is, he’s one of few men in Europe whose influence I want my own creativity informed by. Musicologically, he’s Janus-headed. One Ayrs looks back to Romanticism’s deathbed, the other looks to the future. This is the Ayrs whose gaze I follow. Watching him use counterpoint and mix colors refines my own language in exciting ways. Already, my short time at Zedelghem has taught me more than three years at the throne of Mackerras the Jackass with his Merry Band of Onanists.

Friends of Ayrs and Mrs. Crommelynck regularly visit. On an average week, we can expect visitor/s two or three nights. Soloists returning from Brussels, Berlin, Amsterdam, or beyond; acquaintances from Ayrs’s salad days in Florida or Paris; and good old Morty Dhondt and Wife. Dhondt owns a diamond workshop in both Bruges and Antwerp, speaks a hazy but high number of languages, concocts elaborate multilingual puns requiring lengthy explanations, sponsors festivals, and kicks metaphysical footballs around with Ayrs. Mrs. Dhondt is like Mrs. Crommelynck but ten times more so—in truth, a dreadful creation who heads the Belgian Equestrian Society, drives the Dhondt Bugatti herself, and cossets a powder-puff Pekingese called Wei-wei. You’ll meet her again in future letters, no doubt.

Relatives thin on the ground: Ayrs was an only child, and the once-influential Crommelynck family evinced a perverse genius for backing the wrong side at decisive moments throughout the war. Those who didn’t die in action were mostly pauperized and diseased out of existence by the time Ayrs and his wife returned from Scandinavia. Others died after running away overseas. Mrs. Crommelynck’s old governess and a couple of frail aunts sometimes pay a call, but they stay quietly in the corner like old hat stands.

Last week the conductor Tadeusz Augustowski, a great champion of Ayrs in his native Cracow, dropped by unannounced on a Second Day of Migraine. Mrs. Crommelynck was not at home, and Mrs. Willems came to me all of a lather, begging me to entertain the illustrious visitor. I could not disappoint. Augustowski’s French is as good as my own, and we spent the afternoon fishing and arguing over the dodecaphonists. He thinks they are all charlatans, I do not. He told me orchestral war stories, and one indescribably smutty joke that involves hand gestures, so it must wait until we meet again. I caught an eleven-inch trout, and Augustowski bagged a monster dace. Ayrs was up when we got back at twilight, and the Pole told him he was lucky to have engaged me. Ayrs grunted something like “Quite.” Enchanting flattery, Ayrs. Mrs. Willems was less than
enchantée
with our finny trophies, but she gutted ’em, cooked ’em in salt and butter, and they melted on the fish fork. Augustowski gave me his visiting card when he departed the next morning. He keeps a suite at the Langham Court for his London visits, and invited me to stay with him for next year’s festival. Cock-a-doodle-doo!

Château Zedelghem isn’t the labyrinthine House of Usher it seems at first. True, its west wing, shuttered and dust-sheeted to pay for modernization and upkeep of the east, is in a woebegone state, and will need the demolishers before v. long I fear. Explored its chambers one wet afternoon. Damp disastrous; fallen plaster hangs in nets of cobwebs; mouse, bat droppings crunch on the worn stones; plaster escutcheons above fireplaces sanded over by time. Same story outside—brick walls need new pointing, roof tiles missing, crenellations toppled to the ground and lying in piles, rainwater runneling medieval sandstone. The Crommelyncks did well from Congo investments, but not one male sibling survived the war, and Zedelghem’s Boche “lodgers” selectively gutted whatever was worth looting.

The east wing, however, is a comfortable little warren, though its roof timbers creak like a ship when the wind’s up. There’s a moody central-heating system and rudimentary electricity that gives one crackling electric shocks from the light switches. Mrs. Crommelynck’s father had enough foresight to teach his daughter the estate business, and now she leases her land to neighboring farmers and just about makes the place pay, so I gather. Not an achievement to be sniffed at in this day and age.

Eva still a prissy missy, as hateful as my sisters, but with an intelligence to match her enmity. Apart from her precious Nefertiti, her hobbies are pouting and looking martyred. She likes to reduce vulnerable domestics to tears, then flounces in, announcing, “She’s having
another
weeping fit, Mama, can’t you break her in properly?” She has established I am no soft target and embarked on a war of attrition: “Papa, how long is Mr. Frobisher to stay in our house?” “Papa, do you pay Mr. Frobisher as much as you pay Hendrick?” “Oh, I was only asking, Mama, I didn’t know Mr. Frobisher’s tenure was a delicate subject.” She rattles me, hate to hand it to her, but there it is. Had another encounter—
confrontation
more the word—on Saturday just gone. I’d taken Ayrs’s bible,
Also sprach Zarathustra
, to the stone slab bridge over the lake to the willow-tree island. A scorching hot afternoon; even in the shade I was sweating like a pig. After ten pages I felt Nietzsche was reading me, not I him, so I watched the water boatmen and newts while my mind-orchestra performed Fred Delius’s
Air and Dance
. Syrupy florentine of a piece, but its drowsy flute is rather successful.