Ghost Song (32 page)

‘War,' said Toby, trying out the word.

‘We shall hope it does not come to that,' said Petrovnic, and stood up, nodded briefly to Toby, and went out.

Toby went home with his head spinning, realizing that so far from recanting, he was becoming drawn deeper in. Blood and iron, he thought. Petrovnic didn't like my saying that tonight. I don't like my saying it either. Bismarck, that defiant old aristocrat, one of the fiercest war-horses to come out of Prussia. What put him and his words into my mind? Was it because my father thinks a whole new war is coming out of Prussia before the year is out?

He would have liked to talk to his father about all this, and he might have done so if Sir Hal had been at home more and had he not worn a perpetually worried look.

‘Foreign Office flaps,' said Toby's mother, when Toby remarked on this one evening. ‘I try never to ask. He does get so furious with that sarcastic little man who quotes Napoleon and says we're a nation of shopkeepers.'

‘Sarcastic little man?'

‘Kaiser Wilhelm II,' said Flora drily.

Toby remembered how his father had said that one hell of a war was brewing and that most of Europe would be plunged into it before the year ended. One hell of a war…
Eisen und blut.
Perhaps it was better not to talk to his father at the moment. Perhaps it was better to let the fiction about a jaunt to Paris stand. It was at this point he knew that so far from pulling out of the journey, he was looking forward to it. Because wasn't Petrovnic right? Wasn't it vital that people stood up for justice and equality in the world? Listening to Petrovnic—confronted by the man's passionate beliefs and by the fervour of everyone associated with Tranz—he was swept along by the idea of righting the wrongs of the world and it was easy to be convinced of the sheer
rightness
of everything Petrovnic said.

T
WO DAYS BEFORE TOBY
was due to leave for Bosnia, he and Frank Douglas spent the afternoon in a bare and rather dusty studio just off the Tottenham Court Road, making a gramophone recording of ‘The Ghost Walks'. It was the first time they had done this and Toby was inclined to treat the whole experience with flippancy, because it was the sheet music of their songs that was important and that people bought.

Frank disagreed with him. ‘Gramophone recordings are the way of the future,' he said. ‘This will be a reproduction of our music performed by us—it'll be the way we want people to hear it. Sheet music's all very fine, but it can get torn or lost or thrown away. Gramophone records are more enduring. You never know who might one day be listening to this gramophone record we're making today.'

‘Some descendant in the faraway future?' said Toby, grinning.

‘Don't mock. And it'll be an interesting experience anyway.'

It was a very interesting experience, partly because neither of them had ever seen sound-recording machinery before, but also because they had not realized they would be expected to perform two songs.

‘Didn't anyone
tell
you there were going to be two songs?' demanded the willowy young man who was supervising the procedure, whose temperament appeared to be mercurial and whose temper was unreliable. ‘We
always
do two at a time, one on each side. You have to have one on each side.'

‘Of course you do,' said Frank warmly. ‘One on each side.'

‘I daresay we could fudge up something for the
—
uh—the other side, couldn't we Frank?' said Toby, not daring to meet Frank's eye.

‘Oh we could fudge up anything in the world,' said Frank, with such suppressed mirth in his voice Toby knew they were going to have difficulty in remaining serious for the length of ‘The Ghost Walks'.

‘We'll perform “Tipsy Cake” for the second one,' said Toby firmly, and thought that at least if the solemnity of either of them wavered on that one it would be in keeping with the song's mood.

‘What a good idea. “Tipsy Cake” let it be,' agreed Frank cheerfully. ‘See then, Mr—uh, Mr Willoughby, the full title is “All Because of Too Much Tipsy Cake”. Will you have room for all that on the label?'

‘Well, of
course
we'll have room for— Where is your accompanist?' demanded the willowy Willoughby suddenly looking round as if he suspected someone of hiding in the corner.

‘It's me. I'm the accompanist,' said Frank. ‘And I called in the fiddler from the Tarleton's orchestra as well, only I don't see him yet— Oh, wait though, is that him arriving now?'

The fiddler, clattering up the stairs and entering the studio noisily, was enthusiastic about the recording procedure, and inclined to study the machines with interest. ‘I've never done a sound recording before, it's all very clever, isn't it?'

But after they had run through a few bars as a rehearsal, it seemed the combined sounds of violin and piano did not give sufficient resonance. They needed another instrument, said Willoughby crossly. No, he did not know precisely
what
instrument it ought to be, it did not bloody matter what instrument, but they needed another one.

‘I'll see if I can get old Arthur,' offered the fiddler. ‘I'll bet he'd love to do it. And it won't take long to fetch him, he only lives in Finsbury Park and he'll most likely be at home at this time of day—'

‘Finsbury Park!' shrieked Willoughby. ‘We haven't the
time
for you to go all the way to Finsbury Park and back again, for pity's sake! Vesta Tilley's coming at twelve o'clock for “Jolly Good Luck to the Girl Who Loves a Soldier”, and we're doing “The Girl in the Pinafore Dress” and “I Do Like Pickled Onions” at two.'

‘One on each side,' said Frank.

‘Yes, and— Please
don't
touch that, it's the wax for the cutting of the record and if it isn't kept at the right degree of warmth you'll all come out horribly distorted.'

‘Sorry,' said the fiddler, guiltily snatching his hand back.

‘How about this for a solution,' said Toby hastily. ‘If there's a second piano to hand, I could play at the same time as Frank.'

‘So you could,' said Frank enthusiastically. ‘And with a bit of luck we'll hit the notes at the same time, and even if one of us is a semi-quaver or two behind it'll sound like an echo. That'd be entirely in keeping with “The Ghost Walks”.'

‘Would it be sufficient—what did you call it?—resonance?' asked Toby, looking at Willoughby.

‘Well, it might.' Willoughby chewed his lower lip and thought about it. ‘We'll try,' he said at last. ‘There's a piano next door; I'll see if there's anyone to trundle it in.'

‘We'll all trundle it in,' said Toby, thankful to have got over this incomprehensible, but clearly important, difficulty.

The second piano, duly trundled in and tried out in chorus with the main piano and the violin, was pronounced to add more than enough resonance; in fact, said Willoughby, after they finished and the room was being reset for Vesta Tilley, he did not know when he had heard quite such good quality of sound.

‘Did you not notice Toby playing all those wrong notes?' asked Frank innocently, and was hushed by Toby and the violinist, and carried off by them to the Pickled Lobster Pot for Dover sole washed down with copious draughts of beer. This light-hearted and entirely trustworthy friendship was something else Toby would miss for the next couple of weeks.

He arrived in good time at Waterloo Station, although he was slightly daunted to discover that for this first leg of the expedition he would be sharing a compartment with one of the biblical-bearded patriarchs from the Bloomsbury house and the imperious, black-clad old lady with the grubby diamonds.

‘I am Ilena Osapinsky,' said the lady, proffering her hand as Toby stowed his luggage on the rack. ‘My title is baroness.'

‘Is it? I'm so pleased, I love titles,' said Toby, who never normally gave them a thought.

‘You are Mr Chance, I think?' pursued the baroness. ‘The son of the former music-hall dancer. A lady who danced with a fan to aid the illusion.'

This was said with such icy disdain that Toby instantly said with great enthusiasm, ‘Oh, you've heard of her! I'm so pleased. Yes, she did use a fan in her act—in fact we still have one of her fans, mounted in the drawing room in a glass case.' This was completely untrue: none of Flora's fans had survived, even though Minnie Bean had apparently tried washing one of them in warm water and soda crystals.

‘You are probably more accustomed to first-class travel?' said the baroness rather sneeringly, as Toby looked round the carriage.

‘Yes I am, but I believe the lunch they're serving in first-class is Brown Windsor Soup and roast mutton,' said Toby. ‘So on that score alone I'm very glad not to be there today. I daresay the railway company didn't foresee the possibility of such overwhelming heat during an English June.'

The baroness appeared to lose interest. ‘Is the woman, Alicia Darke, not accompanying us on the journey?' she demanded of the patriarch.

‘Apparently she is not.'

‘I am glad of it,' said the baroness. ‘For she would be a hindrance to the cause, ogling the men constantly and distracting them. She has long since wanted Petrovnic for a lover, you know that, I suppose?'

‘I did not know it.' The patriarch looked interested. ‘But if she wants him, she will have him.'

‘Would you care to lay a wager on that, Ivor?'

‘Such a liaison would not last a fortnight,' said Ivor. And then, ‘I am told a fortnight is her usual time for wearing out a lover.'

‘Indeed? Then today's young men have not the stamina that men possessed in my own youth.' She sent the startled Toby a look in which assessment and curiosity were equally blended.

‘I will take your wager,' said Ivor, having thought it over. ‘A sovereign?'

‘You think small,' said Ilena. ‘Ten sovereigns, or I do not trouble myself in the matter.'

‘Ten sovereigns, then.' Ivor took out a pocketbook and made a note of it. ‘But whoever claims to win must in some way provide proof.'

‘The proof will be a mere bagatelle,' said the baroness, waving one bedizened hand. ‘I shall provide for you the proof.'

Toby was so entranced by all this, he almost missed Sonja's arrival. But he saw her come pelting along the platform, pink-cheeked with excitement and exertion, and leapt out again to help her, pleased to discover she would be in the same compartment.

As the train began to chug its way out of the station, he leaned his head back against the seat and began to fit a tune to the rhythmic clatter of the wheels. He had brought a thick notebook and several sharp pencils with him; he might get a song or two out of this. But no songs came from the humming of the train's wheels, nor even from the overnight stop they made just outside Paris—the second would be in Strasbourg. Toby had half thought there might have been some romance and some colour to be got from these places, but there was not.

The romance came when they crossed into the land that once had been a patchwork of petty dukedoms, ruled by palatines and margraves—the countries that clustered at the heart of central Europe: tiny sovereignties with rich threads of poetry woven through their histories. Forbidden amours in Bavaria and Bohemia—morganatic marriages and thrones renounced in the name of love. Mysterious suicide pacts in hunting lodges in Mayerling… Toby had not been alive in 1889, the year of the Mayerling scandal, but most children of his generation knew the story of the Crown Prince and his mistress and their mysterious deaths in the house deep in the forest. It was romantic and tragic and had all the elements of fairytale and it was a story that stuck in the mind.

As they left Germany and Austria behind, and began on the last leg of the journey into Budapest and Sarajevo, he remembered the sharp hard influence of Germany's Prussian overlords and that this was now a land ruled by a man who had spent the last few years strengthening his armies and building up his navy, and who regarded Britain with deep hostility and jealousy.