Music at Long Verney (22 page)

“Somewhat dusty, is it not?” He hoo-hooed into its interior, and a wiry sigh responded. “OFF we go!”

Tum. Tum-tum.

While she stood in the kitchen, boiling with frustration and choosing out a quellingly flawless duster, it suddenly occurred to her that she had seen no tuning fork. Suppose he was one of those take-in thieves, only waiting for her reappearance to gag and bind the poor old charwoman and make off with her mistress's jewellery? He was steadfastly tum-tumming, still making unsatisfied bites at that middle A – but this might be only a blind. One can tum-tum with one hand while the other tightens its hold on a weapon. She took the duster that came uppermost, and hurried back.

“Here you are. Why, where's that thing you do it with – what's it called? Tuning fork. Haven't you got one?”

“There's one in the bag. But I don't use it. I don't need to. I've got absolute pitch.”

It was clear that jewels would mean nothing to him, nor wine, women, revenge, the call of the wild, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Isles of Greece. He had absolute pitch.

“Don't let me put you off whatever you were doing in here. It won't worry me.”

“Speak for yourself,” she muttered, and slammed out of the room.

Tum. Tum-tum.

The sound pursued her. It possessed the house, as if it were some indifferent occupying power, a foe from the moon. She went back to the kitchen – there is always something to do in a kitchen – and began to count those dusters. Tum-tum. She lost count, left them, polished a spoon, saw a smeared wine glass, and rubbed it. The stem snapped under her energy. Tum-tum. She took herself into the garden, and began weeding. The sound was in the garden, too. Her occupation withered in her hands. She returned indoors, and on an impulse flushed the toilet. The noise of her defiance subsided. Tum-tum. Tum-tum. On other piano-tuning occasions, she had always gone out, with a blithe “Offer him a drink, Mrs Bullen, if I'm not back in time.” For a moment there was silence. Then he began his probing again. Tum-tum-tum, farther up the keyboard. “I shall go mad!” she exclaimed. “Damn Mrs Bullen!” For that matter, she could go out now, flouting him with the roar of the accelerator, leaving him and his absolute pitch to get on with it by themselves. Tum. Tum-tum. But the thought withered, as the expedient of weeding had done. It was impossible to decide on anything with that noise in the house – impossible to think, impossible to act, impossible to exist except as the attendant on those disembodied fidgetings, enforced, just when she was getting used to tum and tum, by an interposition of chords, or a chromatic scale, or an iteration of gaunt fifths. Tum. Tum. Now he had gone back to the middle of the keyboard, just about where he had started from. Good God, could nothing satisfy him? Why couldn't he leave well enough alone, as other people did? Besides, what was this perfection he was tum-tumming after? That chilblained Miss Varley, with all those letters after her name like mixed biscuits – L.R.A.M., F.R.C.O. – what was it she used to bore on about? Intonation, intervals, some major thirds being more major than other major thirds – the gist of
it was that in order to seem in tune whatever the key you played in, half the notes on the keyboard had to be out of tune. A properly tuned piano was, like everything else, a fake. A fake, a fake! Turn. Tum-tum. That was all he was achieving.

“No better than the rest of us,” she exclaimed. “I wonder if he knows it?”

He was now right up at the top of the keyboard, making a noise like a dripping tap. All that fuss about a note you wouldn't want to play more than once in a twelvemonth.

The doorbell rang. Careless as to whether she would again be mistaken for her charwoman, she hurried to answer it. It might be someone who would come in and talk. It was the man to read the electricity meter, who recognised her instantly and remarked, “You've got the piano tuner in, I see.” She kept him as long as she could, but he was not a man of much conversation.

She was resigning herself to more solitary endurance, now of being knelled at – for the piano tuner had shifted his attentions and was probing the abyss – when she realised that a silence had become longer than other silences had been. Into it broke a coruscation of arpeggios rushing from end to end of the keyboard. It was over; he was playing the voluntary. He must be offered refreshment. She could do with a whisky herself. She carried in a tray with cigarettes and glasses and the decanter, only to learn that he neither smoked nor drank.

“But if I can have a glass of milk –”

“Modern, aren't you?” she said, availing herself of the freedom of being Mrs Bullen. Availing herself of the freedom of being Leonora Keeling, she poured out a double whisky and tossed it off. Flown with milk and principles, he would not notice any discrepancy between the two freedoms.

He didn't. “Tell Miss Keeling that I have put in some moth crystals. It's an old instrument, but that's no reason why it
shouldn't be looked after.” He closed the piano, he closed his bag. “I daresay she values it for sentimental reasons.” He handed her the duster. “That's one of the things I like about Miss Keeling. She doesn't try to be modern. She's content to sing those quiet, old-fashioned songs. I think a woman should be her age – she is, anyhow, so why try to conceal it?”

“Have some more milk.”

“Well, thank you . . . I'd really be glad of it.”

Returning with more milk, she found him gazing out of the window.

“Moss roses, aren't they?”

“I'm sure I can't say. Some sort of roses.”

“Moss roses. It's a curious thing, but I always connect Miss Keeling with moss roses.”

“Why? She hasn't got whiskers.”

He wrinkled his pure high forehead in a frown of rebuke. “Miss Keeling is an artist I think very highly of. I have a complete set of her recordings. I should think that's unique. I may say that the earlier ones took a lot of finding. I had to advertise in the
Exchange and Mart
.”

“What's it you think so specially highly of?”

“Her sincerity. I feel she's so sincere. The first time I saw her on television, I said to myself, ‘This is a good woman, who's been tried in the furnace and come out of it as sweet as an old-fashioned rose.' So naturally, when I saw those moss roses in the garden, I was quite struck. I'm like that, though. I can always tell a person's real character. I daresay it's something to do with my absolute pitch.”

“Do you like her voice?”

“I always like a contralto. It's my favourite voice. And she puts so much feeling into hers. That song ‘Little Irish Donkey' – the way she sings that last verse! ‘Close your patient eyes, for when you've climbed the last blue hill you'll be in paradise . . .'”
It was flatteringly obvious that he had listened most attentively.

“Is that the one you like best?” she asked, the performer's insatiable lust to have everything liked best rising in her. “What about ‘Now You Are Home'?”

“Yes, that's certainly one of my favourites.” As though he had learned it at her knee, he welcomed the prodigal. He also Loved His Autumn Roses Best of All, thought of His Neighbours' Sorrows too, and meditated on the Old Sewing Machine that was Silent Now. He had quite a good voice, warm and caressing, and plenty of it. She was dreamily wondering whether she oughtn't to take to milk when she saw him putting on his coat.

Should she tell him? It would give him the thrill of his life, and one doesn't meet such an admirer every day. Should she ask him to stay for lunch?

“Well, I must be going. Remember to tell her about the moth crystals. I wish I could have told her myself. To tell the truth, she's always been a sort of mother image to me. Well, I'll be back next quarter – perhaps I'll meet her then.”

“If you do, I'm afraid she'll be a bit of a disappointment to you.”

“Disappointment? Why? Is she – isn't she as strong as she was? Now I come to think of it, she hasn't been on the screen lately.”

“She's as strong as she was, all right. You should see her going round and round this room doing the high kicks and singing ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-de-Ay'.”

“Ta-Ra . . . ?”

“Song you've never heard of, young man. Goes like this.”

The first couple of kicks dislodged the sandals; the next loosened the duster; a specially ardent kick wrenched the buttons off the overall and split her skirt to above the knee. Round and round she went, singing louder and louder, kicking higher and higher, growing more and more giddy, and each time that she neared him she saw the young man take another cautious
backward step towards the door. When she lost her balance and fell, he made no attempt to pick her up.

Squirming into a sitting posture, she wriggled herself round to face him. Gathering her breath together, composing her features, she assumed her public-appearance expression, smiled her sweet-faced motherly smile, freed her jaws:

“Little Irish Donkey,” she intoned.

“It's disgraceful, disgraceful! You're not worthy to work for such a good woman. I don't believe a word of it!”

But as he rushed out of the room, it was plain that he believed more than he supposed.

Still on the floor, sitting bruised and breathless amid the scene of her thorough turn out, Leonora contemplated her extraordinary behaviour. What a way to treat a piano tuner! What a way to treat one of her public!

“Couldn't have acted otherwise,” she pronounced with solemnity. “No-one with the soul of an artist could have acted otherwise.”

For though it was news to her that she had the soul of an artist, she accepted the revelation. It isn't what you do that matters; everyone has a right to earn a living, and fooling a willing public is as good a way as any other. They enjoy it, you enjoy it, everyone's happy. Where the soul of an artist comes in is when you won't let the public fool you. Owing to an unfortunate train of circumstances that began when she tied up her head in a duster, she had almost yielded to the sweetness of being fooled. But not quite. The soul of an artist had seen to that. She was saved. So was the beef. If she had asked him to lunch, she would have had to give him all the beef. There was not enough for two.

TO READ THESE
twenty stories by Silva Townsend Warner is to delight in a world of wit, anarchy, and sometimes mournful splendour. Most were published in the
New Yorker
but none were reprinted in collections, perhaps because she preferred writing stories to putting together books. They are satiric, fantastic yet clear-eyed, and populated with lively characters: a child-poet, two violinists, a nymph, Lord Byron. These characters find themselves amid equally lively things and events: a mean-spirited saucepan of milk, a heel-kicking rendition of “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-de-Ay”, a breakneck funeral service, an invented Haydn quartet. Neither characters nor settings are predictable, yet at the close of a Warner story everything we have encountered seems inevitable.

This collection begins with houses and their inhabitants, both observed with equal care, for Warner respected the powers that houses, estates, and beautiful things can hold over those who fancy themselves their owners. Although suspicious of wealth and authority, she created tender romance out of the reunion of a beloved object and its rightful owner in “A Flying Start” and “The Listening Woman”. Yet one person's ownership is another's deprivation, making her stories of Mr Edom's antique business inescapably political. The same can be said of the title story.

In “The Music at Long Verney” (1971) we make ourselves
comfortable in a milieu only to be suddenly turned out of it. Of the origin of this story, Warner told William Maxwell: “I saw this couple standing outside their own house and had to know how they got there.” Given its opening sentences, which depict the ancestral mansion as a burden, readers might foresee social comedy about traditions upended; given that Warner was seventy-six when she wrote the story, readers might also expect her to praise mature wisdom, to satirise the callow young. True, the young couple's wealth comes from an herbicide that kills nightingales, and they illuminate their evening musicale with church candles, but Warner does not idealise her elderly Basil and Sybil even as she solicits concern for them. “Improbable and dreamlike”, the story records warfare between landed and exiled, between classes and generations, but it celebrates no victors.

“The Inside-out” (1972) also depicts exile and removal, dramas enacted by children unhampered by polite behaviour. Warner finds the strange in the prosaic – the unpainted backs of furniture, a weedy garden containing a leaf-filled bathtub. The story asks us, “How can we know the boundaries of the prison? Which of us is the interloper? How should we greet the savages?” I think Warner's pleasure in not answering is tangible. “Flora” (1977), the last story she published in the
New Yorker
, uses a supremely banal object, a white plastic rubbish bin, to reveal a great deal about a man, boorish both as host and as scholar. “Maternal Devotion” (1947) depicts the Finch family, the circus act of “The House with the Lilacs” and other stories of the forties, in a suitably unbalanced environment. Here, Cordelia Finch tosses an unwanted suitor to her mother, whose conversational talents exhaust him even as they delight us. With her limitless enthusiasms and unpredictable associations, Mrs Finch is Warner's “only essay at a self-portrait; her conversation and her ineffability. A limited and very laudatory self-portrait, but the resemblance is there”.

David Garnett told Warner, “What you write best about is
love.” “An Ageing Head” (1963) considers two varieties of the phenomenon – the choking affections of relatives and perverse romantic couplings. It is a Warner rocket, the short story as “sniping”. (As she once told a friend, “You can pick odd enemies off, you know, by aiming a short story well.”) Aunt Georgina seems another self-portrait; Warner, active well into her seventies, resented condescending solicitude. “Love” (1972), more affectionate, echoes “The Music at Long Verney”: it too has two couples, youthful and mature, and a house in transition, yet this time Warner's praise of marital devotion is wholly without irony. At its close, a husband muses on the sleeping wife he reveres but knows incompletely – they are a happier pair than those other troubled sleepers, Gabriel and Gretta Conroy.