The Bellwether Revivals (31 page)

‘Weren’t you impressed, sis? I think you’re the only one who wasn’t moved by it. Even Oscar said he liked it.’

‘Actually, I thought my cello line was rather basic,’ she said.

‘Yes, and deliberately so. Don’t think I didn’t notice you trying to spice it up with extra glissando.’ Eden pulled at the neckline of his shirt, as if it were bothering him.

‘I’m just saying it wasn’t very challenging.’

‘My concern was for the architecture of the piece as a whole, not to entertain your ego.’ There had always been a wilful exuberance about Eden, but that night Oscar watched it grow into something that was difficult to witness: sheer, unhinged reverence for his own ability. Eden paced around the room, gesticulating with his glass, telling stories about his great hero, Johann Mattheson, sharing the details of his grandiose theories, whether anyone was interested in these theories or not. ‘… because music doesn’t need any rules for its own sake,’ he got to saying. ‘It’s only
us
that need them. I tried to override those rules tonight. I tried to write something without restrictions. Something to elevate the spirits, just like in the Baroque days. Mattheson said we impose rules and restrictions on music because of our own weaknesses and limitations. Because without rules, we wouldn’t be able to comprehend music at all, we wouldn’t even be able to discern a love song from, from—from a death knell. Music’s a heavenly art so we have to find some way to harness it, to understand it, make it something earthly. You see what I’m saying? We can only understand music through our senses.
Nihil est in Intellectua, quod non fuit in sensu
.’ He didn’t seem to care whether anybody in the room was listening or not. He was talking
at
them, ranting as if he needed to get the whole thing off his chest, stopping only to refill his wine glass, or open another bottle.

It was late and no one had bothered to draw the curtains in the room, so even when Oscar had the temerity to turn his attention away, he could see Eden’s wiry reflection bouncing back at him in the panes of the French windows. Soon, Iris fell asleep on his
shoulder. The others gazed at the floor politely. But Eden was still bounding along: ‘I hope you all noticed the scale. Quite deliberate. Mattheson said F sharp minor is the key that’s most characterised by sadness. It’s very different from any of the other minors. He said it’s a scale that has loneliness and individuality—and
misanthropy
. Ha! Isn’t that wonderful? F sharp minor is the misanthropic scale.’

‘Well, it’s hardly any wonder that we all liked it so much,’ Jane said, trying to interject. ‘We’re all misanthropes here.’ Her tone was pleading, as if she hoped she could make Eden aware of the rabid energy with which he’d been talking.

‘Yes, yes, alright, Jane, but it’s more significant than
that
. Why is everyone always trailing behind?’ Eden looked at them all, bug-eyed. ‘Dr Crest is the biggest misanthrope I know. If we weren’t speaking the same language, I couldn’t get through to him.’

‘Maybe you should could call it “Ode to Misanthropy”,’ said Marcus.

Eden shook his head, bothered by the interruption. ‘It doesn’t have a title. And even if it did, it’s not an ode. I didn’t write it to glorify his name. I wrote it to help him. It’s a paean, that’s what it is. A paean in the truest sense of the word. Read your
Iliad
.’ He swallowed the dregs of his Pinot and shook the glass. ‘Do we have any more of this?’

Oscar wanted to ask a question, but now that the whirlwind of Eden’s chatter had finally begun to die down, he was reluctant to voice it. He had never read
The Iliad
, and only knew a few things about Greek mythology. There was a book about it in Dr Paulsen’s room that he sometimes found himself thumbing through, drawn in by the weight of it. The paragraphs he’d read always troubled him; they seemed so epic and portentous—grave stories of punishments meted out by impatient immortals—and he could never read more than a few pages without shoving it back into the bookcase. Now he was too curious not to ask. ‘What do you mean, read your
Iliad
?’

The question seemed to take Eden by surprise. His expression tightened. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never read Homer?’ He filled his glass from a fresh bottle. ‘Paean—actually, Paion, with an A-I-O—was the physician of the gods. He heals Ares and Hades when they get injured. It’s all there in Book Five. Don’t they cover the classics in state school? You’ll have to borrow my library card.’

‘Join the queue,’ Jane said.

There was plenty of space for the six of them that week. The Bellwethers had nine bedrooms; most of them had not been used since Iris and Eden were children, though Mrs Bellwether had paid to have them redecorated only last summer. Each spare room bore the plain but expensive accoutrements of some interior designer’s choosing: a flotilla of Japanese tube-pillows was organised at the foot of every bed; Indian tapestries hung from the walls; the furniture was all hand-made—blocky, characterless revisions of long-ago styles. While Oscar stayed with Iris in the rectory, Eden and the others had the run of the house, treating their rooms like their personal suites at The Bellwether Hilton. They would traipse downstairs into the kitchen, half-dressed, to load plates with buttery toast and grapefruit halves, to go noisily about the cooking of fried eggs, bacon, and tomatoes while Oscar and Iris silently played cards or swapped sections of the newspaper at the breakfast counter.

Oscar knew it would be difficult to spend a week in such close quarters, exposed to the realities of each other, to their everydayness. He found something unattractive about their lack of consideration for the Bellwethers’ home, the way that Marcus and Yin cavorted around the house like unchaperoned children at a caravan park, the way Eden sat with his dirty shoes upon the furniture and how Jane’s heels pressed little marks into the planks of the parquet floor. He tried to reason out their tactlessness as boarding school behaviour. Because they’d lived away most of their lives, they made the best of their days at home; they
compensated for the discipline of the boarding house by loafing around in their own houses. Somehow, thinking about it this way made it easier to accept.

Oscar had already reorganised his shifts at Cedarbrook, giving himself the entire week off, and he tried to think of it as a holiday. In fact, the slackness of the days at the Bellwether house, the languid trawl of the clouds across the Grantchester sky, made him feel as if he
was
on holiday, staying over at some expensive private resort where everything was free, and there was no mobile phone reception, and even the sun rose brightly every day, giving the air an illusion of summer.

As he lay in bed with Iris that first Tuesday morning, she suggested they could use the coming days to be tourists—to visit the cathedral at Ely, to see a play or an exhibition in London, to drive to the Norfolk coast. They weren’t unappealing ideas, but he told her he’d rather stay exactly where he was. He hoped that a week at the Bellwether house would give them a chance to spend some real time together, to finally settle in one place. He wanted to spend long hours in bed with her in the quiet of the rectory, with the batteries taken out of the clock and the curtains drawn. Maybe they could spread out on a blanket somewhere in the meadow-lands across the river, in the high grass where nobody could see them, and let the time roll slowly by.

She didn’t argue. ‘I know, you’re right, you’re right,’ she said, sliding a hand across his stomach. ‘But it’s not going to be easy. If we hide in our room all day, the others will come calling sooner or later. Do you know how quickly Marcus and Jane get bored? It won’t take long for them to dig up a croquet set or get the barbecue going. They’ll be wanting to swim in the river, especially now it’s getting a bit warmer.’

‘Well, let’s just make the most of it, that’s all I’m saying.’

She got up, pulling on a T-shirt. ‘Yin will eat everything in sight. He’s got a killer whale’s appetite. We might have a full fridge now, but leave that lot unsupervised for too long and we’ll
be boiling nettles by tomorrow, I guarantee it.’ She went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. A while later, she came out, wrapped in a powder-blue dressing gown, drying her hair with a towel.

He made her sit down beside him on the bed. ‘Promise me something.’

‘What?’

‘That no matter how things with Crest and your brother turn out, or how many times the others come banging on our door this week, we’ll find a few hours to be alone every day.’

She stopped towelling the ends of her hair and looked at him, smiling. ‘Easy,’ she said, and kissed the tip of his nose. ‘I promise.’

He reached through the folds of her gown and ran his fingers along the inside of her thigh. ‘Don’t get dressed yet.’

Herbert Crest had checked into the Crowne Plaza in the city and didn’t arrive at the house until seven each evening. So they spent the afternoons the way young people are entitled to spend lazy spring days: drinking beer and sangria and endless cups of coffee, playing badminton on the back lawn until the grass wore down under their trainers, barbecuing steaks and peppers and burgers in the intermittent sunshine, dozing in patio chairs on the porch behind the rectory with their jumpers on, listening to Yin’s mix tapes through a ghetto blaster. It almost felt like summer. The air was mild, and a drowsy daylight survived until five or six, and though dark clouds loomed above the rooftops sometimes, they only ever spat a gentle, lukewarm rain.

For Oscar, the afternoons were for sprawling with Iris on the riverbank, under the shade of the elms and willows, holding hands and peering up at the branches as they moved against the breeze. The afternoons were for finding a cool, dim room upstairs in the house, removing Iris’s clothes and kissing her bare skin until the sound of some searching, beckoning voice came slicing through the hallway, and the slap of feet on the stairs made her
turn away and scramble to pull on her skirt. The afternoons were for Jane and Iris to make daisy-chain jewellery, lying frontways with their legs kicking out from under their dresses, and for the boys to accept them when they were done, wearing them as proudly as diamonds until they wilted and broke apart. The afternoons were for group photographs, posed on the rectory porch, all smiles and bunny-ears and arms around each other’s shoulders; as well as quickly taken snapshots for which nobody was prepared, shut-eyed and funny-faced. The afternoons were for sitting in silence around the big wide patio table, reading books they found in the house; other times they were for contagious laughter, the sharing of jokes, silly ideas, idle thoughts; to speculate, to ruminate, to reminisce. Most of all, the afternoons were for the simple enjoyment of being together.

The longer he stayed in the tranquillity of the Bellwether house, the more Oscar understood the need the wealthy had for distance, for acreage. There was something to be said for being so removed from civilisation—the rest of the world became an afterthought. There was nobody here but the Bellwethers and the flock. Nothing could disturb them. They’d all turned off their mobiles, tired of struggling for reception, but a call would come through on the landline every now and then from Barcelona. Oscar would hear Iris talking to her parents, assuring them that nothing had gone up in flames. ‘Did you want to speak to Eden?’ she’d ask, each time. ‘Well, alright, I’ll tell him you rang.’

Most days, Eden wouldn’t get out of bed until past eleven, and after spending an hour with everyone at lunch, he would go off into the organ house alone; ‘to think,’ he said, or sometimes, ‘to get my head in the right place’. They would hear him tuning the organ and testing the registration for the better part of the afternoon, while they got on with the task of enjoying themselves. Usually, he would emerge around two or three o’clock, and insist that everyone join him in taking a ride along the Cam in the family punt. He’d pack a picnic basket in the kitchen, fill it with
cheese and fruit and a few bottles of wine, and carry it down to the riverbank. Oscar would help him drag the punt out of the bulrushes and they’d load the provisions together. He found he liked Eden at these moments; there was something friendly about the way he’d take the ghetto blaster and ask, ‘What do you think will do the trick today, Oscar? I’ve got Schubert, Mahler; I’ve got Brahms and Liszt. You choose.’

All of Eden’s pretensions seemed to abandon him the instant he got on that boat and took the pole. ‘All aboard, all aboard,’ he would call to them in a sea captain’s voice, and they’d climb in one by one, with Eden helping them down, steadying the boat against the bank. He was a graceful punter and would glide them along the river with effortless pushes of the wooden pole. In fact, his skill for punting was the only thing he didn’t brag about. ‘Oh, it’s not difficult,’ he told them once, ‘it’s
a priori
.’ After a while, he’d give in to Marcus’s constant pleas for a turn at the pole, and they’d switch places. The ride would become turbulent as Marcus staggered around on the till, wetting their heads with drips of silty water each time he made a manoeuvre. Eden would lie back then, with his feet upon the treads and his head against the lip of the boat. He’d run his hands through the tall grass on the bank as they limped along the river, or conduct the up-and-down music bleating from the ghetto blaster with two pointed fingers, eyes closed.

It was only during their first punt ride together on Tuesday afternoon that they talked about Herbert Crest. For the rest of the week, they used their excursions on the boat to get merrily drunk and tell stories about their school days. It was Yin who brought up the subject. Eden was standing high up on the till, punting like a master, his stringy silhouette bearing down over them. They were drifting along soundlessly when Yin said: ‘So how come we gotta do this seven nights in a row? Seems a little excessive.’

Eden lifted the pole out of the water, holding it across his body like a tightrope walker. ‘I’ve explained that already, Yinny. You should’ve listened.’

‘I listened. Just didn’t really understand it.’

‘We’re relieving his pain,’ Jane said.