The Bellwether Revivals (51 page)

‘Keep reading,’ Dr Paulsen said, blinking his eyes open. ‘I wasn’t asleep, I promise—just concentrating on the words.’ But Oscar knew that the old man’s attention span was limited, despite the progress he’d made in the past twelve months. At least he could hold a conversation now without forgetting the name of the person he was talking to; at least he no longer looked back at everyone with blankness.

Oscar folded the dust-flap between the pages and closed the book. ‘We’ll pick it up again tomorrow. It’s almost three. You’re due a sleep.’

Paulsen sighed loudly but he didn’t argue. ‘What time will you be coming tomorrow?’

‘Same time as always.’

‘Eleven?’

‘One,’ he said, helping Paulsen onto the bed. ‘It’s always one. You know I can’t get out of class ’til then. You remember that, don’t you?’

‘Yes, yes, I remember that.’ Paulsen turned on his side. ‘I’m old, I’m not an idiot.’

As Oscar went to close the curtains, he saw the gardeners working in the Cedarbrook grounds—three men were clipping back the wisteria vines and dumping the off-cuts into a trailer. A pleasant, grassy smell rose up towards him. He could hear the quaint snips of pruning shears. When he turned back to say goodbye, he found the old man was fast asleep.

That morning, Oscar had woken early to get to the bookshop in town before class. He’d seen it there on the New Arrivals table, with its gleaming white cover and its simple black lettering: D
ELUSIONS OF
H
OPE BY
H
ERBERT
M. C
REST
. It had felt as weighty and important as he’d imagined it would be, and the pages still bore that fresh-off-the-press scent. On the inside of the dust jacket, there was a new picture of Crest, grinning under the peak of a Red Sox cap. It had been a thrill to take the book to the counter and hand over his money, and to hear the cashier say, ‘Oh, right, I heard about this,’ as she rang it through the till. ‘Wasn’t this supposed to be out, like, ages ago?’

He’d taken the book to Jesus Green, thinking he should read it in the same spot he’d first read
The Girl With the God Complex
. After a few lines of the introduction, he’d felt like he was having a private conversation with Herbert Crest again, as if the old man had simply picked up the phone to say hello. It was a fine book, maybe even his best. It had all the Herbert Crest hallmarks: the earnest prose, appealing to the informed as well as to the layman; the softly spoken address to the reader; the loving way he reported his personal memories to support his psychological arguments.

But Oscar knew the book had not been published the way Crest had intended, and it gave him an uneasy feeling as he turned the pages. There was no mention of the Bellwethers—Theo’s injunction had seen to that. It was an older version of the manuscript, the draft that Crest had finished and submitted to his editor just a few days before Oscar had introduced himself.

He’d followed the progress of the civil suit in the papers. It had been announced in full-page articles in the summer. By the time the court ruled in February, the public’s interest had waned, and the story was reduced to single paragraphs in the outer columns, under dispassionate headlines like:
Killer’s Father Wins Book Injunction
. All of Crest’s notes and manuscripts, barring the original, had been permanently sealed by the judge. Spector & Tillman had released a statement to say they were disappointed with the ruling, and that the original version of the book would now be released; it was a version they were pleased with, despite ‘fundamental differences’ from the final draft. (‘It’s still a terrific book,’ Diane Rossi had told
Publishers Weekly
back in March, ‘so everyone should run out and buy it. But, at heart, it’s not the same book. The final draft is edgier; it reaches more surprising conclusions than the original version, that’s all I’m allowed to say. Even the title is different. And, no, I can’t tell you what it is. That’s court ordered.’) When the book was finally released, a year off schedule, the buzz surrounding it had died down. The public’s imagination had been seized by somebody else’s misery, some other disaster.

Reading in the dreary light of Jesus Green, Oscar had found himself wondering—as he’d often wondered—about Crest’s final version. He’d thought about the sit-downs in the organ house, all those conversations with Eden he would never get to hear. Part of him was glad of the injunction, because knowing these things would only have left him feeling numb and helpless all over again. He couldn’t bear to face Eden again on those pages, to hear the tenor of his thoughts, his justifications, his dangerous,
high-minded ideas. What good were answers now? What good were Crest’s observations and judgements? He didn’t need another opportunity to pick apart the details, to look for the places he could have done something to prevent what happened. He was already living with the burden of those missed chances. Only Theo, his lawyers, and a few senior editors at Spector & Tillman knew what Herbert Crest had really thought. And, for now, if not for ever, Oscar was comfortable with that.

He’d gone to college that morning, feeling fairly bright. It was still difficult to be back in a classroom where the other students were three or four years younger than he was, but he tried to see it as an advantage. He’d already read most of the books on the reading list for his English Lit class and been awarded an A+ for his last assignment, an original poem. Because he was only there to learn, he wasn’t distracted like the boys in his history lessons were when some girl bent over to pick up a pencil. He was taking psychology, too—he was compelled by it. He liked learning about Stanley Milgram and the release of free radicals in the brain. When his A levels were over, he wasn’t going to be taking a gap year in Australia or New Zealand. He’d already wasted too much time. But he was thinking of taking a short holiday—to Paris maybe, or Reykjavik.

It was past three o’clock now, and Dr Paulsen was snoring. Outside, the afternoon was honeybright and the roads were slick with rain. He left the old man with
Delusions of Hope
on his bedside table, ready to be picked up again tomorrow, and made his way through the corridors and stairways of Cedarbrook. All the same old faces were in the parlour—Mrs Brady, Mrs Lytham, Mrs Kernaghan, Mrs Green—and a couple of new auxiliaries were chatting with Deeraj at the nurses’ station. He could hear Jean’s voice bounding from her office. Sometimes, he missed working here. He missed the residents and their gratitude for a good deed, the way the place smelled, how it creaked under his shoes. He still came by twice a week to visit Dr Paulsen, and he still borrowed
books from his shelf, one at a time. There was comfort here—the safest, most reliable kind—and he didn’t want to let it go completely. He’d been working at a hotel in town for a while now. It was lighter work, better paid, and easier to fit around college, but it wasn’t the same as Cedarbrook.

When he got to the front garden, he stopped. Across the old city, the ground was slowly drying out and the air was thick with petrichor. He could almost taste it, like a sweetness on his tongue, and he stood there for a long while, just breathing it in. He lived for moments like this now: for a fleeting scent of the damp earth, for the whiff of a clove cigarette. They were the only things that ever brought her back to life.

He didn’t take the shortcut because he knew the North Gate would still be closed. The pavements were busy with students and tourists and girls with clipboards hustling him to hire punts or take the sightseeing bus. He passed along St John’s Street, stepping out of the way of cyclists, breaking through the crowd. Ahead of him, the grey spires of the King’s College Chapel stood against the sky like gun barrels. There was a queue of people near the Gatehouse. The college would not be open to visitors for a couple more hours, but Oscar kept on walking towards the entrance. When the porter saw him coming, he gave a tender smile, and moved aside to let him through.

In the Front Court, the grass was so plush and green it seemed almost embroidered. The cobblestones felt blunt and familiar beneath his feet. He walked past the chapel, past the ashen gables of the Gibbs’ building, down the gentle slope of the back lawn to the riverbank. He could see his friends ahead of him now, gathered by the tiny patch of ground where they’d planted the bulbs last autumn. Yin was standing tall and wide, his thumbs hanging from his belt-loops. Marcus was right beside him, a full backpack on his shoulders. Jane was kneeling by the flowerbed, raking the soil with her fingers. He called out to them and they turned, waving. He was glad to see their faces again.

‘Look,’ Jane said, ‘they made it.’ She pointed to the mound of fibrous soil before her. The first blue petals of
Iris milifolia
had begun to bloom and seemed so fragile in the bright afternoon. ‘I can’t believe they’re flowering already.’

Once a week since last November, Oscar had come to check on them. They were difficult plants to grow—requiring just the right amount of moisture and sunlight, and he’d had to cover the roots with coconut husks to protect them from the wind and cold—but he didn’t care how much attention they needed. It was better to go to the peaceful grounds of King’s each week and tend to one small corner of earth, thinking of her, than to talk to a gravestone.

He stood with his friends beside the flowerbed, and while they filled him in on the things that had happened since they’d last seen each other, the river flowed by with the quietest of movements. He’d almost forgotten the sound of their voices, and he listened to them talk with a warm feeling growing inside him. Marcus was halfway through his Master’s and was doing an internship at the Royal Opera House in the summer; he was clearly excited about moving to London, though he tried his best to play it down. Yin was leaving next month to join a start-up company in San Francisco: ‘Silicon Valley,’ he said, ‘right back where I started.’ And Jane—’Well, I still have another term to get through,’ she said, ‘and then I’m thinking of retiring.’ There was consolation in knowing that the gears of their lives were still turning, despite everything.

They seemed pleased that Oscar was back in school. ‘Look around you, man,’ Yin said. ‘You belong here more than any of us. I know King’s is probably the last place you’d want to go, but you should think about it. The place could use more people like you.’

They stayed there talking beside the irises for over an hour, until the sky turned glum and the rain began to fall again. He felt better in their company and didn’t want to say goodbye. ‘We’ll go for dinner or something,’ Jane said. ‘We’ll call you.’ But he knew he wouldn’t see them again for weeks, because their lives were
just too different now, their schedules too complicated to manage. Jane hugged him farewell at the North Gate, and he shook Yin and Marcus by the hand. Then he watched the three of them go trundling along the old brick lane, slow and spirited, silent but together.

He stared up at the needling spires of the chapel. At five o’clock, the tower bells would sound, and the porters would open the college to the public. People would soon come streaming in to wait outside the vestibule for evensong. And he knew that once those big oak doors were open and the voluntary began, he’d have to be far away from here. The sound of the organ was impossible for him to be around; his heart would capsize with the slightest note. So he turned his back on the Front Court and went striding through town, hoping he might see something in the darkening sky that hadn’t been there yesterday.

A number of texts informed the writing of
The Bellwether Revivals
, but there are a few works that I am particularly indebted to:

Herbert Crest’s newspaper article on hypnotism is a fictitious reworking of Andi Rierden’s ‘A Hypnotist Taps the Mind’s Power in North Haven’ (New
York Times
, 12 December 1993). I have embellished upon the facts at the heart of Rierden’s piece to suit the requirements of the novel; in doing so, I have stayed close to the style and structure of her original article to retain a sense of authenticity.

Aspects of Elsa Ronningstam’s book
Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality
(Oxford University Press, 2005) helped me to define the limits of Eden’s ‘condition’. Richard Kivy’s
Music Alone
(Cornell, 1990) and
The Corded Shell
(Princeton, 1980) are key to my understanding of music aesthetics, though I’m sure Eden would take issue with some of his assertions about Mattheson. I relied on Hans Lenneberg’s translation of
Der Vollkomenne Capellmeister
, as published in
The Journal of Music Theory
(1958), when beginning to construct Eden’s musical philosophy.

Finally, Beekman C. Cannon’s comprehensive book
Johann Mattheson: Spectator in Music
was enormously valuable to my research, and I am grateful to Yale University Press for giving permission to reprint excerpts from it.

I would to thank everyone who supported me in the writing of this book, and those who helped bring it to the attention of readers. My agent, Judith Murray at Greene & Heaton, offered sage editorial comments and believed in the novel from the beginning; Grainne Fox and Suzanne Brandreth found it loving homes in the USA and Canada. I am very grateful to my editors—Francesca Main, for her perceptive readings and invaluable notes, Josh Kendall and Lara Hinchberger, for their additional insights and suggestions—Maxine Hitchcock, Jessica Leeke, and the hard-working teams at my publishers, Simon & Schuster, Viking Penguin, and McClelland & Stewart.

I owe a big debt of thanks to Adam Robinson for taking me to see the college choirs and making Cambridge feel like home, and to Birkbeck College for keeping the roof over my head while I wrote the book. Thanks for the help, advice, and encouragement of Ailsa Cox, Michael Marshall Smith, Robert Paul Weston, Meryn Cadell, Steven Galloway, Keith Maillard, Derek Dunfield, Amanda Lamarche, Carla Gillis, Cathleen With, Susan Olding, Catharine Chen, Cliff Flax, Alice Kuipers, Patrick Neate, Hellie Ogden, Luke Brown, Mark Wainwright, Bobby Kewley, Laura Brodie, Phil Kielty, and Anne Seddon. Thanks also to Kit Holland and Tim
Marwood for shedding light on unfamiliar aspects of student life, and Shaban Javed for kindness and numerous free meals.