The Bellwether Revivals (6 page)

Oscar watched the orange flames whip steadily against the hearth. His head was foggy with beer, and the voices in the room felt heavier now. Only Iris seemed to be completely sober. She went to turn off a couple of lamps and it gave the lounge a sedate, womb-like feeling—warm, safe, certain. Then she began clearing the mess, sweeping things into a cardboard box.

‘For God’s sake, Iggy, will you stop tidying up,’ Marcus said. ‘You’re making us all feel guilty. I’m getting itchy just watching you.’

‘Leave it, sis,’ Eden agreed. ‘Petra will do it tomorrow.’

‘Petra?’ Yin said. ‘Tell me that’s not your cleaner.’

Eden blushed, his cheeks turning as ruddy as the open fire. ‘She’s more than just a cleaner; she’s a bloody godsend.’

‘When did you get her?’

‘A few weeks ago. From one of those agencies. She whistles when she hoovers, like one of the seven dwarfs.’ Eden snapped his fingers. ‘For heaven’s sake, Iggy, come and sit down.’ He patted the empty space to his left. Iris set the cardboard box down on the floor, dusted off her hands, and went to join him.

‘I can’t believe you have a cleaner,’ Yin said. ‘That’s so bourgeois.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with having a cleaner,’ Marcus said. ‘My parents had two when I was growing up. They were the only people who ever played with me. I loved them like sisters.’

‘Well,
that
explains a lot,’ said Jane.

Eden stared across the room. ‘What do you think, Oscar? You’re the only one here who’s done an honest day’s work in his life. Is there anything wrong with having a cleaner?’

Oscar gave the question less thought than it probably required, and his words came out a little harder than he intended. ‘As long as you treat her well, and pay her what she’s worth, I don’t see the
harm. We’ve all got to make a living. If there weren’t rich Cambridge students like you lot, too lazy to pick up your own socks, there’d be more people out on the streets.’

The room went quiet, and their eyes all seemed to turn in his direction. ‘Nicely put,’ Iris said, a wide smile on her face.

Yin smiled too. ‘I guess we deserved that.’

‘Do you remember that time at prep when the House Parents made us clean the boarding house, so we selotaped ham under Ian Ashbee’s bed?’ Eden said to Marcus, laughing. ‘For weeks, nobody could figure out where the smell was coming from. Ha! The look on his face!’

‘Why did they make you clean the boarding house?’ Jane said.

‘Marcus stole a box of KitKats from the tuck shop.’

‘For you. I stole it
for you
.’

‘Yes, and we
both
got punished.’

‘Hey, what about the time you Tipp-Exed the whole of “Kubla Khan” on the common room wall?’ Yin said. ‘That was classic.’

‘You could’ve got expelled for that,’ Iris said. ‘Dad didn’t think it was so funny.’

‘He has no sense of humour. They were never going to kick
me
out.’ Eden leaned back, satisfied with himself. ‘I was practically running the Oratorio Choir for them, I seem to recall.’

‘And anyway, what kind of idiot thinks Coleridge is graffiti?’ said Marcus. ‘They should have thanked you for elevating the décor.’

‘My point exactly.’

One school story was regaled after another, and for the first time all night, Oscar began to feel genuinely excluded. He was drawn to the urbaneness of their lives, their refinement and culture, but he just couldn’t find a way into their discussion, no matter how hard he tried to interject. They were pulling memories from a private source, from some reservoir of experiences they’d all shared. All he could do was sit there and listen, and watch Iris as she laughed along, telling her own anecdotes about ‘midnight
bridge club’ and swimming regattas. For a while, she barely even looked at him. If she asked him a question directly, it was only to confirm something she already knew: ‘Isn’t that the most hilarious thing you’ve ever heard? Oscar, isn’t that just brilliant?’ The more they talked, the more disconnected he felt.

They were like a family. They called each other pet names: ‘Edie’, ‘Iggy’, ‘Yinny’, ‘Janey’ (only Marcus seemed left out in this regard, though Yin once called him ‘Em’). They teased each other, correcting Marcus when he mispronounced a word, and goading Yin by asking which country was most doomed: one with a flagging NHS, or one with a thriving NRA? Oscar knew he couldn’t compete with this kind of friendship. He had never been as close to anyone as they were with each other. It gave him a despairing feeling in his stomach, like stumbling on a crowded pavement. His attention began to wander.

Iris must have noticed. She turned to him and said: ‘Oh, this is probably so boring for you. I’m sorry.’ Her smile seemed to lighten the space between them all at once. ‘We always do this—end up talking about the old days. And then we wonder why nobody wants to spend any time with us.’

‘I’m a bit lost, that’s all,’ he said. ‘I mean, it sounds like some of you were at school together and some of you weren’t. How do you all know each other?’

It was Jane who spoke up. Her voice was prim, gravelled. ‘Marcus and Eden met at prep—the King’s school. They were both in the chorister programme until they were, what, twelve, thirteen? It’s
such
a demanding programme they have there; every boy has to learn about five instruments and rehearse with the choir eight hours a day. Can you imagine? I’d go spare.’

‘It wasn’t so bad really,’ Eden said.

Jane continued: ‘They met Yin later, at Charterhouse. The three of them were Gownboys.’ Yin raised his glass and nodded proudly. ‘And I boarded with Iris at St Mary’s. I’m sure we didn’t mean to end up at Cambridge together, but here we all are. The
Bellwethers and the flock.’ Jane smiled, revealing a small gap between her front teeth.

‘I think you just called us all sheep again,’ Marcus said. ‘I hate it when you do that.’

Eden reached for one of the wine bottles that were standing at his feet and went about uncorking it. ‘Alright, I’ve got a better story for you, and not about the old days,’ he said. ‘This one’s about Oscar.’ He began filling up everyone’s glasses, and when he reached Oscar, he tilted his head and winked. ‘You should tell them how
we
came to meet.’

Oscar shifted in his seat, head still woozy. ‘God, I don’t think I can remember.’

‘I heard it already,’ Marcus said. ‘You were flirting with Iris outside the chapel.’

‘He wasn’t
flirting
,’ Iris said.

‘Alright then, he was talking to you perfectly innocently outside the chapel, with no lurid thoughts in his mind whatsoever. Along comes Eden, blah blah blah.’

‘That’s not the whole story,’ Eden said. He looked at Oscar. ‘Do you mind if
I
tell them?’

‘Go ahead. I don’t even know what you’re on about.’

Oscar listened as Eden relayed the events of Wednesday evening in detail. ‘… and I was sitting up in the organ loft, and noticed him straight away. Picked him out as a heathen like
that
. He looked so bloody awkward, so unsettled. He was just staring at the choir like he could see the words coming out of their mouths. Afterwards, Iris tells me the only reason he went into the chapel was because he’d heard the organ. Ask him, he’ll tell you. He hasn’t been to church in years.’

‘Well, he’s hardly the only non-believer in the world,’ Jane said.

‘Yeah, big deal,’ Yin said. ‘My uncle Sun Fat is practically a Satanist. Who cares?’

Oscar got the feeling he was being examined. His mouth was going dry.

Eden sat back and folded his arms. ‘You’re missing the point. I wasn’t supposed to be playing on Wednesday. The other organ scholar, Barnaby—it was supposed to be his night. But he’d sprained his wrist, so, like a trooper, I covered for him. And I thought, sod it, I’m not going to stick to Barnaby’s boring old programme—Krebs, Gibbons, Bruna—we’ve heard it all before. The Director won’t care if I change the voluntary. So I played something different, something by Mattheson.’

‘You
didn’t
,’ Marcus said.

‘Too bloody right I did. And look—’ Eden grinned, gesturing towards Oscar with outstretched arms. ‘It worked. Living proof.’

Oscar was having difficulty following their discussion; his mind was clouded with drink, bleary with tiredness. But his head was just clear enough to know that he resented being talked about this way, as if he were something Eden had found flattened on the street and brought inside for the others to prod with a stick.

‘I don’t get it,’ Jane said.

‘He played the Mattheson piece, Jane. Keep up,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s really quite extraordinary.’

‘I still don’t get it,’ she said.

Oscar finally spoke up: ‘Who the hell is Mattheson?’ It came out rather bluntly.

Silence fell in the room.

‘Johann Mattheson,’ Eden said. ‘He’s my fixation
du jour
. I could talk about him all day, every day, for the rest of my life, and I still wouldn’t tire of talking about him.’

‘Oh God, please tell me you’re not going to do your big Mattheson spiel,’ Iris said.

‘He wants to know,’ Eden replied. ‘Who am I to deny him?’

‘Oscar, listen to me, there’s still time.’ Iris looked at him with a pitying sort of expression—mouth pursed, brow lifted. ‘You should get out of here before he bores you into a slow death.’ Oscar didn’t respond. He needed to know what point Eden was trying to make. ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ She
rose from the chesterfield and picked up a few stray glasses. ‘I’m going upstairs to lie down. There’s only so many times a girl can hear the same story.’ She carried the empties into the kitchen and didn’t return.

When Eden started to talk, a certain glee stretched over his face. Johann Mattheson, he told them, was a German composer and theorist. He’d once been a musical prodigy, playing the organ at churches in Hamburg from the age of nine, and singing in the chorus of the Hamburg opera. Handel was one of his contemporaries, and they were close friends for most of their lives, until rivalry eventually got the better of them, ending in a duel. ‘It was a proper sword fight outside a theatre—the real McCoy,’ Eden beamed, ‘and Mattheson nearly killed him, so they say, but a button on Handel’s coat stopped the blade and saved him.’ He was a prolific composer, writing mostly church music—’What they like to call
sacred
music. He was a master at it’—and several operas—’Okay, his operas are tedious, I’ll admit it, but there are some incredible ideas in there, some really profound musical things happening.’ Most of his compositions, Eden said, were lost during the Second World War. But it was Mattheson’s theories about music that he was most interested in—in particular, a book called
Der Vollkommene Capellmeister
.

Oscar kept hearing Iris’s footsteps through the ceiling. He wondered what she was doing up there, if she’d be coming back down.

‘Mattheson and Descartes go together like cheese and wine,’ Eden went on. ‘I’ve really become quite enraptured with the man’s ideas. I’ve read everything he’s written, everything there is to read about him—diary extracts, letters, postcards—anything I could get my hands on. I’ve even started to collect things—anything he might’ve touched.’

‘A man needs a hobby,’ Marcus said.

‘Yes, true, but it’s more than that. He was really onto something in
Capellmeister
but he never quite followed through with his ideas. I think he got rather scared by what he could achieve. Oh
dear, I’m not explaining this very well …’ Eden paused, looking up, as if the answers were somewhere in the gilded swirls of the light fixtures. Then he landed his gaze on Oscar. ‘Remember what I was telling you in the cab, about Emotivism?’

‘Some of it,’ Oscar said. He mostly recalled the warmth of Iris’s hand on his knee, how well she’d endured her brother’s sermon on the failings of her chamber group.

‘Well, let’s extend that line of enquiry …’ Eden sipped his wine. ‘If I told you there is music that makes you happy, and some that makes you sad, you wouldn’t disagree with me, right?’

Oscar shrugged. ‘I suppose not.’

‘Well, Mattheson believed—and
I
believe—that composers have the power to affect and manipulate your emotions, your passions, as Descartes put it. When they’re writing music, they have the potential to make you feel whatever they want you to feel. Sort of like a chemistry experiment: if certain elements are put together in a certain formula you get a certain reaction. Would you say that’s a big leap to make?’

‘I don’t know,’ Oscar said. ‘Maybe.’

‘Well, Descartes didn’t think so. He said even those with the weakest souls can acquire an absolute command of their emotions, if—and I quote—
if art and industry are used to manage them
. And Mattheson believed the same thing. He said that, in some structural way, music and emotions resemble each other. The man was a genius, and I don’t use that word lightly.’ Eden waited. There was a glimmer of something in his expression that made Oscar feel uneasy, a slightly manic thrill in commanding the whole group’s attention. ‘Mattheson took Descartes’s ideas and applied them to music. In
Capellmeister
, he basically lays down a set of instructions for composers, to show them how to induce certain emotions through their work—to achieve that empire over the passions Descartes was talking about.’

There was a long moment of quiet. Everyone looked at each other.

‘Don’t mean to be dim,’ Jane said, ‘but what does any of this have to do with Wednesday night?’

Eden put his hands together and set them on his lap. He recrossed his legs. ‘It’s simple. The piece I played for the voluntary, which Oscar heard, was by Mattheson. It was a piece he composed for a Lutheran church in Hamburg—I’m talking centuries ago. Marcus and I found the notation in a little antique shop in Heidelberg. We only paid fifty euros for it. They didn’t even realise what they had, but we’ve had it verified. It’s the real thing.’

‘So?’ Jane said.

‘So this piece, as far as I can tell, is something he wrote towards the end of his life. Back then, he wanted to see if he could prove his theories in his compositions—to write music that could make people feel a love for God. Sort of like revival music.’