The Courage Consort (3 page)

'I … don't … know if that would be such a good idea,' he said, his tone pensive and musical, as if she'd asked him his opinion and he had deliberated long and hard before responding.

'Is that so?' she said coldly. 'Why not?'

'Well, I just thought, if we're being given this space—this literal and metaphysical space—to rehearse in, far away from noise and distractions, it … well, it seems odd to introduce a crying baby into it, that's all.'

'My baby isn't a very crying baby, actually,' said Dagmar, flapping the hem of her T-shirt with her fists to let the cooling air in. 'For a male, he makes less noise than many others.' And she walked past Julian, to stake her own claim to the Château de Luth.

'Well, we'll find out, I suppose,' Julian remarked unhappily.

'Yes, I guess we will,' Dagmar called over her shoulder. On her back, nestled inside her bulging rucksack, a spiky-haired infant was sleeping the sleep of the just.

By the time the Courage Consort settled down to their first serious run-through of
Partitum Mutante,
dark had come. The burnished lights cast a coppery glow over the room, and the windows reflected five unlikely individuals with luminous clarity. To Catherine, these mirrored people looked as if they belonged together: five Musketeers ready to do battle.

If she could just concentrate on that unreal image, shining on a pane of glass with a forest behind it, she could imagine herself clinging onto her place in this little fraternity. The rehearsals were always the hardest ordeal; the eventual performance was a doddle by comparison. The audience, who saw them presented onstage as if they were a projection from far away, knew no better than that they were a closely knit clan, and this allowed them to behave like one. The artificiality of the concert platform was insulated against disturbing events: no one argued, or sulked, or asked her questions she couldn't answer, or expected her to say yes to sex. All they did was sing, in perfect harmony. Or, in the case of Pino Fugazza's
Partitum Mutante,
perfect disharmony.

'F-sharp there, Kate, not F-natural.'

'Honestly?'

'That's what's written. On
my
printout, at least.'

'Sorry.'

The trick was lasting the distance from now till the premiere.

***

L
ATE ON THE FIRST NIGHT
in the Château de Luth, tucked up in a strange, soft bed next to Roger, Catherine turned the pages of
Extended Vocal Techniques
by the Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble of California. It was a book she resorted to sometimes to put her to sleep, but tonight it had the additional purpose of keeping physical contact off the agenda.

Roger was reading a coffee-table book on Karel Appel, a Dutch artist, that he had found in a bookshelf downstairs—or rather he was looking at the pictures, she supposed; she didn't think her husband had managed to learn Dutch for this adventure. He
might
have done, but she imagined she'd have noticed something if he had.

Slyly she glanced at him from time to time, without moving her head. He was sinking farther down in the bed, inch by inch. Her almost invincible insomnia would give her the edge soon enough, she hoped. She read on.

Vowels can be defined linguistically by the characteristic band of overtones each contains. These bands are narrowed to specific pitches, so that the singer's voice resonates in a way that reinforces a single harmonic partial of the fundamental being sung. Such reinforced harmonics make it possible to write in eight parts for four singers.

Catherine wondered if, rather than losing her sanity, she was perhaps merely getting old.

'Crazy character, this Karel Appel,' remarked Roger.

'Mm,' she said, drawing her knees up a little under the quilted eiderdown to better support her book. She wished this new piece by Pino Fugazza didn't require her and Dagmar to do so many things that distorted normal perception. Other people might think it was terribly exciting when two females singing in thirds made the airwaves buzz weirdly, but Catherine was finding that her nerves were no longer up to it. Even the way a sustained A-flat tended to make an auditorium's air-conditioning hum gave her the creeps lately. It was as if her face was being rubbed in the fact that music was all soundwaves and atoms when you stripped the Baroque wrapping paper off it. But too much sonic nakedness wasn't good for the spirit. At least that's what she was finding lately, since she'd started coming … adrift. A bit of Bach or Monteverdi might be more healing than what this Pino Fugazza expected of her.

Cowardly sentiments, she knew, from a member of the Courage Consort.

When Roger finally fell asleep, it was long past midnight. She didn't know exactly what time, because the only clock in the room was Roger's watch, hidden underneath his pillow as he breathed gently off the edge of the bed. It was strange the things you forgot to bring with you to a foreign place.

Catherine laid
Extended Vocal Techniques
gingerly on the floor, drew the eiderdown up to her chin, and switched off the bedside light. The silence that descended on her then was so uncompromising that she was unnerved by it. It was as if the whole universe had been switched off.

On the threshold of sleep, she found herself wondering how a person might go about killing herself in an environment like this.

At dawn, there were birds. Nothing on too grand a scale, just a few piccolo chirps and twitterings from species unknown. How strange that in London, in her flat near the half-dozen trees planted by the council, there should always be such a racket in the mornings from throngs of birds making the best of things, while here, in the middle of a forest, so few voices should be raised. Either there were only a handful of birds out there, chirping at the tops of their lungs in a hopeless attempt to fill the vacuum, or else there were millions and millions of them, all keeping silent. Sitting in the branches, waiting for the right moment.

Catherine was aghast to find herself becoming afraid: afraid of all the millions of silent birds, infesting the trees, waiting. And, knowing how irrational this fear was, she despised herself. Surely she was too crazy to live, surely it was high time she cleaned herself off the face of the planet, if she'd sunk to feeling anxiety even at the thought of birds sitting contentedly in a forest. It was as if the frayed and tangled wiring of her soul, submitted to God for repairs, had been entrusted to incompetent juniors instead, and now she was programmed to see danger in every little sparrow, dire warning in music, deadly threat from the love of her own husband.

Roger was sleeping like a stone beside her. He might wake any second, though; he never snuffled or fidgeted before waking, he just opened his eyes and there he was, fully conscious, fully functioning. Catherine looked at his head on the pillow, the head she'd once been barely able to resist stroking and kissing in adoration. She'd been so grateful he wanted her, so in awe of his conviction that he could shape her into something more than just another lost and self-destructive girl with a pretty soprano voice.

'You've got it inside you,' he'd promised her.

Yearning, terrified, she'd left her father's house at long last, and given herself over to Roger Courage instead.

Now she lay next to him in this strange soft bed in Belgium, and she wished she could breathe some magic odourless chloroform into his open mouth, to keep him safely asleep while she worked up the courage to face the day.

She mentioned the unearthly silence of the night to the others, over breakfast. She was light-headed with relief by then: she'd leapt out of bed and got herself ready before Roger was able to rouse himself from an unusually deep sleep. She was already in the kitchen, fully dressed, before he made his way downstairs to join his fellow Consort members. She was cooking
havermout
—porridge by any other name—for a ravenous unshaven Ben, and generally behaving like a sound-minded person.

'Good morning, darling,' she said, as her husband appeared. He looked a bit nonplussed, padding down the stairs in his herringbone-patterned socks. (All the men were in socks, actually, caught between the château's house rule against wearing shoes and their own reluctance to wear the leather clogs provided for them.)

Julian, bleary-eyed and elegantly dishevelled, was nursing a coffee without drinking it. As soon as Catherine mentioned the silence, he said he'd noticed it too, and that it wasn't natural. He'd lain awake all night because of it.

Catherine shuddered; the thought of her and Julian lying awake at exactly the same time in the same house, with only a wall between them, was disturbing somehow. It wasn't that she disliked him really, but she was so thin-skinned nowadays, so hypersensitive, that this simultaneous insomnia in a shared darkness was like unwelcome intimacy.

'And the way there's hardly any birdsong, in this big forest: that's a bit unsettling, don't you think?' she suggested hesitantly, wary of stepping into the spotlight of mental frailty but enjoying the idea of communication with her friends.

Dagmar was cutting fresh bread on the kitchen worktop, her snoozing baby lying swaddled in a blanket on the same surface, right near the breadboard, as if she meant to slice him next.

'That silence is what you get if you climb a mountain,' she said, referring to her favourite pastime. 'I like it.'

Having failed to get any joy from womankind, Catherine looked back to the men. Ben was now busy with the
havermout,
however, spooning it through his big soft lips, and Julian had turned his attention to his coffee, so that left only Roger.

Her husband searched his soul briefly for some appropriate observation.

'A vocal acoustic as silent as this must be very rare, when you think about it,' he said. 'I mean, just think of that recording of Hildegard songs by Gothic Voices … There you have Emma Kirkby singing like a lark, and in the background you can hear cars accelerating along the road!'

Julian had to disagree.

'That's because the sound engineers placed the microphones such a long way back from the singers,' he said, 'to try and get that monastery acoustic. They should have miked the singers close up, and put some reverb on later.'

'You can't mean that,' protested Roger. Catherine had ceased to exist, forgotten as she tried to make toast for him under the oven grill. 'The acoustics of a place are unique and precious.'

'For a live performance, yes,' agreed Julian. 'I've never sounded better than in that cellar in Reykjavik, with the stone walls and everything. But Gothic Voices weren't performing, they were making a record. Who needs the Church of St. Jude-on-the-Wall in Hampstead if at the flick of a switch or the push of a fader you can have a churchy acoustic, without the bloody Volvo vrooming up the road?'

A smell of burnt toast started to pervade the kitchen. Little Axel coughed uneasily and started flapping his arms gently on the kitchen worktop, as if trying to fly away to a fresher square of air.

'Sorry,' said Catherine.

***

P
ARTITUM MUTANTE
was sheer pleasure for at least one of its performers: Benjamin Lamb. Pino Fugazza was obviously very taken with the sonorous chanting of Tibetan monks, and had written oodles of something very similar for the bass parts of his own piece.

While the other members of the Courage Consort had to learn complicated and athletic melodies in perverse keys, Benjamin was required to hum like an organ for bar after bar after bar. At the very beginning of the piece, his vocalisations were intended to convey the birth of the universe, no less, and he tackled this with an eerie resonance worthy of a holy Hi-malayan—indeed, of several.

'Mwooooooiiiinnng, mwooooooiiiiinnng, mwooooooiii-innng,'
he sang, from deep within his huge belly.

Pino Fugazza was cunning, though: he'd timed low baritone swoops for Roger to cover Ben's pauses for breath, creating the illusion of a ceaseless foghorn of bass. And, just when it seemed that the music was going to remain abyssally dark forever, Julian came in with a high, pure voicing of the first articulate word: 'God'—pitched in G major, of course.

The real trouble came with the entry of the females, a reflection no doubt on the Italian's philosophy of human relations as filtered through Judeo-Christian tradition. The manuscript became alarmingly complex at this point, the notes crowding the bar lines like dense troops of ants squashed wholesale on the way to something irresistible.

Dagmar and Catherine sang till the sweat was falling off their brows onto the pages. They sang until their throats ached. They sang until they both felt moved to stare at each other imploringly, like two plantation slaves willing each other not to collapse, for that would be to invite a far worse fate. The hours were passing, not in linear flow, but in endless repetitions of two minutes here, five minutes there, and then the same two minutes from before, over and over and over.

Finally, as night was again falling, the Consort reached the end of the piece, and, one by one, each of the singers faded away, leaving Catherine to bring
Partitum Mutante
to its close. The very last note was a very high C, to be reached over several bars from two octaves below, then sustained for fifteen seconds, increasing in volume, then diminishing to nothing. Ecstatic that the end was in sight, Catherine sang it with the purity and sureness of a fife.

For several seconds after she had ushered the last traces of the note into oblivion, the rest of the Courage Consort sat mute. In the extraordinary quiet of Martinekerke forest, they breathed like babies, no one wanting to be the first to speak.

'I was worried about that one, I must confess,' said Roger, finally. 'Well done.'

Catherine blushed and concealed her throat behind one hand.

'I just seem to be able to hit higher and higher notes all the time,' she said.

The silence moved in again, as soon as she'd finished speaking, so she pressed on, making conversation to fill the void.

'Maybe if I'd had one of those fearsome Svengali mothers pushing me when I was young I could have been a coloratura by now.'