The Courage Consort (8 page)

Unexpectedly, however, the director had no difficulty with her claims of mysterious cries in the night; in fact, he went pensive, as if faced with something that genuinely might lie outside the scope of art and arithmetic.

'This is a story I have heard before, yes,' he said. 'In fact, it is a kind of legend about the forest here.'

'Really,' breathed Catherine, gazing at him over the top of her steaming coffee mug. Roger was already fading away next to her.

'It began, I think, at the end of the war. A…' Jan van Hoeidonck paused, checking the Dutch-English dictionary in his head. 'A mental defective mother … can you say this in English?'

'It's all right,' said Catherine, loath to explain political correctness to a foreigner. 'Go on.'

'A mental defective mother ran away from Martinekerke with her baby, when the army, the liberating army, was coming. She didn't understand these soldiers were not going to kill her. So she ran away, and nobody could find her. For all the years since that time, there are reports that a baby is crying in the forest, or a … a spirit, yes?'

'Fascinating,' said Catherine, bending forward to put her cup down on the floor without taking her eyes off Jan van Hoeidonck. His own gaze dropped slightly, and she realised, with some surprise, that he was looking at her breasts.

I'm a woman,
she thought.

Roger spoke up, pulling the conversation back towards Pino Fugazza and his place in contemporary European music. Had the director, in fact, heard
anything
by the composer?

'I heard his first major piece,' Jan replied, unenthusiastically. '
Precipice,
for voices and percussion—the one that won the Prix d'Italia. I don't remember it so well, because all the other Prix d'Italia entries were played on the same night, and they also were for voices and percussion. Except one from the former Soviet Union, for flügelhorn and ring modulator…'

'Yes, but can you remember
anything
about Fugazza's piece?' pursued Roger.

The director frowned: for him, dwelling on musical events that were in the past rather than the future was obviously quite unnatural.

'I only remember the audience,' he admitted, 'sitting there after four hours of singing and whispering and noises going bang without warning, and finally it's over, and they don't know if it's time to clap, and soon they will go home.'

Roger was getting politely exasperated.

'Well … if you haven't heard
Partitum Mutante,
what makes you think it'll be any better?'

Jan waved a handful of fingers loosely around his right temple.

'He has since that time had a big mental breakdown,' he said. 'This could be a very good thing for his music. Also, public interest in Fugazza is very high, which is good for ticket sales. He is very famous in the Italian press for attacking his wife with a stiletto shoe at the baggage reclaim of Milan Airport.'

'No!' said Catherine incredulously. 'Is she all right?'

'She is very fine. Soon I think she will be divorced and very wealthy. But, of course, the music must stand or fall on its own qualities.'

'Of course,' sighed Roger.

Later, when the director had left, Roger stood at the window, watching the yellow minibus dwindling into the distance, on the long black ribbon towards Brussels. As he watched, the sun was beaming through the windowpanes like a trillion-watt spotlight, turning his silver hair white and his flesh the colour of peeled apple. Every age line and wrinkle, every tiny scar and pockmark from as far back as adolescence, was lit up in harsh definition. Eventually the intensity of the light grew too much for him; he turned away, fatigued, blinking and wiping his eyes.

Noticing that Ben Lamb was still sitting in the shady corner of the room, and Catherine lying sweating and sleepy on the couch, he allowed himself to express his first pang of doubt about the value of the project they were all engaged on.

'You know, I'm really rather tired of this glamour that madness is supposed to have, aren't you?' he said, addressing Ben. 'It's the little marks on the score that ought to be sensational, not the behaviour of Italian lunatics at airports.'

Catherine, not happy at the disrespect with which madness was being tossed about here, said, 'Couldn't this Pino fellow just be young and excitable? I wouldn't presume to judge if anyone was definitely mad. Especially an Italian I've only met once. He surely can't be
too
barmy if he drives a Porsche and wears Armani.'

'Poetically put, dear—if somewhat mysterious in reasoning,' remarked Roger.

'No, I meant, he's obviously not … um … otherwordly, is he?'

There was a pause as the men pondered the significance of this word.

'What do
you
think, Ben?' said Roger.

'I think we should sing as much as we possibly can in the next four days,' said Ben, 'so that, by the time of the premiere, we can at least be sure of being less confused than Mr. Fugazza.'

***

A
ND SO THEY SANG
, as the sun blazed in the sky and the temperature inside the château climbed towards thirty degrees Celsius. It was worse than being under a full rig of stage lights; all five of them were simmering in their clothes.

'We'll end up performing this in the nude,' suggested Julian. 'That'll put some sensuality into it!'

The others let it pass, appreciating that he was a man on heat.

When, at last, they were all too tired to go on, Roger and Julian went to bed—not with each other, of course, though lately Julian looked as if he might soon consider anything, even his fellow Consort members, as a sexual possibility. His initial disgust at seeing Dagmar breastfeed had, with the passing days, softened to tolerance, and then hardened to a curiosity whose keenness embarrassed everyone except himself. Dagmar, usually indifferent to the petty libidos of unwanted men, grew self-conscious, and the feeding of her baby became an increasingly secret act, perpetrated behind closed doors. In Julian's presence, she tended to fold her arms across her breasts, protectively, aggressively. After half an hour staring Julian down, she would leap up and start pacing back and forth, a dark band across her bosom where her sweaty forearms had soaked the fabric of whatever she was wearing.

On the night of the director's visit, with
Partitum Mutante
finished off and Julian safely gone to bed, Dagmar sat slumped on the couch, Axel at her breast. Ben sat by the open window, staring out at a sky which, even at a quarter to eleven, still had some daylight left in it. The unearthly quiet was descending again, so that even the drip of a tap in the kitchen could be heard from the front room.

Oddly revived by having had her milk sucked from her, Dagmar decided to take Axel out for a walk in the forest. She did not invite Catherine; the older woman guessed this must be one of those times when Dagmar wanted to have the run of the world alone with her baby, explaining things to him in German.

'Be careful,' said Catherine as they were leaving. 'Remember the legend.'

'What legend?'

'A mother and her child disappeared in that forest once, at the end of the war. Some people say the baby is still out there.'

Dagmar paused momentarily as she made a mental calculation.

'Well, if we meet a fifty-seven-year-old baby on our walk, maybe Axel will like to play with him,' she said, and sauntered into the dark.

Left alone with Ben, Catherine weighed the pros and cons of going to bed. On the pro side, she was exhausted. But the house had absorbed so much heat that she doubted she would sleep.

'Do you want anything, Ben?' she offered.

'Mm? No, thanks,' he replied. He was still sitting by the window, his white shirt almost transparent with sweat. For all his bearlike bulk, he had no body hair, as far as Catherine could see.

'How are you, anyway?' she asked. It seemed a faintly absurd question, this late in the night. 'Tired,' he said.

'Me too. Isn't it funny how we've lived here together, day after day, and sung together endlessly, and yet we hardly say two words to one another?'

'I'm not much of a conversationalist.'

He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, as if about to release his soul into the ether, leaving his body behind.

'You know,' said Catherine, 'after all these years, I know hardly anything about you.'

'Very little to tell.'

'I don't even know for sure what nationality your wife is.'

'Vietnamese.'

'I thought so.'

Their communication eddied apart then, but not disturbingly. The room's emotional acoustic was not full of shame and failure, like the silences between her and Roger. Silence was Ben's natural state, and to fall into it with him was like joining him in his own world, where he was intimately acquainted with each sleeping soundwave, and knew no fear.

After a while, sitting in the golden-brown front room with Ben in the stillness, Catherine glanced at her watch. It was almost midnight. Ben had never stayed up so late before.

'Did you always want to be a singer?' she asked.

'No,' he said. 'I wanted to carry on coxing.'

She laughed despite herself. 'Carry on
what?
She was reminded of those dreadful comedy films her father had never allowed her to see, even when she was old enough to be going out with Roger Courage.

'At university,' Ben explained, 'I was a coxswain in a rowing team. I called instructions through a loudhailer. I enjoyed that very much.'

'What happened?'

'I became involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement. Cambridge wasn't the most left-wing place in those days. I lost most of my friends. Then I got fat.'

You're not fat,
Catherine wanted to reassure him, as a reflex kindness, then had to struggle to keep a straight face in the moon face of absurdity. Reassurance is such a sad, mad thing, she thought. Deep inside, everyone knows the truth.

'What do you really think of
Partitum Mutante,
Ben?'

'We-e-ell … it's a plum part for a bass, I have to admit. But I don't see us singing it far into the twenty-first century somehow.'

Again the silence descended. Minutes passed. Catherine noticed for the first time that there were no clocks in the Château de Luth, except for those inside the computers and the oven, and the wristwatches worn by the human visitors. Perhaps there had once been splendid old timepieces which some previous guest had stolen—she imagined Cathy Berberian stealthily wrapping an antique clock up in her underwear as she was packing her suitcase to go home. Perhaps there had never been clocks on these walls at all, because the château's furnishers had understood that the sound of seconds ticking would have been maddening, intolerable, in the forest's silence.

Suddenly, there was a plaintive, inarticulate wail from outside, a cry that was more high-pitched and eerie than anything Axel was capable of. Catherine's flesh was thrilled with fear.

'There!' she said to Ben. 'Did you hear that?'

But, looking across at him, she saw that his eyes were shut, his great chest rising and falling rhythmically.

Catherine jumped up from the couch, hurried to the front door. She opened it—very quietly so as not to wake Ben—and peered out into the night, which was impenetrably dark to her unadjusted eyes. The forest was indistinguishable from the sky, except that there were stars in one and not the other. Catherine was half-convinced that Dagmar and Axel had been consumed by some lonely demon, swallowed up into the earth, never to be seen again. It was almost disappointing when, minutes later, both mother and baby materialised out of the gloom and strolled up to the château, Dagmar's white trainers luminescing.

'Did you hear the cry?' said Catherine as Dagmar reached the threshold.

'What cry?' said Dagmar. Axel was wide-eyed and full of energy, but his mother was exhausted, overdue for bed. She swayed in the doorway, looking as if she might consider handing her baby over to Catherine for a while.

***

N
EXT DAY
, R
OGER
telephoned Pino Fugazza, to tell him that there was a problem with
Partitum Mutante.
A technical problem, he said. They'd rehearsed it so thoroughly now, he said, that they were in a position to tell the difference between awkwardnesses that arose from unfamiliarity with the score and awkwardnesses that might be … well, in the score itself.

While Roger spoke, the other members of the Courage Consort sat nearby, wondering how Pino was going to react, especially as Roger was pushed,
poco a poco,
to be more specific about the nature of the problem—which was that, in a certain spot, Pino's time signatures just didn't add up. The Italian's daring musical arithmetic, a tangled thicket of independent polyrhythms, was supposed to resolve itself by the 404th bar (symbolising the 4,004 years from Creation to Christ's birth), so that Roger and Catherine were suddenly singing in perfect unison, joined in the next bar by Julian and Dagmar while Ben kept lowing underneath.

'The thing is,' said Roger into the phone, 'by the 404th bar, the baritone is a beat behind the soprano.'

A harsh chattering sound came through the receiver, indecipherable to the overhearers.

'Well…' grimaced Roger, adjusting his glasses to look at the computer screen. 'It's possible I've misunderstood something, but three lots of 9/8 and one lot of 15/16 repeated with a two-beat rest … are you with me?'

More chatter.

'Yes. Then, from the A-flat, it goes … Pardon? Uh … Yes, I see it right here in front of me, Mr. Fugazza … But surely thirteen plus eight is twenty-one?'

The conversation was wound up very quickly after that. Roger replaced the telephone receiver on the handset and turned to his expectant fellow members of the Consort.

'He gives us his blessing,' said Roger, frowning in bemusement, 'to do whatever we want.'

It was a freedom none of them would have predicted.

Later that afternoon, while the Courage Consort were taking a break to soothe their throats with fruit juice, a car pulled up to the house. Roger opened the door and let in a grizzled photographer who looked like a disgraced priest.