Foreigners, Drunks and Babies Read online

  However, the cost to the Academy of recruiting and training scribes and clerks, the journeys undertaken through the length and breadth of the Empire, the additional expenses incurred in policing the Academy enclave and providing protection for academicians, has been nothing short of ruinous. Though requests were made to the Emperor for subventions in his declining years, it was by that stage far too late. He had turned away from the world. He was intent on the composition of his deathless cycles of last poems. It has been whispered he expired a disappointed man. Yet who could have predicted that so much misery and waste of talent would come from an effort to determine once and for all certain literary values? Who could have thought that to let such values flow with the times and to leave them in the casual care of those who need them most would prove the safer and more enlightened policy?

  And thus, my Lady, it is with the most miserable regret and humble supplication that I write on behalf of those who remain in the Academy to beg your indulgence in granting our request. We most dearly beg that your Majesty temporarily suspend (should your Majesty think fit) the operation of the late Emperor your father’s Anthology Decree.

  Many years have now passed since I submitted the Academy’s report to my Lady (who would so quickly blossom into such a fine teller of tales) and it had, I am pleased to relate, more than the desired consequence. Not only did our young Empress revoke her father’s Decree; in her wisdom, she ordered us to set about removing the daggers and poppies from all the poetry collections that had been – I allow myself the liberty of a man surely on his deathbed – defaced by that meddlesome Imperial command. She even designed a scalpel-like knife, adapted from one of those used by her Court beauticians, to help us fulfill our duty to the Empire’s culture. It was yet again an arduous task, once more almost bringing our long-suffering Academy to its knees, what with such considerations as the hire and control of workers travelling far and wide to undertake so menial an operation. Without an interim subvention from the Empress herself, the so-called Special Poetry Award, I am by no means sure that we would have been able to bring to completion her far more enlightened Decree.

  We did our best; but let me end with a word in your ear. Should you, dear understanding reader, by chance or good fortune come across any of the very few copies that must have escaped our vigilance, be sure to treat it with the utmost care. The two or three so far surfacing in the markets for such things have been described in catalogues and leaflets, like the one I’m holding at arm’s length before me, as, and I quote, ‘quite literally priceless’.

  Music Lessons

  Mr King would soon blow full time. You can see the whistle gleaming in his hand. He puts it to his lips. Mr King’s face is gaunt and wrinkled, permanently yellowed from jaundice. He was a fighter pilot in the war.

  At the far end of a cindery field stretching down one side of a raised canal bank, your team is mounting its final attack. Your side’s a goal down, but there’s still time. You’re the goalie. Sometimes you play on the wing. It’s cold standing in the goalmouth. Your clogged soles suck and squelch as they lift out of the ill-drained pitch.

  Inflating his cheeks, Mr King blows a single, high-pitched note and he shoos the boys off with his arms. Your stomach feels as heavy as your feet. The metal rugby boot studs clatter on flaked, subsiding flags. It’ll take a bare twelve minutes to get back home.

  You cross the vicarage’s oval front lawn and ring its blue front door bell. Mum welcomes you back, but you’ve scurried right past her in the porch, and make down the hallway for the dining room. There the upright piano silently takes up its corner. You’ve got just half an hour.

  First, the theory: taking a tram-lined exercise book from the scuffed leather case with its metal bar fastener hooked over the handles, you sit down at the dining table. The book of questions and the clean pages of staves lie cushioned on the thick brown felt, covered by a tablecloth at meal times. The felt is to save the wood from further heat rings, spills and scratches.

  It will take you fifteen minutes to finish the exercises if you keep concentrated on the job. Some stewing steak, browning in the pressure-cooker, loudly sizzles. It’s going to be hotpot, and you can’t wait.

  Counting the lines and spaces, you transpose phrases from one key to another; calculate major and minor intervals; guess the time-signatures for a few groups of notes, scratching in the bar lines, double ones at the end of each example. With no time to play over the passages, you complete the tunes by writing in resolving scales, mechanically arriving at runs of notes that dip under or hover over the tonic, sliding through a dominant seventh below, or a tone above, rising or toppling on to each final chord. You check the agreements with key and time signatures, then put the top back on the fountain pen and blot the page with a soft sheet that sustains yet another bluish ghosting of notes and other marks.

  Slumping back in the chair, you snatch a moment to survey your handiwork. There are the lines of crotchets, quavers, semi-breves and minims, the clefs, rests and signatures, with here and there a crossing out or smudge. But you can’t help regretting that the tails and strokes, the filled-in ovals sitting on or straddling the lines, never look so sure or evenly spaced as in the printed scores.

  If only they could look right too! Closing the manuscript book and questions and returning them to the scuffed music bag brings a further sinking to the heart. Will you ever learn? But there’s no time like the present, so you sit down at the piano and lift the keyboard lid. The maroon hard cover of Hymns Ancient and Modern, the detail from Piero della Francesca’s ‘Nativity’ on The Penguin Book of English Madrigals, assorted dingy piano tutors, a bowl of fruit, and a white table lamp (which shivers distinctly at each note struck) top the dark wood box of the instrument.

  Now the most likely piece lies open on the stand, the brass hooks restraining its pages. For the first time this week you study the score. Initially Miss Austin had given you Edith Horne’s exercises, scales that are to familiarize fingers with the keys: the yellowed and dirt-ingrained ivory of the white notes, the more remote and less frequently visited black ones. The C above middle-C makes only a light, high, almost inaudible tinkling sound. The G below it stays down when you press it, and has to be deftly flicked level with its neighbours by a fingernail after the note has been struck. When the scales and exercises don’t produce the slightest improvement in your application, you’re tempted with books of tunes a boy might be expected to like: popular lyrics, light classics, film themes … Now you’re groping your way through The Sound of Music.

  This Wednesday, as your eyes attempt to decipher the thick black towers of bass-clef chords, to co-ordinate them with the slopes and ranges of the melody, you’re trying to make out through a cacophony of forgotten incidentals, unsyncopated hands, and halting rhythm, ‘Doe, a deer, a female deer’ – its catchy lilt and cadence; later, Herb Alpert’s ‘Spanish Flea’; and, with only a few minutes still to spare, ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’. But it’s too late to hope for better now. You race out through the kitchen and, for Mum, let fall a loud ‘Goodbye.’ She’ll have responded with a ‘Goodbye, dear’ – but too slowly for the words to reach you before you slam the back door, their sound hanging as if unwanted in the all but empty vicarage, like a cough between movements in some hushed concert hall.

  You leap down the stone steps of the back door porch and feel the small cobbles of the yard through the soles of your shoes, cobbles that had rung to the hooves and wheels of the minister’s horse and trap. The grille-like fodder baskets are still there in the stables where Dad parks the family’s grey-green Morris Oxford. The upper floor was really once a hayloft. You’d seen the trapdoors in the ceiling above the fodder baskets where they used to push the hay. The place is strictly out of bounds.

  ‘The floorboards aren’t safe,’ Dad said, ‘and there’s an end of it.’

  The great blue double doors to the yard stand open and you walk on round the oval path of the vicarage garden. It’s like a tiny racetrack made of r
ed shale. There you and your brother would go for spins on bikes and crash, scraping your knees, which would be streaked with two kinds of red, the blood and the grit.

  St Catherine’s Street is unadopted, its cobbles reaching past the church gate as far as the vicarage drive, but no further, petering out into cinders, rocks, and mud. At the bottom of the street, with Mr Hill’s corner shop still open for everything, you can see where the brew falls sharply to lock-ups and allotments: ramshackle planking and tarpaulin with smashed fences and overgrown plots, places for playing war with friends from school.

  Rathbone’s bread factory is more distant, beside the flights of locks in the canal; on the other bank, beyond its tow path, there rise the Wigan Alps, a high plateau of pale grey slag, the peaks giving this landmark its wry local name. Across these ashen tracts towards the railway lines are red brick ruins of abandoned workings, dilapidated pit-heads; their cable wheels and conveyors, corrugated iron roofs, and steel winding gear all dismantled for scrap. Only the walls of former outbuildings, stores, baths, and the offices have been left to the gangs of the surroundings, the Mount Pleasant district.

  When Mum and Dad invited you boys into their bedroom one morning and told you the family was moving to a new parish in a town called Wigan where the coal mines were, you didn’t want to go. It was frightening to think of living in a place covered with bottomless holes in the ground. But they’d said not to be silly: it was quite safe. Now you’d seen the curious circular walls, three times your height, with the sharp glass of bottles cemented on their tops, and had been told by Hawthorne, one of the boys at school, that these were the old pits.

  Not even the bravest or stupidest in the gang would climb those walls. It would be worse than falling into the canal, being sucked down, dragged under by the water rushing through the vents in the slimy green lock gates, or trapped in the mud at the bottom where brass beds and mattresses, bike frames and prams, even old pianos, all brown with rust and mud, would catch a boy’s heavy feet and hold him under until, as it said in the Bible, he woke up dead.

  The steps lead through a crack in the terrace next to Hawthorne’s house. There are three long flights, and two main roads to cross. You always want to walk slowly, be as late as you dare, since every moment will lessen the harrowing; but gravity, which you’d done in science with Mr King, makes it hard not to go down those steps without breaking into a scamper. Dropping, as tardily as possible, you recite the terms you expect to be quizzed on. Some you’d already learned from the theory book. They were in Italian: allegro, prestissimo, andante, vivace, con brio, molto lento, poco a poco, da capo al fine. But there were always more of these mysterious expressions to repeat once more to the end.

  With a regular beat, the soles of your shoes strike the worn stone steps, sometimes splashing in the shallow remnants of recent breaks in the weather the south Lancashire plain’s been enjoying. How many times have you descended into Hell? That’s what your brother Andrew calls it. And how many times will you have to rise again? A memory catches you unawares as you trip down a further flight of steps. You’re about the height of a bedside table. There are grey-carpeted stairs leading to the right and a bedroom door near the top of them. It opens into a small room filled with a vast double bed. The bed has a curved utility-style veneered headboard. Lying under the covers is your dad, his head down at eye level. Someone must have told you he is ill.

  There’s a small round metal tin on the table near Dad’s head. Fiery-devil it says on the tin. The lid shows a bright red dancing figure with glinting eyes and a leering mouth, a sharp toasting fork in one hand and an arrowed tail. Why do you remember that? Is it because Dad was a curate then? Perhaps you asked Mum what the tin was. ‘Embrocation,’ she said: something she rubs on his back. But how can something with the Devil on it make him feel better?

  That was the first time you thought of your father as mortal. He was ill. He might die. Even though he was a clergyman he too could go to Hell if he were bad! How many times have you climbed those flights of steps, after promising to practise as you leave the lesson, and then let it slip as soon as you’re home, so that the music case can just go and rot for another week? People could encourage you, or they could threaten. It was as though the latter, or personal dislike, or an aversion of some kind, would make you not even so much as lift a finger.

  So it’s with bone-idle stubbornness that you view the prospect of learning to play the piano. For six days out of seven you’ll bask in that attitude. Then, for a few hours on Wednesdays, you have to sweat it out.

  ‘You’ll regret it when you’re older,’ Dad said. ‘I never had your opportunity when I was a boy, and I regret it, bitterly.’

  But why then did Mum, who had musical parents, hardly ever play?

  ‘I love all kinds of music,’ she’d say. ‘If only I had more time …’

  You can’t let them down, but then neither can you satisfy them, except in theory. Every six months since you were eight, without exception, you’re entered for a Grade of the Royal Schools of Music exam, and without difficulty have managed five of them. Granted, you never pass with distinction, but you do get through. Then the certificates arrive in the post. Even turning up half an hour late for the most recent, mistaking the time, you still scraped through. But this tale of successes was coming to an end. Grade Five is the last you can take without any performing grades, and you’ve taken none. So now it’s learn the piano, or no more certificates.

  You reach the bottom. Crossing Darlington Street diagonally in the direction of the black-painted front door with its brass knocker struck so many times, you can feel the trepidation and sickness catch at your throat. Ringing in your ears are the musical terms you’ve been repeating (rallentando, allegretto), like charms against flight.

  Passing outside, trying to beat down the emotions that will rise in you at her appearance, the door being opened to you almost now, you hear the playing of another pupil. It always shames you to notice in the confident attack, the cascade of notes, the occasional repetitions with a slight variation of stress and interpretation, the discrepancy between the pleasure it must give Miss Austin to teach Colin, and what the next hour will bring.

  But it’s Miss Austin’s old mother who opens the door to your knock, and who, after taking the duffle coat, shows you into the sitting room where her daughter gives the music lessons. Colin is tucking the red Associated Board examination scores into his briefcase.

  ‘Would you remind your father of the entrance fee?’ Miss Austin says. ‘I’ve entered you and forwarded the sum myself.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Austin.’

  ‘And you can let your parents know I’m confident you are ready for Grade Eight, Colin,’ she adds.

  Showing Colin out, Miss Austin motions you to sit down. While she’s away in the hall, perhaps giving a few more words of encouragement to Colin, you take in the familiar surroundings. The Austins’ sitting room is reserved for proper acquaintances and strangers. Their upright pianoforte has been placed on the left behind the door. On the other side, far enough along the wall to allow it to open, there stands a presentation sideboard, supporting above its laminated drawers a number of photographs of different sizes in variously elaborate frames.

  One contains a picture of Miss Austin as a girl, and tucked into the corner is a small snap of her in teenage; another shows Mr and Mrs Austin together on their wedding day in the fashions of before the war; and a third is of Miss Austin herself standing next to a man of about her age and height. Behind the armchair in which you’re sitting is a lamp on a tall wooden stand. A metronome contained behind the metal plate in its pyramid box is placed on the piano corner. In the net-curtained bay window, on a dark wood whatnot, a beaten brass bowl contains a flourishing double-eared cactus.

  Miss Austin returns, and, closing the door, acknowledges your presence. Jane Austin is a pretty redhead with freckles over the bridge of her nose and cheekbones; she’s wearing a moss-green skirt and a pale pink blouse, and wears a lit
tle makeup which may have slightly softened and faded especially from about her mouth during the day. Her features are smallish, somewhat angular. She speaks with less of an accent than you, and perhaps there’s a trace of the Irish in it. Miss Austin teaches music at the St John Fisher School, and supplements her income by giving lessons to support her widowed mother. She is saving with her fiancé, a Rathbones Bakery manager, towards the day when they will be able to marry. Miss Austin plays the organ for Mass on Sundays and for weddings on Saturdays at St Mary’s Church.

  Smoothing her skirt behind her, Miss Austin takes her usual armchair on the other side of the electric fire. It’s one of the imitation-coal types, whose glass-fibre fuel glows and flickers as an aluminium fan wheel rotates in the currents of warm air produced by the red electric bulb.

  ‘Let’s see how you’ve got on with the exercises, John,’ is how she begins.

  You hand her the manuscript book and move across to the upright dining-room chair placed beside her armchair for this purpose. Miss Austin checks through the answers quickly, pointing out occasional errors.

  ‘Careless!’ she says.

  When she comes to the exercise where the student is required to complete the tune by composing a few bars, Miss Austin stands over the piano and fingers the answers you’ve attempted.

  ‘Did you compose these on the piano?’ she asks.