第14章 Music at the Long Table

Quintin Marlowes came down on the evening of the sixth of January and played to a full common room, and it went badly, and everybody let him. He played for eleven minutes. Pippa counted, because she counted everything, and she stood by the fifth lamp the whole eleven minutes with her sleeve on her hand, and she watched the flame lean towards him twice and away from him four times, and she could not for the life of her tell whether that was the music or the draught from the door. He finished. He put the fiddle down. Nobody said anything. "You could say something," he said. "There isn't anything to say," said Pippa. "It was a tune. You played it. I've watched a great many people in this room all winter say seven kinds of untrue thing to each other and I have found that I would rather have this." "You've been on that ladder nine nights," said Marlowes. "Whoever has been up there, they've been up there nine nights. I've counted." "The ninth lamp." "Ninth." "It's crooked as well." "Everything in this passage is crooked," said Marlowes. "The beams, the floor, and one man, and I'd not name him in front of the fire." * * * The next night he played four pieces instead of one and went up at seven, and the room did not empty when he went. That was the thing Pippa noticed. He went up, and Amberley picked up his glass and started talking to Elverston about a woman he had attended in 1968, and the common room did not go back to being a place where people were being polite to each other. On the fourth night there were people who had not heard him play at all, because they had not come down before, and one of them was a woman of about fifty who had walked up from Selborne in the snow on purpose and stood in the doorway for the whole first piece without taking her coat off. * * * She came the next night, and the night after, and on the sixth she raised her hand at the end and asked him a question about the second piece. Marlowes looked at her. "Which bar." "The slow one. The one where it stops." "That wasn't mine." "It wasn't yours?" "There's a rest in it. Whoever wrote it wanted the fiddle to stop and let the room make the noise for four seconds, and the room won't do it, and everybody who plays this thinks the room has failed them." He turned the fiddle. "I've stopped giving them the four seconds, because the four seconds only work if everybody believes you're going to need them, and this room's not that room." "What room is?" "One where the fire's been going since morning and there's nine people in it," said Marlowes, "and not one of them has anywhere to be at six o'clock tomorrow." * * * On the ninth night she asked him to come and see her, and Pippa watched him come down the stairs afterwards with the fiddle case under his arm and a face like a man walking into weather. "Her name's Bredon," he said. "I know who she is." "Then you'll know she came up here on purpose to hear me and I've spent a week deciding to be bad at it on purpose." He set the case against the wall. "Do you know what the worst of it is? She isn't listening to the notes. She's listening to whether I'm frightened." "Are you?" "Yes," said Marlowes. "Every night. And she can hear it, and she came back." * * * Pippa lit the lamps on the tenth and the eleventh and the twelfth and found, each night, that the seventh wanted doing last of all, and that the ninth wanted doing in the middle of a piece, which she had not expected and never mentioned, and that the first, at the front door, leaned whenever Marlowes put the bow on the string. On the thirteenth she said, out loud, in the passage, with the fourth lamp in her hand: "If you want to tune, do it against a flame." He came down the stair in his shirtsleeves and bare feet and took up his place by the long table, and she stood with the ninth lamp and held it at shoulder height for an hour and forty minutes. "Again," he said at the end. "That one again, and slower, and hold it at the height of the bridge, not the scroll." "Is this how it works?" "This is how *he* worked," said Marlowes. "Flame, brass, and a room with people in it. It's not a secret. It's just that nobody's wanted to stand still for an hour and forty minutes in a corridor since about 1964, and that's the whole secret." * * * On the seventeenth she found him at the bottom of the stairs at two in the morning with a lamp that was not lit in his hand. "Seventh's alight." "Seventh's alight," he agreed. "I went up to check because I couldn't hear anything and there's a way of hearing a house that I have now." "Are you all right?" "No," said Marlowes, "and I'll tell you what's wrong with it, since you're the only person in this house who'd sit still long enough. I've been going deaf for four years. Left ear first. I put it off because I was twenty-six and I was working, and then I put it off because I was thirty and I was in a band in Amberley, and then I put it off because I was thirty-four and the band ended and there was nothing after it." He turned the lamp over in his hands. "I can hear you. I can hear you perfectly, at arm's length, and I can't hear you across a room in a coat. And I have not told anybody, and I have been playing six nights a week for a month, in a room of strangers, with no idea at all whether they can hear a note." "You could have said something." "Would you have let me stay?" "No," said Pippa. "I'd have let you stay and I'd have got Elverston and he'd have looked at it and then you'd have had to sit with the answer." "Yes." He put the lamp down on the stair. "So instead I've been standing in your corridor at two in the morning finding out that I can play to a flame and follow it, and it turns out I can do that better than I ever could follow a metronome, and I'd have got that in my thirties if there'd been somebody in my thirties willing to hold a light." * * * Pippa sat down on the stair beside the lamp with her back against the wall. "Morroway," she said. "Doctor's coming at ten. I'll be in the passage and you can be in the common room with the door shut, and I'll have brought your tea up, and nobody in this house will know anything has happened except Elverston and me." "And after?" "After, you play six nights a week, and I hold the ninth lamp, and on the nights when you can't hear, the flame will tell you, and when the flame can't tell you I'll tell you." She looked at him. "You'll never be able to know what you sound like again. You understand that? It's not going to come back. And you're going to sit in a mountain inn holding a lamp over a book for the rest of the winter, and nobody down in the valley will ever know that a man in an inn at Fernhollow can't hear a violin past the corner." Marlowes sat on the stair in his shirtsleeves with the lamp between his feet and did not say anything for long enough that Pippa thought he had gone to sleep. "You've known me seven weeks," he said at last. "Seven and a bit." "My brother sold my fiddle. Two years ago. He took it to a pawnbroker in Selborne and the pawnbroker had it in his window for eleven months and then gave it to his daughter for her wedding." He laughed once, without any amusement at all in it. "I bought it back off her for four pounds less than it was worth and I have never told a living soul, and I have played it in this house every night for a month, and if you'd asked me at the door in December what the trouble was I'd have said it was money and I would have been telling you nearly the truth." * * * He went up at four. At six he came down and played four pieces, and the room was full, and at the end of the last one the flame on the ninth lamp stood up straight as a nail and Marlowes turned round and looked at it with his mouth slightly open. "Held," he said. "It held." "That's the third time tonight." "Marlowes," said Pippa, "you may put it down as soon as you like. The lamp's a lamp. It's not a certificate." "No," he said. "It's a certificate. I just don't know who issued it." ---