第26章 The Tuner's Ear

## Quintin Marlowes The trouble with a deaf man and a warm room is that he never finds out. I had been six weeks in the Hollowell and eleven days in that room and I can tell you what it was like in a way nobody upstairs could, because they could see it and I could only work it out, and it took me until the fourth night and then it was obvious and then it was more obvious every night after. They had eleven lamps in a corridor and one of them was crooked and one of them was at the foot of the stair, and the crooked one came last, and every evening at six the house went round like a hand going round a clock. The first night I came down and stood at the bottom and heard nothing at all. Not the fire. Not a person breathing. Nine feet of stone wall with three people sitting against it in coats. That was not the worst of it. I want that understood. I could hear the fiddle perfectly. If I played a note in the room I heard the note arrive at the ends of my own fingers like a bell being struck in a cellar. What I could not hear was anywhere. I could not hear the room. * * * It took four nights to work out that a room is a noise. If you have never lost it you cannot be made to understand. A room full of people at a fire makes a noise, and the noise is nobody in it and it is not silence, and it is the thing you play to when you are playing to people. When I put a bow on a string in a hall in Amberley in 1974 I could hear the shape of the hall coming back off the wall behind the band, and I knew exactly how many people were in it and roughly where, and I could lean into it or pull out of it. In the common room of the Hollowell I could hear the fire, and a clock, and the girl with the counting, and Marlowes's own name because he is the man playing it. I could not hear the nine other people at all. * * * So on the fourth night I came down and stood at the back of the room in the dark and did the thing I had been avoiding, which was to play a note and count the answer. A bad fiddler plays to the room. A good fiddler plays to the room and is corrected by it, and the correction is the whole business of the room. I played an A on the open string and I waited, and nothing came back, and I played it again louder and still nothing, and a man at the third chair turned round and put his head on one side at the exact moment I would have sworn there was a silence. He heard nothing either. Because I had played nothing. Because I was playing to a room that had never sent me a syllable of my own music and so I had been playing the way a man talks into a telephone in an empty house, loudly, and with the pauses in the wrong places. I went back up and sat on the edge of the bed for about an hour. * * * And then I thought of the lamp. The fifth of the fifth night, she came out of the kitchen and said, "Marlowes. If you want to tune, do it against a flame." And she stood there with a brass lamp at the height of the fiddle's scroll for an hour and forty minutes and I could see the flame lean. That is the thing I want to put down while I still have this, because nobody is going to believe it and because I have spent four years being a man who believes things that sound like that. The flame leans. I had read it in a book when I was twenty and thought it was one of those pieces of stage business a music master does with a candle. I stood with a lamp in my hand and I could see it — see it better than I could hear a note — and it leaned towards me when the note was true and away from me when it was flat, and the size of the lean told me which, and how far to turn the peg. I did not know at first whether I was imagining it. You do not trust your own eye after four years of not trusting your own ear. So I checked it. I took the lamp and I turned a peg I knew was wrong by a quarter of a turn and I watched the flame go over and lie down on its side, and I turned it back and watched it come up. I checked it eleven times that night, and Pippa stood in the corridor for the whole of them holding it, and she said nothing at all, and I have decided since that if she had said one word I should have stopped and gone back to Selborne and taught children. * * * So I could hear a flame. That is what I had. For eleven days I had a flame that told me the truth about four strings, at the width of my own nose, in the dark, with nine people in the next room making a noise I would never hear. What I did not have was nine people. * * * On the seventh night I put it to her. I said: the room is the instrument and I cannot hear the room. And she said: then play to the lamp, and I shall hold it, and I shall tell you when the room does something. And I said: you are offering to stand in a corridor for four hours a night. And she said: I light eleven of them every night of the week and I have been doing it since the first of December and I do it in nine minutes. I shall do four hours of it standing still and it will be the only useful hour of my day. And she said the thing after that which I have turned over most since. She said: "Also, you are the only man in this house who plays anything, and there are two hundred and eleven people coming up a lane in a blizzard on Saturday to sit on benches, and if you play into a telephone in an empty house on Saturday night then you are not a musician, you are a man with a problem. Either way somebody in this room hears it. That is not a favour I am doing you. That is the whole reason there are eleven lamps." * * * So here is what I want to say about her, and I have been three weeks not saying it. She is twenty-nine. She came up this mountain on the first of December to sell a house. In nine weeks she has emptied a cellar into a village, cancelled a contract with a coach company, learned the order of eleven lamps, fed a doctor against his will, talked a shepherd into being fed, got herself out of a line she had rubbed out with a rubber, and stood at the bottom of a stair in the dark at half past six in the morning to find out whether a man with a hole where his name was was going to be all right. And she holds a lamp. That is the thing I will not get past. She holds a brass lamp at the height of a fiddle's scroll for four hours and takes a candle with her because she will not have the flame fail her, and she stands absolutely still, and when the fourth piece ends and there are four seconds of nothing at all in the middle of it — the rest, the four seconds she says only work if everybody believes you are going to need them — she holds the lamp a quarter of an inch lower. I asked her about that on the nineteenth night. "Why do you drop it?" "Because you are going to be frightened of the silence," she said, "and a man who is frightened of a silence plays through it. If the lamp is lower in the four seconds then I am looking at something, and you can look at what I am looking at." * * * And on the fourteenth of March the old fire answered. I did not tell her for four days and I am writing it here because I have told nobody else and I am not going to be the only person in this world who knows it. I was playing the ninth piece, which is the one I have played every night since January and which is eight bars repeated, slowly, badly, and it is not a tune I wrote. It is a thing that came into my head in 1977 and I have never written it down and I have never played it for anybody and there are four bars of it that are older than I am. The fire went up about a foot and a half without smoke and without a sound and stood there for the length of four bars. I could not hear the room. I heard the fire the whole time because the fire is nine feet away and it is made of a noise I have been listening to all winter and it is the one noise in this house that has never once stopped. And under the fire, for about two bars, there was another one. * * * It came up through the floor. It was not an echo. An echo is the same sound later and softer and I know the difference because I have been poor in a room in Amberley for two years. This was another player, at the same time, a bar behind, playing the same eight bars, and playing them correctly. I have not been able to play them correctly since I was nineteen. It stopped after two bars and the fire sat down again and the corridor went back to being a corridor. * * * I have been working on it since. Here is what I have. Whoever it was did not know the tune. It was a fiddle player and it had the eighth bars and it had them at a distance of about a quarter of a mile and it did not have them very well. It was playing from a written thing, or it was playing from something it had been told. And it was a bar behind me, which means it was not under the fire, it was under the floor, to the left, roughly on the line of the fourteen steps. And whatever it was, it stopped the moment it had four bars, the way a man stops when he has been interrupted by somebody coming into the room. * * * I have not written anything about this in the register. I am aware that I have written nothing about this in the register, and I am aware of what the Thawkeeper of the Hollowell said in the margin of a page in her aunt's writing, which I have not read and do not intend to read, and I am aware that there is a register in this house in which a great many true sentences have gone down and it has been made extremely plain to everybody who can read that not writing one down is a kind of cheating. I have thought about it for three weeks. I am going to write it down tonight, in full, and I am going to do it badly, and I am going to do it at the top of the common room tonight, with the whole house in it, and then the lady of this house is going to have to decide what happens to a guest who has written four lines in a book that cannot be unsaid. I would like it noted, in my hand, in this book, tonight, that I could hear it, and that I am the only person in this house who could not hear the silence, and that if it had been left to me to keep the covenant I should have kept the worst of it and let the best of it go, because a man who cannot hear a room will trust anything that is loud. And I would like it noted that she did not leave it to me. * * * That is all of it. That is everything I came up the mountain to find, and I did not find it until the fourth night, when a woman from the city stood in a corridor with a brass lamp in her hand and told me that the room was the instrument. ---