第35章 A Tune on the Road

Quintin Marlowes went down the mountain on the thirtieth of April with a fiddle case and a brown paper parcel and no particular idea at all. He had been in the Hollowell since the twenty-first of December and he had in that time eaten at a table every day for four months, played in a corridor for four hours a night for eleven weeks, and had a Saturday night in a mountain village to himself, which is not a career. * * * There had been no letter. That was the thing that everybody kept apologising for and he could not make them stop. There had been the *Amberley Courier*, which had a second desk for players and which had moved its second desk to a different town in 1978; a band at Selborne that had wanted a fiddler in 1974 and had disbanded; an orchestra in the city that had wanted a fiddler who could read and had not been able to tell in an interview whether he could, and he had lied about it, and the lie had come out afterwards, and the whole of the rest of it had gone downhill from there. "I can't read," he said. "I never learned. I play by ear and I've played by ear since I was six and I have never once pretended otherwise to a woman who wanted me to pretend, and the only person I did pretend to was a man who was not listening, in a room with twenty other men in it." "That's the last bus," said Pippa. "It's the last coach. I'll walk from Selborne. It's nine miles and I've done worse with worse." * * * He had packed in twenty minutes because he had not unpacked in four months, which was the habit of the house and not his, and the brown paper parcel was not a fiddle. "A tuning fork," he said, when she looked at it. "A-435. It's older than I am. My father's. I bought it back off the man in Amberley who bought it off the pawnbroker who took it off my brother in 1974, which is a sentence with three crimes in it and I've never told anybody in this valley any of it except the woman who gave it back to me." "When?" "Last Thursday. In the deep room. I went down the fourteen steps and I put it on the hearth-stone and I struck it, and I want you to know that I did that because I have been not going down there since the fourteenth of March and I thought I should." "And?" "And the ninth lamp leaned," said Marlowes, "and I stood there with a tuning fork in my hand and a brass lamp leaning, and I have been a musician for twenty-eight years and I could not have told you what I was hearing, and so I am going to put it in the parcel and take it down the mountain and put it in a case and be a man who has a tuning fork." * * * They went out to the coach together at half past three and the whole of the house was on the step, which none of them had been asked to do. "You needn't." "No," said Pippa. "But you will want somebody to have said it, so here it is said. You have been the best thing in this house since the sixth of January and you have had a bad winter of it, and the fault is not yours and it is also not mine, because I did not notice for eleven weeks, and everybody else here is not going to be told by me that I did not notice for eleven weeks." "You noticed on the fourteenth of March." "I noticed on the fourteenth of March," said Pippa, "and I did not do anything about it until the fourteenth of April, and you were on the stairs at two in the morning on the fourteenth of March telling me about your ear, and I went to the doctor in the morning and I did not ask you one single question for a month. I have thought about it every day. It's the worst thing I've done since I came up here." "The doctor asked." "The doctor asked," she agreed. "Which I am told is the whole of a medical practice and I am told it by a woman who has been thinking about her mother's chimney since 1949." * * * "Ruane — " "No." "Ruane is short for nothing. There's no Ruane in my family. It's the name on the bill at the theatre in Amberley and I took it when I was nineteen because a man called Ruane was better at it than I was, and the bill said Ruane Marlowes in front of a hundred and forty people, and I have been it ever since, and I'd not change it now." "Then what shall I—" "You'll use it," said Marlowes. "It's been useful for nine years. But you'll know what it is, and you'll know a man took a name off a poster because it suited him and never gave it back, and you'll be the second person in this house who has done that, and it's a family you could be proud of if the second one is your own housekeeper and the first one is the best barman this valley has ever had." * * * "It is a good name," said Pippa. "It is a good name," he agreed. "It is a name I have earned about forty times, and there are six hundred nights that nobody's heard, and I have got rather better at those six hundred, and that is what I have been doing in your corridor since the sixth of January, and you did it, and you should have it put in a book, and there is a book, and I have not written it down because a sentence can only be true once and I have not got mine yet." * * * The coach came up the lane and had to wait while the whole lane got out of the way. "Summer season," said Pippa. "Don't." "Listen to it. Eleven weeks from June to the middle of September. The valley has a school feast, a midsummer thing on the green that has stopped for eleven years because there is nobody who can play, a harvest supper at the church that has not had a fiddle in it since 1983, and a winter season from the end of October to the thaw, which is the one I am offering you and the one I would like you to take, because it is five months and I want five months of you and a Saturday night in the village with people in it." "You've found a fiddler." "I've found a man who plays against a lamp and cannot hear a room, which means he will play the same way for four hundred people as he does for eleven, and there is not one other player in this valley who can promise you that." * * * "That's a hell of a pitch," said Marlowes. "It's the truth dressed as a pitch, and I have had four months of practice at it with a schoolmistress and a woman of ninety-one and a cook, and they are all better at it than me." "And if I say no?" "Then you take the fork down the mountain and you go to Selborne and you put it in a case and you are a man with a fork and no room, and in about three years you will not be able to hear a fiddle at all, and you will not know it, because that is how it goes." Pippa put her hands in her pockets. "I am not going to argue. I have never once in this house argued with anybody who was leaving, and I am not starting with you. The gate's there. It's a four-mile walk to the post and the coach goes at four." * * * Marlowes got on. He got on and put the case in the rack and then got down again and came back up the lane, because Pippa had said the word *tuning fork* four times in twenty minutes and there was a thing he had been carrying in his pocket since the fourteenth of March which he had not told anybody about, including the woman who had held the lamp for him four hours a night for eleven weeks. * * * "There was something under the floor," he said. "I know. I heard it knock." "You heard it knock." "Tibb's floor gave on the fourteenth of March and she said the join had gone," said Pippa. "I heard it and I put a piece of board across the bottom of the stairs in the second week of April, and I did not tell the housekeeper, because he would have had the floor up in a morning and I did not want that. So it is a house that has a board across the bottom of the stairs, and there is a cook who knows why, and a girl of eleven who counted the stairs from under it and never said one word, and me." * * * "You have known since the fourteenth of March." "I have known since the fourteenth of March that two things happened under my kitchen floor on the same night at about two in the morning," said Pippa, "and that one of them was a man playing eight bars of something he says came into his head in 1977, and that the other one was a thing under the floor that plays the same eight bars a bar behind him and got them better than he did, and that it stopped when it had four bars, the way a man stops when somebody comes into a room." "The fire answered on the fourteenth of March as well." "It answered for a quarter of an hour," said Pippa. "I came down at half past two because the sixth lamp leaned, and there was a fire in that room four feet high with no smoke on it, and I sat on the step of it and watched it for forty minutes, and I could hear you playing through the floor, and I could hear the other thing, and I have never in my life heard anything like it and I have been listening to music since I was six." * * * "So you know." "I know that there is something in this mountain that plays a fiddle badly and knows the tune," said Pippa. "And I know that the Thawkeeper of this house does not have any instructions about it, because the instruction is the ninth lamp and the true sentences and eleven lights in an order, and there is nothing in four hundred pages of that book that says a word about music, and there has not been one word about music in this house for one hundred and twenty-one years." "That is the most frightening thing anybody has said to me all winter." "It's not, at all," said Pippa. "The frightening thing would be if it had been good." * * * Marlowes got back on the coach for the second time. "Two days," he said. "Two days." "And you'll hold the ninth." "I'll hold the ninth," said Pippa. "Pelyn Sedgewick will hold the third, and Sella Quillets will trim the seventh at the top of the stair, and if the seventh is ever cut at the collar again there will be four people in this house who will be able to prove it." * * * The coach went down the lane, and it stopped halfway down, and Tibb Bryce got off it. The cook walked back up a hundred yards in the wet with her apron on and went into the inn and came out again with a brown paper parcel and gave it back through the window of the coach. "That's his father's," she said. "That was in the kitchen drawer at the Hollowell since 1971 with a receipt round it, and I knew whose it was in 1971, because it was never mine and it was never Cressida's, and I took it out of the drawer when you said the name." "I didn't want you to take anything—" "I didn't take anything," said Tibb. "I've had it in a tin under my flour for forty-four years and I've looked at it about once a year and I've never taken it out, and that's a sentence I've been trying to write in that book since November and I could never get it right, and I'll say it now: I have kept a dead man's tuning fork in a tin for forty-four years because in 1947 a man came into that kitchen and played a fiddle for an hour and I was sixteen and he was the first person who ever played anything in my hearing, and he put the fork down on that table when he went out and never came back for it, and there was nobody in that house in 1947 who could have told me whose it was." * * * Tibb got back on the coach and everybody watched her go, and Pippa Danby stood in the lane and listened to the hooves go round the bend at the top byre and did not move for about two minutes. Wilby came out of the door with his stick. "You could have told me in January." "You could have asked me in January." "I couldn't have done," said Wilby. "It was yours and I only had it because you left it in a drawer with a receipt round it, and that is exactly how things get kept for forty years. Somebody leaves something in a drawer and everybody after them is too polite to ask and too frightened to throw it out." He looked at her. "It was a good tune, was it." "It was." "Well," said Wilby, "it's got a better home now than it had." ---