Facing the Music. Andrea GoldsmithЧитать онлайн книгу.
amongst lichen-patched rocks was also familiar, and the huge burnt-out tree trunks, moss-covered and lying like bloodied welts on the slopes. She looked up at the jagged white skeletons of trees burned in the fires of 1967, and wondered whether they, too, would collapse into the undergrowth some day.
It was a changing bush. In winter there was snow, usually a couple of dumps each season, and later a blaze of yellow as the acacias burst. There could be no mistaking this landscape for a pocket of Europe; the trees, in particular, reminded her where she was with their slender branches caught in a fertile tussle for the southern sun. And the sky was a lilac blue, so different from the pallid blue of London, different too, from the gaudy skies of the Australian mainland. And the passage of winter to spring, with none of the civility of the London awakening nor the half-hearted attempt of the mainland, here all was extravagance and a magnificent hotch-potch of light and colour. It was a landscape for music, and had, in fact, inspired much of Anna’s recent work. Her response to the land surprised her; always she had lived in large cities, a chameleon of the shadows emptying her emotions into the streets, shaping and reshaping an identity within the city’s swarming anonymity. She had wondered what would happen to her away from the life-giving byways of the city, yet here in her mountain house, far from withering and shrivelling up, she had thrived.
Just before the main track she stopped, and breathed in the still, fresh air of solitude that had kept her here these past couple of years. In the distance was the sea, a sombre blue in the thin autumn light. The green pastures, stretching from the water to the lower slopes of the mountain, were blotted with sheep clinging together beneath clumps of trees. As the incline stiffened, so the forest began, with dollops of orange and yellow and red amongst the green. It had been a sanctuary for her and Lily, and would, she hoped, sustain her for the trials ahead. Duncan had written, for the first time in twelve years he had written, he had written of illness and death, he had sounded weak and pathetic, he had asked her to come home. Duncan Bayle, born to receive, whose needs had always been anticipated, rarely asked for anything; for him to do so meant the situation was serious. She had rarely refused him and would not now, more for herself than for him, for if he were to die her guilt would be ferocious. Most of her life had been spent in thrall to her father, she could not risk his death holding her forever captive.
There had been a time when she believed that without Duncan she would have no music, without Duncan she would have no life. He was a genius, everyone said so, and from her earliest years, it was as if music, all music including her own, came from him. She had hoped as the years went by to forgive him the loss of her cello, after all, it had been his gift in the first place, but, far from this happening, time only tightened her resentment. Although worse, far worse, was the fear of having no music at all. With the cello gone, there was only Duncan’s music to sustain her, hours of his music every day; to leave him, therefore, had required enormous courage. Initially it seemed her worst fears had been realised when, for the first time in her life, she found herself without serious music, but a few months more saw something of a renaissance, and in time she was to acquire a reputation of her own as a composer that even Duncan would have admired.
She had arrived in London after several months travelling, needing a place to live and a job. The job she found first as the cellist in a chamber group that performed backings to advertisements, and a place to live immediately followed. The flautist with the group, Lewis, whose boyfriend of several years had just left him for a ménage à trois in the Bahamas, needed a new flatmate, and within twenty-four hours of their meeting, Anna had moved into his Islington flat.
It had been strained living with a stranger, and bleak without proper music. She had stayed away from the flat, foraging deep into the London streets and long into the night in search of a heavy, dreamless sleep. She rarely played the cello except with the group, as for composing, she had always regarded that as Duncan’s work.
And so it had happened: for the first time she knew a life without music, yet was managing in a kind of survival. And tried not to dwell on it; only the arrogant can risk knowing their life is empty of purpose.
It was a long time before Lewis knew anything of Anna’s past. When first they met, he had asked if she were related to Duncan Bayle; Anna’s curt denial had prevented further questions. However, a couple of months later, on a rare evening Anna was home, he had asked again. The two of them were sitting at the kitchen table sipping port and eating crisps and chatting about the other members of the group, when out of the blue, Lewis said, ‘You are his daughter, aren’t you? You are Duncan Bayle’s daughter?’
There was something in his tone to suggest that being Duncan Bayle’s daughter was not an altogether fortunate circumstance.
‘Don’t you like his music?’ Anna had asked.
‘Some of it, although I was thinking more about being his daughter, how living with a so-called great man would not have been easy.’
In the pause that followed, Lewis had stood up and taken some dishes to the sink; on the way back to his chair he had stopped behind Anna and put his hands on her shoulders. She had felt a light pressure and a movement of his fingers, gentle, persuasive and rubbing the film off her memories. And began to talk, and once started, found herself unable to stop. On and on she went, fuelling the narrative with more and more port, talking not about Duncan, there was nothing to say about Duncan, but of the nights with strangers, the drugs, the booze, the car at the top of the cliff. She talked about the loss of her cello, about the years of shuffling uppers and downers in a bid to maintain appearances.
‘And so I passed my childhood – not exactly in a state of innocence.’ Then, more to herself, ‘It really was an awful time.’
Lewis had listened without interruption. When she was finished, he sat in the silence, shaking his head in disbelief, and in his face a sympathy Anna found intolerable.
‘I did all right,’ she said quickly. ‘I must have, I’m here to tell the story.’
‘It’s a wonder they didn’t lock you up.’
‘But that’s just it!’ Anna was triumphant. ‘Only by doing what I did, all that crazy behaviour, could I be normal when it was required. Neither my parents nor my teachers thought anything was wrong.’ She paused. ‘Well, not until I refused to work with Duncan, then they couldn’t help noticing there was a problem.’
Lewis could not believe her parents didn’t know. ‘They must have done. All those years of stealing the car and staying out all night, you must have looked like death at breakfast.’
Anna shrugged. ‘They never said anything, and if they did know yet did nothing about it, then they deserved to lose me, deserved a lot worse than that.’
The next morning Anna was too embarrassed to face him. She stayed in bed listening to the stirrings in the flat, waiting for him to leave. After the front door closed, she must have remained where she was, for by the time she got up, the shape of the piece had formed. She could not remember moving from the bed, could not remember the search for pencil and paper, did not know exactly how she began, it all seemed to happen on a fresh plane of consciousness, one clear of bitterness and burnt-out dreams.
There was no doubt, however, about the music. It was a composition for flute and piano, far freer than her father’s work, drawn in the first instance from the London streets where she had walked so often, walking away from her past – not forgetting it, mustn’t forget, just creating a little distance – streets packed with people and traffic, old buildings solid amongst the new, decaying monuments, the human stories in the shadows, threads of sound like the voices of a fugue peeled apart then left to mingle and reconnect in a not-always-comfortable union. The music took up the motion of the city, moving between the landscape and the people, the past and the present. Duncan had never been interested in the flute, had regarded it as light-weight and prissy, far too feminine for his liking. It was an instrument for detail, Anna now decided, and Duncan had never been one for detail.
As the piece evolved, thoughts and images that had flitted by during her London wanderings reappeared, almost as if they had been waiting to be used. So many thoughts, so many memories – of Duncan and her childhood, but also memories not specifically her own. As she wrote