It was her impression, though, that Julian was not a happy man. As the days in the Château de Luth wore on, he was growing increasingly restless. Not restless in the sense of lacking ability to concentrate on the task at hand; he worked as hard on Partitum Mutante as any of the Consort. Nor restless in the sense of itching for physical exercise; he was quite content to let Dagmar and Catherine cycle daily to Martinekerke to fetch their supplies. No, it appeared he was restless sexually.
In London, Julian was a lone wolf, never actually seen with a partner. Roger and Catherine had always assumed he must be gay, what with the Freddie Mercury ansaphone message and the waspish comments he was wont to make, but in Mar-tinekerke it became clear that, at the very least, he was prepared to stoop to females if nothing better was available.
Females were in limited supply in the forest, but Julian made the most of what strayed his way. The first time Gina had come to clean the château, Julian behaved (Roger told Catherine later) like a gallant lord of the manor receiving an impressionable guest. The girl's flat refusal to let him carry her equipment frustrated this line of approach and so he hurried back indoors to launch Plan B, leaving the formal introductions to Roger. When, less than two minutes later, the time came for Gina to be introduced to Julian Hind, 'our tenor,' he was already seated at the piano, playing a piece of Bartók's Mikrokosmos with serene intensity. He turned his cheekbones towards her and raised his eyebrows, as if he'd never glimpsed her before this moment, as if she'd just blundered, childlike, into a sanctum whose holiness she couldn't be expected to understand. He inclined his head in benign welcome but did not speak. Disappointingly, Gina did not speak either, preferring to get down to business. With the plug of the vacuum cleaner nestled in her hand, she nosed around the room, murmuring to herself: 'Stopcontact, stopcontact'—the Dutch word for electrical outlet, apparently. Once the vacuum cleaner started its noisy sucking, Julian stopped playing the piano and settled for a more passive role. Then, all too soon, Catherine had returned from her walk in the woods, and it was time for Partitum Mutante.
The second time Gina came to the château, five days later, Catherine was actually there, privileged to witness the changes that Julian's growing discontentment had wrought on him. It was an extraordinary sight, an unforgettable testament to the power of accumulated sexual craving.
To begin with, he welcomed her at the door as if she were royalty—the English rather than the Dutch kind—and immediately tried to get her to sit down with him on the sofa. When she insisted that she had work to do, he followed her from room to room, raising the volume of his velvety tenor to compete with the noise of motorised suction and clanking, sloshing buckets. He guessed, correctly, that she was involved in the expressive arts and only doing this cleaning work as a way of supplementing a government grant. He guessed, correctly, her birth sign, her taste in music, her favourite drink, her preferred animal. Dashing into the bathroom to fetch her some Elastoplast when she'd cut her finger, he returned naked from the waist up and with water combed through his hair, complaining of the heat.
Catherine didn't dare follow them upstairs, so she made herself a cup of tea, wondering despite herself whether there was going to be some sexual activity in the château after all. By the time she saw Julian again, ten minutes later, he was installed on the sofa, fully dressed, glowering into a book. A strange sound—bed-springy, rhythmic—from upstairs was eventually decoded as Gina slamming an iron onto a padded ironing board.
***
FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE END of the fortnight, Jan van Hoeidoncks dropped in to see how they were getting on. Reacquainting himself with Catherine Courage, he at first thought she must be the sporty German contralto he'd been told about, she was so tanned and healthy-looking. He'd fixed Catherine in his memory as a slightly stooped middle-aged lady dressed in taupe slacks and a waterproof, with a freshly washed halo of mousy hair; here she was in green leggings and a berry-stained T-shirt, standing tall, her hair shiny, plastered with sweat. She'd just been for a long cycle, she said.
The real German woman appeared moments later, cradling a sleeping baby in her arms. She shook Jan by the hand, supporting her infant easily in one arm as she did so.
'This is Dagmar Belotte,' said Roger, 'and … erm … Axel.'
As a way of breaking the ice, Jan made the mistake of asking Dagmar, rather than Roger Courage, what the Consort's impression of Pino Fugazza had been.
'I hate him,' she volunteered. 'He is a nutcase and he smells bad.'
'Extraordinary composer, though, of course,' interjected Roger.
'Don't you check them out before you give them money?' said Dagmar.
The director smiled, unfazed. The German girl's frankness made much more sense to him than the strange, twitching discomfiture of the pale Englishman.
'Pino is very crazy, yes,' he conceded. 'Sometimes crazy people make very good music. Sometimes not. We will find out.'
'And if it's bad?' enquired Dagmar.
Jan van Hoeidonck pouted philosophically.
'Bad music is not a problem in our circles,' he said. 'Ten years later, it's completely disappeared. Biodegradable. It's not like pop music. Bad pop music lasts forever. Johann Strauss. Herman's Hermits. Father Abraham and the Smurfs. These things will never die, even if we put a lot of effort into killing them. But for bad serious music, we don't need to do anything. It just sinks into the ground and it's gone.'
'But Jan, what do you think of Partitum Mutante?' asked Roger.
'I haven't heard it yet.'
'You've seen the score, surely.'
The director gratefully accepted the steaming cup of coffee being handed to him by Mrs. Courage.
'I am a facilitator of musical events,' he explained carefully. 'I read budget sheets. There are enough crescendos there, I promise you.' His face was solemn as he said this, though there was a twinkle in his eyes.
Dagmar excused herself and the conversation moved on to more general matters, like the château and its facilities. Were the Consort enjoying their stay? How was the environment suiting them?
The big fat man called Ben Lamb, sitting in the far corner of the room, made a small gesture indicating no complaints. Roger Courage said something to the effect that concentration on a musical project made the outside world cease to exist, but that during the brief moments when his Consort was not beavering away at Partitum Mutante, the Château de Luth and its setting were very attractive indeed. Julian Hind deflected the question, preferring to discuss with the director the feasibility of a hire-car from Antwerp or Brussels.
'I was wondering,' Catherine said, when Julian, appalled at the high cost of Netherlandish living, had retreated to his room. 'You've had many artists staying in this château over the years, haven't you?'
'Very many,' affirmed the director.
'Have any of them ever mentioned strange noises in the night?'
'What kind of noises?'
'Oh … cries from the forest, perhaps.'
'Human cries?'
'Mmm, yes, possibly.'
She and Roger were sitting together on the sofa. On the pretence of bending down to fetch his plate of cake off the floor, Roger knocked his knee sharply against hers.
'Excuse me, dear,' he warned, trying to pull her back from whatever brink she was dawdling towards.
Unexpectedly, however, the director had no difficulty with her claims of mysterious cries in the night; in fact, he went pensive, as if faced with something that genuinely might lie outside the scope of art and arithmetic.
'This is a story I have heard before, yes,' he said. 'In fact, it is a kind of legend about the forest here.'
'Really,' breathed Catherine, gazing at him over the top of her steaming coffee mug. Roger was already fading away next to her.
'It began, I think, at the end of the war. A…' Jan van Hoeidonck paused, checking the Dutch-English dictionary in his head. 'A mental defective mother … can you say this in English?'
'It's all right,' said Catherin
e, loath to explain political correctness to a foreigner. 'Go on.'
'A mental defective mother ran away from Martinekerke with her baby, when the army, the liberating army, was coming. She didn't understand these soldiers were not going to kill her. So she ran away, and nobody could find her. For all the years since that time, there are reports that a baby is crying in the forest, or a … a spirit, yes?'
'Fascinating,' said Catherine, bending forward to put her cup down on the floor without taking her eyes off Jan van Hoeidonck. His own gaze dropped slightly, and she realised, with some surprise, that he was looking at her breasts.
I'm a woman, she thought.
Roger spoke up, pulling the conversation back towards Pino Fugazza and his place in contemporary European music. Had the director, in fact, heard anything by the composer?
'I heard his first major piece,' Jan replied, unenthusiastically. 'Precipice, for voices and percussion—the one that won the Prix d'Italia. I don't remember it so well, because all the other Prix d'Italia entries were played on the same night, and they also were for voices and percussion. Except one from the former Soviet Union, for flügelhorn and ring modulator…'
'Yes, but can you remember anything about Fugazza's piece?' pursued Roger.
The director frowned: for him, dwelling on musical events that were in the past rather than the future was obviously quite unnatural.
'I only remember the audience,' he admitted, 'sitting there after four hours of singing and whispering and noises going bang without warning, and finally it's over, and they don't know if it's time to clap, and soon they will go home.'
Roger was getting politely exasperated.
'Well … if you haven't heard Partitum Mutante, what makes you think it'll be any better?'
Jan waved a handful of fingers loosely around his right temple.
'He has since that time had a big mental breakdown,' he said. 'This could be a very good thing for his music. Also, public interest in Fugazza is very high, which is good for ticket sales. He is very famous in the Italian press for attacking his wife with a stiletto shoe at the baggage reclaim of Milan Airport.'
'No!' said Catherine incredulously. 'Is she all right?'
'She is very fine. Soon I think she will be divorced and very wealthy. But, of course, the music must stand or fall on its own qualities.'
'Of course,' sighed Roger.
Later, when the director had left, Roger stood at the window, watching the yellow minibus dwindling into the distance, on the long black ribbon towards Brussels. As he watched, the sun was beaming through the windowpanes like a trillion-watt spotlight, turning his silver hair white and his flesh the colour of peeled apple. Every age line and wrinkle, every tiny scar and pockmark from as far back as adolescence, was lit up in harsh definition. Eventually the intensity of the light grew too much for him; he turned away, fatigued, blinking and wiping his eyes.
Noticing that Ben Lamb was still sitting in the shady corner of the room, and Catherine lying sweating and sleepy on the couch, he allowed himself to express his first pang of doubt about the value of the project they were all engaged on.
'You know, I'm really rather tired of this glamour that madness is supposed to have, aren't you?' he said, addressing Ben. 'It's the little marks on the score that ought to be sensational, not the behaviour of Italian lunatics at airports.'
Catherine, not happy at the disrespect with which madness was being tossed about here, said, 'Couldn't this Pino fellow just be young and excitable? I wouldn't presume to judge if anyone was definitely mad. Especially an Italian I've only met once. He surely can't be too barmy if he drives a Porsche and wears Armani.'
'Poetically put, dear—if somewhat mysterious in reasoning,' remarked Roger.
'No, I meant, he's obviously not … um … otherwordly, is he?'
There was a pause as the men pondered the significance of this word.
'What do you think, Ben?' said Roger.
'I think we should sing as much as we possibly can in the next four days,' said Ben, 'so that, by the time of the premiere, we can at least be sure of being less confused than Mr. Fugazza.'
***
AND SO THEY SANG, as the sun blazed in the sky and the temperature inside the château climbed towards thirty degrees Celsius. It was worse than being under a full rig of stage lights; all five of them were simmering in their clothes.
'We'll end up performing this in the nude,' suggested Julian. 'That'll put some sensuality into it!'
The others let it pass, appreciating that he was a man on heat.
When, at last, they were all too tired to go on, Roger and Julian went to bed—not with each other, of course, though lately Julian looked as if he might soon consider anything, even his fellow Consort members, as a sexual possibility. His initial disgust at seeing Dagmar breastfeed had, with the passing days, softened to tolerance, and then hardened to a curiosity whose keenness embarrassed everyone except himself. Dagmar, usually indifferent to the petty libidos of unwanted men, grew self-conscious, and the feeding of her baby became an increasingly secret act, perpetrated behind closed doors. In Julian's presence, she tended to fold her arms across her breasts, protectively, aggressively. After half an hour staring Julian down, she would leap up and start pacing back and forth, a dark band across her bosom where her sweaty forearms had soaked the fabric of whatever she was wearing.
On the night of the director's visit, with Partitum Mutante finished off and Julian safely gone to bed, Dagmar sat slumped on the couch, Axel at her breast. Ben sat by the open window, staring out at a sky which, even at a quarter to eleven, still had some daylight left in it. The unearthly quiet was descending again, so that even the drip of a tap in the kitchen could be heard from the front room.
Oddly revived by having had her milk sucked from her, Dagmar decided to take Axel out for a walk in the forest. She did not invite Catherine; the older woman guessed this must be one of those times when Dagmar wanted to have the run of the world alone with her baby, explaining things to him in German.
'Be careful,' said Catherine as they were leaving. 'Remember the legend.'
'What legend?'
'A mother and her child disappeared in that forest once, at the end of the war. Some people say the baby is still out there.'
Dagmar paused momentarily as she made a mental calculation.
'Well, if we meet a fifty-seven-year-old baby on our walk, maybe Axel will like to play with him,' she said, and sauntered into the dark.
Left alone with Ben, Catherine weighed the pros and cons of going to bed. On the pro side, she was exhausted. But the house had absorbed so much heat that she doubted she would sleep.
'Do you want anything, Ben?' she offered.
'Mm? No, thanks,' he replied. He was still sitting by the window, his white shirt almost transparent with sweat. For all his bearlike bulk, he had no body hair, as far as Catherine could see.
'How are you, anyway?' she asked. It seemed a faintly absurd question, this late in the night. 'Tired,' he said.
'Me too. Isn't it funny how we've lived here together, day after day, and sung together endlessly, and yet we hardly say two words to one another?'
'I'm not much of a conversationalist.'
He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, as if about to release his soul into the ether, leaving his body behind.
'You know,' said Catherine, 'after all these years, I know hardly anything about you.'
'Very little to tell.'
'I don't even know for sure what nationality your wife is.'
'Vietnamese.'
'I thought so.'
Their communication eddied apart then, but not disturbingly. The room's emotional acoustic was not full of shame and failure, like the silences between her and Roger. Silence was Ben's natural state, and to fall into it with him was like joining him in his own world, where he was intimately acquainted with each sleeping soundwave, and knew no fear.
After a while, sitting in the golden-brown front ro
om with Ben in the stillness, Catherine glanced at her watch. It was almost midnight. Ben had never stayed up so late before.
'Did you always want to be a singer?' she asked.
'No,' he said. 'I wanted to carry on coxing.'
She laughed despite herself. 'Carry on what? She was reminded of those dreadful comedy films her father had never allowed her to see, even when she was old enough to be going out with Roger Courage.
'At university,' Ben explained, 'I was a coxswain in a rowing team. I called instructions through a loudhailer. I enjoyed that very much.'
'What happened?'
'I became involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement. Cambridge wasn't the most left-wing place in those days. I lost most of my friends. Then I got fat.'
You're not fat, Catherine wanted to reassure him, as a reflex kindness, then had to struggle to keep a straight face in the moon face of absurdity. Reassurance is such a sad, mad thing, she thought. Deep inside, everyone knows the truth.
'What do you really think of Partitum Mutante, Ben?'
'We-e-ell … it's a plum part for a bass, I have to admit. But I don't see us singing it far into the twenty-first century somehow.'
Again the silence descended. Minutes passed. Catherine noticed for the first time that there were no clocks in the Château de Luth, except for those inside the computers and the oven, and the wristwatches worn by the human visitors. Perhaps there had once been splendid old timepieces which some previous guest had stolen—she imagined Cathy Berberian stealthily wrapping an antique clock up in her underwear as she was packing her suitcase to go home. Perhaps there had never been clocks on these walls at all, because the château's furnishers had understood that the sound of seconds ticking would have been maddening, intolerable, in the forest's silence.
Suddenly, there was a plaintive, inarticulate wail from outside, a cry that was more high-pitched and eerie than anything Axel was capable of. Catherine's flesh was thrilled with fear.