Chapter Sixteen #3
‘Is that what it’s called? Poor Gussie’s too ginger for it. I wonder Rachel didn’t pick a different shade for her – blue, perhaps.’ He held his musing expression for a moment for the pleasure of seeing Alice fidget agonisingly from one foot to the other, then grinned. ‘I’m just teasing you. Go!’
She went.
When your grandmother summoned you urgently by telegram and added the words DO NOT FAIL at the end, you went with all speed. Richard was relieved, on being shown upstairs at Bruton Street by the impervious Chaplin, to find Grandmère in her drawing-room calmly sipping linden tea.
‘No broken limbs, no visible bruises,’ he said. ‘No hovering doctor or militant lawyer. What have I been summoned to? The possibilities eliminated only leave worse ones to the imagination.’
‘What are you chattering about, ridiculous boy?’ she demanded, as he stooped to kiss her cheek. ‘Sit down. Do you wish coffee or tea?’
‘Neither. A large restorative brandy, please, Chaplin. I was summoned on a matter of life or death and have rushed here riven with dread.’
‘It is too early for brandy,’ she said, but she nodded to Chaplin, who oozed over to the decanter tray. ‘This habit of strong spirits in the daytime will be the ruin of society.’
‘Scold me all you wish, ma chère. It doesn’t hurt me and it gives you healthy exercise. But first reassure me that you are not souffrante.’
‘I am always well,’ she said. ‘You know better than to ask me. Thank you, Chaplin.’ She dismissed the butler. When he had gone, she looked at Richard, and her expression, her whole demeanour changed.
‘Oh, God!’ he said. ‘What’s happened?’
‘He is back,’ she said.
He knew at once whom she meant. Sir Thomas Burton.
Immediately, images flooded into his mind, not of Sir Thomas but of Molly.
Were they all here? Would he see her? Surely if she was in London she would not refuse to see him.
Perhaps she’d had time to grow tired of life in America and would be malleable to his persuasion.
Perhaps, now there had been a distance of time in which to reconsider, she might be brought to stay with him.
Grandmère rapped a fingernail on her saucer. ‘Fais attention!’
He pulled himself back. ‘You’ve seen him?’
‘No. Someone – not himself, but some serviteur of his – left his card and tickets to a concert. On the back of the card he has written “Please come.”’
‘So he’s in London. Is – is Lady Burton here? Is she performing? Is he staying?’
‘Too many questions. Be quiet and listen.’ He could see she was upset – which in itself was an indication because, like most of her generation, she did not like to show feelings. She sipped tea and gathered herself. ‘She is not here. You forget she is enceinte.’
‘Oh, God, yes, there was a letter back in—’
‘May. She must be close to her time by now, so she would hardly travel all this way, and certainly not perform.’ She gave a shocked little shake of the head. ‘Imagine how that would look!’
‘I’d rather not. So he is alone?’
‘Apart from his retinue.’ She gave him a look of penetrating pity. ‘La mère est restée avec sa fille.’
‘Of course,’ he said. Naturally the mother would stay with the pregnant wife. ‘But why has he come?’
‘For a tour of Europe. Now I have been roused to make enquiries, I have found out much. He conducts in France, Italy and Germany. He must be back in America for the birth of the child, so he spares London but one concert. At the Queen’s Hall, with the London Symphony Orchestra.’
The LSO had been recently created by a group of players from Henry Wood’s orchestra looking for more autonomy. They had formed a co-operative, choosing which conductors and soloists to hire and sharing the profits among them at the end of the year.
She went on. ‘The programme is the usual fouillis of this and that – a Wagner overture, a little Mozart, a little Elgar, je ne me souviens plus de quoi, and finishing with the fifth symphony of Beethoven, to please the audience.’
‘But still you want to go,’ he said, reading her expression.
‘I must.’
He saw how she was diminished by this last year, how she seemed less vivid, as though Burton’s going had washed the colour out of her, leaving her transparent.
He recognised reluctantly her age and frailty, she who had been a force of nature in his life.
He had never imagined he could ever inhabit a world that did not contain her, but now suddenly it seemed possible.
‘I must see him,’ she said, and opened her palms in a gesture of simplicity.
‘And you want me to go with you.’
It wasn’t a question; and she would never ask. She said only, ‘There are two tickets. It is tonight.’
He gave a grunt of laughter. ‘You don’t give me much notice.’
‘I was not prepared to give you the opportunity to say no,’ she said, with something like her old arrogance.
‘Of course I will come with you. Will you…will you see him afterwards?’
The look she gave him was one of pain. ‘He did not ask.’
He had his own pain to cope with. Of course Molly could not leave Chloe at a time like this, but she might have sent him a letter by Sir Thomas.
She might have written from America to warn him, to apologise.
But she had not even sent a message. He imagined her, too excited by the prospect of a grandchild to care any more about him.
She had made a different life for herself over there, and he must seem a very distant figure, an image spied through the wrong end of a telescope, tiny and unimportant and even a little ridiculous.
He felt ridiculous. He had known many women, made love to many, but she was the first woman he had actually loved.
And she had trampled on his heart and gone away.
He knew that was not quite fair, but he didn’t feel fair.
He needed to start hating her a little so that he could carry on without her, make space for someone else.
He couldn’t begin to calculate how difficult the situation was for Grandmère, who had loved Sir Thomas half a lifetime, and had no time left for someone to take his place.
That Burton had come to London and not told her he was coming, not even delivered the tickets in person, not wanted to see her at all, must be devastating.
But when they arrived at the Queen’s Hall, an usher, inspecting their tickets, said, ‘Oh, madame and sir, there is a message for you.’ He hurried to the box-office and came back with an envelope.
The tickets were box seats, the front row – the best – and there was a bottle of champagne waiting for them, and a corsage of white roses, with his card tucked in it.
Grandmère opened the envelope, read the note and passed it to Richard.
Ma chére, join me at the Café Royal after the concert. Longing to see you. TB
Richard handed it back. ‘Will you go?’
She looked at him bleakly. ‘To join him at the Café Royal means that he is taking a party. If he meant to see me only, he would have asked to meet me in the foyer.’ She shrugged in a very French manner. ‘I know his ways, you see.’
‘But will you go?’
Her expression hardened. ‘To make my own way in a taxi, to see him surrounded by his claque, to be accorded only common attention, like another of his admirers? Non. There is only so much humiliation one can tolerate. You may take me home at the interval. I have heard his fifth of Beethoven before. He takes the scherzo too slowly and the fourth movement too quickly. I have told him so many times.’
Richard smiled. ‘I have much to learn from you.’
‘Tiens, have you only now discovered that?’ she retorted. ‘Pour me some champagne. It would be foolish to waste it, since he has paid for it.’
He could only admire such style.
The box had chairs for eight, but no-one else came to disturb them.
He assumed at first that Sir Thomas in typical flamboyance had bought the whole box; but looking around during the performance, he noted that the hall was barely two-thirds full, with a particular thinness about the expensive seats, and an unwelcome idea came to him.
The next morning he rose early to go out and get the newspapers.
He thought that if there was anything very disobliging written about Sir Thomas, he ought to know so that he could support Grandmère.
It was a foggy morning, and the fog smelt of coal and horses.
The newspaper seller outside the Underground station was dressed for extreme cold.
Perhaps he got chilled standing still for hours on end.
He seemed to have put on several overcoats, one on top of another, peeping out at the neck in degrees of décolletage.
He had finished off the ensemble with a tweed cap and a muffler, between which his unshaven face was pegged in the middle with a bony red nose, moist at the end.
Richard thought at first he was wearing fingerless gloves, but it was just that his hands were black with newsprint, shiny as anthracite.