To my surprise, Bounce didn’t laugh. She leaned back her head, drew the last thread of smoke in, then carefully stubbed the cigarette out. She kept her eyes solemnly on the keys.
“Your father would never agree.”
Of course. Away from the angle of brick, and in cold daylight, his agreement was absolutely essential.
“Oh I don’t know, Miss Dawlish—”
She was silent for a while.
“What does your mother think about it?”
All at once the obscenity of erratic, unpensioned music presented itself to me.
“Honestly, Miss Dawlish—I hadn’t thought seriously about it—honestly, Miss Dawlish!”
Bounce folded her hands in her lap. When she spoke, there was a curious, flat bitterness in her voice that I had never heard there before.
“Don’t be a musician, Kummer, my son. Go into the garage business if you want to make money. As for me, I shall have to slave at music till I drop down dead.”
I nodded, soberly, servilely. Bounce swayed, and went off to sleep, her mouth making little chewing movements. Then her cheeks twisted, her mouth sucked in, and she jerked awake.
“That great boy still sleeping in the same room as his sister—it’s disgusting! But you can’t tell her. Can’t tell her anything. What do they expect?”
A kind of personalized chill crept over my skin. I waited in the silence, glancing nervously at the brown photograph of the young man who stared perpetually past me—glanced from him to the brown photograph of the lady in cap and gown. But Bounce had seen my feet. She looked up and up, till her eyes reached my face. Suddenly there was recognition in them.
“It’s old Kummer! What are you waiting for? Start playing!”
*
The next time I appeared with Mary’s tonic, hoping against hope to get past the music room and into the yard without meeting Bounce, I went through the hall on tiptoe, opened the door into the yard and stepped straight into a family hurricane. Mary was defending the scullery doorway and facing Bounce. Henry had his back—very broad in an overcoat—had his back turned to me.
Bounce shouted suddenly.
“Well, I won’t have him in my house!”
Henry was calm, but with both hands up to appease and quell.
“Look, Auntie Cis, Mary’s got a headache—”
“And I don’t have headaches, I suppose?”
“He’s my boy, Jacky is, and I’ll do what I like. He’s none of your business!”
“Now Mary—don’t speak to Auntie like that!”
“You’d better go, all of you. Go!”
Then they were aware of me. I went forward at last, shambling over the flagstones, and held out the bottle. Mary put back her fallen hair with one hand and took the bottle with the other.
“Kew.”
I got away on my hot, adolescent feet as quickly as I could.
But of course they did not go. A week later, and relations between Bounce and Mary were saccharine again. After that, there was another row, and so on; but still they did not go. Was it in some confusion of my dreams, or listening to her as she slept on the organ seat that I remember her moaning—“Oh Henry, Henry my dear! What’s to become of me?”
My own musical future was decided with nothing but a token resistance from me. If I could not be a professional musician, at least I thought I might take a piano examination. When I braced myself and put this point to Bounce, she sat for a while, thinking, then laughed with a flash of gold teeth.
“Be careful, Kummer—be very careful!”
“Well. I really want to, Miss Dawlish.”
Bounce shook on the organ seat.
“You’re not too highly strung?”
“I want to take an ARCM.”
“What does your father say?”
“He’s willing—provided it doesn’t interfere with my work of course.”
“We’d have to start from the beginning. You’ve just been picking about at the piano, haven’t you?”
“Yes, Miss Dawlish.”
Bounce turned to the keyboard. She pulled a dusty and dog-eared volume out of the mess on the piano, flicked over the pages, arranged them on the music rest then began to play. When she had finished she lit a cigarette.
“There you are. Now you know what you’re up against.”
I hope she took my mutter for awe. But the truth is that I was stunned. What she had played was a Chopin Impromptu. The night before I had heard Cortot play it.
“I’ll work hard.”
“You’ll have to. There’ll be theory too. And ear tests. We haven’t tested your ear out for a long time, have we? Not since you were—that high. Turn round, Kummer.”
I turned away from the piano and faced the yellowing muslin curtains. She began to strike intervals, then groups of more and more complex dissonance. In my mind’s eye, I saw where she put down each thick finger. It was like reading very large print. She finished, and I turned round.
Then she said a curious thing.
“Your father must be proud of you.”
I had no answer to this. Presently she began to talk.
“My father took endless trouble over ear tests. If I couldn’t pick the middle note out of—say—that lot, Crack! would go his ruler over my knuckles—”
She was staring towards the wall, so I looked the same way. I saw the faded sepia photograph of the young man who had hung all those years by the lady in cap and gown, as overseer of the music room. So great was the shock that I did not hear what Bounce was saying. For I had suddenly recognized the hairless eyes and brows, the high cheekbones. The young man—I saw now that he was hardly older than I—was old Mr. Dawlish, his hair flying, his eye already fixed on the absolute.
“—very cold sometimes in the morning. But he knew what it was about. He’d say ‘You go on practising, my girl. That’ll warm you’. Still, heaven is music, isn’t it, Kummer?”
“Yes, Miss Dawlish.”
So now there began a time for me of peace and delight, in which the sky over Stilbourne lifted to infinite distance. Music, music, music, all no longer shady, obscene, but wholly legal—what everybody agreed I ought to be doing. Now the quarrels in the old house were an irritation rather than a way of passing some of my lessons. I would stand restlessly in the hall, wondering where Bounce had got to, and whether I should get my full thirty minutes. Then I would hear her furious voice from the yard.
“Then why don’t you go? Go!”
Their crazy relationship staggered on, Henry holding some sort of balance, understanding both parties and battered from both directions. Then Bounce would come into the music room, her vast bosom heaving, and I would have what was left of the lesson. Nevertheless, the end of music was nearer than I supposed. I had battered too long and too devotedly at our ancient piano. As the disapproving remarks came in from the chemistry and physics masters who had once been so pleased with me, my parents took notice.
“Well I know you’ve got a piano lesson tomorrow; but you’ve also got a chemistry lesson tomorrow!”
“Look—Father. Didn’t you learn the violin?”
“I never let it come between me and the Materia Medica—Oliver, don’t you really want to go to Oxford?”
“’Course I do.”
“These last months are so important, dear,” said my mother pleadingly. “You know we only want what’s best for you.”
The old shame, inculcated year after year, at the idea of becoming a professional musician kept me silent. As if he was reading my mind, my father peered kindly at me across the table. If he had been angry, I could have withstood him; but he sounded understanding and sympathetic as if we were both face to face with iron necessity.
“You’ll have to keep it as a hobby, the way I did. Anyway the gramophone and wireless are going to put most professional musicians out of business. Good Lord, Oliver, don’t you understand? With opportunities like yours, you might even become a doctor!”
So then I had the difficulty o
f confessing to Bounce that I was not going to work for my ARCM after all; but she said little, merely nodding as if she had expected this. Our lessons returned to the old way of wasting time. Indeed, we wasted more time than before, since the rows had reached a critical point. Henry might escape from the hall, gently but firmly, secure in his brown, double-breasted suit with the two fountain pens in the breast pocket, but he would leave flames behind him.
“And you don’t owe me anything, I suppose!”
“We’ve given as much as we’ve took!”
*
And still they did not go.
“I won’t have him here, that horrible, horrible boy—he was torturing it—”
My last lesson came and went; and after a restless summer, I reached the excitement and tremor of packing for Oxford. It was only on the evening before I went that I thought of Bounce again, because of the large square van parked on the cobbles in front of her railings.
“What’s up with Bounce, Mother?”
My mother jerked her head in contempt.
“They’ve gone.”
“Who?”
“The Williamses. Who d’you think? The Pope?” She made a noise as near as nothing to a spit. “I knew they would, one day when she was no more use to him. They’ve taken one of the new bungalows for the time being. It’s said that Henry Williams is going to build himself a house. I never trusted the man. Never.”
I could not remember that my mother had ever had any dealings with Henry, and I wondered how she could be so definite. I watched the door of the house open, and men bring out a few sticks of furniture, carpets, rugs, crockery and beds. My mother watched at my side.
“All shoddy, second-hand stuff. Never spent a penny he didn’t have to.”
Presently the van drew away and my mother returned to her sewing. A pupil, complete with music, went in at Bounce’s door.
“You’d better go over this evening after she’s finished teaching and say goodbye to her,” said my mother. “You owe her that.”
“Oh no! Look—Mother!”
“Nonsense,” said my mother calmly. “You know you’re devoted to her.”
So that evening, when the sodium lamps had shuddered into their ghastly brightness round the Square, I went, a young man dripping with hair oil and burning to get away, across the grass to the old house. The bow window was dark, and I hoped deeply that she was out, or asleep; for the guessed-at lights of Oxford, the concerts and plays, the books and people that would be mine in the intervals of chemistry, drew me strongly, and I could not think of anything else. But looking back at our cottage, I saw how a corner of the curtain was lifted to leave a little triangle in which I felt my mother’s eye. So sighing deeply, I stepped over the chains and onto the cobbles. I opened her front door; and the cold thought fell on me that once more the corridor and the rooms upstairs were dark and empty. Even that hall was haunted again; and despite my eighteen years I left the front door open as a retreat. Sodium light from the Square outlined a window on the floor and lay vertically against the door of the music room. With a tightening of the chest—and perhaps with the phantom of a quarter-size violin in my left hand—I raised the other hand to knock; and took it back again.
The sounds that came from beyond the dark panelling were a kind of ear-test. But a rook had no business to be down there on the left, on the rug before the dull, red eye of the fire. Nor could it add to its faint cawing those curious, strangled sounds as from an incompetently handled instrument. I stood stone-still left hand down, right hand raised, and listened as the caws and chokes prolonged and multiplied themselves; and the ear-test provided the picture I could see as clearly as if no panelling divided us. She was down there in the dark on the left, huddled before the dim fire beneath the glowering bust; trying to learn unsuccessfully without a teacher, how to sob her heart out.
I stole away, my hair lifting against the oil. I closed the door as carefully as if I had committed a burglary. I hastened across the grass and tried to sneak upstairs without my mother seeing me. But though she was sewing still, she had kept her ears open.
“Didn’t have a long talk then, Oliver?”
I grunted, as much like my father as I could.
“Come in and tell me about it.”
Groaning, and curiously enough, blushing as if I had been detected in some impropriety, I went into the sitting room.
“What did she have to say, dear?”
“—She wasn’t there.”
“Nonsense! She hasn’t left the house.”
“She wasn’t there I tell you! Perhaps she’s gone to bed.”
My mother looked up at me over her spectacles and smiled slightly.
“Perhaps she has.”
*
I went away from Stilbourne then, thinking this was my final escape. But I might have known that as long as I was connected with it in any way, we should all continue, even at a distance, to exercise some kind of gravitational influence over each other. Thus, the first copy of the Stilbourne Advertiser which my mother forwarded to me contained not only news of my grand elevation to the status of undergraduate, but also news of Bounce. I read how Miss C. C. Dawlish (well-known local resident) had been involved in an accident at the junction between Cold Harbour Lane and the King’s Path. Little damage had been done but Miss Dawlish had sustained shock. This seemed not very significant to me; but I learned better in the Easter Vacation when I went home. I was spending as much time as I could, walking in the countryside. I had gone down across the Old Bridge, walked up the hill on the other side of the valley and was as far as I could be from the Square. I was brooding on the cheapest way of spending the Long Vacation abroad, somewhere; so it was not surprising that I almost walked into her. The two seater was at right-angles to the road. It had crossed the grass verge and the front wheels were in a muddy ditch. Bounce stood by it, gazing impassively into the woods. I had no chance of avoiding her.
“Hullo, Miss Dawlish! Having trouble?”
Her eyes turned first, then her head. Her mouth was very tight, the deep grooves running into it.
“You’re not hurt, Miss Dawlish, are you?”
All at once her face relaxed and lightened.
“It’s old Kummer!”
“Can’t I help?”
“Help?”
The darkness and tightness settled on her face again. The grooves came back. She began to shake her head, slowly and solemnly.
“No. No, no, no.”
“I could push—”
“No. No.”
A milk lorry came bumping and rattling along through the woods.
“Shall I—”
“No.”
She had not stopped shaking her head. She was frowning and saying “No” as if faced by some very difficult problem, the answer to which was only just out of reach.
“Well then—”
Suddenly the darkness lifted. It was extraordinary and frightening; there was such an instantaneity about the change—like a wireless with a dud valve when the sound is here one moment then clicks away into the distance. Her eyes focused on me, she grinned and showed her gold teeth.
“It’s old Kummer! Are you looking for a girl in the woods?”
I remembered the whole business of Evie Babbacombe and I felt my face blaze. I backed away, holding my walking stick like a sword.
“I—”
“How’s the piano then, my son?”
“No.”
“Better things to do, eh?”
I felt the sweat on my forehead.
“Chemistry and Physics, nowadays. Look—I’m walking back into Stilbourne. It’ll take a long time, I’m afraid. I’ll try to get a lift. Shall I fetch Henry?”
She put back her head and laughed.
“Do you know, Kummer? He always services my car himself—changes the oil and all those things, things inside, I don’t know what they are. And he always cleans it himself, washes it, polishes it. He puts on overalls and gets down to it just like he—??
?
“I’ll fetch him, Miss Dawlish. You’re quite sure you don’t want me to stay? You’ll be all right, here in the—?”
“Here in the woods?’
She laughed again. Then the darkness and tightness was back, eyes unblinking.
“I’m quite safe. Nobody’s going to bother about an old lady like me. Quite safe.”
“I’ll be as quick as I can.”
I hurried along the track, taking the shortest way to Stilbourne. I turned before I reached the corner and waved, as if to assure her of something or other, but she never saw me. She was standing on the verge by the car, staring into the woods. I came to a long bend in the road and there, a hundred yards away, was Henry’s breakdown van approaching. I shouted and gesticulated back to Bounce, trying to convey this to her by a kind of incompetent semaphore. I shouted and pointed at the van, too; but Henry passed me without noticing, in his brown double-breasted suit and trilby hat—passed me, staring mournfully before him through the windscreen. I waited, until I saw his van draw up beside her.
*
At supper, when I was questioned about my walk, my mother was very interested. She listened to my factual account of my meeting with Bounce, nodding and smiling grimly. My father looked up at her over his spectacles.
“Getting worse.”
I looked from one to the other.
“Worse? How? What’s happened?”
My mother waved away my question.
“I knew how it would end when he’d got what he wanted.”
“Come now,” said my father ponderously, as he helped himself to more cottage pie, “Come now. She’ll not have lost. She got her money back ten times over. I’ll say that about young Williams. He’s made a success of things.”
“Not like some people I could mention,” said my mother tartly. “By the time he’s done, he’ll have bought up half the town!”