The Courage Consort

  'So,' interrupted the director, evidently more concerned about where the conversation was heading than the fate of the Concertgebouw. 'This Consort of yours is a family affair, yes?'

  Catherine's ears pricked up again; how would her husband handle this? Nobody in the ensemble was actually a Courage except her and Roger, and she tended to cling to her maiden name as often as she could get away with it, for sheer dread of being known as 'Kate Courage'. She couldn't go through the rest of her life with a name like a comic-book superheroine.

  Suavely, Roger more or less evaded the issue.

  'Well, believe it or not,' he said, 'the Consort is not specifically named after me. I regard myself as just one member of the ensemble, and when we were trying to think of a name for ourselves, we considered a number of things, but the concept of courage seemed to keep coming up.'

  Catherine became aware of Julian's head tilting exaggeratedly. She watched an incredulous smirk forming on his face as Roger and the director carried on:

  'Did you feel maybe that performing this sort of music needs courage?'

  'Well … I'll leave that to our audiences to decide,' said Roger. 'Really, what we had in mind was more the old Wesleyan adage about hymn singing, you know: "Sing lustily and with good courage."'

  Julian turned to Catherine and winked. 'Did we have that in mind?' he murmured across the seats to her. 'I find myself strangely unable to recall this momentous conversation.'

  Catherine smiled back, mildly confused. While meaning no disloyalty to her husband, she couldn't recall the conversation either. Turning to look out the window of the minibus, she halfheartedly tried to cast her mind back, back, back to a time before she'd been the soprano in the Courage Consort. Hundreds of neat, slender trees flashed past her eyes, blurring into greeny-brown pulsations. This and the gentle thrumming of the engine lulled her, for the third time today, to the brink of sleep.

  Behind her, Benjamin Lamb began to snore.

  For the last couple of miles of their journey, the château was in plain, if distant, view.

  'Is that where we're going?' asked Catherine.

  'Yes,' replied Jan.

  'The wicked witch's gingerbread house,' murmured Julian for Catherine to hear.

  'Pardon?' said the director.

  'I was wondering what the château was actually called,' said Julian.

  'Its real name is't Luitspelershuisje, but Flemings and visitors call it Château de Luth.'

  'Ah … Château de Luth, how nice,' repeated Catherine, as the minibus sped through the last mile—or 1.609 kilometres. When the director parked the car in front of the Consort's new home-away-from-home, he smiled benignly but, again, left them to deal with their own baggage.

  The Château de Luth was more beautiful, though rather smaller, than Catherine had expected. A two-storey cottage built right next to the long straight road between Duidermonde and Martinekerke, with no other houses anywhere about, it might almost have been an antique railway station whose railway line had been spirited away and replaced with a neat ribbon of macadamised tar.

  'Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian stayed here, in the last year they were together,' said the director, encouraging them all to approach and go inside. 'Bussotti and Pousseur, too.'

  The house was in perfect condition for its age, except for the artful tangle of stag horns crowning the front door, which had been eaten away somewhat by acid rain in the late eighties. The red brick walls and dark grey roof tiles were immaculate, the carved window frames freshly painted in brilliant white.

  All around the cottage, lushly tasteful woodland glowed like a high-quality postcard, each tree apparently planted with discretion and attention to detail. Glimpsed among the straight and slender boughs, an elegant brown doe froze to attention, like an expensive scale model of a deer added as a pièce de résistance.

  Catherine stood gazing while Roger took care of her suitcase somewhere behind her.

  'It all looks as if Robin Hood and his Merry Men could trot out of the greenery any minute,' she said, as the director ambled up.

  'It's funny you say this,' he commented. 'In the sixties there was a television series filmed here, a sort of French Robin Hood adventure called Thierry la Fronde. This smooth road through the forest was perfect for tracking shots.'

  The director left her deer spotting and hurried off to unlock the front door, where the others stood waiting. They were arranged in a tight trio around their bags and cases, Ben at the back and the shorter men in front, like a rock group posing for a publicity shot.

  Jan worked on the locks, first with a massive, antique-looking brass key and then with a couple of little stainless-steel numbers.

  'Presto!' he exclaimed. Never having seen a conjurer at work, Catherine took the expression as a musical directive. What could he want them to do presto? She was in a somewhat adagio state of mind.

  The château's magnificent front room, all sunlight and antiques, was obviously the one where rehearsals would take place. Julian, as he was wont to do, immediately tested the acoustic with a few sotto voce Es. He'd done this in cellars and cathedrals from Aachen to Zyrardów; he couldn't help it, or so he claimed.

  'Mi-mi-mi-mi-mi,' he sang, then smiled. This was a definite improvement on Ben Lamb's rather muffled sitting room.

  'Yes, it's good,' smiled the director, and began to show them round.

  Catherine had only been inside a couple of minutes when she began to feel a polite unease finding a purchase on her shoulders. It wasn't anything to do with the atmosphere of the place: that was quite charming, even enchanting. All the furniture and most of the fixtures were dark-stained wood, a little sombre perhaps, but there was plenty of sunlight beaming in through the many windows and a superb smell, or maybe it was an absence of smell: oxygen-rich air untainted by industry or human congestion.

  All conveniences, both mod and antique, were on offer: Giraffe upright piano, electric shower, embroidered quilts, microwave oven, fridge, a concert-sized xylophone, an eighteenth-century spinning wheel, two computers, a complete prewar set of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (in Dutch), an ornate rack of wooden recorders (sopranino, descant, alto, tenor, plus a flageolet), several cordless telephones, even an assortment of slippers to wear around the house.

  No, it wasn't any of these things that troubled Catherine as she accompanied her fellow Consort members on their guided tour of the château. It was entirely to do with the number of bedrooms. As the director escorted them from one room to the next, she was keeping count and, by the time he was showing them the galley kitchen, a burnished-wood showpiece worthy of Vermeer, she appreciated there wasn't going to be any advance on four. One for Ben, one for Julian, one for Dagmar, and … one for herself and Roger.

  'The shops are not so accessible,' the director was saying, 'so we've put some food in the cupboards for you. It is not English food, but it should keep you alive in an emergency.'

  Catherine made the effort to look into the cupboard he was holding open for their appraisal, so as not to be rude. Foremost was a cardboard box of what looked, from the illustration, exactly like the vegetation surrounding the house. BOERENKOOL, it said.

  'This really is awfully sweet,' she said, turning the almost weightless box over in her hands.

  'No,' said Jan, 'it has an earthy, slightly bitter taste.'

  So there were limits to his ability to understand his visitors from across the channel, after all.

  ***

  IT WAS AROUND NINE O'CLOCK in the evening, almost nightfall, when Dagmar finally showed up. The director had long gone; the Courage Consort were busy with unpacking, nosing around, eating cornflakes ('Nieuw Super Knapperig!'), and other settling-in activities. It was Ben who noticed, through an upstairs window, the tiny cycling figure approaching far in the distance. They all went to stand outside, a welcoming committee for their prodigal contralto.

  Dagmar had cycled from Duidermonde railway station with a heavy rucksack on her back and fully laden baskets on
both the front and rear of her bicycle. Sweat shone on her throat and plastered her loose white T-shirt semitransparently against her black bra and tanned ribcage; it darkened the knees of her electric-blue sports tights and twinkled in the unruly fringe of her jet-black hair. Still, she seemed to have plenty of energy left as she dismounted the bike and wheeled it towards her fellow Consort members.

  'Sorry I took so long; the ferry people gave me a lot of hassles,' she said, her huge brown eyes narrowing slightly in embarrassment. Like all colourful nonconformists, she preferred to zoom past awed onlookers, leaving them gaping in her wake, rather than be examined at leisure as she cycled towards them over miles of dead flat road.

  'Not to worry, not to worry, we've not started yet,' said Roger, stepping forward to relieve her of the bicycle, but it was Ben she allowed to take it from her. Despite his massive size, unfeasible for cycling, she trusted him to know what to do with it.

  Swaying a little on her Reebok feet, Dagmar wiped her face with a handful of her T-shirt. Her midriff, like all the rest of her skin, was the colour of toffee.

  'Well, childbirth hasn't made you any less of an athlete, I see,' commented Julian.

  Dagmar shrugged off the compliment as ignorant and empty.

  'I've lost a hell of a lot of muscle tone, actually,' she said. 'I will try to get it back while I'm here.'

  'Toning up!' chirped Julian, straining, as he always did within minutes of a reunion with Dagmar, to remain friendly. 'That's what we're all here for, isn't it?'

  The thought of Dagmar's eight-week-old baby roused Catherine from her daze. 'Who's taking care of little Axel?' she asked.

  'It's not a problem,' Dagmar replied. 'He's going to be staying here with us.'

  This revelation made Julian's chin jut forward dramatically. Accepting delivery of Dagmar had already sorely taxed him; the prospect of her baby coming to join her was just too much to take.

  'I … don't … know if that would be such a good idea,' he said, his tone pensive and musical, as if she'd asked him his opinion and he had deliberated long and hard before responding.

  'Is that so?' she said coldly. 'Why not?'

  'Well, I just thought, if we're being given this space—this literal and metaphysical space—to rehearse in, far away from noise and distractions, it … well, it seems odd to introduce a crying baby into it, that's all.'

  'My baby isn't a very crying baby, actually,' said Dagmar, flapping the hem of her T-shirt with her fists to let the cooling air in. 'For a male, he makes less noise than many others.' And she walked past Julian, to stake her own claim to the Château de Luth.

  'Well, we'll find out, I suppose,' Julian remarked unhappily.

  'Yes, I guess we will,' Dagmar called over her shoulder. On her back, nestled inside her bulging rucksack, a spiky-haired infant was sleeping the sleep of the just.

  By the time the Courage Consort settled down to their first serious run-through of Partitum Mutante, dark had come. The burnished lights cast a coppery glow over the room, and the windows reflected five unlikely individuals with luminous clarity. To Catherine, these mirrored people looked as if they belonged together: five Musketeers ready to do battle.

  If she could just concentrate on that unreal image, shining on a pane of glass with a forest behind it, she could imagine herself clinging onto her place in this little fraternity. The rehearsals were always the hardest ordeal; the eventual performance was a doddle by comparison. The audience, who saw them presented onstage as if they were a projection from far away, knew no better than that they were a closely knit clan, and this allowed them to behave like one. The artificiality of the concert platform was insulated against disturbing events: no one argued, or sulked, or asked her questions she couldn't answer, or expected her to say yes to sex. All they did was sing, in perfect harmony. Or, in the case of Pino Fugazza's Partitum Mutante, perfect disharmony.

  'F-sharp there, Kate, not F-natural.'

  'Honestly?'

  'That's what's written. On my printout, at least.'

  'Sorry.'

  The trick was lasting the distance from now till the premiere.

  ***

  LATE ON THE FIRST NIGHT in the Château de Luth, tucked up in a strange, soft bed next to Roger, Catherine turned the pages of Extended Vocal Techniques by the Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble of California. It was a book she resorted to sometimes to put her to sleep, but tonight it had the additional purpose of keeping physical contact off the agenda.

  Roger was reading a coffee-table book on Karel Appel, a Dutch artist, that he had found in a bookshelf downstairs—or rather he was looking at the pictures, she supposed; she didn't think her husband had managed to learn Dutch for this adventure. He might have done, but she imagined she'd have noticed something if he had.

  Slyly she glanced at him from time to time, without moving her head. He was sinking farther down in the bed, inch by inch. Her almost invincible insomnia would give her the edge soon enough, she hoped. She read on.

  Vowels can be defined linguistically by the characteristic band of overtones each contains. These bands are narrowed to specific pitches, so that the singer's voice resonates in a way that reinforces a single harmonic partial of the fundamental being sung. Such reinforced harmonics make it possible to write in eight parts for four singers.

  Catherine wondered if, rather than losing her sanity, she was perhaps merely getting old.

  'Crazy character, this Karel Appel,' remarked Roger.

  'Mm,' she said, drawing her knees up a little under the quilted eiderdown to better support her book. She wished this new piece by Pino Fugazza didn't require her and Dagmar to do so many things that distorted normal perception. Other people might think it was terribly exciting when two females singing in thirds made the airwaves buzz weirdly, but Catherine was finding that her nerves were no longer up to it. Even the way a sustained A-flat tended to make an auditorium's air-conditioning hum gave her the creeps lately. It was as if her face was being rubbed in the fact that music was all soundwaves and atoms when you stripped the Baroque wrapping paper off it. But too much sonic nakedness wasn't good for the spirit. At least that's what she was finding lately, since she'd started coming … adrift. A bit of Bach or Monteverdi might be more healing than what this Pino Fugazza expected of her.

  Cowardly sentiments, she knew, from a member of the Courage Consort.

  When Roger finally fell asleep, it was long past midnight. She didn't know exactly what time, because the only clock in the room was Roger's watch, hidden underneath his pillow as he breathed gently off the edge of the bed. It was strange the things you forgot to bring with you to a foreign place.

  Catherine laid Extended Vocal Techniques gingerly on the floor, drew the eiderdown up to her chin, and switched off the bedside light. The silence that descended on her then was so uncompromising that she was unnerved by it. It was as if the whole universe had been switched off.

  On the threshold of sleep, she found herself wondering how a person might go about killing herself in an environment like this.

  At dawn, there were birds. Nothing on too grand a scale, just a few piccolo chirps and twitterings from species unknown. How strange that in London, in her flat near the half-dozen trees planted by the council, there should always be such a racket in the mornings from throngs of birds making the best of things, while here, in the middle of a forest, so few voices should be raised. Either there were only a handful of birds out there, chirping at the tops of their lungs in a hopeless attempt to fill the vacuum, or else there were millions and millions of them, all keeping silent. Sitting in the branches, waiting for the right moment.

  Catherine was aghast to find herself becoming afraid: afraid of all the millions of silent birds, infesting the trees, waiting. And, knowing how irrational this fear was, she despised herself. Surely she was too crazy to live, surely it was high time she cleaned herself off the face of the planet, if she'd sunk to feeling anxiety even at the thought of birds sitting contentedly in a f
orest. It was as if the frayed and tangled wiring of her soul, submitted to God for repairs, had been entrusted to incompetent juniors instead, and now she was programmed to see danger in every little sparrow, dire warning in music, deadly threat from the love of her own husband.

  Roger was sleeping like a stone beside her. He might wake any second, though; he never snuffled or fidgeted before waking, he just opened his eyes and there he was, fully conscious, fully functioning. Catherine looked at his head on the pillow, the head she'd once been barely able to resist stroking and kissing in adoration. She'd been so grateful he wanted her, so in awe of his conviction that he could shape her into something more than just another lost and self-destructive girl with a pretty soprano voice.

  'You've got it inside you,' he'd promised her.

  Yearning, terrified, she'd left her father's house at long last, and given herself over to Roger Courage instead.

  Now she lay next to him in this strange soft bed in Belgium, and she wished she could breathe some magic odourless chloroform into his open mouth, to keep him safely asleep while she worked up the courage to face the day.

  She mentioned the unearthly silence of the night to the others, over breakfast. She was light-headed with relief by then: she'd leapt out of bed and got herself ready before Roger was able to rouse himself from an unusually deep sleep. She was already in the kitchen, fully dressed, before he made his way downstairs to join his fellow Consort members. She was cooking havermout—porridge by any other name—for a ravenous unshaven Ben, and generally behaving like a sound-minded person.