The Courage Consort

  Catherine was relieved when Roger told her this. She hadn't expected domestic help somehow; after the director's indifference to their baggage, she'd assumed it wouldn't be Dutch. But if someone could come and do something about the sweat-soaked sheets on the bed she'd have to share with Roger tonight, that would make a big difference.

  Minutes after Roger passed on the message about the maid, Dagmar returned from her adventures, hot and bothered. She barged into the kitchen, plastic bags in each fist, Axel still on her back. He was whimpering and grizzling.

  'Moment mal, moment mal,' she chided him, dumping groceries on the kitchen bench. The Times Literary Supplement was obscured by yoghurts, fresh apricots, crispbreads, cheeses, avocados, cold meats, coffee, cartons of 'Vla met echt fruit!,' plastic flip-top containers of baby-wipes—and eggs.

  Roger was already gone; Ben Lamb followed him gracefully, recognising that there wasn't room in the kitchen for all this bounty, Catherine, Dagmar, Julian, and himself as well. Julian hesitated, his eyes on the eggs. He was thinking he might be able to put up with the irritating noise of the baby if there were omelettes on the horizon.

  But Dagmar sat heavily on a stool right opposite him and hoisted Axel over her shoulder, depositing him on her lap. Then, hitching her T-shirt up, she uncupped one breast and guided her baby's mouth to the nipple.

  'Excuse me,' said Julian, leaving the women to it.

  Catherine sat at the kitchen bench, staring abstractedly into Ben's porridge bowl. It was so clean and shiny it might have been licked, though she imagined she would have noticed if that were the case. She herself tended to half eat food and then forget about it. Roger didn't like that for some reason, so, back home in London, she'd taken to hiding her food as soon as she lost her appetite for it, in whatever nook or receptacle was closest to hand. I'll finish this later, she'd tell herself, but then the world would turn, turn, turn. Days, weeks later, ossified bagels would fall out of coat pockets, furry yoghurts would peep out of the jewellery drawer, liquefying black bananas would lie like corpses inside the coffins of her shoes.

  She hoped she wasn't doing it here in the Château de Luth, though chances were that she was. Roger was probably cleaning up after her, refraining from saying anything because of the other people. Could she perhaps be getting Alzheimer's instead of going crazy? At forty-seven she doubted it was very likely … Still: there was something so very blameless and … nonnegotiable about Alzheimer's. Nobody would think of telling you to pull yourself together, or get impatient for you to return to your sex life. You wouldn't have to take Prozac anymore, and if somebody found a hoard of half-eaten apples behind the television, well, they'd understand.

  And when you died, you wouldn't even know what was happening. You'd just dither absentmindedly into the next world, blinking mildly in the light of the Almighty.

  Catherine's eyes came into focus on the Times Literary Supplement, from which she had removed the food and neatly put it away in refrigerator and cupboards minutes ago. The TLS was open at the letters pages, and nine distinguished academics from all over Britain and the USA were arguing about the dedicatee of Shakespeare's sonnets, taking it all very personally. Correspondence on this matter is now closed, warned the editor, but after nigh-on four hundred years it was pretty obvious that the sonnets argument, like all arguments, would run forever without resolving anything. As for Catherine, she had no opinion, except that it would be nine different kinds of hell to be married to these men.

  'You can eat any of the food that you want,' Dagmar said.

  Catherine had forgotten the German girl was there, and looked up with a start.

  'Oh … thank you,' she said.

  'Except if I'm the only one of us who's going to be shopping, I'll need to have some extra money soon,' added Dagmar. Her baby was still sucking at the breast, placid as a sleeping kitten.

  'Just mention it to Roger, he'll take care of it,' said Catherine. She hadn't signed a cheque or set foot in a bank in years. Latterly she had a little plastic card which gave her money out of a slot in the wall, providing she could remember a four-digit number—and the card, of course. There was nowhere in Martinekerke forest where that little plastic card could be inserted.

  'How did you sleep last night, Dagmar?' asked Catherine, carrying Ben's bowl to the sink.

  'Perfect,' said Dagmar.

  'You didn't hear anything unusual, in the small hours of the morning? Like a cry from the forest?'

  'Nothing wakes me,' said Dagmar, looking down at Axel, 'except him, of course.'

  This seemed unlikely, given the child's almost noiseless functioning, but Dagmar must know what she was talking about. Catherine was struck by how, when the German girl was looking down at the baby at her breast, her slim, taut-skinned face acquired a double chin, adding five years to her age. There was a pale scar on Dagmar's forehead, too, which Catherine had never noticed before. Wrinkles of the future, cicatrices of the past, all the million marks recording a private life that no outsider could ever understand.

  'Are you enjoying yourself here?' asked Catherine.

  'Sure,' Dagmar replied. 'It's good they provide us with this space. I've been a professional musician now for ten years, and I have a kid; it's about time somebody pays for us to rehearse, yeah?'

  'But the place itself, and the piece itself—are you enjoying those?'

  'I don't care at all about Pino Fugazza's music,' shrugged Dagmar, removing Axel from her breast. Saliva gleamed on her nipple and areola, prompting immediate loss of eye contact from Catherine. 'I want to sing it well. If I get too bored with the music put in front of me, I should get off my ass and compose some of my own, yeah?'

  Catherine, still embarrassed at her own queasiness about the spittly nipple, was even more thrown by this turn the conversation was taking. The American-accented 'ass' instead of 'arse' emphasised Dagmar's foreignness even more than her German accent usually did, and her frank indifference to the commission that had brought them all here was startling. Strangest of all was this notion that you could compose yourself, if you were dissatisfied with the music you were given.

  'You write music?' At the bottom edges of her vision, Catherine registered that the T-shirt was coming down, covering the perturbing swell of flesh.

  'Sure,' said Dagmar, finding a more convenient spot to lay her boy's wispy head. 'Don't you?'

  Catherine had never once dreamt of composing a note. She played the piano competently, could get by on the flute, could hear a piece of music playing in her head just by reading the score—though not as accurately as Roger could hear it, of course. When it came to score reading, she imagined her brain as an old radio, fading out now and then, and Roger's brain as a CD player, extracting every nuance with digital efficiency. As for the prospect of making her own marks on the staves: no, that was inconceivable. The only times she ever sang a note that was different from what had been written for her, Roger was always there to say, "F-sharp, Kate, not F-natural," or whatever.

  'I'm sure I don't have what it takes,' she told Dagmar.

  The German girl wasn't passionately motivated to disagree, her brown eyes as dark and opaque as Belgian mocha chocolate.

  'If you think so.' She shrugged.

  Catherine flinched inwardly: she'd been hoping for reassurance. How strange these Germans were, not understanding that a declaration of unfitness was really a plea for encouragement. Perhaps it was a good thing they hadn't won the Battle of Britain.

  'I haven't had the right training, for a start,' Catherine said. 'People like Pino Whatsisname have studied composition for years and years.'

  Dagmar was plainly unawed by this reminder of Pino's credentials.

  'Humming to yourself in the bath is composing, don't you think?' she said, hugging Axel up onto her shoulder. 'I sing to myself when I'm out cycling, and to my kid. It's not Partitum Mutante I'm singing, that's for sure.'

  She grinned, and Catherine grinned, too. It was a nice, safe place to leave the conversation.

/>   'I'm going to put Axel to bed now,' said Dagmar. 'You should go out for a walk, don't you think? Everything is perfect out there—the weather, the forest, everything.'

  'I'd like that,' promised Catherine. 'I really would. But maybe Roger wants us to start now.'

  The look she got from Dagmar then was enough to shame her into finding her shoes.

  Gina the maid arrived in a little white Peugeot just as Catherine was stepping out the door—excellent timing, since it meant that Roger couldn't be angry about the delay in the rehearsals, could he?

  Slightly awed at her own daring waywardness, Catherine cast off from the house without even explaining herself to anyone, hurried into the fringe of the forest, then peered through the sparse trees back at the château. Roger and Julian were competing to welcome Gina, who, contrary to expectations, was a blond twentysomething with a figure like a dancer and work apparel to match. Everything in the Netherlands was of better quality than you thought it would be. Even the vacuum cleaner that Gina was struggling to remove from her vehicle's backseat without the assistance of foreigners looked like a design award winner that could suck anything into its sleek little perspex body.

  To the best of Catherine's knowledge, Roger had never been unfaithful to her. It wasn't his style. Once he made a commitment to something, he stuck with it and never let go, no matter what. No matter what. Nor was a sudden heart attack or stroke likely to take him from her. He was four years older than her, but very fit. They would be together always, unless she died first.

  Catherine turned her back on the château and wandered deeper into the trees. As she walked she kicked gently at the soft, rustling carpet of fallen leaves and peaty earth, to leave some sort of trail she could follow later if she got lost. The sky was clear, the breeze gentle. Her footsteps would remain, she was sure.

  During the war, the Nazis had probably killed people in these woods. The war had come to Belgium, hadn't it? She was vaguely ashamed to concede that she wasn't sure. She didn't really know much about anything except singing. Roger had rescued her from postadolescent misery at St. Magdalen's College and, forever after, had taken responsibility for the world at large. He told her what he thought might interest her, vetted out what in his opinion she'd rather not know. Then again, she was terribly forgetful, especially lately. Roger possibly had told her about Belgium and World War II once, but she would have forgotten it by now.

  Anyway, assuming there had been Nazis in this forest, this would have been a perfect spot to execute people. Catherine wondered what it would be like to be rounded up, herded to the edge of a communal grave, and shot. She tried to feel pity for those who didn't wish to die: women with children, perhaps. All she could think of was what a mercy it would be to have the burden of decision shouldered by someone else: a Nazi to lead you from prevarication to the grave, where he would shoot you in the back of the head, a place you couldn't reach yourself.

  Then, a few years later, a French Robin Hood and his Merry Men would ride their horses over your bones, twirling their colourful pennants, delighting children all over Europe.

  After fifteen minutes or so, Catherine stopped walking and squatted against the mossy bough of a cedar, making herself comfortable on the forest bed. The ground was quite safe to rest her bottom—her ass?—on; it seemed to have been designed by Netherlandish scientists to nourish vegetation without staining trousers. The warmth of the sun, diffused by the treetops, beamed vitamin D onto her skin. All around her, pale golden light flickered subtly on the greens and browns, the leaves breathing out their clean, fragrant oxygen.

  Composers are often inspired by nature, she thought. Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, Vaughan Williams, Delius, that sort of thing. What did nature mean to her? She tried to decide, as if God had just asked her the question.

  Nature meant the absence of people. It was a system set up to run without human beings, concentrating instead on the insensate and the eternal. Which was very relaxing now and then. But dangerous in the long run: darkness would fall, and there would be no door to close, no roof over one's head, no blankets to pull up. One wasn't an animal, after all.

  Catherine stood up and slapped the leaves and fragments of bark off the seat of her jeans. She'd had enough nature for one day. It was time she was getting back to the house.

  Walking back along the path she'd made, she became aware of all the birds that must be sitting in the trees all around and above her. A few were twittering musically, but the vast majority were silent. Looking down at her. It didn't bear thinking about; she concentrated on the sound of her own feet rustling through the undergrowth.

  Her quickening breathing sounded amazingly loud in the stillness, and as she walked faster the breaths became more like voiced utterances, with an actual pitch and timbre to them. Exactly like avant-garde singing, really: the vocalisations of a terrorised soul.

  She was almost running now, stumbling on loose branches and clods of earth she had kicked up earlier. The sunlight was flickering much too fast through the trees, like malfunctioning fluorescence, lurid and cold. Had she lost track of time again? Was she hours away from home?

  What would she do if she heard the cry?

  The thought came suddenly, like an arrow shot into her brain. She was alone in the forest of Martinekerke with whatever had wailed out to her during the night. Its eyes were probably on her right now, glowing through the trees. It was waiting for the right moment to utter that cry again, waiting until she had blundered so close that it could scream right in her ear, into the nape of her neck, sending her crashing to her knees in panic. Catherine ran, whimpering anxiously. She would be a good girl from now on, if only Roger would come and rescue her.

  Breathless, half-blind, she broke into the clearing. For all the intensity of her dread, she'd taken only a couple of minutes to put the forest behind her; she hadn't strayed very far from home at all. The château was right there across the road, and the little white Peugeot parked outside spoke of the impossibility of supernatural cries.

  'OK, time for Partitum Mutante? said Roger to her, as soon as she stepped across the threshold.

  ***

  REHEARSALS WENT BADLY that day. Ben, Dagmar, and Catherine were game enough, but Roger was irritable, strangely unsettled. Julian had his mind on something else and lost his place in the score at every small distraction—like Gina leaving the house, for example. He watched her through the sparkly clean windows as she loaded her equipment into her car, and his cue to sing the words of the Creator God went by unnoticed.

  Politely hostile words between Julian and Roger were mercifully interrupted by another phone call. It was a journalist from a Luxembourg newspaper, trying to find a story in the Benelux Contemporary Music Festival.

  Those members of the Consort who were not Roger Courage sat idle while Roger handled the enquiries, the first of which was evidently why Pino Fugazza's piece was called Partitum Mutante. This was one of many questions that Catherine had never thought to ask Roger, so she made the effort to listen to his reply.

  'Well, my Italian is pretty rudimentary,' he purred into the mouthpiece, implying quite the opposite, 'but I gather the title isn't Italian as such, or even Latin. It's more a sort of multilayered pun on lots of things. There's a play on partita, of course, in the sense of a musical suite, as well as some reference to partum, in the sense of birth. Mutante then suggests mutant birth, or a mutant musical form…'

  Catherine's attention wandered to the forest outside. A deer was grazing right near the window. It was really awfully nice out there, seen from indoors. She must go walking in the woods more often, face her fears, not be such a baby.

  'I do think it's awfully important to give performers of newly commissioned music adequate rehearsal time,' Roger was saying to the journalist from Luxembourg. 'Too often when you go to a première of a contemporary vocal work, you're hearing singers flying by the seat of their pants, so to speak, on a piece they've only just learnt. There hasn't been time to master it fully, to capt
ure the nuances and inflections. You have to remember that when a traditional vocal group does Handel's Messiah or some such chestnut, they can virtually sing it in their sleep. What we, in the Courage Consort, are trying to do with Partitum Mutante here in this splendid château is learn it to the point when we can sing it in our sleep. That's when the real work can begin.'

  Moments later, when Roger was off the phone and sitting down with his fellow Consort members, Catherine said, 'I thought it meant underpants.'

  Dagmar chuckled throatily, a release of tension. Roger looked at his wife as if he had every expectation that she would resume making sense very soon, if he only stared hard enough into her eyes.

  'Mutante,' Catherine explained. 'I could've sworn it meant underpants.'

  'I'm sure it's to do with mutation, dear,' Roger warned her mildly, rolling his eyes from side to side to remind her they were not alone in their apartment now. But she was not to be brushed off like that. She had been to Italy only last year, singing Dowland and Byrd. En route, she'd done a bit of shopping in Rome, thrilled and terrified to be off Roger's leash for an hour.

  'I remember when I was in Rome,' she said, 'I needed some briefs. I was in a big department store and I didn't know how to ask. Obviously I couldn't show them my knickers, could I? So I looked up underpants in a guide book. I'm sure it said mutante.' She laughed, a little embarrassed. 'That's the sort of thing I do remember.'

  Roger smirked wearily.

  'On that note,' he said, 'coffee, anyone?'

  When they were all sitting together again, Roger informed them that Pino Fugazza himself would be paying a visit to them tomorrow, to see—or rather hear—how they were progressing with his masterpiece. What needed to be discussed before then, obviously, was which parts of Partitum Mutante they needed to rehearse most intensively, in order to make the best possible impression on the composer.