‘No, Peg.’
‘No one went to his funeral. There was no music for Vivaldi at the end.’
Other mothers told their boys bedtime stories; not this one. She took him to see Bambi for his eighth birthday and she had to lie in a darkened room afterwards. ‘Never ask me to watch another film with a fucking talking fawn,’ she said. Peg had been raised by nannies and the odd tutor – she said she just didn’t know the mother recipe. When she saw her parents as a child, it was to bid them good night. Daddy, drunk at the piano – Lissen to thisss, Peggeee – mummy, sour and grieving. Mummy’s true love had been felled at Ypres. Daddy was the back-up plan. She never forgave him for that.
Over time, Peg showed Frank other pictures in music. The trout in Schubert’s quintet, the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams, the cuckoo in Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’. Then, as Frank discovered music of his own, he showed her pictures too. ‘Listen to this, Peg!’ And she would. If it was music, she would come running. He showed her the way João Gilberto could whisper, so that you could hear a little buzzy bee in your ear, or the way Joni Mitchell sang ‘Blu-oo-oo’ and you saw her all alone in the dark. And what about the low baritone sax in Van Morrison’s ‘Into The Mystic’, just like a real foghorn? There were pictures in all kinds of music, once you stopped to listen.
‘It breaks my heart,’ said Peg, the day she played Vivaldi. ‘When I think of the Red Priest and no music for him at the end.’
9
The Problem of the Green Handbag
SOMETIMES, IF A sales rep was being particularly obtuse, Frank went through all the reasons vinyl was better than CD or cassette tape.
It wasn’t just 1) the ARTWORK and SLEEVE NOTES on the album sleeve. It wasn’t 2) the possibility of a HIDDEN TRACK, or a little MESSAGE carved in the final groove. It wasn’t 3) the mahogany richness of the QUALITY of SOUND. (But CD sound was clean, the reps argued. It had no surface noise. To which Frank replied, ‘Clean? What’s music got to do with clean? Where is the humanity in clean? Life has surface noise! Do you want to listen to furniture polish?’)
It wasn’t even 4) the RITUAL of checking the record before carefully lowering the stylus. No, most of all it was about the JOURNEY. 5) The journey that an album made from one track to another, with a hiatus in the middle, when you had to get up and flip the record over in order to finish. With vinyl, you couldn’t just sit there like a lemon. You had to GET UP OFF YOUR ARSE and TAKE PART.
‘You see?’ he would say. By this point he might be shouting. He could also be lumbering up and down the shop, in a glistening sweat. ‘You see now why you will never get me to sell CDs? We are human beings. We need lovely things we can see and hold. Yes, vinyl can be a pain. It’s not convenient. It gets scratched. But that’s the point. We are acknowledging the importance of music and beauty in our lives. You don’t get that if you’re not prepared to make AN EFFORT.’
And the reps would laugh and say yeah, yeah, they got it, Frank. But they had their jobs to do. They had their sales targets to meet. Phil the EMI rep, who had been coming since the early days of punk, warned that record companies would soon be fading out vinyl altogether. Production costs were too high. ‘End of story, mate.’ If you wanted to run a music shop in 1988, you had to stock CDs.
To which Frank would reply, ‘Get out of here.’ And possibly throw something. ‘I’m never going to change.’
So what was Frank going to do about Ilse Brauchmann’s green bag? Frank was going to do what he always did when life got confusing, and that was absolutely nothing. If that didn’t work, he would do the next thing he always did when life was confusing, and hide. (‘You have a talent for it,’ a girlfriend told him once.)
‘But IlsA BrOWKmann will need it,’ said Kit in England’s Glory, where the shopkeepers of Unity Street had met to discuss the latest development. ‘It matches IlsA BrOWKmann’s coat.’ Kit had been practising her name ever since she left. Now that he had mastered it, he was keen to demonstrate his new skill wherever he spied an opportunity.
‘If she wants her handbag,’ said Frank, ‘she knows where to find it.’
‘Exactly,’ agreed Maud, ‘the woman’s got legs.’ Only, the way she said ‘legs’ made them sound mildly unsavoury. Like an infection, for instance. Or horns. ‘I don’t know why you’re all so keen to see her again.’
‘She was just very lovely,’ said Kit, who tended to say things as he saw and felt them. ‘I wonder who she’s getting married to?’
There followed yet more speculation which got wilder the more they speculated. Father Anthony suggested someone involved in finance, the Williams brothers thought the man would be a lawyer, Kit was sticking with the film theme for Ilse Brauchmann and was certain her fiancé must be a famous American actor, while the man with three teeth suggested foreign royalty.
Kit had already checked the contents of the bag; nothing other than her chequebook and a tube of hand cream. She’d left no clue as to who she was or where she and her fiancé were staying. He had wrapped the bag in bubble wrap and tucked it in the drawer beneath the counter for safe-keeping.
‘I still don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Why does she not listen to music? And what was she doing outside our shop?’ Confusion got the better of him and he sat with both hands on top of his head.
He had made a good point, though, and no one knew the answer. Why would a woman come to a record shop if she didn’t listen to music? Why would she want Frank to tell her about the ‘Four Seasons’? And never mind those questions, WHY had she fainted? What was she doing in Unity Street in the first place?
‘In my opinion,’ said Father Anthony, ‘she came for a reason. Just as she left her bag for a reason.’ He gazed over his spectacles with a lopsided smile; it had become that way after he’d once tried balancing on a spiked railing. Apparently he was remonstrating with God at the time. Frank had carried him all the way to the ambulance. He was lucky he hadn’t lost his eye, the doctors said.
‘Do you mean that she left her bag deliberately?’ asked one of the Williams brothers.
Father Anthony said yes. She had made an unconscious decision to leave her bag. It was her soul speaking. She said she was too busy to return but actually she needed to come back.
‘The woman sounds a right psycho,’ said Maud. She laughed and tried to catch Frank’s eye, but he hadn’t the stomach for connection of any kind. He sat with his arms hugged around his shoulders, adrift and confused. He couldn’t seem to get warm.
‘I still don’t know what Frank should do about her handbag,’ admitted Mr Novak.
Kit scratched his hair as if he had something alive in there. ‘I could make posters. Saying, Have you lost your bag? I could put one in the shop window, and another in the bus stop. Then she’ll come back and we can find out who she really is.’
‘We could all put up posters,’ said one of the Williams brothers.
And so it was agreed. Kit would make posters. They would tape one in every window and they would put them up on Castlegate. So long as she was still in the city, she was bound to return.
As they left the pub Father Anthony touched Frank’s arm and asked if he needed to talk.
‘Not really,’ said Frank.
But Father Anthony followed him anyway.
The music shop glowed a beautiful deep blue in the dark. At the far end, light flickered on the booths as if they were breathing. Frank led the way past the central table and opened the door to his flat. If it was cramped in the shop, the double-storeyed flat was even more so. A kitchen and bedroom on the first floor, two single rooms and a bathroom on the second; all of them crowded with boxes of vinyl. There were no curtains as such, just an old Indian coverlet that Maud had given him one Christmas and he’d nailed above the bedroom window.
Father Anthony made his way to the kitchen sink and stepped in a bucket.
‘Oh yes,’ said Frank, too late. ‘Mind that.’ There was also a new leak in the ceiling.
He found eggs at the back of the fr
idge, along with butter, and a loaf of Polish bread.
‘Something’s wrong,’ said Father Anthony. ‘I can tell.’
Frank stood with his back towards the priest, stirring the eggs over the heat. ‘Do you want beans?’
Father Anthony said yes, please. He would like beans. Then he said, ‘Are you in trouble?’
For a moment, Frank stood eyeing the eggs in the pan. They were on the point of solidifying into a texture that was more like omelette. Frank tipped them on to plates, pushed old magazines out of the way and the two men – one music, the other church – sat opposite each other in the yellow cone of light from the overhead bulb.
‘If you need a napkin, it will have to be the tea towel,’ said Frank.
Father Anthony watched him solemnly from across the table. ‘This is a feast. Thank you.’
They ate in silence. Afterwards Frank poured tea from the pot and they stood at the kitchen window looking out. It was one of the highest points of the city. You could see the old gas works, the tower blocks, the endless streets of houses. In windows all around them, people did the small, routine things they always did. Watching television, washing dishes, getting ready for bed. Moonlight cast a shine over the rooftops; they stretched, like thousands of fish scales, all the way down to the factories and docks, where smoke melted upwards in pale columns. Stars were tiny, cold points speckling the sky.
‘Remember when you and I used to go night-walking?’
Frank nodded and lit up.
‘You saved my life, Frank.’
‘You saved your life. I just found you jazz.’
They kept looking to the window. Their reflections were ghosts on the glass; great big Frank and the ageing ex-priest. Far away a blue light flashed its passage towards the docks.
‘She likes you.’
‘Who likes me?’
‘Ilse Brauchmann.’
‘In case you didn’t hear, she has a fiancé. She’s getting married. I don’t know why you all keep going on about her.’
‘I’m just making a simple observation.’
‘Well, would you stop? With your simple observations? Can we drink our tea and look out the window?’ There was an impatience in his voice that made him ashamed.
‘I’m only saying that beneath that fringe, you’re an attractive man. It’s too late for me but you’ve got years. And it pains me, the way you insist on being alone.’
‘It’s easier.’
‘CDs are easier. You don’t want those.’
They carried their mugs through to the bedroom and played jazz for the rest of the night. All their old favourites – Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Grant Green – not saying much, just sitting on the mattress and listening to records like in the old days when Frank had kept Father Anthony company through the worst, fetching him buckets when he needed to be sick, or blankets when he was shaking so hard he wanted to scream and his joints hurt as if they were being twisted. Round about seven in the morning, a faint silvery light eased into the sky, and then came other colours, tangerine and gold and green. Clouds hung like black bones and smoke lifted from the food factories. The morning shift had started.
‘God help them,’ said Father Anthony. ‘Poor souls.’ His eyelids dropped and snapped open and dropped again.
Frank said, ‘I am in trouble. You’re right. I like her. I don’t know why.’ He spoke very quietly and slowly, more a shaping of his mouth than a full-blown sentence. He just wanted to know how it felt, to say those things, whether or not it hurt. He reached for a new cigarette and his hand shook a little as he struck a match but he was still breathing, wasn’t he, the world was still turning. The lit-up tip of his cigarette was an orange flower in the dark. ‘But she’s got someone else. She’ll probably be gone tomorrow. So, hey. That’s that. Finito. End of story.’
The old priest lay asleep with his arms crossed over his chest, his hands thin and papery. In the distance, traffic was already moving and it was a soft sound, more a lullaby than anything else.
Finally Frank slept too. He dreamt he was back in the white house by the sea, with its jumble of turrets and gabled windows, ornate chimneys and overlapping roofs, perched on the edge of a clifftop. Peg’s family had made their fortune in cigarettes but the house was all that was left. It had turned out her daddy was a gambler and a coke head. Dead by fifty. Her mother died months later.
In Frank’s dream, the tall windows were wide open, sucking the curtains in and out with a life of their own. ‘Peg!’ he began to shout. ‘Peg!’ He chased from one room to another. The drawing room, the ballroom, the old billiard room. He threw open the French doors and tore out to the garden where tamarind trees grew with their feathery plumes of pink blossom. He even jogged down the limestone stairway to the beach that was bordered with thousands of orange flowers. But wherever he went, there was no sign of her. Nothing but the waves breaking in twos and threes on the sand. The fizz of the end.
Shaken, Frank rose and washed his face and made a mug of tea for Father Anthony. He couldn’t stop seeing the white house by the sea. He couldn’t put away the loneliness that swallowed him.
10
Adagio for Strings
MAUD UNLOCKED THE door of her salon and flipped the Closed! sign to Open! She arranged a few magazines in a fan shape and then she put them in a line shape and then she stuffed them back in a regular pile.
Outside, people were stepping from their houses, bundled up against the cold, parents and kids off to school, others to work. One man scraped the frost from his car window; another was trying to fix a gutter by tying it up with string. Two little olive-skinned girls stood shivering in pink coats. Then Kit appeared from the corner, arms flailing, skidding on ice and swerving at the last minute to avoid flooring Mrs Roussos as she emerged from her gate with a bag of rubbish. Its contents spilled everywhere. He dropped to the ground, scooped everything back into the bag, and carried it for her to the bin.
Spotting Maud, Kit did an elaborate mime that made no sense whatsoever. Before she had time to hide, he had exploded into her salon, bringing with him a gust of cold air and a smell of toothpaste.
‘I’m putting up my posters today.’
‘What posters?’
‘My posters to find Ilse Brauchmann. To say we have her green bag. I am going to launch a campaign. They will be on all the lamp posts. Can I count on your support?’
‘As a what?’
Kit looked baffled. ‘As a friend.’
Now it was Maud’s turn to look baffled. ‘As a what?’ she repeated.
Frank’s name was written in Maud’s heart; or – more truthfully – it was tattooed above her right breast, just inside her bra strap. Sometimes when she spoke to him, or while she listened, she placed her hand where the tattoo lay and it was like sending a message in code.
Don’t get her wrong. Maud knew Frank didn’t love her. The problem was that he had a kind of empathy for everyone. There seemed to be no end to the amount of bad news the man could absorb. His shop was permanently occupied by people who would otherwise be roaming the streets or weeping in bedsits. And women were the worst. Anorexic girls, unmarried mothers, battered wives. Frank was so busy loving other people he had no room to accommodate the fact that someone might turn round one day and love him back.
Or maybe he just didn’t want to. She thought that sometimes.
It had happened – Maud’s love – the first time Frank found her a record.
‘Try this,’ he’d said.
‘Try what?’ she’d replied.
‘Go on. Sit in there. Put on the headphones. There’s something I want you to hear.’
‘But that’s an old wardrobe, Frank. I’m not sitting in that.’
Here she was wrong, apparently. It was a new listening booth. Yes, this crappy cupboard with small jewelly birds in the door now housed a velvet chair, trimmed with little tassels, and a headset so large it was a hatful of music.
So she’d sat on the chair, just as Frank asked.
She’d shut the door, and it was strange, it was the same as hiding when you were a kid, only this time you weren’t surrounded by your mum’s dresses and your dad’s suits and trying not to breathe in case they found you, it was like hiding inside a record. Time stopped.
Tick, tick.
‘I think you’ll like this,’ Frank’s voice had boomed from the other side of the door.
Tick, tick.
Barber. Adagio for Strings. She’d never even heard of the guy. Maud played Def Leppard, the louder the better. Anything to silence the voice inside her. Where is that child? Fetch the belt. Why can’t she be a good little girl? But Frank played her the record and it was like walking through a magic door. It was so sad and so simple it could break your heart, but it didn’t. From the softest of beginnings, it built and built as if it were climbing a set of stairs, until the violins were practically screaming AHHHHHHHH – and then it stopped. Nothing. Her heart had swooped to her mouth. When the music started again, she was in tears. Like a switch had been flicked, and her eyes were spouts. Because life goes on, the music told her, even when you think it can’t. Yes, there is fear. There is real cruelty. Not knowing what the fuck. Those things are there. But listen because there is this too – this beauty. The human adventure is worth it, after all.
As she left that booth, the music was in her heart. The shop was just the same, the past was just the same, but now there was also this. This whatever it was. This truth. It was no less than a small miracle. And Frank had given her that.
‘Was it OK?’ he’d asked afterwards. How could she say? How can you tell a man with eyes like chocolate drops that by sticking you for eight minutes in a cupboard, he has changed your life? He knelt at her feet, gazing at her from beneath that floppy fringe – well, she assumed he was gazing – and smiling with his soft mouth, the lower lip cleft with a dimple like a segment of fruit. It was so intimate it was almost post-coital.
So here she was. All these years later. How many nights had she sat with him in England’s Glory as he told another story about a customer who needed his help? How many times had she fetched a takeaway and pushed open the door of his shop, pretending a date had not turned up? How many Christmases? New Years? Birthdays? One day they’d jack it all in. Move out of the city altogether. Real love was not a bolt out of the blue, it was not the playing of violins, it was like anything else, it was a habit of the heart. You got up every day and you put it on, same as your pants, your boots, and you kept treading the constant path.