Nerve

Two

The flat in Kensington was empty. There were a few letters from the day’s second post in the wire basket on the inner side of the door, and I fished them out and walked through into the sitting-room, sorting out the two which were addressed to me.

As usual, the place looked as if it had lately received the attentions of a minor tornado. My mother’s grand piano lay inches deep in piano scores, several of which had cascaded to the floor. Two music-stands leant at a drunken angle against the wall with a violin bow hooked on to one of them. The violin itself was propped up in an armchair, with its case open on the floor beside it. A ’cello and another music-stand rested side by side like lovers along the length of the sofa. An oboe and two clarinets lay on a table beside another untidy pile of music, and round the room and on all the bedroom chairs which filled most of the floor space lay a profusion of white silk handkerchiefs, rosin, coffee cups and batons.

Running a practised eye over the chaos I diagnosed the recent presence of my parents, two uncles and a cousin. As they never travelled far without their instruments, it was safe to predict that the whole circus was within walking distance and would return in a very short while. I had, I was thankful to realise, struck the interval.

I threaded a path to the window and looked out. No sign of returning Finns. The flat was at the top of a house two or three streets back from Hyde Park, and across the rooftops I could see the evening sunlight striking on the green dome of the Albert Hall. The Royal Institute of Music, where one of my uncles taught, rose in a solid dark mass beside it. The large airy apartment which was the headquarters of the Finn family was held by my father to be an economy, as it was within walking distance of where so many of them from time to time worked.

I was the odd one out. The talents with which both my parents’ families had been lavishly endowed had not descended to me. This had become painfully clear to them when at the age of four I had failed to distinguish between the notes of an oboe and a cor anglais. To the uninitiated there may not seem to be much difference between them, but my father happened to be an oboist of international reputation, against whom other oboists were measured. Also, high musical talent, if it exists, is apparent in a child from an extremely early age, earlier than any other form of inborn ability, and at three years (when Mozart began composing), concertos and symphonies made less impression on me than the noise of the men emptying the dustbins.

By the time I was five my shattered parents had reluctantly faced the fact that the child they had bred by mistake (I had caused an important American tour to be cancelled) was unmusical. Unmusical, that is, in their pure sense. I was not tone deaf and soaring flights of melody had drawn from me childish tears, but I never had, and still have not, their complete understanding, intellectual, emotional, technical and spiritual, of the effect of putting certain sounds in certain orders.

My mother never being one to do things by halves, I had henceforth been shuffled off from London between school terms to a succession of long holidays on farms, ostensibly for my health, but in reality, I knew later, to free my parents for the complicated and lengthy concert tours in which they were engaged. I grew up into a sort of truce with them, in which it was tacitly agreed that as they had not intended to have a child in the first place, and as he had proved to be less than a (musical) credit to them in the second, the less we saw of each other the better.

They disapproved of my venture into jockeyship for no other reason than that racing had nothing to do with music. It was no use my pointing out that the one thing I had learned on the various holiday farms was how to ride (for I was enough my father’s son for farming itself to bore me stiff), and that my present occupation was directly due to their actions in the past. To what they did not want to hear my acute-eared parents were sublimely deaf.

There was still no sign of them down in the street, nor of the uncle who lived with us who played the ’cello, nor the visiting uncle and cousin, violin and clarinet

I opened my two letters. The first informed me that my income tax returns were overdue. I slit the second envelope with a smiling and complacent anticipation of enjoyment, which just shows how often life can get up and slap you when you least expect it. In a familiar childish hand the letter said:

Sir Morton Henge, middle aged widower and canning tycoon. Well, well. I wondered sardonically how his serious-minded son, whom I knew slightly, would enjoy the prospect of a cuddly twenty-year-old model for a stepmother. But being in a lopsided way able to laugh at Paulina’s catch made it no less of a blow.

In the eighteen months since I had first met her she had progressed from mousy-haired obscurity to blonde blossoming on the cover of at least one glossy magazine a week. In the last month her radiant eyes had smiled at me (and eight million other men) from a cigarette advertisement in every underground station in London. I had known that it was inevitable that one day she would forsake me if she struck gold in her profession, and our whole relationship had from the start been based on that assumption; but a future without her happy inanity and her generous love-making seemed all of a sudden more bleak than I had expected.

I went through to my bedroom and putting down Paulina’s letter on the chest of drawers, caught sight of myself in the oval mirror on the wall above it. That is the face, I thought, that she has been pleased to see beside her on her pillow, but which was no match for a title and a canning fortune. Looking objectively at my reflection I noted the black hair, black eyebrows and lashes, brown eyes... not a distinguished face, nor handsome; too thin perhaps. Not bad, not good. Just a face.

I turned away and looked around the little sloping-ceilinged room which had been converted for me from a lumber room when I came home from my travels. There was very little in it; a bed, the chest of drawers, an armchair and a bedside table with a lamp on it. One picture, an impressionistic sketch of racing horses, hung on the wall facing my bed. There were no other ornaments, few books, no clutter. In six years of wandering round the world I had become so used to living with a minimum of possessions that although I had now occupied this little room on and off for two years, I had amassed nothing to put in it.

A clothes cupboard had been built for me across one end of the room. I opened the door and tried to look at its contents as Paulina must have looked, the twice she had been there. One good dark grey suit, one evening jacket with black trousers, one hacking jacket, two pairs of grey slacks, and a pair of jodhpurs. I took off the suit I was wearing and hung it at the end of the meagre row, a tweed mixture of browns. They were enough for me, those clothes. They covered every situation. Sir Morton Henge probably counted his suits in dozens and had a manservant to look after them. I shrugged my shoulders. There was no profit in this melancholy stocktaking. Paulina was gone, and that was that.

Picking up a pair of black sneakers, I shut the cupboard door and changed into jeans and an old checked shirt. That done, I contemplated the desert of time between then and the next day’s racing. The trouble with me was that steeplechasing had got into my blood like a drug addiction, so that all the normal pleasures of life, and even Paulina herself, had become merely ways of passing as quickly as possible the hours away from it.

My stomach gave an extra twist, which I would like to have believed was due to romantic desolation at my blasted love life, but which I knew very well was only the effect of not having eaten for twenty-three hours. Admitting wryly that being jettisoned had not spoiled my appetite, I made for the kitchen. Before I reached it, however, the front door of the flat banged open and in trooped my parents, uncles and cousin.

‘Hello, darling,’ said my mother, presenting a smooth sweet-smelling cheek for a kiss. It was her usual greeting to everyone from impresarios to back row chorus singers, and when applied to me still utterly lacked any maternal quality. She was not a motherly person in any way. Tall, slender, and immensely chic in a style that looked casual but was the result of much thought and expenditure, she was becoming more and more a ‘presence’ as she approached fifty. As a woman I knew her to be passionate and temperamental; as an artist to be a first-class interpretative vehicle for the genius of Haydn, whose piano concertos she poured out with magical, meticulous, ecstatic precision. I had seen hardened music critics leave her performances with tears in their eyes. So I had never expected a broad motherly bosom to comfort my childish woes, nor a sock-darning, cake-making mum to come home to.

My father, who treated me always with polite friendliness, said as a form of greeting, ‘Did you have a good day?’ He always asked. I usually answered briefly yes or no, knowing that he was not really interested.

I said, ‘I saw a man kill himself. No, it wasn’t a good day.’

Five heads swivelled towards me.

My mother said, ‘Darling, what do you mean?’

‘A jockey shot himself at the races. He was only six feet away from me. It was a mess.’ All five of them stood there looking at me with their mouths open. I wished I hadn’t told them, for it seemed even more horrible in memory than it had done at the time.

But they were unaffected. The ’cello uncle shut his mouth with a snap, shrugged, and went on into the sitting-room, saying over his shoulder, ‘Well, if you will go in for these peculiar pursuits...’

My mother followed him with her eyes. There was a bass twang as he picked up his instrument from the sofa, and as if drawn by an irresistible magnet the others drifted after him. Only my cousin stayed long enough to spare Art a thought, then he too went back to his clarinet.

I listened to them re-tuning and setting up the music stands. They began to play a jigging piece for strings and woodwind that I particularly disliked. The flat was suddenly intolerable. I went out and down into the street and began to walk.

There was only one place to go if I wanted a certain kind of peace, and I didn’t care to go there too often for fear of wearing out my welcome. But it was a full month since I had seen my cousin Joanna, and I needed some more of her company. Need. That was the only word for it.

She opened the door with her usual air of good humoured invitation.

‘Well, hello,’ she said, smiling. I followed her into the big converted mews garage which served her as sitting-room, bedroom and rehearsal room all in one. Half of the roof was a sloping skylight, through which the remains of the evening sun still shone. The size and comparative bareness of the room gave it unusual accoustic qualities; if one spoke ordinarily it was like any other room; if one sang, as Joanna did, there was a satisfying illusion of distance and some good amplification from concrete walls.

Joanna’s voice was deep and clear and resonant. When she liked, in singing dramatic passages, she could colour it with the suggestion of graininess, a very effective hint of a crack in the bell. She could have made a fortune as a blues singer; but having been born a true classical Finn, so commercial a use of her talent was out of the question. Instead she preferred songs which were to me unmelodic and unrewarding, though she seemed to be amassing a fair-sized reputation with them among people who enjoyed that sort of thing.

She had greeted me in a pair of jeans as old as my own and a black sweater streaked here and there with paint. On an easel stood a half-finished portrait of a man, with some brushes and paints on a table beside it.

‘I’m trying my hand at oils,’ she said, picking up a brush and making a tentative dab at the picture, ‘but it’s not going very well, damn it.’

‘Stick to charcoal, then,’ I said. She had drawn with flowing lines the racing horses which hung in my bedroom, short on anatomy, but full of life and movement.

‘I’ll finish this, at least,’ she said.

I stood and watched her. She squeezed out some carmine.

Without looking at me she said, ‘What’s the matter?’

I didn’t answer. She paused with her brushes in the air and turned and regarded me calmly for some seconds.

‘There’s some steak in the kitchen,’ she said.

A mind reader, my cousin Joanna. I grinned at her and went out into the long narrow lean-to where she both took her bath and did her cooking. It was rump steak, thick and dark. I grilled it with a couple of tomatoes and made some french dressing for a lettuce I found already prepared in a wooden bowl. When the steak was done I divided it on to two plates and took the whole lot back to Joanna. It smelt wonderful.

She put down her brush and came to eat, wiping her hands on the seat of her pants.

‘I’ll say one thing for you, Rob. You cook a mean steak,’ she said, after her first mouthful.

‘Thanks for nothing,’ I said, with my mouth full.

We ate every scrap. I finished first, and sat back and watched her. She had a fascinating face, full of strength and character, with straight dark eyebrows and, that night, no lipstick. She had tucked her short wavy hair in a no-nonsense style behind her ears, but on top it still curled forwards on to her forehead in an untidy fringe.

My cousin Joanna was the reason I was still a bachelor, if one can be said to need a reason at twenty-six years of age. She was three months older than I, which had given her an advantage over me all our lives, and this was a pity, since I had been in love with her from the cradle. I had several times asked her to marry me, but she always said no. First cousins, she explained firmly, were too closely related. Besides which, she added, I didn’t stir her blood.

Two other men, however, had done that for her. Both were musicians. And each of them in their turn in a most friendly way had told me how greatly having Joanna for a lover had deepened their appreciation of living, given new impetus to their musical inspiration, opened new vistas, and so on and so on. They were both rather intense brooding men with undeniably handsome faces, and I didn’t like hearing what they had to say. On the first occasion, when I was eighteen, I departed in speed and grief to foreign lands, and somehow had not returned for six years. On the second occasion I went straight to a wild party, got thoroughly drunk for the first and only time in my life, and woke up in Paulina’s bed. Both adventures had turned out to be satisfying and educational. But they had not cured me of Joanna.

She pushed away her empty plate and said, ‘Now, what’s the matter?’

I told her about Art. She listened seriously and when I had finished she said, ‘The poor man. And his poor wife... Why did he do it, do you know?’

‘I think it was because he lost his job,’ I said. ‘Art was such a perfectionist in everything. He was too proud... He would never admit he had done anything wrong in a race... And I think he simply couldn’t face everyone knowing he’d been given the sack. But the odd thing is, Joanna, that he looked as good as ever to me. I know he was thirty-five, but that’s not really old for a jockey, and although it was obvious that he and Corin Kellar, the trainer who retained him, were always having rows when their horses didn’t win, he hadn’t lost any of his style. Someone else would have employed him, even if not one of the top stables like Corin’s.’

‘And there you have it, I should think,’ she said. ‘Death was preferable to decline.’

‘Yes, it looks like it.’

‘I hope that when your time comes to retire you will do it less drastically,’ she said. I smiled, and she added, ‘And just what will you do when you retire?’

‘Retire? I have only just started,’ I said.

‘And in fourteen years’ time you’ll be a second-rate, battered, bitter forty, too old to make anything of your life and with nothing to live on but horsy memories that no one wants to listen to.’ She sounded quite annoyed at the prospect.

‘You, on the other hand,’ I said, ‘will be a fat, middle-aged, contralto’s understudy, scared stiff of losing your looks and aware that those precious vocal cords are growing less flexible every year.’

She laughed. ‘How gloomy. But I see your point. From now on I’ll try not to disapprove of your job because it lacks a future.’

‘But you’ll go on disapproving for other reasons?’

‘Certainly. It’s basically frivolous, unproductive, escapist, and it encourages people to waste time and money on inessentials.’

‘Like music,’ I said.

She glared at me. ‘For that you shall do the washing up,’ she said, getting to her feet and putting the plates together.

While I did my penance for the worst heresy possible in the Finn family she went back to her portrait, but it was nearly dusk, and when I brought in a peace offering of some freshly-made coffee she gave it up for the day.

‘Is your television set working?’ I asked, handing her a cup.

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Do you mind if we have it on for a quarter of an hour?’

‘Who’s playing?’ she asked automatically.

I sighed. ‘No one. It’s a racing programme.’

‘Oh, very well. If you must.’ But she smiled.

I switched on, and we saw the end of a variety show. I enjoyed the songs of the last performer, a vivacious blonde, but Joanna, technique-minded, said her breath control creaked. A batch of advertisements followed, and then the fluttering urgent opening bars of ‘The Galloping Major,’ accompanied by speeded-up superimposed views of horses racing, announced the weekly fifteen minutes of ‘Turf Talk.’

The well-known good-looking face of Maurice Kemp-Lore came on the screen, smiling and casual. He began in his easy charming way to introduce his guest of the evening, a prominent bookmaker, and his topic of the evening, the mathematics involved in making a book.

‘But first,’ he said, ‘I would like to pay a tribute to the steeplechase jockey, Art Mathews, who died today by his own hand at Dunstable races. Many of you have watched him ride... I expect nearly all of you have seen televised races in which he has appeared... and you will feel with me a great sense of shock that such a long and successful career should end in a tragedy of this sort. Although never actually champion jockey, Art was acknowledged to be one of the six best steeplechase riders in the country, and his upright incorruptible character has been a splendid example to young jockeys just starting in the game...’

Joanna lifted an eyebrow at me, and Maurice Kemp-Lore, neatly finishing off Art’s glowing obituary, re-introduced the bookmaker, who gave a clear and fascinating demonstration of how to come out on the winning side. His talk, illustrated with films and animated charts, described the minute by minute decisions made daily in a big London starting price office, and was well up to the high standard of all the Kemp-Lore programmes.

Kemp-Lore thanked him and rounded off the quarter of an hour with a review of the following week’s racing, not tipping particular animals to win but giving snippets of information about people and horses on the basis that there would be more interest in the outcome of a race if the public already knew something of the background of the contestants. His anecdotes were always interesting or amusing, and I had heard him called the despair of racing journalists since he so often beat them to a good story.

He said finally, ‘See you all next week at the same time,’ and ‘The Galloping Major’ faded him out.

I switched off the set. Joanna said, ‘Do you watch that every week?’

‘Yes, if I can,’ I said. ‘It’s a racing must. It’s so full of things one ought not to miss, and quite often his guest is someone I’ve met.’

‘Mr. Kemp-Lore knows his onions, then?’ she said.

‘He does indeed. He was brought up to it. His father rode a Grand National winner back in the thirties and is now a big noise on the National Hunt Committee; which,’ I went on, seeing her blank look, ‘is the ruling body of steeplechasing.’

‘Oh. And has Mr. Kemp-Lore ridden any Grand National winners himself?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he rides much at all. Horses give him asthma, or something like that. I’m not sure... I only know him by sight. He is often at the races but I have never spoken to him.’

Joanna’s interest in racing, never very strong, subsided entirely at this point, and for an hour or so we gossiped amicably and aimlessly about how the world wagged.

The door bell rang. She went to answer it and came back followed by the man whose portrait she was attempting, the second of her two blood stirrers, still stirring away. He put his arm possessively round her waist and kissed her. He nodded to me.

‘How did the concert go?’ she asked. He played a first violin in the London Symphony Orchestra.

‘So so,’ he said; ‘the Mozart B flat went all right except that some fool in the audience started clapping after the slow movement and ruined the transition to the allegro.’

My cousin made sympathetic noises. I stood up. I did not enjoy seeing them so cosily together.

‘Going?’ asked Joanna, detaching herself.

‘Yes.’

‘Good night, Rob,’ he said, yawning. He took off his black tie and loosened the neck of his shirt.

I said politely, ‘Good night, Brian.’ And may you rot, I thought.

Joanna came with me to the door and opened it, and I stepped out into the dark cobbled mews and turned to say good-bye. She was silhouetted against the warm light in the studio room where Brian, I could see, was sitting down and taking off his shoes.

I said flatly, ‘Thank you for the steak... and the television.’

‘Come again,’ she said.

‘Yes. Well, good night.’

‘Good night,’ she said, and then in an afterthought added, ‘How is Paulina?’

‘She is going to marry,’ I said, ‘Sir Morton Henge.’

I am not sure what I expected in the way of sympathy, but I should have known. Joanna laughed.