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- Herausgeber: Cinnamon Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
An unusual story of love, loss and the possibility of second chances, The Truth in Masquerade follows Anna Maxwell, struggling to understand the abrupt and unexpected ending of her marriage. Haunted by memories of her husband, Edwyn, and of another man who once loved her, she returns to Oxford to sing the role of the Governess in Benjamin Britten's spine-chilling opera, The Turn of the Screw. Caught up in a world of secrets and uncertainties, Anna has to confront the reasons her marriage unravelled, questioning what was true or illusory, and facing the challenge of a demanding dramatic role; a part that has increasingly painful emotional resonances with her own life. Meanwhile, Edwyn, too, is haunted, by ghosts from his past, and a mystery of identity is revealed that Anna must resolve for both of them, if either is to move on with life.
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Contents
Title
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Dedication
Prologue: January 2006
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
THE TRUTH IN MASQUERADE
CAROLE STRACHAN
Published by Cinnamon Press
Meirion House
Tanygrisiau
Blaenau Ffestiniog
Gwynedd LL41 3SU
www.cinnamonpress.com
The right of Carole Strachan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. © 2016 Carole Strachan
ISBN 978-1-910836-25-5
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, hired out, resold or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.
Designed and typeset in Garamond by Cinnamon Press. Cover design by Adam Craig © Adam Craig.
Cinnamon Press is represented by Inpress and by the Welsh Books Council in Wales.
Printed in Poland
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Welsh Books Council
The Turn of the Screw Opus 54 (Myfanwy Piper/Benjamin Britten) © Copyright 1955 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd.
Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.
Eugene Onegin Opus 24 [English] (Alexsandr Pushkin/Pyotr Tchaikovsky/David Lloyd-Jones) © Copyright 1971 by Schauer & May Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.
Sea Fever by John Masefield Reproduced by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Masefield.
And, after all, what is a lie? 'T is but
The truth in masquerade; and I defy
Historians, heroes, lawyers, priests, to put
A fact without some leaven of a lie.
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Dedicated to my brother, Andrew
1958-1984
Prologue: January 2006
It was a wretched end to a gripping story. Later, Anna came to believe it was the turning point after which her life with Edwyn was never the same.
The barge had disappeared into the darkness, moving slowly towards the Thames estuary, its strange cargo settled on a makeshift mattress for the long journey back to sea. Though the river was still alive with the lights of rescue crafts and camera crews, there was little to see now. She huddled against him, hoping his closeness would warm her after the chilling hours of watching and waiting, hoping for good news. Feeling no reciprocal squeeze on her arm, and aware he’d been quiet for some time, she looked up to see his head bowed, his face tired and worn.
He felt disheartened. Despite his efforts, the unyielding past would not give up its secrets. He’d hoped that witnessing the communal effort to save London’s whale would lift his morale, but was subdued by a nagging unease over how it would turn out. The winching of the frightened, disorientated creature from the pontoon onto the barge had been a pitiful sight and he feared the trauma of the rescue would be fatal.
He felt Anna shudder alongside him and saw her long fair hair fluttering in the wintry breeze. He knew that after his bitter rebuke the night before he should offer her some sign of reconciliation.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘They’re doing the best they can for her—let’s go into the warm and get a drink.’
They picked their way through the dispersing crowds and headed towards the Lamplighter. The pub was filling up with other shivering whale-watchers and the usual Saturday night drinkers. Anna hoped that the upbeat weekend atmosphere would prove a tonic for them both. She was saddened by the plight of the whale and still smarting from Edwyn’s uncharacteristic outburst.
She found a small table in the corner near a window from where she could watch him ordering their drinks at the bar. He looked well, his striking silver hair just beginning to thin, but he’d lost weight these last few months and she realised with a pang that he’d aged. She thought he’d feel her eyes on his back and would look round, but he stayed resolutely staring into the large gilded mirror behind the counter on which he leant.
She loved this pub, its walls lit by oversized dressing room light bulbs, covered in photographs of well-known opera singers and posters from long past productions. Sammy, the landlord, had spent thirty years as a barman at the Royal Opera House, and five years earlier had opened the pub after which he’d always hankered. He was there tonight in one of his signature silk waistcoats, chatting to regulars, telling the scurrilous stories for which he was notorious.
Edwyn brought over their drinks and sat beside her. Looking drained and distant, he avoided her gaze and looked distractedly across the room. She searched his face for clues of what was wrong, but found only disconcerting blankness.
He’d been fine the previous day when he set off to pursue a new lead for his research, though he’d been vague about where he was going.
Some dusty archive or other, she’d assumed.
But on his return, his hostile reaction to her eye-catching display in the hallway had shocked her.
‘He was always squirrelling stuff away in his damn boxes and God knows what might be in there.’
She’d loved her father-in-law and mourned his death. The boxes, carved from birch wood and poplar and painted with Jim’s distinctive designs, were so much part of who he had been, she felt it right to show them off as a tribute to him. Briar roses, daffodils, forget-me-nots, sunflowers, peacock feathers, butterflies—gathered together and arranged on shelves in the narrow alcove in their hallway, she thought the effect was pleasing, so Edwyn’s irritation was bewildering.
His father had died before Christmas and he’d shown no inclination to begin sorting through the old family home, so that day, Anna had decided to make a start herself. Many of the boxes were empty but some were a jumble of the detritus collected over a long life and she’d assumed that one day, when he felt ready, Edwyn would want to explore them, might treasure their contents.
They rarely argued—this was unfamiliar territory—but she knew it would fall to her to mend the fault line between them.
‘I’ve got my first music call on Monday,’ she said.
Edwyn looked up with surprise: ‘You’re starting early.’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘The music’s tricky so I want to be sure I’ve got it sung in to my voice before we start rehearsals in July. I’m aiming to be off the book by the time I get to Myddleton.’
‘Are you looking forward to it?’ he asked, taking a sip of wine and studying her closely for the first time.
‘I am,’ she said cautiously. ‘I love Britten’s music and The Turn of the Screw is such a wonderful ghost story—together they make a terrifically spooky opera.’
‘And you’re to be its unreliable heroine.’
‘Yes’, she said, with a smile. ‘The Governess.’
Edwyn gazed into the ruby red wine in front of him and considered the journey that Anna and the Governess would take, a venture beginning in hope and anticipation and ending in dread and despair. The thought made him wince; a mixture of pity and remorse he didn’t fully understand.
He became aware of activity and shouts outside the window. The door of the pub opened and a group of people came in, led by a large man whose jacket bore the distinctive badge of the British Divers Marine Life Rescue. His dark hair was wet and matted and he was visibly exhausted.
‘We’ve lost her,’ he said. ‘She’s gone.’
There was a gasp of collective disappointment.
‘It was always touch and go,’ he said, ‘though she seemed to be doing well, but then she went downhill fast and…’
His voice trailed into a silence eventually broken by a low murmur as conversations resumed in muted tones.
‘She lost her way,’ Edwyn said after a while, twiddling the stem of his glass. ‘Separated from her family. She must have been terribly scared.’
Anna nodded and blinked, and he could see from the tears shining in her pale blue eyes that she was upset, but he could find no words of comfort, the whale’s sad end only compounding his own desolation.
The unexpected ringing of the pub bell made him look over to the bar where Sammy was calling for quiet, his puffy face more flushed than usual.
‘Let’s have a moment’s hush for the whale,’ he said, and Edwyn saw him reach down to the CD player he kept behind the counter. Straining to listen as the bar gradually fell quiet, he heard the low notes of a piano chord and saw instant recognition in Anna’s face.
‘Sea Fever, John Ireland,’ she whispered, sitting back to enjoy the muscular baritone voice filling the room with the haunting ballad.
“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s
shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking,”
From the first sonorous chord it drew him in, the music sometimes robust, at other times gentle, moving from anxious tenderness to pressing urgency. The steady rhythm of the piano accompaniment conjured the swell of the sea, while the voice part began tentatively, but gained confidence as the call of the ocean impressed itself on the singer.
“I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls
crying.”
Edwyn sensed the melancholy, too; the reality that anyone ‘going down to the sea’ is inevitably leaving family and friends and native land.
And this singer could tell a story that was almost visual: from the barest pause it was clear that he had heard ‘the seagulls crying’ as he pondered the voyage of life.
“I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a
whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.”
Anna loved the setting and the singer, admired his rich, subtle voice and his willingness to express the sentimental core of the song. She knew what skill it required to make something sound so effortless.
Sammy had judged perfectly the wistful mood of the room and the drinkers listened in rapt silence. The man from the rescue crew was unashamedly wiping his eyes, while the woman he’d sat with was patting his back, just as earlier he had patted and consoled the struggling whale.
Anna longed for Edwyn to reassure her that all was well, but though he was still there, sitting beside her, it was as if he had gone missing.
Her stomach lurched and she felt a sudden, strange fear that he no longer had need of her.
Chapter 1
Edwyn had said that Myddleton was a classic setting for a ghost story: a Victorian country house, set in sweeping grounds of park and woodland.
Anna had hoped to arrive in welcoming sunshine, not under darkening skies and with the threat of an impending storm. But the summer day’s brightness had faded and apprehension overtook the mood of determined confidence in which she’d set off. She had never before made this journey alone without Edwyn waiting at the end of it, and as she drew closer to Oxford, the familiar route assumed an almost alien unfamiliarity.
She approached the house from the main entrance up a long, tree-lined drive, just wide enough to allow cars to pass in both directions. As the drive swung round to the right, Anna caught her first glimpse of the house and in her astonishment at what she saw, found herself braking abruptly. By lowering her head and peering through the windscreen, she could take in the whole of its extraordinary frontage: it was as if Keble College had been transported from the centre of Oxford and dropped in the countryside as an extravaganza of Rogue Gothic. Its red brick, patterned with banding of white and blue, and its pointed arches and plate glass, made it an ebullient combination of medievalism and Victorian modernity.
The drive curved up to the front of the house, where a circular area of neatly raked pale yellow gravel led to a handsome main entrance with a teak bench placed to the left of the door. Her agent had told her that the stage area was to be along the right-hand side of the house where there was a large paved terrace from which lawns, gardens and parkland fell away into the distance.
Further to the right, she could make out the shimmering waters of the lake and knew that it was there that she would find the Forester’s cottage that would be home for the next few weeks. She needed to take a fork off the main drive and make her way round to the far side of the lake, but realised that she’d gone too far and had to reverse the short distance back to the turning she could see in her mirror. Once she’d turned into the lane, she stopped the car and got out, intending to pause a while and take in the surroundings, hoping to feel the same “summer sweetness” that Henry James’s unnamed heroine described on her arrival at Bly.
In summers past she would not have been here.
For almost half her life, she’d had a base with Edwyn in Oxford whenever she needed it, and in early summer, when he was busy with exams and marking, she had normally spent any free weekends there, too. Now, she’d had to find a place for herself, on her own; somewhere she could live in privacy and reasonable comfort for over a month. She was still self-conscious about what had happened, fearing that even strangers could tell at a glance that she had only recently clambered out of the chasm which had opened in her life. She’d been glad to learn there was a cottage available for rent in the grounds of Myddleton, where she could bury herself in the countryside, away from the connections which would be painful in the nearby city.
Even now, six months on, she felt the brutal, shocking suddenness of it. Remembering the call from her agent that had brought her to Myddleton, Anna winced at the life changes so short a time had brought. On that cold, grey Saturday in December, Edwyn had been excited at the prospect of her appearing at Myddleton. At their home in Richmond, over coffee and croissants in their tiny conservatory, he’d described it to her with all the vivid detail and enthusiasm which characterised his academic work.
The house, he said, had been built in 1860 by a wealthy industrialist from the Welsh valleys; a man who’d always longed to retire to the gentle, rolling countryside of the Cotswolds. In 1878 it was bought by an Italian nobleman whose considerable wealth allowed him to create a luxurious retreat for his opera-singer wife, where they could entertain lavishly and she could recharge herself after exhausting tours.
In 1883, the Count embarked on a major development of the site, using the original architect, William Butterfield, and adding wings to the north and south, a clock tower, orangery and a small private theatre that was modelled on the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. The names of famous composers were inscribed in its ornate mouldings, with Mozart holding pride of place over the centre of the stage.
Following Madame’s death in 1900, the grieving widower retired to his family home in Sicily and the estate endured a sad succession of unsuitable owners, each one increasingly ill-equipped to maintain it. During the Second World War, it was requisitioned as a hospital, and then for over thirty years it was a shabby but respectable retirement home, until it was closed when fire gutted the first floor and caused the deaths of three elderly residents.
Thereafter, it remained shut up and cheerless until good fortune produced a saviour determined to restore Myddleton to at least some of its former glory and to make its charms accessible to anyone who shared his love of music.
Daniel Ennis had studied at New College and Edwyn had met him on a number of occasions when he’d returned for reunions. He’d made his fortune in the early years of the mobile phone revolution and had indulged his passion for opera by providing financial support for a couple of productions at Glyndebourne. When his company was bought out, he was wealthy enough to fulfil his dream of developing a small summer festival near his childhood home in Oxford.
When he first saw Myddleton, it had been empty and for sale for so long that even the agents who were marketing it had despaired of ever finding a buyer. They feared it was the wrong house in the wrong place: close to northern cities of industry and invention, like Leeds or Manchester, its Victorian ostentation might have found approval. Within sight of Oxford’s dreaming spires, most house-hunters searching for country residences were looking for genteel properties of pleasing proportions built in the mellow hues of Cotswold stone.
So Daniel was able to negotiate a price far more favourable than he’d expected to pay for a property and estate that met his requirements so perfectly. The north wing now housed a mixture of small companies: graphic designers, media agencies, a literary agent, and a firm of architects, while the entire south wing was taken over by an independent film company which specialised in scientific and nature films. A grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund enabled him to restore the orangery and the theatre, and in August 2005 the first Myddleton Festival took place.
Held over a fortnight, the festival was a miscellany of classical music performances, most held in the theatre, some outside. For the first week the main focus was an out–door opera, the design of which could make full use of the ornate exterior of the house, the wooded grounds and the ornamental lake.
Despite the serene surroundings, Anna felt overwhelmed by the challenge ahead. She felt the hot colour creep up her neck into her face, and not for the first time, she asked herself whether they only wanted her as the Governess because they believed she would appear convincingly unhinged. Did they plan to play on her state of mind to suggest that the innocents were corrupt and that ghosts walked abroad at Bly even in the brightest sunlight?
No, she reassured herself: the offer had come several weeks before that shattering decision at the end of January.
She sighed and got back into the car.
The lane was narrower than the main drive and she made her way cautiously, praying she wouldn’t meet anyone coming towards her. By now, the lake was on her left and ahead of her were three detached cottages, built as homes for bailiff, gardener and forester, but now let as holiday properties. The backs of the cottages looked out over the lake and each had a small front garden bordered with a picket fence and a gate on which a brass plate bore the relevant name. The Bailiff had been granted the largest and grandest of the three, while the other two looked identical, though Gardener’s had a terracotta colour front door and paint work, while Forester’s had green.
The road came to a dead end beyond the cottages, but widened enough to form a turning and parking area. Two battered Volvos and a yellow soft-top indicated that Anna had neighbours, and as she manoeuvred her silver grey hatchback alongside them, she could smell the acrid fumes of a barbecue that was struggling to catch light.
Chapter 2
He had seized the best of the weather in which to take his regular Sunday walk along the coastal path. The day had looked set to be one of endless grey skies and miserable drizzle, but as the afternoon drifted into early evening it had brightened into an unexpected blaze of blue and yellow.
Because it was late when he left home, he drove further east than usual to pick up the Llyn path and walk towards Criccieth. He parked his car at the Feathers pub directly opposite the boyhood home of Lloyd George and made his way down the long farm track that led to the point where the river Dwyfor curled round to join the sea. The sun was in his eyes as he turned left and made his way along the uneven track with the sea on his right and farm fields on his left. He peered through the dazzle of sunlight, waiting for the bulk of the time-worn castle that dominated the coastline to come into view.
The path was quiet—he passed no one—and he was alone with the swarms of tiny white butterflies that danced ahead of him along the path like handfuls of confetti suspended just out of reach. He had never seen them in such abundance before and guessed this must be their time to thrive in an all too brief lifespan. He wondered if Jim had these white butterflies in mind when he splashed them over the jewellery box he’d made for Anna to mark their engagement and which she kept on her dressing table.
He bent to retie the loosening laces on his boots and looked up with a jolt as a man’s voice ahead of him called out ‘get along there!’ He smiled as he realised the command was not directed at him. Making their rolling way towards him was a small herd of cows, the sight of them incongruous in this beach-side setting. He stepped off the path on to the sandy beach so that he would not have to encounter them head-on and settled his back against a small dune to wait for them to pass.
He was glad of the excuse to stop and take in the scene. He sat with his knees hunched awkwardly under his chin and gazed out to sea. The image of Anna’s jewellery box had not only conjured troubling thoughts of her, but also of another box, painted with lilies, once prized by another woman. He pictured it now, sitting on his desk alongside a fading wedding photograph in a tarnished silver frame.
He watched a man playing in the shallows with a wriggling toddler who was screeching in delight as the water swirled and frothed around his chubby sunburned legs. He wondered what it would have been like, what pleasure it might have been to see a child grow up to adulthood; imagined grandchildren, too, with some likeness of him or Anna.
He knew Anna regretted their childlessness, not realising that he was relieved to be spared the risk of failure, the fear that he would recreate the prickly, uncommunicative family in which he’d grown up.
Behind him he heard the farmer call again. ‘That’s it, my lovely. Up you go,’ and he turned to see the last of the cows disappearing up a path away from the sea, helped on her way by a friendly pat on the haunch from the farmer.
Tranquillity returned to the path but as he resumed his walk, he felt a stab of melancholy, his conscience unsettled by thoughts of Anna. He shook himself and picked up his speed, following the path round to the left and towards the promenade above the West Beach. Here, there were more people around, several families walking on the sand, inspecting rock pools and collecting shells. He passed a couple sitting on one of the benches on the stretch of headland that led into Marine Parade. The man was reading a local paper while his wife dozed, her head on her chest, and both hands clutching the handbag on her lap.
In the mellowing sunshine, the tall Victorian villas in their assortment of pastel colours had an old-fashioned charm, the eye forgiving the juxtaposition of aspiring gentrification and shabby decline. He walked to the far end of the terrace towards the hulking castle with its broken walls and one remaining gatehouse. Along Marine Terrace the houses were a mix of private homes, guest houses and holiday flats and whatever their state of repair they commanded the same spectacular views over Cardigan Bay, with Harlech in the distance and the mountains of Snowdonia beyond.
He stopped as he always did outside one of the few houses without a name, a plain number 9 on its royal blue door. The refurbishment was coming on well and behind the scaffolding he could see a tasteful frontage re-emerging out of the flaking paint and ugly staring windows that had so disappointed him when he first saw the house many years before.
He wondered if he would ever feel able to knock on the ornate cast iron door-knocker and impose himself on the goodwill of the couple who lived there. He turned away from the house and looked out to sea. A few people further along the esplanade were peering through binoculars, perhaps hoping to catch sight—as Edwyn never had—of the harbour porpoises and bottlenose dolphins said to regularly visit Criccieth’s beaches. As he began to walk back the way he’d come, he made a pact with himself: if ever he spotted one of these friendly creatures at play in the waters visible from number 9, he would regard it as a sign that he should pay a call.
When he returned to the headland, the wind was getting up and all the benches were deserted. The elderly couple had gone, leaving the newspaper behind, its pages blown open by the breeze and threatening to scatter. Thinking to deposit the paper in the waste bin he could see ahead, Edwyn gathered up the pages and was about to fold them together when a striking photograph caught his eye. The large handsome manor house must once have been splendid, but it was clear that after years of neglect, nature had moved in and taken over. The headline told him that it was to be redeveloped as a health spa and hotel and, after years of planning disputes, the builders were about to begin work. Nothing remarkable or unusual in that, but the caption to the photograph made him suck in his breath—this was Cadwallader Hall, a place he had searched for and never found.
Chapter 3
Her immediate impression was of uncluttered, comfortable charm and as she stood in the doorway, Anna felt her taut shoulders soften with relief.
‘Yes,’ she thought. ‘I can live here for a while.’
The front door opened straight onto the open-plan downstairs living area, with a kitchen at the front and a lounge-dining room at the back, overlooking a small patio and, beyond that, an expanse of lawn that ran to the water’s edge.
She put down the box of groceries she’d brought in from the car and ran her hand along the cream work surfaces which served to separate the kitchen and living areas. The kitchen was new and a quick look in the pine cupboards reassured her that it was well-equipped and clean. There were a couple of homely touches—a copy of the Radio Times and the local paper on a long coffee table in front of the sofa—and on each of the two windowsills in the kitchen, there stood a squat glass vase overflowing with pink and lilac sweet peas.
Anna leaned across the sink and sniffed. Their delicate fragrance, she realised, made little impact on the distinctive smell of the place—a mix of toxic air-freshener on top of liberal use of bleach and disinfectant. She spotted the air-freshener on the draining board and tipped it into the pedal bin, making a mental note to burn some toast the next morning to diffuse these odours and impose herself on her new home.
Throughout the downstairs, the predominant colours were cream and a muted bottle green, with touches of dusky pink. There was a two-seater sofa and matching chair, a flat screen television, a music centre and against the left hand wall, a small pine dining table with three chairs. Double doors opened onto a flagged patio, on which there was a small wrought iron table with two matching green chairs.
Anna opened the doors to let in air and to check how much privacy she would have from her neighbours. She could hear no signs of the people immediately next door, so she stepped to the end of the patio and looked to her left towards the other two cottages. All three were detached and had paths which ran down both sides into their gardens, partially screened from each other by low hedges. She could see that the patio doors of the Gardener’s cottage were open, but there was nobody around and all she could hear from inside was the muted rise and fall of a cricket-match commentary.
Beyond that was the much larger garden of the Bailiff’s cottage, which she guessed had three bedrooms rather than the one she would find upstairs in Forester’s. The barbecue was still spluttering and she could hear women’s shrill voices from inside the cottage calling to the two men who were ostensibly in charge of it, but who were standing by the lake, sharing a joke. From the clatter of crockery, Anna feared that a party was in preparation and she wondered with dread just how many people the two Volvos had borne to Bailiff’s Cottage. The smoke was drifting towards her and when she felt her eyes smart, she hurried inside, closing the doors behind her.
‘Oh God,’ she groaned.
She was feeling neither sociable nor in the mood for neighbours whose noise and cooking would intrude on what she had hoped would be a peaceful evening. She recognised the onset of irrational disgruntlement and as she went out to the car to get her bags, she felt the beginnings of a headache tightening around her forehead.
She carried her heavy cases upstairs one at a time. A pine staircase directly ahead of the front door led to a narrow landing off which there was an airing cupboard, a large double bedroom overlooking the lake, and an immaculate white bathroom above the kitchen. Up here, dusky pink became the principal colour, with splashes of green to add depth. Above the bed there was a shelf full of books and she remembered noticing a small low bookcase in the lounge. The books calmed her, as if they had been put there to be her companions over the coming weeks.
She sat on the bed and studied the row of creased and faded spines. They were mainly shabby paperbacks of well-known classics and she guessed some might have come from the big house, though previous guests could have left the more recent bestsellers. Her eye was caught by a book, which had toppled over towards the edge of the shelf and against which the weight of the other books was pressing. She righted the books that were leaning over and lifted the one that had fallen onto its side, a cheap and dog-eared edition of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, with an unattractive front cover photograph of an over-made-up woman standing at a tall window, holding a Japanese fan to her chin.
‘Like a rustic Madame Butterfly,’ she mused with surprise.
She turned it over and studied the publisher’s text on the back cover, mouthing the words silently, as a child might.
“Tracing the life of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene, thisis one of Hardy’s greatest love stories. Sergeant Troy, the dashing but faithless soldier, and Mr Boldwood, the lonely bachelor of repressed and violent passions, both court the independent young heiress, deflecting her life from its intended course of rustic happiness with the most devoted of her suitors, Gabriel Oak.”
She tipped the book towards her so that it briefly touched her chest.
‘Gabriel Oak,’ she murmured. ‘Where are you now then?’
For a few moments she sat still, her lids closed against the encroaching headache, her mind’s eye looking back on a younger self, standing under the Armistice Magnolia tree in the gardens of St Hugh’s College. She tilted her head, testing the intensity of the pain, then opened the book and flicked through it until she found the last pages of Chapter 4.
The Mistake
In the copy that had once been hers, the words had been underlined in red ink.
She closed the book and placed it carefully at the end of the shelf, propping against it a smooth mottled stone she found on the dressing table alongside the bed.
She felt an urgent need to busy herself by unpacking and settling herself into her temporary home. Two sleek pine wardrobes with drawers and hanging space provided plenty of room for her clothes and in the bathroom there was a deep window seat on which she laid out her toiletries and makeup. She enjoyed the sense of nesting and for a short while she forgot both her irritation and her headache.
Downstairs, and feeling hungry, she unpacked her groceries and made herself a ham sandwich and a cup of tea. She placed them on the coffee table and sat back on the sofa to enjoy the view of the lake.
The small side window in the kitchen was open a fraction and the aroma of barbecuing burgers was unmistakable. She balanced her plate on her lap and picked up the Oxford Times, glancing at the date to check that it was the current edition. She scanned the front page and leafed through the paper, taking in the impression it had always given her of a town more notable for its crime and lawlessness than as an ancient seat of learning and culture. She had just found the arts pages when the party at Bailiff’s Cottage got into full swing. Clearly the whole household was now in the garden making merry to the jangling accompaniment of what sounded like Johnny Cash.
‘Not for long,’ she hoped uncharitably.
She looked through the double doors at the sky that was darkening perceptibly and thought they would soon be driven indoors by rain. She pushed the paper away and finished her sandwich, though she had lost her taste for it, the tranquillity shattered, as she had feared.
As she sipped her tea and gazed ahead, an advertisement in the listings section caught her eye and she picked up the paper once more.
It was for a concert that evening at New College Chapel to be given by the New Oxford Chamber Choir. Though it was fifteen years since she had last sung with NOCC, she still thought of it as her choir.
Her heart raced and for a moment, she wavered. She had planned a solitary evening preparing for the next day, and it felt foolhardy to risk the ghosts she might meet beneath the Bridge of Sighs and down New College Lane. But the noise of the barbecue had unsettled her and she was tempted by the soothing diversion that an evening of choral music might provide.
She looked at her watch.
Chapter 4
Though she guessed that cross country there would be a more direct way into Oxford, Anna decided to retrace the route she had taken earlier through Marcham and rejoin the dual carriageway at the Abingdon/Witney interchange. As she made her way along the quiet country roads, the sky ahead shifted and changed in harmony with her fluctuating moods.
As she headed north on the busy dual carriageway, the skies lightened as if Oxford was beckoning to her. She knew that once she came off the A34 at Hinksey Hill, she would have missed her last easy chance to turn back. The traffic lights at the top of the exit slip road turned green as she approached them and she took this as a sign she should go on.
‘Right then.’
Now, however, she was faced with how best to negotiate the city’s one-way system so as to arrive in time.
She waited at the traffic lights on the Abingdon Road in order to turn right onto Donnington Bridge.
‘Come on!’ she exhorted the lights in frustration, mentally counting how many more sets lay ahead along her chosen route.
Green at last.
From there, she made steady progress and relaxed a little, pleased that she had summoned the energy and courage to go on with this unexpected venture.
‘Keep going,’ she exhorted the timid learner driver a few cars ahead of her.
As she made her way over Magdalen Bridge she pushed away the thought of punts jostling for space on the river below and turned right into Longwall, where she could see that it had already rained, and though it must have been only a light shower, the sky ahead looked an ominous shade of charcoal. She made her way past university departments and college sports grounds, intending to turn left into the wide expanse of Mansfield Road and park at the far end as close as possible to Holywell Street and the entrance to New College.
She jumped with surprise as enormous raindrops clattered with force against the roof and windscreen, obscuring her view until she turned on the wipers which, because she had jabbed at them in haste, came on at their most frenetic speed. As she adjusted them and the windscreen cleared, she saw that the turning into Mansfield Road was blocked by two fire engines and was unpassable.
‘Damn!’
She glanced at the clock on the dashboard.
‘Let’s hope there’s a space round here then,’ she muttered, continuing past the Pitt Rivers Museum up to the traffic lights, and increasing her speed as she saw them about to change to amber. As she turned left, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had started. She saw that there were only a few cars parked in the bays outside Wadham College. She took the first space she came to and fumbled in her purse to find coins with which to feed the meter.
The air was full of the smell of rain on dust and seeing that the sky still threatened, she grabbed a small umbrella off the back seat and stuffed it into the side of her bag. She hurried past the college and hesitated at the corner outside the King’s Arms, where the wooden tables and benches were wet and empty, the recent rainstorm having driven the drinkers inside.
‘Where now then?’ she asked herself, pondering which way she should go.
If the entrance in New College Lane was open, that would be the quickest option, but despite being the front gate of the College, Anna knew it was often closed. However, she had a knack for finding it open.
She lifted her head heavenwards and silently implored the porter.
The streets were almost deserted and in the thickening light they looked cold and unwelcoming. Anna waited as a cyclist idled through the green light and then she hurried across the road onto Catte Street and towards the Bridge of Sighs that linked two buildings of Hertford College.
She started to run now, her footsteps echoing down the secluded alley which led to one of the two entrances to New College, and which, if it was open, would bring her out into the Front Quadrangle near the entrance to the Chapel. Her breathing quickened as she ran faster. She turned the bend into the long straight stretch between the walls of the cloister and Warden’s Barn and could see the three-storey Gate Tower ahead of her.
‘Why do I do this?’ she berated herself. ‘I hate being late!’
The gate was closed and forbidding.
She stopped and clutched her side, where she’d felt the sharp, stabbing pain of a stitch. As her breathing steadied and the cramp receded, she looked up at the top storey of the Tower with its welcoming figures of the Virgin, an angel and the founder of the College, kneeling as if in homage to those who passed through the gate. From past experience, she knew that it was worth continuing up the alley and testing whether the door was really locked or not.
She pushed against it and relaxed as its heavy weight gave way to her.
She blessed the unknown porter and made her way through into the Quad, where she saw that people were still straggling into the Chapel, some stopping in the antechapel, as she did, to buy a ticket and collect a programme from a curly-haired girl seated behind a rickety table. She tip-toed round the ancient brasses set into the flag-stoned floor and as she stepped into the Chapel itself, she shivered in its cool air, remembering that the temperature remained chilly, even in summer.
She stood for a moment to take in the familiar building, founded by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, at the end of the fourteenth century. He wanted worship to be at the heart of College life and so the Chapel was designed to be the most inspiring of the College buildings.
The choir were filing in through a door on the left-hand side of the Chapel that led through to the vestry and beyond it to the Song Room, where they would have rehearsed and lined up. She found a seat towards the back, sitting alone on the end of a row, alongside the central aisle, from where she hoped she would have a good view.
The singers stood in two lines in front of the altar, with the decorated panel of highly intricate tracery behind them, ten men in the rear and fifteen women in front of them. The side door opened and the conductor made his way through to stand in front of his choristers, facing the audience who were clapping with enthusiastic anticipation.
The young man opened his arms wide and took a step forward, waiting for the applause to peter out. When it did, he moved closer to the audience, standing in the aisle among the first few rows.
‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, thank you,’ he said in a genial Yorkshire accent. ‘It’s very good to see so many of you here with us at New College. Tonight’s concert is something of a homecoming for us—and an end.’
He cupped his hands as if he was holding something fragile.
‘For the last ten days, we’ve been on a tour of what we called Wessex and tonight is the final performance of this programme of glorious English music before we go our separate ways for the summer.’
‘Wessex,’ Anna thought. ‘How romantic.’
She watched him and smiled. He was still talking—about the music, why he had chosen it and how most of it would be sung a capella—and in his animation he frequently gestured with his arms or ran a hand through his increasingly untidy hair.
He reminded her of Gerry, who had conducted NOCC during her second and third years: though Gerry’s broad accent was that of the Belfast outskirts, both men were short and slightly tubby, with thin fly-away dark hair, large, old-fashioned glasses and passionate enthusiasm for their music.
She glanced down at the programme and nodded with recognition and pleasure. Vaughan Williams, Howells, Stanford, Delius and Britten: she had once sung all these pieces with a youthful delight in the beauty and skill of the settings.
The conductor turned to face his singers, waiting with his head bowed until the audience had settled and the last few coughs had died away. Then, with a quick and purposeful movement, he lifted his arms and launched into a set of folk songs by Vaughan Williams.
Anna peered at the rows of choristers—the men in dark suits, the women in what Gerry had always called “long coloured” which tended then, as now, to create an impression of a riotously coloured garden run wild.
She tried with difficulty to make out individual faces. Light streamed through the magnificent transformed windows, but inside the Chapel it became a half-light, which created an unreal, twilit world in which the faces she saw in front of her blurred with those she had known so well sixteen years before.
From the back row, came the glint of glasses reflecting in the light.
‘Why do men in choirs always wear glasses?’ she wondered.
Where a couple of angled spotlights fell on them, the women’s faces looked bleached, their features naked, making them appear implausibly young. One girl caught her eye, as she shifted and swayed every time they sang the cheerful refrain “Just as the tide was flowing.”
The sound was full of energy and vigour with a beguiling freshness that only the very young can produce. Every item they sang in an ambitiously planned programme was polished and professional.
‘Were we this good?’ Anna asked herself as they rose to the harmonic challenges of some particularly dissonant pieces by Peter Warlock and some rich and expressive part songs by Finzi that called for unforgivingly long-breathed lines. They were exuberant and confident—fearless even—and she guessed that this final performance, coming at the end of an intense tour, would be special for all of them, particularly those leaving Oxford for the last time.
After the Finzi, the tallest and most gangly man in the choir stepped forward and the conductor moved to the side and sat at a piano, which Anna noticed for the first time. Referring to her programme, she felt a fleeting ache. Benjamin Britten’s plaintive setting of a poem by Thomas Hardy called The Choirmaster’s Burial was Mark’s song—a piece that time and time again his fellow choristers insisted be included in programmes of secular music, whatever the season; a haunting tale of a kindly man whose last wish for a musical send-off was denied by the slothful vicar but granted instead by celestial musicians undeterred by frosts and cold weather.
Though he looked nervous, the young tenor soloist was good and his ill-fitting suit with its over-large jacket somehow added a convincing innocence to his spirited performance. After the first spare, melismatic lines, Anna shut her eyes and there before her was Mark, fair-haired and slightly freckled, his unfailing good nature shining through an honest face, his sweet-voiced tenor singing out in heartfelt support for the loyal Choirmaster.
Noisy applause brought her abruptly back to the present and, after the briefest of bows, the smiling soloist slipped into the ranks of the back row, making way for two girls who stepped forward from the centre of the front row to take solo parts in Herbert Howells’s choral setting of The Summer is Coming.
Under the sympathetic guidance of the conductor, the breathy, fluttery voice of the diminutive soprano and the fruitier tones of the more mature alto enhanced the lyrical, English music. This was the last item in the first half and when it was over, the conductor leant towards his soloists and gave each in turn a brotherly peck on the cheek.
Anna guessed that his female choristers would love him for the gentleness and warmth that was apparent even from this distance, while he would love them for their prettiness and their vivacity and would be destined to find friendship and willing companionship—but probably not love amongst them.
‘Better that way,’ she thought, slipping out through the antechapel and into the Quad to be on her own during the brief interval. The air felt heavy and close, warmer here than in the Chapel, and for the moment there was no sign of rain. She walked down the side of the Chapel and turned left through an archway, which led past the Song Room into another huge Quad that opened off the Holywell entrance. A short way to her right, there was a bench, which looked dry enough to sit on.
‘Well, better for them, I suppose, if not for him.’
She winced at the memory of her almost disastrous first year in the choir, when by falling for the Chorus Master in her second term, she followed a long line of other blonde, blue-eyed sopranos who had endured the same ultimate humiliation.
‘Just like Sergeant Troy,’ Mark had been quick to point out. ‘Dashing but faithless.’
Mark’s friendship had been one of the reasons she had decided to stay on in the choir and when Gerry took over at the start of the next academic year, she felt her blotted copybook had been wiped clean.
She had known, though, that Mark’s affection for her was growing. Even then he saw himself as Gabriel Oak to her Bathsheba Everdene.
The light in the chapel was murkier as she took her seat for the second half. She opened the programme to remind herself what was coming: Britten’s Flower Songs, The Bluebird by Stanford and more Vaughan Williams, but it was the opening item, as soon as the first humming notes emerged, which stirred the most powerful emotions.
Delius’s entirely wordless piece To be sung of a summer night on the water was one of the most melancholy and atmospheric Anna had ever heard or sung. Gerry had introduced it to the choir at the start of his first summer term and somehow it had inspired the suggestion that when everyone was done with exams, they should take punts and picnics on the river and sing under the city’s bridges, allowing passers-by to gather and listen.
The audience in New College was still, perhaps transported to water by the stunningly evocative mood music. All around her, Anna was aware of captivated faces, all eyes focused on the source of magical images.
Yet the only face she saw was Edwyn’s—leaning over the parapet of Folly Bridge and aiming with surprising precision, a white carnation into her lap. She knew that she had blushed in a confusion of embarrassment and pride, her pleasure marred by the cloud that had settled on Mark’s equable features; the accusing expression that said:
‘So you’ve met your Mr Boldwood.’
It was at the start of their second year that Mark had started calling her Bathsheba. It was said playfully, but behind the banter lay infatuation, tinged with the sadness of being unrequited.
‘Why? Because… despite all the tragic twists and turns, it just seems so fresh and hopeful,’ he had said, when she asked him why Far From the Madding Crowd was his favourite book.
