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CHAPTER 1
Jelly d'Arányi's assistant, Anna Robertson, seemed to enjoy keeping her employer's feet attached in some small way to the earth. By the time their Eastbourne hosts called them downstairs for drinks, a frost was forming on Anna's bedroom window; Jelly, though, had dressed for dinner in a crimson evening gown with a fashionable, deep-scooped back that exposed her shoulder blades. She had spent enough of her childhood in the 19th century to cherish a lingering nostalgia for its flamboyance and poetry.
'Jelly, you'll catch your death,' Anna protested. She preferred a plain skirt, court shoes and cardigan; tonight it was buttoned up to her chin. Suffering from a chronic cough and a slight fever, she had been asleep for two hours while Jelly was practising. Last night Jelly had performed the Brahms Violin Concerto in nearby Hastings; today she could not rest. Another concert ahead meant more music to prepare. Jelly was pleased to see Anna looking a little brighter. 'Darling, don't worry about me. I just want you to feel better.'
The dining room was warm, the fire smouldering in its grate beneath the mantelpiece. There a silver frame held a photograph of the Southerns' two sons, who had both fought at Mons in 1914. One body was never returned; the other boy came back with an uncontrollable twitch of the head and neck, unable to speak. After two months in a nursing home, he disappeared one night. Trawling a nearby lake for evidence, they discovered he had found peace at last in its waters.
The windowpanes multiplied Jelly's slender image skimming across the lamp-lit hallway, the gleam catching her necklace – a gift from a long-ago admirer. Ten or fifteen years previously, scarcely a day would pass without a delivery boy on a bicycle bringing flowers, a parcel or an invitation to a dance – and Jelly loved dancing. Many weeks, what with concerts, salons and dinner parties, she'd seen in the dawn three or four times. This year at the end of May she would be 40. Part of her still felt no older than she was in 1916, on the day before she heard that Frederick Septimus Kelly was dead.
'Jelly d'Arányi!' Charles welcomed her with a mock-ceremonial bow as she swept in. 'There she is. Muse to Bartók, Ravel and Elgar, angel to Vaughan Williams and Holst, and no wonder. You look positively scrumptious.'
'And I'm a deeply grateful guest, as ever. I don't know how many years I've been staying with you after concerts now.'
'I've lost count, and the more it is, the happier we shall be.'
She gave him a kiss. He returned it, twice – then turned to Anna and pressed her hand to his lips, perhaps so that she would not feel left out.
'Charlie, dear, are you flirting again?' His wife, Mary, gave a tut that Jelly judged only semi-serious. 'Why don't you pour Jelly and Anna a nice glass of sherry? Goodness knows they've earned one.'
*
After they had eaten and the maid had cleared the plates, Charles sat back, a crystal decanter in front of him. 'So, ladies, what's after port? Cards? Charades?'
'We could have a good session, as there are four of us,' Mary suggested. 'It's always better with more people.'
Anna and Jelly exchanged glances. 'Mary likes to play the glass game,' Jelly explained.
'Load of rubbish, but if Mary gets a kick out of it I don't mind,' Charles declared. 'Who knows, these supposed spirits might even tell us something useful this time. What shares we ought to buy, or how the economy is ever going to get out of this damnable hole.'
'Don't swear, dear,' said Mary. 'Jelly, Anna, will you play?'
They both hesitated, Jelly fidgeting with the cross at her throat. 'I've always felt it's just ... not quite right,' she said.
'I find it too scary,' Anna admitted. 'Adila sometimes wants me to join in, but I don't dare.'
'But what harm can it do?' Mary cajoled. 'It's only the glass game, not a séance. We're not spiritualists – anything but – and there's no ectoplasm or ghosts appearing to worry about. Why not join us, just this once?'
'Do humour her, dear Jelly,' said Charles. 'Otherwise I'll be in for a double session tomorrow.'
Jelly looked from Charles to Mary, and at Anna, who gave an almost imperceptible shrug. 'Just a few minutes, perhaps,' she said. It seemed the polite solution.
'We can stop whenever you like,' said Mary. She beamed at Jelly, then drew the curtains, closing out the world. Opening a drawer in her bureau she brought out a well-used Ouija board, its black print fading towards sepia. The letters of the alphabet were marked on it in a wide semi-circle of two rows, the numbers up to nine – plus zero – in one row beneath, as well as the words 'Yes' on one side, 'No' on the other and 'Goodbye' at the bottom. This she placed in the centre of the table, with a small planchette pointer on top. Finally she extinguished the lamp and lit one candle; dim lighting would aid concentration. In the glow of its flame, Jelly saw the faces of her companions turned to gold, while their surroundings melted into the darkness.
They took their seats, two on each side of the table.
'Very gently,' Mary instructed. 'Everyone rest one finger on the pointer. Whatever happens, don't push. Let them move it as they wish. I'll ask the questions.'
For a while the pointer stayed immobile. Then beneath their fingers it gave the slightest shudder.
'Is there anybody of friendly intent who would like to talk to us?' Mary intoned. And as they watched, the pointer began to slide over the board towards the letter N.
'Are you doing that?' Jelly mouthed at Anna.
'No! It's just ... moving on its own. How on earth ...?'
'Mary, it's you!' Charles accused.
'No, it is not. Hush, please.' Mary was officious, noting down the letters 'N-O-T-Q-I-T-E'.
'That's ridiculous,' Charles said. 'If there's nobody there, how can there be someone to say "Not quite"?'
'Sometimes I am not quite here either,' Jelly tried to joke.
'They're having fun with us, so let's have some fun with them, or whoever is moving the pointer this time. Let's ask some real questions. The stock markets. Volatile as hell. So will the Dow Jones move up or down tomorrow?'
The pointer spun from letter to letter: F-T-S-C-V. 'Gibberish,' said Mary. 'Let's keep on.'
Jelly was indeed not quite there. A wall of tiredness had come upon her – the inevitable delayed reaction after the post-concert euphoria. She half followed the pointer beneath their fingers, with scant concern for the outcome.
The arrow glided to the letter A, then in succession to D-I-L-A. Jelly's stomach gave a flip. 'Adila?' she said.
Jelly's sister Adila was, according to her friend, Baron Erik Palmstierna, a psychic 'sensitive'. For her, messages would come through unusually clearly and at considerable length, often whirling the glass along at high speed, in English, French, German or even perfect, grammatical Hungarian. News of Adila's gift spread rapidly through those circles that interested themselves in 'psychical research'. She would interpret the incoming messages while a minute-taker – sometimes her husband, but more usually Erik, who was the Swedish minister to London – transcribed them, one letter at a time. Jelly, living with Adila and her family, usually managed to avoid these sessions, finding them most uncomfortable when the messages made sense. Ill at ease with Erik, she would have preferred her sister's talent to be restricted to the violin.
'What's Adila got to do with the stock market?' Charles demanded.
The pointer chuntered on, letter by tortuous letter.
'It seems to say something along the lines of "Adila is playing beautifully at this moment",' Mary declared, reading back her transcript. 'Jelly, is she?'
'No, no, no,' Jelly insisted. 'She has a concert today, but it was this afternoon, not this evening. You see? This is just a silly game!'
'Don't call them names,' Mary said. 'They don't like it.'
The pointer bowled off again, faster. The letters spelled 'Gad you'.
'Glad? Who is it you are glad to see?' said Mary. 'Is it Jelly?'
The arrow meandered towards 'Yes'.
Jelly pulled her hand away as if from spilled acid. 'I'm sorry, I'm not happy doing this. I'll go to bed now, if you will please forgive me.'
'I will, too, if that's all right,' Anna said quickly.
'But –' Mary hesitated. Jelly seized the opportunity to throw her arms around the Southerns in turn, to bid them goodnight and to thank them profusely for taking such good care of her and her ailing assistant.
'Now the mystery will remain,' Charles said, as she made for the stairs. 'Who knows what message might be waiting in heaven for Jelly d'Arányi?'
*
Anna paused on the landing.
'Do you really believe in that glass game, Jelly?' she asked.
Under her discomfort, Jelly pondered. 'To be perfectly honest, no. And you?'
'It's not that I don't believe in God. But I don't think I believe in this as well.'
'Good. Let's get some sleep.' Jelly kissed her assistant on both cheeks, then retreated to her guest room and welcome solitude. Was it not simply wrong to disrupt the heaven-set boundaries of our living dimension, and wrong to disturb the dead, even if they sometimes seemed willing to be disturbed? Supposing the spirits were not who they claimed to be, but demons waiting to misguide or destroy you? And if a spirit was communicating – in truth – how was she supposed to accept such a notion? How was anyone?
She had grown extra-resistant to the glass game since a message arrived purporting to be for her from Sep Kelly. If Sep wanted to speak to her from beyond the grave, she didn't want to know. It would not bring him back. Besides, she couldn't bear to imagine his bullish and uncompromising Australian spirit buzzing around someone's dining table like an invisible mosquito. Sep had been blown up in the Battle of the Somme. If he were still present, if he loved her after all, precious little good it could do them now.
At first, in the aftermath of the war, she added her tears to the outpourings of grief among her equally bereaved friends; for a time, they yearned to attempt reunion through any means there might be, glass or otherwise. With the passing years, the futility of it began to creep up on them; life grew harder and bodies older, but nothing would bring back the departed. Now, trying in vain to sleep, Jelly was wishing she had gone straight home.
*
Jelly, Adila, Adila's American-Greek husband Alec Fachiri, their little girl Adrienne and their yappy fox terrier named Caesar lived on a Chelsea cul-de-sac – off the Fulham Road by St Stephen's Hospital and what used to be the workhouse – in a graceful Victorian villa with a fake Italian bell-tower and tripartite windows. From within, the sky appeared to divide into three like a Renaissance altarpiece. Their friends dubbed the place Hurricane House: you'd understand why as soon as you went in and faced the piles of books, magazines and sheet music, along with the ornaments spilling off the shelves – vases, tea sets, photographs, Hungarian dolls, Dresden china figurines, musical boxes that no longer worked. And the sound of instruments being practised simultaneously in different rooms would blend now and then with the chime of clocks that never struck together. Here, Jelly felt as much at home as she could anywhere, now that their parents were dead.
The three sisters and their mother, Antoinette, arrived in Britain when Jelly was 16, bringing with them little more than talent, charm, the good name of their great-uncle Joseph Joachim, and a handful of concert dates in Haslemere. Jelly still remembered Wesselényi Street in Budapest where she spent her childhood: a dark chimney of a road, snaking into town just behind the Great Synagogue of Dohány Street. How precarious life there must have been, and with what care their mother had concealed this; Jelly had been aware that times were growing tougher, with no idea why, and if Antoinette had had her own reasons for wanting to leave her husband behind, she kept them to herself. These days Jelly sometimes wondered what had passed between them, how much her mother had had in the bank, if anything, and whether the concerts that she and Adila gave with their pianist sister Hortense had been out of volition or out of necessity. It was too late to ask.
She could not pass the former workhouse without imagining how it must have felt to be its inmate. Though she earned well, relatively speaking, for her performances and recordings, she knew she would have commanded still higher fees had she been a man and that her imminent 40th birthday, had she been a man, would be seen as the start of her prime, not the end of it. Once she had dreamed about having her own house, but those earnings were not what they were ten years ago, before the Depression, and Adila and Alec would not hear of her leaving them in any case. Still, she was well aware that she remained an unpaying guest in their home – in her darker moments, perhaps a 'maiden aunt'. Joking about her nomadic concert life, declaring, 'I'm a Gypsy,' she could never quite escape the sensation of glassy surfaces under her feet: slippery to walk on, easy to shatter.
*
It was nearly lunchtime when Jelly arrived home from Eastbourne via Victoria Station. On the steps in her old mink coat, juggling suitcase, violin case, handbag and keys, and listening with delight to Caesar's piercing welcome-home bark, she caught a glimpse of Mrs Garrett next door, slipping away from an upstairs window. The Garretts did not consider the foreigners at No. 10 entirely suitable people, especially not Jelly, whom they knew was unwed, went on the stage, sponged off her brother-in-law and kept peculiar hours. Jelly smiled and waved. Then came the skittering of Adrienne's feet on the hall floor and her little niece hurtled out into her arms. 'Auntie Jeje!'
'Hush, sweetheart, you'll scare the neighbours,' Jelly laughed, dropping everything and lifting her to cover her face with kisses. 'Oof, what a big girl you are.' Adrienne gave a giggle, smoothing her cheek against the fur of her aunt's coat. Caesar charged through the doorway a second later, slobbering with joy all over Jelly's stockings.
'Ach, Sai darling, you're home. Today, I know, there will be a miracle!' Adila stumped out in her house slippers, calling Jelly by her family nickname – pronounced 'shy'. Her hair stood out in intense curls around her head. To judge from her look, she had surfaced within the hour.
Jelly put down Adrienne and the sisters swamped each other with hugs and greetings, Adila's preternaturally dusky. She insisted that when she'd had diphtheria, aged nine, it had affected her voice, pushing it down to the tenor register. 'Tenor?' Alec would joke. 'Baritone, my dear.' He always insisted he'd fallen in love first with her voice – it resembled his chosen instrument, the cello.
'You've obviously been up for hours,' Jelly teased her.
'We had a late dinner after the concert.' Adila pushed the door open to usher everyone inside. 'I made boeuf bourguignon. Apron over concert dress, musician to mama in moments, and we danced until two. We missed you, darling – the dancing is never so good without you.'
'Last night? But Adi ... What time was your concert?'
'So, everyone arrived about 7 for drinks, we began at 7.30, the singer and the pianist did the first half, I did second half with ... Sai, have you seen a ghost?'
Jelly's guts were twisting into a knot out of all proportion to yesterday evening's minuscule significance. 'It wasn't in the afternoon?'
Adila raised an eyebrow. 'Why?'
'Nothing, nothing ...' She changed the subject, fast. 'Did you hear what happened to me in Hastings? The local conductor had appendicitis, so guess who conducted instead? Adrian Boult!' She gave a gurgle of laughter. 'I know it's not funny really, but I was so pleased to see him.'
'He is the best of them all.' Adila scooped Adrienne up into her arms. 'Adri, darling poppet, come along. Auntie Jeje has to unpack. Let's take Caesar to the park.'
In Jelly's room, above the studio extension, a music stand perched between a silver-gilded writing table in the corner and antique wardrobes crammed with concert gowns, cloaks, coats, hats and a rickety tower of Chinese silk boxes containing ostrich-feather fans – mostly broken now – that she and Adila had collected as girls. While Jelly emptied the suitcase in her usual post-tour routine and chattered with Maria, Adila's new maid, she fought to regain her equilibrium.
It was a normal weekday, normal as can be. Adila's husband Alec was at his chambers in the Inner Temple. The house's sounds were pattering about in their usual sequences of cleaning and, as far as possible, tidying; a piano tuner had arrived to attend to the Bechstein in the music room; and from the window she spotted her sister and niece in their hats and coats making their way up the road, Caesar on his leash padding beside them. Everything was normal. Soon she'd forget about Eastbourne, the Southerns and that smallest yet most uncomfortable of coincidences.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ghost Variations"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Jessica Duchen.
Excerpted by permission of Unbound.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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