Read an Excerpt
1
Time Out
Swimming in a double-breasted suit against the Monday morning
incoming tide, I feel a double misfit. The whole working world
is flooding into town while I am heading out, and for no good
reason. What is more, I am just about the only man on the
forecourt in a respectable suit. Times have changed, and chinos
are worn to work.
Or whatever they call work. Sitting at a flickering screen,
hunting and gathering data, strikes me as a poor substitute for
the thrill of the chase, the joy of the kill, the kiss of conquest.
There is no romance, no mortal struggle, in digitised so-called
work. It is a virtual pursuit, without real vice or virtue. Mine, on
the other hand, is a people profession, hence almost obsolescent.
It would not do to enquire too closely into the purpose of my
trip. ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ nagged the railway hoardings
during the war. No, not enough to convince the auditors, who will
slash my expenses claim on seeing the negligible returns. Nor to
satisfy Myrtle, who will raise a quizzical eyebrow and register a
connubial debt. There is no pot of gold at the end of my trail
nor, truth be told, enough profit to interest a Sunday boot-saler
–- which is not, of course, what I tell the accountants (‘must keep
in touch with consumer trends’), or Myrtle (‘meeting a familiar face
can make all the difference when money’s tight’). What matters is
that I know why I am going, and I don’t have to make excuses to
myself. Escape, or the illusion of it, is what keeps me alive and
my business more or less solvent.
Survival instinct propels me through the Euston crowds towards
a reserved first-class seat on the nine-oh-three Intercity Express, my
chest pounding with unaccustomed effort and an absurd anticipation
of adventure. Absurd, because previous expeditions have
attested beyond reasonable doubt that any prospect of adventure
will get scotched at source by my innate reserve and speckless
propriety –- attributes that are bound to be mentioned in my
none-too-distant obsequies, alongside the Dear Departed’s musical
expertise, mordant wit and discreet philanthropy.
Adventure is, in any case, antithetical to my nature and inadvisable
in my state of health. Furred arteries and a fear of bypass
surgery have imposed severe restraints. I am limited to six lengths
of the health-club pool and half a mile on the electronic treadmill;
excitement is strenuously avoided; conjugality is conducted rarely
and with the circumspection of porcupines. ‘Take care of yourself,’
are Myrtle’s parting words and, for her sake, I do try. In the absence
of marital ardour, it’s the least I can do.
Yet, even a rackety, unbypassed old heart can be stirred by
departure fantasy. As I board the train, my pulse picks up ten
points in fake anticipation. I look ahead breathlessly, with a
reassuring sense of déjà vu. It’s like watching televised football
highlights on a Saturday night when you’ve already heard the
classified results on the radio. The programme may reveal some
fine points of form and skill, but any tension has been ruled out
by an incontrovertible foreknowledge of the outcome.
Watching stale soccer from the snug of a prized deco armchair
is the limit of my permitted thrills –- a sad comedown for one
who was groomed to make things happen. Sad to have slipped
from motivator to spectator, from the wings of great stages
to a piece of high-winged furniture. Still, there are compensations.
By staying out of the thick of things, I have acquired
an aura of what, in small-business circles, passes for timeless
wisdom.
Lifelong prudence has reaped its rewards. My town house
has a heated indoor pool, I holiday winter and summer in
wickedly overpriced Swiss resorts and my pension arrangements
are structured to keep me in comfort for three lifetimes. ‘Comfort
ye, comfort ye, my people,’ said the prophet Isaiah –- so we made
it the tribal aspiration. What greater calm can a man find on earth
than the quiet rustling of gilt-edged assets?
At Rotary and Bnai Brith you cannot tell me apart from the
rest of the Lodge, and that is how I like it; none of the other
brothers has, to my certain knowledge, been invaded by genius
and ruined by its defection. Forget I mentioned that: not many
people are meant to know about it. ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ my father
used to say, when asked how he was; and so do I. Normality is my
nirvana. Only within, deep within, at the clotted edge of irreparable
loss, do I feel the need for an unnecessary journey that will allow
me to avoid devastating self-contemplation and the acceleration of
inherited arteriosclerosis.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the railways were mostly run for people
like me, half-wrecked psyches in perpetual flight from the missing
part. I can just see a Development Director springing his brainwave
initiative at a board meeting. ‘Why don’t we run extra Mondaymorning
services to the boondocks?’ he proposes brightly. ‘There
must be thousands of useless deadweights, dog-ends and waitingfor-
godders who are just dying to get away.’
Settling in my window seat I pop two pills, a brand-name
sedative and a homoeopathic palliative, shutting my eyes for ten
minutes of yogic meditation. My Harley Street consultant (the
cardiologist, not the naturopath) advises daily exercise and the
avoidance of agitation. Being of a responsible disposition, I eat
warily and carry a kidney-donor card. If I see a pretty girl or a police
chase, I look away. In Michelin-starred restaurants, I order steamed
fish. I have many friends but no recent lovers, vague interests but
no driving passions.
Myrtle, my partner in life, has a life largely of her own. A
large-boned lady of healthy appetites, she lunches sparingly in
good causes and plays bridge for her metropolitan borough. She
took it up in her thirties, after having children, discerning in
the pastime an outlet for her formidable memory and jugular
instincts. Myrtle can remember the seating plan at every chickenschnitzel
wedding we have attended, the Order of Service at
Her Majesty’s Coronation, the universal symbols of the periodic
table and the entire line-up of the Hungarian football team that
inflicted England’s first home defeat, 3–6, in the aforementioned
Coronation Year, which was also the year of our marriage. Many’s
the time I have urged her to apply her remarkable mental powers
to a worthier object than a pack of cards. But Myrtle’s tolerance for
ladies who lunch on behalf of the starving and homeless is limited.
Our two sons have grown up and apart from us, triumphs
of private schooling and canny marriages. One is a Kensington
obstetrician with a trophy wife, the other a libel lawyer with a
traditional spouse. Over dinner, I prefer the barrister’s scurrilous
gossip to the manicured sanctimony of a society abortionist.
But I feel no satisfying patrimony when, on Friday nights, we
play a charade of happy families around a table groaning with
murderously poly-saturated fats. Monastically picking at my wife’s
heedlessly prepared dietary dynamite, I retire dyspeptically to bed
with a glass of camomile tea and the Spectator, a lifelong habit,
while coffee is taken in the lounge. My apologies are accepted
with a wince of scepticism. Some in the family, I suspect, ascribe
my medical condition to chronic hypochondria.
A decent Omm-trance is pretty much unattainable on a train
that starts and lurches through a thicket of signals, then spurts
past outer suburbs like a runaway horse. Once the speed settles to
a steady rocking, incomprehensible announcements splutter forth
about the whereabouts of the refreshment car and would the chief
steward please make his way to first class, thank you.
Giving up the quest for inner peace and undistracted by the
silvered February landscape, my attention turns to business, which
barely needs it. The company I keep going is a spectre of the firm
that my father founded in 1919 ‘to advance the appreciation of
music among men and women of modest means’. In its heyday,
Simmonds was a household name, to be found in the nation’s living
rooms among the Wedgwood teacups, Hornby toys and grafted
aspidistras in Robertson’s jampots. Simmonds (Symphonic Scores
and Concerts) Ltd manufactured piano reductions of orchestral
masterpieces, issued in noble purple covers for the uniform price
of sixpence. We also produced popular lives of the great composers,
albumised folk-songs and approachable novelties by uncelebrated
living composers. But the heart of Simmonds was the concert
division, which organised orchestral nights for all the family,
grannies to toddlers, at group discounts that worked out at less
than the price of a cinema seat.
Simmonds’ suite of offices, nuzzling the old Queen’s Hall at the
top of Regent Street, buzzed seven days a week with unprofitable
ideas, artistic aspirations and fatally entrapped wasps. No window
was ever opened, for fear of diluting the fug of inspiration.
Elbow-patched pianists in pursuit of unpaid fees jostled students
and factory workers waiting for last-minute penny tickets. Trilbyhatted
newspapermen interviewed stateless conductors in secluded
corners –- on one occasion, apparently, in the left hand stall of
the ladies’ washroom where the cistern drip-dripped so relentlessly
that an idle wit attributed the metronomic tempi of that
night’s Tchaikovsky Fifth to the inadequacies of Simmonds’
plumbing.
My father, hunched behind a pyramid of unread contracts and
uncorrected page-proofs, presided at all hours over his musical
emporium, seldom locking up before midnight. ‘I can’t leave the
place empty,’ he would say. ‘Who knows when the next Kreisler
might walk in?’ Half a century before open-plan offices, he took
his door off its hinges, the better to observe all comings and
goings. No artist ever entered unnoticed. As mail piled up and
secretaries resigned in tears, my father juggled three telephone
receivers simultaneously, virtuosically and without ever raising his
voice.
Mortimer (Mordecai) Simmonds had the manners of a gentleman
and the abstraction of a scholar -– though he was neither,
having been sent to work ‘in the print’ at thirteen years old to
support a widowed mother and four sisters in Bethnal Green. In
the inky-stink din of a newspaper press, he befriended the lower
echelons of journalism and ascended the proof-readers’ ladder to
join the sub-editors’ desk of a literary supplement, itself a passport
to Hampstead salons. There he met in mid-war and was persuaded
to marry my mother, the dowried and somewhat dowdy eldest
daughter of an Anglo-Sephardic dynasty, the Medolas, who offered
to set him up in the business of his choice. Bookishness beckoned,
the more so after two years on the Somme, but he failed to find
the kind of books that would give him aesthetic satisfaction and
would also make money. His business career was going nowhere
when a friend gave him a spare ticket to the Queen’s Hall on
4 May 1921, a date he would commemorate every year of his
life. The soloist was Fritz Kreisler, back for the first time in eight
years. Hearing him play an innocuous concerto by Viotti moved
my father more than all the words he had ever read. Kreisler, with
his bushy moustache and flashing eyes, ran off dazzling cadenzas as
if they were child’s play while holding listeners, one by one, in the
grip of a limpid glare. ‘I was seduced,’ my father would recall. ‘It
was as if he played only for me. From the moment his eye caught
mine, I knew that my life was destined for music.’
Unable to read a score or play a scale, my father hired a tutor
to instruct him in the difference between crotchets and quavers
and the significance of pitch relations in concert programming.
He frequented student recitals at the Trinity College of Music,
behind Selfridge’s department store, sniffing talent by instinct.
One violinist he picked off the pavement, busking in Oxford
Street. With a handful of hopefuls, he put on chamber recitals at
the Aeolian Hall, a churchy room on Regent Street; and with the
newly formed Birmingham Orchestra, bussed in for the night, he
staged the first of his family entertainments at the marbled Royal
Albert Hall, on the southern edge of Hyde Park.
No critic was ever invited to his concerts, but the halls were
full and admission was universally affordable. An outraged music
industry condemned Simmonds for ‘lowering the tone’. My father
laughed, and halved his top-price tickets. He refused to join
collegial committees to discuss unit costs, credit lines and entry
controls on foreign performers. He could not countenance anything
that imposed restraint on an interpreter of music, a bringer
of light and joy. He revered artists, almost without reservation.
No Balkan pianist with three Zs in his name would ever come
under pressure from Mortimer Simmonds to adopt a new identity
for English convenience. No fat singer was ever required to slim.
He gave second chances to panic-frozen beginners and blamed
his own shortcomings when a concert flopped. He had no time
for snob-appeal or seasonal brochures, for copyright niceties and
entertainment tax -– least of all, let it be noted, for his wife and
son, whom he only ever saw in daylight over Sunday lunch, and
not with undivided attention or unfailing punctuality.
So when the phone rang one winter Sunday with the roast beef
charred in the oven and my mother muttering over her petit-point,
I failed to react in any way, hysterical or practical, to news of his
death at the desk. My father belonged to Simmonds (Symphonic
Scores and Concerts) Ltd, not to me; he died at his post, as it were,
amid a mound of unopened mail. He was sixty-one, my present
age. At the funeral, the rabbi spoke of his love of art, his
humility and self-deprecating wit. He left me wishing I had seen
more of him.
Hauled out of Cambridge, where I was sitting my history finals,
I took charge of the firm and swiftly secured its future. On to
my father’s hyperactive disorder, I imposed financial rigour. The
rabble of loss-making unheard-of composers, most of them Hitler
or Stalin refugees, was parcelled off to a modern-music publisher in
Vienna, who kept three and unsentimentally sacked the rest. The
family concerts were wound up and the soloists redirected to rival
agencies. Two became famous; the rest vanished into marriage,
music-teaching or orchestral drudgery. I was sorry to lose the
artists, for their eagerness was infectious and their egotism endlessly
amusing. Some I had grown up with, others were so daunted by
the challenge of tying their shoelaces that I did not like to think
what would become of them without our unstinted protection -–
but what else, in the circumstances, could I have done? There was a
pressing personal reason for me to terminate our involvement with
talent, a reason I try very hard, on medical and legal advice, not
to dwell upon or commit to print.
I got a good price for the offices from a Dutch merchant bank,
retaining a corner space for myself, a spinster secretary called
Erna Winter and an occasional junior. The revenue from these
rapid disposals provided for Mother, who fell silent after Father’s
death and required periodic care in a private psychiatric hospital.
During a remission she helped arrange my introduction to Myrtle,
the bony daughter of Hispanic cousins, and morosely graced our
solemn nuptials before overdosing on anti-depressants -– whether
deliberately or accidentally I neither knew nor deeply cared.
When my rationalisation was completed, what remained of
the firm was a publishing division, producing purple-backed
low-priced study scores for amateur and professional use. In
less than a year, I had made Simmonds (Symphonic Scores and
Concerts) Ltd profitable and risk-proof, reducing its operations to
the point where they would never demand of me the sacrifice that
my father had so willingly offered.
My shortcomings would be exposed in time, though not
emphatically enough to dent my sage-like reputation. What I
did not know at twenty-one years old is that risk elimination
is bad for business. You have to take chances to have a shot at
winning but I, unfamiliar with life, applied the dusty theorems
of Cambridge economists and the jerky responses of a traumatised
mind.
Before very long, one of the composers I had sold off wrote a
million-dollar theme song for a Hollywood movie; another had
an opera staged in fifteen German cities. My father’s favourite,
Vladimir Kuznetsov, was found hanged from a light-fitting in
a Dalston bed-sitting room. His ‘nephew’ and room-mate, a
costermonger called Steve, assured me that the poor chap’s death
had nothing to do with losing his publisher, but was the result
of an auto-erotic experiment taken to an unfortunate extreme.
Smitten with regret, I endowed a Kuznetsov Prize in the wretched
creature’s memory.
Simmonds’ family concerts continued as cheerily as before under
new ownership, enticing ordinary people to hear the music they
loved and new artists to test their mettle away from critical
ears and cultural commissars. My withdrawal made my competitors
rich.
As for publishing, the bedrock of our business, I failed to
anticipate a collapse in the demand for printed music. Radio
and recordings –- tapped, like water, with the touch of a finger
–- destroyed domestic music-making and fostered musical illiteracy
on a scale so vast that, when people now talk of ‘playing’ music,
what they mean is shoving a tape into the car dashboard. Few
wrestle with a reed for the joy of hearing its wail and fewer still
consult a pocket score during the course of a concert. Schools
have stopped teaching children to play anything more elevated
than penny whistles and dustbin lids. The ‘popular score’ has
become a contradiction in terms.
Demand for printed music persists only in those parts where a
semblance of Victorian values somehow prevails. In churches that
keep up a trained chorus for Sunday worship and community halls
where brass bands come together of a Wednesday night to practise
early-industrial traditions. Towns and scrubland villages where tots
can blow a tune before they read or write and teens discover sex
in the coffee breaks of choir rehearsal. Often as not, these are the
most derelict and violent corners of the kingdom: Ulster streets
where the pipes play in sectarian bombings, Welsh hill-farms where
counterpoint and lonely alcoholism are common-law co-habitants,
Humber fishing ports where the cod has been fished out but the
trawlermen’s songs live on.
These are Simmonds’ last resort, the relics I shall nurse until
retirement or death, whichever comes the sooner. It is to one of
these regions that I am heading now, to a downtrodden part of
northern England where, in a wilderness of closed mines and
disused shipyards, choral societies spend their year working up
Messiah for Christmas, colliery villages have band calls twice a
week and the roughest of rugby tacklers can play rude ballads
on a pub piano, two-handed and with passable accuracy. Behind
the coal-blackened fascias of terraced houses and defaced concrete
council blocks, kids are made to play their scales before they have
their tea. Beyond the electronic gates of executive lawn estates,
music forms the first line of class-war defence: ‘If snot-nosed
Kayleigh with a single mum can get Grade Three with merit
in piano and violin, I want our Charlotte to show what she
can do at the Easter AIDS Awareness Concert.’ Music took
a bashing when Margaret Thatcher crushed the miners, but
men who may never work again still approach me with urgent
requests for a Trumpet Voluntary or singalong Elijah, and
indigent single mothers with barely enough in their purses to
put food on the table somehow manage to shell out for one
of the tacky fiddles, made in China, that I carry as a tenuous
sideline.
Unfailingly on my quarterly visits, I get asked to audition
pre-matriculants who have applied for a place in one of London’s
famed music colleges and academies. Invariably, I advise them to
consider a different vocation than one that will take them no
higher than the rear desk of an insecure provincial orchestra.
‘No matter,’ say the mums dismissively. ‘At least he won’t go
down the pit like his dad.’ That cliché has rung all the hollower
since the mines were shut, the shipyards became marinas and Dad
was reduced to terminal unemployment or a demeaning ‘service
industry’ existence as a waiter or tele-sales clerk. There will never
be real work again around these parts for real men, let alone the
dignity of labour.
The quick and the bright make an early escape, the quick to
professionalised sport, the bright to chase musical dreams in rock
groups and classical conservatories. My immediate destination,
which must remain nameless, has never launched a star, but it
has contributed any number of foot-soldiers to the musical army:
boys who blow horns in opera orchestras and women who saw
at violas as far afield as Sydney and Singapore, not to mention
keyboardists for any number of backing groups. It yields the
occasional ballet conductor and, once in a while, a contralto
steeped in sacred oratorio. Stout and dependable performers,
the soul and sinew of musical industry they are –- a triumph of
application over inspiration. I admire their grit as a dodo might
nod to a dinosaur, two anachronisms trudging against the tides of
fashion towards certain extinction.
Dismissing these maudlin reflections, I hear my station called
–- mumbled, rather –- over a crackly address system by a Punjabi
ticket-inspector unversed in English cadences. The clipped consonants
of crisply uniformed conductors have been abolished, mashed
into a multicultural blur by a soon-to-be privatised rail network
that has begun to call its passengers ‘customers’ and treats them
like cattle. Mine is not the only occupation in modern Britain
that has lost its point and purpose. The whole lackadaisical country
is slouching into sloppiness. Bloody Germans could teach us a
thing or two.
Chewing a Cham. Rad. homoeopathic sedative, I grab my suitcase
and stumble off the train, into the sour blare of a brass band
playing, as if by macabre request, V. Kuznetsov’s Dawn on the
Dnieper. At the centre of the platform stands the Lord Mayor in
full esoteric regalia, all gowned and chained. I know the fellow.
His name is Charlie Froggatt and we once hacked our way
through the Mozart clarinet quintet with two schoolmasters and
a visiting undertaker in the empty Temperance Room of Bethesda
Methodist Chapel –- a hip-flasked impromptu performance on a
blank August bank holiday. Froggatt, a grocer by trade, is a whiz
on the woodwinds.
‘It’s sodding Simmonds, innit?’ he bellows in my direction.
‘Welcome to Tawburn!’ though that is not the name of the place.
Time for some pseudonyms. Can’t use X and Y –- too Conan
Doylish. Let’s call the area ‘Tawside’ and its towns ‘Tawburn’ and
‘Oldbridge’. Anything more readily identifiable could provoke a
reopening of police files, and that’s the last thing I need. Tawburn
Station is where I stand, amid the usual debris of empty crisp
packets and polystyrene cups.
‘Your Worship,’ I address Froggatt with mock pomp, ‘how good
of you to come out and greet me –- and in full fig, what’s more.’
‘Cut it out,’ growls Froggatt. ‘This isn’t for you. It’s bleddy
Tawside Music Day and we’re trying to raise a bit of consciousness
in public places. Band’s been practising that modern sunrise stuff
for weeks and still comes unstuck on high E. Come to think of
it, you’re just what I need. Jump in car and I’ll give you lift to
the town hall.’
There is no polite way out of this. Froggatt grabs my elbow and
steers me ceremonially down the platform to his black Daimler,
the band switching to the safer chords of ‘Hail the Conqu’ring
Hero’ from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus. My luggage is picked up
by a porter, whom I point to the Royal Tawburn Hotel across
the square. Rather than use one of the health-club inns that have
sprung up around the marina, I stick with the lugubrious old
station hotel, where no amount of air-freshener can ever dispel
the day-long stench of breakfast kipper.
‘Don’t get all worried,’ says Froggatt, pouring us a pair of malts
from the back-seat bar, ‘this isn’t gonna cost yer. It’s just a little
favour I need off you tonight. Dinner, black tie, all that.’
No excuses come to mind. My nights on Tawside are mostly
free, ever since I learned to avoid amateur musical evenings,
where the playing is almost as excruciating as the semi-defrosted
canapés. I tend to spend my evenings alone in the Royal’s saloon
bar, unwinding with the intake of roughly twice the Health
Department’s recommended alcohol consumption. The bar is
oak-panelled, uninvaded by satellite TV and one-armed bandits
and therefore half deserted -– leaving me to do the Daily Telegraph
crossword in peace. If I crave conversation, there is a barman
who is knowledgeable about football and numismatics, and a spot
of passing trade, nothing too taxing. One distant night, before my
first heart murmur, a breezy blonde who popped in for a pack of
fags tipped my double Laphroaig all over the Telegraph and my
trousers. This led to a round of drinks each and a soggy stagger
upstairs, ostensibly to clean up, culminating in spontaneous carnal
combustion. It was an event of no consequence –- the sort of thing
that happens to a travelling salesman when his luck is in. An
occupational digression, occasioned by ennui and opportunity.
Like the deal that got away, you put it out of mind and hope
there is no comeback. Hardly worth mentioning, really.
Froggatt’s sand-dry accent drags me back to tonight’s obstacle,
the Mayor’s black-tie dinner. Sitting in a stiff collar surrounded
by small-town tradesmen is not my idea of a good night out, and I
cannot cope with a late night if I’m to do any business tomorrow.
Worse, what if he expects me to make a speech? Public speaking
gives me the stutters, a regression to boyhood reticence.
‘Fret not,’ says Froggatt, anticipating my objections, ‘we’ll have
you tucked up in bed by eleven and you won’t have to get up and
perform. Just be chairman of our jury and present the prize for the
telly cameras in time for the nightly news.’
‘What jury?’ I demand.
‘Tawside Young Musicians’ Competition,’ sighs the Mayor.
‘Not heard of it? I’m not surprised. We’ve hardly any prize
money and I can’t afford PR. Couldn’t get local telly to cover
the semis and the best we can hope for tonight is ten seconds
at the end of the regional news. But at least it’ll show we
care about music up here, and that we’ve bred some of the
finest musicians in the world. There are some good youngsters
coming up. They’re about the only export commodity we’ve
got left.’
‘And I’m the best chairman you can get?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ rasps Froggatt. ‘I invited Sir John
Pritchard, the conductor chappie; he has cousins in the town.
But we got a call last night that he’s “unwell” and you can’t get a
big name at short notice. I was bleddy wetting myself -– until you
stepped off the train, and I thought, He’ll do.
‘Simmonds is a big name around here. Everybody sees it on
the front of their music sheets. Mr Simmonds of Simmonds as
chairman of the jury? That’ll do nicely, and I’m not taking no
for an answer.’
‘But I’m not in the least bit qualified,’ I protest. ‘Judging a
competition calls for specific instrumental expertise. I play the
fiddle and piano a bit but you know me -– I’m just a commercial
traveller in musical goods, a cog in the music machine.’
‘Don’t give me that,’ says the Mayor, with a hint of metal. ‘No
false modesty. Your family has worked with Kreisler and Heifetz,
your name’s almost as famous as theirs. You can tell a decent
fiddler from a fake, a flash of talent from a teacher’s pet.
‘Anyway, you won’t have to judge the technical stuff on your
own. We’re calling in two professors from Manchester. You’ll also
have two council men, our head of Music and director of Arts and
Leisure Services, to broaden the perspective. What you do is chair
the panel and throw a casting vote only if the profs and the officials
can’t agree on a winner. You’ll have six of the best under-eighteens
in all England. Just pick one, declare the result before half ten and
I’ll do all the speeches. Any problems?’
We have pulled up at Tawburn town hall. Waiting for me
indoors are the directors of Education and Libraries who, I hope,
are about to sign replacement orders for lost and damaged scores
that will cover my overheads to the end of the financial year. I
badly need those orders. Knowing that refusal can offend, and that
offending the Mayor can have an adverse effect on library sales, I
quickly acquiesce. ‘Yer an ace bloke,’ says Froggatt, charging up
the steep front steps in a swirl of robes. ‘My car will call for you
at six. Be there.’
It is a relief to switch to the sigla and ISBNs of professional
librarianship, the furtive codes of scholarly commerce. The day
passes in a pleasant blur of ur-texts and catalogue prices, book-trade
gossip and musical trivia. By the time the tea-trolley comes round,
I have secured the biggest orders and could well go home, mission
accomplished. But I am committed to the evening’s dinner and
have arranged in my mind to spin out the rest of the week with
a tour of small accounts that will justify my absence to Myrtle
and the taxman. Small shops, small change. But it gives me the
sense of stealing time for myself, time that is mine to own and to
squander.
That’s what I lost when the genius left -– the mastery of time.
Like death, it is a loss that cannot be repaired, a hole in the heart
of things. I trudge back to my hotel in slashing rain, the shop-lights
twinkling on glossy pavements. It is a two-minute trudge, not long
enough for reflective anticipation of the evening ahead. When the
blow falls, it will fall without warning. Nothing in this final day
of normality has deviated from the norm, nothing warns me that
the monotony of my half-life is about to be shattered, that I am
to be brought face to face with the thing I most fear and long for
–- the golden part that was gutted from my subsequently empty
existence.
Excerpted from The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht. Copyright© 2002 by Norman Lebrecht. Excerpted by permission of Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
