CHAPTER
THREE
1. Who were the major musical influences of your
youth?
2. When did you first begin to compose?
3. Which contemporary composers do you most
admire?
4. Which, if any, contemporary composers do you
dislike, and why?
5. Which of your own
compositions do you particularly like, and why?
6. Do you compose for particular musicians and,
if so, who?
7. Does composition come easily to you, or is it
generally a struggle?
8. Can you compose in your head, or do you
require the aid of a piano?
9. Do you have a specific time-of-day when you
prefer to compose and, if so, when?
10. How many compositions have you thus far
composed?
Anthony Keating's head
was fairly bulging with these and other such questions as he pushed open Mr Tonks' front gate for the second time that week and, gently
closing it behind him, stood for a moment staring up at the large detached
property. Had he expected to catch
someone spying on him from one of its upstairs windows? The question subliminally presented itself to
his vain imagination and was hastily dismissed.
There were quite enough questions in his head already, and the more he
thought about them the more ridiculous and superfluous they seemed to become. If he persisted in thinking much longer he
wouldn't be able to conduct an interview at all. He would answer all the damn questions
himself in order not to have to drag them up again. Or, better still, he would drop them through the
composer's letterbox in the form of a questionnaire, and leave him to answer
them in ink. There were times, to be
sure, when it was wiser to do that than to appear in person. But such a procedure wasn't, alas, the
general policy of 'Arts Monthly'!
He strode up the garden path, climbed the five steps which
culminated in the front entrance and, transferring his customary attaché case
to his left hand, gently pressed the doorbell.
There was a gruff response from Ludwig as before, but this time it came
from deeper inside the house, from one of the downstairs back rooms, and was correspondingly
quieter. As human steps approached the
door, the housedog's barking grew no louder but remained mercifully confined to
the same distant level. A little of
Keating's previous apprehension returned as the lock was turned, but then,
suddenly, it gave way to an extremely pleasant surprise. For there, standing right in front of him,
was the composer's daughter, Rebecca!
"Mr Keating?" she smilingly ventured, before he could
introduce himself.
"Why, yes!" he admitted, feeling slightly flattered to
be expected and perhaps even recognized by this attractive young female. "Sorry to be a bit late, but my taxi was
held-up in the traffic."
Rebecca smiled understandingly.
"Actually, I should be apologizing to you," she remarked,
whilst inviting him into the hall.
"I take it my father told you on Monday about his trip to
"He did."
"Well, he rang home this morning to say that he was being
detained there an extra day and wouldn't be able to take part in your interview
as arranged," said Rebecca, frowning slightly. "However, he suggested that, if it's
convenient for you, you return here tomorrow at the same time. Unfortunately, a Friday afternoon appointment
is now the best he can do."
Keating could scarcely believe his ears, though the sinking
feeling in his guts was all too real.
Really, this was the last thing he had expected! "Oh dear," he sighed. "So I've come all the way up here for
nothing!"
There then ensued an uncomfortable silence, which seemed to
dovetail all his existential nightmares into one tight focus.
"Would you like a tea or something?" asked Rebecca,
feeling something like genuine sympathy for him. "Seeing how grey, wet, and windy it is
today, you deserve some kind of refreshment for your trouble."
"Well, if it's no real inconvenience to you, I could
certainly use some tea right now," he averred, his throat dry and sore.
"Splendid!"
Rebecca closed the front door behind him and then led the way along the
hallway into the music room at the rear of the house. "If you'd like to wait in here a
moment," she murmured, as he crossed the threshold and encountered
depressingly familiar surroundings, "I'll have it ready in a jiffy."
He stood his attaché case on the floor beside the coffee table
and, with a sigh of despair, slumped down in the velvet-cushioned armchair
which had served him on Monday afternoon.
What a bloody nuisance this damn composer was proving to be! If only Mr Tonks
had telephoned the offices of 'Arts Monthly' and thereby saved him the trouble
of coming all the way up to Hampstead for nothing! What a stupid waste of time! And what a bore it would be, having to repeat
the journey tomorrow! He frowned
bitterly and swore at the composer beneath his breath. How could he return on the Friday? He had been given another assignment in the
meantime. Really, this sort of thing was
more than a trifle annoying, it was downright maddening!
He glanced uneasily round the room. In front of him the large portrait of Bartók appeared even more disagreeable than the first time
he had set eyes on it, as also, for similar reasons, did the smaller ones of
Ives and Varèse to his right. Behind him, Stravinsky was doubtless staring
down at the crown of his head with an equally disagreeable face!
Getting up from his chair, as though to escape their gazes, he
ambled over to the french windows and peered out
through their misty glass. It was indeed
a miserable day, not raining at the moment, but still very damp and, for this
time of year, extremely windy. The rain
clouds of the morning had given way to an unending sheet of dark cloud which
completely obliterated the sky, and in the garden the roses, dahlias, and
fuchsias looked distinctly out-of-place as the prevailing wind swept over and
around them, severely ruffling their habitual equanimity. One might have supposed it was the middle of
November, so different was the scene from the one which had charmed his eyes a
few days ago, when the sun had shone down from a flawless sky onto everything
below, including the supple bodies of the two young women in eye-catching
bikinis. Yet, mysteriously, one of those
very same sunbathers was now fetching him a cup of tea. And, as though the clouds of discontent
created by the composer's absence were somehow being dispersed by this thought,
the sunshine of his gratitude for her presence suddenly pervaded his soul with
restoring warmth, and he began to smile.
Yes, at least there was something for which to be grateful!
A couple of minutes later the door was nudged open and Rebecca Tonks entered the room bearing the same tea-tray which her
mother had brought him on Monday. "Voilà!"
she exclaimed, placing it on the small coffee table in front of him,
and, as she bent forwards to pour the tea, he acquired a brief but engaging
view of her shapely breasts, compliments of the décolleté vest she was
wearing. "I didn't want to drag you
into the kitchen because our dog is there and he would only bark unnecessarily
and make a general nuisance of himself, so I hope you
don't mind drinking it here."
"Not at all," Keating hastened to assure her. "I find this a most delightful
room." It wasn't exactly the truth,
but he smiled gratefully as he accepted some milk from her and helped himself
to the tea she had just poured him. Was
there something about her that was different from when he first arrived? He could almost swear she had applied a
little additional eye-shadow and sprayed or brushed her long hair. And the perfume? He couldn't recall having smelt anything so
sweet whilst he stood in front of her in the entrance hall. But perhaps the fact of the open door or the
state of his nerves had prevented him from noticing? He shrugged mental shoulders and sipped his
tea. "I hope you weren't offended
by my curiosity the other day," he at length remarked, fearing that if he
didn't say something to start a conversation she would think he didn't like her
and preferred to be left alone.
"After all, it's not every day that one is blessed by the sight of
such an attractive bikini-clad young person peering-in through the
windows." He could see plainly
enough how this statement embarrassed her in its sudden frankness.
"I wasn't aware that you were looking at me to begin
with," she confessed, with an involuntary giggle. "I was too intent on watching my father
at the piano. But you did give me rather
a surprise, I must say! I hadn't
suspected there was anyone else in the room." She turned her gaze in the general direction
of the french windows, as though to put herself in
his position.
"Well, as long as I didn't give you a particularly
unpleasant surprise I needn't be too apologetic," said Keating. "You gave me a pleasant surprise
anyway," he boldly added.
With compliments like that, it wasn't long before he had seduced
her into talking about herself, her friends, interests, and, above all, her
father. She knelt on the carpet in front
of him whilst he sipped his way through two cups of tea and nibbled at the
occasional sweet biscuit, the provision of which was a tendency she had
apparently inherited from her mother.
"Yes, he's quite a good pianist really," she agreed,
after Keating had given her an encouraging opinion of her father's impromptu
performance. "But he isn't a
particularly keen one, in view of the fact that he's far too wrapped-up in his
compositions to have much time or inclination to spare on purely instrumental
work. That's why I could scarcely
believe my ears when I heard him playing Schumann the other day. He hadn't done that for ages. If he does play the works of other composers,
they're mostly twentieth-century ones - people to whom he can relate."
"Like Berio?" suggested
Keating thoughtfully.
"Not so much him as composers like Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, and Honegger, together
with such people as you see advertised in this room," she remarked,
briefly drawing his attention, with an all-embracing sweep of her arm, to the
portraits again. "Personally, I'd
rather he played the works of nineteenth-century composers more often,"
she added, sighing faintly, "and thereby gave one something melodically
pleasant to hum along to. Unfortunately,
so much twentieth-century stuff only depresses me."
"I'm sincerely relieved to hear it!" admitted
Keating. "After all, a good deal of
what passes for contemporary music isn't really music at all. It's calculated noise. It conforms, all too poignantly, to the
tendencies outlined by Spengler in his seminal tome The Decline of the West. Anti-music would be a more accurate
description."
"I'm afraid I don't know all that much about Spengler," confessed Rebecca apologetically. "But I can sympathize with your
conviction. Music has become far too
intellectualized, rationalized and serialized, these days, for its own
good. It needs to be simplified,
returned to the life of the soul."
"Alas, that's unlikely to happen!" opined Keating
boldly. "For the soul you refer to,
the soul of great classical music, is dead. It's the contemporary intellect which rules
the roost, and such an intellect is generally incapable of being other than
itself. All it can do is carry on
churning out the atonal cacophony which becomes it, to live in the lunar bedlam
it seemingly requires. Civilizations
rise and fall, you see, and when they're due to fall, then fall they damn-well
will - inexorably. Western civilization
is falling ever more precipitously into a chasm of soulless chaos. Every new avant-garde composition is a
further stab in the back of genuine music, a further insult to the culture that
preceded it. We can't put the clocks
back, and neither can we expect Western civilization to continue
indefinitely. It's in its senility now,
so the compositions it produces are correspondingly senile." He was aware that the devilish spirit of
contentious didacticism had taken possession of him again and, in an instant of
self-consciousness, he almost felt ashamed of himself for succumbing to its
invidious influence. But the demon had
to be placated somehow, and giving vent to this spirit wasn't the worst of
evils! On the contrary, it was virtually
a good, a veritable purgative. "So
the progress of anti-music is the chief concern of contemporary composers, the
process of furthering the mechanistic rot which began during the
late-eighteenth century," he went on, undaunted. "How long this process can continue is
anybody's guess, though, to judge by the extent to which the most radical
compositions have furthered the rot, one gets the impression it will have
reached its goal in a decade or two. I mean,
how can it go on getting indefinitely worse and worse? There has to be a limit somewhere. Otherwise you'll come full circle. You'll end-up back at the beginning again,
producing plainsong, progressing to the baroque, and culminating in the
classical. All that can happen now is
for the anti-musicians to carry-on the work initiated by the Romantics and
plunge contemporary serious composition deeper and deeper into the avant-garde
cacophony it seemingly requires.
However, we're not exactly called upon to criticize it or to preach a
crusade for the resurrection of genuine music and the correlative termination
of the cacophonous. On the contrary, if
we're not direct participants, we can only be witnesses, and hopefully
persevering ones, too!" His theory,
he knew, was usually on a more idealistic footing than his practice. Nonetheless, there were times when he was
capable of showing a degree of understanding and even sympathy towards what he
personally abhorred. "To my mind,
however, those who now perform the works of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven are more admirable or, at any rate, less contemptible than people who
specialize in composing cacophony, in being contemporary atonal
composers," he defiantly concluded.
"Thanks for the compliment!" laughed Rebecca, who was
something of a classicist herself.
"I usually do my best not to perform anything too
atonal." And here she began to
expatiate on the subject of her flute lessons and who she particularly enjoyed
playing, which, to Keating's delighted surprise, included some leading jazz and
rock musicians. "But
seriously," she added, returning to the gist of his previous comments,
"you can't dismiss all contemporary works as cacophonous, or anti-music. Depending how you define 'contemporary', this
century has produced some really fine music."
"Oh, I entirely agree!" rejoined Keating, slightly
embarrassed by the looseness of his generalization. "Even so, it's only fine by
twentieth-century standards, not by those of the previous three centuries. The very fact that it was composed in the
twentieth century virtually guarantees it a comparatively inferior musical
status.... Yes, you can demur if you like, but I assure you it's
perfectly true. It has the ring of
soulless modernity about it, and that is a far cry from soulful antiquity! What we hear is less the kernel of music than
its husk, a materialistic shell, brass and percussion heavy, which conveys no
more than the appearance of music while being totally bereft of its essence. The fall from melodic grace is atonal only
because it lacks a soul. And what
applies to melody applies even more to harmony, where the fall from harmonic
grace has taken a discordant turn symptomatic of tonal decay. It isn't beauty and love which rule the
contemporary compositional roost, but ugliness and hate; not goodness and
pleasure, but evil and pain. The sooner
such anti-values are eclipsed by new positive ones, the better it'll be for
From the hall, the resonant sound of a grandfather clock striking
three interrupted his diatribe and made him aware of how quickly the last hour
had passed. Far more quickly, he
reflected, than would have been the case had circumstances permitted him to
conduct the interview with Rebecca's father instead! But Mr Tonks was
still in
Yet how beautiful she looked!
How her dark-blue eyes, smooth black hair, moderately aquiline nose, and
sensuous little mouth charmed him! And
he had seen so much more of her besides!
Seen her minus the white cotton vest, the black satin
miniskirt, and the purple nylon stockings. Even seen her without a
bikini top on for an instant, though she hadn't realized it. For if she had, she would
probably have blushed a little more intensely when he alluded to his curiosity
of the Monday afternoon. But that
was at a distance of several yards, and now he was seeing her close-up, so
close, in fact, that he could almost smell her fragrant skin through the
alluring perfume he still entertained a private suspicion about.
"Do you have a favourite composer?" she asked, once it
became evident to her that he had nothing to add to his previous statement
concerning contemporary music.
"Not in any permanent sense," he confessed, smiling to
himself at the thought that Rebecca was asking him the sort of questions he had
reserved for her father, "though I've admired quite a number of different
composers over the years, including Ravel and Martinu. How about you, do you have one?"
"Probably Schumann," she admitted, smiling faintly.
"So that explains why you were at the french
windows on Monday, does it?" Keating deduced, as a fierce shaft of
sunlight suddenly pierced the gloom and illuminated the coffee table on which
the tea-tray was resting. The silver
teapot and part of the unused sugar bowl glistened dazzlingly.
"Don't tell me the sun's come out at last!" exclaimed
Rebecca, and, scrambling to her feet, she hurried across to the windows in
question. Sure enough, the oppressive
sheet of grey cloud was speedily disintegrating into small, separate cumulus
clouds which permitted intermittent sunshine.
The garden, at that moment, stood bathed in sunlight.
"You could almost do some more sunbathing now," said
Keating, who had also got to his feet and was standing just behind her.
"If it wasn't for the fact that I'm already over-tanned, I
might consider it," she responded, half-turning towards him. "But too much sun is suicidal. That's what the latest medical reports are
telling us, anyway."
"So I hear," murmured Keating, gazing over her
shoulder at the bright red roses which stood in the middle of the garden and
glistened majestically in the fresh sunlight.
How exquisite they were! And how
exquisite, too, were all the other flowers and shrubs which could be seen to
either side of the rose bushes, combining their individual appearances into a
delicate fusion of colours and shapes!
The symmetrical brilliance of the layout was beyond criticism -
virtually flawless. The serried ranks of
flowers somehow reminded one of a military display, suggested, more
specifically, a parade ground where soldiers stood to attention and scarcely
dared breathe. This was especially true
of the dahlias, though the fuchsias hardly qualified for the analogy which now
presented itself to Keating's imagination, as he admired the beauty of
cultivated nature through eyes that had been deprived of such a spectacle for
too long, and simultaneously reflected upon the apparent discrepancy between
the sense of the Beautiful in which Howard Tonks
indulged with his flower arrangements and the overwhelming ugliness of the
man's music. How was it possible that a
man whose compositions abounded in inharmonious elements to the point of
cacophony could produce such a delicate harmony of colours and shapes in the
garden? Did the one necessarily preclude
the other, or was it that nature was beyond the decline of civilizations and
therefore enabled one to lavish aesthetic care on what remained impervious to
the transmutations of art? It didn't
appear to make sense, but there it was, a picture of perfect taste, a garden
where all the thistles and weeds, stones and pebbles, had been removed from the
soil in the interests of the flowers and other plants of a higher order; where
naturalism had been purged of realism and materialism, as it were, in the
interests of an idealism which had blossomed splendidly in the guise of the
various flowers straining heavenwards
towards the clearing sky. There was
little possibility of one's stumbling upon anything ignoble out there! A regular fidelity to beauty had ensured the
absence of ugliness.
"Yes, my father's very keen on gardening," confessed
Rebecca, responding to a comment Anthony Keating duly made about the harmonious
layout. "It's his main hobby,
actually."
She stood no more than an inch or two in front of him, staring
at the roses. The scent of her perfume
excited him immensely, causing his gaze to wander from the garden to her hair,
shoulders, and arms. More beautiful by
far than anything outside, it was ridiculous of him not to acknowledge the fact
and do something to show his appreciation, to prove that one was a man and not
a child or a dog or something. Besides,
was she not expecting him to do something?
Was she not secretly willing it?
Had not the intellect run its dreary course and made delight in
sensuality a virtual certitude? Yes, she
had listened attentively to his Spenglerian
discourse, his condemnation of bourgeois decadence, his cynical appraisal of
contemporary 'classicism', and allowed herself to be seduced by the impassioned
flow of his words. Now she would be
better qualified for that other, more tangible seduction, since women did not
live by intellect alone!
Thus, with a complimentary remark directed at her beauty, he
enveloped her waist and gently drew her against himself. She pretended surprise, protested weakly, and
then submitted to his embrace, to the kisses he proceeded to shower upon her
hair, neck, face, shoulders, lips. Oh, how much better to cultivate the garden
of such a beautiful young woman whilst it was still there to be
cultivated! And just the two of them,
with Ludwig safely locked away in the kitchen and her parents up in
"You work pretty fast, don't you?" she managed to say,
as he disengaged his lips from hers and applied his nostrils to the perfumed
lobe of her nearest ear.
"One has to these days," he replied. "One can never be sure that one will get
a second chance to make up for one's procrastination."
"That's true of any time," she smilingly retorted.
"Yes, but more so of today," he insisted, and before
she could say anything else he had glued his mouth to hers and made amorous
contact with her tongue. She felt
herself being drawn away from the french windows,
felt her short skirt sliding to the floor, and, most poignantly, felt a hand on
her left breast, felt the nipple respond to its caresses and send gentle waves
of pleasure coursing through her. How
could she resist him? The lure of
greater pleasure was too strong. If he
could get this far, what sense was there in preventing him from going
farther? "We really oughtn't to
behave like this in my father's study," she found herself feebly
protesting. "It's not the place to
...” But he had removed another item of her clothing and, through his
persistent caresses, made it harder to resist him.
"One can make love virtually anywhere when the desire to do
so is sufficiently intense and the justification for it beyond dispute,"
he confidently assured her, smiling encouragement.
"Yes, but ... not in my father's study." The words more or less spoke themselves, without
conviction. For, by now, she was lying
on the Afghan carpet with her eyes closed in the throes of pleasure and her
arms wrapped around his neck. There was
only one item of clothing to be lost, and that was no longer in its original
position but over half-way down her thighs.
The evidence of the senses spoke strongly in favour of love, and slowly,
steadily, inevitably, the words were superseded by sounds of a non-verbal
nature, the sounds became more spontaneous, frequent and intense, more the
product of satisfied desire than the desire for satisfaction, and culminated,
some frantic minutes later, in a sound which was nothing less than the
expression of undiluted sensual ecstasy, the ultimate comment upon everything
that had gone before - the sound of sounds!
Was the music room really that inappropriate a place to engender it?
But just as she was about to offer her most sensitive parts to
the probing tongue which had hitherto confined itself to her mouth and breasts,
there came another sound, one that issued not from her mouth, still less from
Keating's, but from the handle of the door to the study. And this sound was quickly followed by
another one, as leather-soled footsteps could be heard entering the room. "Miss Tonks!"
a voice hoarse and flabbergasted exclaimed in a pitch which bore no relation
whatsoever to anything amorous.
"What-on-earth are you doing down there like that?"
Violently startled out of her ecstatic abandon, Rebecca turned
her head in the direction of the disembodied voice and encountered, with
unbelieving amazement, the astonished face of Mrs Marchbanks
staring down at her with open mouth and protruding eyes. The old woman was now leaning against the
wall with one hand across her bulging chest and the other on her perspiring
brow. She appeared to be on the point of
fainting.
"I don't believe it!" she gasped, as her eyes
encompassed the mostly naked bodies of the two young people spread-eagled on
the floor in a posture of inverted oral sex.
"Who-the-devil's that?" exclaimed Keating,
endeavouring to raise himself to a position where he could see for
himself. But his voice sufficed to
ensure the old woman that she was not hallucinating and, with a gasp of
unbelieving dismay, she staggered out of the room and slammed the door shut
behind her with an involuntary shudder.
"Oh, shit!" cried Rebecca, her face rose-red with
embarrassment, and, disengaging herself from Keating's frozen grasp, she rolled over onto her stomach and began to
sob. The body that, a moment before, had
been shaken by sexual ecstasy was now convulsed by emotional pain, the pain of
a shame the likes of which she had never experienced in her entire life!
Overcome by pity Keating attempted to console her, to mitigate
the horrible shame which he, too, was now experiencing in some degree. How was it possible
to plunge to such remorseful depths after one had scaled all but the highest
sensual heights? He was virtually on the
brink of tears himself. If only he could
have seen who had so completely interrupted their pleasures.
The ugly sound of the front door slamming shut made him start
from his preoccupation with their mutual distress and nervously inquire of
Rebecca who had barged-in on them.
"The housekeeper," she replied through trembling
lips. "I had forgotten the old bag
was coming today. No, not forgotten,
simply overlooked the time." Her
sobbing grew more intense. Yes, it was
all her fault that this sordid thing had happened, her fault for having invited
Keating into the house in the first place, instead of sending him away at the
door, as her father had advised her to do over the telephone. But she had taken a fancy to him the
afternoon he saw her in nothing but a pale-blue bikini, had purposely gone out
of her way to dress-up for him today, and, with secret exultation, allowed
herself to be ravished by him as soon as the opportunity arose, as it was
almost bound to do in sight of the rose bushes.
She had only herself to blame for having invited him not only into the
house, but into the very room from which he had first laid eyes on her a few
days previously.
"Do you think she'll tell your father?" asked Keating.
"Quite possibly," came her sob-choked reply.
Anthony Keating sighed despairingly and, as he did so, the noise
of Ludwig's fierce barking filled the air.
The housedog had evidently taken up the challenge, from the kitchen, of
the slammed front-door. For a house
that, ten minutes earlier, had been the very soul of tranquillity was now a
bedlam, a place from which one longed to escape, as from a cacophonous
recital. It was as though some terrible
crime had just been committed, the evidence of which was to be found in the
nude and trembling body of Rebecca Tonks, the items
of clothing scattered across the floor, and the noise of Ludwig's continuous
barking. A ghastly dread suddenly
pervaded the young correspondent's fear-racked mind: what if the housekeeper
were under the false impression that Rebecca had been raped and was now going
to the police? How could he explain his
conduct or justify his presence in the house when, to all intents and purposes,
he was a complete stranger there? His
heart beat frantically as he pondered this possibility and imagined himself
being questioned by stern-faced men in dark suits who suspected the worst. After all, had Rebecca really encouraged him
to have sex with her? Hadn't she
protested against his amorous advances?
Yes, two or three times! But that
wasn't to say she didn't want sex at all.
On the contrary, her smile of gratitude ...
He felt a hand on his shoulder and, startled out of his sombre
reflections, discovered that Rebecca was no longer a convulsed heap of guilt
and shame but, in the meantime, had pulled herself together and dried her
eyes. She offered him a wan smile, saying: "If she does tell my father, I'll stand
by you."
"You will?" he responded, unsure what to think.
"Of course. We'll stand or fall together."
Overcome by relief, Keating bent towards her and kissed her on
the brow. "Such a fine young
lady," he murmured, holding her tightly against his chest. "It would have been positively
outrageous of me not to have given you the kind of appreciation your body
deserves."
Partly flattered, in spite of her private misgivings, she smiled
in admiration, or perhaps it was forgiveness, of his romantic bravado and
returned him an equally noble kiss.
"Yes, you're probably right," she conceded.
