The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [128]
“I suppose I can,” she said, with a flick of her hard black eyebrows. “Of course I’m not asked to these highly important gatherings … I’m rather sorry you have to waste your time with them.” It was her sly way of reaching to him over the heads of the other staff. Underneath it, he assumed, must lie wounded pride at coming back to teach music in the house she had lived in as a girl. Once he had asked her what the music-room had been in her day: the housekeeper’s bedroom, apparently, and the sick-bay next door the cook’s. “Have you looked at the Gerald Berners?”
“I’ve looked at it long and hard,” said Peter.
“Rather dotty, isn’t it,” said Corinna. “Mother will be thrilled, she adored Gerald.”
“Well, I’m glad you’ve let me off the other two morceaux.” It was just the simpler middle one they were doing, the so-called “Valse sentimentale.”
Corinna steadied the music on the stand. “Can you think of any other composers who were peers of the realm?”
“What about … Lord Kitchener?” Peter said.
“Lord Kitchener? Now you’re being silly,” said Corinna, and coloured slightly, but smiled too.
First of all they played straight through the piece. “I should just say,” said Peter at the end, “that I assume it’s meant to sound as though I can’t play to save my life.”
“Absolutely. You’ve really got it.” With Corinna there was somehow a risk that one might revert to the age of eleven oneself, and get whacked round the head with a book. They went through it again, much more confidently, then she stood up for another cigarette.
“Isn’t this main tune oddly familiar?” Peter said.
“Is it? I shouldn’t have thought any of Gerald’s stuff was familiar.”
“No … I mean, I think he’s pinched it. It’s Ravel, isn’t it, it’s definitely French.”
“Aha …?”
Peter played the tune again, very plainly. “God, you’re right,” said Corinna, “it’s the Tombeau de Couperin”—and sitting back down she shunted him off the stool and played the Ravel, or a bit of it, with her cigarette between her teeth, like a pianist in a speakeasy.
“There you are!”
“Naughty old Gerald,” said Peter, which was a liberty she allowed; though she then said,
“It might just be naughty old Maurice, of course. You’ll have to check the dates. Anyway, we’d better look at the Mozart for ten minutes, then I must get back, I have to take my husband to the cricket club.”
“Oh, in Stanford Lane?” It was a pleasant ten-minute stroll from the bank. “I must say you spoil your husband.”
Though not cross, Corinna didn’t look pleased by this. She pushed the Trois Morceaux into her music-case, and then flattened the Mozart sonata on the stand. “I suppose you haven’t heard about him?” she said.
“Oh, no, I’m sorry … Has something happened?” Peter saw him being knocked down in the Market Square.
“Ah, you don’t know.” She shook her head as if exonerating Peter, but still somewhat nettled. “People say it’s agoraphobia, but it’s not actually.”
“Oh …?”
She sat down again. “My husband had a very bad war,” she said, with her little quiver of irritable tension. “It’s something that’s very hard for people to understand.”
“I’m afraid I only met him for three minutes when I opened my account,” said Peter. “He couldn’t have been nicer—even to someone who had more than forty-five pounds.”
“He’s a brilliant man,” said Corinna, ignoring this pleasantry, “he should be running a far more important branch, but he finds many things difficult that other people don’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I think people need to know that, though of course he loathes having any special exceptions made for him. Probably he’d hate me telling you this. Essentially he cannot tolerate being alone.”
“Yes, I see.” Peter glanced at her face, unsure if this explanation marked a new intimacy. She jetted up the last bit of smoke, and stubbed the cigarette out in the bin.
“He was escaping from a German POW camp when the tunnel