The Pyramid Read online

  CLARA CECILIA DAWLISH

  1890 1960

  Three score years and ten. Nothing either way. Expected expectancy. However I read the name and the date, they said nothing more, suggested nothing more. I lowered my eyes to the chips, examined carefully the immortelles which looked so inappropriately like part of a wedding cake. It was only when I examined the nearer surround—looked down, in fact, almost between my separated feet—that I grasped the true thoughtfulness of Henry’s tribute. Here were three words in small lettering. They were placed there at the foot with exactly his modest assurance, his sense of position, of who was entitled to do what. Sitting on the lichened tombstone, with white marble before me, I fell into a kind of daze of remembering. They were not really Henry’s words, nor Bounce’s, though she used them often enough. They were her father’s. Fishing back, grinning wryly, as I sat there in the sun, I could just remember him.

  *

  Old Mr. Dawlish. He was one of those eccentrics a child will accept as part of the landscape. We had a number of them in Stilbourne. There was one, a deformed halfwit in a wheelchair for whom I felt no pity, since he was an object, like the horsetrough, or the illegible stone that lay against the town hall pillars. There was another, a strange lady wearing many skirts and a vast hat full of dead leaves so that she looked like an aged and emaciated Ophelia. Bounce’s father, old Mr. Dawlish, did not look as eccentric as these two, certainly. But he was noteworthy. He was a failed musician, rumoured to compose; but in fact he kept a music shop and tuned pianos. By some inheritance from our town’s complex interweaving, he owned not only the shop but also a house on the other side of the Square from my father’s cottage. He had inherited a little money; and this, combined with his property, made him wholly estimable. He played the organ in church until Bounce was old enough to take over. But most of his time, while a bored girl minded the shop, he walked, or lunged, rather, through the lanes and streets. He was a slight man, in pepper and salt, and he had a shock of white hair which flew and tumbled above a fiercely aesthetic face. Always he looked up and to the side, as if preoccupied with some absolute before which people were shreds and tatters. Now and then, as he lunged through the streets, you could hear him—swept up, just like Beethoven in some tempest of the mind—cry, or rather, caw aloud:

  “Aaa—ah!”

  It may have been, that finding himself entirely without talent, he was resolved to give at least one first-class performance out of THE LIVES OF THE MASTERS or turn himself into the portrait of a romantic musician from the brush of Delacroix. He believed, I came to know, in the New Woman, Wagner and Sterndale Bennett, though not in Mr. G. B. Shaw, or young Mr. Holst. Since he owned property, for all his eccentric lunges, he gave Stilbourne a painless excuse to feel that it was in touch with the arts as much as it ought to be. I noticed him first when I was so small my nurse was pushing me up the High Street from the Old Bridge to the Square in a pushchair. I was interested because there was a Poor Man standing at the corner with a battered pram. He had what was much more exciting than a baby in it—a curling green horn which ended in a wide, trumpet mouth. He was turning a handle below the horn with one hand and holding his cap out with the other. As we drew near I heard a most delectable sound coming out of the horn—Honkety tonk ti tonk ti tonk! I laughed aloud and clamoured to be unstrapped so that I could join the children who were dancing round him. This was impossible, of course, since it was a public place, and the children were ragged and dirty. But before I had done more than give a preliminary whine, excitement piled on excitement. Mr. Dawlish came lunging across the Square from the church, a stick in his hand, his white, artistic hair flying. He made for the dancing group, and the Poor Man switched from my nurse to hold his cap out in this new direction. Mr. Dawlish, cawing like a furious rook, brought his stick down on the turntable of the phonograph, and pieces of black stuff flew all over the place. The dancing children shrieked and laughed and clapped and went on dancing. My pushchair slowed; then shot by, as my nurse hurried past the group, keeping well to the inside of the pavement. Naturally I was slewed in the straps of my chair, trying to enjoy the sight as long as possible; and in the few seconds left to me I saw the sleepy, sunny street fill with people: Moore from the Ironmonger’s, Miss Dimble from the Needlework Shop, Mrs. Patrick from the Sweet Shop, three men from the Feathers, the smith with a smoking horseshoe at his halfdoor; these made a crowd in the middle of which white hair flew. There was no honkety tonk any more, but only rook-cawing, and the bird-dweedle of children.

  Now you may wonder how, at the age of three, I knew these people, their names and provenance; but a child’s retina is such a perfect recording machine that given the impulse of interest or excitement it takes an indelible snapshot. I did not know their names or where they came from. But I saw them numberless times later and compared them with the snapshot that lay in my head, and indeed, still lies there. I take the snapshot from whatever drawer it lies in and sort my impressions into two piles—one of primary, ignorant perceptions; the other a gradual sophistication which tells me the horseshoe was cooling, my own white shoes made of kid, and Mr. Dawlish a thwarted man, violently acting out his prejudices and the drama of his fruitless ambitions.

  I have early pictures of Bounce too. I was accustomed to the sight of this lady walking with her unusual clothes and elastic step along the other side of the Square towards the church. It was inevitable that I should learn some music from her.

  I say “some”, advisedly; for my father had a deep conviction that the profession of music was a perilous one and that I should descend through a course of indescribable bohemianism, to end, perhaps, pushing round a phonograph and holding my cap out.

  Apart from seeing Bounce, I met her first when I was six. I went with my mother across the Square to the house where she lived alone and taught alone, one hundred and fifty yards from her father’s music shop. My mother dressed with care, gloves, hat, a coat that pushed up under her jawbones. She opened our front door and let me out, opened our iron gate and let me through. We crossed cobbles and she bent, unhooked a length of chain so that we might enter the square of grass, then hooked it on again. To my eyes, the unvisited grass seemed vast as a night-time prairie for it was late Autumn and the gas lamps round the Square gave no light in the central area. On the further side of the grass, she unhooked another length of chain, then fastened it behind us. We crossed more cobbles, opened the iron gate of Bounce’s house, and my mother rang a jangly bell by the front door. My left hand held a quarter-size violin in a velvet-lined case, and I was looking down at this when the door opened. I saw little but Bounce’s feet at first, for I was shy, and I saw little more when we went inside for the house was dark. Her shoes were unremarkable, though heavy, and I watched them for a while, as the adult chatter went on above my head. As my eyes became accustomed to the qualified gloom of the entrance hall, I grew a little bolder, looked up slowly, and saw Bounce for the first time, close. I observed a severe grey skirt, the waist accentuated by a leather belt. Above this was a shirt striped black and white and narrow at the cuffs and collar. Down the front was a brown tie, fixed by a large brooch of some ugly, semi-precious stone in brown and black.

  Halfway along the righthand side of the dark brown hall was a dark brown door with a dark brown settle beside it. After I had put my hat, my gloves, my muffler and my coat on the settle, we three went through the dark brown door into a darkness without any brown in it. All I could detect were two disparate eyes of faint light; one, a dull red spot low down, the other a blue bud, high up. Bounce’s face approached the bud and turned it into an incandescence which illuminated the darkness without removing it. There was no pink or white in her face, only pale yellow, which combined with her high cheek bones, lashless eyes and hairless brows, gave her an appearance Chinese rather than European, indeterminate rather than female. At that time I thought of people as male or female by the nature of the clothes they wore, and the only thing definably female about Bounce was her skirt. E
ven her mousey hair, pulled back and pinned into a bun, was no positive evidence, since the bun was so flat as to be all but invisible from my level. But while I examined her mutely I heard the soft closing of the door behind me. I gazed at the glimmering bow window and heard my mother’s step across the cobbles. When I looked back at Bounce I found she was doing something serious with a sort of rack that hung on the wall, so I started to examine the room instead. The darkness still crouched everywhere behind the hissing gaslight; but—as I was to discover through the years—even daylight could do no more than filter through curtains of yellowing muslin. Had there been no curtains, daylight could still only penetrate halfway down the room; for it was interrupted by an enormous grand piano that grinned savagely at the curtains as if it would gnaw them, given the chance. It had an attachment I have seen nowhere else—a complete set of organ pedals and the appropriate long, smooth seat. The lid was piled almost to the ceiling with tattered music, broken strings, a violin, books, dust, curious, unidentifiable objects, and the teetering bust of a bearded gentleman I later knew as Brahms. In the darkness beyond the piano was the red spot of the fire that smoked almost as much as Bounce. For while I had been examining the room she had selected and filled one of a dozen pipes. She sat at the organ seat and lighted the pipe; she drew, puffed, expelled long coils of smoke which joined an air already laden with dust and must. I looked away again at the rack, and then above the rack to the large, brown photograph of a lady in cap and gown, and the large, brown photograph of a man who stared bleakly across the room above my head. I looked back at Bounce, because she began to talk a little between puffs.

  “There’s—nothing—quite—as satisfying—as a pipe.”

  Immediately she had said this, she put the pipe back in the rack, and lit a cigarette. She took out my violin and bow and showed me what parts I must not touch with my greasy fingers. Then she began—the smoke making her eyes blink and run as she bent down—to put me into the correct position for playing the violin.

  It is necessary to be cruel to musicians if they will not be cruel to themselves; and nothing is crueller than the position for playing the violin. That left arm bent, with its intractable elbow wrenched across the body, that wrist back where it must be to allow the little finger free play across all four strings—only the soaring voice from the instrument can justify it. If you found a skeleton twisted so, you would say it was a victim in the grip of a judo expert and just about to be thrown. Before we had any soaring voice either from her violin or mine, Bounce used my small body as a kind of lay figure, and arranged my joints with abrupt, manly, no nonsense jerks, pulls and pushes, a lay figure into which she inserted my still untuned instrument as an afterthought.

  No sooner had I been fixed in a position for being thrown by the judo of music than I was unfixed, and my violin—that tiny thing which had glowed so when we bought it in the Bristol Arcade—was put in its coffin. Bounce put on a man’s jacket and pinned on her flat hat while I struggled with my own wrappings. Then she led me back through all the bars and gates and chains to my father’s cottage. The ladies agreed that I should be brave enough to go and come by myself in future. Bounce left me with instructions for my practice; a daily return to the judo position, left arm contorted, chin down, shoulder up, and subsequent insertion of my still voiceless instrument.

  On Friday, ducking under chains, scampering across grass, I returned to the gloomy hall and knocked as instructed on the music room door. Bounce let out a large girl and let me in. This time, after some more judo, she tuned my instrument then made me saw away at the open strings. As a reward she took up her own violin and played me a scale, sometimes putting her fingers in the wrong places so that I laughed and made a face. Bounce looked down at me, severe as her skirt, till I became solemn. She made me imitate her exactly.

  “Back, Oliver, back! Can’t you tell when you’re not in tune? You must listen!”

  Sometimes she would grab and manipulate my fingers. Presently a tear ran down my cheek and dropped on the brown varnish of my violin.

  “What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?”

  She jerked away, stood two yards off. She lowered her voice to a whisper of distaste.

  “You want to go, don’t you?”

  Yes, I wanted to go; but all I could do was nod dumbly. Bounce became very busy. She put my violin away quickly. She reached into shadows, took out a candlestick and lighted the candle at the gas.

  “Come along.”

  I followed her; but she neither put my coat and muffler on me, nor showed me to the front door. Instead she went through the hall, then up dark, angled stairs, where the candlelight was no more than a puddle. We came to a long corridor and there were doors on either side, some open, to show a bare floor and a glimmering window. At the end of the corridor was a step up and a glass door. Bounce opened the door.

  “There you are.”

  She handed me the candlestick and shut the door behind me. I advanced fearfully and saw a water closet of brown earthenware. Beside it was a handle and an iron rod which went straight up, miles up, through the ceiling. Behind me, I heard Bounce’s manly shoes clump away down the corridor. I backed against the wall, and concentrated as hard as I could on the flame of the candle. I could understand now how I had mistaken her meaning and she, mine; but I was powerless to mend matters, and could only go along with them. I stayed where I was against the wall and the ice of that darkness and remoteness formed on my skin and in my hair. The stump of candle shortened itself.

  *

  At last, far off, I heard her irritated shout.

  “Oliver!”

  I leapt at the handle and pulled it. For a few seconds nothing happened. Then, high up in the roof, there was a clank, a gurgle, a rushing descent. The unseen pipes hummed, roared at me, foamed. I burst through the door, tumbled down the step, and fled along the corridor. Bounce was in the hall, with a big boy who had just come in. She took the candle from me.

  “That’ll be all for today, Oliver. Practise that scale. I’ll see you on Tuesday.” Two yards away she bent towards me, as the big boy listened shamelessly. “And remember to go next time before you come.”

  *

  So now I was fully launched on my career as an amateur musician. Tuesdays and Fridays, Fridays and Tuesdays. My mother was able to include my new status in her conversations with our few acquaintances.

  “Oliver’s getting on so well,” she would say. “He’s devoted to Miss Dawlish—aren’t you, dear?”

  I would agree shyly. There was not an admissible boy or girl in our society whose parents were not agreed on our devotion to Bounce. It was a rock in our lives, so real, so hard, so matter-of-fact. When I caught myself working out a sum; thirty minutes equals sixty times thirty equals one thousand eight hundred seconds, I recognized it as no more than evidence of my personal depravity. When I watched the clock, in the last hour before a lesson, I was very careful to ‘go’ before I went.

  So now I knew Bounce and watched her across the Square as she bounced along to the church or bounced back again. When she was not in the church, every half hour a boy or girl would enter the door beside the bow window of the music room. Indeed, she worked hard, did Bounce. This may have been the reason for a curious habit of hers which I discovered by accident and fostered afterwards as carefully as I could. If your mistakes were demonstrable, Bounce would correct them irritably. But if you could stay between what might be called the astonishingly wide limits of permissible error, her eyes would droop, her chin lift; and sitting on the organ seat of the piano, she would fall fast asleep. A cigarette would hang from her half-open mouth, and she would sway or rock or circle slowly like a top, until some loss of unconscious balance, or some crashing mistake on the part of her devoted pupil, would jerk her awake again. This was an incentive to accuracy perhaps, but alas, not enough incentive to cure my growing distaste for my tiny violin and the tedium of practising it. So I moved, as the months passed, through a series of crises, during which Bounc
e shamed me by contrasting my carefree life with the tribulations of her youth as a real musician. Once at least, she sent me home early in disgrace, since I had not written out a scale properly.

  “I can’t do anything with you,” she said, severe as her skirt, “if you only work during lesson time. Now I’ll tell you, Oliver. When I was a girl my father made me copy out fugues with a different coloured ink for each voice; and if I got a part wrong—Crack! went his ruler across my knuckles!”

  So off I went, and tried to linger out my statutory half hour by following the man who was turning up the four gas lamps of the square with his long pole. As time went on, these glimpses of the Dawlish family life, fused into a sombre picture: Crack! over the knuckles with a ruler—Bonk! in the organ loft with a roll of music—Jab! in the ribs with the point of a bow—I came to a vivid awareness of lunging Mr. Dawlish with his ready hand and his eye fixed on the absolute. Indeed, I sometimes wondered as I threaded the various iron obstacles between our house and hers if she might not call him in, when my shortcomings and misdeeds—my wickedness in fact—got beyond her own ability to cope. But fortunately this never happened.

  The first break in my progress from lesson to lesson came when I took an examination in elementary violin playing. We took a whole series of examinations, because otherwise no one would ever know whether we could play or not. Once successful, we had bought—or our parents had bought for us—a certificate which could be framed and hung on the wall, or put away in a drawer as ammunition for the battle of life. But the examination was a turning point—seemed, now I look back, to have sparked off everything.

  To begin with, it was the first time I ever rode in a car. This car I was to ride in was almost as big as a bus. It stood on the cobbles, alongside the iron railings that fronted Bounce’s house, and we children gathered by it. Black winter had gone and there was sun; and we were excited and chattering. A man stood by the car; and though at the time I thought of him as just another grownup, I can rely on the retina of childhood again, take out and examine a snapshot. He was a lean young man, of medium height, with a thin, brown face, and eyes that swam as with glycerine. He wore a shiny blue suit; and he introduced me to the method of saying one thing with your face and another with your voice. He looked at a piece of paper in his hand. He said this was the house right enough but he’s rung and rung; he had to see Miss Dawlish and he didn’t suppose any of us were Miss Dawlish, whatever? His face was very sad and yet his words were a joke. Instantly he was a success. We all had our pictures of Bounce; and the incongruity of his sadness, our ourness and Bounce’s bounceness nearly rolled us on our backs. But before exchanges could go any further there came an elastic step along the cobbles in front of the railings of the houses and Bounce was with us. The man put on a blue peaked cap, and touched it. Bounce took up a position two yards away from him, feet together, hands up a little, elbows back, and explained that she had been detained by the vicar. The young man opened a door and she ordered us in. After we were settled, she climbed unhandily into the seat by the driver, and we were off. There was no noise in the back of the car; and the two adults were silent in front; but a mile out of Stilbourne one little girl felt sick and attending to this emergency broke the ice. For as we rolled on between Dog Roses and Queen Anne’s Lace we listened to an entrancing chatter from in front. The young man’s voice had a liquid lilt in it, one most unusual in Stilbourne, a voice to match the mobility of his face. It varied quickly in pitch, was deft and light, like a musical instrument. Yes, he came from Wales, Cardiff, yes Miss, he sang a bit you know, was a tenor, he and the lads always used to sing a bit when they got together. It seems strange to me now that we learnt about him so quickly—learnt that he was poor, hard-working, eager to improve himself, a lover of music and a first class mechanic. We learnt from a strangely voluble Bounce what we had always known but never thought of, that there was no garage in Stilbourne, only the bicycle shop and the smithy; and that we had had to hire a car to get into Barchester because though we could return on the four o’clock bus, no bus went the other way until two in the afternoon, except on market days. The man wished he could read music proper, like you, Miss. He wished he could get into Barchester City Choir, which was about to render St. Paul in the cathedral; and forthwith he sang a phrase with passionate unction—“Now we are ambassadors in the Name of Christ!”