He turns the page to read a detailed and appreciative description of Evelyn’s unique tuning, written while he sat with her in the pit after rehearsals as she moved her levers and plucked her harp strings. Once he had thought of his notebooks as a record for their children and so he did not write about the shape of her bare white thighs around his waist or the long moan of her juddering climax as she clung to him. But now it is an exquisite torture to him that these things are missing. He is living on the lingering scent ofher and these chaste cliches in his diaries, with nothing of substance to his fantasies, nothing to fill or nourish him.
The reveille ends, but in Michael’s cabin there is still an echo of the harp burbling away in a stream of arpeggios. This is why he uses the earplugs. There is always a harp playing in his ears while he’s inside the train, all day and all night. He is never free from it. That’s what the Crow does when he’s in here, it reaches inside him and pulls out threads of melody to hum his obsessions back at him, singing songs he barely remembers, snatches of nursery rhymes he’s not heard since he was at his mother’s breast, and weaving it all into whatever reality he’s currently swimming in with a kind of childish glee, careless of whether that music might be sweet to him or if the last thing he wants to hear is a fucking harp.
Evelyn’s introduction to the Pearl waltz tonight was so beautiful I almost missed my cue. My bow was poised, I was looking at the exact bar in the score, but her vibrato just went on and on, right through my bones.
The new harpist is fine. He’s competent, his instrument gilded finely enough to sit at the front of the pit and look plush, his manner affable enough, but there is no more sparkle of a black sequinned dress as the orchestra stands during the curtain calls, no more vibrato before the second act waltz and no more stray red hairs in his bed.
Dinner with Lance after the show and we were talking about the music we loved as children and right at the same time Evelyn and I started talking about Sandy Denny and we looked at Lanceand held hands under the table and sang ‘Who knows where the time goes…’ and he laughed and she leaned in to rest her head on my shoulder and I have never been so happy, so right, so light in all my life.
Enough. He wedges the notebook back on the shelves in a place he tells himself he will forget by tomorrow morning and pulls on his trousers and an old jumper of Lance’s. At the door he takes a battered satchel off the hook on the back of door and slings the strap over his shoulder. There is a brief, agonising whisper of the siren arpeggios as the earplugs slip a little but he does not let it pull him into madness. He hums ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ to distract himself and shoves it back in. His cabin door clicks shut behind him.
The dining car is right in the middle of the Grub, the centre of everyone’s world. At this time of day it’s filled with technical crew just finished setting up the Grit, pouring themselves cups of thick black coffee from the urns beside Gino’s serving hatch. Michael joins the end of the line and shuffles along. He is hungry, but it is almost indistinguishable from all the other emptinesses he feels. He stands between Danny and Kavi the stagehands, skinny among their burl, and each of them nods good morning without speaking. Everyone knows about the earplugs.
‘Afternoon morning,’ says Gino as he passes Michael a knife and fork through the hatch. ‘I never know which one. I’m still serving some breakfast so you can have roasted millet pancakes with a variety of toppings or celeriac soup,which is the lunch option.’ Michael can barely hear Gino through the plugs and the thrum of voices in the dining car, but his beard makes the movements of his lips very obvious and he’s got very good at reading lips.
‘The soup please.’
‘Good choice.’ Gino slides a plate across the hatch. ‘And there’s phone signal, by the way. In case you want to contact anyone.’
A slick of ice along his spine. ‘Why are you telling me that?’
Gino sighs. ‘I’m telling everyone, Michael. I’m supposed to spread the word like I always do.’
Michael takes his plate and moves away without athank youor asorry. He’s a landmine these days, that trips only explosions of grief inside him. He sees Henry the second violin in a booth, both hands clutched around a mug of herbal tea. Perhaps Michael should like him more, as one of the only people here who didn’t know him as Evelyn’s other half, but there’s something both cold and over-eager about him that is exhausting. He clearly wants to be Michael’s friend – or something more – but Michael can’t imagine getting through a conversation about the weather, let alone explaining that he’s flattered, but not interested.
Henry smiles but Michael pretends he hasn’t seen him and sits in a booth at the far end of the carriage with his back to everyone. He alternates sips of coffee and spoonfuls of soup because everything tastes like sawdust. He’s only eating because hunger is one pain too much to deal withand because Gino would know if he didn’t and tell AJ. The black tuxedo he wears for shows hangs on him as if on a wire hanger, his skin is sallow and flakey and his hair is lank. He stares at the fogged windows, all that water condensed on the glass from cooking and breathing and the spray of taps and the steam of tea. He reaches into his satchel to take out his notebook and pen and writes:
I wonder if any of this water passed through her body to become a little bead on this window, or if there’s no longer anything here in the Grub which she once touched.
He returns his plate and mug to Gino, smiles contritely and pulls the door to the gangway open. The air outside is chilly and damp, mist curling between the cars. He jumps the three steps down from the Grub and lands with a squelch in wet, loamy soil covered in a carpet of rotting evergreen needles. Instantly, the distant hum of harps is gone, and Michael pulls the plugs out of his ears and stuffs them into his pocket.
Before him is a graveyard straight out of a storybook, the most misty, overgrown, haunted-looking graveyard he could ever have imagined.It likes a sense of theatre, Michael remembers writing in the diary of his first pledge,it sucks at the essence of what you think a place is like and spits it out at you in technicolour.
Michael wanders among the graves, picking his way between the drooping yews and the ivy creeping over the stones tumbling this way and that like the earth beneath them is buckling, trying to release the bodies buried within.Wandering alone like this is against the rules but he’s beyond that now, even Belinda would agree. Damp spreads inside his shoes and his skin pimples with cold and something else, an eerie sense that come seven thirty tonight the dead could heave themselves out of their coffins and come shuffling into the auditorium just as they are, flesh falling off bones, formaldehyde leaking from their skulls.
He turns onto a wide avenue flanked by marble mausoleums, and the Grit looms out of the mist at him. He sees a familiar black-clad figure standing in the middle of the avenue, fog curling like ghostly hands around his ankles.
AJ’s brilliantined silver hair is speckled with dew and he wears a black suit with a mandarin collar and black patent shoes with gleaming white spats. Michael has never seen him in anything else, except for the time when there was a fire scare before reveille and they all stood in a dark field waiting for Belinda in her hi-vis jacket to inspect the Grub, where he waited next to Cecile in a wine-red velvet dressing gown and matching monogrammed slippers.
Michael comes to stand next to him.
‘A little melodramatic today, don’t you think?’
AJ gives his enigmatic little smile.
‘It’s All Souls’, Michael.’
‘Oh yes,’ he murmurs, a little ashamed. He wants people to think he’s recovering and coming back to himself, and he especially wants AJ to think that, but losing track of the date is a clear sign he’s still floundering. For Michael, there is no difference these days between the dead and theplain gone. He should light a candle for Evelyn, the way his mother will be lighting one tonight for his grandparents. Let the wick make a deep well within the wax and splutter into darkness.
‘Too on the nose.’ AJ sighs. ‘The Grub’s always been obvious in its metaphors and mockeries.’
Michael thinks of the harp music and the vibrato that plays over and over and over until everything in him is jangling with the note.
Not everyone can feel it, you know. AJ said when he’d tentatively broached the subject with him in the first month of his pledge.For some the Grub is just a train and the Grit just a theatre and the only thing unusual about this job is the audience.Evelyn was the only person — other than AJ – who’d felt it as he did.
He’d been sitting in the dining car after the show, the crew pulling the Grit apart and hauling it back to the cargo carriages with the Grub nestled peacefully in a dark valley blanketed with snow. Everyone was drinking aniseedy liqueurs from the bottle. He felt a light tap on his shoulder.
He looked up from his notebook to see the new harpist standing by his booth, clutching a glass of red wine. His fingertips started to fizz at the nearness of her. He’d been with the company for two years and in that time he’d lived in shy, bewildered celibacy, watching Lance work his way through the dancers, orchestra and most of the crew, standing alone on the edges of a raucous, never-ending game of musical beds.
