The Accompanist

It was the Afternoon. Joyce had been with me for nearly two hours when suddenly she leaned me to look at my watch on the table.

"Half past four," she cried in a panic. "Stop it! i shall be late," and, scrambling out of bed, she started getting into her clothes in a rush. she frowned when she caught me watching her. I liked seeing her dress. Her legs and arms were thin and as she put up her arms to fasten her bra and leaned forward to pull on her tights, she seemed to be plying a game of turning herself into comic triangles. She snatched her pale-blue jersey and pulled it over her head; when her fair hair came out at the top, she was saying:

"Don't forget. Half past seven. Don't be difficult. You've got to come, William. Bertie will be upset if you don't Ivy and jim will be there and Bertie wants you to tell them about Singapore."

In a love affair, one discovers a gift for saying thinks with two meanings;

"If they are going to be there, Bertie won't miss me," I said. "He used to be mad about Ivy, asked her to marry him once--you told me."

"You are not to say that," joyce said fiercely as she dragged her jersey down. "Bertie asked a lot of girls to marry him."

So I said yes, I would be there, and she put on her coat, which I thought was too thin for a cold day like this, and said:

"Look at the time! I shall be late for Hendrick," as she struggled away from my long kiss. Her skin burned and there were two red patches on her cheeks. Then she went.

It was only on her "music days," when she was rechearsing with Hendrick, that we were able to meet.

Afterward, I went to the window, hoping to see her, but I missed her. I pulled a cover over the bed and walked about the flat, and then I came across a carrier bag on the table. Joyce had forgotten it. This was typical of her. She had more than once left things behind--earrings twice, an umbrella, once even her music. I looked into the bag and saw it contained eight small apple pies packed in cartons. Joyce was a last-minute shopper and they were obviously meant for the dinner we were all going to eat that evening. Well, there was nothing to be done. I could hardly take them to Bertie's and say, "your wife left these at my place"--she was supposed to be at Hendrick's. Before I left at seven, I ate one. It was cold and dry, but after seeing Joyce, I always felt hungry.

It was a cross-London journey into the decaying district where she and bertie lives. One had to take one bus, then wait for another. Their flat was on the ground floor of a once respectable Victorian villa. I was glad to arrive at the sae time as four other guests, all of us old friends of Bertie's: André, an enormous young Belgian in a fur coat; his toylike wife; Podge, an unmarried girl who adored Bertie and who rarely said anything; and a sharp, dark political girl who worked on a review Bertie sometimes wrote for. Bertie himself came to the door wearing old-fashioned felt slippers. It was odd to see them on a young man with hair sticking up at the back and who was even younger than we were--not yet (continued on page 126)The Accompanist(continued from page 103) 30. He had a copy of Le monde in has hand and he waved it in the air as he shouted "Well done!" to all of us in the voice of a housemaster at the school sports. And as we went in, he was jubilant, crowing like a cockerel.

"My errant spouse," he said, "is at this moment, I presume, toiling across the metropolis and will be here soon. You see, this is one of Joyce's music days. Hendrick's concert is coming on the week after next and he makes her rehearse the whole time, poor wretch. Of course, it's awfully nice for her."

(Bertie loved things to be "awfully nice.")

"He has discovered," Bertie went on proudly, "that she is the only accompanist he can work with. It's very useful, too," and Bertic looked over his glasses sideways at us. "It brings in the pennies. And it gives me time to catch up on The times and Le Monde."

And he slapped the paper against his leg with something like passion. Then he led us into the bedroom, where we were to leave our coats.

Except André, we were all poor in those days. Flats were hard to find. It had taken Bertie and Joyce a long time to find this one--they had had to make do with Bertie's old room--and to wait for Bertie's family firniture to arrive out of store from the north. As we took off our coats, we felt the chill of the room and I understood Joyce's embarrassed giggles when she spoke of it. It was, in the late-vactorian way, high and large; the moldings on the ceiling, a thing nowadays admired, looked like the decorations on a dusty wedding cake. There was a huge marbled and empty fireplace, but--at variance with the period--brutal red tiles were jammed round it and it was like as enormous empty mouth, hungry for coal or the meals served there when the room had been the dinning room of earlier generations. In front of it, without curb or fenber, a very small electric fire--not turned on--stood like a needy orphan. Bertie was careful with money and he and Joyce has not been able to afford to redecorate the room. One could detect small dim flowers in the gray wallpaper. In the day window hung three sets of curtains: net for privacy, then a lighter greenigh summer set and, above them, heavy, once-banana-colored curtains, faded at the folds, like the old trailing robes of a dead Edwardian lady. But it was the enormous bed that, naturally, appalled me. The bed head was of monumental walnut, scrolled at the top, and there were legs murderous to a bare foot. Over the bed was spread a pink satiny coverlet, dolled by love knots and edged with lace from the days of Bertie's parents, even grandparents. It suggensted to me a sad Arthurian barge, a washed-out poem from some album of the Love's Garland kind. There was, of course, a dressing table with its many little shelves. One had the fear of seeing dead heroines in its mirrors and even, in the cold, seeing their breath upon the glass. I caught sight of my own head in it, looking sarcastic: I tried to improve my expression. Faded, faded--everything faded. The only human thinks in the room were our coats thrown onto the bed--I dropped mine out of pity on what I hoped was Joyce's side of it--and the hem of one of Joyce's dresses caught by the doors of a huge wardroube. The sight of it made me feel that the misty air of the room was quivering with Joyce's tempers and her tears.

But I exaggerate--there was one more human thing: Bertie's old desk from his Oxford days against the wall near the inner door, and his long bookcase. This was packed with books on modern history. politics and economics, and here it was that Bertie would sit typing his long articles on foreign politics. We all knew--for she had told us--how Joyce would go to sleep at night to the sound of "poor Bertie's" typewriter. She was a simple girl, but Bertie was charged by a brain that had given him a double first at Oxford, made him the master of six or seven languages and kept him floating for years like an eternal student on scholarships, grants and endowments. In the corner stood stacks of The Times, Le Monde and other periodicals.

"Haven't you caught up on these yet?" André said.

"You see, they're something useful," Bertie said. And he added with a stubborn laugh, "Joyce, poor wretch, complains, but I tell her I don't like throwing things away."

We moved into the other room.

I must say that any guilt I felt, or ought to have felt, vanished when I was with Bertie, though this evening I did feel a jolt when I saw the dining table that had been pushed into a far corner of the large room. Those apple pies! Moral questions, I found, had a way of putting out their noses in small ways in these weeks. But, like everyone else, I felt affection for Bertie. He loved his friends and we loved him: He was our collector's piece and in his shrewd, posscssivc way, he felt the same about us. His long nose on which the glasses never sat straight, his prikness, his jacket stuffed with papers, pens and pencils, his habit of standing with his hands on his hips, as if pretending he had a waist, his short legs apart, his feet restless with confidence like a boy keeping goal were endearing.

His sister-in-law, the only women to wear a long dress, and her Australian husband were standing in the room.

"And this is William," Bertie said, admiring me. "He's just back from Singapore, idle fellow."

"We have just hopped over from Rome," said Ivy's husband.

Unlike Joyce, Ivy was almost a beauty, the clever businesswomen of the family. The rest of the evening she seemed to be studying me--so much so that I wondered if Joyce, in her thoughtless fashion, had been talking about us.

We sat around on a deep, frayed sofa or in armchairs in which the cushions had red or green fringes, so that we seemed to be sitting among dyed beards, while Bertie kept us going about people he'd met at the embassy in Brussles, about the rows on the commission--the Frence delegate walking out in a huff--or a letter in The Times in which all the facts were wrong. The dark girl started an argument about French socialism amd Bertie stopped it by saying he had put in an afternoon's tennis in Luxembourg. He was still delighted with us and swaying on his feet, keen on sending over a volley or smashing a ball over the net. This brought back to me the day he had asked Joyce to marry him. It is the only proposal of marriage I have ever heard. All of us except Ivy and her husband had been there. We had managed to get one of the public courts in the park: On the other courts, players were smartly dressed in their white shorts and we were a shabby lot. I could see Bertie, who was rolling about like a bundle in old flannels that were slipping down and sending over one of his ferocious services; I could hear him shouting "Well done!" or "Hard luck, partner" to Joyce, whose mind strayed if an airlpance or a bird flew over. I saw him sitting beside Joyce and Podge and me on the bench when the game was over, with one eye on the next game and the other reading a (continued on page 142)The Accompanist(continued from page 126) thick political review. It was the time of the year when the spring green is darkening with the London lead. Presently, I heard him chatting to Joyce abput some man, a cousin of André's who had found an "awfully nice niche" in Luxembourg. At that time, Bertie had found no niche and was captivated by those who had. Joyce, of course, had only a vague idea of what a niche was and first of all thougth he was talking about churches, but then he was on to his annual dispute with his solicitor, who wanted him to get rid of his furniture because storage charges were eating up the trust.

"You see," he said, talking across Joyce and podge to me, "I shall want it when I get my London base."

Joyce laughed and said, "But you are in London."

"Yes," said Bertie, "but not as a base. My argument is that I must let it stay where it is untill I get married."

André and his wife were playing and she had just skied her ball and, waiting for his moment, André smashed it over. Joyce cried out, "Marvelous!" She had not really been listening to Bertie. "I'm sorry. I was watching André--Bertie, i meant You--you're getting married! How wonderful. I am so pleased! Who is it? Do tell us,"

Bertie gave one of his side glances at Podge and me and then said to Joyce: "You!"

It was really like that: Joyce saying, "Don't be silly, Bertie," and, "No, I can't.I couldn't...I..." He got hold of her hand and she pulled it away. "Please, Bertie," she said. She saw, we all saw, he meant it and she was angry and confused: We saw the other couple coming toward us. their game over. Joyce felt so foolish that she picked up her racket and ran--ran off the court.

"What's the matter with Joyce?" said André.

Bertie stood up and stared after her and began beating a leg with the review. He appealed to all of us.

"I've just asked Joyce to marry me," he said and reported his peculiar approach.

"And she said no," I said with satisfaction. Love and marriage were far from my own mind; but hearing Bertie and seeing Podge run after Joyce in the park, I felt a pang of jealousy and loss. In two days I would be far away from my friends, sweating in a job in Singapore. Bertie heard my words and, as always when he was in a jam, he slyly dropped into French. Lightly and confidently, he said:

"Souvent femmme varie."

Afterward, it struck me that Bertie's proposal was an appeal: It was the duty of all his friends to get him married. Indeed, Podge said she was afraid he was going to turn to her next. There was even an impression that he had proposed marriage to all of us; but I now see that he was a man with no notion of private life. The team spirit contained his passion and, knowing his exceptional case, he was making us all reponsible as witnesses and as friends.

This passed through my mind as we all sat there in his flat, listening for the distant ticking of a taxi stopping at the end of the street. Joyce was forbidden to spend money on taxis and would come running in breathlessly, saying she had had to "wait hours" for a bus.

Conversation came to a stop. Bertie had at last run down. Suddenly, Ivy said: "Bertie, how long was this awful furniture in store?"

Bertie was not put out. He loved Ivy for calling it awful. He crossed his short, sausagelike legs and sat back with pride in which there was a flash of malice and flicked his feet up and down.

"Twenty-seven years," he said. "No, let me see. Mother died when I was born, father died the previous year, then my aunt Tansy moved in for four or five years; that makes twenty-two years. Yes. Twenty-two."

"I like it," said Podge, defending him.

"But it's unbelievable," said Ivy. "It must have cost a fortune to store it."

"That's what my guardian says," said Bertie.

"Why didn't you make him sell it?" said André.

"I wouldn't let him," said Bertie. "You see, I told him it would be useful when I got married."

We used to say that it must have been the tought of having Bertie's furniture hanging over them that had frightened off the girls he had wanted to marry. After all, a girl wants to choose.

Bertie's pink face fattened with delight at the attack.

"Joyce hates it," he said comfortably. "She thinks I ought to sell it."

He was wrong: Joyce laughed at it, but she dreaded it.

"You'd make a fortune in Australia with furniture like this," said Ivy's husband.

"No," said Bertie. "You see, it was left to me."

He took off his glasses and exposed his naked face to us. I did not believe Joyce when she told me he had cried when she had begged him to sell it, but now I did.

If the bedroom had the pathos of an idyl, the furniture in this living room was haulking manufacture in which romance was martial and belligerent. Only in some lost provincial hotel that is putting up a fight against customers do you sometimes find oaken objects of such galumphing fantasy. There was a large armoire with knobs, like breasts, on its pillars and shields on the doors. Under them sprays of palm had been carved, but the top appeared to be fortified. The breast motif appeared on the lower drawers. The piece belonged to the time when cotton manufacturers liked to fancy they lived in castles. There was a sideboard that attempted the voluptuous, but oak does not flow: Shields were embossed on its doors. Again, there were shields carved on two smaller tables; on the dining table, the carved edges would be dangerous to the knuckles. Its legs might have come from the thighs of a Teutonic giantess. The fireplace itself was a battalion of fire irons, toasting forks, and beside it, among other things, were two brass scuttles (also with breasts), coats of arms, and legs that stood on claws. There was an atmosphere of jousting mixed with Masonic dinners and ye olde town criers.

"There ought to be a suit of armor," said André's wife.

The only graceful object was Joyce's piano, which had belonged to her mother. It stood there, defeated.

Bertie nodded.

"You see," he said, grinning at us, "it was left to me. It's my dot," he said, giving a naughty kick with his slippers.

Father dead before he was born, mother dead, aunt dead, Bertie was trebly an orphan. He had been brought up by a childless clergyman who was headmaster of a well-known school--photos of school and Oxford groups on the mantelpiece. André and I recognized ourselves in the latter--Bertie was institutional man, his furniture was his only link with common human history. It was the sacred evidence not only of his existence but of the continuity of the blood stream, the heartbeat and the inextinguishable sexual impulse of his family. He was a rarity and our rarity, too. We were a kind of society for his protection. Joyce, who loved him, (continued on page 198)The Accompanist(continued from page 142) felt this and, oddly, I did, too.

But no Joyce came and André gave restless glances at the bottle of sherry that was now empty. Bertie saw that a distraction was needed.

"We can't wait any longer," he said. "Let us eat."

He jumped up and, putting on one of his acts of pantomime, he went to the dining table, picked up a carving knife and fork and, flinging his short arms wide, he pretended to sharpen the knife and then to carve an imaginary joint.

We laughed loudly and Ivy joined him.

"Come on!" she said and, pulling Le Monde out of his pocket, put it on the dish and said, "Carve this."

Bertie was hurt.

"Shame," he said, putting the paper back in his pocket.

Fortunately, the front door banged and in came Joyce, breathless, frightened, half-laughing, kissing everyone and telling us that Hendrick was giving a lesson when she got there and then would not let her go. And, of course, she had to wait for hours at a bus stop.

"Poor Bertie," she cried and kissed him on the forehead and, shaking her hair, stared back, daring us to say anything that would upset him. She went out to the kitchen and came back to whisper to her sister.

"I've got the chops, but I must have left the pud in the taxi. Don't tell him. What shall I do?"

She looked primly at me. She had not yet changed her clothes, but because she looked prim (and by one of those tricks of the mind), I suddenly saw her standing naked, all bones, her long arms freckled, and standing up to her knees in the water rushing over the rocks of a mountain stream in the north where she and Bertie and I and a climbing party had once camped for the night. I was naked, too, and on the bank, helping her out, while Bertie, who had refused to go into the river, was standing fully dressed and already, at seven in the morning, with an open book. Berie was unconcerned.

Yes, I thought this evening, as she looked at me, I had one of those revelations that come late to a lover: she sands with the look of a girl who has a strange shame of her bones. She pouts and looks cross as a woman does at an inquisitive child; there is a pause when she does not know what to do, and then she pushes her bones out of her mind and laughs. But that pause has bowled one over. It was because Joyce was so funny to look at that I had become serious about her.

By the time we all sat down to the meal and studied her, I had advanced to the fantasy that when she laughed, her collarbones laughed. She had quickly changed into a dress that was lower in the neck, so that one saw her long throat. The food was poor; she was no cook, but André had brought wine and soon we were all shouting. Bertie was in full cackle and Joyce was telling us about Hendrick, whom the rest of us had never met, and after dinner Bertie persuaded Joyce to go to the piano and sing a French song.

"Jeune Fillette," he called. Quickly, with a flash of nervous intimacy in her glance of obedience, she sat at the piano and began:

"Jeune fillette, profitez du temps...."

Bertie rocked his head as the song came out of her long throat. The voice was small and high and it seemed to me that she carried the tune like a crystal inside her. The notes of the accompaniment seemed to come down her arms, into her hands--which were really too big--and out of the fingers, rather than from the piano. She sang and she played as if she did not exist.

"Her French accent," André's wife whispered, "is perfect; not like André's." And said so again when the song ended.

Joyce had her entrancing and sensuous look of having done something wrong.

"She can't speak a word of French," said Bertie enthusiastically. "She was eight months in Paris, staying with Ivy, and couldn't say anything but yes and no."

"No," said André, swelling out to tell one of his long Belgian stories, "is the important word."

"You have Mother's voice," Ivy said to Joyce. And to us, "Mother's voice was small. And true, too--and yet she was deaf for the last twenty years of her life. You won't believe it, but Father would sing the solo in church on Sundays and Mother rehearsed him all the week perfectly, and yet she can't have heard a note. When she died, Joyce had to do it. And she hated it, didn't you."

Joyce swung round on the stool and now we saw--what I had begun to know too well--a fit of defiance.

"I didn't hate that, Ivy," she said. "You know what I couldn't bear! On Saturdays," Joyce blurted to us all, daring Ivy to stop her, " after lunch, before anything was cleared away, he used to make me get the scissors and clip the hair out of his ears, ready for Sunday."

"Joyce!" Said Ivy, very annoyed. "You exaggerate."

"I don't," said Joyce. "He used to belch and spit into the fireplace, too. He was always spitting. It was disgusting."

We knew that the girls were the daughters of a small builder who had worked his way up and was a mixture of religion and rough habits.

"And so," said Bertie to save the situation, "my future spouse began her Wanderjahr, abandoned all and ran away to Paris, where Ivy had established herself--and met the baron!"

Ivy nodded gratefully.

"Your baron, Joyce!" she laughed.

"Who is the baron?" the Australian asked.

Now Joyce appealed to Ivy not to speak, but Bertie told us, mentioning that he had met the baron since those days, in Paris and Amsterdam--Bertie kept in touch with everyone he had ever met. It is painful to hear someone amiably destroy one of the inexpressible episodes in one's life and I knew Joyce was about to suffer, for in one of our confiding afternoons, she had tried to tell me. It was true that Ivy, the efficient, had started a translation bureau in Paris and the so-called baron, a Czech exile, used to dictate long political aritcles to Joyce. In the long waits while he struggled to translate into English, Joyce's mind was far away.

"He always asked for Joyce," Ivy said. "He used to say----"

"You are not to say it!" said Joyce.

But Ivy mimicked him.

"I vant ze girl viz ze beautiful ear. One year in Paris, she knows no French, no languages--but she understands. How is zat? She does not listen to ze language. She listens to the pause!"

"Well done!" cried Bertie.

"What the hell is the pause?" said the Australian.

"Before he started dictating again," I said brusquely.

Bertie looked at me sharply. I realized I had almost given Joyce away. What I think the baron was trying to say (I had told Joyce, when she, too, had asked me what he meant, for she had grown fond of him and was sorry for his family, too, whom he had had to leave in Prague) was that Joyce had the gift of discontinuity. She was in a dream until the voice that was dictating or some tune began again. She and I went on talking about this for a long time without getting any clearer about it and I agree there was some conceit on my part in this theory: I saw myself as the tune she was waiting for.

"André," Joyce called to hide her anger. "Sing us your song. The awful one."

"It's Bertie's song," said André. "It's his tour de force. Play on, Joyce--and put all the pauses in."

She could always take a joke from André, who looked like a mottled piecrust. He had all the beer and Burgundy of Brussels in him, all those mussels, eels and oysters, and that venison.

Bertie's song was one of his pantomime acts to which his long nose, his eyes darting side glances and his sudden assumption of a nasal voice gave a special lubricity. The song was a rapid cabaret piece about a wedding night in which the bride's shoulder is bitten through, her neck twisted and her arm broken, and ends with her mother being called in and saying:

Ci-gît la seule en France Qui soit morte de cela.

Bertie was devilish as Joyce vamped out the insinuating tune. We all joined at the tops of our voices in the chorus at the end of each verse:

Ça ne va guère, ça ne va pas,even Joyce, her little blue eyes sparkling at the words she did not understand. though André had once explained them to her. In the last chorus, she glanced back at me, sending me a reckless messsage. I understood it. From her point of view (and Bertie's), wedding nights were an academic subject. Bertie's enjoyment of the song was odd.

"Really, Bertie!" said the dark girl who had argued with him about French socialism at dinner.

When she got up from the piano, Joyce looked enviously at her sister because her Australian husband had laughed the loudest and had given Ivy a squeeze. Then, as she caught my eye again, her strange pout of sensuous shame appeared and I felt I was slapped on the face for having thoughts in my mind that matched her own. Her look told me that I could never know how truly she loved Bertie and feared him, too, as she would love and fear a child. And she hated me for knowing what I would never have known unless she had mumbled the tale of tears and failure in the gray room next door.

And a glum stare from Podge, Bertie's oldest friend, showed me even more that I was an outsider.

The song had stirred Bertie's memory, too, but of something less remote. He planted himself before me and sprang into yet another of his pantomime acts that the sight of me excited. He put on his baby voice:

"William and I didn't have our pudding! Poor Bertie didn't have his pudding."

Joyce's face reddened. Their everyday domestic life the talk of food money and rearrangements, was irritating in my situation. I lived on my desire: They had the intimacy of eating. I must have put on a mask, for Ivy said:

"William's all right. He's got his wellfed Chinese look."

Even Joyce had once said that about me.

"How awful of me!" Joyce cried to all of us.

I thought we were lost, but she recovered in time.

"Oh, Bertie, isn't it terrible? I left it...." (She dared not say "in the taxi.") "I left it at Hendrick's."

Bertie's jollity went. He looked as stubborn as stone at Ivy and Joyce. Then, with one of his ingenious cackles, he dropped into French.

"Tout s'arrange," he said. "You can pick it up on Friday when you go there for rehearsal. By the way, what was it?"

"But, Bertie," Ivy said. "It will be stale or covered in mold by then. Apple tarts."

We all saw a glitter of moisture in Bertie's eyes: It might have come from greed or the streak of miserliness in him; it might have been tears.

"We must get them back," said Bertie.

André saved Joyce by coming out with one of his long, detailed stories about a Flemish woman who kept a chicken in her refrigerator for two months after her husband left her. It became greener and greener and when he came back with his tail between his legs, she made him eat it. And he died.

André's stories parodied one's life, but this one distracted Bertie while Joyce whispered to her sister.

"He means it."

"Tell him Hendrick ate them. He has probably eaten them by now. Singers are always eating."

"That would be worse," said Joyce.

After that, André bellowed out a song about his military service and the party broke up. We went into the bedroom and picked up our coats, while Joyce stood there rubbing her arms and saying, "Bertie, did you know you had turned out the fire?"

I was trying to signal Friday, Friday, Friday to her, but she took no notice. Of course! Her sister was here, staying on in London. How long for? What would that mean?

We all left the house. Bertie stood, legs apart, on the step, triumphant. I found myself having to get a taxi for the socialist girl.

"Where on earth are we?" she asked, looking at the black winter trees and the wet, sooty bushes of the gardens in the street. " Have you known them a long time? Do you live in London?"

"No," I said. "I'm on leave. I work in Singapore."

"What was all that extraordinary talk about the baron?" She sent up a high laugh. "And the pause?"

I said it was all Greek to me. I was still thinking, Friday, Friday, Friday, Friday. Joyce would come or she would not come: more and more reluctant as the day drew nearer, with a weight on her ribs, listening for her tune. And if she heard it, the bones in her legs, her arms, her fingers, would wake up and she would be out of breath at my door without knowing it.

"She seemed to be studying me--so much so that I wondered if Joyce had been talking about us."

"There was a large armoire with knobs like breasts and a sideboard that attempted the voluptuous."

"I suddenly saw her naked, all bones, her long arms freckled, standing up to her kness in water."