Chapter 17: The Concert

The scarf was Mr Fixer’s idea. He had produced it from somewhere about his person at the last moment, dark and plain and only a little moth-eaten at one end, and tied it round Elliot’s neck with three quick movements that suggested a past containing occasions. “You can’t go up there looking like a man who sleeps in a bunk,” he had said, which was exactly what Elliot was. Mr Plum had looked at the knot, and undone it, and tied it again, and said nothing at all.

It was the only thing he had on that had not been slept in. He was aware of it the whole way forward.

At the oak door the enforcer looked at him, and at the scarf, and wrote Marsh, E., and then, after a moment’s thought, (concert), in brackets, so as to be fair to everybody.

The First Carriages had come out entire.

He had never seen so many of them at once. He had seen them one or two at a time, in armchairs in corridor bays, behind a newspaper; he had seen them not look at him. Now they filled the corridor of Carriage 12 from wall to wall and moved down it towards the hall at a pace that was less a walk than a procession, in coats he could not have afforded with a year of chits and dresses that whispered on the carpet. There were people from every upper floor between here and the oak door, and their stair-keepers had evidently been given the night off, or else every stair-keeper on the train was here too, somewhere, being given a good seat for once. Mrs Hebble passed him in purple. She nodded, and he had the strong impression that she was writing him down in her head.

The hall had been lit.

All three chandeliers were burning, and turning very slightly on their chains, so that the light went round the room in slow, shivering rings. Both tiers of balcony were full, and the painted sky over them had been dusted, or had at least been looked at sternly. Three hundred seats in red plush, and somebody in every one of them, and a low continuous noise rising off them all, like a kitchen heard through a wall. Elliot stood at the back by the double doors, where Albion had put him, with his back to the panelling and his hands in his pockets, and looked for people he knew.

Drummond was on the aisle in the fourth row, with his reading glasses folded in his breast pocket, sitting very upright. Madame Vetch was in the front of the first balcony, in the colour of old port, with a ring on every finger and the air of somebody who had come to see what the evening would fetch. Hartley-Voss was at the side door with his clipboard and his little stack of printed cards, face down, and a face that had been holding itself together since the morning by main force. Lotz was nowhere. Lotz, Elliot suspected, would no more have come out of his kitchen to hear his own concert than a tailor would follow a coat out into the street to see how it walked.

The Conductor sat in the front row, in the middle, with an empty chair on either side. Nobody had been seated next to the Conductor, and nobody seemed to have expected to be.

Behind them, in the middle of the second row, sat two people whom nobody introduced.

A man and a woman, neither young nor old, in clothes that were very good and gave nothing away. Both wore grey gloves and did not take them off. The woman had a programme open on her knee and was reading it with polite attention, as if it were a bill. The man was looking at the stage. The people in the seats on either side of them were talking to the people on their other sides, and leaning, very slightly, that way.

On the stage the chairs stood in their crescent, measured to the inch with knotted string. At the front, to the left, the sugar gramophone stood under its glass bell, with the chandelier-light going round inside its amber horn. To the right stood the table in dark blue velvet, with nothing on it.

Albion came and stood beside him.

“Card?” said Elliot.

Albion moved his eyes, very slightly, to the front row. The Conductor was holding a folded card in one long hand, against the knee, as you might hold a ticket you had not yet been asked for.

Madame Courcier came on without any ceremony at all, and the hall went quiet for her without being asked.

She stood at the front of her crescent with her feet apart, as she had on the first day, and the musicians settled behind her, and she lifted her bow; and then there was music, and for a while Elliot forgot that he was standing at the back in a borrowed scarf with his whole future folded up in somebody else’s hand.

He did not know what any of it was. He had never known. In his old life music had come out of a phone propped against a mug, or through the wall from next door, and he had put it on to make a train journey shorter or a spreadsheet less lonely. This was not like that. It went up into the painted sky and the chandeliers took it and turned it round in their light, and it came down again on everybody at once, three hundred people in red plush and a man from Seventy-four, without any regard to their tickets. He saw Drummond close his eyes. He saw the woman in the grey gloves stop reading her programme.

It was very beautiful, and it went on for some time, and somewhere in the middle of the third piece Elliot looked at the glass bell at the front of the stage, and at the empty velvet table, and at the card in the Conductor’s hand, and remembered what the interval was for.

“Five minutes,” he said to Albion.

“Three,” said Albion.

The knot in the panelling was a few yards aft of the doors. He put two fingers into it and pulled, and the section of wall swung out towards him, and he stepped through into the back of everything and let it close.

The passage was full. It was the busiest he had ever seen it: porters along the whole length of it, standing flat to the plaster, each with a board or a tray held level at chest height, waiting for the interval with the patience of people who had been standing in that exact spot for a great many concerts. On the boards stood the patisserie’s sixty pieces. The swan went by him at the height of his chin. A rose on a square of waxed paper. The small theatre with its curtain half up. Nobody spoke. Through the plaster came the music, muffled, as if from another life.

He went down the passage sideways, a step at a time, saying sorry to every tray.

She was in the recess by the bell-board, where the passage widened by enough for one person to stand out of the way. She was in her whites, with her hair pinned back hard, and she had a tray in her hands of twelve sugar roses, each with its petals turned back separately, and she was looking at nothing.

She saw him. She did not move, because there was nowhere to move to; and then he saw her decide not to want to.

“You’ve been not asking me for two days,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Lotz said you’d stood outside the door.”

“Twice.”

“Three times,” said Marisa. “Once you didn’t know I was in.”

He stood in front of the recess with his back to the plaster and the porters’ trays going by behind him at the height of his ears, and found that every question he had prepared was the wrong size.

“Why?” he said.

She looked at him for a moment.

“Everybody asks where,” she said. “Mr Hartley-Voss asks where the drawings are, twice a day. Lotz asked me where the dowel had gone.” She looked down at the roses. “You’re the first one who’s asked me that.”

He waited. Through the wall, the music climbed, and went back for something, and climbed again.

“There was a woman,” said Marisa. “My first winter in the kitchens. She used to come in after the last service and sit on the stool and watch me work. Older. Small, smaller than me. She smelled of beeswax, like a floor that’s just been done.” She said it quite plainly, as if describing a recipe. “She taught me sugar. Lotz taught me to be quick. She taught me sugar. How to make it forget it wanted to be anything else. How to make a thing that looks like one thing and is another, so well that nobody thinks to look.” Her mouth moved. “She said I had good hands. Lotz said that too, when he took me on. Lotz meant I was quick and clean. She meant I understood what I was touching.”

“What was her name?”

“I asked her once.” Marisa shifted the tray, very slightly, to keep it level. “She said names are currency, and she’d spent hers a long time ago.”

He thought of beeswax, and did not say anything.

“She stopped coming,” said Marisa. “Years ago. And then this autumn she was sitting on my stool again one night when I came in, as if she’d never gone. She said the gramophone had been aboard once before and had gone off again, and it wasn’t to go again. She said it wasn’t a thing to be traded.” Her eyes came up. “And I believed her. I still believe her. I measured it, with Mr Hartley-Voss holding the lamp and talking about the seating, and I put my hand inside the well while he was looking at his clipboard, and slid the bolt on the back door and drew a knife round it, and I didn’t think about anything except that she was right.” She stopped. “I didn’t think about the Conductor. Not properly. Not until you came in with Albion that morning, and I saw his face, and I thought: somebody is going to have to stand up in front of all those people and say it’s gone. And it won’t be her, and it won’t be me.”

The tray was very steady. Her voice was not.

“She said hold it until someone asks you why,” said Marisa. “Not where. Why. She said I’d know them when they did.”

“I’m asking,” said Elliot.

She looked at him for a long moment. Somewhere behind him a porter coughed, very quietly, and the music on the other side of the wall came to a place where it slowed.

“There was a man in the ice,” she said. “Three nights ago. She told me. She said he’d be found.” She looked at his hands, which had still not entirely come back to him, and then at his face. “She said he was the sort who’d left word.”

He found that he did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing.

“I can open it,” said Marisa. “It’s built to come apart from the back. There’s six pins. Nobody else will know where.” She drew a breath. “I made it. I’ll undo it.”

Through the wall, the music stopped, and the applause began.

The interval was already loose in the hall when they came in by the side door, half the seats emptying towards the corridor and the dining saloon and the other half turning to talk to each other about what they had just heard and what everybody was wearing. Hartley-Voss was halfway down the side aisle with his stack of cards held against his clipboard, making for the front row with the face of a man walking to his own hanging. In the front row, the Conductor had begun to unfold the card.

Marisa went up the steps at the side of the stage in her whites, with nothing in her hands.

Elliot did not see what she did to the hall. He saw it happen. It went out from the stage in a ring, as the noise of Carriage 74 had once gone down a block of bunks at a time: the people in the front rows first, turning, and then the people behind them turning to see why the people in front had turned, until the half of the hall that was still in its seats was looking at a young woman from the patisserie standing beside the glass bell with her hands at her sides.

“No,” said Hartley-Voss, arriving. “No — I’m so sorry — nobody touches—”

“She does,” said Albion.

He had come up the other steps. He nodded to two of the porters at the side of the stage, who had been waiting to clear the chairs, and they came and took the glass bell between them and lifted it, slowly, straight up, and carried it off to the wings as if it were full to the brim.

Marisa went round to the back of the sugar gramophone, where the hall could not see, and knelt.

From the back of the hall Elliot could see only her shoulders, and her elbows moving, small and quick and certain. He saw her take a thin knife from her apron and draw it down a line in the walnut-grained sugar that nobody but she could have found. He saw her draw something out, and lay it on the stage beside her, and draw out another. Six. He saw a section of the back of the cabinet come away in her hands in one piece, the painted grain still perfect on it, and saw her set it down on the boards face up, carefully, as if somebody might want it later. Then she reached into the base with both arms, up to the elbow, and stopped, and braced her knees, and lifted.

It came out wrapped in grey felt, a bundle the size of a small suitcase, and she held it against her chest with her arms locked round it and her face gone tight with the weight, and stood up.

Albion was already there. He put his hands under it.

“The records said twelve pounds,” said Marisa, letting him take it. “It’s closer to fifteen.”

“Records,” Albion said.

He carried it across the front of the stage, past the opened cake, to the table in dark blue velvet, and set it down in the middle of the velvet, and drew back the felt.

The hall made a small sound, the sound three hundred people make when they all draw breath at once and then remember where they are.

It was smaller than Elliot had expected, and darker. The horn was brass, flared and fluted, with a soft bloom of age at the rim, and the cabinet under it was walnut gone nearly black with handling. It stood on the velvet with the lamplight in its horn and did not look like anything that had been inside a cake. It looked like a thing that had always been standing on that table, and that the table had been waiting for.

Nobody said what had happened. Nobody needed to. Down every row, people who had walked past the sugar gramophone under its glass for two days turned to look at the opened back of it, and at the felt on the boards, and at the young woman in whites standing beside it with her hands at her sides, and Elliot watched them understand it, one after another, and watched them decide, being the First Carriages, not to say so aloud.

In the front row the Conductor folded the card in half, and in half again, and put it inside the dark coat.

At the side of the stage, Hartley-Voss looked down at the little stack of printed slips in his hand. Then he put them in his pocket, all of them, and buttoned the pocket.

In the second row the man in the grey gloves leaned over and looked at his companion’s programme, and she took a small pencil from somewhere and made a mark beside something on the second page, and closed the programme, and folded her hands on it.

Madame Courcier came out from the wings with her violin under one arm, and went to the velvet table, and looked at the gramophone for a long time without touching it. Then she opened the little door of the record well with one finger. The sleeve was there, where she had put it a fortnight ago with her own hands. She looked at the brass of the horn, and at the cabinet, and bent a little closer, and Elliot, even from the back of the hall, thought he saw her nostrils move.

“Someone’s kept this well,” she said, to nobody in particular, and went back to her chair.

Marisa had not moved. She was standing by the opened cake, looking at the hall, and it seemed to Elliot that she had only just noticed it was there.

Then she turned and went down the steps at the side, and along the wall, and when she reached the back of the hall where he stood by the doors, she stopped.

“The roses won’t keep,” she said. “They’re on a tray in the passage. In this heat.”

“Go on,” said Elliot.

She looked at him, and at the stage, and then at him again.

“I’d do it again,” she said.

“I know.”

She went out by the knot in the panelling, and the wall closed behind her.

Albion had come back down off the stage. He stood beside Elliot at the back of the hall and looked at the gramophone on its velvet.

“What happens to her?” said Elliot.

“Conductor’s decision.”

“You keep saying that.”

“It keeps being true,” said Albion.

The second half began with the gramophone.

The hall had filled again, faster than it had emptied, and it was very quiet, and the quiet had a different shape from the first half’s. Madame Courcier stood beside the velvet table with her violin laid on her chair behind her. She took the record from its sleeve and set it on the turntable. She wound the crank, and the sound of the winding was the only sound in the hall, a dry ratchet, eight turns, nine. She lifted the arm, and held it a moment over the black edge of the record, and lowered it.

There was a hiss, like a long breath let out through the teeth. Then the music.

He had expected it to be thin. It was an old machine with a horn the size of a hat, and in his life he had heard old recordings on the radio, scratched and far away, like people singing at the bottom of a garden. This was not thin. It was not loud either. It came out of the horn and went to the back of the hall without seeming to cross it, and arrived at him complete, as if it had started where he was standing.

It was a slow piece. Strings, and something under the strings that might have been a voice or might have been a horn; he could not tell, and did not try. It went up a little way and paused and came down, and went up again a little further, the way a person goes up a stair in the dark, feeling for each step.

And somewhere in it, without any change in the music at all, there was a question.

It had no words. He would try afterwards, many times, to say how he knew it was a question, and never manage it. It was in the music the way a lifted eyebrow is in a face. It did not ask the hall. It asked him. It came out of the horn and across three hundred people in red plush and found him at the back by the doors, in his borrowed scarf, in his sawdusty boots, with the cold still in his fingers from the ice, and it asked him, quite gently, and as if it had a right to know:

Why are you here?

He did not have an answer. He stood with his back to the panelling and it went on asking, not insisting, only waiting, the way someone waits who has asked a thing and is prepared to wait a long time.

He looked along the back row, because he had to look at something. A woman with a fan was listening with her head on one side, smiling a little. Drummond’s eyes were shut. In the second row the woman in grey gloves sat quite still with her programme on her knee, as though listening to a pleasant piece of music, which was what she was doing. Beside him, Albion was looking at the stage. Nobody had turned round. Nobody looked as if anything had been asked of them at all.

It was asking only him.

The piece went up its stair a last time and did not come down. It stopped at the top, on a note that went on after the strings had gone, thinning, until there was only the hiss, and then the needle running in the silent groove at the centre, round and round. Madame Courcier lifted the arm.

For a moment nobody moved. Then somebody in the balcony began to clap, and then everybody did, and the hall was full of it.

Elliot found that he was holding the scarf. His face was wet. He hadn’t noticed.

In the front row the Conductor did not clap. The Conductor had turned in the chair, the only person in the hall who had, and was looking past three hundred people and two guests in grey gloves, all the way to the back, to the doors. They looked at him for as long as the applause lasted. Then they turned back to the stage.

The rest of the second half was very fine, and Elliot heard almost none of it.

When it was over and the hall had begun to empty, two men from the Office came up the side steps in dark coats and white gloves, and stood on either side of the velvet table, and waited. The guests from the second row came forward against the crowd going out. They did not hurry. They stopped at the edge of the stage, below the table, and looked up at the gramophone, and did not touch it. The man said something to the Conductor, who had come to stand beside them, and Elliot was near enough by then to hear what it was.

“A lovely evening.”

“I am glad you found it so,” said the Conductor.

The woman inclined her head. Neither of them looked at the opened cake, or at the back of the hall, or at anybody in particular. They went out with the crowd, side by side, and the crowd made room for them without seeming to notice that it had.

The men in white gloves lifted the gramophone off the velvet between them, one at the cabinet and one steadying the horn, and carried it away through the wings.

Elliot stayed where he was until the hall was nearly empty. Fen was coming round with his string, gathering up the chairs. The sugar gramophone still stood at the front of the stage with its amber horn whole and its back opened like a cupboard, and on the boards behind it lay the painted panel, face up, and six thin pins in a row, and a length of grey felt folded in four.

On the velvet table, where the real one had stood, there was a square. The nap had lain down under the weight of it, and stayed down, and it showed in the chandelier light a little darker than the rest when you stood on one side of the table and a little lighter when you stood on the other: the exact size and shape of the thing that was gone.