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THEEN

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

PRELUDE AND FUGUE
presented by

Terry Pow

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Mvo degree in EHLIiSh

Major professor

Date December 12, 2002

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Prelude and Fugue

BY

Terry Pow

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of English

2002

ABSTRACT
PRELUDE AND FUGUE
BY
Terry Pow
Prelude and FUgue is a seriocomic novella that deploys a
flashback narrative structure of questionable stability to

investigate linkages between virtuosity, insanity and

suicide.

“Discord is harmony in a remoter key.”

-—-Arnold Schoenberg

“What it all adds up to is not the issue; it's what it all
subtracts to that counts.”

—— Roy Prewt

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
PRELUDE ................................................. 1
CHAPTER 2
FUGUE .................................................. 12
CHAPTER 3
CODA..............................................r...112

iv

PRELUDE

Nathan Dupre peered through the backstage peephole to
assess the evening's turnout. A square-shouldered man with
a large shapely head topped off with a vibrant mane of dark
curly hair (strategically tinted to keep him on the
youthful side of 40, though he was, in truth, nudging 50),
Nathan struggled to suppress the nervous wallowing
sensation in his stomach that always afflicted him just
before a performance.

Behind him a dapper little man with small quick hands
fussed with the tails of Nathan’s jacket.

“Try to keep your hands off my ass, Hendershot,
there’s a good fellow,” Nathan muttered as he pressed his
right eye close to the peephole and scanned the rows of
seats. The auditorium was already half filled.

“Can’t have you walking onto the Wigmore Hall stage
looking like a dog’s dinner, now can we sir?” said
Hendershot.

He grasped both sides of the jacket and gave them a
sharp tug. The gap between the tails closed momentarily
then sprang apart again.

“If you don't mind my saying, sir, you've expanded a
bit since you were last in London,” said Hendershot. He
gave up fighting the tails and began flicking dandruff

flecks from the jacket’s collar.

“Are you suggesting I'm fat?” said Nathan, controlling
with an act of pure will the gorge of pungent gases
bubbling up from his gut.

“Portly is the term I’d use, sir. Quite an attractive
shape, for some tastes.”

Nathan had stopped listening. His attention was
caught by a young woman third row back. Her hair was piled
in a Gaudi tower of golden ringlets, and the décolletage of
her blue satin gown left precious little to the
imagination. Nathan sighed. At one time such a sight
would have required a mental note not to glance in her
direction for fear of forgetting whether he was meant to be
playing Beethoven or Stockhausen. Somewhere in the passage
of years between New York and London (and Paris and Rome
and Berlin and Rio and Budapest and Tokyo and Des Moines
and Ljubljana — name a city with a piano in it) the eager
arpeggio in his loins had diminished to an almost
imperceptible pianissimo. Only the dry lust of looking
remained. This troubled Nathan. With most male virtuosi
of his age the notion of performance carried a lusty double
meaning. Both on stage and in the bedroom they displayed
prodigious appetites. They never seemed to get enough.
Indeed, one octogenarian pianist Nathan knew well, a

household name, had to be defibrillated on top of his

Steinway, where he’d passed out while servicing a young
French horn player. Musicians still joked about it on the
circuit. Which reminded Nathan that years ago he had once
enjoyed a French horn player.

“My lord, but did she give amazing head.”

“What's that you said, sir?” asked Hendershot, as he
buffed Nathan’s wingtips.

“Nothing, just musing to myself,” replied Nathan, his
eye glued to the peephole.

Must be something to do with the embouchure French
horn players develop to control their refractory
instrument, Nathan pondered. What was the girl's name? No
good. Gone. Sucked into the great waste-compactor of the
past with so many other happy memories. Speaking of
happiness, the blonde with the plunging neckline had leaned
forward to adjust the strap on her shoe. Paradise cracked
open its doors to Nathan's straining eyeball. Two of the
most beautiful breasts he had ever seen listed to the brink
of freedom from their slender harness. Nathan tried to
suck the entirety of the image through his eye and pump it
down to his crotch, but somewhere around his belly button
it faded. The usual problem. And no chance to try again.
The woman had finished with her shoe and was now talking to

her companion, cozying up to him and resting her hand on

his thigh. Quite high up his thigh. Nathan took an
instant dislike to the man. Too young, too handsome and,
worst of all, too slim. Most likely an arbitrageur with a
Jag and a penthouse at Canary Wharf. Punk. Nathan became
aware that Hendershot was trying to ask him something.

“I was wondering what the house looks like,”
Hendershot repeated.

Nathan sighed: back to dull reality. He tore his gaze
from the blonde and swept his eyeball across the hall.

“Not bad. About five hundred punters. Oh, shit!”

Hendershot paused in his ministrations.

“What is it?” he asked.

“That little turd Briskit from the Herald-Tribune just
walked in.”

“I think the name is Brasket,” said Hendershot.

“Briskit, Brasket, whatever the fuck!” snapped Nathan.
“Who the hell invited him is what I want to know?”

“He's meant to be one of the more perceptive daily
critics,” said Hendershot.

Nathan tore his eye from the peephole and turned
around, his face flushed with irritation and repressed
stomach acids.

“Perceptive my dick!” he exploded. “He covered the

Well-Tempered Clavier recital I gave at Avery Fisher last

season and spent half the review yammering on about my
‘excessive rubato’. The idiot doesn’t know rubato from
rhubarb. He has some burr up his butt about ‘period
authenticity’, as if Bach wanted a bunch of half-witted
robots playing his music. He tried to paint me as an old
fart from the Pleistocene era totally out of touch with
modern musicology. That kind of party—line hogwash gets
right on my tits.”

A sudden flare-up of heartburn silenced Nathan. He
closed his eyes and took a long deep breath.

“How much time?” he asked.

Hendershot glanced at his watch.

“Less than a minute. Let’s do the list, shall we.
Boogers?

Nathan sniffed.

“Clear.”

“Hanky?”

Nathan slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and
felt the cool Irish linen of his handkerchief.

“Present.”

“Fly?”

Nathan ran his hand down the front of his pants.

“Zipped.”

Hendershot smoothed Nathan’s lapels then looked him in

the eye.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I want to puke and poop my pants at the same time.
Other than that I feel wonderful,” Nathan replied.

“Go break a leg,” said Hendershot with a wink.

“Fuck you too,” Nathan responded, and stepped into a
void of bright light and thunderous applause.

The piano, a massive Bosendorfer, awaited him like an
ocean liner ready to cast off. Its matt black exterior
housed nine thousand moving parts — three times the number
of bones in the body of the poor soul whose job it was to
wrestle sublimity from it. It seemed such an uneven
contest. Like a gladiator facing a famished lion armed
with a net and a toothpick. Nathan turned to the
auditorium, rested his left hand on the side of the
keyboard and bowed. Hendershot was right about the dress
pants; they needed letting out at least an inch in the ass.

Nathan sat down. He adjusted the height of the piano
stool, not because it needed adjusting but because the
activity of fiddling with the knobs felt somehow calming.
From the corner of his eye he glimpsed Hendershot standing
in the wings. The little man gave Nathan a dainty wave.
My life could be worse, Nathan thought; I could be

Hendershot, being buggered by a different sailor every

Saturday night. But maybe that’s not so bad. At least
it’s contact of a sort. Who do I have to snuggle up with
on a Saturday night? Any night come to that?

In the auditorium the final murmurs, rustlings, snorts
and coughs diminished into a pool of silence pregnant with
expectancy. This is the awful moment of commitment every
musician dreads. Beyond this point there’s no stepping
back until the last sixteenth note has been slain, the
final chord laid to rest. Nathan swung his hands to his
sides to loosen his shoulders, tested the pedal with his
right foot, raised his hands and poised them above the
keyboard ready to execute the B flat major chord that
launches Beethoven’s “Hammerclavier” sonata on its
rendezvous with destiny. It was at this moment he heard
the voice.

Nathan Dupre, how did you get so old?

It was a young woman's voice. Nathan lowered his
hands to his sides and glanced at the audience. The
surprise of hearing the voice, any voice, at that moment
overwhelmed his comprehension of what exactly the voice had
said. He expected to see turned heads in the audience,
maybe some “shushings” to silence the miscreant who had
violated recital etiquette. But all the heads faced

forward, oblivious of anything untoward. Puzzled, Nathan

turned back to the keyboard and positioned his hands once
again to begin.

And so fat. Nathan, how on earth did you grow so
pudgy?

Nathan swung around. This time he heard both the
sense and the sound. And there was something in the timbre
of the voice, a sparkling, audacious merriment that struck
a remote chord buried in his memory. But he quickly
dismissed the idea as absurd. Nathan noticed several
members of the audience turn to each other with shrugs and
puzzled expressions. It was clear they were wondering why
he had twice aborted his performance. By now Nathan’s
surprise had transmuted into annoyance. Why would someone
attempt to disrupt his recital in such a juvenile fashion?
He decided to say something. Without rising from the stool
he turned and addressed the auditorium:

“Ladies and gentlemen, with all due respect I must
request you keep any comments until after the performance.
This is a difficult and demanding work. It requires of the
interpreter every last ounce of concentration. Thank you
for your understanding."

For some audience members this little speech only
increased their bewilderment. Others, who perhaps had even

less of an idea of what was going on, settled for the

notion that it was a permissible display of artistic
temperament and rewarded it with a ripple of applause.
Nathan acknowledged the applause with a patrician nod and
turned back to the keyboard once again. He closed his eyes
and raised his hands above the keys.

You look sad. Are you so terribly lonely, Nathan?

“Cassie?”

The question burst from Nathan’s lips before he could
stop it. He sprang to his feet, knocking over the piano
stool, and staggered to the edge of the stage. Using his
hand as a shield against the lights, his eyes raked the
auditorium for the source of the voice. By now the
audience's mood had transformed from puzzlement to
consternation. One dowager in the second row began
swatting her neighbors with her program in her panic to
squeeze by and escape the madman on stage.

Nathan paid her no attention. Standing at the edge of
the stage, he scanned the rows of seats back and forth,
searching. Until at last he found her. Third row back.
The golden hair, the merciless blue eyes, the wide full
mouth and almost perfect teeth, and most of all the head
rolled back and laughing, laughing, an inexhaustible
torrent of laughter.

“Cassie!” Nathan repeated, louder this time. (“Who’s

10

Cassie?” someone asked in the audience.) Nathan rubbed his
eyes — and she was gone. In her place sat the blonde in
the blue satin dress, cringing in her companion’s
protective arms. Nathan felt his blood go cold and his
knees buckle.

“Don’t do this to me again!” were the last words he
uttered as he stepped off the edge of the stage and pitched
head first into the lap of the critic from the New York

Herald—Tribune.

11

12

FUGUE

The donkey stood in the middle of a wide expanse of
lawn that fronted a large, rambling Victorian house. The
building exuded an air of crumbling neglect. Stout oak
buttresses supported a tumoral bulge in the west wall,
numerous roof tiles lay cracked, missing or skewed at
eccentric angles, and rampant ivy smothered the entire
front of the building, including several upstairs windows,
in an impenetrable mass of dark green leaves.

Nathan put down his suitcase. In the distance he
could hear the grinding gears of the taxicab that had
delivered him from the airfield at Barnstaple. The cab was
an ancient Morris Minor, minus suspension, driven by a old
man with beer-bottle glasses and an luminous wen on the
side of his nose. Had Nathan not been so weary from
travel, he might have been more alarmed at the manner in
which the driver hurled his vehicle down the narrow Devon
lanes, where two emaciated cows could not comfortably
squeeze by each other. Since the lanes were lined on
either side with thick high hedges, every bend represented
the likelihood of hideous collision. In the whole trip the
only words the driver uttered, in his clotted West Country
accent, were: “You be a Yank, then, young’n?”

Nathan took a deep breath. The fresh early-morning

air tasted good. And there was something new carried on

13

the breeze that he hadn’t experienced before: the salty
tang of the ocean. The house and its fifty or so acres of
grounds, a mixture of copse and pasture, stood on a high
bluff. In the distance beyond the northernmost hedge
Nathan could make out a long promenade and beyond that,
flecked with sparkling white caps, the rolling green blue
of the Atlantic Ocean. This vast continuity of water
linked the New World with which Nathan had been familiar
since birth to an Old World that promised him only
strangeness.

A desperate he hawing cut short Nathan’s reflections.
The donkey seemed to be in distress. Nathan regarded the
animal for a moment then looked around. Since arriving he
had not seen a single human soul. It was early but surely
somebody must be up and about. Nathan picked up his
suitcase and made his way toward the front entrance. A
second strangled he—haw stopped Nathan in his tracks. What
on earth was wrong with the beast? Nathan put down his
suitcase and crossed the lawn to get a closer look.

As he neared the donkey he noticed something dangling
from its mouth. It took him a moment before he recognized
it was the strap and lace-trimmed cup of a white brassiere.
The rest of the garment was apparently lodged somewhere in

the animal's gullet. As Nathan drew closer, the animal

14

backed away. It gave Nathan a dark look and wagged its
head, which made the bra strap jiggle in a ludicrous
fashion. Nathan took another slow step forward and reached
out for the strap.

“Get yerself back, young'n!”

The shout came from a middle-aged man in field clothes
who emerged from around the side of the house. He hastened
across the lawn in a bandy-legged stride.

“Get yer back!” he repeated.

A bramble of carrot-colored hair topped the man's
round red face. He led Nathan by the arm to the edge of
the lawn, turned and approached the donkey. As he drew
close, be began talking to the creature.

“What yer been up too now, Ernest?” he began, then
recognized what the donkey had in its mouth. “Oh my gawd,
she'll be right bolloxed about this, old lad!”

The man took a series of baby steps toward the donkey,
then lunged forward, grabbed the end of the bra strap and
yanked as hard as he could. The donkey reared back with an
anguished he-haw, dragging the man off his feet and halfway
across the lawn before it occurred to him to let go of the
strap. He lay on his face moaning.

Another person appeared on the scene: a large roly-

poly woman in a cook’s apron. She waddled up to the man

and stood over him with her arms akimbo, shaking her head.

“Dudley Figgis, you daft bugger,” she said, reaching
down a fat hand and yanking the man to his feet. “You’ve
skinned yer nose, that’s all. Get into the kitchen with
yer.”

Holding his nose, the man limped back to the house.
The woman turned toward the donkey, which stood facing her
twenty paces away, pawing the ground with its front hooves.
It was not a picture of contentment. Nathan noticed that
the other cup had now disappeared, leaving just a few
inches of drool-flecked strap dangling from the side of the
creature’s mouth.

The woman approached the donkey, making a soft
clucking sound. When she reached it she laid her hand on
its back and began stroking. The woman paid no attention
to the bra strap, but edged her way toward the animal’s
rear end, never letting her hand leave its back. Once
level with the donkey's haunches she paused. She took a
deep breath, slipped her hand between the donkey's back
legs, squeezed its testicles, and then jumped to one side
with surprising agility.

The donkey levitated from the ground. With an
anguished he-haw it ejected the brassiere twenty feet

across the lawn, where it landed in a damp ball. The woman

16

walked over, picked up the brassiere, gave it a vigorous
shake, and headed back to the house with it.

A moment later another figure appeared at the front
entrance. Nathan recognized the face from his mother’s
photo album.

“Nathan? Is that you?”

The tremulous voice belonged to a tall thin middle—
aged woman wearing a silk dressing gown decorated with
astrological signs. A turban of the same material covered
her head. She approached Nathan with an angular gait as if
the bones in her slender frame had worn loose in their
sockets and threatened to dislocate at any moment.

“My dear child, how long have you been standing out
here in the chill air? I expressly told that idiot of a
taxi driver to honk his hooter when he dropped you off. We
would have fetched you from the airport ourselves except
that Henry’s eyes aren’t reliable any more and as for me,
well I never learned the art of driving. I do most of my
voyaging on the astral plane. Ha, ha. Well, more of that
later. Come, let me look at you.”

She gripped Nathan’s shoulders with her bony hands and
leaned down to study him. It was a long face, with high
cheekbones and blue watery eyes outlined with a thick

application of black mascara and eyeliner, giving the

17

overall effect of a mask. But it was not an unfriendly
face, even though the fluttering eyes lent it an air of
perpetual distractedness.

“Welcome to Hawksmoor,” she went on. “As you've no
doubt surmised, I am your Aunt Iphegenia. But do call me
Aunt Iffy — everyone does.”

A cloud from nowhere darkened Aunt Iffy's face and a
large solitary tear rolled down her bony cheek.

“Forgive a foolish woman, Nathan. But Cassandra wrote
so much about you, your musical gifts, your beautiful
nature — and now to meet you for the first time in such
tragic circumstances.”

Nathan was too travel-weary to feel tragic at this
moment, but he made an effort to appear sad.

Aunt Iffy dabbed away the tear with an astrological
handkerchief and managed a wobbly smile.

“But we must be brave! What's predestined in the
stars, right Nathan? Chin up and all that.”

She took his hand and led him toward the front
entrance. “We’ve just started breakfast. I'll introduce
you to your new family.”

#
For some reason the curtains were still drawn in the

breakfast room, which was illuminated by two oil lamps, one

18

situated on a sideboard and the other in the center of a
large oak table. At one end of the table sat a large man
with straggly gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses perched on
the end of his nose. He had a professorial air about him.
Aunt Iffy introduced him as Nathan’s Uncle Henry. He
glanced up from his bacon and eggs, muttered something that
sounded vaguely like a welcome, shoved a wedge of fried
bread into his mouth and returned his attention to his
breakfast plate. Next to him sat a skinny man with bulging
cadaverous eyes and a mottled bald head. He half-rose from
his chair and nodded curtly at Nathan. His name was Franz,
but Nathan didn't quite catch on to his connection with the
family from Aunt Iffy's vague description. Before he could
enquire, the big round woman who wrestled the brassiere
from the donkey entered and placed before Nathan a large
plate stacked with fried bread, six rashers of crispy bacon
and two fried eggs.

“I hear Ernest has been eating underwear again,”
muttered Uncle Henry without looking up from his plate.

Aunt Iffy sighed.

“What was it this time?” she asked.

“From what I’m told,” continued Uncle Henry in a slow
pedantic tone, “it was a lady’s brassiere. A double ‘D’

cup, from what I hear.”

19

The big round woman flashed Uncle Henry a baleful
look.

“We have Cook to thank,” Uncle Henry went on, “for
extracting the item of lingerie from Ernest’s gullet.”

Aunt Iffy beamed at Cook.

“Oh well done!” she said. “However did you manage
it?”

“Yer don’t want to know, Ma’am,” replied Cook,
thumping the teapot down on the table.

A pained expression clouded Aunt Iffy’s face.

“Henry, I get so worried about Ernest,” she said.
“He’s such a sensitive soul. In those sad eyes one can
plummet the depths of the world’s pain.”

“If yer don’t mind my mentioning it, Ma’am,” Cook cut
in, “that beast needs tethering.”

Aunt Iffy’s eyes almost fell out of her head.

“Tether Ernest?” she exclaimed.

“Jest a suggestion, Ma’am.”

“But he’s a free spirit. Like the wind, he comes and
he goes.”

“That’s as maybe, Ma’am,” persisted Cook. “But he
also ‘comes’ to my clothes line and ‘goes’ with my undies.”

Aunt Iffy considered the thought, then shook her head

vigorously.

20

“No, the idea is unthinkable. To tether Ernest would
be like putting a ball and chain on the vital force of
nature itself. It’s quite unthinkable."

“Whatever you say, Ma’am,” said Cook, exiting the
dining room with a tray piled high with dishes.

As Nathan tucked into his bacon and eggs he heard
bangs and crashes interlaced with muffled Devonian oaths
from the direction of the kitchen.

“Imagine tethering Ernest,” Aunt Iffy went on, still
distraught at the notion. “Henry, did you hear what Cook
just said?”

“Yes, my dear,” responded her husband, without looking
up.

Further conversation about the callous impropriety of
Cook’s suggestion was interrupted by the arrival of a girl
of fifteen or sixteen. It was clear she had just climbed
out of bed. A riot of uncombed blonde curls tumbled about
her head. She wore a faded blue blouse torn at the elbows
and pair of baggy corduroy trousers that had seen many
better days.

Aunt Iffy’s face lit up.

“Cassie, my sweet. Let me introduce you to Nathan
Dupre, your cousin, all the way from Chicago, Illinois.”

Cassie turned to Nathan, and he received the first

21

indelible effect of those piercing blue eyes. Set wide in
a high broad forehead, their gaze fixed him like a specimen
on a pin until she released him by turning away, offering
only the briefest smile by way of greeting. Cook entered
and placed a plate of buttered toast before her. She
ruffled the girl’s tangled hair with her hand, smiled to
herself, and then left the room. Cassie nibbled a slice of
toast, then turned to the head of the table.

“Is it true, Uncle Henry,” she asked, “that farting in
church is a sin?”

“It’s a little early for theology, don’t you think my
dear?” muttered Uncle Henry, sponging the last residues of
egg yolk from his plate with a piece of fried bed.

“Rory Dimcock’s dad is a deacon at St. Anselm’s and he
says a fart in church is an affront to the Holy Ghost.”

“My dear,” broke in Aunt Iffy in an attempt to divert
the conversation, “perhaps you could walk Nathan down to
Westward Ho! this afternoon, after he’s had chance to rest
up.”

Cassie took another nibble at her toast.

“It is an issue, though,” she persisted, “for people
who believe in the bodily resurrection. It means there’s
going to be an awful lot of farting in paradise.”

“Well, I’m sure the people in paradise will be very

22

discreet about it, my dear,” said Aunt Iffy.

Cassie turned the full beam of her wide blue eyes on
Aunt Iffy.

“But think about it,” she insisted. “All the dead
people from Adam and Eve until yesterday. That’s an awful
lot of people to cram into one place. The smell has got to
be pretty bad.”

Aunt Iffy wilted under the child’s intense gaze. She
turned to her husband.

“Help me, Henry,” she said.

Uncle Henry crammed the last piece of fried bread into
his mouth and flushed it down with a swig of hot tea. He
looked down at his empty plate for a moment as if in deep
thought.

“The flaw in your argument, Cassie my dear,” he
finally pronounced, “is that one needs to subtract the
multitudes of people who, for one reason or another, won’t
make it into paradise. That should ameliorate to a
considerable extent the smell.”

Cassie considered this point, then looked up with a
beaming smile.

“Oh, yes,” she exclaimed, “I forgot all about the

damned.”

23

Nathan rolled over in bed and felt a current of hot,
musty air brush his face. Feeling too exhausted to wake up
he turned away his head. Something cool and moist nudged
his cheek. Nathan turned and found himself looking up into
a pair of large doleful eyes.

“Ernest? What are you doing here?”

The donkey seemed well recovered from his morning
adventure with Cook’s brassiere. He wore a large silver
pentagram between his ears, which lent him a magus-like
appearance. Nathan didn’t notice the animal’s lips move,
but he heard him say: “Hop on my back.”

“What was that?” Nathan asked.

“Hop on my back,” the animal repeated.

Nathan closed his eyes and scrunched his head deep
into the pillow.

“Ernest, I’m far too tired. Come back after my nap.”

Again, Nathan felt the donkey’s cold wet nose pressed
against his cheek and the voice was more insistent this
time.

“I’ve something to show you.”

Realizing further rest was out of the question, Nathan
pulled on his jeans and a sweater and, using a chair,
climbed onto the donkey’s back. They slipped silently from

the house.

24

It became clear that Nathan had slept longer than he
intended because it was already dark outside. But there was
a full moon, which bathed the house and surroundings in
milky light. Not that Ernest needed much light. He was a
surefooted animal and negotiated with ease any obstacles in
his path. Soon they passed the property’s northern
boundary and entered a neighbor’s cornfield. The tall
stalks, drooping under the weight of ears the size of grape
bunches, brushed against Nathan’s legs as they traveled
through. Twenty paces into the field, Ernest veered a
little to the left. Looking down, Nathan glimpsed what the
donkey had sought to avoid. Two bodies, their flesh pale
and snakelike in the moonlight, lay coiled together so
tightly it was difficult to tell where the man began and
the woman ended. The woman’s dark hair lay splayed among
the cornstalks in tendril-like waves. Her lips parted in a
silent sigh as the man moved within her. As the donkey
passed by, the woman’s eyes flicked open and she smiled at
Nathan. The donkey proceeded a few more steps into the
corn then veered to the right. Another couple came into
view. This time the woman straddled the man, her breasts
pendant as the ripened corn. The donkey’s progress through
the field became an intricate zigzag as the animal picked

it’s way between couples. On either side Nathan witnessed

25

every imaginable configuration of intercourse, and some
that even his virginal imagination could never have
conceived. Bodies of all ages, sizes, shapes and sexual
proclivity copulated in the corn. Nathan looked on this
carnal diorama in wonderment as Ernest slipped through a
gap in the hedgerow and they emerged into a sheep pasture.
This narrow strip of land terminated at the
precipitous edge of a cliff. Beyond its ragged margin
stretched an endless expanse of ocean. Moonlight flowed on
its undulating surface like molten lead. A well-worn sheep
path followed the Cliff’s contour at a safe distance from
the edge but close enough for Nathan to hear the ponderous
rhythm of waves breaking among rocks a hundred feet below.
Ernest picked his way along this track toward a narrow spit
of land that jutted some distance into the ocean. The
sheep track, Nathan felt relieved to see, gave this
vertiginous promontory a wide berth. But his relief turned
to terror when, instead of following the track, Ernest
turned onto the promontory. Nathan shouted at the donkey.
He pulled his mane, even tugged his ears, but to no avail.
Ernest continued his measured, surefooted pace down the
spit, which narrowed to the point where two people walking
along it (should they be suicidal enough to try) would have

found it treacherous to pass. Nathan forgot the first rule

26

of acrophobia and glanced down. The dizzying emptiness
rushed up at him and almost knocked him from the donkey’s
back. He clutched at the animal’s mane as it continued
forward. At the sharp end of the promontory the donkey
stopped, and for the first time on their journey Ernest
spoke.

“Watch.”

Nathan had no intention of watching anything. He kept
his eyes tight shut. Beneath him he could hear the sea’s
predatory roar and that was bad enough. But a sudden jerk
of the donkey’s body caused Nathan’s eyes to snap open —
and then widen at what they beheld. The sliver of ground
beneath the donkey had begun to crumble. It started with a
small patch beneath Ernest’s right foreleg, which broke
free and sent a rain of rock fragments skittering over the
edge into the abyss. Ernest adjusted his footing. But now
a large chunk broke loose beneath his right hind hoof. The
donkey lurched backward, its hoof stabbing at the exposed
cliff face in desperate search of purchase. It was a brave
but hopeless effort for now the entire section beneath them
subsided several feet, remained stable for a cruel moment,
then broke free of the cliff face with a sharp crack. The
donkey disappeared beneath him and Nathan tumbled into a

roaring void that sucked the breath from his body.

27

Nathan lurched upright in the bed, every pulse point
in his body pounding. He opened his eyes. The room was
darkened but needles of daylight pierced the moth holes in
the red velvet curtains. Nathan wiped away the sweat that
beaded his face and ran his hands through his hair. He
took a deep breath and shook his head.

“That must have been some dream, Chicago boy.”

Nathan swung around. Sitting on a stool by the door
he recognized the curly—headed profile of Cassie. At her
feet he also recognized his suitcase. It lay open with his
belongings scattered on the carpet. For a moment Nathan
didn’t know what to say, then he blurted out the obvious
question?

“What are you doing in here?”

“Going through your things, of course,” she replied.
Cassie picked up a framed photograph from the suitcase and
turned it toward Nathan.

“Is this your famous dead mother?"

#

Cassie walked several paces ahead of Nathan down the
narrow lane that led, with many sharp twists and turns,
down to the seaside village of Westward Ho! She clutched a
brown paper bag filled with cheese and pickle sandwiches

that Cook had packed for their lunch. Aunt Iffy, after

28

much probing of her purse, had handed Nathan a sixpenny
piece with which to buy ice creams, uttering the tremulous
hope as she parted with the small silver coin that he might
bring her back the change.

Nathan and Cassie hadn’t spoken a word to each other
since he asked her to leave his belongings alone and clear
out of his room. This she had done with magnificent
indifference to both possessions and possessor. Indeed, it
is unlikely they would setting out on this little excursion
together had not Aunt Iffy insisted, with particular
emphasis toward Cassie, that the fresh air would do them
both a world of good, and wouldn’t it be a nice opportunity
to get to know each.

Nathan couldn’t help but notice that his cousin, for
all her outré behavior, cut a pretty shape as she strode
down the lane, her head tilted back slightly with the
sunshine dancing in and out of her curls. There was
something about her walk that was different from that of
any American girls Nathan had known. Not that he had known
any in a sense remotely intimate. Perhaps it was in the
free and easy movement of her limbs; something flowing and
unrehearsed, a kind of liquefaction within the loose—
fitting blue frock. Nathan also found himself fascinated

by the way her hand, when it swung back, appeared like a

29

little bird about to take flight.

Cassie turned around in the center of the lane to face
Nathan. She spread her legs apart as if ready to do
battle. Nathan stopped, wondering what he was in for now.
From the strained expression on her face it seemed as if
she were coming to some momentous decision.

“All right,” she said. “I was wrong to go through
your suitcase. Not that you’ve got much that’s interesting
in there. But that’s not the point. It’s just that I’ve
never met an American before, andm”

“You thought I might have a six-gun in there, and
maybe some spurs or maybe the shrunken head of Al Capone,”
Nathan broke in.

“Oh go on, pee all over my apology. I’m trying to be
nice. It’s not easy.”

“I guess not,” said Nathan. He wasn’t sure where this
line of conversation was heading and wasn’t in the mood for
a major confrontation. In a less abrasive tone, he asked:
“So what were you looking for in my case?”

Cassie stared at the ground for a moment, then glanced
up at Nathan. Again he felt the almost physical effect of
those piercing blue eyes. Her expression was serious.

“Actually,” she said, “I was looking to see if you had

packed any johnnies.”

30

“Packed what?” Nathan asked.

“Johnnies,” Cassie repeated. “Those rubber things men
slip over their willies to prevent girls from getting
banged up.”

Cassie rolled an imaginary johnnie down her raised
index finger to demonstrate what she meant.

Nathan stared at her.

“Were you raised by wolves?” he asked.

“I take it you didn’t pack any johnnies, then,”
continued Cassie. “Pity. They come in jolly useful at the
right moment.”

Nathan’s could think of nothing to say. He could only
continue to stare.

Cassie maintained her intense expression for a moment
longer then dropped the bag of cheese and pickle sandwiches
and covered her face with both hands. It looked as if she
was struggling for breath. Nathan stepped forward, worried
she might be having some kind of seizure. He touched her
shoulder.

“Are you okay?”

Cassie dropped her hands. Tears streamed down her
reddened cheeks.

“You silly bugger,” she gasped, and reared back her

head and let go with a peal of laughter that startled into

31

flight a large bird resting in the hedgerow. The laughter
rolled on and on, each wave cresting the next until,
doubled up at the waist, she managed to regain control of
herself.

“My god, I thought I was going to die laughing,” she
said, catching her breath.

Cassie straightened herself, brushed the hair from her
eyes and faced Nathan with a broad smile salted with irony.

“I think we should be friends,” she said.

“Well, okay,” replied Nathan, still wary.

They stood facing each other in silence for an awkward
moment.

“Well?” Cassie asked.

“Well, what?” Nathan responded.

Cassie cocked her head and pursed her lips.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

“Kiss?” Nathan felt his knees liquefy.

“We’re cousins, silly. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It’s not that, it’s just m”

“Oh come on, don’t be so wet!”

Nathan stepped forward, held this feral, unpredictable
creature lightly by the shoulders and kissed her cheek. He
stepped back.

Cassie gave him an appraising look.

32

“I though you yanks spent all your time watching
movies,” she said.

“As it happens, I haven’t seen many movies,” Nathan
replied, relieved to be talking rather than kissing. “If I
wasn’t traveling with my mother on her concert tours then
I’d be at home in the charge of a tutor, and none of them
seemed to have a thing for movies. On top of that I
practice the piano three to four hours a day. So you’ve
probably seen more movies than I have.”

Cassie reached forward and pulled Nathan’s head to
her. Her lips met his with a soft, moist intensity.
Nathan found this experience new and overwhelming all by
itself, but when her tongue slipped between his teeth and
began exploring the inside of his mouth and throat he
became aroused.

Sensing this, Cassie ran her free hand down the front
of his trousers and rubbed her palm up and down his fly.
Her eyes gleamed into his.

“So you are a boy, after all,” she said.

She turned away, picked up the brown paper bag and
carried on down the lane, whistling.

For a moment Nathan couldn’t move, as his brain
struggled to process the clamor of messages from his

senses. Then he caught up with Cassie and walked beside

33

her in silence.

“I was wondering,” he finally said.

She turned and looked at him, her eyebrows raised.

“I was wondering,” he repeated, “if you greet all of
your male cousins in this fashion.”

Cassie smiled.

“You’re the only cousin I have. So I don’t get much
chance to practice.”

Nathan nodded.

“I'd say that’s probably just as well,” he said.

As they passed a wooden gate to a cornfield Cassie
stopped walking.

“Wait here a moment,” she said, and climbed over the
gate.

“What are you doing?” Nathan asked.

“Back in a jiffy,” she said, and disappeared behind a
thick hedgerow. A minute later she reappeared.

“What was that all about,” asked Nathan, as they
continued down the lane.

Cassie ran her hands through her hair and shook her
head.

“I took my knickers off.”

“What?”

“Are all yanks deaf or something? I said I took my

34

knickers off.”

“Whatever for?” insisted Nathan.

“If you really must know, I wet them laughing at you.”

They walked on in silence.

“But what did you do with them?” Nathan found himself
asking against his better judgment.

Cassie turned to him.

“I threw them as far as I could into the cornfield.”

She chuckled to herself.

“I’d love to see the farmer's face when he comes
across them”

#

A salt breeze snicked along the promenade. It felt
like fine sandpaper against his skin as Nathan leaned over
the stone parapet. Before him lay the Bay of Bideford, a
large cup—like indent in the north Devon coastline, framed
by the sandbars of Ilfracombe to the northeast and the
craggy cliffs of Hartland Point to the southwest. The tide
had retreated, exposing a wide strip of bronze sand
punctuated by outcrops of barnacle-crusted rocks slick with
seaweed. Children clambered over a nearby rock pool
seeking hermit crabs and other stranded sea creatures. A

little farther out, a man and woman walked their dog, their

shadows elongated across the smooth sand. Straining his

35

eyes, Nathan could just make out the hazy outline of a
sliver of land slouched against the horizon. “Lundy
Island’s the last bit of land between here and America,”
Cassie had informed him, before borrowing the Sixpence and
disappearing to fetch ice creams.

The thought of America slipped like a cold stone into
Nathan’s pleasant mood. Since his mother’s funeral earlier
in the summer he had built a wall around his feelings. The
formalities of the funeral had helped, followed by the
successive condolences of family acquaintances and those of
his mother’s musician friends who stopped by their North
Shore apartment to talk with him in the days following the
service. It later struck him as odd how people had talked
to him without quite talking about the exact circumstances
of her death. Although he hadn’t been able to put a name
to it until several weeks later, his predominant feeling
during the whole sad affair was one of irritation. Simply
stated, his mother’s sudden death had put a major crimp in
his plans. He had loved her, but she could have chosen a
more considerate time to depart the planet. First there
was the issue of where he was to live. He liked Chicago,
but as an orphaned sixteen-year-old (his father had
abandoned them when he was a baby) he could not seriously

expect to live in the apartment by himself. For one thing

36

there was no way he could afford to. His late mother’s
estate was comfortable not spectacular; her international
celebrity had only just begun to pick up when the 747 she
was traveling in tumbled out of the sky over the Sea of
Japan. Or was it the Indian Ocean? How odd that he could
no longer quite remember.

A trust fund secured his future education. The plan
was for Nathan to attend Julliard, his mother’s alma mater.
Arrangements had been made for him to fly to New York City
in the fall to audition for a place the following spring.
For the first few days after the funeral, Nathan clung to
this idea as the one rock of certainty in the suddenly
fluid foundations of his life. He would get into Julliard
and move on with his life. However, a request to revisit
his mother’s attorney two weeks after the funeral stood
this certainty on its head. The attorney had discovered a
sealed envelope overlooked among his mother’s papers. It
contained a letter from Nathan’s mother assigning
guardianship of him to her sister in England in the event
of her death. It took Nathan a while to comprehend the
implication of this information. He had a vague awareness
of having an aunt somewhere in England. He even recalled
some joking at the dinner table when he was younger about
“batty Aunt Iffy.” Apparently she was a good ten years

r
37

older than his mother. The sisters were never particularly
close and hardly ever kept in touch over the years. Nathan
could never have imagined a circumstance in which he might
end up living with Aunt Iphigenia. Not even remotely.

A scream wrenched Nathan from his thoughts. Below, a
boy with a lobster-red face chased a girl across the sand
waving a string of seaweed above his head. In desperation,
the girl abandoned the sand and began scrambling up a steep
ridge of large gray pebbles stacked against the sea wall
ten feet beneath where Nathan stood. The boy whooped and
hurled the seaweed. The gelatinous string lassoed through
the air but missed the girl by a yard. Nathan smiled, then
realized it had been a while since Cassie had disappeared
with the Sixpence. He looked down the long promenade. In
the distance, beside a bowling green, he could see the
yellow-and-blue ice cream stand. A handful of people stood
in line, but Cassie was not among them. Neither could he
spot her swaying walk among the staggered clusters of
holidaymakers passing along the promenade.

Nathan sighed. Maybe she’d got stuck in one of the
little gift shops around the corner from where he stood.
Quite likely his ice cream cone was already history. Bored
with waiting, Nathan decided to investigate. Surely it

would be almost impossible to lose someone in such a tiny

38

village, whose commercial enterprises amounted to a couple
of pubs, a fish and chip shop, a general store where you
could buy anything from bacon to socks, and a string of
marginal businesses focused on relieving bored tourists of
their small change. These latter businesses had a sad and
hopeless air to them. The heyday of Westward Ho! as a
tourist attraction, inspired in the late 19U‘Century by the
popularity of the Charles Kingsley novel of the same name,
had long passed. These days most holidaymakers heading
west drove on by. Westward Ho! lacked both the commercial
allure of Weston-Super-Mare, with its restaurants and
theatres, and the quintessential charm of Clovelly, a tiny
fishing village twenty miles up the coast. Nestled in a
small bay at the base of a high cliff, Clovelly’s steep
streets were impassible to most motor vehicles. Other than
walking, all transportation was handled by donkey. Several
dozen of them passed their whole lives in the village.
Cassie was in none of gift shops. Nathan began to
feel irritated. He stepped back into the narrow road and
looked up and down. It was then he noticed that a building
he had taken to be private home appeared to be a bookstore.
A sun-bleached sign above the entrance read: “Orient Books”
and beneath it in smaller type, “World’s Largest Secondhand

Bookstore.” It seemed an unlikely claim to Nathan, but he

39

stepped inside anyway. If Cassie wasn’t in here, at least
it would kill some time.

A musty fusion of old books, damp and cat pee hit
Nathan’s nostrils. Nathan squeezed through a narrow
hallway lined with tumbling stacks of ancient
encyclopedias, magazines, and yellowed newspapers crumbling
at the edges. At the end of the hallway he turned into a
small room. Book-crammed shelves lined the walls from
floor to ceiling and spilled into precarious stacks on the
threadbare carpet. On the windowsill sprawled an enormous
ginger cat. It regarded Nathan with large liquid eyes,
blinked, and returned to its nap.

“Can I help you, young man?”

Nathan turned. A squat woman who appeared to have no
neck had entered behind him, supporting herself on a
hickory cane. Lank gray hair straggled halfway down her
back. Her eyes glinted with a sharp intelligence and her
voice revealed no trace of Devonian burr.

“I’m just browsing,” Nathan replied.

“Ah, an American,” she said, swiveling her neck-less
body to get a better look at Nathan. “Then you must be
Iphigenia’s new charge.”

It took Nathan a moment to realize she was talking

about Aunt Iffy.

4O

“So sad about your poor mother,” she continued. “I
have no appreciation for music myself, classical or
otherwise. Tone deaf. But I’ve heard Iphigenia talk about
her sister, Cassandra, and she showed me a press clipping
once from one of her concerts. Having you here will be so
nice for Cassie, the poor little waif.”

Poor little waif was not the description that leapt to
Nathan’s mind in thinking of his cousin. The woman eased
herself into an armchair. The instant she was settled, the
ginger cat jumped from the windowsill and climbed onto her
lap.

“Mr. Thackery and I have some cataloguing to do, so
browse away young man,” she said. “This floor is novels,
romances, children’s books and West Country history.

Second floor is poetry, philosophy, religion and biography.
Third floor you’ll find esoterica and archeology. In the
basement there’s quite a decent collection of erotica, but
you’ll have to ask me nicely for the key to get into
there.”

“That’s okay, I’d better be going,” said Nathan.

The woman said nothing. Mr. Thackery gave Nathan a
disdainful glance, yawned, stretched, and settled himself
into a large ginger ball on the woman’s lap.

At the door, Nathan discovered that a summer storm had

41

sprung up from nowhere. Rain pelted down and a miniature
flood raced down the glistening street. He pulled back
into the bookstore and decided he might as well look around
until the rain left off. The first floor didn’t hold much
interest so Nathan decided to investigate the upper
stories. Piles of books and fusty periodicals constricted
the stairway’s already narrow wooden steps. Halfway up,
the stairs turned at a blind angle. Nathan didn’t notice
the man coming down until they collided. A large heavy
book slipped from the man’s hands and tumbled down the
stairs. Several pages tore loose from the tattered binding
before the tome landed with a thump at the bottom. The man
pushed by Nathan and loped down the stairs to retrieve the
book. He sat on the bottom step muttering to himself as he
reinserted the pages. Nathan recognized the mottled bald
head as belonging to the skeletal foreign-looking man who
sat next to Uncle Henry at breakfast. Franz (Nathan
recalled the name) finished fiddling with the book and
headed toward the little room, presumably to pay for it.
It didn’t occur to him to glance back to see if Nathan was
all right.

Nathan was about to continue up the stairs when he
noticed one of the book’s pages wedged between two stacks

of magazines. He picked it up. It was an illustrative

42

plate depicting, according to the caption, “The
‘Grubmannspiel’, based on the microtonal concepts of Juan
Carillo’s ‘Metamorphosen Piano’.” The picture showed a
grand piano to which had been added four additional
keyboards terraced one above another. Sixteen pedals were
connected to a complex system of blocks and pulleys, and
beneath the piano hung what looked like a steam boiler.
Nathan folded the page and slipped it into his pocket. He
would give it to Franz at supper. Maybe it would coax a
Teutonic “thank you” from those cadaverous lips.

At the top of the stairs a small dormer window
filtered a few fugitive rays of daylight through its grimy
pane. Nathan peeked out. The window overlooked an
alleyway that ran behind the bookstore. The rain had eased
up. Nathan was about to turn away when he noticed two
figures at the far end of the alleyway locked in a tight
embrace. One was a youth of about eighteen years, a beefy
lad with close-cropped hair; the other was Cassie.

Nathan recoiled from the window. He felt his stomach
twist and knot. And the next moment he felt foolish for
reacting this way. Why should it surprise him that Cassie
had a local boyfriend? He peered through the window again
feeling a little like a Peeping Tom. Cassie and the boy

had gone.

43

Nathan made his way out of the bookstore. As he
passed the little room he glimpsed the neck—less lady and
the ginger cat asleep together in the armchair.

Dodging puddles, Nathan walked back to the promenade
wall, where he found Cassie waiting. As he drew near, she
turned and smiled.

“Jesus, Nathan, I thought I’d lost you. Where have
you been?”

Nathan tried to conceal his irritation. He reminded
her about the ice cream. She stared blankly at him for a
moment then covered her mouth with her hand.

“Oh my god!” she screamed. She rummaged in the pocket
of her frock and pulled out the Sixpence. She offered it
to him. Nathan pushed her hand away.

“Keep it,” he said.

Cassie shrugged and pocketed the coin.

“We’d best get back," she said. “Aunt Iffy is holding
a séance tonight, which means supper is a little early.”

They walked along in silence for a while, until Nathan
asked a question that had been puzzling him.

“Why do you call your parents ‘Aunt’ and ‘Uncle’? I
noticed it at breakfast this morning when you were talking
with your father.”

Cassie thrust her hands into her pockets as she strode

44

along.

“They’re not my real mum and dad,” she said.

“They took me in when I was a toddler. They seemed so
much older than other kids’ parents that I began calling
them Aunt Iffy and Uncle Henry. They don’t mind.”

Nathan felt curious about the fate of her real
parents, but since she didn’t volunteer further information
he decided not to appear nosey by inquiring further. But
he did have another question.

“That bald, skeleton-like guy at breakfastm”

Cassie turned to Nathan with a broad grin.

“You mean Franz?”

Nathan nodded.

“Who is he? What’s his connection with the family.”

Cassie chuckled.

“What made you suddenly think of Franz?” she asked.

“He almost knocked me down the stairs in the bookstore
a little while ago.”

Cassie laughed.

“And I bet he didn’t apologize, right?”

Nathan nodded.

That’s because he's locked in a world of his own,”
said Cassie.

“But who is he?” Nathan persisted.

45

Cassie took Nathan’s arm and pointed to a large, ugly
Victorian building set back from the promenade on higher
ground about a half-mile ahead of them.

“That’s the Lido Hotel,” she said. “During the war it
was turned into a prison for captured German officers.
Uncle Henry was sent down from London to interrogate them.
That’s how he met Aunt Iffy, by the way. She was a nurse
at the prison and quite a looker back then although it’s
hard to believe now. Anyway, Uncle Henry took a shine to
Franz. It turned out they shared a passion of some weird
kind. Don’t ask me to explain it. All I know is it’s some
crazy idea to do with musical sounds. Uncle Henry began
spending more and more time off-duty with Franz in his room
discussing theories, poring over books, making weird
drawings and such. I’m sure the War Office would have shit
themselves had they known about this. But Westward H0! is
such a long way from London, so who really cared.”

“But how did Franz end up living with you?”

“The war ended and Franz discovered he had nothing to
return to. His family was wiped out in the Dresden
bombing. Poor sod. So Uncle Henry and Aunt Iffy took him
in. He and Uncle Henry spend their time pottering around
in the barn working on their ‘project’.”

They turned from the promenade and began climbing the

46

steep, twisting lane that led back to Hawksmoor. A mile up
the lane they paused to catch their breath. Behind them an
engorged crimson sun sank into the ocean as the Lundy
Island ferry steamed its lonely way back to Bideford.
Nathan noticed the tide had turned. The sea had
repossessed the rock pool where the children played
earlier.

“You like to look, don’t you cousin Nathan.”

“What do you mean?”

Cassie squinted at him. Nathan noticed she had a
small gap in her otherwise perfect front teeth.

“I noticed it when I saw you from my bedroom window
this morning.”

“I didn't know I was being watched,” Nathan responded.

Cassie persisted with her train of thought.

“You have a way of not quite participating in life,”
she said.

“As opposed to kissing anything with pants on and a
pulse?”

Nathan regretted the words the moment they were out of
his mouth. Cassie frowned and looked at him closely. He
felt the intense blue eyes slip beneath his skin, exposing
the tight little protective knots with which he kept the

world at bay. Again, he felt like a specimen on a pin under

47

her gaze. Cassie smiled, but it was a smile laced with
challenge.

“How would you like an adventure, Nathan Dupre?”

Now it was Nathan’s turn to smile.

“Every moment with you is an adventure.”

Cassie acknowledged this compliment with a nod.

“I mean a real adventure,” she went on. “Life or
death. I wonder if you’re up to it.”

#

Nathan had just slipped into a sweet dreamless sleep
when he sensed a sudden sexual arousal. His eyes flitted
open to discover Cassie with her hand down the front of his
pajama bottoms. He tumbled out of bed.

“Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed from a tangled heap of
sheets and blankets. “Is this what you mean by an
adventure?”

Cassie stood up. She wore a pair of corduroy pants
and a light sweater over a blouse.

“I was trying to wake you up in a nice way,” she said.
“Hurry and get dressed, we haven’t much time.”

Nathan glanced at the clock on his bedside table.

“It’s gone midnight,” he complained.

“I know, and if you don’t get your pimply arse into

some trousers right now we’re going to miss it.”

48

Nathan disentangled himself from the bedclothes.

“‘It’? What ‘it’?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. I’ll wait outside the
door since you’re such a shy boy.”

Nathan pulled on his clothes and joined Cassie on the
landing. She put her finger to her mouth and led the way
down the stairs, every other one of which creaked as if in
pain. The passage to the back door took them past a room
that had been closed earlier in the day. Now it was ajar,
spilling a pool of light into the hallway. Cassie stopped
by the door. She motioned to Nathan, who put his eye to
the gap and peered into the room. Five people sat in a
tight group around a small shiny table. Nathan recognized
four of them: Aunt Iffy and Uncle Henry, Franz, and the
neck—less woman from the bookstore. The fifth he hadn’t
seen before: an imposing older woman in her sixties with a
broad Slavic-looking face and tight curly gray hair half—
concealed by a black shawl. The group sat in silence with
eyes closed and hands linked on the table. Aunt Iffy’s head
suddenly slumped to her chest and a long tremulous sigh
raked her frail body. Nathan heard something heavy move
directly behind the door, followed by a snort and a he-haw.
Cassie’s hand clamped across Nathan’s mouth as she pulled

him down the hallway and out of the back door. Once

49

outside, Nathan turned to her.

“Was that what it sounded like?”

“Not so loud,” whispered Cassie, leading him by the
hand around the side of the house toward a small wooden
shed.

“Ernest is Aunt Iffy’s spirit medium. She uses him to
channel Harun bin al Shadad.”

Nathan stumbled into a vegetable frame and scraped
his shin.

“Shit! Harun bin al who?”

“He’s one of the Guardians to the Other Side. Now
shut up a minute while I find the key.”

Cassie felt along the top of the shed’s door frame.

“Bless you Dudley Figgis for being such a creature of
habit.”

She held up the key, unlocked the padlock, and swung
open the door.

“Hold this a moment.”

She handed Nathan a candle stub. She pulled a box of
matches from her pocket, struck one and lit the candle. It
sputtered into life. Cassie took it from Nathan and
stepped inside the shed. Holding high the candle, she
scanned the contents. The usual things: spade, fork a

rusted-out wheelbarrow, flowerpots, big bags of potting

50

soil, and cobwebbed shelves filled with bottles containing
mysterious fluids and cans of pruning sealant, rooting
powder and rat poison.

“Ah, there it is,” exclaimed Cassie.

She pointed to the back of the shed. Nathan strained
his eyes to see. Leaning against the wall, covered in bird
netting, stood an ancient tandem bicycle.

“Quickly, let's get it out,” said Cassie.

They had to remove half the contents of the shed
before they could extract the machine.

“I hate to tell you this, but both tires are flat,”
said Nathan.

He was right. It looked as if the tandem hadn’t been
used in years.

“Shit!” said Cassie. She grabbed the candle and
disappeared back into the shed. Nathan heard objects being
thrown about before she emerged with a big smile and a
bicycle pump.

The initial sensation as Nathan peered over Cassie’s
shoulder was one of delight as the tandem rolled down the
sloping lane and the summer night air brushed his face.

“Why didn’t we take this thing this afternoon?” he
asked, as the vehicle picked up pace.

“Aunt Iffy wouldn’t approve,” responded Cassie over

51

her shoulder.

“Why not?” Nathan asked.

“She says I have no sense of danger.”

The tandem sped down the slope. Cassie’s hair streamed
into Nathan’s face and obscured his vision of the road
ahead.

“Can’t you slow this thing down a bit?” Nathan yelled
in her ear.

“I wish I could.”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t have brakes.”

“What?” Nathan screamed, almost tumbling from the
saddle.

“Don’t jiggle!” Cassie yelled back.

The lane’s gentle slope steepened into a serious hill,
which, as Nathan recalled from their afternoon’s walk,
warped into sharp twists and turns before it leveled out at
the promenade several miles distant.

Hedgerows blurred by on either side. Nathan closed
his eyes and gripped the handle bars.

“We’ll be fine,” Cassie shouted, “if we both lean into

the bends at the same time.”

52

A full moon hung over the ocean as the tandem creaked
along the promenade. Pedaling became more difficult until
Nathan, still shaking from their lunatic plunge down the
winding hill, noticed the rear tire was riding on its rim.
The tandem rolled to a stop.

Cassie inspected the tire.

“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll sweet-talk Figgis into
picking it up in the morning. Come on, let’s run.”

“Run?” said Nathan. “Run where?”

Cassie pointed along the promenade. About a mile
away, he could make out a dozen or so people standing by
the sea wall where he’d waited for Cassie in the afternoon.
On a sudden impulse they scattered away from the wall.

“It’s a full moon, which means a spring tide,” Cassie
said. “If we don’t run we’ll miss the peak.”

As they drew nearer, Nathan saw what made the people
scatter. A tower of water rose high in the air from behind
the sea wall and lashed down on them with a drenching
.spray. Nathan heard screams and laughter as people ran in
all directions to escape the salt rain. Then, like the
children’s game of “What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?”, they
tiptoed back toward the sea wall. In this game most of the
players were not children but sturdy youths. At a dry

distance from the spray, a gaggle of girls in tight

53

revealing blouses and heavy make-up cheered on their heroes
and challenged in graphic terms the masculinity of those
who ran too soon. Behind them, its doors open well beyond
legal closing time, the Dog & Whistle pub offered a cozy
vantage for viewing and refreshment.

“The trick is to count the waves breaking against the
wall,” said Cassie, pulling Nathan through the crowd of
onlookers.

“Why’s that?” Nathan asked.

“Because every seventh wave is a big one,” said
Cassie, who appeared to be searching for someone in the
crowd. “It's not guaranteed, butm”

Screams and yells cut her short as a massive column of
water leapt up with a whoosh from behind the wall, hung in
the air for a moment, then lashed down.

Nathan scrambled backwards, tripped and sprawled on
his backside. He shielded his face with his arms as the
cold salt water drenched him from head to toe.

Cassie, who’d been niftier on her feet, peered down at
him.

“Are you okay?”

Nathan nodded and stood up. He would have been more
embarrassed had he not seen that a number of others had

also been caught by the wave.

54

“I want you to meet someone,” said Cassie, leading
Nathan by the hand to a group of leather-clad youths
standing by their motorcycles. As he drew nearer, Nathan
recognized the close-cropped hair of the boy he’d seen with
Cassie from the bookstore.

“Findlay,” said Cassie, “I want you to meet Nathan
Dupre, my cousin from Chicago, Illinois.”

The youth sized up Nathan, decided he was no threat,
and gave him a nod by way of welcome.

“Aren’t you going to get us some scrumpy?” Cassie
asked him with a sweet smile.

“Git it yerself,” Findlay responded.

“Come on, Fin, you know we’re under aged,” Cassie
wheedled.

Findlay shook his head, smiled and took a step toward
'the pub door.

“Ye’ve got money then, I take it?” he asked, turning
back to Cassie.

“Oh, give me a break,” Cassie pleaded. Then her eyes
lit up. She rummaged in her trouser pocket and pulled out
the Sixpence. She pressed the coin into Findlay’s large,
farmrreared hand. He looked at it in mock disgust.

“Jeezus frigging Christ, it’s going ter take more than

allleeding Sixpence fer two pints of scrumpy.”

55

“Well, add this to it, then,” said Cassie, flinging
her arms around his broad shoulders and fastening her lips
to his. Nathan turned his attention to the sea wall.

Another wave reared its head above the wall and pelted
down upon the scattering spectators. But there was
something different about this wave’s effect on the
spectators. Instead of yelling, the crowd went quiet. A
bandy-legged youth with a cigarette dangling from his mouth
ran toward the wall and, straining with the effort, lifted
an object from the ground and hoisted it above his head.
From what Nathan could tell, it looked like one of the
large smooth pebbles he had noticed beneath the sea wall
when he watched the children play in the afternoon. The
youth turned and hurled the pebble back over the wall. A
roar of cheers and motorcycle horns greeted the ceremony.

“It’s begun,” said Cassie, back at Nathan’s side, her
face flushed with excitement.

“What’s begun?” Nathan asked.

“The potwalloping,” Cassie replied. “See, there’s
another one!” She pointed to a pebble, larger even that
the last, glistening beside the wall. A different youth
ran across, picked it up and tossed it over the side.

“This is really great,” Cassie went on, her eyes wild

and shining in the moonlight. “A spring tide like this

56

only happens once, maybe twice, a year.”

Findlay appeared at their side holding two pint
glasses of what Nathan imagined was beer. Cassie grabbed
one of the glasses, threw back her head and gulped down
half its contents. She wiped her lips with the back of her
arm. Findlay seemed impressed.

“Christ, gal, have you got an elephant’s bladder?”

Cassie took another draught and drained the glass.

She turned to Nathan, her face flushed.

“Drink up or the tide will be over.”

Nathan took a sip and screwed up his face. It wasn’t
any kind of beer he recognized.

“What is this?” he asked.

“Scrumpy,” said Cassie. “Like cider but without the
bubbles.”

“And a mule’s kick,” broke in Findlay.

Nathan took a swig. Cassie snatched the glass from
him and handed it to Findlay.

“Hold onto this for him,” she said, dragging Nathan
away, “we’re going potwalloping.”

A couple of dozen people, men and women, hunkered down
behind the sea wall.

Another big wave hit and two huge pebbles slammed onto

the ground behind them. The women screamed and two men ran

57

from the wall, hoisted the pebbles back into the sea and
crouched down again.

“Do you mean to tell me the sea is hurling those huge
stones over a ten-foot wall?” Nathan said.

Cassie smiled. She was looking for some spaces along
the wall.

“This is nothing,” she said. “One year the sea
pitched a pebble through the roof of the Dog & Whistle.
Come on, we can squeeze in over there.”

She dragged Nathan to a spot along the wall. They
crouched down just as another big wave hit. He could feel
the wall shudder as the waves slammed into it on the other
side. With the next big wave, a large pebble hit the
ground five feet behind them. Cassie sprang forward to get
to it first. She managed to lift it a few inches from the
ground then dropped it.

“Leave it!” Nathan yelled. “Get back here.”

Cassie stared at him as if he were insane.

“I can’t leave it after I’ve touched it. That’s seven
years bad luck.” She tried to lift it again and moved it a
few more inches.

Nathan could sense the monster beyond the wall
preparing for another stone-hurling assault.

“Shit!” he muttered. He left the safety of the wall,

58

ran across to Cassie and pushed her aside. “Get back to the
wall,” he told her.

He slid his hands beneath the stone’s slick surface
and lifted. He managed to get it to knee height and
staggered with baby steps about ten paces before dropping
it. He heard Cassie’s voice shrieking from the wall:
“Hurry up, Nathan!” He tried again and this time managed
to hoist it to the top of the wall. As he pushed it over,
a wave roared up the seaward side of the wall, sending
Nathan flying. Sprawled on his back, Nathan looked up into
a towering column of water. At its liquid heart he saw a
blackness that grew larger and larger. At the last moment,
Nathan rolled aside and a massive black pebble crunched
into the ground inches from his head. People were now
fleeing the wall for the safety and comfort of the Dog &
Whistle. Nathan felt someone grab his arm.

“Come on,” said Cassie. “The fun’s over.”

Fun? The notion seemed to Nathan hysterically funny.
He began to laugh. Cassie looked at him and smiled.

“You almost had your head bashed in, and you’re
laughing about it?” she said, laughing herself. “Maybe
there’s hope for you yet, Nathan Dupre.”

#

59

Nathan awoke late next morning. As he lay in bed, he
sensed a tension in the house. He heard Cook’s heavy
footstep on the landing and whispered voices. Nathan could
not make out what they were saying, though he could hear
Aunt Iffy giving instructions of some kind to Cook and Cook
responding, “Yes, ma’am”. A minute or so later Nathan
heard a vehicle scrunching on the gravel outside. He
climbed out of bed and peered through the tiny dormer
window. He was just in time to see a white ambulance
disappear through the gate. For a while its light was
visible above the hedgerow as it made its way down the
lane.

Nathan pulled on his clothes and hurried downstairs.
The door of the breakfast room stood open. The room was
empty, although half-eaten eggs and bacon congealed on
plates suggested breakfast had been suddenly abandoned.
Cook entered with an empty tray. From her puffy eyes it
was clear she had been crying.

“Where is everybody?” Nathan asked.

Cooked stacked the dishes on the tray. She seemed to
be debating within herself whether she should be talking
about matters that, strictly speaking, were none of her
business. The debate didn’t last long. She put down the

tray and eased her large frame into one of the chairs.

6O

“The poor little wretch," she said.

Nathan knew at once that whatever had happened that
morning involved Cassie.

“Where's Cassie?” he demanded. The bluntness of the
question shook Cook from her lachrymose state. She looked
in mild surprise at the young lad who before yesterday had
been a total stranger to the family.

“The poor smidgeon had another one of her episodes,”
said Cook, accenting the word “episodes” to suggest a
process both mysterious and maleficent. “She’s had ‘em
before, poor little waif, but this’n were bad. Right
before breakfast. Mistress called the ambulance. They’ve
gone with her to the big hospital in Bideford.”

“What happens with these episodes,” Nathan asked.

Cook ignored the question. Her mind was traveling
down a different path.

“I dunnat understand why it’s the innocent little
chicks of this world that suffers so,” she said, talking to
herself more than to Nathan. “I know she can be a right
hellion,” she went on, a smile flitting across her face as
if hellions met with her approval, “but no child has a
sweeter nature.”

Cook turned to Nathan, her face breaking into a wider

smile.

61

“Why, even that damned donkey, which plays havoc with
my clothes line, owes its life to her.”

“Ernest?” said Nathan, surprised.

“Beast near died in front of her,” Cook went on,
warming up to a story. “’Appened in Clovelly, three
summers ago. Collapsed from a weak heart, they said. Most
like the strain of carrying heavy loads up them steep
cobbled streets all those years. It got its wind back, but
they was ready to take it to the knacker’s yard. Cassie,
bless her heart, wouldn’t let ‘em. Stood her ground and
defied them. Never seen nothing like it. She had Figgis
fetch it home next day. If I’d had my druthers, the
knacker would have gotten the beast, and good riddance.
Anyhow, there’s precious little chance of getting rid of
the animal now that Missus has decided it is a spirit
messenger for Harun al Whatisface. A donkey, I ask yer!
Figgis has more sense than that, and he’s as daft as three
short planks.”

Cook pulled herself from the chair and resumed
stacking the breakfast dishes on the tray.

“Sitting here talking all morning won’t butter my
parsnips,” she said, hoisting the tray and heading toward
the door. “That cousin of yours will be all right,

young’n. You’ll see.”

62

With nothing better to do, Nathan decided to take a
stroll outside. Puffball clouds scudded across a blue sky.
Nathan could hear the bleating of sheep from a pasture
behind a ramshackle pole barn that stood near a small copse
a hundred yards from the house. He decided to walk in that
direction. Having been brought up in a city apartment, the
ways of country life were quite alien to him. Maybe the
fresh air and the sounds and smells of nature would help
sort out the tangle of impressions and feelings churning
around inside him. As Nathan neared the barn, the door
slid open and Franz stepped out.

For an awkward moment they stared at each other
without speaking. Then Nathan remembered something. He
reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out the
illustrative plate. He handed it Franz.

“I think this belongs to you,” said Nathan.

Frank took the page and goggled at it, trying to sort
out in his head a connection between it and Nathan.

“It fell out of the book on the stairs,” said Nathan,
adding, “In the bookstore.”

The penny dropped. Franz turned his bulbous eyes on
Nathan and something that may have been a smile twitched in
his face.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, yes! Much thanks! This is

63

most important. Most important indeed.”

He continued to stare at Nathan, which made for an
awkward moment.

“Well, I was just out for a walk,” Nathan said, and
began moving away.

After a half-dozen paces Franz called his name.
Nathan turned around.

“You play the piano, yes.”

Nathan nodded.

“Of course you do. You are your mother’s son.
Cassandra Ostrey. I heard her in Berlin before the war.
Wonderful musician. Tragic affair, her death. But I’m
sorry to remind you of sad things. There’s too much
sadness everywhere. Come with me. I’ll show you
something. It may interest you.”

Franz indicated that Nathan follow him into the barn.
Nathan hesitated. He did not want to appear rude, but he
really wanted to be outside at this moment. The house had
seemed closed-in to him, and the barn’s gloomy interior
looked even more so. He wanted to stay in the daylight for
a bit. Though none of this was spoken, Franz seemed to
intuit the boy’s feelings. He looked up at the sky.

“It’s a beautiful day,” he said, and another smile

struggled to establish itself on Franz’s abject face.

64

“Henry and Iphigenia have gone with the girl to the
hospital. You know this?”

Nathan nodded.

“Which means my day is free until they return. Would
you like to see an old lighthouse? Good, it’s settled.”

#

The lighthouse perched on a small headland three miles
up the coast from Westward Ho! Though it hadn’t been used
in more than sixty years, the solid stone walls still gave
an impression of permanence and security on a stretch of
coastline notorious for shipwrecks. In his excellent
English, Franz explained that before the Customs and Excise
built the lighthouse in the 1800’s, the locals set false
signal fires to lure ships onto the rocks so they could
plunder the cargo.

“This light changed everything,” he said. “It could
be seen miles out to sea.”

He stretched his arm toward the middle distance where
the Atlantic swell glistened in the sunlight.

“In 1943 I saw the light myself. From the periscope of
German U-boat.”

Nathan looked up at Franz, who responded with a
crooked smile.

“We were reconnoitering this coastline for a possible

65

invasion route. With British defenses concentrated along
the English Channel, we thought perhaps we would come in
the back door. Catch the British with their pants down.
Pretty damn smart, heh?”

Franz shielded his eyes as if searching for the
precise spot where the U-boat had waited beneath the
ocean’s surface on a summer night sixty years ago.

“I told my first officer, ‘I see the light’. I gave
him the coordinates, and told the crew to prepare to dive.
We had other beacons to confirm along the coast before
daylight. But my first officer remains hunched over
charts. He’s scratching his head. He looks up at me.
‘Something is not right,’ he says. ‘According to our
charts the lighthouse is eighteen points north-west of the
coordinates you just gave me’. So I raise the periscope
again. Check coordinates. Same coordinates. ‘Wolfgang,”
I tell him, ‘maybe our charts are a little bit off.’ He
gets red in the face. ‘The Fuhrer’s charts are never
little bit off,” he says. He is a loyal party member. No
question in his mind the charts are accurate. ‘Then
Wolfgang, how do you explain the discrepancy?’ He thinks
for a moment. Then he announces in a matter-of—fact voice:
‘The lighthouse has moved.’ One of the deck officers laughs

aloud. I shut him up. I'm beginning to lost patience. I

66

remind my first officer of certain facts we know about the
Widdicombe Lighthouse. It was built in 1823 from one
hundred and sixty tons of solid Devonian rock. It does not
get up in middle of night and tiptoe two miles up the
coast. My first officer is a stubborn man. He urges that
we surface and make confirmation with binoculars. It is a
full moon, he says. Visibility will be good. I remind him
that visibility will be also good for any destroyer
cruising the coast looking for German submarines. But I
decide to err on the side of caution. We surface. I check
the lighthouse with my binoculars, then hand them to my
first officer. He spends a long while studying the
lighthouse — its shape, its height, even the peculiar
wobble in the light as it turns past the twenty-five degree
mark. It is every solid inch the Widdicombe Lighthouse.
My first officer lowers the binoculars. He looks at me and
nods. I give the order to dive. We submerge to ten
fathoms. Fifteen minutes later we run aground on those
rocks over there. Do you see the tops of the tallest ones
sticking out of the sea like teeth?”

Nathan could just make them out in the swirling surf.

“By our charts and visual confirmation of the
lighthouse we should have missed that headland by one

Innidred meters at least. At least! Fifteen crew members

67

drowned in the wreck, including my first officer. Two
years later, long after Henry had finished interrogating me
and the war was almost over, he explained to me what had
happened. British intelligence had learned of the
alternate invasion plan. They even knew of our U-boat’s
mission. So a company of the Royal Corps of Engineers was
ordered to demolish the Widdicome Lighthouse, transport it
two miles west along the coast to a treacherous headland,
and to rebuild it there. Stone by stone. And they did
this in one day. One hundred and sixty tons of stone in
one day. But do you know what amazes me most?”

Nathan shook his head.

“When they reinstalled the light mechanism they found
it no longer wobbled when it turned past the twenty-five
degree mark. In moving and rebuilding the lighthouse the
wobble had somehow been corrected. It took ten electrical
engineers working into the night to put the wobble back in
the light. They had it fixed just one half-hour before I
raised the periscope.”

Franz thought for a moment, then turned to Nathan.

“Can you imagine anyone going to that much trouble in
order to deceive? That is precision, Nathan. That is

virtuosity of a high order.”

68

Aunt Iffy and Uncle Henry returned to Hawksmoor by
taxi late in the afternoon. Cassie was not with them.
Uncle Henry headed straight for the barn without saying a
word to anyone. After some brief words with Cook, Aunt
Iffy put a stick-like arm around Nathan’s shoulder and led
him to the back room where he had witnessed the séance the
night before. Aunt Iffy’s face looked even more tragic
than usual. She settled into a chair at the small polished
table, closed her eyes and put her hand to her forehead.
Nathan wondered if she were about to slip into a trance.
After a moment she opened her eyes and rested them,
moistly, on Nathan.

“My dear sweet child,” she began. “your cousin will
be staying at the hospital for a little while.”

“How long?” Nathan demanded. “What’s wrong with her?”

The force of the boy’s questions startled Aunt Iffy.
Whatever soothing words she had prepared in her mind became
jumbled into confusion. Her long bony fingers fluttered on
the table-top as if grasping for her derailed train of
thought.

“What’s wrong with her?” Nathan insisted.

Aunt Iffy sighed and wrapped her arms around herself.

“Well, you see, she has a condition,” she began.

“She’s had it since early childhood. It’s partly physical

69

and it’s partly, wellm” Aunt Iffy put her hand to the side
of her head to complete the sentence.

“Will she be okay?” Nathan asked.

“There are treatments,” Aunt Iffy continued, her voice
slipping into a tremolo over which she had no control,
“that seem to help but they are rather taxing.” Aunt Iffy
forced a smile, “But there’s every likelihood she’ll be
back with us in a few weeks.”

“Weeks?” Nathan shouted the word across the table,
making Aunt Iffy jump. He had not intention of upsetting
his aunt, but the mention of weeks seemed an unconscionable
amount of time. He softened his voice for his next
question.

“When can I visit her?”

Aunt Iffy wilted as if she were about to slip beneath
the table.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Not for any of
us. The doctors are quite insistent. For the treatments
to be effective, Cassie needs total peace and quiet.
Nothing to excite her poor, precious little head.”

Large tears began rolling down Aunt Iffy’s cheeks,
carrying a slick of black mascara with them. Nathan felt
bad that he’d been so concerned for his own feelings that

he hadn’t thought to consider his aunt’s emotional turmoil.

7O

He reached across the table and laid his hand on her arm.

“Bless you, sweet child,” she said, dabbing away the
tears with a handkerchief covered in kabalistic signs. She
made an effort to pull herself together and placed her hand
on Nathan’s.

“Since we’re having this little chat, now might be a
good moment for me to make an announcement. It’s something
of a surprise. I’ve found a piano teacher for you.”

This statement was indeed a surprise. In fact, it was
such an unexpected segue from the matter in hand that
Nathan pushed back his chair in astonishment.

“Piano lessons?”

“Yes, my dear,” Aunt Iffy pressed on, trying to build
up a head of steam that would discourage interruptions.
“Madame Soler. Quite an extraordinary woman, although her
personal habits may seem a little strange at first. But
impeccable credentials. She was once a pupil of Nadia
Boulanger in Paris. She now lives in Croyd, quite alone,
and she is accepting pupils. In fact, I rather think you
may be her only pupil. She’s rather fastidious — I mean
picky, Nathan dear — about whom she teaches. But when I
told her of your background, your provenance, so to speak,
she immediately became interested. I’ve arranged with the

taxi company to pick you up at 3 p.m. on Wednesdays,

beginning tomorrow afternoon. There’s a rather decent
spinet in the basement. Hasn’t been used in years, but a
thorough tuning should cure that. I’ll ask Figgis and
Franz to haul it up into the front room so you’ll have
something to practice on. So you see it’s all quite
settled.”

Aunt Iffy affixed an expression of resolution to her
constitutionally irresolute face, hoping against hope it
would hold in place at least for the next few minutes.

“But Aunt Iffy, I don’t want to play the piano
anymore,” Nathan responded.

“My dear, you mustn’t say such a silly thing. After
all those years of study. Such a talent cannot be allowed
to blush unseen. It belongs to the world.”

“Well, the world can screw itself,” said Nathan, with
more asperity than he’d intended. “I’m done with the
piano.”

Aunt Iffy gathered her scattered wits for one final
assault.

“Nathan, you don’t quite know what you’re saying.
You’re upset. The unfortunate circumstances of your
mother’s bereavement are still fresh in your mind. And now
this business with Cassie. It's all very understandable.”

“I’m done with the piano.”

72

“But when you’ve had a moment to think things overm”

“I’ve thought things over.”

“It seems such a terrible waste.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But it’s what your mother wants!”

Nathan stared at his aunt. Her face registered the
final exhaustion of dissembling twitches and tics. She
lived now from the raw nerve of truth. Nathan asked in a
quiet voice: “How do you know what my mother wants?”

“I spoke with her,” responded Aunt Iffy.

“When?”

“Last night at the séance. Harun put her through.”

Nathan closed his eyes. Aunt Iffy grasped this as a
sign of encouragement.

“It’s just like Harun to do that. I had no thought of
trying to contact Cassandra. In fact, we were trying to
channel that musician-inventor fellow who’s been helping
Franz and Henry with their project in the barn. What’s his
name? Something Carillo. A sweet little man who comes
through clear as a bell. He’s so excited that Franz and
Henry are completing the project he had to leave
unfinished. But where was I? Ah, yes, last night we
could tell Ernest was restless. I’m sorry, I should

explain. Ernest is our spirit link to Harun, who’s one of

73

the three hundred and thirty three Threshold Guardians to
the Other Side. It’s a little like a relay race. We
contact Ernest, who contacts Harun, who ‘calls the name’ of
the deceased we seek to contact. Usually it goes like
clockwork. But last night Harun reported a ‘disturbance’
at the portal. Someone un-called was seeking contact.
Strictly speaking, Harun should have observed our wishes
and put Mr. Carillo through. But he’s such an impulsive
Guardian that he switched Cassandra through instead. You
can imagine our surprise. Particularly mine. I hadn’t
spoken with my sister in years, alive or dead. Because of
our age difference we were never close as children. And
when she moved to America, our only contact was an
occasional letter. Of course, I was always delighted to
hear from her. And particularly of my talented nephew.
Anyway, after we’d recovered from our shock around the
table, Cassandra implored me to find a good teacher so you
could continue your musical studies. It was desperately
important to her. She made me promise, Nathan, and I did.
She also asked me to tell you that she’s keeping busy, and
not to worry about her.”
#
Nathan resisted the idea of piano lessons for a week.

But Aunt Iffy’s reproachful look at the breakfast table day

74

after day wore him down. Also the continued absence of
Cassie, with no indication of when she might return from
the hospital, left him at a loose end. If nothing else,
the taxi ride to Croyd, a village on the other side of the
River Tor, would make for a change of scenery.

Madame Soler’s home turned out to be a small cottage
set some distance back from a narrow lane. It was a
quintessentially Devonian cottage, floating in a riot of
English country blooms. Beaming sunflowers contended with
ambitious hollyhocks to see who could climb highest up the
front wall. Musk roses gilded the lower windowsills and on
either side of the narrow stone path that led to the front
door foxgloves, daisies, lupins and forget-me-nots rubbed
shoulders in promiscuous profusion. The whole effect
indicated the careless artistry of a green thumb.

Nathan knocked at the front door. No answer. He
tried again, louder this time. Still no response. Nathan
walked around to the back of the cottage. He paused to
look down the long narrow garden, framed on either side by
an herbaceous border. Farther down, a trellis covered in
sweet peas half hid a small herb garden and a vegetable
patch in which carrots, beetroots and leeks stood smartly
to attention in regimented rows.

The back door stood open. Nathan knocked and waited.

Something smelled good.

“I expect you could use a slice of gooseberry pie.”

Nathan jumped. Behind him stood the Slavic-looking
woman with the tight curly-gray hair he had spotted at Aunt
Iffy’s séance. She carried a pair of pruning shears and a
half-dozen yellow roses. The petals glowed as if the sun
was folded into them. The old woman took Nathan’s arm and
led him into a small kitchen, where the source of the
enticing aroma sat waiting on a counter.

“Sit, sit,” she said, as she cut a large wedge from
the pie, slipped it on an old cracked plate and handed it
to Nathan along with a fork. He broke off a piece of pie
with the fork and was raising it to his mouth, when the old
woman cried out: “Wait! First we do introductions and
toasts.”

Her joints creaked as she stooped to retrieve a bottle
and two small glasses from a cupboard beneath the sink.

She set the glasses on the table and removed the bottle
cork with her teeth. Nathan watched with alarm as she
filled the tiny glasses to the brim with a clear fluid.

The old woman smiled and turned the bottle label toward
Nathan. It depicted a hermit standing beside a clear blue
lake. The lettering beneath the picture was in an alphabet

Nathan didn’t recognize.

76

“Red pepper vodka from Lake Baykal,” she said,
flinging back her glass and draining it with one gulp.
“Very difficult to obtain,” she continued, and pointed to
Nathan’s glass. “Drink up!”

Nathan raised the little glass to his lips and took a
sip. The fiery fluid slipped between his lips and set the
inside of his mouth aflame. The old woman waited for
Nathan to finish choking, then topped up both glasses.

“Now watch me,” she said. “Like this!”

She knocked back the drink, snapped her empty glass
down on the table-top, sighed and turned her dark eyes on
Nathan.

“No, really, I can’t drink it,” he said, pushing aside
his glass.

“Sure you can,” she said, refilling her glass. “Watch
one more time. Pay careful attention to my hand.”

She flicked her wrist as if throwing the vodka to the
back of her throat. This time a tiny shiver of pleasure
accompanied her sigh. She pointed to Nathan’s glass.

He picked it up, closed his eyes, and threw the
contents as far to the back of his mouth as he could. He
had prepared himself to choke, perhaps die, but the effect
was quite different. The liquid rippled through his body

with a warmth that unlocked tensions he didn’t realize he

77

had. Even his thoughts became lighter.

The old woman watched him closely.

“Excellent!" she said. “Now we can make formal
introductions. Nathan Dupre, it is my intense pleasure to
introduce myself, Madame Soler.”

She paused until Nathan realized it was his turn.

“Madame Soler,” he began, noticing that he didn’t have
quite the accustomed control over his speech, “it is also
my intense pleasure to introduce myself, Nathan Dupre.”

Madame Soler slapped the table with her hand.

“Bravo! Now we can begin.”

Nathan picked up his fork and aimed it toward the
gooseberry pie on his plate.

“No, no, no!” Madame Soler exclaimed, catching hold of
Nathan’s hand. “First we toast the Greats.”

Nathan dropped the fork.

“The Greats?” he asked.

Madame Soler nodded vigorously.

“The great composers,” she said. “Today we shall skip
the Romantics because they are so many. We will instead
toast the great forebears of the Western classical
tradition.”

Madame Soler topped up the glasses and held hers in

front of her.

78

“To Johann Sebastian Bach,” she proclaimed and downed
the vodka.

She gave Nathan an encouraging nod.

He picked up the small glass.

“To Johann Sebastian Bach,” he yelled, knocking back
the vodka. As he slapped down the empty glass on the table
he wondered who else Madame Soler might have in mind as
“great forebears of the Western classical tradition”. Bach
had nine children, four of them also composers. Was it
possible they were going to toast each one of them? It was
with no small relief that he heard Madame Soler skip the
younger Bachs and go straight to Franz Joseph Haydn. By
the time they reached Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the third
and last toast to the “greats”, Nathan’s muscles, bones and
sinews had liquefied into a body of light. He had never
felt more lucid.

As Nathan forked ambrosial chunks of gooseberry pie
into his mouth, Madame Soler leaned across the table and
fixed him with her large black eyes.

“Now about this piano problem Iphigenia tells me
about,” she said, tapping Nathan gently on the arm. “I
know you’re mother died and this is a big sadness. And
this sadness is all around you like a fog. Where does the

fog come from, Nathan?”

79

Nathan put down his fork. For the first time he
became aware of the ticking of a large ormolu clock on the
mantelpiece. Madame Soler repeated the question.

Nathan looked up at her.

“From the piano,” he murmured.

“From inside the piano?”

“Yes.”

Madame Soler lowered her eyes as if she were thinking
over his response. After a moment, she looked up again and
slapped the table with her hand, making the tiny vodka
glasses jiggle.

“No problem!” she declared. “We forget about the
piano. Screw the piano! Screw all the pianos! The big
ones, the little ones, the in-between ones — screw them all
twice over! But, Nathan, every Wednesday I bake a pie and
you come here for your lesson.”

#

For the next six weeks, Nathan turned up at the
cottage for a piano lesson during which he never once
touched or even caught sight of a piano. He began to
wonder if Madame Soler had a piano in the house.

Each lesson began with the smell of fresh—baked pie as
Nathan walked up the narrow stone path through the lupins

and forget-me-nots. Each pie seemed more delicious than

80

the last. Madame Soler's back garden offered not only a
profusion of gooseberries, but also strawberries,
raspberries, quinces, damsons, loganberries and exquisite
sloes which, sweetened with honey, deliquesced upon the
tongue with a pinprick of tartness.

The toasts multiplied as they worked their way through
the Romantics, from Schubert to Berlioz. By the third
week, Madame Soler had to creak her way down to the cellar
to retrieve a fresh bottle of vodka. Once done with the
Romantics, Nathan imagined the toasts might ease up a bit.
But he hadn’t reckoned with The Russians. In addition to
the well-known figures — Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Borodin,
Smetana, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich, Mussorgksy,
Scriabin and Stravinksy - Madame Soler also dredged up
Dargomyzhsky, Gniesin, Ippolito-Ivanov, Scherbatchov,
Viyelgorsky, Dunaevsky, Slonimoky, Miaskovsky, Vasilenko,
Taneyev and Kalinnikov. Nathan had his suspicions about
their qualifications for “greatness”, but they toasted them
anyway.

After the toasts, they moved to a small sitting room
and collapsed into armchairs. A large stone fireplace
dominated the room. Above it hung a forested landscape by
Levitan, which looked as if it might be an original. At

this point in the lesson, Madame Soler usually launched

81

into a story. The stories took different forms. Some were
rambling, sentimental accounts of her childhood in Moscow.
Others were pointed and often hilarious satires of
musicians and their peculiar habits and obsessions. But on
the fifth visit, Madame Soler, more expansive even than
usual, began a story to which she took the unusual step of
appending a title:
deblfini’a Violin

I don’t expect you to have heard of Tomasio Godolfini.
Few nowadays remember his name. The encyclopedias grant
him only a passing mention, listing a half—dozen etudes and
a caprice, and dismissing Godolfini as but one of a legion
of virtuosi who trod the trail blazed by the peerless
Nicolo Paganini. In one sense, the neglect is justified.
The etudes are derivative and the caprice is laughably
unplayable — you would need three hands to make it work!
But with others’ music, Tomasio could conjure his
instrument to sing like an angel. As with the Genoese
master, who’d died just a few years earlier, women flocked
to Tomasio’s recitals. They threw themselves at him, body
and soul. .Mbre body than soul, perhaps. It makes one
wonder: What is this connection between virtuosity and the
female libido?

Where did this young man, so handsome, so charming, so

82

talented — where did he spring from? Therein lies a
puzzle. Nething is known about his background before he
arrived in Genoa, almost a year to the day after Paganini’s
death. Net a thing. Net a scrap of a record. Net a
mention in a diary or register or court document or lover’s
letter or tailor’s bill. Nething. Godolfini himself
brushed aside all such inquiries. “I am here,” he would
respond with rakish disdain, “isn’t that enough for you?”

Of course, the inevitable happened. People began to
whisper that Paganini had returned in the body of this
elegant young.man. His playing certainly approached the
bravura of a Paganini. He was adept at all the tricks: the
left—hand pizzicato, double-stop harmonics, ricochet
bowings. He had the virtuoso technique under his finger
tips. The same finger tips that teased the secret parts of
women into a frenzy of passion.

[“Nathan, I trust to your maturity that I can talk
frankly about such things.”]

One evening, after a concert in which Godolfini
dazzled and seduced the audience into demanding fifteen
encores, an old man approached the maestro in his dressing
room as he was packing away his instrument. Godolfini
looked up, surprised to find the old man there. He was

also a little irritated since he was anticipating at any

83

moment the arrival of a young woman who’s abundant
cleavage, so entrancingly visible from the stage, had
tormented Godolfini almost beyond endurance. During the
intermission he sent a note to her. When he returned to
the stage, the sight of those trembling hemispheres as she
leaned forward in her seat, and the bold, unambiguous smile
when their eyes met, were all the assurance he sought for
an evening of delight to follow. But now he had to deal
with this ancient intruder. Something about him appeared
just a little familiar to Godolfini. That shock of white
hair and emaciated, almost spectral, face: hadn’t Godolfini
glimpsed him staring down from the nosebleed seats at
Mainz? And, before that, in Scharhausen? New that this
connection had been made, it suddenly seemed to Godolfini
that this melancholy face had been a background fixture at
all of his concerts and recitals.

“Pray, what can I do for you?” Godolfini asked,
struggling to keep a tang of irritation out of his voice,
while yet remaining brisk and businesslike. Godolfini had
the showman’s sense of noblesse oblige. A crumb of
attention must be paid to one’s idolaters.

The man stared hard at Godolfini.

“Burn it,” he said, in a cracked whisper.

It was Godolfini’s turn to stare hard at the stranger.

84

“I’m not sure I quite caught what you said,” he
responded.

“Burn it,” the man repeated, louder and quite
distinctly this time.

Godolfini glanced toward the door and was relieved to
see it standing ajar. Should this strange fellow turn out
to be an escapee from a local lunatic asylum, inspired by
some deranged hatred of music, rescue could be quickly
summoned. Yet he was so pathetically thin. A feather
would knock him down. Godolfini took comfort from this
observation and decided, at least for the moment, to humor
his uninvited guest.

“What is the ‘it’, my dear sir, that I should burn
with such urgency.”

The man pointed to the violin Godolfini was about to
place in its silk—lined case.

“That thing!” he said, injecting the word “thing” with
a disgust that sent a tremor through his frail body.

Startled, Godolfini looked down at the instrument,
then up at the man. He began to snicker and soon was
laughing aloud.

“This is no laughing matter,” the man snapped.

Godolfini pulled himself together.

“Indeed it is not,” he replied, no longer striving to

85

keep the tartness from his voice. This bizarre interview
had gone on long enough, he thought. Time to cut it short.

“I’m rather fatigued, as you might imagine, and I am
expecting company at any moment. New, if you don’t mindm”

Godolfini stood and extended the violin bow toward the
door.

“Sit down!” barked the man.

Without knowing quite why, Godolfini sat. The old man
took a small step toward him.

“You’ll have plenty of opportunity to diddle that
young woman with the big titties sitting in the third row
of the orchestra who seemed to inspire your performance
this evening. That is of no consequence. What I have to
say to you, however, is of the utmost consequence. It
concerns, sir, your immortal soul.”

In other circumstances, Godolfini would have brushed
aside such sententious nonsense. But he felt no such
inclination at this moment. It took Godolfini a moment to
arrange his thoughts.

“Sir, I hold in my hands an artifact from the workshop
of Antonio della Sigure, master instrument maker of
Cremona, mentor to Stradivari and Guaneri and spiritual
heir to the divine Amati. I would rather burn in hell than

consign such craftsmanship to the flames.”

86

“So you very may well,” responded the old man in a
quiet voice.

Godolfini’s patience snapped. He set the violin in
its case, strode across the room and flung wide the door.

“I didn’t invite you into my room. New I am ordering
you out of it.”

The old man ignored the demand and settled himself,
with an arthritic sigh, into a well-upholstered chaise
lounge, a piece of furniture for which Godolfini had quite
other plans for the evening.

“This is really too much!” Godolfini exclaimed. He
was about to add a good deal more when, to his horror, the
old man reached forward and lifted the violin from its
case. Godolfini darted across the room to interpose
himself between the old man and the hearth where a fire
crackled briskly.

The old fellow looked up, and his face broke into a
smile, or something close.

“I have no power to destroy this. Only you can do
that.”

“But why on earth would I want to?” demanded
Godolfini. His composure had begun to fray around the
edges. “I make my living from that instrument.”

The old man held the violin at arm’s length, as if it

87

were infected with plague.

“No, this devil’s handiwork makes its living from
you,” he said. “Come closer and I will show you what I
mean.”

Godolfini edged forward — then lunged and grabbed the
violin from the old man’s hands. He clasped it to his
bosom like a mother reunited with her abducted child.

“Have you ever listened to it,” the old man asked.

“Are you mad? I listen to it whenever I play, as do
thousands of others,” Godolfini replied.

The old man pulled himself to his feet and approached
Godolfini, who clasped the violin even tighter.

“Listen to it now,” said the old man.
Godolfini looked perplexed. “But I’m not playing it
now.”

“Precisely,” said the old man. “Now is the time to
hear what you have failed to hear all these years. HUmor
an old man. Put the sound board to your ear and tell me
what you hear.”

Godolfini sighed. “If it will finally get rid of
you,” he said, and put the violin’s sound board to his ear.
He held it there for a moment, then lowered it with a
shrug.

II

“Nething,” he said. “Now if you would be so kind as m

88

“Listen again!” interjected the old man. He added a
soft “please” which so caught Godolfini by surprise that he
raised the violin again to his ear. Fer a few seconds his
face retained its disdainful expression. But then, by
degrees, it began to change. A flicker of sadness crossed
his face. This deepened into a profound sorrow. Godolfini
began to weep. He lowered the violin and sank down onto
the chaise lounge, his head hanging on his chest. He
sobbed like a baby.

The old man regarded him for a moment with compassion,
then left the room.

[Madame Soler took a sip of tea. Nathan leaned
forward in his armchair. She smiled at the boy. “What did
Godolfini hear from inside the violin, and did he actually
throw the instrument in the fire? I can see from your
eyes, these are burning questions. I will address the
second one first.”]

Yes, Godolfini did thrust his beloved Sigure into the
flames. But straightaway he pulled it out again. Apart
from some minor singeing of the scrollwork, it was
undamaged.

For a year, Godolfini did not play the violin. He
departed for Italy and closeted himself in his summer villa

in the val d’Orcia. The “official” explanation was that he

89

was exhausted from years of recitaling and needed to rest.
Of course, gossip elaborated this into a nervous breakdown,
and even that the ineffable purity of his high E had, from
repeated performance, perforated Godolfini’s eardrums and
rendered him deaf and unable to play any more. In other
words, the expected tittle-tattle. Darker rumors also
emerged. Two servants, man and wife, who claimed to have
fled Godolfini’s villa in fear of their lives, spoke of
screams in the night and strange comings and goings at all
hours. These disturbing stories began to gather
cirwzulation, until Godolfini revealed in a note to the
.hxmal magistrate that the servants had been dismissed for
Stemaling silverware. The servants were drummed out of the
towua and after that people left him in peace and the name
Of (Rodolfini dropped off the edge of the world.

Or seemed to. .Months later a poster appeared in a
railnmy'station in Krakow: “Maestro Godolfini — The Second
Paganini — Will Perform a Selection of His Compositions
Including a New WOrk Entitled, ‘Lucifer’s Caprice.’”

You could count on your thumbs the number of people
pWho turned up for the recital, held in an obscure hall
fifinelling of rotting fish in a remote suburb of the city.
AfiDst were local drunks and derelicts seeking a warm refuge

fklr a winter’s evening. But the audience did contain one

90

distinguished guest. Returning by train from a visit to
Moscow, the Viennese music critic Oscar Stein found himself
stranded in Krakow due to heavy snow in the Tatry
Mountains. He noticed the recital poster. It piqued his
interest. Rather than spend a bleak night in a railway
station, he hired a horse-drawn cab to seek out the
performance hall. A few years later he included a brief
account of that evening in his memoir, “Musical Nights.”
He described a gaunt, almost cadaverous Godolfini, who
sneered down at the sparse audience before launching into
the first etude. Stein noted that the playing was
virtuosity of the highest order, but that it had — how did
he put it? — something of a fraught quality, as if the
Performer were being pursued by demons in velvet slippers.
But this was nothing to compare with the urbane critic’s
astonishment when Godolfini stepped forward to perform the
final work of the evening, the “Lucifer’s Caprice.” I
believe I can recall Herr Stein’s exact words: “This
Walking skeleton twisted and cavorted about the stage, his
eyes blazing as if he were in secret communion with
Beelzebub, while his instrument screeched like a tortured
Cat.”

In another recital shortly after, Godolfini exhibited

himself to the audience. Three ladies fainted. The

authorities were called. Godolfini was committed to a
local asylum, where on a cold moonless night he hung
himself with the strings from his violin.

Madame Soler stopped talking. She stared at the floor
for a long while. Nathan leaned forward and tapped her on
the knee.

“What happened to the violin,” he asked.

Her face lit up.

“Of course, of course,” she exclaimed.

She pulled herself from the armchair and crossed to a
large teak armoire. She groped around on the top shelf and
returned to the armchair carrying a battered black violin
case. She handed the case to Nathan.

“Open it,” she said.

Nathan flicked open the rusted latches. Inside rested
a violin, a venerable instrument whose varnish had darkened
to a rich sepia. It had no strings, and a portion of the
scrollwork showed evidence of fire damage.

“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to tell you how I came
by this instrument,” Madame Soler said. “All I know is
I’ve been waiting a long time for the right person to show
it to.”

Nathan stared at the instrument.

“Take it out and hold it,” said Madame Soler.

92

Nathan hesitated.

“Go ahead,” she urged. “It won’t bite.”

Nathan lifted the instrument from its case. He was
surprised by how light it felt.

“Hold the soundboard to your ear.”

Again, Nathan hesitated. Madame Soler smiled and
rolled her eyes. Feeling a little foolish, Nathan raised
the soundboard to his ear. At first he noticed nothing,
except the musty smell of old wood kept too long in the
dark. Then he heard it: a faint sob, from inside the
violin. A child’s sob. Nathan held the instrument closer
to his ear. The sobbing intensified. It seemed to come
from every part of the violin, swelling and filling the
soundboard, a lonely, helpless sound. Tears welled up in
Nathan’s eyes. He wanted to tear the violin from his ear,
but he couldn’t. Amid the tumult of sobbing he now heard,
faintly at first then louder, another sound: his name.
“Nathanm” the voice sounded. “Nathanm” — so much like his
mother. The voice uncoiled from the instrument and slipped
into Nathan’s ear, snaking its way deep inside him. Nathan
glimpsed Madame Soler’s face. She sat upright in her

armchair, her eyes closed tight.

93

At the next lesson there was no pie and no toasts.
Instead Madame Soler led Nathan to a room he had not seen
before. A vintage Bechstein, battered and scuffed with the
passage of years but still a magnificent instrument,
dominated the small room. Madame Soler pulled a sheet of
music from a shelf crammed with scores and set it on the
music stand. She tapped the piano stool with her hand,
inviting Nathan to sit. Nathan hesitated. Madame Soler
fixed him with her large dark eyes.

“It is time,” she said.

Nathan sat and glanced at the music. It was a Chopin
etude, a piece booby—trapped with whiplash dynamics and a
seductive melody that slipped from hand to hand like a
woman of loose virtue. He began to play, hesitantly at
first then with growing confidence. It felt strange to
once more be in control of a machine that had been a part
of his life since he could remember. He also recognized a
familiar comfort that harkened back to childhood. If he
stayed close to the notes he would be safe. The lines of
the musical staff were like railroad tracks. Beyond them,
on either side, lay chaos — a land of torture and pain and
inexplicable cruelties where creatures with heads growing
out of their backs ran wild. But if he stayed on track, no

matter how difficult things became, the music would bring

94

him home unscathed.

Halfway through the piece, Madame Soler stopped him.

“Yes, it’s good,” she said. “Technically, I would say
it is even exceptional. I can tell this. But there is also
something lacking. Something your mother had. You know
what I mean?”

Nathan shook his head.

“Danger is lacking,” said Madame Soler.

“What do you mean?” Nathan protested. “I played the
notes, I observed the dynamics.”

Madame Soler thought for a moment.

“It’s not about the notes and the dynamics. They are
essential, of course. But Chopin invites you to something
else — to risk, to unpredictability, to discovery. This
invitation he offers only to the truly accomplished, not
the hacks and tinkle-plonkers who fill the concert halls
today. You hear Chopin’s invitation, but you hold back.
The question is why.”

Madame Soler leaned forward and flipped the pages of
music. She pointed to a passage.

“Play from here.”

Nathan began the section and after a half-dozen bars
Madame Soler clapped her hands. Nathan stopped playing.

“Read to me what it says three bars back from where

95

you stopped,” she said.

Nathan squinted at the score.

“‘Tempo rubato’” he said.

“You know what rubato means?”

“Of course,” Nathan replied. “To vary the time for
greater expression.”

Madame Soler shook her head. As she spoke, her words
burrowed deeper and deeper into Nathan.

“You must steal time, Nathan,” she said with great
emphasis. “Rubato comes from the Italian. It means
‘robbed’. You rob from the tempo — you rob from time. You
don’t shoplift a little bit here, a little bit there. You
must be an audacious thief! Steal the whole caboodle from
right under Chopin’s nose! That’s what a virtuoso does.
Are you such a man, Nathan? The voice is inside you, but
are you reckless enough to follow wherever it leads, even
to insanity? Will you sinter and burn for your art,
Nathan, or will you grow old and fat and comfortable? Are
you truly your mother’s son, or are you merely talented?”

#

At his next visit to Madame Soler a bottle of red
pepper vodka and two small glasses had returned to the

table. As Madame Soler filled the glasses, she announced:

96

“This is the last time we shall meet.” The news hit Nathan
with a dull thud in the stomach.

“Why?”

It seemed such a puny word for all he was feeling.

Madame Soler slugged back the vodka. She pointed to
Nathan’s glass, but he shoved it aside. It fell from the
table and splintered on the stone floor.

“No, I need to know why,” he said, with a violence
that took him by surprise. “You can’t just abandon me like
this. I’m tired of people doing that.”

Madame Soler looked at him, and for the first time
Nathan saw how old she was. She had always been fastidious
in her make-up. Today she wore none. While her eyes
remained bright, her cheeks were sunken and the skin
bagging in her jowls. It seemed to Nathan a wretched
container for such a fierce spirit. Yet at the same time
there was a beautiful heroism in the way she allowed
herself to be seen unpainted.

Nathan felt a confusion of emotions sluice through
him.

“I’m sorry about the glass,” was all he could think of
saying.

“Forget about the glass,” replied Madame Soler.

She picked up her glass and hurled it against the wall

97

where it shattered with a pop, skittering bright shards
across the countertop and floor. Madame Soler’s eyes did
not move from Nathan.

“Where are you, Nathan?” The voice sounded as if it
was coming from some resonant space inside Nathan.

“What do you mean?,” he replied.

Madame Soler paused as if she was organizing in her
mind something elusive that needed to be expressed.

“I mean your absence, Nathan. Your absence from your
own life. When did you leave and where have you been?

Your mother’s suicide ”

“My mother died in a plane crash,” Nathan broke in,
feeling Madame Soler’s words lance through him like burning
iron. “My mother m” he repeated, then faltered.

“Cassandra Ostrey died as she lived, Nathan — wild and
entirely selfish,” said Madame Soler. She continued as if
talking to herself: “She was brilliant, talented, a
musical prodigy, the kind of “little virtuoso” newspapers
love to write nonsense about. From the age of four she was
on display, a tiny thing seated before a big black box full
of levers, pedals and wires. She discovered she could
control this beast. She could make it dance and sing. It
was at Julliard that she received her first warning. Her

{professor’s students were gathered for a studio recital.

Cassandra was the star of the studio and she knew it. She
raised her hands to play — and froze. She could not move.
All she had to do was let her hands sink down into the
keys: gravity would do the rest. But her hands refused.
They hovered immobile above the keys, defying gravity. No
effort of will would unlock them. Her body began to
tremble. The professor asked her what was wrong. She
turned toward him, her face pale and terrified, and then
she collapsed. Later, she said all she could remember was
feeling the way she had once felt as a child when she
became separated from her mother in a large department
store. She had been admiring a pretty doll. When she
turned around her mother was gone. She was alone in a
world of strangers. Cassandra experienced two more such
episodes after graduating from Julliard and beginning her
concert career. One happened in Paris, and was passed off
as an “indisposition”. The second occurred at the Wigmore
Hall in London. She froze at the opening of Beethoven’s
“Hammerclavier” sonata. Two days later she flung herself
into the River Thames.”

Madame Soler paused. Tears streamed down Nathan’s
cheeks. Madame Soler reached across the table and took his
hand in hers.

“Nathan, it is time to step into your own story,” she

99

continued. “You are not your mother. For one thing, you
are not as gifted. But count that as a blessing. You will
make a name, you will be applauded, and you will slip into
a comfortable, forgetful and impotent middle age.”

Madame Soler eased herself to her feet. She retrieved
two new glasses from the cupboard beneath the sink, filled
them with vodka and offered one of them to Nathan.

“We will make one last toast together and then we will
part.” -

Madame Soler raised the glass. “Tempo rubato!” she
cried and downed the vodka with a single defiant gulp.

#

As the taxi returned him to Hawksmoor after the final
lesson with Madame Soler another cab approached them down
the narrow lane leading from the house. Nathan’s driver
had to pull into the hedgerow so the other cab could
squeeze by. This cab was empty, which for Nathan could
mean only one thing. It had just dropped off a fare at
Hawksmoor. As his cab pulled into the driveway, Nathan
leapt from it before it stopped. Cook stood by the front
entrance. She smiled at Nathan and pointed to the back of
the house.

Nathan ran around the side of the building.

100

She was standing at the bottom of the garden by a
gate, staring across the cornfields and pasture toward the
distant ocean.

“Cassie!”

She turned at Nathan’s call, appeared for a moment to
be searching for a name to fit a face, then smiled and
waved back. Nathan ran up to her. After a moment’s
hesitation he flung his arms around her. She began to
laugh, but when he tried to kiss her she pushed him away.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

Nathan was taken aback by the force of this repulsion,
but kept in mind where she had been and what she had likely
gone through during the past couple of months.

“I’m sorry,” he said, blushing. “My impetuosity got
the better of me.”

“I should say so,” she responded, but in her next
statement a glint of the Cassie he remembered broke through
this frosty exterior. “Anyway, when did you become
infected with impetuosity, Nathan Dupre?”

Nathan smiled.

“It’s great to have you back,” he said.

Cassie looked at him, and it was as if her gaze flowed
around him and rested on some distant object visible only

to her.

101

“They had no choice,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Cassie narrowed her gaze on Nathan.

She looked older though still pretty, with her cascade
of blonde curls and the little gap in her otherwise perfect
front teeth that he found so charming. Yet in a few weeks
she had grown into a dimension where he couldn’t quite see
all of her.

“I told them to bring me back to Hawksmoor or I’d kill
myself,” she said, her voice level and matter-of—fact.

All Nathan could do was stare. Cassie smiled.

“That knocked the wind out of you, didn’t it,” she
said.

“I can’t believe you just said what you did,” he
replied.

Cassie pulled back the sleeves on her pullover to
reveal bandages on both her wrists.

“I think I made my point to them,” she said. She
winked at Nathan. “You can kiss me now, if you like.”

Cook’s voice calling them to supper rescued Nathan
from the immediate demand of trying to make emotional sense
of what he’d heard.

He turned and hurried toward the house.

Cassie watched him for a moment.

102

“Oh, well,” she said to herself, following Nathan.
“Maybe later.”

When Nathan and Cassie arrived at the supper table,
Uncle Henry and Franz were locked in a discussion about
their project. The name “Julian Carillo” came up
repeatedly and quite a heated dispute developed as to the
number of times one could “split the tone”. Uncle Henry,
wielding a chunk of beef sausage on the end of his fork,
maintained there was no limit. He waved the sausage around
the table in search of validation. Aunt Iffy averted her
eyes and Nathan and Cassie presented him with expressions
of such cosmic vacuity that he gave up and turned back to
Franz.

“Microtonal division,” he said, punctuating his point
with the impaled sausage, “is held back only by the
limitations of the present technology.”

“Theoretically, yes,” replied Franz, stretching his
head like a snapping turtle toward Uncle Henry. “But in
the land of living things, these limitations are
insurmountable. Consider the technology of the human ear.
Sensory data passes through a mechanical interface — the
bones and drum of the ear — before it reaches the
electrical circuits of the brain. It is mediated, Henry,

by mechanical processes. We are mechanisms. Everything

103

beyond the mechanistic domain — art, philosophy, music,
literature — is a card trick. We permit ourselves to be
deceived in the name of a fiction called culture. It is
tragic that we are so willing to sacrifice the purity of
the machine to such a gaudy harlot.”

“But Carillo in The Thirteenth Sound,” responded Uncle
Henry, his face reddening, “makes it transparently clear
that m”

Franz interrupted: “Whatever theoretical position he
takes, Carillo was constrained to recognize the mechanical
limitations of tone division with his Metamorphosen Piano.
He reached sixteen divisions of the tone perceptible to the
human ear. Maybe we will achieve thirty-two divisions with
our Metamorphosen II. Beyond that, I fear, lies an
irreversible glissade into madness.”

“Poppycock,” responded Uncle Henry, wrenching the
piece of sausage from the end of the fork with his teeth.
“I thought all you Germans were idealists.”

“I had a bellyful of idealism in the last war, thank
you very much,” said Franz.

An uneasy silence hovered over the table. Aunt Iffy,
in a dither, summoned Cook to bring more toast and a fresh
pot of tea.

Cassie turned to her uncle.

104

“Uncle Henry,” she said, “Nathan here is a pianist.
I’m sure he’d be fascinated to see a demonstration of your
project.”

Uncle Henry chewed over this suggestion along with his
sausage. He swigged down the remains of his tea.

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure, my sweet,” he
responded, pushing a frizzled fragment of bacon rind around
on his plate. “Unfortunately, the project is not quite
ready for public demonstration.”

Cassie broke into a peal of laughter. Unnerved by the
sudden noise, Aunt Iffy poured hot tea into her lap instead
of her cup.

“But Uncle Henry,” Cassie continued, ignoring Aunt
Iffy’s moans as Cook helped her into the kitchen, “you and
Franz have been working on this thing for fifteen years.
It’s almost as old as I am. If not now, when will it be
ready to show to the world?”

“She has a point, Henry,” said Franz. “Sooner or
later we have to let go.”

Uncle Henry fixed Franz with a look of alarm tinged
with a faint gleam of interest.

“But what about the temperament calibration?” he
asked.

“It’s close enough,” said Franz.

105

“And the arpeggination modulator you were working on?”

“Fixed it yesterday,” responded Franz, grinning like a
gargoyle.

Uncle Henry nibbled a corner of toast and ran his hand
through his thin gray hair as he thought this over. A
twitch began at the corners of his mouth and almost
developed into a smile when he shook his head vigorously
and slapped the table with his hand.

“It’s no good, I’m afraid,” he said. “You’re
forgetting about the leak in the boiler.”

Franz took a moment to think this over.

“That’s true,” Franz muttered, half to himself. “But
it’s only a tiny leak. A small weld should patch it. And
if we watch the pressure regulator carefully, we should be
able to keep the Metamorphosen running for at least five
minutes without fear of explosion.”

Uncle Henry raked out his ear with his pinkie, tasted
its contents with the tip of his tongue — and pushed back
his chair.

“Against my better judgment,” he announced, and
turning to Nathan, added: “Come on, my boy.”

#
The Metamorphosen II resembled the illustration of the

Grubmannspiel that Nathan discovered in the bookstore at

106

Westward Ho! The basis of the device was a Steinway
concert grand piano. This had been augmented by the
addition of an elaborate system of pedals — thirty-two
compared with the Grubmannspiel’s sixteen - connected to
the piano’s innards by a ganglia of wires running through
an array of blocks and pulleys. The most striking
innovation with the Metamorphosen II, however, was the
presence of eight full-sized keyboards, double the
Grubmannspiel’s complement, arranged in a double-tiered
circle around a small round stool where the player
presumably sat.

Uncle Henry extricated himself from beneath the
machine, his face shielded by a welder’s visor. He turned
off the welding torch, and gave the large cylindrical
boiler slung beneath the Steinway a sharp rap with his
knuckles. It responded with a dull metallic ring.

“I think that should hold nicely,” he announced.
Turning to Franz, he added: “Be sure to keep a close eye on
the pressure regulator.”

Franz nodded and stooped to adjust a thermocouple.

Uncle Henry turned to Nathan.

“Are you quite sure you’re ready?”

Nathan nodded.

“Very well then,” said Uncle Henry. “You’ll need to

107

crawl underneath to reach the stool.”

Nathan glanced at Cassie, who gave him a smile and a

thumbs up as he scrambled beneath the circle of keyboards.

He discovered that the stool swiveled three hundred
and sixty degrees enabling him to reach any of the
keyboards with ease.

Uncle Henry pulled a lever and a valve on the side of
the piano opened with a sharp hiss.

“It’ll take a few moments to get a full head of
steam,” he said. “Give me a middle C. Any keyboard will
do.”

Nathan pressed middle C, but he couldn’t hear the note
due to the whirring of wires and pulleys beneath the piano
that steadily intensified in volume.

Uncle Henry stood back from the machine.

“All set!” he yelled.

“What do you want me to play?” Nathan shouted back.

Uncle Henry cupped his hand to his ear.

“What’s that?”

Nathan repeated the question at the top of his voice.
The heat and steam from the boiler had begun to make him
sweat.

Uncle Henry appeared surprised by the question. He

turned to Franz, who shrugged.

108

“You don’t play a Metamorphosen, dear boy,” Uncle
Henry bellowed at Nathan. “It plays you!”

The monstrous device began to revolve, slowly at first
and then with gathering speed. At the same time, Nathan’s
stool began to turn in the opposite direction. As he
reached out to steady himself his right hand accidentally
stuck a chord on one of the revolving keyboards. This
threw him off balance in the opposite direction. He flung
out his left hand and struck the dominant of the same chord
on a different keyboard. Again, to retrieve balance he
struck a chord with his right hand. Then his left. Then
his right. His left. His right. Left. Right.

Leftright. The counter—revolutions of machine and stool
steadily accelerated. Sweat rolled down Nathan’s face and
trickled from his armpits. His hands moved in a blur from
keyboard to keyboard as he maintained precarious balance by
the fleeting touch of fingers on keys. Inside him a voice
insisted: “This is crazy. You can’t keep this up!” He
soon realized the voice was the problem. He could not
listen to it and keep his balance. He clung to the voice
for as long as he could and then let it go. It disappeared
with a shriek into the vortex. And a strange thing
happened. Without the voice he discovered he could play

all eight keyboards in turn as they whirled by him. It felt

109

as if he were performing the whole of the well-Tempered
Clavier, all of the stately preludes and sinuous fugues,
from minute fractions of each tone orchestrated into a
single moment of time.

#

Cassie came to Nathan in the middle of the night.

He felt her body slip into bed beside him. He felt
her breath on his neck. He felt her voice in his ear. He
felt her mouth all over him.

#

A noise awoke Nathan just before dawn. Sensing the
empty space beside him, he got up and went to the window.
A light fog lounged above the dewy grass. Nathan went back
to bed. When the noise awoke him a second time he knew
what it was. He leapt from bed without dressing, hurled
himself down the stairs and ran outside. The wet grass
chilled his feet. He ran around to the rear of the house.
Nathan glimpsed a movement near the cornfield. He cried
out but the fog, much thicker on this side of the house,
swallowed his voice.

Nathan ran toward the cornfield. He found the gate
open and a narrow passage trampled through the corn.
Nathan stepped into the corn, crying out as broken stems

cut into his bare feet. Again he saw movement ahead, and

110

this time he recognized what it was. Almost to the other
side of the cornfield trotted Ernest. On his back, naked,
sat Cassie. Nathan called out her name. She half-turned,
revealing a silver pentagram woven into her golden hair.
She faced forward again and Ernest trotted faster. They
left the cornfield and entered the sheep pasture that
bordered the cliff top.

Ignoring the trampled corn that cut like razor blades
into his feet, Nathan ran across the field and emerged,
breathless, into the pasture. He was in time to see Ernest
and Cassie moving along a sliver of cliff that jutted
perilously into the ocean. By the time Nathan reached the
entrance to this narrow promontory, Cassie and the donkey
had arrived at its vertiginous tip. The Atlantic breeze
lifted her golden hair like a prayer as the animal stepped
into nothingness and rider and donkey disappeared from

View.

111

CADENZA

112

Glock, Hinters & Connolly
Attorneys-at-Law

Michigan Plaza

Chicago, Illinois

Nathan Dupre
c/o Sutton Manor Recuperative Lodge
Hampstead, London

Dear Mr. Dupre:

Please permit me to extend my very best wishes for your
continued recovery from your unfortunate fall in the
Wigmore Hall six weeks ago. The effects of prolonged
concussion can be severe and unpredictable. I would like
to reassure you that at all times your affairs have been
protected by the full legal resources of Glock, Hinters &
Connolly.

As to the information you requested in your recent
correspondence, I am now in a position to report back to
you the findings. As you know, we secured for this
research the services of Orghast and Withers, a reputable
firm of private investigators in the West Country area of
England. We will be sending you their full report under
separate cover. What follows is a summary, which I’ve
taken the liberty of itemizing under the following
headings, without presuming any order of priority:

LIDO HOTEL, WESTWARD HO!

Indeed, this establishment was sequestrated as a prisoner
of war facility in 1940. Its primary function was as an
interrogation center for captured German officers. Since
you were unable to provide a last name, I am afraid it is
not possible to determine if the “Franz” you mention was
one of the 15 German officers who bore that name at the
facility during the years it operated as a prison.

U-BOAT

A record does exist of a German U-boat running aground, but
30 miles to the north of Westward Ho! No survivors were
reported.

WIDDICOMBE LIGHTHOUSE

No record exists of a lighthouse of this name, or, indeed,
of any such navigational warning device having been erected
in this area.

113

HAWKSMOOR

This house does still exist. It was built in the early
18005 by the owner of a number of tin mines in the
locality. It has changed ownership several times over the
years. As a musician, you might be interested to learn
that the house was occupied for a short period in the late
18008 by a violinist named Godolfini, an eccentric fellow
by all accounts. Today, Hawksmoor is owned by the boroughs
of Northam and Appledore and used as a retirement home for
the elderly.

ORIENT BOOKSTORE
No record exists of a bookstore of this name in the area.

POTWALLOPING

This is indeed a local custom stretching back at least 200
years. However, it is carried out slightly differently
from the way you describe it. The strong Atlantic tides
have a propensity to push back the barrier of pebbles that
runs from Wesward Ho! to Seaton. Every summer, the locals
pick an evening to move the pebble ridge back to its proper
position. (I understand from Mr. Orghast that this
colorful tradition is accompanied by heavy consumption of
the local brew!)

AUNT IFFY, CASSIE, UNCLE HENRY, MADAME SOLER, ET AL

No verifiable traces can be found for these people — with
the exception, perhaps, of Madame Soler. Mr. Orghast
happens to be a theatrical history buff and the name
“Soler” pricked his memory. In searching through his
collection of documents he came across a poster for the
Prince William Music Hall in Exeter, dated 1923. Listed
near the bottom of the billing is the following: “Madam
Soler & Her Amazing Talking Violin”. Apparently this
person (real name Hetty Baxter from Liverpool) used her
ventriloquism skills to throw her voice into various
musical instruments.

I hope you find this information helpful. Once you have
read Orghast & Withers’ full report, please do not hesitate
to contact us again should you require our further
assistance in this or any other matter.

Again, let me wish you a full recovery and a speedy return
to the concert platform.

114

Sincerely,
Norman Glock
Senior Partner

P.S. I believe that Mr. Hinters, my fellow partner,
previously informed you that Mr. Brasket of the “New York
Herald-Tribune” has agreed to settle out of court for the
minor injuries he sustained as a result of your fall.