It seemed to me that the recital could end in nothing but disgrace and ridicule. I wondered why David went along with the idea.
“Amateurs have a lot of self-confidence,” said Mrs. Biesel, when I asked what she thought. “A professional would be scared.” I had come round to her house to call for Lily: she was spending a lot of time there, too, encouraging David.
Mrs. Biesel had a soft Southern voice and was not always easy to understand. (I was amazed when I discovered that to Mr. Chadwick all North Americans sounded alike.) I recall Mrs. Biesel with her head to one side, poised to listen, and her curved way of sitting, as if she were too tall and too thin for most chairs. I could say she was like a Modigliani, but it’s too easy, and I am not sure I had heard of Modigliani then. The Biesels were rich, by which I mean that they had always lived with money, and when they spent any they always gave themselves a moral excuse. The day Lily decided she wanted to go to London without me, the Biesels paid her way. They saw morality on that occasion as a matter of happiness, Lily’s in particular. Any suggestion that they might have conspired to harm and deceive was below their view of human nature. Conversation on the subject soon became like a long talk in a dream, with no words remembered, just an impression of things intended.
Mr. Chadwick pored over stacks of yellowed sheet music his mother had kept in a rosewood Canterbury. He wanted David to play short pieces with frequent changes in mood. “None of your all-Schubert,” he said. “It just puts people to sleep.”
Mrs. Biesel supplied printed programs on thick ivory paper. We were supposed to keep them as souvenirs, but the printer had left off the date. She apologized to Mr. Chadwick, as though it were her own fault. (It is curious how David was overlooked; the recital seemed to have become a social arrangement between Mrs. Biesel and Mr. Chadwick.) Mr. Chadwick ran his eye down the page and said, “But he’s not doing the Debussy. He’s doing the Ravel.”
“It’s a long, hard program,” said Mrs. Biesel, in just above a whisper. “It might have been easier if he had simply worked up some Bach.”
At three o’clock on one of the hottest afternoons since the start of recorded temperatures, David sat down to the restored Pleyel. On the end wall behind him was a large Helleu drawing of Mr. Chadwick’s mother playing the piano, with her head thrown back and a bunch of violets tied to her wrist. The winter carpets, rolled up and stacked next to the fireplace, smelled of old dust and moth repellent. Still Mr. Chadwick would not let the room be aired. To open the windows meant letting in heat. “You must all sit very still,” he announced, as David got ready to start. “It’s moving about, stirring up the atmosphere, that makes one feel warm.”
Who was there? Mr. Chadwick’s friends and neighbors, and a number of people I suspect he brought in on short acquaintance. I remember his doctor, a dour Alsatian who had the complete confidence of the British colony; he had acquired a few reassuring expressions in English, such as “It’s just a little chill on the liver” and “Port’s the thing.” People liked that. When I think of the Canadians in the winter salon — the Lapwings, and Lily and me, and Fergus Bray, and an acquaintance of Lapwing’s called Michael Hagen-Beck — it occurs to me that abroad, outside embassy premises or official functions, I never saw that many in one room again. Hagen-Beck was an elderly-looking undergraduate of nineteen or twenty, dressed in scant European-style shorts, a khaki shirt, knee socks, and gym shoes. Near the end of the recital, he walked out of the house and did not come back.
Lily mooned at David, as she had at Christian Ferras. I supposed it must be her way of contemplating musicians. There was nothing wrong with it; I had just never thought of her as a mooner of any kind. Once she sprang from her chair and pushed open a shutter: the room was so dim that David had to strain to read the music. Mr. Chadwick left the shutter ajar, but latched the window once more, murmuring again his objection to stirring up the atmosphere.
During the Chopin Edie went to sleep, wearing one of those triangular smiles that convey infinite secret satisfaction. Her husband wiped his forehead with a cotton scarf he took out of her handbag and returned carefully, without waking her up. I had the feeling they got along better when one of them was unconscious. He adjusted his glasses and frowned at a gilt Buddha sitting in front of the cold fireplace, as if he were trying to assess its place in Mr. Chadwick’s spiritual universe. During the pause between the Chopin and the Albéniz, he unlocked the French doors, left them wide, and went out to the baking terrace, half covered by the branches of a jacaranda; into the hot shade of the tree he dragged a wrought-iron chair and a chintz-covered pillow (the chair looked as if it had not been moved since the reign of Edward VII), making a great scraping sound over the flagstones. The scraping blended with the first bars of the Albéniz; those of us in the salon who were still awake pretended not to hear.
I envied Lapwing, settled comfortably in iron and chintz, in the path of a breeze, however tepid, with trumpet-shaped blue flowers falling on his neck and shoulders. He seemed to be sizing up over the chalkier blue of a plumbago hedge the private beach and white umbrellas of the Pratincole, Rivebelle’s only smart hotel — surviving evidence that this part of the coast had been fashionable before the war. In an open court couples were dancing to a windup gramophone, as they did every day at this hour. We could hear one of those tinny French voices, all vivacity, but with an important ingredient missing — true vitality, I think — singing an old American show tune with sentimental French lyrics: pour toi, pour moi, pour toujours. It reminded me of home, all but the words, and finally I recognized a song my aunt had on a record, with “She Didn’t Say ‘Yes’ ” on the other side. Perhaps she used to dance to it, before she decided to save her energy for bringing me up. I remembered just some of the words: “new luck, new love.” I wondered if there was any sense to them — if luck and love ever changed course after moving on. Mr. Chadwick was old enough to know, but it wasn’t a thing I could ask.
Lapwing sat between two currents of music. Perhaps he didn’t hear: the Pratincole had his whole attention. Our wives longed to dance, just once, in that open court, under the great white awning, among the lemon trees in tubs, and to drink champagne mixed with something at the white-and-chromium bar, but we could not afford so much as a Pratincole drink of water. I don’t know how, but Lapwing had gained the impression that Mr. Chadwick was taking us for dinner there. He sat at his ease under the jacaranda, choosing his table. (A later review of events had Lapwing urging Hagen-Beck to join us for dinner, even though his share of the day was supposed to end with the petits fours: a story that Lapwing continued to evoke years after in order to deny it.)
The rest of us sat indoors, silent and sweating. We seemed to be suffocating under layers of dark-green gauze, what with the closed shutters, and the vines pressing on them, and the verd-antique incrustation in the ancient bronze ornaments and candelabra. The air that came in from the terrace, now that Lapwing had opened the French doors, was like the emanation from a furnace, and the sealed windows cut off any hope of a crossbreeze. Mrs. Biesel fanned herself with a program, when she was not using it to beat time. Fergus Bray slid from his sofa to the marble floor and lay stretched, propped on an elbow. I noticed he had concealed under the sofa a full tumbler of whiskey, which he quietly sipped. Once, sinking into a deep sleep and pulling myself up just in time, I caught sight of Lapwing leaning into the room, with his eyes and glasses glittering, looking — in memory — like the jealous husband he was about to become.