George had his back to us, like a boy who didn’t want anyone to see his birthday present.
“The box,” Ralph said again, with a firmness I hadn’t heard before.
“All right, it’s empty,” George said, turning around slowly. He had the lid open, showing the box’s bare interior. “There was a mistake. I took the mask to the compound dressing station, then left it there by accident when I came back to the hut.”
“Why did you come back instead of going straight to the shelter?” Ralph asked.
“Because I still wanted to listen, all right? The sound mirror still works, even with those chunks taken out of it. I felt I could still be some use.” He gestured helplessly at the headphones. “I still wanted to listen,” he said again, more quietly this time.
“You hear it too,” Ralph said, wonderingly.
“Hear what?”
“The music. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, old man. You said this was the only place you could concentrate. You meant more than just that, didn’t you? This is the only place where it comes back—the music—as if this war weren’t standing between us and everything we ever thought mattered. It’s why I couldn’t work here any longer, why I had to go back to the ambulance service.”
George stared at him without saying anything. So did I.
“I thought I was going insane at first—a delayed effect of the shellshock,” Ralph said. “Well, perhaps I was, but that didn’t make the music go away. If anything, it just got stronger. It was like hearing someone hum a tune in the next room, a tune you almost recognized—you could pick out just enough of the melody for it to be maddening. I talked to some of the other chaps, thinking there must be some kind of interference on the wires …but when I got funny looks, I learned to keep my mouth shut.”
“What was the music like?” George asked.
“Beautiful beyond words—what I could hear of it. Enough to break your heart. Well, mine anyway. The Pastoral, how I always meant it would sound. I could hear it, as if it were being played to me by an orchestra, as if I were just a listener in the audience. But not just the Pastoral …there was also the London, done differently—I always did mean to take another stab at that one, you know …Lark …and music I don’t even recall intending to write but that seems to have me all over it.”
“It’s our music,” George said.
“I know, old man. That’s what I’ve been hardly daring to admit to myself, all this time. It’s all the music we would have made if this war weren’t in the way. I think we did write that music, in some weird way, and it’s making itself known to us here. No one else hears it, of course. But you and I …I think we’re like antennae, or microphones, ourselves. I hear the music I would have made, and I suppose you hear your own tunes.”
“I hope they’re mine. I couldn’t bear the idea of them being yours.”
“That good, eh?”
“Lovely. Lovely and sad and stirring …everything I ever wanted music to be.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “But it’s so terribly quiet. Some days I don’t hear it at all. Today it seemed to be coming through stronger than most. If I could only get it down …”
“You mean on paper, sir?” I asked. Ralph gave me a blank look, and I said: “It’s just that when we came in, I thought I saw some papers in Mr. Butterworth’s log book. I didn’t make much of it the time, but now that I know about the music, I wondered if you’d been trying to write it down.”
George gave a short, weary laugh. “You don’t miss much, Wally. I thought I was much too quick for you.”
“Can I see?” Ralph asked.
George slid the log book across the desk and opened it again, revealing the loose papers inside. He passed one of them to Ralph. It was a pink form with typewriting on one side. “Never was much good at transcription,” he said. “You’d be faster and more accurate. But then it wouldn’t be my music you’d be hearing, would it?”
Ralph tapped his finger along the music, making a kind of low tum-te-tum noise. He wasn’t exactly singing along with it, but I could tell he was imagining it properly, just as if a band were playing in his head, with all the right instruments. “Well, it’s got the Butterworth stamp,” he said eventually. “No doubt about that.”
George leaned forward a little. “What do you think?”
“I think I’d like to hear the rest of it. This is obviously just a fragment, a few bars of a much larger work.”
“I can only write what I hear. As you say, it’s as if a chap next door is humming a tune. You can’t dictate which tune he’ll hum, you just have to go along with him and hope for the best.” George paused and looked serious. “Did you ever write any of it down, old boy?”
“Transcribe it, you mean?” Ralph shook his head slowly. “I was too scared to. Scared that if I wrote it down, the music might stop. And that if I put that music down on paper and convinced myself that it really was something I’d come up with, I’d have to admit to myself that I was going quite insane.”
“Or that the music’s real,” George said quietly.
“Now you know why I stopped working here, of course. No use to man nor boy if all I kept hearing was music instead of airplanes.”
“I hear the airplanes as well. It’s just that the music comes through when they’re not there.” He turned to me sharply. “Well, Wally, what do you make of it? Are we both for the nuthouse?”
“I don’t think so sir,” I said.
But in truth I wasn’t sure. George might have been younger than Ralph, but they were still old men, and they had both had their share of unpleasant experiences in the war. So had I, in a smaller way, and I still felt that I had my marbles …but what kind of condition would my head be in twenty or thirty years from now if the war just kept on the way it had?
Perhaps I would start hearing secret music as well.
“Wally,” Ralph said to me, “I want you to listen very carefully. We’re Royal Army Medical Corps men. We have a patient here and a duty to protect him. Understood?”
I nodded earnestly, just as if I were still taking ambulance classes in Dorking. “What are we going to do, sir?”
“You’re going to take him to the shelter. George will use my gas mask, and you will use your own.”
“And you sir?”
“I shall wait here, until you can return with a second mask.”
“But the seals, sir …”
“Will hold for now. Be sharp about it—we don’t have all afternoon.”
“No,” George said, more to me than Ralph. “He isn’t staying here. It’s his gas mask, not mine—he should be the one using it.”
“And you’re thirteen years younger than me, old boy. One of these days, for better or for worse, this war is going to be over. When that day comes, I’m not going to be much good for writing music—I’m worn out as it is. But you’ve still got some life in you.”
“No one’ll be writing much music if the Huns take over.”
“We thought the world of German music before all this started—Bach, Brahms, Wagner—they all meant so much to me. It seems funny to start hating all that now.” Ralph nodded at the still-flashing red light. “But we can discuss this later—provided we keep our voices down. In the meantime, Wally’s going to take you to the shelter. Then he’ll come back for me, and we can all sit around and joke about our little adventure.”
“I’m not sure about this, sir,” I said.
“RAMC, lad. Show some spine.”
“Sir,” I said, swallowing hard. Then I turned my attention to George. “I don’t think there’s much point arguing, sir. Perhaps it isn’t such a bad plan after all, anyway. I can sprint back with another gas mask pretty sharpish.”
“Take the mask,” Ralph said.
Something passed between them then, some unspoken understanding that was not for me to interpret. Time weighed heavily and then George took the mask. He said nothing, just fitted it over his head without a word. I put on my own mask, peering at the world through the grubby little windows of the mica eye-pieces.