Moon Song (6 page)

‘Yes, Kathryn was at school here. Got a scholarship to the RCM, but came back home after.’

‘How ever did that ale bar start?’

‘Jim Carver had this idea,’ she began. ‘He’s ex-navy, submarines I think, wanted to do something completely different when he got out and he likes beer. Oh, you can get wine there too, he keeps a few good clarets and burgundies, and some esoteric single malts, but nothing else. Just beer. He goes round the country looking for brews. In the trade, I understand, he’s a bit of a showcase.’

‘And he’s found himself a superb chef.’

‘That’s Alice, his wife. She’s got a couple of young chefs to help, sort of in training with her, but she’s the business. Jim got the idea a while before he left the service, so Alice decided to get herself trained up to do that side of it. Put herself through catering college, then got into training with Hugh FernleyWhittingstall at River Cottage.’

‘Well, it works a treat.’ Mark pushed his plate away.

‘What’re you going to do with yourself today?’

‘I’ve got the interview with the radio station this morning, then a CD signing at the sci-fi book and music shop in the afternoon.’

‘Why don’t you try the brasserie for lunch? It’s very good. Cedric and I have church this morning but he’s bringing the students over for tea, we’ve got three organ scholars who are
tripping over themselves to meet you. One’s a very talented girl with a complete hero-worship of Marie-Claire Alain, so you have some competition.’ She quirked her eyebrows at him.

‘Excellent stuff! I’ll do my best to be back on time but I don’t know how long the signing’ll go on for. What time is tea?’

‘Four-thirty, all cake and buns but don’t worry, you don’t have to eat anything, the kids’ll scoff the lot. Worse than gulls!’ She laughed.

Mark’s feet remembered. They took him out of the Close through the little archway to the High Street, crossed him to the passage that led into Gandy Street, over Queen Street and down into Northernhay Square where the headquarters of Exon Radio hid at the top of a three-story town-house. He rang the bell. Shortly, footsteps sounded, the door opened and Isoldé smiled up at him.

Mark’s eyebrows went up.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid it’s me to do the interview. Jamie’s got a bad cold and won’t inflict it on you. Do you mind? Come on in.’ She opened the door wide.

He followed her up the steep stairs into a big loft. All the attic rooms had been put together, knocking down walls and putting in steel beams to hold the roof up. The effect was a crazy mix of Swedish sixties and recording studio.

One end was hi-fi, antique stacked Quads and an incredible pair of huge horn speakers carefully placed in front of soundcurtains. The side wall was solid industrial shelving covered in amplifiers, tuners and tape machines, including an ancient highspeed Revox. The other end was all the radio gear including some very up-to-date digital and computer kit. Somewhere towards the middle of the room, a fifties glass coffee-table sat between a pair of comfortable leather armchairs.

‘Coffee?’ Isoldé pointed him towards the armchairs.

‘Black please.’ Mark sat down. He felt a bit thrown. He’d been with this girl the previous evening, liked her, perhaps more than
liked, and now they had to do an interview for the radio. Then, this afternoon, she’d be at the bookshop signing. It seemed they were doomed to see a lot of each other. Mark didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. He wanted to get to know her, felt she wanted to know him too, but he didn’t want all this officialwork-stuff to spoil it. He wondered if he could handle it …if she could.

Isoldé brought the coffee then went to sort out the recording gear. She came back and fixed up yet another piece of antique kit. He began to smile.

‘I know!’ She laughed back. ‘It’s Jamie. He’s got a real thing about the old kit they used in the seventies, hence the Neuman.’ She chuckled, tapping the microphone she’d just connected to the Nagra portable tape recorder. ‘Fortunately, he shows me how to use the stuff.’

‘You …er …work together?’

‘Yup.’ Isoldé watched him sideways. ‘But that’s all we do. Jamie’s gay. His partner, Paul, is the recording engineer who did you last night,’ she finished. She tested for levels and took up her notepad. ‘He’s given me a list of questions to set us off, but he doesn’t mind if we divert a bit into interesting side roads, just as long as we get all the basic stuff about you and Exeter.’

She took a breath, raised her eyebrows, finger over the onswitch. Mark nodded.

‘It’s very good to have you back in Exeter at last, Mr King,’ Isoldé opened the interview.

‘Mark, please …’

‘Thank you, Mark. How long is it since you played here?’

‘It must be seventeen years now. I came back while I was at the Royal College of Music, in London, and did an afternoon recital, but …’ he let the sentence trail off, eyebrows shooting up, an “oh help!” expression on his face.

‘And how does it feel, now, after all that time?’ Isoldé
prompted him, smiling encouragingly.

‘Oh, good!’ Mark paused. ‘But strange too. Like coming here. My feet knew the way because one of my school-friends lived in this house and I used to hang out here in term time. Now it’s the radio station.’

Isoldé’s eyebrows went up, she flashed him a smile. ‘That’s a marvellous coincidence and hopefully makes you feel at home. But could we go back to the beginning? What drew you to music, to the organ?’

‘The man who played in the little church on the cliff at Caer Bottreaux set me off.’

‘Caer Bottreaux …?’

‘That’s where I was born, grew up, North Cornish coast, just up the road from Tintagel. I’m a vurriner really.’ Mark smiled as he pronounced the word Devon-fashion. ‘From across the Tamar. And I forgot my passport!’

‘As an old Exonian I think we’ll count you as an honorary Devon man.’ Isoldé laughed. ‘How old were you then, in Caer Bottreaux? How did you meet the organist?’

‘I had a good voice as a boy and they wanted me in the choir. The first time I went for practice and the organist started up with this incredible beast, it just rolled me up. I couldn’t take my eyes off it and hit loads of wrong notes. Finally he got exasperated and said
“You just come over here, young Mark, so you can see her then. We’ve got to get that goggle-eyed look out your system or we’ll never get a good note out of you!”
And he showed the organ to me. All those stops and pedals. And the pipes …that’s what did it, when I first heard them breathe. They do that you know, almost breathe of themselves. After a few more weeks, when I’d showed him I really could sing, he let me watch while he played after choir practice one evening. That was it. My hair stood on end. He took pity on me then and began to give me lessons.’

‘Just like that? I understood organists were very protective about their organs.’

‘Oh they are!’ Mark laughed. ‘But …yes …that’s how it was, sort of. I already did piano lessons, so I knew my way round the keyboard, after a fashion, but the organ is very different and, of course, the pressure’s the other way around. Piano’s hard, percussive, whereas the organ’s soft. I had to unlearn a whole load of things in order to play it.’

‘But it stuck, you enjoyed it.’

‘Ye-es …enjoy’s not quite how it is. Organists are very passionate about their instrument, it’s like a part of yourself, once you’re bitten you’re never free of it. Organs are my life.’

‘So you learned with the organist in Caer Bottreaux?’

‘Yes, but he soon realised that I could go much further than he could take me. He came down to our cottage by the harbour one evening and knocked up my parents, told them he’d help me get into the Cathedral School here and so he did. Wrote up a recommendation which got me an interview and then I had to play for them. They started me off on a little organ in the precentor’s house but then they took me up to the cathedral. I was thrilled and terrified all at the same time, climbing up into the organ loft. It’s huge up there, especially when you’re only twelve. I could hardly reach the peddles but the organist helped me and I managed to play “Three Blind Mice” for them, and then a bit of some of the hymns we used at home. Then the organist sat beside me and began Bach’s toccata and fugue in D minor. I knew it, of course, and he somehow got my hands to play the right notes while his feet fumbled the peddles and he pulled the stops I couldn’t reach. In the end we were both laughing fit to bust. I followed him back down the stairs to where the precentor was waiting. The organist just nodded to him. “He’ll do,” he said. And that was it. I began at the Cathedral school the following week.’

‘Did you mind being away from home, boarding school?’

‘Yes and no. I missed the sea very much. Our cottage was right down by the harbour, you can always hear the sea there. When
the gales are up the sea crashes on the rocks, the cliffs thunder and it’s all you can do to stand upright outside the cottage door.’

‘That sounds incredible!’

‘So it is.’ Mark chuckled. ‘Not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re born there it’s in your blood.’

‘You missed the sea, here at school …’ Isoldé prompted him.

‘I did. But the organ held me. I needed that more than the sea.’

‘Did you sing in the choir too?’

‘For a short while, until my voice broke. The good voice I had as a boy became quite undistinguished once it changed. I can sing along in a folk group now but that’s about all.’

‘You got a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, didn’t you?’ Isoldé took the interview forward into his early adult years.

‘Yes. I worked really hard and did well there. It was great fun, being in London, not just the music but the life-style too. London’s a great place to be a student, or it was when I was there. But on the music side, there’s so many organs to hear, and to play as well if the organist will let you, so many different types. I always used to love playing in St-Mary-le-Strand, although there are better organs, I suppose, but the place is magical.’

‘What are your most impressive memories of organs?’

‘Oh, that has to be Liverpool! You can walk about inside the thing there. It makes me feel like being inside the engine room on the Starship Enterprise.’

Isoldé quirked her eyebrows.

‘Star Trek.’ Mark grinned. ‘Beam me up, Scotty! The pipes and walkways between them are like being inside a starship. If ever you get the chance you should go and see it, it’s quite incredible.’

‘Your career took off soon after you left college, is that right?’

‘I was lucky. The dean of the Royal College of Organists had a friend over from Germany and he heard me. I was invited to the church at Lunenburg Heath, to play the Bach organ. The
senior recording engineer from Deutche Gramophone was there, heard me and steered me to a recording contract with them. I was just twenty-two. Things have sort of gone on from there,’ Mark ended with a rueful grin.

Isoldé’s eyes twinkled back. ‘You spend quite a lot of your time abroad now, don’t you?’ she continued serenely, not telling him she’d been there, at Lunenburg Heath, heard him, fallen under the organ spell.

‘Yes.’ Mark rolled his eyes. ‘Good for the bank balance, but I miss being at home.’

‘Ah yes, home. You live in a very interesting house don’t you?

‘No!’ he put his hand over the mike and she obligingly hit pause. ‘I won’t talk about that on air. It’s my home. Private.’

‘Not even about Tristan Talorc?’

‘Nope!’

‘Not even to me, later?’

‘That’s different.’ He smiled.

She carried the interview deeper into his career and the music he loved, finishing on a good upbeat note advertising his next recitals, the latest CD which was out now in the shop in Cathedral Close. Mark was surprised, it had actually been fun, she was very good, had got him to talk about himself far more than he usually would.

He watched as she packed up the recording equipment.

‘Must be worth a few bob,’ he said, fingers running over the steel casing of the old tape machine.

‘Yup! It’s Jamie’s passion. He’s been collecting since he was a kid.’

‘I’ve never seen most of it before. You hear about it, from recording engineers, but the London studios don’t use any of this now. Nor the European or American ones.’

‘No, all digital, computerised, streaming. We do that too, for the radio output, and the computer radio, Exon’s got a YouTube page. But Jamie loves using the stuff, even editing by hand with
a razor blade sometimes. He’s got the antique kit anyway and the radio station’s almost a one-man-band. And Paul loves it too.’

‘Exon Radio’s got a hell of a reputation though.’

‘He does get some good programmes, like the recording Paul got of you last night. That’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing and I dare say the Beeb will be on to him to hire it for Radio 3. The interviews are special too but they can be a bit hi-brow sometimes, boffin-stuff for artists. You’re relatively light relief.’

‘Nothing wrong with that!’

She finished putting things away.

‘Can I give you lunch?’ he asked.

‘Actually, Jamie’s given me the order to take you out,’ she said over her shoulder.

‘Thank you …’ Mark blinked internally. This woman took charge in a very subtle way, you didn’t notice until you were in up to your neck.

He waited while she locked up, then she led him back to the close and round to the Brasserie the precentor’s wife had told him about that morning. They walked in silence; somehow there was no need to talk.

Isoldé helped him through the signing, making sure the queue was orderly, that he had water to drink and nobody overstayed their welcome. There seemed to be an inordinate number of people wanting his CDs, and wanting them signed. Exeter was a provincial town, he could hardly believe there were that many people who knew his music, and wanted it.

‘Jamie’s had a piece about you on the YouTube page since a few weeks back, advertising the concert and the signing, then a follow-up a few days ago. Radio 3 picked it up too, gave it a mention last week in up-coming events so there’s a lot of out-oftowners here, people from all over I think, who’ve come for the day, maybe for last night too.’