On Beulah Height (52 page)

This was expected. Despite posters, local press announcements, and word of mouth, news of the change of venue hadn't reached everyone and several patrons had had to be redirected from St. George's Hall to the Beulah Chapel.

In the circumstances no one complained. In fact, commercially speaking, it was no bad thing, thought Arne Krog as he observed the throng of people examining the tapes and discs on sale at the foot of the chapel. There were half a dozen on which he figured, though only two on which he was the sole artist. His recording career had paralleled his performing career--a steady effulgence that rarely threatened to explode into stardom.

Elizabeth had only the one disc on offer, but it was the one attracting most attention. In the circumstances not surprising. The clever among them would buy half a dozen copies and get her to sign and date them. Fifteen years on they could be a collector's item. Whereas his voice would hardly even rank as forgotten because it had never really ranked as rememberable. He could smile ruefully at the thought. The trappings of stardom he had always envied, but the possession of the kind of voice that brought them he regarded as a gift of God, and therefore simply to be marveled at. So it didn't bother him that Elizabeth might be a star, only that her brightening might be at the expense of others' darkness.

But he still wasn't sure he'd been wise to hand that envelope to the detective. It had been a moment's impulse, unlikely to have been acted on had the man been that fat bastard, Dalziel!

He went into what would have been the vestry if the Beulahites had vestries. Elizabeth was in there, looking as calm as a frozen mere. Inger was going through her usual preperformance finger-suppling exercises. Walter was looking at his watch as though it had disobeyed a direct command.

"I think we must start," he said.

"Fine," said Krog. "I'm ready. Inger?"

"Yes."

They looked at Wulfstan. There had been a time when, as chairman of the committee, he had acted as a sort of MC, introducing the performers. But there had been something so unbending about his manner that in the end the experiment had been discontinued. "Not so much a warm-up," Krog had described it, "as a chill-down." Now it was his custom to signal to the regulars that things were about to start by simply joining Chloe on the front row.

Tonight, however, he said, "I will stay with Elizabeth so she is not sitting here alone."

The singer looked at him and smiled with a kind of distant compassion, like some classical goddess gazing down on the mortal coil from her Olympian tea table.

"No, I'll be fine. You go and sit with Chloe. She'll be expecting you."

Wulfstan didn't argue. He simply left. He might not be much good on a stage but he certainly knew how to get off it.

In a broad American accent Krog said, "Okay. Let's do it."

He stood aside to let Inger go out before him.

"Good luck, Elizabeth," he said. "Or if you are superstitious, break a leg."

She met his gaze with an expression blank beyond indifference and he turned away quickly.

The applause which had begun as Inger took her seat at the piano swelled at his appearance. Small audiences loved him. If he could have performed to the whole world, fifty or sixty at a time, in village halls on summer eves, he would have been an international favorite.

He smiled on them and they smiled back as he bade them welcome with easy charm. As he spoke, his eyes ran along the rows. Many he recognized from previous years, the Mid-Yorks culture vultures who came flapping down to feast, and be seen feasting, on these musical bar-snacks. Then there were the tourists, glad of an evening excursion from musty hotel lounges, or holiday cottages not half as comfortable as home. And scattered among them were other faces he remembered or half remembered, from those long-off days when he stayed at Heck and was a popular customer at the village shop and patron of the Holly Bush Inn.

Wasn't that Miss Lavery from the village school? And old Mr. Pontifex, who'd owned half the valley? And those wizened features at the back of the hall, didn't they belong to Joe Telford, the joiner, by whose gracious permission they were performing here tonight? And that couple there, she like patience on a monument, and he like the granite it was carved from, were not they the Hardcastles, Cedric and Molly?

His gaze came forward and met Chloe's in the front row, and his voice faltered. His instinct had been right. This was no occasion for the Mahler cycle. Elizabeth had wanted to end the concert with it, but at least his resistance had prevented that. He wanted the concert to end on an upbeat note with a rousing encore or two. No one would be calling for encores after the Kindertotenlieder. So finally she had agreed to end the first half with it. Now he saw even that as a mistake. God help us, they'd probably all go home!

But it wasn't possible to change now. All he could hope was that the Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel which sat ill with the Kindertotenlieder but which he'd chosen deliberately for that reason would act as a kind of advance antidote.

By the time he came to the ninth and final song, he knew he'd been wrong. Sometimes an audience creates its own atmosphere, let the artist do what he will. He could feel them turning from the masculine vigor and sturdy independence expressed in several of the songs, and immersing themselves in the fatalistic melancholy which he'd always regarded as their lesser component. Even this last song, I have trod the upward and the downward path, a sort of middlebrow "My Way" in its assertion of stoic refusal to be overwhelmed by the vagaries of unfeeling fate, somehow came out positively plangent with despair.

He took his bow, made no attempt to milk the applause, but went straight into his introduction of Elizabeth.

He kept it short and flat, but Walter Wulfstan at his worst would have been hard pressed to lower that overheated atmosphere of expectation. And even if he had, the appearance of Elizabeth would have sent it soaring again. Those who had seen only the photos were rocked back by the reality. And those on whose minds the image was printed of a short, plump, plain child with cropped black hair gasped audibly at sight of this tall, elegant woman with the erect carriage of a model, her slim body sheathed in an ankle-length black gown, with long tresses of blond hair framing the face of a tragic queen.

Krog turned and walked off, suspecting he could have hopped off backward, grimacing like an ape, for all the attention anyone was paying him. Someone remembered to applaud, but the clapping was spasmodic and soon done. Silence fell. Outside sounds swam by like fish seen from a bathyscope, denizens of a completely different world.

Elizabeth spoke, her Yorkshire vowels startling as growls from a skylark.

"Fifteen years back, over the Neb in Dendale, three little lasses, friends of mine, went missing. I'm singing these songs for them."

Inger came in with the short introduction, then Elizabeth started singing.

"And now the sun will rise as bright As though no horror had touched the night."

It took no more than the first few lines of that first song to show Krog that he had been both right and wrong.

Wrong that she wasn't ready for this cycle. She sang with a purity of line, an uncluttered directness, which made her performance on disc seem strained and affected. And the piano accompaniment was the perfect complement to this version of her voice, which could have been buried in the richer textures of the full orchestra.

And right that she should never have been allowed to sing them here. In the silence when the first song ended he heard a stifled sob. And many of the faces he saw from his vantage point to the side were stricken rather than rapt. At the least he should have agreed to her request that the concert finished with the cycle, for after this the second half of the program with its mix of love duets and popular favorites was going to sound tastelessly bathetic.

He focused on Chloe Wulfstan's face. The pain he saw there was reason enough to have banned the Mahler even if everyone else in the audience were simply enjoying the performance as a superb example of lieder singing. It was nearly twenty years since he'd met her on his very first appearance at the festival. To a young singer making his way, this kind of engagement was a necessary staging post on the way to heights. And when he saw his host's young wife and felt that familiar tightening of the throat which was the first signal of desire, his instinctive reaction had been to chance his arm because he doubted if he'd be this way again.

He'd given her the full treatment but she had only smiled--amused, as she admitted later, by his flowery continental manners--and returned her attention to its main focus, her young daughter.

He had thought about her for a while, but not for long, and when Wulfstan invited him back the following year he had accepted, not because of Chloe, but simply because he wasn't yet in a position where he could afford to refuse.

When he saw her again, it felt like coming home. That summer they became friends. And his relationship with Wulfstan changed too. Another reason for accepting the invitation was that he'd come to realize the man was rather more than just a big frog in the middle of a little northern pool. He had connections all over Europe, not the kind of connections, alas, which oiled the hinges of the doors of La Scala or l'Opera or the Festspielhaus, but a useful network of local introductions which could help bring work and get himself noticed. At a personal level, he found it hard to warm to the man, which should have made the prospect of seducing his wife that much easier; but now that he saw him as in some degree a patron, self-interest turned its cold shower on his loins, and it was almost pure accident when during his third festival, while strolling with Chloe under the Neb, he slipped while crossing a stream, fell against her, splashing them both, and they kissed as though there was nothing else to do.

So it had begun. She saw it as "the real thing," whatever the real thing might be, and this might have worried him had she not made it clear that her daughter's interests came first, and until the girl was fully grown, there was no way Chloe would contemplate leaving Walter. But she was no fool. When he assured her that his love was so strong, he was willing to wait forever, she replied, "That's very noble, Arne, though it could be, of course, that you're just delighted to be able to have your cake and ha'penny!"

What would have happened if the tragedy of fifteen years ago hadn't intervened he could only guess. What he knew for sure was that her pain and their separation had affected him in ways he could not begin to understand, and his life had seemed a walk-on part till, in the wake of the Elizabeth crisis, she had come back to him once more.

Now there seemed nothing to prevent her leaving Wulfstan. Instead she had prevaricated, and finally come back up here to live.

What had made Krog start poking around his host's study, he did not know. He had no particular object in mind, just a vague hope that he might find something to give him leverage in prizing Chloe and her husband apart. Inger had caught him searching in there but, in her usual uninvolved way, had said nothing and closed the door. When he had found the transcripts and worked out the implications, his first reaction had been dismay. That a man would wish revenge on his daughter's killer he understood. That he could chain a suspect against whom nothing had been proved in a hole in the ground and leave him there to drown baffled his understanding. And the other big question which he didn't want to ask because he was afraid of the answer was, how much did Chloe know about this?

Nothing, he assured himself ... he could not believe ... nothing! Perhaps indeed he had got it all wrong and these were merely the crazy ramblings of a disturbed adolescent. Or perhaps Walter had nothing to do with the presence of Benny in his cellar. But when he had followed him up the Corpse Road on Sunday morning, and again today, and seen him standing there looking down on the reemerging relicts of Heck, he had been sure.

Certainty of knowledge did not mean certainty of action. His earlier doubts about the impulse which had made him give the transcripts to Pascoe were now turning to bitter regrets. Why had he made himself an instrument when he could have simply remained an observer? For now as his gaze moved from the lovely and beloved face of the wife to the ravaged face of the husband, he thought he saw there, as clearly as the returning outline of Dendale village under the searching eye of the sun, the lineaments of guilt and the acceptance of discovery.

There were only five songs in the cycle, but each created a timeless world of grief of its own. So rapt were the listeners that no one turned during the penultimate song when the rear door opened and three men and a woman stepped quietly inside.

"Don't look so pale! The weather's bright. They've only gone to climb up Beulah

Height."

The local reference turned the screw of pain another notch. And its repetition in the closing lines with their heartrendingly false serenity in which hope comes close to being crushed out of despair, was too much for Mrs. Hardcastle who slumped against her husband's rigid body, silently sobbing.

"We'll catch up with them on Beulah Height In bright sunlight. The weather's bright on Beulah Height."

Then almost without pause, Inger Sandel launched into the tumultuous accompaniment of the final song.

Krog, from his viewpoint through the partially open door of the vestry, could see the reactions of the newcomers. Three he knew. Dalziel, his face slablike, showing nothing of what was going on behind those piggy eyes. Wield, his irregular features equally unreadable but giving an impression of an intensity of listening. Pascoe, visibly moved, unable to hide his feelings. And the fourth, a woman Krog did not know, young, attractive without being an obvious beauty, her eyes like a policeman's taking everything in, while her ears heard the music without responding to it.

The tumult and strife of the song, with its images of foul weather and guilt and recrimination, all began to fade now as the singer emerged from it, like a lost traveler finally achieving peace and shelter.