The Evangeline (24 page)

He started to explain, but she stopped him with a look. ‘You won’t have time to, until the trial is over. I have a couple of weeks of vacation owing, and I thought it might be good to get away. I thought—’

‘You thought you might like to spend your vacation—which you haven’t taken, by the way, in years—here in the city? And as long as you are going to be here anyway, you could keep an eye on me, make sure I take my medicine and get some proper rest like the good, docile patient you know I want to be?’

It made her angry with herself that he could see right through her. Feeling frustrated and inept, she tossed her napkin at him and shrugged helplessly. ‘If you want to kill yourself, I suppose you have that right; but you might at least wait until the trial is over before you do it.You may not owe it to me to take decent care of yourself, but don’t you owe something to your client? Do you think he should have to go through a second trial, live through everything all over again, because his lawyer wouldn’t bother with stupid things like getting enough sleep, much less taking the medication his doctor prescribed, and died the day before the case was supposed to go to the jury?’

Darnell had never seen her angry and only seldom seen her upset. ‘I promise that won’t happen,’ he said, devastated by the tears she was fighting to hold back. ‘I promise I won’t die.’

‘You promise you won’t die!’ she exclaimed, laughing through the tears she tried to rub away with the back of her hand.‘I really think you believe that, that all you have to do is promise and it won’t happen.You’re just like Marlowe: you think the only thing that matters is what people believe. If they believe their death will allow someone else to live, they can die knowing their death has a meaning! If you believe you can’t die because the trial isn’t over, then you don’t have to do anything to prevent it! I wish I could share your belief, but you’ve got a heart condition, William Darnell, and that isn’t a question of what you believe or what you promise. If you don’t take care of yourself, you’re not going to live long enough to see what that jury decides!’

‘I’m all right—really!’ he said with all the assurance he could. ‘And I do take all those pills you give me, and in the order in which I am supposed to. I have the names of all of them memorised.Would you like me to recite them?’

Wiping away the last fugitive tear, she fixed him with a physician’s sceptical stare. ‘Tell me the truth. Has anything happened? Have you felt any dizziness? Any loss of breath? Have you had any chest pains? Anything?’

He had already made the mistake of dismissing her offer to stay with him as not just unnecessary but as a kind of intrusion. His pride, his stupid insistence on his own independence, had hurt her. He had to tell her the truth. ‘The other day in court, I suddenly felt weak. Everything started to go black. But within a minute I was fine, and it hasn’t happened again. Just that one time,’ he said with a confident smile.

Summer reached across the table. He started to take her hand. She shook her head and held his wrist, counting to herself as she listened to his pulse.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said as he signalled to the waiter for the check. ‘We’ll watch the sailboats out on the bay and look across at the city. I’ve always thought it’s the best view there is of San Francisco. And then we’ll find a bench and you can tell me what you’re going to do this week at trial and I’ll tell you how much you’re going to like having me there, waiting for you when you come home each day from court, making certain you get all the right things to eat and plenty of sleep.’

‘In other words,’ said Darnell as he paid the waiter, ‘I should now consider myself under house arrest?’

Summer smiled. ‘I’ll try not to make it seem too much like prison.’

Outside the restaurant, Darnell took Summer by the hand. For a long time they walked in silence, listening to the wind snap the canvas sails of the boats that were close to shore and to the sounds of cheerful voices that echoed, dreamlike, from the shiny decks half hidden in the waves.

‘Everything else changes,’ he said as they stopped at a bench and watched the ferry pull out from the dock, heading back to the city on another thirty-minute run, ‘but this never does, the sight of boats on the bay. Maybe that’s why people love the sea, why they’re always drawn back to it. There was something Marlowe said, almost the first time I met him: that you begin to understand how simple it all is out there, how the rest of it is all a fiction, the made-up story of other men’s dreams and ambitions—that the only thing that matters is life and death, and how you live them. Not just how you live your life, mind you, but how you live your death. I can’t honestly tell you that I quite understand it, but when he said it, I believed it. Marlowe does that, you know—gives you the sense that he knows things you don’t, and that he won’t tell you all of it because you might not be quite ready to hear the whole, unvarnished truth.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

I
F WILLIAM DARNELL HAD NEVER HAD ANYONE like Vincent Marlowe as a defendant, neither had he ever had a witness like Hugo Offenbach. There had been a few trials he could remember, most of them in the early years of his career, in which someone of remarkable intelligence had been called by either the prosecution or the defence. They had usually been mathematicians or involved in one of the more theoretical sciences, like physics or genetics—disciplines that, because most of us had studied some part of them in school, were not entirely beyond the average comprehension. Hugo Offenbach was another kind of genius, less understood and more mysterious. It did not matter which of two people followed the same mathematical formula to the correct conclusion; it mattered a great deal which of two musicians played a violin concerto. Genius in science was known by its method; genius in music and the arts was known by its result, a feeling that you were in the presence of something great and inimitable, something you might never experience again.

Offenbach was a genius, but that did not mean that the major critics thought he knew anything about music. His views on certain matters were considered hopelessly out of date, the uninformed opinions of a musician so well trained in the classical tradition of his instrument that he failed to grasp the important changes made by modernity. In a long-forgotten essay, published in a periodical with a circulation so limited that issues were hand-addressed to each subscriber, Offenbach had first given expression to a point of view from which he had never departed. Speaking of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, he wrote:‘While everyone spoke of progress, measuring the vast improvement in the material conditions of existence and the spread of democratic institutions and the rights of individuals, music and art began a long descent into madness.’

Lacking all talent for evasion, Offenbach, to the lasting mortification of friend and foe alike, offered as examples of the ‘new barbarism’ Bartók’s violin sonatas, numbers 1 and 2, and Webern’s ‘Four Pieces for Violin and Piano’, works which he resolutely refused to play, because ‘it would be like writing an obscenity on the wall of a church’. If he had not been the greatest violinist of his age, he would have been dismissed as a harmless crank. If he had not been the greatest violinist of his age, the crowd that watched him enter the courtroom on Monday morning, the next witness for the defence, would not have felt the same sense of wonder.

Even to people who had no interest in classical music, Offenbach’s face was famous because of the distinction of his accomplishment. He appeared not to have changed, at least in any obvious way. His thin lips were pressed together in a straight line the way they usually were; his eyes, intelligent and alert, looked straight ahead. The eager crowd, turning towards him with its unremitting gaze, had no effect. He was used to being on stage, all attention centred on him.

The gate in the railing swung shut behind him. The clerk was waiting, ready to administer the oath. But first Offenbach stopped, turned to his left and quickly walked the few short steps to the counsel table. ‘It’s good to see you again, Mr Marlowe,’ he said in a firm, even voice.

Marlowe had risen from his chair as Offenbach approached. They looked at each other like old war comrades, men whose memories are secrets no one who had not been there could understand.

‘Thank you, Mr Offenbach,’ whispered Marlowe. He lowered his eyes and, with what seemed like reluctance, let go of the older man’s hand.

Offenbach settled into the witness chair, turned to the jury and, without any change of expression, gave the kind of formal nod with which he might have acknowledged a concert audience. He looked across at Darnell, who was standing just in front of the counsel table, and nodded again, signalling this time that he was ready to begin.

Darnell could not quite help himself. He stared down at the floor, smiling to himself at how Offenbach had managed with just two small gestures to make the usual formalities of the courtroom seem somehow lax and undisciplined.

‘Mr Offenbach, let me ask you first why you were aboard the
Evangeline
. As a concert violinist, was it not difficult for you to take that much time away from your schedule?’

Hugo Offenbach was short—five foot six, perhaps five foot seven—and of less-than-average weight, but he held himself with an almost military bearing, his thin shoulders square, his small, round head moving only when his shoulders did. Every movement was quick, sharp and precise, the way his fingers worked when he played. His sat motionless while Darnell asked his question, then turned his head and shoulders to the jury. ‘I was invited by an old friend of mine, Basil Hawthorne, who was a friend, or at least a business acquaintance, of Mr Whitfield. I had never met Mr Whitfield myself. I had just finished a fairly lengthy concert tour in Europe. I was tired. I thought it would be good to get away, to be out on the ocean with no one else around. I’ve spent so much of my life indoors.’ He paused and looked at Marlowe.‘I did not know it would end like this. No one did.’

‘Basil Hawthorne was what I think is called an impresario, someone who arranges concert tours for musicians?’

‘And my dear friend.’

‘He was lost at sea?’

‘The night of the storm. I don’t know what happened to him. He may have been in the other lifeboat. All I know is that he did not survive.’

‘On that night, the night the
Evangeline
sank, what happened to you? How much do you remember?’

‘Captain Marlowe did not want to alarm anyone, but I could tell that something was wrong and that he was worried. The sea had been rough for days, but—and it’s the strangest thing—the worse it got, the better we sailed. Perhaps Marlowe can explain it, or someone else who has spent his life at sea—I’m ignorant about such things but I can try to tell you what it was like. The
Evangeline
seemed to come to life, to breathe, as if the storm had shocked her into the conscious knowledge of what she could do. It affected all of us. We were like children set to gallop on a horse that did not need a hand on the reins to tell her what to do. For those few days, the days before that night, I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so aware of my own existence, or felt quite so connected with the world around me. And then the storm changed—not in degree, but in kind. And the
Evangeline
changed, too. She was not running over the sea anymore; the sea was running over her, crushing her to death. The equipment—all the electronics—had failed. Marlowe was holding on to the wheel with all the strength he had. He saw me come on deck and told me to grab a coat, something warm, and to brace myself because he did not know how much longer he could keep her headed into the storm. That’s when it happened, just seconds after that. The boat seemed to lift right out of the water as if it were being tossed end over end, and then there was this ghastly shudder as if it had been ripped apart.’

Offenbach stared down at his hands as he slowly shook his head. The silence in the courtroom was heavy.

‘I don’t know what happened next, except that Marlowe saved me. I had a heart attack, not strong enough to kill me, but I lost consciousness. Marlowe somehow got me into the lifeboat.’

‘And your violin?’

‘Yes, and my violin.’

Darnell moved across the front of the counsel table, close to the jury box.‘Who first suggested that it might be necessary to kill someone to save the others?’

‘Trevelyn,’ replied Offenbach immediately.

‘You’re sure? There isn’t some possibility that others were talking about it and you simply remember his voice more than the others?’

‘Trevelyn,’ he repeated so quickly that their two voices echoed together. ‘No one else had said anything like it. As far as I know, no one else had even thought it.’

‘The defendant, Vincent Marlowe, testified that not only had he thought it, he had known it was something that would have to be done when that ship that could have picked you up sailed by without stopping. Does that surprise you?’

‘That Marlowe would say it? No. He would say it whether he ever actually had that thought or not. In his mind, it would not make any difference who said it first or who thought about it first, because he allowed it. He’s wrong about that, of course. Trevelyn — and not just Trevelyn—would have killed someone to get what they needed. But I agree with Marlowe that it would be wrong to blame Trevelyn, or anyone else.We were not civilised people living in comfortable homes, debating after dinner about where we wanted to spend our next holiday. The choice was stark, simple: kill or die. If it hadn’t been for Marlowe, some of us, I’m afraid, would have ripped the others apart, driven mad by hunger and our own repellent taste for blood. Marlowe put an order on things. He changed us from a pack of dying animals to something at least a little more human.’

Darnell looked him squarely in the eye. ‘Is it your testimony that, whatever he may have thought about this himself, Marlowe was driven to it by the force of circumstances in which he found himself? That if he had not stopped them, men like Trevelyn would have taken matters into their own hands and killed whoever they wanted?’