Authors: Christopher Priest
When we arrived at the house she forgot all about the baby grand. We went straight to bed.
I awoke in the night, unused to feeling the body heat of someone else sleeping against me. The windows were wide open and there was a draught from outside, but it was still a warm night. I shifted position, trying not to disturb her. Cea obviously sensed me moving, turned towards me, her hand resting on my chest. She settled down again. Her breathing was steady.
I was fully awake, though, and I lay on my back in the dark, as contented as I had ever been. This at last seemed to represent the real reason for my quest back to Temmil. I had not personified it directly to Cea but now that we were together again I realized that I had been burying, suppressing, a long-held wish to be with her again.
I suddenly saw in a different light all that guilt I felt after our one night together at the end of the tour. True, I had walked away from her and left her, but she had done much the same to me. That night we had been attracted to each other by the glittering excitement of the moment, the orchestra and the music, the heady roar of applause, the drinks party and excited conversations afterwards. We both knew this. Neither of us pretended anything else, consented to it, made no secret of what would happen soon after.
And soon after, it did happen. I travelled away the next day, Cea returned to her life here on Temmil.
I had regrets, I had a feeling of guilt, but these feelings were swamped by everything that happened on my return to Glaund. When next I had the mental space to remember the time with Cea, all that remained was the guilt.
As I was lying there beside her, with her unclothed body sprawling on the bed, dimly lit by the night glow from the window, I wondered if what I had been really going through was not guilt but a feeling of longing, of missing her, of wanting to be with her again. Now here I was.
I was happy that night in the warm dark, feeling the movement of her breath across my face and neck, sensing the strands of her hair lying against my shoulder, knowing that when I woke up in the daylight she would still be there.
I drifted back to sleep – then, suddenly, with no sense of subjective time passing, the sun was up, I was half-awake and Cea was still there beside me. She had turned over so that her back was towards me. For a few moments the euphoria I had felt during the night returned to me, but then, unexpectedly, my mood shifted.
In the bright daylight I looked around at the room we were in, the room with the bed. That is all it was. There was nothing personal or individual about it. Just the bed and a small table, my clothes dropped on the floor. Cea’s were scattered elsewhere, probably on the floor by the other side of the bed. I had put no pictures on the walls, there were no books, the blinds, still wide open, were the ones that had been there when I moved in. It was not a room I could call my own.
Temmil itself was a disappointment. It was no longer the place I thought I had found, the place I wanted to be. A creeping conventionalism was taking the place over: restaurants with unimaginative menus, bars without live music, places that closed early every evening, gated communities, single-storey houses built on the slopes of the hills. The roads were being widened, streetlights were going up. I felt out of place, wanted something from the island that no longer existed. It was a paradise being concreted over for the sake of new and safe suburbs.
But I had been here only a short time. Perhaps I should stay for a while, learn the place, not rush to opinions about it?
I was fretting as these thoughts went through my mind. Beside me, I could sense Cea was waking up too.
I needed the stimulus of other people working in the same way as me. I was feeling my music slipping away. In the past I had thrived on the muscular difficulties of modernist music, the challenge, the satisfaction of being awkward and novel. Now I felt myself writing tunes, enjoying natural harmonies. Would this streak of easy familiarity also work itself out if I embedded myself more firmly in island life?
How deep should I go? How long should I stay?
Cea turned over to embrace me, laid her head on my chest.
‘I have to go home now, Sandro,’ she said quietly.
‘At least stay and drink some coffee with me.’
She raised her head, looked at me.
‘My mother can’t get out of bed on her own. I have to be there for her. I should go now.’
‘Will you come back?’
She was already sitting up, looking around for her discarded clothes.
‘Maybe this evening. I have to be with her today – we planned to go shopping. She needs all sorts of things.’
She pulled on some of her clothes then used her mobile phone to call a taxi. She hurried to the bathroom before the car arrived, so I dressed too. There were so many things I wanted to say to Cea – I had imagined a relaxed morning with her while our mild hangovers slowly disappeared. Then some time together – perhaps a swim, a walk, a tour around the town? I wanted to talk with her about music, how she had come to adapt that cadenza of mine, where she and I would head next, what our future might be. All we had together was an instant of past, and an even shorter present. Could two people’s future be built on such a flimsy basis?
I was no longer sure what I wanted: of me, of her, of this island. Most of all I did not want her leaving me like this. So soon, after last night.
I went down the lane with her and we waited until the taxi arrived. Then she was driven away, a dust cloud thrown up by the car’s tyres from the unmade surface and drifting briefly. I walked back to the house. The day, hardly begun, had already lost its point.
I took a shower, put on some fresh clothes. I made myself breakfast and a large flask of coffee. In my music room – like my bedroom, it contained hardly anything personal, the usual mess of papers spread randomly on the floor – I sat at the piano while I sipped my first cup of coffee but my mind was empty. Nothing stirred inside me. I practised for a while, but I could still hear in memory Cea’s fluid playing at the bar and all the pieces I usually went to for relaxation now sounded spiky, academic, cold.
I poured myself a second cup of coffee, returned to the piano, sat and stared at the keyboard. I had placed the coffee precariously on the floor beside my feet because there was nowhere else to put it. I could not risk standing it anywhere on or near the piano in case of accidental spills. I was thinking about Cea, the pleasures of the surprise meeting with her, what we had done, the promise of more. I was daydreaming about her, completely unprepared for what then happened.
Like a roaring in my mind I heard a great swelling of music – an imagining of complex orchestral music, intriguing, unique, complete. Above all, complete. A whole work.
It was over in less than a minute but in that time, in some kind of imaginative shorthand it is impossible to understand or describe, I heard the whole of what would probably be an extended orchestral suite of at least twenty or thirty minutes’ duration. My normal method of composition was a slow and sometimes painful process of seeking notes on the piano, making marks on the manuscript, following an unending series of changes of mind, abandoning and restoring certain phrases – but this piece had come to me entire.
I knew it as well as something I had played all my life. I started playing the piano, hesitantly at first, but with an increasing sureness. The music was mine, coming from within.
I turned around, reached down to the floor for paper and pen, tried to scribble notes, but I knew immediately that my old way was no longer the right way. I rushed from the room, found my digital recorder, checked the battery, stood it beside me at the piano – then I started playing again. The sureness remained.
I played the piece through to the end. It was as if my mind and hands and heart were being guided by a spirit force, almost an example of automatic playing. I came at last to the finale, which was as whole in my imagination as the rest of the piece.
When it was over, shaking with excitement and relief, and still not at all sure what had happened to me or how, I sat slumped on the piano stool. I was glad no one was there with me – it was a moment of necessary solitude, beyond anything in my experience, beyond expression.
I checked the recorder: everything was safely stored in the memory.
I stared down at my cup of coffee, which, neglected while the spirit of the music absorbed me, had gone cold. I saw concentric rings fluttering across the surface, peaking briefly in the centre. I was thrilled by the music – was I trembling enough to transfer my excitement through the stool to the floor, and thence into the coffee? The rings shivered again to the centre, then again.
This time I felt it myself – the floor was shaking.
I heard a loud, frightening noise: a groaning, rasping sound, unlike anything I had experienced before. When I stood up it was as if vertigo had struck me. I staggered in terror across the room, recovered, felt myself toppling again. I reached out towards the piano, the most solid thing around me. The house was shaking – dust and pieces of plaster showered down from above. I lurched against the piano, trying to get my balance, because I knew I had to leave the house as soon as I could.
Then it stilled. The tremor passed. Silence fell once more.
The dust cloud started to drift and settle. The light fixture, hanging in the centre of the ceiling, continued to swing to and fro but that too was steadying. My heart was racing – brief and minor though it was, the earthquake had been terrifying.
I went out on to the balcony. Most of my view was across the open hillside or the sea, so there was not much difference to normality, but I saw that several people were standing out in the road that led down to the town. What I could see of the town from this position looked normal.
A siren started howling somewhere in the centre of Waterside, the eerie signal distorted by the distance.
Back in the house I switched on the television. I tuned to the scientific station, the one that monitored the volcano, and was immediately rewarded with an intense amount of information and commentary. Everyone who spoke or was interviewed was excited.
The likelihood of an eruption was now set at red – Imminent – and as if this was not warning enough the graphic in the corner of the television picture was flashing on and off urgently. Listening to the comments I learned that the alarm level had been steadily increasing during the night, a sense of emergency gripping the people who ran the project. There were several gradations of amber: Negligible, Minor, Small, Reduced, Average, and so on. Through the night it had climbed through Increased Amber, Large Amber, Dangerous Red. It had been upgraded to Imminent about an hour earlier. Tremors were being reported from several different parts of the mountain’s environment, but for the moment emissions from the crater of the volcano were still at a normal level. The scientific stations had been evacuated and the seignioral policier forces were on standby for civilian evacuation, should that be necessary.
I found this exciting and alarming, but also thrilling. I called Cea’s mobile phone to see if she knew any more, but the call went to her voicemail. The recording mentioned a landline number, so I called that too. Again there was no answer.
I went back to watching television.
The full eruption began about half an hour later. All three of the remotely controlled cameras monitoring the crater and the largest of the fumeroles lost their pictures more or less at once – a spokesperson said they had been built to withstand huge physical pressures, so the cameras were still thought to be working, but there was suddenly so much steam and smoke that nothing could be seen.
I went out to my balcony and stood on the part of it from which I knew I could look in the direction of the Gronner’s cone. I saw a vast, bulging plume of dark grey smoke or ash, rising in the distance above the trees that stood in the way. The plume was already high in the upper atmosphere. The wind was taking it towards the north-east, away from Temmil Waterside.
Later, it was announced on television that three active lava streams had appeared and were moving rapidly down the mountain. Two of them were already disgorging into the sea, while the third was moving across a thinly populated area to the north. Everyone on the island was informed that no emergency evacuation was necessary at present, but that people living in the vicinity of the Gronner should make themselves ready to be moved out at short notice.
Wondering if that meant me or Cea, I tried calling her again, without success.
There was something else, too. I was burning with the need to see her again, because I wanted to tell her about the astonishing music that had come flashing to me just before the eruption. I had never known music to present itself to me in that way: the completeness of it was uncanny. But beyond even that, in the excitement of the earth tremor, and the news of the eruption, I had almost overlooked the fact that the same thing had happened again.
As I had been standing on the balcony after the tremor, in the last few moments before the volcano burst forth, I had heard and felt in my imagination a beautiful romantic song, the complete music and the words as well: it was a ballad about a young man who discovers a wounded seabird on an isolated beach, repairs its wing somehow and despatches it to his loved one with a message of undying devotion. It was amazing, inexplicable.
Whence had such a song arisen? Unlike the time when I discerned the miraculous orchestral work, so much was happening then, just as the eruption was about to start, that I had been unable to play or record the song. I was already beginning to lose it. The details of it were fading. I could remember the sentiments and much of the story, but not the actual words – similarly, I could still sense the melody, but the phrasing and the arrangement of the voice were already leaving me.
The third time I tried to phone Cea I heard an electronic howl of broken communication. From the television I later learned that much of the island’s digital network was temporarily out of action: masts had been destroyed and there was immense electrical disruption from the eruption. Some areas were already unable to receive television signals, and several telephone landlines had been cut.