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.
