The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

she thought everybody else had.

He smiled. “Anyway, let’s not talk about it. This concert…” He trailed off.

Isabel knew there were occasions when Jamie did not look forward to a performance, and the shrug that he gave revealed that this was one.

“What is wrong with it? It looks interesting enough.”

He drew an imaginary line on the table, a casual, invisible doodle that she assumed divided the evening’s offering into two. “Some of the pieces are interesting. The others…well…” He reached for the programme that Isabel had bought in the lobby. “Here. This new piece. Melisma for the Return of Persephone. It’s rubbish. I just don’t like it. This is only the second time it’s been played, which surprises me. Once would have been enough. Or too much.”

Isabel was surprised by this comment. Musicians could backbite, but Jamie, she thought, was not like that; he was usually gentle. Something had irritated him profoundly for him to say this. “Somebody must like it,” she said mildly. “It must have some merit, otherwise…”

Jamie shook his head. “You’ve got a touching faith in the way these things work, Isabel,” he said. “Merit doesn’t come into it.”

He was in an odd mood, she decided. “All right,” she said. “But don’t let it worry you. And I’ll try not to catch your eye during the performance.”

He had glanced at his watch, and she decided that it would be better to leave him by himself. She rose to her feet, explaining that she was going to go to her seat in the hall, where she would read the programme notes. He said yes, that was a good idea; he would see her afterwards and they would go back to the house together. Had she brought her car? She had, and had parked it conveniently behind the hall, outside the small, secondhand bookshop that specialised in science fiction. A bassoon was not an easy instrument to carry, and on the occasions when Jamie played the contrabassoon, difficulties of transport could become acute. The contrabassoon had eighteen feet of wood and metal tubing, and required a case that was almost six feet in length. Some contrabassoonists, Jamie had pointed out, were considerably smaller than their instruments—though this was not the case with him.

“Maybe they’re compensating for being so small,” he had once suggested. “A tiny tuba player must feel much bigger than he really is.”

Isabel thought this was possible; she had noticed small men in immense cars and sometimes there did appear to be a connection. Yet one had to be careful with observations of this type; it was very easy to be uncharitable, and then to regret it, as she had been, and done, once, when on holiday in Spain with John Liamor and they had been talking about ostentatious cars and inadequate drivers. They had been sitting in a pavement cafe, and at that moment an immense Mercedes-Benz had entered the plaza and had drawn to a halt near them. And Isabel had said: “Yes, now look at him. He’s making up for something.” John Liamor had said, “Yes, obviously.”

Then the driver had got out of the car and raised himself with difficulty onto his two artificial legs.

THE PIECE that aroused Jamie’s disdain came immediately before the interval. Before the concert began, Isabel had the opportunity to read the programme notes and the composer’s biography. “Although not yet thirty, the American composer Nick Smart has attracted considerable attention for his bold and original compositions for both voice and chamber ensemble. In Melisma for the Return of Persephone, this talented young composer, currently spending a year as composer in residence at the University of Edinburgh, applies a technique of Gregorian chant to explore the vowels of Persephone’s name. Mr. Smart will be conducting his piece this evening.”

Isabel smiled to herself. Jamie did not like pretentiousness; and that, she thought, was why he had taken against Melisma. She could understand that: the greatest beauty, she felt, was to be found in simplicity. Ornamentation had its place, but that place was a small one. And what, she wondered, had Persephone to do with it? It was unfortunate that Hades had seized Persephone and taken her into the underworld; Demeter was rightly distracted, as anyone would be in the circumstances, but…The concert was about to begin. She snatched a last glance at the small photograph of Nick Smart, printed alongside his biography. A young man smiling at the camera, captured against a background of a college building, it seemed, somewhere old, in the new way that buildings are old in the United States, and…She peered at the photograph; the lights were dimming in the hall. Yes, he looked remarkably like Jamie. It was uncanny.

There were four short pieces before Melisma began. Jamie played in the first two, and then slipped back onto the stage shortly before the outgoing conductor welcomed Nick Smart to the podium. Isabel watched as a lithe figure, clad in the crumpled black linen suit favoured by composers, ascended the steps at the front and shook hands with the man who now passed him his baton. So that was Nick Smart; although Isabel was in the third row from the front and therefore able to see the stage quite well, it was difficult to make out very much about the composer from behind. But even then, she thought that had Nick Smart been sitting at the bassoon rather than Jamie, she would not have known the difference.

Melisma began. Isabel closed her eyes and tried to follow the direction of the music, but it soon defeated her. The possibility of resolution was raised from time to time, but then quickly dashed as an unexpected chord intruded. Miasma, thought Isabel; this is a miasma. Miasma for the Confusion of Persephone. Jamie would appreciate that, she thought.

She looked in Jamie’s direction. It seemed that there was little for the contrabassoon to do in the early stages of the piece, but, towards the end, when the prospect of Persephone’s release drew closer, there were rumbling bassoon sounds on the lower notes of the register, signifying, Isabel imagined, the depths of Hades from which the unfortunate girl would shortly be released. She suppressed a smile. Hell, she thought, was more likely to be a place of white noise, the noise favoured by torturers, than a place of contrabassoon pedal notes. Or would Hell be an endless loop of boy bands or rap? Either would be torture.

Of course, the abolition of Hell meant that such thoughts were now the merest fantasy. Isabel was agnostic as to what, if anything, lay in store for us after this life; that there was a world of spirit seemed to her to be a possibility that we should not exclude. Consciousness was an elusive entity about which we knew very little, other than that it came into existence when certain conditions were present—a sufficient mass of brain cells operating in a particular way. But could we really say much more than that about where it was located and whether it could survive in other conditions? The fact that a plant grew in one place did not mean that it could not grow in another. And if something lay behind this consciousness, orchestrated it and the conditions that produced it, then why should we not call this something God?

She closed her eyes. The key in which the music was now being played suggested that Persephone was out of the underworld and that flowers and grain were returning. She opened them. A few energetic bars more and the music suddenly came to an abrupt, unresolved end. No resolution. That is so counterintuitive, thought Isabel. And if a composer does not resolve a piece then the applause should be similarly incomplete. One hand would be aimed at the other, but would stop short of actual