speeches.
“Pull the screens,” George said.
I did as I was told and sat down on the little stool next to his bed. The screens muffled some of Mr. Chamberlain’s speech, but every now and then his voice seemed to push through the green curtains as if he were trying to reach me personally, the way a teacher might raise his voice to rouse a daydreaming boy at the back of the class.
“You’re looking better, sir,” I offered.
“Nothing time won’t heal.” He touched the side of his head with his good arm, the one that wasn’t bandaged. “I’ll be up on my feet in a week or two, then I’ll get my new posting. No use for me in Dungeness anymore, though—my hearing’s no longer tip-top.”
“Won’t it get better?”
“Perhaps, but that won’t make much difference in the long run. They’re getting rid of the sound mirrors. We always knew it was coming, but we thought we’d be good for another year. It turns out that the new system won’t need men listening on headphones. The new breed will stare at little screens, watching dots move around.”
Mr. Chamberlain said something about “over by Christmas,” followed by “looking forward to a bright and prosperous Nineteen Thirty-Six.”
“And the music, sir?” I asked.
“There won’t be any more music. Wherever it came from, whatever it was that let us hear it …it’s gone now, or it will be gone by the time they tear down the mirrors. Even if it’s still coming through to Dungeness, there won’t be anyone there who can hear it. Best to forget about it now, Wally. I’ve no intention of speaking about it again, and with Ralph gone, that only leaves you. If you’ve an ounce of common sense—and I think you’ve rather more than an ounce—you’ll say no more of this matter to any living soul.”
“I’m sorry about Mr. Vaughan Williams, sir.” I’d called him Ralph all the time I had known him, but sitting next to George I found myself coming over all formal. “He was always kind to me, sir, when we were doing our ambulance duties. Always treated me like an equal.”
“He was a good man, no doubt about that.” George said, nodding to himself. Then he patted the bedsheet. “Well, thank you for coming to visit, Wally. Knowing how busy you ambulance chaps are, I appreciate the gesture.”
“There’s another reason I came, sir. I mean, I wanted to see that you were all right. But I had something for you as well.” I reached into my pocket and withdrew the folded piece of pink paper. “We found this on him. It’s one of your transcriptions, I think.”
“Let me see.” George took the paper and opened it carefully. His eyes scanned the markings he had made on it, the scratchy lines of the staves and the little tadpole shapes of the notes. There were lots of blotches and crossings-out. “Did you see him do this?” he asked, looking at me over the edge of the paper.
“See him do what, sir?”
“He’s corrected me! You wouldn’t have noticed, but not all of those marks were made by me! The beggar must have sat down and taken the time to correct
“When we were on our way to the shelter, sir?”
“Must have been, I suppose.” George shook his head in what I took to be a mixture of dismay and amusement. “The absolute bare-faced effrontery!” Then he laughed. “He’s right, though—that’s the galling thing. He’s bloody well right!”
“I thought you ought to have it, sir.”
He began to fold the paper away. “That’s very kind of you, Wally. It means a lot to me.”
“There is something else, sir. When we found that sheet of paper on him, he’d folded something into it.” I reached into my pocket again and drew out a small brass key. “I don’t know what to make of this, sir. But I’ve a personal effects locker, and my key looks very similar. I think this might be the one to his locker.” I felt as if I were about to start stammering. “The thing is, there
I passed the key to George.
“Why would he put his key in that piece of paper? Anything personal, he’d have wanted it sent on to Adeline.”
“He must have known what he was doing, sir. You being a composer and all that …I just wondered …” I swallowed hard. “Sir, if there was music in that locker, he’d want you to see it first, wouldn’t he?”
“What makes you think there might be music, Wally?”
“When you asked him if he’d written any of it down, he said he hadn’t.”
“But you wonder if he was telling a fib.”
“It’s a possibility, sir.”
“It is indeed.” George’s hand closed slowly on the key. “I wonder if him correcting my music was a sign, you know? A way of giving me permission to correct his if I saw something in it I didn’t think was right? Or at the very least giving me permission to tidy it up, to put it into some kind of order?”
“I don’t know, sir. I suppose the only way of knowing would be to open the locker and see what’s in it.”
“And you haven’t already done so?”
“I thought that would be a bit impertinent, sir, as he’d clearly meant for you to open it.”
George passed the key back to me. “I can’t wait. Go and see what’s inside now, will you? I assume they’ll let you?”
“I was his ambulance mate, sir. They’ll let me anywhere.”
“Then go to the locker. Open it and find his music, and bring it to me. But if you don’t find anything …I should rather you didn’t come back. I wouldn’t like to see your face come through that door and then be disappointed. If there’s something in there I must have, correspondence or suchlike, then you can have it sent to my bedside by one of the orderlies.”
My hand closed on the key. “I hope I’m not wrong about this, sir.”
“Me too,” George said softly. “Me too.”
“I won’t be long.”
I opened the curtain. The key was hard against my palm, digging into the flesh. Mr. Chamberlain was still going on, but no one seemed to be listening now. They had heard it all before.
A FAMILY HISTORY
Sailing to Egypt in the spring of 1798, General Bonaparte and his army passed within two miles of the English fleet, northeast of Malta in the middle of the night. What would have happened if Horatio Nelson had set a different course and had captured his enemy at sea?
Of course everything would have changed, instantly and for the better. Its revolution unchecked, France would have become a paradise on Earth, where free men and women raised their eyes from the dirt and stood up straight as if for the first time. Pigs would have learned to speak, donkeys to fly.
Colors would have been brighter, smells sweeter. The weather would improve. God would smile on France and all the French dominions. In June of 1815, gentle breezes would caress the empty fields of Waterloo. A system of high pressure would extend to the New World, and a midsummer hurricane would not rip apart the small, vulnerable French towns of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.
It would not destroy the farmhouse of Fran?ois and Marie Louise de Fontenelle in Pointe a la Hache, a sliver of land between the swamp and the Mississippi River. It would not orphan their children, Amelie and Lucien, and force them to abandon the only home they knew and ride north along the makeshift levees from which, years before, they had hailed the flotilla of barges carrying General Bonaparte to New Orleans, when he took up his duties there as governor.
Disconsolate, the two orphans would not have found refuge with an aunt and uncle on the Rue des Dryades in
