Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

Dominic was astonished. He hadn’t noticed this incalculable girl of his following any significant glances, and yet it seemed she knew very well what was going on. He wished he did. There was certainly something, and there was a tension in the air that threatened more; yet nobody else seemed to have noticed anything. Maybe all the girls took that declaration to themselves, and applauded it accordingly; and it was just possible – wasn’t it? – that that applied to Tossa, too.

“Now hold your horses a minute,” beamed Dickie Meurice, fanning down the applause. “We haven’t finished yet. Oh, yes, I know that’s all we promised you, but we’ve still got a card up our sleeve, you’ll find. Some of you know it already, but to most of you it’ll be great news. Do you know who’s been modest enough to come along to this course as a student? She’s right there among you at this moment, maybe some of you talked to her at dinner and never realised. Liri… Liri Palmer! It’s no use trying to hide back there. I know where you are.” She hadn’t moved, not even a muscle of her disdainful face. She didn’t want to be haled out of her anonymity, but she certainly wasn’t hiding even from the crack of doom.

“Yes, folks, that’s the whole secret. Liri Palmer is here among us. There she sits! Now you give her a big hand, and maybe she’ll surrender.”

He was growing by the minute, expanding to fill the twenty-one inch screen that wasn’t there, to dominate the cameras, the emotions and the events of this evening. This was what he’d been waiting for.

“Come along, Liri, don’t cheat us. You can’t blame us for wanting you. Come up here where you belong, and let us hear from you.”

Every head had turned by this time, even the slowest of them had located her, even those who knew nothing about her had identified her by the glutinous stares of the others. Someone began to applaud, and all the rest took it up like a rising wave.

“Come on, Liri, we’re all waiting just for you.”

She rose from her chair, but only to gain a hearing. “I came to listen, you must excuse me. And I haven’t got my guitar down here.”

“Lucien will lend you his guitar, I’m sure. Come on, you can’t disappoint everyone. Lucien, don’t just sit there, help me out. If you ask her, I’m sure she’ll come.”

Lucien Galt was seen for once out of countenance, and that in itself was astonishing. He sat shaken and mute, staring across the array of hopeful faces to where Liri stood braced and annoyed, her brows drawn down in a formidable scowl. It was Lucien who flushed and stammered.

“Yes, Liri, please do. You’d be giving everyone so much pleasure.”

There could have been no milder invitation, but what happened next was more like the formal acceptance of a challenge.

“Very well,” said Liri abruptly, “since you ask me.” And she walked fiercely up the gangway between the goggling fans, and stepped up on to the concert dais in the great window-embrasure, where the artists sat. She took the offered guitar, sat down on the forward edge of Dickie Meurice’s table, and stroked the strings, frowning. There was a moment of absolute silence, while she seemed to forget they existed, and only to be gathering herself for a private outburst. Then the whole drawing-room shook to the shuddering chords she fetched out of Lucien’s instrument, and she lifted her head and poised her silver-pure entry with piercing accuracy, like a knife in the heart:

“Black, black, black, is the colour of my true-love’s heart!

His tongue is like a poisoned dart.

The coldest eyes and the lewdest hands…

I hate the ground whereon he stands!

“I hate my love, yet well he knows.

I love the ground whereon he goes.

And if my love no more I see

No one shall have his company!

“Black, black, black, is the colour of my true-love’s heart…”

An achingly sweet voice, so rending in its sweetness as to corrode like an acid when she used it like this, as if all the frightening possibilities of her nature, for good or evil, could be molten in the furnace of her feeling, and pour out in that fine-spun thread of sound to purify or poison. She sang with such superb assurance that they all accepted it as the only rightness, only realising afterwards how she had changed words to her own purposes, and torn the heart out of the song to leave it the antithesis of what it was meant to be. As if she turned the coin of love to show hate engraven in an almost identical design.

The silence was unnerving, but it did not unnerve her. She stood up, and the applause began, noisily and violently, with almost guilty fervour, to cover the pause which should not have been there. She laid down the guitar on the table.

“It doesn’t sing properly for me. I’ll use my own tomorrow, if you don’t mind.” There was an empty chair behind the semi-circle of artists; she slid by them and took it, abdicating from public notice before they had stopped approving her, and giving them no acknowledgement.

The incident was over before half of those present fully grasped that there had been an incident. But with the end of the applause the numbness wore off, and the shock reached them all.

In the front row old Miss Southern, as innocent at seventy as she had been at seventeen, leaned anxiously to her neighbour. She had come to this course in the hope of hearing again “Early one morning.” “The Oak and the Ash.” “Barbara Allen,” and all the songs she had been taught at school – sometimes in bowdlerised versions! – and nobody could put anything over on her where the canon was concerned.

“But she got it wrong,” she whispered. “It’s hair. ‘Black is the colour of my true-love’s hair.’ Do you think we ought to tell her?”

“No!” hissed her neighbour, appalled. “For heavens’ sake!”

“But perhaps she got it from one of these degraded variants, you know. I learned it at school. It’s