Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

‘It was when Simon St John was laying down the cello parts for Alien,’ Lol said, ‘and I said I’d like something pastoral but moody. So Simon starts playing this lovely, sorrowful tune. And there it was. Hills… real hills. Texture. Dull day. Low cloud. And some diffuse, underlying emotion. Elgar’s Cello Concerto.’

‘Wow,’ Merrily said.

No particular reason for Lol not to know about Elgar. His own dead muse, Nick Drake, had, after all, been inspired by the likes of Delius and Ravel.

But Elgar had always seemed so Establishment. Hadn’t he been made Master of the King’s Musick? Hadn’t he composed all these marches and patriotic anthems? Hadn’t he written Pomp and Circumstance, whose very title…

‘Misunderstood,’ Lol said. ‘Most of his life people were getting him wrong. Even his appearance… Looked like an army officer. Or a country squire. Misleading.’

‘You mean you like Elgar?’

‘Son of a piano tuner with a shop in Worcester. Self-taught. Lived for nine years in Hereford where he employed his daughter’s white rabbit as a consultant because his wife wouldn’t let him have a dog. Kept trying to invent things. Had a home laboratory. Seems to have blown it up, once. What’s not to like?’

Merrily drove a little faster. You slept with someone – albeit rarely for a whole night – and you thought you knew everything about him.

‘And even when he was famous,’ Lol said, ‘he was often mentally, emotionally and spiritually… totally messed up.’

She glanced at him, sitting there with his hands on his knees, watching the dark, burnished landscape. How much common ground was there in the creative landscapes of classical composers and guys who cobbled together, albeit sometimes brilliantly, four-minute songs on their guitars?

‘He smoke?’

Thinking about Hannah and the strong tobacco.

‘Lifelong,’ Lol said.

‘What about women? Did he… like women?’

‘A lot. His wife was nine years older and a lot higher up the social scale than him. Her dad was a general or something. She helped him and encouraged him. It seems to have been a good marriage.’

‘But?’

Some people suggest he had affairs with younger women. It’s more likely to have been just… crushes.’

‘Where’d you learn all this?’

‘Couple of biographies.’

‘It’s just… you’ve just never mentioned him. You’ve never once mentioned Elgar.’

‘Well, you don’t, do you?’ Lol said. ‘He’s just too… too there. Part of the tourist trail. Every few miles, another sign saying Elgar Route. Nobody notices any more. He’s official. He’s a thousand people waving Union Jacks at the last night of the Proms. Which is why it’s so interesting how ambivalent he was about all that.’

Lol looked out of the side window towards a round hop kiln spiking the sunset like the tower of a Disneyland castle.

‘In fact, he was a romantic, a dreamer. And the landscape was everything. This landscape. When he was dying, he-’

He broke off, pretending to correct a twist in his seat belt, Merrily slipping him a glance.

‘Lol?’

‘Sorry?’

‘When he was dying what?’

‘Bit of whimsy, that’s all. Maybe not a good time.’

Merrily sighed.

‘OK,’ Lol said. ‘He’s lying there. He knows this is it. Coming up to the big moment he famously orchestrated in The Dream of Gerontius .’

‘That’s the one about the guy who’s dying and what happens afterwards? I’m sorry, I ought to know. I feel so…’

‘Heavenly choirs, conversations with angels, stodgy theology, heavy-duty dark night of the soul.’

‘Right.’

‘Anyway, inches from death, Elgar – I suspect – is trying hard not to think about the implications of all that. And Gerontius goes on for ever, while the Cello Concerto comes in at less than half an hour.’

‘Your kind of music.’

‘Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was checking out Elgar-’

‘No, you’ve every right- Just… carry on.’

‘So there’s a friend at the bedside. And Elgar beckons him over and feebly whistles the main theme from the Cello Concerto.’

Lol began to whistle softly, this rolling tune that rose and fell and rose and then fell steeply… and the road swooped down among long fields and hop yards under a sheet-metal sky warmed by bars of electric crimson.

‘This isn’t going to be a joke, is it?’ Merrily said.

‘No, but it has a punchline. Elgar says to the guy, “If ever you’re walking on the Malvern Hills and hear that, don’t be frightened

… it’s only me.”’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Only me, huh?’

‘For what it’s worth,’ Lol said, ‘he didn’t mention the bike.’

Animation

Just when you very much needed to talk to your daughter…

MUM. EIRION’S COMING THROUGH EARLY. WILL PICK ME UP. WE NEEDED TO TALK. E. WILL GIVE ME LIFT TO SCHOOL. SEE U TONITE.

LOVE, J.

Seven-thirty, Merrily had come stumbling downstairs in her towelling robe and the note was on the kitchen table, suspiciously close to where she’d left her own message yesterday for Jane.

Eirion and Jane needed to talk? We need to talk. Do you want to talk about this? What an ominous cliche talk had become, thanks to TV soaps. It meant cracks, it meant falling apart.

Not that Merrily hadn’t been conscious of a reduced intensity in the Jane/Eirion department. Not so long ago, one of them would phone every night, maybe in the morning, too – on the landline from home, Jane having gone off mobiles because they fried your brain and texting was for little kids.

That was something else: of late, Jane had become kind of Luddite about certain aspects of modern life. A year before leaving school, feeling threatened by change and destruction – was Lol right about that?

And the biggest change was the one affecting her relationship with Eirion – a year ahead of her and about to become a student. Big gap between a university student and a schoolkid. The gap between a child and an adult.

Nearly a year ago, Eirion had been sitting at this very kitchen table, on a summer morning like this, humbly confessing to Merrily that he and her daughter had had sex the night before. Both of them virgins. It had been almost touching.

Merrily put the kettle on, made some toast. Hard not to like Eirion, but liking your daughter’s boyfriend was a sure sign, everybody said, that it wouldn’t last. In an ideal world, Jane would have met Eirion in a few years’ time, when she’d been around a little. But society wasn’t programmed to construct happy endings. Relationships were assembled like furniture kits, and everybody knew how long they lasted.

The sun was swelling in the weepy mist over Cole Hill, evaporating the dew on the meadow. The mystical ley recharging. But Jane was stepping off it, moving safely out of shot.

‘Oh, come on, Jane!’

Eirion lowering the digital camera. A Nikon, naturally. He’d shot the view from the top of Cole Hill and the low mound on the way to the church, the hummock that Jane was convinced was an unexcavated Bronze Age round barrow. And then they’d walked another half-mile and crossed a couple of fields to find the prehistoric standing stone, half-hidden by a hedge and only three feet high but that was as good as you got in this part of the county. Fair play, he’d taken pictures of them all and he hadn’t moaned. Until now.

‘ No.’ Jane flung an arm across her face. ‘For the last time, this is not about me, it’s about-’

‘Yeah, yeah, the balance and harmony of the village and the perpetuation of the legacy of the greatest man ever to come out of Hereford. But I have to tell you, Jane – speaking as a person only a few short years away from a glittering career in the media – that a shot of you, with your firm young breasts straining that flimsy summer-weight school blouse, will be worth at least a thousand extra hits.’