Gavin Corbett: Green Glowing Skull

‘I would never make judgements of that nature about a person.’

‘But these pretty things … What you see about you are monetary investments.’

He leaned forward in a manner that suggested he was about to say something very important, though the lower part of his face wrestled with a smile.

‘You’re not a — hoo hoo hoo — thief, are you? You’re not one of these drag-racing hooligan bucks who would twist an implement inside an elderly man and rob his things?’

‘No, Mister Kennedy-Logan. I have come here to be taught how to sing.’

‘Shall I tell you what is the most valuable of all the items in this room? It’s those curtains.’

He pointed to dark red drapes, drawn across, on the end wall.

‘You wouldn’t think to look at them, would you? They’re from Turkey, from the early nineteenth century. They look better tied back in the wings, I feel about it, where the gilt threading picks up the light, but they add an element of drama to the nightly act of blocking out the evening.’

He remained leaning forward, with a slump, as his dog trilled enquiringly and tried to catch his eye.

‘But I do not sleep in this room, so it’s an act best described as a ritual, then.’

At this moment Rickard felt that he could have risen from his chair and walked out of the room and apartment undetected, such was the completeness of the trance that the old man appeared to be in. Instead, in a life-changing intervention, he said, ‘Mister Kennedy-Logan, I am booked in for a singing lesson tonight, yes?’

‘Booked …’

The old man grasped, peevishly, thin air, as if he might have found an appointment book there.

‘Singing lesson … Yes. Do you have a song that you could sing so that I can gauge the quality of your voice as it is?’

‘I do,’ said Rickard. ‘I usually like to warm up with “Come Off It, Eileen”.’

‘Good choice. Not too challenging. Away you go.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Unaccompanied?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right. Here you have it, so. Ahem .’

Rickard stood up, cracked back his shoulders, and began:

‘With a nerve to match her rosy cheeks

And a cheek to pique my nerves,

My brazen Eileen, mo cushla …’

‘Stop there, stop there.’

The old man lifted a hand, his forefinger extended; and he was chewing, seeming to be assessing Rickard’s efforts with more than one sense.

‘You have very good vibrato.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rickard, still frozen mid-pose, his arms stretched around an invisible keg at his chest.

‘And more. And more.’

Rickard laughed, in astonished gratitude.

‘Yes. You have quite a range of gifts.’

‘I’ve been told that I have excellent control in the middle to upper register, if only you would give me the chance to show you.’

‘Oh yes … control … middle to upper register … I can tell that, I can tell. No, you’re ready.’

‘When you say “ready” …?’

‘I could do with a young man like yourself, and a voice like yours, pure and not so fraught with the years.’

‘I’m not as young as you think,’ said Rickard, with a suddenness and even a venom that surprised him, his arms dropping by his side. For some reason the use of the word ‘young’ felt like an attack on his very sense of himself. His reaction seemed to jolt the old man.

‘Do you not consider yourself young?’

‘I have not considered myself young for many years, even when I was young. Even the pop vocalists I admired when I was young were people who sounded old, like Kaarst Karst of Kaarst Karst and the Iron-filers.’

‘When did you technically cease to be young?’

‘I could last credibly claim to be young five years ago when I was in the middle of my thirties.’

‘You’re young in my book. It’s unusual for someone of your age to be interested in the old-style tenor singing. Your soul may creak but, I tell you, it’s exciting for my ears to hear a virgin voice like yours. You should revel in the light voice that you have, your spry and tinkling tone; do not be after some character that you do not possess. You would be ideal for a project I have in mind. I and the man you met in the club last night, Clive, wish to form an Irish tenor trio and we are on the lookout for a third person. We will play the front parlours and concert venues of this city, whose people’s appetite for Irish ballads and art songs and the singing styles of John McCormack and Joseph “The Silver Tenor” White I believe is dormant but has not disappeared.’

Rickard was still brooding over the ‘young’ comment.

‘Mind you,’ the old man went on, looking Rickard up and down, ‘young though you are, it’s not as if you’ll be attracting the attention of the ladies. Your thighs are swollen like upturned bowling skittles and you have hips like a hula hoop and your face looks like it’s been split with a hatchet and has gradually fused back together after many setbacks in a humid region of the world.’

It was an easy decision to make in the end. If Denny Kennedy-Logan could continue to offend him, Rickard would not feel so bad about spending time with the old man and not his parents. The next evening, finding him in the drawing room at the clubhouse again, Rickard said he would join his trio.

They began practising every night in the drawing room, in front of the fire and often in the company of others. In a typical session they talked about programmes for future concerts and considered the suitability of certain songs for future audiences. In Denny’s experience the Anglo audiences did not respond well to ‘Come Out Ye Black and Tans’, and neither did the black audiences; the Jewish audiences did not like the songs that laboured the point about Jesus. Early on Denny suggested that they include in their repertoire arias, bel canto, lieder, zarzuela excerpts and late-eighteenth-century pleasure-garden songs, but this idea was dropped owing to Rickard and Clive’s lack of training in and ignorance of these styles. A good deal of the evenings was spent in reminiscing. Denny and Clive were capable and guilty of great nostalgia. Clive remembered the village and hinterland of his youth, and the Dublin he later escaped to; Denny talked about Dublin — which he called ‘Dovelin’, with three syllables — as it could have been: a Hanseatic outpost, with terraces of tall Billy-gabled houses. But the real Dublin was not so bad, he said; it was where he had learnt to sing, and learnt all the songs that meant the most to him, and it was the city of his father and mother, and the city that gave birth to them: the floral Victorian city; and of the generations preceding them: the stout Georgian city; and of a less-easy-to-define lineage. (Twice in three weeks Rickard listened to Denny tell the story of when, as a young man of seventeen, he was invited to ‘Glena’ by the marsh, the home of John McCormack, to view the body of the tenor-count in repose, and how grand he looked in that cucumber- and lily-scented room in his dark blue papal uniform and his lilac sash, with a medal pinned to his breast and a ceremonial sword by his side, and that surely in such resplendence he had graduated to the ranks of the most exalted heralds.) They spoke of the entertainment that was had in the Theatre Royal on Hawkins Street. Clive bemoaned the day that establishment was razed (which he remembered well, because he’d been there the day that it happened, and he remembered not just the wrecking ball and the clouds of dust but the lament of many voices that came to his mind: Jimmy O’Dea and Maureen Potter and Noel Purcell crying for Dublin in the rare aul’ days and the big American variety stars who had graced the Royal stage down the years and under it all Tommy Dando’s organ playing a dirge). Denny dismissed that version of the Royal as ‘a seedy penny gaff’, and Clive as ‘an old blow-in’, and preferred to talk of the previous Royal on the site, the building that burnt down in 1880, where his great-grandfather had seen Pauline Viardot in Don Giovanni .