T. Boyle - Water Music

Ned softened. "I did," he admitted.

The man held up the instrument. "You know what this is?"

"A fife?"

"Clarinet," said the man.

Ned wanted to know how the sound was made. The man showed him. Could he learn to play? Ned asked. The man stared down at Ned's hand, then asked him if he was hungry.

♦ ♦ ♦

Prentiss Barrenboyne owned a block of houses in Mayfair. He was in his mid-fifties. He'd never been married. His mother, a fierce and acerbic empiricist with whom he'd lived all his life, had died a month earlier. He brought the boy home that night and let him sleep in the coal cellar. In the morning he instructed his housekeeper to wash and feed him. It was a foot in the door. By the end of the week Ned Rise had become a habit.

Officially he was established in the house as a servant, but Barrenboyne, won over by the lad’s ingenuous and consuming enthusiasm for the clarinet, came to treat him more like a member of the family. He bought him clothes, gave him milk and chops and drippings, taught him to read and how to balance a teacup on his knee. There were trips to the concert hall, the theater, the shipyard and the zoo. A tutor was engaged. Ned acquired the rudiments of orthography, geometry, piscatology, a phrase or two of French, and a profound loathing for the Classics. He was no Eliza Doolittle. His progress — if the bimonthly absorption of a date or sum merits the appellation — was as leisurely as the drift of continents. The tutor was beside himself. He looked at Ned’s face and saw the face of a wiseacre. He accused him of drinking ink and flogged his backside as he flogged his memory. Ned bore it with patience and humility. There were no tantrums, no fits, no funks. He did what was expected of him, sang hosannas to his redeemer and polished his prospects. He knew a good thing when he saw one.

Seven years passed. In France they were sending out invitations to a beheading, across the Atlantic they were knocking down forests and bludgeoning Indians, in the East End they nabbed the misogynist known as “The Monster” who for two years had been goring women’s backsides in the street, and in Mayfair Ned Rise was eating three meals a day, sleeping in a bed, bathing at least once a fortnight, and stepping into clean underwear each and every morning. Seven years. The memory of the streets had begun to fade. He’d never eaten offal, witnessed perversion, theft, arson and worse, never huddled over ash pits with ice crusting his lashes and a cold fist clenching at his lungs — not Ned Rise, pride of the Barrenboynes.

Over the years Ned and his guardian had grown as close as palate and reed, wedded by their love for music. A week after the old man took him in the music lessons began. His face and crown suffused with blood, the hoary mutton chops bristling, Barrenboyne grinned his way into the room one night, a wooden case in hand. Inside was an ancient C clarinet, the one he himself had played as a boy. He handed it to Ned. Within the year Ned was playing passably in spite of his handicap, capable of sight-reading practically anything by the following summer, and in five years’ time proficient enough to accompany his mentor to the park for his public debut. They sat there on the very bench on which Ned had first seen the old man, he with his C clarinet, Barrenboyne with his B-flat, and played airs from Estienne Rogers’ tunebook. People gathered round, tapped their feet, swayed their bodies, while Mozart, dying in Vienna, composed his great Requiem Mass. Ned rose to the occasion.

♦ ♦ ♦

One morning, just before dawn, Barrenboyne stepped into Ned’s room and shook him by the shoulder. “Get up, Ned,” he whispered. “I need you.” His voice trembled. His face and jowls were redder than Ned had ever seen them, red as tomatoes, flags, the jackets of the King’s Hussars. Ned was nineteen. “What’s the matter?” he asked. No answer. Birds began to whistle from beyond the windows. The old man was breathing like a locomotive. “Get dressed and meet me out front,” he said.

Barrenboyne was waiting at the gate. He was dressed in the suit he’d bought for his mother’s funeral, beaver top hat, silk surtout. Under his arm, a leather case, the rippled skin of some exotic reptile. A new clarinet? thought Ned. He’d never seen it before. They walked at a brisk pace: through Grosvenor Square, down Brook Street, across Park Lane and then into the soft green demesne of the park itself. The place was deserted. Fog, like milk in an atomizer, hung low over the wet grass. A crow jeered from a treebranch. “You know what a second is?” Barrenboyne said.

It was a slap in the face. “A second? You’re not—?”

The old man took hold of his sleeve. “Just take it easy now,” he said. “You’re a grown man, Ned Rise. Prove it.”

Two men — figures out of the gloom — were waiting for them by the edge of the Serpentine. One of them was a blackamoor, short, fat as a sow. He wore a feather in his hat, doeskin breeches, lisle hose and an iridescent waistcoat. A real buck. Barrenboyne strode up to them, bowed, and presented the leather case. It was seventy degrees at least, but the negro was shivering. His second, who kept inhaling snuff from an enamel box and sneezing into his handkerchief, took the leather case and opened it, between sneezes, for the negro. The negro selected a pistol. There was liquor on his breath. Then the sneezer offered the case to Barrenboyne. The old man lifted the weapon from its case as gently as if he were unpacking his clarinet for a breezy concert on the green. It began to drizzle.

The sneezer was snuffing snuff in a paroxysm of nervous energy, snapping open the box, pinching a nostril, gasping and slobbering into his handkerchief, all the while jerking his limbs and shuddering like an epileptic. The negro dropped his gun. The drizzle turned to rain. Barrenboyne’s wattles began to vibrate as if he were exploring the upper register of the clarinet, and Ned found himself trembling in sympathetic response. Finally the sneezer managed to walk off twenty paces and set the principals on their marks. “Ready!” he bawled. Two harsh metallic clicks echoed over the field, one in imitation of the other. “Take aim!” Barrenboyne and the negro slowly raised their arms, as if saluting one another or taking part in the opening movement of a revolutionary new dance routine. Ned could picture them, jetéing over the greensward to leap through one another’s arms. “Ffff—” came the aborted command, tailed by a septum-wrenching sneeze. There was a flash and a snap. Birds cried out at the far end of the field. The negro’s pistol was smoking and his eyes were still buried in the crook of his elbow. Barrenboyne lay on the ground. Dead as a pharaoh.

♦ LAYING IT ON THE LINE ♦

Dawn. The sun breaks over the Sahel like a cracked egg and takes up where it left off the day before — scalding, incinerating, searing the life from everything within its compass. Carrion sniffers and night-roving reptiles creep back to their dens, and the big battered Nubian vultures sail out over the plain to check out the leavings. Rocks begin to expand, stunted shrubs dig deeper into the earth, mimosas fold up their leaves like parasols. By eight in the morning the horizon is shirred.

Mungo Park lies motionless on his back, watching a millipede trace a series of blind circles across the roof of his tent. Since the night of his “attempted escape” things have gone hard on him. Six men now doze outside his tent each night, and his food and water ration has been cut by half. It begins to occur to him that he may not make it after all, that he might just lie here and waste away, dauntless discoverer of the interior walls of a Moorish tent. He will join Ledyard, Lucas and Houghton in the ranks of failure and ignominy. He will never again lay eyes on Ailie, nor his mother, nor the bonny banks of the Yarrow. His bones will dry and crack and fall to dust under the alien sun and the wheeling strange colossi of misplaced constellations. He begins to feel daunted.