Blue-Eyed Stranger, page 12
“Can I Skype you this evening?” he said instead. “This village seems like a really fast-paced place. I need to keep in touch with the news.”
Billy coloured up. He ducked his head, but Martin had already caught the smile and been charmed. “I don’t . . . I’m not very good at chatting.”
“That’s okay. I’m not great at it either, to tell the truth. But we could have the window open while we do other stuff, and it would be like we were together. I wouldn’t want to go to bed without wishing you goodnight.”
Tipping his now-red face into his hands, Billy chuckled. “Well, if you really would like that.”
“I really would.”
Over the next few weeks, Martin sat through five job interviews, doing his best to be charming, professional, interesting, personable, trustworthy, and dynamic. The rest of the time he staved off his feelings of despair and inadequacy by researching ancient dance and music along with Billy. They emailed almost constantly, phoned two or three times a day, and Martin found himself spending the whole day just waiting for Billy to get on Skype so he could see his pixelated face. Their Skype sessions slowly expanded from five minutes before bedtime to the whole evening. Skimping on his meals to save up for petrol so that they could spend the weekends together, Martin felt hopeful, blessed, job situation notwithstanding.
The Scottish show went well. Even the rain stopped after the first day, letting him pack everything away dry. He enjoyed it more for not being exhausted from work, but he didn’t like being so far away from Billy. When he cut short time spent around the fire in the evenings so that he could spend it just chatting to Billy instead over the phone, it began to really dawn on him that he had it bad.
Edith had an Anglo-Saxon hearpe, which she had bought in a flush of love and enthusiasm and had never learned to play, chiefly because nobody knew how it had been played in the first place. They had no music for it, and no one was available to teach her. In his new enthusiasm for all things musical, Martin borrowed the instrument from her and took it home with him. He’d hoped to find at least a couple of offers for job interviews in his email folder when he got back, if not an actual offer of employment, but he got none. New relationships and . . . love . . . aside, that was ever so slightly crushing. So he fled from it by taking the hearpe to show to Billy before the engine of his car had barely had time to get cool.
“It’s a kind of lyre?” Billy asked, turning it in his hands with the practical reverence of a musician. Edith had handled it as if it would bite; she was always very timid. Billy held it the way he held his violin, with just the right pressure for the thin wood of its sounding board. Confident but gentle, sure as the way in which he handled Martin. Once he had thought of the comparison, Martin had to grin. Billy touched him like a musical instrument—like a thing that gave joy.
“The Saxons called it a harp,” he said, noticing that the depth of the instrument, which had always seemed ridiculously slim, was not actually much less than that of a violin. “Manuscripts show that it’s plucked or strummed with one hand, while the other hand comes through the hole there at the top and blocks off the strings to make chords.”
Manuscripts showed King David, from the Bible, holding the thing upright, the bottom of the body cradled in his lap, the thin curved arch of the top against his chest. Billy, however, positioned it like a guitar, sideways across his knees. He fiddled with the chords and the tuning for a while, and then launched into a rendition of “All You Need Is Love,” with a strummed accompaniment.
“You know what?” Ruefully, Martin stirred the pan of spaghetti they had put on for their dinner. “Just about everyone in the society has tried to play that thing, and failed. I don’t know why we never thought of giving it to an actual musician before. None of us are, you see.”
“It’s hard to play a musical instrument that nobody knows how to play, particularly if you’ve never played any other instrument in your life.” Billy had now angled the top of the harp up to meet his chin, was curled over it, as if it and he were whispering secrets to each other. Martin thought perhaps they were.
“Do you like it? As a form of instrument it lasted for a very long time. Thousands of years. Things like that have been found in the pyramids. And then it reaches the year one thousand and disappears utterly, never to be seen again. It seems a shame, you know, that something so ancient should die out so completely.”
“I do like it.” Billy gave a twisted smile, as though he knew what obsolescence felt like. “There’s no doubt it’s limited, but then so is a single-row melodeon. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad instrument; it just means you have to pick the right music. Did you find any?”
“I did.” Martin offered him the printouts of the very few tunes he had found from the ninth century. “What do you think?”
Billy looked through them, set the one called The Wanderer on top of the pile, and began to half pluck, half strum the notes, punctuating them with taps on the soundboard that made the lyre resonate like a drum. Already it sounded more like music to Martin than anything he’d heard a member of the society play.
“Can you get me any more of these? I know a couple of guitarists who could pick them up easily enough.”
Martin sighed. “This is the only one in the society, and I can’t afford to buy any more at the moment. The group is having to sub me for petrol as it is.” He thought about the session they had attended—the violin and the pipes together, the very different instruments complementing each other. “But I can get hold of a bone whistle, a set of Jorvik panpipes, a kantele, and plenty of finger cymbals, if you can find anyone to play them.”
Billy beamed up at him from his seat by the kitchen table. “Christine plays the whistle, bone or otherwise. Matt plays the harmonica, so he’d probably be at home with the panpipes. And I bet Annette, our fiddler, could adapt to the kantele, particularly if she was allowed to bow it. What about dancers, though? The Griffins are generally up for anything, but I don’t see your hard men of the Dark Ages being keen to try experimental dance.”
Martin thought about Rolf in his oily gambeson that reeked of pig fat, the world’s largest sword hanging from one side of his belt and the world’s largest axe on the other. Rolf in full chain mail, learning to caper. “Yes,” he agreed, quailing inside a little at the memory of Brian’s comments about the biscop—what all right-minded men would think of dancing when you could be fighting. “Rolf might think it was a bit girly.”
Billy flourished his fork disapprovingly, but he laughed. “He doesn’t want to say that around us. Graham’d be insulted anyone thought dancing wasn’t manly, and Margery’d be insulted anyone thought ‘girly’ was a bad thing. But speaking of the Griffins, most of them will be down the pub this evening. Do you want to come?”
Martin would have been happy to spend this evening as he had most other evenings in Billy’s presence, curled up together on the sofa, watching the History Channel or the occasional cooking programme or movie, but the idea that Billy was beginning to integrate him into the rest of his life gave him such a buzz of proud joy that he didn’t hesitate to say yes. So they flung on light jackets, and on a whim Martin packed up the hearpe in its sheepskin case and brought it too.
It was a warm Friday night in June, and sunlight still slanted past the beeches that bordered the village green. The Griffins were already there when they arrived, sitting outside the pub at a couple of rough picnic tables shaded by green and white umbrellas. It somehow had not occurred to Martin that they would remember him, but when they did he kicked himself mentally and all his inner parts clenched up cold as he realized they might figure it out.
“Martin!” Annette shuffled up and indicated the bench next to her. Out of her greatcoat and veil, she was a slim woman in her forties, with dark-brown hair speckled with silver strands. Sallow skinned, she wore no makeup at all and had a thin, pointed nose that put him in mind of a Concorde. “What a pleasant surprise. I didn’t know you’d kept in touch.”
“We’ve been—” said Billy, and Martin was so terrified he was going to say “going out” that he jumped in and shut Billy down hard.
“We thought it would be fun to try to reconstruct Viking music and dance. Maybe get a demonstration together for one of the shows this year.”
Billy’s smile went out like a snuffed candle, and he felt dreadful about that, but he couldn’t . . . He reached out and squeezed Billy’s knee reassuringly under the cover of the table. Billy gave him a disappointed look, but then sighed, remembering, perhaps, their conversation at the show where they had met, agreeing to let it slide for now.
He went inside to buy a round of drinks in apology, and when he came back carrying a tray of clinking pint glasses, he found Billy explaining the harp to Annette.
She took her pint with a nod of thanks and a smile. “I was just saying, do you know the ‘Abbots Bromley Horn Dance’?”
“I . . . uh.” He sank down on the bench next to Billy. Billy’s shoulders were relaxed again and his face smooth and engaged. Martin’s consciousness of how terrible a person he was ebbed away enough for him to appreciate the warm summer evening, the windmill behind the Georgian houses across the empty road, and the cascades of flowers from all the pub’s window boxes. “I don’t know anything about dancing at all.”
“We could use—” Billy began, and Matt cut him off as though he had not spoken at all.
“It should be well up your street. It’s been danced every year in an unbroken tradition in Abbots Bromley since before records began.”
“It’s been my experience,” Martin suggested—carefully, because he didn’t know how Matt would take to his claiming any kind of intellectual equality—“that records don’t tend to begin until the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Which would still make it too modern for us.”
“Ah, but the thing is,” Annette jumped in while Matt fiddled with his phone, “the dance is done with each dancer carrying a rack of antlers, which are stored in the church for the rest of the year, and someone, some anthropologist, or the like, dated the antlers with that radiocarbon dating thing.”
“Oh yes, I heard about that,” said Billy eagerly. “They were—”
“A thousand years old!” Matt finished, triumphantly holding out his phone.
They leaned together over its square surface, Martin with a hand on Billy’s shoulder, ostensibly for balance, actually intended to reassure him that he was there, that he saw and heard Billy just fine, and he was sorry about the crassness of everyone else.
The sun made the little figures on the phone hard to pick out, but the tune rose from it as faint and melancholy as the smell of the trailing verbena above his head.
“I bet I could get something similar to that.” Annette tucked the hearpe into her body and plucked an approximation of the haunting melody. It sounded even eerier under her hands.
“Well it’s an easy enough dance.” Matt looked up at his onlookers. “Let’s try it.”
Billy, Matt, redheaded Graham, and the white-haired Boy all perked up at the suggestion. “Colin’s inside at the bar,” said the Boy. “I’ll get him. But that’s still only five.”
Billy nudged Martin with his knee, and Martin acknowledged that he had a lot to do to make it up to his springbok. He cleared his throat. “Well, if it’s new to you too, I’ll have less of a disadvantage. How about teaching me?”
The dance began simply enough. The six of them lined up in two lines of three, came together to meet in the centre, heads bowed as though they were stags clashing their antlers. Then a do-si-do manoeuvre he recognised from supervising some of McKay’s country dance lessons. But then the set burst apart, turning first into a spiral and then a procession, and that was mind-bogglingly tricky to work out.
By the time the light was leaving the sky, they had it cracked. They danced it through once completely, while the occasional passing car slowed so the drivers could get a proper eyeful. It was probably the most English thing Martin had ever done—morris dancing on the village green in front of the pub, while the drinkers who had come out from the bar to watch heckled them good-humouredly, and the ducks on the village pond quacked out of time with the thin fragile music of the harp.
He sat down again exhilarated and breathless, and flung an arm around Billy’s shoulders, trying to keep it friendly looking while giving it a little private squeeze. “That was awesome! A thousand-year-old dance. Just imagine how much better it could be with everyone in early medieval kit and an authentic band. You can bet our rival society doesn’t have anything like this. And there’s nothing like a desire to one-up that lot to motivate the lads.”
Billy smiled, perhaps at his enthusiasm or perhaps at the touch on his shoulder. “I’ve been thinking too.” His voice and face were raised, as though he meant to say this to the whole side. Martin had a sudden flash of fear that maybe the near-hug had given him the idea that it was okay for the Griffins to know, and he was going to announce their private business to everyone.
He dropped the shoulder clasp at once and linked his hands around his beer mug. Evening midges were out now, tickling along his cheeks and down his back. Alternatively, the crawling sensation might be fear.
“Matt, I wanted to . . .” Billy began.
But Matt was talking to Graham, and Annette was talking to the Boy. Colin had disappeared again to watch the football on the pub’s big-screen TV, and no one was listening to Billy. Not listening to him again. Still not listening.
It might be shooting himself in the foot, but Martin didn’t currently care. He hated to see Billy treated like he didn’t exist. “Matt?” he said, touching the guy’s elbow to get his attention. “Billy had something to say.”
Billy pinked up across the nose at that, his smile practically glowing, and Martin felt so proud he was almost prepared to be outed then and there.
“You remember when we were dancing at the Spread Eagle in Stretham?”
Matt sat down with a flicker of gaze towards Martin that he couldn’t quite parse. Annette and the Boy turned in their places to listen.
“There were lots of sides in black face, and that black lady had to drive through the middle of all of us in her car?”
“I remember.” Annette looked at Martin too, uncomfortable, a little guilty. “She looked so threatened, poor woman. She must have thought we were mocking her.”
Martin caught his breath. Well, well, it took a while but things percolated under the surface, sometimes.
“I know we say, ‘It’s authentic,’” Billy went on, his voice apologetic but firm. “But we’ve already mucked around with the kit—you wouldn’t see any nineteenth-century plough boys wearing top hats and raven feathers and steampunk goggles. So why not muck around with the face paint too?”
He turned to Martin almost fiercely, in a strange, exalted mood, as if he didn’t know whether he was thrilled or terrified. “Would it still be an insult if our faces had red and black patterns? Like the red arrow we have down our spines? Because then it would still be a disguise, but it just wouldn’t be offensive.”
Martin was struck speechless. He had been expecting the dismissal of his desires and fears, coercion to see things their way, to stop making trouble. That was how his own family expressed love after all—forcing him into things he didn’t want. This was so much better.
As he dropped his face into his hands to try to conceal how moved he was, Annette covered for him with what seemed deliberate grace. “I could have red roses on top of the black. I could have a face full of red roses. How marvellously strange!”
“Boy?” Matt asked.
Billy leaned in to whisper, “Are you okay?” in Martin’s ear. “I thought you’d be happy. Did I get it wrong?”
“The whole thing’s made up in my opinion,” the Boy grumbled. “Red, black, half and half, I don’t care.”
“I’m so . . .” Martin murmured, trying to find a way to say how touched he was. But he couldn’t manage it here where he was being observed. “Can we go home now? I want to kiss you.”
“Graham?”
“Rather fancy being Rorschach, actually. So yes, I’m for it.”
“Well then, we’ll make that a new rule,” said Matt with a brisk air. “If that’s better, Martin?”
“It really is.” Martin stood up and offered his hand for a handshake, not knowing a less sentimental way of saying You’ve justified my faith in human nature. “Thank you.”
“And thank you,” he said later, as he and Billy turned into the shade of the churchyard yews on the way back to Billy’s house, and he pulled Billy into a long, melting kiss. “You have no idea what a weight that is off my mind. You’re the best man alive, Billy Wright. I hope you know that. I’m going to try to say it often enough that you never forget.”
The twentieth of June, a Friday, and Billy woke with the knowledge that it was going to be a good day. When he drew back his blackout curtains, it was to deep-blue sky with a few fluffy clouds. The wheat was ripening, and the golden flowers of the oilseed rape fields were beginning to fall, green fields becoming yellow, yellow fields turning green in a slow, fresh seesaw of colour. The roses were out in the hedgerows, and under one of the churchyard yews a small red fox sat, licking its paw and glancing up to meet his eye when he slid the window open to let in cool sunshine.
He was light today. The muscles of his legs were springy, the inside of his chest was free of lead. He thought he knew what Martin meant about the joys of taking chain mail off. Depression was a heavy thing, but on the days when it wasn’t weighing him down, he felt like he could fly.
Martin didn’t cure the depression. Billy still had good days and bad, and during the week, when Martin wasn’t there, it was sometimes all he could do to put on clothes, make it to the sofa with a box of cereal and a cup of tea, snag his laptop, and browse eBay all day long while waiting for Martin to Skype. But there was something about the man that made even those days easier. Even the worst of his doubts could not convince him that Martin was only pretending to care about him.
