The Devil's Harmony, page 7
They had bought two bottles of wine and some Belgian chocolates to take. Dr Purslove said Prosecco was what people liked at the moment, so they had a bottle of that, and then the professor had noticed some very nice Madeira in the wine shop, and remarked that Madeira had been rather forgotten about, and it would make a nicely unusual aperitif. It was a bit unfortunate that Theodore remembered the fruity old Flanders and Swann song about, ‘Have some Madeira, m’dear’, even to the extent of trying out a couple of verses in the taxi. The professor hoped he did not start singing the entire song later on – you could never be sure what Theo might descend to after a few glasses. Still, very likely he would not remember all the verses.
Theodore Purslove, remarking that Pimlico had always been considered rather trendily upmarket and it would be interesting to see Arabella’s flat, thought that between the Prosecco and the Madeira, Ernest might become quite mellow. They might even find out a bit more about Nina and the night of the Epiphany Concert.
‘It looks as if we’re here,’ said the professor, as the taxi drew up in front of a tall old house with a neat row of labelled bells alongside the front door.
‘It does indeed. I see there’s one of those old parks in the square,’ said Dr Purslove. ‘Very nice, too. This looks like the flat.’
‘Don’t drop the wine,’ said Professor Liripine as they clambered out of the taxi.
‘I shan’t. I’m looking forward to our dinner, aren’t you?’ said Dr Purslove. ‘Phin says Arabella’s a very good cook.’
Phin had managed to put in a couple of hours on his current commission for the work on the obscure jazz musician, but the Chopin Library and the “Dark Cadence” were far more alluring than New Orleans and the shape-note hymns of the early nineteenth century. He finally gave up, and set off for Arabella’s flat, where he found her stirring the beef stroganoff, and breaking off at intervals to train a hairdryer on to an amorphous mass in a glass bowl.
‘I found this at the bottom of the freezer,’ she said. ‘It’s lemon mousse, so if I can defrost it in time it’ll make a beautiful pudding. I can’t actually remember when I made it, but it was probably meant to impress somebody, and most likely it was you, so I hope you enjoyed it.’
Phin disclaimed ever having eaten lemon mousse in Arabella’s flat.
‘I just wish I’d found it sooner and got it thawed out. I daren’t try to defrost it in the microwave, because you never know with mousses, do you? Would you mind taking a turn with the hairdryer while I lay the table?’
Phin, warily plying the hairdryer, was grateful that there did not seem to have been any worse catastrophes than a frozen lemon mousse.
The beef stroganoff was delicious, and the professor and Dr Purslove ate with enthusiastic appreciation.
Arabella was wearing a velvet shirt the colour of autumn leaves, with a string of amber beads around her neck. The colours made her eyes look almost golden, and Phin thought that this weekend he would take her out to some very expensive restaurant so that she could wear it again, and the diners could all envy him. It was not that Arabella was beautiful – she was not – and it was not because she was pretty, which she definitely was not. But he knew everyone would still look at her and be envious.
‘You were going to have lemon mousse for pudding,’ she said. ‘And if you’d seen it when it came out of the freezer, you’d have sworn that was what it was. But after the ice was hairdryered away, it turned out to be chicken soup, which is a pity, because if I’d realized in time we could have had it as a starter. But there’s plenty of cheese and some fruit, and we’ll break open the Madeira to go with it.’
Dr Purslove said he rarely ate pudding, and he suspected Ernest wasn’t supposed to eat it at all. The professor glared at him, but said, quite mildly, that he was particularly fond of cheese and fruit to round off a meal. He added that Arabella was extremely thoughtful to be going to all this trouble.
‘And if that’s Brie, I’ll have just a sliver, please. Oh, and celery too. Very nice.’
Phin thought there was an unspoken understanding that they would postpone talking about the scrapbook until they had finished eating, but he was aware of tension around the table. It was only when they left the table for the deep sofa and armchairs grouped around a low table and Arabella had made a large pot of coffee, that he said, ‘If everyone’s comfortable, I think this is the moment we start to talk about the scrapbook.’
It was as if the threads of that tension were suddenly pulled taut. The two academics exchanged glances, then both looked at the scrapbook which Arabella had set out in front of them.
‘We both think,’ said Phin, ‘always assuming the documents are genuine, that they were deliberately chosen. Put into the scrapbook for a purpose.’
‘We even think there’s a sequence to them,’ said Arabella. ‘We don’t know if someone was trying to tell a story, or even send a message, but the whole thing kicks off with a Nazi command for the destruction of various buildings. It’s a horrible soulless thing.’
‘The Nazis did destroy almost the entire city through most of the 1940s,’ said the professor.
‘But,’ said Phin, ‘this order from the German High Command lists the buildings destined for destruction in the last half of 1944. But the Chopin Library isn’t on it. It’s almost conspicuously absent, in fact. The order is very detailed – there’s even a map of the area, showing the buildings marked out for destruction, but the Library isn’t one of them.’ He was unable to tell if this came as a surprise to the two men.
‘Interesting. Anything else?’
Arabella said, ‘Yes, and I only deciphered it about half an hour before you all arrived. I haven’t even had time to tell Phin about it. Sorry, Phin, but what with the lemon mousse … Also, of course, I might be making much of little, but you could have been right when you said all this might go back farther than World War II.’ She turned the pages of the scrapbook. ‘I know you’ll have seen this already, professor, but you might not have studied it in any detail, partly because it’s so fragile it looks as if it would crumble if you breathed on it – and very, very faded – but also because it’s in Russian.’
‘A music score,’ said Phin, leaning forward. ‘Very old and faded, but the notes still readable.’
‘It’s handwritten,’ said Arabella. ‘As if someone copied it. You can see how the ink’s faded to pale brown.’
‘I do remember seeing it,’ said the professor. ‘I only glanced at it, because it wasn’t music I recognized, but I remember thinking it looked like the lettering of one of the Eastern European countries – what we used to call the Eastern bloc. I mentioned it to you, didn’t I, Theo?’
‘It’s actually the Russian alphabet, so you did recognize it accurately, professor,’ said Arabella. ‘I did manage to translate the title, and it seems to be an aria from a Russian opera called The Demon.’
Professor Liripine frowned. ‘I don’t know of it, but Russian stuff is your field of expertise, Theo.’
‘The Demon,’ said Dr Purslove, thoughtfully. ‘It’s an opera that was composed by – let me think – yes, by Anton Rubinstein. And if my memory serves, he wrote it in the early 1870s – Tchaikovsky’s often said to have been influenced by it when he wrote Eugene Onegin, in fact. The Demon was quite popular in its day, although when Rimsky-Korsakov was invited to a private performance, he didn’t think much of it. It wouldn’t be at all his kind of thing,’ he said to the professor.
‘Rimsky-Korsakov was very specific in his likes and dislikes,’ agreed the professor.
None of this was said with any sense of displaying or imparting knowledge; it was the offhand familiarity of two people whose daily round is among and within the great composers and musicians of the world. For Phin, it was a reminder of their dedication to their work, and he also found it rather endearing to see the sudden understanding between them.
As Arabella turned the scrapbook’s pages, Phin felt again as if it were breathing a strange, sad magic into the room. It was as if trapped memories were blindly trying to find a way out, but were too far back, and too weak, to manage it.
‘I’ve assumed that’s the title of the actual opera at the top,’ said Arabella. ‘And that immediately under it is the name of the aria.’
Theodore Purslove was staring at the music. ‘That is the title,’ he said. ‘And I might not recognize more than a few words of Russian, but I recognize this. The aria is “Ne plach’ ditya moya”. That translates, more or less, as “Don’t cry for me, my child”, although it’s more usually known just as the “Demon’s aria”. It’s beautiful and rather sad, and …’ He paused, then said, ‘And it was an especial favourite of the tsar.’ Almost as an aside, he added, ‘I mean the last tsar – Nicholas II, who was butchered to death in a cellar in 1918, and his wife and their daughters and son murdered with him.’
With the words, images brushed Phin’s mind again, but this time they were familiar and recognizable ones from faded photographs and erratic old movie footage: autocratic and imperious people, the women with elaborately dressed hair and sumptuous gowns, the men in the formal dress uniforms of various regiments, all of them shown against splendid backgrounds of palaces and glittering ballrooms, or wandering in leisurely fashion through beautiful gardens. Also, of course, there were the dozens of books and films and documentaries about their deaths on that long-ago summer night, and the romantic speculations as to whether one of the daughters had escaped.
Dr Purslove was saying, ‘The tsarina – Alexandra – is supposed to have often sung that aria to their son – Alexei – to try to calm him when he was ill. The child was haemophilic, as I expect you know, and often seriously unwell and in pain. One source even says she sang it to him as they were all forced down to the cellar to be shot – to try to distract him from what was ahead.’ Theo Purslove made a slightly impatient gesture with one hand, as if to brush aside any idea of sentiment. ‘I never believed the story, and it’s almost certainly one of those romantic tales with no basis—’
‘Most likely conjured up by some old servant who escaped the Revolution and wanted to tell a good story,’ nodded the professor. ‘Not that I’d want to decry any of the hardships people went through during the Revolution.’
‘There’s also the possibility that the story could have been started by one of Rubinstein’s descendants trying to revive the opera,’ said Dr Purslove.
‘And then embroidered over the years?’
‘Exactly so. Actually, I always thought it rather a mawkish tale.’
‘I wouldn’t disagree with you on that, Theo.’
This appeared to satisfy them that they were not in the least affected by the small, sad tale, and Phin took the opportunity to say, ‘Why would that aria be included here, though? Because if we’re accepting that the scrapbook is telling a story, then this particular page points back to …’
He stopped, and his eyes met Arabella’s.
She said, slowly and deliberately, ‘It points back to Imperial Russia in general, and the murders of the last Romanovs in particular.’
Again there was the silence. And again, Phin had the sense of the faded memories reaching out hopefully.
He said, ‘Is it relevant to the “Cadence”? We thought the scrapbook was about the Nazis’ occupation of Warsaw and the execution of a traitor. I can’t see how the Romanovs come into that.’
‘I can’t see it, either,’ said Dr Purslove.
‘I think I might be able to throw a glimmer of light on it,’ said the professor. ‘I don’t know if it’ll be more than a very faint glimmer, but … Where did I put my briefcase? I didn’t leave it in the taxi, did I … No, here it is. I had an email just as we were setting out, and I didn’t have time to read it properly, because we were running late on account of Theo not being ready, as usual—’
‘Who’s the email from, professor?’ asked Phin, before Dr Purslove could say anything.
‘Nina Randall. She’d put an attachment to the email,’ said the professor, in the careful tones of one who makes a point of regarding the greater part of modern technology and modern communication as intricate and insecure, but is prepared to acknowledge their usefulness. ‘I got the hotel reception to print everything out for me while I was waiting, so … Does anybody know what I did with my glasses? Oh, thank you.’ This was to Arabella, who had found and handed over the glasses.
‘I heard from Nina as well,’ said Phin, as the professor donned his spectacles and burrowed in his briefcase. ‘She was going to see if there was anything in their archives office or any of the old newspaper records about the Library, wasn’t she? She didn’t sound very hopeful of finding anything, though, because—’
‘Because the Chopin Library became an outcast,’ said Arabella, softly. ‘It’s hardly referred to anywhere. No photographs or images of it seem to have survived. It’s almost as if people wanted to expunge it from the records – even from their own memories and the memories of their descendants. Sorry if that sounds melodramatic.’
‘It does, a bit, but you’re right,’ said the professor, looking up from his briefcase, and regarding Arabella over the top of his spectacles. ‘Nina said almost exactly the same thing.’
‘Ernest, I think we’d all like to know exactly what Nina Randall did say, so will you find the email and read it, please.’
‘I have found it,’ said the professor.
Nina had written:
Hello professor,
You do hand me some fascinating tasks, and they frequently take surprising twists. I’ve never forgotten that time you set up that weekend study group focusing on Elgar, and I came back to Durham to help out. Eight of us decamped to the Malvern Hills – that was when we discovered the cobwebby antique shop with the ancient ciné footage of Dame Clara Butt, dressed as a mermaid, performing some of the songs from Sir Edward’s Sea Pictures. In retrospect I’m not sure if my attempt that night to recreate her perform-ance down to the actual costume worked as well as it might have done. But it was certainly a research project that led us down some unforeseen paths.
Without looking up from the page, the professor said, ‘That was a particularly interesting study project.’
‘Yes, I’m sure it must have been.’ Phin did not dare meet Arabella’s eye.
The professor turned to the second page.
But as to the Chopin Library, as I told you, I thought it would be looked at askance if I started to delve into its history from here, but I did take a stealthy look in a few old files. I came up against a remarkable number of blank walls, though, and I think I might have abandoned the search altogether if it hadn’t been for the charming young man, Lucek Socha, who found the scrapbook in the first place. He’s taken this whole project to his heart and he’s determined to get at the truth of it.
So, I hope you might find the attached useful. It’s certainly primary research material, which – as you once taught me – is always good to have.
It was in a file relating to one of the original fire services, of all things – somebody, at some time, seems to have compiled a kind of memorial to the firefighters of the city, and the file found its way to our archives offices. The original is in Polish, of course, but I’ve made a translation for you. There’s a curious part at the end, which didn’t mean much to me. I thought this was about the Library, but I’m wondering if there’s another aspect you haven’t mentioned.
I haven’t done anything about verifying this – again, I don’t want to draw attention to the delvings. But it looked like a genuine first-hand account from a man who saw the Chopin Library burn, and it reads as if he wrote it shortly before Warsaw was liberated.
Professor Liripine paused to readjust his spectacles and drink some of his coffee, then he reached for what was clearly Nina Randall’s translation.
As soon as he began reading it, Phin felt as if those struggling ghosts had crept even closer. They want to be heard, he thought. They want it known what happened inside the Chopin Library that night – that’s why the scrapbook was made.
SEVEN
‘It is being rumoured around the Street of Music that an enquiry may be made into aspects of the work of the Verbrennungskommando (Burning Detachment), and the Sprengkommando (Demolition Unit), during the occupation of Warsaw,’ began the document. ‘None of us expects to be questioned, but memories fade with the months, so I am setting down my recollection of an event that happened near to my restaurant – the night when a building which holds a special place in my heart was burned.
‘The Chopin Library always meant a great deal to me, and I am not ashamed to say this. My father was head chef there in the years of its greatness, and in my own time I knew some of the modern musicians, as well – among them the remarkable young man who was the Library’s director of music, Yan Orzek, whose tempestuous ways and attraction for the ladies were as famous as his musical talent.
‘I should explain that I am a chef by profession and also by inclination, and that my restaurant is near to the Street of Music. It is known as Anatol’s, this being my name and that of my father and grandfather, also.’
The professor glanced up. ‘Yan Orzek,’ he said. ‘And Anatol. I think those are the first names we’ve actually found, aren’t they?’
‘I’m making a note of them,’ said Phin, who had already reached for his pen.
‘In the bad years, we were dirt under the boots of the oppress-ors, and it was a great struggle to keep my restaurant open. But there were loyal friends who came to dine, and to enjoy the music which we managed to provide, even though it was only a single pianist and the piano itself a jangling old instrument, sadly in need of tuning.
‘There were people gathered in my restaurant on the night I write about. A good supper was being served – it was still sometimes possible to get food if one knew where to go. It was known that I opened my doors for an hour or two on most evenings, and no objection was made.’
