The Courage Consort Read Free

of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw was heading just now. Catherine's irritation softened into boredom; her eyelids drooped in the flickering sunshine.
    'So,' interrupted the director, evidently more concerned about where the conversation was heading than the fate of the Concertgebouw. 'This Consort of yours is a family affair, yes?'
    Catherine's ears pricked up again; how would her husband handle this? Nobody in the ensemble was actually a Courage except her and Roger, and she tended to cling to her maiden name as often as she could get away with it, for sheer dread of being known as 'Kate Courage'. She couldn't go through the rest of her life with a name like a comic-book superheroine.
    Suavely, Roger more or less evaded the issue.
    'Well, believe it or not,' he said, 'the Consort is not specifically named after me. I regard myself as just one member of the ensemble, and when we were trying to think of a name for ourselves, we considered a number of things, but the concept of courage seemed to keep coming up.'
    Catherine became aware of Julian's head tilting exaggeratedly. She watched an incredulous smirk forming on his face as Roger and the director carried on:

    'Did you feel maybe that performing this sort of music needs courage?'
    'Well … I'll leave that to our audiences to decide,' said Roger. 'Really, what we had in mind was more the old Wesleyan adage about hymn singing, you know: "Sing lustily and with good courage."'
    Julian turned to Catherine and winked. '
Did
we have that in mind?' he murmured across the seats to her. 'I find myself strangely unable to recall this momentous conversation.'
    Catherine smiled back, mildly confused. While meaning no disloyalty to her husband, she couldn't recall the conversation either. Turning to look out the window of the minibus, she halfheartedly tried to cast her mind back, back, back to a time before she'd been the soprano in the Courage Consort. Hundreds of neat, slender trees flashed past her eyes, blurring into greeny-brown pulsations. This and the gentle thrumming of the engine lulled her, for the third time today, to the brink of sleep.
    Behind her, Benjamin Lamb began to snore.

    For the last couple of miles of their journey, the château was in plain, if distant, view.
    'Is that where we're going?' asked Catherine.
    'Yes,' replied Jan.
    'The wicked witch's gingerbread house,' murmured Julian for Catherine to hear.
    'Pardon?' said the director.
    'I was wondering what the château was actually called,' said Julian.
    'Its real name is't Luitspelershuisje, but Flemings and visitors call it Château de Luth.'

    'Ah … Château de Luth, how nice,' repeated Catherine, as the minibus sped through the last mile—or 1.609 kilometres. When the director parked the car in front of the Consort's new home-away-from-home, he smiled benignly but, again, left them to deal with their own baggage.
    The Château de Luth was more beautiful, though rather smaller, than Catherine had expected. A two-storey cottage built right next to the long straight road between Duidermonde and Martinekerke, with no other houses anywhere about, it might almost have been an antique railway station whose railway line had been spirited away and replaced with a neat ribbon of macadamised tar.
    'Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian stayed here, in the last year they were together,' said the director, encouraging them all to approach and go inside. 'Bussotti and Pousseur, too.'
    The house was in perfect condition for its age, except for the artful tangle of stag horns crowning the front door, which had been eaten away somewhat by acid rain in the late eighties. The red brick walls and dark grey roof tiles were immaculate, the carved window frames freshly painted in brilliant white.
    All around the cottage, lushly tasteful woodland glowed like a high-quality postcard, each tree apparently planted with discretion and attention to detail. Glimpsed among the straight and slender boughs, an elegant brown