Valley of Decision Read Free Page B

she singing?’ Horace asked. ‘That’s what I want to know about. I’ve paid good money.’
    â€˜Marvellously.’
    â€˜She’s keeping her practice up?’
    â€˜Must be. She’s due to go back to it. She’ll have to lose a stone or two.’
    â€˜Can’t have too much of a good thing.’ Horace was pleased to be sitting with his daughter-in-law, pleased with himself, his wife, her cooking, the time of night.
    â€˜Was she a good teacher?’ Joan Blackwall asked Mary.
    â€˜I hardly saw her at the RCM. The odd consultation lesson. She was in Bayreuth, or New York, or Sydney. But she was good. She bothered to listen.’
    â€˜She thought you would make it,’ David said.
    â€˜She was kind to me. It was her recommendation to Will Broderick that got me into Omnium.’
    â€˜And now you’re both retired up here?’ Mrs Blackwall said.
    â€˜She won’t stay long,’ David prophesied. ‘She’s not sung out her old engagements, and she’s been here three years. She’ll be signing up again. Won’t leave it there.’
    â€˜How old is she?’
    â€˜Thirty-eight, would you say, Mary? Thereabouts.’
    â€˜And what will her husband do about her setting off again?’ Horace.
    â€˜There’s a very great deal of money in it,’ David said. ‘Cash talks.’
    â€˜He’s not short.’ Mary.
    â€˜No. But she’s had enough as the squire’s wife.’
    â€˜Has she told you?’ Mary, mocking.
    â€˜You know her better than I do,’ he said sombrely. ‘She’s ambitious, a singer. She thinks of herself. Can hardly do otherwise in her position. Sir Edward has had her home now for some months each year. People did say she was just a bit frightened of singing herself out.’
    â€˜No sign of it,’ Mary said.
    â€˜There must be,’ Horace Blackwall sounded interested, ‘quite a difference between Rathe Hall and Purcell and howling Wagner over immense distances and a full orchestra. It’s nothing to do with music really.’
    Nobody took him up. David had his eyes shut as if he were dropping asleep. When they had all refused alcohol Horace invited Mary to sing. She stood up.
    â€˜I know what I like,’ he said, guying himself.
    â€˜Not more than two,’ his wife warned, moving towards the piano. ‘Mary’s tired.’
    He chose, immediately, without hesitation. ‘Have you seen but a bright lily grow?’
    â€˜And?’ Joan looking for music.
    â€˜â€œThe Lass with the Delicate Air”.’ He smiled in anticipation, pleased that he could make such a demand. He conducted to himself, though one could not tell which song.
    Mary sang, standing by the piano, one hand splayed on the lid. Her voice rang with no strain, no fatigue, soared about the big room, clipping the notes in the centre, taking the upward rising scale of the first song like a jewelled stairway. She smiled vaguely, impersonally in the direction of her father-in-law. ‘Oh, so white’, the tone exactly reflected the purity, the strength of her musicality and the transient, elusive beauty of whiteness in nature that resided permanently, ‘oh, so white, oh so soft’, in the lady, in Mary. Small lines furrowed at the corners of her eyes, her mouth; her skin seemed, trick of the light, to have lost something of its bloom. She was tired, David decided, but it did not show in the voice. That sprang, leaped, couched, settled with creamy power.
    Horace, David knew, was particularly fond of the high notes at the end of ‘The Lass’. Under Mary’s skill the simple device, the soaring and dropping, had about it an innocence, a freedom from the sensual yet based distantly, obliquely in sexuality, a richness of some golden, naked age that existed only out of the corner of the eye. David himself stretching, knowing exactly how his wife would perform, would