The Courage Consort by Michel Faber Read Free Book Online

would be like to be rounded up, herded to the edge of a communal grave, and shot. She tried to feel pity for those who didn't wish to die: women with children, perhaps. All she could think of was what a mercy it would be to have the burden of decision shouldered by someone else: a Nazi to lead you from prevarication to the grave, where he would shoot you in the back of the head, a place you couldn't reach yourself.
    Then, a few years later, a French Robin Hood and his Merry Men would ride their horses over your bones, twirling their colourful pennants, delighting children all over Europe.
    After fifteen minutes or so, Catherine stopped walking and squatted against the mossy bough of a cedar, making herself comfortable on the forest bed. The ground was quite safe to rest her bottom—her ass?—on; it seemed to have been designed by Netherlandish scientists to nourish vegetation without staining trousers. The warmth of the sun, diffused by the treetops, beamed vitamin D onto her skin. All around her, pale golden light flickered subtly on the greens and browns, the leaves breathing out their clean, fragrant oxygen.

    Composers are often inspired by nature, she thought. Beethoven's
Pastoral
Symphony, Vaughan Williams, Delius, that sort of thing. What did nature mean to her? She tried to decide, as if God had just asked her the question.
    Nature meant the absence of people. It was a system set up to run without human beings, concentrating instead on the insensate and the eternal. Which was very relaxing now and then. But dangerous in the long run: darkness would fall, and there would be no door to close, no roof over one's head, no blankets to pull up. One wasn't an animal, after all.
    Catherine stood up and slapped the leaves and fragments of bark off the seat of her jeans. She'd had enough nature for one day. It was time she was getting back to the house.
    Walking back along the path she'd made, she became aware of all the birds that must be sitting in the trees all around and above her. A few were twittering musically, but the vast majority were silent. Looking down at her. It didn't bear thinking about; she concentrated on the sound of her own feet rustling through the undergrowth.
    Her quickening breathing sounded amazingly loud in the stillness, and as she walked faster the breaths became more like voiced utterances, with an actual pitch and timbre to them. Exactly like avant-garde singing, really: the vocalisations of a terrorised soul.
    She was almost running now, stumbling on loose branches and clods of earth she had kicked up earlier. The sunlight was flickering much too fast through the trees, like malfunctioning fluorescence, lurid and cold. Had she lost track of time again? Was she hours away from home?
    What would she do if she heard the cry?

    The thought came suddenly, like an arrow shot into her brain. She was alone in the forest of Martinekerke with whatever had wailed out to her during the night. Its eyes were probably on her right now, glowing through the trees. It was waiting for the right moment to utter that cry again, waiting until she had blundered so close that it could scream right in her ear, into the nape of her neck, sending her crashing to her knees in panic. Catherine ran, whimpering anxiously. She would be a good girl from now on, if only Roger would come and rescue her.
    Breathless, half-blind, she broke into the clearing. For all the intensity of her dread, she'd taken only a couple of minutes to put the forest behind her; she hadn't strayed very far from home at all. The château was right there across the road, and the little white Peugeot parked outside spoke of the impossibility of supernatural cries.
    'OK, time for
Partitum Mutante?
said Roger to her, as soon as she stepped across the threshold.
    ***
    R EHEARSALS WENT BADLY that day. Ben, Dagmar, and Catherine were game enough, but Roger was irritable, strangely unsettled. Julian had his mind on something else and lost his place in