The Voices by F. R. Tallis Read Free Book Online Page B

not.’
    ‘Then what was it? What happened?’
    ‘A little absence, that’s all.’
    ‘An absence?’
    The doctor’s eyebrows drew closer together. ‘Mrs Norton,’ he continued with weary forbearance, ‘I could refer your daughter to a specialist, but it would serve no purpose, save, perhaps, that of easing your anxiety.’ Laura felt a creeping sense of shame. Yet again she had wasted his time. The hiatus that followed made her feel uncomfortably exposed. She was desperate for the doctor to say something else, to end the silence and, with it, her humiliation; however, he remained impassive and she was forced to mutter, ‘Yes, yes. I’m sorry.’
    The doctor shook his head. ‘Oh, good heavens, Mrs Norton, please. You’ve no need to apologize. Motherhood is a demanding occupation.’ He stood up and extended his hand. ‘Your daughter’s fine.’

Mid-May
    Christopher was so engrossed in his work that he’d lost track of time. It was probably two o’clock in the morning, or thereabouts. He could only estimate the hour because he’d left his wristwatch on the kitchen table. Christopher liked working late – the absence of distraction. It reminded him of his years spent at the BBC when he would stay behind to use the equipment for his own compositions and musical experiments. He felt a twinge of sadness, a nostalgic yearning for his younger days – the solitude and cigarettes, the sleepless nights and grey, autumn mornings. Just before sunrise, he would leave the BBC studios in Maida Vale and walk up and down Elgin Avenue. There was usually no one about, apart from the occasional prostitute dressed in a raincoat and high heels. Of course, there was something contrived about his behaviour. Even then he knew that he was adopting an attitude, a posture, but the romance of it all was so very seductive, and the excitement of being part of something entirely new was a powerful drug. The fact that he wasable to create music from sounds that had never before been heard by the human ear was, as far as he was concerned, utterly miraculous.
    The music coming through the headphones dispelled Christopher’s reminiscences and brought him firmly back into the present. His ‘score’ was marked with circular coffee stains and looked more architectural than musical. The system of notation he employed was a haphazard combination of borrowed symbols and his own idiosyncratic shorthand – angled lines, filled-in oblongs and a range of invented hieroglyphs. When a melodic fragment did appear it was accompanied by a general indication of the desired effect: reed, carillon, theremin.
    Pitches fell at different rates, their descent finding chance harmonies that quickly dissolved again into discord. A throbbing bass note, deeper than the lowest church organ pedal, provided a fundamental that helped the listener to appreciate these moments of transparency. The music suggested slow disintegration and reminded Christopher of a painting by Salvador Dalí showing a landscape draped in wilting clock faces. It was a beguiling sound and Christopher was pleased with what he had accomplished, but at the same time he regretted that this artful composition would be largely wasted on an audience whose attention, at this particular juncture inthe film, would be wholly directed at the screen and an action sequence involving a perilous escape from an exploding space station. He imagined teenage boys sitting in half-empty cinemas, their eyes flickering in the darkness, their hands transferring popcorn from big cardboard buckets into their wide-open mouths.
    Christopher had been finding that he was increasingly envious of those Oxford peers of his who had continued to compose serious music. When their pieces were praised by critics in the broadsheets he felt strangely desolate. He had begun to think much more about posterity. In the past he had accepted his loss of ‘reputation’ with stoic indifference. It would have been churlish to complain as he