Serial Harmonies

© 2018 Diana Cockrill. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

This novel is based on some factual events, but all characters portrayed are imaginary and any similarity is purely coincidental.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

Published by AuthorHouse  12/15/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8602-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8601-1 (e)

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Contents

Overture

Theme

Variation 1

Variation 2

Variation 3

Variation 4

Variation 5

Variation 6

Variation 7

Variation 9

Variation 10

Intermezzo

Marche Funèbre

Nocturne

Finale

And Pilate said unto Him What is truth?

[Gospel of St. John, Chapter 38 v 18]

Programme Note – to be read before listening to the music

RACHEL – REHEARSING

Before the sound begins we cannot measure it,

Nor, when it ends, be sure

How long it hung suspended in our minds

Until it ceased to endure.

Wearing your woman’s clothes you did not move me.

Never the thought occurred

To chart those chords, to test those treacherous rhythms.

But now, my proud one

Stepping to the music

A prince, coming victorious from the chase

Slender and laughing, cruelly aware of conquest

You hold my woman’s heart on your high lance point

Display me as your trophy

Toss me, a late-fall love, from hand to hand.

Oh song, my sound, base of my harmony

Help me sustain that note

Until our lungs ache, and the guttering torches

Shake their smoky tresses up the walls

One last defiant flare before the night.

Then, as your great hall whispers into darkness

Let the weeping end in Ramah

And the voices die away.

Overture

Before the sound begins … All music, and all listening, must begin from silence. From something which is not there.

All emotional upheavals, too, must start from a place where there is no emotion, somewhere in which, like a cancer, the new feelings can grow and multiply until their presence is big enough, painful enough, to make itself felt on the outside. Then, if the host, the patient, the sufferer, is lucky, they may understand themselves. If not, the question Why me? will continue to haunt them as long as the emotion has them in its control.

Without a theme there can be no variations. The theme is fact, what is, or was, or happened, or was said; sometimes what was painted on canvas or written in words. The variations are sunspots leaping away from the parent body, loops that return to base or wild-cats that fly out into infinity. They are what might have been, what was, but seen from another angle, what it was hoped would happen or what hindsight reported although common sense said very firmly that it wasn’t so. Chinese whispers, where each person who passes on the story, whether it is about the expenses of Members of Parliament or what happened to Fred’s false teeth on that holiday in Scarborough, adds or subtracts a little bit of detail, makes the whole thing what they would have said if they had started it.

Most musical variations take up a theme from another composer, another period in time. Rachmaninov turns his theme upside down and lays on the slush with a heavy hand; Handel gets himself moved by a local blacksmith whistling a catchy tune; Britten and Vaughan Williams use very English themes as pegs for their masterpieces. The theme doesn’t have to be original. It is what you do with it once you have picked up the idea that matters. You, just you, have for a brief moment power over another, even if that other is long since dead. A single spermatozoa breaking through into an egg and at once becoming a cluster of cells that continues to grow and change until a person that differs from both sperm and egg, though with echoes of both, is created.

Variations, in turn, move into and out of key structures that the people involved can probably neither anticipate nor understand. There’s logic in it, somewhere. Like the logic hidden so carefully in Bach’s set of two-part inventions for keyboard; one invention for each key, moving up to the relative minor and up again to the next major key. Playing Bach is like a woman making love to another woman; only when you’ve had hands-on experience do you begin to see the structure. Just listening isn’t enough. You have to play, touch, persuade the music out of what is written in the score or inside them until it shows on their faces. And things go in sets of three. Women, broken hearts, surprises.

I remember flicking open my mobile phone, and sitting looking at it in silence for a long time. I didn’t really need to make that call, or so I told myself. My hand was quite steady. I’d been through all the moods, cried most of the tears I’d be crying. The tight-gripped stomach muscles were relaxed again; the feeling of being a hamster on a wheel had left me. I found the helpline number in Yellow Pages, and eventually, because I’m not the sort of person who likes inaction, I began to press the buttons. On the phone you can still be tempted to spin a story that’s not quite true. I was half pleased, half resentful that the unknown woman on the other end of the line invited me to call in and talk to her.

I’m Kate. Just come along any Thursday. I’m usually around. If you’d like to tell me your first name, just so that I can let my colleagues know you’re likely to drop by.

Julia. I’m Julia. That’s all you need to know. Relief was suddenly choking me. She heard it in my voice. Maybe she thought I was crying.

It’s all right, she said. We’ve all been there. Hope to see you soon, then. The conversation could have trailed on, but she killed the call, a decisive end. If that was how she tackled a situation, perhaps I would like to talk to her.

So – you’re a writer, and a singer.

It was a week later when she said that to me. She wasn’t in the least as I’d imagined her. I’d dreaded something totally butch, jeans, desert boots, short-cropped hair and a stud or two – the stereotype of lesbianism. But this – this I could admire. Sleek black trousers with a slight flare and a plain cream shirt, something clever involving graduated amethysts and pearls on a snake chain round her neck, tiny amethyst studs in her ears. Her eyes were made up, and a faint whisper of perfume came across the space between us. Old enough to merit my respect, young enough to be fun. The ideal woman.

Well, I’ve won a poetry competition, and had a short story published. And I’ve always been in a choir of some kind, somewhere. I couldn’t think of life without making music, although it’s music that’s got me into the state I’m in.

The third surprise was her advice to me when she’d listened to a summary of my problems.

You say you’re computer literate. So why not write down what’s happening to you, why it waited until now, once you were divorced after 20 years of marriage? Put some details about yourself in it too, and bring it back for me to read when you’ve finished. Does that sound reasonable? Call it a set of variations, if you like. You may find it an interesting task.

Very well – let the story begin with a woman on a bus. That in itself is open to infinite variation, but the bus, apart from its colour and size, cannot vary too widely from a norm. It is somewhere we are safe, somewhere contained where we can sit and look out at other people, something we can control to a degree by pushing a button to make it stop so that it is obedient to our world and fits in with us. As to the woman who is travelling, there too are so many possibles. A bag lady, trolley on wheels ready for pillage around the supermarket? Going on holiday with a neat tidy suitcase and