Cover

Dedication

for Robert Bolt

PART I
Autumn

CLAUD BANNISTER SAT BESIDE his mother, enduring the concert. What right, he asked himself, had an unknown provincial quartet to perform three pieces of modern music for the first time? How was a discriminating sophisticate such as himself to know whether the music was good or bad? I need, he told himself with secret mortification, to read the opinion of the London critics before I dare judge. I am ignorant of music, if not tone deaf. I am neither discriminating nor sophisticated; I have come back to Mother after years of school, university and failed exams without money or qualifications, without even the courage to tell her what I intend to do with my life. What shall I say when she asks me? This music is incomprehensible, he thought, glancing covertly at his mother, yet she seems to understand it. What does she hear which I do not?

On the way to the concert Margaret Bannister had tried, unwisely she now realised, to jolly her son out of his gloomy mood and, failing, had called him ‘a veritable bundle of resentment’—another of her misplaced remarks, she told herself, exasperated. To hell with it, she would enjoy the music, worry later.

These seats are appallingly uncomfortable, thought Claud, leaning back until the back of his seat creaked, tangibly annoying a bald man sitting in the row behind, a man who as they had come in to the concert hall had called out to his mother in jest, laughed appreciatively at some negligible joke she had made in return, had obviously admired her and been backed in his opinion by his wife who, grey-haired, stout and dowdy, had kindly included him, Claud, with, ‘How nice to see you, Claud’ (remembering his name while he remotely forgot hers). ‘How seldom we see you, how glad you must be to spend some time with your clever, witty mother.’

Clever? Witty? What did all these grey old people know of cleverness or wit?

The quartet scraped to the end of the difficult piece. The audience clapped, the musicians stood and bowed.

‘I might grow to like it when I have listened to it a few more times,’ his mother said to the neighbour on her left. ‘We finish, thank the Lord, with dear old Bach but they did their best, the brave young things.’

Claud scowled at the quartet, stringy and not particularly young, bracing themselves to have a bash at Bach while his mother sat back relaxed, anticipating pleasure. Grey, grey, they are all grey, grey-haired and largely dressed in grey. Claud’s eyes roamed disapprovingly over the audience, seeing grey even when the heads were tinted black, auburn, even blond.