The Spirit and the Flesh Read online

  The Spirit and the Flesh

  Douglas Boyd

  © Douglas Boyd

  Douglas Boyd has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part III

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part IV

  Chapter I

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part V

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  On the platform of the ancient Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral the chamber orchestra was tuning to the harpsichordist’s A. Backstage, there was hardly room to move. Camera cables snaked across the floor and through doorways. Empty instrument cases lay across chairs with articles of clothing draped over them. The entrance to the platform itself was half-blocked by a camera and a colour monitor on a pedestal, beside which the cameraman was talking to one of the television stage managers, both wearing headphones. The SM, wearing headphones and a dinner jacket, was watching the monitor screen as last minute adjustments were made to the lighting.

  Jay French – the evening’s soloist – blocked out all the noise and people, to concentrate on the sound of the harpsichord. She blew a note, pulling out the head joint of the flute minutely to flatten the pitch. Satisfied, she peered through a gap in the screens at the edge of the staging and looked at the packed rows of seats. Somewhere in the audience were her father and mother, but she could not see them.

  ‘It’s a good house.’ The comment came from Carl Moritz, the orchestral manager. Resplendent in impeccably cut dinner jacket and scarlet cummerbund, he had counted at a glance what was called in the business ‘the bums in seats’.

  To Jay, he added, ‘Your name on the bill is a good draw.’

  ‘I went to school here,’ she said, recognising a few faces. ‘And Dad still practises medicine in Herne Bay, ten miles away. He’s a pillar of the community.’

  ‘Local girl makes good?’ Carl teased. ‘Don’t be modest, Jay. You’re filling houses all over England.’

  He looked away swiftly, but not before Jay caught a hint of pain in his eyes. Poor Carl, she thought, it still hurts him to be close.

  The SM was asking, ‘The director wants to know when the conductor will be ready for his entrance.’

  ‘Where is the man?’ muttered Carl.

  ‘In the loo,’ said Jay, ‘for the sixth time.’

  ‘The bloody Magyar’s been shitting himself with nerves ever since the rehearsal,’ Carl muttered so that only Jay could hear.

  Jay was normally icy calm before a performance but resented that the tyro conductor booked for this concert was going to get part of the credit for her performance with the orchestra that evening.

  Carl turned at the sound of footsteps, beaming. ‘Ah, there you are, Zoltan. You look wonderful, Maestro!’

  The young Hungarian was sweating with tension, Jay saw. He mopped his face on a towel and tried to smile at her. She looked away; his nerves were his problem – if he could not cope with them, he’d never make it as a conductor.

  ‘He’s here,’ the SM said into the mike on his headphones.

  Over the headphones, Jay heard the director’s voice, sounding calm. ‘Standby cameras. Cue videotape. House lights and cue applause.’

  The house lights dimmed. Another SM on the side of the stage cued the applause. The conductor sucked in a deep breath and walked onto the platform in a spotlight. As the lights came up, he bowed to the public, raised his arms majestically and turned to welcome Jay.

  Carl held her back until the applause had built. ‘At least the Magyar looks good,’ he murmured.

  For the first time that evening, he let himself look at Jay. He took in the green satin evening dress that brought out the colour of her eyes. Long sleeves gathered at the wrists emphasised the décolleté. ‘You look stunning tonight, Miss French,’ he said quietly.

  ‘If there’s ever an award for the best orchestral manager, Carl,’ she murmured, ‘you’ll get it.’

  ‘In your case, I meant it.’ He kissed the back of her hand and let her go.

  Jay stepped onto the platform and allowed the conductor to lead her to the front. She felt good in her new dress. It had cost a fortune but was worth every penny at that moment. In the pool of light between the orchestra and the front of the platform, she acknowledged the applause and raised her flute. The clapping hushed and died. Jay retuned to an A note on the Leader’s violin. It was not necessary, but audiences liked a little fussiness in a soloist. She gave the conductor a nod to indicate that she was ready. As she closed her eyes, breathing in on the up-beat, she caught a glimpse of her father’s wavy grey hair six rows back from the front.

  Then time stood still.

  Jay’s ears rang with the reverberation of a sound she could not identify. It was like the echo of a door closing at the end of a long corridor, but without the initial crash. She had the feeling that the closing door had cut off the sound of a voice with something very important to say. Her brain strained to catch the words, while at the same time knowing that it should be concerned only with her flute and Gluck’s music.

  In one corner of her field of vision, Jay saw a look of alarm in the orchestral flautist’s eye as they played the opening duet together, with the strings and harpsichord discreetly supporting the melody. She was aware that her own sound was wrong; the notes were correct, but voiced as though a child had learned the part without grasping its sense.

  Twenty eight … twenty nine … she counted in her head, praying that the echo of the slamming door would die away in time. But as it receded towards silence, so her mind strained after it. The solo in the Dance of the Blessed Spirits began on bar thirty three. It was perhaps the most beautiful piece of music ever written for flute and one which was a joy to play, each time Jay performed it.

  Thirty one … thirty two, she counted to the end of her bars rest. Her fingers shook and refused to open or close the keys of the flute. Instead they jerked spasmodically in front of her eyes. The flute, instead of lying comfortably below the lower lip, slipped away sideways and down however much she tried to pull it back to the proper position. For a moment she thought she was going to drop it altogether. It slid through hands moist with perspiration and she caught it awkwardly, halfway to the floor.

  Dizzy, Jay thought she was going to fall off the platform. The cameram
an immediately in front of her had the same thought. She saw him look up, alarmed, and track the camera back out of the way. People in the front row were staring, knowing that something was wrong.

  Jay tried to step away from the edge of the platform but her legs refused to obey. The musicians hesitated and stopped playing one by one. In the audience every pair of eyes was locked onto her. In the mobile control room, the director stared at the monitor screens, gazing from the output of one camera to another, all confirming that Jay was staring blankly into space with an expression of anguish on her face.

  The conductor lowered his baton and turned to her, a tense smile glued in place for the benefit of the public. With a huge effort, Jay regained control of her legs, turned and walked off the platform in a daze. She stumbled off-balance and had to catch at chair-backs and the shoulders of the musicians for support on her slow and painful way through the orchestra to the back of the platform; it took all her concentration to place one foot in front of the other twelve times.

  Carl was standing just off-stage, a hand outstretched to guide her last paces. As she collapsed against his broad and comforting chest, Jay felt tears welling in her eyes.

  ‘Oh Christ!’ she said. ‘I can’t play a note, Carl!’

  He led her to a chair, then hissed to the back desk fiddles: ‘Go on to the Handel.’

  The message was passed forward to the conductor. There as a rustle of paper and the scraping of chair legs on bare boards as the orchestra turned to the next item in the programme: a concerto grosso in which Jay was not involved.

  Carl knelt by her chair. Behind him the television SM was looking anxious, being bullied for news by the director but not knowing what to say.

  ‘Now take it easy,’ Carl said soothingly. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  He tried to take the flute from Jay but fingers that had refused to play refused now to let go, staying locked tightly around the instrument in spasm.

  Jay shook her head in bewilderment. ‘I don’t know what happened, Carl. I just couldn’t play a note.’

  He stood up, thinking fast. ‘Are you going to be all right by the end of the Handel? If so, I’ll give Zoltan the nod.’

  Jay’s hands unlocked suddenly. The flute fell into her lap. She looked at her hands. They were trembling now so strongly that ripples in the dress fabric were travelling right up her arms to the shoulders.

  ‘Look at my hands,’ she gasped, horrified. ‘I’m like some damned old woman with palsy. Oh, Carl! Whatever’s happening to me?’

  He had an arm around her shoulders, trying to comfort her. ‘Has this ever happened before?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, of course not.’

  But it had. Sitting there as the orchestra played the opening bars of the concerto grosso, she remembered the terror of what had happened ten years before, on Easter Sunday of 1982.

  Chapter 2

  She had woken that morning with no inkling of what lay ahead. If most 19-year-old girls on holiday slept late, Jay was the exception. Early rising was for her an unbreakable discipline. In term-time during her years at a specialist music school, work had begun at six o’clock, seven days a week. Although she was now a student at the Royal Academy of Music in London and free to decide her own schedule of work and practice, she still got up each day at six o’clock, did breathing exercises at the open window, had a short Yoga session and then practised for two hours solid.

  On that morning Jay opened the windows of her bedroom and looked out at the view which she had known for every holiday she could remember. The garden of her parents’ cottage in the Dordogne was overgrown but beautiful. A lawn, broken by mature shrubs and trees, merged into a vineyard. Through the leafless trees she could see the terracotta roofs of the little village of St Denis. The air was cold, with a trace of frost on the grass. Smoke was already rising from some of the chimneys. Jay shivered, forced herself to do some deep breathing and closed the window with relief

  In the other bedroom of the small cottage, her parents awoke and lay dozing to the sound of Jay’s flute. She was not playing pieces of music, but scales and long notes and studies. By the time she had finished practising, her father and mother had breakfasted, packed the car and were ready to start the journey back to England.

  At the last moment, Jay ran half a mile to the nearest neighbour, a woman artist with whom she had made friends during the holiday. As she ran back along the tow-path beside the placid Dordogne after saying goodbye, she was feeling fit, relaxed and happy.

  ‘I’ve got a surprise,’ her father announced. ‘We’re not going to take the main roads home, for once. We’re going to head across country and spend the night at Chinon.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ Jay asked.

  Her mother passed a road map to her and pointed. ‘In the Loire Valley, darling. There’s a castle there. You’ll like it. And the countryside is very different from the Dordogne.’

  ‘I thought it would make a change,’ her father said. ‘A change from rushing back to Calais as fast as we can, like lemmings on wheels.’

  The journey lasted three hours, during which Jay hardly spoke; she was practising in her head, eyes closed and fingers moving on the keys in her imagination. Her parents, used to her silences, did not intrude but chatted between themselves quietly. At Chinon they booked into a small hotel nestling beneath the frowning castle walls and walked up the hill to where the great fortress of the Plantagenets still brooded on its limestone spur. The atmosphere was hot and clammy, with thunder grumbling beyond the horizon.

  They joined a small group of tourists at the main gate of the castle, waiting for the next guided tour. A lover of old buildings, Jay would have preferred to wander around the castle on her own, but her father, being a doctor, preferred facts and figures to guesswork and imagination.

  The guide was a student who had only taken the job because a friend had said it was a good way of getting to chat up foreign girls. In this party Jay was the only girl but his efforts to make conversation were frustrated by her parents who saw him off like sheepdogs each time he tried to get close. In a light cotton dress and sandals, with her long blond hair falling loose on her shoulders, the boy probably thought Jay a typical English girl on holiday – an attractive, carefree 19-year-old. Only on second glance was there something about her piercing eyes and the set of her classical features that indicated a combination of intelligence and authority unusual in someone so young.

  For her part, Jay thought it a pity that he was so unenthusiastic. The bored monotone in which he was delivering his commentary made it a soporific recital of dates and names, difficult to follow. In the sultry pre-storm heat, the group flocked after him from one point of interest to the next. Outside the Boissy tower Jay leaned against the sun-warmed stone, with her eyes half closed, day-dreaming and letting her imagination people the castle for her as she half-listened to the guide’s voice. Most medieval history she could remember was about kings and battles but here at Chinon the name of one woman constantly intruded: Eleanor of Aquitaine. She had been queen of France and twice queen of England, yet was usually known by the title to which she had been born: Duchess of Aquitaine. It was in the Boissy tower that Eleanor had had her apartments.

  *

  The guide looked at his wristwatch and hurried through his script, hustling his group along. This was his last tour before the two-hour lunch-break.

  ‘S’il vous plaît …’ The interruption came from behind him.

  He recognised the English girl’s voice and turned as she stepped forward and put her hand on his bare forearm. She had her back to the rest of the group, so that only the guide saw her strained expression, or rather a hundred different expressions chasing each other across her face as she stepped closer to him.

  Her eyes were not looking at him but right through him. It sent a shiver down his spine. Her lips opened as she took another step closer until their bodies were touching. He was too surprised to step back. Incredulously, he thought, she’s g
oing to kiss me.

  Instead she fell gracefully into his arms. He felt the bare skin of her back above the cotton sun dress and the softness of her breasts against his chest as the unexpected weight of her body nearly pulled him with her to the ground. Then she was lying at his feet, her skirt blown clear of a pair of shapely tanned legs by the breeze. Her parents pushed through the gawping spectators.

  ‘Je suis médecin,’ Jay’s father pushed the guide aside. And to the crowd watching: ‘Ecartez vous, s’il vous plaît. Give us some room, please.’ He felt Jay’s pulse and beckoned to the guide: ‘Give me a hand to carry her into the shade, will you?’

  *

  Jay felt herself being lifted by two pairs of hands, and then was aware of rising to head height and beyond until she was looking down on the scene as the body that was hers was carried into the shade of a wall. She stopped rising and found her view framed by a narrow window whose small leaded panes gave onto the courtyard, which was not peopled now by a small group of tourists but full of the hustle and bustle of medieval life, as the thousand inhabitants of the castle went about their daily tasks.

  *

  ‘Gold?’ queried Richard Coeur de Lion.

  He licked grease off his lips, threw away the chicken leg he had been eating and brushed aside the page boy holding the rest of the dismembered bird before him on a pewter plate. As the page moved away, the king caught him by one ear lobe and tweaked it hard between the grimy nails of his index and thumb.

  ‘Did I tell you to move, boy?’ he hissed, bringing his mouth close to the ear with its now bleeding lobe.

  The boy stifled an exclamation of pain. ‘No, Sire,’ he whimpered.

  ‘Then why did you?’ The king’s voice was full of menace.

  ‘I thought, Sire …’

  ‘You thought? What thought you?’ Still gripping the lobe, Richard turned the boy to face him. He raised his hand until the unfortunate page was able to touch the ground only on tiptoe. The chicken slid off the plate and fell into the ankle-deep muck in which they were standing. A dog poked its head between the king’s legs and grabbed the unexpected treat, but was attacked by another cur before it could swallow a morsel.