endangered paradise, an endangered ocean, haunting summons, a haunting enchantment .
Out of the depths of the studio “Mack the Knife” ceased and was followed by the music of Delius sailing across the Anglian sea of Stella’s orphanage upon which Mack’s women were subtilized into spectres of perennial however sordid grief, perennial however enchanting beauty.
First came “A Song of Summer”, one of Jenny’s favourite records.
The generous rise and fall of the waves (the cellos and basses) and the seagull gliding by (a flute theme) transported Stella into a meditative, child’s eye exultation and vision. Jenny Diver’s tears streamed down the sky into the sea but they were rich beyond every calculation, they almost seemed to choke her into serenity. In the midst of the waves the gull altered its shape. It beckoned, it called, from some endangered, yet serene, climate in which the no longer blind, no longer paralysed, no longer deaf composer lived.
Jenny turned now to “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring”. Stella listened for the faint cuckoo, cuckoo. It came after—or in the midst of—a body of repeated phrases, short, glancing tears from Lucy Brown. There it was ,faintest crack in the coffin of nature, cuckoo , phantom egg deposited in the nest of a stranger….
Jenny stopped the record and put on “Brigg Fair” in which folk-song and magical season blended and Sukey Tawdrey was subtilized beyond cheap or sordid encounter into delicate place, all her gaudy, funeral garments swinging in the lightest wind, the lightest alchemy of the fair of death and life; sometimes a slow, quiet swing or dance enveloped her limbs, only to be quickened again, enlivened again, into the commerce of heart and mind. Then came the poignant commodity of “Brigg Fair”’s grief, the “still sad music of humanity”, changing nevertheless into child’s eye wonder, pearls for tears, into a long bar of echoing stillness, sounding the heights and the depths, and summoning her, summoning her ,to follow in the footsteps of the dancers on sarcophagus-globe, earth and sea and sky.
Lastly Jenny played “A Walk in the Paradise Garden”. Here it was that her departure seemed to grow imminent into an endangered paradise, half-Utopia, half-inferno. The mosaic sea gave way to snow mountains and ice maidens wreathed nevertheless in flowers plucked from a wild garden. The soft tread of spectres accompanying Jenny Diver and Sukey Tawdrey rose, sank back, rose again. Each spectre clung to the clarinets, to a pendulum that rose in one direction before it returned and melted into stillness, a stillness that was never wholly still, bride of both clock time and timelessness somewhere in the mountains above the sea or somewhere in space above the earth, in another planet where life and death whispered endless secrets to each other.
*
December brought the curtain of weather down over White City and broke upon Stella less with music and more with operatic mutes whose gestures were eloquent enough for the season of the year. They were sullen creditors, scarcely saying a word but threatening catastrophe unless they could collect money Sebastian owed them. They were not—Stella discovered—his greyhound pavement suppliers of speed but others of whom she knew nothing and from whom he had borrowed a fiver here, a fiver there, to bet on “the horses”. The horses had become a new lie. He sweated over bits of paper with the names of jockeys and favourites. Towards mid-December a terrifying jockey arrived, terrifying saviour, moment of truth. It was to make Stella see how dangerous their way of life had become, how prone they were to hurt each other, how third-party child could mirror judgement day.
It had been a depressing morning, damp, cold, heated atmospheres in turn. They had quarrelled over money. He had called her a cold-hearted bitch. Then he had stormed out of the house. The quarrel, on Stella’s part, had been aggravated by the fact
Out of the depths of the studio “Mack the Knife” ceased and was followed by the music of Delius sailing across the Anglian sea of Stella’s orphanage upon which Mack’s women were subtilized into spectres of perennial however sordid grief, perennial however enchanting beauty.
First came “A Song of Summer”, one of Jenny’s favourite records.
The generous rise and fall of the waves (the cellos and basses) and the seagull gliding by (a flute theme) transported Stella into a meditative, child’s eye exultation and vision. Jenny Diver’s tears streamed down the sky into the sea but they were rich beyond every calculation, they almost seemed to choke her into serenity. In the midst of the waves the gull altered its shape. It beckoned, it called, from some endangered, yet serene, climate in which the no longer blind, no longer paralysed, no longer deaf composer lived.
Jenny turned now to “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring”. Stella listened for the faint cuckoo, cuckoo. It came after—or in the midst of—a body of repeated phrases, short, glancing tears from Lucy Brown. There it was ,faintest crack in the coffin of nature, cuckoo , phantom egg deposited in the nest of a stranger….
Jenny stopped the record and put on “Brigg Fair” in which folk-song and magical season blended and Sukey Tawdrey was subtilized beyond cheap or sordid encounter into delicate place, all her gaudy, funeral garments swinging in the lightest wind, the lightest alchemy of the fair of death and life; sometimes a slow, quiet swing or dance enveloped her limbs, only to be quickened again, enlivened again, into the commerce of heart and mind. Then came the poignant commodity of “Brigg Fair”’s grief, the “still sad music of humanity”, changing nevertheless into child’s eye wonder, pearls for tears, into a long bar of echoing stillness, sounding the heights and the depths, and summoning her, summoning her ,to follow in the footsteps of the dancers on sarcophagus-globe, earth and sea and sky.
Lastly Jenny played “A Walk in the Paradise Garden”. Here it was that her departure seemed to grow imminent into an endangered paradise, half-Utopia, half-inferno. The mosaic sea gave way to snow mountains and ice maidens wreathed nevertheless in flowers plucked from a wild garden. The soft tread of spectres accompanying Jenny Diver and Sukey Tawdrey rose, sank back, rose again. Each spectre clung to the clarinets, to a pendulum that rose in one direction before it returned and melted into stillness, a stillness that was never wholly still, bride of both clock time and timelessness somewhere in the mountains above the sea or somewhere in space above the earth, in another planet where life and death whispered endless secrets to each other.
*
December brought the curtain of weather down over White City and broke upon Stella less with music and more with operatic mutes whose gestures were eloquent enough for the season of the year. They were sullen creditors, scarcely saying a word but threatening catastrophe unless they could collect money Sebastian owed them. They were not—Stella discovered—his greyhound pavement suppliers of speed but others of whom she knew nothing and from whom he had borrowed a fiver here, a fiver there, to bet on “the horses”. The horses had become a new lie. He sweated over bits of paper with the names of jockeys and favourites. Towards mid-December a terrifying jockey arrived, terrifying saviour, moment of truth. It was to make Stella see how dangerous their way of life had become, how prone they were to hurt each other, how third-party child could mirror judgement day.
It had been a depressing morning, damp, cold, heated atmospheres in turn. They had quarrelled over money. He had called her a cold-hearted bitch. Then he had stormed out of the house. The quarrel, on Stella’s part, had been aggravated by the fact
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