The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood

wasn’t
flirting
,’ Iris said.
    ‘Alright then, he was talking to you perfectly innocently outside the chapel, with no lurid thoughts in his mind whatsoever. Along comes Eden, blah blah blah.’
    ‘That’s not the whole story,’ Eden said. He looked at Oscar. ‘Do you mind if
I
tell them?’
    ‘Go ahead. I don’t even know what you’re on about.’
    Oscar listened as Eden relayed the events of Wednesday evening in detail. ‘… and I was sitting up in the organ loft, and noticed him straight away. Picked him out as a heathen like
that
. He looked so bloody awkward, so unsettled. He was just staring at the choir like he could see the words coming out of their mouths. Afterwards, Iris tells me the only reason he went into the chapel was because he’d heard the organ. Ask him, he’ll tell you. He hasn’t been to church in years.’
    ‘Well, he’s hardly the only non-believer in the world,’ Jane said.
    ‘Yeah, big deal,’ Yin said. ‘My uncle Sun Fat is practically a Satanist. Who cares?’
    Oscar got the feeling he was being examined. His mouth was going dry.
    Eden sat back and folded his arms. ‘You’re missing the point. I wasn’t supposed to be playing on Wednesday. The other organ scholar, Barnaby—it was supposed to be his night. But he’d sprained his wrist, so, like a trooper, I covered for him. And I thought, sod it, I’m not going to stick to Barnaby’s boring old programme—Krebs, Gibbons, Bruna—we’ve heard it all before. The Director won’t care if I change the voluntary. So I played something different, something by Mattheson.’
    ‘You
didn’t
,’ Marcus said.
    ‘Too bloody right I did. And look—’ Eden grinned, gesturing towards Oscar with outstretched arms. ‘It worked. Living proof.’
    Oscar was having difficulty following their discussion; his mind was clouded with drink, bleary with tiredness. But his head was just clear enough to know that he resented being talked about this way, as if he were something Eden had found flattened on the street and brought inside for the others to prod with a stick.
    ‘I don’t get it,’ Jane said.
    ‘He played the Mattheson piece, Jane. Keep up,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s really quite extraordinary.’
    ‘I still don’t get it,’ she said.
    Oscar finally spoke up: ‘Who the hell is Mattheson?’ It came out rather bluntly.
    Silence fell in the room.
    ‘Johann Mattheson,’ Eden said. ‘He’s my fixation
du jour
. I could talk about him all day, every day, for the rest of my life, and I still wouldn’t tire of talking about him.’
    ‘Oh God, please tell me you’re not going to do your big Mattheson spiel,’ Iris said.
    ‘He wants to know,’ Eden replied. ‘Who am I to deny him?’
    ‘Oscar, listen to me, there’s still time.’ Iris looked at him with a pitying sort of expression—mouth pursed, brow lifted. ‘You should get out of here before he bores you into a slow death.’ Oscar didn’t respond. He needed to know what point Eden was trying to make. ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ Sherose from the chesterfield and picked up a few stray glasses. ‘I’m going upstairs to lie down. There’s only so many times a girl can hear the same story.’ She carried the empties into the kitchen and didn’t return.
    When Eden started to talk, a certain glee stretched over his face. Johann Mattheson, he told them, was a German composer and theorist. He’d once been a musical prodigy, playing the organ at churches in Hamburg from the age of nine, and singing in the chorus of the Hamburg opera. Handel was one of his contemporaries, and they were close friends for most of their lives, until rivalry eventually got the better of them, ending in a duel. ‘It was a proper sword fight outside a theatre—the real McCoy,’ Eden beamed, ‘and Mattheson nearly killed him, so they say, but a button on Handel’s coat stopped the blade and saved him.’ He was a prolific composer, writing mostly church