Ghosts and Other Lovers (20 page)

Edward Craithe had been Flora Abernethy's lover. The original score, from 1940 or so, was in her hand, and no drafts or notes for it had ever been found among Craithe's papers. And of course, as even I knew, it was very different from the style in which he had previously been working. The big mystery about Craithe, and the only fact which I knew about his life, was what had happened to him in 1940. He had disappeared then, and no trace of him had ever been found. Maggie suggested that Craithe's last symphony had actually been a collaboration between him and Flora Abernethy, but she referred me to an article published in
The Feminist Review
in 1984 which argued that it was Flora Abernethy's work alone, written after her abandonment by Craithe, and that it was the refusal by the establishment to accept this and take her seriously which had led both to her mental breakdown and to the effective end of her career.

"Of course, there's no way of proving authorship, but at least the issue could be raised. She's a lovely lady, very articulate, I'm sure she'd be great on TV. Her connection with Craithe could be the hook for a fascinating program."

For once, I agreed with Maggie. I'd been looking for my next project, and now I'd found it. Music, history, a mystery, the hint of scandal: had Craithe been given credit for his girlfriend's work? Maybe she knew the truth behind his disappearance. From what Maggie said, the old lady was ready to talk; the time was ripe to solve the mystery of Edward Craithe.

 

 

Maggie thought there was no way of proving authorship, but I believed otherwise. I'd heard of a computer program which could analyze a piece of music and generate more in the same style, and if computer programs could be used to authenticate works believed to be by Shakespeare and other word-mongers, how much more easily would one deal with the more mathematical structures of music!

 

The London Library listed two biographies of Craithe, one from 1952, the other from 1976. I reserved them both. It seemed strange to me that there had been no new biography in twenty years. Weren't there others, like me, tempted to solve the mystery of Craithe's disappearance? Or had it been solved? How to go from egocentric ("What a brilliant idea I've had!") to paranoid ("Everyone else in the world has known for years.") in five minutes. I got on my bike and went straight to the library before anyone else could steal my books.

The 1976 biography, by Mark R. Thomas, had a section of photographs, as well as footnotes. I looked at the pictures first. Craithe, in a studio shot from 1936, looked smooth and oiled, handsome as a matinée idol. Flora Abernethy had dreamy eyes but a determined jaw. I began to skim-read, with the 1952 biography, by A. D. Wallace, close at hand for the occasional contrast and comparison.

Edward Craithe had been born shortly before the first world war into a middle-class Edinburgh family. They were not especially musical, but there was a piano, and music lessons, for all the children, and when Edward showed an interest in composition it had been encouraged, and a tutor provided. By the age of twenty-three he was teaching music at a private school in the city and his first symphony had been performed, to encouraging reviews. He announced his engagement to an eighteen-year-old girl of good family, and then, scandalously, broke off the engagement a few months later, having fallen in love with another woman. This, of course, was Flora Abernethy, an "older woman" (she was twenty-five) with no living relations, who played the violin in a chamber group, and supported herself by giving music lessons. Although they traveled together unchaperoned, and may have lived together, Flora always kept her own rented room, and they did not marry. Wallace hinted that a prior marriage had made it impossible for Flora legally to marry Edward, but Thomas had interviewed Flora Abernethy and quoted her "philosophical and moral objections" to marriage.

According to the earlier biography, Craithe had been lured into joining a strange cult by the gullible Flora, who was under the influence of its leader. According to Thomas there was no cult, only a Taoist monk called Hsiu Tang whom Flora and Edward had separately approached for tuition in traditional Chinese music. Along with musical instruction he had taught them his own esoteric branch of Taoism which was based on the ancient Chinese belief that everything was created out of music, and that it was possible to learn to hear this divine music through a specialized form of meditation. The details now could only be guessed at and supposed. Hsiu Tang had, like Craithe, vanished around 1940.

Both biographies ended with speculation on what had happened to Craithe. They were in agreement that after being called up he had deliberately deserted, under pressure from Flora, who was pregnant. Wallace believed that, after a period of hiding out, perhaps in Wales where Flora had suffered a miscarriage, Craithe had repented of his cowardice and gone to London to enlist under a false name. He had then become one of the many casualties of the war, dead in some foreign field, buried under an assumed name. Thomas went along as far as the flight to Wales and the miscarriage, but then, as Flora descended into madness, he believed that Craithe had left (perhaps unaware of how ill Flora had become, assuming she would follow later) and gone by boat to Ireland. There he had stayed in a cottage on the west coast, living like a hermit and continuing to compose music, for several years until his death, while still a young man, from what might have been TB. Much hand-written sheet music had apparently been found in the cottage after his death, and although most of it had been destroyed, the author claimed to be in possession of a few remaining scraps in which he had recognized Craithe's distinctive style.

More for the computer to analyze, I thought happily. I was always happier when I found a way of using the computer. I don't know how I'd live without it.

 

 

Back at home, I trawled the Internet in search of connections, posting requests here and there. If there was anyone writing a biography or otherwise researching Craithe, I wanted to know about it.

 

I arranged a meeting with my TV people and came away with seed money -- well, with a contract and the promise of seed money. The zeitgeist was with me: Scottish composers were "in," and if I could, as I'd hinted, solve the mystery of Craithe's disappearance -- big time. If not, well, I could still have an effective, artistic little biography to appeal to a smaller audience.

I tracked down the biographer, Mark Thomas, and took him out to lunch. He agreed to give me copies of the music that had been found in the cottage in Ireland, although he warned me that they were only scraps, not enough to prove anything.

"They might be enough for the computer," I said. "They can extrapolate from very little, and make comparisons with the body of work."

He scowled. "I can do that, too. I could continue what there is on certain lines . . . but that's not to say that what I came up with would be what Craithe wrote. I think you have the wrong idea about how music works: yes, it may be mathematical, but that's not to say it is utterly predictable. Set a problem within certain limits, take any five musicians and no two of them would reach the same conclusion."

"I don't know anything about music," I said. "But I do know computers, and there are programs which can write music."

He snorted. "Depends what you call music."

"That's not really the point. It's analysis, not composition, I'm interested in. Computers are great for detective work. What made you decide the music you found was Craithe's? There must have been some basic principles. . . ."

"To be perfectly honest, I was following a hunch, operating on instinct as much as anything. There's no proof." He looked straight into my eyes, and I suddenly twigged that he'd made the whole thing up to sell his biography.

"Wasn't there any music found in the cottage?"

"Yes, of course! You don't think I made that up? Look, I don't have proof, these things
can't
be proved, whatever you may think, but using my knowledge of musicology and of Craithe I made some perfectly legitimate speculations. . . . Of course the music was there! But most of it was burnt by the time I got my hands on it. There were really only scraps left."

"Could I see them?"

"I've brought you photocopies. You can use them however you like."

"Thank you. There's something you might not have thought of doing, but I'd like to get it analyzed not only in comparison with Craithe's other works, but also to compare his last symphony with Flora Abernethy's own compositions."

"Oh, Lord," he said. "You're not intending to argue -- not seriously -- that loony feminist's theory?"

"Why not? The only manuscript is in her hand, and you must admit that it is completely unlike his earlier works."

"It's also wholly unlike anything
she
ever wrote," he said definitely. "There's absolutely no connection between any of her known works and Craithe's final opus. So if the lack of connection between the last symphony and his earlier work is meant to be proof that he couldn't have written it -- why doesn't it matter in her case? I'll tell you why: the woman who wrote that article had no notion. She was simply casting about, rather desperately, in search of some new victim-heroine to prove her thesis that women's work is always stolen by men. She had absolutely no evidence. And for all the mad things Flora Abernethy said, she never claimed that Craithe's work was hers."

"You did ask her?"

He looked at me without replying. I felt I was trespassing, but I didn't let it stop me. "I did think it strange that although you interviewed her you didn't give her explanation of what happened to him. Surely she had some idea?"

"She was quite mad. It would not have been kind, nor served any purpose, to have published her rambling, mystical notions. As far as she was concerned, Edward Craithe simply vanished. He 'left this plane,' I believe was how she put it. I doubt she'll be able to tell you anything useful. If you have any idea of putting her on television . . . well, I hope you'll think very hard about it."

"I don't intend to exploit her," I said, annoyed. "Maggie -- her social worker -- doesn't think she's crazy."

He shrugged. "Even if she's completely sane now she's unlikely to be able to remember the truth of what happened when she was mad. I suspect that she simply doesn't know what happened to Craithe, whether he told her where he was going, expecting her to follow, or if he simply abandoned her, unable to cope with her grief and her madness any more than he could cope with the war."

I wondered what Flora Abernethy had told this man but I didn't press him; I preferred to let her speak for herself.

 

 

Flora Abernethy lived in a basement flat on a rundown street near the center of Edinburgh. She was a frail-looking, white-haired woman who spoke clearly but moved very slowly. The dimly lit front room was bone-chillingly cold, although it was only October; she switched on an electric heater for my comfort. Even had Maggie not warned me I would have recognized by this how she lived, pinching and scrimping and doing without, putting on another ancient woolly rather than add to her electricity bill. I wished I'd brought more than a box of biscuits, but Maggie had insisted that Miss Abernethy would be mortally insulted by a food basket. "Too much like charity. She'd be mortified." If my program got made, then later there would be money she'd be able to accept: fees for her time and help, fees for the use of her music.

 

When we were settled, finally, with our cups of tea and the box of biscuits open on a table between us, I asked if she minded my tape recording our interview.

"I don't mind at all, dear. In fact, I prefer it. This way there can be no confusion about what I've said. Because you're bound to question it. But I don't mind that, as long as you hear it. It won't hurt me if people think I'm mad. What matters to me is that the truth should be told."

"Yes . . . what truth is that?"

"About Edward Craithe. What happened to him. Isn't that what you've come to ask?"

My heart lurched. I had meant to lead up to this more gently, but. . . . "You know what happened to him?"

"Of course I do. I told the other one, the one who was writing a book, but he never put in what I said. He thought I was mad, you see, and of course I was, driven mad with grief, but that's not to say that it wasn't true. I know what happened. I know what I did.

"I've always been able to hear the music in people. It was a gift I was born with, although as I grew up I realized that other people couldn't hear what I could, and that it would be better for me if I didn't talk about it. One day, after I was grown, I attended a lecture on non-Western musical traditions, and the lecturer mentioned in passing the ancient Chinese belief that all of creation was molded according to the music performed inside it. And suddenly I understood: this was how I perceived the world. After that I was wild to learn whatever I could about Chinese music and religion.

"I didn't get much further until I came across Mr. Tang. He could hear the music in people, too, and so we recognized each other. Unlike me, he came from a culture, a tradition, which accepted his gift, and made sense of it. He agreed to teach me what he knew.

"One day when I was going to visit Mr. Tang I met Edward coming out. We knew each other already, for we belonged to the same musical world. At first I was wild with excitement, imagining that he had the gift too, but I soon learned I was wrong. He had approached Mr. Tang as an interested outsider. He did not 'hear' people as I did, yet he was drawn to the idea of a universal music, of music as the shaping principal of all creation. . . . I think really it was the religious impulse in him which was nearly strangled by his dour, Free Church upbringing, and that he was looking for God in music as the only alternative he could imagine to worship. It might have remained an intellectual interest for him, he might have drifted away as easily as he had drifted into the orbit of Mr. Tang -- but he fell in love with me, and began learning to listen."