Death on the High C's by Robert Barnard

Author:Robert Barnard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER XI

Black Notes and White Notes

‘Hate her?’ said Calvin Cross, spreading out his hands ingenuously and looking at Superintendent Nichols. ‘I don’t know—one doesn’t really think in those terms. But certainly I thought her one of the most ghastly women I’ve ever met.’

‘You quarrelled, I gather,’ said Nichols.

Calvin frowned briefly. ‘Ah—someone’s been talking. Who, I wonder? Well, again, quarrelled isn’t quite the word for it, because we didn’t have stand-up slanging-matches of the sort some members of the company go in for. It was more a matter of guerrilla warfare—of her lobbing neat little bombs in my direction, and me fielding them and lobbing them back. The fact is that we were sniping at each other, or niggling each other in some way, pretty much the whole time.’

Calvin’s pleasant, boyish face was open and transparent, his smile ready, his look steady. He seemed the frankest of frank witnesses, and Nichols found himself wondering what lay behind it, wondering if anything was being covered up, if another self lurked behind the white teeth and engaging smile. Because no one grew up black in Britain without bruises, little emotional wounds that could be cherished and nourished, and picked at until they became gaping holes. No black could be quite as genuine with a policeman as Calvin Cross was trying to be—it would go against his whole experience as an immigrant.

‘Was it just a matter of colour, this bad feeling between the two of you?’ Nichols asked.

‘Colour?’ said Calvin. ‘Oh, someone’s told you about that little incident, have they? Owen, I suppose. No, no—that didn’t come till we were well-entrenched enemies. I suppose you could say that our differences were mainly artistic.

‘You mean you had different approaches to the opera?’ asked Nichols.

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ said Calvin, his face becoming suddenly serious. ‘You see, we’ve got Simon Mulley as Rigoletto. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but the only thing to be said, really, is that he’s a great artist. Bridget and I are watching him every minute of rehearsals, every gesture he makes, just learning from him the whole time—quite apart from the singing, and what he can do with a simple phrase—it’s just unbelievable.’

Calvin pulled himself up.

‘Sorry—you won’t want me getting all enthusiastic. But the fact is, working with him is a great experience for young singers like us. He’s marvellous to us: we all three talk over the opera a lot—our parts, the movements, and so on. Most of the time we have to fight Owen Caulfield to get to do what we want, but that’s by the way. The point is that the three of us—and Ricci, too—are really trying to do justice to the piece, if that doesn’t sound too pompous.’

‘Not at all,’ said Nichols. ‘I get your point. And I suppose Miss Ffrench wasn’t interested in this sort of approach.’

‘Miss Ffrench was only interested in waggling her tits in the audience’s face. She was interested in sex and herself, and that was absolutely all.

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