It was like a new game for him at first. Sometimes it would be high – his familiar clear golden notes – and sometimes he could make it low and husky. One evening in the parlour he created an entertainment as good as a play, telling the adventures of a butterfly exactly in the style of the novel Chrysal; or the Adventures of a Guinea. The butterfly he did in a high squeaky voice, and the villains which it encountered on its journey through London thundered with his deepest bass. I played rippling chords and imposing fanfares for when the butterfly was received at court, and Mama laughed so much that the tears poured down her face.
She laughed a good deal less when she discovered that we knew the novel because Richard had ordered it from Grandmama Havering’s circulating library. My name was on the order, and my morals were the ones most likely to be corrupted from reading fiction. I took the blame; and Richard took the credit for his wit and imagination. He played with his surprising new voice and I believe he never thought – and I never knew – that his voice was altering for ever.
Its range was not always steady. It was not always controllable. Sometimes in mid-sentence it would suddenly go high or suddenly break and become husky. Richard ceased to find it amusing and snapped at me when I laughed. Then, worst of all-while he was singing a simple high sweet song and I played a lilting harmony on the pianoforte – his voice broke.
He frowned as if something small and trivial had happened, like a doorknob coming off in his hand. ‘Play it again, Julia!’ he said. ‘This stupid voice of mine …’
I played it, but my fingers had lost their confidence and I hit a shower of wrong notes. He did not even reproach me. It was only a high G, and he could not hit it. Three times we tried, my piano part sounding worse and worse all the time. Richard did not even complain. He just looked at me in great perplexity and then turned his face to look out of the window at the grey sky and the heaped clouds.
‘It seems to have gone,’ he said, very puzzled. ‘I can’t do it.’
He went from the room slowly, with none of his usual swinging stride. As he went up the stairs to his room, I could hear him clearly, all the way up the first flight of stairs, singing the phrase over and over again. And over and over again the leap to the high G quavered and broke. He had lost the high aerial reaches of his wonderful voice. His gift, his very very special gift, was being reclaimed.
After dinner, when we were in the parlour, he said confidently, ‘I’d like to try that song again, Julia. The one we were doing this morning. I had a frog in my throat this morning, I think! I couldn’t hit the note at all. I can do it now, I know.’
I fetched the sheet of music and propped it on the stand. I bungled the introduction badly, and the ripple of arpeggio that should have been smooth was as lumpy as an apple crumble.
‘Really, Julia,’ Mama said with a frown. And then she turned to Richard and smiled.
He was sitting in the window-seat, looking out towards the trees, as beautiful as a black-headed cherub, utterly unchanged. He drew a breath ready to sing, and I hit the right chord for once.
The note was wrong.
Richard snapped it off short.
And tried again.
My hands dropped from the keys. I could not think of what to say or do. For a second Richard’s pure lovely voice was there, but then it quavered and broke and was gone. Richard looked at me in utter bewilderment, and then at Mama.
‘Your voice has broken, Richard,’ she said, smiling. ‘You are becoming a man.’
Richard looked at her as if he could not understand her.
‘Early,’ she said. ‘You’re an early starter, Richard, at only eleven. But your voice is definitely breaking. You will not be able to sing soprano again.’
‘His voice will go low?’ I asked. I had never thought about such a process. Richard’s golden voice seemed such a part of him that I could not think of him without it. By the stunned look on his face, he could not imagine himself without it either.
‘Of course,’ Mama said smiling. ‘He would not make much of a man with a voice like a choirboy all his life, would he?’
‘But what shall I sing?’ Richard asked. He looked almost ready to cry. His colour had rushed into his cheeks and his eyes were dark with disappointment. ‘What shall I sing now?’
‘Tenor parts,’ Mama said equably. ‘Julia will be the soprano of the household now.’
‘Julia!’ Richard spat out my name in his temper. ‘Julia cannot sing. She sings like she was calling cows home. Julia cannot sing soprano.’
Mama frowned at his words, but remained calm. ‘Hush, Richard,’ she said gently. ‘I agree, none of us have your talent for music. But there are many good tenor parts you will enjoy singing. Your uncle, Julia’s papa, had a wonderful voice. He used to sing all the tenor parts when we sang together. I still probably have some of the music at Havering. I will look them out for you when we are next there.’
‘I don’t want them!’ Richard cried out in passion. ‘I don’t want to be a tenor. I will never sing a tenor part. It’s such an ordinary voice! I don’t want an ordinary voice. If I cannot have my proper voice, I won’t sing at all! My voice is special. No one in the county sings like I do! I won’t become an ordinary tenor!’ He stormed from the room in a fury, slamming the door. I heard his boots pound upstairs, loud on the bare floorboards. There was a shocked silence in the little parlour. I closed the lid of the pianoforte softly. Mama snipped a thread.
‘It was never music for Richard,’ she said sadly. ‘He just wanted to be exceptional.’ I said nothing. ‘Poor boy,’ Mama said with a great deal of pity in her voice. ‘Poor boy.’
Richard did sing again in public. There was an experimental service with harvest hymns at Chichester Cathedral. Grandmama Havering took the two of us, and Richard joined in with a clear light tenor. An unexceptional voice. We both remembered the times when he had sung with a voice as bright as a choirboy and people in the pews all around us had craned their necks to see Richard, with his eyes on the altar, singing like the angel Gabriel. No one turned their heads at Richard’s pleasant tones now. Only I looked at him with a little glance which I was careful to keep neutral. If he had thought I pitied him, he would have been most angry.
I said nothing at all until we were home and Mama had gone upstairs to take off her hat. Richard was idling in the parlour. I went to the pianoforte and opened the lid.
‘Let’s sing something!’ I said as lightly as I could manage it. I brought my hands down in a ringing chord and for a mercy hit all the right notes. But when I looked up, Richard’s face was sombre.
‘No,’ he said softly, ‘I shall never sing again. Oh, I may groan on a little in church like I did today. But I shall never sing in the parlour, or in the kitchen, or even in my bathtub. I had the voice I liked, but now it has gone. And I’ll never get it back.’
‘Your voice now is very nice, Richard …’ I offered hesitantly.
‘Nice!’ he shouted. But then at once he had himself under control. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is very nice, isn’t it? Before it broke I had a voice which was probably as good as anyone’s in Europe. But they would not let me use it, or train it, or even see good music teachers. Now it is gone, and all I have instead is a powerless tenor which you tell me is very nice. Well, as far as I am concerned, that is the same as having no voice at all.’
‘What will you do, Richard?’ I asked. I found my lips were trembling as if Richard were telling me of some mortal wound. In a way, I suppose, he was.
‘I shall do nothing,’ he said quietly. ‘I shall forget the voice I had, and very soon so will everyone else. I shall forget that I wanted to be a musician. I shall forget the plans I had