The Travelling Hornplayer Read online

  Praise for The Travelling Hornplayer

  ‘Pungent with life, with wit, love, yearning and grief, The Travelling Hornplayer is Barbara Trapido’s most entertaining and powerful novel to date. Her fans might be forgiven for thinking this writer couldn’t get any better. She just has’

  Harriet Castor, Guardian

  ‘Audacious, energetic and dazzling . . . The vividness, and the immediately engaging style, is as sure as ever, and the Dickensian swiftness with which she can draw a character is full of charm . . . There aren’t many novelists whose stories one doesn’t want to end, but Barbara Trapido is one of them’

  Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday

  ‘A funny, cunning and surprisingly sexy novel, which moved at least this reader to both tears and laughter. Anyone who knows the preceding volumes will not be disappointed by this even more deeply felt sequel, and anyone who doesn’t should get all three immediately’

  Michael Dibdin, Sunday Times

  ‘Her most marvellous yet, fearlessly acrobatic, tragic and comic. It offers the huge pleasures and pains of old friends, families and foes from her earlier books’

  Elspeth Barker, Independent on Sunday Books of the Year

  ‘The woman is brilliant . . . she actually makes you laugh . . . Trapido’s jet-propelled cast of characters . . . find their fates interweaving, and linked, and their loose ends becoming knotted . . . I enjoyed every page of this book, which is so shimmering with wit, hectic energy and crazy convolutions of plots that I ended up in a state of sublime, satiated exhaustion’

  Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

  ‘A wonderful novel . . . It is one of those (thankfully rare) books that one has trouble putting down . . . This has one of those magical and perfect endings which leaves you with a wholly satisfying sense of closure while revealing nothing . . . I also loved the novel’s gleeful disdain for the distinctions between comedy and tragedy. The relationship between Stella and her mother was so affecting . . . But then a few pages later I was screaming with laughter over Sonia and her corset’

  Jonathan Coe

  ‘Delightful . . . Barbara Trapido deserves to be cherished’

  Anita Brookner, Spectator

  ‘An enchanting book, funny, poignant, and full of grace . . . the brio that Trapido brings to her comic set pieces is combined with the inventiveness and affection for her characters that make all her books such a joy to read’

  Miranda Seymour, Independent

  ‘A lovely, lovely book . . . profound, wise, funny, true . . . It’s a long time since I read a novel that has all this fire and passion and convincingness (these are utterly real people) of the great nineteenth-century novelists . . . which I had believed was an impossible feat nowadays’

  Humphrey Carpenter

  ‘Smart, inventive and funny, with the glitter of a Grimm’s fairytale . . . the story spins along with spiky mistresses, good stepmothers, bad mothers and maidens loitering in towers . . . Barbara Trapido’s novels shimmer with stylistic and literary pyrotechnics and leaps of faith. They are also stuffed with sly allusions, illusion, coincidence, a lightly-worn erudition and a knockabout comedy that masks a passionate and serious appraisal of human suffering’

  Elizabeth Buchan, The Times

  ‘A great pleasure to read . . . Trapido’s wonderfully ironic eye takes in ghosts, adultery, art and AIDS . . . She has the mindteasing skills of a crime writer combined with a sense of humour as dry as a Martini’

  Peter Buckham, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Gloriously entertaining . . . utterly irresistible . . . an entrancing, quirky confection packed with such a rich mixture of fun and pathos that readers may well need to pause occasionally, if only to draw emotional breath . . . The magic lies in the way the author interweaves the loves and lives of her wacky cast’

  Gillian Fairchild, Daily Telegraph

  ‘The Travelling Hornplayer has characters realized with such vividness that they really do seem like people one has met – or would like to meet’

  Christina Koning, The Times

  ‘Highly engaging . . . dedicated to showing the reader a good time . . . This is not just because of the enjoyable preposterous plot, but the sheer quality of Trapido’s prose’

  Louise Doughty, Observer

  ‘This has it all: love, death, loss, poetry, music and gorgeous locations . . . the characterization is wonderful and the humour irresistible’

  Cosmopolitan

  ‘Trapido is the most vigorous, empathetic writer. Her portraits of family life and relationships are models of observation and wit, imaginatively balanced between the familiar and the off-beat . . . Trapido offers a tragedy told with humour and verve, as if no situation is so black it cannot be leavened’

  Rosemary Goring, Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Spellbinding . . . Beguiling and brilliant, Trapido’s sparkling jewel box of a fifth novel is a deceptively intricate mesh of passions and misunderstandings . . . written with seductive charm and a giddy, knife-edged humour’

  Big Issue

  ‘She is one of the funniest of novelists . . . [she] writes with a bubbling wit. Her high spirits are unquenchable’

  Scotsman

  For Alexandra Pringle and Charles van Onselen

  ‘I ask no flower,

  I ask no star;

  . . .

  . . .

  I am no gardener,

  And the stars are too high.’

  Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827), Seventy-Seven Poems

  from the Posthumous Papers of a Travelling Hornplayer

  Contents

  The chapter subtitles are from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, words by Wilhelm Müller.

  1. Des Müllers Blumen

  The Miller’s Flowers

  2. Das Wandern

  Wandering

  3. Morgengruss

  Morning Greeting

  4. Wohin?

  Where to?

  5. Tränenregen

  Rain of Tears

  6. Die liebe Farbe

  The Beloved Colour

  7. Danksagung an den Bach

  Grateful Address to the Millstream

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Also Available by Barbara Trapido

  1. Des Müllers Blumen

  Ellen

  Early on the morning of my interview, I woke up and saw my dead sister. I had not seen her for three years. She came into my bedroom, opening and closing the door without a sound. Her hair was bobbed short and she was dressed in plain white cotton T-shirt and knickers. Nothing else. I watched her cross the room on bare feet, and pause to touch the somewhat staid interview clothes that I had laid out on a chair the night before: navy calflength skirt, navy lambswool jumper, cream silk shirt, paisley silk scarf, best polished boots. She paused again to stroke the foot-end of my duvet. Then she walked on towards the window, where the curtains were drawn shut. While her facial expression in life had been characteristically animated, it was now serene and fixed, like that of a person sleep-walking.

  Though she made no sound, she left a five-word sentence behind her in the room. The words were in German. I heard them in her voice but, at the same time, I was aware that the voice was audible only inside my own head: ‘Die Sterne stehn zu hoch.’ I should explain here that I don’t really speak German – that is, not beyond the level of GCSE Grade C – though I knew that I had come across the phrase before, and I knew enough to be able to translate it: ‘The stars are too high.’

  As soon as she had disappeared behind the curtain, I jumped out of bed and went to the window. Nothing was there; only the cold glass panes and, beyond them, the gleaming monochrome of the garden in the minutes before the dawn. Of one
thing I am completely certain. I was not asleep. I remember that the vision of her filled me with a terrible longing, and that my lack of fear surprised me. I remember that I felt honoured by her being there, and that afterwards I felt pain. I felt the loss of her, once again, like an ugly lump of flesh twisting inside my own chest.

  When my sister was killed by a car in north London, her small leather backpack was thrown clear of her body. It contained nothing except a return train ticket between King’s Cross and Royston in Hertfordshire, where she was still at school, her Young Person’s Railcard and the extended essay she had just then had returned to her that she had written for her A level German course.

  Since she had not filled in the address section of the railcard, it was the essay that had made the job of identifying her such an easy one for the police. The front cover of the essay’s binder had a large adhesive label with the name of her examination board and that of her school. It also gave her name and candidate number, and the title of her essay. It was called Love and Death at the Mill: Twenty Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Travelling Hornplayer.

  I was in Edinburgh when she died – I was coming to the end of my first year at the university – but no one at home had any idea why Lydia had gone into London that day, though within the week, while going through her things, my father and the Stepmother had come upon the draft of a letter written to the middle-aged writer son of one of my sister’s godmother’s friends; a person whom neither I nor my parents had ever met though we were all aware that he had written a novel some years earlier entitled Have Horn; Will Travel. The place where my sister died was directly in front of his London flat.

  The letter, which was long and jaunty, was one in which she had sought his advice over the essay, but it was not difficult to tell that, in its childish, girly way, the letter was a bit of a come-on. Some months after the date of it, she had submitted the essay and had been awarded an A, along with special words of praise from both teacher and moderator. The speculation was that, on having the essay returned to her, she had simply decided, on the spur of the moment, to take it into London and show it to him, her unofficial adviser. She hadn’t made any arrangement to do so, and had evidently found the writer away from his flat, since he had gone home two days earlier than usual that week, to be with his wife and family somewhere in the Cotswolds, where they lived. The place in London was merely a small bolt-hole where he went during the week to work.

  Though the driver had been travelling too fast, the accident was ruled not to have been his fault. A witness confirmed that, for some reason, my sister had run at speed straight out in front of the car without looking to left or to right. It was said that she had seemed distressed.

  The force of contact had been such that she had been thrown clear of the road onto the grass of park. Near to where her body had landed, there was a small man-made lake bordered with periwinkles and forget-me-nots. Vergissmeinnicht. It is difficult, in retrospect, to avoid the crude symbolism of this too blatant coincidence, since the same blue flowers – the blaue Blümelein – are associated with the mill girl’s eyes in the cycle of German Romantic poems to which her essay relates. They grow by water and they come to deck the grave of the miller who dies, of course, of unrequited love. They are a repeating and prevalent feature of my sister’s extended essay; the essay which my father has had bound in leather and which he keeps on his study desk.

  After that early morning visitation, I went downstairs to the tall bookshelves in the hall where, at the top near the ceiling, are stacked some dark green box files that contain those of my sister’s papers that my father chose to keep. I felt impelled right then to re-read the letter, and it brought vividly back to me all that schoolgirl bubble and silliness that she and I had shared in our capacity as each other’s best friend. Once my sister was gone, these were qualities that I either suppressed or lost. Not having Lydia to bounce off, I became somebody else. When you are young enough – and I was eighteen to her seventeen when she died – you still, perhaps, have options about the kind of person you will become. I became, because of her dying, a more earnest, more straight-faced, more directed person. It may be that I became a bit of a bore.

  It surprises me now to remember that my father – our father – had used to call us ‘Gigglers One and Two’; that he was always inclined to treat us as if we were two halves of the same pantomime horse. He has treated me very seriously ever since. People in the past were often unable to tell us one from the other. This was not only because we looked alike, but because our speech and other mannerisms were similar. It is only very rarely now that a person will call me by her name. The Lydia that once lived is dead in both of us.

  My sister’s letter went like this:

  Dear Mr Goldman,

  I don’t expect you will remember me, but I met you in my Godmother Vanessa’s house in Worcestershire last summer. You had driven down to drop your mother. However, you may remember that Godmother was a concert soprano in her day and that she made you sing. You sang songs from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and your mother played the piano. Although, as you must know, you sing very well, I confess that, had my sister Ellie not left an hour before your arrival, we would have giggled throughout your performance. As it was, I merely yawned and played with the cat, and ate far too much of the carrot cake that Godmother had made in your honour. Godmother Vanessa is your greatest fan, and she always calls you ‘The Novelist’.

  ‘My dears,’ she’d said to Ellie and me, ‘do you know that “The Novelist” is coming to tea? I think we will make him a carrot cake.’

  My point now is that when I got home I recollected your singing. After I got back I began to think about some of the things I’d half overheard you say to Godmother. You said that water was the metaphor that bound the poems together and you made some joke about its ‘convenient fluidity’. You said that the water, while it encouraged and sanctioned the idea of male restlessness and male wanderings, then became quite cruelly deceitful, detached and inscrutable. You said something about sex and fluids and suicide. You said what a useful thing it was for the German Romantics that the word Herz rhymed with Schmerz. (I hope you enjoy being paraphrased like this.)

  To tell you the truth, I went out the next day and I bought the song cycle on CD. I bought it twice, once being sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who sings beautifully but he has irritating nursery sibilants, and once, somewhat shriekishly, by a woman called Birgitte Something. I wanted to see if the songs could cross gender, but I expect they can’t.

  I decided then and there to abandon my previous resolution to Improve my Mind by reading my way through the Encyclopaedia Britannica, starting with the letter A. I have opted for A level German, though my sister thinks I must be off my head. We both did GCSE German, you see, because our mother said we had to. That’s because she’s French and she’d always made us speak French with her at home, so we could do that quite well already. Naturally, we’d wanted to sign up for GCSE French, thinking it would be a good skive, but the tyrant matriarch wouldn’t allow it. After that, Ellie thought two years of German had been quite enough. Two years of:

  ‘Was hast du gern?’

  ‘Ich habe Popmusik gern.’

  ‘Und hast du eine Lieblingsgruppe?’

  ‘Ja. Abba ist meine Lieblingsgruppe.’

  She’d also had a Bad Experience during the German exchange, while I’d had the most adorable dentist’s family in Munich who took me on lovely jaunts and offered to put braces on my teeth. Ellie’s family swept her off over the border into the country somewhere outside Vienna. She was stuck with these two pigmentless boys in lederhosen called Hubert-und-Norbert, who looked exactly like white mice and had not an eyebrow between them. One of them played a squeeze-box and the other one blew on this brasswind item at all hours, right under her window. On Easter morning she’d woken up to a blast, only to find that Herr Vater White Mouse was looming over her bed, clothed from head to foot in a yellow fur-fabric bunny suit with polka-dot bo
w-tie and handy pull-down zip.

  The only outing she’d been taken on was once to the cathedral in Vienna, where Frau Mutti White Mouse had been so odiously smug about the Defeated Infidel at the Siege of Vienna that Ellie was moved to observe (in English) that if only the Infidel had not been repulsed at the gates of Vienna then perhaps Hubert-und-Norbert would be sporting sexy black eyebrows and even sexier black moustaches. The episode has left my sister with leanings towards dark men called Ishmael and Quoresh, especially in djellabahs. She thinks it no accident that the word ‘pasha’ should sound so much like ‘passion’.

  Anyway, the upshot is that I have decided to write my A level long essay on the poet Wilhelm Müller, who, as you will of course know, wrote the poems on which Die schöne Müllerin was based. The trouble is, I knew very little about German poetry – or poetry in general, since I see now that I have Misspent My Youth reading Quite the Wrong Sort of Book. I only know German poetry if it’s hymns. I know ‘Ein feste Burg ist Unser Gott’ and I know ‘Praise the Lord, Ye Heavens Adore Him’, which is really Deutschland über Alles. So I wonder now if you could bear it if I were to come in on the train to see you and talk to you about German poetry, and German Romanticism, and Herz, and Schmerz, and especially about Wilhelm Müller? And would you mind if I were to take down absolutely every word you utter? And if I were then to submit these utterings, word for word, as my extended essay?

  This letter is getting far too long. Ade. Ade. Please reply to me.

  Yours sincerely,

  Lydia Dent

  My sister had added the obligatory adolescent postscript. It said:

  P.S. I have translated one line in the poems as ‘Better you should have stayed in the woods’ – ‘Doch besser du bliebest im Walde dazu’ – but it sounds too much like the punchline of a Jewish joke. (As in ‘Better he should have been a doctor.’) Is German a dialect of Yiddish, do you know, or could it be the other way round?