Read Online The Courage Consort by Michel Faber - Free Book Online Page A

her and raised his eyebrows, as if he'd never glimpsed her before this moment, as if she'd just blundered, childlike, into a sanctum whose holiness she couldn't be expected to understand. He inclined his head in benign welcome but did not speak. Disappointingly, Gina did not speak either, preferring to get down to business. With the plug of the vacuum cleaner nestled in her hand, she nosed around the room, murmuring to herself: 'Stopcontact, stopcontact'—the Dutch word for electrical outlet, apparently. Once the vacuum cleaner started its noisy sucking, Julian stopped playing the piano and settled for a more passive role. Then, all too soon, Catherine had returned from her walk in the woods, and it was time for
Partitum Mutante.

    The second time Gina came to the château, five days later, Catherine was actually there, privileged to witness the changes that Julian's growing discontentment had wrought on him. It was an extraordinary sight, an unforgettable testament to the power of accumulated sexual craving.
    To begin with, he welcomed her at the door as if she were royalty—the English rather than the Dutch kind—and immediately tried to get her to sit down with him on the sofa. When she insisted that she had work to do, he followed her from room to room, raising the volume of his velvety tenor to compete with the noise of motorised suction and clanking, sloshing buckets. He guessed, correctly, that she was involved in the expressive arts and only doing this cleaning work as a way of supplementing a government grant. He guessed, correctly, her birth sign, her taste in music, her favourite drink, her preferred animal. Dashing into the bathroom to fetch her some Elastoplast when she'd cut her finger, he returned naked from the waist up and with water combed through his hair, complaining of the heat.

    Catherine didn't dare follow them upstairs, so she made herself a cup of tea, wondering despite herself whether there was going to be some sexual activity in the château after all. By the time she saw Julian again, ten minutes later, he was installed on the sofa, fully dressed, glowering into a book. A strange sound—bed-springy, rhythmic—from upstairs was eventually decoded as Gina slamming an iron onto a padded ironing board.
    ***
    F OUR DAYS BEFORE THE END of the fortnight, Jan van Hoeidoncks dropped in to see how they were getting on. Reacquainting himself with Catherine Courage, he at first thought she must be the sporty German contralto he'd been told about, she was so tanned and healthy-looking. He'd fixed Catherine in his memory as a slightly stooped middle-aged lady dressed in taupe slacks and a waterproof, with a freshly washed halo of mousy hair; here she was in green leggings and a berry-stained T-shirt, standing tall, her hair shiny, plastered with sweat. She'd just been for a long cycle, she said.
    The real German woman appeared moments later, cradling a sleeping baby in her arms. She shook Jan by the hand, supporting her infant easily in one arm as she did so.
    'This is Dagmar Belotte,' said Roger, 'and … erm … Axel.'

    As a way of breaking the ice, Jan made the mistake of asking Dagmar, rather than Roger Courage, what the Consort's impression of Pino Fugazza had been.
    'I hate him,' she volunteered. 'He is a nutcase and he smells bad.'
    'Extraordinary composer, though, of course,' interjected Roger.
    'Don't you check them out before you give them money?' said Dagmar.
    The director smiled, unfazed. The German girl's frankness made much more sense to him than the strange, twitching discomfiture of the pale Englishman.
    'Pino is very crazy, yes,' he conceded. 'Sometimes crazy people make very good music. Sometimes not. We will find out.'
    'And if it's bad?' enquired Dagmar.
    Jan van Hoeidonck pouted philosophically.
    'Bad music is not a problem in our circles,' he said. 'Ten years later, it's completely disappeared. Biodegradable. It's not like pop music. Bad pop music lasts