On Chesil Beach Read Online Free PDF Page B

near the Albert Hall, in a prim hostel for female students where the lights went out at eleven and male visitors were forbidden at any time and the girls were always popping in and out of each other’s rooms. Florence practiced five hours a day and went to concerts with her girlfriends. She preferred above all the chamber recitals at the Wigmore Hall, especially the string quartets, and sometimes attended as many as five in a week, lunchtimes as well as evenings. She loved the dark seriousness of the place, the faded, peeling walls backstage, the gleaming woodwork and deep red carpet of the entrance hall, the auditorium like a gilded tunnel, the famous cupola over the stage depicting, so she was told, mankind’s hunger for the magnificent abstraction of music, with the Genius of Harmony represented as a ball of eternal fire. She revered the ancient types, who took minutes to emerge from their taxis, the last of the Victorians, hobbling on their canes to their seats, to listen in alert critical silence, sometimes with the tartan rug they had brought draped across their knees. These fossils, with their knobbly shrunken skulls tipped humbly toward the stage, represented to Florence burnished experience and wise judgment, or suggested a musical expertise that arthritic fingers could no longer serve. And there was the simple thrill of knowing that so many famous musicians in the world had performed here and that great careers had begun on this very stage. It was here that she heard the sixteen-year-old cellist Jacqueline du Pré give her debut performance. Florence’s own tastes were not unusual, but they were intense. Beethoven’s Opus 18 obsessed her for a good while, then his last great quartets. Schumann, Brahms and then, in her last year, the quartets of Frank Bridge, Bartok and Britten. She heard all these composers over a period of three years at the Wigmore Hall.
    In her second year she was given a part-time job backstage, making tea for the performers in the spacious green room and crouching by the peephole so that she could open the door as the artistes left the stage. She also turned pages for the pianists in chamber pieces, and one night actually stood at Benjamin Britten’s side in a program of songs by Haydn, Frank Bridge and Britten himself. There was a boy treble singing, as well as Peter Pears, who slipped her a ten-shilling note as he and the great composer were leaving. She discovered the practice rooms next door, under the piano showroom, where legendary pianists like John Ogdon and Cherkassky thundered up and down their scales and arpeggios all morning like demented first-year students. The hall became a kind of second home—she felt possessive of every dim and dowdy corner, even of the cold concrete steps that led down to the wash-rooms. One of her jobs was to tidy the green room, and one afternoon she saw in a wastepaper basket some penciled performance notes discarded by the Amadeus Quartet. The hand was loopy and faint, barely legible, and concerned the opening movement of the Schubert Quartet No. 15. It thrilled her to decipher finally the words, “At B attack!” Florence could not stop herself playing with the idea that she had received an important message, or a vital prompt, and two weeks later, not long after the beginning of her final year, she asked three of the best students at college to join her own quartet.
    Only the cellist was a man, but Charles Rodway was of no real romantic interest to her. The men at college, devoted musicians, fiercely ambitious, ignorant of everything beyond their chosen instrument and its repertoire, never much appealed. Whenever one of the girls from the group started going steady with another student, she simply vanished socially, just like Edward’s footballer friends. It was as though the young woman had entered a convent. Since it did not seem possible to go out with a boy and still keep up with the old friends, Florence preferred to stick with her hostel