The Bellwether Revivals Read Online Free PDF Page B

moved by the beauty of the music. She doesn’t think composers know how to arouse our emotions, or manipulate our feelings through the placement of the notes. According to her, when Mahler brings us out of that fourth movement
—poof
!—we all cry tears of generality. Are you following this?’
    Oscar nodded, though he was still perhaps a page or two behind.
    Eden began to laugh. ‘At least, that’s how she used to think, before I started to show her the light. She may have changed her mind in the last couple of hours.’
    ‘I don’t know
what
I think,’ Iris said, folding her arms.
    ‘Now there’s a cop-out for you.’
    ‘Shut up, Eden.’
    ‘She’ll figure it out for herself one of these days. It’s just a matter of time.’
    Oscar watched the two of them like a spectator at a tennis match, his eyes moving from Iris to Eden and back again. He was beginning to understand that this kind of dispute was somehow unexceptional to them, just another quarrel in a lifetime of disagreements.
    The taxi stopped at a red light on Hills Road. Iris gazed out of the window, irritated. ‘Did you ever stop to think that I could be right about this?’ she said. ‘That maybe I’m the one who’s got it figured out and it’s you and all your Emotivist friends who’ve been stumbling in the dark?’ Her voice was dry and pleading. ‘You’re not always right about
everything
, you know. Why can’t you let me have an opinion without trying to convert me to
your
way of thinking? And—’ she breathed, calming herself down, ‘—and how did we get back onto this stupid bloody subject anyway?’
    Nobody answered. The cab moved away from the junction.
    It was then that she placed her palm on Oscar’s knee. Her hand was warm, so light he could barely feel it. She left it there for a long moment, not even looking at him. Then she pulled it back again, absently, and tucked it underneath her leg. ‘It’s not like any of this pontificating makes a difference to me. If I leave the chamber group, it won’t be for any deep philosophical reason. It’ll be because I’m tired of it. Same reason I dropped all the other groups I was in. Same reason I dropped my first boyfriend and the lacrosse team at boarding school.’
    Oscar was still learning how to be around the two of them, but he felt so at ease in their company—more alive somehow. They were the kind of sophisticated people his father never let him be friends with when he was younger—‘the high and mighty crowd,’ his father called them, the ones who lived in the detached houses out in Cassiobury. Oscar would see them in the wing mirror of his father’s van, wandering home from the grammar school in their smart black blazers; the kids whose parents his father built extensions for, but with whom he was too proud to share a cup of tea after a day’s work, fearing their good crockery and their vast, expensive kitchens. Now here Oscar was, holding his own amongst the same type of people. He felt a similar contentment in the presence of Iris and Eden as he did with Dr Paulsen, as if they had reset the clocks so he could live an hour ahead of the person he used to be.
    It was nearly ten thirty when their taxi pulled up outside a three-storey tenement on Harvey Road. A light was on in the front window, venting through the collar of the drawn curtains. The rain had stopped and the taxi motor hummed in the soundless night. Eden paid the driver with a twenty and told him to keep the change. There was something about the thoughtless, distracted way he handed over the money that made the gesture seem patronising, like he was unaware of the note in his hand, uninterested in its value—just a boy buying rides with fairground currency.
    They got out and Eden took his bike from the boot, locking it by the wall. Oscar helped Iris carry her cello case up the steps to the front of the house. There was a round blue plaque beside the entrance that said:
    Sir Charles