The Stranger's Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

reveal it for what it was. There was no visible horn, and the drawers were really doors, concealing the mysterious louvred compartment from which the music emerged.
    Now her mother was stooping and pulling records out from the cupboard at the bottom, trying to find Senta’s Ballad. There were only a dozen records but of course they all looked the same and she didn’t have her spectacles.
    ‘Are we having the Hollander?’ said Mrs Kalbeck.
    ‘If Mother can find it,’ said Daphne.
    ‘Ah, good.’ The old woman sat back with a glass of cherry brandy and a patient smile. She had heard all their records several times, the John McCormack and the Nellie Melba, so the excitement was mixed with a sense of routine, which she seemed to find almost as pleasing.
    ‘Is this it. . . ?’ said Freda, squinting at the difficult small type on the label.
    ‘Oh, let me do it,’ said Daphne, dropping down beside her and nudging her until she went away.
    It was Daphne’s own favourite, because something she couldn’t describe took place inside her when she heard it, something quite different from the song from Traviata or ‘Linden Lea’. Each time, she looked forward to running again through the keen, almost painful novelty of these particular emotions. She set the disc on the mat, took another big sip from her glass, coughed shamefully, and then cranked up the handle as tight as it would go.
    ‘Careful, child . . . !’ said her mother, one hand reaching for the mantelpiece, eyes fixed as if about to sing herself.
    ‘She’s a strong girl,’ said Mrs Kalbeck.
    Daphne lowered the needle and at once walked towards the window, to see if she could spot the boys outside.
    The orchestra, they had all agreed, left much to be desired. The strings shrilled like a tin whistle, and the brass thumped like something being thrown downstairs. Daphne knew how to make allowances for this. She had heard a real orchestra at the Queen’s Hall, she had been taken to The Rhinegold at Covent Garden, where they’d had six harps as well as anvils and a giant gong. With a record you learned to ignore the shortcomings if you knew what this piping and thumping stood for.
    When Senta started singing it was spellbinding – Daphne said this word to herself with a further shiver of pleasure. She sat on the window-seat with the shawl pulled round her and a mysterious smile on her face at the first intimacies of the ginger brandy. She’d had a real drink before, a half glass of champagne when Huey came of age, and once long ago she and George had done a small but rash experiment with Cook’s brandy. Like the music, a drink was marvellous as well as alarming. She was gripped by the girl’s eerie calls, Jo-ho-he, Jo-ho-he , which had a clear warning of tragedy to them; but at the same time she had a delicious sense of having nothing whatever to worry about. She looked casually at the others, her mother braced as if for the impact of salt waves, Mrs Kalbeck tilting her head in more mature appraisal. Daphne saw the beauty of being spontaneous, and had to hold back a number of things she suddenly felt like saying. She frowned at the Persian rug. There were two sections, which recurred; there was the wild storm music, where you saw the men hanging in the rigging, and then, when the storm was stilled, the most beautiful tune she’d ever heard came in, dropping and soaring, rapturous and free and yet intensely sad, and in either case somehow inevitable. She didn’t know what Senta was saying, beyond the recurrent sounding of the word Mann , but she sensed the presence of passionate love, and felt the air of legend, which had a natural hold on her. Emmy Destinn herself she saw as a wild waif with long dark hair, somehow marked out by her own peculiar name. Almost at once she sang a high note, the brass fell downstairs and Daphne ran over to lift the needle off the disc.
    ‘It is sadly shortened,’ said Mrs Kalbeck. ‘In truth there are two more