A Note in Music – Rosamond Lehmann (1930)

I have been wanting to read A Note in Music for a very long time, and yet for some reason I only acquired a copy about a week ago. Not able to wait, I began reading it right away, and fairly flew through it. It was worth the wait.

Rosamond Lehmann is certainly one of my favourite writers (the list is pretty long I admit). I came to her in a roundabout way, I first read a biography about her by the eminent biographer Selina Hastings back in 2009. It set me on a course to read everything she had written, and now, apart from a play she wrote in the 1930s I have. A Note in Music was the last of her books I had left to read, and I am sad there are no more. I suppose I shall have to begin re-reading (there is in fact one novel I have read twice). She is a quite exceptional writer, a fascinating woman who was very much a part of the Bloomsbury group.

A Note in Music was Rosamond Lehmann’s second novel. Her first novel Dusty Answer published three years earlier was an enormous success, and A Note in Music is a worthy successor to that extraordinary debut.

This is a gloriously nuanced novel, a portrait of marriage and the disappointments of an ordinary middle-class life.

Grace Fairfax is thirty-four, childless following a still-birth some years earlier, she is married to the dull, hard-working, conventional Tom. Living in a dull northern town, her life is one of unvaried routine. However, Grace has a glorious inner life, a woman of imagination, in tune with the countryside she loves so much, she knows herself capable of great love, and still misses the southern country of her youth. A year earlier, a fortune teller had told Grace that her life lacked purpose, Grace wasn’t surprised.

“The country haunted her still, she said to herself: not a day passed without bringing some picture remembered or imagined. Dawn and sunset were not in these skies, behind the slate roofs and red brick chimneys of the residential quarter – but in her mind’s eye, over country spaces; and spring and autumn still made her sick for home. How many times had she not thought of the summer evening when a bird had sung in the poor lilac tree in the front patch?… But that would never happen again, now that the trams came to the end of the avenue.”

Norah MacKay is Grace’s best friend, she too a woman living a somewhat disappointed life. Married to bad tempered university professor; Gerald, mother to two boys, Norah once knew great passion with Jimmy – lost in the war.

“It was such a great love, she whispered to herself: how could it be (for the thousandth time) that it had not availed to save him? That was his fault…so like him…just as everything was coming right at last. In spite of her, he would not, could not care to save himself. To her passionate feminine instinct for life he had opposed his masculine indifference; and somehow, in the general destruction of mankind by man, he had disappeared with a smile and a shrug, and defeated her.”

When brother and sister Clare and Hugh Miller arrive, temporarily, in the town they bring with them the sense of another way of life – a freedom, and independence that both Grace and Norah recognise and respond to similarly. Clare, an old friend of Norah’s stays with the Mackays for a time, infecting even the dour Gerald with the promise of unimagined possibilities. Hugh is passionate, exudes vitality, freedom and the ability to do just as he pleases. Clare is young, beautiful and irresistibly unconstrained. Hugh, the reader realises is perhaps not quite all Grace and Norah think he is, and while his charisma is not as obvious to the reader at times, (and I think this is deliberate – as it shows how we can respond most extraordinarily to the almost anyone if our imaginations can make them into something else) there is no doubting his effect upon Grace in particular.

Grace sees Hugh first when she in the cinema with Tom, the cinema one of the few pleasures in her life, has evolved into part of a weekly expected routine. Over the coming months Grace meets Hugh only a handful of times, yet each moment is imprinted on her mind, as she develops a gentle unspoken love for the young man who represents all that her life lacks. There is an unforgettable afternoon of tennis, fishing and summer fun at the house of Norah’s relatives – that seems to live long in the memories of those who were there.

Another character we meet is Pansy – a young woman living with her brother. She makes her living as both a hairdresser and a prostitute. She too, drawn to Hugh, who she met at the local dance hall, seeing in him that promise of another life. Pansy, engaging most of her energies in remaining respectable, striving to fool her neighbours into believing she is not what she is (as ever, in these cases, they are not fooled). When Grace goes away by herself on a holiday in the countryside – Tom, miserable, unable to cope, meets Pansy at the fair.

A Note in Music is quite simply a beautiful novel, exquisitely written, moving and revealing, it’s the kind of novel I love best.