The Songs Read online

  ALSO BY CHARLES ELTON

  Mr. Toppit

  Copyright © 2017 Darkwood Ltd.

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Elton, Charles, author.

  Title: The songs / Charles Elton.

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2017] | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016032123 (print) | LCCN 2016026447 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781590518007 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590517994 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Jewish families – Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | Jewish fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Jewish. | FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PR6105.L76 (print) | LCC PR6105.L76 S66 2017 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92 – dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016032123

  Ebook ISBN 9781590518007

  Publisher’s note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v4.1

  a

  FOR JULIA ELTON AND REBECCA ELTON FITZSIMONS

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Charles Elton

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Rose

  Maurice

  Rose

  Joseph

  Rose

  Shirley

  Maurice

  Joseph

  Shirley

  Rose

  Maurice

  Rose

  Joseph

  Rose

  Shirley

  Maurice

  Rose

  Shirley

  Rose

  Joseph

  Rose

  Joseph

  Rose

  Thank You

  About the Author

  Rose

  MY BROTHER HUDDIE said that we must be in the very small percentile of people who had a mother who fell out of the same window twice. Even dogs don’t do that: they learn from experience.

  Huddie and I liked statistics and research. We were both good at maths; we liked to set each other problems — what percentage of the world population has eaten oysters or what the odds are on a dog in China being neutered. Huddie spent a lot of the day on the computer and told me all the things he had found when I got back from school. There were fewer of them now because he had become so slow on the keyboard.

  Our mother died when she fell out of the window the second time so he had done some research on falling. He had found out that it is better if your body is floppy, but the problem is that you instinctively tense up in a dangerous situation like falling out of a window and that’s why bones get broken and people get killed. Being drunk — like our mother was — can sometimes help you: the cognitive processes are slower and the tensing-up instinct does not kick in so quickly and that can save your life. It certainly did for our mother the first time she fell: no bones were broken. Her spleen was ruptured, but luckily that wasn’t an organ in constant use, unlike her liver.

  Of course, being drunk is not an infallible method of falling from a window safely. Our mother was also drunk the second time, but she fell differently and her head hit the pavement first. She was in a coma for three days before they switched off the machine. Iz told us he had taken us to the hospital to see her, but, because I was only three and Huddie two, we did not remember it. That was almost the only thing he ever told us about our mother, and we knew better than to ask him.

  Iz was our father, Isaac Herzl, which was the name you saw in newspaper profiles and on concert posters and CD covers but because he was eighty now there were almost none of those things anymore. Everyone called him Iz even if they did not know him. I think that’s what it’s like with well-known people: patches of knowledge seep in like damp and make you feel you have some special connection with them even though the same patches of knowledge — fleeing from Germany as a child before the war, fighting in Israel with the Jewish underground in 1947, singing at his concerts, the causes he had championed — were actually shared by everybody else as well. When strangers talked about him — about the power of his personality or the intimacy of his singing or the passion of his commitment — their connection to him seemed forged from links as strong as steel; ours sometimes seemed flimsier than that.

  We had an unusual childhood, certainly more interesting than children whose fathers were doctors or lawyers or bus drivers. Even the names he had given us were unusual: I was called Rose Sharon Herzl, named after a character in his favorite book, The Grapes of Wrath, and Huddie was Huddie Ledbetter Herzl, after a black American blues singer from the 1940s.

  When we were young, Iz took us to concerts or meetings or demonstrations, although he did not seem to have the time or inclination to tell us what the meetings or demonstrations were about. Iz always said that children should work things out for themselves. We were exposed to all sorts of people who came from all sorts of countries and spoke all sorts of languages. We heard a lot of songs in those languages.

  But as children, it did not make much difference to us whether he was a pioneer of the folk movement or had sung protest songs at demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and been arrested or had been on fact-finding missions to countries accused of ethnic cleansing. Even now, when I was sixteen and Huddie fifteen and we understood all the things he had done, it still did not make much difference to us.

  When I was small and was asked what job Iz did, I said that he was an “Active Singer.” That was not the kind of job that other children at school were familiar with and they probably thought that it meant that he sang while taking exercise. I really meant “Activist Singer” but I was not exactly sure what that involved. I knew that his songs were about a lot of different things but they seemed filled with ambiguities. Why was it fine for some people to die but not others? Were all people of one color good and people of another color bad? Why weren’t all people who worked called working class? Maybe the ambiguities were why I wanted logic and precision so badly later. Maybe that was my version of teenage rebellion, better than smoking or stealing your parents’ vodka.

  Iz was a mystery really, but maybe everyone’s parents are a mystery to their children. Iz always believed that the important thing was what a man did, not who he was or where he came from. He had always said to us, “It is the future not the past you must concentrate on.” You might say that’s a sophisticated concept for a child to grasp, but I think I was a sophisticated child.

  He certainly never talked about his past. He didn’t even bother to fill in any of the gaps in his early life: his Wikipedia entry was headed “This page has issues” and there were a lot of things with question marks and “[citation needed]” next to them. His birthplace was listed as “Leipzig?” his father’s profession was “Lawyer?” and the date he was put on a Kindertransport boat to get him out of Germany was “1938?” Obviously, Iz was the one person who knew what the facts were and could have corrected them, but now he was eighty it was too late: his memory had begun to fail.


  There were other gaps: he had another child, our half brother, Joseph, whom he never talked about. We had never met him: he was years older than us. Of course we were intrigued by the idea of having a brother. We had researched him: he was quite a famous songwriter but not the kind of songwriter Iz was — he wrote the lyrics for musicals. He was Iz’s child by someone who had died a long time ago and Iz did not talk about whoever that was either. Nor did he talk about our mother.

  Her name was Molly Pierce and she was a singer and songwriter, too. People generally believed that she had killed herself when she fell from the window that second time but we tried to stay open-minded about it. If a suicide note had been found at the time, or if one turned up later lost behind a sofa, we would have had to accept it but until then we could believe what we liked and we believed that the fall was accidental. We were not just trying to make ourselves feel better: we had thought it through logically. I know it doesn’t look good having a mother who keeps falling out of windows, but that was actually the point: if you had fallen out of a window once and survived, you wouldn’t choose that method if you were trying to kill yourself.

  Obviously with the drink and the drugs she was always self-destructive, but that didn’t mean she wanted to die. Huddie and I looked at other forms of self-destructive behavior: if you are anorexic all you are trying to do is lose weight and be as thin as possible. You’re not trying to kill yourself. If you’re an alcoholic, you just want to get drunk, not die of some horrible liver disease. The trick is to stop at the right moment. You need to be disciplined about self-destruction; otherwise you can die like our mother did.

  Despite the fact that our mother had died thirteen years before, people on the internet were still fascinated by her life and death. We did not like the fact that there were so many strong opinions from people who did not know her, many of them lifted from the book about her life which was called Icarus’s Valentine: The Legacy of Molly Pierce. I had found it in a secondhand bookshop and kept it hidden in my bedroom. It was not a book that would have been very welcome in our house. Some people say it is full of inaccuracies, particularly about Iz and the part he played in her death. That was another part of his past that he did not bother to correct.

  Huddie and I, the closest people in the world to her — genetically at least — could talk about her in a calmer and more rational way. In fact, I would go so far as to say that we managed to neutralize her. You wouldn’t have found us bursting into tears at the mention of her name. It was better that way.

  Still, even after all this time, her name cropped up so we couldn’t just forget about her. There had been a review of a recent album by Mockingbird, the group our mother had once been part of, which lamented the absence of “the late, sublime Molly Pierce” from the lineup. The original lineup was the one that everyone loved, particularly Niall McCarthy, who had started the group, and our mother. She played the piano and sang in a clear pure voice that, so the biography said, was so full of emotion and pain that people were held spellbound.

  All of the group were interviewed for the biography of her. Some of them talked about her drinking and her many erratic performances but they all seemed to be in awe of her talent. They obviously disliked Iz because he had persuaded her to leave the group and only work with him. Niall McCarthy had other reasons: he and our mother had lived and sung together for years. Their duets were always the heart of Mockingbird concerts, particularly when they sang “Icarus’s Valentine.” He was so distraught when she left him for Iz, apparently, that he went to live in a Sufi commune in Eastbourne. I suppose creative people are more sensitive than other people.

  Ironically, it was at a Mockingbird concert that Iz and she first met — a benefit concert for El Salvador after the Civil War ended. The climax of the evening was when, as a surprise guest, Iz had joined Mockingbird onstage — a coup for one of the acknowledged legends of folk to shine his light on a group of younger musicians, only compromised by the speed with which he got together with our mother and made her pregnant with me — that very night, according to some sources. He was sixty-two. She was thirty.

  For the final number of the evening, Iz and our mother sang the national anthem of El Salvador in Spanish. One of the verses began:

  Libertad es su dogma, es su guía

  Que mil veces logró defender

  Those words translated into English were on our mother’s gravestone in Highgate Cemetery: “Freedom is her dogma and her guide; a thousand times she has defended it.”

  I’ve only ever found one photograph of us with her. We are perched on the control desk in a recording studio looking at our mother through the glass. The sharpness is on her: her head tilted into the microphone, her hand cupping her ear as she sings with her eyes closed. Our faces are fuzzy and out of focus. Huddie always said that it was a sort of metaphor. I wish there had been other pictures. I do not think that photograph defines the unbreakable bond between mother and child.

  At the time Iz and our mother broke up, when she left the house taking us with her, she was recording her only solo album, Magnetic North: it was called that because she said in one of her last interviews that her music was a perfect construct in her head but when she tried to get it onto record, it did not turn out the way she had hoped. It was like heading for the North Pole, she said, but finding herself at Magnetic North instead, which was not the exact top of the world, but the point at which the earth’s magnetic field points vertically downwards.

  The recording of Magnetic North is still the subject of debate. Iz was producing it, but only about six tracks were completed before she left and it was abandoned. The songs are very different from her work with Mockingbird. Iz got her to do a completely different version — just with piano and oboe — of “Icarus’s Valentine,” which was always the highlight of the Mockingbird concerts.

  On the live recordings it was much more like a rock song. She was on her own for the early verses, then gradually the rest of the group came in on their instruments and it built through a long guitar solo until the end, when the whole group sang. I knew the words by heart:

  When the moon is in its quarter

  And the sun is at its height

  When you’ve followed nothing that you ought to

  And chosen wrong from right

  When you’ve broken everything —

  Everything that’s fine

  I know that Icarus will send his valentine

  His feathers wet with melting wax

  You watch him falling from the sky

  On life you hope there is no tax

  On death you cannot say goodbye

  And when you’ve stolen everything —

  Everything that’s mine

  I know that Icarus will send his valentine

  People have always loved the song and I do now. I regret that Huddie and I were so pedantic then — we always had to analyze everything: we wanted everything to be logical and accurate. We debated whether melting wax could be “wet” because it is oil based not water based. We discussed the fact that, as far as it can be dated, Icarus lived in the Mycenaean Age, around 1500 BC, while the origins of Valentine greetings were in the Middle Ages, so we thought the song had a fundamental flaw in it. I’m not sure why we believed that songs should be logical. Nothing else seemed to be.

  After she left, in the year that led up to her death, it is well documented that her drinking became out of control. She went back to Mockingbird for a while, but there were cancelled dates and reports of shambling, embarrassing concerts. And there were obviously drugs — the autopsy after her death found heroin in her system.

  She lived in a rented flat in Maida Vale with Huddie and me after she left, but I have no idea who was looking after us when she was falling to pieces — ours were not the kind of parents who employed nannies. Maybe Iz sent over one of the political refugees he rescued from some corrupt regime. I can’t even count the number of evenings Huddie and I had sat listening to somebody who had escaped from politi
cal oppression singing one of their incomprehensible songs of freedom. There were a lot of them over the years: they did things like mow the lawn and do repairs round the house.

  A few weeks before she died, Iz did something that caused outrage: he took us away from our mother — an act that was referred to as “kidnapping” in the biography. People who took our mother’s side believe that was the reason for the downward spiral that led to her death. Those who supported Iz took a different line: he had done everything he could to help our mother, and now it was time to protect his children from her self-destructive behavior.

  We found it hard to piece together a coherent account of the days leading up to our mother’s death. There were a variety of conflicting opinions on various fan sites, often tirades against Iz for his real or perceived failings as a husband and half-formed interpretations of what had happened. Someone had even posted a timeline of the days before her death: places she may or may not have gone to, bars and restaurants she may or may not have been in and people who may or may not have been in them with her.

  What was not in question was that some kind of party was in progress at the flat when she died. The balcony from which she fell was in the bedroom off the living room. The varying testimony of the people there did not vary on one point: she was in the living room with everyone else, and then she wasn’t. Nobody saw her again. We always wondered what she was thinking about in the bedroom on her own. Maybe she was thinking about us, and Iz taking us away from her. Huddie said — half-jokingly — that she must have been talking about Iz when she wrote “When you’ve stolen from me everything, everything that’s mine” but, of course, she was no more able to look into the future than anyone else.

  It was a hot evening —July — and the windows of the bedroom must have been open. The flat was on the second floor and there were two big French windows in the bedroom, both opening onto a ledge with a low cast-iron parapet. Our mother must have been out there before — at least once anyway, because that was where she fell from the first time, the time she didn’t die.