Free The Courage Consort by Michel Faber Page A

her baby became an increasingly secret act, perpetrated behind closed doors. In Julian's presence, she tended to fold her arms across her breasts, protectively, aggressively. After half an hour staring Julian down, she would leap up and start pacing back and forth, a dark band across her bosom where her sweaty forearms had soaked the fabric of whatever she was wearing.
    On the night of the director's visit, with
Partitum Mutante
finished off and Julian safely gone to bed, Dagmar sat slumped on the couch, Axel at her breast. Ben sat by the open window, staring out at a sky which, even at a quarter to eleven, still had some daylight left in it. The unearthly quiet was descending again, so that even the drip of a tap in the kitchen could be heard from the front room.
    Oddly revived by having had her milk sucked from her, Dagmar decided to take Axel out for a walk in the forest. She did not invite Catherine; the older woman guessed this must be one of those times when Dagmar wanted to have the run of the world alone with her baby, explaining things to him in German.
    'Be careful,' said Catherine as they were leaving. 'Remember the legend.'
    'What legend?'

    'A mother and her child disappeared in that forest once, at the end of the war. Some people say the baby is still out there.'
    Dagmar paused momentarily as she made a mental calculation.
    'Well, if we meet a fifty-seven-year-old baby on our walk, maybe Axel will like to play with him,' she said, and sauntered into the dark.

    Left alone with Ben, Catherine weighed the pros and cons of going to bed. On the pro side, she was exhausted. But the house had absorbed so much heat that she doubted she would sleep.
    'Do you want anything, Ben?' she offered.
    'Mm? No, thanks,' he replied. He was still sitting by the window, his white shirt almost transparent with sweat. For all his bearlike bulk, he had no body hair, as far as Catherine could see.
    'How are you, anyway?' she asked. It seemed a faintly absurd question, this late in the night. 'Tired,' he said.
    'Me too. Isn't it funny how we've lived here together, day after day, and sung together endlessly, and yet we hardly say two words to one another?'
    'I'm not much of a conversationalist.'
    He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, as if about to release his soul into the ether, leaving his body behind.
    'You know,' said Catherine, 'after all these years, I know hardly anything about you.'
    'Very little to tell.'
    'I don't even know for sure what nationality your wife is.'
    'Vietnamese.'
    'I thought so.'
    Their communication eddied apart then, but not disturbingly. The room's emotional acoustic was not full of shame and failure, like the silences between her and Roger. Silence was Ben's natural state, and to fall into it with him was like joining him in his own world, where he was intimately acquainted with each sleeping soundwave, and knew no fear.

    After a while, sitting in the golden-brown front room with Ben in the stillness, Catherine glanced at her watch. It was almost midnight. Ben had never stayed up so late before.
    'Did you always want to be a singer?' she asked.
    'No,' he said. 'I wanted to carry on coxing.'
    She laughed despite herself. 'Carry on
what?
She was reminded of those dreadful comedy films her father had never allowed her to see, even when she was old enough to be going out with Roger Courage.
    'At university,' Ben explained, 'I was a coxswain in a rowing team. I called instructions through a loudhailer. I enjoyed that very much.'
    'What happened?'
    'I became involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement. Cambridge wasn't the most left-wing place in those days. I lost most of my friends. Then I got fat.'
    You're not fat,
Catherine wanted to reassure him, as a reflex kindness, then had to struggle to keep a straight face in the moon face of absurdity. Reassurance is such a sad, mad thing, she thought. Deep inside, everyone knows the truth.
    'What do you really think of
Partitum Mutante,
Ben?'
    'We-e-ell …