A Note in Music

A Note in Music / Rosamond Lehmann
London: Virago, 2001, c1930.
337 p.

Dreamy and imaginative Grace Fairfax is married to Tom, she's 34 and has no children (after a lost pregnancy earlier in their marriage). Her much livelier best friend Norah has 2 sons and is married to Gerald, an annoying, irritable university professor. They live in a northern English town, rather grey and industrial. They are ripe for being dazzled by the arrival of Hugh Miller, charismatic university student, and his lovely sister Claire. 

Hugh and Claire somehow charm both of these couples, and their presence changes the way they all interact. Blustery Tom seems the least affected, but his quiet (and bored) wife falls for all of Hugh's charms, even if Hugh is oblivious to this. Claire vamps Gerald and upsets Norah, even while Norah is also admiring Hugh in a detached way. 

This setup could be edgy in other hands but here it's more melancholy. Hugh doesn't see these older women as women, more as sisters or listeners. But his youth and freedom to shape his own life appeals to them, and opens a window onto another kind of living. And then Hugh and Claire move on, leaving change behind them. Not a lot of change, but an internal shift that is particularly noticeable in Grace. 

Both couples stay together in the end, and somehow these shifts have brought them together more closely rather than broken them up. I believe Grace and Tom's ending, but think that it would be more likely that Norah would have finally left the dour Gerald instead of doubling down on their marriage. 

The plot is pretty slight, the characters are so detached from one another, but the writing is lovely and poetic, with internal dialogues and so much nature description - I liked this quote, which is pretty representative: 

“Some essence of the spirit of the spring day seemed to hover, brooding and shining upon the long, sunny stretch of water. The lake was girdled with trees and bushes, and wild song welled out as if from the throats of hundreds and hundreds of choral branches. The unfolding leaves covered the boughs with a manifold variety of little shapes. Knots, hearts, points, clusters of rosettes, dots and tapers of budding foliage, made up embroideries of infinite complexity in jade, in greenish-silver, in honey-yellow; but some were tinged with a russet flames, haunting the eye with an autumnal prophecy.”

If you're looking for lots of action or character interactions between people who actually communicate, this isn't it. But if you want internal reflection, nostalgia, nature and art, with a fairly vague conclusion, you'll like this one. It sounds like a boring book this way, but it really isn't! I was absorbed in reading this and discovering each isolated character. A melancholy story but well worth reading.