‘I will make some enquiries,’ Audran says. ‘About this as well as a driver. Now, if there’s nothing more …’
He departs as quietly as he came. It is only later that something about this exchange strikes Bess as curious.
Audran the meticulous note-taker had not thought it necessary to write anything about the music in his little book.
7
From the unpublished diary of Antoine Brassac, (1876–1937).
Translated by his sister, Cecile, keeper of his papers.
Vendredi 18 Février 1910
Too much wind here. Too much heat. Too many rocks and trees. And always flies. Serpents also. I have seen them slide away when I find somewhere private to make water.
It is hard for a man to feel at peace. Not least a French gentleman accustomed to situations better than this.
My employer, the Magic Man, said this would be a field for flying.
It is a paddock. With slopes and not the open spaces I would like.
Still I have one crate of the Voisin to unpack. I must do this very slow, very careful, on a blanket so nothing is lost in the brown grass where serpents hide. If a part is lost or broken I have no replacements.
Monsieur Bleriot had little respect for the brothers Voisin and their flying machine. A chicken coop with wheels, he called it. And two pairs of wings. Unlike his own machine, first to cross the Channel seven months past. The machine I helped him build. With one set of wings, like the seabirds.
I saw M. Bleriot leave from Calais as the sky lightened. Then shed tears without shame when I hear he has reached Dover.
For this M. Bleriot won the newspaper prize of one thousand pounds
I was not forgotten. But a gentleman does not talk of money.
Now I am in this place. Too much sun. Too far to fly from Calais. Preparing the Voisin for a man who had never sat in a flying machine until Novembre.
This country is a clock wound backwards. M. Bleriot flew from France to England, but here nobody ever crossed over a paddock.
Mr H. has no moustaches, but he is like M. Bleriot. They both need to win. It is why Mr H. crashed in Hamburg after I gave him flying lessons. He tries too soon, before he is ready. I cannot teach patience.
In Paris I must rush to reach the train to Marseilles. I forgot a box of parts for the Voisin, already in crates on the ship. Spare nuts for the rudder, wrapped in pages of Le Monde. Left on back seat of taxi.
Mr H. is very angry when I tell him. M. Bleriot never spoke to me like that.
I almost left then. Leave Mr H. and petite Madame H. to board the Malwa and never see this place with too much wind.
Madame saw my mood and made me stay. Told me her husband always has too many things in his mind. Said he is like a child who needed my help. And she would see I am looked after.
She has a pretty smile and calls me Antoine.
To him I am always Brassac.
He will hurry to be up in his Voisin and I know why.
In this paddock I am not alone.
Another man is here to fly.
8
HARRY is interested in how things work. He will look at a stained-glass window in a church or stately home and admire the soldered joins but not the beauty of the overall picture. Study the workings of a clock but not register the time.
He believes he is a master of mysteries. Because he has devoured so much detective fiction (Conan Doyle and Poe are his favourites), he maintains he only needs to skim the first few chapters of a new book to guess the plot. When he encounters other escape artists his priority is to assess their techniques, which he invariably suspects have been appropriated from himself. He knows their tricks; his only interest in rivals is evaluating their expertise. On stage, his art lies in making the impossible seem effortless. Off stage, however, there is much he does not know.
The fast-approaching comet has yet to flash across his consciousness. But he has heard something about another aspiring aviator setting up at the Diggers Rest field. A fellow called Banks, with a Wright flying machine. Yet he is apparently just a motor mechanic from a Melbourne garage: surely not the type to thwart the ambitions of the great Houdini.
Harry is unaware that another flying machine has been put on public display in Martin’s department store in Adelaide, a smaller city than Melbourne five hundred miles to the west. This aircraft, the same model used by Louis Bleriot to conquer the Channel, has been imported by local businessman Frederick Jones. Like the Wright brothers, Jones has a professional background in bicycles. He has also been captivated by the magic of flight but, unlike Harry, is too timid to leave the ground himself.
To help cover costs, Jones permits his new Bleriot monoplane to go on display in Martin’s Magic Cave – its basement – as part of an advertising promotion. Customers are invited to view this world-famous contraption that ‘has passed over the rolling deep and is ready to tackle the airy billows’. The Bleriot – little higher than a man, its most striking feature a single propeller up front – stands stationary for three weeks as curious people file past. It is a chrysalis. Dormant. Waiting for its wings to be freed.
If Harry were to see Adelaide newspaper advertisements for Martin’s latest attraction it might strike him that the way the Bleriot is billed – ‘The Talk of Kings and Emperors; The Wonder Of The Age’ – is similar to Rickards the promoter’s descriptions of his Mysteriarch. Man and machine are both on show. But Harry is like someone perpetually locked within one of his own trick cabinets, ignorant of anything on the other side of the sliding panels.
He is also oblivious to much going on within the Metropole. He assumes himself to be its most illustrious guest. Horace Audran has encouraged this belief. Harry has no inkling that in his own hotel, on the morning after his lunch with Bess, a man who is a much more renowned figure in performance venues worldwide is trying to settle into another day’s work.
HE is a tall man who walks with a slight limp, the legacy of an automobile accident several years earlier. It hurts his right leg to be seated too long at the piano, gleaming black, situated in a corner of a room like the one shared by Harry and Bess and their porcelain son, but on a different side of the building. The piano is near a casement window, but the white lace curtains have been kept closed. The window has been edged open just enough for warm air to combat the fug of cigarette smoke. He has a lit cigarette in his mouth, its burning tip close to the fringe of his dark moustache. Another cigarette, forgotten, burns unnoticed in a heavy glass ashtray resting on the piano keyboard, to the far side of the highest notes. Beethoven used these notes; he seldom does. He must keep in mind which notes the human voice can reach. Resting on both his lap and the piano keys is a disordered pile of composition paper. He plays a few notes on the piano with one hand, scribbles on the paper with the other, stops, repeats the process. Continues. Sometimes scratches through what he has just put down with his pen or tosses away a sheet altogether. A small pile of discarded sheets near his left foot, resting on the piano’s damper pedal, suggests an unsuccessful morning.
This is hard work. Always, it seems, harder than before. The struggle within himself is more fierce. It never gets easier to release what he hears in his head. Musical notes, like insects, resist being pinned on paper.
