The Song of Hartgrove Hall Read online

  Praise for The Song of Hartgrove Hall

  “Rarely does a novel capture both my heart and mind, but Natasha Solomons’s new novel gripped me from the first chapter. Written in exquisite and razor-sharp prose, The Song of Hartgrove Hall explores the bonds of family, the power of music, and the very nature of what it means to leave behind a legacy. I cannot recommend this novel strongly enough. It read like music itself and its beautiful and haunting notes lingered long after I finished the last page.”

  —Alyson Richman, internationally bestselling author of The Lost Wife

  “Packed with beautiful writing and marvelously conceived characters, The Song of Hartgrove Hall moves effortlessly between the threadbare riches of England’s postwar country house society and the discordant ambitions of modern life, all bound together by a timeless love story that will break you and heal you. Natasha Solomons is a writer after my own heart.”

  —Beatriz Williams, New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Life of Violet Grant

  “Natasha Solomons crafts a symphony of words in this luminous novel of a young musician on the verge of great passion. From the very beginning, I was swept away in the music of the story. Brimming with the intertwined melodies of love, loss, and regained joy, The Song of Hartgrove Hall soars.”

  —Jessica Brockmole, author of Letters from Skye

  “A delightful, moving, utterly believable family saga.”

  —The Times (London)

  “[A] tender, lyrical novel of family and fame.”

  —Sunday Express (UK)

  “Here is a green and pleasant portrait of longing for a lost home, full of English eccentricity.”

  —The Jewish Chronicle (UK)

  “Books rarely make me cry, but I reluctantly admit to more than a few specks of dust making their way into my eyes when reading this.”

  —fRoots (UK)

  “Moving and engaging . . . a captivating story that stays with you.”

  —Choice (UK)

  Praise for The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

  “Natasha Solomons scores another win with The Gallery of Vanished Husbands . . . a beautifully told story that will resonate with readers who have ever felt there was more inside of them than what was expected of them.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “Solomons creates in Juliet a detailed character portrait of a woman who exhibits strength and poise under less than ideal conditions. Each chapter tells the story of one of Juliet’s paintings and of important events in her life, and readers will respond to the realistic and beautifully flawed characteristics assigned to her.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Reads like a quiet domestic mystery and a romantic drama rolled into one. . . . Absorbing and exciting.”

  —RT Book Reviews (Rating: ****)

  “Solomons provides wonderful descriptions of London in the 1950s and 1960s, as the city reawakens after years of deprivation and war, to become vibrant and lively, just like Juliet herself.”

  —Historical Novel Society

  “Solomons . . . has lavished care on every word and ensured this charming, mesmerising story is ultimately about the triumph of the human spirit. . . . A warm, luscious read that brims with passion and skilfully evokes a bygone era. . . . A beautifully written tale about a woman who was left socially dead but rose again by seizing life.”

  —The Times (London)

  “Captivates you with its charm, quirkiness and old-fashioned storytelling.”

  —Daily Mail (London)

  “A charming tale.”

  —Good Housekeeping (UK)

  Praise for The House at Tyneford

  “Like Downton, this romance compellingly explores the upstairs-downstairs dynamic of estate life.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Natasha Solomons has written a lovely, atmospheric novel full of charming characters and good, old-fashioned storytelling. Fans of Downton Abbey and Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden will absolutely adore The House at Tyneford.”

  —Kristin Hannah, New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale

  “The House at Tyneford is an exquisite tale of love, family, suspense, and survival. Capturing with astonishing detail and realism a vanished world of desire and hope trapped beneath rigid class convention, Natasha Solomons’s stunning new novel tells the story of Elise Landau, a Jewish Austrian teenager from a family of artists, who is forced to flee her home in Vienna carrying only a guide to household management and her father’s last novel. . . . Elise hides as a parlor maid in a fine English country estate, but soon she discovers that passion can be found in the most unexpected places. Already a bestseller in Britain, American readers will thrill to The House at Tyneford.”

  —Katherine Howe, New York Times bestselling author of The House of Velvet and Glass

  “The House at Tyneford is a wonderful, old-fashioned novel that takes you back in time to the manor homes, aristocracy and domestic servants of England. In this setting, Natasha Solomons gives us a courageous heroine whose incredible love story will keep you in suspense until the final page.”

  —Kathleen Grissom, author of The Kitchen House

  “Solomons’s poignant tale provides richly textured details that hold the reader’s interest. Fans of Ann Patchett will find Solomons’s style similar and will appreciate how the subdued tone and the quiet of the countryside contrast with the roar of war.”

  —Library Journal

  “Halfway through, I was so invested in this gorgeously written story that I could barely read on, fearful that what I wished to happen would never come to pass. Permeated with an exquisite sadness, it reminded me of Atonement . . . I adored this book.”

  —Donna Marchetti, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “Stunning . . . The House at Tyneford is an exquisite tale of love, family, suspense and survival.”

  —The Times (London)

  “Both a love story set during the Second World War and an elegy to the English country house . . . the greatest pleasure of the novel is its stirring narrative and the constant sense of discovery.”

  —Times Literary Supplement (London)

  ALSO BY NATASHA SOLOMONS

  The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

  The House at Tyneford

  Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English

  PLUME

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2015 by Natasha Solomons

  Originally published in Great Britain as The Song Collector by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-40702-2

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Solomons, Natasha.

  Title: The song of Hartgrove Hall : a novel / Natasha Solomons.

  Other titles: Song collector

  Description: New York City : Plume, [2015]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015038594 | ISBN 9780147517593 (softcover)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary.
| FICTION / Romance / Contemporary.

  Classification: LCC PR6119.O455 S66 2015 | DDC 823/.92—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038594

  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, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for Natasha Solomons

  Also by Natasha Solomons

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  March 2000

  November 1946

  May 2000

  New Year’s Day, 1947

  August 2000

  June 1947

  March 2001

  February 1948

  August 2002

  March 1950

  August 2002

  June 1952

  March 2003

  July 1954

  October 2003

  June 2007

  July 1959

  A Note on Song Collecting

  Acknowledgments

  A Sneak Peek of The House at Tyneford

  For Luke and his grandparents

  Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me.

  —Thomas Hardy, ‘The Voice’

  Worse than thieves are ballad collectors, for when they capture and imprison in cold type a folk song, at the same time they kill it.

  —John Lomax, introduction to American Ballads and Folk Songs (1932)

  March 2000

  Edie sang at her own funeral. It couldn’t have been any other way. Most people first knew her by her voice. New acquaintances took a few weeks or months to reconcile that voice, that thrill of sound, with the slight, grey-eyed woman holding the large handbag. She was a garden thrush with the song of a nightingale. It was one of her nicknames – ‘The Little Nightingale’ – and the one I felt suited her best. The nightingale isn’t quite who we think she is. Contrary to what most people believe, the nightingale isn’t a British bird who winters in Africa. She’s an African bird who summers in England, and the sought-after music of an English summer evening is really music from the African bush, as native to Guinea-Bissau as to the moss-sprung and anemone-speckled copses of Berkshire and Dorset.

  Edie once told me that the English countryside never really made sense to her. Her tiny Russian grandmother had looked after her while her parents manned their stall in Brick Lane, and she used to tell Edie stories. In winter they’d huddle under blankets beside the electric fire in their grotty flat, passing a cigarette back and forth, Edie listening, her Bubbe talking. Bubbe’s stories were all of Russia and the white cold, a cold so deep it turned your bones to ice, and if the wind blew hard, you’d shatter into a billion pieces, fluttering to the ground as yet more snow.

  In summer Edie and Bubbe would take apples out to the scrap of green that passed for a park and sit on a tarpaulin square (for a woman raised in Siberia, Edie’s grandmother was remarkably anxious about the ill effects of dew-damp grass). On sun-filled afternoons, when grubby daisies unfurled in the warmth, young men unbuttoned their shirts to the navel and girls furtively unpeeled their stockings, Bubbe would tell stories full of snow. Edie would lie back and close her eyes against the jewel gleam of the hot sun and envision snow racing across the grass in waves, turning everything white, smothering the sunbathers who had only a moment to shiver and scream before they shattered into ice.

  It was rare for Edie to confide anything about her childhood. She kept it close, self-conscious and uneasy under the barrage of my interest. ‘I’m not like you. It wasn’t like this,’ she’d say, gesturing to the house with its lobes of wisteria or at the trembling willows by the lake. I’d feel embarrassed and overcome with a very British need to apologise for the quiet privilege of my own childhood, which, according to Edie, must have diminished any loss or sadness that dared intrude in such a place.

  For all their charm, the gardens at Hartgrove never quite touched Edie. She admired the tumbles of violets, and the slender spring irises the colour of school ink, but she never troubled to learn the names of the flowers. I always had the gardener fill the pots on the terrace where we breakfasted with golden marigolds, so she insisted on calling them the marmalade flowers. It confused Clara sufficiently that, when she was about five, I caught her trying to spread the marmalade flowers on her toast.

  But when it snowed, Edie longed to be outdoors. She was more excited than the children. At the first flake, she’d put on three coats at once, bandage her head in coloured scarves like a babushka and rush out, staring at the sky and willing a blizzard. Long after the girls were tired and damp from sledging in the fields, Edie lingered. Clara and Lucy would flop before the hearth in my study beside the steaming spaniels, and present to the fire rows of cold pink toes. Under the pretext of putting on a record for the girls (The Nutcracker or a swirling, cinnamon-sprinkled Viennese waltz – our children’s taste in music was as sugar-sweet as the candy they lusted after), from the window I’d watch Edie as she’d start towards the house and then pause every few steps, turning back to gaze at the white hills and the huddle of dark woods, like a lover reluctant to say a last goodbye.

  So many people think they knew her. The Little Nightingale. England’s perfect rose. But Edie didn’t dream of roses in summertime, she dreamed of walking through snow, the first footsteps on an icy morning.

  November 1946

  Hartgrove Hall is ours again. It’s a strange sensation, this supposed homecoming – the prodigal sons returning all at once to Dorset on a bloody cold November morning. We are silent on the drive from the station to the house. Chivers steers the cantankerous Austin at a steady twenty miles per hour, the General parked beside him on the front seat absolutely upright as though off to inspect the troops, while Jack, George and I are jammed into the back, trying not to meet one another’s eyes as we stare resolutely out of the windows.

  I’m nervous about seeing her again. Hartgrove Hall is our long-lost love, the pen pal we’ve been mooning over in our thoughts for the last seven years, but each of us is submerged in lonely and silent anxiety at the prospect of our reunion. We know the house has had a tricky war – a parade of British regiments followed by the Americans, all of them tenants with mightier preoccupations than pruning the roses or sweeping the drawing-room chimney or halting the onslaught of death-watch beetle that has been gobbling through the rafters for ever.

  As the car creeps higher and into the shadow of the hill, hoarfrost is draped across the branches like banners and where the trees meet across the narrow lane, we plunge through a tunnel of silver and white. The car turns into the long driveway and there she is, Hartgrove Hall, bathed in early morning haze. To my relief she’s still the beauty I remember. I can’t see her flaws through the kindly mist, only the buttery warmth of the stone front, the thick limestone slabs on the roof drizzled with yellowing lichen. I climb out of the car and absorb the multitude of high mullioned windows and the elegant slope of the porch, and out of childish habit suddenly recalled, I count the skulk of stone foxes from the family crest that are carved on the flushwork. Ivy half conceals the smallest fox, so that he pokes his snout out from amongst the leaves as if he’s shy. I’m frightfully glad to see him. I thought I’d recalled every detail of the house. I’d paced its walks and corridors each night before falling asleep and yet, already, here is something I’d quite forgotten.

  The yellow sandstone façade is the same but the wisteria has been hacked away and without it the front looks naked. All of the windows are unlit and the house looks cold, unready for guests. We’re not guests, I remind myself. We are the family returned. Yet it’s an odd sort of homecoming: instead of Chivers or one of the maids lingering in the porch to welcome
us, a major from the Guards waits on the front steps, stamping his feet to keep warm. On seeing us, he stops abruptly and salutes the General. The major thanks him for his honourable sacrifice and generosity even though we all know it’s bunkum and the house was requisitioned by law. Although, I suppose, knowing the General, he would have surrendered the house in any case out of a sense of duty. The General takes great pleasure in doing his duty. The more unpleasant the sacrifice, the more he enjoys it.

  The major clearly wants to be off but Father keeps him talking outside for a good fifteen minutes while it starts to sleet. We all stand there rigid with cold and boredom. I’m amazed that Jack doesn’t declare, ‘Bugger this, I’m off to inspect the damage done to the old girl,’ and disappear, but then he and George have been demobbed for only a month or so. Beneath the civvy clothes they still possess a soldier’s habits and to walk away from a senior officer wouldn’t just be poor manners but a disciplinary offence.

  After an age, the General allows the unfortunate major to depart and marches indoors. Jack, George and I hesitate, unwilling to follow. I want our reunion to be private and, as I glance at my brothers, it is clear that they feel the same. Jack lingers for a moment, then turns back down the steps, making for the river, while George heads in the opposite direction, crossing the lawns towards the lake. I wait for a minute, gulping cold, fresh air, feeling the bite and tang of it on my teeth, and then slip into the house. The great hall is almost as frigid as it is outside. In the vast and soot-stained inglenook there is no fire. I am almost certain that there used to be a constant fire. The requisite carved foxes gaze out from the stone-carved struts, chilly and forlorn. I suppose there is no one to light a fire now and I don’t suppose there will be again. I notice that the mantelpiece is missing. I can’t think how it was taken or why.

  The walls are bereft of paintings. The good ones haven’t hung here for years. They were flogged, one Gainsborough and Stubbs at a time, but my ancestors were sentimental chaps. Until the army requisitioned the house, copies of the originals used to hang around the hall – gloomy reminders of what was lost to Christie’s to pay inheritance tax, veterinarian bills, servants’ wages and to replace rotting windows. Some of the copies were rather good, others less so – peculiar, carnival-mirror distortions of the originals. For years, Jack, George and I used to play ‘spot the imposter’ and attempt to guess which of the bewigged and unsmiling portraits were copies. Then the General told us that none of them was real and the game was rendered pointless.