An award-winning author with his first book, The Snow Geese, William Fiennes was privileged in a way few of us ever have been. His family estate was a broad-moated medieval Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire, where visitors were shown “through the Great Hall, down the Long Gallery, into the King's Chamber, Council Chamber, Queen Anne's Room, Great Parlour and Chapel.”
Its extensive grounds were the setting for guided tours, theatrical presentations, local fairs and international film shoots (including those for Shakespeare in Love and The Scarlet Pimpernel), and Fiennes conducts us to a shimmering, sensuous past that was Arcadian in its physical enchantment and the various fascinations it afforded William. Spiral staircases, battlements, secret rooms, medieval Spanish armour which his mother conditioned with WD40, various attics, the Great Hall where young William learned to ride a bicycle, the moat where he fished for pike, and areas with swifts, rooks and a majestic heron.
The Music Room, by William Fiennes, Random House Canada, 216 pages, $29.95
These were only some of the inquisitive boy's interests. There were gardeners, helpers in the kitchens, Father reading Trollope by the fireside, Mother sewing patches into old tweed jackets and refreshing the rush matting in the King's Chamber with a watering can, and scary moments, too, in the Groined Passage, as well as eerie ones in the Barracks, where soldiers had taken refuge during the Civil War.
There were also disruptions, fear and anguish caused by the Fiennes' eldest son Richard, brain-scarred by epilepsy, who would erupt violently, especially if his favourite football team, Leeds United, lost a game. Then there could be a fork to the father's throat, a scalding hot cast-iron frying pan pressed against the mother's cheek, or a berserk smashing of windows with an iron pole. Richard, 11 years older than William, could be affectionate and loving, but his condition led to severe spasms, and even though it is related with restraint, the scene of him lying on his back on the floor, arms stretched rigidly along his sides, his fists clenched and his whole body jerking as he gnashes on a cushion that his father holds between his teeth, is scary.
With exactitude of diction that makes lingering thoughts shine all the brighter, this is a memoir of subtle word music and even subtler patterning of consciousness about an extraordinary childhood challenged by a brother's major dysfunction. Its title fits because the music room is where a very young William Fiennes makes an important discovery about time and pitch as his mother conscientiously practises her viola, and because the last scene is of volatile Richard, Leeds bobble hat on head, pipe in hand, waiting to sing the anthem Lead Me, Lord on Christmas Day as his family watches, holding its breath.
He turns his ill-fated brother into an unforgettable victim
The title is apt in another way as well, for the memoir is punctuated by sequences of potted medical history about epilepsy, the malady that caused Richard's acute, chronic and often violent distemper. These little sections could easily have become irritating interruptions or academic discourses, but they do not.
An alternative title to the book could be In Custody, because the estate and house (an ancestral inheritance) “didn't just belong to us: it was part of the country's heritage, the world's, and our task was to care for it as long as were here, and do our best to leave it in good health for future generations. ‘We're stewards,' Dad told visitors,” and every night was marked by the ritual of shutting down the house.
The custodial connotation is continued with the process of memory, including the history of epilepsy and its treatment, and culminating with the portrait of Richard. This memoir tries to take custodial charge of the past in a way that implicitly acknowledges Carl Jung's line: “The beloved dead are our task.”
