If all the people could get drenched through with sunlight once, the expression of their faces would be different ever after.  But there’s never enough. – Rosamond Lehmann’s A Note in Music

I almost didn’t make it through my second reading of this sad novel.

Lehmann’s A Note in Music (1930) is perhaps her most exquisite book.  There are beautifully evocative descriptions of nature, witty and earnest dialogue, and the busy, busy thoughts of unhappy people, especially married women.   

Lack of love is the main theme. Marriage is not synonymous with love for Grace or her friend Norah, who no longer love their husbands, if they ever did. Delicate, sickly Grace, who enjoys books and long walks, is bored by the town and her husband, Tom, a staid businessman. Often he takes her to the cinema.  But, as she confides in Norah, she would have married anyone in the state she was in after Jimmy, her boyfriend, died in the war.  And she associates her marriage with memories of her stillborn baby with the cord wound three times around the neck, a puppy who died, and the lack of light in the northern provincial town where they live.      

She strikes out for independence by taking a trip alone to the country. The trip rejuvenates her. Here, Lehmann’s prose is part Romantic, part Proustian, with long passages of ecstatic stream-of consciousness.  A  phrase repeats throughout the book, “a note in music.”  .

Here is its first appearance.

A row of hollyhocks bloomed against the fruit wall at the end of the garden.  She fancied that their round heads were notes of music painted upon an outspread scroll; chords and scales splashed down in tones of rose and crimson upon the green keyboard of the espalier.  Soon, she thought, in the present heightening and harmony of the interplay of all her senses, they would strike audibly upon her ears.

And the note of music, which recurs again and again, stands for so many things that are both beautiful and difficult. 

Some scenes remind me of The Forsyte Saga, especially those which focus on Grace’s husband Tom.  Like Soames, the stuffy businessman whose wife is repulsed by him, Tom is annoyed by the new generation of workers at the office. Tom “shook his head, seeing the old order changing, and the direction of the firm passing from the venerable hands that had shaped it, and bullied it, and won its name and fame…”

Misery dominates the middle-class marriages. In addition to Grace,  there is buoyant Norah, the busy mother of two sons, who does not love her husband, Gerald, an unsociable professor.  She is lost; she can’t think of how to spend her time; so she keeps busy with charity work, Norah looks down on Grace’s languishing, but is sad that they have not become closer friends.

The only well-beloved character in A Note in Music is Hugh, a delightful closeted gay man to whom both Grace and Norah gravitate. Grace is in love with him. Even a beautiful prostitute named Pansy stalks him, because he was so kind to her. And no one understands that he is gay. It is as if they do not know about homosexuality. (Perhaps they don’t.) He is quietly obsessed with Oliver, a bohemian man who sent him poetry books but no longer returns his letters. Now his sister Clare, a glamorous, careless, rich woman of the 1920s, is the only person he loves.

What do we learn from Lehmann?  The rich are careless, and the married middle-class is unromantic.  Their trips to the cinema emphasize the importance of romance. But to Lehmann we wonder if she lost the romantic fever.

The person we worry about most is Grace.  Will she survive her loneliness and losses?