Impromptu
At one hundred and sixty six years of age, Anne Abraham Muir was, by a significant margin, the oldest resident of St. Francis of Assisi’s care home in Shropshire. For nearly a hundred years, ever since entering her sixties and leaving middle age behind her, she had never had a good word to say about anyone, or anything for that matter. She was a very devout Catholic and prayed the rosary daily. Every morning, upon waking, she read psalms aloud to herself. In the unique growl of her voice, she barked their luminous imageries at the dawn and thanked God for letting her live to witness yet another sunrise. No-one in the earth’s brief history had ever witnessed so many sunrises, or sunsets, or springs, or autumns. The orderly would enter with Anne’s tea, in the same cosied china teapot out of which Anne had been drinking tea since before the birth of the orderly’s grandparents, and Anne would normally say something critical and unfriendly to the orderly. Other than her demandingly merciful Catholic God, Anne’s great love was music, the late Beethoven string quartets in particular. For her last forty-seven birthdays, nearly fifty years, poor budgets and poor organisation had thwarted her wish for a live string quartet to be booked and brought to the care home to play the great thirteenth, (opus 130), in her honour. She could only hope that this year might be different but she wasn’t optimistic.
That morning, it was Anne Abraham Muir’s one hundred and sixty seventh birthday. She did not have much hope that her great great great great great great grandson would make an appearance. She had never even met her great great great great great great granddaughter-in-law, nor their twin daughters- Anne’s great great great great great great great granddaughters. After witnessing the births and demises of so many descendants, she had grown weary of the process but did feel, given her longevity, that a certain level of respect was due to her by those she had not, as yet, outlived..
The heavy load of mail that morning came addressed from a miscellany of countries, of continents. Gerontologists, human scientists, and neurologists in Ireland, France, Holland, Morrocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, and Cambodia wished to study her. News that she had lived to celebrate yet another super-centennial birthday had spread around the world.
The BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky, and GB News were all outside, pointing their cameras at Anne’s bedroom window or filming reporters- with microphones clipped discreetly onto their lapels- who were explaining the macabre situation to interested viewers.
But then, gradually, a silence began to spread through the gathered reporters, a silence which mounted like a soft, invisible wave until their chatter had ceased altogether. A celestial foursome of birds, two turtle doves, a white duck, and a swan, were approaching. Their silhouettes enlarged at the pace of a dilating pupil. They came closer and closer to the earth, until they were not in silhouette but a vision of white, a quartet of medically giant, white-plumed birds, whiter than milk or snow. The duck’s bill was robin-red, the swan’s banana-yellow. Gazed upon in mute wonder by the stunned reporters and news-people, and now Anne- who, miraculously, still possessed twenty-twenty vision- and a few other residents of the rest home- many of whom couldn’t be quite sure what was going on, these four curiously bonded birds alighted on the grass whereupon they immediately transformed, with the swiftness of a breaking egg, into a string quartet. Four humanlike angels in white suits. The two turtles became a pair of cherub-faced young men holding yellow violins, the white duck became a severe-eyed, silver-haired male violist, and the swan was turned into an ancient old woman with wisps of the whitest hair who played the cello.
They began playing immediately, from memory, and with closed eyes. They communicated with spooky clarity, as if by telepathy. Perhaps it was by telepathy. Each sound was effortlessly united with its neighbours. Though four, they spoke in a single accent. What they played had never before been heard on the earth. It issued with harsh melancholy from their bows, which they held in the deftest, most delicate grasps. The music was so beautiful but often so painful as well. Somehow it was both totally familiar and totally unfamiliar in the same instant. Everyone listened, in ham-fisted silence, with puzzled awe and inconstant understanding.
The media-organisation personnel were tranced and static. They did not notice Anne opening her window and leaning as far as she dared over the ledge, fiercely and fully in love with the strange music. It enabled her to glimpse a paradise she had never known existed, on earth or in heaven.
In showing her that place, in leading her to it and enabling her mortal sight to glimpse a world beyond mortality- the portal of which is death itself, the mortally-wounding music of the quartet, so bizarre and wonderful, gave her permission to die. She did die, tumbling over the window-ledge and expiring smilingly. Her corpse lay, contorted and unacknowledged, on the cold ground.
The quartet finished, bowed, and then turned back into birds. The listeners applauded with dead-eyed enthusiasm. The quartet’s instruments fused to their hands with a chorded complaint of the sixteen strings, and then their laden arms rose and opened behind them, achieving the kinetic, cruciform symmetry of their former wings. Their white clothes remained white but became feathers.
And then they flew away, quickly darkening and disappearing into the sun’s white light.
