Wanda led me into the drawing room. She sat down at the piano, threw out a few chords at random, and then I heard the strains of one of my favorite pieces: The Mysterious Barricades. Never had Couperin’s strange music squeezed my heart so much. Those treacherous and melancholy phrases, which revolve endlessly on themselves; those appoggiaturas, which give such a sense of incompleteness; those capricious resolutions that resolve nothing and which, from their gracious knot, instantly let new garlands of crystalline sound unroll; that softness and those desires, almost gallant and almost funereal; all that enveloped  me and rendered me numb. Something mysterious isolated me and cut me off from the world. A kind of reverie, heavy and deadening, stole over me, paralyzing me bit by bit. Life appeared to me through a mist, dancing and blurry, and like the golden robe of a dancer seen on the other side of a river, surrounded by fog and all mixed up with birds, with grains of wheat, with clouds of incense, with gusts of leaves. Persistent images of love, which burned my eyes; longing for an unknown sun; desires for an undying woman, more beautiful than all earthly roses; a dance of the still feeling dead, floating under the cypress trees of a cemetery, while the circling owl spots in the distance a vole, or the moon, or the return of a drunken porter.

I saw the day depart for the West, sliding along a purple, sandy path; I saw the night approaching from the East, running along already black paving stones. I saw the heavenly blacksmith hang a star from the void of his workshop – first one, barely burnished, then another, better finished, like a sparkling pendant. I closed my eyes. Wanda was silent for a long time.

- Well?

The sound of a human voice made me shudder. Mlle de Vionayves put her hand on my shoulder. (28-30)

That same evening, she took herself to the piano and played again, I don’t know why, The Mysterious Barricades of Couperin which she liked so much and which I too liked ordinarily. Why, that day, did I experience a sense of ill-being, of indefinable anguish? There was the same, secret numbness that the music brought on, the same paralyzing fascination. One could have listened to it for a long time without daring to tear oneself away or regaining one’s freedom. Rings of fleeting pleasure, of straitened melancholy, unfurled without end. The music came and went like a raft gliding from one bank to another, carrying nothing but sundered couples, lovers dead or separated. Listening to it, it was as if I saw, at the bottom of an old garden, musty and dilapidated, endless walls of roses, their bases pulpy and powdered with gold, their moving terraces the color of gold, or of nymphs. It was as if these roses threw up an impenetrable wall between ghosts, perruqued or in hoop-skirts, whose arms stretched towards, but never reached, each other across  the abundant hedges, their uppermost twigs both spiny and flowered. After many reprises, I was tempted to get up, to beg Wanda to stop, but I stayed put in my armchair, inert and as if indifferent, exhausted by the languor of that smooth and weakening music.

- Well? said Wanda when she had finished, what’s wrong with you, Guy, you seem completely crushed.

- I don’t think much of that music. It destroys me.

- It doesn’t take much to do that! Me, I like it better and better. I shall end up playing nothing but Rameau, Couperin, Daquin and Dandrieu, but Couperin is the one I prefer to all others. When I listen to him, it seems as if I am no longer a silly girl of today, with the ridiculous fads of the young, but that I am living the delicious life of the 18^th century, that I get my hair done at the Belle-Poule, and wear hoop-skirts three metres wide, and go visit Mlle de Lespinasse or Mme d’Epinay.

- Alas, I said, I too wish things were like that. Perhaps, after all, it is that regret that makes me so sad when you play that piece! (88-90).

“By the way,” he went on, “he has one little nervous trick which also gives him away.”

“What’s that?”

“Haven’t you noticed? He whistles softly a little tune under his breath, on occasions."

“I’ve noticed once or twice. That’s quite true."

"Have you noticed it is always the same tune?" asked Cherrington.

"No, is it?"

"Yes. I don’t suppose he knows what it is himself. He always whistles a snatch of the same tune, just as other people nervously doodle on a sheet of paper in the same way, or make the same gestures with pencils or spectacles when they are thinking of something else. The interesting thing is that it is a tune I know but can’t for the life of me place. All I know is that there is something wrong about the way he whistles it and that it is well known to me.”

"What sort of tune is it? A dance tune ?”

"No, not a modern dance tune" said Cherrington. "It’s an old melody - the sort of thing you might get in some harpsichord music. I could easily track it down at home. It’s not Byrd or Bull or Gibbons or any of the English composers: I feel sure it is some early continental composer- Scarlatti or Rameau perhaps or someone less well known like Buxtehude or Pachelbel or Frescobaldi. I don’t know."

"But it is very unlikely Conningsby would know any music by early classical composers.”         

"Is it?"         

"Most certainly. I know he has no classical musical knowledge at all. He is only interested in swing music."

"That’s very curious. I doubt if I am wrong in this matter. After all I have only seen the man close to twice but it was a haunting little tune, and as I say somehow changed since I last heard it. I am sure that if I had my own music library of early keyboard composers available I could track it down at once."

"Does it really matter?"   

"No, I suppose not" said Cherrington readily. "Just my insatiable curiosity. I like to be able to label correctly all the strange facts I note."

"Well,” said Anne. "If you. really must track this tune down, though to me it seems a waste of time, I expect we can easily do so.”

"How?"        

"I've made friends with an old bachelor who lives out on the ridge beyond Delhi and who has a very large collection of music, both scores and recorded. I know he is interested in the primitives and if you like we will go out there and see him. He's a very charming person: ex I.C.S. but retired early in the war and is staying out here rather than go back in the middle of the war. I don’t blame him - he has a lovely house and plenty of servants and good food, and there are no relatives for him to go back to in England."

"What s his name?"

"Cooper. Sir Francis Cooper."

Sir Richard stopped in his tracks and seized the girl by both hands. “If I weren’t such an old man and if my nephew Giles wasn’t eyeing us suspiciously from our table over there, I should kiss you with delight" he said.

"But why?"

"Your mention of this charming person Sir Francis Cooper, whom we must certainly go and meet, has jogged my memory. I have no doubt that the tune which Wing Commander Conningsby whistles occasionally is a dance by Couperin, although at
the moment I cant remember what it is called. Do take me to meet your friend as soon as convenient.”

"I will indeed. And now we must join the others. Giles is looking very savagely at you."

It was not until the following Monday morning that Cherrington and Anne Longford were able to go out to Sir Francis Cooper’s house. She had been on duty all day Sunday and Sir Richard was busy on Sunday evening putting the finishing touches to his Monday morning’s lecture…

“Anyhow here we are. I should warn you,” said Anne as they went up the drive, "that you may find Francis a little absentminded or peculiar. He's a bachelor and has lived a lot out here by himself. Despises the present British administration as effete and spineless. But he is really a dear and very kind and gives gramophone concerts every week to which officers and other ranks can come. I was going to one when I called to see you last week."

Sir Francis Cooper greeted them affably enough although he was persuaded that Cherrington was a man from the Ministry of Economic Warfare who was supposed to be coming out to see him that morning. "It is only fair to tell you, my dear sir," he said "that my information is likely to be out of date. It is a long time since I dealt with problems of rubber and rice - yes a very, long time.”

While they were talking Cherrington looked appreciatively round the large room into which they had been shown - exquisitely furnished, booklined, the floor covered with Persian rugs, housing two grand pianos - it was such a room as he would like to inhabit himself. His heart warmed to the slightly donnish figure of Sir Francis.

It took them several minutes to explain to Sir Francis why they had come. "But whatever does the Ministry want with early piano music?” he asked and then looked craftily and wagged his finger at them. "I see now” he said. “It’s some special code. There’s no need to tell me. I saw that excellent film "The Lady Vanishes". I fully understand. My library is at your disposal."

They thought it better not to protest and it was not long before Cherrington, with an exclamation of triumph took over a volume of Couperin harpsichord suites to the piano and began playing quietly. As Anne Longford listened she remembered having heard the tune once or twice before; it was a rondeau with a refrain which at, times sounded lively and gay, at others sinister and dark. Or was it that Sir Richard, whose playing she admired at once, was putting some sinister content into his execution of the tune. She went over to the piano and Cherrington turned to her .

"This is it," he said, smiling "Les Barricades Mysterieuses.”

"Pleased at tracking it down?” she asked, "your vanity satisfied?”

He stopped playing and his face was puzzled. "I'm just wondering,” he said "why Wing Commander Conningsby whom you tell me has no interest in classical music, whistles this rather obscure tune, and why he always whistles it out of tune and time". (58-60)

  “You might ask him another question,” said Cherrington. “Ask him why, when he is nervous or excited, he whistles to himself, and slightly out of tune, the melody from Couperin’s Les Barricades Mysterieuses.”

      The other three stared at Cherrington uncomprehendingly; indeed Sir Richard was rather puzzled himself why he had said what he did. (90)

"Sergeant Whiting?"

"Yes, sir."

"So good of you to come up and see me. Cigarette?" Sir Richard held out his case and gave the young man a light. "I expect you are wondering what it is all about."

"I am rather."

"My name is Cherrington, Sir Richard Cherrington."

"Yes. That is what the Squadron Leader in the Secretariat said." He hesitated. "Were you at Cambridge, sir?" he asked.

"I was," said Cherrington. "And still am there normally. I have been lecturing at Delhi University and am about to go back to Cambridge."

"I thought I had seen you about," said Whiting. "In Trinity Street and in the bookshops and at concerts."

"You were an undergraduate were you?"

"I had finished my degree and taken the Mus. Bac. just before war broke out," went on Whiting. "I was in the middle of my course at the Royal College when I was called up.”

"Did you study the organ at the College?” asked Cherrington.

"Yes."

Cherrington walked over to the piano and sat down on the piano stool. "Did you. ever play the harpsichord?" he asked. "Or were you particularly interested in early keyboard music?"

"Bach of course," said Whiting, "But my especial love was modern French organ music."

Softly, quietly Sir Richard began to play the piano. He did not look at Whiting as the haunting melody of Les Barricades Mysterieuses grew under his hands, first gravely and then gaily, the tune at one moment bright and happy, at another recurring dark, sad and sinister. When he had finished and only then, he turned to the other man and asked, ill concealing the excitement he felt, "Do you know that tune?"    

"Oh yes, it’s familiar to me all right, but I don’t know the name."

"I see. Have you heard the tune recently?" Sir Richard made the question sound a matter of routine

Whiting was puzzled. "Yes I have," he said. "But for the life of me I can’t think where. I’ve been so busy in the last few months organising concerts and running the orchestra. Should I know the tune ?"

"Not necessarily. It is actually a rondeau from a harpsichord suite of Couperin." "Couperin, yes. Yes"

"A rondeau called Les Barricades Mysterieuses" went on Cherrington.

"I've heard of it yes, and have heard it several times. Probably at concerts in Cambridge." He paused. "And yet the tune is somehow familiar to me. I've heard it recently. Why do you ask? Why have I been sent for, sir? Is there some mystery behind all this?"

"Indeed there is a mystery," said Cherrington easily. "The mystery is why Couperin gave this title to his dance. Les Barricades Mysterieuses - the mysterious barricades. To what mysterious barricades did he refer ? Is it a tune of hate or love, a love song perhaps symbolising.."

"Walt a minute, wait a minute." Whiting was on his feet. "You have set my mind going. A love song, of course, that is it. Now it all comes back to me."

"You heard the tune in Murree in June," said Cherrington, softly.

"Yes. How the devil did you know? What is all this about?"

"Under what circumstances did you hear this tune ?"

"It was the night that the Colonel was murdered and the bungalow burnt down. I expect you have read about the Murree case, haven’t you? It attracted a deal of publicity
at the time."

"I have read about it" said Cherrington, with studied understatement.

"I'd been taking a friend of mine, a girl I know," he blushed. "Well, actually I'm going to marry her," he hurried on. "She was staying at the leave camp at Lower Topa and I was staying in Murree. I took her to a dance at Sams and we went for a walk afterwards along one of those little hill paths. Do you know Murree, sir - I don’t suppose you do?"

"I have been there once."

"I see. I don’t know why I am telling you this," said Whiting. "Except that I don’t know why you played this tune to me. We sat on a bench on one of the hill paths and looked out over the valley towards Pindi - it was a quiet moonlight night. We hadn’t been there long when a man in RAF uniform came along the path. The path was in shadow so that I couldn’t see him clearly: I never saw his face clearly nor could I tell what badges of rank he was wearing. What I did notice was that he had very large moustaches and was smoking a cigar; but what attracted my attention was the fact he was whistling a tune - the tune you have just played to me."

"Are you sure of that?"

"No doubt about it at all. I noticed it because it was an unusual tune: one doesn’t expect to see RAF officers going around whistling tunes from harpsichord suites. As I know now he was whistling it very well."

"You can swear to that?” Cherrington looked at Whiting keenly.

"Oh yes, I can. I think I have a really good aural memory."

Cherrington began to play again. It was difficult to do what he wanted, but by playing carefully chosen wrong notes and altering the time, he managed to convey the impression of the air out of time and tune as he had heard it whistled by Conningsby in his office. He stood up and went over to Whiting.

"That wasn’t quite the same, was it?" said Whiting. "I mean you had done something very curious to it? Why was that ?"

Cherrington spoke slowly and deliberately. "I want you to answer this question most carefully," he said. "I have played you Couperin tune twice - the first time as it should be played and the second as you say, having done something curious to it. Which way did you hear it whistled that night in Murree?''

Whiting did not hesitate a moment "The way you first played it, sir. There can be no doubt about that."

"You are absolutely sure?”

"Absolutely sure. Is it important?"

"Very important. Very important indeed."

"So it was in connection with the Murree murder that you sent for me?"

"It was but I couldn’t put the circumstances of that night into your mind before I played you the tune. I hoped the tune would start a train of thought in your mind and lead you to the Murree murder and I was fortunate." He paused."The murderer was less fortunate. It was bad luck that of all the people who saw him that night, it had to be you - a trained musician. Yes, I can sympathise with him, almost. And yet," went on Cherrington, "he was not thorough, not careful enough. It is indeed difficult to carry out a perfect murder which is carefully premeditated." (147-9)

Conningsby went over to the window of the little room in which they were interviewing him, and looked out into the courtyard. Softly he began to whistle, nervously and jerkily, and half under his breath. Cherrington caught the lilting melody of Couperin. It was out of tune and time but, distorted though it was, there was no doubt it was still Les Barricades Mysterieuses.

"Tell me Conningsby," asked Cherrington. "Why do you in moments of stress always whistle that little tune under your breath?"

Conningsby turned round, startled. "What tune?” he asked.

"What you have just been whistling."

"Oh that? I hadn’t noticed it was always the same tune. That particular tune has been buzzing around in my head for a long time. I picked it up in Ceylon when I was stationed in Kandy. I had a room next to a man who was very musical but had very few records. He used to play this tune a great deal. He told me once what it was."

"A rondeau by Couperin - The Mysterious Barricades."
"That’s it. Catchy little tune isn’t it?"

"You didn’t manage to catch it very accurately."

"Is that so? Don’t I sing it correctly?"
"No. But that fact may have helped to save you from the gallows.” (166-7)

At eight o’clock the following evening Sir Richard sat playing the piano in the Penrose bungalow at Karachi. He had had a pleasant flight down from Delhi that afternoon, and had spent the morning beforehand taking a sentimental farewell to India - watching the dhobies’ bulls go by and the coolies and bullock carts and peasantwomen, and the babus on bicycles belatedly hurrying to their offices. On arrival in Karachi he registered himself at the Sind Hotel, had himself and his luggage weighed, and the luggage labelled and taken to his room

He was pleased that he had been allotted a room in the wing of the hotel other than that in which he had stayed on his previous visit. All the same the sight of a neat card by his bedside announcing arrangements for the next day - times of calling, times for the car, times for the launch - brought back very vividly to him the circumstances of Chandler’s death. He had been glad to get away from the Hotel and its unpleasant memories and to dinner with the Penroses. He had been playing aimlessly for some minutes and it was only the entrance of Mr and Mrs Penrose that brought his mind back to the music. He realised that he had been playing Les Barricades Mysterieuses, and stopped, getting up quickly.

"Please don’t stop," said Mrs Penrose, "Do go on playing.”

"No, no. I was just playing at random while waiting for you to arrive."

“Do please finish what you were playing. It sounded a most haunting melody."

Cherrington sat down again at the piano and played that tune which had in such a curious and remarkable way featured in his life during the last few weeks in India. Yet tonight he could recapture none of the gaiety of the tune: it sounded sinister, cold, menacing, the melody returning again and again as though voicing some supernatural force of inerrant retribution.

He finished playing and the music died away.

"What was that?" asked Mrs Penrose.

“A rondeau. A rondeau by Couperin called Les Barricades Mysterieuses - the Mysterious Barricades. Like so many of Couperin’s titles, we don’t know what this one means. Many people have made guesses."

"A rondeau," said Penrose. "It didn’t sound a bit like a rondeau the way you played it. It may "be silly of me, but it gave me a most eerie feeling."

"Yes," said Mrs Penrose. "It almost made me shiver."

Cherrington came over to them from the piano. "You felt that," he said. "Curious how a man’s mood can come out in the music he plays. I couldn't help making it sound that way. To me it is now a sinister, tragic tune.”

"Why?"

"Because of that tune," said Cherrington slowly, 'because of the Mysterious Barricades I first met a man for whose death yesterday by his own hand I suppose I am largely responsible, whose love for this country had taken recently a curious form. And because of that tune two other people will shortly be condemned to death in Delhi - well because of that and because in a court of law their love for each other will, in the shadow of the gallows, so quickly turn into hate. It is a curious thing isn’t it," he went on. "That love and hate so quickly turn into each other, as though in the extremes of experience we were nearer to other extremes than we ever imagine. I think that love and hate march along a common frontier too often and too easily crossed. Do you think that it was of those barricades that we must all erect mysteriously in that dread border country of which Couperin was thinking when when he wrote this music - now grave, now gay, now happy and assured, now sinister and terrifying?"

He stopped speaking and there was silence in the room.

Mrs Penrose got up and drew her wrap around her.

"Let us go into dinner," she said. (182-3)

Always helpful, never hurried,

Always willing, never worried,

Serve the public, slow but surely,

Smile, however sad or poorly,

Duty done without a swerve is

Aimed at by the Civil Service.

Pitland's pitiable story goes to show how tenuous are the mysterious barricades which divide clairvoyant perception from hallucination, reality from unreality and sanity from madness. (2)

With its hesitant notes, despite the fast rhythm and the force in those matt copper tones, 'The Mysterious Barricades' managed to catch the mood that must have prevailed at court after the parties were over and Madame de Maintenon had banished all recklessness. The greatest monarch in the world was about to die. The whole of France had been transformed into a deserted hospital, without medicaments or provisions. The cries and torches were thronging the gates. The gangrene went to his heart. Memory, the palace, was committed to memory and the past. The future, tomorrow, was something with which you must not concern yourself.

The spiral is twisting, cogs, butts, springs, in the intricate, perfectly formed mechanism, repeats the same movement again and again. The music oscillates round something not yet expressed, something not yet achieved, something forever repeated. There is one obstacle it cannot escape - one is forbidden from saying more - and against which it does not dare offend. Time exists, time existed, time will exist no more. The man at the harpsichord carries the past like an impediment. The people are there but they don't speak and they will never meet. There is no hope left. The past belongs to him now, the past is his present. The seductive beautiful song of the past recurs, tries to force itself forward, is pushed back by an invisible obstacle, attacks it with increased tempo, slows down, is pushed back quite close to another vaguely perceptible opening. A last effort. A failure. There is no exit here and, in the reprise, no self-evident repose. (153)

 "A monument, to be more precise," Flower said. "A monument in the shape of a wall."

   "How fascinating," Pozzi said, his voice oozing with unctuous contempt. "I can't wait to see it."

   "Yes," Flower said, failing to catch the kid's mocking tone, "it's an ingenious solution, if I do say so myself. Rather than try to reconstruct the castle, we're going to turn it into a work of art. To my mind, there's nothing more mysterious or beautiful than a wall. I can already see it: standing out there in the meadow, rising up like some enormous barrier against time. It will be a memorial to itself, gentlemen, a symphony of resurrected stones, and every day it will sing a dirge for the past we carry within us."

   "A Wailing Wall," Nashe said.

   "Yes," Flower said, "a Wailing Wall. A Wall of Ten Thousand Stones. (86)

"Now we should stop and go to bed. But first, after all that Bach, I should like to play one of my very favorites from Monsieur François Couperin. There are eight morceaux, and this is the fifth piece in the sixth ordre. It is called 'Les Barricades Mistérieuses.' This would be called 'The Mysterious Barricades' in English, I believe. I think of my affliction sometimes as my personal barricade mistérieuse, perhaps this is why I like to play this one so much. Listen."

   She begins to play. I know the work but I'd never heard it played as Mirabelle plays it. There is the deep, dark mystery of the unknown. I can almost experience her blindness in those sections. The contrast with the lighter sections is strong and the continual recurrence of the low tones is beautifully executed. I'm enthralled. I almost lose contact. Then she is finished. I get up, turn on the light, go over, and put my arms around her from behind. She clasps her hands over mind. They are warm and must be tired. (315-6)