In the 1970s I began to play classical guitar and became interested in music composed for the lute (the forerunner of the guitar) in the 15th,16th and 17th centuries, much of which has been transcribed for guitar.
In the early 1980s I purchased a lute, and discovered for myself what history had documented … that the lute is a beautiful but temperamental instrument, highly sensitive to fluctuations in environmental ambience and apt to go out of tune mid-piece.
And yet so much of its music is virtuosic, and the composer performers of the time, playing in draughty, unheated, unairconditioned spaces must have been extraordinarily gifted.
I thought to myself, weave some romance in, some intrigue, and there’s a story to be told about them.
What I hadn’t imagined, back then, is that in the year 2000 I would find myself squaring up to the breakdown of my marriage and the fracturing of family that would follow.
Eventually, I was fortunate to meet someone who would restore my belief and trust in love and in 2006 we pooled our resources and bought the converted barn that remains our home to this day.
We never imagined, however, when moving in, that during the first six months we would each, separately, have an unnerving experience that suggested we might be sharing our home with ‘others’ who had long ago dwelt there, or passed through.
Neither of us felt any sense of malignity, and while there has been the odd inexplicable occurrence over the years since, those first vivid experiences have never been repeated. But for each of us they were so real, so vivid, as to be unforgettable.
Unsurprisingly, then, the supernatural had to figure in Provenance; and so it does, in the survival of a 15th century Italian lute that, by a vague and haunting connection to the past, touches the lives of two present day lovers.
My short story Stay a While, included in Unshriven, an anthology of tales of the supernatural published in 2021 by APS Books, relates the haunting experiences that my partner, Michèle, and I will never forget.
A holiday in Bellagio, on the shores of Lake Como in Northern Italy, in 2008, impressed upon me a wonderful setting for part of the story, and the Provenance die was firmly cast. It’ll probably come as no surprise to discover that Provenance also recounts something of the journey travelled by a man forced to come to terms with an unexpected and unwelcome divorce, and the aftermath of it.
It is so true, and so often said, that writing can be such wonderful catharsis.