A woman was seated at a piano, leaning forward across the keyboard, her back towards the crowd. She swayed gently from side to side as she played, responding to the rhythm. She was playing jazz, a slow piano blues. The only other musician on the platform with her was a double bassist, standing beside the piano, his eyes closed as he played.
I took a seat at a table and ordered a large glass of beer.
The place was so dark I could barely make out who else was there – the only lit area was the tiny platform and a patch of dance floor in front of it. I watched the pianist, admiring the lightness of her touch, the way she appeared to feel the music more than play it. I had never had much time for jazz, but I was quickly won over to the sort of music she was playing, and the skill with which she performed.
After about thirty minutes she came to the end of her set. While she remained at the piano she pushed the stool back and turned to speak to her bassist. She was holding a long glass of light beer, which she sipped several times.
Staring at her, I suddenly realized I knew who she was. The lighting remained diffuse, the sort of stage light that illuminates without making detail clear. I could hardly see her face, but her manner, her bearing, was completely familiar to me.
I left my table and walked across to the raised stage. She turned towards me with a ready smile as I approached – the bassist laid his instrument on the floor, and walked down from the stage, heading for the bar.
I said, ‘You’re Cea, aren’t you? Cea Weller?’
‘Yes, I am.’
I had the light behind me, so I could see that she was trying to peer at me to see my face. ‘I am Sandro,’ I said. ‘Alesandro Sussken. Do you remember me? You performed my—’
‘Sandro!’
She stood up quickly, smiling with recognition and presented her face to me. We kissed briefly, coolly, on each cheek. Then she sat down again.
‘I’ve moved to Temmil,’ I said, still standing, my body throwing a shadow across her. She did not seem surprised to see me.
‘Yes, I heard you were coming here. My father told me.’
‘Your father?’
‘You met him that evening at the concert.’
I thought back – I had been introduced to many people that evening. Nothing about him registered now. Why he should know my movements I had no idea.
‘Yes – that’s right.’ I said. ‘But he wasn’t my main interest that evening.’
‘I thought you’d forgotten about me, Sandro.’
‘We agreed, didn’t we?’
Just one night. I had been due to sail across to Hakerline the next day, while she was in the process of preparing for a series of recitals on another island. Demmer? I could not stay on Temmil, she could not leave with me, I was full of remorse because I was married, we had to part and knew we would and then we did so.
She stretched out and briefly took my hand. ‘I know what happened, Sandro. I’ve no regrets.’ When she let go of my hand I crouched down on my haunches so that I was no longer standing over her. ‘We obviously have some catching up to do,’ she said. ‘So where are you staying?’
‘I’ve rented a house on the edge of town. Just for a while.’
‘If you’re renting that sounds like a more than temporary stay.’
‘I’m not sure what I want to do. For now I will stay put but I might even settle down here. I like being here on Temmil and I like the house. There’s a baby grand in there.’
She looked impressed by this news. The bass player was heading slowly back towards the platform. At that moment he had paused to talk to a couple of people at one of the tables.
Cea said, ‘I will be playing for another half-hour. Are you going to stay on and listen to the rest?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘Let’s have a drink or two afterwards to celebrate.’ The bassist had stepped up to join us on the platform. Cea looked towards him and said, ‘Teo – this is Sandro Sussken. An old friend of mine.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Sandro,’ he said pleasantly. When we shook hands I felt the hardened fingertips of someone who regularly played a string instrument. The fingers of my left hand were similarly callused from the violin. They had been like that all my life.
I walked back to my table and sat down. After a few moments Cea made an announcement into her microphone but because of the muffled acoustics I could not hear exactly what she said. I thought I heard her say my name. In a moment she and Teo began playing again.
The piece started with a slow introduction, Teo leading with a series of long bass runs, while Cea played quietly sustained chords, but then she took over the main theme.
I was suddenly fully alert. I recognized the music – it was an improvised, extended, subtly restructured version of the cadenza from the second movement of my piano concerto, the one Cea had performed at our final concert. As I realized what she was doing I saw her shifting on her stool before the piano, turning and looking back towards me across the wide cellar space. She was smiling.
Shortly before she completed the second half of her set I ordered a bottle of wine and two glasses, and had them brought to my table.
62
Someone put on records after Cea had finished her set and a few people began dancing in the space in front of the platform. We wanted to talk so we had to raise our voices to hear each other. Our heads were close together.
I told Cea the story of what had happened to me since the last time I saw her. She had known at the time that I was married, but said she was shocked to hear that the marriage had ended so suddenly and irretrievably. When I explained about the time detriment, it was a subject obviously familiar to her, but she nevertheless sympathized. I described in some detail my long journey across the Archipelago, the dealings with the adepts, and much else.
‘You didn’t give them money, did you?’
‘I had to.’
‘No you didn’t. It’s a racket – a way of taking money from tourists.’
‘They wouldn’t help me unless I paid them.’
‘That’s what they tell you. But the detriment can be corrected in other ways. No one who lives in the islands would ever go near the adepts. They’re a bunch of crooks. There’s an inexpensive insurance policy you could have taken out. You claim exemption at the Shelterate offices. You should talk to my father when you meet him. He travels around the islands a great deal.’
I was remembering the annoyance of dealing with the adepts, the apparently endless walking or driving about as a way of correcting lost or gained time, while I hobbled along with my luggage. I said nothing. I did not like the idea of having been rooked by those people, but I didn’t want to go into the subject with Cea just then.
She was drinking quickly and soon we ordered a second bottle. She told me what had happened to her since we parted. The most serious change was the closing of the concert hall. Audience numbers declined sharply after our tour and several sponsors had withdrawn funds. The social nature of Temmil was changing, Cea said. More and more people were coming to the island to retire. Many of them were business people with a lot of cash to spend. There was some kind of scheme the seigniory had set up to attract wealthy people to Temmil, few of whom had any interest at all in the arts.
The sense of excitement about having an orchestra on Temmil, of greeting visiting artists, of setting up workshops for young musicians – all this had begun to fade away. Her own career as a concert soloist had come to an end, partly because of the loss of the hall but also because she had become the unwitting carer for her elderly mother. She said she was more or less trapped at home on Temmil, until what she called the inevitable happened. Her mother was in her early eighties. Cea said she adored her, of course, but—
‘I loved what you were playing tonight,’ I said. ‘How does that sit alongside your classical training?’
‘Music is music,’ she said, which was of course something I entirely agreed with. ‘When you hear the great jazz musicians you realize how skilful t
hey are. My father played jazz – I grew up listening to him and playing the records he had. He took me to some of his gigs. I enjoyed his music but it was always the great classical composers I felt most drawn to. When I realized my career as a concert pianist was most likely over, playing in clubs like this was the only work open to me in town. It was really difficult for me and not simply because of money – I had never played jazz before and I had to learn the hard way. Back then there were more bars where they wanted live music so I was able to pick things up as I went along. That wouldn’t be possible now – these days there’s just this place still open. And one other, but that only opens at weekends.’
A new record came on, a slow number with romantic lyrics. Several couples stood up and began to dance. Cea pushed back her chair.
‘This is the one they always play before closing,’ she said. ‘Come on – let’s celebrate. I’m happy to see you, Sandro.’
We went to the dance floor and she pulled me close against her. I realized she was slightly drunk, but then so too was I. We began moving around the dance floor, hardly in step, holding on and leaning against each other. The side of her face was against mine. I breathed her scents.
When we finally left the club she declared she wanted to see my house and try out the baby grand. She said she had recently retrained as a piano tuner – playing in clubs didn’t pay enough, so she needed a secondary career. Tuning was interesting and lucrative. She promised to put everything right for me. I said I would like that. We laughed at what we saw as a double meaning. We were soon alone in the darkened street, unsteady on our feet. We walked slowly and deliberately up the gentle hills towards the edge of town. It was another hot night but there was a breeze from the sea and the stars were out. We held each other, arms and hands touching, and sides pressing. I was full of excitement – it had been a long time.
When we arrived at the house she forgot all about the baby grand. We went straight to bed.
63
I awoke in the night, unused to feeling the body heat of someone else sleeping against me. The windows were wide open and there was a draught from outside, but it was still a warm night. I shifted position, trying not to disturb her. Cea obviously sensed me moving, turned towards me, her hand resting on my chest. She settled down again. Her breathing was steady.
I was fully awake, though, and I lay on my back in the dark, as contented as I had ever been. This at last seemed to represent the real reason for my quest back to Temmil. I had not personified it directly to Cea but now that we were together again I realized that I had been burying, suppressing, a long-held wish to be with her again.
I suddenly saw in a different light all that guilt I felt after our one night together at the end of the tour. True, I had walked away from her and left her, but she had done much the same to me. That night we had been attracted to each other by the glittering excitement of the moment, the orchestra and the music, the heady roar of applause, the drinks party and excited conversations afterwards. We both knew this. Neither of us pretended anything else, consented to it, made no secret of what would happen soon after.
And soon after, it did happen. I travelled away the next day, Cea returned to her life here on Temmil.
I had regrets, I had a feeling of guilt, but these feelings were swamped by everything that happened on my return to Glaund. When next I had the mental space to remember the time with Cea, all that remained was the guilt.
As I was lying there beside her, with her unclothed body sprawling on the bed, dimly lit by the night glow from the window, I wondered if what I had been really going through was not guilt but a feeling of longing, of missing her, of wanting to be with her again. Now here I was.
I was happy that night in the warm dark, feeling the movement of her breath across my face and neck, sensing the strands of her hair lying against my shoulder, knowing that when I woke up in the daylight she would still be there.
I drifted back to sleep – then, suddenly, with no sense of subjective time passing, the sun was up, I was half-awake and Cea was still there beside me. She had turned over so that her back was towards me. For a few moments the euphoria I had felt during the night returned to me, but then, unexpectedly, my mood shifted.
In the bright daylight I looked around at the room we were in, the room with the bed. That is all it was. There was nothing personal or individual about it. Just the bed and a small table, my clothes dropped on the floor. Cea’s were scattered elsewhere, probably on the floor by the other side of the bed. I had put no pictures on the walls, there were no books, the blinds, still wide open, were the ones that had been there when I moved in. It was not a room I could call my own.
Temmil itself was a disappointment. It was no longer the place I thought I had found, the place I wanted to be. A creeping conventionalism was taking the place over: restaurants with unimaginative menus, bars without live music, places that closed early every evening, gated communities, single-storey houses built on the slopes of the hills. The roads were being widened, streetlights were going up. I felt out of place, wanted something from the island that no longer existed. It was a paradise being concreted over for the sake of new and safe suburbs.
But I had been here only a short time. Perhaps I should stay for a while, learn the place, not rush to opinions about it?
I was fretting as these thoughts went through my mind. Beside me, I could sense Cea was waking up too.
I needed the stimulus of other people working in the same way as me. I was feeling my music slipping away. In the past I had thrived on the muscular difficulties of modernist music, the challenge, the satisfaction of being awkward and novel. Now I felt myself writing tunes, enjoying natural harmonies. Would this streak of easy familiarity also work itself out if I embedded myself more firmly in island life?
How deep should I go? How long should I stay?
Cea turned over to embrace me, laid her head on my chest.
‘I have to go home now, Sandro,’ she said quietly.
‘At least stay and drink some coffee with me.’
She raised her head, looked at me.
‘My mother can’t get out of bed on her own. I have to be there for her. I should go now.’
‘Will you come back?’
She was already sitting up, looking around for her discarded clothes.
‘Maybe this evening. I have to be with her today – we planned to go shopping. She needs all sorts of things.’
She pulled on some of her clothes then used her mobile phone to call a taxi. She hurried to the bathroom before the car arrived, so I dressed too. There were so many things I wanted to say to Cea – I had imagined a relaxed morning with her while our mild hangovers slowly disappeared. Then some time together – perhaps a swim, a walk, a tour around the town? I wanted to talk with her about music, how she had come to adapt that cadenza of mine, where she and I would head next, what our future might be. All we had together was an instant of past, and an even shorter present. Could two people’s future be built on such a flimsy basis?
I was no longer sure what I wanted: of me, of her, of this island. Most of all I did not want her leaving me like this. So soon, after last night.
I went down the lane with her and we waited until the taxi arrived. Then she was driven away, a dust cloud thrown up by the car’s tyres from the unmade surface and drifting briefly. I walked back to the house. The day, hardly begun, had already lost its point.
I took a shower, put on some fresh clothes. I made myself breakfast and a large flask of coffee. In my music room – like my bedroom, it contained hardly anything personal, the usual mess of papers spread randomly on the floor – I sat at the piano while I sipped my first cup of coffee but my mind was empty. Nothing stirred inside me. I practised for a while, but I could still hear in memory Cea’s fluid playing at the bar and all the pieces I usually went to for relaxation now sounded spiky, academic, cold.
I poured myself a second cup of coffee, returned to the piano, sat and stared at the keyboard
. I had placed the coffee precariously on the floor beside my feet because there was nowhere else to put it. I could not risk standing it anywhere on or near the piano in case of accidental spills. I was thinking about Cea, the pleasures of the surprise meeting with her, what we had done, the promise of more. I was daydreaming about her, completely unprepared for what then happened.
Like a roaring in my mind I heard a great swelling of music – an imagining of complex orchestral music, intriguing, unique, complete. Above all, complete. A whole work.
It was over in less than a minute but in that time, in some kind of imaginative shorthand it is impossible to understand or describe, I heard the whole of what would probably be an extended orchestral suite of at least twenty or thirty minutes’ duration. My normal method of composition was a slow and sometimes painful process of seeking notes on the piano, making marks on the manuscript, following an unending series of changes of mind, abandoning and restoring certain phrases – but this piece had come to me entire.
I knew it as well as something I had played all my life. I started playing the piano, hesitantly at first, but with an increasing sureness. The music was mine, coming from within.
I turned around, reached down to the floor for paper and pen, tried to scribble notes, but I knew immediately that my old way was no longer the right way. I rushed from the room, found my digital recorder, checked the battery, stood it beside me at the piano – then I started playing again. The sureness remained.
I played the piece through to the end. It was as if my mind and hands and heart were being guided by a spirit force, almost an example of automatic playing. I came at last to the finale, which was as whole in my imagination as the rest of the piece.
When it was over, shaking with excitement and relief, and still not at all sure what had happened to me or how, I sat slumped on the piano stool. I was glad no one was there with me – it was a moment of necessary solitude, beyond anything in my experience, beyond expression.
The Gradual Page 27