An Equal Music

by Vikram Seth

  "And Virginie, does she - did she - pay you?" "You're changing the subject." . , „ "No, I'm not. Did she?" .?,..'„ - ;

  "Yes, for lessons, of course." -

  "And did she stop when you began making love?" I look at Julia, surprised. This is blunt, coming from her. "No," I reply. "I did suggest it once, but she said that that would mean that I was in effect paying her." "She sounds formidable. Perhaps you don't value her enough,"

  2.12. I VIKRAM SETH

  "Really?" I say, and kiss her. "Why don't we take a shower together?"

  "Good heavens, Michael, what's happened to you in the last ten years?"

  "Come on. I'll soap the Serpentine out of you." v But this is abortive, because in the middle of it, the "i/ erratic water pressure of Archangel Court strikes once again, and she is left soaped and shampooed with only a tepid trickle coming down.

  "Don't panic," I say. "I'll get some water from the tap. That usually works."

  She squints to read me through the soap. "Hurry, Michael," she says.

  "You look gorgeous. I'll see if there's any film in my camera." I make a clicking gesture.

  "That isn't funny." She sounds upset.

  The buzzer rings. Young Jamie Powell, one of my students, appears in the little blue screen. I tell him to walk around the block and come back in ten minutes. He is the most reluctant of my students, so he sounds more pleased than surprised.

  Julia is dressed by the time he enters. Jamie is a useless little adolescent brat, quite musical, guitar-obsessed, hopeless on the violin. Why his parents insist on his continuing his lessons with me I don't know, but at least it's income. He looks at the two of us with knowing amusement. There are quick introductions, "Jessica, this is Jamie; Jamie, Jessica," before she leaves, unkissed and unkissing. But Jamie snickers on throughout his lesson.

  Even though it's been interrupted, even though she's gone and I may not see her for a while, her visit has made me happy for the rest of the day. I hardly think of the future of our relationship, so dazed am I by the intimacy and disbelief and excitement of its renewal. When we are together we talk of almost everything - about those times

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  in Vienna when we were happy, and about music, and about our years apart - years not lost now, but missing. But though I talk about the shape of my life during this period, I do not touch upon the darkness, still almost inexplicable to me, that came over me and caused or forced the breach between us.

  I tell her now of the time, listening to the radio in the taxi, that I felt certain I had heard her play. I felt it in my spirit, I say; I could not have been mistaken. She thinks for only a second, and tells me that I must have been. Neither was she in England at the time nor has she ever played Bach in public. It could not have been her, she says, but some other woman.

  "Woman?" I ask.

  "Yes," she says. "Since you say you mistook it for me."

  ' "'• "--"«•. fy-y,,.. 4.11
  •-'. &-•..' ••>•:. .-- - '

  Though she talks about her family, she never touches on how exactly or where exactly she met James, and how he wooed and won her. Nor do I want to know.

  Our endearments are not the same. Rebuked once, I do not call her what used to be so natural. There is room for only one darling, and I don't wish, even if it didn't disturb her, to remind her of her crescent, her dining table, her child, her husband. But I feel I know her uniquely - as this man who lives with her cannot - in the core of her being: the great, fraying cord that links her to her music. I knew her when she was in love for the first and - but what do I know of this? - perhaps the only time.

  Things are well between us, and my hours, even when I am alone, revolve around this varying brightness. But she

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  inhabits dual worlds, which chafe each other. She has a life beyond me, places and people that are closed to me. In Vienna my friends like Wolf and hers like Maria enriched our sense of each other, even became each other's friends. Now we are in a bubble, and the beings of others are figments of our speech. We are narrowed into amours. But we have anyway become less sociable over these years apart: she cannot cope in a crowd, and I have merely reverted to the solitariness of my earlier life.

  Even when there is a concert that we would both love, in a hall equipped with an induction loop, we do not go. Who knows whom we may meet, or who may see us. Besides, her hearing aid, even adjusted to the loop, sometimes prevents her from hearing the right pitch. When she's been with me she hasn't worn it at all.

  I would have expected more protest, more despair, more rage. When I say so, Julia tells me about people she has met in her lip-reading classes. One suffers from a disease that gives him dreadful, nauseating attacks of dizziness while progressively stripping him of his hearing. One became deaf after a serious stroke; he bumps into people on the street and they shake him off as a drunk. One, a woman of about fifty, lost all her hearing overnight as the result of a bungled operation. "They get by," she says. "I'm much better off than them."

  "But you're a musician. That must make it hardest of all."

  "Well - I have you now to share it with."

  "You're taking it too lightly."

  "Well, Michael, it's for me to take. You would have managed somehow if this had happened to you. You might not think so, but you would have."

  "I doubt it, Julia. I don't know what I'd have done to myself ... I ... You have more grit than me."

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  "I don't. I just remind myself that a deaf mother's better than none."

  I can't think what to say to this.

  "At least," she says after a while, "at least I wasn't born deaf. At least my memory can tell me what Schubert's string quintet sounds like. I'm luckier there than Mozart - who never heard a note of it - or Bach who never heard a note of Mozart..."

  Sometimes the mask slips and I sense her wretchedness.

  I ask her how she still makes music with her hands, how she plays as finely, as feelingly as she still does. It is beyond my comprehension. She, who is so eager to talk of music in general, retracts herself into brevity. All she tells me is that she finds a mental analogue to the way she hears a phrase, and then lets her body portray it. For me her deafness has broken some ideal dream, but how can I question her more aggressively? What does she even mean by "portray"? What do her ears feed back to her? How does she now sense exactly what the pedal sustains?

  She is still fond,'of the small graspable pleasures of life. One, of these is the view from the buses, and we ride them sometimes, sitting upstairs on opposite sides of the aisle. This must remind her, like me, of the time we first sighted each other. "I don't feel proud of these trysts," she says today. "If someone else were doing what I am, I wouldn't know what to think of them."

  "But that makes them sound so grubby, Julia. You can't mean that. You're not unhappy to be with me, are you?"

  "No, how could I be?" she says, reaching out to hold my hand before she sees the conductor and thinks better of it.

  What is it like for her? How can she sustain these visits to me while being wife and mother at home? Since she believes in trust, I see her pain, and yet I dare not probe

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  for fear that it will spill that world into our own. I don't ask her, nor does she tell me whether she has been to church these last two weeks, and if so what thoughts passed through her mind.

  Adultery and sin: ludicrously, there are no gentler words. But Julia cannot accept all this brimstone: gentle herself, she must believe in an understanding God. All this is foreign to me, incomprehensible even. But have I forced her into more than what she wanted? Should we have continued making music together, nothing else, to re-create the bonds of stimulation and companionship so long lost? Would there then have been no guilt? Could she have reconciled herself to having two husbands, each for a different world? Could I have stood it and not singed and warped?

  Pointless to think of it, now that
it has begun- But what if it had not begun? What if we were not making love together, we whose blood beats in one pulse? How touching it would be, how chaste, sad, poignant, beautiful - how self-congratulatory, how false, how agonising, how comfortless.

  4.12

  Erica and the four of us are sitting in a black cab on our way to Stratus Records. Erica has just told us that the new girl in her office has booked us four, rather than five tickets to Vienna and Venice. She didn't realise that Billy's cello always gets a seat of its own.

  "That's absurd, Erica," says Piers. "Get rid of her." "Well, she's new, she's young, she's just out of college, she didn't know."

  "So what do we do about the last ticket - Or do we go on separate flights?"

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  "The travel agents said they'd get back in touch with us by the end of the week. I'm quite optimistic."

  "When aren't you?" exclaims Piers.

  "Anyway," says Billy, staring rather morosely out of the window of the taxi, "I'm not so hot on Vienna."

  "Oh, what is it now, Billy?" says Piers impatiently. "You've never complained about Schubert before."

  "Well, for a start, I think our programme's unbalanced," says Billy. "We can't play both the string quintet and the Trout."

  "What is it this time, Billy? Chronological stress? One's too early, one's too late?"

  "Well, yes, and they're both quintets and they're both massive. "

  "We're going to play them," says Piers. "All Schubert goes together fine. And anyway, if he'd lived to be seventy, all this would be early Schubert. If you had any objections, why didn't you bring them up earlier?"

  "And I'd really much rather play second cello in the string quintet," adds Billy.

  "But why?" Task. "The first cello has all the loveliest tunes."

  "I've got all the loveliness I can handle in the Trout," says Billy recalcitrantly. "And I like all those stormy bits in the string quintet: Duh-duh-duh Duh-duh-duh Duhduh-duh Dum! I should be the one to play them. I'm the anchor of the quartet. Why should the outside cellist always play second cello?"

  Helen, who has contrived to put her arms around both Billy and me, squeezes his shoulders and, incidentally, mine. "You'll get to play second cello with some other quartet sometime," she says.

  "I don't know," says Billy after a while. "Anyway, that isn't the same thing at all."

  "What is the matter with everyone today?" asks Helen

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  in exasperation. "Everyone seems to be tense about something."

  "I'm not," I say.

  "Oh, yes, you are. And you've been that way for the last God knows how long." v "And you're not?" Piers demands of Helen. ^' "No, why should I be?" says Helen. "Look!" She points out of the window at a bit of St James's Park. "It's spring."

  "Helen's in love with a horrible fellow called Hugo," says Piers for our benefit. "He's part of an outfit called something Antiqua, he plays a baroque fiddle and wears sandals and sports a beard: you get the idea."

  "I'm not in love," says Helen. "And he's not horrible."

  "Of course he is," says Piers. "You must be blind."

  "He's not in the least horrible, Piers. I was in a perfectly good mood just now."

  "He looks like a hairy slug," says Piers.

  "I won't have my friends talked about in this way," says Helen hotly. "You've only met him once so you don't know how nice he is. And it's thanks to him that I've managed to get a deeper viola, and it's only because of that that we can make this recording at all. Don't forget that."

  "As if I could," says Piers.

  "Don't you want to make this recording?" asks Helen. "I thought we'd convinced you at long last."

  "Well, it's three to one," says Piers, almost to himself.

  "Piers," says Helen, "everyone feels it's three to one against them at some time or other. And no one's forcing you to do anything. When Tobias was -"

  Her brother fixes her with a piercing look, and she stops in mid-sentence.

  "All right, all right," says Helen. "Sorry. Sorry. I didn't

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  mean to bring that up. But it's absurd. One can't talk about Alex. One can't talk about Tobias. One can't talk about anyone."

  Piers, jaw tight, says nothing, and avoids looking at any of us.

  "Negative, negative, negative, everyone's so negative today," says Helen brightly. "This morning when I was making coffee I suddenly realised how boring musicians are. All our friends are musicians and we aren't interested in anything except music. We're stunted. Totally stunted. Like athletes."

  "Right, troops," says Erica. "Here we are. Now remember. What we need is a united front."

  4.13 , :: •• jv-_? ••"-•-

  Ysobel Shingle plumps us up with passionate praise, and is not at all rigid about time-tables, style of playing, the ordering of those parts of the "Art of Fugue" where different orderings are possible. She is delighted with the thought that, owing to Billy's insistence and Helen's explorations, it will be possible to play the whole thing without transposing anything.

  She asks us if we would prefer to record in a regular studio or somewhere with a more natural atmosphere she mentions a church they sometimes use. Erica tells her we can't decide so early on, and this, like everything else, doesn't seem to bother her.

  She is extremely intense and nervous throughout the discussion, and we end up in the strange position of trying to put her at ease. There is something spectral to her tremulous pallor, as if she has just landed from another planet and is trying to come to terms with her

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  displacement and to perform her transgalactic mission simultaneously.

  She appears to be terrified of Erica, of the telephone, even of her own secretary, but Erica has told us already that in fact Ysobel Shingle is not terrified of anyone, including the financial figures who ostensibly own and control Stratus Records. She goes to their meetings, and whenever they criticise or question anything, she lowers her voice to a whisper and mumbles so intensely that they drop their objections. Everyone is afraid of losing her, since she is the constructive force behind what Erica calls their "A and R", shorthand, apparently, for "Artists and Repertoire".

  From time to time, even in the course of our meeting, her voice almost disappears, and only her lips appear to move. Though it has us completely perplexed, I reflect that Julia would be fine in a situation like this. I am rather startled at the thought, and even at myself for thinking it. But suddenly Ysobel Shingle smiles in a wintry manner, and appears to gain some tentative confidence, and the train of her voice emerges from its tunnel to say, "So we could, you know, go ahead with that too - if it's acceptable to you, of course. Publicity and Promotion will skin me alive if you don't agree, but it's entirely up to you." Her smile becomes wanner at the thought of her impending martyrdom, and we swiftly agree to whatever it was she requested under her breath.

  Piers keeps his reservations to himself and is outwardly almost enthusiastic about the project. Helen tries to disguise her surprise and gratitude. After it is over, Erica, full of delight at how things have gone, and finding she is late for her meeting with a Spanish diva, dispenses "mwah-mwah!" kisses to each of us, hugs the flinching Piers, and rushes halfway across the street to grab a taxi which has halted at a set of traffic-lights.

  AN EQUAL MUSIC | ZZI

  ,r V"x- ,:,,• -•.. *•• 4.14 -• • , -, • •

  "Michael, is that you, Michael?" :

  "Yes, hello, Dad. What's up?"

  "Oh, not a lot, Zsa-Zsa's sick. We're taking her down to the vet tomorrow."

  "Nothing serious, I hope."

  "She's throwing up all over the place, and she doesn't, you know, she doesn't seem to have any, any ..."

  "Energy?"

  "Energy." My father sounds relieved.

  But I can't contrive to be worried about Zsa-Zsa, who once every year or so frightens everyone and in due course emerges in hardier health. Sh
e has exceeded her nine lives already and appears to be neither conscious of it nor grateful for it.

  "Are you all right, Dad?" I ask.

  •t, "Fine, fine . . . haven't heard from you in a while." " "Oh, I've been pretty busy."

  "I can imagine- Vienna, wasn't it?" ?<- . ^"No, Dad, that's coming up." y ,.,, -:f(

  •' "How you do it, I don't know." •-•"••' : -,, :

  - "Do what?" -, ' ^ i

  "You know, keep things up, Joan and I were saying how proud we were of you. Who would have thought you'd be doing all these things . . . oh, I know what I had to say. Has Mrs Formby called you?"

  "No, no, Dad, she hasn't."

  "Oh. Well, she wanted your telephone number and I couldn't see any reason not to give it to her."

  "That's fine, Dad."

  "I don't want to give your number to a whole ruck of folk. I don't want them disturbing you if you'd rather not."

  "You just use your judgment, Dad. If you give it to

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  someone, it's fine by me. What did she want? Did she say?"

  "No, she didn't. Should I have asked?"

  "That's all right. I just wondered."

  "Oh, she said she loved the Christmas pudding you took around. Nice lady she is. Always has been."

  "Auntie Joan all right?"

  "She's all right, except for her, you know, the hands ..."

  "Arthritis."

  "That's it."

  "Give her my love."

  "I will." "' ' >- ••-••• ••••.'"•

  "Well, bye, Dad. Talk to you soon."

  I re-play the conversation in my mind. I suppose I can expect a call from Mrs Formby soon. I go to my small music room - more music cell than music room - and open my violin case. I lift the olive-green velvet covering and take out the Tononi. Gently, very gently, with the back of my hand I touch its back, its belly. How long we have lived together, the two of us: my time in Vienna, the solitary years that followed, these years with the Maggiore. It came into my life the same year as Julia. How long we have sung in one voice. How much we have grown into each other. How could anything part us now?