An Equal Music
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the city on the day of the earthquake was born the weak priest whose writings were dispersed, coming through hands and hands to the library of the curved wall. There they lay till ecstasy rose unheard to the crowning angels and the dove. If we were dolphins, what would we play? If we had four hands would Bach's mind have further branched? Let our thumbs be opposable at the opposite edge. Let our teeth be pulled, let us have baleen like whales, that our plankton love might grow, that we might ungnashing plash and play.
Grief and rue, grief and rue, break the erring heart in two. They cry out the flight, there she must be in 6D, viewless and hurtling on the winds. Will she land, has she landed, can she land, and have all papers stamped or surveyed? Is she of this centimetrage, and are these her birthmarks? Are her eyes gold, her hair blue? She has marbled the apartment in grey. She has written die Liebe into my notebook. Campari calls from the Lido, and I sing of trout at the sight. From above light darkens upon red pillars, the colour of algae, and music floats on the unsanded shelves and shoals.
Signora Mariani may make what she will of the sheets. The county Tradonico may tend his loquat groves and use a scarecrow against an avalanche. Let the smoky Kail sustain himself on Mars, and Yuko lay rue on Beethoven's grave. Let the lord of the manor of Rochdale clap his coffin into a canoe and disport himself on the waters. Let Zsa-Zsa sleep on a pillow of haddock in Maria's cello case. Let Mrs Wessen live to see her thousandth moon. Let Ysobel unknit her forehead. Let not poor Virginie weep. Let all and no things come to pass, for how will I pass these days?
An egg may not be unboiled nor trust resealed. We play here in the dark boding school where the cross tilts grossly forward, yet the people applaud. We play there in
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a villa in solid Italy, its rose sun-hot, its iris dying in a walled field a sixth part of Venice. Two great white dogs are there, like polar bears at sport. Cherries are ripe, and I wander within the grove, kissing them and biting them off the trees.
I have exhausted my means. I have seen a dog on a boat, which was Carpaccio's dog incarnate. I saw it, it was small and white and faithful, and alert to the goingson about it. It noted the worth of the woman's pearls, it weighed the grief of the Invicta'd teenager. In sluggish dyslexia under the bridges wove the S, whereon the dull barge sat, the lively dog a jewel on its prow. Its forepaws were so still. My hand was halted then, or was it later? Each beast is sad thereafter, yet how few are penitent.
See how the lightning flashes and it storms across the black lagoon to the white-lit church, its two-faced front major and minor both. There is the font in which our common caul was dipped and named, though we have bowed and fled. Piers, Helen, Billy, Alex, Michael, Jane, John, Cedric, Pefegrine, Anne, Bud, Tod, Chad, James, Sergei, Yuko, Wolf, Rebecca, Pierre: what catalogues of ships and seed will fill this regiment, this firm, this sausage-skin? These isles are unserene and full of noise. A rack is winched behind that pink-white wall. A cruiseship bellows and a sparrow screams. Green lapwater, a child's balloon, bronze bells. She reads these on my lips: her own grow pale. -» *v .....
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7.1
"Welcome back to London, welcome, welcome, welcome. I hear it was an enormous success," says Erica. "Congratulations, congratulations, well done! Lothar was raving about it."
"Lothar wasn't there," I reply, moving the receiver a bit further away from my ear.
"I know," says Erica, slightly chastened. "He was in Strasbourg - sorry, Salzburg - silly me!"
"Lunch at the Sugar Club, Erica?"
"No, no, no, just a slip. I hope Piers didn't mind. He sometimes gets his knickers in a twist about things like that. He thinks someone should be there, twisting arms, chatting up the press and the powers that be. But it was well reviewed, so he must be happy. I wish I had been there to hold all your little hands, especially during that interval, but there it is, there it is. Next time!"
"Who told you about that?"
"About what?"
"The interval."
"No one, no one, I just picked it up from here and there. Little bird, grapevine . . . terribly dramatic, I must say. Sometimes it makes for fantastic playing, all that adrenalin floating around - flowing, I mean."
"How far has it gone?"
"Not far. Actually, in confidence, it was Lothar, and he
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was told by the management of the Musikverein. They felt they needed to tell him; and Lothar himself is the soul of discretion - which, of course, got him into trouble with Piers. Actually, entre nous, I'm getting rather tired of Piers - and I hear he's getting tired of me. Is that so?" Erica suddenly sounds very alert.
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"Well, your Julia, you know. To tell or not to tell. Lothar didn't, or couldn't, and Piers felt it was a breach of faith. Poor girl's deaf as a post, surely we're entitled to know, that sort of thing. You know how Piers is. Do you think he's trying to get rid of me?"
"No, I don't think so, Erica. You're a wonderful manager. What gave you that idea?"
"Agent. Just agent. Nothing more fancy. Well, it's a number of things. The 'Art of Fugue', most recently. Oh, well, I'm just sounding everyone out," says Erica artlessly
- or is it artfully? "Piers is not a happy bunny. He never has been, has he? Though I hear he was rather naughty in Vienna after hours: And have you been good?"
"What do you mean by good?"
"Well, you define it first, you evasive boy, and then answer the question."
"No, you define it... By the way, Julia is not deaf as a post."
"No, no, of course not, of course not, but it would make for such wonderful promotion. Lothar shouldn't try to keep it quiet. What lies behind that sad smile? She plays like an angel, but can't hear a note . . . With the right build-up you could fill the Albert Hall."
"For heaven's sake, Erica! What is this - Barnum and Bailey?"
But Erica's thoughts have run ahead. "That's the hardest thing about you lot: how do you promote a
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quartet? Who is a quartet? What is its real personality? Four faceless faces. Now, if I could split up your personalities, like the Spice Girls, there could be fantastic crossover possibilities . . ."
"Really, Erica!"
"Oh, Michael, don't be so prim. I'm just thinking of ways of bringing home a bit more bacon - so to speak! Ysobel, you know, is terribly clever in that respect. But she's so fastidious musically that she manages to get away with it. Well, I must rush."
"Afternoon nap to sleep it off ?"
"Hah! And what are you doing?"
"Practising the viola. Getting my fingers used to it again after so long. It's just that one crosses over a lot more. And of course there's the vibrato -"
"Oh, you clever thing ... so I hope to see you soon . . . be good . . . and fight my corner for me if Piers says nasty things . . . best love . . . ba-yee!" says Erica, and puts down the phone quickly.
7.2
I relive our last day in Venice, Julia's and mine.
I have a rehearsal, she a flight to catch. We are at bay, yet fear to confront each other. We are sinking into an earlier darkness, only worse. She is packing, avoiding my eyes.
What I did was unforgivable - but nor am I in a forgiving mood. The night before she gave me the book, we had made love, more at her desire even than mine. Yet, just a few hours later, such a letter to this other man: yes, yes, her husband, yes.
"How could you read that letter? How could you bring in Luke? I thought we operated at a different level."
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Why this? Am I a fork-lift?
"I don't hate him. I don't hate you. I'm sorry for what I did."
She looks at me as if she does
n't believe me. "I'll have to hide out somewhere and keep lying to James. I'll have to tell him I'm visiting someone or doing something. I don't understand you any more - if I ever did. What do your apologies mean? I won't even be able to see Luke."
"I don't understand you either - if I ever did. Why are you playing with me? Why did you ask me to your house to meet your husband? I'm still baffled. Why did you come here with me if everything between us was a sham?"
The post-mortem merges with an earlier one. Were there three corners to that crisis then? Was it not just teacher and student in a war of wills? But have we not worn this cloth bare? Depression made me brutal. I felt cut off, even from her. My link with Carl too began almost like love. ^'1 can't take on anyone at this point," is what she tells me I then said - but could I have said that and nothing more? Did I feel lessened by this younger woman, just a shade scornful of my ignorance? "I thought we operated at a different level." I never had what she took - takes - for granted.
And now she tells me what she has not read: "Your letters were in Vienna, in a trunk. I found them last week. It was quite a shock. I'd asked my father not to send them on. I didn't know he'd stored them - anyway, they must have got there with his other papers. I found them with old dolls and other stuff my mother hadn't sorted or thrown out. I didn't read them - how could I have done? It wasn't just that you yourself were there. I feared the memories that they might dredge up, ten-year-old thoughts only half true to us."
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• •• Vf'
"Was that why you decided to come to Venice with me?"
"I don't know - so much was going on - yes, probably
- partly."
"So you did read them."
"No, I didn't - I began reading one. I opened it at random. I couldn't go on. Don't."
But there is no one else in this apartment where we have been happy. She lets my hands rest for a few seconds on her shoulders. My palms rest on them, my fingers do not move along the marks. She read it, then, my raw remorse and sorrow. That would not have aged.
"Michael, don't write to me," she says.
"Will you call me - or fax me - or drop by?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Yes, in time. Now let me be." But in this I hear her father's voice: a small lie, the easier to detach herself.
She goes out to send a fax. In an hour she returns. I carry her bags to the stop. She tells me to go back. I refuse. We stand there unspeaking until the boat comes to take her to the Lido, from where she will go straight to the airport. She steps quickly onto the boat. No kiss, not even to avoid a scene.
I go to my rehearsal. I live on in the apartment in Sant'Elena. I read and walk and do the usual things. Is this what happens when your life is not in your own hands?
Yes, I have got to where I am from somewhere else. But I too am subject to higher powers - to music, to my fellows, to the life of someone who is better off without me. Even for music, can I serve her now? Sometimes my fingers move across her book as if they held an unknown form of braille. Here too in London it's a talisman that calms me in these weeks I wait for her.
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•• -- ' - : •' 7-3 -
From her book with its grey marbled cover, laid open on the music-stand in my cell, I play the first contrapunctus, but this time with a viola. It is written out, as it happens, in the alto clef, so it is easy to read.
We have realised that we are going to need not two but three violas for our work on the "Art of Fugue": Helen's regular instrument; the special large viola, strung low; and one for me to play where my part falls below the compass of the violin. For this I can't simply borrow Helen's regular viola, since I will also need to practise at home.
I have borrowed the viola I am playing from a dealer. It is an odd pleasure to be playing the larger instrument again after so many years. I had forgotten - not forgotten exactly, but got unused to - how much more one needs to stretch.
We are beginning - with something of a shock - to come to terms with the complexity of our project. What exactjy is to be included in our recording? In what order are the various fugues and canons to be played? Where only three of us are playing, should Piers or I play the highest voice? Exactly which fugues require Helen to tune low or me to exchange my violin for a viola? What is the best pace for these pieces, to none of which Bach has assigned a tempo?
We have decided to leave all this, in the first instance, to Billy. He is to be our researcher, ponderer, and director. If he tells us to play something funereally, we will play it funereally; if headlong, headlong. After we have tried it his way we can approve or adjust or overturn. It may be that only someone with the instincts of a composer could guide us through these musical thickets. Piers knows and accepts this. I did not realise he
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had been voicing his doubts about the "Art of Fugue" to Erica yet again.
In remarkably short order - and I suspect he began working on this during our stay in Venice - Billy has produced a document of a dozen pages or so in which he has addressed most of our potential questions: exclusions, ordering, tempi, substitutions, retunings, personnel, variant readings. He talks about Bach's manuscript, the engraved edition of 1751 published a year after Bach's death, the doubtful question of whether the chorale dictated by him when he was blind and dying was intended to form part of the work, the placement of the great incomplete "three subject" fugue which if completed would almost certainly have included as its fourth subject the main theme of the work, the researches into Bach's intended order both from general principles and from the examination of erased page numbers in the extant copies of the first printed edition, and even a few arcane questions of numerology involving the letters in Bach's name.
He has also, sweet Billy, got his computer programme to generate parts for Piers, Helen and myself in the clefs most convenient for the instruments we will be playing. This must have taken ages to key in.
We do not often practise anything without having read it through together first, and all we have ever played together so far is the first contrapunctus. But in this work, especially for Helen and (to a lesser extent) for me, there will need to be a great deal of preparation if we are to play fluently. So after I have played the first piece from Julia's book and have turned its blank pages one by one, projecting onto them the water and sky and stones of Venice, I revert to Billy's computer-generated parts.
These I scan for hours in preparation for our first rehearsal, thinking of them and playing from them till my
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mind and fingers stretch to conform to what sounds before my eyes and in my ears.
: . ' 7-4 ,'.- '-••
Write to me some word of love and comfort. Or leave a message on my answering machine. Or turn up at my door, or in my small blue screen. I wrote to you; I know the fax went through.
It is June: squirrels eat the unripe figs on the wall, dried chestnut flowers are swept to the gravel verge.
I have not heard from you. You have not replied to my unbidden fax. Are you not in town? Have you gone somewhere with your husband and his mother and your child? With his little grey blazer and little green cap, are his days no longer numbered and lettered and noted?
Where did you hide for a week till the marks were gone? Back to Vienna, to your mother's house? - you had some days to spare from those you took from me. I don't forgive myself. That is not all that I have done to you.
The public squares grow garish with laburnum, and near the sunken garden the mushroom-topped may is thick-flowered with pink. The small grey monsters march in a crocodile.
White may is what I love, and lilac lilac; yet modish colours will displace them quite. I walk here and there, and you play Bach for me. Is love so light in the scale? But I see plinths and pillars and pediments from the heights of buses. It is a film over my vision: this is what the great stonemason, with his four volumes, has done to London town. Slow are such actions, but once set are set.
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Arsenale, and eleven cats followed her as she called and fed them. She, old woman, threw them scraps from a bag, and they mewed from gratitude and want. They were lean and full of sharpness of spirit and sore with mange, not like the well-loved Zsa-Zsa, so ill now in the North.
You said that I should wait for you to call. How many minutes are required of me who have touched you after years? Look gently on me with those blue-grey eyes. Yes, you may smile, you may well smile and laugh. Be reasonable!
Then to my mind comes the courtyard of washing and wistaria that we looked down at, from the room where we made love those days of the week and that Sunday.
I put my hand on my shoulder where your head rested. Then I say your name once, twice, a third time, a fourth. Some nights I sleep like that, remembering you; some nights I only sleep as dawn comes on. ^
7-5
But now I am here at her door. Luke is at school, the mother's help attacks subjunctives at the French Institute, and James flicks his abacus in Canary Wharf. How will she hear the bell? There must be some mechanism, for she is at the door. I read her face. Is she happy then to see me? Yes and no. But there is no surprise. She looks so tired; her face is drawn. Is it sleep she lacks more, or peace? She steps back, and I enter.
"You don't mind?" I ask.
"I need some time on my own."
"Is there anyone at home?"
"No. Would I speak like this if there w«ce?^ '
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"Will you forgive me, Julia? I didn't mean to say what I said or do what I did -"
"Yes," she says, too quickly. -. ,
"I don't know what got into me-" ^,,:: .
"I've said yes. Don't go on."
"I won't ask you why you didn't come to see me. But couldn't you have written?"
"After what happened, why should I deceive you as well?"
I say nothing, then: "Will you show me your music room today?"
She looks at me with a sort of exhaustion. She could not have expected this question, but acts as if nothing would surprise her any more. She nods, but it is an unspoken concession - as if to give me a free choice of my final meal.