An Equal Music

by Vikram Seth

  We go up the stairs. The whole of the first floor is a single room. In the middle, by an unused fireplace, stands a black Steinway. At a bay window a desk looks out over the garden of thef-crescent. On the desk my blue porcelain frog squats on a pile of notepaper, facing a half-finished letter. I avert my eyes.

  "Working hard?" I say when we have turned to face each other.

  "Yes. Vienna decided things for me."

  "So you'll play alone from now on?"

  "Yes."

  "Can't you have a cochlear implant or something?" I blurt out.

  "What are you talking about? You don't know the first thing about this," she says, her anger rising. Did I think once there was no wrath in her?

  Somewhere in the house a phone rings four times, then stops.

  I notice the "Goldberg Variations" lying open on the

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  piano. "Well, since everything I say sounds stupid, why don't you play something?"

  She sits down immediately without either protest or active acquiescence, and without bothering to open the volume plays the 2.5th variation: but as if I were not there. I stand, eyes closed. After she has finished, she gets up and closes the lid. I look down.

  "I've been playing the first piece of the 'Art of Fugue','' I say.

  "Would you look up? Thank you. Yes?"

  "I've been playing the first piece of the 'Art of Fugue'. With a viola. From your manuscript."

  She looks abstracted, distracted. The words have led her into a maze of thought.

  "Will you copy the next fugue into my book?" I ask. I hardly want this, but I feel that I can keep her talking only through a series of questions and requests.

  "I've been working too hard," she says. I can make nothing of her answer.

  "Chopin? Schumann?" I say, thinking of her Wigmore Hall concert.

  "And other things." She does not wish to enter into it. She looks restless. Her eyes go to the table where the blue frog rests.

  "I can't sleep without you," I say.

  "Don't say that. Everyone gets to sleep eventually."

  "What should I say then?" I ask, stung. "How's your gardening? How's your tinnitus? How's James? How's Buzby? How's Luke? In fact, how is Luke?"

  "I suppose he's growing daily in academic, artistic, musical, social, spiritual, physical and moral stature," says Julia dreamily.

  I begin to laugh. "Is he now? That's quite a lot of growth for a small boy."

  "I'm quoting from his school brochure."

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  I kiss the side of her neck, where no trace remains of any mark.

  "No - no - let me go. Don't be crazy. I don't want all this."

  I release her and go to the window. A blackbird is pecking at something under a rain-drenched rhododendron bush. Perhaps she feels that she has been too harsh. She comes up to me and lays her hand very lightly on my shoulder.

  "Can't we just be friends?"

  So here they are, at last, these words.

  "No!" I say, not turning around. Let her read my shrug.

  "Michael, think a little of me." So, finally, I am permitted my name.

  We walk downstairs. She doesn't suggest a coffee.

  "I'd better go," I say.

  "Yes. I didn't want you to come, but here you are," she says, looking miserably into my eyes. "If I didn't love you, things would be quite a bit simpler."

  ,So will she visit me? May I come here again? Whatever her answer, I won't be at rest. Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?

  She takes my hand, but not in enforced ceremony. The door opens, closes. I look down from the top step. Water, full fathom five, flows down Elgin Crescent, down Ladbroke Grove, through the Serpentine to the Thames, and double-deckered red vaporetti sputter like Mississippi steamboats down its length. A small white dog sits on the sneezing prow. Go, then, with the breathing tide, and do not make a scene, and learn wisdom of the little dog, who visits from elsewhere, and who knows that what is, is, and, O harder knowledge, that what is not is not.

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  7.6

  We are at Helen's for our rehearsal.

  "I'm going on a diet," says Billy. "I've been told I'm overweight."

  "No!" says Helen. "How slanderous."

  "The doctor," explains Billy, "says I'm grossly overweight, grossly, and my blood pressure is dangerously high, and if I love Lydia and Jango I'd better start slimming, so that's what I'm going to have to do. I don't have a choice. Last week I went to the gym three times, and I feel I've lost a couple of pounds already."

  Helen starts to smile.

  "It's too horrible," says Billy. "He said 'grossly' . . . He didn't even try to be tactful . . . Have all of you looked at my notes?"

  "They're terrific," I say. Billy bucks up. Helen and Piers nod their approval. So here we are together. I too have my family now.

  "It must have taken you weeks to key all our parts in," I say.

  "Oh no," says Billy. "I just scanned it in from a score just scanned it in, cleaned it up, adjusted the odd clef, and printed it out. It's amazing what you can do these days." His eyes light up with the possibilities. "My programme now has a playback setting for piano called espressivo - a few controlled irregularities, and you can hardly tell it's a computer that's playing, not a human being. Soon they'll perfect it, and you won't be able to tell. Performers will be redundant for all practical purposes . . ."

  "I suppose composers won't," snaps Piers.

  "Oh, yes," says Billy in joyful contemplation of his own obsolescence. "Take fugues, for instance - you can already do all sorts of things with computers. Say you

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  want to repeat a fugal subject at the twelfth, augmented, inverted, and with a delay of a bar and a half - touch a few keys and it's done."

  "But where's the imagination in all this? Where's the music?" I ask.

  "Oh," says Billy, "that's not a problem. Just generate lots of combinations, vet them for harmonic compatibility, and test them out on humans for beauty. I'm sure, in twenty years, computers will out-perform us in blind tastings. Maybe we'll even have a formula for beauty, you know, based upon testing various parameters. It won't be perfect, of course, just more perfect than most of us."

  "Disgusting," says Helen. "Chilling. A sort of chess."

  Billy looks hurt. "A sort of holier chess."

  "Well," says Piers. "Back to the imperfect present. This is all fascinating, Billy, but would you mind kicking off ?"

  Billy nods. "J thought we might start with something that doesn't require Michael to play the viola," he says. "This isn't a vote of no confidence, of course . . ."

  I look at him carefully.

  "No, really," says Billy. "Really. It's just to keep things simple, you know, as simple as possible. And for a start it's probably better if Helen doesn't attempt to play with that larger viola tuned down."

  Helen nods her head slightly.

  "Well," says Billy, "that narrows it down to contrapunctus five or nine. Does anyone have any preference?"

  "You're the boss," says Piers.

  "Oh, OK," says Billy. "Number five. Pizzicato throughout."

  "What?" say the three of us almost in unison.

  Billy is well pleased with the effect. "Well, what have

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  you got to lose?" he asks. "It'll only take three minutes or so. Right, Michael, begin," he says, a trifle dictatorially. "Here's the tempo."

  "Billy, you're nuts," I say.

  "We haven't even played the scale yet," Helen points out.

  "I forgot about the scale," says Billy. "Let's play it then. The D minor scale - pizzicato."

  "No!" says Piers, goaded into action by this sacrilege. "We can't play the scale pizzicato. It would make a travesty of it. We'll play it arco first, and then you can do what you like with us."

  So we bow the scale first, and then Billy makes us pluck it, which is b
izarre, and we follow this up with contrapunctus five. Though we don't get any true sense of the length of the sustained notes, and though the plucked violins sound pathetic compared to the cello, the counterpoint emerges with etched clarity. In addition, it's something of an exercise in intonation. We never did this when we practised the first contrapunctus for the encore. Perhaps we should have.

  Billy takes us quite gradually through our paces. For the next pass we play it through with the kind of vibrato we normally use. The third and all subsequent passes are almost without vibrato: the style in which Billy intends that we should record or perform the work. It is slow going, but revealing. In an hour or so we move to the other piece that lies in our compass, and come to terms with it in much the same way.

  Then, at a stroke, the quartet is transfigured - its sound, its texture, its appearance. We move directly to a piece where both Helen and I have to use deeper, larger instruments. We look and we feel oddly out of proportion: with ourselves and with the others. I play the viola I

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  have borrowed, she what could perhaps be called a tenor viola. It makes an amazing sound, lazy and growly and very rich and weird, and suddenly all four of us are laughing with delight - yes, delight, for the world outside has thinned out of existence - even as we continue to play.

  7-7 •':• • -v;- T

  We move from piece to piece, in an order that Billy has thought through. Our session was planned to last from two till six o'clock, but we decide to continue it after dinner. Helen and Billy cook the pasta and sauce, while Piers and I attend to the wine, the salad and the table. Billy phones Lydia to say he'll be late and Piers makes a phone call too.

  This impromptu dinner at Helen's is the first time for months that all four of us are - as we so often used to be

  - together for a-meal; and it is odd that it should happen iniondon, rather than on the road. In neither Vienna nor Venice did we eat together. Those few days with Julia ; ;

  could not be spared or shared. And when she left I II continued my solitariness. ill

  Billy resists a second helping. The fact that we have ||

  several hours of playing ahead of us doesn't matter. It is still so exciting that we are playing the "Art of Fugue", and for a recording at that, and such a relief that Helen's instrument, so improbably strung, is all that we could ,

  have wished it to be, that there is an atmosphere of • celebration more than work. j

  "Rebecca's baby's going to be called Hope," says }' Helen. ^

  "So it's going to be a girl?" asks Piers. II

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  "No, they're not sure. They didn't want to find out. But they're going to call it Hope anyway."

  "Stupid father, stupid name," says Piers. "I'm not going to the christening. Stuart's the most boring man I know."

  "You can't hurt Rebecca," says Helen. "Besides, he's not boring."

  "He is boring. He's a sort of microwave of boredom. You're bored to a crisp in thirty seconds. No, to a sog," says Piers, grinding great quantities of pepper onto his pasta.

  "What does he do?" asks Billy.

  "Something electronic," says Piers. "And he talks about it all the time in a dreadful nasal voice, even when no one in the room has any idea what he's talking about. He comes from Leeds."

  "Liverpool," says Helen.

  "Well, somewhere forgettable," says Piers.

  There was a time when I would have risen to such taunts, but that was years ago.

  "They've come out with a special shampoo for redheads," says Helen.

  "Good," says Piers with patently feigned interest. "Very good. Tell us more."

  "Do you think we should aim to perform the 'Art of Fugue' on stage sometime?" asks Billy.

  "Oh, Billy, give us a break," says Piers.

  "Why?" I ask. "Let's discuss it. It's better than discussing Rebeccas and Stuarts whom neither Billy nor I knows."

  "You don't know how lucky you are," says Piers.

  "Rebecca has been our friend since she was a baby," says Helen. "And she was Piers's first girlfriend."

  "She was not" says Piers. "Anyway, I have nothing against Rebecca."

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  "Yes, I think we should perform it," I say. "After all, our encore went down well."

  "But can we hold an audience for that long?" asks Billy. "The whole piece is in the same key - or at least each fugue begins and ends in it."

  "That's true for the Goldberg too," says Helen. "Well, it's the same tonic anyway. And pianists fill halls with that."

  "But it's also the sameness of the 'Art of Fugue' that bothers me," says Billy. "I mean, in terms of texture - for a performance piece. On the other hand it does build up. Perhaps we could play half of it..."

  "Why didn't you write about all this in your brief, Billy?" I ask.

  "Oh, I don't know, I thought my notes were too long anyway."

  "They weren't," says Helen.

  Billy hesitates for a second, then continues. "Personally

  - and this has nothing to do with Ysobel or Stratus or our quartet as stich - I feel that strings are ideal for bringing fugues out, ideal. They sustain notes better than the harpsichord or piano. They express individual lines better. And unlike, say, wind instruments, they let you double-stop - as Piers and I had to at the end of the first piece today, when four parts became six. Besides, Mozart and Beethoven agree with me."

  "Oh, they do, do they?" asks Piers. "When did you last use the celestial link-up?"

  "I didn't need to. It's a well-known fact that Mozart arranged Bach fugues for string quartet, and Beethoven arranged a Handel one."

  We look astonished.

  "It's a well-known fact, is it?" asks Piers threateningly.

  "Well, perhaps not in some quarters," says Billy with a satisfied smile.

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  "If it's true . . ." begins Helen, "if it's really true, couldn't we perhaps play the first half of the 'Art of Fugue', and then - after the interval - these Mozart and Beethoven arrangements? That would be a great programme, and it would give the audience a bit of variety."

  "Yes," groans Piers, "why don't we build our whole life around fugal programmes?"

  "Fugues are so empowering for the middle voices," continues Helen, a bit smugly.

  "Empowering. Empowering," says Piers. "Who's been talking to you about empowerment? No, don't tell me. I smell sandals."

  "Oh, Billy," says Helen suddenly, "I've got the ideal dessert for you. It'll take me thirty seconds precisely."

  She jumps up, goes to the freezer, then to the microwave, puts it on for about ten seconds, and emerges with five yellow cherries on a plate, which she places in front of Billy.

  "What are these?" he asks. :

  "Yellow cherries. No calories to speak of."

  "But what have you done to them?"

  "Eat them quick, then ask. Quick."

  Billy puts one gingerly into his mouth, then rolls his eyes back in ecstasy. He eats another, and another, till they are all gone.

  "They're a miracle," he says. "It's like molten cherries outside, and crunchy sorbet inside. Marry me, Helen."

  "You're already married."

  "So I am. How did you do it?"

  "Bought them, washed them, froze them, microwaved them. That's it."

  "You're a genius."

  "I call them cerise microsorbet. I'm thinking of starting my own school."

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  h

  "That would be great," I say. "A string quartet cooking school. Helen could be the director, Piers and I the students, and Billy the guinea-pig. Erica would have ; no problem with a brand image then."

  "Why does Erica need to brand us?" asks Piers.

  "Oh, she just thinks that we need something to make us better known to the musical public. String quartets are hard to promote."

  "That's Erica all over," says Piers. "I've been wondering about her. I think we shoul
d consider getting another agent."

  Billy, Helen and I, in different ways, demur.

  "I wasn't happy about this trip," says Piers. "We barely broke even financially, and - well, there were other things as well." Piers avoids looking at me. "Now we've got the clarinet quintet coming up with Cosmo. We've played with him before, so we know he's OK, but if we hadn't, how would we know? How can we trust our agent if she doesn't inform us fully?"

  "Erica didn't know about Julia," I say. "Be fair, Piers. Lbthar knew, but decided he couldn't tell. If you're thinking of getting rid of anyone, it should be him. Except that you won't, because he's the best agent in Austria."

  "I'll have some more cherries," says Billy quickly.

  Helen prepares some more of her creation, and each of us gets a helping this time. She pours out some grappa she bought in Venice, and good fellowship is restored.

  The second half of the rehearsal begins. But now I cannot forget the world outside, and from time to time I am attacked by small panics lasting a few seconds each, when my hand but not my mind is on the notes before my eyes, and I sense the grey bathroom near the Brahms-Saal closing in on me.

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  7.8

  I get back home late at night and check my messages.

  "Michael, this is James; James Hansen. I need to speak to you. Please call me on my office number," begins the message. There is a brief pause and a rustle of paper. He gives me his number, and adds, rather brusquely: "I'd appreciate it if you'd call me as soon as possible."

  There is another message after this, but I can't take it in, and have to rewind the tape to get it. Something about an overdue score from a library. I close and extend my left hand, which is bothering me a bit - the rehearsal was long, and I'm not yet used to playing the viola again.

  Why is it he and not Julia who has called? Why does he want me to call him at his office? What has Julia said to him?

  My thoughts are interrupted by the phone. Who could it be at this hour? It must be eleven o'clock.

  "Hello - Michael?" says my father's voice.

  "Dad? What's the matter? Is everything all right?"

  "She's dead - Zsa-Zsa's dead. This afternoon. I called but I kept getting your machine." My father's voice is querulous, tearful. ' ' ;