An Equal Music

by Vikram Seth

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  8.i

  Only my daily rigours keep me clear. We meet, the four voices, and enter a braid. So I play, and I am praised by my fellows, and I bow, I bow, for only sorrow moves me cleanly through these lines. My violin senses where I am veering, and keeps me to the path that is direct and spare. How few months we have together.

  Sun-up, sun-down. I practise duly what I must. We perform, and the mad fan reappears to taunt us with adoration. Will nothing be done about him? What hath closed Helen's eye? In the green room we are quizzed and questioned. I am out of all this.

  My violin, I am sad like you, and yet I thank the moon for these few months of grace. Your strings are true. How will the chartered surveyor smile on you? He will have you appraised and divided, back and belly, between his daughters. Your golden grain will milk him his balances. How thick, how sour must blood be, that it can corrode all propinquity?

  I must use the dumb-blind alphabet at night. My one hand will speak to its partner and know what it is doing. Sensile, sensate, sensory, sensible, sensitive. I retain two others unsaid: sensuous, sensual. Two escape me still sensive, sensal - for I am uncertain as to their meaning; that then is nine. As for sensational, it is a doubtful case,

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  and I would leave one finger uncorresponded. She can play on two manuals as I cannot, but what will stir her stereocilia in their ruined bath?

  Moon-rise, moon-set. In Boston too the weeks pass at this pulse. Need I list the vegetation that the Gulf Stream gifts the squares of London? Shall I blotch the invariant calendar with dyes and juices? The golden husks of limekeys were gathered in piles along the kerb. The acres near the Round Pond grew dust-white with flower-of-grass. All this, it seems, happened from new moon to new moon. But then the rain was a patter, almost a crackle, in the sycamore behind me. And now it is more a sort of steam, mixed with the pollen of lime blossom, rising from the grass and resting below the lowest boughs. ••,-

  8.2

  Hawthorn is green in berry, and pyracantha ripe. My feet have lost their holdj my hands scrabble for purchase. The days swelter and they make Carnival in the streets. I said I could not sleep without you, yet I do. Is it not to be wondered at?

  We are at Denton's auction house now, and I am here to see Piers bid, for I cannot yet take what I must soon take, a step such as this towards infidelity. Piers is indifferent towards his violin. But now he has seen and held and heard one that he loves, has borrowed it from Denton's and played it with us for a couple of days. It is a burnished red with black crackling. Sadly - or, rather, happily for Piers's hopes, because this reduces only its monetary worth - its scroll is not by the original maker. It has a grand, unplaintive tone, slightly too penumbra'd with richness and resonance for me, but Piers loves it with the passion of sudden and, yes, attainable love. With all his savings and borrowings he can just about reach the

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  estimated price. The auctioneer's 15% will stretch him on the rack, but he knows that this is what he must have. He will spend years paying it off.

  It is marked in the auctioneer's catalogue as a PJ. Rogeri. Henry Cheetham, the green-suede-jacketed, urbane, avuncular head of the musical instruments department at Denton's, has collared Piers. Indignant snorts, anxious consultations of his watch and managerial glances around a room adorned with fiddles mark his monologue, so confident, so confiding.

  "Oh, yes, the dealers say we auctioneers are in it for the quick buck, but I don't see any dealers starving in attics, do you? At least in our case everything's transparent. The price is the highest bid at an open auction - plus our, well, pretty modest commission when you come to think of it. Well, all right, we collect from buyer and seller, but, you know, overheads and so on. And we certainly don't get into the sorts of shenanigans that they do. Dealers! Compared to them we're bloody saints! . . . Well, good luck, Piers, old chap, I do hope you're not outbid. Too bad about the last time. I've a feeling, though, that you were being preserved for this one. Just look at that purfling - that grain - that glowl What tone. What timbre. What, er, what a terrific old fiddle this is. You were made for each other. Ah, two forty. I'd better go down. You've registered, haven't you? Good . . . good . . . very good indeed! Piers is a pro!" he adds confidentially to me. "He'll teach you the ropes. Or should I say strings? Ha ha ha!" And, well pleased with this last, he walks magisterially out of his office, leaving Piers sick with anxiety.

  "I bet Henry's telling everyone it's made for them. I bet he is."

  "I suppose that's part of his job." ;

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  "Whose fucking side are you on, Michael?" says Piers with miserable viciousness.

  "Hey, come on now," I say, placing my arm on his shoulder.

  "It's twenty minutes till the auction begins. How am I going to get through it?" he demands. "I can't concentrate on the newspaper, I don't want to make small talk, and I don't dare to have a drink."

  "How about doing nothing? - 4-sttggest.y

  "Nothing?" says Piers, staring at me.

  "Yes," I say. "Let's go downstairs, sit down, and do nothing at all." '•••.

  y.;^: ^7;4~." 8-3 :,:;,:. ,.• .• • -

  At 3 p.m. the auctioneer ascends his podium in the great room downstairs. He passes his right hand through his greying blond hair, taps the microphone placed at the front of the lectejfn, nods at a couple of faces in the audience. A young man in a green apron - he looks like a butcher's boy, I think with a start - stands in front of the podium. He holds up the objects announced and sold: at first, a few books relating to the art of string playing; then bows: silver-mounted, gold-mounted, bonemounted. The butcher's boy holds them from the frog and the tip, rather gingerly. The auctioneer's eyes are languid and alert, his voice coaxingly brisk. His suit is dark grey and double-breasted. His gaze moves swiftly from the floor where we sit to the bank of telephones to our left.

  The price of a bow rises swiftly from a starting price of £1,500, less than half its lower estimated value in the catalogue.

  "Two thousand two hundred here now . . . yes, against

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  •J>

  you, in front of me ... two thousand four hundred ..." A young woman on one of the telephones nods. "Two thousand six hundred . . . yes. No? No? Two thousand six hundred once; twice," - he taps the hammer lightly on the lectern - "sold for two thousand six hundred pounds to ... ?"

  "Buyer number two hundred and eleven, sir," says the woman on the phone.

  "Number two hundred and eleven," repeats the auctioneer. He pauses for a sip of water.

  "Do you really want to sit through all this?" I ask Piers.

  "Yes."

  "But you said it would be two hours before the Rogeri comes under the hammer. Isn't all this just a sort of preamble?"

  "I want to wait. You can suit yourself."

  He bids for nothing else. He wants nothing else. He torments himself. But he follows the prices, and points out to me that things are going, on the whole, for less than their lower estimates. It bodes well for him; don't I agree? I nod. I've never been to one of these things before. I am hardly capable of holding his hand through this auction, so jittery am I myself.

  The secret, says Piers, is to calculate the total cost including commission and tax at each level of bidding, decide the most you are willing to pay, and stick to it, no matter how hectic the bidding or how tempting the prize. With a pencil he circles the figure he will refuse to go beyond, and underlines it for good measure.

  He points out the dealers at the front. Despite the chasm between them and the auctioneers, they are quite happy to procure what they desire in enemy territory. An hour into the auction, a brittle middle-aged woman, heavily lipsticked and mascara'd and with a laugh like a

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  slash enters, preening and basking. She represents one of the wealthier dealers. A bearded, humbler fellow responds to her witticisms with a stifled giggle. She bids for a few items w
ith a nod of her head, picks up her seven shopping bags after half an hour and hangs visibly about the corridor for a bit before leaving.

  Who are these others around us? I recognise a woman who is an amateur violinist and part of the management of the Wigmore Hall. I see Henry Cheetham sitting discreetly to one side. I recognise a couple of faces from orchestra or session work. But London is a musical universe, and who the others are I do not know.

  The auction has moved from cellos to violas to violins.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," the auctioneer is saying, "do call out if you have the slightest doubt that I've noticed you. Fingers are sometimes difficult to see, especially behind a catalogue, and it's very awkward having to reopen a bid once I've closed it. Well, I shall take that bid at nineteen thousand pounds with apologies to the gentleman here in front ..."

  Piers is looking ill. He is taking slow breaths to calm himself. One violin, estimated in the same range as the one he wants, goes for just over its lower estimate, and his shoulders relax. The auction, so slow before, is careering along at a mad pace. Before he expects it - for in his nervousness he has stopped following the order in the catalogue - the Rogeri is on the block.

  In his hands it was as if it belonged to him. But now it is the aproned lad who holds it up before us.

  Its red-brown grain flares out through its ground of gold. It is not ashamed of its "later Italian scroll" nor does it deign to care whose chattel it is to be. Messrs Denton and Denton will sell it to whoever's need is greatest, whoever's purse is deepest, whoever will most

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  recklessly mortgage his future, whoever is of its desirers the most pound-puissant.

  Piers bids nothing till they have expended themselves competing on the phone and on the floor. Its estimate is £35,000 to £50,000, because of that blessed unoriginal scroll. But they are already at £28,000, the price at which the other one was sold.

  There is a pause, and at last he raises his paddle. The auctioneer looks relieved.

  "Thirty thousand from a new bidder. I have thirty thousand here in the middle. Any advance on thirty thousand pounds?" Someone behind us raises a hand, for the auctioneer's eyes move to the back of the room. "Thirty-two thousand. I have thirty-two thousand." His eyes focus on Piers, who nods slightly. "Thirty-four, I have thirty-four thousand." His eyes zigzag back and forth between the only two bidders remaining. "Thirtysix ... thirty-eight . . . forty."

  I read the signs of Piers's confusion in his hands clutching the catalogue, in his breathing, so deliberately slow. "It's against you, sir," the auctioneer is saying, pointing, ballpen in hand, to where he is sitting. "Forty thousand against you; do you wish to bid?" It is all Piers can do not to turn around to face his unseen rival, who is so precipitately gobbling away huge chunks of his savings and earnings with each bid. He nods, slightly, calmly.

  "Forty-two thousand," says the auctioneer. "Fortyfour. Forty-six. Forty-eight."

  The bidding pauses as the auctioneer looks at Piers and waits for his bid. Finally, Piers nods.

  "Fifty thousand," says the auctioneer imperturbably. "Fifty-two. Fifty-four. Fifty-six. Fifty-eight."

  "Piers!" I whisper, shocked. He has gone ten thousand pounds beyond the figure he circled.

  "Do I have an advance on fifty-eight? At the back?"

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  The auctioneer waits. There is a deep silence in the room. By now it is clear that these are two musicians, not dealers, bidding against each other, for they have far exceeded what is rational for resale. This piece of maple and spruce before them is not something that will pass into their hands and out again.

  A mobile phone bleeps stridently; bleeps; bleeps; bleeps. Heads turn towards the source of the sound. Piers's paddle falls to the floor. The startled boy in the apron twirls the violin around, then back again. The auctioneer frowns. The bleeping stops as suddenly as it began.

  "I imagine that has been detonated here by Christie's," he says, to perfunctory laughter. "Well, after that little intermezzo, perhaps we should continue. Fifty-eight. I have fifty-eight. Do I have sixty at the back? I do? Sixty. Sixty-two?" He looks at Piers, whose shoulders have slumped.

  "Don't go on, Piers," I whisper. "Something else will come along at the,next auction."

  But Piers looks up at what the butcher's boy is holding, and nods once more.

  "Sixty-two. I have sixty-two. Sixty-four? Sixty-four. Sixty-six?"

  Piers nods, white-faced.

  "Sixty-six. Do I have sixty-eight at the back? Sixtyeight."

  "Shit," whispers Piers to himself. The woman in front of him half turns around.

  "Don't do it, Piers," I say. He glares at me.

  "I'm sorry, sir, was that a bid? Do I have seventy?"

  "Yes," says Piers aloud for the first time, in a calm, anguished voice. Is he giving himself away? If so, good. Let the other bastard have it, Piers. Don't ruin yourself.

  "Seventy. Seventy-two at the back? Yes, seventy-two.

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  Seventy-four?"

  I say nothing. I have undermined him enough. Piers is silent. The auctioneer's acute eye is on him, appraising his struggle. He does not rush him. His ballpen is poised in his hand. Finally, Piers nods once again.

  "Seventy-four. Seventy-six? I have seventy-six. Sir?"

  "No/ No/" I whisper to Piers.

  And at last Piers shakes his head, defeated.

  "Seventy-six. Any other bidders? Seventy-six once, seventy-six twice, sold at seventy-six thousand pounds to buyer number . . . one hundred and eleven."

  The gavel descends. A hubbub breaks out in the room. The next violin is displayed.

  Piers is sighing a long, half-sobbing sigh. In his eyes are tears of frustration and despair.

  "Lot number one-seven-one. A very fine and rare Venetian violin by Anselmo Bellosio . . ."

  8.4

  "That concludes the sale for today."

  Ten minutes have passed since the Rogeri was sold. Piers is still sitting as others get up all around him.

  We too get up at last. A young woman standing near the door is being congratulated. She, however, looks shattered. This must be the unseen bidder at the back. She looks at Piers and opens her mouth as if to say something in consolation, then thinks better of it.

  Piers stops and says, "Forgive me for bidding so long. I wanted it so much. Forgive me." Before she can respond or he break down, he walks into the corridor.

  "Dear chap," says Henry Cheetham, waving as he advances towards us. "Dear chap. What can I say? There it is. She felt it was made for her. There you have it:

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  everything in the doldrums, and then suddenly - frenzy!

  Quite electric." He takes out a maroon pocket-handker-

  V chief to dab at something invisible on his chin. "If it's any

  consolation," he adds, "I'm sure she would have gone

  much higher. Well, it's a rum world. But nil desperan-

  • dum and all that ... see you, I hope, at the next . . . er

  ... ah, hello, Simon. Excuse me."

  Suddenly I see Mrs Formby's nephew putting my violin under the auctioneer's hammer, and I feel a visceral urge to smash his smug face to pulp. My heart is racing, my fists clenched against someone I hardly know.

  Piers puts his hand to his forehead. "Let's get out of here."

  "I've got to pee. I'll be back in a minute."

  As I make my way through the dispersing crowd, the girl from the Wigmore Hall whom I had noticed in the crowd greets me.

  "Hello, Michael."

  "Hello, Lucy." „

  "Exciting, wasn't it?" ^ •

  I pod, but say nothing. ;," -:

  "Sorry about Piers."

  "Yes," I say. "Were you also bidding for something?"

  She nods. "Nothing in quite the same range, though."

  "And did you get it?"

  "No. Not my day either."

  "Bad luck. I'm sorry, I must
rush off to the loo. Oh, by the way, Lucy, I wonder if you could do something for me. When the tickets for Julia Hansen's concert go on sale, would you keep one aside for me? I know that these things sometimes disappear quite fast."

  "I'd be happy to." ,

  "You won't forget?"

  "No. I'll make a note of it. You played with her in Vienna, didn't you?" ''.,-, .

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  Jj

  "Yes. Yes. Thanks a lot, Lucy. See you."

  "You don't know, do you, that she's changed her programme?"

  "Has she? Good. Schubert replacing Schumann, no doubt."

  "No. She's playing Bach."

  "Bach?"

  "Yes."

  "Bach? You're sure?" I stare at her.

  "Of course I'm sure. She faxed us about a week ago from the States. I can tell you that Bill wasn't delighted. If you've agreed to play Schumann and Chopin, you shouldn't suddenly spring Bach on us. But, well, she explained the reasons: the range of octaves is smaller, more within her . . . you do know, don't you?"

  I hesitate, uncertain for a second what her question means, then nod. She looks relieved.

  "I shouldn't be saying all this," she continues. "I just assumed you knew about her, well, difficulty, since you've played with her. But it's to be kept firmly under our hats. Her agent insists that we can't say anything. But can I ask you something in confidence? There was no problem with her playing in Vienna, was there, Michael?"

  "No. None."

  "Odd piece to choose, though, for our concert, I thought - the 'Art of Fugue'."

  "No - no - not the 'Art of Fugue'! It couldn't be that. Surely not?"

  "Well, one certainly doesn't hear it too often," she says. "I looked in the clash diary. Doesn't seem as if it's being played anywhere in London that month. In fact, I can't remember the last time I heard it played live on the piano. But one can never be too sure. One doesn't hear a double-bass concerto for a year, and then suddenly,

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  presto: three double-bass concertos by three different musicians in a week. What's the matter with you, Michael? Are you all right? You look as if you've seen a ghost."

  "I'm fine," I say. "Just fine."

  I get to the toilet. I enter a stall, sit down, and stare at the door, my heart thumping sickly, erratically in my chest.