An Equal Music

by Vikram Seth

  8-5

  At home I try to practise this but cannot. My hands will not deal with it. The finger pads refuse to touch the strings. I force them to, and hear the sound before I bring my bow to bear. But now my ears repel it. This goes beyond sense. I, who have loved the "Art of Fugue", can play no part of it even to myself. I'll practise scales and wait for this to pass.

  Yet in rehearsal with the others tonight the fit still grips my riands. We play the scale but even here the notes I play are foreign to myself. Can they not hear this? Then Billy tells us which fugue we're to play.

  I try to tune the string down. After a minute the others look at me, bemused. It seems too low for F now, now too high. ,.,_,,.. ,,s ... - ... .

  "Ready?" f ; , __ , ~ ^. ; . .

  "Yes."

  Now Billy nods. Mine is the third entry of the four.

  "What are you playing at, Michael?" This from Piers.

  No, no, I am playing at nothing, I am playing nothing, this something has me right along the nerve. I cannot breathe, and all along my arms I feel the fine hairs rise.

  "For heaven's sake, what's the matter?" says Helen.

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  For everything has stopped. Why have I not come in? I thought that I was playing but am not.

  "Michael," says Piers, "get a grip on yourself."

  But I have lost the link from eye to hand. A simple

  trick, and within my powers on Monday. It is the

  v hammers, not the bow, that sound the strings. I see the

  l-V very room where as we play she plays. But no, she sleeps

  in Boston, well espoused.

  "Here, let's try it again," says Billy.

  I make a sound, but such a sound as stops the others dead, mid-note. These bones, so many, in these muchtrained hands have lost clean action, and this mind is smudged.

  "God damn it, Michael," says Piers, "this isn't going to be another Vienna, I hope."

  "Should we try the first fugue first?" asks Billy. "Just to break ourselves in again. After all, we know that one perfectly."

  "No, not that fugue," I say. "I'm sorry, I ... I'll be fine in a day or two."

  It was that fugue that coiled all this around me. It led her to me, and that night, she played it. It is the unpaid remnant of the gift she promised me and then defaulted on.

  "Well, what should we do?" says Billy. "Should we rehearse something else? But I don't know if we've got the music. And there's so much work to be done on this . . . Erica says the producer and maybe even the sound engineer want to set up a meeting with us soon. Time's short. Perhaps we should just barrel ahead."

  "I don't know if I'm up to it today," I say. "I seem to be having a bit of bother with this piece."

  "I wouldn't call this just a bit of bother," says Piers. "If you're going to make a habit of this, it's going to be impossible for everyone."

  "What do you mean?" I ask.

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  "I think you should consider all this seriously. We've contracted to record the 'Art of Fugue'. The Maggiore is not going to put on a slipshod performance."

  "Shut up, Piers," says Helen, flushed with anger. "Don't make silly threats. Do you think Billy - or I - or Michael - would allow anything sloppy to go out under our name? We'll meet here the day after tomorrow at three - agreed? Get some sleep, Michael - you look burned out. I'll phone you later. You must let us help you if there's anything we can do."

  I loosen the bow. I place the violin away. I leave quickly. I do not look at any of them. As for myself, I need to slump, to sleep. I must restore these arcs into a vault. Under the clustered cherubs gilt and grey, I too must dream of some perfected heaven.

  8.6

  A message from,f!elen on the phone. I don't answer it. A card from Virginie, travelling with friends. A letter from Carl Kail. I leave it sealed. Why should I come to terms with the whole world?

  It is a brutal place. A swan was killed last night on the Round Pond. Its throat was cut. Yet surely a gondola is as beautiful as a grand piano, a peacock's legs as ugly as a swan's. Its pimpled carcass lies preserved in ice.

  Why must she spin me down into this place? I should consider all this seriously. These are my options: yes, and no. If I could play this thing, would I not stay? For its own sake, if not for all of us? But I can't play two bars and not seize up.

  I will apply my balms: a walk in the park, but not by the Orangery; the chess puzzle, covering with my hand the screed on bridge; the sage Wodehouse, not the

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  unsettled Donne; the blackbird on my street, neither lark nor nightingale. How late must he be musicking this year?

  I wake up to the sound of the first contrapunctus: louder and louder she thumps it out, for she cannot hear it. She has made me redundant, she has downsized me. The small grey suits are back, so she is back. Day by day, m every way - academic, artistic, musical, social, spiritual, physical, moral - the children of Pembridge School get better and better.

  More news. They are tearing music out of the lives of poorer children. Now children, say your L M N. Literate, Musicale, Numerate. Now once again, all together: Illiterate, Immusicate, Innumerate. These sainted powers will starve you of music as surely as the damned. Leave music to those who can afford indulgences. In twenty years no butcher's son will be a violinist, no, nor daughter neither.

  I cannot play it, for all this two days' grace - nor would I play the serpent or the shawm if you gave me two months or twenty years. What has possessed me lies outside my hold. It is a piping Pembridge child that says: so did you know my mother before I was born? Was there such a time - before I was born? Tears fill his eyes that such a thing should be.

  What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go. O Luke, O Luke, rack me no riddles more. Why were you not my son?

  8.7

  Winters will pass, and lips remain unkissed, and heart unsoothed, and hands and ears unlinked. No mystery must remain. I rip Carl's envelope open with my fingers.

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  What is this?

  Yes, this is just by way of follow-up. He got my letter, which he considered kind and untrue; indeed, its loud tact made it less than kind. He knows perfectly well what I felt towards him. Senility, he would point out, does not invariably accompany decrepitude. He will not repeat regrets, but simply say that he has decided at last that the quartet is in fact my true home. He exhorts me to remain where I am. Perhaps his contribution to musical posterity will be a bloodline of second violinists. I will no doubt have heard that Wolf Spitzer is now a member of the Traun Quartet. Nothing of his own health or plans or deeds. No request for a response. End of letter.

  Strange missile, coming at a time like this when no one could have known, not I, not they, that anything would be amiss among us. He has decided; that is just as well. For Wolf I must be and am glad, but in myself I burn that this man still should claim the right to bless or blast what I may do or notv

  Late at night, thirst wakes me, and then I cannot sleep. By.my bed lies the book inscribed and scored by her. With water on my fingers I move along my part. Page after page I hear my smudging notes. The staff dissolves, the heads and stalks blur into mire, the water in my glass grows turbid brown. The wetness seeps into the neighbouring voices, onto the pages not yet traced and bleared. As if in worn-down braille my fingers touch my name, that once you wrote; and look, I cannot read it any more.

  8.8

  When I tell them, Helen speaks first. --•-.....•,--«-• .

  "Michael, take a week off and return - you can't mean you want to leave us. What about our solidarity of the

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  middle? We can't do without you. I can't, I know. What will we do about Bristol next week? About everything that's been booked. It would make me sick to play with someone else."

  "I didn't mean what I said, damn it," says Piers. "You're crazy, Michael, to think I meant it.
All I meant was we couldn't make a bad CD. Are you threatening to take off just because of something I said? Helen's been giving me hell even before you burst this bombshell. OK, you've lost it for a while, but it'll come back to you. You're obviously going through some sort of crisis. You're not the only one among us who has caused a problem. It's happened before. We worked it out. We'll work it out again. We're not that fragile."

  But there's no point; the braid has been untwined. I've thought it through and through. Think of Stratus, I tell them, think of Ysobel. How often do these chances come? A second violin, well, you found one once.

  Billy is sad. He doesn't say too much. He sees more clearly than the other two that it's no use, that things are too far gone. "Last in, first out," he says. "We'll miss you, Michael."

  They will all miss me, none can wish me luck. Why would they when I'm doing this to us? Round and round we talk, but nothing moves.

  I am no use, dead-fingered, to you now. I can't even survive an interval. Play on without me, as for a minute you played in the hall where she will play. It is an aimed shaft, it has hit home. No, not even that; all this is collateral to her aims. But she must salvage, must she not, her life?

  Tell them I'm ill; give Erica my love. What's lapsed has lapsed. It's fugue I suffer from. Even this fiddle that I play must go. By night, by day, I am half flesh, half wood.

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  .* :*' ,-.-.-.. ', .- . 8.9 -.: . ; .. ..:..:

  No, says Erica, how can she represent me now? There are no mwah-mwahs for me: she speaks most sternly. A foolish thing, irreparable harm, career. They will find someone else, they'll have to, you've made them; but how about you? I'm fond of you, Michael. How can you let this happen to yourself ?

  Now Helen calls again, refusing tears. What will my work be? Will I make ends meet? Where is my anchor? Why not stop this now? But I've been through these reasonings myself. It's true, I didn't share your meals in Venice, but as we strayed we saw Augustine's dog.

  It was once a cat, you know, she says sadly. ,

  A dog.

  A cat, though, once.

  I saw a dog. She saw a dog. It was a dog. I even saw it on a barge one day in tender replica, alert.

  A cat, originally, in,his sketch. In the BM, I think.

  No, that's not true. I will stop up my ears. Dear Helen, tell, me that it is not so.

  Why not face facts? Why argue this right now?

  .. '.::•<;•;..••• . •-.:. .;:.! 8.IO . :'. , • ••'

  The violin on the pillow next to mine, I sleep and wake and sleep again. Outside in the untravelled trees the migrant birds rest. In whose hands will it sing? How can I play without it? How with it? I tune it well, and it sounds well again. I cannot support it, or claim it, or bear it.

  Blizzard confetti slew about me: fax paper, tufts of a white dog's fur, snow on a carpark, the ivories she plays. If each _voice in her hands were a city, which would have

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  IT

  j)

  which part? She is going deaf and it is I who cannot play the things she does. What suasion will you use on one who lacks a will? "This isn't something I would ever play for anyone but you."

  Besides, it is not merely in my mind. This thing I hold is coming half apart. This is no mere tinnitus in my head. It hums, it keens, it has the buzzing bane. The swollen belly chafes the fingerboard. Sanderson will see it, he will see to it, he will judge its ills, he will press it, prod it, patch it into good humour. It has cause to keen, these are our last few months. But why this sudden mutiny at this time?

  8.ii

  Mrs Formby died yesterday.

  Auntie Joan phones to tell me. Apparently, she had a stroke a fortnight ago, which impaired her speech. Yesterday morning she had a second stroke, and died as she was being taken back to hospital.

  I am glad she was not bedridden for months or years and was clear in mind and speech till almost the end. As with my mother, her end was swift.

  I wish I had known she was so ill. Auntie Joan and my father themselves didn't know about the first stroke. I would have gone up to see her one last time, and have played a little for her. For her the Tononi would have sung anywhere - house, hospital or Blackstone Edge.

  Her Tononi. I grieve for it, and for myself. It won't be months now but weeks before it is reclaimed from me.

  I will not go to her funeral - a cremation, says Auntie Joan. Mrs Formby hated funerals - was impatient with the well-wishers who came to her husband's, and never went to those of her friends. The chartered surveyor will

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  be there, a cat from Cheshire, dreaming of cream. His wife will be muted, looking to her husband for guidance. Their three yowling daughters will postpone their scratching and sulking till the drive back home.

  Into his hands I will deliver my beloved fiddle.

  I loved Mrs Formby. She woke me to the joy of music. In her passing I am to taste its sorrow. ' "••'

  8.12 • -••" •• '• ; ' ( '•' •

  "Please be more mechanical," begs the conductor, for we are recording a Mozart piano sonata fluffed up by some creative sicko into a concerto minus the piano. This is called Be Your Own Maestro. Young pianists with ambition will play their sonata to the accompaniment of an orchestra. Mozart leaves something to be desired: the sicko has added new tunes to him, and the triangle goes tink tink tink. The.'Camerata Anglica is playing, and most of the players are'gagging. But this is meat and mortgage to rhe now: up my bow goes, and down, in perfect rhythm and intonation.

  I thought that I might buy a violin once. Now when the mail drops through my door I think: no Rochdale postmark, please. One day's grace more.

  I see white hairs. Those that I see I-pluck. I get the usual headaches. Now I think: cat or dog? cat or dog?

  How fares the Maggiore minus me? How have they patched things up? Helen still calls me sometimes, but to ask how I am coping, not to draw me back.

  In the British Museum Print Room the daylight pours through the roof. Carpaccio's box is brought. His sketch is clear.

  Augustine has no beard; the music's blank. , >

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  And it's a cat that holds the floor. No, not even a cat, not even that but some sly stoat or weasel on a leash!

  Why? Why? Why? Why? I have taken much, but this touches more than me. The poor dog will weep that there was a time before he was born. Stoat! Stoat! Stoat! ;.'• Stoat, do I wrong you? Are you an ermine, winter...Jj white? You have no tail-tip, but this is a sketch: the astrolabe's an O, the music blank. Pure, chaste and noble in the winter months, you spoil in summer and revert to stoat.

  Where was that dog that solaced me conceived? Must he grow rank, lanky and feline-clawed? Upstairs we kissed, not knowing we were viewed.

  Zsa-Zsa, you have died. Old widow Formby has died. Does Carl too speak like the light of a dwarf from beyond the grave? Outside the Print Room is a map of Venice. Of this and other matters I must inform her. She would want to know. On Oxford Street our gondolas passed by. She raised her veil, and swiftly she was gone.

  Last night her hands moved in among the keys. What was she playing that appeased my dream? Bach, to be sure; but I had not heard it before. How many chambers does one's heart require to play such music? Was it something he wrote in the years immediately following his death?

  - - - ' 8.13 '-. ' ••

  Strange to be a man and never grow big with child. To feel a part of you opening, and a part of you leaving, and howling as if it were not a part of you. Then it puts on a green cap and a grey suit and has friends. All these are waiting on the Pembridge steps for pieces of themselves to emerge, and to all of them this once happened.

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  It is the time for conkers and their hedgehog casings. Plane leaves, lime leaves twirl and whirl. What does young Luke of Boston think of conkers? What does his Oma from Klosterneuburg, the 2 6th district of Vienna under the Reich, think of conkers
? She stands beneath the blood-beech, muttering. Chestnut and poplar line the Danube there.

  Oh, it is 3:45. They emerge and are precisely kissed, but where is Luke? That is her car, parked there. She comes out and rushes up the steps. Luke is there, and she. Their faces speak their happiness.

  She is on the pavement near the car. She does not see me and she cannot hear me. This must be reconfigured. Verdi cannot read Wagner's lips, nor the lion the griffin's.

  I am in eyeshot now. She starts. How blue are her attentive, panicked eyes.

  "Michael."

  "Hi, Julia. You know, that Carpaccio dog -"

  "What?" >"

  "You know, in Venice, at the Schiavoni -"

  "In Venice, where?" '•'••'.

  "In the Schiavoni-" -^ • -.:,-.

  "Get into the car, Luke."

  "But Mom - it's Michael. I want to -" ;

  "Get into the car at once."

  "Oh OK, OK, don't get mad."

  "What's all this about? Why are you bothering us?"

  "But all I wanted to say -"

  "Yes?"

  "That dog was originally a cat. Or a stoat. Or ermine. It wasn't a dog at all. I saw the drawing, the drawing he made himself." . "Michael, what exactly have you come to say?"

  I need to say so much that I say nothing. Maggiore,

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  Formby, Tononi, Augustine . . . names in a phone book, how can they break her heart?

  "Well, what? Don't just stand there."

  UT )>

  "Michael, this is hopeless."

  "I thought you said you'd always love me." ' "I didn't think it would come to this."

  "Julia -"

  "Don't. Luke can see you. Stay where you are."

  "I had a letter from Carl Kail."

  "Michael, I'm sorry, I can't stop to talk."

  "The bonsai -"

  "Yes," she says bitterly. "Yes. It's well. It's very, very well. A brilliant present. I suppose I should thank you."

  "Why are you playing the 'Art of Fugue'? What are you trying to do?"

  "The 'Art of Fugue'? Why? Why not, for heaven's sake. I love it too. Now I've really got to go, believe me. And, Michael, you are bothering me. Do you understand that? You are bothering me. Don't, please don't stand in wait for me again. I don't want to see you. I don't. I really don't. I'll break down if I do ... If you love me that's not what you'd want. And if you don't love me, just go and get on with your life."