The Concert Pianist

by Conrad Williams

  Philip could not believe this was him. The man he read about seemed like a stranger. The article was penned by a well-known music journalist whom he had met once or twice and who asserted that Philip was a national treasure, a world-class artist of remarkable pedigree, whose musical lineage hailed from Solomon and Hess. His blood pressure rose as he read the florid tribute:

  Morahan’s art is mysterious. He has technique in spades, a rich tonal palette, rhythmic suppleness and strength, all of which you forget when you hear him play because he tells the story of each piece so spellbindingly that heart and mind are in thrall. He is the music, and whether it comes from long study or some God-given instinct, time after time he gets it right. Familiar repertoire is reborn under his touch. One is allowed privileged communion with the first poetic impulse, the composer’s first rush of feeling into music. This sense of a reincarnation is the kernel of Morahan’s art. Compositions cease to be musical artefacts, susceptible to this or that approach, but living organisms of startling immediacy.

  He stared like a dead man at the shelves of sheet music rising above his head. The papers and flyers slid off his lap on to the floor. He did not understand his past any longer. It seemed as though everything that had happened to him belonged to another man’s life. It was a life that until recently he seemed to enjoy. In the last two years he had become busy as Guest Professor at the Academy. A new generation of students disarmingly looked up to him and he straddled the steed of reputation as best he could. Life’s long central plateau had become endurable at last. He was reconciled to the consoling habits of a working life and enjoyed teaching. Classical virtues he now preferred to romantic extremes. Sex and love were pleasures, not necessities. At fifty-two he was doubtful whether any truly new emotion or experience might be in store for him. Pleasurable repetition, he suspected, was the game from now on. Without dwelling on it, he guessed the relativity of his achievement as a pianist. He had heard so many wonderful players in his time. The effort of topping previous achievements seemed daunting, anyway. Talent was perhaps a kind of fate, driving you or leading you, but always in charge, setting the tempo for your life.

  Philip knew that he had entered a settled managing phase harnessed by routine, and the sense of having fewer nerve endings but more knowledge than before, more depth and experience to call on, except that depth was calling on him now, surging up, a retributive bonanza of suffering and anxiety that pained him more than he could bear. He did not like, could not endure, what he thought of his life. When he learned of the abortion it threw a switch, as if only now were he fated to suffer what he should have been rueing for years: loneliness, childlessness, a life without love.

  Marguerite had phoned him the day before. A pitiful call. He could hear her baby screaming. Vadim had deserted her, it seemed, walked out as if she did not exist and did not matter. She copiously wept, lapsing into French. Did Vadim no longer find her attractive or interesting? Was he bored with the mother of his baby boy? How could he leave her on her own like this? He was inhuman, a bastard. She should never have got involved with him. Poor Vadim, if only he knew how much she cared for him. She had left three messages on his mobile declaring her love but now regretted this sign of weakness because he deserved not love but a decanter over the head, or a dinner plate, or a knife in the ‘eart, the imbecile, the blackguard.

  He listened with terrible pity and a kind of moral paralysis, as if it were too late and futile anyway to hope for reconciliation. He begged her to be calm. Sooner or later Vadim would return to the flat because that was his home, and she was his wife, and in the meantime she must think about her marriage. Vadim, he said, was not an ordinary kind of husband. He was an artist and artists crave freedom. And Vadim was no ordinary artist. He was a phenomenal talent with a complicated, difficult temperament that was not his own fault. He was under immense pressure, and the pressure was causing misbehaviour, stupidity. She had to remember that his parents died when he was fourteen, that his uncle was a nasty piece of work, that everybody in Moscow wanted him to be this or do that, and that Vadim had been locked in rooms to practise the piano and beaten for bunking off lessons, and tasked by his music professors with the most horrendous weekly challenges that he had met head on with all his defiant brilliance as if to say there was nothing he could not do. Philip asked her to forgive him because Vadim was a sweet man despite his misdemeanours. The complex adult harboured an innocent child. If the adult mistreated her, she must tackle the child. She must support and nurture and pacify. She must grant him his freedom and love him for what he was. It sounded, he later realised, like a plea in mitigation for all pianists - for himself in particular - and a rotten one at that.

  Later that day he attempted to cancel the meeting John had set up with Frank Bulmanion. Bulmanion was a City man turned arts angel with a fledgling record company. He wanted to sign Philip and Philip did not want to be signed. John thought a meeting would help. Philip disagreed. A meeting had nonetheless been arranged for the Saturday, and Philip was determined to get out of it. There was no point John parading him in his current ruined state.

  ‘I want to cancel the meeting,’ he said smartly over the phone.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ said John.

  ‘Not up to it.’

  John was resilient. ‘I’ve booked a flight back from Barcelona for this meeting. Ursula’s coming up from the country. I don’t want to give Frank the wrong signal.’

  He needed to confess. He wanted to tell John the truth. ‘Bulmanion knows I have a concert.’

  ‘Of course! He’ll send a limo to collect us both. You’ll be pampered and flattered for an hour. Then you’ll be driven home. Plus you need to meet Ursula. She’s dying to be introduced to you.’

  ‘John, listen . . .’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘About Ursula.’

  ‘What about Ursula?’

  ‘Oh God!’

  ‘Oh God anything in particular?’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘You what?’

  He swallowed. ‘She’s only twenty-six!’

  John was baffled. ‘I’ve never heard a man your age complain about a woman being twenty-six.’

  ‘It’s . . .’

  ‘You’ll love her. I promise. She’s a sweetie. And really capable. Listen, Serena’s booked us a table at your favourite restaurant for after the concert. Anyone you’d like to bring along?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right. Saturday’s a date. Be ready for a pickup around 3 p.m.’

  He lay on the spare-room bed, looking at flecks of rain on the windowpane. He stared at the ovolo cornice, following it along the edge of the ceiling into an alcove. He looked at the changing hue of the walls, a pale green with a hint of yellow in it. Here in the suburbs it was deadly quiet. He could lie on this bed for years and nobody would know. He allowed his thoughts to drift and ramble, snaring at this and that, Camilla weeding in her garden, the ceiling of the Duke’s Hall where he had judged Academy competitions; and gently he pictured Katie’s bedroom in that beamy cottage the morning after the fire, her room intact and door shut, a capsule of preservation attached to a blackened skeleton. They had found the three-year-old under the covers, curls on pillow, teddy clutched to her breast. She had died of a heart attack.

  He glanced away. It was dangerous to lie down sometimes. Camilla was to blame. She had mentioned Peter, bringing it all back, entwining sorrows. He had managed to forget all that misery, pushing it away, locking it up. Black thoughts were to be struck off the edges of the mind.

  He swung his legs off the bed.

  An hour later he was standing on the kerb at Oxford Circus, gazing at the grey façades of buildings and at pigeons zooming from their niches across the heads of milling pedestrians. Moments later he was heading for the down escalator inside HMV.

  If he couldn’t play, at least he could listen. He had recalled Alfred Cortot’s version of the Funeral March Sonata - not in his collection. Cortot had a special way with Chop
in and to hear him again might be helpful. Philip was thinking positive, and anyway it was good to be out and about.

  As ever, they were shrinking the Classical department. Glass partitions were on the move, breaking gaps into the rest of the store so that Classical’s meek sound signature was garishly perforated by pop strains from neighbouring sections, colours running between Britney and Vivaldi. Diffident Angus stood behind the service counter, tracking obscure recordings for nerdy customers with his usual dandruffed brio. Everything was on offer. Box-set clearances, twofer discounts, bargain-table giveaways.

  Philip strolled along the aisles getting a sense of the layout and absorbing the chocolatey posters of lovely divas whose physical charms eroticised the retail process: Oh, to possess a golden voice and a gorgeous pair. What talents! What pleasures for the world! Cellophane wraps sparkled in halogen light. Hi-fi mags glittered on the shelf. He was nearly happy.

  The Chopin rack was tightly packed with recordings by old frauds and younger rivals. He flicked through quickly, searching for the Cortot, first under ‘Sonatas’, then under ‘Ballades’. Perhaps any unfamiliar recording would help. He needed to hear the piece as if from outside, agonised into life by some other poor sod.

  Then he saw himself.

  His own face stared back from the CD cover.

  Philip frowned. He plucked the disc from the shelf.

  He was puzzled and curious. Two years ago he recorded the Chopin Ballades for Cecilia, who went bust prior to release. Cecilia’s catalogue was subsequently assigned to Planetarium, who did nothing. John had told him to let things stand until he had a new contract; so he forgot about these particular recordings.

  Philip held the disc in his hand, vaguely disconcerted. Maybe there was a review somewhere. Unlikely, given the label.

  He drifted off again, uncertain what to look for now. At the end of the aisle he came to a magazine section in racks on the wall. He hesitated a second before reaching down the new Gramophone edition. He flipped the glossy pages. The ‘instrumental’ review section seemed to have disappeared between a pull-out and ‘Opera’. Suddenly, he saw his name in print: ‘Chopin Ballades, Logos, £5.99’.

  Philip looked over his shoulder in the direction of Angus and then moved behind a pillar. His heart fluttered with a mixture of vanity and dread. This was his first release in years. They had reviewed it all too promptly. He glanced to right and left, ashamed of his sickly excitement. He pulled open the magazine, flattened the spine, folded it over. He gripped the thing in both hands as if trying to control it.

  Right from the very first line he sensed something odd. He would not skip ahead but read each sentence closely, hope on hold as he turned the page. There were neutral comments and impartial remarks and patches of lip-service that reflected his stature with preliminary conscientiousness, but the air of reserve grew chillier and chillier, and as he read on down the column unease became horror. The chosen comparisons were delicately destructive, favouring the recordings of Perahia and Zimmerman, and the summing-up was respectfully dismissive. But the last paragraph was awful. His playing, he read, had become ‘an anatomy lesson’. He ‘exposed everything and said nothing’. In this recording ‘spontaneity has been supplanted by intellect, impulse by calculation’. ‘On the evidence of this CD,’ concluded the reviewer, ‘Morahan’s playing has wholly lost its former incandescence.’

  He sighed, fending off the shock, and then, head swimming, read it again. He drank in every word, savoured every sentence, steeped himself in every phrase, as if to know what other people would be thinking of him.

  He replaced the magazine and walked in a daze along the aisle, passing out of Classical into Jazz. He was soon standing between display boxes of Oscar Petersen and Dizzy Gillespie. After a moment’s light-headedness,he went to the escalator and ascended to the ground floor.

  He halted outside on Oxford Street, registering noise and smell, and then dragged himself back to the underground entrance. One had to get through it. One had to press on, keep going.

  Back at home he put the kettle on. While it was boiling he frittered around nervously with sheet music in the living room. An hour later he sat dead still in the armchair, hands clubbed together, staring at the floor.

  He was sitting in the same position at 9 p.m., amongst the shadows of a room lit only by lamps in the street outside.

  Chapter Six

  Ursula caught his eye as she entered the room.

  He sat with John Sampson in the Highgate millionaire’s music room, surrounded by abstract paintings on bare brick and art books across coffee tables. Behind him reared a grand piano, white. Before him lay a view of the garden: Monet bridges over lily ponds, cherry blossom and forsythia, glancing light through the still bare limbs of an acacia tree. His hands were tightly clenched, John was handsomely beaming everywhere, and now as she entered in haste, coming through from the hallway (she knew she was late), he could see in a glance why John was so chuffed with her.

  Ursula’s face was flushed and yet she met him with the togetherness of high female confidence, aware of the effect - impossible to disown - of her looks on first-timers. She possessed along-limbed figure of line and buoyancy, a radiant smile, twirling black hair. She stood before him like an unexpected gift or tribute, and was almost amused by the look on his face. For a moment she let Philip adjust to the spectacle, the smell of perfume, the gloss of hair, and readily followed whatever anybody else was saying. As John made introductory jokes about their client, she kept returning her eyes to Philip, looking for her chance to be more than a first impression.

  They sat down on white chairs and sofas. John was manfully pleased with everything, particularly the Corot over the grand. Philip combated his unease with interlocked hands and did everything to avoid eye contact. John chatted on, drawing Ursula’s attention, and Philip stole quick, disbelieving glances at his new agent. She sat forward on her chair, hair trailing in a cloud of curls to the small of her back, which rose from the bulb of her hips and bottom like the stem of an exotic plant. The tapering line of her forearm and wrist followed the long arc of her thigh. Her momentary glances were full of innocent goodwill.

  He looked away. This was not what he wanted, not what he could bear. Ursula’s beauty impaled his privacy. The very look of her appealed to a vitality he could no longer supply. Just to behold her was to experience, in a flash, generational redundancy. What could a perfect young woman know or care to know about the trials and tribulations of a medieval bachelor? He would have to talk to John about this later. He was desperate to be out of here.

  All morning Philip had been trying to tell John he would cancel. He tried on the phone: John was too harassed. He tried in the limo: John was too talkative. He tried in the hallway of Bulmanion’s mansion, but John was so urgently positive about this coup of a meeting, so buoyed by the concerts and publicity and the magnificent interior of this splendiferous house that it just seemed impossible. There was no right moment and no reprieve from this headlong charade and Philip knew anyway that John would never recover. Because Philip wasn’t ill or dead or injured and John had invested so much time in setting up the concerts, and life was complicated enough without the nervous breakdowns of artists, besides which Philip was British, for Christ’s sake: his only sane client! For Philip to cancel in these circumstances would be absolute bollocks.

  So Philip had been thwarted and was now boxed into this false meeting, his frame of mind decaying, his social skills on holiday. Bulmanion’s spectacular residence made it worse. Every grand room and chandeliered corridor and gilt-framed mirror breathed expectation, privileged opportunity. And Bulmanion had sought him out. ‘Ex-City, hedge fund, or some bullshit,’ said John. ‘Cleaned up merrily, now worth a ton and is crazy about music. He’s a veritable Medici, gets whole symphony orchestras to play in his country seat, sponsors the South Bank, lays on grants and scholarships, and now runs his own record label, specialising in guess what? Pianists! He’s a great flapping angel for the mus
ic biz, and I’ve been stalking him like a puma.’ John rubbed his hands. ‘Business warlord turned Renaissance man. Don’t be put off by his face.’ Bulmanion’s first record label was launched in the nineties. Endymion, he would say, was ‘a learning curve, not about money - you lose money in classical - but values’. He was gearing up for a new venture, with a clearer philosophy, and seeking new artists. Colossally well informed about pianists in particular, he was keen to meet Philip. He thought Philip outstanding and under-recorded and envisaged a long-term arrangement of the greatest flexibility. Philip had resisted such commitments in the past, somewhat to his detriment, and John was determined that he grab the chance. ‘You’ll find him civilised and persuasive if you don’t look too closely at his face.’

  ‘I don’t like business warlords.’

  ‘You’ll love Frank. He’s your number-one fan.’

  John was convinced, if they met, that Frank’s knowledgeable enthusiasm would overwhelm Philip. Philip’s misgivings had meanwhile turned to rank antipathy.

  ‘Can we cancel the meeting?’ he had pleaded on the phone that morning.

  ‘If you cancel the meeting, I’ll slit my throat and bleed to death and leave a suicide note blaming you.’

  ‘I’m not signing anything.’

  ‘Just come!’

  He sat in his seat, staring hard at the wall. They were waiting for Bulmanion the three of them, waiting for the lord and master to arrive and shower them with the gold dust of patronage. He could get up and go, just scramble, but John’s mumblings to Ursula paralysed him somehow.