The Concert Pianist

by Conrad Williams

She was crossly amused by his horrible parody.

  ‘Because this ain’t no dress-rehearsal!’

  ‘Shut up, Philip.’

  ‘And I’m a talented bastard, so I shouldn’t complain. Is that it?’

  She gave him a gravely forbidding glance.

  ‘An attitude makeover?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe. Lighten you up a bit.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. You see, things can happen that change your mind on this.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Bad things.’

  ‘What bad things?’

  ‘There’s no need to say.’

  ‘Yes, there is. What bad things?’

  ‘Things happen out of the blue.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘People . . .’ He swallowed.

  ‘Somebody . . .’

  ‘Friends. Close friends.’

  She waited.

  He averted his eyes.

  ‘Which friends, Philip?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘They died?’

  His face grew pale.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘An old cottage. Went up like a . . .’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  He looked at her starkly.

  She moved her hand, rose slightly.

  He held her gaze, drawing her in, fastening on her.

  ‘What is one to make of that? Yes, a tragedy. Now what? These things happen and one has to carry on, sure, but carry on to what? I mean something like that can’t be “understood” or put in any kind of box. How can anybody come to terms with arbitrary disaster? I get no help from religion or philosophy.’

  She looked at him with grim understanding.

  ‘Life is so much sadder than we can bear.’

  She averted her eyes. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Regeneration is not so simple, except in the dumb sense life goes on, replicating endlessly.’

  ‘I only wanted to help you,’ she pleaded.

  ‘You’re kind.’

  ‘It’s not pity.’ She was sudden. ‘I believe you’re a great pianist. That means something to me.’

  ‘My therapy is to ignore and forget. Something disgusting happens. Blank it out. Why grant victory to fate? It’s enough that fate happens. Stand back and let the scythe come swishing in. It’ll be my turn next.’

  She sat there still and thoughtful, immersed in what he had told her. It seemed there was no come-back. She had wanted to help, believing that she could. Often, in the past, he had seemed intractable to the sympathetic. He presented opportunities for redemption, and this drew women to him who were then dismayed by his incapacity to be tamed into happiness according to their instincts for love and nurture. His moods were part of an emotional constitution that worked well in relation to music and badly in relation to his personal happiness. Happiness for Philip was subsumed in obsession. How to give perfect realisation to a musical work, an abiding concern: happiness through thinking, practising, listening, playing, discovering, uncovering, inhabiting, performing, realising and sharing a score to the umpteenth degree. Ursula thought, perhaps, that the emotions she experienced, listening to him play, related in some direct way to his passions as a man. She was drawn by the sensibility of an artist without considering that the quality she loved was elicited by music. The energy she witnessed grandly exerting itself at the keyboard music unleashed. Philip had often pondered the correlation between a pianist’s inhabiting of emotion in romantic repertoire and his ability to love another person wholeheartedly. Did feeling stem from him, or was he merely the vessel through which it passed? Emotion in music was nobody’s property. Emotion in performance was variable, mysterious and strangely sourceless.

  She drew herself up, and then she looked at him. She parted her lips, and looked at him. It was her way of getting around words, of cutting away ideas and explanations and recalling him to the fact of her presence.

  He inhaled slowly, as if taking in a haul on a cigarette, and at the bottom of the intake she got through. What he experienced was not so much the sudden truth of her arresting beauty - a kind of jolt to the system - as the force of will projected through that beauty, making him realise directly and instantaneously the strength of her mission: to appeal to a complex and sensitive mind, almost to excite him as a piece of music would excite him, to be an experience that he could neither resist nor comprehend because Ursula was so determined and surprising: the incalculable total of different orders of value paradoxically focused on him.

  Eventually she looked away, though whether the spell had passed or was broken he could not tell.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said.

  She was not ready for this.

  ‘And perceptive.’

  She leaned forward with a pained expression, returning her wine glass to the table, but then she laughed, and met his gaze with a confident directness.

  Philip considered his hands. Probably he had said the wrong thing.

  She gave him a more settled look, and now her demeanour was rather different, as though she had the full set, suddenly, a recovered sense of her power, and with it the dynamic of opposites she liked to work within: male and female, youth and maturity.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.

  ‘That it’s probably time for me to leave.’

  He felt a pang.

  She pulled her jacket back on, making to rise. He rose, too. She moved without hesitation into the hall. They went to the front door, and as he followed her his heart sank.

  In the hallway she turned, all zipped up, hair in her collar, and gazed at him half humorously. She had known a great deal about him, and found out more. Now he knew a little about her, too.

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’ She kissed him lightly on the cheek and let herself out.

  Chapter Nine

  He came out in a daze from the doctor’s surgery. Traffic crisscrossed in front of him, a hurtle of cabs and cars reflecting bright sunlight, festive summer light. A rap wagon throbbed on the kerb; a shuffling woman and a dog passed him.

  The GP was a locum, Asian, the waiting room crowded. Philip sat in a corner reading Hello magazine amidst people with preoccupying medical conditions and doomed faces.

  His test results had not arrived, or been mislaid, and were then found. The locum sat at his desk checking the notes on screen, clicking and scrolling whilst Philip sat on a chair with his hands on his lap. He watched the doctor’s face, busily concentrating. He was asked to unbutton his shirt and take a seat on the couch behind the screen. His abdomen was palpated, chest tapped, tongue examined. A nurse came in. Words were exchanged about another patient.

  Philip reclined meekly as if diagnosis were simply the means by which professionals caught up with what was already factual in one’s body.

  John Sampson had phoned him in the waiting room. Philip reflexively answered.

  ‘I’m at the doctor’s.’

  ‘I need to see you.’

  ‘Let me call back when I’m out.’

  ‘Where’s the surgery?’

  ‘The surgery?’

  ‘Give me an address. I’m coming right now.’

  After the examination the two men resumed their seats at the doctor’s desk. The locum rummaged around with papers: Philip’s results or someone else’s. He made a further appraisal of the clinical notes from the last consultation. After a moment, he drew his chair closer to Philip’s and looked at him directly. His expression was different. His brown eyes sought a link with Philip’s before he spoke.

  ‘Um . . . listen, it’s not bad news and it’s not good news.’

  Philip’s heart quickened.

  ‘We’re missing one of the blood results, which is infuriating. My apologies. The ultrasound shows a shadow, which could be various things. The long and short is that you need more tests and probably a keyhole biopsy.’

  Philip frowned.

  ‘Straightforward procedure.’ He seemed to shrug. ‘The cons
ultant will advise on the test results, obviously.’

  ‘Right.’ He had not expected this. His chest was tight.

  The doctor looked at him carefully.

  ‘A shadow, you say?’

  ‘There’s a shadow.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Discolouration, maybe nothing, maybe scarring from a viral infection.’

  ‘But the biopsy?’

  ‘I don’t want to alarm you unnecessarily.’

  Philip stared at him.

  The doctor seemed to wait.

  ‘Some kind of growth?’

  ‘Well, this is precisely what we have to investigate.’

  ‘Because of the shadow?’

  ‘Because of the bloods.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Mr Morahan, it’s a possibility we have to rule out.’ He looked away quickly. ‘I should be able to get an appointment for you in the next few days.

  His heart was racing now. He noticed how the doctor would not meet his eye.

  He was sent back to reception, asked to leave a further urine sample. It took an age to relieve himself into the plastic bottle in the gents. He was light-headed, weak at the knees. On the wall of the waiting room was a poster entitled ‘Menopause Whenopause?’ and another advertising antenatal classes.

  He came through the electric sliding doors to see John Sampson parking his car on a double yellow line. Philip stood on the kerb and watched the traffic pass as John undid his seat belt and pocketed his mobile before jacking open the door and springing out.

  John’s office move was going on this week and his eyes were puffy with tiredness and stress. ‘You’re liable but Bulmanion will pick up the tab.’

  They stood facing each other on the pavement outside the doctor’s surgery.

  ‘Need to get some sort of medical opinion, doctor’s certificate.’ He swallowed. ‘OK, no venue’s going to sue a major artist, but people need to claim insurance. Best course is to phone Frank, say sorry, you’ve had a major crisis in the family, make it up, doesn’t matter what.’

  His head was burning. He felt weightless and weak.

  ‘It’s not in your nature. But you need to bend a little. That way he can deal with the insurers. Plus I can spin it. Might do us some good.’ He glanced around nervously.

  Philip grimaced.

  ‘Just say yes!’

  ‘Can we . . .’

  He raised a finger remonstratively. ‘You’ve dropped a thudding great turd on your career.’

  He looked away. He was feeling dreadful. He needed to sit down.

  ‘I’ve had a ton of angry calls and I’m thoroughly hacked off. Meanwhile, you loll around having a nice little flirtation with Ursula, your phone off the hook while I shovel shit.’

  He shook his head contritely. ‘I wasn’t flirting, John.’

  ‘You don’t explain, apologise, communicate.’

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘Can you imagine what it was like sitting in the stalls at QEH, surrounded by the music establishment?’ He was distraught now. ‘I should have known my client. Should have realised that when you told Frank you’d play you were pulling the wool over our eyes or totally deluded. I don’t pretend to understand what’s going on in your mind and that’s a failing, but nobody exists in a vacuum. You’re in a community of relations with the venues, the audience, the press. You can’t treat this infrastructure like an army of court flatterers . . .’

  ‘John!’

  ‘. . . by cancelling at point-blank notice. Nobody does that. Nobody needs to. It takes a certain kind of naivety or grandiose arrogance to dunk everyone in the piss pot after the moment of no return!’

  Philip felt his eyes smarting as though he were about to cry.

  John shook his head, seeming almost to feel sorry for himself. He pulled at the skin under his eyes, grazed his cheek with his fingernails. He looked sallow, and exhausted.

  Philip had no strength for confrontation.

  John faced him and sighed deeply.

  ‘I’m so sorry, John.’

  The agent hung his head. He was briefly in remission from the throes of apoplexy. ‘I don’t know what you’re going through. You won’t share it with me. I accept that.’

  ‘I need to go home or sit down.’

  John pointed to a bench on the pavement. Philip sat down and John perched on the end.

  ‘I’m sure there are people who can help.’

  Philip nodded dutifully. He wanted to appease John’s anger.

  ‘What I can do is hold the structure in place, give you continuity. So when you snap out of it something is there. I want to keep our options open. That’s all.’

  As he sat there on the street bench it welled up inside him, a terrible pity for himself that made his eyes water. He had a shadow inside him, an undefined manifestation that might have been nothing, or the finger of death. He was drained, enfeebled and horribly humanly vulnerable, his worries and woes subsumed in dread. He could barely make the effort to sit up.

  ‘A couple of calls, a couple of gestures, a little bridge-building. We’re insuring the future. You need to be allowed to make music, give concerts, record repertoire. If that is taken care of, your other concerns will sort out.’

  John tapped the back of the bench with his palm. He took in the faces and backsides of passing girls. His eyebrows arched. He blinked.

  ‘I’ll draw up a press release. Tell Frank - uh - death in the family. You know, milk a bit of pity. Square off the South Bank. I can darn out the wrinkles if you’ll promise to play the next two concerts.’

  Philip nodded carefully, as though in full agreement. ‘I can’t really promise anything.’

  John turned to face him directly. His mouth worked a little before he spoke. ‘Even if you played like a crippled pig on acid you’d do less harm to your career than cancelling again.’

  Philip looked into John’s eyes, the irony dawning that he might have the perfect excuse.

  John was not a safe recipient of such news. Later, he wondered if it was the prospect of John’s ‘profound sympathy’ he could not stomach, or the visible dawning in John’s eyes that his client was history. He suddenly felt cold, withdrawn. It was too much to be subjected to this pressure. John’s insistence grated on him, and at such times one had to be forceful.

  John nodded. ‘What d’you say, then?’

  Philip swallowed. ‘Don’t let’s fall out over this.’

  He shook his head, annoyed by the tone. ‘No agent in the world can function this way.’

  ‘I understand. There’s nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re saying this.’

  Philip sat rigidly on the bench. ‘Please leave me alone.’

  John smiled in disbelief. ‘I don’t just walk away, Philip. Your problem is my problem.’

  ‘Shut up, will you!’

  John stood abruptly. He was full of energy, almost cocky with the sense of rectitude. He tugged at his trouser belt, flicked a hand through his hair.

  ‘I’ve seen this existential heebie-jeebie rap with a dozen clients. I don’t get sucked in. It doesn’t behove me to be gentle and caring, because you don’t employ me to be gentle and caring. I am here to be positive and effective, and if possible amusing; and whatever I say - and I’ll always be blunt - because I refuse to be the victim of mass artistic temperament, you’ll remember it was me who secured the concerts, the sponsorship, the record deal, by exuberant proactivity and regal dynamism of an ilk rarely seen in this industry. And here I am again, the managing director and principal shareholder of a company with twenty-two employees, one hundred and fifty clients, and an annual turnover of four million pounds, sitting on a pigeon-shit bench in Marylebone, having driven through syphilitic traffic, talking to my dear Philip, whom I love and admire deeply, because I would do anything for you, trying to solve your latest crisis not with cocoa and commiseration, which you can get from that tramp over there - but with practical suggestions which I’ll
deliver on a nod. I can endure irritability, the slings and arrows of ingratitude. I am not some sensitive floral creature. But even I can’t ignore self-destruction, and for you to brush me off . . .’

  ‘I’m not brushing you off!’ he shouted.

  ‘Sack me if you want, but I can’t change the way I work, and while I’m your agent I’ll say it straight, because there’s no value to you if I’m pulling my punches.’

  ‘Oh, punch away.’

  John’s expression was suddenly serious. He came closer to Philip, sat down slowly on the bench.

  ‘I don’t quite know how to say this.’

  ‘Yes you do.’

  His cheek muscles bunched against unsavoury thoughts. ‘Frank tells the truth.’

  Philip shook his head.

  ‘No reflection on anything. Just career dynamics.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘You’re fringe.’

  Philip smiled bitterly.

  ‘Wednesday didn’t help. Wednesday was ostentatiously unhelpful. Even so, we have a couple of days to lock in the miracle that is Frank. Before he pulls the plug, and you’re left with a shitty review and a cancelled concert and no record deal and no sponsor and nothing on the horizon!’

  ‘How can you talk to me like this?’

  ‘Because it’s true. There’s hundreds of pianists out there struggling for the limelight, whose best work is going unrecorded, whose careers are languishing. The big time is just a handful of names. Hordes fall by the wayside. But you’ve been given a chance.’

  ‘I just can’t . . . I just . . .’ His temples were pulsating. He felt contaminated by the things John was saying.

  ‘And I have to tell you, I have to be honest, I’m just being completely above-board. . . if you drop out, Vadim’s in line. I don’t want it to come as a nasty surprise.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Breaking news. Your protege is the hottest thing in town, because Paul Harringay at Classique is banging on to everyone about his new Rachmaninov disc, which is truly awesome, and the majors are wading in. If you drop the concerts, Vadim will grab them, and Bulmanion will be on to him like a flash. He’ll get your deal.’

  Philip gazed at his agent in a trance of wonder.

  John gazed back, watching the effect of his words.

  ‘I have no choice because Vadim is the only person who could hold those dates.’