The Concert Pianist

by Conrad Williams

  ‘You’re diabolical.’

  ‘Cobblers! I’m doing my job.’

  ‘You’re pressurising me.’

  ‘Hah! Join the real world.’

  ‘I can’t . . .’

  ‘It’s last-chance saloon, old man!’

  ‘My reputation doesn’t stand or fall on a concert.’

  ‘Oh no? Ashkenazy and Pollini are busted flushes. Brendel’s getting old. Argerich is history. There’s phase-outs everywhere. Zimmerman and Perahia are gilt-edged but corporate. Hamelin and Volodos are around for a bit, Hough’s holding up, Schiff’s dug in but, as Frank says, you’re almost a legend, and if you let yourself fade into musical history . . .’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘. . . turning sepia before our eyes, Vadim et al will take over.’

  ‘He’ll take over anyway.’

  ‘In this rat race, damn it’ - John banged his fist on the bench - ‘you have a duty to promulgate your art!’

  ‘For Christ’s sake . . .’

  ‘Can you imagine Franz Liszt relinquishing his crown? Or Rubinstein, or Horowitz flinging in the sponge? Letting some other pianist steal their thunder? You have to be magisterial, Philip. You have to get in there and show them you’re the fucking best. You have to fling the rabble aside, because this is not some well-mannered cultural Utopia of egalitarian mutual respect between caring, sharing touchy-feely hard-working humble pianists, worker ants in the garden of music, this is a battle for supremacy. Greatness needs to impose itself. Needs to prove what greatness in music means. Otherwise the geeks and the technocrats will crawl all over the shop. You owe it to your art, Philip.’

  ‘Oh, fuck my art.’

  ‘If you really think that, fire me now.’

  ‘I’m going mad listening to you.’

  ‘I can’t represent has-beens.’

  ‘I’m not a fucking has-been! I didn’t get to where I am by making compromises. If that’s going to jeopardise our relationship . . .’

  ‘Relationship! What you call a relationship is a one-way street of ego-massage and damned hard work in return for the immortal blessing of your music when you feel like it on your terms.’

  ‘Then, let’s call it a day.’

  ‘Nobody else will take you on.’

  ‘Ursula would look after me better than this!’

  John’s expression hardened. ‘She won’t get the chance.’

  Philip looked at him in confusion. ‘Are you trying to get rid of me?’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Because of Ursula?’

  John was adrift for a moment.

  ‘You’d throw me away out of some misplaced sense of jealousy?’

  ‘Jealous! I’m not jealous.’

  Philip stared at him. He could see it in John’s eyes. John was jealous. Jealous of Ursula’s sympathy for him, the fact she had gone to his flat and waited for him in a car all day. John had forced Ursula on him and now he was jealous of her concern.

  ‘You insult me because you want to get rid of me.’

  ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous.’

  ‘Because you fancy Ursula and want to promote Vadim?’

  ‘If you believe that . . .’

  ‘Go to hell!’

  He turned on his heel and walked away fast.

  ‘Philip!’

  He walked rapidly along the pavement, not looking back. He crossed the road at the intersection of Dorset Street, and headed round the corner and out of sight.

  ‘Philip!’

  He was light-headed and sweaty around the collar. Iron palings flowed past, fan lights and window grilles to his right, sapling trees in squares of earth and parked cars on his left. A drilling din erupted: side-street roadworks. The sun was pouring down over car bonnets and the smooth, dry belly of the road. He pressed on only half aware of the launderette and the sex shop and the aubergines and sweet potatoes coming out to greet him on grocers’ stalls. His legs carried him on, rescuing him from the dementing pressure of the scene he had left behind; but when he turned into Devonshire Street a new sensation developed hailing from a telephone booth, the sight of which filled him with dread, as though the world were stained from the top of the sky downwards, causing him to catch his breath and panic. He reached out to steady himself and was suddenly going down like a nine-pin, a twisting collapse, legs buckling, elbow raised before he hit the ground and blacked out.

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  A man and a woman were helping him stand. He was ropy but clear-headed. They kept in position, firm hands under armpits, and brought him to a table outside a Greek restaurant, where the proprietor fetched a glass of water and called a cab.

  He nodded his thanks and sat there feeling weird, concentrating on his water and trying to calm down. He stared at the fabric of the blue cotton tablecloth, watched a pair of businessmen eating meze on a nearby table. When the minicab arrived he put a pound coin down and let himself be guided by a waiter to the door of the cab. He collapsed on to the back seat, hauling his mobile from a pocket.

  ‘You OK, boss?’

  ‘Camberwell, please.’

  She was not there at the office, which gave him hope as he dialled her home number. He glanced out of the window watching the street ease by, anticipating the sound of her voice. The number rang and rang and he held on tightly, panic rising. He screwed up his face, made himself redial. He stared past the driver’s headrest, mobile cupped to his ear, and thought how peculiar it was that this dizzy foreboding had been in store for him all these years, and that his tightly wrought life should start to unravel now. The cab bumped along, finding its way through the midday traffic of Central London, and Philip’s expensively acquired mastery of the piano seemed a wraith-like thing.

  ‘I’m falling apart,’ he told her.

  ‘Philip!’

  ‘I need a shoulder to cry on.’

  ‘Where are you?’ she said.

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  ‘You’re coming here?’

  ‘Laura, thank God you’re in.’

  Chapter Ten

  Laura, in the early days, had been his George Sand, sans cigar. She was almost rotund, a cuddly bun of a girl, with hips that curved well when she lay on her side and a bottom that improved and improved as she bent over. Her neck was short, her arms plump, her waist a little vague. Nature had not shoe-horned her into the easiest shape for kindly consideration, but her eyes were so dark and holding that it was impossible to look at her and not be captured by something depthlessly feminine. Her gaze offered involvement, soft curiosity and, when he played the piano in her drawing room and she curled on the chair listening to every breath of sound, those eyes of hers became sightless with recollection.

  He had found her gentle and robust at the same time. Her thoughtfulness was a kind of armour. Responsive and susceptible, she saw people with a true eye. Laura enjoyed what life yielded easily and sidestepped the rest, being a centred sort of person with an instinct for survival. She coveted solitude, but social people needed her. She attracted the decent, the noisy and the overwrought, drawing in all types, but without quite belonging to their worlds. He found her freely expressive but never talkative. He had to listen carefully because she said so many things that were so well put it was easy to miss quiet gems. She noticed language, the rum adjective in someone’s tale, the force of an unfamiliar word. Her feel for what people meant when they tried to express themselves was for Philip profoundly companionable. At last, he felt intelligible as a man rather than as a musician.

  Her social circle, which included Derek, was ideally devoid of professional musicians; and if it sometimes appeared that Laura’s friends needed to smoke and drink and relate more intensely than he because they lacked his channel of musical expression, it also seemed that their sharing of ideas, their playfulness and wit enlarged social contact to something he had not enjoyed before. Her friends were at the early, unfailed stage of promising careers, but their day jobs were left at the door, like brollies
in the hat stand. Philip found himself appreciating the independent-mindedness of people who worked hard perhaps, but didn’t make work into everything. Laura’s barrister friends he found particularly amusing. Rodney and Colin Wyatt were brothers at the Criminal Bar with lumbering pinstripe-clad figures, big voices, bigger appetites, and a monstrous knowledge of classical music. Romantic souls were trapped inside their bloated public-schoolishness, rendering them double anachronisms, of which they were wistfully aware. They were honoured to meet Philip, referring to him as ‘Maestro’ with an appreciation beyond irony. It was only when Philip heard them addressing another friend as ‘Deity’ and Laura as ‘Principessa’ and someone else as ‘Imperator’ that he realised these terms were tokens of affection rather than an index of his musical stature amongst the educated public.

  Laura’s solidity of character appealed to his need for freedom. He could tour, practise, travel, and when he returned she would be getting on with her life but ready to absorb him. She took quiet and immense pleasure in her new boyfriend. In the early weeks of their romance she came to one of his London concerts, and having known little about his standing in that world, and being a newcomer to the experience of a piano recital, she was struck to see him on stage, aghast that the sensitive man who had come into her life was so brilliant and the object of so much devotion. In the dressing room afterwards, amongst a crowd of well-wishers - some of them famous - she glowed with pride.

  He was honest from the start. Even before the first kiss he explained that it was impossible for him to get married and have a family. He liked children. He enjoyed domesticity, but he had always known music would come first. It was unfair to inflict the absences and the obsessiveness of his calling on another person, equally impossible to compromise. Marriage without flexibility was not marriage. In the end he knew he could not be beholden to another.

  She had listened to this carefully, advancing as far as she could towards his point of view, gaining his confidence by not arguing the point or questioning the finality of his self-knowledge. She took him as he was. And later, when the romance had started, and Philip was spending the night with her three times a week, and flying her out to meet him on tour, she found it hard to imagine the line beyond which their relationship would become too much for him, too limiting, or consuming, because everything they did together went so easily and so well, and the terrible moods that he hinted at, the seething maestro fits, never happened. He felt at home in her ground-floor flat, and liked having her to stay in his house. She could work on his computer there, and he was happy to practise on her upright. Although their time together was shaped by his diary, his busy round never stopped them doing the couply things: weekend lie-ins, wine-bar trysts, art-gallery outings. He practised, boy, did he practise, but the habit was so ingrained it seemed nothing could disrupt him. Their moderate social lives blended easily. Philip passively enjoyed the company of more relaxed people. He cherished the musical judgements of Rod and Colin Wyatt, gloriously irreverent as they were. The brothers knew every artist, every recording, every anecdote; they were comically erudite. They had gone to a thousand concerts and could talk musical shop with the bluff confidence of those who have never touched an instrument, let alone performed, but have listened devoutly for years and know what the main thing is. Whilst duly humble where appropriate, the flick of a cigarette, or the twiddled stem of a wine glass might see off some world-class pianist whose efforts they deemed ordinary. Rod tended to sit at the end of the table, giant legs parked to one side, his broad face beaming in candlelight like a post-prandial Henry VIII; Colin struck profile between Laura’s female guests, exuding intensity of aspect and listening judicially to his brother’s intelligent balderdash.

  Rodney had once turned to face Philip with a look of encyclopedic finality. ‘You “own” the Chopin Studies. In the way Horowitz “owned” Rach 3, or Cortot the Chopin Preludes.’

  ‘I agree,’ nodded Colin, raising his glass in tribute.

  ‘Everybody else can just buzz off.’

  Philip had smiled wisely. Like most pianists he distrusted approval as much as he resented criticism. He made it a point of honour never to condemn fellow musicians or to admit praise, however sincere. In general, the brothers’ discussions he found both amusing and depressing. ‘Face it, Colin,’ said Rodney on another occasion. ‘We’re hooked on music that’s a century out of date, with no status in the mainstream. Our one abiding passion is a hangover from a bygone era, making us into walking dinosaurs.’

  Colin was not happy with this description. ‘I don’t think you can put classical-music lovers on the same level as trainspotters or S & M collectivists. We’re not a quaint fringe. We are keepers of the Grail in a time of cultural darkness. Our taste is far more important than the mass taste of the age.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Col!’

  ‘I refuse to be culturally irrelevant just because I’m civilised and sensitive.’

  Rod smiled dangerously. ‘Just because your CD collection is not quite the honey trap for young lovelies that you hoped.’

  ‘That’s irrelevant.’

  ‘But true.’

  ‘Call me snobbish, elitist and a fogey,’ insisted Colin.

  ‘We will.’

  ‘But not because I adore classical music.’

  Rod nodded and turned to Philip. ‘We are your followers.’ His eyebrows peaked nobly. ‘The Knights Templar de nos jours.’

  Laura accommodated him without surrendering and he was increasingly dependent on her. He experimented with the idea of marriage, nurtured fantasies of a proposal that never became plans. Though he was tied up with her there was some element of true love slightly around the corner, which he could neither define nor identify, except by its absence, and the more he came to ask of himself what this missing element was, the more absent it seemed, like vanished lust, inexplicable but unarguable; and as he reflected on the issue, as he felt he must, for her sake, his lack of certainty began to irk him. She was ten years younger than he, ten years firmer. When did he kid himself he would find more than this in a woman? And anyway, it was not an issue of content or type or the sum of any female quality that she might represent, because he already loved her for the very thing she was. He loved her, he felt sure, as much as he could love anyone.

  The demise of their relationship was a terrible thing. Her hints were so gentle at first, so painfully reasonable. If, as he said, his love was complete, how could he deny her the fulfilment of that love? How could marriage and children be anything but a natural extension of their fondness for each other? He would listen and nod, feeling her view with care, even tenderness, whilst his heart twisted. Her reasonable questions exerted suffocating pressure. She was probing into an area that he did not control or understand. After such exchanges, an abyss opened between them - harrowing for Philip. He needed so much to feel close to her.

  His special pleadings about the life of a pianist wore thin. Nothing could be more important than a central relationship. Laura herself pointed out that an art form that depended so much on the humanity of its practitioners could hardly prescribe that its practitioners sacrifice something essential to that humanity. When he tried to explain his need for freedom, for separateness, she told him he was already enmeshed with her, that the need was a delusion. When he tried to describe the missing element or uncertainty, she said that he had no model of Miss Right, no archetype on to which any girlfriend could superimpose. He had never known his mother and his adoptive mother was quite different. He had, instead, to value the reality.

  They coasted along, hoping in a way that the relationship would simply subsist. Then the deadlines began, the signs of a terminal toughness. Philip had to face the well-meaning enquiries of her father - the dear old man meekly hoping to clear things up for Laura’s sake, and putting his foot in it with both of them. He was shamed by the old boy’s love for his daughter and fondness for him. His hopes for Laura’s future happiness and his own peace of mind as an ageing father rested on th
e match and Philip felt acutely sorry for the family heartache their separation would cause. He suffered the kind remonstrations of old friends. Peter and Clarissa were devoted to Laura. John Sampson heaped praises on her. She had the double thumbs-up from Julius Robarts, his American colleague. ‘Great PR for you, my friend. It’s like your aura’s had a makeover.’

  All he could do was feel guilty and selfish and incompetent, whilst recognising it was up to her to get rid of him. Whatever she said, he would not make the break. The onus was on her to get so pissed off that she left him, and this he probably exploited, knowing she would never give up.

  He was wrong about that. Laura had shockwaves of rancour in store. It depressed him to see this final backlash and he believed it when she said he had ruined her life. He was her undoing, the curse of a man who cannot commit and who comes at an age when a woman has few remaining chances. Without him her prospects were more hopeless than ever. He had cheated her of vital years, a happy future, the chance of a family.

  She foresaw this in the doomed last months of their years together and the injustice of it drove her to an extremity of contempt for him. He took the punishment like a man, feeling that, if she had suffered from his emotional incapacity, he should be made to suffer for it, too. In the end, of course, his pity had limits. One could not be forced to marry. Her haranguing and beseeching became tedious.

  The break was sudden. One morning in his house she gathered her possessions into a carrier bag and left without a word. He stood by the sash window in the living room, looking down at the street as she came out of the building, and watched her hail a cab without a backward glance.

  Thereafter she wrote him a letter that poisoned his sleep for weeks. It was a declaration of the most desperate love and it paralysed him completely. Everything good about Laura breathed in the lines of this letter. Even her handwriting moved him: so feminine, so genteel, so lovably old-fashioned. Her phrases were full of life and intelligence. In language she conveyed the beauty of a woman’s ardour. Her appeal washed away all the rancour between them so that he could see again the calibre of feeling he had attracted. All her qualities shone in this letter and for days he struggled with the conviction that, if he did not take up the challenge and offer to marry her, he would be letting something of inestimable value slip through his fingers - a fine woman’s love. He expected her to call as the days passed, but Laura knew better. This was her parting shot. The situation now had a bitter clarity and it was up to him to respond. If he could bear to live without her love, she had done the right thing. She had wanted him to know exactly what he was throwing away: a part of himself. For six or eight weeks the world was a bleak place for Philip. He had the certainty of a wrong turn, but was powerless to do anything. He decided to suffer and survive. He despised himself, of course.