Two years later they met by chance in Harrods. Both were Christmas shopping and it seemed the civilised thing to have tea upstairs. That went well enough and a couple of weeks later he invited her to a gallery preview, which she attended. Now forty-two, Laura was an archivist working for Channel 4. There was no hint of a boyfriend and yet she seemed to have moved on, and somehow or other they found a groove that did not insult the strength of their previous bond. There followed sundry meetings, strangely autumnal in character. She had not quite forgiven him, nor fallen out of love with him, but habits had changed, and the same dignity that compelled her to leave him allowed her to enjoy his company without expecting too much. She took him as she found him and kept herself in rein. Perhaps it pleased her to sense he still needed her. On one of these occasions Camilla’s name came up. Laura had discovered a friend in common with Philip’s old flame. That friend had told Laura about the abortion, and Laura now passed this on to Philip. At the time, he was so surprised he hardly noticed how she slipped it into conversation. It was the kind of news that came from nowhere but was impossible to forget.
Chapter Eleven
He stood in her front room.
She had a plumber in the flat, so was out in the kitchen. She gave him a whisky the moment he arrived.
He had spent many evenings in this little drawing room with its Victorian fireplace and stripped-pine floorboards. He recognised all her things, moved but not replenished: the heirloom Bechstein against the wall, lid closed; the alcoves of bookshelves showing the same faded spines; the tired chaise in the bay, dried flowers in the hearth, boudoir throws on old armchairs, even the fat candle on the mantelpiece with its hint of convent solace. A dead fly lay on its back on the windowsill. The room was faded and smaller than he remembered. It was a cosy enough place six years ago. She should have moved on by now.
He remained standing because he needed to stay on his toes. He was apprehensive and absolutely ready to cave in, and guilty in advance because he had come to be mothered. He needed to be dosed with sympathy and Laura was the only person he could turn to. Beneath the need, however, was something else. He was more shaken up than he realised and wondered in dread what either of them could take from an encounter in this state. When she came into the room, eyes wide with concern, she seemed already to understand that something serious had happened, and that this was something she might have predicted and even known about: a moment of reckoning that flowed from everything that had failed to happen in his life.
She took his hand with the care of a nurse, gazed into his eyes.
He was distressed by her touch. It brought emotion to the surface. His eyes prickled and he let out a deep sigh.
‘Sit down then.’
‘OK.’
‘Let’s have a cigarette.’
He subsided into the armchair, like Frankenstein sitting down, a palm on either knee.
‘I’ve left mine . . .’
‘I’ve got some in a drawer.’
She was soon sitting near him, leaning across the arm of the chaise, watching him smoke. He sipped his whisky and puffed gratefully and thought what a blessing it was when you were miserable to let someone look you in the eye, as though the main thing, first off, was to let the bad feeling be registered. Her dark eyes were so subtly knowing.
He waited for something to occur to him, a way in. He had no idea where to begin.
‘I heard about the concert,’ she said.
‘Oh.’
‘Sounds awful, Philip.’
He nodded in agreement. That was one of many awful things, and now they were all mixed up.
‘I’ve just cancelled the series.’
She did not react.
‘Think I’ve sacked John.’
‘Did you row?’
‘Yes.’
He could see that she was unsettled by this. Whatever he might tell her, the consequences of a rift would seem worse than the cause.
‘Gosh,’ she said softly.
‘I can’t trust him any more.’
He looked at his whisky. He hated more than anything the idea of going back to hospital: long corridors, waiting rooms, grave faces.
‘How are you?’ he said quickly.
‘Fine.’ She smiled.
‘It’s nice to be here.’
‘Lucky I was in. I’ve hardly been back recently. It’s all very musty and dusty.’
He frowned. ‘Oh. Right.’
There was a pause. He drew himself up in his chair, and then the realisation dawned. His head cleared suddenly. ‘Have you . . .?’
Laura looked at him in a certain way, to prepare him. Her face was tranquil, the outer effect of unfamiliar happiness.
He swallowed.
She smiled again, ironically bunching her cheeks and then releasing them.
His heart was sinking, an unprecedented feeling.
He glanced away for a moment, as if to fortify himself. He could not rise above an abrupt sense of loss, a landslide of the spirit: and yet this was inevitable.
‘Somebody from work?’
‘Someone new.’
‘Rodney!’
She laughed. ‘Course not!’
‘Colin?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. He’s married.’
‘Colin’s married?’
She half-smiled and shrugged. ‘One bachelor less in the world. True love, actually.’
‘You?’ He was tense with emotion. ‘Or Colin?’
She looked away, drawing on her cigarette. ‘Maybe both of us.’
Philip averted his eyes. His ash hung long and crooked. He felt as though he would never get out of the chair.
‘Nobody you know,’ she said, after a while.
He nodded.
‘Think I’ll have another drink.’ She rose and then leaned across, bringing him the smell of her scent. ‘Another?’
He heard her talking to the plumber along the corridor. She was chirpy and light-hearted, her voice ringing, and when she came back into the room, a glass in either hand, he could see her expression changing back a gear, as if to protect him from the sight of her happiness. He noticed her hips as she came towards him. She had developed a way of walking, an unaccustomed ease of movement that asserted a right to her new sense of attractiveness. It suited her.
He was now less sure where to start. His preoccupations seemed endless. His life’s orderly scheme had been abandoned and yet he had no idea how to live without order. As she took up position near by, softly settling on the chaise, he was struck by the sensation of her being so easily close to him whilst belonging to another man. He savoured the surprise unpleasantness of this emotion, noticing a strange jealousy in the mix. He was becoming the master of retrospective regret.
Her words of comfort could not mean the same now.
‘What did John say?’
He shook his head.
‘He’s very fond of you.’
‘I need to know.’ His throat was dry. ‘Why did you tell me about the abortion?’
Her face changed colour. She put her glass on the table.
‘Why did I have to know that?’
‘Why?’
He rubbed an eye.
She shook her head.
‘What good would it do me?’ He could not bear to look at her.
‘Sorry. I couldn’t keep it to myself.’
‘I confronted Camilla.’
‘You what!’
‘I went to see her.’
‘God!’
‘She has two lovely children.’
Laura was ashen-faced.
‘She didn’t deny it. She made her reasons absolutely clear and that was that.’
Laura digested the remark without reacting. She was concentrating hard, measuring what might and might not be said.
‘You knew I’d be devastated.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Bull’s eye, Laura.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
‘Why else, then?’
‘I see. You imparted this information to make me realise how profoundly I was rejected by Camilla?’
The accusation seemed so unfair. ‘Camilla’s been married for ages, Philip. She was a lost cause years before I came on the scene.’
‘Yes, but you thought I hadn’t accepted that. So I needed to hear about the abortion to make it crystal clear.’
She looked at him with painful honesty. ‘I was never jealous of Camilla.’
He got up from his chair, walked across the room. ‘You wanted me to know how much you suffered when I refused to have a family. Payback time. I can understand that.’
‘Think what you like.’
‘You wanted this information to have an effect.’
She frowned, overwhelmed suddenly. ‘Why not? It’s your information. Your life!’
He turned to meet her head-on.
‘It should have an “effect”,’ she told him.
‘I needed to suffer in order to rise to your proud level of emotional maturity. Is that it?’
‘Blame me all you like. It’s not true. Have you tried to understand why this revelation is so upsetting?’
‘I’m sure you can tell me.’
She looked away. ‘Philip, I’ve said enough.’
‘About our relationship, sure. You needed me to be something that suited you, and when I failed to be that thing, you had no interest in the very thing I was.’
‘Why are you here?’ She was almost angry. ‘How can I possibly be of help to you?’
Her strength, once bared, cowed him. She was no longer bound up with him and he could never return to her again, and this was suddenly stark. His anger was beside the point and so were his accusations of bad faith.
He passed a hand across his face. No one could partake in his misery. He felt foolish, deflated. ‘What’s wrong with me, then?’
She shook her head, knowing it was neither the time nor the place for this. ‘You’re in a state.’
‘No! No! What has always been wrong with me?’
She looked at him squarely for a moment, and then shrugged.
‘Very difficult for you to be objective. I’ll take that into account.’
She raised her glass, swigged back the whisky. ‘It’s not fair to ask me.’
‘Tell me the worst. With knobs on.’
She laughed, shaking her head sadly at the same time.
‘Because you left me,’ he said. ‘You were the one that left!’
She gave him an odd look. This interpretation did not please her. ‘That’s what happens when a man won’t commit. The woman has more faith, and then more courage.’
He raised his hands in frustration. ‘Yes, but why can’t I commit? Why am I such a basket case?’
She heard the plumber calling in the corridor and slipped outside to pay him. Philip looked around in a turmoil of embarrassment and dismay. He had not meant to ask this question; it just came out of him. He had come here to be comforted, to feel loved.
He waited in suspense, and as he returned to his seat he felt more like a friend whom he had once made the mistake of pitying, Michael Connelly, an Irish theatre director. Michael’s romantic activities were tiringly ceaseless and repetitively futile. He had once been invited by a married couple to join them on holiday in Portugal. Other couples and plentiful children were present in a scene of uxorious contentment. Connelly was duly relieved when one Robert Burlap turned up. Also in his forties and militantly unmarried, Burlap had hired a sports car. The spectacle of so much fulfilment was tiring for both men. They decided to slip away to Lisbon for a couple of nights ‘on the town’, as a one-in-the-eye to the marrieds, ‘on the town’ amounting in all probability to two sedentary restaurant-bound evenings of swapped gossip and mutual solidarity in the forlorn existentials of bacherlordom. Michael was hoping for an exchange about the odd sensation of being middle-aged, barren, slightly depressed and fixated on younger women. Robert would surely drop his guard and wash down a clubby platitude or twain with a good bottle of Dao. Why were they so high and dry, so unwilling to commit, so enervatingly incorrigible? It was time for a few statesmanlike reflections that would place their rather dubious behaviour in a wider context, alleviating any sense of guilt or responsibility, not to mention seediness, as if commitment-phobia and two-timing were a zeitgeist bugbear victimising them as much as the poor women they strung along. Robert, alas, would not be drawn. Michael’s enquiries were deflected. His frank and occasionally compromising admissions were stonewalled with a curt smile. Burlap kept it light and general with the result that two men with a rich kinship in emotional incompetence found it impossible to communicate. Michael told Philip, when the holiday was over, that Robert must be hell to go out with. ‘Conversation can never get personal. He’s a sphinx without a bloody secret!’ Philip had suspected that Robert could bear to hear neither his own evasions nor Michael’s lies. For neither man was self-knowledge a palatable option. Emotional depletion begat a kind of cognitive circularity. Whatever their starting point they would end up with themselves as they were, not as they might be, which after a third glass of port was beginning to resemble destiny. Whence real passion at their age? The biological clock was a woman’s problem. Men had the emotional clock to fret over and Robert and Michael had just twigged this valuable and compassionate concept when, for both of them, it was two seconds past midnight.
Philip looked at the pattern on the rug. He waited awkwardly. He was being examined in every way at the moment. Other people were running tests and making diagnoses or reviewing him judicially. All his life he had been dissected as a pianist, his every career progression had been approved by someone other than himself: examiners, jurors, music critics, audiences. His art had been written about and subjected to comparison, but as a man he had never been quantified; his moral nature was undefined, known to intimates perhaps, who had only ever been able to take him as he was - a law unto himself.
She came back into the room and settled on the chaise.
‘Remember,’ she said, her voice tight, ‘that you requested this.’
He swallowed. ‘That sounds so ominous.’
‘It’s only my way of understanding you. Probably very shallow.’
‘I doubt it, Laura. I doubt it.’
She passed him a look that was gentle at first, almost questioning. She seemed to reassure him of good faith. The look was a reminder of all that had gone on between them, and supremely of her loyalty to his best interests, but in her eyes he saw a strange superiority. She knew her mind; she had a view, and this was a view she could only impart in full.
He was determined to hear her. He wanted to know what he was up against, the full interpretation.
‘I used to think that music was your strategy for avoiding the pain of human relations. If you devoted yourself to the piano, you could reach people on your own terms. Music was a means to keep the world where you wanted it. At arm’s length. It was an obvious strategy because you’re so gifted, and as an only adopted child it must have been great to have this world that you could escape into. That’s how I understood it in the early days, when you spoke of your commitment to the piano, like vows. Here was a man trying to hold himself together. Sudden intimacy would engender the terror of separation.’ Laura frowned intelligently, gathering the thread. ‘Before then, I never understood men who couldn’t commit. With you I had to form an understanding. To be deserted or let down by a lover . . . I could see that was an unbearable prospect. I never believed you were indifferent. Self-protective, rather.’
He sat with crossed arms, gazing into the fire grate.
‘Then I met Edward. I realised how natural and uncomplicated it is when you meet the right person, even though meeting that person is a fluke. All the important things can be so simple. But without having those things - love, trust, security - you just haven’t developed.’
‘Is this you
talking, or your shrink?’
She was sudden. ‘If I hadn’t met you, I wouldn’t have needed a shrink! You were the most complicated thing that had ever happened to me. I was determined not to be fucked up by you, Philip. Because unlike you I had no international career to go back to, no cheering audiences and famous friends. After my three years as your girlfriend I had no fall-back position. And without a decent future, the future I deserve, the past is just OVER.’
He shook his head.
For a moment she was subdued, depressed all over again.
‘I hoped that if I was constant, always there for you, that if I poured love into you’ - she wiped her nose with the back of her hand - ‘you would gradually heal, and some inner place would thaw, and the love that I thought was trapped inside you would get out; and eventually we could get married and have a child. I played a long game, Philip. And lost. Something you will never do. In fact, giants of the keyboard have no idea what ordinary people put up with to find fulfilment. They have to be patient. And strong. So strong.’
He avoided eye contact, but she was in any case downcast with reminiscence. She paused, as if to gain strength for what was to come. She had lived through all this. Talking it through required courage and concentration. She had to say what she thought, and she had to trust what she said for both their sakes. ‘But then I realised I had fallen in love with the artist and not the man, and that these two things were not the same. Your beautiful playing was not a gift to me. It was a gift to the world. What I got to myself was only the man.’ She looked at him with pain. ‘The man was not enough. I could have gone on hoping for the best, because people develop and you had a history to overcome, but . . .’ She had lost all colour. Her lips worked the bitterness of a thought. ‘After the fire, there really seemed no point.’
The Concert Pianist Page 12