The Concert Pianist

by Conrad Williams

  He had not expected this and was suddenly at sea. It hit him in the vocal cords so that when he spoke his voice was trembly. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You are cauterised, Philip.’

  He smiled uncomprehendingly. ‘I wish I were.’

  ‘In your heart you are.’

  ‘You’ll have to justify that.’

  Her jaw jutted and her eyes glinted. ‘Dead inside.’

  ‘You condemn me but you don’t help me!’

  ‘You don’t need help. You’ve got exactly what you want.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe it.’ She grappled the end of the chaise. ‘When Peter and Clarissa and the children died, you didn’t react.’

  ‘I reacted!’

  ‘Philip, you didn’t go to the funeral. You didn’t write to his parents. You froze up. I remember you flying off to Stockholm for a concert the day after we heard. When you came back, you wouldn’t even talk about it. And he was your best friend!’

  He guarded the side of his face with his hand. ‘I was . . . he was like a brother to me . . . I was . . .’

  ‘You never shed one tear,’ she declaimed.

  ‘I coped with it in my own way.’

  ‘Because you hate strong feelings. Better to have no feelings at all than to grieve someone’s death.’

  He was tortured now.

  ‘Your heart is a sliver of ice.’

  He tried to think straight. ‘I couldn’t assimilate it . . .’

  ‘Assimilate! What kind of word is that? Your friends died and you didn’t flinch.’

  ‘I didn’t . . . I couldn’t get my head round it. Couldn’t understand . . .’

  ‘Because people mean nothing to you. You’re so wrapped up in yourself that nobody else is quite real and when they die you don’t really notice.’

  ‘What is one supposed to do?’ he shouted. ‘There’s more to grief than tears. One minute they were there. Then they were . . . gone. I couldn’t figure it.’

  ‘Figure this. Understand that. You’re all brain and no heart. I saw the coldness and I wanted to get out.’

  ‘I do have feelings, Laura.’

  ‘What use are feelings if nobody ever gets the benefit of them? They might as well not exist. No feelings. So no wife. No children. Nothing.’

  She was overwhelming him.

  ‘No wonder you can’t play,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, don’t!’

  She was formidable now. ‘I mean are those bad reviews just a coincidence?’

  ‘I only had one bad review.’

  ‘God, why are we doing this? What’s the bloody point? You can’t connect with reality.’

  ‘The Gramophone guy’s an opera specialist!’

  She shook her head. ‘Rodney said there were three bad reviews.’

  He was stunned.

  She glanced, suddenly hating herself.

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Philip . . .’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  She looked at him, pausing a moment while the information settled on his mind, and then her eyes grew large. Suddenly, she knew what she meant exactly. ‘If you can’t be wholehearted in love or grief, how on earth can you expect to move your listeners?’

  His face went white. He had to look away and blink hard against the cruelty of her logic. His hands crushed together on his lap.

  ‘You’ve become narrow.’

  He had no resistance.

  Laura stared at him concertedly, holding on to the point. ‘I think you have to look at yourself. In the past you’ve made other people unhappy. Now you’re the unhappy one. You have a lot of issues, Philip. It’s time to get help.’

  He felt like a child.

  ‘Are you going to be unhappy for the rest of your life or face up to things? You need to change.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Change is not easy,’ he said softly.

  ‘It’s extremely difficult. Very painful. But there’s no going back. You have to break the pattern, because the past is over and what you could get by on then isn’t enough any more. The grand bachelor days have led to this, look at you, this ruined figure. And now you’re desperate and miserable because you’ve been living your life in a way that doesn’t work. Get some help, get your own therapist. Do the job properly. You’re too old at fifty to have delusions about the quality of the life you’re living. It’s now or never, Philip.’

  He gazed at her abjectly.

  ‘What have you got to lose?’

  She rose suddenly. She was done with him.

  ‘Laura!’

  She walked towards the door and turned to face him one last time. ‘You’re right, Philip. You’re absolutely right. That’s exactly why I told you about the abortion. I wanted to prove to you that even you have feelings deep down beneath that crust of ice and it’s bloody well time you acknowledged them!’

  ‘Laura!’

  ‘Go, please. Leave me.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Serebriakov - a face cut from rock, the jaw, the cheekbones, the ridge of the brow, a face forged by the sufferings of Soviet history, custom-made for one of those banners showing Lenin in implacable visionary mode, expressing how hard Russia was going to have to be to itself, to change; and in that look of bitter endurance, in Serebriakov’s case caused by his utter disgust with politics, his refusal to be manhandled by history; in the way he looked up at you with intolerable candour, in that granite glance there were flashes of a suffering so compressed that pain itself seemed hewn in the moulded cast of his cranium. The cyclone of his talent had nonetheless protected him from historical reality. During the war he was pushed around in the service of his country: propaganda films for the Red Army, monkey-like performances at state functions, cocktail piano for Politburo chiefs. He was blackmailed and threatened by the Ministry of Culture, coerced and bugged. His family were gently persecuted and two of his Jewish friends disappeared from their flats without trace. But life was easier for him than for most. The Wehrmacht swarmed over the Ukraine, the Red Army crumpled back to Moscow, Stalingrad became a whirlpool of death and Serebriakov learned new piano sonatas. He transcribed any orchestral score he could find, and gave concerts in blacked-out halls at short notice. Later in his life he spoke of those years with an intractable mixture of sorrow and contempt. Human dignity had been stripped from everyone. To relate all the incredible stories of cruelty and suffering was to share a class of information that could not be felt, being beyond the heart’s endurance. And so one pressed on. History was everywhere, regrettable, hideous, but the mission of a pianist was not to oppose or resist. The duty of a pianist was to survive through music and to distribute as widely as possible (on countless tours of the most obscure parts of the Soviet Union) Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Et la Lune Descend sur le Temple qui Fut, Aux Cyprès de la Villa d’Este, Goldberg Variations, and a thousand other pieces ‘which they need out there’. In the fifties he played in tiny town halls, churches, old air-raid shelters. He loved the days of travel to reach these places. He was a great walker and never missed an opportunity to explore the landscape around remote towns. Privileged and pressurised in equal measure by the Soviet authorities, his reputation with professionals and his fame across the Union was instantly monolithic; and as copies of his recordings and accounts of his playing eked out to the West, foreign critics began to anticipate from musical Russia something as titanically galvanised as the Cold War superpower itself. What forging of temperament had he endured to become this legendary figure? His Russian contemporaries whispered of something immeasurable, something absolute; and if indeed his first concerts in Europe were received with due hysteria it proved remarkably trying to pinpoint his genius. Felix Weber, the Austrian critic, attended his Berlin debut. ‘I went to hear him play sonata of Haydn. At first I think no big deal. A minute later the tears are streaming down my face.’

  Since the early sixties he had moved to the West. He was shy but his reputa
tion brought him into contact with kings and movie stars. A recluse by nature, he disdained his own celebrity and loathed most of his recordings. Those who gained his trust he invited to a manor house in the Perigord Noir. Music could be played in an adjoining barn. Despite his fame he lived only for music and it would take many hours of shared music-making or solemn record-listening to gain his confidence. To those who had figured out how to fit in around him he was angelic. He revealed a gift for mimicry and a sense of satire. Serebriakov detested the vain and pompous and knew too many people with these qualities. Occasionally, a satirical rage would convulse him, and then his humour could be lethal.

  By the seventies he was a living legend, so associated with the post-war years as to seem almost historic. His mountainous presence lurked mistily behind the new generation of pianists. In a way, his sovereign example was a backdrop to all who followed. Against Serebriakov you could measure any pianist. He incarnated an absolute musical integrity beyond the reach of ambition or fame.

  This was the person who in 1974 attended a concert of Philip Morahan’s. Philip had no idea of the maestro’s presence during the concert and was stunned to see him in the dressing room afterwards, taking his place in the queue of well-wishers. They had never met before and, when the divinity shook his hand and congratulated him with the tenderest smile, Philip felt he had been blessed.

  By then, Konstantine was already a decade into his friendship with Arthur England. Konstantine had fallen like a lover for the landscape around Arthur’s home near Bromyard, with its views across Herefordshire to the Black Mountains. He would spend a fortnight there every summer, going on walks, and immersing himself in the music that Arthur lived and breathed: Britten and Delius, Howells and Bax, Finzi and Vaughan Williams. He had returned again this year (possibly for the last time) to celebrate his birthday and make a little music. He was eighty-eight, not well. He had come up from France by train and been collected in London by Arthur in Oswald’s Bentley (driven on this occasion by Kevin - Kevin was Oswald’s sous-chef and manservant when not chauffeuring the elderly great along Arcadian B-roads). The same driver had been sent to collect Philip two weeks later, and Philip now sat in the back seat, allowing himself to be conveyed along the M40 into the past, as Kevin slalomed in great swerves of effortless velocity between crowded motorway lanes.

  He had not been to Herefordshire in years. As they drove through the Chilterns his tired eyes could not escape the scenery: the dramatic revelation of vast fields, sudden stands of beech, the forested capes of commanding hills enshouldering the road. In late May the beeches seemed shampooed. Their crowns were glossy and well conditioned. After Oxford the trees became more furrowed and antique, and as the grand old estates around Ledbury and Tewkesbury kicked in, the rolling landscape was indented by lordly Wellingtonias, and blasted oaks with antlered crowns and old limbs elbowed in cow mud.

  He sank lower and lower in the back seat, catching everything, stone houses, the rivers of May blossom, the muffled heads of thatched cottages that came and went. He had nearly fallen asleep when the car pulled to the right and proceeded with reverential moderation down a lane. The lane levelled and broadened in preparation for the drive to Arthur’s house, and then the gravel crackled and the palms of a cedar loomed overhead and they were there, approaching the posing corner of Moreton Manor. He watched the Edwardian pile draw closer, with its mock-Tudor chimney stacks and gables, and mullion bays blindly greeting all comers. They came under a gateway on to the forecourt and parked. Philip got out of the car and had time for a glance at the long view to the west before Oswald’s cornet greeting cut the air.

  He sat with Oswald in the old kitchen sipping tea. Arthur and Konstantine had driven off to Hergest Croft to see the azaleas, and Julius Robarts was upstairs, flat out with jet-lag.

  Oswald’s lined face and stringy dewlaps and eye pouches were all caught up in the excitement of the event, and twitched vitally as he described the delicacies he had prepared with his kitchen underlings, the wines that were assuming perfect temperatures, and the distinguished musicians Arthur had conscripted, not just from the four corners of England, but from all over the world.

  ‘We have Lola Montrero, ha ha.’

  ‘Lola?’

  ‘Set the cat among the bloody pigeons.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘Vyacheslav Chuikov.’ Oswald wobbled his jowls compassionately. ‘Veritable thumb-sucker and nose-picker. Autistic, I presume.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Geraint Davies, Cedric Bowles, Aldous Braebourne. Two Royal College professors.’

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘Damien Baldwin. Lovely Mauritz Wengler all the way from Berlin. Your friend, Vadim.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘I’ve put you in that cosy b & b up the road, all expenses paid, so mind you eat your Full English. There’s a peer. Some jackanapes New Labour acolyte keen on the blasted arts, would you believe! Couldn’t keep him out. Amanda Holcraft. The Ambrose Quartet.’

  ‘You putting everybody up?’

  ‘I’m packed to the rafters. More tea, please, Barry.’

  A clean-cut young man emerged from the pantry. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and had a tattoo on his biceps.

  ‘Give Philip a spot more, too, would you, Barry.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Oswald laughed chestily. ‘I’m fortunate in having these paragons at my disposal.’

  Philip watched Barry return to the pantry. ‘Where d’you get them?’

  ‘They’re Harry Ploughman types from the local.’ He managed a pursed smile. ‘Sweet dullards. But . . . you know . . . decorative!’

  ‘Watch your silver.’

  ‘Oh sure! I’m like a closed-circuit camera with these fickle youths. Follow your every move, don’t I, Barry!’

  ‘How’s Arthur?’

  ‘Indefatigable. I so hope he notices when I die.’

  ‘You’re a juvenile by comparison.’

  ‘A buggered old wreck of seventy-two,’ he chortled.

  Philip looked in astonishment at the floor. ‘Lola’s coming?’

  Oswald nodded certainly.

  ‘God, I haven’t seen her for about twenty-five years.’

  ‘Lovely girl. Julius said he calculated she must have smoked seven hundred and fifty thousand cigarettes since they last met. Doesn’t look a day older.’

  ‘She’s remarkable.’

  ‘Very great pianist and a total maniac.’

  ‘I’m glad Julius is here.’

  ‘He’s a dear. Apparently he qualified as a chartered accountant before getting the piano bug.’

  ‘Oswald!’

  ‘Well, you know what I mean.’

  Oswald was a doughty satirist of musical types. Whereas Arthur presented a timeless patrician serenity that was a bit out of date, but just about plausible given his vast age, Oswald had appointed himself court jester. He found musicians to be an extraordinary and ridiculous bunch: ‘People whose talents so far exceed their social skills that sometimes I feel I’m conversing with a pair of hands attached to a life-support system.’ Oswald prospected for the one foible or characteristic which would make it impossible to take a great musician seriously again. He would look at you and say: ‘Seven hundred and fifty thousand Marlboros. They call her Rola,’ and that was it for the tumultuous Montrero. Oswald liked people to the extent that their conversation allowed him to recreate himself as wit and sophisticate. Someone described him as the gargoyle on Arthur’s cathedral, but Arthur relied on his camp alter ego for everything, and the two had been inseparable for years. ‘Thirty-five years, actually, which is a lot longer than some of you promiscuous heterosexual bods.’ Oswald had private means. ‘Based on biscuit tins, or something. Bloody catering. Look at me now. All I ever do is cook meals for people.’

  ‘How’s Konstantine?’ said Philip.

  ‘Oh.’ Oswald looked away, blinking. He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘He’s not got long.’

  Philip glanced at
his lap.

  ‘What will we do without them, Philip, these grand old boys?’

  Philip spent the afternoon walking in the lanes. He heard rustic voices carrying in the wind, the cranking sound of farm machinery. The verges were dense with celandine and greater stichwort. Old trees looked young again, the wooded hillocks more buxom. He would take in the long view to the west, towards the Welsh hills, visible as a blue line over the interceding countryside, the soft patchwork that rolled from Moreton Manor across the Golden Valley to the Black Mountains, a rural Eden of meadows and parkland and cider-apple orchards glinting in the afternoon light.

  He sat down at the foot of a hornbeam and gazed at the tracery of hedgerows, and out of nowhere he pictured Katie approaching him in the long grass and raising her hand to show him a pair of mating butterflies that had settled on a forefinger. They had sat together in the ragged shade of a hawthorn and watched in delight as hares bounded all over the field. He remembered walking back with her through a wood, and when they emerged the three-year-old pointed to a glider hanging over the far fields like a hovering gull, sheet white against azure.

  Memory weighed on him. The past was all around him now.

  Today, he felt no pain, merely the actuality of things.

  After seeing Laura he had purchased the offending magazines: Hi-fi News and Record Review, International Piano, Classic CD. He read the reviews in the privacy of his drawing room. He was satisfactorily numb. They were not terrible. They were certainly not good. The magazines slipped off the chair on to the floor as he stared at the writhing shadows of a tree on his ceiling and walls.

  He had accepted Arthur’s invitation right off. He was not presentable in any sense, just a shell of a man now, but a couple of nights in Herefordshire would help eat up the wait for the test results; and Konstantine he could not refuse. In his present knackered straits it moved him to contemplate the old boy’s incorruptible purity, his allergy to compromise, his dogged perseverance. He had never been commodified by the record companies. No impresario had tamed him. Throughout a bustling musical life he had never let go of the main thing, the simple sense of how to play a piece. He knew. And what he knew was unfathomable. Philip dared not play his best recordings too often. He was not invariably attuned, but when in the mood he found himself experiencing something beyond insight or interpretation. It was like sharing for a moment a physicist’s mentalisation of space-time or subatomic particles, as though Serebriakov divined the music of the spheres and made them audible. The celestial order of his playing induced a kind of ravishment - so beyond one’s means to reproduce as to reek of total genius.