Crescendo

by Charlotte Lamb

  refused to be saved, and fought off rescue in a panic and terror which no calming words could touch.

  The piano still gave off that faint vibrating hum which came when music ended. No wonder he had refused to play for her, lying when he said he was not in her class!

  Grandie thrust him aside and tried to put an arm round her, but she could not bear that, either. She felt as though she were shaking into pieces, her whole body shuddering. She wanted to be alone— not to be touched, to be free.

  'Don't touch me!' she said hoarsely, and turned to run up the stairs into her own room, bolting the door and hearing their footsteps coming after her. . 'My God, I warned you,' Grandie said thickly. 'Gideon, 1 warned you. I'll never forgive you.'

  Gideon spoke close to the door, his voice plead­ing. 'Marina, let me in, darling. Let me in to talk to you. I've got to talk to you!'

  'Go away,' she said in a voice which was not her own, a high still little voice, a child's, remote and cold.

  It had been so easy in this quiet little backwater to slide back into the safe past, a past still un­troubled by dreams. Now the dreams would come and she would have pain.

  She sat down on the bed and wondered how she was going to bear it. Grandie and Gideon were talk­ing outside. Gideon said suddenly, very loudly, 'I'll break the bloody door down!'

  Grandie was angry, too, but his anger was with Gideon. 'This is still my house. Leave her alone!' He sounded like a man on the verge of doing some-

  thing violent. 'If you'd left her alone in the first place this wouldn't be happening. You're as selfish as ever, Gideon.'

  Marina stopped listening to them. Her mind was occupied with the bitter memories she had been try­ing to lock away for months. They poured into her like acid and she crouched on the bed, her hands over her eyes.

  When she was eighteen, Grandie had taken her to London to take up a place at the Royal College of Music. Marina had not wasted her long years under Grandie's personal, unstinting tuition. In some ways she was more advanced than most of the other students and in others she had been a very shy, withdrawn girl who was almost entirely ignorant of the world in which she found herself. Her first months at the college had been a wild, dizzying whirl of new experiences. She kept Grandie in touch by letter and she made new friends, but it was still Grandie who was her only close friend, her mentor and her ally.

  Just before the end of that first term, Grandie had come to London to hear a concert given by one of his pupils; one of the most brilliant pianists of the day. Afterwards he and Marina were going back to the cottage together. That evening she had sat in rapt intensity listening to music so perfectly executed and interpreted that she was deeply im­pressed. Grandie and several other friends whom they had met that evening took her on to a party afterwards. It was being given in honour of the pianist. He was knee-deep in excited women in the long cream and gold room. Marina shrank into a chair, terrified by all the people. Her upbringing had made London an ordeal for her. She detested noise, she feared crowds.

  Now she sat on a chair and stared at the black head, watching the movements of the tall lean body, listened to the occasional note she caught of his deep voice.

  Once as he moved he caught sight of her and looked at her. Marina was so nervous that she looked away, clasping her hands in her lap.

  He was talking when she looked again. A woman with wreathed silky black hair hung on his arm, smiling at him, the languid sensuous lines of her body betraying to Marina's stare that she was in love with him. As she watched she saw his sinewy hand slide down the woman's shoulder and arm, saw him smile into her eyes, and she knew then that Gideon Firth was the woman's lover. Her innocence of passion had been somewhat rudely shattered when she arrived at the college. All her fellow students seemed to lead exciting lives. Marina had no time for love, but she learnt to recognise the look of it, to comprehend the emotions behind the way some­one touched the person next to them.

  Grandie had come over to collect her, smiling. 'Now why did you hide away like that?'

  He knew her shyness and was indulgent with it. His arm around her he led her towards the door. Gideon Firth stopped them before they reached it. He turned his glittering eyes on Marina and she looked into his hard, sensual face and saw the up­lifted excitement of the performance still on him. He was reckless with it, his mouth smiling widely.

  'You haven't introduced me, Grandie,' he said.

  Grandie smiled, pleased. 'Gideon, this is my granddaughter. Marina, Gideon Firth.'

  Gideon held out his hand and she shakily put her own into the strong fingers. Holding her hand, he had bent that dark face on her with a confident, piercing smile.

  'Marina,' he repeated. 'Incredible!' He spread her fingers out over his palm. 'You play, of course.'

  Grandie laughed and began to tell him about her while she stood with a flushed face and downcast eyes, so conscious of Gideon that she could not look at him.

  They were interrupted a moment later by the dark woman who twined herself against Gideon with the assurance of one who has a claim to such familiarity. Once Marina looked up and the woman's cold eyes assessed and dismissed her with a flick from head to foot. Hot-cheeked, Marina did not look up again.

  They left, and Marina was silent all the way back to the hotel at which Grandie was staying. She had a room there too for the night.

  'He could be a great pianist,' said Grandie, nod­ding, as they were on their way home next day.

  'Could be?' she repeated in disbelief. 'He is!'

  Grandie's mouth went straight, wryness in the shape of it. 'He's technically amazing and very clever, but the feeling ... it's too much on the sur­face, a mimicry of the thing, not the thing itself.'

  Marina stared at him, remembering the fluent ease and delicacy of the playing. Was he right?

  'He's too hard,' Grandie added. 'Too certain.'

  She remembered Gideon's elevation after the con­cert, his triumph and glitter, and sensed that Grandie might be right.

  Christmas came with a bitterly cold spell of weather. Marina wore a little circle in the frost on the window pane by leaning against it, her nose pressed to the cold glass, her breath slowly thawing the brittle crystals. The grass was stiff and silvered, the roofs glistening, the cats walking over icy ground with a pained expression.

  Grandie gave her a white fur muff and hood for Christmas. She put them on for the first time to walk along the cliff paths and watch the sea coldly breaking on the stones. Two days after Christmas she was playing absorbedly when she felt someone in the room behind her. Glancing over her shoulder, expecting Grandie, she met Gideon Firth's black eyes.

  Her hands stiffened and fell still.

  'Go on,' he said, sinking into a chair.

  She shook her head, hurriedly getting up from the stool. 'Does Grandie know you're here?' Her voice sounded unlike itself, thin and high.

  'He told me to come in and listen,' Gideon said softly, staring at her. 'I'm here. So sit down and play to me.'

  She gave him a half-frightened look. 'I couldn't!'

  His brows rose. 'You play at the college. Why not to me?'

  She didn't know why, only that she did not want to have him sit there and listen to her. Hurriedly escaping into the kitchen, she put on her red cloak, muff and hood and went out into the frosty air.

  Grandie did not say anything, just looked at her with affectionate amusement.

  Walking along the cliff path, she heard twigs breaking behind her and looked round to find Gideon at her heels. Her face coloured.

  'Hallo, Red Riding Hood,' he said mockingly. 'I'm the wolf.'

  She had a self-protective flare of annoyance. 'My hood's white,' she pointed out.

  He joined her and looked down into her face. 'So it is,' he said softly, his hard mouth curling. 'And very charming, too.'

  The kiss was light and teasing, a kiss for a child, and she pulled away with a racing heart and a sense of danger.

  Gideon took her arm, his hand curling r
ound it possessively. 'Where shall we walk? There ought to be a wood,' he said, still teasing.

  They walked along the cliff paths to Spanish Headland and stood in silence staring out into the tumultuous seas, hearing the wind whip flailingly across the tops of the waves and churn them into white foam.

  'Real Wagner weather,' Gideon commented.

  On the way back to the cottage he complained of the cold and slid one of his hands inside her muff. 'What warm little fingers,' he said as he found them. Marina felt his index finger stroking her palm and a shiver ran down her back.

  Grandie had made coffee, and Gideon drank it gratefully, shivering. When his hands had warmed up he played to them, and now Marina could hear what Grandie had meant. In the concert hall the brilliance of the finish had obscured it for her, but now she heard the polished hardness overlaying the music and she was disturbed. It revealed the man, she thought, watching him.

  Gideon swung to look at her in the little silence that followed. She looked at him with wide, dis­tressed eyes and saw a frown pull his black brows together.

  He searched her face and the frown deepened. Rising, he gestured. 'Now you,' he said with a terse parting of his mouth.

  Marina sat down and stared at the trees beyond the window. For a few moments she did not touch the keys. She breathed quietly, thinking. Gideon made an abrupt movement and Grandie put a hand on his arm. The black head swung and Gideon looked at him. Grandie shook his head.

  Marina played, aware at one level of her mind of the many threads of technique which she was holding at the back of her head, and at another level aware of what the music needed, allowing herself to become the reed through which the wind blew, her body flowing into the piano as though it were part of it, an extension of it. Submerged in the music, she had no personality, no claims to identity. All her technique was used merely to free the music and let it exist. Marina did not exist.

  When the notes fell into silence she sat with her hands in her lap, drained, still empty of thought, a discarded vessel.

  Grandie got up and kissed her cheek, then went out. Marina did not turn to look at Gideon. She could hear him breathing behind her, but he was not moving. After a long time he got up and went out too without saying a word.

  When she went into the kitchen later he had gone. Grandie never mentioned to her anything Gideon had said, so she did not know whether he had been pleased or indifferent.

  He did not come again that holiday. She returned to college and a few months later Gideon came to give the prizes away at their speech day. Marina was trembling as she went up to receive hers. Gideon handed it to her, his eye skating over her. He gave her a little nod of recognition but made no per­sonal comment. She was surprised afterwards at the sherry party which followed that he came up to her.

  'How's Grandie?' he asked.

  'Very well,' she said politely.

  Gideon looked at her with restless eyes, their movement over her flickering lightly. 'Will you have dinner with me tomorrow?'

  The question sounded almost nervous, which was ridiculous because he was a world-famous artist and she was a shy nineteen-year-old.

  She looked away, flushing. For a few seconds she hesitated, knowing instinctively the dangers of say­ing yes. Her eyes came up to his face.

  Gideon was watching her. Their eyes held. 'Thank you,' she said slowly.

  That first evening he had talked of Grandie and then of music, his taste in it inclining to the music he played best himself, music which gave scope to his power and verve. Marina said very little. She listened with her eyes on his hard face and her features betrayed her inner hesitance about him.

  He did not make any attempt to touch her. He drove her back to the hostel in which she was living and said goodnight, then Marina went in and felt the weariness of someone who has been under strain for a long time. Gideon tired her. When she was with him she felt as though he were an electric light shone directly into her eyes. She was guarding her­self against it, but the tension of keeping up her shield was exhausting.

  Like any international musician he spent a good deal of time out of the country. When he was in England and had some free time, he began to see Marina regularly, but those evenings came so in­frequently that she forgot between each occasion just how much of a strain it was to be with him, and when he came back like a homing pigeon she accepted invitations recklessly.

  She was torn now between a deep attraction and an equally deep fear of him. Marina was ultra­sensitive, yielding by nature, someone who gave of herself, to music or to the people she cared for, but because she was so fragile in identity she had to protect herself. She was learning how easily Gideon could hurt her and how deep that hurt could go.

  They never spoke of his private life, but in musical circles it was open knowledge that he had a long-standing affair with Diana Grenoby.

  It had given Marina a shock to find the woman's face staring at her from an opera programme one evening. She had read the biography under that beautiful, sophisticated face with intent absorption. It had not mentioned Gideon, of course, but it had given Marina an insight into the older woman's life­style.

  Diana Grenoby was a soprano with a lovely voice, and when Marina heard her sing she was inevitably impressed but could sense that Diana had the same polished gloss which made Gideon so impressive and yet so lacking in final satisfaction. There was no music in either of them, she told herself. Music was feeling. The technique had to be there, of course; it Was the foundation of the house. But the tech­nique could not make up for a lack of sensitivity, humanity, and that was what both Gideon and Diana Grenoby revealed in their performances. It was why Diana, although the owner of a beautiful voice and a dazzling beauty, had never become a really great singer.

  Gossip columns occasionally gave Marina a glimpse of Gideon's relations with Diana. He was seen with her from time to time and although the newspapers were discreetly veiled about their re­lationship, Marina's friends at the college filled in the bare details for her without ever realising that she was personally involved.

  'There've been other women,' one girl said, yawning. Marina had never hinted to them that she knew Gideon personally. To them it was all fas­cinating gossip about a star they admired. 'But she's lasted the longest. Not surprising—she's a very sexy lady, they say.'

  Marina had said nothing, but winced.

  Marina was working absorbedly at the college, most of her waking hours spent in learning, practis­ing, untired of constant repetition and the need to be as close to perfection as one could. When she was not with Gideon she shut him out of her mind. He

  was an unresolved problem. She had not permitted herself to admit just how much of a problem he was, but as the months passed and she saw more and more of him, the problem grew.

  She knew he was still seeing Diana Grenoby, but they had never mentioned that name. Gideon was keeping his evenings with Marina on a level which excluded any necessity to admit or deny commit­ment. He never kissed her. He never touched her. They talked and listened to music, they saw films or had dinner, they walked in the London parks and went to the theatre. It was a friendship, nothing more, and had Gideon been a boy of her own age Marina would have felt no qualms.

  Gideon, though, was both much older and far more experienced. He never took her to his London flat. Their meetings always took place on public ground, a safe venue where they were never really alone.

  One evening at the end of the following autumn she was at the opera when she saw Gideon in the stalls with Diana. The two of them were talking animatedly, laughing, and Marina saw the physical intimacy between them even more sharply than she had the first time she saw them together.

  It drove a thorn into her. She sat with the music assaulting her ears and wanted to cry. I love him, she thought, watching that black head in the dark auditorium.

  She did not sleep that night. She lay awake and faced the problem that had haunted her for months. Her relationship with Gideon was based on shifting sand.
It could only hurt her. Whatever he wanted from her could never be enough. She had to end it before she got hurt even more.

  He rang two days later, and she gently regretted that she couldn't see him during the week he was to be in London. 'I'm booked every day,' she told him.

  Gideon sounded curt. 'I see. Well, next time I come back.'

  'That would.be nice,' she returned without over- enthusiasm.

  He rang off and she cried, but her working life had taught her to protect herself against outside things that could destroy her concentration and she turned those lessons to good use. Gideon flew round the world playing in various capitals and while he was away Marina finally accepted her first date with someone of her own age.

  He was a violinist at the college, a thin sensitive boy a year older than herself. They had known each other since her first day at the college and Paul had often invited her out, but she had politely made excuses. Now she agreed and began to date him once a week. They got free tickets to recitals and com­petitions, discussed music avidly, endlessly. Marina was often with him at the college since they worked in the same groups. She enjoyed his company. They were careful with each other, making progress slowly, neither wishing to hurry into a relationship from which they could not draw back.

  When Gideon got back he rang her. They had not seen each other or spoken for three months. She spent some time congratulating him on the success of his tour. 'I read a lot of rave notices. You must be very pleased.'

  'Will you have dinner with me tonight?' he asked when she had run out of things to say.

  'Oh, dear, I would have loved to,' she said, her voice a little too careful. 'But I have a date, I'm afraid.'