by Adam Thorpe
He sounded excited.
‘Guess what, Jack?’
‘What?’
‘I’ve broken my bloody finger.’
‘That is not good, Howard.’
He meant it, too. Howard explained that he had been shaking out a tablecloth when his finger hit the wall. Jack couldn’t see it.
‘Where were you shaking it?’
‘A friend’s house. In his very nice garden. That’s immaterial. The Japanese tour is off. At least for me. I’m gutted. And my lessons. I’m going to have to give one-handed lessons.’
‘Oo-er.’
‘It’s in a splint, it’s a compound fracture of the upper flange, thanks for asking. At least a month.’
‘A nice word, flange.’
Howard needed consoling. He also needed someone to accompany a student of his who was playing Schumann’s Märchenbilder for her audition at the Royal College and this was her last lesson.
‘When for, Howard?’
‘Five o’clock today. Per favore.’
‘I’ve a meeting on a matter of great local importance.’
‘Send Milly.’
‘You know Milly works. She gets back at seven every day, knackered from trying to sell composting toilets and photovoltaic panels to people who take weekend breaks in Australia.’
‘Why does she work so hard, Jack? I work hard because I need the cash. She’s a living cash machine –’
‘Howard, do you want me to come over or not? Right now I’m teaching.’
‘You ar-re notta jest a gee-nius,’ said Howard, in a cod accent meant to be Italian, ‘you ar-re smelling of the r-roses.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Spot on. I’ve noted that down in case you’ve forgotten it by tomorrow.’
The Thai student at the piano was staring at him on the phone with an intense, smiling, patient look. They had been working on serial technique and its use of chromatic texture, and the loose paper on the desk was covered in scribbled numbers and arrows, like a chemical formula. He wondered, as he sat down again next to her, whether her brimming enthusiasm indicated that she fancied him, or was merely how Thais were, a kind of politesse. When he and Milly were considering adoption, Thailand was one of the possibilities. They were too old now (over forty), to go through the official channels, so they’d spent a long time poring over the atlas before consulting an agency. There were so many dirt-poor or conflict-riven countries to choose from. Because of her work with responsibly harvested timber suppliers, she had a lot of contacts with Thailand. And they both felt that Thais were nice and polite and friendly, like the Vietnamese. It was like choosing curtains. A moment came, last spring, when they revolted against it.
‘We’ll come back to it,’ said Milly. ‘It doesn’t have to be Thailand. Maybe we should go for somewhere with much worse problems. Burkina Faso. Mali. Niger, where they’ve got kids coming out of their ears.’
‘A disabled mite with leprosy or something, abandoned in a sewer in Somalia,’ said Jack, half jokingly.
‘You said it,’ said Milly.
‘Or we could just get a St Bernard,’ Jack went on, keeping it light.
‘That’s not very funny.’
‘No. Actually, seriously, maybe a dog would be a good idea. The Johnsons were broken into last week.’
‘Not until we move to the country,’ said Milly, who knew all about dogs and their snail-trails of saliva and their stinking wet coats. Her parents’ present pair of golden retrievers burrowed into your groin as though they’d lost a rubber ball in there.
And then she started crying, quite unexpectedly. It was the memory of Max and the thought that she’d be forty-two soon and the move to the country was predicated on small legs pattering over the lawns. Her best friend, Samantha Carlisle, had started the menopause at forty-three. But Sammy had five girls and a large estate in Devon, farmed organically.
The truth is, Milly felt useless, compared to her parents and – this was her and Jack’s secret – almost everyone else. Her older brother, Philip, would inherit the Hall, as every older brother had done since 1105 (with the odd exception, like a kink in the rope, that the family ignored). So she threw herself into her work, trying to persuade nasty little men with goatee beards in places like Basingstoke to be environmentally responsible when they did their office makeover. She also offered feng shui as a complement, having taken a part-time course. But feng shui was already losing its allure, having signally failed to improve, in any detectable, accountant-friendly way, either office relations or profits. It was all very draining. She was increasingly left with minor nursery-school conversions and corporate executives who fancied a wooden house smelling of sap with built-in sauna. Yet she was always reading about green design being an expanding sector. She still had hopes for the world: that it could be saved. Jack, who’d given up this idea long ago, admired her for it. Truly admired her.
Yeh was waiting. Jack had thought about Milly crying that time, and many other times, and felt depressed.
‘OK now, Yeh, play the Schoenberg as if it’s a girl crying for her lover.’
Yeh collapsed into laughter, her hand over her mouth, her frameless spectacles almost falling off her delicate nose. Jack wondered if the touch of her shoulder on his was deliberate. She reminded him of his long-ago Chinese girlfriend. He wondered, as Yeh played the late Schoenberg as if it was his early Verklärte Nacht, whether his lost son would have been followed by a daughter, and whether that daughter would have liked the piano as much as Yeh liked it. He corrected Yeh a couple of times and then played it himself, trying to invert the piece so that the notes became silences and the silences became notes, at least in his head.
‘That’s so beautiful,’ she said, touching his shoulder again with hers. She didn’t seem anxious any more. Maybe her anxiety was to do with him.
‘Yeh, when you get out into that nasty world of music professionals, never say that to anyone superior to you in position or talent. They’ll think you’re saying, “I wish I could play like that.”’
‘I wish I could.’
‘You play the way you do, I play the way I do. But what do you want to be, a composer or an interpreter?’
‘Both. To compose and play for my lover.’
She was looking straight in his eyes. He looked away, flicking his bulky lock off his eyebrows.
‘OK, that’s it, Yeh. Same time next week. The Chopin nocturne.’
All he’d had to think of was Milly, crying that time and many other times.
There was what sounded like a tarantella being played on a fiddle as Howard opened the door to his flat. His finger was in a splint and neatly bound.
‘Hear it?’
‘That’s not Schumann.’
‘The smallest size viola. Balkan dance exercise.’
‘The prodigy?’
‘It’s not the stereo,’ Howard laughed.
The lively fiddle-playing came to an end. They went through to the living room, where a small boy stood in a white collared shirt and corduroy shorts. He had jet-black hair that flopped across his brow and was holding a small viola that still looked too large.
‘This is Jaan,’ said Howard. ‘My little prodigy. We’re almost finished.’
‘Hi, Jaan. I’m Jack. Short for John. Well, it’s not really shorter, is it? I guess Jaan might mean John, too. We’ve probably got the same name. We seem to have the same hairstyle, at any rate.’
The boy nodded but didn’t say anything. He had a very serious face. Jack knew he had a tendency to gabble, with kids.
The piano took up 60 per cent of the room. It was a Bechstein salon grand. The carpet was white and fluffy, like the coat of the Dulux dog, and the piano’s paws were hidden in it. Jack liked the all-whiteness of Howard’s apartment, with the pottery (that Howard claimed was Sumerian, but Jack couldn’t believe that) a scriptural buff on the white shelves. The books were mostly in the hallway, which made it cramped. All Howard’s money had gone into this place, which looked out on Bolton Gardens –
the end furthest from Earls Court Road. The kitchen and the two small bedrooms and Howard’s tiny study in the box room were immaculate. The guest bedroom had a double bed on which, Jack recalled, Howard would perch while Jack tried to read before sleep (this was when he was over in London from The Hague: Howard’s flat was very convenient).
‘I feel very close to you, Jack,’ Howard would say, in his silken dressing gown.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I think we could grow even closer.’
‘Probably.’
‘I don’t feel we’re close enough.’
‘No, I think it’s very special as it is, our friendship.’
‘But it could be an awful lot closer. There’s a missing element, Jack.’
‘I think it’s just fine as it is.’
Howard never tried it on in any other way; no fumbling, no overt sexual innuendo. Eventually, he gave up.
The boy had a limp, a slight one. Jack tried not to notice but Jaan’s little body rolled slightly from side to side as Howard took him into the kitchen to choose scores together on the table.
Jack sat at the piano and ran his fingers over the keys. The touch was tighter than his own: it didn’t quite play itself in the same way. And it was due for a tuning, from the sound of its lower register. Because Jaan, the little limping boy from Estonia, was there, he played Pärt’s Für Alina, which was a piece that left plenty of space for improvisation as long as you obeyed the composer’s instruction: Calm, exalted, listening to one’s inner self. Jack had played this piece for hours, in the past, before it became well known. He could see the boy through the open door of the kitchen, but the boy didn’t look up. He had a sweet, round face. Then he and Howard came back in and Jack came to a stop, gently muting the sustained note.
‘You’re from Estonia? I love Estonia,’ he said to Jaan.
The boy’s mouth puckered at one corner. It might have meant anything. It might have been a smile.
Howard said: ‘Jaan, show my friend what you can do. Jack’s a famous composer.’
‘Oh, so famous I am, I am,’ Jack said, his own voice tinny in his head.
‘Play him the Mozart, Jaan.’
The boy immediately tucked the viola under his chin and, with a five-yard stare straight ahead at the piano leg, played a little Mozart sonata. Jack had never seen a kid playing so fiercely, as if he was fighting some counter-current, and yet somehow the notes came out with relative delicacy.
Jack clapped, pulling an impressed face. ‘Pretty darn good,’ he said. ‘A very nice tone.’
The sound was, of course, childlike on the little viola, and the playing without subtlety, but for a five-year-old with less than a year’s experience, the performance was fairly remarkable.
‘What do you like about the viola?’ he asked. He was thinking of Kaja in the concert in Tallinn, and how he’d never quite been able to get a bead on the whole thing, which had gone mostly shadowy except in his dreams.
The child shrugged. So far, he had not said a word to Jack. Anyway, it was a stupid question. Howard was answering his mobile, which had vibrated in his pocket at the end of the Mozart.
‘Your mum’s on her way,’ he announced to the boy. ‘She’s got held up on the bus. The traffic’s awful since the … erm …’ He checked himself and turned to Jack. ‘So, what do you think, Mr Famous Composer? Pretty ace, huh?’
‘Pretty impressive.’ He chewed his lip a little and then he said, ‘Do you know, Jaan, one of my favourite composers is Estonian? Arvo Pärt?’
The boy was avoiding his eyes and frowning, as if thinking hard.
‘Howard,’ he said, ‘I need the toilet?’
‘Of course, guv’nor. Don’t forget to say hello to Cliff.’
Howard kept a goldfish called Cliff in a tank in the toilet window. He’d won Cliff in a funfair nearly ten years ago and the tank water was an opaque green. When the boy was out of the room, Jack asked Howard about the limp.
‘Club foot. He’s had the works, plaster and braces, vast improvement, but that’s as good as it’ll get.’
‘Oh dear. Poor kid.’
‘He copes.’
‘Seems to.’ To change the subject, he asked Howard who was going to stand in for him in the Dumka Quartet.
‘Henninge Landaas,’ Howard replied, flopping onto the sofa.
‘That’s OK, then.’
‘I was looking forward to Japan. They say the muscle action might not be the same. I don’t even have brittle bones.’
‘That’s woeful. Did I tell you about the woman we saw being run over by a bus?’
The doorbell chimed and Howard levered himself up, wrinkling his hawk nose.
‘That’ll be the neurotic mother,’ he said, without lowering his voice. ‘The harassed Kaja K.’
‘Kaja?’
Jack’s heart stopped, then reluctantly got going again with a kind of mammalian reluctance, a more-than-my-job’s-worth sort of lunge. He got off the piano stool, then got back on it again, too unsteady to stand. He had to escape, but the only way was into the box room. Howard was opening the door in the hallway, out of sight beyond the arch and the side of the bookcase. The boy came back into the room: he was Estonian and his hair was as black as Jack’s used to be (it was now a false black-with-a-hint-of-henna, having lurched into a streaky grey two years ago), with the same bulky Hitler-flop of hair. He avoided Jack’s eyes again and began putting away his viola. Jack did not know what to do. The voices in the little hallway became faces. One of them was Howard’s, the other a young woman’s that Jack had never seen before. He felt stupid. Of course Kaja was a common name in those parts, like Sarah or Helen here. These coincidences only happened in TV dramas and trash novels. London was full of Baltic women, and Russians, and Poles. She seemed very young to be the boy’s mother. She was carrying a full-size viola case.
‘This is Jack Middleton,’ said Howard. ‘The composer.’
‘Hi,’ said the young woman.
‘Hi, Kaja,’ said Jack. The name in his mouth was oddly dulled, like a sweet turned into a pebble.
‘I’m Ffiona,’ said the woman, frowning. ‘With two fs. Like in toffee.’
‘Fortissimo,’ said Jack, surprised.
Howard laughed. ‘A muddle, Ffiona. I thought it was Kaja at the door, the mother of this little boy. But you were in fact Ffiona with two fs, five minutes early.’
‘For once,’ Ffiona said.
‘Jack’s going to accompany us,’ said Howard. ‘We’re very blessed.’
‘Thank you, Padre,’ said Jack. ‘Hymn 142.’
Ffiona seemed either very serious or secretly nervous. She was dark-haired and attractive, with a rather square jaw and firm mouth – and was not much more, Jack now realised, than eighteen or nineteen. Her black eyebrows made her look permanently quizzical. The little boy sat on the sofa next to his rather battered leather viola case, his feet dangling off the edge. Jack sat at the piano, smiling his encouragement, and shook his fingers to loosen them. The boy did not smile back. Ffiona and he were a pair, Jack thought. Maybe they were counterpointing the ever-ebullient Howard. Ffiona asked Jack if he needed the music and Jack said, rather contritely, that it might be useful to have the Schumann in front of him.
She played superbly but without a great deal of soul, more earnest than musical. She needed to smile.
‘Thank you, Ffiona,’ he said.
Howard said that it was faultless apart from a few minor points he ran through quickly as Ffiona nodded.
‘Above all, you are going to loosen up for the audition. That is an order. Start with the face. If you relax your face, everything else will follow. Compris?’
Ffiona’s firm mouth flickered a smile. Jack felt it would be an interesting mouth to kiss, little pecks to soften it up followed by a long, lingering smacker. Howard’s phone went off in his pocket and he answered it impatiently.
‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Keep calm. I’ll tell him. He’s quite safe with me.’ He turned to the boy and tol
d him that his mother was still on her way but that the bus was stuck in a traffic jam.
‘The traffic’s really mental since the bombs,’ said Ffiona.
The boy’s ears pricked up. Howard asked him if he would like a glass of guava juice. The boy said, ‘Yes, please.’
Ffiona had to leave and they all wished her luck.
‘She never thanked you, did she?’ said Howard, in the kitchen. ‘I noticed that. Whereas our little Jaan here is extremely well brought up, not being English. Shall I mash, as we say in Derbyshire? “Make tea”, to the likes of you. I made a strawberry-jam sponge cake yesterday and it actually rose.’
‘Just a swift one, thanks. Where’s she coming from? The mum?’
‘Bounds Green.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Exactly. Right on the North Circular, Enfield way. Land of the zombies. Piccadilly Line, but she won’t now take the Tube.’
‘What’s her surname?’
‘Krohn.’ Howard spelt it. ‘Why?’
‘Nothing.’He didn’t recognise the name. He felt relieved but somehow reduced. ‘That’s a long way, Bounds Green.’
Jaan was studying the table, where the glass of guava juice threw an interesting reflection. Howard began to pour the tea. His strawberry sponge cake was ridiculous, like a tall carnival hat sawn in two when the head was still in, but it tasted good.
‘Well, I’m much sought after as a teacher, for some reason,’ said Howard, catching the drops off the teapot’s spout with a kitchen wipe. ‘Much sought after. Like a character property with a view, orig feats and FCH.’
Jack felt a twinge of jealousy, even though he had no intention of teaching beyond the minimum. Howard worked hard, he needed the money. Jack would have liked to have needed the money. Maybe she had changed her name, married.
‘Milly thriving? The ecology thing?’
‘That reminds me, we’re going out at seven thirty. Wedding anniversary.’
‘Serious?’
‘Very serious.’
‘Ruby or diamond?’
‘Melamine, I should think. Twelve years.’
‘Oh, that’s bound to be something semi-precious, like jasper. Or sapphire. Twelve years! Unbelievable. Look, you two have done darn well, in the circs,’ Howard added, his eyes filming. ‘I’m sure something’ll happen, anyway, when you least expect it.’