by Ian Mcewan
He was dropped right by the terminal building. As he was getting out of the back seat and saying his goodbyes, he noticed that the policeman in the driver’s seat was the very man he had picked out of the line the second time. But neither Clive nor the driver found it necessary to comment on the fact as they shook hands.
iv
The flight was two hours late into Schiphol airport. Clive took the train to Centraal Station and from there set off on foot for his hotel in the soft gray afternoon light. While he was crossing his first bridge, it came back to him what a calm and civilized city Amsterdam was. He took a wide detour westward in order to stroll along Brouwersgracht. His suitcase, after all, was very light. So consoling, to have a body of water down the middle of a street. Such a tolerant, openminded, grown-up sort of place: the beautiful brick and carved timber warehouses converted into tasteful apartments, the modest Van Gogh bridges, the understated street furniture, the intelligent, unstuffy-looking Dutch on their bikes with their level-headed children sitting behind. Even the shopkeepers looked like professors, the street sweepers like jazz musicians. There was never a city more rationally ordered. As he walked along, he thought about Vernon, and the symphony. Was the work ruined, or simply flawed? Perhaps not flawed so much as sullied, and in ways that only he could understand. Ruinously cheated of its greatest moment. He dreaded the premiere. He could tell himself now, in all tortuous sincerity, that in making his various arrangements on Vernon’s behalf, he, Clive, was doing no more than honoring his word. That Vernon should want a reconciliation and should therefore want to come to Amsterdam was surely more than a coincidence or a neat convenience. Somewhere in his blackened, unbalanced heart he had accepted his fate. He was delivering himself up to Clive.
These reflections brought Clive at last to his hotel, where he learned that the reception tonight would be at seven-thirty. From his room he called his contact, the good doctor, to discuss arrangements and, for one last time, the symptoms: unpredictable, bizarre, and extremely antisocial behavior, a complete loss of reason. Destructive tendencies, delusions of omnipotence. A disintegrated personality. The matter of premedication was discussed. How should it be administered? A glass of champagne was suggested, which seemed to Clive to strike the appropriate festive note.
There were still two hours of rehearsal, so, having left the money in an envelope at reception, Clive had the doorman wave down a taxi for him outside the hotel and within a few minutes was at the artists’ entrance round the side of the Concertgebouw. As he passed the porter and pushed open the swinging doors that led to the stairs, the sound of the orchestra reached him. The final movement. It was bound to be. As he went up, he was already correcting the passage; it was the french horns we should have been hearing now, not the clarinets, and the tympani markings were piano. This is my music. It was as though hunting horns were calling him, calling him back to himself. How could he have forgotten? He quickened his stride. He could hear what he had written. He was walking toward a representation of himself. All those nights alone. The hateful press. Allen Crags. Why had he been wasting time all afternoon, why had he been delaying the moment? It was an effort to stop himself running down the curving corridor that led around the auditorium. He pushed open a door and paused.
He had arrived, as he had intended, in the stalls above and behind the orchestra, behind the percussionists, in fact. The musicians could not see him, but he was right in view of the conductor. Giulio Bo’s eyes, however, were closed. He was standing on tiptoe, craning forward, his left arm extended toward the orchestra, and with splayed, trembling fingers was gently lifting into being the muted trombone that now delivered, sweetly, wisely, conspiratorially, the first full statement of the melody, the “Nessun dorma” of the century’s end, the melody Clive had hummed to the detectives yesterday and for which he had been prepared to sacrifice an anonymous rambler. And rightly. As the notes swelled, as the whole string section positioned their bows to breathe the first sustaining whispers of their sinuous sliding harmonies, Clive slipped quietly into a seat and felt himself tumbling into a kind of swoon. Now the textures were multiplying as more instruments were drawn into the trombone’s conspiracy, and dissonance was spreading like a contagion, and little hard splinters, the variations that would lead nowhere, were tossed up like sparks, which sometimes collided to produce the earliest intimations of the racing wall of sound, the tsunami, that now began to rise up and soon would obliterate everything in its path before destroying itself on the bedrock of the tonic key. But before this could happen the conductor rapped his baton on his desk, and the orchestra raggedly and reluctantly subsided. Bo waited for the very last instrument to fall silent; then he lifted both hands in Clive’s direction and called.
“Maestro, welcome!”
The head of every member of the British Symphony Orchestra turned as Clive got to his feet. As he descended to the stage there was a clatter of bows against music stands. A trumpet sounded a witty four-note quotation from the D major concerto—Clive’s, not Haydn’s. Ah, to be in continental Europe and be maestro! What balm. He embraced Giulio, shook the hand of the concertmaster, acknowledged the musicians with a smile, a little bow, and hands half raised in modest surrender, then turned back to the conductor to murmur in his ear. Clive wouldn’t address the orchestra today about the piece. He would do it in the morning, when everyone was fresh. For the moment he was happy to sit back and listen. He added his note about the clarinet and french horns and the tympani’s piano.
“Yes, yes,” Giulio said quickly. “I’ve seen it.”
As Clive returned to his seat, he noticed how solemn the faces of the musicians were. They had been working hard all day. The reception at the hotel would surely lift their spirits. The rehearsal continued, with Bo refining the passage he had just heard, listening to different sections of the orchestra independently and asking for adjustments in, among other things, the legato markings. From where he sat, Clive tried to prevent his attention from being drawn into technical detail. For now, it was the music, the wondrous transformation of thought into sound. He hunched forward, eyes closed, concentrating on each fragment that Bo permitted. Sometimes Clive worked so hard on a piece that he could lose sight of his ultimate purpose—to create this pleasure at once so sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating air this nonlanguage whose meanings were forever just beyond reach, suspended tantalizingly at a point where emotion and intellect fused. Certain sequences of notes reminded him of nothing more than the recent effort to write them. Bo was now working on the next passage, not quite a diminuendo so much as a shrinking away, and the music conjured for Clive the disorder of his studio in the dawn light and the suspicions he had had about himself and hardly dared frame. Greatness. Was he an idiot to have thought this way? Surely there had to be one first single moment of self-recognition, and surely it would always seem absurd.
Now it was the trombone again and a tangled, half-suppressed crescendo that erupted at last into the melody’s final statement, a blaring, carnivalesque tutti. But fatally unvaried. Clive put his face into his hands. He was right to have worried. It was ruined goods. Before he had left for Manchester, he had let the pages go as they were. There was no choice. Now he could not remember the exquisite change he had been about to make. This should have been the symphony’s moment of triumphant assertion, the gathering up of all that was joyously human before the destruction to come. But presented like this, as a simple fortissimo repetition, it was literal-minded bombast, it was bathos; less than that, it was a void: one that only revenge could fill.
Because rehearsal time was running out, Bo let the orchestra play on to the end. Clive slumped in his seat. It all sounded different to him now. The theme was disintegrating into the tidal wave of dissonance and was gathering in volume, but it sounded quite absurd, like twenty orchestras tuning to an A. It was not dissonant at all. Practically every instrument was playing the same note. It was a drone. It was a giant bagpipe in need of repair. He could only hear the A,
tossed from one instrument, one section, to another. Suddenly Clive’s gift of perfect pitch was an affliction. That A was drilling through his head. He wanted to run from the auditorium, but he was right in Giulio’s sight line, and the repercussions of leaving his own rehearsal minutes before the end were unthinkable. So he slumped further into his seat and buried his face in an attitude of profound concentration and suffered right through to the final four-bar silence.
It was agreed that Clive would travel back to the hotel in the conductor’s Rolls, which was waiting by the artists’ entrance. But Bo was caught up in orchestra business, so Clive had a few minutes to himself in the darkness outside the Concertgebouw. He walked through the crowds on Van Baerlestraat. People were already beginning to arrive for the evening’s concert. Schubert. (Hadn’t the world heard enough from syphilitic Schubert?) He stood on a street corner and breathed the mild Amsterdam air which always seemed to taste faintly of cigar smoke and ketchup. He knew his own score well enough, and how many As were there and how that section really sounded. He had just experienced an auditory hallucination, an illusion—or a disillusion. The absence of the variation had wrecked his masterpiece, and he was clearer than ever now, if such a thing were possible, about the plans he had made. It was no longer fury that drove him, or hatred or disgust, or the necessity of honoring his word. What he was about to do was contractually right, it had the amoral inevitability of pure geometry, and he didn’t feel a thing.
In the car Bo took him through the day’s work, the many sections that seemed to play straight from the page and the one or two that would have to be picked apart tomorrow. Despite his awareness of its imperfections, Clive wanted the great conductor to bless his symphony with a lofty compliment and angled a question accordingly: “Do you think the whole piece is hanging together well? Structurally, I mean.”
Bo leaned forward to slide shut the glass that separated them from his chauffeur.
“Is fine, everything is fine. But between you and me …” He lowered his voice. “I think the second oboe, the young girl, is very beautiful but the playing is not perfect. Fortunately, you have written nothing difficult for her. Very beautiful. Tonight she will have dinner with me.”
For the rest of the short journey Bo reminisced about the BSO’s European tour, which was almost at an end, and Clive recalled the last occasion the two of them had worked together, in Prague on a revival of the Symphonic Dervishes.
“Ah yes,” Bo exclaimed as the car stopped outside the hotel and the door was held open for him. “I remember it. A magnificent piece of work! The inventiveness of youth, so hard to recapture, eh, maestro?”
They parted company in the lobby, Bo to make a quick appearance at the reception, Clive to collect an envelope from the desk. He was informed that Vernon had arrived half an hour ago and had gone to a meeting. The drinks party for orchestra, friends, and press was being held in a long chandeliered gallery at the rear of the hotel. A waiter was standing by the door with a tray, from which Clive took a glass for Vernon and one for himself. Then he retreated to a deserted corner, where he settled on a cushioned window seat to read the doctor’s instructions and open a sachet of white powder. From time to time he glanced toward the door. When Vernon had phoned earlier in the week to apologize for setting the police on him—I was an idiot, pressure of work, nightmare week, and so on—and especially when he had proposed coming to Amsterdam to seal the reconciliation, saying he had business there anyway, Clive had been plausibly gracious in reply, but his hands had been shaking when he put down the phone. They were shaking now as he tipped the powder into Vernon’s champagne, which effervesced briefly, then subsided. With his little finger Clive wiped away the grayish scum that had collected round the rim of the glass. Then he stood and took a glass in each hand. Vernon’s in the right, his own in the left. Important to remember that. Vernon was right. Even though he was wrong.
Only one problem now preoccupied Clive as he made his way through the cocktail roar of musicians, arts administrators, and critics: how to persuade Vernon to take this drink before the doctor came. To take this drink rather than another. Best, perhaps, to intercept him by the door, before he reached for one from the tray. Champagne slopped over Clive’s wrists as he edged around the loud brass section, and he had to go a long way back up the gallery to avoid getting close to the basses, who already seemed drunk, in competition with the tympani. At last he attained the tempered sodality of the violins, who had permitted flutes and piccolo to join them. There were more women here to exert a tranquilizing effect. They stood about in softly trilling duets and trios, and the air was pleasantly heavy with their perfume. To one side three men were discussing Flaubert in whispers. Clive found an unoccupied patch of carpet from which he had a clear view of the high double doors that gave onto the lobby. Sooner or later someone was going to come and talk to him. Sooner. It was that little shit Paul Lanark, the critic who had pronounced Clive the thinking man’s Gorecki, then later publicly recanted: Gorecki was the thinking man’s Linley. It was a wonder he had the nerve to approach.
“Ah, Linley. Is one of those for me?”
“No. And kindly bugger off.”
He would have been happy to give Lanark the drink in his right hand. Clive half turned away, but the critic was drunk and looking to have fun.
“I’ve been hearing about your latest. Is it really called the Millennial Symphony?”
“No. The press called it that,” Clive said stiffly.
“I’ve been hearing all about it. They say you’ve ripped off Beethoven something rotten.”
“Go away.”
“I suppose you’d call it sampling. Or postmodern quotation. But aren’t you meant to be premodern?”
“If you don’t go away I shall smack your stupid face.”
“Then you’d better give me one of those to free up a hand.”
As Clive was looking round for somewhere to put down the drinks, he saw Vernon coming toward him with a big smile. Unfortunately, he had two full glasses of his own.
“Clive!”
“Vernon!”
“Ah.” Lanark mimicked adulation. “The Flea itself.”
“Look,” Clive said. “I had a drink all ready for you.”
“And I got one for you.”
“Well …”
They each presented a glass to Lanark. Then Vernon offered a glass to Clive, and Clive gave his to Vernon.
“Cheers!”
Vernon gave Clive a nod and a meaningful look and then turned to Lanark.
“I recently saw your name on a list of some very distinguished people. Judges, chief constables, top business people, government ministers …”
Lanark flushed with pleasure. “All this stuff about a knighthood is complete nonsense.”
“It’s certain to be. This concerns a children’s home in Wales. Top-notch pedophile ring. You were videoed going in and out half a dozen times. We were thinking of running a piece before I got bounced, but I’m sure someone else will pick it up.”
For at least ten seconds Lanark stood erect and motionless, with military dignity, elbows tucked in at his sides, champagnes held out before him, and a remote grin frozen on his lips. The warning signs were a certain bulge and glaze in the eye and an upward rippling movement in his throat, a reverse peristalsis.
“Watch out!” Vernon cried. “Get back!”
They just managed to leap clear of the arced contents of Lanark’s stomach. The gallery was suddenly silent. Then, with an extended, falling glissando of disgust, the whole string section, plus flutes and piccolo, surged toward the brass, leaving the music critic and his deed—an early evening frites and mayonnaise on Oude Hoogstraat—illuminated under a lonely chandelier. Clive and Vernon were borne away with the crowd, and as they drew level with the door were able to extricate themselves and step into the calm of the lobby. They settled themselves on a banquette and continued sipping their champagne.
“Better than hitting him,” Clive said. “Was any
of it true?”
“I didn’t used to think so.”
“Cheers again.”
“Cheers. And look, I meant what I said. I really am sorry about sending the police round to you. It was appalling behavior. Unconditional, groveling apologies.”
“Don’t mention it again. I’m terribly sorry about your job and all that business. You really were the best.”
“Let’s shake on it, then. Friends.”
“Friends.”
Vernon emptied his glass, yawned, and stood. “Well, look, if we’re having supper together, I might take a short nap. I’m feeling quite whacked.”
“You’ve had a heavy week. I think I’ll take a bath. See you down here in about an hour?”
“Fine.”
Clive watched Vernon slouch away to collect his key from the desk. Standing at the foot of the grand double staircase were a man and a woman who met Clive’s gaze and nodded. A moment later they followed Vernon up the stairs and Clive took a couple of turns around the lobby. Then he collected his own key and went to his room.
Minutes later he was standing in the bathroom barefoot but otherwise fully clothed, bending over the tub, trying to manipulate the shimmering gold-plated mechanism that stopped the plug hole. It needed to be simultaneously lifted and turned, and he didn’t seem to have the knack. Meanwhile, the heated marble floor was communicating through the soles of his feet a reminder of sensuous fatigue. White nights in South Ken, mayhem in the police station, accolades in the Concertgebouw; he’d had a heavy week too. A short nap, then, before his bath. Back in the bedroom he floated free of his trousers, loosened his shirt, and with a moan of pleasure abandoned himself to the giant bed. The gold satin bedspread caressed his thighs, and he experienced an ecstasy of exhausted surrender. Everything was good. Soon he would be in New York to see Susie Marcellan, and that forgotten, buttoned-down part of him would flourish again. Lying here in this glorious silkiness—even the air in this expensive room was silky—he would have been writhing in pleasurable anticipation if he could have been bothered to move his legs. Perhaps if he put his mind to it, if he could stop thinking about work for a week, he could bring himself to fall in love with Susie. She was a good sort, straight down the line, she was a trouper, she’d stick by him. At the thought, he was overcome by a sudden deep affection for himself as just the sort of person one should stick by, and he felt a tear run down his cheekbone and tickle his ear. He couldn’t quite be troubled to wipe it away. And no need, for walking across the room toward him now was Molly, Molly Lane! And some fellow in tow. Her pert little mouth, the big black eyes, and a new haircut—a bob—seemed just right. What a wonderful woman.