Parallax View (8 page)

She took a light lunch alone, still triumphant at trapping Ventori at his games. Later, she settled at the Steinway in the practice suite adjoining her room to work on the Schumann piano concerto she would play in Paris.

Late in the afternoon she was interrupted by a knock at the door: a servant relaying a request from Jonathan that she join him.

Jonathan had moved the piano stool so that he could sit staring out across the gardens. His posture spoke of depression.

“You asked me to come,” said Mae, crossing the room. He had another hour of her time to use today, but that did not mean she had to make it easy for him.

He made no response. He stared at his hands, clasped between his knees. Mae positioned herself on the arm of a chair, so that she was in his line of vision. “Do you want me to play again?”

He looked up then, desolation in his eyes. All his earlier arrogance had fled. “I couldn’t work,” he said. “When I heard you play I was suddenly aware of the sparseness of the piece, the false economies I had used in my haste to produce something. And the solutions were there before me, ready to be plucked from the air. But...”

“But?” Mae could not help but empathise with Jonathan’s wretched state. She knew the desolation creation could bring.

“But... I lost it. It’s gone.”

“It’ll come again,” said Mae. All she could give him were platitudes. “It needs time.”

“You’re sure?” he said, his tone suddenly hostile, accusatory. “You know about these things, do you? I suppose you’re in Ventori’s pocket, just like all the others, aren’t you? You just want me to write. You just want to make money out of me.”

She was taken aback by the sudden swing in his mood. Only a minute earlier he had seemed so vulnerable she had even been willing to forgive him his crudeness of this morning. Most hateful of all was his accusation that she was just like all the others: motivated only by greed. “He pays me, yes,” she said. She kept her face expressionless. Let him think what he liked.

There was a silence then, time for Jonathan to visibly calm himself. Finally, he said, “Please, Mae. Will you tell me what’s happening here?”

“I am a pianist,” she said. “They pay me to play your music for two hours a day. Beyond that I know little.”

Jonathan looked around the room. “I know they watch me,” he said. “And I have some memories of a time before this. I know I was in a hospital once, that I was ill.”

Now Mae was convinced that he was some kind of psychiatric patient. PK Syntronics had discovered an
idiot savant
, someone they thought they could turn into some kind of musical production line. He certainly had a gift. It was just like the Academy, she mused: coaxing talent into full fruition. Only, this chateau in the depths of the Dordogne was a far more pleasant setting than that grim stone complex in Wenzhou.

Jonathan had risen and now he slid open the French windows. Glancing back into the room, he said, “I like to walk. You’ll join me?” There was a hint of his former brashness returning to his tone, to his mannerisms.

Mae shrugged, but stood nonetheless. She hated to admit it but she was intrigued. For the first time since she was a child, she wanted to find out more about another human being.

They walked across the gently sloping lawns, descending towards a neat circular lake. As the chateau diminished behind them, Mae felt pressure lifting from her shoulders. She glanced back at the building, a curious mix of the modern and what Ventori had told her was an eighteenth century manor house, one of the last to be built before the Revolution. The modern rarely blended well with the old, she thought.

It was warm for so late in the afternoon in the early autumn. A cooling breeze blew downy seeds across the surface of the lake.

Jonathan had said nothing since they left his room. Mae looked at him. He no longer seemed depressed. His expression was that of a child, eyes half-closed. Listening, she realised. To the sound of the breeze, of the chattering swallows dipping low across the wind-rilled lake. Perhaps he was genuinely gifted after all, she thought: there could be few people so fascinated by the everyday sounds of nature.

Confirming her thoughts, he said, “Listen. There’s music in everything.” Suddenly he reached out and pinched the lobe of her ear. “Such an under-used organ,” he continued, as she jerked away from his touch. “I sometimes sit here for hours, just listening to the world. Every sound I hear is a gift from the Lord.”

Later, as they reached the far side of the lake, Jonathan said, “Such an illusion of freedom.” He gestured all around. “Open lawns, a lake, forest... But it is all enclosed. I have explored. There is a wall, patrolled by guards and by strange-looking dogs carrying devices strapped to their backs. I am granted the freedom of the chateau, but I am effectively a prisoner.”

“We can leave whenever we choose,” said Mae, uncertainly, recalling Ventori’s words. “The security is to protect us from the world, not to restrain us. It is a fact of life for those with money.”

Jonathan seemed to have lost interest. His moods were so inconstant.

“How did you come to be here?” She was showing curiosity, betraying a weakness.

She waited for him to seize on it, but instead he said, simply, “I honestly do not know.”

“But where were you before? What did you do?” She would know if he had been successful as a composer and, with his clumsy style, he was clearly not a musician.

“Before? It seems that I had another life, very different from this one. But my memory is hazy. What little I can recall seems unreal and contradictory. The only part of my life that is real for me is the present: I am here in this pampered seclusion. Ventori wants me to compose and–” suddenly, violently, he struck his chest “–I feel this desperate need to compose, yet it does not come out in the shapes I carry in my head.”

He turned to her, took her hand, gripping it so hard she could not extract it. “They’re using me, Mae Chang. They want my music and they offer me riches, but my happiness is of no concern to them!”

Mae eased her hand out of his grip. She thought of Anton, of Ventori, of her parents growing fat off her money back in Quxian... of all the two-faced greedy agents, lawyers, promoters and publicists with whom she spent much of her working life. She smiled at Jonathan, said, “I know how you feel.”

She turned away. There was something in his posture, his odd mix of arrogance and vulnerability, that was reaching out to her.

“And you?” asked Jonathan, as they started to head back towards the chateau. “You are a pianist, I know. You have come to learn my music. Where are
you
from?”

She thought of Wenzhou, the Academy. Of how the Chinese authorities had seized on the idea of creating a new generation of world-beating musicians just as they had created a generation of athletes twenty years earlier. She had left Wenzhou at the age of ten, for the Taipei Conservatory and later, the London School of Music.

“Nowhere any more,” she said quietly. Concerts around the world since the age of fourteen, international stardom and acclaim. The sheer, heart-rending
emptiness
of it all.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

They approached the chateau. Jonathan paused outside the drawing room and looked up into the clear blue sky at the fluffing contrail of a long-gone jet. Then he cocked his head, listening intently again.

Mae listened too, and at first she could hear only silence interrupted by the occasional sounds of birds – but then she made out the distant, almost subliminal, drone of traffic.

Jonathan stepped inside, shaking his head. “The world is so strange,” he said.

He stopped by the piano, played a top C five times as if he was ringing a bell. “You will play the sonata again, I think. I feel ready to work.”

He had used up his two hours for today, but Mae resisted the impulse to walk straight past him and out of the door. She sat at the piano, sharing the stool as before, and waited as Jonathan started to scribble on his pad. Twenty minutes later he thrust two sheets of music at her and instructed her to play.

She gathered herself, then studied the changes he had made to the opening sequence of the slower second movement. When she was sure of herself she played, happy that Jonathan remained quiet by her side, his eyes closed and his head dipped, as if in prayer.

He nodded when she had finished, then turned to the next page of manuscript.

They worked through the score minutely, a page or two at a time. At nine o’clock a bell rang for dinner and Mae surfaced with a heady sense of accomplishment. For a mere copyist, Jonathan certainly had an acute critical faculty: he had identified many of the weaknesses Mae had spotted, but he had also made changes that overcame flaws she had failed to detect.

Now, returning to the real world, Mae smiled at Jonathan, aware of the intimacy they had shared for the last few hours.

Jonathan smiled back, then he seized her face in his big hands and forced his mouth onto hers. At first, she was too startled to resist, and his tongue forced itself deep into her mouth, so that she almost retched.

As his hand moved down her body and found one small breast she bit hard.

He cried out, and as he pulled away he fell off the stool they had shared.

Mae forced herself to stay calm as she stood and looked down at him, sprawling on the floor. Slowly, she turned and walked across to the door. She would not let him know that he had scared her, she would not give him that victory.

When she reached her own room she was sick in the basin.

He summoned her late the next afternoon and they worked through until dinner, establishing a routine that was repeated the following day. The events of the first evening went unmentioned, although it was noticeable that Jonathan did not press against her quite so intensely when they sat next to each other at the piano.

She watched Jonathan carefully, ready for any sudden swing in his mood. She had seen behaviour like this in a conductor who had later been exposed as a drug abuser. She remembered hearing somewhere that many of the symptoms of psychiatric patients were a result of the brain-altering drugs they were being treated with, rather than their condition. Perhaps that was the explanation for Jonathan’s shifting moods: a mixture of mental instability and whatever – perhaps innovative – drugs they were using to treat him.

She found herself drawn ever deeper into the mystery of this man and his uncanny gift. Indeed, at the end of the third day she realised that not once had she used the TV in her room, her usual fix – a reminder of the awfulness of the real world. The time with Jonathan was a time apart.

Over the first half of their week together, Mae wondered how she might get closer to Jonathan Graves. It seemed that to know him was impossible, as he hardly knew himself. He was adrift in a world that made little sense to him, his music his only anchor to reality, his only connection – apart from his lust – with Mae. Sometimes, during breaks from their work, Mae ventured tentative questions about his past: she asked about his childhood, asked about the places he had visited, the people he knew. On these occasions he withdrew into himself, losing the animation and enthusiasm of creation and becoming lost, confused.

At the end of her third full day at the Chateau d’Arouet, she left Jonathan’s drawing room early. When she poked her head around the door of the viewing room, she saw a man she did not know. In his white over-suit he looked like a medic.

“I want to see Dr Ventori,” she said.

The man nodded, then spoke into a phone. “He’ll be in the morning room in five minutes,” he told her.

When she entered the morning room – a long, narrow hall in the old part of the building – she saw Ventori standing with his back to her, admiring the view along the drive towards the entrance gates. He turned. “Ah, Ms Chang,” he said. “Might I ask how the work is proceeding?”

He would know already, of course. He was making small talk. Mae struggled to remind herself of how she handled such situations. To her surprise, she realised how far she had let her defences lapse in the last three days.

She shrugged, made her expression blank. “That all depends on what criteria you choose to judge by. You realise, of course, that his composition is far from original?”

Ventori nodded. “Jonathan shows certain influences, I agree. That is no bad thing, in my opinion: merely to be so good is original enough these days.”

“Where did you find him?” Revealing her curiosity, her weakness.

“Jonathan has a long history of mental instability, Ms Chang. For much of his life he has been institutionalised. His gift was identified by an enlightened junior doctor –”

“And PK Syntronics sees commercial possibilities in the work of such an
idiot savant
.”

Ventori smiled, nodded.

After a little more of the obligatory small talk, Mae returned to her room. Ventori had confirmed her suspicions, yet the encounter had done little to dislodge her own uncertainties.

As she climbed the stairs and walked through the now-familiar maze of empty corridors, she felt – not for the first time – that her every move was being watched, recorded. Before she fell asleep, it came to her that she and Jonathan were like rats in a maze.

~

The following morning she asked to be driven into the nearby town of Périgueux. She needed to get away for a time.

She felt a heady sense of release as she jumped from the Mercedes and lost herself in the flow of people. She visited a succession of boutiques, trying on outfit after outfit. The fact that she could buy whatever she wanted meant little to her, but she still experienced that same childish thrill she had first felt as a small girl in Taipei when she had seen the shops, all the goods stacked high.

Finally, the puritan peasant in her rebelled and she retreated to a McDonalds for a Coke and fries.

It was then that she understood how much she had enjoyed these last three days: the uninterrupted practices in the suite adjoining her room, the naive eagerness of Jonathan’s composition. She resolved to tell Anton, when she rejoined him in Paris, that she must have more times when she could shut herself away from the world like this.