The Concert Pianist (12 page)

She nodded carefully. ‘Why can't you have a child with someone else?'

He was almost amused.

‘If that's what's missing in your life!'

‘There speaks a twenty-six-year old.'

She frowned at this tack.

‘I'm a knackered old bachelor, Ursula.'

‘Bachelors are supposed to have fun.'

‘What you don't know about men of my age!'

‘I like men your age.'

‘God, you're charitable.'

‘I'm not being kind.' She moved her bottom, looked at him levelly.

Philip reached for the wine glass. He could not conceive that Ursula was flirting with him.

‘If a man my age is single, there's usually a good reason.'

‘Maybe you haven't met the right person.' She looked at him innocently.

Philip felt more alert now. He took a sip from his glass.

‘One needs talent, I think, to spot the right person.'

‘And a passionate nature, which you have.'

He looked at her suspiciously.

‘Oh, come on, Philip! It's not that difficult, making babies. Falling in love.'

‘Relationships can be difficult.'

‘But is that destiny or luck?'

He
smiled. ‘In my case incompetence.'

‘You want freedom, but you need love. There's got to be a way.'

He raised his eyebrows. How simple life could look from the twenty-six-year-old end of the telescope.

‘Can I tell you something?' he said, after a moment.

She smiled.

‘About something else?'

‘Don't be too defensive,' she said.

‘I'm not being defensive. I'm changing the subject.'

‘That's what I mean.'

He decided to ignore this. He looked at her for a moment. She leaned across a pile of cushions, legs curled up.

‘The other week, I had a student here. Girl from the Academy. I try not to have students in the house because they chatter away and you can't get rid of them. She was Russian. Twenty-two or -three. She played the Funeral March Sonata. The piece I was supposed to play last night. When I heard what she did with it I couldn't speak afterwards. It was quite overwhelming.' He grimaced in recollection. ‘Chopin wrote the march itself in 1836. The plight of Poland, the death of his sister. He had enough good reasons to pen a funeral march. Two years later he and George Sand went to Majorca for some sun, but he got bronchitis and started coughing blood and only just survived. Back in France he composed three further movements around the funeral march: the Opus 35 Sonata. Well, I knew all this, but I had always seen the work as a young man's measuring up to death, with a touch of Gothic rhetoric. A walk around the graveyard, not a flop into the coffin. When the Russian girl started I had the sensation of actually being Chopin and feeling what I can only describe as terror. You see, when Chopin was in Valdemosa, I'm sure he thought he would die. And though he survived, he had the taste of death in his mouth. The whole sonata is his creative struggle with the memory of that abyss. I think he realised that he'd written a funeral march for himself. It was an unconscious musical premonition that became, in Majorca, almost a reality. With a terrible insight. Because after the funeral march, what comes next? A return to life, spring? Some ethereal threnody conducting us to a place of peace? Not for Chopin. What you hear in the last movement is the absolute end. A soundworld beyond human life. The unspooling of consciousness itself.'

He
looked away. He was now ready to make a declaration. He felt somehow stronger as he spoke the words.

‘An unwelcome elegy for the death of an unborn child, I thought. It reminded me of something known for a while but not yet felt. When I die there will be nothing left of me, nothing that precedes or succeeds me. No parents or siblings or cousins. No wife and children. I am the beginning and end of the line. Anticipated by nothing. Returning to nothing.'

He gazed into the mirror above the mantelpiece, saw his reflection, saw Ursula's.

She held his eye as he looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her expression seemed unfamiliar, as though the reversed image of her face in the mirror showed another self.

He looked darkly at her. She was being drawn into the contradictory world of his mind, a place where external reality is alternately overpowering and non-existent.

Slowly he came back to the armchair. After a moment he sat down. The wine, as he sipped it, tasted strange.

She remained still. She had the look of a person whose role is to wait and to listen.

Philip allowed the silence to play out. He feared that his candour would be alienating. He was not an easy man to reassure. He regarded Ursula with sympathy. Her revered pianist was in dire form today.

‘Why can't you have children?' she asked.

‘Oh, that again.'

‘Because you can't fall in love any more?'

He stared at her.

‘This Laura. You weren't in love with her?'

‘She says I'm a claustro-agoraphobic. Can't bear to be alone. Can't tolerate intimacy.'

‘Isn't playing the piano all about love in some way?'

‘It's all about everything.'

‘When you can do it?'

‘I play the piano to move myself, Ursula. The audience attends, and hopefully the audience is also moved. Human love is a matter of practical compromises and sharing. It's a loving enterprise that delimits artistic freedom unless your partner is a doormat, and God knows there are some. So you make a choice between going it alone
and
harming no one - what I've done - or inflicting your inability to compromise on a partner, which seems selfish. Or you give into the demands of marriage and parenthood and become a more connected human being and less yourself. Good for partners and children. Bad for your art.'

‘What about the heart, Philip? The heart needs sustenance. How can you be human and cut out tenderness and passion and all the bonds that enable people to be happy and to care about each other?'

‘Classical music doesn't come from happiness. So much of it is so fundamentally tragic.'

‘But this musician,' she burst out, ‘can't play the piano any more. The romantic artist hero has gone on strike! If music is the great love of your life, you've just been dumped. What now?'

He glanced away.

‘You're miserable,' she said, ‘because you need more of life and a lot less of art. Music has dried you up in some way. I don't believe this emotional current you're talking about stems from turning your back on other people . . .'

‘ I don't . . .'

‘If music is about everything, it's about everything in life!'

He covered his brow, as though she were striking him.

‘You need to live a little, Philip. The piano is part of something much larger. You have to find a reason for living beyond all this.' She gestured at the shelves of music.

He regarded her with tense admiration. Ursula's appearance belied her true nature. The collapsible lissomness of legs and shoulders, the fine eyes were upstaged by her rigorous certainty, which somehow sidelined the feminine.

He shook his head. ‘What do you recommend then?'

She shrugged. ‘Very easy. Cancel the series.'

‘Cancel the series?'

‘Postpone Bulmanion.'

‘This is my agent speaking?'

‘Put everything on ice.'

He was amused. ‘And do what?'

‘Time out. Find yourself away from music.'

‘I have commitments . . .'

‘Escape everything to do with music.'

‘And then?'

She
smiled brilliantly, almost teasingly. ‘Have a romance.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘Food, sex, travel.'

‘You have a touching faith in my . . .'

‘ I honestly believe a good woman will sort you out.'

He blinked. ‘I'd like to find a good woman.'

‘Many fish in the sea.'

‘Very helpful of you, Ursula.'

‘I believe in keeping my clients happy.'

‘Thank you for your professional attention.'

‘My pleasure.' She gave him a half-humorous look and tossed the hair off her face.

She ran a fingernail over her knee, finessing her composure in a new position on the recamier, which produced more leggy slants and the roll of her hip.

Philip maintained a look of introspection whilst allowing his mind to be compressed by the alien notion that Ursula might find him attractive because of his fame or artistry or the residue of some teenage crush garnered at a concert when he was ten years younger and which somehow still flickered on in her head despite his present state. The idea was incongruous and not to be dwelt on, and probably deluded because how could a woman of her opportunities feel anything more than respect for a man of his age? He was not a sexual player any more, not in his own mind. Ever since Laura, he had censored the idea of another relationship; if that one had failed, it was impossible to imagine another could succeed. Certainly he was inhibited by a fear of repeating the past, inflicting disappointment on somebody new and loathing on himself.

He waved it away, as if to release himself from her attention.

‘You get off the train at my stage of life, you might never get back on.'

She gave him a look of pert reproval. ‘The train's already crashed.'

‘Well . . .'

‘Regenerate, Philip. Get on another one. A better one.'

He leaned forward, setting his glass down. ‘Where did they teach you this happy-clappy born-again guide to mid-life crisis?'

‘We don't have time to be depressed.' She almost smirked. ‘We barely have time to sleep!'

‘
Prozac and Viagra. That's your philosophy, I take it.'

‘No!'

‘Life is short and shitty, so let's party and laugh.'

‘I didn't say that.'

‘If I knew how to regenerate, I would. Yeah, sure, fool around like some menopausal twit desperately clutching at the wisps of lost youth. Take a holiday in Florence, coming to terms with middle age over the crossword puzzle and a glass of Chianti. Read pop psychology and self-help manuals to get in touch with my inner fluffy bunny.'

She was crossly amused by his horrible parody.

‘Because this ain't no dress-rehearsal!'

‘Shut up, Philip.'

‘And I'm a talented bastard, so I shouldn't complain. Is that it?'

She gave him a gravely forbidding glance.

‘An attitude makeover?'

‘Yeah, maybe. Lighten you up a bit.'

‘No, I don't think so. You see, things can happen that change your mind on this.'

‘What things?'

‘Bad things.'

‘What bad things?'

‘There's no need to say.'

‘Yes, there is. What bad things?'

‘Things happen out of the blue.'

‘What happened?'

‘People . . .' He swallowed.

‘Somebody . . .'

‘Friends. Close friends.'

She waited.

He averted his eyes.

‘Which friends, Philip?'

‘Does it matter?'

‘They died?'

His face grew pale.

‘When was this?'

‘An old cottage. Went up like a . . .'

‘When did this happen?'

He looked at her starkly.

She
moved her hand, rose slightly.

He held her gaze, drawing her in, fastening on her.

‘What is one to make of that? Yes, a tragedy. Now what? These things happen and one has to carry on, sure, but carry on to what? I mean something like that can't be “understood” or put in any kind of box. How can anybody come to terms with arbitrary disaster? I get no help from religion or philosophy.'

She looked at him with grim understanding.

‘Life is so much sadder than we can bear.'

She averted her eyes. ‘When did this happen?'

‘Regeneration is not so simple, except in the dumb sense life goes on, replicating endlessly.'

‘I only wanted to help you,' she pleaded.

‘You're kind.'

‘It's not pity.' She was sudden. ‘I believe you're a great pianist. That means something to me.'

‘My therapy is to ignore and forget. Something disgusting happens. Blank it out. Why grant victory to fate? It's enough that fate happens. Stand back and let the scythe come swishing in. It'll be my turn next.'

She sat there still and thoughtful, immersed in what he had told her. It seemed there was no come-back. She had wanted to help, believing that she could. Often, in the past, he had seemed intractable to the sympathetic. He presented opportunities for redemption, and this drew women to him who were then dismayed by his incapacity to be tamed into happiness according to their instincts for love and nurture. His moods were part of an emotional constitution that worked well in relation to music and badly in relation to his personal happiness. Happiness for Philip was subsumed in obsession. How to give perfect realisation to a musical work, an abiding concern: happiness through thinking, practising, listening, playing, discovering, uncovering, inhabiting, performing, realising and sharing a score to the umpteenth degree. Ursula thought, perhaps, that the emotions she experienced, listening to him play, related in some direct way to his passions as a man. She was drawn by the sensibility of an artist without considering that the quality she loved was elicited by music. The energy she witnessed grandly exerting itself at the keyboard music unleashed. Philip had often pondered the correlation between a pianist's inhabiting of emotion
in
romantic repertoire and his ability to love another person wholeheartedly. Did feeling stem from him, or was he merely the vessel through which it passed? Emotion in music was nobody's property. Emotion in performance was variable, mysterious and strangely sourceless.

She drew herself up, and then she looked at him. She parted her lips, and looked at him. It was her way of getting around words, of cutting away ideas and explanations and recalling him to the fact of her presence.