The Concert Pianist (16 page)

‘Why are you here?' She was almost angry. ‘How can I possibly be of help to you?'

Her strength, once bared, cowed him. She was no longer bound up with him and he could never return to her again, and this was suddenly stark. His anger was beside the point and so were his accusations of bad faith.

He passed a hand across his face. No one could partake in his misery. He felt foolish, deflated. ‘What's wrong with me, then?'

She shook her head, knowing it was neither the time nor the place for this. ‘You're in a state.'

‘No! No! What has always been wrong with me?'

She looked at him squarely for a moment, and then shrugged.

‘Very difficult for you to be objective. I'll take that into account.'

She raised her glass, swigged back the whisky. ‘It's not fair to ask me.'

‘Tell me the worst. With knobs on.'

She laughed, shaking her head sadly at the same time.

‘
Because you left me,' he said. ‘You were the one that left!'

She gave him an odd look. This interpretation did not please her. ‘That's what happens when a man won't commit. The woman has more faith, and then more courage.'

He raised his hands in frustration. ‘Yes, but why can't I commit? Why am I such a basket case?'

She heard the plumber calling in the corridor and slipped outside to pay him. Philip looked around in a turmoil of embarrassment and dismay. He had not meant to ask this question; it just came out of him. He had come here to be comforted, to feel loved.

He waited in suspense, and as he returned to his seat he felt more like a friend whom he had once made the mistake of pitying, Michael Connelly, an Irish theatre director. Michael's romantic activities were tiringly ceaseless and repetitively futile. He had once been invited by a married couple to join them on holiday in Portugal. Other couples and plentiful children were present in a scene of uxorious contentment. Connelly was duly relieved when one Robert Burlap turned up. Also in his forties and militantly unmarried, Burlap had hired a sports car. The spectacle of so much fulfilment was tiring for both men. They decided to slip away to Lisbon for a couple of nights ‘on the town', as a one-in-the-eye to the marrieds, ‘on the town' amounting in all probability to two sedentary restaurant-bound evenings of swapped gossip and mutual solidarity in the forlorn existentials of bacherlordom. Michael was hoping for an exchange about the odd sensation of being middle-aged, barren, slightly depressed and fixated on younger women. Robert would surely drop his guard and wash down a clubby platitude or twain with a good bottle of Dao. Why were they so high and dry, so unwilling to commit, so enervatingly incorrigible? It was time for a few statesmanlike reflections that would place their rather dubious behaviour in a wider context, alleviating any sense of guilt or responsibility, not to mention seediness, as if commitment-phobia and two-timing were a zeitgeist bugbear victimising them as much as the poor women they strung along. Robert, alas, would not be drawn. Michael's enquiries were deflected. His frank and occasionally compromising admissions were stonewalled with a curt smile. Burlap kept it light and general with the result that two men with a rich kinship in emotional incompetence found it impossible to communicate. Michael told Philip,
when
the holiday was over, that Robert must be hell to go out with. ‘Conversation can never get personal. He's a sphinx without a bloody secret!' Philip had suspected that Robert could bear to hear neither his own evasions nor Michael's lies. For neither man was self-knowledge a palatable option. Emotional depletion begat a kind of cognitive circularity. Whatever their starting point they would end up with themselves as they were, not as they might be, which after a third glass of port was beginning to resemble destiny. Whence real passion at their age? The biological clock was a woman's problem. Men had the emotional clock to fret over and Robert and Michael had just twigged this valuable and compassionate concept when, for both of them, it was two seconds past midnight.

Philip looked at the pattern on the rug. He waited awkwardly. He was being examined in every way at the moment. Other people were running tests and making diagnoses or reviewing him judicially. All his life he had been dissected as a pianist, his every career progression had been approved by someone other than himself: examiners, jurors, music critics, audiences. His art had been written about and subjected to comparison, but as a man he had never been quantified; his moral nature was undefined, known to intimates perhaps, who had only ever been able to take him as he was - a law unto himself.

She came back into the room and settled on the chaise.

‘Remember,' she said, her voice tight, ‘that you requested this.'

He swallowed. ‘That sounds so ominous.'

‘It's only my way of understanding you. Probably very shallow.'

‘I doubt it, Laura. I doubt it.'

She passed him a look that was gentle at first, almost questioning. She seemed to reassure him of good faith. The look was a reminder of all that had gone on between them, and supremely of her loyalty to his best interests, but in her eyes he saw a strange superiority. She knew her mind; she had a view, and this was a view she could only impart in full.

He was determined to hear her. He wanted to know what he was up against, the full interpretation.

‘I used to think that music was your strategy for avoiding the pain of human relations. If you devoted yourself to the piano, you could
reach
people on your own terms. Music was a means to keep the world where you wanted it. At arm's length. It was an obvious strategy because you're so gifted, and as an only adopted child it must have been great to have this world that you could escape into. That's how I understood it in the early days, when you spoke of your commitment to the piano, like vows. Here was a man trying to hold himself together. Sudden intimacy would engender the terror of separation.' Laura frowned intelligently, gathering the thread. ‘Before then, I never understood men who couldn't commit. With you I had to form an understanding. To be deserted or let down by a lover . . . I could see that was an unbearable prospect. I never believed you were indifferent. Self-protective, rather.'

He sat with crossed arms, gazing into the fire grate.

‘Then I met Edward. I realised how natural and uncomplicated it is when you meet the right person, even though meeting that person is a fluke. All the important things can be so simple. But without having those things - love, trust, security - you just haven't developed.'

‘Is this you talking, or your shrink?'

She was sudden. ‘If I hadn't met you, I wouldn't have needed a shrink! You were the most complicated thing that had ever happened to me. I was determined not to be fucked up by you, Philip. Because unlike you I had no international career to go back to, no cheering audiences and famous friends. After my three years as your girlfriend I had no fall-back position. And without a decent future, the future I deserve, the past is just OVER.'

He shook his head.

For a moment she was subdued, depressed all over again.

‘I hoped that if I was constant, always there for you, that if I poured love into you' - she wiped her nose with the back of her hand - ‘you would gradually heal, and some inner place would thaw, and the love that I thought was trapped inside you would get out; and eventually we could get married and have a child. I played a long game, Philip. And lost. Something you will never do. In fact, giants of the keyboard have no idea what ordinary people put up with to find fulfilment. They have to be patient. And strong. So strong.'

He avoided eye contact, but she was in any case downcast with reminiscence. She paused, as if to gain strength for what was to come. She had lived through all this. Talking it through required
courage
and concentration. She had to say what she thought, and she had to trust what she said for both their sakes. ‘But then I realised I had fallen in love with the artist and not the man, and that these two things were not the same. Your beautiful playing was not a gift to me. It was a gift to the world. What I got to myself was only the man.' She looked at him with pain. ‘The man was not enough. I could have gone on hoping for the best, because people develop and you had a history to overcome, but . . .' She had lost all colour. Her lips worked the bitterness of a thought. ‘After the fire, there really seemed no point.'

He had not expected this and was suddenly at sea. It hit him in the vocal cords so that when he spoke his voice was trembly. ‘What d'you mean?'

‘You are cauterised, Philip.'

He smiled uncomprehendingly. ‘I wish I were.'

‘In your heart you are.'

‘You'll have to justify that.'

Her jaw jutted and her eyes glinted. ‘Dead inside.'

‘You condemn me but you don't help me!'

‘You don't need help. You've got exactly what you want.'

‘I've got nothing.'

‘I couldn't believe it.' She grappled the end of the chaise. ‘When Peter and Clarissa and the children died, you didn't react.'

‘I reacted!'

‘Philip, you didn't go to the funeral. You didn't write to his parents. You froze up. I remember you flying off to Stockholm for a concert the day after we heard. When you came back, you wouldn't even talk about it. And he was your best friend!'

He guarded the side of his face with his hand. ‘I was . . . he was like a brother to me . . . I was . . .'

‘You never shed one tear,' she declaimed.

‘I coped with it in my own way.'

‘Because you hate strong feelings. Better to have no feelings at all than to grieve someone's death.'

He was tortured now.

‘Your heart is a sliver of ice.'

He tried to think straight. ‘I couldn't assimilate it . . .'

‘Assimilate! What kind of word is that? Your friends died and you didn't flinch.'

‘
I didn't . . . I couldn't get my head round it. Couldn't understand . . .'

‘Because people mean nothing to you. You're so wrapped up in yourself that nobody else is quite real and when they die you don't really notice.'

‘What is one supposed to do?' he shouted. ‘There's more to grief than tears. One minute they were there. Then they were . . . gone. I couldn't figure it.'

‘Figure this. Understand that. You're all brain and no heart. I saw the coldness and I wanted to get out.'

‘I do have feelings, Laura.'

‘What use are feelings if nobody ever gets the benefit of them? They might as well not exist. No feelings. So no wife. No children. Nothing.'

She was overwhelming him.

‘No wonder you can't play,' she said.

‘Oh, don't!'

She was formidable now. ‘I mean are those bad reviews just a coincidence?'

‘I only had one bad review.'

‘God, why are we doing this? What's the bloody point? You can't connect with reality.'

‘The
Gramophone
guy's an opera specialist!'

She shook her head. ‘Rodney said there were three bad reviews.'

He was stunned.

She glanced, suddenly hating herself.

‘I didn't know that.'

‘Philip . . .'

‘Oh . . .'

She looked at him, pausing a moment while the information settled on his mind, and then her eyes grew large. Suddenly, she knew what she meant exactly. ‘If you can't be wholehearted in love or grief, how on earth can you expect to move your listeners?'

His face went white. He had to look away and blink hard against the cruelty of her logic. His hands crushed together on his lap.

‘You've become narrow.'

He had no resistance.

Laura stared at him concertedly, holding on to the point. ‘I think
you
have to look at yourself. In the past you've made other people unhappy. Now you're the unhappy one. You have a lot of issues, Philip. It's time to get help.'

He felt like a child.

‘Are you going to be unhappy for the rest of your life or face up to things? You need to change.'

There was a long silence.

‘Change is not easy,' he said softly.

‘It's extremely difficult. Very painful. But there's no going back. You have to break the pattern, because the past is over and what you could get by on then isn't enough any more. The grand bachelor days have led to this, look at you, this ruined figure. And now you're desperate and miserable because you've been living your life in a way that doesn't work. Get some help, get your own therapist. Do the job properly. You're too old at fifty to have delusions about the quality of the life you're living. It's now or never, Philip.'

He gazed at her abjectly.

‘What have you got to lose?'

She rose suddenly. She was done with him.

‘Laura!'

She walked towards the door and turned to face him one last time. ‘You're right, Philip. You're absolutely right. That's exactly why I told you about the abortion. I wanted to prove to you that even you have feelings deep down beneath that crust of ice and it's bloody well time you acknowledged them!'

‘Laura!'

‘Go, please. Leave me.'

Chapter Twelve

Serebriakov - a face cut from rock, the jaw, the cheekbones, the ridge of the brow, a face forged by the sufferings of Soviet history, custom-made for one of those banners showing Lenin in implacable visionary mode, expressing how hard Russia was going to have to be to itself, to change; and in that look of bitter endurance, in Serebriakov's case caused by his utter disgust with politics, his refusal to be manhandled by history; in the way he looked up at you with intolerable candour, in that granite glance there were flashes of a suffering so compressed that pain itself seemed hewn in the moulded cast of his cranium. The cyclone of his talent had nonetheless protected him from historical reality. During the war he was pushed around in the service of his country: propaganda films for the Red Army, monkey-like performances at state functions, cocktail piano for Politburo chiefs. He was blackmailed and threatened by the Ministry of Culture, coerced and bugged. His family were gently persecuted and two of his Jewish friends disappeared from their flats without trace. But life was easier for him than for most. The Wehrmacht swarmed over the Ukraine, the Red Army crumpled back to Moscow, Stalingrad became a whirlpool of death and Serebriakov learned new piano sonatas. He transcribed any orchestral score he could find, and gave concerts in blacked-out halls at short notice. Later in his life he spoke of those years with an intractable mixture of sorrow and contempt. Human dignity had been stripped from everyone. To relate all the incredible stories of cruelty and suffering was to share a class of information that could not be felt, being beyond the heart's endurance. And so one pressed on. History was everywhere, regrettable, hideous, but the mission of a pianist was not to oppose or resist. The duty of a pianist was to
survive
through music and to distribute as widely as possible (on countless tours of the most obscure parts of the Soviet Union) Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Et la Lune Descend sur le Temple qui Fut, Aux Cyprès de la Villa d'Este, Goldberg Variations, and a thousand other pieces ‘which they need out there'. In the fifties he played in tiny town halls, churches, old air-raid shelters. He loved the days of travel to reach these places. He was a great walker and never missed an opportunity to explore the landscape around remote towns. Privileged and pressurised in equal measure by the Soviet authorities, his reputation with professionals and his fame across the Union was instantly monolithic; and as copies of his recordings and accounts of his playing eked out to the West, foreign critics began to anticipate from musical Russia something as titanically galvanised as the Cold War superpower itself. What forging of temperament had he endured to become this legendary figure? His Russian contemporaries whispered of something immeasurable, something absolute; and if indeed his first concerts in Europe were received with due hysteria it proved remarkably trying to pinpoint his genius. Felix Weber, the Austrian critic, attended his Berlin debut. ‘I went to hear him play sonata of Haydn. At first I think no big deal. A minute later the tears are streaming down my face.'