The Concert Pianist (3 page)

‘OK. So warm up while I stretch my legs.'

‘Stay!'

‘Vadim!'

‘I won't play.'

‘You must! As a favour to your chauffeur.'

‘Piano-playing is no favour.'

‘Listen! If John hears you've cried off again, you'll get the red card.'

Vadim sucked on his cigarette, thumbed his forehead.

‘Pianists come cheaper than agents. Especially first-rate agents like John.'

‘Not this pianist.'

Philip
stared at him. He felt responsible and yet powerless. The brilliant protege was turning into a twenty-five-year-old problem child. For weeks Vadim had been stupidly unable to focus. There were marital issues, of course, but the real reason was an adolescent refusal to accept the pressure of his calling, a doomed bid for free will in an industry of fearsome competitiveness and declining audiences. It was as though he had not accepted that, because of his gifts, he had no choice but to play the piano and to try dutifully to be a great pianist, because anyone born with such gifts was too precious to be allowed any other course, and suddenly agents, mentors, and critics were joined in a conspiracy to exert pressure and raise bars. The Moscow years were driven and unhappy (both his parents died in a Soviet air disaster). Vadim was taken over by a grim uncle and the head of the Conservatoire piano faculty, who jointly saw to it that he was grown like the hottest of hothouse flowers, and only rewarded for the death of his parents with early fame. Since moving to London, freedom and choice had engendered a kind of rebellion. No sooner were the foundations of a fabulous career laid than his appetite for experience beyond the piano stool overwhelmed him. He wanted suddenly to do everything, try everything. Vertiginously he needed football matches, water-skiing, nightclubs, sexual spice. Casually he got married, as though marriage were a drug that could be trialled and dismissed. The breaking-free was of course vital, because artists need to live like everyone else, but Vadim's tour of instant gratification became a willed exercise in cultural superficiality, impairing the nuclear-fission programme that virtuosos need to contain safely by focused practice and rigorous self-discipline if they are to erupt brilliantly in concert and not destructively elsewhere. He now had a wife, baby, and mortgage, but his attitude was in tatters and his artistry distempered. This maddened Philip.

‘Have you called Marguerite?'

Vadim leaned against the wall, eyes downcast.

‘She's left two messages on my mobile. I don't know what's wrong with yours.'

The non-reaction amazed him.

There was a knock on the door. The stage manager leaned in, a young fellow with a neck tattoo, pierced eyebrow and number-one haircut. ‘Everythin' OK, sir?'

Philip
sighed. ‘Everything's fine.'

‘A'right, guv. I'll pop by when it's five to go.'

They heard the door click shut.

‘Why green paint!' Vadim was incredulous. ‘I don't like this colour.'

‘Please call her after the concert.'

Vadim looked down, his face overcast by untranslatable feelings.

‘I've spoilt your preparation, I'm sorry.'

Vadim pulled away, slumping down on to a chair. ‘Cigarettes,' he said.

‘Have the pack. I'm going to take my seat.'

There were things he must say, but not now.

On the street Philip gazed at the evening sky and inhaled the bad air. A one-way system brought the traffic in rush-hour surges around the square, wafting fumes across the concourse. He tapped out a cigarette, desperate to inhale. There were so many things he could not bear about the day, the debacle of his meeting with Camilla, the coming struggle with Vadim: an Oedipal vying with an ‘adopted' son if ever there was one. And now Vadim's crisis reprised his own. His playing was dreadful at the moment. For days he had been out of sorts and utterly terrified by the thought of his concert and the standard expected of him. He had forced a practice session at the weekend with grim results. Sleepless nights and bad feelings had stripped his playing of its confident strength and control. There were memory lapses, fluffs everywhere, lagging reflexes. The whole mechanism was in turmoil. His sense of crisis was held in check only by a disbelief that this could be happening to him.

The auditorium was large and dull. Curtains had been pulled across the back of the hall, a lectern set to one side. Up on the stage - like an ocean liner in profile - the piano. Two youths at the door handed programmes to the incoming public.

Philip sat in the stalls and gazed at the motley array of humans who, on a Tuesday evening, were attending a piano recital in Southampton of all places. Most were music-society oldies sinking stiffly to their seats, or shakily standing in the aisle - genteel listeners from a bygone age when every parlour had an upright. Two plump grannies sat at the front, cramming flapjacks from
tissue
paper into their mouths whilst fluttering programmes like fans. There were sundry Plain Jane music maids with lank hair and bony knuckles, a pair of schoolmaster types fruitily murmuring. The rest were odds and sods scattered here and there, laxly curious, vaguely aware that despite all appearances this was an ‘event', but the sort of event that drew few people these days, no one funky or hip, or God forbid glamorous or socially exciting, no opinion-formers from the vanguard of contemporary culture whose enthusiasm would make word of the concert ripple through media pages galvanising young readers to see this young pianist, to collar an experience as exciting as anything modern life could offer. It was a pianist's fate to play to this loyal straggle of oddballs, the remnants of an elapsed century's fading mental culture, and despite the drab eclecticism of the folk here tonight, he felt deep gratitude for anybody who could be bothered to turn up these days to a piano recital. For such loyal, rare souls the pianist's anguished craft was still worthwhile.

He pulled a tube of mints from his pocket. He was in a mess, complexly anxious. Fringe issues were irking him: another doctor's appointment for the test results; the unsettling prospect of a new agent John Sampson wanted to foist on him, some gorgeous young woman - the last thing he needed! In a professional adviser Philip required a man of his own age and prejudices who remembered his triumphs and forgave his weaknesses. He was in no mood for anyone modern, attractive, or challenging.

His child would have been fourteen by now. A girl, he was certain. He blinked concertedly, as though on the edge of tears. Sorrow was almost tidal in its surges and abeyances.

When Laura first told him, he managed to ignore the news in the way one would kick aside a rumour too old to bother with. His reaction was a defence against the need to suffer the consequences of unwelcome knowledge. It happened so long ago, but something from those long-gone days was still palpitating, live enough to wriggle into the present so that suddenly he felt the news like a young husband, the marvellous surprise of conception, the heady novelty of creating a child with someone you loved, the warm wash of broody feeling triggered by a pregnancy - all these things he felt, out of nowhere, violently. As if he and Camilla were still lovers, he experienced a disabling love for this glimmer of a child, as though a
river
of feeling existed within him designed for the purpose that he had never known before. It all welled up, together with a swamping sense of loss and waste that made it impossible to concentrate on the piano, on anything. He grimaced, guarding the edge of his face with his hand.

A man appeared from the wings. He raised an arm to hush the audience. Philip held his breath, fearing the worst.

Holding a scrap of paper the man read out a last-minute change to the programme. Vadim had ducked Brahms's Handel Variations and would play a Rachmaninov selection instead.

Philip looked at the ceiling, struggling to control his vexation. He was acutely concerned for Vadim. Almost for the sake of his nerves he determined to think about something else. He was actually dreading the performance.

It came back to him now, something Vadim had mentioned in the car. Konstantine Serebriakov had been heard by someone or other playing in Reigate. The great Russian was absolutely ancient but he still managed, fifty years after his coronation as the world's greatest pianist, to make music where he could, small venues, private gatherings, nothing grand or pretentious. Philip had been thinking of him recently because a producer friend, Derek Woodruff, was nobly hoping to make a documentary for BBC 2 about pianists. Philip had given him the principal figures, a few basic pointers. Derek was fired up by the whole idea of the artist hero/virtuoso, a priestly figure on the one hand mediating between God (the composer) and his audience (the flock), and a proto rock star on the other. His enquiries were like mirrors reflecting unfamiliar angles and aspects of one's life. He rather rashly decided that Philip should be the subject, and although a TV programme held no allure, Philip was happy to answer his questions. Derek's courteous detachment licensed a kind of intimacy.

‘Did you make some kind of executive decision not to get married?' ‘I was always a hard worker, a perfectionist. And in the old days I travelled all over the world.' ‘You liked the freedom?' ‘Well, you can't do it without the freedom.' ‘Are you afraid of commitment?' ‘You see, for me, playing the piano is the most intense way of being alive. How d'you reconcile the give and take of a good relationship with that kind of consuming passion? I never
wanted
to take more than I gave, but it seemed I was bound to if I got married.' ‘So you have no regrets?' ‘I have only regrets.'

Vadim was on stage almost before anyone had noticed. He arrived beside the piano and bowed to a weak burst of applause in which the splatting sound of individual pairs of hands could be heard. He acknowledged the sparse audience with an opaque dignity.

He looked even larger on the platform. His trunk was burly, his head somehow grand in profile. Philip found it almost comforting to see him solidly ensconced at the head of the instrument.

Philip averted his eyes, heart beating hard. He could barely endure the indecent knowingness of being a fellow pianist.

Vadim gazed at an upward angle, slowly raising his hands.

There were blustery coughs and sniffs, chair-creakingadjustments.

The early bars of Rachmaninov's Etude Tableau in C minor were like sounds from a faraway world. Vadim sat at the keyboard as if hearing a call to arms, or the rumour of something heroic. A tethered power lurked in the first gruff phrases. The player was alert, his torso and broad shoulders crowding close to the lower keyboard as if to protect a secret, or the making of a spell, hands moving stealthily, depressing keys with soft creepiness or Stakha-novite force. Vadim's narrowed eyes were trained on the innate sense of sounds, the meaning in certain clashes, the potency of harmonic shifts. He would look down and then upwards, seeking the destination of a phrase, and then to the side, the frequency of dark sound catching his attention for the first time; and slowly the audience settled and became still, subdued by an equivalent concern with the progress of this ominous elegy, which spoke to them of things they knew nothing about. The initial statements were rounded off and now movement began, footsteps, an eerie procession, lit here and there by torches, and still his face was full of pilgrim enquiry, as though he too were following the crowd that seemed to file under the vaults of some massive structure, with baleful octaves deep in the bass of the instrument and great framing pillars of sound rising above tiny humans, until the processional was under the highest point and giant church bells exploded, and Vadim's teeth were set with the effort of massive directed force and the exultant sense of Russian grandeur peeling from the piano.

Philip
was fixed dead still with the deepest concentration. After the ringing climax there was a dying away, and tension went out of his body, a gasp of relief almost. Vadim had wrested iron control from utter disarray. Two further etudes followed, the first a tornado of double notes, blisteringly executed; the second martial, chunky, hectoringly percussive, the crashing last bars of which shook a spastic clatter of geriatric commendation from the floor.

He listened to the second group of pieces with something approaching astonishment. Vadim unfolded a selection of Rachmaninov preludes with extra-terrestrial lucidity. He engaged the swirling semiquavers of the C minor Prelude with the command of an elemental force, propelling notes as the wind drives leaves, a crystalline dispatch evoking huge currents of energy, liquid or electrical, backed up and ready to smite drenching storms of sound, as if music were a kind of exciting weather, something released from on high. Just as his technical aplomb seemed to derive from an almost inhuman configuration of hearing and reflexes, so his playing transcended the little life of man. Epic landscapes were conjured, the chromatic winds of the Steppe, vast skies. Sound had energies and tensions like particles in physics that composers harnessed and pianists released. Listening to him play was hearing nature itself, the force and fabric of Creation.

Philip remained in his seat during the interval, forehead cupped in his hand. As always when Vadim was ‘on' he felt the same sequence of emotions: alarm (the talent was so overpowering); defeat (one could never catch up); gratitude (for the existence of such talent); and love (for the regenerative turmoil it caused). Such playing was a gift from the purest, the noblest part of a person; it rescued Philip from the loneliness of a personal quest. In a peculiar way the acute listener was closer than a lover to the being of a musician; and what could one feel for the person who played like that but love?

This he had often thought, and during the interval he was grateful to his friend for reminding him of the point. One owed an almost blind loyalty to such gifted colleagues. Alas, in the second half Vadim's playing deteriorated so abruptly (it was almost pugnaciously brash and insensitive) that Philip's softer thoughts vanished. The Chopin was cavalier, the Liszt exhausting. There was muscular brilliance and power, but no sense of discovery, no care for suggestion. He listened with disbelief, and then boredom. The last
blasting
cavalcade of Liszt's Mephisto Waltz yanked the audience to their feet, while Philip sat in dismay, wondering what he was going to say afterwards. He had a sick sense that confrontation was inevitable. What, otherwise, did he stand for as a friend, as a mentor?