The Concert Pianist (6 page)

He sat on the stool by the counter sipping coffee. He would finish the coffee and then practise. He could feel the lines in his face this morning, the weight of his eyelids, the prickly surface of his skin. The prospect of his concert was solidly in view and, as he gazed through the mesh of his decrepitude towards that prospect, it seemed like someone else's bad dream. How could a man in his state deliver those titanic pieces to a paying audience? He should cancel, of course; but cancellation seemed almost as absurd as the concerts themselves. Cancellation was an obverse disaster no less forbidding than the thought of the first recital next Wednesday evening at seven-thirty, when a thousand listeners would pack the Queen Elizabeth Hall in complacent expectation of absolute brilliance.

A few minutes later he passed from the kitchen into the hallway, and from the hall to the music room. He went steadily across to the piano and sat down on the stool. The lid was raised and ready. The
stand
he set flat. He arranged his feet on the pedals and glanced down the long length of the instrument, allowing his shoulders to relax and waiting for the impulse to gather, to rise up as a tactile need for the keys. He placed his hands on his lap, holding back a little, marshalling himself. He regarded his hands, conjuror's hands, unusually lined and walnut-creased at the finger joints, crosshatched on the palms. The skin was weathered and elastic around the knuckles and smooth near the cuticles. He had large, well-architected hands, good hands for a pianist. He looked at them now with a kind of compassion for their hard-won suppleness and strength. The open piano was a sorcerer's brazier from which these dextrous hands had conjured the most marvellous sounds, gossamer traceries, exquisite cantabiles, thunderous fortissimos, prismatic washes, aqueous translucencies. These hands had worked hard to transport and enthral. They had served music well.

Slowly he shut the lid of the keyboard and sat motionlessly on the stool.

He found the packet on the shelf and opened it carefully. He sat down with the contents spilling into his palms, leaflets, copies of the concert programme, Xeroxed ads from
Piano Gazette
and
Music Magazine.
John's assistant Serena had photocopied all four pages of the
Sunday Telegraph
article and folded them in. The flyers were gloss-finished and showed a profile of Philip at the keyboard in his usual convulsed state. He flipped the programme, saw the heading ‘Sonata Series', the works listed in each recital, and a commentary by someone called Geraldine Mercier. ‘An epic journey of Himalayan purview,' she wrote. ‘A traversal of the repertoire's most spiritually demanding summits, culminating in Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata. Morahan's sequencing demonstrates the aesthetic and emotional range of sonata form, its narrative properties and metamorphic imperatives. From Haydn to Scriabin, Mozart to Medtner, Chopin to Samuel Barber, his selection encompasses phenomenal diversity and the coherence of a remarkable tradition.'

He passed a hand across his face, dragging at the sallow skin under his eyes. Was sonata form itself to blame, he wondered? The element of quest, the struggle for transformation, the harnessing of extremes and the reconciling of opposites: was it too much to ask that one played these highly wrought works in sequence? In the first
recital
he would play Beethoven's Waldstein and Chopin's Funeral March Sonatas before the interval, and pieces by Scarlatti, Barber and Rachmaninov in the second half. Setting aside the epic concentration required to play these works, he wondered now whether it was really the concert's underlying theme of death and regeneration that was sapping him. How could he approach the Funeral March Sonata in this frame of mind? The whole piece screamed out a negative transference of its composer's terror of death.

His hands were shaky now: the coffee and insomnia, the hive of nerves in his belly. Hopelessly he unfolded the
Sunday Telegraph
article, eyes skating over the column inches and the full-page photograph that meticulously investigated the lines in his forehead, and captured the defenceless light of his blue eyes behind specs. He looked like some sort of intelligent life form from outer space, caught on a brief visit to Planet Earth, his craggy face strangely innocent of the ways of the world whilst looking fraught with otherworldly concerns: a face that had lived life from the brain out.

Philip could not believe this was him. The man he read about seemed like a stranger. The article was penned by a well-known music journalist whom he had met once or twice and who asserted that Philip was a national treasure, a world-class artist of remarkable pedigree, whose musical lineage hailed from Solomon and Hess. His blood pressure rose as he read the florid tribute:

Morahan's art is mysterious. He has technique in spades, a rich tonal palette, rhythmic suppleness and strength, all of which you forget when you hear him play because he tells the story of each piece so spellbindingly that heart and mind are in thrall. He is the music, and whether it comes from long study or some God-given instinct, time after time he gets it right. Familiar repertoire is reborn under his touch. One is allowed privileged communion with the first poetic impulse, the composer's first rush of feeling into music. This sense of a reincarnation is the kernel of Morahan's art. Compositions cease to be musical artefacts, susceptible to this or that approach, but living organisms of startling immediacy.

He stared like a dead man at the shelves of sheet music rising above his head. The papers and flyers slid off his lap on to the floor. He did
not
understand his past any longer. It seemed as though everything that had happened to him belonged to another man's life. It was a life that until recently he seemed to enjoy. In the last two years he had become busy as Guest Professor at the Academy. A new generation of students disarmingly looked up to him and he straddled the steed of reputation as best he could. Life's long central plateau had become endurable at last. He was reconciled to the consoling habits of a working life and enjoyed teaching. Classical virtues he now preferred to romantic extremes. Sex and love were pleasures, not necessities. At fifty-two he was doubtful whether any truly new emotion or experience might be in store for him. Pleasurable repetition, he suspected, was the game from now on. Without dwelling on it, he guessed the relativity of his achievement as a pianist. He had heard so many wonderful players in his time. The effort of topping previous achievements seemed daunting, anyway. Talent was perhaps a kind of fate, driving you or leading you, but always in charge, setting the tempo for your life.

Philip knew that he had entered a settled managing phase harnessed by routine, and the sense of having fewer nerve endings but more knowledge than before, more depth and experience to call on, except that depth was calling on him now, surging up, a retributive bonanza of suffering and anxiety that pained him more than he could bear. He did not like, could not endure, what he thought of his life. When he learned of the abortion it threw a switch, as if only now were he fated to suffer what he should have been rueing for years: loneliness, childlessness, a life without love.

Marguerite had phoned him the day before. A pitiful call. He could hear her baby screaming. Vadim had deserted her, it seemed, walked out as if she did not exist and did not matter. She copiously wept, lapsing into French. Did Vadim no longer find her attractive or interesting? Was he bored with the mother of his baby boy? How could he leave her on her own like this? He was inhuman, a bastard. She should never have got involved with him. Poor Vadim, if only he knew how much she cared for him. She had left three messages on his mobile declaring her love but now regretted this sign of weakness because he deserved not love but a decanter over the head, or a dinner plate, or a knife in the ‘eart, the imbecile, the blackguard.

He listened with terrible pity and a kind of moral paralysis, as if it
were
too late and futile anyway to hope for reconciliation. He begged her to be calm. Sooner or later Vadim would return to the flat because that was his home, and she was his wife, and in the meantime she must think about her marriage. Vadim, he said, was not an ordinary kind of husband. He was an artist and artists crave freedom. And Vadim was no ordinary artist. He was a phenomenal talent with a complicated, difficult temperament that was not his own fault. He was under immense pressure, and the pressure was causing misbehaviour, stupidity. She had to remember that his parents died when he was fourteen, that his uncle was a nasty piece of work, that everybody in Moscow wanted him to be this or do that, and that Vadim had been locked in rooms to practise the piano and beaten for bunking off lessons, and tasked by his music professors with the most horrendous weekly challenges that he had met head on with all his defiant brilliance as if to say there was nothing he could not do. Philip asked her to forgive him because Vadim was a sweet man despite his misdemeanours. The complex adult harboured an innocent child. If the adult mistreated her, she must tackle the child. She must support and nurture and pacify. She must grant him his freedom and love him for what he was. It sounded, he later realised, like a plea in mitigation for all pianists - for himself in particular - and a rotten one at that.

Later that day he attempted to cancel the meeting John had set up with Frank Bulmanion. Bulmanion was a City man turned arts angel with a fledgling record company. He wanted to sign Philip and Philip did not want to be signed. John thought a meeting would help. Philip disagreed. A meeting had nonetheless been arranged for the Saturday, and Philip was determined to get out of it. There was no point John parading him in his current ruined state.

‘I want to cancel the meeting,' he said smartly over the phone.

‘Don't do that!' said John.

‘Not up to it.'

John was resilient. ‘I've booked a flight back from Barcelona for this meeting. Ursula's coming up from the country. I don't want to give Frank the wrong signal.'

He needed to confess. He wanted to tell John the truth. ‘Bulmanion knows I have a concert.'

‘Of course! He'll send a limo to collect us both. You'll be
pampered
and flattered for an hour. Then you'll be driven home. Plus you need to meet Ursula. She's dying to be introduced to you.'

‘John, listen . . .'

‘I'm listening.'

‘About Ursula.'

‘What about Ursula?'

‘Oh God!'

‘Oh God anything in particular?'

‘I . . .'

‘You what?'

He swallowed. ‘She's only twenty-six!'

John was baffled. ‘I've never heard a man your age complain about a woman being twenty-six.'

‘It's . . .'

‘You'll love her. I promise. She's a sweetie. And really capable. Listen, Serena's booked us a table at your favourite restaurant for after the concert. Anyone you'd like to bring along?'

‘No.'

‘Right. Saturday's a date. Be ready for a pickup around 3 p.m.'

He lay on the spare-room bed, looking at flecks of rain on the windowpane. He stared at the ovolo cornice, following it along the edge of the ceiling into an alcove. He looked at the changing hue of the walls, a pale green with a hint of yellow in it. Here in the suburbs it was deadly quiet. He could lie on this bed for years and nobody would know. He allowed his thoughts to drift and ramble, snaring at this and that, Camilla weeding in her garden, the ceiling of the Duke's Hall where he had judged Academy competitions; and gently he pictured Katie's bedroom in that beamy cottage the morning after the fire, her room intact and door shut, a capsule of preservation attached to a blackened skeleton. They had found the three-year-old under the covers, curls on pillow, teddy clutched to her breast. She had died of a heart attack.

He glanced away. It was dangerous to lie down sometimes. Camilla was to blame. She had mentioned Peter, bringing it all back, entwining sorrows. He had managed to forget all that misery, pushing it away, locking it up. Black thoughts were to be struck off the edges of the mind.

He swung his legs off the bed.

An
hour later he was standing on the kerb at Oxford Circus, gazing at the grey façades of buildings and at pigeons zooming from their niches across the heads of milling pedestrians. Moments later he was heading for the down escalator inside HMV.

If he couldn't play, at least he could listen. He had recalled Alfred Cortot's version of the Funeral March Sonata - not in his collection. Cortot had a special way with Chopin and to hear him again might be helpful. Philip was thinking positive, and anyway it was good to be out and about.

As ever, they were shrinking the Classical department. Glass partitions were on the move, breaking gaps into the rest of the store so that Classical's meek sound signature was garishly perforated by pop strains from neighbouring sections, colours running between Britney and Vivaldi. Diffident Angus stood behind the service counter, tracking obscure recordings for nerdy customers with his usual dandruffed brio. Everything was on offer. Box-set clearances, twofer discounts, bargain-table giveaways.

Philip strolled along the aisles getting a sense of the layout and absorbing the chocolatey posters of lovely divas whose physical charms eroticised the retail process: Oh, to possess a golden voice and a gorgeous pair. What talents! What pleasures for the world! Cellophane wraps sparkled in halogen light. Hi-fi mags glittered on the shelf. He was nearly happy.

The Chopin rack was tightly packed with recordings by old frauds and younger rivals. He flicked through quickly, searching for the Cortot, first under ‘Sonatas', then under ‘Ballades'. Perhaps any unfamiliar recording would help. He needed to hear the piece as if from outside, agonised into life by some other poor sod.

Then he saw himself.

His own face stared back from the CD cover.

Philip frowned. He plucked the disc from the shelf.