Amsterdam (15 page)

To think he had once called them pigs and argued, during a three-month flirtation with anarchism in 1967, that they were the cause of crime and would one day be unnecessary. The whole time he was there he was treated with courtesy and even deference. They seemed to
like
him, these policemen, and Clive wondered if there were not certain qualities he had never known he
possessed—a level manner, quiet charm, authority perhaps. By the time it came to the identity parade early the following morning, he was anxious not to let anyone down. He was led out into a yard behind where the patrol cars parked, where a dozen men were standing by a wall. Straight away he saw his man, third from the right, the one with the long thin face and the telltale cloth cap. What a relief. When they went back inside, one of the detectives gripped Clive’s arm and squeezed, but said nothing. Around him was an atmosphere of suppressed rejoicing, and everyone liked him even more. They were working together as a team now, and Clive had accepted his role as a key prosecution witness. Later on there was a second parade, and this time half the men had cloth caps and all had long thin faces. But Clive wasn’t fooled and found his man right at the end, without a cap. Back indoors he was told by the detectives that this second lineup was not so important. In fact, for administrative reasons they might even discount it completely. Generally, though, they were delighted with his commitment to the cause. Consider himself an honorary policeman. They had a patrol car going out toward the airport. Would he like a lift in that direction?

He was dropped right by the terminal building. As he was getting out of the back seat and saying his goodbyes, he noticed that the policeman in the driver’s
seat was the very man he had picked out of the line the second time. But neither Clive nor the driver found it necessary to comment on the fact as they shook hands.

The flight was two hours late into Schiphol airport. Clive took the train to Centraal Station and from there set off on foot for his hotel in the soft gray afternoon light. While he was crossing his first bridge, it came back to him what a calm and civilized city Amsterdam was. He took a wide detour westward in order to stroll along Brouwersgracht. His suitcase, after all, was very light. So consoling, to have a body of water down the middle of a street. Such a tolerant, openminded, grown-up sort of place: the beautiful brick and carved timber warehouses converted into tasteful apartments, the modest Van Gogh bridges, the understated street furniture, the intelligent, unstuffy-looking Dutch on their bikes with their level-headed children sitting behind. Even the shopkeepers looked like professors, the street sweepers like jazz musicians. There was never a city more rationally ordered. As he walked along, he thought about Vernon, and the symphony. Was the
work ruined, or simply flawed? Perhaps not flawed so much as sullied, and in ways that only he could understand. Ruinously cheated of its greatest moment. He dreaded the premiere. He could tell himself now, in all tortuous sincerity, that in making his various arrangements on Vernon’s behalf, he, Clive, was doing no more than honoring his word. That Vernon should want a reconciliation and should therefore want to come to Amsterdam was surely more than a coincidence or a neat convenience. Somewhere in his blackened, unbalanced heart he had accepted his fate. He was delivering himself up to Clive.

These reflections brought Clive at last to his hotel, where he learned that the reception tonight would be at seven-thirty. From his room he called his contact, the good doctor, to discuss arrangements and, for one last time, the symptoms: unpredictable, bizarre, and extremely antisocial behavior, a complete loss of reason. Destructive tendencies, delusions of omnipotence. A disintegrated personality. The matter of premedication was discussed. How should it be administered? A glass of champagne was suggested, which seemed to Clive to strike the appropriate festive note.

There were still two hours of rehearsal, so, having left the money in an envelope at reception, Clive had the doorman wave down a taxi for him outside the hotel and within a few minutes was at the artists’ entrance round the side of the Concertgebouw. As he
passed the porter and pushed open the swinging doors that led to the stairs, the sound of the orchestra reached him. The final movement. It was bound to be. As he went up, he was already correcting the passage; it was the french horns we should have been hearing now, not the clarinets, and the tympani markings were
piano. This is my music
. It was as though hunting horns were calling him, calling him back to himself. How could he have forgotten? He quickened his stride. He could hear what he had written. He was walking toward a representation of himself. All those nights alone. The hateful press. Allen Crags. Why had he been wasting time all afternoon, why had he been delaying the moment? It was an effort to stop himself running down the curving corridor that led around the auditorium. He pushed open a door and paused.

He had arrived, as he had intended, in the stalls above and behind the orchestra, behind the percussionists, in fact. The musicians could not see him, but he was right in view of the conductor. Giulio Bo’s eyes, however, were closed. He was standing on tiptoe, craning forward, his left arm extended toward the orchestra, and with splayed, trembling fingers was gently lifting into being the muted trombone that now delivered, sweetly, wisely, conspiratorially, the first full statement of the melody, the “Nessun dorma” of the century’s end, the melody Clive had hummed to the detectives yesterday and for which he had been prepared to sacrifice
an anonymous rambler. And rightly. As the notes swelled, as the whole string section positioned their bows to breathe the first sustaining whispers of their sinuous sliding harmonies, Clive slipped quietly into a seat and felt himself tumbling into a kind of swoon. Now the textures were multiplying as more instruments were drawn into the trombone’s conspiracy, and dissonance was spreading like a contagion, and little hard splinters, the variations that would lead nowhere, were tossed up like sparks, which sometimes collided to produce the earliest intimations of the racing wall of sound, the tsunami, that now began to rise up and soon would obliterate everything in its path before destroying itself on the bedrock of the tonic key. But before this could happen the conductor rapped his baton on his desk, and the orchestra raggedly and reluctantly subsided. Bo waited for the very last instrument to fall silent; then he lifted both hands in Clive’s direction and called.

“Maestro, welcome!”

The head of every member of the British Symphony Orchestra turned as Clive got to his feet. As he descended to the stage there was a clatter of bows against music stands. A trumpet sounded a witty four-note quotation from the D major concerto—Clive’s, not Haydn’s. Ah, to be in continental Europe and be maestro! What balm. He embraced Giulio, shook the hand of the concertmaster, acknowledged the musicians
with a smile, a little bow, and hands half raised in modest surrender, then turned back to the conductor to murmur in his ear. Clive wouldn’t address the orchestra today about the piece. He would do it in the morning, when everyone was fresh. For the moment he was happy to sit back and listen. He added his note about the clarinet and french horns and the tympani’s
piano
.

“Yes, yes,” Giulio said quickly. “I’ve seen it.”

As Clive returned to his seat, he noticed how solemn the faces of the musicians were. They had been working hard all day. The reception at the hotel would surely lift their spirits. The rehearsal continued, with Bo refining the passage he had just heard, listening to different sections of the orchestra independently and asking for adjustments in, among other things, the legato markings. From where he sat, Clive tried to prevent his attention from being drawn into technical detail. For now, it was the music, the wondrous transformation of thought into sound. He hunched forward, eyes closed, concentrating on each fragment that Bo permitted. Sometimes Clive worked so hard on a piece that he could lose sight of his ultimate purpose—to create this pleasure at once so sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating air this nonlanguage whose meanings were forever just beyond reach, suspended tantalizingly at a point where emotion and intellect fused. Certain sequences of notes reminded him of nothing more than the recent
effort
to write them. Bo
was now working on the next passage, not quite a diminuendo so much as a shrinking away, and the music conjured for Clive the disorder of his studio in the dawn light and the suspicions he had had about himself and hardly dared frame. Greatness. Was he an idiot to have thought this way? Surely there had to be one first single moment of self-recognition, and surely it would always seem absurd.

Now it was the trombone again and a tangled, half-suppressed crescendo that erupted at last into the melody’s final statement, a blaring, carnivalesque
tutti. But fatally unvaried
. Clive put his face into his hands. He was right to have worried. It was ruined goods. Before he had left for Manchester, he had let the pages go as they were. There was no choice. Now he could not remember the exquisite change he had been about to make. This should have been the symphony’s moment of triumphant assertion, the gathering up of all that was joyously human before the destruction to come. But presented like this, as a simple fortissimo repetition, it was literal-minded bombast, it was bathos; less than that, it was a void: one that only revenge could fill.

Because rehearsal time was running out, Bo let the orchestra play on to the end. Clive slumped in his seat. It all sounded different to him now. The theme was disintegrating into the tidal wave of dissonance and was gathering in volume, but it sounded quite absurd, like twenty orchestras tuning to an A. It was not dissonant
at all. Practically every instrument was playing the same note. It was a drone. It was a giant bagpipe in need of repair. He could only hear the A, tossed from one instrument, one section, to another. Suddenly Clive’s gift of perfect pitch was an affliction. That A was drilling through his head. He wanted to run from the auditorium, but he was right in Giulio’s sight line, and the repercussions of leaving his own rehearsal minutes before the end were unthinkable. So he slumped further into his seat and buried his face in an attitude of profound concentration and suffered right through to the final four-bar silence.

It was agreed that Clive would travel back to the hotel in the conductor’s Rolls, which was waiting by the artists’ entrance. But Bo was caught up in orchestra business, so Clive had a few minutes to himself in the darkness outside the Concertgebouw. He walked through the crowds on Van Baerlestraat. People were already beginning to arrive for the evening’s concert. Schubert. (Hadn’t the world heard enough from syphilitic Schubert?) He stood on a street corner and breathed the mild Amsterdam air which always seemed to taste faintly of cigar smoke and ketchup. He knew his own score well enough, and how many As were there and how that section really sounded. He had just experienced an auditory hallucination, an illusion—or a disillusion. The absence of the variation had wrecked his masterpiece, and he was clearer than ever now, if
such a thing were possible, about the plans he had made. It was no longer fury that drove him, or hatred or disgust, or the necessity of honoring his word. What he was about to do was contractually right, it had the amoral inevitability of pure geometry, and he didn’t feel a thing.

In the car Bo took him through the day’s work, the many sections that seemed to play straight from the page and the one or two that would have to be picked apart tomorrow. Despite his awareness of its imperfections, Clive wanted the great conductor to bless his symphony with a lofty compliment and angled a question accordingly: “Do you think the whole piece is hanging together well? Structurally, I mean.”

Bo leaned forward to slide shut the glass that separated them from his chauffeur.

“Is fine, everything is fine. But between you and me …” He lowered his voice. “I think the second oboe, the young girl, is very beautiful but the playing is not perfect. Fortunately, you have written nothing difficult for her. Very beautiful. Tonight she will have dinner with me.”

For the rest of the short journey Bo reminisced about the BSO’s European tour, which was almost at an end, and Clive recalled the last occasion the two of them had worked together, in Prague on a revival of the
Symphonic Dervishes
.

“Ah yes,” Bo exclaimed as the car stopped outside
the hotel and the door was held open for him. “I remember it. A magnificent piece of work! The inventiveness of youth, so hard to recapture, eh, maestro?”

They parted company in the lobby, Bo to make a quick appearance at the reception, Clive to collect an envelope from the desk. He was informed that Vernon had arrived half an hour ago and had gone to a meeting. The drinks party for orchestra, friends, and press was being held in a long chandeliered gallery at the rear of the hotel. A waiter was standing by the door with a tray, from which Clive took a glass for Vernon and one for himself. Then he retreated to a deserted corner, where he settled on a cushioned window seat to read the doctor’s instructions and open a sachet of white powder. From time to time he glanced toward the door. When Vernon had phoned earlier in the week to apologize for setting the police on him—I was an idiot, pressure of work, nightmare week, and so on—and especially when he had proposed coming to Amsterdam to seal the reconciliation, saying he had business there anyway, Clive had been plausibly gracious in reply, but his hands had been shaking when he put down the phone. They were shaking now as he tipped the powder into Vernon’s champagne, which effervesced briefly, then subsided. With his little finger Clive wiped away the grayish scum that had collected round the rim of the glass. Then he stood and took a glass in each hand. Vernon’s in the right, his own in the
left. Important to remember that. Vernon was right. Even though he was wrong.

Only one problem now preoccupied Clive as he made his way through the cocktail roar of musicians, arts administrators, and critics: how to persuade Vernon to take this drink before the doctor came. To take this drink rather than another. Best, perhaps, to intercept him by the door, before he reached for one from the tray. Champagne slopped over Clive’s wrists as he edged around the loud brass section, and he had to go a long way back up the gallery to avoid getting close to the basses, who already seemed drunk, in competition with the tympani. At last he attained the tempered sodality of the violins, who had permitted flutes and piccolo to join them. There were more women here to exert a tranquilizing effect. They stood about in softly trilling duets and trios, and the air was pleasantly heavy with their perfume. To one side three men were discussing Flaubert in whispers. Clive found an unoccupied patch of carpet from which he had a clear view of the high double doors that gave onto the lobby. Sooner or later someone was going to come and talk to him. Sooner. It was that little shit Paul Lanark, the critic who had pronounced Clive the thinking man’s Gorecki, then later publicly recanted: Gorecki was the thinking man’s Linley. It was a wonder he had the nerve to approach.