Song Of Time (21 page)

“I’m so, so, sorry for you, my darling,” Harad then murmured loudly enough for the onlookers to hear. “I thought you were going to be a marvellous failure. I thought you were going to eke out your life in some dreadful high-rise and die an early death surrounded by bottles of absinthe and vials of float. Instead, you poor thing, you’ve got this— success. Just remember, though, that this is just the beginning.” I was drawn even deeper into an unlikely Chanel-scented hug. “And take proper care of Claude…”This time, Harad’s voice really was a whisper. “He’s far more easily broken than he seems.”

Not only this, but a dissonant phrase from our performance of
She Moves Through the Fair
would, like shells from Proust’s imaginary Balbec, and the alternate pages of
Finnegan’s Wake
read backwards, be contributing towards the great work which Harad was creating on the floor above. And wasn’t that Max Rochereau? And that’s definitely Agnieszka Perrot. Soon, even Jane Affray was talking to me in her animatedly verbose way about how she longed to write a song cycle without words. And I’d perform it, wouldn’t I? And I’d be sure to be here, and read this, and listen to that, and taste these, and sample those, and look in there? Dropped calling cards, the leaf-falls of fame, purred their dying voices across the wine-spilled floors. Soon, people were gathering at the lift and trying promising doors in the hope that they might find a way up to Harad’s famous 6th floor.

I found Claude talking animatedly to a tall, good-looking woman who seemed to be in her early thirties—although, in Paris of all places, it was getting ever-harder to tell. This was Mathilde Irissou, recently nominated by the PS, the French socialist party, as their candidate for the summer’s presidential elections.

“You must be so weary of people congratulating you,” she cooed in perfect English. “But you deserve it. Half the audience were in tears, you know.”

“I certainly haven’t got tired of praise. I hope I never do.”

Mathilde’s Irissou’s straight hair, not so much blonde as amber, was cut at shoulder-length in a neat bob. In a style she’d pioneered after recent seasons of epaulettes and coxcombs, she was dressed severely but elegantly in a dark suit which nevertheless gave discreet prominence to her superb figure. Of mixed Algerian and Polish blood, a self-made product of the dire estates beyond the
Periphique
, she looked every inch the up-and-coming politician, although her main claim to fame until this year had been as the latest incarnation of bare-breasted Liberty emerging from the barricades. In England, there would have been snig-gers. In France, it meant they took her all the more seriously.

“I’m sure you already know how much I admire Claude.” In this age beyond make up, Mathilde’s lips were naturally, unnaturally red, her teeth were whitely perfect, and her eyes were diamond-bright. “You share our commitment to a just, socialist Sixth Republic?”

“I’m all in favour of equality, if that’s what you mean.” I’d already realised that I didn’t like this woman, or the way she looked at Claude, but I pushed such thoughts aside. For Mathilde Irissou was a billion times better than the fatly smug Blaise Boullard, present occupant of the Elysée Palace. And I understood enough from Claude by now to know that politics wasn’t about looking for perfection and rejecting everything else.
It’s the art of the possible. It’s what can be done, Roushana. Here and now. In this imperfect world…

“We need the support of people like you, Roushana. I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you and Claude are an important couple, and I don’t just mean artistically, although that’s obviously true. He’s a black American, you’re an Asian Englishwoman, and yet you’ve both chosen France.”

“Actually, my father was Anglo-Saxon.”

“Is that so? Well, all the better. And your mother—the work she does for the poor and radiation-poisoned in India. You’re a stunning example, Roushana…” Taking my hand in both of hers, she squeezed it and slipped into passionate French. “Between us, we can change the world. These elections aren’t just about who’s going to make the necessary alliances and choose a compromise president for the next five years. You might think you know what Boullard is like, but you don’t. Naturally, there are the deals, the corruption, the brazen inefficiency. Naturally, there are the contracts for buildings which never get built. But that’s just circling around the pot. And it’s getting far worse. This will be the most brutal of all elections. Look, look, over there…”

Despite it all, I was flattered by her warm urgency. Had she really said
change the world?
In this strange and sudden process of my rising, in the fever of Paris in that gathering spring, anything seemed possible.

“Ah,” Claude, a fresh glass of wine slopping in his hand, rejoined us and noticed the direction in which we were looking. “That fraudulent slug. I know that Harad’s a great one for irony, but inviting creatures like that here tonight is just taking it too far…”

If anything, the most distinguishing feature of the man standing awkwardly at the edge of a group was his absolute ordinariness. Everyone else here tonight possessed some combination of talent, fame, power, good looks or money, but, scruffily dressed in jeans, rain-sodden sneakers and a loose, grubby smock, he was their antithesis. His skin was so oddly blotched and mottled that he looked as if he might once have been badly burned, and he was plump and unattractive. You could even see the gleam of his scalp through the greasy hair which, in an almost touching attempt at vanity, he’d attempted to comb across it. He was so unprepossessing it seemed ridiculous that he should be here, but at the same time he radiated a sort of composure—an arrogance, even. And he was oddly familiar…

“Hey, Christos!” Claude shouted over the heads which surrounded us, “how about some water?”

The man didn’t seem to hear and shuffled in his slightly lopsided way towards another oblivious group. But now that Claude had said the name and mentioned water, it all fell into place. He’d shouted worse things, and thrown objects, at this so-called Christos as we lay in bed and flicked from channel to channel on what was still then called the TV. There were many prophets and messiahs back then in Paris, but Harad Le Pape had shown his or her usual judgement by choosing Christos out of all of them to invite here tonight. He was the phenomenon of the season. You saw his disciples handing out apocalyptic flyers and selling cheap bottles of water on almost every street.

“You know,” Mathilde murmured, “there’s every chance the funda-mentalists will have the swing vote in the next Assembly. In effect, and if Boullard gets the presidency again, they’ll probably dictate the choice of Prime Minister. From there, we’ll have a ban on birth control and all forms of abortion. There’ll be total censorship. Women will lose the right to employment. It’ll be the Middle Ages…”

“You really think Boullard would let things go that far?” I asked.

Claude laughed whilst Mathilde favoured me with the different smile she obviously reserved for the blissfully innocent. “Boullard will do anything to keep power, Roushana,” she continued in English. “That’s why we have to stop him. I know it’s easy to be cynical about politics, but there are times when thought and action are crucial, when the very soul of a country lies on a pivot. And this is one of them. France is close to collapsing into factions. We have to give people hope. We have to make a stand. And if that means…” She gave a Gallic shrug. “If that means we have to resort to clichés and soundbites. If I have to purr to the cameras and stick out my chest and do my best to look appealing, so be it. There are worse things. There are worse prices. Which…” Another pause; one of those random insertions which politicians use to make it sound as if what they’re saying isn’t rehearsed. “Which brings me to a favour I have to ask you both. That tune, the one those children played tonight at the Opéra.”

“
Les Escaliers de Montmartre
?” I offered as if she needed my help.

“Exactly. I’ve been trying to get it out of my head for weeks. Then, every time I do, I come across someone else whistling or humming it. We’re looking for a campaign tune, and my advisors’ spin engines tell us that we need something catchy and without words. That tune, to be honest, would be perfect. We’d only use it for the length of the campaign. Then, and if we win as your backing would almost certainly help us do, who knows what a nation might offer in gratitude…?”

This was like watching a good jazz musician improvising. The switches in gear were surprising, yet they seemed inevitable once they’d occurred. But Claude was up there with her. “There are rights issues, Mathilde, and we’d need to speak to our agents, but I’m sure we could sort something out by the weekend? Would that be good enough?”

“That would be perfect…” Mathilde strained forward and up. Her lips and then her fingers lingered on his cheek. Then, with seemingly equal passion, although the sensation was somewhat chilling, she kissed me. “I need you…” she whispered. “Both of you…Remember… Please don’t forget…”

The hours floated on with the resolute illogic of a party. Outside by now, all of Paris might be awake or asleep—living or dead—but everyone who was anyone was still here, and would instantly start talking about whoever was the first to leave. So we all stayed. There was even a rumour that Harad might actually have decided to allow an exclusive preview of his or her great project on the 6th floor, although that was stretching things too far. Then Karl Nordinger, whom I’d been avoiding all night on the basis of our sour encounter in that café, cornered me with a characteristically disconcerting smile stitched across his face and a sickly whiff of Pernod.

“Really enjoyed your performance tonight, Roushana.”

“I thought you…” But how could he, of all people, detest musicians?

“Can I show you something?” Unwanted possibilities ran through my mind, but I nodded anyway.

The party groups had grown denser and more agitated in their rivalries, and the far rooms of Harad’s apartment, with their toppled wineglasses and discarded clothes and trampled drug inhalers, seemed storm-wrecked and empty. Nordinger took me to a keyboard which sat beside windows awash with grey rain. He toyed with its controls and music began to play.

“This is what I’m currently working on,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like very much, I know…”

For many minutes, I just stood there listening. Even from the little I then heard, I already suspected that Karl Nordinger’s
Fourth Symphony
would be his greatest work. Despite, or perhaps because, of our first introduction, I’d now come to know a little more about the man. His parents had been aid workers, and he’d spent his childhood in a variety of third world countries staring out at poverty and violence through the wires of compounds. I supposed it explained a lot, not least his cynicism, and his impossible-to-place accent. He’d started out as a computer geek making dance music, then announced to a mostly disinterested world that he would reinvent the symphony. Of course, it was an absurd presumption and the few who bothered to listen laughed. But then came the First Symphony, and his suite
Swann In Love
, which Claude had espoused in his touring-conductor days. Everyone was listening to him by now. Nordinger’s music was rich, and in some ways it was backward-looking, although many of the tones and references were eastern and scraps of it broke the edges of tonality, whilst others were so abrasive they sounded like orchestral heavy metal. It was as if, as Harad Le Pape him or herself had once commented in the days when he or she still wrote reviews, Beethoven had written trance music. To me, though, Nordinger was reminiscent of Mahler. Not so much in his structures and tonalities, but in grasping at the seemingly ridiculous ambition that a piece of music can encompass the entire world. And Nordinger was able to do something which hadn’t been possible for composers in any previous century, although many toyed with the idea. Using artificial intelligence software, he’d created scores which evolved of their own volition. The middle section of
Swann in Love
, for example, which was once pitted with ironic interjections from the woodwind, was now filled with Proustian twilight.

“See this…” He silenced the keyboard and called up a section of score onto its screen. “I know…” He chuckled. “Sibelius—what you were playing this evening. A total rip-off.”

Not that it was, although I could see what he meant in those gath-ering D minor strings.

“Then there’s this. It’s not finished.”

My skin prickled. For the first time, I saw the scattered notes of the third movement’s famous
Song of Time
.

“Obviously, that bit’s played on the harmonics. The last phrase ends with both the first and second strings.”

“It looks…Quite beautiful.”

Nordinger made a grimace.

“No, I don’t mean beautiful, I mean—”

“Doesn’t matter what you mean. Could you play it?”

“I haven’t got my violin here with me.”

“Not
now
. I mean at the first performance, although fuck knows when that will be.”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, it’s so simple. But…”

“But what?”

“Nothing. I’d be honoured.”

This was an enormous privilege, and I recanted everything I’d ever thought or heard about Karl Nordinger. No-one but a genius of extraordinary sensitivity could write music of such compassion and sadness. Even after I’d returned to the factions of the party, the purity of his melody stayed with me. Haunting—yes, perhaps that would be the closest possible word. But now things inside Harad’s apartment really were starting to wind down. Farewells were being called. Couples and other alliances were reconnecting, or deciding to remain apart. There was no sign of Mathilde Irissou, or Max Rochereau, or Karl Nordinger, or either of the two Susi Broadsmeres, or the character who called himself Christos, or even Harad Le Pape him or herself. Were these, I wondered as Claude and I found our way back out onto the streets of Paris, really the people who we shared this triumphant party with? They looked so lost and pointless now, the men bedraggled, the barefoot women carrying their impossible shoes as they dwindled with their reflections along the shining pavements.