Song Of Time (38 page)

So Claude, who never embraced anything less that whole-heartedly, made Paris his
leitmotiv
, and if Paris meant anything as the years went by and the myths proliferated and people began to look back fondly to that seemingly golden time, it meant Karl Nordinger, and his magnificent
Fourth Symphony
. Of course, Claude still loved the work. But he came to hate it as well, and, as other conductors learned from the mistakes he had made in dealing with an evolving piece of music, and a generation of critics far less iconoclastic than Harad Le Pape began to hail it as the masterpiece it always was, it haunted him far more than he ever dared admit. For all his stirring re-interpretations of Elgar and his re-discovery of Blore, it was the one thing which all the people he encountered knew about him. For here was Claude Vaudin, who had made a famous mess of the first performance of the one acknowledged work of symphonic genius to be produced in the twenty first century.

Claude was torn. That era in Paris had fitted him so well that he found it hard to discard it. He often tried to re-invent some different milieu which would do the same thing again—with him, there were always the next trend, a different philosophy or cause or tone-scale or way of living or dressing—but the effect grew thinner as he got older and began to turn a little fat. Sometimes, and for all my continued close-ness to him, I’d barely notice whatever fad he was currently chasing until it was gone. For me, it was always a lot simpler. I had my violin, and then I had the kids. But he was tied to the chains of Paris, of those great times of overreaching failure and glorious success, which part of him, for all that he railed against it, never really wanted to shake off.

After Yellowstone, after Mathilde’s election, after the mess of Christos and the fiasco of that premiere, it was inevitable that things would change between us, and I realise now far more strongly than I did at the time that I was already steeling myself to losing Claude. I knew the pattern by then. Claude took on lovers just as he took on his other passions, and the times when you were in the spotlight of his attention were glorious, but—inevitably, so it seemed—short-lived. After that night, though, something changed within Claude. In many ways, he became louder and more bombastic, more obviously the famous Claude Vaudin, but the Claude I knew, the quieter real man who lay underneath all the power and bluster, was less certain of himself, and in far greater need. I got lucky, if lucky is what you call it. If things had worked out differently in Paris, I might well have lost him. But instead of falling out of love with me and moving on to his next big passion, Claude Vaudin took me as the refuge he could return to from a world which had turned wintery.

I’m still not that sure that I was ever really that good at providing a welcoming mind and heart and body to soothe away all his frustrations and pains. Love, whatever it is, has always been mysterious to me: some-thing you feel, if you feel it at all, only when it’s mostly gone. Was I ever that warm and womanly? Or is the icy tone which people have always heard in my playing, and the difficulty I still feel about giving either Maria or Edward the unconditional love I got from my own parents, what I really amount to? Did Claude stay with me because I loved him enough, or because he feared I didn’t love him at all? It would certainly explain a lot. The angers, the demands, the tantrums, the breakages…

And Claude liked a drink. In fact, he liked several, and so did I. Even after Paris, even when we had the kids, it long remained part of the fun of being with Claude. In fact, getting properly drunk became an act of nostalgic reunion. But then I realised one day that the soberups weren’t working and the whole thing was getting in the way of my playing, and that was it. I simply quit. From then on, drink became another barrier Claude could never quite bridge between us.
Go on, Roushana. Just try. This is one of the last, ever, Californian whites. You can still taste the lost sunshine.
But the more expansive his cellar became, the less I wanted to submit. So Claude drank the whole expensive bottle—indeed, several bottles—himself.

None of it’s easy, you know. Not living, or being famous, or being great and talented and handsome and knowing for most of your life that the best times have already gone. And being American; that as well. It wasn’t just losing his parents. In the quick way they surely died, that was probably a sort of blessing. As the states divided in that terrible, messy war, and no matter which of the several sides you supported and how many fundraising performances you gave, there was soon no country left to call America, although being American was a big part of what Claude truly was. That passion. That optimism. That can-do. All of it gone, a harbour to which he could never return, especially when visiting what remained of the country itself was far more painful to him than India ever became for Mum.

So Claude kept up with his new passions and his new orchestras, and he held those famous parties and, yes, there was the DB. I remember he had this brief, searing enthusiasm for the music of Thin White Duke-era Bowie: sleek and soulless soul music sung by a white Londoner lost in cocaine and Los Angeles, all sheen and bluster and not much else. But Claude wouldn’t have a word said against it. He got this machine from somewhere, a sort of cassette called an eight-track, which he installed into the DB’s dashboard. He was always playing this particular song—
Young Americans.
He’d sing along at full volume about living for twenty years and having to die for fifty more as he drove, often drunk and dangerously one handed.

Not that it was just drink, or ever had been. In his hurry to keep up, a Thin Black Duke who didn’t quite fit into his sleek suits because the diet hormones he took were cancelled out by the soberups, Claude was always game for the next big high. He never took serious risks—there was always some essential caution—but he could never ignore the chance of an interesting experience, and I had to grow used to a variety of different Claudes in the times he spent with me here in Morryn. There was always some new gateway which would unleash and explain everything until the next one came along, although it wasn’t as simple by then as saying that drugs degraded your critical faculties. There were substances which did the exact opposite, just as there were those which allowed you to see your own private version of God.

Claude tried them all, or at least he said he did, for the story, the public performance, was always at least as important to him as the truth. And he
could
take it—he could take them all. He was big and he was strong and he was Claude Vaudin, whilst I, being me, drew back and said little and let him get on with it, knowing that any other course would only make matters worse. No matter how far he went, I always knew that he would come back, even if some of the journeys were very strange. I remember how he once returned from Singapore with what he was sure, absolutely convinced, was the way ahead not just in terms of creativity, but of understanding the human mind. Sitting beside him on our bed and wishing we could simply make love and go to sleep, I watched as he opened a prosaic matchbox-sized tin. Inside, there seemed to be two small-bore bullets. Then, by small expansions and contractions, the bullet-things started moving.

“Doesn’t look very promising,” he admitted, “but the whole insight they offer is entirely unique. They’re not about changing consciousness. They’re just about bringing two minds closer together. They allow you to share your dreams…”

I’d already decided I wasn’t having any of it, especially when Claude explained you let them crawl into your ear.

“They’re just like little transmitters. They form a holistic pattern of the entire sleeping brain, which they then impart, send out, to their host-twin. Imagine, what
this
will do to the world. And it’ll be cool Roushana. It’ll be great.”

Exactly who, I couldn’t help wondering, had Claude shared these things with already to know that they were so wonderful? And why on earth should I risk my mind and my hearing for the sake of some dubious technological stunt? But Claude had to demonstrate, tilting his head to let one of the things worm its way into his ear as if that would make me like the idea more. Then, playfully at first, and then more insistently, he tried to get me to do the same. A scuffle ensued and I ended up stamping repeatedly on the remaining bullet-thing as, shedding delicate wings of circuitry, it tried to crawl away across the bedroom floor.

I spent that night alone down here on this divan. I remember staring up at that ceiling and thinking of the thing in his head, sending out unreceived dreams into a changed and hostile world.

By then, Claude was returning for the first time in years to performing publicly on the piano. Gone were the percussive jazz experiments and treated strings of Paris. This was about a new simplicity, and he settled on the great body of work central to all solo piano music, which is of course Chopin. Slimming down a little, sobering up, getting himself some more appropriate suits, combing his hair in a way which covered his growing bald spot for which he was too vain to take treatment, Claude set out to re-conquer the world.

I was surprised that the critics still cared enough about Chopin, or even Claude, to be as harsh as they were. Essentially, they saw him as a conductor pretending to be a pianist, and the worst part of it all was that Claude knew they were right. He slunk home with half the tour cancelled, as sad and as needy as I’d ever seen him, although the humility and the sobriety were on hold. By then, he’d developed this thing about Leo. It was a kind of jealousy, I suppose. I must have told him once about hearing my brother playing the
Raindrop Prelude
on that New Year’s morning, and so of course Claude got himself drunk enough to sit down at the piano and play it for me, and then turn and ask if it was anything like as good. Of course, it wasn’t—how could I tell him otherwise when, with music if nothing else, we always kept to the truth?—and in his worst moments Claude came to see my lost brother as some kind of ultimate musical competitor: Ashkenazy, Barenboim, Prevent, Gould and Keith Jarrett combined…

What else can I say? How many other Claude-stories do you want me to tell? You know what happened—you know where this leads. It’s so easy, with all this stupid hindsight, to make it seem as if it was always coming. Claude liking a drink. Claude loving that DB so much that I would sometimes sit inside it when he wasn’t here and breathe its leather scent and feel far closer to him that when he was. There were the dangerous nights when I agreed to drive out with him for fear of what would happen if he drove alone. There was the talk—sometimes, he seemed to believe it—about the machine guns and ejector seat he was going to have fitted so he could finish off his James Bond car. And all the wild theories—stuff he’d have called reactionary nonsense when he was young. Best or worst, I always thought, was his idea that the Yellowstone eruption had been trigged by some Arab atom bomb. But that wasn’t Claude. That wasn’t
my
Claude, the man I still loved and still wanted to be with forever, and in precious moments—in soft mornings, walking the beach or just playing music here in this room or simply making love—still sometimes was.

Claude didn’t have to die. It happened, but it didn’t need to. There was so much he wanted to give, and I loved him so very dearly…It was just another night—inside Morryn, anyway, although outside the weather was brewing up a storm almost as bad as this. I’d come back lateish from town, cold and soaking wet from the rain, and I’d got changed and we’d eaten in the old kitchen, and Claude had drunk some wine, just as he always did. I was feeling tired. I think I was probably coming down with something—one of those stupid, snivelling diseases they’ve never worked out how to cure. We sat in here for a while, but I said I’d like an early night, and I stood up from this divan and went over to that chair by the desk, and leaned over and kissed his forehead. When I got upstairs, I could still hear him moving about, and then, after I’d laid down, I heard him lift the lid on the piano. He started playing. It was nothing special. No particular piece. He probably wasn’t really thinking, just sipping a glass of wine or two and strumming, although Claude often played far more beautifully and soulfully when he did that than when he tried. If you could have trapped the moment, you’d have had the essence of my husband. Easy, relaxed, charming, profound—everything. Much as I was feeling achy and sniffly and part of me wanted him to simply come to bed, I felt happy like that, lying there listening to the delicate sound of my Claude’s playing coming up through Morryn above the boom and swish of the storm. The music drifted, it paused—he probably went to open a fresh bottle—I was already half asleep when he started playing again, but I was sure he drifted into a twinkling rendition of
Les escaliers de Montmartre
, which made me want to laugh and cry. So I fell asleep sniffling and smiling, and I suppose Claude went on drinking and playing, and at some point he must have decided to take the DB out for a drive. If I’d been awake, I’d have tried to stop him. Worst come to the worst, I’d have even gone out with him as I’d done before. But he went out alone in the DB, out into that storm, which, being such a big soppy Romantic, and of course rather drunk, would have seemed to Claude like a very obvious and natural thing to do. He was probably planning on stopping above Bezant’s Bay. It was one of the places he liked best, especially when the weather was this wild. He’d stand there above the cliffs like Mickey Mouse in
Fantasia
, conducting the storm. But instead he must have overshot, misjudged—the road there was already failing and badly marked—and when I awoke the next morning, Claude, his DB, everything worth remembering, was gone.

ADAM’S PACED THE MUSIC ROOM, SAT DOWN, crouched beside me, moved to stand at the window surrounded by reflections of the storm. He’s stared at the automatic piano which Claude played, as if it might start playing again with a will of its own, although that would scarcely be a surprise to either of us now. The way he’s reacted, the plays of rain-driven shadows across his face, are like those he displayed when I played him music. He’s more than an audience. He’s there—he’s involved…