The Maestro's Mistress (25 page)

It was a concerto for
connoisseurs, demanding both stamina and musical sophistication from the
audience who in turn would expect nothing short of excellence from the
performers.

Tara’s flight from Heathrow was
delayed because of a bomb scare and when she eventually arrived at the Golden
Hall the rehearsal had finished some time previously.

Fatigued, queasy and wracked with
nerves she looked around the great ornate hall and felt completely overwhelmed.
It was a place of opulent magnificence, a glowing gilded palace of music. The
fifty-foot ceiling was elaborately panelled around a series of ten central
paintings depicting female figures draped in long floating robes. White,
long-necked birds perched on the narrow balcony above the orchestra section
whilst the rest of the balcony was supported on golden columns cast in the form
of heavy-breasted Amazon figures naked from the waist up. Thirty six of them
formed an impressive ring around the hall.

Tara stared up at them. Their
smooth faces, framed in shoulder-length ringlets were cool and impartial as
though they were constantly sitting in judgement. She had the feeling they
would give no quarter to those who fell short of perfection. Horrified panic at
what she had let herself in for kept rising in her throat.

A small man with a mass of frizzy
hair came forward to greet her. She recognized him immediately as Hermann Otto,
the octogenarian who had been a mainstay of music in Vienna and Salzburg for
over fifty years. Like Xavier, his face graced countless record sleeves and CD
covers. Tara had also seen him many times on television conducting the great
orchestras of Berlin and Vienna.

Otto had worked with some of the
great composer/conductors of the early part of the century, including Richard
Strauss and even the genius Gustav Mahler who had noted the potential of the
young Otto when he was no more than a boy. It was like confronting an icon of
living history.

‘Tara, Tara, Tara!’ he exclaimed.
‘I hear so many wonderful things about you.’

‘I think I’d rather you’d heard
bad,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Then at least I wouldn’t be an awful
disappointment.’

A grating guttural chuckle
bubbled in his throat. He chuckled all the time, never stopped smiling. She
began to feel better. He took her hand and shook it warmly, his eyes beaming
out from the heavy wrinkled folds of skin surrounding them.

‘You are terrified,’ he said,
observing her trembling fingers. ‘You are quivering with fear.’

She nodded.

‘This is how it should be. No one
ever plays well without the demon of terror driving them from within.’

He placed an arm around her
shoulders. ‘The Elgar Concerto,’ he mused. ‘I always play it completely
straight. You know? No conductor’s frills. Just like your Xavier would choose
to do. You will be quite safe with me.’

‘I hope I do you justice,’ Tara
said simply.

Another chuckle from Otto. ‘My
beautiful orchestra, you will love them. They will do everything to help. You
take the music at your own pace – and I will bind you all together.’

Tara took a deep breath. He was
talking about one of the great Viennese orchestras, one of the greatest
orchestras in the world.

‘What a wonderful challenge,’
Otto murmured, ‘to play for an audience so spontaneously, so fresh.’

My God! Tara thought. He’s going
to let me simply go on and play. No impromptu run through just with him.
Nothing! She wished she saw the situation in such a positive light as Otto did.

In the white-walled dressing room
she took out her photographs of Xavier and Alessandra and placed them on the
table beneath the mirror. Then she put on the simple toga-style dress of green
silk that she had bought on Georgiana’s advice on one of their recent shopping
trips. It was a good choice, concealing all the ripening bulges. After that
there was nothing to do but pluck at the tendrils of hair around her face and
wait. She judged that she had gone beyond fear now.

Walking onto the stage she was
aware of the stern formality of the occasion. Black ties and jackets were the
uniform for the men, orchestra and audience alike, whilst the women formed a
kaleidoscope of colour against which a firmament of jewels flashed. The
auditorium throbbed with a low ripe murmuring. A heady cocktail of expensive
perfumes hung in the air.

Otto hugged her to him as he led
her to the front of the orchestra. Then his hands invited the audience to
welcome her with warm applause, acknowledge her courage in acting as a stand-in
at such short notice.

Tara stood in motionless
concentration. And then her bow was carving over the strings and the joy of
creating this majestically beautiful concerto blotted out all fear.

Otto was as good as his word. He
let her have her head and he took the orchestra with her. And as she played
Tara knew that she was making contact with this exacting audience; that she was
making Elgar’s music sing to them. That she could do all this even without Saul.

Her breathing deepened. How she
adored this exposure to an audience, how hungry she was to draw them into the
magical circle of a composer’s sublime artistry.

The music was carving inside her
now, taking her on a deeply personal journey. The figure of her father seemed
to materialize at her side. She was conscious of that loved, grave face
watching her. Assessing, analysing, urging her on.

‘You will have Freddie’s gift,’
he used to say to Tara in those dreadful empty months after her brother died.
She had understood that it was her duty to rekindle her dead brother’s
snuffed-out torch and bear it out into the world for him.

She remembered the weight of
responsibility which had fallen on her young shoulders at the sound of her
father’s words. Heavy words, pressing her down; crushing her own developing
individuality. She had been a child of only nine.

She had tried so hard. She had so
wanted to please her father, carry out his longed for wishes and make it up to
him for the loss of his son. She had been too young to understand that the task
was impossible and thus must be quietly abandoned. After all, the message in
her father’s words was clear enough. Her child’s spirit had struggled to make
his dream come true. She had driven herself on. Always trying. Always failing.
Never good enough.

Eventually despair had taken
over. She had given up her mission and cast it away from her. After all that
uphill toiling she had known she would never be as good as Freddie; not as an
instrumentalist, not as a person. After all, he was dead; he was a saint who
could never again do any wrong.

As she played the Elgar Concerto
in the great Viennese hall she understood the anger and despair of her
childhood with the rare clarity that can come with great emotional tension. And
with that understanding her spirit lightened. A burden was lifted.

No Daddy, she thought, not Freddie’s
gift but my own. Me - Tara.

And then she was playing not for
her father not for any of her teachers, not even for Saul. She was playing
simply for the people who were here now with her in this hall. For the reticent
English composer who had conceived the music. And for herself.

After the final chord, as Otto
lowered his baton, the orchestra exploded into spontaneous applause. The noise
of their delighted enthusiasm clattered around her, rattling through her
nerves, drawing her out of her reverie, propelling her on the journey back to
the real world.

Otto saw that his soloist was
only slowly swimming up from that private place into which an artist can
submerge themselves when playing. He turned her gently to face the audience. He
took her hand, pressing it firmly. He took her in his arms, hugged and kissed,
clapped his hands together as his arms linked behind her neck. The audience
roared.

It seemed to Tara that history
was recording a new beginning for her.

There were two telephone messages
at the desk in her hotel. She read them when she finally got in at two in the
morning.

The one from Roland said crisply,
‘Tonight the foundations of a glittering career have been laid.’

And from Saul – just one word.
‘So?’

She slipped into bed, elation
having turned to exhaustion. The music still crashed in her head. But tonight
there was no Saul to enfold her with his body and his will and soothe it away.

On the flight back to London late
the next morning Tara read the newspaper criticisms of her performance. Several
British journalists had attended the concert, it being a rather special event
when a great Vienna orchestra played on their home territory. Reports had been
phoned through to London to make the morning editions and copies had just
arrived at the airport as Tara checked in.

The comments on her performance
were unanimously positive and some went further than that. ‘Strong, muscular
playing from the young British soloist,’ said
The Guardian
. And the
stern critic in
The Times
went so far as to describe her interpretation
as ‘poetic – bringing a glow of fresh colour to an Edwardian masterpiece.’

Tara relaxed in her seat and
closed her eyes, letting the praise trickle over her in a warm stream. It told
her that she was a player of worth and stature. And she had proved it out there
in the big wide world on her own. No Daddy looking over her shoulder and
chivvying her on, no Saul acting as her beloved guardian and patron. She was a
player of individuality and quality. Finally she believed it. Because now she
could see the reason behind her previous stubborn denial of her abilities – the
long shadow cast by her talented dead brother from whose loss her father had
never recovered.

She saw it so clearly now; how
her father had unconsciously compared her with the dead Freddie. Maybe nothing
had been said directly, she could not remember. But she had sensed it with a
child’s keen intuition: she could still call up the feelings of despair and
inadequacy even now.

And she could also feel again her
anger as a teenager when she had finally abandoned the task of attempting to
give her father something that was not in her power to give. The only thing she
had been able to do was rebel – stamp on her musical talent and bury it in a
dark hole. Open up a brittle, jagged gap between herself and her much loved
father.

She could see now that it was no
coincidence that the re-emergence of her longing to be a brilliant player had
begun to flower after his death.

Then Saul had come into her life
and become the guardian of all her hopes: emotional, sexual, musical. With cool
clear-minded impartiality he had nurtured the green shoots of her reawakened
ambitions. Without him it would not have been possible to reach the pinnacle
she was perched on this morning.

But there was someone else
besides her father and Saul who had played a crucial part in all this. Someone
she had treated with dismissive disdain - railed at, abused. Her mother. Tara
looked back again into her childhood and saw her mother there as a shadowy
presence, a warm anchor of stability and calm, acting as a foil to her father’s
obsessive ambition.

Whilst her father had been a
ruthless driving force her mother had offered the very gentlest encouragement.
She had always been there when the young Tara needed a shoulder to cry on. And
she had never compared her to the dead Freddie.

Tara gave a sharp gasp as the
jig-saw pieces of her childhood slotted into a coherent picture. It was her
mother who had been her greatest ally. Her mother who had borne the brunt and
taken the flak. The rage and frustration Tara had felt for her father she had
vented on her patient mother.

After her teenage rebellion the
relationship with her father had become a curious mixture of the warmly loving
and the reverentially distant. Tara had learned never to get into fights with
him. The anger that swelled inside her; dark, incomprehensible and terrifying,
must be held down at all costs. Far too dangerous to uncork.

There had been just one crucial
final engagement between them – a battle between a man with only months to live
and a girl struggling to get a grasp on her own ambitions.

He had been cool and reasonable.
She had been a ball of rage, yelling until she tasted blood in her throat. She
had let him know without a doubt that the last thing in the world she was ever
going to do was practise on her bloody violin. It could be broken up and used
for bonfire fuel for all she cared.

Rachel had intervened –
staunching wounds, getting lacerated herself, carrying all the future blame.

Tara thought of her mother in
Saul’s big country house at this moment, caring for little Alessandra, taking
her through the initial hours of her first birthday. It would have been
impossible to entrust Alessandra to anyone but Rachel.

Recalling some of her more brutal
retorts to her mother over the years Tara gave a grimace. She determined to
make a new start. She and Rachel would talk over the past together, explore it
at leisure and draw close to each other. The triumph of the Vienna concert
would be a gift Tara could offer her mother to mark the beginning of a new
closeness between them.