The Secret Knowledge (2 page)

“Why?” He is behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders, she can feel herself flowing into his touch.

“Unless you can tell me exactly what’s going on I can only fear the worst. I read the newspapers, Pierre, I know about the problems in the world. Only the other week there was that bomb that went off and killed so many people.”

“It was in Serbia.”

“How do I know your secret club isn’t an anarchist clique?”

“I can assure you it isn’t any such thing.” He makes her turn and in his face she sees a childlike radiance. “I suppose you could say I’m a utopian, dreaming of an ideal world. Is there anything wrong in that?”

“Of course not.”

“I want us to be together in that world. Forever.” When he holds her close to his chest she thinks she feels rising inside him the great announcement he wants to make, his proposal of marriage. Not yet, though. Releasing her he says, “Let’s go to the big wheel.”

What he means is that she should stop asking questions, but while they walk to join the queue she finds it impossible. “You’ve always been lost in your ideas, Pierre, yet never so mysterious.”

“It’s only temporary, and for the best. When the time is right I’ll tell you everything.”

“And when will the time be right?”

“Soon.”

They stand waiting in line with the families, couples, excited children and quietly curious grandparents. Pierre pays at the desk they reach and receives two blue tickets he holds aloft as though perusing their authenticity. “Let’s keep these as souvenirs,” he says.

“Of what?”

“Of this moment, right now, that will never come again for us.”

She looks at them in his hand, small scraps of coloured paper, and the bad feeling is in her throat and chest, the nauseous sense of foreboding. At the head of the queue, people are being assisted into a waiting carriage, and to Yvette’s eye there is something in all of it that resembles the herding of livestock. She watches the door being locked on a mother and father and their two children. Life is weightless, a falling through an endless void she can’t quite picture or put a name to, but she senses it right now, in this moment that can never return.

She grips him suddenly. “Let’s not.”

“What?”

“I’m scared of it.”

He laughs. “It’s perfectly safe, Yvette, just look at everyone else.”

“I don’t care about everyone else, only us. Let’s go back.”

The bearded gentleman in front can be seen listening to the little crisis; his wife is speaking to him from under her broad hat but he isn’t listening, instead his head is cocked to catch the drama played out behind.

“I paid for the tickets, Yvette.” There is the faintest note of petulance in Pierre’s voice.

“I’ll pay you back.”

“I didn’t mean that. Are you honestly frightened of going up? I’ll hold your hand, it’ll be beautiful, I promise.”

“It’s not the ride I’m afraid of.”

“Then what? Please let’s do it, Yvette. It’s how I planned it in my mind. How I’ve imagined it. You know there’s something very important I want to say to you. Something that will affect us for the rest of our lives…”

She silences his lips with her fingertips. “All right. Enough, darling. Only promise me again, promise me with all your heart that it will be beautiful.”

“I do.”

Their turn arrives. The couple in front are shepherded into the empty wooden cabin that swings to a halt before them, then Pierre and Yvette are invited too, as well as two young men behind. It all happens so swiftly and easily, Yvette thinks, watching through the glass window while the attendant bars the door firmly shut. She grips Pierre to steady herself when with a sudden lurch the cabin moves in an upward arc, making the passengers laugh nervously. It stops again for the performance to be repeated below, and before long they have all become accustomed to this new form of transport, giving them a slowly widening view of the surrounding park with each stage of the ascent.

“Aren’t you glad?” Pierre whispers, and she nods. Did he always imagine there would be four strangers riding with them?

“I’m not afraid any more.”

The remaining compartments are eventually filled; the wheel begins to rotate at a smooth and graceful pace, bringing the enraptured riders past a summit that makes them gasp with awe.

“I feel almost like a bird!” says one.

“The people are no bigger than ants.”

Standing apart from the babble of excitement, Pierre’s observations are more considered, as though he has thought in advance of the wheel’s effect and significance. “The modern world makes everything seem small,” he tells Yvette softly, the two of them pressing against a pane to see the approaching ground, the passing sweep of attendants standing idle, the commencement of the next orbit. “Life seen from a speeding window.”

“Don’t you like it?”

“The categories of like and dislike are outmoded.”

She has heard him talk this way often enough about music, but now she knows he is referring to something else. “I suppose I must be old-fashioned, Pierre, I still believe in like and dislike. That’s why I wonder about your friends.”

“They’ve helped me see the world in a completely different manner. Not through a window at all. They speak of new laws of science: relativity, quantum theory.”

“What does this have to do with us?”

“They’ve made me realise that every moment is a decision, a test. You thought of turning back, but didn’t.”

“Because I trust you.”

“If we hadn’t got on, it would only have made the tiniest difference to the world, but differences add up, everything matters.”

“Are you saying that if I walked away it would have been the end?” The absurdity of the idea is what permits her to express it; Pierre seems to take it seriously.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know what would have happened.”

This is the test, then; her future happiness depends on a fairground ride. “Don’t play games with me.”

“I’m not, it’s life that plays with us – a game of chance.”

“I thought you believed in destiny.”

“I believe in hope.”

The carriage passes its apex once again; Yvette wonders how many more rounds there will be before the finish. “I also have my hopes, Pierre. Tell me whatever you have to.”

“Two things,” he says. “Two very great things on which the whole of my world now hinges.” He clasps her hands. “Yvette, I want you to be my wife.”

He has timed it imperfectly: they are not far from the ground. But others in the carriage catch the flavour of Yvette’s rapturous response, they hear her acceptance, see the way she kisses and holds him, so that when they all reach the top there is a general mood of celebration, of quiet congratulation. There are smiles and sighs, and a polite turning away to allow the couple a restoration of their privacy.

“I’m so happy, Pierre.” She wipes a tear from her eye.

“I was very nervous about asking.”

“Is that all? Is that why you were so strange?”

“I suppose.”

She laughs. “You’re so adorable!” A catalogue of plans passes through her imagination: the church, the dress, the guests. An entire future constructing itself in an instant out of the simplest, humblest materials, like a palace of playing cards, and at its foundation the parents whose permission will be needed: his proud German father. It worries her. “You said there were two things.”

“Not here, my love.”

The wheel slows to a halt and beneath them a carriage is unlocked. The spell has ended; the atmosphere in the compartment changes to an impatience to be freed. Waiting in silence, Yvette feels anxiety return like an inexorable tide. It was such a short and blissful experience, soaring free of gravity. “Give me the tickets,” she says when their door is opened and they step into the dull terrestrial air.

“You see why I said we should keep them?” Crumpled from his pocket, they have the solemn mortality of fallen feathers. “This is the happiest day of my life, Yvette.”

“And mine.” She is a sleepwalker in two worlds at once, reality and dream; his proposal should have turned one into the other but hasn’t, instead it has emphasised their separation. She wants someone to shake her by the shoulders, wake her, show her that the marriage has happened, the children are born.

He leads her back to the row of stalls that was their rendezvous; he wants to buy her something, a sweet biscuit perhaps, or a posy of flowers. He speaks rapidly as if trying to placate a child while thinking of more important matters only an adult can understand; he sounds nervous and evasive.

“Tell me now,” she demands. “If I’m to be your wife there can be no more secrets.”

“You must wait here for me,” he says urgently.

“What?”

“I have to leave you for a few moments.”

“Why?”

“As soon as I come back I’ll explain everything, I promise. I will tell you the secret knowledge.”

He has the face of a stranger, an emerging look of barely suppressed panic.

“You’re going to meet one of them, aren’t you?”

“Don’t try to guess, Yvette, you can’t possibly imagine… Please don’t make this harder for me. I love you so much.” “Then why not trust me?”

“First I have to trust myself. My own destiny. Yvette, I believe in the better world that’s approaching, I really do, but it won’t come unless we make it happen. There are risks…”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me, after asking me to marry you. Do you want me to reject you? Is this the test you had in mind?”

He nods vigorously. “That’s right, it’s a test. Your test, Yvette. All you have to do is wait here for me. Five minutes. Wait here, and when I come back our future can begin.”

“You mean this is like making me go on the big wheel?”

“Exactly.”

His sinister friends have put him up to this ridiculous stunt, she knows it. He will come back and confess, then she must persuade him to forget about them forever.

“One thing, Yvette.” He reaches inside his jacket and brings out something small, hidden in his fingers. A ring? No, what he holds before her is a key. “The manuscript – it’s in a drawer of my desk.” He gives her the key and she stares at it in bewilderment, not hearing his words. She raises her eyes and sees him already hurrying away.

“Pierre!”

He doesn’t look back. Pierre goes in the direction of the boating pond, disappearing among the trees, but Yvette has lost sight of him before then, her eyes filled with tears. She holds the key so tightly that it hurts. This is the future he has promised: lies and deception. It has to be another woman. Pierre is a partisan of the avant-garde and she is not naive. There are secrets she will need to learn.

This is worse than her earlier wait, the fairground looks monstrous and hostile, every smile a taunt. What if she were to walk away? Can she not put Pierre to the test, make him prove himself worthy of her love? Is she to be nothing more than the muse of a genius? She can see the tent with the painted wooden dummy outside that made him pause.
Ariel: The Extraordinary Flying Girl
. The unseen show within becomes a sudden source of fascination for her. She wants to witness the spectacle, enjoy it alone while she is still free. Yes, free, without a ring on her finger. Only a key. With her gaze fixed stonily on the flapping canvas tent she walks toward it, clutching his ridiculous gift and wondering if she should toss it away like an apple core – his desk, his unscored symphony, his destiny. Growing before her eyes is the wooden figure of a diminutive flat-chested girl, a fairy beckoning with a fixed expression, so that Yvette sees nothing else, hears nothing, feels herself drawn inside the sprite’s realm, being swung like an acrobat on a giant rotating wheel of fortune, and only gradually she realises that encroaching on her consciousness is a noise, a din, anguished shouts and a general rushing. Startled, she turns and sees a convergence like water in a funnel, a flow of people following others to discover what is going on near the boating pond where the crowd is densest, and she goes too, feeling herself pushed and jostled but with her senses dulled like a diver’s at great depth, catching eventually, from distraught onlookers making their way back in her direction, that there has been an accident, a gun went off, a man is feared dead, and somehow she knows immediately who it must be, though it will be so long before she can ever bring herself to believe it. Yes, she keeps telling herself, it’s the happiest day of my life. The happiest day of my life.

The venue is a provincial town hall, the concert an item in the annual local arts festival. Why was David Conroy invited to perform? Probably because among the better known pianists the organisers tried first, none were available, or all were too expensive. He didn’t think of it while playing, the music mattered more to him than thoughts of his declining career, but standing beside the instrument to acknowledge applause for the final piece in his recital, he senses the disappointment of people who would have preferred tunes they already knew, played by someone whose name they recognised.

He walks from the stage and the clapping continues; they’ve paid good money and expect an encore, though some have trains to catch or restaurant tables waiting; he can see figures leaving while he returns and sits to give the obligatory bonus feature, Liszt’s
Églogue
providing an envoi as civilised and unambiguous as coffee and mints. Departing the platform once more he is congratulated in the wings by the young female assistant who has gauged the diminishing ovation and politely shows him back to his dressing room.

He’s not yet fifty but feels too old for this. Sitting alone in front of the mirror’s tired reflection he checks his phone, there’s a text from Laura, she hopes the tour is still going well. Tour is too grand a word for the three engagements that have taken him out of his college routine for a week. The truth is that he no longer tours, or records; the prize-winning rising star of three decades ago turned into a disappointed teacher who does occasional performances like this, off-circuit, low fee, barely more dignified than a church-hall vanity concert. Laura’s text is concise, impersonal, the sort of thing she could have sent to one of her journalist colleagues. Their last interaction before parting was an argument about the fridge.