The Virtuoso (2 page)

He lifted his eyes from the keys and looked at Beecham. The conductor lowered his head questioningly and the boy responded with a nod.

The hall grew quiet and expectant; the strings lifted their bows. I looked at the programme on my father’s lap: the face of a child with large, imploring eyes stared out at me, and above, in bold script, the name
Noël Mewton-Wood.

The concerto began: C, E flat, G—a grim announcement from the strings marching up the minor triad. The sound branched out into harmonies, modulations, melodies weaving in and out of each other; the orchestra churned like a storm. Amidst this tumult, Noël sat upright and still at the piano, as if chiselled from marble.

The orchestral
tutti
ended with three crashing Cs. Noël lifted his hands and held them above the lower keys. A pause, then he began. Forte octaves, both hands, three times up the keyboard, arriving at the theme, those big dark chords producing an orchestra of sound. Then the most pleading, yearning song. I’d never heard
anything so beautiful, that sorrowful melody returning again and again, each time more regal or gleeful or tragic. His entire body poured into his fingertips, launching into the most raging fortissimos, his pianissimos spun into the finest thread.

I sat transfixed for the entire concerto. Mesmerised by this sound that thundered throughout the hall, staring at the tall, skinny teenager who sat over the keys of the Steinway like a sparrow perched on the haunches of a large black bull.

By the cadenza and final chords of the third movement I was no longer watching his hands; my gaze was glued to his face, at those solemn eyes that looked down upon his fingers as if they were foreign to him.

Noël drew his hands up off the piano and onto his lap, sitting still for one moment, studying the keys as if he, like the audience, was not entirely sure what had transpired.

The crowd was in rapture.

He tipped his head up to draw in some air then dropped it down again, this time casting his eyes beyond the piano, beyond the orchestra. He rose and carefully stepped out towards the audience, standing soberly. And everyone could see—yes, it was just a young angelic boy. He placed his hand on the slippery arm of the Steinway, his chin pressed against his chest. Then he bowed ever so slightly, like a stalk of wheat swaying in the breeze, a gesture as perfectly executed as every other movement he had performed that evening. Beecham,
grinning like a proud father, turned to the audience and stretched one arm out towards Noël.

I sat up tall in my seat and clapped as hard and fast as I could, hollowing my palms to produce that same round, loud crack as my father. The applause was growing around us, hitting the stage like a shower of bullets. Noël stood for a second or two longer, blinking into the din, before turning and walking from the stage.

As we sat there, still clapping, both of us with smiles fixed wide across our faces, I looked up at my father and said to myself that I would remember this moment for the rest of my life.

Standing here now in my robe with my favourite grey cashmere suit laid out expectantly before me, I can recall that evening fifteen years ago with more clarity than concerts I attended only last week.

Yes, everything changed for me after that night. My days suddenly filled with great purpose. I immersed myself in the musical world and acquainted myself with my new set of peers—musicians, conductors, composers—when they appeared in the paper or spoke on the wireless, following all they said and did. When all of London’s critics remarked on Noël’s tremendous concerto performance—his ‘engaging confidence’ and ‘virtue of honesty’—I agreed wholeheartedly, parroting each comment back to my father, swelling with these weighty adult words and opinions.

The conductor Sir Henry Wood declared that Noël reminded him of all the great pianists of the past, and Beecham called Noël ‘the best talent I’ve discovered in the Empire for years’. Beecham had staked the flag: Noël was new musical territory—and I was part of the pioneering expedition. And so began the traversing, the mapping and the unearthing of Noël Mewton-Wood.

If it wasn’t for the cultural blackout that hit London at the beginning of 1940, more would have been made of Noël’s arrival, yet his timing also made his appearance more auspicious. That this young boy with the ivory skin and the hands that played the sublime could rise when Britain was poised on the brink of possible invasion. In my mind he was a national hero, as potent as a front-line commander. But at the same time, he was entirely removed from the everyday of a war that trampled our days and blackened our nights. He became gloriously untouchable: a brilliant cumulus cloud floating over our cold and muddy lives.

Like every household at the time, at six o’clock each evening, my father, my aunt and I would gather around the wireless to listen to the BBC broadcast—
Blood for Britain, Road Safety in the Blackout
or
Eleven Hours in a Rubber Dinghy.
There were news flashes of European towns captured, and stories of the unimaginable evils of the Huns, who tortured and ate their own children, murdered their neighbours and were marching left-right-left-right towards us that very minute. I accepted that I was to do my bit (‘This war is the people’s war!’)
and listened eagerly, standing by for my instruction. ‘Preparation! If the invader comes…’ I waited, masking my excitement, in quiet hope of being given a chance to prove myself. I’d see the invader floating down from a parachute like a spider dangling from a thread, his body braced in attack position, his helmet, long boots and vest all charcoal black as if he’d just walked unscathed from a blaze.
Do not give a German anything. Do not tell him anything. Hide your food and your bicycles. Hide your maps. Think of your country before you think of yourself
. I readied myself for his imminent arrival, and at the end of each day leaned forward in my chair, listening with my father and aunt to the World Service broadcasts, awaiting further instruction and word from the front.

And then: ‘Now continuing our evening special on our friends from across the Channel, tonight we look at the life of the French impressionist composer Claude Debussy. To begin the programme we’ll hear three of Debussy’s works for the pianoforte from
Estampes—“Pagodes”, “Soirée dans Granade”
and
“Jardins sous la pluie”
—performed by the young Australian pianist Noël Mewton-Wood.’

The room would then fill with the most exquisite sounds: harmonies plucked from the ether by a composer who arrived on the heels of the nineteenth-century Germans—Wagner, Beethoven and Mahler—with their colossal sounds, their Faustian soul-struggles. Debussy presented the only possible passage forward: impressions of moonlight, footprints in the
snow, spellbinding in their simplicity. As I sat in the living room, warming my hands by the fire, digesting battle calls, sirens and insistent broadcasts, the hacking machinery all miraculously subsided, evaporated into the passing of a cloud, drifted off in an ephemeral mist.

I closed my eyes and imagined Noël playing, his raindrop touch, his intimate knowledge of worlds so beguiling. No one else could hear what I was hearing,
really.
They just heard sparkling virtuosity, a respite from the war. They couldn’t hear because he was playing for me, for the one person who knew and understood him.

My desire to see him and hear him felt urgent, and I would remind myself that he was somewhere near me, breathing the same air into his lungs. I’d imagine him in the evenings, eating his meal and taking a cup of tea, gazing out the window and thinking about me.

Noël was one of the up-and-coming musicians whom Myra Hess adored, and whose talents she fostered. (‘What on earth will the boy be like at forty?’ she once exclaimed on the radio.) So each week I’d look for his name in the National Gallery programme in the paper, and when I saw he was performing, even if my father insisted I go to school, I’d catch the midday bus to Trafalgar Square, indifferent to the trouble I’d get into if caught.

As London headed into summer, the fences around the Gallery were removed, and guests and diners spilled out onto the lawn. Pulling out my lunch from its brown
paper bag, I’d sit on the grass, sniffing the warm blossomy air, admiring the way the young girls lounged about, pulling up their skirts to sun their legs, bowing their heads coquettishly as they listened to tales from young soldiers who knelt down beside them.

Then as the clock approached one, I’d pay my shilling and walk down the marble corridors towards the Barry Rooms, heading through the crowd towards the nearest empty cane-bottomed chair. Once seated with my satchel between my feet, I’d look up at the bevelled glass-panelled dome and Renaissance frieze with busts of painters gazing down upon me, and wait.

From behind a red curtain, Noël would emerge onto the makeshift platform. A quiet nod to the audience, then he’d sit at the Steinway, and those gargantuan hands would concertina outward, arching up over the keys—and he would begin.

Once, after a performance, I lingered around afterwards, hoping to see him, or for him to see me. He came out from behind the curtain with several men and stepped down from the stage. Waiting for him on the floor was a middle-aged woman with a girl several years older than myself. I couldn’t see the girl’s face properly from where I stood but could make out, from the tight clasp of her hands at the front of her coat, the importance of this meeting.

Noël greeted the woman with a kiss on the cheek then glanced down at the girl, bent his knees a little and leaned over to say hello. I moved forward to listen.

The woman was saying that young Margaret was one of her students and that she was born in Melbourne—‘just like you, Noël’—and came to watch him play as often as she could.

‘I’d give my right arm to play the Fantasy-impromptu,’ the girl broke in, gazing dreamily up at him.

‘Well, you’d have to follow that up with the
Revolutionary
étude, I suppose, if you only had your left hand remaining,’ Noël said, sending the girl into a fit of giggles.

They spoke for a while, Noël showing no concern for all the men and women queuing to shake his hand. I couldn’t believe he was giving her so much attention; he asked her which pieces she was studying and questioned her about Melbourne—did she swim at St Kilda beach or Brighton? Had she ever been to Studley Park to row along the Yarra?

‘Please come back and see me again; I’d be most grateful if you did,’ he said. Then he kissed the woman once more and told her he’d send two tickets for his next concert, and Margaret began jiggling up and down on her toes as if she were about to spill over.

The teacher held Margaret’s shoulders and started to edge backwards, as if suddenly recognising what an imposition she had made upon this famous musician, thanking and apologising all at once.

‘Make sure you come and say hello again,’ he repeated and then turned to join his friends on the other side of the stage.

Margaret and her teacher walked past me towards the exit. Margaret clutched her small red handbag to her chest and her eyes drifted up to the ceiling where they floated about, bobbing like balloons. I have rarely felt so bitter as I did at that moment, standing fixed to the marble floor, glaring at the girl’s wobbly grin as she drifted towards the door.

It was not until after the war, soon after Noël and I had first met, that I next thought of Margaret. Noël was doing a BBC broadcast for Australia Day that was to be heard in the faraway continent. He mentioned to me in passing that he once knew a lovely Australian girl called Margaret with dark, lonely eyes, who he’d often met for cups of tea and rock cakes at Fortnum and Mason’s. Her father had died at the start of the war and she’d later fallen in love with a soldier, but her mother made her return with her to Australia, and Noël had since lost contact with her. During the broadcast that evening, Noël introduced his programme—‘I’m going to start with Chopin’s Fantasy-impromptu and follow it with the
Revolutionary
étude.’ As I listened to his performance, the rumble of the
Allegro agitato
softening into the sonorous voice of the
cantabile
, my eyes filled with tears. And it wasn’t until well after the broadcast had finished that I could brush aside the image of the girl with the brown woollen coat and red handbag, who’d stood up on tiptoes to stretch a little closer to her idol.

The Gallery concerts spanned the entire war. Every lunch hour, Londoners filed in under the dome to
listen to Beethoven, Mozart and Bach. In the sanctum of the Barry Rooms, only a small note on the bottom of the programme—
In case of Air Raid Warning, audiences will proceed downstairs where adequate protection is available—
alluded to the world that existed outside the Gallery walls.

Four weeks before the first anniversary of the concerts, on the seventh of September 1940, at five in the afternoon, the sound of air-raid sirens faded out into the buzz of aircraft engines. Above, in the grey skies, a squadron of fifty aircraft inched over us like migrating ducks, small flocks each in perfect diamond formation. They were low enough for us to see them rock from back to front in the wind, the sun glistening off their bellies as they opened their hatches and released their bombs, dropping them in clusters like handfuls of pebbles. My first thought before running to safety was that they seemed too meagre, those seed-like bombs that spiralled through the air, to cause that piercing whistle.

We had been told on the wireless that the planes would be fired at, that we would be protected, but there was no defence, no retaliation. We just sat there while they bombed us, our shelters rocking like cradles. It sounded as if the whole city was being destroyed; it seemed impossible that we weren’t hit, that we could be still alive.

The concerts continued without exception throughout the Blitz; air raids were viewed by the concert committee as mere inconveniences rather than
threats. During the September daylight raids of the Battle of Britain, the concerts were moved downstairs, from the glass-roofed dome into the shelter-room, where they remained for the following nine months. Despite the suffocating stuffiness in there on warmer days, the pools of water that collected on the stone floor, and the icy draughts of winter (when I once saw a clarinettist warming her instrument over an oil-stove, trying to get it up to pitch), every day there they were, hundreds of people who’d made their way through glass-strewn streets and smouldering rubble to queue up for the concerts.