The Virtuoso (27 page)

‘How would
you
know how he was?’

Gerald had been getting on my nerves a lot lately with his clever little titbits and insights about everyone we knew.

He leaned back in his chair, smoking his cigar and gazing off into the corner. ‘Noël wasn’t a very happy man.’

I shrugged, not really wanting to get into another disagreement.

Gerald took his time, looking about the room. ‘You’ve seemed quite good over the last month. You seem to be getting over it all. Is that right?’

I wasn’t at all sure what he was talking about.

When I didn’t respond he continued. ‘When you were in hospital, I chatted with your aunt—not at all what I expected, I must say—and she told me you went through a similar sort of thing after your father passed. Really—why didn’t you tell me how your father died?’

I still had no idea where he was heading and, frankly, was feeling quite annoyed. I couldn’t understand why he had to behave so peculiarly each time I mentioned Noël’s name. He looked down at my foot, which I realised was tapping up and down restlessly on the Beauvais rug.

‘I realise this must all be terribly upsetting for you.’ He looked at me almost sternly. ‘But, Noël…he was not a well young man.’

I glanced up from my lap towards him and saw his eyes as I hadn’t seen them before, completely unguarded. It was as if I’d looked at him at the precise angle to see deep into the back of his eyes. It only lasted for a fraction of a second, then moments later I lost that minute degree and again only saw his glassy, blue-brown irises.

‘Much like your father, it sounds. So you don’t need me to explain…Anyway, it certainly wasn’t the first time Noël had tried. Poor boy. Lord knows how long it had been going on. Very…
tragic…
really.’

Gerald was studying me and, just for a moment, I saw my aunt, and her sober gaze when she told me that my father had died—words that she spoke so calmly, that have hung in my mind as a string of sounds, but of which I’ve never felt able to grasp the meaning. My face felt flushed and my head heavy and dizzy, as if a motor were whirring inside. I rolled my head back and closed my eyes.

‘It might have been the night of Bill’s funeral,’ Gerald continued. ‘Raymond was over at Noël’s,
keeping an eye on him. Noël had been fine over dinner, a little quiet, but nothing you wouldn’t expect. He said goodnight and went upstairs to the loft, threw back a hundred aspirin and washed them down with gin.’ Gerald paused momentarily, rubbing the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Anyway, he didn’t die, so started slashing at his veins—very brashly—and that didn’t help either. So he staggered back downstairs, covered in vomit and blood, bumped into Raymond on the landing, just laughed and said, “I’m very sorry, I seem to have made rather a mess."’ Gerald had slipped into Noël’s characteristically jolly voice with its mild Australian inflection.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I started to wonder if I might be drunk and imagining everything Gerald was saying.

Gerald paused. ‘Oh dear…’ He put his hand on my knee.

I opened my eyes to see him leaning forward, trying to gaze up into my eyes, holding out his hanky to me.

‘I only found out myself after Noël was gone, and, well, you were in such a state, and hearing about your father and all…I tried to talk with you once and you almost snapped my head off.’ Gerald’s voice was strained, his lips twitching. He eventually sat back in his seat again, his brow tightly knitted.

He took a sip on his brandy and relit his cigar. His tone changed: apologetic but, at the same time, not
addressed to me at all—as if he was just recollecting out aloud. ‘I only really know of one other, but there’s been mention of more—they keep these things quiet, of course. A chap at the British Council told me that, while touring in Germany some time soon after the war, one day Noël just felt that he couldn’t play the piano any more—he later said that he wasn’t able to concentrate properly. Bill, whom he’d only just met, was the one who found him in his room, veins all cut up—salvaged him, very inexpertly, I hear. But managed to get him back on his feet again.’

I was staring down into my glass, swilling the amber liquid so violently it skirted the smooth rim of the balloon. My face was heating up and blood was pounding in my limbs. I looked up at Gerald, restraining myself from throwing the entire glass at him—the critic, the historian, the arbiter of truth—sitting there so cleverly in his silk upholstered armchair.

‘He adored Bill, he really did. Despite all Noël’s little indiscretions Bill was the one person who seemed to be able to keep him from going off the rails. Extraordinary, isn’t it? Such a brilliant boy.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘The Busoni was a breeze for Noël. I can’t understand it at all. But clearly Bill could.’

I reached for one of Gerald’s cigars. I’d have one more, I decided, then off to bed.

‘You know, just a few days before Bill died, Noël did a broadcast from Wales and dedicated it to
his beloved
Clara.’

I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, restraining a smile. I stared at the floor as I contemplated how much I ought to tell Gerald and what he’d make of it all. Gerald, who prided himself on knowing everything about everyone.

‘Apparently Bill’s mother, when pregnant with Bill, was certain she was going to have a girl, and called the unborn child Clara. When Bill grew up to be as camp as he was his father would scream at him that he ought to still be bloody well called Clara.’ Gerald was laughing, his eyes pinned on me, willing me to join in the joke. ‘Noël thought that story was priceless.’

Gerald, grinning, refilled his glass, then pointed the bottle in my direction. He hovered for a moment, trying to catch my eye, put his other hand on my knee, then leaned towards me.

He was drunk. I had to go to bed before I throttled him. I stood up, shoving those tampering little hands off me and almost knocking him to the floor. I turned around and made for the door, half-inclined to wallop him one on my way out.

Gerald was yelling at me as I walked out into the corridor and hurled my glass to the floor. ‘Young man, you come straight back in here at once,’ he cursed.

The high-pitched shrill of my cognac balloon smashing on the floor, like a hundred tiny glass bells ringing, prevented any other thought or sound entering my mind. I reached the top of the stairs and headed straight for my bedroom door.

Your father stepped in front of a bus today
—they may have been my aunt’s exact words; I’ve done my best to forget.

What an inglorious way to go out. Yes, my little von Braun improvisation was so much more—
Maestoso.

Forty-three pages of suicide notes had been found littered about Noël’s room, starting off quite sober, apologetic
—I’m sorry to be doing this, but I can’t play the piano any more, and if I can’t play the piano, my life cannot continue…
Then, as the gin kicked in, working himself up to the deed, getting more and more erratic and excited, his handwriting barely legible, the demon within him started to surface. He lashed out at everyone: his close friends the critics Eddie Sackville-West and Desmond Shaw-Taylor, the BBC, his agent Emmie Tillett (
You mustn’t do anything for Ma Tillett, she’s no good, she’ll say one thing and do another, she’s a sick woman
), anyone who might have stood in the way of his music, his
destiny.
The heat of the gin, thumping around in his veins, his writing and logic increasingly confused, forming violent streaks across the page, until finally—all of it, suddenly, stopped.

I’m sure he had no idea what he was doing, that he thought of this act, like his pounding concertos, as
simply a flight—a miraculous escape. Thought that he’d be able to gaze down, unscathed, upon us—see our stunned faces, bathe in our thundering applause.

Music is my life
, he wrote.
If I can’t play music, there’s no point going on.

I’d never questioned that music was Noël’s life. But for the first time I had to ask myself what that really meant, when the alternative to music was death. I wondered whether a love that existed as a refuge from the world could really be described as love at all.

I still spend a lot of time thinking about Noël’s and my relationship (I even checked in the
Oxford
, as I, too, was beginning to wonder whether this word was really apt.
The state of having relation to; kinship
—yes, yes, surely we had this, didn’t we?) A lot of time thinking about love. And each time I’ve tried tracing the relationship to its source I’ve found myself travelling far back to before I’d even heard of the illustrious Noël Mewton-Wood.

I remember when my father took to coming home from work and going straight to his room, often not coming out for dinner or for the rest of the evening. During the night I’d hear him walking about the house like a ghost or sitting by the gramophone listening to his records. In the morning he’d leave early, before I’d even woken, and my aunt and I would find, sitting on the stove with a cloth draped over it, the evening meal
she had cooked for him, exactly as she’d left it the night before.

I started to create a game for myself where I, too, would hide in my bed for an entire afternoon, only coming out for dinner. First of all I’d puff up the blankets and quilts so that they’d best conceal my body, then I’d slip in carefully, turning my head to the side, lying as flat and still as I could, and calm my breath to a shallow murmur. And then I’d just wait—wait for someone to find me.

Several months before I’d started this afternoon ritual there’d been a kidnapping in London. Edward Mathers, a seven-year-old boy, the same age as me at the time, had disappeared from his bed one night without a trace, his bedroom window left wide open. On the wireless and in the newspapers we’d hear about Edward’s despairing parents, who would do anything for their dear boy’s return, even just a word to know that he was all right. Our neighbours, while putting out the milk bottles and watering their vegetables, would discuss how terrible it was, how dreadful for the poor parents, that a young boy from a good home in a good suburb could be snatched from his own bed in the middle of the night. I’d watch my father read the articles, shaking his head, and I’d search for any sign of emotion on my aunt’s face as she sat with her darning in the living room, listening to the broadcast.

I convinced myself as I lay there in bed—quiet, slow breathing, trying to ignore the increasing pressure in my bladder—that I knew Edward and was somehow
in contact with him, and that by removing myself from the visible plane of our house I had slipped through a crack in my world and had descended into his. I’d whisper quietly into the blankets, which grew hot and moist around my face, telling him of the things he’d missed at school, that all the teachers and students had been talking about him, saying how sad it was that he had gone. I reassured him that everything would be okay, he just had to wait, because we would both be rescued together and everyone would hold a big party to celebrate our return.

Each week, before I bundled up our newspapers and took them down to the fish-and-chip shop, I’d cut out any article I could find on Edward and paste it into an exercise book, and alongside each, I’d write my own personal letters to him, convinced that he could read my words. There were rumours about the mother’s jealous lover, blackmail and revenge, which tickled my imagination despite the fact I never fully comprehended their meaning.

Edward Mathers was never found and the mystery surrounding the kidnapping was never solved. But my fascination with him and his disappearance continued long after the articles ceased; that wonderfully chilling thought kept returning to me that someone—someone just like me—could vanish from their bed without a trace.

I realise now that this preoccupation with Edward Mathers was a rehearsal for what came later with Noël—an obsession that continued up until recently when,
months after his death, the last trickle of articles dried up, leaving me foraging through the papers, unable to find a word. And it then seemed that Noël, like Edward, had simply vanished from the world.

At some stage my attachment to Edward must have faded away completely, as it was only years later, as a teenager during the war, when I read the letters between Tchaikovsky and his patron Madame von Meck, that the memory of Edward Mathers resurfaced, accompanied by a pang of guilt that it had been so long since I had spared my old friend a thought. I spent the remainder of the afternoon wondering about what might have become of Edward, and was only able to calm myself by writing to him, explaining everything that had happened in my life since I’d abandoned my letters so many years earlier.

Tchaikovsky’s relationship with Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy widow and music-lover, started after von Meck wrote to the composer to commission a violin and piano arrangement. When Tchaikovsky had completed the job, von Meck wrote back expressing her gratitude and asking just one thing of him:
To believe absolutely that your music makes my life easier and more pleasant to live.

They began to write to each other several times each week. Von Meck provided Tchaikovsky with a salary, giving him the opportunity to compose with absolute freedom. He dedicated his music to her and also wrote her letters about his emotional troubles and
creative process. She quickly became the most crucial support in the composer’s life.

I remember the feeling of envy and longing when I read of their love for each other, their bond of unconditional support. A relationship they were able to maintain in its pristine state by a rule they brokered at the beginning of the correspondence:
I feel the more you fascinate me the more I shrink from knowing you
, she wrote.
I prefer to think of you at a distance and to be at one with you in your music.
The rule was that they must never meet.

Their letters grew increasingly passionate and intimate, and the two became more and more dependent upon one another. When in the same town their correspondence detailed their daily itineraries so to avoid any personal contact. Besides a few brief, unintended encounters—catching a glimpse of the other across the crowd at the opera, or when their carriages passed in the street—the couple maintained their intense relationship for thirteen years without ever meeting.