The Virtuoso (28 page)

When von Meck asked Tchaikovsky if he had ever known non-platonic love, Tchaikovsky replied with words that I feel could be my own:

Yes and no. If this were put slightly differently, i.e. by asking if I have known complete happiness in love, the answer would be No, no and no!!! However, I think that it is in my music that the answer to your question lies. If you asked me if I have understood the whole power, the whole
immeasurable strength of this feeling, the answer would be: Yes yes yes, reiterating that I have passionately tried more than once to express in music the agony and at the same time the ecstasy of love…I completely disagree with you that music cannot fully communicate one’s feelings of love. I hold the complete contrary that only music can achieve this.

I still find myself thinking about Tchaikovsky and von Meck’s correspondence, perhaps not quite so often as I once did. In the past, whenever musical peers proclaimed the arrangement as tragic or pathetic, I used to nod, while secretly coveting such an affair. I understood Tchaikovsky’s dependency upon von Meck entirely, and why it was so essential they never meet. There is no greater intimacy than that which lies hushed and full of potential, and never has to awaken to the searing light of day.

Even after Noël’s death, after all that happened, after all that I’d learnt, I often amused myself with thoughts of others as a way to pass the time, but it was those childhood and teenage imaginings—those perfect compositions—of Edward and Noël that always remained immaculate and complete for me, shimmering like pearls within the hard, calcareous walls of my life.

Over time, my lodging at Gerald’s house began to seem like that of one of those vaguely domesticated tabbies that will saunter into a stranger’s house, help themselves to a plate of milk, curl up on the sofa, and never question for a moment that this hasn’t always been their home.

Autumn had arrived, my favourite time of year in London, and with it the realisation that I’d watched the walnut trees outside my window through almost a full cycle of seasons. They’d now turned golden and were about to shrink into that petrified stance I’d seen them in when I first arrived. Gerald no longer seemed at all bothered by my long-term residency; in fact he even looked relieved when I started discussing coal orders and meals with Martha. (Gerald wouldn’t have minded if we’d had pork pie every night of the week. He loved the ceremony of meal times—the embroidered napkins and all the various little forks and spoons—but couldn’t give a hoot what we ate.) Nor did he mind me flicking through his late father’s rare-book collection and disappearing with a signed copy of
Prometheus Unbound
and several other treasures up to my room.

I did try to raise the topic of my stay, but every time I mentioned finding somewhere else to live, Gerald would widen his eyes, appearing horrified, and exclaim, ‘You’re not missing that frightful place at Ma O’Grady’s, are you?’ Even Gerald’s mother, Virginia, seemed to prefer having me in the house. She was spending more and more of her time in the
country these days and said she always fretted about Gerald being in the London house on his own. ‘He’s like Harold,’ she’d say, smiling down apologetically at her Highland terrier. ‘Just rattles about the house in a terrible state when left on his own.’

I thought a lot about Ma O’Grady’s, where I’d lived for over eight years—its leaking pipes that trumpeted and shook throughout the night, the dusty grey floorboards, the scratching of the rats nesting in the walls, the one small window over near the kitchen sink—and wondered how I’d survived there so long. Yet I did also miss the dank solitude of my damp little room. Sometimes the sportive camaraderie at the Maddevers’ was a little suffocating (even Martha was unnervingly cheerful, whistling Vivaldi as she dusted all the picture frames). I’d feel I was letting the side down when I’d sneak off to be miserable in my room, a pastime I absolutely refused to give up.

Other times I was quite at home amongst the bonhomie of the household; Gerald and I would get drunk and laugh about ghastly things each of us had done (like the time Bill caught me in his study at Hammersmith, rifling through his belongings and pocketing the Festival Hall photo of Noël), things that I’d never really been able to admit to myself before, let alone laugh about with someone else.

Gerald, however, grew tired of sitting around the house day and night as I preferred to do, and soon returned to his old ways, gallivanting about to bars and parties. I’d hear him in the middle of the night on the
porch fumbling for his keys; then in the morning, over tea and scrambled eggs, before heading to a meeting or off to his study to write, he’d tell me about whomever he’d met up with the night before. It could be anyone from Sergeant ‘Molly’ Bloom with tip-offs of planned raids, to Betty Lou who was making a costume for the Chelsea Arts Ball of a peacock with a fifteen-foot tail that could rise and lower and fan out across the room.

Gerald, in his off-the-cuff manner, would often tell me I needed to get out more, that I was beginning to look a bit peaky. I knew what he was suggesting but had no desire whatsoever to go importuning about between the lamp-lit shadows up at Hampstead. The sensory prison I had constructed about myself seemed to be the one amenable furnishing in what I’d decided was an increasingly alien and iniquitous world. What’s more, I had a greater than moderate fear that if I did venture out of my cocoon and indulge in a little trade, what was sure to be a clumsy and soul-sapping encounter could sour my enjoyment of such activities for life.

I might have remained in this frigid state for some time if it wasn’t for something unexpected that had crept into my life, something of which I was not fully aware until it had become quite familiar—a delightful frisson between Gerald and me.

As you’d expect, I was terrified when it began. But I did manage to welcome this new visitor (as it did seem like an additional presence in the house), enjoying the passing glances, the cups of tea delivered to my
room, and the occasional gift—anything from a tailor-made shirt in some extravagantly divine fabric to a rare musical biography. And for quite some time I saw no reason why we shouldn’t maintain this titillating little game forever.

But then Gerald would stay out all night or, even worse, bring one of his chavies back to the house. One time I was forced to share breakfast with a young cockney projectionist called Danny who called Gerald ‘darling’, touching his hand each time he spoke to him, and made comments about what a
bona
marriage Gerald and I had. Gerald found the whole situation thoroughly amusing and sat in his chair laughing, honey and butter dripping off his forkful of drop-scone onto the tea-rose china plate in front of him. I was appalled, not only that I’d been dragged into such a distasteful milieu but also that this stout lad with blotchy white skin and only a scant acquaintance with a knife and fork was Gerald’s choice in bedfellow. I sulked for the entire day, pepped up occasionally by chinks of curiosity, wondering what Gerald had told young Danny boy for him to have made such a remark about Gerald and me.

Only a week later at the Rockingham, Reggie, an acquaintance of ours, enquired, quite sneeringly I thought, how long the two of us had been married. I was completely flummoxed by the question, but, after I recovered from the shock, found myself feeling quietly tickled. I blushed and let out the most idiotic giggle. Gerald, on the other hand, laughed heartily, as
if he’d been asked how long he’d been straight. He replied, as if I wasn’t even present, ‘Married? Oh no, he won’t let me anywhere near him.’ Then turning to me, twitching his lips and right eyebrow—a roguish look tantamount to a wink that I’d seen him throw to others during the act of seduction—‘Married to the dead, aren’t we, dear Persephone?’

My blush must have fully blossomed to vermilion at that point. I was partly smarting from the jarring reference to Noël. But also embarrassed—how ghastly that anyone might believe I still maintained such loyalty to Noël—and
angry.
If I’d thought of it sooner, I might have made some retort about not being married to the dead but to beauty and greatness, attributes perhaps he hadn’t stumbled across amongst those flea-ridden chimneysweeps for whom he had such a penchant. But I didn’t say a thing; I just stood there dumb, his unabashed gaze pinning me against the wall, rousing the most delectable sense of terror in me. For all my indignation it was a delightful moment; I couldn’t have felt a more panicky thrill if I were about to walk on stage at the Festival Hall to perform in front of the Queen.

Charles Monk arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, down from Oxford for the day and keen to meet this young chap who’d been writing these scandalous articles for musical journals in Britain and America.

He nodded to me sternly. ‘I enjoyed the piece you wrote on Chopin for the
Canon.
’

‘The one on Chopin’s heart?’ I said, as if there’d been many. ‘Oh yes.’ I smiled feebly, remembering the pathetic state I’d been in when writing it shortly after Noël died. It was a piece about Chopin’s crippling longing for his homeland, Poland, and the request in his will to be buried next to Bellini in Paris but have his heart cut out and returned to Poland.

‘I thought that little reverie you included about Liszt, Delacroix and the others sitting in Chopin’s Paris flat by candlelight, listening to him on his Pleyel piano, most bold—you wrote it as if you were there yourself. And Madame George Sand sitting entranced, Chopin longing for Poland, Sand longing for Chopin—very poetic. To be honest, I don’t normally enjoy reading such whimsies, but it really was strangely compelling. You mimicked the haunting nostalgia of Chopin’s music extremely well.’

I smiled appreciatively.

‘But what can you do with Beethoven?’ His tone changed—almost chastising, as if it were I who’d come begging to him. ‘We’ve all read a hundred biographies and the old man’s getting a bit dusty these days. Can you come up with something new? Something about the Immortal Beloved?’

I shrugged. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

And for a moment even Gerald looked disappointed. He’d told me Monk would be arriving for our meeting with chequebook in hand, and he’d encouraged me to tell him exactly what he wanted to hear.

‘I can’t promise what I’ll find out in Vienna,’ I
continued. ‘I’m primarily interested in what
inspired
Beethoven. And it seems the one thing other than his art—his
heavenly muse—
that really stirred him was his secret obsession for the Immortal Beloved. As you’d know, many of the great composers had an obsession with a distant or fantastical love. They’re sprinkled throughout musical history. These mythical figures who embody the perfect world for which the composer longs, the world he strives to create in his music.’

Both Gerald and Monk were silent. Then, slowly, Monk smiled, the corners of his thin mouth turning downwards as he did so, and nodded.

We had a few sherries and chatted about the music of not only Beethoven, but Schumann, Brahms, Wagner and Berlioz. When the clock in the hall chimed four Monk looked at his watch, got up from his chair, walked to the desk and opened his briefcase. I followed him over and stood, I realised, like an army officer, heels together and hands behind my back; I might even have been rocking from heel to toe, in that partly smug, partly agitated way that such men do.

I relaxed as soon as I brought my hands forward to meet his fountain pen and leaned over the table, signing the contract illegibly. I’d recently started signing my name with my left hand, and although I could manage some gallant loops—something I could have never achieved with my right—there was no denying a timid awkwardness in the unpractised lettering, which was best hidden in a scrawl.

He pulled out a chequebook from his inside coat pocket.

How quaint these publishers are, I thought, as he scribbled on a cheque, ripped it carefully from the book and handed it to me. I found it hard not to grin, not because of the £400 piece of paper that seemed to burn the skin of my fingertips, but because of the theatricality of it all—Monk’s momentarily steely eyes, which met mine with a conspiratorial glint, and the way he clipped the lid back on his pen so precisely, handling it like a surgeon with a scalpel. I felt as if we’d just signed a warrant, and I was the mercenary being sent out to return with the body. Poor Monk, I hoped I didn’t disappoint him too much, I thought. But it did get so boring, all this debate, all this discussion—
Who
was the face of the Immortal Beloved?—as if the answer really mattered. As if it might actually unlock the door to the composer’s phenomenal genius.

He smiled. ‘All the best in Vienna then.’ Yes, there was that look again: the co-conspirator. He would have slapped me on the back but was far too starched a sort.

‘Yes, it’s very exciting.’ I turned to look at Gerald, who was wearing his usual purring grin.

Monk glanced around the room in that perfunctory way people do before leaving, and as Gerald and I showed him to the door I realised how true that glib line I’d just tossed out actually was. That feeling—
excitement—
was such a distant notion, like a childhood Christmas. I used it these days merely to fill a gap in
sentences, without the least nostalgia for that tantalising sense I’d once known so well. That unparalleled joy of creating
what could be.

We walked Monk to the door and as he spoke about several other forthcoming publishing projects, I pictured myself with Gerald, strolling through the doors of the
Theater an der Wien
to see
Fidelio
, which had had its premiere in that very theatre almost one hundred and fifty years earlier, when Beethoven had lived in a room upstairs. I imagined visiting Teplitz, the spa town where the Immortal Beloved letter was possibly written, and walking the streets with Gerald, as Beethoven had walked with his friend Goethe. No, we wouldn’t be hunting down the Immortal Beloved like a pack of hounds chasing a rabbit; we would just be walking in the composer’s footsteps, visiting the White Swan, eating stracchino and Verona salami on the banks of the Danube, roaming through the fields beyond the Vienna woods, engaging in things that had inspired the composer, and simply enjoying the Immortal Beloved’s elusive presence when we sat in the audience, listening to the Vienna State Orchestra performing ‘Ode to Joy’.