The Virtuoso (6 page)

‘No, Anton Steiner.’ I couldn’t match his playful tone.

‘Oh, that’s right—so you are. Have you met his wife? Excellent pianist, but makes this dreadful noise when she plays, as though she’s got a bombinating bee trapped in her mouth.’

‘I might have met her once.’ I smiled and shrugged, not entirely comfortable with Noël’s ridiculing of Edith Steiner, a dear old lady who always pulled me aside whenever we met to tell me how highly her husband regarded my playing.

‘I once heard her accompany a violinist playing a Brahms sonata. The buzzing was so loud I could hardly contain myself. And poor Eleanor, the American lass sitting next to me, she was in such a state she almost swallowed her hanky!’

I kept smiling throughout, despite my embarrassment for poor Edith.

‘Lovely chap, Steiner. “Funf”, we used to call him. You remember Funf? The German spy?’

‘Can I do you now, sir?’ I asked in my best Mrs Mopp, the charwoman’s voice, despite thinking little of the wartime comedy programme to which Noël referred, always having preferred the classical music shows.

Noël laughed loudly then dipped his head and crooned Colonel Chinstrap’s catchphrase, ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

I hoped the conversation might drift away from this difficult banter, and tried, uselessly, to think of one of the many anecdotes I’d set aside during the week to tell him. I resorted to asking him what concerts he’d been to lately and was relieved when he started telling me about an organ recital—Debussy and Jongen—he’d attended the night after Walter’s.

‘Jongen’s
Symphonie Concertante
isn’t a great work for the Abbey, though. If “
Nuages
” was Debussy’s study of what can be done with a single colour, the
Symphonie Concertante
was like a Belgian study of mushy peas,’ he laughed.

Our conversation continued similarly through both intervals, rather nervously, I thought, but without any awkward pauses, nonetheless. His eyes darted about as he spoke, as if they were tracing the outline of every detail in the foyer. Then occasionally, at the end of a phrase, or during my reply, they’d come down to land on me, his gaze softening and deepening, and it would be I who’d scurry off to the side.

At the end of the opera I followed him through the crowd like a child trailing a parent. People were approaching him with smiles and handshakes, congratulating him on a recital or badgering him about why his agent hadn’t fixed him the big HMV contract he deserved. Noël was nothing short of charming, thanking them bashfully as if their praise was entirely
unwarranted, and joking that he’d send a postcard from Carnegie Hall. At the first opportunity he excused himself to the Gents, and as I stood at the door waiting for him I could hear a tune being whistled, a solo melody sailing out above the hubbub of the foyer.

‘Orlando Gibbon’s
Fantasia
in four parts?’ I asked as he emerged, still trilling.

‘
Very
good,’ he replied, causing me to blush.

We stepped outside and he was almost skipping down the stairs, then he just came out and asked, ‘So are your digs near here?’ as casually as if he were enquiring the time.

I hardly knew what to say; I just looked at him quite stunned and replied that we’d have to take a bus. Then he suggested we go back for a cup of tea, with such innocence that I felt as though my stifled desire was far more indecent than his bold and breezy approach.

Once we were on our way Noël seemed far more relaxed, chatting away as if we were old chums and even occasionally slapping me on the back, leaving a large warm imprint that sent blood surging straight to my loins.

When we arrived at my place he was still talking about the opera, sprinkling his discussion with quotes from the libretto in flawless Italian. I hardly uttered a word; I kept envisaging the kinds of chandelier-lit living rooms that he surely must have been accustomed to—Louis XIV cabinets, Picassos and Miros adorning the walls. I was panicking about what we would do
once we were inside, trying to decide which record to play—would Schumann or Chopin be too obvious?—and hoping he didn’t take sugar with his tea as I’d left my week’s rations on the bus. But when he followed me up the stairs of the lodging house, reducing his voice to a whisper as if he’d been there a dozen times before, he didn’t seem the least perturbed by his surroundings. Then the moment we entered he headed straight for the piano.

‘We adore the story of Tosca because we relate to her romantic spirit,’ he said, gently lifting the piano lid as if he were handling precious jewels. He started playing ‘
Vissi d’Arte’
while watching me at the sink, scampering about as I was with kettle and cups.

‘But she’s a rather hysterical type,’ I said, unnecessarily focused on the gas burner I was lighting. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to let him know I wasn’t the sort to get too carried away. ‘Puccini certainly was fond of his little-girl heroines.’ Without looking up at him, I pulled out some rolls and cheese and placed them on the table.

‘Yes, a bit of a sadist they say.’ Then, flicking through the music at the piano—‘Ah, you’re playing
Fantasiestücke!
Wonderful!’ He started on ‘
In der Nacht
’ without even turning to the page. ‘You know this one’s about the romance of Hero and Leander?’ He looked at me and smiled.

I can’t even remember what I said next; I just recall staring at him, trying to make him merge, visually, into my apartment, make his presence seem natural. Here was he, the great Noël Mewton-Wood, asking
my opinions on music, toying with me, noodling at the piano that I had sat at, dreaming of him, for almost six years. I wasn’t sure whether what I felt was more euphoria or acute discomfort, that he had unwittingly stumbled into my lair where all my secrets lay.

My room, such an obliging accessory to my fantasies, now looked so dreary and grey. I had become accustomed to letting my days slip by like a lustreless backdrop upon which I could erect my brilliant imaginings. Now that my dream-world had invaded my reality so scandalously—marched straight in and sat down at my piano in front of me—I was at a loss as to how I might wed the two. It struck me that perhaps I had conjured this all. But then he was so much bolder, more generous and attentive than my imagined Noël, whom I knew so intimately; I was quite disturbed by how differently he behaved. All that childish behaviour (jumping about pulling faces and cracking lewd jokes), I really had no idea how to respond at all.

I didn’t have to worry for long, though; I didn’t have to do a thing. I took the whistling kettle off the burner, and as I turned to face the room Noël bounced up from the piano and landed before me, so close that I had to step back against the cupboards. His right hand slipped quietly around my waist (I didn’t notice until he pressed me against it), and with his left hand he took the kettle from me and lowered it onto the bench without a glance. Then, for the first time since the end of the performance, our conversation stopped and we stood facing each other in a terrifying silence.
He pulled me in close with those Herculean hands—I thought he might squeeze the breath out of me. My body froze up, but that didn’t bother him at all; he pressed his lips down hard on mine. I remember that moment so clearly it might have happened just now—a thousand tiny strings within me were suddenly snipped, and I all but collapsed into his arms.

I hadn’t even opened my eyes. I just lay there with the duvet wrapped around me, listening to the patter of the rain, water trickling from the guttering and running down the pipes, the swish of the cars as they sailed through the puddles on the street.

He had left several hours earlier, well before it was even light, and although I now lay smiling in anticipation of our next meeting (I’d been barely conscious when he carefully untangled my arms from his body then whispered that he’d ring), I was glad to wake up and have my place to myself. If he had stayed, the morning might have been awkward—even a little sour, dare I say—in comparison to the night before.

I opened my eyes and looked around the room, marvelling at its stillness, at the dull, grey walls that had witnessed such a night. I felt as if I were in a concert hall after a symphony had been performed and the orchestra and crowd had all departed—captivated by the silence, chasing the sound of the strings, the horns, the flutes.

My eyes were drawn immediately to the teapot and cups on the table, his on the side nearest the window
with its handle towards the sink. Because that’s where he’d stood drinking his cup of tea when he slipped out of bed in the middle of the night and started reciting a poem by Cavafy, performing it over and over. Although the room was near freezing, he stood there wearing only his boxers, with bare feet and no shirt (I couldn’t take my eyes off his taut ivory-white chest). But as I was gazing up at him I realised he was standing right in front of the window, for all the world to see! The blind was all the way up; the cord had long broken and I rarely bothered standing on a chair to pull the blind down—what did it matter if someone on the street saw me rinsing a cup or boiling a kettle? But what if someone were to look up and see a half-naked man drinking a cup of tea at three in the morning—a
different
man to the one they so often saw up there, opening a can of beans, all on his own? Even worse, what if they were to recognise, not just a half-naked stranger but a half-naked Noël Mewton-Wood? That would be the end of his career, I thought: he would be humiliated in court, splashed across the papers and sent off to Wormwood Scrubs. And all because he spent one night with me. He would forget about how sublime our time together had been, how I’d combed my fingers through his wavy hair and told him he’d made me the happiest man in the world—yes, I would just be the wretch who ruined his life.

He was standing there reciting Cavafy and I was about to call him over to the piano rather than make a scene, insist we play some Schubert, get him away from
that window. But then he put down his cup—in the very position in which I now saw it—slipped on his shirt, and tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom. I was immediately up on a chair and pulling down the blind, and when he returned from the bathroom—again whistling Gibbon’s
Fantasia
, softly this time—I was standing at the piano, flicking through some scores, and he didn’t notice a thing.

I turned now to look at the pillow beside me, the empty space in the bed. I could smell him, feel his hands on my skin. I imagined where he might be at this moment—practising perhaps, or maybe discussing a programme with Sargent or Beecham—no doubt also thinking about our night.

Then I had an idea. I would go shopping. I had about five pounds in the tin under the sink, for food, books, music and outings, as well as some extra coupons I’d saved, but I wouldn’t need all of that now—I hadn’t spent a penny the previous night. Noël had provided the opera tickets, bought the champagne, offered me cigarettes. But it was clear I’d be needing some new clothes. I’d go to the street market at Petticoat Lane where I’d heard you could buy extra coupons. First I’d get myself a shirt, something smart but relaxed, like the ivory-coloured one he’d worn. And I’d need some cologne—I had no idea what type; I’d never worn cologne before, but I was sure the ladies at Boots would help me if I told them I wanted to ask out a girl in my office. And depending on how much money I had left, I’d buy
something for Noël; I’d go to Covent Garden and buy him a scarf, or a book—a book of poetry, that’s what I’d get him, I thought. I would go to that little bookshop on the corner and ask the bookseller if he had some poetry, not by Cavafy but by someone
similar
to Cavafy—something that an admirer of Cavafy was sure to like.

Four hours
until curtain-up.

I’ve just looked in the mirror. I haven’t shaved for two days. I look old. Well, not old, but beyond my twenty-six years (is it possible only nine years have passed since that night?). I dreamt last night that my hair had turned white, and I’ve just now noticed several grey hairs in front of my ears and a couple of white whiskers on my chin. My father went prematurely grey; I can’t even remember him with dark hair. Perhaps I’ll be grey by thirty too. I am looking more like him: my face is getting longer, thinner; my eyes more deep set, without that wide-eyed gaze.

I ought to have had a haircut for tonight’s concert, made the kind of effort I once might have made. One time I met up with Noël after a visit to the barber, my hair brilliantined into oily submission, and he told me I looked like Dirk Bogarde. Noël adored Dirk Bogarde.
After he saw
Hunted
he didn’t stop talking about it for weeks.

Today, I dare say, I look more like Bela Lugosi after a night on the town. Yes, a vampire—how fitting.

The beginning of our affair was the happiest time in my life. Noël and I saw each other most weeks; we’d go on walks through Hampstead Heath, or to the ballet or a recital, and chatted about everything from French clocks to John Ireland’s chamber music. Noël constantly drew my attention to places and people we passed in the street, telling stories that painted an entirely new world from the one in which I’d been living.

Once, when walking along Ebury Street in Chelsea, Noël pointed to a house where, in 1764, Mozart’s sick father forbade his eight-year-old from practising, so Mozart, instead, composed his first two symphonies. Then another time, when walking past St Mary’s Hospital, where Alexander Fleming had discovered penicillin, Noël remarked, ‘Isn’t it magnificent that such seemingly inconsequential events—a microscopic spore drifting in through a window—can change the lives of thousands of people, can change the course of history?’ I agreed, saying what a wonderful word was
serendipity
, delighted that in our discussion we had touched upon the topic of which I felt we both were thinking: our
fateful birthday meeting in Hammersmith only six weeks earlier.

During our conversations I would often think of his cousin, Walter Turner, and the world that he saw,
crowded with a thousand beauties.
I’d see Noël staring up at an elm tree or a swallow’s nest under a bridge; I’d look up and see only a tree, only a nest, yet he’d be standing there captivated by the sight. I watched his face switch from curiosity to exhilaration during our discussions of Sibelius, Offenbach or Blake; sometimes he’d even stop still on the footpath as I spoke, looking at me, his mouth twitching, his jaw clenching momentarily, and an expression of what I took—uncomfortably at first—to be affection, or admiration, would come over him as he teased me with his gaze. I’d be as self-conscious as if I had the eyes of the entire Albert Hall upon me, yet at the same time feel we were the only two people in the world.

It is the occasions when he visited me at home, however, when we would sit at my table with pots of tea and scores spread out in front of us, that I find myself thinking about the most. There was nothing more deliciously torturous than those long wintry afternoons in which we discussed the pieces we were working on, knowing that hours later we’d be grappling with each other’s belts and buttons as we stumbled towards the bed.

In grey flannels and sports jacket he’d lean back in the chair, twiddling a pencil in his fingers and chatting away, his chin pressed against his chest, blinking all
too frequently, and for a moment seeming quite timid. Then an idea would come to him in a flash, and he would lunge forward, face animated, and his hands open in front of him as if he were actually presenting some miraculous concept to me. Often I’d even forget to listen to his words; I’d just sit and watch him, his mind leaping about, his fingers drumming on the tabletop, his glimmering eyes and slender wrists.

Other times we’d be engrossed in conversation for hours, discussing the technical aspects of a single composition. ‘How do you finger that phrase there?’ I would ask, and without a pause he could tell me his fingering for any passage in any piece of music, and demonstrate to me by playing it slowly on the table. Often he would take my wrist, lightly tracing the tendons in my hand with his fingertips and remark, ‘But your hand is different, you see—you must play the A flat with the fourth not the third.’ He would lead me by the hand to the piano, and as I played he’d gently support my wrist with his third finger, rolling it up and down, left and right, guiding me through the most treacherous passages.

I once asked if he could help me with the cadenza from Tchaikovsky’s
Concert-fantasia.
He sat me down and didn’t even ask which part I was having problems with, he just told me to put my right hand on the keys and play the first note. Then he asked me to play the first two notes, then the first three, and so on. Any problem in a passage of music, he said, can be broken down to a problem between two notes.

He told me that Cortot, the brilliant Chopin pianist, was asked what was the most difficult thing about piano playing. Cortot thought for a moment and then answered, ‘Getting from one note to the next.’ Noël said that one time Cortot was practising at the Academy for a concert, sitting at a piano, slowly playing two notes over and over. After some time a teacher in a neighbouring room charged in and was about to hurl abuse at this infantile annoyance when he saw the magnificent Cortot sitting intently at the piano, rolling his fingers back and forth over the notes like a child.

That was the way Noël presented the world to me: he would break it all down and explain in the simplest terms the inevitability of the fall of the ancient Egyptian empire, the process by which a virus replicates itself in the human body, why cooked onions taste so sweet.

I watched the way he leapt to the piano when he thought of a piece of music he wished to learn, approaching it with childlike gusto. Noël didn’t believe that anything could be too difficult or incomprehensible once reduced to its most elemental parts. ‘A flower is simply made from atoms,’ he told me once. ‘This music—it’s just notes, nothing more.’ Then he smiled and shrugged, as if it were all so perfectly simple, placed his hands on my shoulders, drew me in close and kissed me.

That’s what Noël believed and that’s what I believed too when I was with him. That when I played the piano I could create something wonderful like a flower, atom by atom, note by note.

He was a difficult man to pin down. He stayed in Sussex with the Eckersleys most of the week, practising from early in the morning until midday, and one knew never to ring him during this time. Then in the afternoon he’d be off visiting Michael Tippett or another local musician, or heading into London to see his agent, and to rehearse or arrange scores with conductors. So I never knew where he might be at any time or when I might see him. Besides, he seemed to prefer to turn up unannounced; I’d answer a knock at my door to see him standing there with an ardent gaze as if he’d been dying to see me all day. He enjoyed the element of surprise, often bearing some object of great interest—a Stravinsky record he’d had on order for months that had only just arrived, or the latest issue of
Nature
that contained some fascinating article that he wished to share. He was also very fond of food (he once played me his ‘first composition’, which he’d written when he was five, a rollicking number about going to the corner shop to buy some cheese sticks, the piece ending with an exuberant glissando as the cheese slides down his throat) and would often pull from his bag a jar of his aunt’s homemade green-tomato relish sent over from Australia, half a dozen eggs from a neighbour in Renby Grange, or some other delicacy that hadn’t been seen in the high street since before the war.

One time he walked in swinging a string bag, grinning like a schoolboy, reached inside, then presented a package wrapped in butcher’s paper. ‘Chicken,’ he said with a nod, as if I’d dared him to front up with such a meal.

‘For dinner?’ I hadn’t eaten chicken since I was a child. The first few Christmases after the war began my aunt would mould a pound of mince into the shape of a bird and roast it. After that she tired of the effort involved and started cooking it in a tin, no different from a regular meatloaf. But if it came with apple sauce and arrived any time around Christmas, we called it false goose, nonetheless.

‘Well, unless you’d like to keep it as a pet. Though I don’t suppose it’s laid any eggs for some time,’ and dropped the package into my hands.

‘Where on earth did you get it?’ It was difficult to imagine Noël waiting down at Redlich’s in that interminably long queue that appeared whenever word was out that there was anything more interesting than calves’ feet or rabbit in the trays.

‘Oh, I have friends in fowl places.’

I hooted a celebratory laugh and unwrapped it, pepped up even more by having noticed he’d brought the little wooden box that contained his toothbrush, which he only carried when staying overnight. ‘Well, I hope it didn’t cost more than a poultry sum.’ I was becoming more accustomed to Noël’s repartee, and was always pleased with myself when I managed to join in.

‘Would you like to invite any friends over to join us?’ he enquired, and I immediately worried he might be tiring of my company. Sometimes when we were together I’d catch his gaze wandering across the room, and I knew he was thinking about a piece he was working on, or a forthcoming concert. It often seemed an impossible task to compete with such considerations.

‘It’s probably a little late to ring anyone.’ I had no intention of sharing him.

We cooked the chicken, absolutely swimming in lard, in a saucepan, both of us taking turns to stir the potatoes about, spooning dripping over the top, then reporting back to the other how smashing it looked and smelt. It turned out a little burnt on the bottom, but served with lashings of lumpy gravy we didn’t mind one bit. We barely spoke as we chewed at bones and wiped gravy from our chins to the bucolic sound of a Delius concerto sweeping plangently about us. I couldn’t help but feel it was all devilishly extravagant.

‘Oh, this is bloody marvellous,’ Noël said, holding a drumstick up in one hand, sucking the fingers of the other. ‘Things aren’t so tough, are they?’ He grinned at me and winked.

‘Not at all. Quite satisfactory indeed.’ I imagined the smell of our feast spiralling along the hall, to stiff old Kingsley upstairs, and downstairs, to the O’Gradys and the Italian couple who’d only recently been released from internment. I could tell none of them thought much of me at all—there was never more than a nod as they passed me in the corridor—and I was quite
tickled by the thought of the succulent aromas wafting into their rooms.

‘Ben’s been having a heck of a time with his arm,’ Noël mentioned after some minutes had passed. ‘Shall I find out who his doctor is?’

Without me having said a word, Noël had detected the problems I was having with my right hand: the chronic pain that would intensify throughout my practice from a dull ache to a blaze up my arm, over my shoulder and down the right side of my back. I was more than happy to be suffering from a similar ailment to Benjamin Britten, but I’d already seen several doctors, and found the experience—and their suggestion my affliction was imaginary—quite dispiriting.

‘I shouldn’t bother. None of them has a clue what the problem is. My father gave up on them and eventually took me to an osteopath who told me I had gout! He started twisting my arm as if he were giving me a Chinese burn. Of course that just made things worse.’

‘Oh you poor boy.’

‘It’s my aunt’s fault,’ I said, shocked by my bitter tone. ‘As a child, she made me write with my right hand even though I was left-handed. She’d hold my left hand behind my back to stop me grabbing the pen with it.’

‘How dreadful!’

‘For years—it still happens occasionally—I’d wake during the night, my right arm locked rigid and the hand balled in a fist.’ I held up my clenched hand, thumb and knuckles gleaming white.

I couldn’t stop talking. I told him about all the piano teachers I’d tried, hoping one might be able to help me—one who taught in the manner of Liszt, another who taught from the Deppe school—and how there was never any improvement.

‘One teacher told me to think of my palm as being like the soft palate in my mouth; I must work from there, pulling each finger in towards it as I played. Old Neville Majors—who hardly had any teeth, and used to eat yoghurt all through my lessons—insisted I play as if I was holding an egg in my hand,’ and I curled my thumb and third finger together forming a perfect circle. ‘The opposition of the thumb and third was his big thing. There was also Miss Friedman, whose huge breasts would hover over me as I played—“You are pulling back rather than pushing forward,” she’d yell, parting the air in front of her as if she were swimming breaststroke. I’d try leaning in towards the keys and she’d shriek, “No, no, no! From within. With-iiin!”—clutching her enormous bosom. I obviously didn’t last long with her!’

Noël, laughing, got up from the table, washed his hands, then walked behind me and started massaging my back and running his fingers through my hair. Then with one palm against the nape of my neck and the other gripping each shoulder in turn, his fingertips worked into my bones, as if recording shape and movement, exploring their way around each tendon and muscle, rolling the joint in circles, and driving his thumbs into my blades.

I could feel him pressing his body against mine, pulling me back towards him, and although blood was heating my face and my groin, I also felt like I might burst into tears at any moment.

‘I think you just need to relax more.’ He gave my shoulders one last squeeze before returning to his seat.

He leaned back in his chair, reaching down into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes.

‘I wonder what I’d do if I didn’t play the piano,’ I said. ‘Have you ever thought what else you’d have done?’

‘If I didn’t play the piano?’ he responded, lighting his cigarette, sucking in his cheeks as he inhaled, then hanging his head back to watch the smoke drift up and hover around the light globe.