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.
Our two dinner plates with their dry purple bones and sticky film of gravy sat ugly between us.
‘I’d rather be dead,’ he said with a short laugh, still gazing up at the ceiling.
I cleared the plates and, from under the sink, fetched the bottle of Gordon’s I’d recently bought, afraid my morose behaviour had ruined everything.
Early the following morning Noël rushed out the door, never content to lounge around, even to listen to or play music. Daytime, for him, was for getting things done. I lay in bed a while, staring at his string bag hanging over the back of a chair, grateful as always when he left something behind. I lifted an arm to inhale the musky sweet smell of him on my skin, and recalled the doughy warmth of his chest after he undressed.
Even though he’d only just left, as usual I started to feel slightly anxious. The room now seemed unnaturally still and airless; there was something condemning about it.
I was bothered by our conversation the previous evening. I felt like a fool, having asked Noël what he’d do other than play piano. He’d more than once made comments about something or other that he’d do once he was the world’s top pianist. I always admired the way he tossed these words out so nonchalantly, as if he’d said them so many times before that they no longer carried any real weight at all. I’d heard his mother, Dulcie, exhibit the same ease with Noël’s endowment when she spoke on the radio, chatting about ‘her darling Noël’, who, at the age of three, would sit at the piano saying he was ‘playing concerts’, then ask for paper with ‘train tracks’ on it. I felt appalled with myself; I had no idea why I’d said it, why I
’d shown so little respect for who he was.
Then I thought about my aunt, who, so unlike Dulcie, had rarely ever spoken a kind word about my playing, or anything else for that matter. I remembered when I was young, my father read from the paper about a child pianist from Herefordshire whose parents had insured his hands for three thousand pounds; how envious I was, and how quiet I kept when my aunt proclaimed the parents were clearly out of their minds. Years later, when she told me that my piano teacher had recommended I study at the Academy, she smiled, shook her head and told me that if I was going to be a brilliant pianist, we’d surely all have known about it by now.
It was my father who loved to listen to me play, and for whom I always performed. He’d sit in his armchair, reading the evening paper as I practised, and although I’d sometimes think he wasn’t taking any notice, he’d often dip the paper down below his eyes at the end of a piece and say, ‘The number three? A wonderful piece,’ before smiling and returning to his news. He’d sit there for hours if I kept playing, and I would, even when I’d grown sick of everything I’d practised. Those were the times I’d think I could play all through the night, when I knew how it surely must feel to be the greatest pianist in the world.
Noël dropped over on his way to the Wigmore and handed me a ticket for his evening’s performance, a Beethoven recital. The seat was in the middle of the second row; I imagined he’d chosen it especially so that he could look down and see me from the stage.
I was standing by the table, fiddling with a cigarette lighter, unsure if I ought to play a record or even offer him a chair and a cup of tea. He was leaning against the sofa, his suit in its cover draped over one arm, chatting away as if he were at a party.
As he spoke I thought about his programme and ran through each sonata in my mind (the Pathetique, the Waldstein, the opus 110, the opus 31 no. 2), tens of thousands of notes to be played, to absolute perfection.
I wanted to enquire if he was nervous, but didn’t want to jinx anything. I kept thinking about the last movement of the Waldstein sonata with its prestissimo runs of octaves, one hand galloping after the other. Only a month earlier we were at the piano and he’d confessed that the one thing he always had trouble with was glissando octaves. ‘Really?’ I had replied, dropping both hands onto the keys, octaves rippling up the keyboard. ‘I used to use Moiseiwitsch’s method,’ I said as I continued my display, ‘but now find it easier with the thumbs angled in.’ I turned to him; he wasn’t looking at my hands but glaring straight at me. His face lacked any expression except for a glimmer of something—hostility—in his eyes. I stopped mid-passage, dropped my hands into my lap and looked down at them, ashamed. When I glanced back at him again, he was joyfully animated once more.
‘I prefer Schnabel’s method,’ he said. ‘When a piece gets difficult, just make faces,’ and he launched into an horrendously demanding passage from the Busoni concerto, contorting his face from a manic grin to a choking grimace.
As he stepped away from the sofa I asked him if he needed shoe polish, a comb or anything else at all. He told me that Nancy had shone his shoes for so long that morning that he was surprised he had any shoes left at all, then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. A part of me wanted him to go, a relief from the tedious navigation through each second. But as soon as he’d left, the latch clicking shut behind him, I hung about at the door, my ‘Break a leg’ and his sweet, dewy cologne clanging around the room like dying moths.
I managed several hours of practice, but was too occupied with concerns about Noël’s performance to work very well at all. I also got thinking about Robert and Clara and the difficulties they faced, juggling the needs and commitments of two artistic careers. Robert was quite humiliated by his wife’s great popularity on stage while his compositions so often received lukewarm responses. Yet he’d become anxious if she toured alone—he’d fret so much he sometimes couldn’t compose at all. As for Clara, the moment their first child, Marie, was born, she realised it would be near impossible to successfully fulfil the dual roles of virtuoso and mother. But it seemed she didn’t mind so much—sacrificing her career for her husband’s—when she listened to, or played, his compositions. For she understood more than anyone else the sheer brilliance, and absolute necessity, of Robert’s music.
As soon as evening started to seep into my room, leaving me sitting at the piano in still, muddied light, I started to imagine the shimmering chandeliers of the concert hall. By five o’clock I was dressed in my navy-blue suit with my hair combed back and was heading out the door, even though the concert didn’t start until a quarter to seven.
Light shone out from the glass doors of the foyer, illuminating a lively crowd inside. I skipped up the steps and onto the black-and-white-marble floor. Even though I couldn’t see anyone I knew, I felt like a host watching over his guests, inebriated by the perfumed laughter of the ladies with plunging necklines leaning over the banister, and the banter of silver-haired gents reeking of lavender brilliantine and Upmanns. I reached for my cigarette case (I’d only recently started smoking, since meeting Noël), lit up and checked myself in the etched mirror near the bar, admiring the grin that sidled up from the corner of my mouth each time a velvety curl of smoke escaped from between my lips.
After two cigarettes I entered the hall and made my way through the crowd towards my red plush seat, two back from the foot of the stage.
The seats about me were filling rapidly. Amid this commotion the platform seemed unnaturally still: empty except for the large black Steinway, the piano stool, and two pillars at either end of the stage, which supported large brass vases of white roses. Above the stage floated the cupola, arched with Numidian marble, containing its frieze of the Soul of Music, a man crowned in gold leaf, his hands grasping upwards and his eyes gazing rapturously towards Harmony, a fiery mass with tentacled rays beaming across a blue sky.
In the front row, several seats to the right of me, a tall, lean woman caught my eye. She had an imperious glare, and her neck was so long that when reading the programme in her lap she looked out of her horn-rimmed glasses and along her nose as if gazing down from a great height. When the gentleman on her left addressed her—‘Dulcie, my dear woman’—and she snapped her head around, giving me full view of her square chin and the thick waves of brown hair upon which her hat neatly balanced, I immediately knew her to be Noël’s mother.
The lights dimmed and a spotlight illuminated the side of the stage. Applause erupted, and out through the stage door stepped Noël. He carried the light with him as he walked, quite rigidly, through the darkness to the front of the stage. He stopped and stood tall and brilliant within the centre of the orb—it seemed the light actually radiated from his skin, glowing alabaster; his hair glistened around the edges like a halo. His gaze was loose, out into a crowd brimming with adulation; he almost seemed oblivious to it all. Then he lowered his eyes a fraction, and I tried to pull them in towards me. He didn’t smile, but there was a moment when his face seemed to slacken.
His Adam’s apple dropped suddenly, then rose. He lifted his gaze again, staring out beyond the back wall of the hall. Tiny beads of sweat started to pearl and sparkle along the sides of his neck. He turned and walked to the piano, his coat tails swinging breezily behind him.
He stepped in front of the piano stool, swept his coat from underneath, then sat, grabbing the sides of the chair. The applause stopped, and the shuffle of the stool on the stage floor and a few muted coughs from the back of the hall were all that could be heard. He stared at the keys. I clenched my hands, anticipating that first chord. Minutes seemed to pass. I could feel a rapid fluttering in my chest, echoing around my ribcage; my body was trembling and cold. He raised his hands, pausing an inch above the notes. Then in one movement his hands opened up like vipers about to swallow the piano whole and he landed them fortissimo on the keys, the C minor chord of the Pathetique sonata, diminishing immediately into that dark, agitated introduction.
Two hours later, arpe
ggios bolted up the keys to the triumphant A flat major chord of the opus 110 sonata; the audience leapt to their feet, cheering and clapping. Noël stood next to the piano and nodded swiftly, stony-faced, then turned and left the stage.
The lights rose and I made my way out into the aisle as the din that had filled the hall before the recital gradually resumed.
‘He played the D minor awfully well…’
‘Well?’ another retorted. ‘He played it within an inch of its life!’
I turned to see Dulcie glaring like a cobra at a small woman with rouged cheeks and eyes that appeared on the verge of tears.
‘You can hear Schnabel’s influence,’ a gentleman’s voice spoke from behind me. ‘His technique is astounding.’
‘But so much more sensitive and passionate,’ replied a middle-aged woman whose perfume couldn’t quite disguise the smell of sherry. ‘He makes love to the piano when he plays!’
Backstage in the green room several dozen guests already lounged about, chatting and drinking. A steady flow continued to arrive, looking about as they entered, smiling and nodding to a familiar face as they strode into the room. Noël was standing on the far side by the fireplace drinking a glass of champagne with a couple of gentlemen whom I didn’t recognise.
Dulcie was in the middle of the room next to a table laid with champagne flutes, a silver tray of dry biscuits, cut sausage, pear and cheese, and several ice buckets holding bottles of champagne. I was keen for a drink but wary of approaching her, unsure how obvious Noël’s and my relationship might be, and scared that with a single glance she might uncover everything.
I turned to my right and edged around the room, perusing each and every one of the signed photographs that crowded the walls: Melba, Hess, Curzon, Moiseiwitsch and dozens of others. Glamorous publicity shots where performers posed like screen actors on velvet chaise-longues, and lively rehearsal photographs at the Wigmore, many with personal messages scribbled below. I leaned forward to decipher the scrawl under a portrait of a balding man with wistful eyes: To dear old Wigmore Hall, an old friend, Arthur Rubinstein. I wondered where Noël’s photograph would one day hang.
The Virtuoso Page 6
