The Virtuoso

by Sonia Orchard

  Do see if you can come to the Glasgow concert, we must both start saving up. And please cheer up about your job! Remember the proverb:

  ‘Everything comes to him who waits.’

  With best love,

  Noël

  I pocketed the letter and could feel myself growing unsteady again. Pacing about the room, sniffing at every object, I felt that I might choke on the odious veneer of watercolour landscapes, a glazed Chinese tea set, and a framed letter from the King. I wondered if I ought to leave. I couldn’t have even said what it was that disturbed me—I just felt immensely troubled, as if I were inhabited by some foreign, seething being.

  But I didn’t want to leave—like a snarling creature in its lair, I was exactly where I wanted to be, marching in circles, winding myself up.

  Floorboards creaked above me. A door opened and closed.

  I imagined Bill, half-naked, slipping out of the bed; Noël still asleep, waking only later to the sound of Bill placing a tray of tea and toast on the bedside table next to him. As I saw all of this—Noël sitting propped up against pillows, Bill stirring the tea—I started to think how pathetic they both were. That Noël had chosen to be with this ridiculous feeble-minded man who didn’t understand him at all—that they had fooled themselves how happy they really were! And as for this quaint little study with its fastidiously kept files and affectionately displayed photos, it really was—like everything else they’d built around them—just one enormous sham!

  I’m not sure how long I stayed. I can’t remember leaving—only walking past the wall at the end of the street, feeling very shaken, and it seeming that someone was walking beside me.

  I recall looking out to the river and thinking how extraordinary it was that at times of extreme sadness the world can possess such unearthly beauty. The sky was milky blue except for a brilliant burnished orange radiating out from where the sun peeked over the elms far in the east near the bend. And I was struck by the desire to throw myself into that deep, shimmering water.

  Martha’s just brought me up a plate of rather cheerless-looking macaroni cheese, a slice of jam sponge and a pot of coffee. She gave me the most studied look when she placed down the tray, as if she was expecting me to burst into tears or blurt out some confession. What has Gerald been telling the dear woman? I really do wish he’d hold that tongue of his in check.

  Anyway, I’m now not sure I’m terribly hungry, what with thinking about that shameful night in Hammersmith; I really must have been quite off my head at the time. But I’ve got a long evening ahead, so I’d better try to eat something.

  So, no—I hadn’t had the faintest idea that Noël long dreamed of becoming a composer. Only now, regretfully, do I imagine that perhaps it wasn’t that important to me at the time. I simply saw him as the greatest pianist in the world; the rest, I thought, would surely follow.

  I probably soon forgot about the letters in Bill’s study. Maybe I just chose to forget, what with everything that then happened. The entire circumstances were really most unpleasant for me at the time, all of us being such great friends. I really had no idea how I felt—angry? Besotted? Frustrated? Bored? All of these, I’m sure. But I couldn’t see any of that then. No wonder I had no idea what was going on for Noël.

  But don’t think for a minute I haven’t wondered how differently it all might have ended up. If I’d behaved otherwise, that is. Such small, simple things that I could have said or done at various times, which may have altered everything. I think a lot about that, actually—how we find ourselves where we are, at the end of an intricate, delicate web, a veil of minuscule crossroads trailing out behind us, endlessly in all directions. And whether we could have just as easily made a small, innocent turn—caught an eleven-thirty bus, say, rather than one at twelve o’clock—or a series of them, way, way back, and now be living entirely different lives.

  I decided not to go to the 1952 Aldeburgh Festival. I’d been twice before. In ‘48, the year Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears founded the Suffolk seaside festival, I saw Noël stand in, last minute, after Clifford Curzon cancelled; he played Schumann’s entire Davidsbündlertänze and several other mammoth works to a full house in the Aldeburgh Cinema on a Sunday afternoon. I also went in ‘51, the year Noël premiered the Gerhard Piano Concerto at the fourteenth-century Aldeburgh parish church. But a month before the ’52 festival, at one of Noël and Bill’s Hammersmith dinner parties, Bill asked over his limply held wine glass if I’d be attending Aldeburgh. He lowered his glass, picked up his pieces of cutlery as if they were surgical implements, edged a morsel of Noël’s jugged hare onto his fork and placed it in his mouth. As I watched his lazy, ungulate-like mastication I announced, ‘No.’ I said it quite loudly—loudly enough for Noël and Tippett, who were arguing about Sibelius, to turn their heads momentarily. ‘No, I won’t be going to Aldeburgh,’ I said again. Noël was to be performing twice—works by Beethoven, Britten, Weber, Rainier, Hindemith, Saint-Saëns and Poulenc—several pieces of which I hadn’t yet heard. But I had said no, and I wasn’t going back on my word.

  I spent the festival week in London, sweltering in my room and on the underground, avoiding any talk of Aldeburgh. When I next bumped into Noël at the Rockingham he didn’t seem his usual lively self: his laughter was forced and his words either stumbled or blurted out too loudly. In retrospect it was probably the first time that things hadn’t seemed quite right with Noël.

  I didn’t enquire of the festival; however, it came out through the course of our conversation that Ben had been very busy the entire week working on his opera Gloriana, which he hoped would be ready for Coronation week the following year, and Ben had asked Noël if, after the Proms, he would substitute for him and tour the country with Peter. I knew Noël enjoyed accompanying musicians, especially tenors like Peter, but I wondered how he felt now to be standing in for another pianist. Noël Mewton-Wood—an understudy— filling in for Britten, who made being a musician, a composer, a performer, appear so stunningly simple; who was called upon to perform all around the world; who was commissioned to compose by the future Queen. What’s more, everyone knew that Peter was miserable when without his partner—that he moped and whined and would barely even eat. That even though Peter adored Noël and considered him a brilliant pianist, he’d far rather be performing with Ben.

  I remember Noël standing there with his head bowed, looking out from under his eyebrows, eyes flitting about the room as he mentioned that Bill was off to Scotland the following day to curate an exhibition of modern British portraiture. He said that Bill had an extraordinarily keen sense of colour and light, and he had recently bought Bill some paints and an easel to set up in the yard. Bill had already finished some lovely watercolours of the grebes feeding in the evening, he said, and another of the rowers as they trained on the river. I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t think of anything more hideous than an amateur rendition of a spindly brown bird pecking in the boggy, littered mudflats, but I said nothing. I stood, letting my heavily lidded eyes tell him how uninterested I was in the amusements of this lumbering man with his wispy blond crown and manicured nails, who smelt as pink and soapy as a baby; I wanted him to suddenly recognise the absurdity of Bill’s behaviour and be embarrassed, even appalled, by the realisation.

  Then, out of the blue, Noël said to me that maybe I’d like to come over for dinner the following night; it would just be the two of us. And he just stood there—sadly, now I come to think of it—waiting for me to reply.

  Even now I’m as astounded by my response as I was moments after I spoke: arms crossed, smoke trailing from the cigarette between my fingers, I said to him that I believed I was busy.

  That winter was one of the coldest I can remember. Some days the smog was so thick you could barely see your feet, and one night a performance at Sadler’s Wells had to be cancelled because the stage wasn’t visible from the stalls. It was too cold to stay home, so most nights after work I’d go out drinking, often with Gerald, always keeping my eye on
the time so that at least half an hour before close I could start batting my eyes towards the finest suit in the bar and find myself a charming rosewood-carved bed for the night, with the plumpest goose-down pillows and duvet. I heard little about Noël and Peter’s tour. And any time he crept into my mind I’d shoo him out, slamming that door shut with the thought that Bill, like myself, was stuck working in London. I was also convinced that out of the three of us, I was surely having the most fun.

  I was now working in the library at the Royal College of Music, supervising the record collection, and also in charge of writing programme lists and notices for their newsletters, magazines and concert programmes. More recently I’d also been writing articles for the Gramophone and other journals, jobs that Gerald had lined up for me. I didn’t mind all of this new work; I moved through it quite effortlessly. Though every now and again, as if someone had tapped me on the shoulder or whispered in my ear, I’d become suddenly aware how far I’d been carried away from my music, that a considerable stretch of time had passed without me returning to the piano, and perhaps it could now be assumed that I never actually would. Strangely, and almost sadly, I realised that I wasn’t particularly bothered.

  I’d do all my writing at home, working at the table with a tumbler of gin and a packet of cigarettes, on the typewriter Gerald had given me soon after we’d met as a gentle inducement to write down some of my precocious—as he called them—musical ideas. I enjoyed coming up with the inconsequential pieces I wrote for the College, and even more so the journal articles I’d been writing since Gerald had gone away to a cousin’s wedding on the Amalfi coast and had asked me to cover his notices and column, ‘The London Stave’. I never told him how flattered I was by his request; I just simply shrugged and agreed, and remained quietly pleased with the work he subsequently sent my way, despite considering the clattering contraption on which I tapped away a vulgar apparatus.

  Still, I never missed a performance when Noël was in town. He played less and less of the lollipops (the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky concertos, the Bach Toccata—crowd-pleasers that would have reeled in the record companies), and more pieces that audiences had rarely, or never before, heard, often by contemporary composers—Seiber, Ferguson, Oldham, Rawsthorne, Bliss, Bush and Tippett—some of whom wrote works specifically for Noël to perform, dedicating the music to him.

  During his returns to London I’d see him out drinking at parties and bars around Soho, always without Bill, and often disappearing out the door on the tail of someone who I’d joke to Gerald looked five-dimes-for-a-dame. Noël never mentioned the tour with Peter or any other work he was doing. I’d hear from Gerald that everyone was talking about how Noël and Walter Goehr had just that day recorded some formidable concerto in a single take, and I’d look over my shoulder to the corner of the bar and there I’d see Noël sitting at a booth ordering champagne for some pouting youngster.

  I remember the day the notice came out in the paper for his recording of the Bliss concerto, telling of most ingenious and brilliant passage-work and cadenzas, a thrilling account of a defiantly romantic concerto. I carried the paper around with me all day, then in the late afternoon, stepped onto the train at Liverpool to see Noël sitting in the corner, his head buried in volume four of The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I rushed up to him and said hello and was about to congratulate him on the notice when he jumped to his feet and started reciting, by heart, long extracts from Gibbon’s tome.

  I took a seat and patiently listened as Noël ranted and rambled, not quite sure how else to respond. When Noël finally broke off his monologue he sat down next to me, leaned in close, raised his eyebrows, looked around the carriage and whispered, ‘Tell me—I haven’t got my glasses with me—are there any good-looking boys about?’ Then realising we were at his stop, he jumped up and waved as he leapt out the door.

  In the summer of ‘53, Noël performed at the Festival Hall twice, as well as the Proms, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Edinburgh Festival and the St Ives Festival, where he premiered a sonata Bliss had dedicated to him. Hindemith publicly announced, ‘If you want to hear my music the way it is meant to sound, listen to Mewton-Wood perform it’; the conductor Malcolm Sargent proclaimed Noël ‘a genius’. Noël appeared unstoppable.

  The only times he ever upset his increasingly large following were during the occasional performances when something would rattle him and he would go through his tone. Once, during a performance of Saint-Saëns’ Le Carnaval des Animaux, the orchestra hashed their entry at the end of one of his solos. Noël’s jaw and temples rippled, his hands came crashing down on the chords, and I felt the entire audience bristle, fearing for the piano’s safety.

  Then, in the green room after the performance, Noël flirted outrageously with a young clarinettist from the orchestra. I was annoyed that he had lost his temper on stage, and now, rather than talking with critics and conductors, he seemed more interested in hunting down a bit of trade. When I approached him to say hello, without intending to snap I said, ‘I’ve told you before not to sit down before walking on stage— your trousers were all creased!’ He jerked his head back—I wasn’t sure if he was shocked or bemused—so I added, ‘You know your crotch is the first thing people look at when you walk out!’ and winked, which sent him into fits of laughter.

  I kept an eye on him from the other side of the room as I chatted with John Amis, who mentioned in passing that Noël was terribly depressed about how few times he’d been asked to perform at the Festival Hall. He said that up until that summer, in the two years since the Festival of Britain, Denis Matthews had played seven times and Noël had only been asked to play once.

  I was surprised by John’s words, and said, ‘But everyone adores Noël.’

  As I was speaking, though, a strange sensation came over me, a feeling of both panic and sadness, as if I were suddenly aware that everything was rapidly coming to an end. It all seemed so clear to me that these were the last few quivering moments before a momentous breakthrough, before real international success. It was now only a matter of time until a major recording contract was signed and Noël and that blasted man Bill left for America, possibly not to return for several years.

  I looked around the room at the large crowd that had gathered here after his performance—London’s most notable musicians, politicians and aristocracy—and then glanced at Noël over near the wall, talking to the young clarinettist over the rim of his champagne glass, and was seized by the terrible feeling that all of this would soon be gone.

  At the beginning of autumn when the leaves on the plane trees first started blanching and withering on their limbs, Noël and Bill bought and moved into their own home, a Georgian terrace in Hillgate Place, Notting Hill. I didn’t see much of either of them around this time. Bill was now Exhibitions Officer for the British Council and was frequently away setting up shows and liaising with other cultural officers (Noël spoke of the exhibitions Bill curated as if they were symphonies Bill had composed), and Noël was recording a long list of concertos for the small Concert Hall label with the conductor Walter Goehr. I, on the other hand, was out drinking every night, only just managing to hold down my job at the library, having recently received my final warning after blowing up at a student for returning a record to the wrong shelf.

  Noël was telling everyone that Bill was the best thing that had happened to him, that he couldn’t stand it when Bill went away. Yet it was in those days and weeks when Bill was out of London that I’d see more of Noël. He’d be at the Rockingham, the Fitzroy Tavern, the Lily Pond or the Copa Bar, surrounded by a group of friends or admirers, a cigarette in one hand, a champagne in the other, and a gin-and-tonic, ordered by some young hopeful, bubbling quietly on the bar.

  One evening when Bill was in Germany I bumped into Noël as he was heading out the door of a bar in Charlotte Street. He was broadcasting the following day, Stravinsky’s choral ballet Les Noces, and suggested that we go out for a drink afterwards. I had the aft
ernoon off and, as he wasn’t sure what time they’d be finished, he proposed that I come to the BBC Maida Vale studios and sit in on the recording, then we’d head out somewhere from there.

  I’d seen Walter Goehr, a tiny dark-haired Berliner, conducting at Morley College and with other orchestras, but had never made his acquaintance, so when I arrived I slipped into the recording booth and picked up a paper to read while the choir, percussionists and pianists set up. I’d only nodded to Noël through the glass, but even with my head buried in the Guardian I could hear his jovial laughter rising over the din of drums and cymbals being assembled, and singers running through arpeggios.

  Once the recording began the large white studio transformed, as if a net had been cast and pulled, drawing everyone together. The men and women who’d been scuttling about tightening stands, carrying percussion and warming up their voices, all fused together—a chanting choir, four grand pianos, mechanical percussion—producing one eerily melodious sound. Faces hardened, not a flicker of emotion was shown by the singers or instrumentalists evoking a Russian peasant wedding. The music leapt mid-beat from one phrase to the next, the pianos rippled, the timpani rumbled, the snare hissed and the whispers of the choir bit like bullets. Walter Goehr, with a stern brow and clenched jaw, struck the air with his arms as if he were conducting a fleet of tanks.

  I put my paper down as the music stormed towards the end, anticipating those final wedding-bell chords played by all four pianists—B, C sharp and its octave—over the top of the solo baritone. Then a moment before the first of the chords, Noël jumped in a fraction too early—it was only a split second, but enough to ruin the bell-like effect. The red light on the studio wall lit up, the music collapsed in a heap and the perfect tension that had been breathed into the room, inflating it like a balloon to the point of explosion, had suddenly expired, and the air became a swarm of bees expelled from their hive.