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’.
Gerald had barely closed the door behind Monk when he turned to me with a pursed grin. ‘Champagne?’
I was relieved by Gerald’s good cheer; Monk was, after all, a friend of his. I would have been most upset if Gerald thought I’d just fleeced him.
Gerald filled two champagne flutes and we raised our glasses.
‘Cin-cin then, ol’ boy. To the book.’
‘To the book,’ I repeated. Then we both took a sip.
‘So have you got any idea what you’re actually going to write about, then?’ Gerald smiled, almost mockingly.
‘Haven’t the foggiest. Beethoven, I suspect. Something will pop up…I hope.’ But I wasn’t really thinking about the book at all. I was noticing how devilishly handsome Gerald appeared to me all of a sudden. The realisation almost made me want to weep.
‘Righto then, that’s good enough. To hope.’ Gerald raised his glass before taking another sip. I watched him, so different from me, I thought—his eyes closed, sucking the tiny bubbles against the inside of his cheeks, savouring each miniature explosion.
On the twenty-ninth of March 1827, Beethoven’s coffin was carried through the streets of Vienna, preceded by an honorary escort of a hundred men, and followed by a long procession of riders and carriages carrying the nobles. Around twenty thousand mourners crowded behind fences, hoping to catch a last glimpse as the funeral cortège moved past. A travelling merchant arrived in the city that day and asked an old woman what the fuss was about; the woman answered, ‘Don’t you know? They’re burying the Herr General of the musicians.’
As I walk along Notting Hill Gate, watching the after-work crowd spill out of the shops and offices and into the bars and buses, I imagine myself yelling out a similar announcement. Noël’s memorial concert has loomed in my mind for months, and although I’ve done my best to put the thought aside all day, now, as I head towards the Wigmore, the evening sinking further into night, a steely terror prickles under my skin. The disinterest of the crowd—all rushing off to get done up like a dog’s dinner and to swing their clammy bodies around a dance hall, or head to a neighbourhood hall to laugh along with some dreary New Year pantomime—only increases my feeling of dread. I’m not bothered by being dragged back through the muck of that dreadful time a year ago—God knows I could do enough of that on my own—but, rather, by the thought that this is to be Noël’s final burial, his very last concert.
People don’t talk much about Noël any more; his name only comes up when discussing great performances of the past. Someone will mention the thundering Ludus Tonalis at Morley College when the small brown Steinway seemed about to collapse under his crashing hands, or the Busoni concerto at the Chelsea Town Hall with Norman Del Mar conducting and an orchestra that took up half the hall, a huge wax-disc machine in the centre of the room (that no one could remember how to operate) and a chorus of critics in the first three rows sitting like hyenas ready to pounce on this long, difficult, atrocious piece. And how Noël had just walked onto the stage and tossed it off so effortlessly, so magnificently. Yes, he’s given us an extraordinary catalogue of programmes and discs to flick through and reminisce over. But Noël himself, the man—he is now, undeniably, history.
Everyone will be there, of course. Except Tippett. He requested that his song Remember Your Lovers be played, but apparently is still too shattered to attend. Poor chap—not the first close friend of his to suicide and he really hasn’t coped with it at all. Cecil Day Lewis has written a poem about Noël that Bliss has put to music —A fountain plays no more, it begins, then goes on to say something about the fury and the grace. Alan Bush has also composed a memorial piece, and of course there’s Ben—he’s written something to an Edith Sitwell poem about the Blitz. Ben’s also going to play a piece Noël composed when he was fifteen years old, the year he and his mother boarded the Rubicon in Melbourne and steamed to London. Fifteen, and heading to the other side of the world to meet Turner, Schnabel and Beecham. Fifteen, with his whole illustrious life stretched out ahead of him.
The memorial ought to have been a month ago, of course, on the anniversary of his death. But then Ben’s bursitis flared up and the whole thing was postponed until today. I was furious when John told me; it was like postponing Remembrance Day because the bugle player has a cold—inconceivable. It’s not a performance for Britten, I said, it’s a memorial for Noël. If Ben’s arm’s too sore, I told him, I’ll play the bloody piano!
I actually had a good chat with John when he rang to tell us. Lovely chap, John—strange how I never really got to know him when Noël was alive. He said that I could come over and play on Noël’s Steinway anytime I liked. He also told me the most extraordinary story. The week after Noël died, John said he went to Hillgate Place to help Dulcie sort through Noël’s things. He sat at the Brinsmead and started playing his part to the Busoni concerto, one of Noël’s and his favourite duets. After playing the five-minute orchestral introduction, just at the moment when Noël’s part enters with a low forte C, the low C string in the Steinway snapped, like a gunshot echoing around the room. John said he was in fits of laughter when Dulcie raced back in to find out what all the palaver was about.
Yes, a very kind offer, I thought, for me to come over and play Noël’s piano, but I’m not sure—it might be a bit grim. I said I’d have to think about it.
He also told me Peter and Ben have Noël’s sofa now, up at Crag House. They asked Dulcie for something to remember him by, as everyone did at the time (Noël didn’t leave anything for anyone in his will, except for John, to whom he left both pianos, his radio-gramophone and all of his records). There was a terrible frenzy of friends, colleagues and admirers all scavenging for mementos from Dulcie—asking for the music to this or that, a pair of gloves, a scarf or a photo. I didn’t ask for anything—I still had the mother-of-pearl cufflinks, the Davidsbündlertänze, as well as the sheet music to Debussy’s duet La Mer (which had actu
ally been my father’s, but I once took it to Noël’s house when I went over for lunch and Noël spilt a forkful of omelette with wine sauce on the front page—so I still have that, the stain under the title of the music). No, I didn’t want a souvenir— how was that going to help matters? I can understand the Steinway or the Brinsmead or one of his lovely paintings (I’ve heard that a couple of Lowrys and Grants have been popping up occasionally at Sotheby’s already). But the sofa—I can’t imagine how they could even think of sitting on it.
I spent the day of the anniversary at home listening to Noël’s recordings. That devastating second movement of the Chopin E minor—cried like a baby all through it; couldn’t stop the tears but just had to hear it over and over. I hadn’t listened to them for such a long time; for months I couldn’t even glance at the sleeves let alone play them. Each note had the metallic whiff of gin, each minor cadence was the quivering and sudden bow of his knees as he collapsed on the floor next to the sofa. So a relief, of sorts, to be hearing them again. To close my eyes and be carried to the second row at the Wigmore, or the Albert Hall. To listen as if I’m hearing them for the very first time, Noël playing them just for me.
A poster in a shop window I just passed caught my eye, a woman in skirt and bonnet with her arm around a girl with blonde plaits, both waving down at a steamship on a river, snow-capped mountains in the distance and, underneath, the words The Beautiful Blue Danube is Calling You! I smile, thinking of Gerald and our little trip, and am surprised that even the thought of meeting him in half an hour at the pub before the memorial is so gladdening for me. I have to admit, I have been looking forward to our Viennese jaunt enormously. We packed the Citroën this morning and after the concert we’re driving straight to Dover; we’ll be on the ferry to Calais by eleven o’clock this evening. Gerald bought tickets for the Orient Express as a birthday present, tried to cheer me up a bit, dear soul. We had planned to travel straight after the memorial on the fifth of December—pictured an eggnog and marzipan Christmas—but then, of course, everything got delayed and we were stuck in London. Probably for the best, remembering the maudlin state I was in over that awful birthday period. For weeks, I just sat around in my room, listening to records, hardly eating a thing. Gerald was most relieved I was sorted out by Christmas, knowing the effort his mother would go to, the roast goose, the pudding with bread and brandy sauce, the bonbons. Then one morning just before Christmas, I walked out from my room, met Gerald downstairs for breakfast, and he said to me, ‘My word, you look quite a different chap this morning!’ I was glad he’d noticed as I felt remarkably changed myself. For the first time in weeks I hadn’t woken thinking about Noël. No, instead I’d woken excited about my research and the writing of the book. What’s more, I’d decided I wouldn’t write anything at all about the Immortal Beloved—it seemed almost vulgar to dissect that too much—but, rather, I would write on a subject that I believed encapsulated the Immortal Beloved, encapsulated it all: a book about Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. It was only later that day that I again thought about Noël and resolved that I would write the book in memory of him. Because, I thought, it was really seeing Noël perform the Beethoven C minor that got it all started. I still remember so clearly sitting there at the Queen’s Hall next to my father, the joy of watching Noël perform up on stage, of rising up above my seat, floating around the dome of that magnificent building, and everything else simply sloughing away.
The Virtuoso Page 24
