The Secret Knowledge

by Andrew Crumey

  Paige has been asked to do one of the watery bits again, she’s got to get the fingering right otherwise that water’s going to pour out of her hands and make a puddle on the floor. All very well hacking away at the rocks but they’re mountains in the background, need to look at what’s in front. And Paige thinks of Julian Verrine, his invitation to what she supposes should be called a business lunch. Can’t help imagining herself on Classic FM bashing through crowd-pleasing double octaves and to hell with getting the trickles right. Definite star quality. Sean opens the newspaper and sees her looking glamorous in a full-page interview. Wishes he’d never hurt her.

  Mrs White says they should take a short break because she can see that Paige is getting tired. Very important not to overstretch the tendons. She refills Paige’s teacup and says she’s had a letter from Sarah about the mission, Paige is never good at keeping up with soap-opera but knows from previous lessons that the daughter does some kind of religious work, Mrs White is a loyal church-goer and exudes a serenity that Paige envies though also doubts. All very well to have faith yet what if it’s false? Paige would never discuss it with her, but if the miscarriage came up she knows Mrs White would say it’s in heaven, the little cabbage stalk grew wings and became an angel, when really it never had any life except a potential one that got burned like old paper.

  Paige declines a Jaffa Cake and asks, “Have you heard anything about Mr Conroy?”

  Mrs White shakes her head earnestly.

  “Is it true he’s gone missing?”

  “So it would appear. Some fear the worst.”

  “You mean harming himself?”

  “He tried it before, you know, when he had a breakdown a few years ago. Such a common story, artists cracking under the strain. So easy to become isolated and obsessive. And it all started so well for him, I remember when people were seriously calling him a new Pollini. But that was a long time ago.”

  “Beaten by his own demons.”

  “He certainly made a fine job of sabotaging his career though who can say how things would have turned out otherwise? You know how heavily the odds are stacked against any kind of success, Paige. First there has to be complete mastery of technique, no one would question David’s, in his day he was astonishing. And sensitive interpretation, again he had it, even if his readings were a little clinical. Then luck, David got his break when John Ogden had to cancel a performance and they wanted a last-minute replacement. But once you’ve got an audience you have to hold on to it, and that means connecting. I don’t think David ever truly connected with the public. I think he despised them, because really he despised himself.”

  Paige wants to know more but it’s time to resume work. Her mind keeps wandering and her playing is sub-standard, Mrs White can sense it and soon calls a halt.

  “Perhaps you didn’t get enough sleep,” she says kindly.

  Paige is thinking about the meeting with Julian Verrine, wondering what to wear. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course, dear.”

  “How good do you really think I am?”

  Mrs White answers without hesitation. “You’ve got huge potential.”

  “I’m not talking about that.” Potential, Paige knows, is something that gets incinerated. “I mean now.”

  The teacher’s beneficence remains undimmed though her response is evasive. “There’s a difference between performing for one person in a room and a thousand in a concert hall.”

  “I want to know if I can connect.”

  “You need to do the other things first: technique, interpretation, projection.”

  “I’m twenty years old, there are pianists younger than me giving Prom concerts.”

  “Yes, and Liszt was touring when he was twelve, you missed your chance at being a child prodigy. But as a mature artist you’re not yet fully formed. A child could learn the part of King Lear, but would he understand it?”

  “You’re saying I don’t have enough life experience?” Paige is thinking: if only you knew.

  “Yes, I suppose that’s what I’m saying. If you’re asking me about show business then it doesn’t matter, the younger the better, as long as there are no wrong notes. A lot of concertgoers hear Beethoven no differently at fifty than they did when they were twenty so that’s all the more reason for it not to matter, they like to see someone young and pretty on stage doing something they can’t do but wish they could. Given the right PR you could probably have a career like that tomorrow, though it wouldn’t last long.”

  Paige wants to ask Mrs White about Verrine, has she heard of him? She says nothing.

  “We’re not going down that road,” Mrs White says with maternal firmness. “We do things the right way, college concerts and competitions, no jumping the queue.”

  The teacher offers more tea and biscuits for consolation but what Paige reads in Mrs White’s words is a simple message: you’re not good enough. She asks, “Did Mr Conroy say anything about me?”

  “David and I have never had much to say to each other about anything.”

  “You don’t get on?”

  “We all have our own kinds of artistic temperament. Put it this way, the reason why David never did chamber performances was that he couldn’t find players who’d put up with him. A soloist in everything.”

  “I heard that his wife left him.”

  Mrs White looks surprised. “Wife? He’s never been married.”

  “Or his partner. He said she walked out on him. Not long before I started.”

  “He’s always lived alone.”

  “But he said it.”

  “It simply isn’t true.”

  “Then he lied to me?”

  Mrs White sighs. “He has quite serious mental issues, you realise.”

  “Delusions?”

  “That’s what it sounds like. He’s always been very private but one thing I can say for certain is that no woman would ever have been able to live with David Conroy.”

  Paige is stunned. She mentally replays her encounters with Conroy, instantly reinterprets them, knowing that nothing he said can be trusted. Her star quality is no longer definite, there is only roughness around the edges. She’s gripped by a sickening dizziness. What about Julian Verrine, has he also been deceived by Conroy’s fantasies? Paige wants to tell Mrs White but it’s too late, the teacher is looking at the clock, lifting the biscuit plate, smiling to indicate that time’s up and she has another appointment. With rising nausea Paige goes out and along the corridor, pushing between other students to reach the staircase, hurrying as she goes down to the entrance hall, her throat dry as stone, tears gathering. She’s beside the glass case with its celebration of the famous and the dead, the remembered few, the ones of whom it’s been decided that they mattered after all. She wants to smash the bloody thing.

  She tries calling Ella but it goes onto voicemail and Paige hangs up, she starts texting then quickly deletes it. Who gives a shit what Conroy did or didn’t say, or what Mrs White thinks? You’ve got to believe in yourself as an artist, this is what Paige tells herself, though the voice she hears isn’t really hers, it’s the voice of someone she’d rather be, someone who could genuinely believe. The louder voice, her own, is saying: you’ve fucked it up, you should have listened to your parents. You’re good but not great. Do you really want to earn a living playing cocktail bars and wedding receptions?

  She needs air and daylight, goes through the revolving door onto the steps and stands feeling the breeze, breathing deeply until the sickness leaves her. The sound of traffic calms her, movement of distant pedestrians, spectacle of life’s insignificance.

  “Hey, Paige.”

  She turns and sees in his regular spot the skinny protester with his placard on a pole. Only him today. No hat this time, his brown hair is untidy and he needs a shave but the look suits him. Still can’t remember his name.

  “You OK?” he asks.

  “Where are the others?”

  “Didn’t show.”

  Sh
e goes over to him, looks at the placard with its painted slogan. “Why do you do this?”

  “Because I want change.”

  “And you think this can make a difference? Doesn’t change happen anyway?”

  He starts telling her the kind of idealistic stuff he must say to everyone, she zones out and watches his teeth, sees a tiny white spot of saliva find its way onto his lip and stay there like a pearl, wonders what it would be like to be kissed by him. Eventually she interrupts. “Aren’t there better places to make a protest than outside a music college?”

  “Sure, but I don’t want to miss lectures.”

  “Revolution has its limits, right?”

  He laughs, she joins in.

  “Better go.”

  “Bye, Paige.”

  The conversation has lifted her mood, she walks home thinking about her meeting, it’ll probably go nowhere but you never know. It isn’t down to Conroy or Mrs White or her mum and dad: it’s about people like Julian Verrine. Again she plays the fantasy of Sean opening the newspaper, a photograph of her at the keyboard.

  Next day she arrives promptly at the restaurant, a place she’s never been in, popular with media types by the look of it, stylishly minimalist like a picture in a magazine. The waiter sees her lingering at the entrance and comes to attend; she gives Verrine’s name and is taken to a table already occupied by a slim man in his thirties wearing a light grey suit. He stands and greets her warmly.

  “Paige, great to meet you, so glad you could come.”

  He has a firm handshake, deep suntan, finely trimmed beard and an expensive looking watch. Later, when Paige tries to describe him, she’ll find that this is all she can say about Julian Verrine.

  “How’s the piano playing?” he asks brashly, she tells him she’s studying Chopin and he nods approvingly. “Can’t do better than that. David’s never been too much of a fan, though.” Immediately they have alighted on the subject of their common acquaintance. “Heard anything?”

  “My new teacher worries he might have harmed himself.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Verrine says earnestly. “It would be so out of character.”

  The waiter brings water and offers them a selection of bread rolls, a piece of theatre that puts her in mind of Mrs White’s comments about show business. It occurs to Paige that as a pianist she’s training to be a kind of retail assistant, serving up musical morsels with a flourish. Verrine orders a glass of red wine, Paige sticks to water. She asks him how exactly he knows Conroy.

  “We go back a long way.”

  “You’re his agent?”

  “I’ve helped set up quite a few of his performances. Not an impresario as such, but I have contacts. That’s what it’s all about, you know. Contacts.” His moisturised skin creases easily into a smile as he raises his glass to toast their new partnership. “Now, tell me about Klauer.”

  The sudden change of topic takes her aback. “What about him?”

  “You still have the piece?”

  “I gave my copy back to Mr Conroy. He told you about it?”

  Verrine cuts into his roll, disembowels it and pushes some of the white fluff into his mouth, scrutinising Paige who for a moment sees his eyes flick to her breasts before he takes a sip from his glass to wash down the bread. “Did you play all of it?”

  “Only the slow movement.”

  “Odd case from what I hear. Shot himself and survived, something like that.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  The waiter comes again, the next stage of the performance, inviting them to order. They haven’t looked at their menus; Verrine glances at his and opts for steak, Paige finds her attention falling more on the prices than the elaborate descriptions, hopes she hasn’t misinterpreted the arrangement, and orders a risotto involving morel mushrooms and pine kernels. She has no idea where such things come from or how they’re harvested, they seem to exist only for places like this.

  “Chopin, eh?” Verrine resumes. “Poor fellow’s buried all over the place, heart’s in Warsaw and the rest of him’s in Paris, though it’s what he wanted, apparently. Know about his eyes?”

  “Where are they buried?”

  “Paris, I presume. But no one knows what colour they were. Liszt wrote that they were blue, others swore they were brown, some say hazel. Rotted away to dust now, so we’ll never find out.” It’s a sad and distasteful image but Verrine doesn’t notice Paige’s reaction or else doesn’t care, instead he pursues the thought. “So many things we can never know, because they make no difference. The colour of a man’s eyes, even if he’s alive or dead.”

  “You mean Mr Conroy?”

  “I meant Klauer. Dead now anyway, regardless of how things went. History doesn’t care either way.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Verrine looks pleased to have elicited some resistance. “Are you going to tell me about the butterfly effect? Tiny details changing the course of history? I don’t believe that nonsense.”

  “You’re a fatalist?”

  “No, I believe we can all make a difference. I just don’t waste my time on details.”

  “I’m guessing you don’t play an instrument.”

  He laughs. “Touché. You’re right, I could never have been a performer. But I’ve helped launch a few careers.”

  The waiter has reappeared, this time to replace redundant cutlery that had already been on the table when they arrived, with implements deemed appropriate to their order. Details, Paige thinks. Maybe Verrine’s right, we waste too much time on ones that make no difference.

  “I want to know more about the Klauer piece,” Verrine says.

  “You already know more than I do.”

  “But you’ve played some of it, you know how it sounds. What did David say about it?”

  “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “I want to hear it from you.” Verrine’s look is momentarily steely, Paige can imagine him as boss of some big company, calmly firing an employee after years of faithful service, and again his eyes move to her breasts though this time they stay there a little longer. She doesn’t dislike his attention, instead she feels herself drawing power from it, and almost without thinking, she flexes her back, a movement that swats his gaze like a fly.

  “The Klauer’s an interesting work,” she says confidently.

  “Romantic or modernist?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “If it was a film soundtrack, what sort of film would it be?”

  This is hard too; Paige thinks of the slow movement and tries to imagine the actors it would accompany, but all she can see is an empty landscape, remote forest or wetland, somewhere beautiful yet bleak. “Arty,” she says.

  “I was afraid you might say that. No chance of making that your concert debut, then.”

  “I already told you, I don’t have the score.”

  “Oh yes, that’s right,” Verrine reminds himself. “But would you be able to play any of it from memory if you had to?”

  “Why might I have to?”

  “I was simply wondering.”

  Their meal arrives; the risotto is a little tit-shaped mound that looks like a starter. Fortunately Paige isn’t hungry, Verrine’s manner has somehow taken away her appetite. He slashes his bloody steak with enthusiasm. She says, “You mentioned on the phone about possibilities. Performances.”

  “That’s right.” He chews a piece of meat and looks as if he’s thinking of her body.

  “So how would that work?”

  “One step at a time, Paige. First I’d like to find David so the three of us can discuss this together.”

  “Mrs White can give you an opinion.”

  “I’m not looking for a reference,” he says with a voice that’s suddenly cutting, effortlessly dismissive. “I want to know why you’re pretending you haven’t heard from him.”

  She feels the blood fall from her face. “What?”

  His manner abruptly changes. “Only joking, Paige.”

  “Why would
you think he’d contact me?”

  “Because you’re special.”

  Conroy’s delusion: definite star quality. Paige says nothing.

  “We’ve got to find him.”

  So none of this is about her after all; Verrine wants to get in touch with his act. “What if he’s killed himself?” she says bluntly.

  “He hasn’t. I know David, the pattern’s familiar. He’s prone to paranoia, sometimes feels he needs to run away and hide. Conspiracies, threats, he suddenly sees them popping up everywhere and can’t cope. Usually resurfaces after a few weeks but I can’t wait that long.”

  “Look, Mr Verrine, I never had much to do with Mr Conroy, his mental health isn’t my business. I’ll be honest, I thought we were going to talk about my career, not his.”

  Verrine is barely listening, he summons the waiter with a wave of his hand and orders another glass of wine to replace the one he’s drained. Then he says, “It’s you I want to talk about, Paige. But you’re wrong about David, closer to him than you realise. You’re his new discovery, his little star, he shows you something incredibly precious, shares it with you, this lost work he wants you to learn, a secret he keeps even from his wife.”

  “I thought he didn’t have one.”

  Verrine’s smile is undented. “Joking again. So let’s talk business. You’re young, pretty and talented. That’s a combination I like. But a career doesn’t simply happen, it has to be made. First thing we want is an endorsement, David’s won’t do because to be perfectly frank his opinion no longer carries the weight it used to. I’m thinking maybe Paul Morrow.”