The View from Mount Dog

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The boy was clearly disconcerted. He was leaning forward, filling his saucer with cold coffee from a cup unwittingly held at an acute angle.

  ‘I don’t see how you could have guessed,’ he said. ‘We don’t know each other, Mr Raffish.’

  ‘Anthony. But we do; or at least I do. Let us proceed. The concertos I mentioned, have they not most of them been played here in London over the last six months?’

  The boy straightened up, his face pale and anxious. ‘You’ve been following me.’

  ‘Not at all, I assure you. I have been following music: it is my profession. It just so happens you were also present on many occasions. I have not followed you, but whenever you were there I watched you, that I admit.’

  ‘What are you?’ Zebedee put the cup down and stood up. ‘I’m confused. You’re very kind to have invited me home and given me coffee, and I love your piano and everything, but I don’t know that anything you have told me about yourself is true.’

  ‘But you do know that everything I have said about you is. Very well, then. I am, if you will, a talent scout. I am always at concerts because they are my life-blood and because I am always on the lookout for a certain kind of person. Some months ago I spotted you and thought you were one and now tonight I know that you are. You’re not the only one,’ he added with maybe an edge of malice. ‘There are enough of the others to make me a very comfortable living, but not so many that I don’t count them as friends and value them as artists.’

  ‘You’re an agent.’

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Anthony Raffish, ‘I suppose I am. But an agent with a difference. I specialise in lost causes.’

  ‘You haven’t the right to say that.’ The voice came faintly from the bottom of the canyon as of one already resigned to being crushed.

  ‘Oh, but I have, my dear, I’ve a perfect right.’ He studied the boy calmly, seeing the angry rigidity of the head staring away upwards into the shadows, divining the involuntary flooding of the eyes, knowing the solitary, introspective work. My, but he was vain, this one. ‘Like you I am a musician. But, also like you, I am a performer. We wish for reasons of whatever personal bent to take our private selves out on to a platform. Because I am so much older than you – and no doubt spurred by the bitterness of the performer forced to become a member of the audience – I am a very good judge of spectacle. Already, I suspect, you have a better musical intelligence than I; but I also know that your hoped-for career as a pianist is a lost cause unless….

  Unless what? cried the boy inaudibly

  … unless Anthony Raffish takes you in hand. Antonin Raffawicz will listen to your music but it is Anthony Raffish who will lead you out to play. Now, you will have noticed I have asked nothing about your plans, what your teacher says, not even who he is. I have not enquired about the prizes you have carried off nor the competitions you may or may not have won.’

  ‘I presumed that was because you were too busy telling me how clever you were,’ said Zebedee.

  ‘That was to give you confidence. Since I could show you that, although we had never met I already knew a great deal about you just from watching you at some concerts, I imagined we could cut out all the nonsense and the delicacy and get down to helping you.’

  ‘I like delicacy…. And, anyway, if you’re offering to be my agent you’d be helping yourself as well.’

  ‘Granted. But it will be I who take the initial step to bring about the realisation of your fantasy.’

  ‘Fantasy? What fantasy? I have a perfectly realistic ambition to be a professional pianist, that’s all. I just want to make a living out of my music.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ contradicted Anthony Raffish complacently, ‘you want much more than that. You could achieve that by being a répétiteur with some teaching and sessions on the side. No, you are ambitious for the spotlight and that doesn’t make you any less of a musician. I said fantasy and I meant it. Admit it, now; this is your secret. You go to these concerts fully prepared. And why? Because it is your dream that the soloist will suddenly fall ill and lo! out of the audience steps the unknown Mr Hoyle in the nick of time, sits down among the startled orchestra, gives a nod of assurance to the bewildered conductor, and away goes Rachmaninov Two or Beethoven Five fit to electrify anyone. Especially the critics, hurrying home from the tumultuous applause to write glowing accounts of this new Wunderkind who at only a few seconds’ notice was able to change for ever the way in which we look at Rachmaninov Two and Beethoven Five. The recording industry ignores him at their peril, the public to their loss, etcetera. And so a great career is launched. By a stroke of fortune a kitten on the keys becomes overnight a lion rampant on fields of ivory. Oh dear me, yes. And why not?’

  There was a silence. Then, ‘You think you’ve seen through me, I suppose.’

  ‘Not at all. Your most private depths remain as opaque to me as to you. I merely understand a particular fantasy because it is all bound up with being unable to start your career properly. You’re not alone, of course.’

  ‘That’s not how it feels.’

  ‘Maybe, but the audiences in the concert-halls and recital-rooms of the world are full of frustrated talents who go mainly because they hope against hope that the million-to-one chance will be given them to step into the breach and shine more brilliantly than the star they’re replacing. That is what performers are driven to when they haven’t got careers.’

  ‘It’s ridiculous. I’m a pianist, an artist, not the sort of spectator who goes to a motor race secretly hoping for blood. I’m not so cold and malicious as to want people to fall ill suddenly or drop dead of a heart-attack.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not. But there are only so many concert-halls, so many days in a year, so many occasions for a soloist. It’s a highly competitive business nowadays, not a bit unlike sport; and wherever there’s competitiveness there’s the wish to cut a competitor’s throat. In the case of a nice young man like yourself the suppressed wish is to have someone or something else do the cutting – luck, fate, circumstance, call it what you like.’

  Zebedee had sat down at the piano. Suddenly he began playing Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s ‘Ich ruf’ zu dir’. The depressed magnificence of the music rose in the gloom and held everything securely in its place, for it was as if an avalanche had been about to rush down and engulf him utterly. Sustained and sustaining, some echo hung about the canyon’s ledges and sills long after the last sound had died. ‘I’m not a throat-cutter, it’s no good,’ he said finally.

  ‘Not even Lipatti played it better than that, dear boy…. Why should you be a throat-cutter? That’s what agents are for. You are a musician through and through. It is a great crime that the world is so constituted that people like us need to fight in order to be heard. Or at least in order to make a living out of being heard.’

  ‘That’s what I tell my teacher. He’s always trying to get me to enter competitions. I’m always refusing. I tell him that if I were a poet I wouldn’t give readings of my work in pubs, either, not simply to gain an audience. I’m not beery. I’d rather starve than try to be hearty with people I secretly despise.’

  ‘Well, there we are. Nowadays, I’m afraid, one of the unexpected consequences of the television age is that the right kind of exposure can be critical to the success of a performing artist. If American presidents need to be sold on television like soap powder, can a mere instrumentalist hope for a hearing and fame without? It’s no good relying on the audience’s judgement: they simply don’t know enough. What they like is to be able to attach some sort of persona to the performer. You have to be both able and identifiable, and if you’re a bad self-publicist you need an agent who can market you in the right way. You need to be managed.’

  ‘Which is where you think you come in.’

  ‘My dear, I know I do. Your name, for a start. “Zeb Hoyle.” Whoever heard of a musician being called Zeb Hoyle? It’s inconceivable. You sound like a footballer. No, we’ll have to find you a stage name. Personally, I like ini
tials; they always sound so distinguished. Either that or a single name like Solomon or Michelangeli, but that would be pretentious for somebody as young as you are. Now, what sort of a name? Nothing too English, I think, something which prompts the faintest of musical associations. Cramer? Yes, I quite like that. “Z. Cramer.” No, the “Z” is wrong because the Americans will pronounce it differently. What about “J. S. Cramer”?’

  ‘J. S. Cramer.’ Zebedee laughed.

  ‘Perfect,’ said Anthony Raffish, his head on one side. ‘I especially liked the way you threw back that glossy mane of yours. Looks are extremely important, of course. You’re lucky to be so personable. If you were very plain or even downright ugly, we might have had to make you demonic and tousled. As it is, you can be wayward, poetic and geistig as the Germans say.’

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ cried the boy, but there was new colour in his face. ‘You sit there and cynically package me?’

  ‘Why not? What’s wrong with cynicism? I’m not a bit cynical about your playing, which is what counts. As for packaging, you’ll need it sooner or later if ever you’re going to get out of the dumps you’re in. Whatever you do, don’t pay any attention to established musicians saying that if you’re really worth listening to you’ll inevitably be heard. That is a pseudo-worldly vulgar ism. You’ll find that when people become famous they very much want to believe that all it took was their sheer, unvarnished talent, whereas … my dear, the stories I could tell about the wily moves, the astonishing flukes and – yes – the beds which have helped many a career on its way. It’s enough to make your hair curl.’

  Perhaps it was true, thought Zebedee half an hour later on his way back across London to the drab rooms he rented near Archway. It was scarcely the first time he had heard such ideas; usually they made him despondent, even irritable, since he could never be quite sure if they were true and there seemed to be nobody who would give him an answer. The lessons, the regular exams, the years of practice stretched back to his earliest childhood so interwoven with anguish as much as with public praise and private pleasure that they had become the texture of his entire life. So much work and reflection had long since readied him for the public career he knew he had earned and yet now he was to believe he had done only half what was necessary. It was not enough to sell sounds; the marionette in tails who sat on a stool and made those sounds had also to be sold. Candlesticks? Sequins? Lace at the wrists? An eye-catching eccentricity like an inability to play without a glass of water on the piano?

  Bitter impatience with such tomfoolery brought his heels hard down on the pavement. Get away from such ideas. Get away, too, from Anthony Raffish. Zebedee was unable to be precise about what he had most disliked in the arthritic musician. Perhaps it was having been at least partially seduced by the man, by the cultured clutter of his rooms, the piano whose tone he could still hear, the urbane bohemianism of the foreign background and cosmopolitan past. Also, of course, Raffish had for a short time enjoyed precisely the success which Zebedee now longed for. But under it all there ran a current of unease like a pool spreading from beneath a lavatory door, and he knew that no matter how much might evaporate in the early light of next morning the defect would still be there.

  This turned out to be the case. ‘I met the most extraordinary man last night,’ he told Antoinette during their hour. Antoinette from Basle had been coming to him for lessons for six months now and she was completely in love with him, which at some level he found quite understandable.

  ‘How extraordinary?’ So Zebedee told her. ‘I think maybe he is bogus,’ she said. ‘Watch out. Perhaps you should not see him again.’

  But within a week Anthony Raffish lightly knuckled his arm on the way out of a Wigmore Hall recital.

  ‘I didn’t see you,’ said Zebedee.

  ‘Aha, we were late and crept in at the back at the end.’ He indicated a tall, earnest girl with scraped hair. ‘This is Sandra Padgett. Sandra, Zebedee. Sandra’s a remarkable clarinettist. From Harpenden, but quite brilliant. Come, we will take a taxi to Marble Arch and walk a short while in the Park.’

  Zebedee found himself borne along, not quite cursing himself for weakness. Whatever current it had been, sinister or otherwise, it seemed sponged away now by that immediately familiar, open-handed assertiveness.

  ‘We shall talk about musical lost causes,’ said the old pianist once they were sauntering across the balding grass, and he spoke irrepressibly of a nineteenth-century Italian named Pietro Raimondi who had written extraordinary works such as three separate oratorios which could be sung one after the other and then combined and sung all three at once. ‘A prodigious contrapuntal feat, my dears, but nowadays who can find three orchestras and three choirs for a single performance? A very strange man, quite forgotten, although I seem to remember he composed more than fifty operas. He once wrote a fugue for sixteen four-part choirs, that I do remember. Imagine, a sixty-four-voice fugue. There’s a glorious madness there.’

  Zebedee glanced from time to time at Sandra, but her eyes were fixed on Anthony Raffish’s animated face. The little man made stiff, right-angled gestures to add force to what he was saying.

  ‘There’s something very grand about artists, often first-rate artists, with at best a minority appeal utterly refusing to compromise and make their work accessible, isn’t there? Or it may be a radical incapacity. Years ago I became friendly with a most strange old half-Indian named Sorabji, a quite astonishing pianist and an even more astonishing composer. He never wrote very much, I don’t think, but it’s hard to tell because he would allow practically none of it ever to be published or performed. I remember Alfred Cortot telling me how highly he rated one of Sorabji’s piano concertos he was allowed to see. A fascinating man; I suppose somewhere must be all those manuscripts of his which I used to beg him to let me see but to no avail. There is one work of his in print which I think Zebedee here might be interested in since it would satisfy any pianist’s desire for the outré. It’s called “Opus clavicembalisticum” and it goes on for hours and it’s so preposterously difficult it makes Busoni look like Grade Five. Now, there’s a composer who ought to be disinterred, or at least properly examined before being reinterred. But probably a lost cause after all as no doubt he himself wished. One can’t help admiring the ferocious pride or stubbornness of people who go to such lengths to scupper all chance of worldly success in order to remain true to their private vision….’

  And so he talked and toddled, and so Zebedee’s gloom returned at the seeping glitter of menace and corruption he thought to detect somewhere beneath. Was he being warned? ‘This young man needs watching.’ That was what a reviewer had written about his Wigmore Hall début after first conceding that anyone who includes ‘Gaspard’ and ‘Islamey’ in a first recital and plays them with complete technical mastery would merit watching anyway, even were it not for the thoughtfulness of his late Beethoven. Needs watching. And what since then? Nothing. No offers, no records, no engagement, nobody watching at all. Happy the man whose private vision can pay the rent.

  Abruptly he turned to walk back to Speaker’s Corner and catch the Tube. He couldn’t think what the purpose of this stroll, this conversation was, but hardly doubted there was one.

  ‘You will give me your address,’ said Anthony Raffish. He produced an envelope and held a pen in his bunched fingers. ‘Yes?’ And Zebedee found himself surrendering that part of his life which was comprehended by Archway. As he watched Raffish’s painful scrawling he glanced up and found the tall girl’s eyes fixed on him with an expression he could not read.

  Three days later he received a plain white postcard. My dear J.S., tomorrow night’s Festival Hall concert will, I venture, contain something of interest to you. I think you should be there. Yours ever, A. Zebedee looked up the programme and failed to see anything immediately suggestive. Among other things a Weber clarinet concerto and – horrors! – a symphony by Ives in the second half. Rather even Burl than Charles, he told himself, but none the le
ss went.

  The clarinettist billed to end the first half was a staunch old virtuoso now moving in stately fashion towards the end of his much-acclaimed career. Indeed, there had been rumours that this might be his last public appearance in England and it was presumably this which accounted for the televising of the first half. As Zebedee watched him come on to an immense ovation he thought he looked ripe for intensive care, let alone retirement. A grey, pained face beneath a strange grey toque of hair, a weird busby which in its way was almost as renowned as the playing of the man beneath it. The concerto started, and Zebedee found his attention wandering. Why was he here? What was the significance of the occasion? In all those serried tiers of seats he failed to spot Anthony Raffish or, indeed, anyone he knew.

  A murmur in the audience brought his attention sharply back. Up on the platform something was wrong. The orchestra were nearing the end of a passage which led into a sequence of athletic arpeggios for the soloist, but his clarinet was hanging slackly by his side, held like a stick in its middle while the high grey nest was bending forward as if gravely acknowledging premature applause. His other hand rose to meet it as sudden folds appeared at the knees of his dress trousers. A Second Violin with presence of mind quickly left his desk and moved forward to take the man’s elbow and help him backstage. Perhaps mindful of the cameras, which ought at this moment to be switching viewers’ attention to a close-up of a cellist’s bow or a female horn’s décolletage, the conductor kept the orchestra together in a way which suggested that like all performers they knew the show must go on. It was all happening so quickly, in any case, that the wobbly virtuoso with his bent back to the podium had only taken a few escorted steps towards the wings when the music reached the soloist’s entry. And suddenly, right on cue and from low down in the auditorium, it came.