The View from Mount Dog

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  A tall girl in a long black dress was standing in the aisle between the front rows of seats, clarinet to her mouth. The conductor turned round to face this unexpected source of music, and the girl gave him a visible nod of encouragement. She walked as she played, slowly, statuesquely, down to the edge of the platform and stood to one side of the podium, half-turning to face the audience and the conductor at the same time. And still the dazzling passagework glittered off the little silver keys of her instrument. Coming so soon after the old virtuoso’s last notes the comparison was cruelly easy to make. Even the more unmusical among the audience could detect the edged difference in tone the girl produced; instead of the mellow, rounded sounds of the concerto’s opening were now an almost nasal brightness and clarity whose excitement gripped players and listeners alike.

  It had taken Zebedee several astonished seconds to recognise the girl as the one in whose company he had so recently strolled. He was not particularly startled by her virtuosity, but her punctuality was another matter. He wondered how she had managed to tune up beforehand, let alone keep the reed warm while sitting in the audience. Had she hidden her clarinet under her dress? After an astonishing cadenza the movement ended and spontaneously the audience broke into a great torrent of applause for her impromptu courage, her femaleness, her preparedness, in recognition of her having provided them with a real-live televised event and – who knew? – even for her playing, in the middle of which the conductor reached down a brilliant black arm with a white cuff to help her on to the stage. A cheer went up. And it was not until then that certain things began to trouble Zebedee very much indeed. There was something not at all right about this sleighted piece of drama; but time and again he came up against the impossibility of believing it could be the ‘something of interest to you’ which Anthony Raffish had predicted. How could he have foretold an illness so sudden as to attack a soloist in mid-movement? It was uncanny. But there seemed nothing else suggestive or apposite in the rest of the programme. The concerto itself ended with a standing ovation for the girl whose serious expression unexpectedly yielded to a concerned smile before she handed her instrument to the conductor, exited quickly and, as the cheering continued, re-entered and came to the front of the platform where she raised both hands, very white in the television lights, for silence.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ came her small unamplified voice. ‘To set your minds at rest I’m sure you’d all like to know that Julius de Kooning is not seriously ill but is just suffering from sudden faintness brought on by an exhausting schedule. He would like to apologise to us all and promises an entire concerto next time. I’m sure we wish him a speedy recovery. Thank you.’

  The applause broke out anew, respectful at first as if for an absent friend and mixed with some relieved laughter, but becoming more frenzied as the unknown girl’s interrupted ovation resumed. It seemed to Zebedee quite endless and the next morning he found she was rather famous under the name of ‘Alicia Cazenove’. Sandra Padgett had presumably been left in Harpenden, the split chrysalis from which a higher imago had finally emerged to dry her magnificent wings in the springtime heat of the television lights.

  Zebedee could predict only too easily the sort of inferences Anthony Raffish might draw for him from this astonishing example of a career taking off and decided to boycott concerts where they might run into one another. He was unable to avoid his own, however, such as the one at the Royal College a week later when he was accompanying a violinist as well as playing some solo works.

  ‘I did enjoy that,’ said the familiar voice at his elbow as he left the building afterwards. ‘How very well you play Fauré; not many Englishmen can, I find. He demands real subtlety of tone. How right you are not to make his sonorities sentimental as if he were a French Elgar.’

  ‘I don’t find Elgar sentimental,’ said Zebedee abruptly.

  ‘Quite right, too,’ came the imperturbable voice. ‘But the English can read sentimentality into anything once they set their minds to it. They treat Elgar like he treated dogs. Now, do I detect nettlement in your tone?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Not intentionally, perhaps. I shall go home now: I’m giving a lesson later.’

  ‘So busy. What a pity. Oh, J.S., J.S., don’t you sometimes feel it all slipping away?’

  ‘I don’t quite know what you mean, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You’re a silly boy, Zeb,’ said Mr Raffish with a glint in his voice, ‘and you’re much too brilliant to let the silly boy win. Don’t worry, I do understand about what happened at the Festival Hall the other night. You’re puzzled and faintly alarmed – anyone would be. “How could he have known?” you ask yourself. “Is there something sinister about this arthritic little poseur – for I only have his word for it that he could ever play a note himself?”’

  This was so precisely the rhetoric with which Zebedee had compulsively been addressing lamp-posts, plates of chips, the bathroom mirror, that he started with a kind of guilt. ‘You’re unfair, Anthony,’ he said; and there was suddenly something so doleful in the ageing face looking up sideways into his through the mauve electric wash of a street-lamp he added, ‘But I admit to moments of scepticism. I get those all the time, especially about myself.’

  This seemed to defuse things, for when Raffish spoke he was once more all charm and coercion. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘we shall take a taxi and I will prove something to you. And if you’re worried about your pupil’ – again it was like a foreign expression – ‘you can ring her from my flat and tell her you will be an hour or so late. This is important to you since it concerns your future. All is not yet lost.’

  How Zebedee could once more find himself standing at the bottom of that canyon with the landslides of culture held magically from rushing down and swamping him, he hardly knew. He had willingly come quite against his will, as if to be scrupulously fair to a lover he had already decided to reject. He watched as the older man fumbled in one geological corner of the room and excavated the top of an old radiogram. He switched the machine on with a pop, and the hum of valves warming came from somewhere halfway up the cliffs. He coaxed a record out of its cover and put it on. Out of a crackle of surface noise the two arresting chords of Chopin’s B minor Scherzo struck, followed by such a breathtakingly clear torrent that Zebedee was momentarily chilled before undergoing the sensation of being picked up bodily and carried off. In the calm of the central section he was able to cross the room and find the record sleeve. On the front was a black and white photo of a very young man, practically a boy, in that classic musician’s dated pose of dreaming face propped on folded hands. The dreaming face was undoubtedly that of the elderly cripple lost somewhere in the shadows of this cavernous room. Zebedee turned the cover over.

  A Chopin recital by a pianist who, despite his youth, has been called by no less a maestro than Vladimir Horowitz ‘the most astonishing talent of his generation known to me’ is a true musical event. Antonin Raffawicz studied in Paris under Nadia Boulanger and Rosina Lhevinne as well as Alfred Cortot in Switzerland….

  All should be forgiven, thought Zebedee as the Scherzo ended. As was intended, added a cynical observer buried inside him, as was intended.

  ‘Well, enough of that,’ broke in Anthony Raffish, taking the record off with a harsh scrape. His eyes glistened in the semi dark. ‘All very long ago now. I sometimes wonder myself who he was and what became of him. Such promise, and all that.’

  ‘It was wonderful playing,’ Zebedee told him truthfully. ‘I’ve never heard it played like that.’

  ‘Do better yourself, then.’ The words were brusquer than the tone. ‘Only do it, Zebedee. You can now; don’t wait until the misery of isolation takes your edge off.’

  ‘But what do you want me to do, damn you?’ cried the boy passionately. ‘You keep grabbing my arm, tugging my sleeve, saying, “Get on, do it now, don’t hang about, it’s later than you think,” but you don’t seem to realise that I know all that already. I worry myself ill about it, my father worries abo
ut it, my teacher worries but pretends it doesn’t matter being a slow starter. So I hardly need you to tell me what the matter is if you won’t also tell me what to do about it. And you can’t; getting on is obviously just a matter of dumb luck. Dumb fucking luck.’ Disastrously, the adjective came out as youthfully flung in the face of an outmoded and genteel knowledge of the world. Anthony Raffish seemed not to notice.

  ‘My dear, so change your luck; don’t just sit there being petulant. I’ve told you before, you need an agent. I have heard you play many times here and there, you know; I told you I was a talent scout. Well, then. I believe in you and I think you have it in you to be a great pianist. Look here. See this?’ He pushed a programme into Zebedee’s hands. ‘See that name? Who do you think is his agent? Or hers?’ He found another programme lying about in the general confusion. ‘Or his, or his? Or this one? Oh, yes, him, too.’ Zebedee’s lap flowed over with sheets, playbills, posters, photographs, name after famous name.

  ‘All yours?’ he asked at length.

  ‘Mine,’ said the old agent. ‘Every one of them. Go on, look at them. Him, for example. You don’t think that’s his original name, do you? Terence Abbott, he used to be, from Sidcup or somewhere. Terry, the south London equivalent of Ovid J. Finkelmeyer. So tell me, does that name go with a black tie and a Guarnerius? And’ – some more paper fell to the floor – ‘what about her?’

  Her was an internationally celebrated contralto pictured in an advertisement torn from Time. She was standing holding a sheet of music in one hand (the grey blur of the page could, Zebedee found, be resolved by a musician into – bafflingly – an easy piano version of ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’) while her other hand rested on a slab of mirror-like black wood, presumably the top of a piano. A gold watch was casually obtrusive. Zebedee glanced at the text. ‘Dame Celia finds her DateMatic® an essential part of the hectic, globe-trotting life of a virtuoso. I’m afraid I find the jet-lag beginning to catch up towards the end of the season, she admits. I catch myself thinking that if it’s Thursday it must be Puccini but thank goodness I have my DateMatic® to remind me that it’s only Wednesday so it must be Meyerbeer….’

  ‘It stinks, doesn’t it?’ Anthony Raffish was watching him sagely. ‘But out of the stink comes forth sweetness and that’s what counts. It’s up to you to change your prejudices, I’m afraid. You may think it’s something exclusive to the age we live in, but you’d be quite wrong. You don’t like the idea of music competitions, either, do you? But they’ve been around for centuries.’

  ‘Prizes, yes, and contests between famous players; but not those sports events you see on television. Knock-out competitions between wretched children who have been pushed and groomed into empty virtuosity. Half of them haven’t an ounce of musicianship in them but it’s funny how often the little girls who win seem to have long blonde hair and get all that close camera-work on their lips stretched around their embouchures.’

  ‘Bravo!’ said Anthony in delight. ‘Quite right, of course; it’s a mixture of Young Gymnast of the Year and what I believe they call soft porn. But for the winners it’s the chance of a career.’

  ‘Yes, and how many of those go on to make one? It’s usually the real musicians who come third or who don’t get placed at all, and what happens to them? How can anyone begin a career with a nationally viewed public failure into which he was urged for the greater glory of parents or teacher? The whole thing’s rotten.’ To his embarrassment Zebedee found himself on the edge of tears.

  ‘It’s a murky old world,’ conceded the agent complacently. ‘It’s actually rather jolly sniffing out ways of making ends meet. Personally, I never asked to stop creating sounds; but since the matter was decided for me by inscrutable fate I now take the greatest of pleasure in creating careers instead. My only stipulation is that the people I represent are not the products of what Madison Avenue used to call “hype”; they must be genuinely good. You are one such. You want to force me to be specific? Very well, then. In exchange for your signing a contract with me I will undertake to provide you with an opportunity such as you saw young Sandra – or should we say Alicia? – grasp with both hands the other night on nationwide TV.’

  There was a long silence. Zebedee was more shocked than he could ever remember. Not even the mawkish pleadings of a schoolteacher years ago had filled him with such a sense of being intolerably presumed upon.

  ‘I can’t believe that you can admit to such a thing,’ he said at last.

  ‘My dear, I’ve admitted to nothing. I’m offering you a properly organised career.’

  ‘You’ve as good as told me you arranged to have Julius de Kooning fall ill the other night. What did you do? Put laxative in his dressing-room coffee?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Mr Raffish sharply. ‘I won’t have you say such things. That’s criminal.’

  ‘I imagine that’s what anybody else would say. A newspaper, for instance.’

  ‘My dear Mr Hoyle.’ Gone now was the expansiveness of the voice and in its place a glacial remoteness. ‘It would be the height of folly to throw up all hope of a career in your chosen profession at the very same moment as becoming embroiled in a nasty and extremely expensive lawsuit.’

  A terrifying sense of things having got far out of hand gripped Zebedee. How had they elided so quickly from Chopin to this bristled menace? Was everything really so thin? ‘I’m leaving,’ was all he could say helplessly. ‘You’ve upset me and I don’t quite … I’m not sure of anything.’

  The bray of laughter from the shadows was one of mockery he had not had directed at him since school.

  ‘You poor little boy. Upset, are we? Deary me, as the English say, we have had a sheltered life, practising our scales and keeping our pretty nose clean. The world is too much with us, is that it? Better avoid it altogether while admiring yourself for being uncontaminated? Fine. So when even your precious world of music is revealed as being rather worldly, oh, the hands daintily lifted in horror and, oh, how the first suspicions must be schoolboy ones of skulduggery! The far more likely explanation wouldn’t have occurred to you, which is that successful performers like de Kooning get booked solid three years in advance by hard-nosed little agents like me: concerts here, recitals there, recording studios everywhere, aeroplanes, taxis, hotels hotels hotels, and when they reach his age they get tired and maybe even a bit stale and so when that agent comes up to them in private and offers to make a certain arrangement – something non-taxable, let us say, in return for the momentary embarrassment of a public retreat to the dressing room – don’t you think they mightn’t be glad of a week off? And if the net result of that well-earned little rest taken at no risk whatever to an established career is to give some younger musician a chance are you going to tell me a great moral crime has been committed? Well, are you? So go away, young Mr Hoyle; go away and do some growing up instead of haunting the concert-halls with your scores and your fantasies. I promise you, you’ll one day play all the better for acquainting yourself with the world; the great composers were not angels. Go away and swindle somebody or betray someone you love. Yourself, for example. Go and give yourself clap.’

  *

  Years later Zebedee never recalled this episode without once more experiencing its vivid shock. Never in all his life had he occasioned such an outburst as this, and at the time he but dimly grasped how it could have happened. In his mind’s ear he could still hear the bitter tone but never the words themselves. On the other hand he found it easy to recall a conversation some months afterwards with a fellow-musician, an oboist with whom desultory chat before a recital had revealed they had an acquaintance in common.

  ‘You’re not with him, are you?’ the oboist asked when Anthony’s name had cropped up. ‘Are you with Raffish?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ Zebedee must have betrayed a vehemence which the other picked up at once.

  ‘Ah, you went through that mill, did you? No doubt a brilliant man but a nasty little queen for all that.’ Then, catchin
g the blank look on Zebedee’s face, ‘You don’t mean he didn’t make a pass at you?’

  ‘Good heavens, no,’ said Zebedee, but with more assurance than he felt.

  ‘Surely you didn’t believe all that crap about his wife?’

  ‘The Hungarian pianist?’

  The oboist laughed. ‘Hungarian pianist, was she? French oboist, the night he met me. For my money she never existed at all; she was a useful fiction. I admit I never liked him so I was glad he lost all interest in me when he discovered I already had an agent. In fact I gather he’s first-rate. He certainly knows how to spot talent. He goes to every concert that ever is, knows all the managements intimately. He’s got a sort of carte blanche to wander around the dressing rooms and hobnob with people. There was a time when I couldn’t play anywhere without him popping up from behind box offices and stage doors. I suppose that’s what you have to do, just know everybody, and it seems to have paid off in his case. There are lots of famous names with Anthony Raffish and there’s apparently nothing he won’t do for his musicians. But watch out if you cross him – they do say he can be pretty catty and spiteful, although I’ve no intention of finding out.’

  About eight months after that Zebedee was approached by an American recording company, one of whose talent scouts had been impressed by a recital he had given in London. He had been flown to Pasadena and there had recorded a programme of piano music by Gottschalk which, coming as it did at a time of increasing interest in nineteenth-century American music, had a considerable success. This led to a contract to record a MacDowell concerto, and suddenly he was being billed as an up-and-coming exponent of American music, living in America for months at a stretch, travelling about that continent from hall to hall and from studio to studio. On his twenty-eighth birthday Zebedee found himself, with some degree of irony, signing a contract to record Ives’s ‘Concord’ sonata. How differently things had turned out, he wryly thought, from what he had once imagined or even wanted. Not ‘J. S. Cramer’ playing limpid Viennese classics but Zeb Hoyle playing Ives and being paid handsomely to do so.