The View from Mount Dog (24 page)

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 less 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.

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.

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.’