The View from Mount Dog (25 page)

‘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 about 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, catching 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.

Shortly after that he crossed the Atlantic for one of his rare visits to Europe to fulfil an engagement at a Promenade Concert where he was booked to play Rachmaninov Two. His appearances in England were now infrequent enough for it to be a real pleasure to return. In the earlier part of his transatlantic exile he had commuted a good deal between Boston and Basle, for the young wife he had taken with him to America had failed to adjust to life there and by the time she came to deliver their child Antoinette had gone home to her parents. It often struck Zebedee how odd it was to have a Swiss son; but then, that whole episode of marrying and parenting now seemed part of a
previous period in his life, even to belong to a person who no longer quite existed, someone who had once been deeply unhappy in north London.

In fact he found the pleasure of being back in London undercut more than expected by the memories it evoked. How pungently it returned, that atmosphere of despondency and dreaming; of endless hours at the keyboard in rented rooms, of lonely walks to all-night fast-food bars, of concerts and recitals from which he had gone home rancorous with envy. A particular stench of memory still clung around that brief episode with Anthony Raffish, he admitted. How did those few meetings of a long time ago still retain the power to make him feel awkward, even guilty? He had of course been very young then…. Had he betrayed himself in some way? He could no longer quite remember. Anyway, it hardly mattered now as he sat in his dressing room, clearing his mind in a professional manner of all but the music itself.

For almost an hour he sat in stiff collar and shirtsleeves quietly reading the score and sipping black coffee until the bell went. The walk onstage afforded him considerable pleasure: it was only the second time he had played in the Albert Hall, and it was still something of a novelty to view the scene of his former yearning pilgrimages from the performer’s side of the platform. With a sense now of pleasurably relaxed homecoming he softly began the first of the eight chords which opened the concerto.

Rachmaninov’s Second is a busy work for the soloist. In the first movement, at any rate, there are few of those moments common in concertos of a century earlier when he can sit back from time to time and let the orchestra introduce or develop its own material. Thus it was that Zebedee was too occupied to notice that all was not well with him until a good way into the first movement. The pain suddenly became acute enough to force itself on his attention and in so doing reminded him that it had been there in his stomach practically since the moment he had come onstage. He noticed the conductor watching him with concern; the keyboard became slippery. More and more his mind was diverted into holding himself together until the movement’s end while his fingers mechanically, professionally, played the notes. At last they were into the accelerando of the coda whose increasing pace and excitement made it easier for him to disguise and appease the pain by swaying his body, shifting position.