The Concert Pianist (11 page)

The pressure of thoughts was suddenly unbearable. Grand gestures begat new crises. He was alone with his music, but more alone without it. How could a man reconstruct his life at fifty-two? What remained but drift and boredom when obsession failed? A failed artist had nowhere to go. Music, already, was a kind of last resort.

He wondered in a panic how quickly he could clear this up. All kinds of prostrations and grovelling were imperative to get John back on side. Bulmanion was a write-off but, if he could just pull himself together and do the next two concerts, he would have a life. The Royal Academy would let him off. Pupils would understand. He could return to routine at a lower level of ambition, holding on to what he had and not expecting much. The past would lead to the future and this episode might soon be forgotten.

He ached. His feet ached. His head throbbed. He sat at the metal table breathing the trafficky air, listening to the warble of city pigeons, and it seemed to him then as he lit another cigarette that thinking itself was pointless. Thinking would not contribute.

Mid-evening he was back in Chiswick. Walking along the pave
ment
to his house he felt like going to bed and sleeping for ever. Reaching for the keys in his pocket, he pushed through the front garden gate and rose up the step to his porch. He worked the key in the lock and was about to go in when somebody called his name. He looked over his shoulder.

‘Philip!'

Ursula stood on the pavement. She stared at him timidly.

He looked at her in astonishment.

She came closer, almost cradling herself.

‘Are you all right?'

His heart beat hard. He had not banked on seeing anyone.

‘Sorry to . . . I've been waiting for hours.'

‘Waiting?'

‘In the car. Over there.'

‘Did John send you?'

She was distressed by the idea. ‘You're not answering calls.'

He stared at her.

She looked at him almost bravely, as if to show the depth of her concern. She was flushed with agitation and a kind of embarrassment.

‘I wanted to see that you were OK,' she said.

He nodded vacantly.

She smiled with painful relief.

He was not at ease with her concern.

‘I'm OK.'

‘Can we talk?'

‘Don't worry.'

‘Philip!'

‘I can't talk, really.'

‘Of course.' She stepped towards him. ‘Of course.'

She was tall, almost precarious, her neck willowy under the weight of thick hair, tucked inside her collar.

‘I'm not here because I'm your agent.'

He stared at her.

She came even closer.

They exchanged a look.

‘Please!' she said.

He tried saying something but had no will to resist her. He turned, twisting the key in the lock, and let her into the house. Once
inside,
he gestured her into the front room, catching the smell of her leather jacket as she passed. He followed her in, almost as if this were her home now.

Ursula came into the drawing room with a kind of reverent watchfulness. He circulated behind her, switching on lamps and pulling curtains, and she stood by the piano as he fetched a wine bottle and glasses from the kitchen. She gazed thoughtfully at his Steinway and then took herself across the room to consider a landscape painting. Her arms were folded protectively.

Philip glanced at her as he opened the wine bottle. Both of them knew she had exceeded her brief and that their professional relationship could help neither of them. Not that he wanted help. He wanted to lie down and go to sleep. He gave her a glass and crossed the room to a seat. After a moment she followed his example and took herself to the end of the recamier, where she perched.

They sat across from each other silently for some moments. He regarded her expressionlessly. Her being in his room was not his doing. He felt he was staring at a stranger whose solicitations he was too exhausted to repel. For a while the anomaly of her presence was strangely absorbing. Behind the mask of his face he was sinking. Ursula's unexpected manifestation held him at least to the moment. He was prepared to stare at her indefinitely.

She sipped her wine, waiting for him. She was not exactly at ease. Whatever she thought she was doing, she was doing it for the first time.

‘I intended to play,' he said, monotonally.

She shook her head, signifying an automatic acceptance of whatever he would say, the matter being absolutely beyond accountability.

‘Till the last second.'

She nodded carefully, acknowledging the sentiment, the reality of his feelings.

There was a pause.

‘I wasn't really surprised,' she said.

He made no reply.

‘After Saturday.'

Philip rubbed his eyes and then stared at her without expression.

‘The moment I met you I knew something was wrong.'

He
took a sip of his wine. He was shattered.

She looked away. ‘I know you think I'm inexperienced, but I've been listening to your CDs for years. I went to your concerts as a teenager. Apart from the fact that I love your playing' - her colour rose - ‘ I feel I know you quite well. In fact, when we met the other day you were exactly as I imagined.' She glanced at him sincerely. ‘When you said you wanted to cancel I was so struck.'

She took his silence as permission to continue.

‘I noticed . . .'

Her gaze was intense. She had been working up to this.

‘When you looked at me . . .'

She blinked and glanced away.

He watched her in silence.

Ursula moistened her lips, smiled apologetically. ‘A frightened boy. The look of a distressed child.'

Philip could only raise his eyebrows in mild amazement at this declaration. He had no idea how to respond. Her sympathy was undeserved, uninvited. He had not expected to reckon with the piercing concern of a young woman at this hour of the day.

‘You reminded me of my brother Paul,' she continued.

He stared at her.

‘Paul was eight when my mother died. I was fourteen. It was terrible for me, but for him . . . He lost something of himself.'

Strangers had been intimate with him in this way before. It was as though they believed that he as a pianist could be entrusted with tragic confidences, could purge the woe of the world in his playing.

‘When you . . . didn't play . . . it was like a confirmation.' She rubbed her eye. ‘Of . . . Oh, I don't know. I'm sorry. Excuse me.'

He waited.

‘You must think I'm very intrusive.' She smiled courageously.

He shrugged. ‘No.'

‘You see, my mother was a pianist. We listened to your records all the time. My father took me to your concerts in Berlin. There was always music in the house. When Mother died we'd play her favourite records. She listened to your Kreisleriana, and your Brahms violin sonatas with Wolfram Eckert, and so my family was always passionate about your records, and when my mother died, so united by them.'

Ursula
smiled again with the relief of confession.

He pulled himself up a little, almost to displace his embarrassment. Ursula's declaration filled him with humility. What she told him explained a great deal.

‘My father is still alive,' she added. ‘He's a novelist, actually. Diederich Kaustner.'

Philip inhaled deeply, feeling the wine strike at his tiredness. He sat in the chair for a while, wondering what to say. He frowned, touched his forehead delicately. Ursula's solicitude was so penetrating. ‘I reminded you of your brother?'

She looked at him in pity. ‘Because you lost your mother?'

He smiled to cover his unease. She was being so distressingly sympathetic. ‘I never knew my real mother. For all I know she may be alive.'

‘Then you lost having a mother.'

For a moment he sensed the inscrutability of his own feelings. ‘She was Irish.'

‘Your mother?'

He managed to sit up a little. He sipped at his wine and cleared his throat. He was suddenly overcome with the crushing sense of what he had thrown away last night - his reputation, his entitlement to respect. He had abandoned his audience at the height of their expectation.

‘Your mother was Irish?'

‘An Irish nurse,' he managed. ‘She worked in a hospital in Manchester. I was the result of a broom-cupboard romance that may have been one fuck long.'

He had no idea why he was telling her this. There seemed a need to offer something in return.

‘You were adopted?'

‘By a grammar-school teacher and his wife. Few years ago I tried to trace my mother through an agency. No luck. My father lives in Australia. He was a consultant eye surgeon until quite recently. I wrote to him for the first time when I was thirty-five suggesting we meet up. He replied saying that he had his own family who knew nothing about me, and didn't think it was wise.'

She nodded carefully. ‘Were you disappointed?'

‘I never expected love. What . . . depressed me was the lack of curiosity.'

‘
Did he know of your success?'

‘I didn't want that to be his reason for seeing me.'

‘And your adoptive parents?'

‘I loved them and they did everything to support my music and to help me get on. They're both dead, but I think of them a lot. I held on to their house for a few years after they died, then sold it and put the money in high-tech stocks. Lost everything, actually.'

There was a long interval of silence. Philip gazed at the floor.

‘D'you feel cheated of your birthright? A parent's love?'

He gazed at her intently. She wanted to know the givens. He could tell her the givens, but from what standpoint do you evaluate a life that has been the only one possible for you?

‘Whether and how I feel it, I don't know. My destiny was to become a pianist, and almost everything about that destiny means a life outside normal human relations. But yes, one craves normality. Music is very rewarding, and one leaps into it, but when I see happy families, happy parents, happy children, I wonder what it would have been like to be unexceptional, and tied into life in the usual way. Music abducted me at an early age. It takes over your mind, your body. My closest allies were dead composers. My fantasy life a score. To say I was lonely is untrue. I was dangerously self-sufficient. To have a
raison d'etre
at the age of seven is quite something. The child is suddenly partaking in a grown-up mental world, though what happens to the child in all this, I don't know.'

Ursula nodded. She passed a hand inside the lapel of her jacket and eased it over her shoulder and arm. With a neat shrug she released the other shoulder and arm. Her coils of hair sprang loose and she had to tame it with her fingers, drawing it back around her ears, flicking it off her collar. She wore a gypsy-style shirt with puff sleeves and bare arms; a necklace of beads and a silver bracelet.

He saw shapely arms, fine wrists. He was aware of her breasts in the contours of her shirt. Ursula had flamenco possibilities in the line of her neck and shoulders.

She recollected the wine glass, ran its stem between her fingers. She looked suddenly thoughtful.

‘Why are you so miserable?' she said.

He looked at her in surprise.

‘
Something has happened?'

He reached for the wine bottle, topped up his glass.

She regarded him with contemplative intensity, as if divining something.

He actually found it impossible to speak. To begin to explain was to head off in a direction he could not face. He could hardly describe, let alone define, and just to make the attempt was somehow to parade so much vulnerable feebleness that he would rather it stayed trapped inside him. As he sat there, biting his lip, staring blankly at her bare foot, which had discarded its shoe and risen on to the sofa, he felt the old resentment growing - against his weaker self - that he could not share these thoughts with another person and satisfy her sympathy.

‘Konstantine Serebriakov was there last night,' she said.

‘What!'

‘In the audience.'

‘No!'

‘With Arthur England and Jean Rose. John spotted them.'

Philip smothered his face in shame.

She was dismayed by his reaction, watched him closely.

‘Apparently, he's very ill.'

He massaged his eye-sockets, defeated by this latest news.

‘People were moved by your speech. Everybody is desperately concerned about you. There's no shame, Philip.'

With a sudden burst of energy he ejected himself out of his chair. ‘I'm holed beneath the water-line,' he said brightly.

‘Why?'

Her look held a quality of sympathetic overflow, of ready amazement, showing the depth of her talent for dramatic participation. He faced Ursula, looking down at her as she gazed up at him, and saw in her lovely face the expression of a woman who could generate the most turbulent excitement from her body, whose bare arms and neck were maddeningly responsive to touch, whose high-strung sensitive involvement derived from a physical intensity of being.

He turned away, compressing the idea into a tight corner of his mind. He steadied himself at the mantelpiece.

Philip waited. A special effort was required, which he could barely bring himself to make. He sensed that she was giving him an
opportunity.
‘Two years ago I split up with a girlfriend. Laura. She wanted to marry.'

Ursula looked up at him.

‘Anyway . . . um . . . anyway, we keep in touch. She told me recently that an old girlfriend of mine got pregnant as our relationship was ending, and had a termination.' He looked down. ‘How did she find out? Don't know. Why did she tell me? No idea. I just couldn't get it out of my mind.'

He was adrift for a moment.

‘I felt that in ending that baby Camilla was somehow terminating me. Another generation of Morahans stymied, as though we're not wanted in the world.' He managed to look at her directly. ‘Me or my child.'