The Concert Pianist (32 page)

The cabby dropped Vadim off first at Derby Square. He tossed a ten-pound note on to the seat and let the door crunch shut without another word.

Philip
lay in his bed without sleeping all night. It was one of those nights you just had to get through and when in the morning he sat in the bath, testing the pain in his upper arm, he allowed himself a laugh because things couldn't get much worse than this.

Chapter Twenty-two

Ursula walked ahead of him. The wind was settling, birds were singing. Clouds separated in the blue above.

He trod slowly on the grass, taking it in. The morning light brought all to the fore, the staples of the English countryside: oaks covered in green mist, baby thistles in the grass, spots of yellow underfoot - daisies, buttercups - which one noticed as scattered harbingers of the super-burst of yellow across the valley, a field of oilseed rape. It came up like fresh paint: the umpteenth impression of a type of landscape loved since childhood and encountered over the years time and again, which you could rediscover but never possess, and which seemed to exist as much in the imagination as on this particular morning in May.

Ursula had helped him pack. She selected somewhere at random, in the lee of the South Downs, a Georgian farmhouse with ensuite rooms (seaweed shampoo, thundering breakfast, crippling mattress). It was oddly familiar, this neck of the woods. Driving to the pub he had recognised certain landmarks not seen for decades and assumed that he had come here as a child with his father. The family had spent summers at an aunt's house near Fernhurst and the elderly schoolteacher had transposed his hiking activities from the Peak District to the South Downs. Gordon was a master of solitude. A Germanist, he had interrogated spies for MI6 in the fifties. He knew reams of poetry by heart and combined a romantic love of the countryside with Spartan self-discipline. His best friends were a dog and pipe. In later life Philip liked to think of him trekking across the Peaks towards a remote pub and a heartening pint. A tall man with a jovial laugh and a toothy smile, he was beadily appreciative of a person's character, thanks to a lifetime in the classroom. It was
strange
to think he might have walked here all those years ago. The same oaks would have seen him pass, lending a wisp of shade as he climbed the hill.

Ursula was ahead of him now. They had drifted apart, reveries diverging. She looked adventurous from behind, like someone who especially belonged in this scene of rolling hills. She pressed on as if drawn by the need to explore, to see round corners. She cut a fine figure against the rising meadow. It was easier to sense who she was from afar: a romantic woman who believed in destiny and who needed her own space. He admired her initiative. She had known what to do with him. He had allowed himself to be given an outing in the last days before his operation, which she had taken as leave. After this she wanted to go on to the seaside and meet her childhood self on the beach - inhaling the saline breeze, watching the seagulls come and go.

The entrance of the wood seemed familiar. He passed under the canopy and was sure he had come here before. The neglected woodland seethed with death and decay. Spindly saplings had given up the ghost at thirty feet and died on the spot. Full-grown sweet chestnuts toppled by the gale still lay on the ground, roots exploded, new limbs rising from horizontal trunks. Epic beeches had been tipped by the winds and caught, half slain, by struggling neighbours. Here and there a sprawling oak, dominating its patch, had elected to die, leaves retracting to a ruff from which forked, dead branches extended. The earth was soft and spongy, a mattress of bracken and powdered decay. Gliding through the wood was like returning to a primitive past and a primitive sense of the earth's fertility: a chaotic, prolific, sheltering richness generating awesome trees and flourishing bracken, an original beauty.

The soil became sandier, matted with clumps of needle and dead twigs bearing cones. Between the broad-leaf trees pine trunks rose like temple columns to unseen heights. A spruce plantation darkened the wood beyond, its martial ranks splicing vistas into nowhere.

Despite the lines of barbed wire and the sprouts of coppice, long since ready for the saw, all plans for the wood seemed abandoned. Rotting faggots stood in neglected heaps and would crumble at a kick: the pathway was strewn with fallen branches. Dead trees, sixty feet high, had been left to crash down in the next high wind.
The
scene was like a battleground of stricken figures, everything abandoned to the struggle for light, with so much hopeless endeavour, as if the wood's primary use was not to grow trees but to enrich the soil with leaf mould and wood rot, to feed insects, fungi and moss.

He caught sight of a tree and remembered it instantly: a birch with a broad crown unusual for its candelabra elegance. The stalwart trunk was like a pillar in a Gothic cathedral, grooved and blackened with age. The upper limbs were witchily twisted.

‘That's me,' he said, pointing at the tree.

Ursula came over to admire the birch.

‘Serebriakov over there.' He indicated a massive oak tree. ‘And Vadim.' A soaring pine had gone straight to the top.

‘Yes, but look at all the other poor mortals.'

‘I'm sure I've been here before.' He seemed pleased.

She was expectant.

‘Somewhere near there's a glade of bluebells.'

He was having the memory for the first time: a lovely surprise.

‘Over there.'

She gazed uncertainly through the trees.

Somewhere near, he was sure of it, the ground began to slope down. He remembered the footpath, the bluebell mist that went on for acres, softly lit under sparse trees, so endless that you lost all sense of perspective in the hovering blue.

‘There are bluebells everywhere,' she said.

He left the footpath and cut across the ferns and brambles, ducking between low branches. He had his bearings now. He was following the light, the sense of the sun splintering through the roof of the wood. The soil was crumbly, ankle-twisting. He inhaled the tang of mould and pine resin. Ursula followed dreamily, picking her way through the undergrowth.

He came to an opening. He was pleased to see a vaunting beech tree with great cruising branches that took advantage of the open light, because this he remembered for sure. Was he ten years old then, or twenty?

He frowned at the fluke, and then was suddenly overjoyed to be standing on the same spot all those years later, standing where his father had stood. He gazed at the bright grass, at the break of blue sky. It seemed Gordon was here but a second ago, was here now in a
sense,
no less present for being in an earlier version of the present. His father had been so distant and yet he was knowable again through what he loved, would have loved on these walks, these long walks that allowed him to bear out the terms of his contract with life.

They crossed the track and followed a fox-run into the wood. After a while they came to a meadow with a pond and fruit trees scattered about. The grass was shiny. He heard the drone of a bumble bee. Ursula drifted into the space with a smile on her face, the effect of the sun.

‘Great place for a bottle of wine,' she said.

Philip stood, hands on hips, smiling and nodding.

‘Look.' He had seen a stile through a gap in the trees. ‘We go up there.'

This time they moved through a firebreak along a smothered path pushing through the vegetation. She led the way, hair looming large over her wavering figure. It was hard to believe, looking at her now, that she had any connection to jobs and offices. She seemed naturally to sidestep the mundane. One day she would write, perhaps. Her behaviour was probably governed by the unconscious need of rich material.

The coppice was dense and limitless on both sides of the path, the fanning branches multiplying endlessly. He looked anxiously to the right and left. The bluebells were a kind of proof - if he could find them.

She had come to a stile, and when he looked up she was gracefully traversing it. Suddenly it was bright and open again and when he caught up with her he saw in a glance that a section of the wood had been cleared and all that remained was a wasteland of stumps and chewed-up earth, and what Ursula was staring at so intently was the wide view the clearing had opened. Without realising it they had been on high ground on the edge of a ridge, and the wood had been razed from the top of an escarpment of several hundred feet down to the valley floor, hectares of woodland sectioned and airlifted, so that one could see out over an aerial panorama of the South Downs across an undisturbed valley - miles wide - of field and forest. A high ridge ran across the view to the east and then plunged into the valley. Looking down one could make out the crowns of a thousand trees, viridian fields, ochre hedges following the wiggle of invisible lanes.

They
paused, gazing in amazement at the distant scene, so far-reaching and tranquil.

‘Eternal England,' she said.

He drew closer to her. ‘Grander than a painting.'

‘Amazing to think it's our country.'

‘A far cry from what you read about in the papers.'

‘How do we get there?'

He smiled.

‘I want to get in and lock the gate behind me,' she said.

‘Oh, you can never get back in. It's enough to know it's there.'

They gazed for several minutes in silence. He put his arm around her. She relaxed into his side.

The wind was light, gently ruffling the trees at the bottom of the incline. He could feel the heat of the sun in her hair. Birds hovered and flitted across the expanse of sky.

He felt the sensation gathering, an unfamiliar bliss. Everything one could have wanted from that view was still there, a landscape of promise, with its fertile woodland and thick fields and high pacific hills sheltering the valley, and beyond that, the bluey line of the Downs trailing to the distance.

He kissed her on the side of the face and she looked up at him softly. She was soothed by the pressure of his embrace.

He could let it go after all. Standing here was as nice as anything else, more than sufficient. So much of his life he had spent living in his head. If you chose to look around and live in the moment then this was the best that could happen, a relaxed fulfilment of sensation and feeling, doubly serendipitous, thanks to Ursula, who was more than enough in herself but always brought something else.

‘I wish I were a painter,' she said.

‘Yes.'

‘Poussin would have loved this.'

‘An English Arcady.'

‘Arcady here and now in Tony Blair's Britain.'

‘In some ways more compelling than a painting.'

‘It forces you to look and look and look. And even then,' she said, ‘I can never get enough.'

‘Yes, but you'll feel better for it.'

‘I want to live there, somehow. Be a bird or doe.'

‘A faun!'

‘
You be a faun. I'll be a nymph.' She laughed.

He entwined his hand in hers, clenched tight.

After awhile, she made to move on.

‘Don't.' He halted her gently.

She came back to him, leaned into his side.

‘Don't go.' His arm drew her tight. ‘This is the best bit.'

She looked at him with a kind of tenderness, that could have been yearning, a welling of emotion to the surface, or pity for what was ahead of them both, which she shared from the depths of her heart, as though her predicament were a reflection of his, and it were better to let this be felt than spoken of, because there was nothing either of them could do except live through it to the best of their ability.

He kissed her almost confidentially on the forehead.

‘There'll be lots of best bits,' she said, taking his hand, drawing him on.

‘D'you know, I don't care about the concert any more,' he said.

She turned to look at him curiously, and then smiled.

On the return walk they divided again. He trod down the path, thinking about hospital and what it would be like to arrive with his pyjamas and wash things and a magazine or two. Once checked in he could be properly stoical. It would be easier to submit to the prospect of an operation from under the covers of a hospital bed. He would succumb to all that, letting them do what they needed to do, find what they needed to find. Afterwards they would gather at the end of his bed and report on the surgery, how successful, what grade of cancer, the next phase of treatment. He might enjoy being the centre of attention. It would be the first crisis, lowering by a notch or two his right to be alive. Thereafter he would be an invalid with carte blanche to feel sorry for himself, receiving phone calls from the people who cared. Unless he pegged it on the slab, of course. Always a risk nowadays.

He came out of the wood into a meadow blanched by the midday sun and saw her trailing through the grass. He followed at a distance, gazing at a tree that all those years ago his father might have stopped to admire.

Chapter Twenty-three

They were having breakfast in the hotel bedroom when the call came. It was a bright room with a round table in the bay window and a view of the pier. Vadim had phoned John Sampson that morning. John tried Ursula's mobile, left a message, and Ursula was now calling back while Philip ate his toast and read a newspaper.

‘That's a bad idea,' she said.

Seconds later Philip was talking to his agent.

‘Great news,' said John.

Vadim had changed his mind. He was ready to share the concert.

‘Why?'

John claimed credit: artful persuasion, tact, persistence, but Vadim, it turned out, had called that morning out of the blue.

‘Two days' notice. That's nice of him.'

‘I'll have to run it by the South Bank people.'

‘What did he say?'

‘He didn't . . . well, I think he's had a change of heart.'

‘Is it possible?'