The Lemon Table (12 page)

The
allegro
ended, and Maestro Haitink slowly lowered his head, as if giving everyone permission to use the spitoon and talk about their Christmas shopping. J 39—the Viennese blonde, a routine programme-shuffler and hair-adjuster—found a lot to say to Mr. Sticky-Up Collar in J 38. He was nodding away in agreement about the price of pullovers or something. Maybe they were discussing Schiff’s delicacy of touch, though I would choose to doubt it. Haitink raised his head to indicate that it was time for the chat-line to go off air, lifted his stick to demand an end to coughing, then threw in that subtle, cocked-ear half-turn to indicate that he, personally, for one, was now intending to listen very carefully indeed to the pianist’s entry. The
larghetto
, as you probably know, begins with the unsupported piano announcing what those who had bothered to read the programme would have known to expect as a “simple, tranquil melody.” This is also the concerto in which Mozart decided to do without trumpets, clarinets and drums: in other words, we are being invited to attend to the piano even more closely. And so, with Haitink’s head staying cocked, and Schiff offering us the first few tranquil bars, J 39 remembered what she hadn’t finished saying about pullovers.

I leaned across and poked the German. Or the Austrian. I’ve nothing against foreigners, by the way. Admittedly, if he’d been a vast, burger-fed Brit in a World Cup T-shirt, I might have thought twice. And in the case of the Austro-German, I did think twice. Like this. One: you’re coming to hear music in
my
country, so don’t behave as if still in yours. Then two: given where you probably come from, it’s even worse to behave like this in Mozart. So I poked J 38 with a joined tripod of thumb and first two fingers. Hard. He turned instinctively, and I glared at him with finger tapping my lips. J 39 stopped chattering, J 38 looked gratifyingly guilty, and J 37 looked a bit scared. K 37—me—went back to the music. Not that I could entirely concentrate on it. I felt jubilation rising in me like a sneeze. At last I’d done it, after all these years.

When I got home, Andrew applied his usual logic in an attempt to deflate me. Perhaps my victim thought it OK to behave as he did because everyone around him was doing the same; it wasn’t unmannerly but an attempt to be mannerly—
wenn in London
… Additionally and alternatively, Andrew wanted to know, wasn’t it the case that much music of that time was composed for royal or ducal courts, and wouldn’t such patrons and their retinue have been strolling around, having a buffet supper, throwing chicken bones at the harpist, and flirting with their neighbours’ wives while half-listening to their lowly employee bash away at the spinet? But the music wasn’t composed with bad behaviour in mind, I protested. How do you know, Andrew replied: surely those composers were aware of how their music was going to be listened to, and either wrote music loud enough to cover the noise of chicken-bone-throwing and general eructation, or, more likely, tried to write tunes of such commanding beauty that even a lustful upcountry baronet would for a moment stop tampering with the exposed flesh of the apothecary’s wife? Was this not the challenge—indeed, perhaps the reason why the resultant music had lasted so long and so well? Furthermore and finally, this harmless neighbour of mine in the wing-collar was quite possibly a linear descendant of that upcountry baronet, simply behaving in the same way: he’d paid his money and was entitled to listen to as much or as little as he chose.

“In Vienna,” I said, “twenty or thirty years ago, when you went to the opera, if you uttered the slightest cough, a flunky in knee-breeches and a powdered wig would come over and give you a cough-sweet.”

“That must have distracted people even more.”

“It stopped them doing it the next time.”

“Anyway, I don’t understand why you still go to concerts.”

“For the good of my health, doctor.”

“It seems to be having the opposite effect.”

“No one’s going to stop me going to concerts,” I said. “No one.”

“We don’t talk about that,” he replied, looking away.

“I wasn’t talking about it.”

“Good.”

Andrew thinks I should stay at home with my sound system, my collection of CDs, and our tolerant neighbours who are very rarely heard clearing their throats on the other side of the party wall. Why bother going to concerts, he asks, when it only enrages you? I bother, I tell him, because when you are in a concert hall, having paid money and taken the trouble to go there, you listen more carefully. Not from what you tell me, he answers: you seem to be distracted most of the time. Well, I would pay more attention if I wasn’t being distracted. And what would you pay more attention to, as a purely theoretical question (you see how provoking Andrew can be)? I thought about this for a while, then said: the loud bits and the soft bits, actually. The loud bits, because however state-of-the-art your system, nothing can compare to the reality of a hundred or more musicians going full tilt in front of you, cramming the air with noise. And the soft bits, which is more paradoxical, because you’d think any hi-fi could reproduce them well enough. But it can’t. For instance, those opening bars of the
larghetto
, floating across twenty, thirty, fifty yards of space; though floating isn’t the right word, because it implies time spent travelling, and when the music is on its way towards you, all sense of time is abolished, as is space, and place, for that matter.

“So how was the Shostakovich? Loud enough to drown the bastards out?”

“Well,” I said, “that’s an interesting point. You know how it starts off with those huge climaxes? It made me realize what I meant about the loud bits. Everyone was making as much noise as possible—brass, timps, big bad drum—and you know what cut through it all? The xylophone. There was this woman bashing away and coming across clear as a bell. Now, if you’d heard that on a record you’d think it was the result of some fancy bit of engineering—spot-lighting, or whatever they call it. In the hall you knew that this was just exactly what Shostakovich intended.”

“So you had a good time?”

“But it also made me realize that it’s the pitch that counts. The piccolo cuts through in the same way. So it’s not just the cough or the sneeze and its volume, but the musical texture it’s competing with. Which means of course you can’t relax even in the loudest bits.”

“Cough-sweets and a powdered wig for you,” said Andrew. “Otherwise, you know, I think you’ll go seriously, woofingly mad.”

“Coming from you,” I replied.

He knew what I meant. Let me tell you about Andrew. We’ve lived together for twenty or more years now; we met in our late thirties. He works in the furniture department of the V & A. Cycles there every day, rain or shine; one side of London to the other. On his way he does two things: listens to books on tape with his Walkman, and keeps an eye out for firewood. I know, it doesn’t sound likely, but most days he manages to fill his basket, enough for an evening fire. So he pedals along from this one civilized place to another, listening to cassette 325 of
Daniel Deronda
, while constantly on the lookout for skips and fallen branches.

But that’s not all. Even though Andrew knows a lot of cut-throughs where the firewood hangs out, he spends more than enough of the journey in rush-hour traffic. And you know what motorists are like: they only look out for other motorists. Buses and lorries as well, of course; motorcyclists occasionally; pedal-cyclists, never. And this makes Andrew hopping mad. There they are, sitting on their arses, pouring out fumes, one person to a car, a traffic-jam of environmentally abusive egoists constantly trying to swerve into an eighteen-inch gap without first checking for the presence of cyclists. Andrew shouts at them. Andrew, my civilized friend, companion and ex-lover, Andrew, who has spent half the day bent over some exquisite piece of marquetry with a restorer, Andrew, his ears full of high-Victorian sentences, breaks off to shout,

“You fucking cunt!”

He also shouts, “I hope you get cancer!”

Or, “Drive under a fucking lorry, arse-face!”

I ask what he says to women drivers.

“Oh, I don’t call them cunts,” he replies. “‘You fucking bitch!’ usually seems to cover it.”

Then off he pedals, scouting for firewood and worrying about Gwendolen Harleth. He used to bang on car roofs when a driver cut him up. Bang bang bang with a sheepskin-lined glove. It must have sounded like a thunder-machine from Strauss or Henze. He also used to snap their wing-mirrors back, folding them in against the car; that used to irritate the bastards. But he’s stopped doing this; about a year ago he had a scare from a blue Mondeo which caught up with him and tipped him off the bike while the driver made various threatening suggestions. Now he just calls them fucking cunts at the top of his voice. They can’t object, because that’s what they are, and they know it.

I started taking cough-sweets to concerts. I handed them out like spot fines to offenders within my immediate reach, and to distant hackers at the interval. It wasn’t a great success, as I might have foreseen. If you give someone a wrapped sweet in the middle of a concert, you then have to listen to the sound of them taking the paper off. And if you give them one unwrapped, they’re hardly likely to just pop it into their mouths, are they?

Some people even failed to realize I was being offensive, or retaliatory; they actually thought it was a friendly gesture. And then one evening I stopped that boy near the bar, put my hand on his elbow, but not hard enough for the gesture to be unambiguous. He turned, black turtleneck sweater, leather jacket, spiky blond hair, broad, virtuous face. Swedish perhaps, Danish, maybe a Finn. He looked at what I was holding out towards him.

“My mother always told me never to take sweets from kind gentlemen,” he said with a smile.

“You were coughing,” I replied, feebly unable to sound cross.

“Thank you.” He took the sweet by the wrapper end, and gently tugged it away from my fingers. “Would you like a drink?”

No, no, I wouldn’t like a drink. Why not? For the reason we don’t talk about. I was on those side-stairs down from level 2A. Andrew had gone for a pee and I got talking to this boy. I thought I had more time. We were just exchanging numbers when I turned and Andrew was watching. I could hardly pretend I was buying a second-hand car. Or that this was the first time. Or that … anything, really. We didn’t go back for the second half (Mahler 4) and instead had a long bad evening of it. And that was the last time Andrew came to a concert with me. He stopped wanting to share my bed as well. He said he’d still (probably) love me, still (probably) live with me, but he didn’t ever want to fuck me again. And later he said he didn’t even want anything halfway to fucking either, thank you very much. Perhaps you’d think this would make me say Yes please, I would like a drink, to the smiley, virtuous-faced Swede or Finn or whatever. But you’d be wrong. No, I wouldn’t, thank you, no.

It’s hard to get it right, isn’t it? And it must be the same for the performers. If they ignore the bronchitic bastards out there, they risk giving the impression that they’re so engrossed in the music that, hey, cough away as much as you like and they won’t notice. But if they attempt to impose their authority … I’ve seen Brendel turn away from the keyboard in the middle of a Beethoven sonata and glare outwards in the rough direction of the offender. But the bastard probably doesn’t even notice he’s being rebuked, while the rest of us start fretting about whether or not Brendel’s been put off, and so on.

I decided on a new approach. The cough-sweet approach was like an ambiguous gesture from cyclist to motorist: yes, thank you kindly for swerving across the lanes, I was planning to jam my brakes on and have a heart attack anyway. None of that. Perhaps it was time to bang on their roofs a little.

Let me explain that I am of reasonably sturdy physique: two decades in the gym haven’t done me any harm; compared to the average pigeon-chested concert-goer I might be a lorry-driver. Also, I dressed myself in a dark blue suit of a thick, sergey material; white shirt; dark blue undecorated tie; and in my lapel a badge with a heraldic shield. I pitched the effect deliberately. A malefactor might well mistake me for an official usher. Finally, I moved from the stalls to the annex. That’s the section running along the side of the auditorium: from there you can follow the conductor while also policing the stalls and the front half of the terrace. This usher would not hand out cough-sweets. This usher would wait until the interval, and then follow the offender—in as ostentatious a way as possible—out to the bar, or one of those undifferentiated areas with wide-screen views of the Thames skyline.

“Excuse me, sir, but are you aware of the decibel-level of the unmuffled cough?”

They would look at me rather nervously, as I made sure that my voice was also unmuffled. “It’s reckoned at about 85,” I would continue. “A fortissimo note on the trumpet is about the same.” I quickly learnt not to give them the chance to explain how they’d picked up that nasty throat, and would never do it again, or whatever. “So, thank you, sir, we would be grateful …” And I moved on, that
we
lingering as endorsement of my quasi-official status.

With women I was different. There is, as Andrew pointed out, a necessary distinction between You fucking cunt and You fucking bitch. And there was often the problem of the male companion or husband who might feel within himself stirrings from the time when caves were daubed with ruddy bison in stylish freehand. “We
do
sympathize about the cough, madam,” I would say, in a lowered, almost medical voice, “but the orchestra and conductor find it quite unhelpful.” This was, when they came to consider it, even more offensive; more the snapped-back mirror than the thundered roof.

But I also wanted to bang on the roof. I wanted to be offensive. It seemed right. So I developed various lines of abuse. For instance, I would identify the malefactor, follow him (statistically it usually was a him) to where he was standing with his interval coffee or half of lager, and ask, in what therapists would call a non-confrontational manner, “Excuse me, but do you like art? Do you go to museums and galleries?”