The Secret Knowledge (8 page)

Yes, thinks Conroy, and Beethoven fucking hated it. He unlocks his front door, deactivates the burglar alarm and sees the mail piled on the floor, he thought Laura would be back already but she must still be away on her assignment. He’s had no more texts, hasn’t been able to speak to her since that last argument. Among the junk mail there’s a large envelope with a handwritten address, he takes it to the kitchen and opens it after he’s put on the kettle. The collector he met at the second performance, Verrier, has sent a photocopy of the sonata he mentioned.

Conroy’s parched, makes some tea and sits at the kitchen table. Showed up at Tune Inn and the green room was a marquee with rugs and sofas, ethnic finger food, crew of enthusiastic helpers fresh out of university. One of them said come and meet Paul Morrow who was sitting holding court with a glass of white wine in his hand, Conroy couldn’t tell if the ongoing repartee was a press interview or regular conversation. Of course he didn’t want to come and meet bloody Paul Morrow.

He quickly looks at the Klauer score and reads the accompanying letter from Verrier who’s been doing some research and says the composer died from a gunshot wound in a Paris park in 1913, reported in the press as a tragic accident, probably a polite way of saying suicide. Klauer’s handwritten notation on the photocopied sheets is neat and readable, first movement looks interesting, perhaps a touch of Busoni about it. Again the tantalising vision of a come-back concert, media interest. Forget the music; the troubled young genius blew his brains out and the world unjustly forgot him, that’s a story.

Morrow, unshaven in baggy blue pullover, was telling his little entourage about his plan to do the complete
Well-Tempered Clavier
at Heathrow airport. “Like, you can buy your duty free, listen to some Bach, whatever.” The juvenile assistant with a Tune Inn tee-shirt did the introductions, Morrow didn’t bother getting up but stretched an arm in languorous handshake. He’d obviously never heard of Conroy, had no idea he might face any kind of competition for audience-share that afternoon, knew in any case it would be no contest. Wine-glass in hand, Morrow generously asked about Conroy’s programme, nodding with approval. “Great line-up, I’ve never heard of the Firelli, that sounds really cool. I’d love to hear your gig, man, it’s fucking nuts the way they scheduled it. Wonder if they could change the timings? And
Kreisleriana
, that’s wicked.”

The Tune Inn organisers hadn’t stopped to ask themselves how two guest artists might feel about being made to clash, they had thought only about abundance of consumer choice: a jazz quartet in a kitchenware promotion, Mongolian folksong next to a lecture on Italian wine, some Debussy for dessert; or if not that, then an entirely different permutation from the menu. Morrow was inter-changeable with a TV chef, Conroy with a jar of mustard. He asked Morrow, “Have you ever read
Kreisleriana
?”

A double-take, like it was some new kind of street-talk that needed decoding. “You mean played it?”

“It’s a book by E.T.A. Hoffmann.”

“No shit.”

Morrow looked genuinely interested to learn more but his female minder interrupted to say they needed to go outside for a photo shoot and that was the end of the conversation. Instead Conroy had to continue it inside his own head, telling the departed Morrow that the book features a musician completely opposed to false reputation, the shallowness of mass taste and received opinion; a person living for art in a world that recognises only commercial value, therefore considered mad.

Conroy sips his tea, thinks about unpacking. He used to keep a bag permanently ready for concert travel, these days he doesn’t need to. Eventually he lifts his case from the hall and takes it to the bedroom, some of the shirts have remained unworn and can be hung before he dumps the rest in the washing machine. He opens the wardrobe. Half the space inside is empty. Laura’s clothes are gone.

First thought that hits him: we’ve been burgled. Next: why did she take all her clothes for a trip of a few days? Then at last the truth, at least twenty minutes before he finally accepts it, once he’s established that she’s removed not only her clothes but every item she owns, every ornament and photo, cleared herself completely out of his house, his life, told him unarguably that it’s over. And he realises that it was already over when he left for the tour, finished even before then. It was over from the first moment they met. Their entire relationship was between two people destined to part.

Everything really happens long before it becomes fact; public knowledge is invariably the last to arise. How long was Laura planning her escape, when did she decide on the form of her exit? Conroy’s still asking himself the question hours later, the whisky bottle almost empty, something happening on television that he doesn’t feel the need to comprehend. This is how all things conclude: badly, without resolution. He knew it when he was stupidly trying to get off with that girl after his second recital, when he was lying on the hotel bed wondering what it would be like to be single again. He got his wish.

Conroy re-reads Verrier’s note in hope of distraction, or perhaps because a handwritten letter – so rare a thing nowadays – is a kind of human contact we’ve largely forgotten. Right now, Verrier is Conroy’s drinking buddy, a connoisseur, not fooled by charlatans like Paul Morrow, he can see through that sham, it was Conroy he paid to hear. The audience at Tune Inn: a few dozen too slow to make it to Morrow’s sell-out. The kind of man she’d probably prefer to be sleeping with, maybe is.

Art is human, it’s flawed. We make mistakes, hit wrong notes, and those great composers, they were human too, they wrote wrong notes, performers learn and repeat them. But there has to be the illusion of perfection, gleaming image of mass production and infinite reproducibility. His students at the college, he’s meant to get them to competition standard, meaning they should play like machines, he shows up at work next day having slept for two hours and he’s got to give lessons as usual, though all he wants is to tell them to go to hell.

When he gets a call on his office line he assumes it’s Laura, grabs the receiver, skull throbbing, but it’s Verrier. “Did you get the score?”

“I haven’t had time to play it.” Conroy’s hung-over, they aren’t buddies now, Verrier’s unwelcome urgency has too much salesmanship about it.

“I look forward to hearing your opinion.”

“I’ll let you know.”

Student he sees later in the week, kid called Harry, he could be the next Paul Morrow, the hair and attitude are spot-on and who gives a damn about expression? They’re doing Chopin
Études
; Harry attacks the ‘Winter Wind’ like he’s a psycho with a hunting knife, sawing his way through the right-hand sextuplets. This is competition style, all right. The two of them discuss interpretation and Harry uses the term “take-home message”. What else do you expect from a generation taught to equate education with financial investment and personal debt? Conroy nods off in the middle of the next piece but is woken by a fortissimo fit for the Wembley Arena.

“How was it?” Harry asks at the end, a puppy wanting a pat on the head.

“You’ve clearly been practising.” This is what every teacher at every level says to every student who’s just dished up for them a plateful of musical vomit.

“Thanks.”

Four days of a life without Laura that began years ago, her number comes up as not recognised, she’s ditched her mobile as well as her man, both equally outmoded. After Harry, Conroy has some free time and starts playing through the Klauer. This, too, he thinks, is a kind of farewell gesture, and like every artwork it’s a one-way message. Klauer bowed out and left no room for a response; all we’ve got is a half-empty wardrobe.

Klauer’s a chameleon, the first movement gives nothing away, there are possible references or allusions, but no sense of who exactly he was, this mysterious fellow with his secret knowledge. Nor did Conroy ever really know Laura; it’s only when they surprise you that you find out your ignorance. We expect continuity, not paradox.

The slow movement strikes him as more readily grasped, something operatic about it, though gradually Conroy understands what the peculiar scoring and implied colours really mean. This is an idea for a symphony; these are meant to be violins, horns, an oboe. The entire work is a skeleton, and it’s with this in mind that he repeats the movement, trying to guess which solo instrument is intended to be heard at the outset. In his mind a park, people in old-fashioned costume. A dull pop somewhere and a man falls to the ground. That’s all there is to it, the gap between life and death.

In the afternoon he has a new student to see, a late starter on the course, must have transferred from somewhere else. When he arrives at the room she’s already waiting for him, small girl, sweet smile but can’t have much strength in those limbs. She says she’s called Paige. He opens the sound-proof door, gestures her inside and asks, “How long have you been playing?”

“I started when I was four.”

“How long is that?”

“Sixteen years.”

She tells him a familiar story of lessons and grade exams, junior competitions and medals, a childhood dominated by a single lustrous project. Conroy always likes to know from the start what sort of influence the parents have had, he’s seen plenty of students glad to have escaped domestic domination and wanting to take it easy. But this girl seems motivated, managed to do well in her school subjects, had other options and chose music against her parents’ advice.

She offers him the
Barcarolle
, accomplished if a little stiff. Conroy finds himself trying to guess which edition she’s used: Chopin wrote two slightly different manuscript versions. A left-hand D sharp soon gives it away, he stops her not long after. Next it’s Beethoven, this sounds more promising, but while she plays and Conroy stares through the window at the trees and small park where a woman pushes a buggy he finds his mind drifting, the ‘Waldstein’ isn’t holding his attention. What did Adorno say it made him think of when he was a child? Knights in a forest. Conroy must still have the book, unless Laura took it, though she seems to have been meticulously selective, removing only what was unambiguously hers. Surprising, in the Venn diagram of their material possessions, how negligible the overlap.

In Paige’s performances Conroy detects a troubling insincerity, a desire to please out of a sense of duty. “Play me something you love,” he tells her, and she offers Janacek’s suite
On An Overgrown Path
. An intriguing choice; its demands are expressive rather than technical. Here, thinks Conroy, is someone genuinely more interested in art than showing off. The tone feels exactly right, her playing is sensitive but restrained, completely devoid of sentimentality. She conveys what for Conroy is the real essence of this piece: the loneliness of a bad relationship. She can’t possibly understand at her age, perhaps even Janacek didn’t know it when he wrote the music (though he would come to know it), but Conroy can hear it as he looks down on the muted street. Truth is not something we discover consciously; it discovers us.

He turns to watch, his view of her is from the side, her concentration appears total. She looks younger than twenty. If he’d ever had a child, he thinks, he would have wanted one like this. But it’s too late. It almost feels as if his life is already over.

Towards the end of the piece there’s a section marked ‘adagio dolcissimo’; a mysterious, floating passage that sounds like a memory, but a memory of what? If the whole piece is really about loneliness then this section is the dream of how things might otherwise have been, a false memory of happiness, a path denied. Yet this girl has so many possibilities in front of her, such potential – he hears it now – what can she know of suffering and disappointment? It moves him that she should be able to express so clearly a pain still to be felt. And this, he realises, must be the key to Pierre Klauer’s music. A life full of promise, haunted by its own doomed future.

He wonders about the other path she might have taken; after she’s finished he asks her what degree subject she gave up. Physics, she tells him. He’s surprised, and thinks of the gauche student at his recital recently, the one who said we’re all inside a box. What he meant is that we’re dead in our graves from the very first moment of existence; it just takes a while to figure it out. Yes, he’s sure she said physics.

Conroy decides they should spend more time on the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, he understands now that all the faults he heard before were those of her teachers, she needs to unlearn what was drilled into her. He sits at the neighbouring keyboard, demonstrating passages he wants her to try, pointing out where she was apt to shorten a note, blur a chord or misplace an emphasis. In every case she takes his suggestion and turns it into something new, never mimicking, always pushing herself to experiment. So many ways to play the same piece and none is definitive, there’s always room for variation. But Conroy’s job is to bring her to competition standard, he’s a quality-control inspector on a production line in an industry that demands consistency and predictability. He wonders if she’s just too good for the professional circuit, the world of crowd-pleasing monstrosities like Tune Inn with their banal maxim of inclusivity. Paige, he senses, is an individual, not an acrobat. Beethoven is what they ought to work on but Conroy wants to hear more of that depth of feeling Paige found in the Janacek; they should go off the familiar track.

He shows her the Klauer slow movement. She takes a moment to prepare then picks up the bare opening theme, more slowly than Conroy had played it, and as the full chords enter he senses a different orchestration from what he had previously imagined. Paige’s tone is warmer, the view less tragic. He can see the Paris park again, the strollers in their antiquated clothes, but now the same scene is reinterpreted and crucially altered: Klauer is a man filled with hope and optimism. Yet still he puts a gun to his head. Contradiction is the key.

“Stop there,” he tells her. “When do you think it was written?”