The Virtuoso (13 page)

I started to spend more time at the Bayswater apartment he shared with his older sister, Ginny, and her best friend, Dora. Clifton would cook dinner for the four of us (Woolton pie with a soggy pile of peas on the side, and blackberry trifle for dessert), entertaining us all with his anecdotes and impersonations of Academy professors. The girls would be falling off their chairs, almost crying with laughter each time Clifton stood and performed his imitation of Peter Pears in a nasally strangulated voice, singing Britten’s ‘I Wonder As I Wander’. Watching his gleeful face, happiest when making those around him laugh, I’d start to forgive him for his coarseness, his incessant chatter, his abrasive quips, and I wondered if maybe he did possess some musical talent after all. For years I’d envisioned attending the Salzburg Festival with my father, and then after that with Noël; it now seemed ironic that this most unlikely character had bounced into my life and with the least effort was sweeping me off to this illustrious place. I started to think that perhaps I was extremely lucky to have found Clifton, and maybe I’d initially been too intolerant of this big, floppy, kind-hearted boy with his booming laugh and insatiable physical demands.

As our departure neared, my mind began brimming with images of Salzburg: Rolls-Royces pulling up outside the Festival Hall with movie stars stepping out wearing the latest Parisian fashion and cradling long, skinny cigarette holders in their hands.
Clifton and I followed the newspaper columns daily to find out the latest international performers to confirm, and to gossip about all the famous people we’d heard might be attending. It seemed that in an attempt to resurrect the festival, the organisers had filled the programme with debuts of young composers and musicians as well as world premieres. I started to see my arrival with Clifton as being symbolic of this process of renewal, and the more I convinced myself of this, the more my mind was flooded with images of the two of us meeting the up-and-coming young performers from all around the world who, charmed by Clifton’s humour and my musical knowledge, would invite us for martinis at the festival lounge, or present us with green-room passes to the Festival Hall. I even started to fantasise that, walking with Clifton along the banks of the Salzach River, dining in the Mozartplatz, listening to the radiant voice of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in
Figaro
, I might actually forget about Noël and, lo and behold, Clifton and I might even fall in love.

We stepped out into the unnervingly still and bright air of Salzburg’s main railway station at around eight in the morning. We were amongst a hundred or so other tourists and troops who had alighted from the train; most were sighing and grinning giddily at the snow-capped mountains enveloping us, sniffing the clean, icy air and rustling about in their purses for hotel vouchers.

We were the last to collect our cases; Clifton was too overawed by it all—yodelling and laughing—to rush, and I’d hardly slept, having been kept awake much of the night by the French children fighting and crying in our cabin, and a stomach upset from the goulash I’d eaten for dinner. In addition to all of that, since my rude morning awakening by the border police barking their commands in my face, I hadn’t had much time to collect my thoughts and establish how I now ought to be behaving towards Clifton, following the previous evening’s incident in the dining car. Even though I’d dissected the entire event in tremendous detail during the wee hours of the morning, I realised as soon as I stepped down onto the platform and was slapped in the face by the white-gold light that I was, literally, in a new land entirely, and I was going to have to rethink everything.

It had all taken place while we were eating dinner. The entrée plates had just been removed from our table and, amidst the calming beat of the train, quiet conversation bubbled around us from the other guests’ tables. Clifton took a sip of wine and moved forward in his chair (even though it seemed completely out of the blue at the time, when I reflected back, it all appeared so cringingly rehearsed), then, looking me straight in the eye, he whispered that he was in love with me. It was the first time in my life someone had ever said those words to me, yet, strangely, my initial reaction was complete obliviousness, as if he had simply mentioned that his dumpling soup was a little
salty. He remained in this position, leaning forward, his gaze upon me, forcing me to look away. While contemplating how to resolve this situation I found myself glancing across the aisle, where my sight landed upon an older gentleman in a dinner suit, who happened to be eating a plate of snails. I can’t be sure if I’d ever seen anyone eat snails before but, even if I hadn’t, it wasn’t the alarming content of the dish that caught my eye; rather it was the expression of the gentleman himself, and the chilling apathy with which he ate those grotesque little creatures. He looked down upon each slug, carefully placing the pincers around its slippery shell. Occasionally he looked up at his wife, the same sang-froid expression upon his powdery cheeks, then returned to his precise working at the shell. With his cocktail fork he prised out a delicate little morsel, taking one last glance at it as it dangled in front of his mouth, slipped it onto his tongue, which had poked out gingerly from between his lips, so snail-like itself, then sucked both inside with a prolonged salivous slurp.

‘You don’t have to say anything; I just wanted to tell you,’ Clifton added, smiling, before catching the waiter’s eye and signalling for two more glasses of riesling.

At first I was greatly relieved that Clifton had disposed of the topic as smoothly and rapidly as he’d introduced it; but over the course of the meal, as I thought further about what he’d said, I began to grow increasingly irritated. While Clifton chatted away I
began to practise my retort—the words I ought to have said—and several times in the quiet moments that passed during the main meal, I was tempted to raise the topic once more and point out to Clifton that his comment was unwarranted, even ridiculous, and that he couldn’t love me as he really didn’t know me at all. But after prevaricating a number of times, and leaving my response for what I realised was too long, I decided that as I’d got out of what could have been a remarkably uncomfortable situation rather well, I’d do best to leave the matter alone.

As I continued to dwell upon the exchange, however, it occurred to me that it was in no way how I might expect such an event to transpire. What bothered me more than anything afterwards, and even now, was how completely unmoved I found myself. I struggled to touch upon some kind of feeling, response, but all I could summon was a sense of annoyance, that a trip proceeding along so smoothly had been quite unnecessarily disrupted.

By the time we went to bed my anger had passed and I was left moping about in a shroud of disappointment. Then during the night, after the French children had finally dozed off and I was left lying awake listening to the snoring of fellow passengers and the rattling and clicking of the train hurtling through the mountains, one of the strange thoughts I had was that perhaps when I woke in the morning and opened my eyes upon this fairytale town, some deep and loving feelings for Clifton might possibly have emerged. However, some
time after my military-style rousing in the early morning, my insomniac meanderings returned to me, appearing like some mildly delirious dream. I was touched by a moment of sadness, as if something precious that I’d held during the night had been lost, and I relapsed into the same morose mood in which I’d found myself before going to bed.

After taking our cases to the pension and getting freshened up, Clifton and I visited the Mirabell Gardens, conversing little as we wove about between the beds of red, pink and white roses. He was smiling the entire time, eyes half closed like a cat enjoying the sun on its face, occasionally making one of his poetic remarks about the large ceramic urns with their ‘cascading violets’, and the ‘coveys of cloud-white pigeons’ that gathered at our feet every time we paused. I was having trouble finding anything to say and it was only when we sat on a bench and I looked up at the fine mist-spray of the fountain in front of us and noticed the medieval castle set against the blue sky in the distance, lording over the town, that I finally spoke.

‘Look at that castle. Imagine how big it is.’

Clifton looked off towards the castle then turned back to me, laughing. ‘Why? I can see how big it is.’ Then, in a theatrical voice, staring upwards: ‘Imagine how blue the sky is, how white the clouds are…You really say some daft things.’

‘I just mean that it doesn’t look real, does it? Even though it’s there, you have to imagine it’s real.’

‘I can see it’s real.’

I felt a lump in my throat, something hard and sharp wedging in my chest. I looked up and around at where I was—the endless rows of flowers, the brilliant blue sky, the ice-capped mountains along the horizon—and longed for the familiar streets of London and the stifling heat of the underground. I wondered how I was possibly going to survive the next seven days.

But as we walked around the maze-like alleyways of the old town I may as well have been wandering the streets of Soho or Covent Garden. When I looked about I’d feel momentarily alarmed, suddenly realising I was surrounded by neat little shops and cafés with wrought-iron trade signs and colourfully painted coats-of-arms hanging out the front; it was as if someone had quietly wheeled in theatre sets around me when my back was turned. I was occasionally aware of the baroque spires that rose from the terracotta rooftops, the white-peaked Untersberg Mountain looming over us from the south and the emerald-coloured Salzach River flowing quietly through the town, but I could only really appreciate them as backdrops for my imagined meetings with Noël.

Over the next few days we went to some small musical events—a choral concert held in a small church and a local string chamber orchestra playing Debussy and Schubert—the standard of neither, I thought, being any better or worse than what we saw regularly around London. On the following day we had morning tea outside, at the Café Tomaselli, surrounded by groups of infantry soldiers, the checked tablecloths strewn with
Stars and Stripes
newspapers and army hats. The soldiers were laughing and downing Stiegl Biers, their feet in brown, high-laced, spit-shined boots resting on the wooden chairs they’d gathered around themselves. Corned-beef sandwiches in one hand, cigarettes in the other, flicking their ash into half-eaten bowls of vanilla pudding, they seemed to be having the time of their lives.

After silently taking our
Kaffee mit Schlag
(Clifton insisted on not being taken for an American and so ordered everything in German) and a Linzertorte that seemed to have been made with barely a pinch of sugar, Clifton leaned across the table and asked me if I was enjoying our stay.

I stared down into my coffee and kept stirring, hoping to find an answer. I was bothered by all the American accents that clanged through the streets; ‘G.I. Jive’ and ‘Jill’s Juke Box’ blasting out from every café’s wireless; the jeeps and motorbikes hooting along the laneways; and the paucity of food, even at the most famous cafés, that made our ration system back home seem quite luxurious. ‘It’s different to how I imagined…’

‘Red carpet being rolled out along the footpaths, drunk old barons stumbling out of the casino in tuxedos in the middle of the day—yes, yes, yes. Well there has been a
war
on, you know.’

I smiled back, grateful for his humour, if nothing else.

After a lunch of cheese and bread in the park I took a walk by myself along the cobbled streets, past
heisse
wurstel
stands where troops lounged, eating hotdogs, and along laneways where cardboard signs hung crookedly in café doors under dusty lace curtains, apologising in German and broken English that the café would be closed until further notice. I thought about my father, who’d told me stories about holidaying in Austria as a boy, riding bicycles with his father through the woods and hamlets outside Salzburg and visiting the terrifying fortress near Vienna where Richard the Lionheart once lay imprisoned. I wondered if it was my father’s presence that was missing in my visit to this great city, or whether my melancholy was due to the sight of all the boarded-up buildings and burnt-out shells of medieval apartments that sat rudely among the tourists and festivities like a pack of vengeful ghosts.

I walked to the Mozartplatz. In the centre of the square stood the bronze statue of Amadeus, looking out over the river, a quill in one hand, his cape billowing over his other arm, the Mönchsberg Mountain a giant green throne behind him. I glanced about the busy plaza and imagined the composer walking through the crowd, humming a melody that he would later scribble down. Looking up at the statue, so large and noble above me like some great deity or liberator of the town, I wondered what he’d think if he were alive today, what he’d make of all this cheer and adulation. After all, during his life, the people of Salzburg didn’t appreciate Mozart’s music one bit; they disliked it so much, in fact, that the 25-year-old composer moved to Vienna,
where he only lived for another ten years before dying in poverty and being buried in a shared grave.

I looked out towards the mountains, then to the three-storey medieval building in front of them, which stretched the entire width of the square. Underneath its central gable a large white triangular frieze had been fashioned to appear as if a part of the original building, but bore the rather un-gothic inscription,
Headquarters Zone Command.

Dozens of soldiers were spilling out from the front entrance, jogging down from the steps in their baggy belted khakis, behaving more like school children after the bell than commandeering troops. Some of them had massive black holsters strapped loosely around their hips. How ludicrous, I thought, the idea that these hungry ashen-faced Austrians around us might need any disciplining at all.

I headed away from the river and walked to the Domplatz, dominated by the imposing gothic cathedral with its two tall green spires standing like rockets about to launch into the sky.