The Virtuoso (20 page)

Noël hadn’t performed until week three.

I remembered that day—Bill was out of town and I had asked Noël if I could accompany him to rehearsal. As we walked along the corridors I was gazing through the glass wall overlooking the river, wondering why Noël showed so little excitement, whether perhaps he was nervous. He walked in silence, running his hand along the cool Derbyshire stone walls, then he stopped and looked at the polished surface next to his hand. When I moved towards him I noticed the white shapes floating in the greyish brown stone, thousands of them, some shaped like rings, others like small sausages or eggs.

‘Ammonites,’ he said. ‘They’ve waited hundreds of millions of years to be immortalised in these walls.’

I looked closer and realised that the small white shapes in the marble were fossils, that I was standing next to a wall containing thousands of tiny Palaeozoic animals. I gazed ahead along the smooth, glassy surface and was overcome by a feeling of great unease, by the motionless drift of creatures as far as I could see.

As soon as Noël joined Maurice Miles and the Yorkshire Orchestra on stage he was his usual buoyant self. But watching him, grinning and making jokes, I wasn’t able to forget his troubled look—suddenly so
much older than his twenty-eight years—as he’d stared at the wall, at that ancient, frozen parade.

Now the silver-framed photograph commemorating his Festival of Britain performance was on Bill’s desk.

I slipped the souvenir into my pocket.

There was one last letter in the manila folder, addressed to Dulcie, still in its envelope. My lungs felt small and tight, and I realised I was grinding my teeth. I began reading, hoping the letter might provide some kind of relief, but it was another rejection letter, for a composition that Dulcie had sent to the BBC. I put the letter away and found, sharing the same envelope, a letter to Dulcie from Noël, written in the early years of the war. The crossings of the
T
’s were scratched almost across entire lines; the letters were barely legible, frantically written and oriented in all directions. I wouldn’t have recognised it for Noël’s usually steady hand if it weren’t for the sweeping signature at the bottom, with its two dots punched into the paper, umlauting the
e.

Saturday

Dear Mother
,

I received your letter today and I must say I was very surprised at your feeble-mindedness. You may be sure that until I am really famous I shall receive many adverse criticisms but for you to change your opinion of any particular performance of mine because of a critic is so surprising. You told me after the concert that the only thing you wished
to improve was the way I walked on. You now say in your letter that the pedal spoilt the effect of the Chopin étude yet when I especially asked you after the concert whether this was the case you definitely said ‘no’!!! If you thought it was spoilt you might have said so when asked: but if you didn’t think so then to change your opinions to that of someone else is very feeble-minded.

Do see if you can come to the Glasgow concert, we must both start saving up. And please cheer up about your job! Remember the proverb:

‘
Everything comes to him who waits.
’

With best love,

Noël

I pocketed the letter and could feel myself growing unsteady again. Pacing about the room, sniffing at every object, I felt that I might choke on the odious veneer of watercolour landscapes, a glazed Chinese tea set, and a framed letter from the King. I wondered if I ought to leave. I couldn’t have even said what it was that disturbed me—I just felt immensely troubled, as if I were inhabited by some foreign, seething being.

But I didn’t want to leave—like a snarling creature in its lair, I was exactly where I wanted to be, marching in circles, winding myself up.

Floorboards creaked above me. A door opened and closed.

I imagined Bill, half-naked, slipping out of the bed; Noël still asleep, waking only later to the sound of Bill
placing a tray of tea and toast on the bedside table next to him. As I saw all of this—Noël sitting propped up against pillows, Bill stirring the tea—I started to think how pathetic they
both
were. That Noël had
chosen
to be with this ridiculous
feeble-minded
man who didn’t understand him at all—that they had fooled themselves how happy they really were! And as for this quaint little study with its fastidiously kept files and affectionately displayed photos, it really was—like everything else they’d built around them—just one enormous sham!

I’m not sure how long I stayed. I can’t remember leaving—only walking past the wall at the end of the street, feeling very shaken, and it seeming that someone was walking beside me.

I recall looking out to the river and thinking how extraordinary it was that at times of extreme sadness the world can possess such unearthly beauty. The sky was milky blue except for a brilliant burnished orange radiating out from where the sun peeked over the elms far in the east near the bend. And I was struck by the desire to throw myself into that deep, shimmering water.

Martha’s just brought me up a plate of rather cheerless-looking macaroni cheese, a slice of jam sponge and a pot of coffee. She gave me the most studied look when
she placed down the tray, as if she was expecting me to burst into tears or blurt out some confession. What has Gerald been telling the dear woman? I really do wish he’d hold that tongue of his in check.

Anyway, I’m now not sure I’m terribly hungry, what with thinking about that shameful night in Hammersmith; I really must have been quite off my head at the time. But I’ve got a long evening ahead, so I’d better try to eat something.

So, no—I hadn’t had the faintest idea that Noël long dreamed of becoming a composer. Only now, regretfully, do I imagine that perhaps it wasn’t that important to me at the time. I simply saw him as the greatest pianist in the world; the rest, I thought, would surely follow.

I probably soon forgot about the letters in Bill’s study. Maybe I just chose to forget, what with everything that then happened. The entire circumstances were really most unpleasant for me at the time, all of us being such great
friends.
I really had no idea how I felt—angry? Besotted? Frustrated? Bored? All of these, I’m sure. But I couldn’t see any of that then. No wonder I had no idea what was going on for Noël.

But don’t think for a minute I haven’t wondered how differently it all might have ended up. If I’d behaved otherwise, that is. Such small, simple things that I could have said or done at various times, which may have altered everything. I think a lot about that, actually—how we find ourselves where we are, at the end of an intricate, delicate web, a veil of minuscule
crossroads trailing out behind us, endlessly in all directions. And whether we could have just as easily made a small, innocent turn—caught an eleven-thirty bus, say, rather than one at twelve o’clock—or a series of them, way, way back, and now be living entirely different lives.

I decided not to go to the 1952 Aldeburgh Festival. I’d been twice before. In ‘48, the year Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears founded the Suffolk seaside festival, I saw Noël stand in, last minute, after Clifford Curzon cancelled; he played Schumann’s entire
Davidsbündlertänze
and several other mammoth works to a full house in the Aldeburgh Cinema on a Sunday afternoon. I also went in ‘51, the year Noël premiered the Gerhard Piano Concerto at the fourteenth-century Aldeburgh parish church. But a month before the ’52 festival, at one of Noël and Bill’s Hammersmith dinner parties, Bill asked over his limply held wine glass if I’d be attending Aldeburgh. He lowered his glass, picked up his pieces of cutlery as if they were surgical implements, edged a morsel of Noël’s jugged hare onto his fork and placed it in his mouth. As I watched his lazy, ungulate-like mastication I announced, ‘No.’ I said it quite loudly—loudly enough for Noël and Tippett, who were arguing about Sibelius, to turn their heads momentarily. ‘No, I won’t be going to Aldeburgh,’ I
said again. Noël was to be performing twice—works by Beethoven, Britten, Weber, Rainier, Hindemith, Saint-Saëns and Poulenc—several pieces of which I hadn’t yet heard. But I had said no, and I wasn’t going back on my word.

I spent the festival week in London, sweltering in my room and on the underground, avoiding any talk of Aldeburgh. When I next bumped into Noël at the Rockingham he didn’t seem his usual lively self: his laughter was forced and his words either stumbled or blurted out too loudly. In retrospect it was probably the first time that things hadn’t seemed quite right with Noël.

I didn’t enquire of the festival; however, it came out through the course of our conversation that Ben had been very busy the entire week working on his opera
Gloriana
, which he hoped would be ready for Coronation week the following year, and Ben had asked Noël if, after the Proms, he would substitute for him and tour the country with Peter. I knew Noël enjoyed accompanying musicians, especially tenors like Peter, but I wondered how he felt now to be standing in for another pianist. Noël Mewton-Wood—an
understudy—
filling in for Britten, who made being a musician, a composer, a performer, appear so stunningly simple; who was called upon to perform all around the world; who was commissioned to compose by the future Queen. What’s more, everyone knew that Peter was miserable when without his partner—that he moped and whined and would
barely even eat. That even though Peter adored Noël and considered him a brilliant pianist, he’d far rather be performing with Ben.

I remember Noël standing there with his head bowed, looking out from under his eyebrows, eyes flitting about the room as he mentioned that Bill was off to Scotland the following day to curate an exhibition of modern British portraiture. He said that Bill had an extraordinarily keen sense of colour and light, and he had recently bought Bill some paints and an easel to set up in the yard. Bill had already finished some lovely watercolours of the grebes feeding in the evening, he said, and another of the rowers as they trained on the river. I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t think of anything more hideous than an amateur rendition of a spindly brown bird pecking in the boggy, littered mudflats, but I said nothing. I stood, letting my heavily lidded eyes tell him how uninterested I was in the amusements of this lumbering man with his wispy blond crown and manicured nails, who smelt as pink and soapy as a baby; I wanted him to suddenly recognise the absurdity of Bill’s behaviour and be embarrassed, even appalled, by the realisation.

Then, out of the blue, Noël said to me that maybe I’d like to come over for dinner the following night; it would just be the two of us. And he just stood there—sadly, now I come to think of it—waiting for me to reply.

Even now I’m as astounded by my response as I was moments after I spoke: arms crossed, smoke trailing
from the cigarette between my fingers, I said to him that I believed I was busy.

That winter was one of the coldest I can remember. Some days the smog was so thick you could barely see your feet, and one night a performance at Sadler’s Wells had to be cancelled because the stage wasn’t visible from the stalls. It was too cold to stay home, so most nights after work I’d go out drinking, often with Gerald, always keeping my eye on the time so that at least half an hour before close I could start batting my eyes towards the finest suit in the bar and find myself a charming rosewood-carved bed for the night, with the plumpest goose-down pillows and duvet. I heard little about Noël and Peter’s tour. And any time he crept into my mind I’d shoo him out, slamming that door shut with the thought that Bill, like myself, was stuck working in London. I was also convinced that out of the three of us, I was surely having the most fun.

I was now working in the library at the Royal College of Music, supervising the record collection, and also in charge of writing programme lists and notices for their newsletters, magazines and concert programmes. More recently I’d also been writing articles for the
Gramophone
and other journals, jobs that Gerald had lined up for me. I didn’t mind all of this new work; I moved through it quite effortlessly. Though every now and again, as if someone had tapped me on the shoulder or whispered in my ear, I’d become suddenly aware how far I’d been
carried away from my music, that a considerable stretch of time had passed without me returning to the piano, and perhaps it could now be assumed that I never actually would. Strangely, and almost sadly, I realised that I wasn’t particularly bothered.

I’d do all my writing at home, working at the table with a tumbler of gin and a packet of cigarettes, on the typewriter Gerald had given me soon after we’d met as a gentle inducement to write down some of my
precocious
—as he called them—musical ideas. I enjoyed coming up with the inconsequential pieces I wrote for the College, and even more so the journal articles I’d been writing since Gerald had gone away to a cousin’s wedding on the Amalfi coast and had asked me to cover his notices and column, ‘The London Stave’. I never told him how flattered I was by his request; I just simply shrugged and agreed, and remained quietly pleased with the work he subsequently sent my way, despite considering the clattering contraption on which I tapped away a vulgar apparatus.

Still, I never missed a performance when Noël was in town. He played less and less of the
lollipops
(the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky concertos, the Bach Toccata—crowd-pleasers that would have reeled in the record companies), and more pieces that audiences had rarely, or never before, heard, often by contemporary composers—Seiber, Ferguson, Oldham, Rawsthorne, Bliss, Bush and Tippett—some of whom wrote works specifically for Noël to perform, dedicating the music to him.

During his returns to London I’d see him out drinking at parties and bars around Soho, always without Bill, and often disappearing out the door on the tail of someone who I’d joke to Gerald looked
five-dimes-for-a-dame.
Noël never mentioned the tour with Peter or any other work he was doing. I’d hear from Gerald that everyone was talking about how Noël and Walter Goehr had just that day recorded some formidable concerto in a single take, and I’d look over my shoulder to the corner of the bar and there I’d see Noël sitting at a booth ordering champagne for some pouting youngster.