The Virtuoso (23 page)

By the time we arrived the large Victorian manor was full of guests, mainly gentlemen dressed in sports coats or bow ties, sipping gin or champagne in the salon amongst the twenty or more keyboard instruments. The room resembled a private museum, except that at the foyer end there were sofas, wingchairs and occasional tables where people were lounging,
drinking and nibbling canapés. As Noël darted off into the crowd I walked amongst the instruments: single and double-manual harpsichords, painted with scrolls, vines or scenery; small desk-like virginals, one from Verona that was dated 1586; spinets; clavichords; and square, cabinet and grand pianos, including, I noticed, a Broadwood of the same make and date as the one owned by Beethoven.

Noël brought me a gin and nodded to the instruments. ‘Lovely, aren’t they? We’ll see if we can’t have a bit of a tinkle later on,’ then he winked and again turned and disappeared.

Frankie Laine was crooning in the background; a seemingly endless supply of champagne, beer, whisky and gin was sweeping around the room on silver trays from the kitchen; and a steady trickle of guests were arriving, removing their gloves and hats, and waving across the room. I accepted every drink offered to me, ingratiating myself with the waiting staff as I did, so that before long I was in the kitchen helping myself to the bar, each time pouring doubles for Noël. Leaning against the kitchen counter, knocking back a string of martinis as I surveyed the crowd, and enlivened by the joie de vivre of the party, I stopped thinking about trying to seduce him. I was far more taken by a vision I had of him stumbling through the crowd at the end of the night, in an intoxicated state, looking for me, begging me to forgive him and take him home.

I was in a particularly genial mood, flirting with any gentleman or lady who came near me, praising
their dress or jewellery, rubbing their lapel or pendant between my thumb and forefinger and staring into their eyes until they blushed, or the abrupt heave of their chest warned me to think carefully where I might be taking this harmless little prank.

At one stage my wiles landed me in the arms of a chorus boy in full stage make-up who’d just arrived at the party from the London Coliseum, where he’d been performing in
Guys and Dolls.
He was a persistent little chap and it was only when he swung me across the room while belting out a heavily vibrato’d version of ‘Take Back Your Mink’ that I was able to make my escape. I was then drilled into a corner by a poet and his halitosis-infused reading of an obscure free verse called ‘Blue Danube’—about our loss of innocence in this nuclear age, he told me with a dejected gaze. I also recall some drunken lass with morsels of dried biscuit and caviar caught in her brilliant red ringlets, who leaned with both silky white paws on my shoulder as she slurred emphatically and repeatedly that I was the embodiment of her dear dead brother Freddie.

I shook myself from her clutches and made my way into the more sobering milieu of the library, where I found Gerald, Pat Trevor-Roper and several others standing about with brandies and cigars, talking of a recent impressionist exhibition they’d all seen at the Tate. Pat was expounding his theory about the work of sight-affected painters, how their poor vision gave them a unique perception of the world and was
actually, he believed, an artistic asset. He started reeling out names—El Greco, van Gogh, Cézanne, Monet, Turner, Renoir, O’Keeffe—and, still feeling a bit frisky from the other room, I was about to interrupt and suggest that maybe the same could be inferred of musicians, that perhaps their creations also sprang from an impairment in the way they perceived the world, borne from some shortcoming or absence—a threatening darkness from which they rose up like phoenixes, surrounding themselves with these breathtakingly beautiful universes. I was about to make some rash conjecture that hadn’t entered my mind up until then, about illusion—the illusory world of sound—but Pat was waxing on, and Gerald and the others were clearly fascinated, and before long I’d both completely forgotten what I was about to say, and lost track of Pat’s thread entirely. I was deciding whether to persevere with this discourse, which was only making me more confused, when I heard from the salon across the foyer, amongst boisterous cheers and clapping, an unusual thin, crisp jazz being played. I retreated from the discussion about El Greco, slipped into the kitchen, fixed two more drinks, then squeezed through the crowd to find Noël sitting at a Ruckers harpsichord, thumping away, playing a boogie.

Several yards from Noël, a young man in a candy-striped suit started accompanying him on a chamber organ, which sat like a tall kitchen dresser, its cupboard doors wide open exposing shining metal pipes that ran
up towards the ceiling. The floor in front of the two performers was gradually filling with people twisting and foot-tapping, and sofas and chairs were being pushed to the walls to allow for the dancers to swing each other around the room.

I moved over towards Noël and noticed, inside the open lid of the instrument, the most tranquil sylvan scene of languorous courtiers and musicians. The soundboard was painted with powder-pink roses, violets, birds and insects, and the panels were bordered with bronze arabesque designs of vines and classical heads.

An older gentleman wearing a velvet suit and beret leaned in towards me and said, ‘Aren’t they wonderful?’ I wasn’t quite sure if he meant the musicians or the instruments, but then he nodded towards the chap at the chamber organ, who was vigorously tapping his foot to the beat, and added, ‘That one belonged to George the Second.’

People were descending the stairs and others were pushing past me from the foyer, and in the middle of it all I spotted a small, tidy man—Raymond, I guessed—running about with burlap covers, frantically covering the remaining instruments.

Noël’s entire body, from his head and shoulders to his toes, was pulsing to the beat; a grin was fixed on his face as he stared down towards the keys and then all around the room into the crowd. I put our drinks down on an occasional table, carried it close to Noël’s side, downed half my drink, then slid in beside him at
the bass end of the keyboard. Noël shifted over to give me more room, then his hands hopped to the upper manual of keys without skipping or blurring a note.

Noël was improvising around a D major twelve-bar blues with a strong boogie bass line. Above his hands read the nameplate
IOANNES RVCKERS FECIT ANTVERPIÆ
, embossed in gold. I listened to the riff—tapping my shoe on the marble floor for a few bars, my heart racing to the same beat—then jumped in, left hand first, thumping up and down the keys, before adding some jingling right-hand chords, letting them drift up the keyboard towards Noël so that his elbow nestled into my side.

I looked out into the party and saw that the candy-striped organist had also been joined by another; a trumpeter stood in front of them, waiting to catch Noël’s eye before he started; and to our right, a woman stepped forward from the dance floor, resining a violin bow as she tapped her feet on the ground in front of the swelling crowd.

Noël carried us all from one motif and key to the next; he led each of us into a solo, then jumped in at the end with a few crashing chords or a rippling cadenza, drawing the music back to the original theme, and nodding out to the crowd, prompting their applause.

We might have been playing for hours, I’m not sure—I must have waved over the drinks waitress half a dozen times, downing each glass in one. I could barely hear the notes or think a single chord, I’d merged so
completely with this glitzy bacchanalia: naked arms flickering like flames above the whirling Lindy Hop, men hand in hand as they jived about the room, women dancing in bare stockings or landing on someone’s lap as they skipped from the floor.

I glanced down at my hands and noticed that we were back in D major. As I watched my left hand leap up the seventh I heard a melody rising above the throng of the room that caused me to tremble with recognition—it was as if I’d suddenly heard my father’s voice, or something equally distant and resonant. I thought that maybe it was a favourite piece of my father’s, or perhaps a tune I’d learnt as a child. But my head was so full of gin and jitterbug that this tune I longed to remember flittered about in my mind like a hummingbird trapped in a room, taunting me with its message. Then all at once it came to me, this tune that was rising out from the harpsichord, out from the courtiers and musicians who so gracefully lounged in the centre of the party: this music, it was coming from Noël—he was playing the Rondo in D! He remembered that first night at Walter’s! He was playing it for me! I tossed back my head laughing—laughing so ecstatically I thought I might fall from the seat. I turned around and looked out among the suede shoes and ostrich feathers, wanting to catch someone’s eye, anyone’s, and yell out to them, ‘Listen! It’s Schubert! It’s the Rondo in D—isn’t it the most magnificent tune? It’s like a hummingbird, don’t you think?’ I desperately wanted
to tell someone, but they were all swinging and cheering, threaded in each other’s arms, and no one was looking my way, no one had noticed the Rondo; they were too entrenched in this raucous sound that was ringing through me like a school bell clanging down the corridors, too entrenched to hear the hummingbird twittering over the top. I gave up on finding anyone to share my revelation; no one else need understand. Laughing, I hung my head back and gazed up at the chandeliers that appeared like thousands of raindrops frozen in the air above me.

Beginning to feel light-headed, I swung my gaze back down towards the keyboard, towards the hands that were singing out for me. My eyes settled and focused on Noël’s frenetic fingers, and it took me a moment to realise—I didn’t understand at all—his hands were shaking at chords, gliding through jazz riffs, jumping about in boogie time, the same as they had been before. I closed my eyes and listened, trying to hear the Schubert, remembering how sweet that gambolling melody had been. But the boogie was loud and clear, as loud and clear as my heartbeat thundering in my chest. Opening my eyes, I looked again at his hands, ripping up an A seventh chord into runs of swinging thirds. I looked around—waiters skating across the floor and couples throwing themselves around the room—it was as if nothing had even happened, as if the Rondo had never been played. But I
knew
I had heard it! It had all been so undeniably clear! I started to worry that perhaps
none of this was actually happening at all. I felt very faint all of a sudden and had this crushing feeling under my ribs as if someone was standing on my chest. I needed some fresh air, I needed a glass of water. I dropped my hands into my lap, my entire right arm burning in pain. Massaging my forearm, I slid out from the stool, stumbling, barely able to stand, then rested my hand in the bough of Noël’s shoulder and neck, feeling his warm, damp skin against my palm. I leaned down and told him I’d be back, not to go anywhere. He turned his face towards me, inches away, and smiled—his beautiful brown eyes burning into mine. And though I remember him leaning in and saying something, his breath hot in my ear, his words have since been engulfed by an impenetrable haze—like the messages from the dead received in one’s dreams that disappear behind the glaring curtain of day.

I turned and pushed through the crowd, propelled by a blast of drunken determination. And that’s the very last thing I remember.

Two days later, I started my birthday morning with a cup of tea and listened to Cortot’s recording of the
Davidsbündlertänze.
I looked at my watch: seven o’clock. Noël wouldn’t be back from his Wales broadcast until the late afternoon. I decided I’d ring him when I returned from work.

The day wore on: tediously slow, uneventful except for an argument with Marjorie, my boss, regarding my
so-called shambolic appearance. My senses still felt numbed from the party and I was disturbed by my inability to remember how everything had finished up at Raymond’s. I’d woken the following morning at home, dreadfully sick, my right arm aching, and my gloves and scarf and the music from Noël on the floor. The last thing I could vividly remember was
that
look from Noël as I leaned down to him at the harpsichord. I had assumed we would be going home together, but I was at a loss to remember if anything at all had happened after that.

When I arrived home from work that day there were two messages on my door: my aunt had rung to wish me a happy birthday, and Gerald had rung and asked that I ring back immediately. There was no message from Noël; I decided to put off ringing him until later.

Ma O’Grady had recently installed a pay phone in the hallway, so before going up to my room I sat on the stairs and dialled Gerald’s number, and was still deliberating over ringing Noël when Gerald answered. I’m not sure I listened to a word he said, but rather just sat staring up at the evening light shining through the frosted pane above the front door. Over the previous few weeks I’d been experiencing bouts of breathlessness—sometimes I’d stand at the edge of a busy road and the traffic would seem particularly chaotic, the car horns reverberating all through me as if I were made of jelly, and I’d be rooted to the kerb, unable to step
onto the street. This same feeling of terror was rattling me now; it was only the urgency of Gerald’s tone that brought me to.

‘I said Bill’s dead!’

I sat there frozen, my heart pounding, letting the words trickle down and permeate their meaning.

‘Did you hear me? I said—’

‘Yes, I heard you.’ And for a moment the most extraordinary thought entered my mind—that maybe
I
had killed him. Again, Gerald’s voice faded into incoherence, and I sat, elbows on knees, my head and the receiver in my hands, trying to remember what had happened that night. Whether I’d come straight home, or had first gone back to Noël’s. My mind was racing so furiously I started shaking. I looked up at the front door, imagining the thumping knock of the police arriving any moment.

‘Noël’s
beside
himself.’

All I could remember were his eyes staring up at me.

‘Such a
trag
edy. The doctor said he’d be fine, then only an hour before Noël was to collect him from the hospital…complications of some sort…secondary infection they said…’