The Virtuoso (24 page)

For a moment I felt I couldn’t breathe, I was so confounded by relief, shock and joy. ‘That’s awful.’

‘I know, it’s simply dreadful.’ Gerald’s words were drawn out, each syllable carefully enunciated, giving me time to calm my thinking. He continued, saying what a lovely man Bill was—’We were just chatting
the other day; he told me the funniest story about when he went to greet the Ballet Rambert at Hamburg Station during a heatwave. One of the male dancers had fainted on the platform, and Bill said Marie Rambert walked straight towards him, and just
stepped over
the unconscious dancer, held out her hand and said, “A pleasure to meet you, Mr Fedrick."’ Gerald laughed briefly. ‘Oh, I really can’t believe he’s gone!’

I asked Gerald to repeat what had happened; I said I’d been too shocked to listen before.

Gerald sighed, but as soon as he started I could tell there was nothing he’d rather be talking about.

‘Peritonitis—burst appendix. Apparently he’d suffered stomach-aches for days…’

‘Really?’

‘And
poor
Noël, he knows more about medicine than most doctors—he blames himself entirely.’

‘Would it have made a difference…? If he’d stayed home?’

‘Oh, I have no idea, darling.’ Gerald always called me darling when unhinged. ‘I really don’t think there’s much he could have done. Though Raymond says Noël was in a
ghastly
state by the time he left.’

My head sank further into my hands. ‘So was I…’

‘Don’t
I
know—
I
was the one who found you in the kitchen drinking Pommeroy from the bottle and put you straight in a cab!’

I sat on the stairs listening to Gerald’s story—all the details he’d been scrupulously collecting all day.

How Noël had rung Pat in the early hours of the morning, and that Pat had picked them up and taken them to the Westminster Hospital, just as Bill’s appendix burst. When Bill came out of the operating theatre the doctors said that he’d be fine to leave the following morning. ‘Noël cancelled his broadcast and stayed at the hospital all yesterday. Then, early this morning, Noël got the call—oh, it’s just
awful!
And you’ll never believe what day it is today.’

The ivy-green door, the Rondo in D.

‘It’s simply
awful!’

Over the following week I barely left my room. I didn’t want to run into anyone—least of all Noël—who might hold me partially to blame. I spoke to Gerald daily; he told me what a wonderful job Noël had done with the funeral—I know, I really ought to have gone—and that Noël had gone to stay with Pat for the time being but was practising at home each day in preparation for his German tour.

It’s awful to admit but at the time I felt the outcome couldn’t have been better for me, and as the days passed I felt a growing ease. I’d sit in my room listening to records in a luxurious state of calm, like a caterpillar snug in its cocoon enjoying the last still moments before making its glorious entrance out into the sun. I also sensed that after the initial shock—and any irrational thoughts that we might be somehow partly responsible—Noël, too, would realise what a blessing this had turned out to be. Yes, I was beginning to feel
as if I’d masterminded the entire event: that everything was unfolding exactly as it ought.

Then one evening, as if to confirm everything, I was relaxing in my room with a gin and listening to Maynard Sullivan’s Concert Hall show when Maynard mentioned that the evening’s programme had changed due to Mewton-Wood cancelling his scheduled broadcast of Weber sonatas. He would instead repeat the previous week’s broadcast, which had received such an overwhelmingly positive response: Mewton-Wood playing several of the dances from
Davidsbündlertänze.
As I fetched my score, Maynard went on to say that, in the spirit of Schumann, Mewton-Wood had dedicated the performance to his beloved Clara.
His beloved Clara.
He’d dedicated the music to me.

After a week I decided to write to Noël. I kept the message brief (aware that so much can be misconstrued from written words), expressing my deepest condolences and letting him know how fond I was of Bill. I then went on to tell him how thrilled I was to hear his
Davidsbündlertänze
broadcast and how I really did understand
everything.
I told him I’d get started on the music as soon as my arm allowed and that whenever he was ready—no rush at all—he must come and see me. I’d be waiting for his call.

Friday came around and I still hadn’t heard from Noël. I’d been on the verge of ringing for days, but reminded myself that Noël mightn’t have received my letter until Tuesday, and as he was preparing to leave
for Germany the following week it was perfectly understandable that he hadn’t found time to ring. After all, I thought, perhaps he’d decided to write to me, in which case a letter was sure to arrive on Monday.

To take my mind off things I decided to go to Aldeburgh for the weekend, get some fresh sea air, then ring Noël on Monday, whether I’d heard from him or not.

At Aldeburgh I checked in at the Mill Inn and spent my first morning walking along the shingled beach, all speckled grey, blue, brown and white, and fringed with bushes of red valerian and yellow-horned poppy. I passed Crag House, Ben and Peter’s home, where Noël stayed whenever he came to the festival, wondering if the pair was home, and whether, given the circumstances, I ought to drop in for a visit. As I stood staring at the house, which sat in between the sea and the main street, I thought about the times, many years earlier, when I’d wandered past during the festival, how it always seemed to me like a large, faded pink music-box, melody pouring out over the pots of geraniums hanging from the second-floor sunroom, wafting into the seaside breeze, mingling with the sound of the waves slapping and sifting through the sand, bicycle bells and the cries of gulls. On those summer afternoons I would often see Ben, Peter, Noël and others, sitting in sun chairs around the back of the house, watching the herring and lobster fishermen return with their nets and pots. In the evenings, after
the day’s concerts had come to an end, E.M. Forster, the Del Mars, Lord Harewood, Imogen Holst and all the other visiting musicians, artists and performers would descend on the house, playing music, chatting and drinking until late. Each day I would walk along the beach or the main street, watching them head down the road to a recital, or pile into Ben’s Alvis, taking off for a drive through the countryside. Years later, when Noël told me about rowing on Thorpeness Mere with a boat of carol singers drifting by, and about the premiere of Britten’s
Saint Nicolas
in the parish church (when Ben was so nervous that he listened from the churchyard, lying on his back with his hands over his face), I had nodded along to Noël’s tales, never mentioning that I’d witnessed each entire event.

On the Sunday afternoon, even though the clouds were low and dark, I borrowed a bicycle from the owner of the inn and rode west out of town to the fourteenth-century Aldeburgh parish church where, two and a half years earlier, Gerald and I had stood among a crowd of hundreds, waiting to hear Noël unveil the new Gerhard concerto. I thought about that sunny afternoon, of Norman Del Mar conducting from the pulpit, waving his arms about all the way from his shoulders like a crazed evangelist, gazing devoutly at his soloist at the piano. I remembered how I’d walked from the church that afternoon, the sun still high in the sky, the churchyard and garden abuzz with people, my senses keenly aware of the warbler singing in the trees, the bees circling about
the roadside poppies, and that for months after settling back into London life I’d find myself drifting into the same dazed euphoria each time I thought about that day, imagining myself returning to Aldeburgh one year with Noël.

I wrapped my coat tighter around me and entered through the shadow of the tower and stair turret into the cold, empty church, listening to the distant hum of the wind coursing about the meadows. Even though I sat alone at a pew, the
reality
of this return with Noël seemed, at that moment, as close to me as ever. I looked up at the stained-glass window of St Peter and St Paul, which even in the diminishing light still rained down its kaleidoscope of colours, then stood up from my pew.

Stepping over the gravestones in the aisle, memorials to fallen Aldeburgh soldiers, and heading towards the door, my eye was caught by the large brass-and-marble plaque commemorating the crew of the lifeboat
Aldeburgh
who’d all died in a capsizing over fifty years earlier. Arched above the sculptural relief of the boat, an inscription was emblazoned—
Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life
—and as I read this line, my body, which had been trembling with cold, was suddenly alight with the realisation that there really was
nothing
I wouldn’t do for Noël.

Wandering around the churchyard and garden, my eyes flitting over the crumbling tombstones and inscriptions, I thought about all the years I’d known
Noël. I realised that I had, for so long, been an aspiring musician myself, hankering for his attention, yet I’d never once told him how I really felt. This was a man who embodied Romanticism, who could play Schumann, Beethoven and Chopin in a way that brought his listeners to tears. Yet I had never been able to tell him what he meant to me, and that I was willing to devote myself, unconditionally, to him. As I thought about all of this I remember a feeling of extraordinary serenity coming over me. I realised I’d forgiven Bill for all that had passed, and even found myself telling him I was sorry for everything he’d had to endure. Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad sort after all, I thought, just caught unwittingly between Noël and me.

I rode straight back into town, anxious to return to London to speak with Noël. Looking up at the sky as I pedalled, the clouds seemed to be shifting hurriedly to the east, dragging darker ones behind. At the inn I consulted the train timetable pasted to the wall at the foot of the stairs, and realised I had several hours to wait until the next city-bound train. Packing my bags, I looked out the window and noticed the small Moot Hall that had sat in the centre of this little Tudor town when Shakespeare’s theatre troupe had performed here, but which now trembled a stone’s throw from the waves, as if resigned to being one day swallowed by the sea.

I hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast so walked up the road and ordered a fish pie at the grey, weathered benches in front of the Cross Keys Inn, amongst
barrels of withered hydrangea, and looked out across the sea. The clouds were beginning to darken even more, the filtered sun casting a surreal light over the boats that rocked precariously, moored on the water, as if posing for a Turner painting. Watching the melodic rise and fall of the swell, I recalled the photographs in the paper from earlier in the year when the North Sea had risen eight feet, bursting the Aldeburgh sea wall and submerging the entire Moot Green and the eastern side of town. I thought how extraordinary it was that these waters, usually so majestic and serene, were capable of transforming, within almost an instant, into the most terrifying and malevolent creature.

On my way back to the inn, with the wind whipping in off the water, I spoke to the only other person on the beach, an old lady foraging for pipis, whose face was as weather-beaten as the igneous rocks strewn along the point. She told me in her thick Suffolk accent that the Romans had built a fortress here that was now well under the sea; that a bronze head of Claudius had been found in the nearby river, and that she had been standing on this very spot when
Magdapur
was sunk by the Germans. With her craggy face wrapped up in scarves she looked like a hermit crab, and spoke with her finger, pincer-like, pointing out threateningly to the sea, telling me that we stood powerless against the ravages of time. Normally I would have been irritated by such a garbled rant and menacing grey eyes, especially in the face of an encroaching storm, but
there was little that could upset the revelatory mood I was in.

I arrived back home late that night to find several messages taped to my door, including one mentioning that Gerald had rung several times and I must ring him back urgently. I peeled off the messages and, exhausted by my day and excited by the thought of the week ahead, went straight to bed, feeling, as I lay there, as if I were on a large steamer ship, being carried along by the ocean. I enjoyed the deepest sleep I’d had in months.

By the time I finally spoke to Gerald the following afternoon I had already bought the morning paper and read on the front page that, over the weekend, Noël Mewton-Wood,
the brilliant Australian pianist
, had killed himself.

I still
shudder when I think of that day.

There he was on the front page of the newspaper—
Australian Pianist Found Dead in Music Room.
Next to an advertisement for Yardley hand cream—a picture of long slender fingers at a piano keyboard, can you believe? And underneath,
Are you proud of your hands? Hands are such tell-tales…

I had just made myself a cup of tea, just sat down with the paper rolled up under my arm and was deciding whether it was the right time to ring him. Then I opened the paper and saw his face, his sombre eyes. It was one of the recent photographs taken for his German tour. He didn’t like those photos at all; he thought they made him look angry. If I recall, the day they were taken, he had been angry. The wallpapering in his terrace had been delayed and he was going to have to cancel his house-warming party until his return from Germany. But then he laughed it off, as he always
did, saying he ought never to have asked a Roman Catholic to wallpaper a room in a print called Colosseum, then went chuckling off to Kensington to have his photo taken.

And now his simmering face stared at me—
dead
—from the newspaper.

The rain rapped at the window with its long, icy fingertips. I pressed my palm flat against the page, running my fingers across his cold newspaper face, taking a sip of tea. I couldn’t taste it—just felt it like warm tears rolling down the back of my throat.

Dear God, I’m crying again. And I’ve been feeling so much better lately. There are bound to be tears all round tonight, but it would be preferable not to turn up weeping like a child.

And now my coffee’s cold. A horrible thin, wrinkly skin stretches across the top. I’ll call Martha and ask her to bring me a nip of whisky. Only a nip. It’s almost time to get going. Get this dreaded evening over and done with.

The funeral was at Golders Green Crematorium on the Wednesday. Gerald picked me up in the morning wearing a mauve suit with a sprig of winter honeysuckle in the lapel. Seeing him at the door dressed like that, I
became suddenly aware of how wretched I looked and smelt. Until that moment, I’d found a brutal comfort in the fetid odour of my room—overflowing ashtrays and picked-at cans of food lying all about the place; there was something vibrant and robust about the stench of decomposition. But the dewy waft that accompanied Gerald’s entrance instantly aged everything around me. He was aware of it too, I’m sure, but simply smiled, patted me on the back and trundled me into his Citroën.

‘Pull up all right then, did we?’ he asked as he started the engine, nodding to my suit, the same navy velvet number he’d seen me in the night before. ‘I feel horrid this morning. As if I’ve been half-beaten to death by the entire Chelsea horn section.’

Gerald had spent the last two evenings at my place. I’d refused to go out as he’d wanted, so we compromised by sitting in at my digs and polishing off three bottles of Glenfiddich (I hadn’t been able to stomach gin—too remindful of Soho bar life; I found the punishing sourness of whisky far more desirable at the time), listening to all of Noël’s recordings and reminiscing over his career like two drunk old radio announcers conducting an on-air retrospective.

I could barely remember Monday night, or Monday daytime either for that matter. When Gerald came over on the Tuesday he told me he’d found me in bed the previous evening listening to ‘
Vissi d’Arte’
, wearing an evening suit, my mother-of-pearl cufflinks, a silk hanky in my pocket, and reeking of lavender water (as
well as, of course, whisky). I was blathering about having been to Sadler’s Wells to see
Tosca
, but that the insolent wench at the box office would only sell me tickets to
Salome.
He said he put me to bed around midnight after I started snoring in my chair and my tumbler dropped out of my hand onto the carpet and rolled across the floorboards. I had followed a trail of ants to a sticky glass under my bed that next morning, so I guess most of what he told me was true.

Tuesday, I could remember. I rang work and told them I had a migraine (which was partially correct: I did have a vile hangover for that treacherous half-hour upon waking before the first shot of whisky went ringing through my veins). Then Gerald arrived and we went for a walk around Regent’s Park, visited a few galleries on Bond Street, stocked up on chocolate at Woolworths and even poked our heads in at Harrods. It was one of those blue-sky winter days when everything appears so still, crisp and clear, as if you’re looking at it all through a bottle of fine gin. Quite frankly, I was surprised how reasonable I felt. But by about five o’clock, when the sun had sunk below the treetops of Regent’s Park, the long, cold evening ahead stretched out in front of me like a desert, and a feeling of absolute terror set in. I suggested a whisky at my place with a tone of such indifference that I was surprised when Gerald instantly agreed.

And then, so I was led to believe, it was Wednesday.

We drove to Noël’s terrace in Hillgate Place, as I’d insisted on placing some winter roses on the doorstep.

Afterwards, we were motoring along Westbourne Grove, making scant conversation about a record Gerald was reviewing and an exhibition of medieval manuscripts that had just opened in Chelsea, when Gerald started up again on his campaign to get me chatting to his friend Charles Monk, a commissioning editor at Oxford University Press, who’d apparently been most impressed by the
daring
but
level-headed insight
of my articles, my ability to
penetrate the minds
of musicians and composers.

‘Yes, I suppose I could,’ I replied, partly to get him off my back and partly because it suddenly didn’t seem such a big deal any more, and I struggled to remember why I’d been so opposed to the idea in the past. The last two times I’d rung the library to tell them I wouldn’t be making it in to work, I’d felt as if I was ringing someone else’s work, that this place actually had nothing to do with me whatsoever. I thought about my colleagues—Marjorie, who glanced at her watch every time I was seconds late to work; Angus, and his cloying obsession with Bach’s sacred cantatas; and dithery Gladys, who’d blown the element in the urn three times so far this winter—and already they flickered in my mind like characters from a past life. The smell of the books, the rattle of the trolleys, the furry-edged cards of the catalogues all seemed like snapshots from childhood, isolated and indistinct. I started to doubt that I would ever be going back.

There was a hold-up in the traffic, so we sat idling behind a bus, the car humming away contentedly,
making occasional hiccups as if choking on the cold. I was about to suggest that maybe I’d write about Chopin when Gerald, with his usual candour, said, ‘Perhaps you could write something on Noël.’ Then his voice trailed off, his eye drawn to something on the street outside the passenger window. I turned around and saw, parked alongside us, a hearse. Yards away from where I sat, two men in black suits stood at the open back doors, sliding in a casket or, rather, a casket-shaped box. It didn’t seem to be made from solid wood but what resembled plywood, and was draped in lengths of blue and red satin material.

‘Oh dear,’ Gerald said.

We both sat there, unable to avert our eyes from the box. I measured the length of it in my mind, felt the weight of it in the pallbearers’ hands, imagined the body supine beside us. We barely spoke a word for the rest of the drive.

We had lunch at a pub in Golders Green. I don’t know what I was thinking, ordering steak-and-kidney pie (I could stomach little more than the crust); the stout went down far easier. Our conversation, which had started up as soon as we took a seat by the fire, was again beginning to grow rigid. Each time I spoke I felt as though I was in front of an entire auditorium, every word rattling about awkwardly in my head. By the time we turned into Hoop Lane and were approaching the gates to the crematorium I felt almost mute.

We found a park just behind Pat’s Bentley. From both directions along the street, darkly dressed figures
moved like sleepwalkers towards the main gate and the redbrick Lombardic buildings that spread out grimly just off the road. A large, motionless crowd was gathered inside the gate, and as we walked closer this mass of dark grey began to define itself into hundreds of suited gentlemen, hands in pockets or drawing on cigarettes. There were faces I’d seen on stage, on screen, in the green rooms, at music festivals, or at Noël’s and other parties over the years; it seemed every London musician, conductor, composer and critic was here on this overcast Wednesday afternoon. For a moment I felt a twinge of pride, seeing all these famous men with whom, for one day, I belonged.

I only recall seeing a few women, though there were probably more. Chatting to a group of men (whom I just managed to recognise without tumblers and cigars in their hands) was Claire, who ran the Copa Bar in Soho, looking like Queen Mary, draped head to toe in crêpe and clutching a bunch of Palma violets. As I watched her, tears streaming almost gaily down her blotchy face, a man from one of the tabloids approached Gerald and me, nodded in Claire’s direction and asked if that was Noël’s mother.

‘Heavens no,’ Gerald replied, almost laughing.

It didn’t take us long to spot Dulcie and point her out. Chatting to Pat, in the sea of tar-coloured suits, she was wearing white cat’s-eye glasses, a narrow-waisted sky-blue frock and a matching blue hat with a plume of white ostrich feathers spraying out from the top. She looked as if she was on her way to Ascot.

He raised his eyebrows and smiled, amused, then turned back to us. ‘Knew him well then, did you?’

The word
knew
hit hard—Gerald and I had refrained from using such language, delicately sidestepping the past tense—and I resented hearing it from a journalist I’d only met in passing. What’s more, he had that perky stare of a newshound on the job.

‘Fairly well,’ I replied.

‘First time I saw him was during the war with the Liverpool Philharmonic,’ the journalist stated. ‘The way he played that big cadenza at the end of the first movement of the Beethoven number one was absolutely dazzling. Everyone leapt to their feet at the end. Later I heard some old colonel say to FitzBrown, “I wish you’d ask your young pianists not to play those flamboyant cadenzas!” Fitzie put him straight, told him it was Beethoven’s original cadenza, just played as it ought to be played.’ He was grinning. Quite proud of himself, it seemed.

Gerald smiled politely. ‘I’m sure the colonel was much obliged for the information.’

The wooden doors to the chapel opened, and as we shuffled towards the entrance I saw a glass-fronted box mounted on the wall, and within, a plaque that read
Noël Mewton-Wood.
It was then that I was struck by a grave familiarity: we had all queued like this, to see Noël, so many times before. The Wigmore, the Albert Hall, the Festival Hall—it now seemed, as we were ushered past the name printed boldly at the door, that all those past occasions had been rehearsals for this
one final performance. It seemed impossible that Noël wouldn’t step out under the lights and play for us all, as he always had.

Inside the chapel, waiting for his audience, there he was. On a navy-skirted podium, surrounded by wreaths of white lilies and roses: a plywood box draped with blue and red satin.

The sermons began, followed by hymns, and then telegrams from Stravinsky, Hindemith and other conductors, composers and musicians from around the world. Eddie Sackville-West stood and spoke of Noël’s enthusiasm, his friendliness, his brilliant intellect, and that rhapsodic Lisztian quality he possessed. That hidden strain of romanticism, he said, the mixture of power and extreme sensitivity that made his playing of the
Davidsbündlertänze
so utterly memorable.

Despite the reminiscing about Noël, or perhaps because of it, I listened without any sense of Noël’s absence. It was only once the service was over and we were asked to move out into the memorial garden that I felt a stab of panic. I looked over my shoulder at the casket for the first time, properly, and imagined Noël lying inside.

The doors were opened and a numbing wind landed on my cheeks. Outside, I moved about amongst the sniffing and weeping, the glazed, blinking eyes and hankies blotting cheeks. I walked through the grieving crowd, watching with fascination, as if I were a bird perched up in the maple, gazing down upon the mourners.

Britten was shaking his head to Pears and Myra Hess, exclaiming that he didn’t understand why so many people he loved found living so difficult. As everyone started to shrink into small groups, unburdening themselves with memories, crying freely, crumpling under one another’s embrace, I started to feel everything unravelling. It was as if an air-raid siren had sounded and I was the only one who could hear it. My lungs were contracting and rising in my chest, a hard-walled capsule wedged beneath my throat. I knew that I had to get away from there immediately.

Gerald clearly would have liked to stay—his eyes and cheeks were sodden, and he now wanted to douse himself further with wine and recollection—but he took one look at me, patted me on the back and said, ‘Let’s get you home, shall we?’ And thank God he did. When we arrived back at my digs and bumped into Ma O’Grady at the bottom of the stairs she handed me a letter that had been mistakenly delivered to the neighbours on Monday.

I took one look at it, saw that sweeping handwriting that I knew so well, and burst into elated laughter, as if everything over the last few days had been one extraordinary farce. I ripped open the envelope; inside was a thin piece of notepaper, folded in half.

Friday

My dear friend,

Thank you so much for your kind letter, I really am very grateful. I’m so glad you and Bill got along
so well, he thought you most charming and was looking forward to more of our evenings together.

I leave for Germany next week and expect to return just before Christmas. I would so like to pop over and see you after I get back, I recently stumbled upon some wonderful Weber duets that I’m sure you’ll find delightful. Have you managed to get going on the Schumann?

I’m sorry that your arm is still playing up

—Really, one’s insides are the devil.

Once again, very many thanks.

Yours,

Noël