The Virtuoso (26 page)

The morbid smell of bitter almonds cut through the still, icy air of the entrance hall. They walked into the music room and there they saw Noël, crouched on the floor, his right arm resting on the chartreuse-coloured silk sofa, his head collapsed on his forearm, his skin bearing a faint blue pallor. Despite the near-freezing temperature he was dressed as if he were somewhere quite warm, wearing a red plaid open-necked shirt, khaki shorts and white plimsolls.

On the occasional table beside him were a near-empty bottle of gin and a small brown bottle of prussic acid, labelled by the Cambridge University Chemistry Department, later found to have been stolen. On the desk near the window and all over the floor were loose pages of writing, some ripped or screwed up into balls
and strewn across the room, amongst a mess of manuscripts, scores and gramophone records. On the wall near Noël’s body, at about chest height on the brand-new green, gold and ivory wallpaper, was a large stain, like a watermark, and stuck to it were tiny shards of crystal. Scattered on the carpet below were the broken remains of a tumbler, coated with a clear, sticky residue of cyanide and gin.

My first real venture out after the funeral was to hear a Myra Hess recital at Morley College. I was nervous about going, not just because Tippett and, no doubt, many of the others would be there, but also because of the thought of seeing that small brown Steinway, which used to tremble under Noël’s pounding fortissimos, sitting there on stage, having survived him. But it did seem fitting to go and hear Myra, of all people: a woman whose gentle touch and radiant smile had carried London’s audiences through the war.

Myra rarely veered from what she called the
roast beef of music—
Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Scarlatti, Schubert and Schumann—and in recent times had grown even more uncompromising in her programmes. Today’s recital was entirely Bach, mainly late partitas and toccatas. There was something indefinably calm and enduring about the music of Bach, attending to the spirit rather than the emotions. One felt a great sense of dignity in being stirred by such music.

As Gerald collected my hat and coat from the stand
he insisted once more that this concert was just what the doctor ordered.

After a most august performance, Myra played, as an encore, the crowd’s old favourite, ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, a piece she’d performed many times at the National Gallery concerts. There was one recital in particular that I recalled hearing with my father on a lovely still autumn day after a night of heavy shelling. It was well known that Myra had nerves that gnawed at her like ants and was often totally incapable of giving a public performance, but that day she rose to the occasion, drifting into the room in her long black gown and playing the most lambent rendition of this familiar work, as if she’d arrived from a place that had never known bombs, raids or propaganda. The counterpoint voices meandered like trickling tributaries into a sunlit stream on which the audience gently floated.

Just as it had at the National Gallery so many years earlier, a reverent silence settled over the room once Myra lifted her hands from the piano. Then, after several seconds, the crowd launched into fierce applause. Myra stood and took a bow, wearing a timid but gracious smile, then drifted offstage.

We joined Pat, Tippett and John in the foyer, who were all raving about Dame Myra and her playing, John insisting she ought to be ordained the Jewish Queen Mother.

I hadn’t seen any of these men since the funeral, and there we hadn’t spoken. Today they all nodded and greeted us cheerfully enough, but I felt, maybe
imagined, a degree of reserve. I couldn’t be certain how much Noël had told any of them about his radio dedication to me, and about me being over at his house the night Bill went to hospital.

The conversation turned to Bach and soon enough to cataracts, the cause of Bach’s blindness. Pat mentioned a colleague of his, Harold Ridley, who’d developed a synthetic lens for cataract suffers from plexiglass. ‘If Bach had been alive today,’ he stated in his scholarly tone, ‘we could have prevented his blindness.’ He raised his eyebrows and smiled, as if, I thought, laying claim to all those yet-to-be-written works of the composer.

I watched this tall, slender, well-to-do man, thinking how impeccably he spoke; it wasn’t at all surprising he’d done such a sterling job with the press, quieting any rumours about Noël. I’d always been slightly intimidated by Pat’s intellect, and, shall we say, class. But the longer I stood listening to him chatter away, the more firmly I concluded that, despite what this distinguished surgeon might or might not know about Noël’s and my relationship, he could hardly afford to think ill of me, or blame me in any way. He was, after all, a doctor, and in charge of Noël’s care on the day that Noël died.

‘In Bach’s time they treated cataracts with
couching
operations,’ Pat continued. ‘The blind patient sits in a chair—no anaesthetic of course; maybe a mug of mead if they’re lucky—and the surgeon leans over with a sharp instrument, a bit thicker than a darning
needle, and pokes it in the patient’s eye.’ Then he turned to me, positioning his long surgeon’s fingers in front of my face, as if holding a large needle, and demonstrated the deft jab into my right eye. ‘When he feels something hard—the lens—he works it down away from the pupil, letting it fall into the vitreous fluid. If the lens doesn’t stay down, it has to be broken up in pieces and these fragments pressed down inside the eye.’

‘Oh, how barbaric!’ Gerald said, screwing up his face.

‘The procedure was a favourite with travelling surgeons because the patient would usually go blind soon afterwards,’ Pat continued, performing to his captive crowd.

‘Bach’s surgeon was an Englishman called John Taylor,’ I chipped in.

‘Yes, scoundrel of a man!’ Pat said, without even glancing at me. ‘He blinded Bach in Germany one year, returned to England, and—you won’t believe it—blinded Handel a year later!’

‘Well, he clearly wasn’t very fond of Baroque music, was he?’ John exclaimed.

‘An absolute villain,’ Pat added, turning to me smiling.

‘It’s a matter of perspective, really. Many people at the time considered Taylor a highly skilled surgeon,’ I said, avoiding Pat’s now-indignant gaze. I’d always been fascinated by the character of John Taylor but hadn’t realised until this point that I actually felt quite
sorry for the chap. I found it hard to accept that Taylor understood the ramifications of the operation he was performing; surely it was a case of either bad luck or sheer incompetence. I tried to imagine what he would have thought if someone had told him that two hundred years after his own death he would be remembered not for anything he’d contributed to the world but for what he’d taken away. That a group of musicians and music-lovers would be standing around at a Sunday-afternoon concert talking about his heinous role in musical history.

Pat shifted his stare from me, returning his focus to the group. ‘Well, you can believe what you like, young man. I think Samuel Johnson summed Dr Taylor up perfectly when he described him as the triumph of impudence over ignorance.’

Pat stood there wearing his charmingly clever smile, while Tippett, John and Gerald stood about him, laughing in response.

I remained bothered about the conversation at Morley College all evening and, shortly after dinner, retired to my room, pondering the life of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Several months after the fateful operation by Taylor and less than a year after writing the Mass in B minor, Bach died from a stroke. On his death bed, lying there poor and blind, had Bach thought about all the people he had lost in his life, and was he grateful for the pending reunions? I wondered. Would he have reflected on his mammoth opus and felt at peace that he had left
the world so much, or would he have been frustrated, departing with still so much more to give? Or perhaps, as Pat would no doubt suggest, he lay there cursing the day John Taylor was born into the world, wishing the worst possible retribution upon him.

When my father told me the stories of Bach—how as an orphaned child he copied out the manuscripts of Froberger and Buxtehude by moonlight each night while his jealous older brother was sleeping; or how as an adult, he’d walk 250 miles and back to hear an important musician perform—I wondered why other people did not choose to follow in this great man’s path. I did not question for a moment that virtuosity could be earned, that anyone could
choose
to be brilliant. Yes, I remember as a child, lying there in bed, listening to my father potter around his study late into the night, and actually
deciding
to be brilliant. I thought about Bach during the 1720s, after the death of his first wife and during the long procession of infant deaths suffered with his second wife, how he was writing up to one cantata each week, one of the most astonishing creative feats in the history of Western music. Just a child, I had lain there thinking about all of this and I’d decided that I too would do the same.

I now sat in my room at Gerald’s house, looking out at the night sky and garden, deathly still and glowing steel-grey. Downstairs in the library, I could hear Gerald playing the
Pearl Fishers
on the gramophone and imagined him sitting back in his armchair, closing his eyes and listening to the flute and the harp and
that sonorous duet of the two lovestruck fishermen. I thought about my father and all those times I’d watched from my bedroom window as he was carted off to hospital in the neighbour’s Morris Minor. I thought about Noël’s imploring eyes as he gazed up at me from the harpsichord that last time I saw him. Parading past me was this stream of events in which had I been someone else, someone of some worth, I might have
acted
, and things might have turned out differently. I began to think that in life we actually get to decide very little at all. We don’t decide to be a Johann Sebastian Bach or a John Taylor; the world decides for us. The more I thought about this, the more certain I became that I indeed possessed no greatness; I held no claim on fame or glory at all. The truth that I’d held so closely to my chest was that the world had seated me closer to Taylor than to Bach: a realisation with which I wasn’t sure that I could live.

The next couple of months at Gerald’s passed in a fog of whisky, writing and cigars. I’m not sure if Gerald was regretting his open-ended invitation for me to stay—I was now making a decent income from my articles and at least now was able to pay my way—but he was occasionally becoming quite short with me, accusing me of all manner of things around the house, from purposely withholding telephone messages, to quietly drinking the house dry. Don’t misunderstand me—we got along marvellously most of the time, but every now and then little rows would erupt over some small
annoyance and I’d jump down his throat, such as when he was too stingy in meting out my pills, or when he came up with unthinkable stories that such and such a person had apparently said about Noël.

Then one evening Gerald dragged me out for a drink at the Pink Elephant. I went along just to please him; he had, after all, done so much for me, it really was the least I could do. Besides, playing up to the gin-doused flirtations and dreary innuendos of priggish Cambridge lads and chorus boys was an act I’d been pulling off with little effort for years.

It didn’t take me long to fall back into my old routine and sidle up to a tiny man seated at the bar with pencilled eyebrows, dark almond-shaped eyes, a shining black comb-over and wearing an indigo silk neck scarf. I recognised him as Kip, the actor I’d met a few years ago at Le DucÉ, the same night I’d met Gerald. I contemplated going home with him and amused myself with the possibility that I could effect something—an event, an intimate exchange.

I noticed his kohl-lined eyelids batting and those eyes sizing me up in the same cold, listless manner I recognised in myself, and it was at that point I realised I had no interest in this man, that my desire was born of boredom and something more akin to malice.

Kip spoke to me about being terrified of leaving his digs at night since a close friend had been charged with gross indecency. ‘Luckily he was spared from the queer-ken,’ he said in a seamless blend of Polari and hysteria. ‘He’s been put on the treatment and ever since he’s been
growing bloomin’ foofs.’ He gestured a large pair of breasts in front of him. ‘He was wearing a sweater the other day and I told him he looked like Lana Turner!’

I mentioned my close call with Noël, realising as soon as I’d spoken that I hadn’t told this story to anyone, and had the dreadful thought I might be incriminating myself in some way.

Kip replied with a theatrical shrug and exhaled his cigarette smoke. ‘Yes, well that bold
omi
did plough his own furrow, didn’t he?’

I responded with a laugh and nod, unsure which had pained me more: Kip’s outright dismissal of my tale or the reminder of Noël’s notorious reputation.

Kip went on to tell me he’d heard from a neighbour in Hammersmith that the police were constant visitors at Noël’s house, always dropping in for a cuppa and a chat. ‘You know what I heard?’ he said with a salacious smile. ‘Noël was out trolling one night and tried to blag an undercover rozzer who was having a Barclays in the Kings Park cottages. Noël would have been thrown in the queer-ken except it turned out the rozzer’s mother was an ex-opera singer. He said to Noël as he was taking off the cuffs that she’d have hanged, drawn and quartered him if she’d found out her son was responsible for putting away the likes of Mr Noël Mewton-Wood.’ He raised his pencilled eyebrows that already hung in a surprised expression too far up his forehead and pursed his lips.

I responded with a faint smile, obviously not enough to warrant further attention. He turned away and
dipped his head coyly to a young spiv wearing a velvet collar and a lurid kipper tie, who’d just sat down next to him at the bar.

Later at home, when Gerald and I sat for our nightcap in the library, I relayed Kip’s story, hoping that Gerald would assure me what an incorrigible liar Kip was known to be.

‘Oh
that,
’ Gerald responded, as if I was referring to some inconsequential incident. ‘Yes, yes, well, the dear boy was bound to get into a bit of trouble now and again, wasn’t he? I mean, that was just the way Noël was.’