Rogue's Gallery (11 page)

‘Maybe you are right. Maybe he was my many-greats grandfather.'

They looked at each other and laughed. If she had not been under the spell of the shroud she might have seen that his eyes were cold, that they belied his laugh.

The tour of the royal apartments was coming to an end. They emerged into the courtyard of the palace, then through an arch back to the Piazza Castello. Violetta could see her man for the first time in the sunlight. How strong the mouth was, how bright the eyes! He was even more exciting than she had thought.

‘I've been so glad of your company. Could I buy you coffee? Or lunch – it's not far off lunchtime.'

‘Alas – I have to go back to my flat, my studio. I am a poor artist. I must get images from the palace into my sketchbook – mere stuff for the tourist trade, you understand, but my living. This hevening. What about dinner this hevening?'

‘What a good idea!' said Violetta, at last giving way to her girlish flirtatiousness. ‘Why don't you come to my hotel? I believe the Grand's dining room is excellent. Or we could go out to a restaurant.'

The man shook his head.

‘I am not a person to call at a respectable hotel. I would
not compromise a fine lady like yourself – me a poor, dirty artist. You come to my flat. I cook you a fine meal, authentic, something handed down in my family for generations.'

‘How exciting!'

‘I promise you, exciting! Here is my card. You come at eight?'

‘Eight o'clock,' she said, looking at the card. ‘Mario Pertusi.'

‘But you can call me Casanova. The ladykiller.'

They both laughed again. She wished she could kiss him her arrivederci, but she just said it and raised her hand, walking away across the square, past the news stand with its shrieking headline, past the cafes and the banks and the tourist office. Before plunging into the small streets leading to the cathedral she looked round, but her poor eyesight did not allow her to see Mario Pertusi still watching her from the entrance to the Palazzo Madama, his eyes cold and searing, his thin-lipped mouth open in anticipation.

And while Pertusi went back to his studio flat, with its crude drawings of women in notebook after notebook, its worse than amateur attempts at oil-paintings of screaming red mouths, bulging eyes, slashed breasts, which he now turned with practised hand to the wall, Violetta went to the cathedral and the queue to see the shroud, under skies that were clouding over fast. She was told that you had to buy a ticket to see it, and that the ticket office (of course) was elsewhere, back in the Piazza Castello. When she had bought it and taken it back to the cathedral she was told that the ticket was for admittance at a certain time – at seven o'clock that evening, in fact.

‘Are you trying to keep the damned thing secret?' she yelled at the scandalised priest on the door, then turned and ran out into the heavy rain which had now been pouring for five minutes. She looked around at the sodden nuns, at the priests with little groups from their villages, the women's groups that bore an awful resemblance to British Women's Institutes. She screwed up her ticket and dropped it on the cathedral steps.

‘I don't need to see him,' she said. ‘I've seen him.'

She made her way, absurdly happy and at peace, back to the Grand Hotel. She didn't need lunch – couldn't face anything so mundane. In her room she bathed, then lay on her bed dreaming,
seeing
him – the all-forgiving eyes, the air of vast and varied experience, the presence of a man who took on his shoulders the whole burden of sinning humanity.

Soon she sank into a light doze. Then she got up, put on her best and silkiest underclothes, her smartest dress. She emptied her bag to find his card and looked at his address. That was easy enough: a tiny street off the Via dell'Accademia. She could hardly wait, but forced herself to. To drink whisky would be like some kind of profanation. She must have all her senses alert, alive. At last it was time. She skirted the Piazza Carlo Felice till she found the Street of the Academy. At last she found Mario's little road, and number 12. It was an old house, shabby, dirtied by a million Fiats, by the dust and grime of passing humanity. There were no bells on the outside, but plenty of light inside. He had put them on for her. Third floor it had said on the card. She went inside and walked up the stairs,
hardly able to contain her excitement. There were two flats on the third floor, one seemingly empty. On the other was the name: MARIO PERTUSI. She waited for one delicious moment.

Then she rang the bell to begin her assignation with her shroud.

Mr Mozart, who appeared in two of my ‘Bernard Bastable' books, is a historical figure, but one of the ‘what if' variety. He is an answer to the question, ‘What if Mozart had stayed in Britain after his 1764 visit?' My answer was that he would have been reduced to musical hackwork, writing pap music for pantomimes and vaudevilles, and being patronised by royalty and bigwigs. In the second of the books, when Mozart was in his 70s, he formed a friendship with the young Princess Victoria in whom he was trying to discover some musical talents. Things seemed to be looking up
…

The commission came into my life accompanied by Mr Lewis Cazalet. The arrival of that gentleman was announced by Jeannie, my unusually bright and alert maid of all duties.

‘There's a wee mannikin to see you. Says he has a proposal, something to your advantage.'

I did not jump up with the alacrity I would once have
shown. My position as piano teacher to the Princess Victoria brought me, as well as great pleasure, none of it musical, a great number of prestigious pupils. I stirred reluctantly in my chair, only to have Jeannie say: ‘Don't hurry. Let the body wait.'

I nodded, and went to the piano and played a showy piece by my friend Clementi, sufficiently
forte
to penetrate walls. Jeannie came in as I was finishing.

‘He's walking up and down. He's a mite … unappetising.'

I raised my eyebrows, but I relied on Jeannie's judgement, and told her to show him in.

The gentleman whom she ushered in was not short, but there was a sort of insubstantiality about him: he was thin to the point of meagreness, his gestures were fluttery, and his face was the colour of putty.

‘Mr Mozart?' he said, taking my hand limply. ‘A great honour. I recognised one of your sonatas, did I not? Your fame is gone out to all lands.'

I was not well disposed towards anyone who could confuse a piece by Clementi with one of my sonatas.

‘Mr … er?'

‘Cazalet, Lewis Cazalet.'

‘Ah – a French name,' I said unenthusiastically. That nation had virtually cut the continent of Europe off for twenty years, the very years of my prime, when I could have earned a fortune.

‘We are a Huguenot family,' he murmured, as if that was a guarantee of virtue and probity.

‘Well, let's get down to business. I believe you have a proposition for me.' We sat down and I looked enquiringly at him.

‘Perhaps as a preliminary' – No please! Spare me the preliminaries! – ‘I should say that I am a man of letters, but not one favoured by fame and fortune like yourself.' Did my sitting room look as if I was favoured by fortune? ‘As a consequence I have been for the last five years librarian and secretary to Mr Isaac Pickles. You know the name?'

I prevaricated.

‘I believe I have heard the name mentioned by my son in Wakefield.'

‘You would have. A great name in the north. Immensely wealthy. Mr Pickles – his father was Pighills, but no matter – is one of the foremost mill-owners in the Bradford district. He is, in newspaper parlance, a Prince of Industry.'

‘I see,' I said. And I did. A loud vulgarian with pots of money and a power lust.

‘A most considerate employer, and generous to boot on occasion. I have no complaints whatsoever.'

‘That's good to hear. In sending you to see me this, er, Pickles has some end in view, I take it?'

Mr Cazalet hummed and hawed. Then he suddenly blurted out:

‘A requiem. He wishes you to write a requiem.'

‘Ah. I take it you mean a requiem mass. Is Mr Pickles a Catholic?'

‘He is not. His religion is taken from many and is his own alone.'

‘And the person for whom this requiem is to be written?'

‘Is immaterial.'

‘I assure you it is not. If it is for His late Majesty King
George IV it would be very different to what I would write if it was for the Archbishop of Canterbury, for example.'

‘I would imagine so!' He hummed again, let out something like a whimper, then said: ‘It is a requiem for his wife.'

‘I see. Mr Pickles was a devoted husband I take it?'

‘Mr Pickles is the complete family man – affectionate, but wise … I must insist, however, that the information I have just given you remain completely confidential. Com-plete-ly.'

‘It will. But there must surely be a reason for this request?'

He looked at me piteously but I held his gaze.

‘The lady in question is still alive.'

I sat back in my chair and simply said ‘Phew.'

In the next few minutes he confided in me the facts of the case. The wife in question was sick, sicker than she herself recognised, the doctor was certain her illness was terminal, but would not commit himself to a likely date. All the uncertainties of the commission would be reflected in the fee, and there was one further condition that Mr Pickles absolutely insisted upon:

‘That is that you tell no one of this commission, tell no one that you are writing a requiem, tell no one when it is performed that you wrote it, and give total and absolute rights in the work to Mr Pickles, along with all manuscript writings.'

‘I see,' I said. ‘And the fee he suggests that he pay me?'

‘The fee he is willing to pay you is fifteen hundred pounds.'

Fifteen hundred! Riches! Good dinners, fine silk clothes, rich presents for my children and grandchildren. Oh wondrous Pickles!

‘Say two thousand,' I said, ‘and I am Mr Pickles's to command.'

I was not deceived by the conditions. Mr Pickles was an amateur musician who wanted to pass my work off as his own. When his wife died he wanted to impose on the world by pretending that the superb requiem that was performed for her was written by his good self, divinely inspired (rather as that arch imposter Samuel Taylor Coleridge tries to pretend that his poems were in fact written by the Almighty, with himself acting merely as amanuensis). And it would all be in vain: every society person with any musical knowledge would know it was not by him, and anyone of real discernment would guess it was by Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart.

The only fly in the ointment was spelt out for me by the Princess Victoria at her next weekly piano lesson, where she murdered the works of lesser men than I (I had learnt the lesson of not encouraging her to her painful operations on works of my own). When she had screwed out of me the reasons for my lightness of heart (unusual, even with her delightful presence) she said:

‘He seems a very dishonest man, Mr Mozart.'

‘Distinctly devious, my dear.'

‘Devious! What a lovely word. If he can rob you of credit for the music, he can hardly be trusted to pay you for it.'

It was something I resolved to bear in mind.

From the start Mr Pickles showed he had learnt lessons from the negotiations of Mr Cazalet.

‘The fee I'm offering,' he said to me in his Hyde Park mansion, ‘is two thousand pounds. Subject, naturally, to some safeguards.'

Two thousand pounds, as asked for! I wouldn't like to say how long it would take me to earn that amount by more legitimate pursuits. Kensington Palace paid me thirteen and sixpence an hour for my lessons with the princess. We were sitting on a superb sofa, which must have been in Mr Pickles's family since the time he started to make a fortune from his niche in the cotton industry, which was warm underwear. I could have done with a pair of his long combinations now: this luxurious sofa was about half a mile from the nearest of two fires in the high-ceilinged drawing room of his mansion. I got up and strolled over to his fine grand piano, much nearer the fire. I played a few notes.

‘This will need tuning,' I said. Mr Pickles was outraged.

‘I assure you it is just as it came from the makers.'

‘That is the problem. Pianos go out of tune.'

‘But the finest singers and pianists have used it,' he neighed, like a child wailing. ‘My musical soirées are famous.'

‘Mr Pickles, I played for King George III when he was a young man. I know when a piano needs tuning.'

He backed away at once.

‘Yes, yes, of course. But we haven't gone over the cond—the safeguards.'

‘For a fee of two thousand pounds I accept those without question. If I understand Mr Cazalet, they are that you will own the piece absolutely, my name will not be attached to it, nor will I verbally lay claim to it. I suggest you might like to call it the Pickles Requiem, and state on the title page that it is “by a gentleman”.'

Mr Pickles almost purred.

‘Yes, yes. That has a ring to it. “The Pickles Requiem”. In memory of my late wife, of course.'

‘Of course. I didn't realise that your wife had died since I talked to Mr Cazalet.'

‘She has not. I refer to her proper designation when the great work comes to be performed.'

‘I see.' (But I didn't).

‘I want the piece to be sung within a week of her death, as a direct statement of my grief and sense of loss.'

‘Of course, I quite understand … You might find it advisable to let the orchestra and choir rehearse as much as possible in advance.'

‘Ah yes, I see. Well spoken, Mr Mozart. It must be done in the most tactful way possible.'

‘Totally secret, I would suggest. The public prints take any opportunity for ridicule … Now I think our business is over?'

‘You accept my conditions? And will compose the work entirely in this house, and leave the manuscript and any notes here always?'

‘I do accept, and will write the piece as you stipulate.'

We shook hands on it. I had not thought it necessary to mention that nothing in the ‘safeguards' prevented me from
writing out a second copy at home when I was satisfied with a movement.

On the following evening a message arrived from Pickles Palace (as I called it in my mind) with the news that the Danish couple I had recommended, Herr Bang and Dr Olufson, had been and tuned the piano. No expense spared, obviously. I felt quite sure Mr Pickles noticed no difference.

I began work next day. An anteroom next to the drawing room was assigned entirely to me – the lowly room being chosen not to downgrade my position and purpose in the household but to give easy access to the piano. I say ‘began work', but I had begun work on it in my heart before Mr Cazalet had closed the front door. It was to be a work not full of grandeur, still less grandiloquence, with no trace of suffering or hell fire. It was to be gentle, gracious, kind on the ear – a feminine requiem you might say, for the wife of a wealthy industrialist who must surely be his superior in manners, knowledge of the genteel world, and kindness.

On my third day of working in Pickles Palace, when I was just completing the Sanctus, which I had decided to write first, I had the honour of a visit. I was sitting in the great drawing room with welcome spring sunshine coming through the high windows, and trying things over on the piano, which was now a superb instrument and sounding like one. I was conscious after a time that I was not alone. I looked round in the direction of the door towards the hall, and saw a figure standing near the fire.

‘Very beautiful, Mr Mozart. Very lovely.'

The voice came as if from a great distance. It was
genteel – no, aristocratic – and it proceeded from a slim, graceful yet commanding woman of perhaps thirty-five or forty, elegantly dressed in a loose-fitting day gown. What a contrast she made to the mighty Pighills himself!

‘I am honoured by your approval. Do I have the pleasure of—?'

‘Mercy Pickles,' she said, distaste creeping into her tones. ‘I hope you will create one of the great ecclesiastical musical works. It should have a life beyond the immediate one marking the death of my husband's mother.'

‘Mo—?' I pulled myself up. ‘I suppose all composers would like to think their works will last.'

‘He is very fond of his mother,' she said, in the same distant tones she had used hitherto. ‘She used to make the mill-children's gruel and beat them when they went to sleep. Naturally he's devoted to her, but I found her less than charming.'

‘A wife seldom gets on with her husband's mother,' I said.

‘When my father sold me, at the age of sixteen, to a man more than twice my age, his mother made it her business to make my life an endless swamp of misery. When she suffered the onset of senility I made it my business to return her treatment in kind. It palled after a time. There was little joy in mistreating someone so far removed from the world that she could not appreciate the fact that she was being mistreated. Now all I wish is that she would hurry up dying.' She stopped, possibly feeling she had said too much. ‘And then we can all hear your wonderful requiem.' She thought for a second, then said: ‘Take care, Mr Mozart.'

She glided from the room. ‘Take care' is a popular form of farewell that sat ill with her aristocratic air. But perhaps she meant it to be taken not as a courtesy but a warning.

My first encounter with the Pickles sons was no less confusing, but even more thought-provoking. I was playing over a first sketch for the
Libera Me
section – a grand, sweeping theme with a hint of yearning – when the doors of the drawing room opened and two young men began a progress across the great expanse of the drawing room, talking loudly. I went on playing. The voices rose to a crescendo. I was intrigued and stopped playing to listen. The voices immediately ceased. I was impressed: they knew enough about music to notice when it stopped. They turned round and saw me.

‘You must be Mr Thingummy.'