Song Of Time (18 page)

At last, I felt happy, although it was worry rather than happiness which filled my head as I carried my violin beneath my coat through the freezing January rains, dodging rickshaws, cyclists, fountaining puddles and ghost vans on my way towards the apartment of the famous Harad Le Pape. Harad was an inescapable presence for anyone who cared about art in Paris then. There were inner circles, outer fringes, nodding acquaintances, latest discoveries, sell-outs and cast-asides—there were even those who would never, ever, hear mention of Harad Le Pape’s name—but to be entirely outside of the scope of Harad’s influence would have been cultural suicide, even if such a thing were possible. Harad’s finger wasn’t on the pulse. Harad
was
the pulse.

And, finally, I’d been noticed. My bracelet had chimed with a message telling me that I was invited to see Harad Le Pape. It seemed impos-sible—inevitable—or a total hoax. I felt lucky, but I also felt that this was no more than my due, as, drenched and nearly late, I gazed up at the spectacular apartments along the Marais. Here, even the ubiquitous advents no longer stained the clouds’ undersides, and the rain had sluiced the pavements nearly clean. This was a different Paris to the squalling squats I’d grown used to, but it was somewhere I was desperate to enter, whatever the rules of its games.

A young man, sodden and weeping, was sitting at the entrance to the building which contained Harad’s apartment. He looked up at me with what could have been either pity or envy as I passed him. On through the revolving doors, I entered a marble hallway which looked more like the atrium to a large bank, but nevertheless bore odours—of cooking, of a variety of pets, and, more faintly, of toilets—which weren’t entirely unlike those which greeted me in my tenement each evening. I dripped and squelched my way towards the lift and pressed its ceramic button.

The door on floor 5 was mysteriously open, and I wandered in through a series of echoey rooms where gilt furniture and cherub-encrusted ceilings battled for attention with torn canvasses and virtual projection equipment. There, quite alone in a last greyly empty space, sat Harad Le Pape. I’d expected some sort of never-ending party—the comings and goings of writers, dancers and body artists—but the only sound which touched the bare walls was that of the rain.

Harad’s big body bulked awkwardly erect on a large divan chair before a huge, dead fireplace. The rampart jaw, the needling eyes, the slicked-back reddish hair—it was all there. The hands were delicate. The big feet were encased in brogues. Harad was wearing a dark blue suit, part mannish, but set with florid eruptions of butterfly silk at collar and neck. I could have minutes, hours, seconds, to make my impression. Apart from the divan, which Harad Le Pape already more than fully occupied, there was nowhere else to sit.

“So…”Thepinholeeyesstarednearly,butnotquite,atme,andIwas reminded of Mum. Even though that gaze reputedly never missed anything, Harad had the intense, unnerving stare of the blind. “You brought your instrument?”

I was starting to shiver as I produced it from beneath my sodden coat. “I haven’t brought any music. But I could play—”

“No.
Please
. No music. Least of all today. I’ve heard you, haven’t I? It’s not as if you’re some performing monkey. I know you have the facility.”

Uppermost in my mind as I hugged my violin—I couldn’t help it— was the much-debated question of Harad Le Pape’s sex. He or she seemed to be an indefinable mixture of the broadly mannish and the delicately feminine. Not that sex changes and even neuterism were uncommon in those days in Paris, but the messages here were far more complex. A couple of years earlier, I’d been assured, Harad had borne the overdecorated mannerisms of a camp male. Before that had come a stage of matronly print dresses. The cleverness of Harad’s trick—and not that anyone would have ever dared call it a trick—was that the signals never stayed the same.

“I’d been told you were English?”

“I am.” I shrugged. “It’s just—”

“But you’re
not
, are you. Don’t know where you belong. How about
here
? Does this feel like home?” Again, almost a smile. Harad spoke clear, accentless French with cold puffs of condensation in a graceful alto. “I don’t mean this apartment. I mean Paris.”

“I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway.”

“Good. Artists shouldn’t have homes. Think of what happened to Monet at Giverny. Mould growths in oils. Better to be like Conrad. Becket. Igor. Write, live, in a foreign tongue. Tear down the walls. Be blind as Joyce. Drink like Hemingway.
Taste
the alienation. Then you can say something worthwhile about your home. Or, better still, realise that nothing remains to be said and give up entirely. Pity we can’t travel to the stars yet, eh?”

This was, as I soon discovered, a typical conversation: cryptic, rambling, one-sided. You always got the general impression that things were making a kind of sense, even if you were unable to work out what it was. There had been a famous review, back in the days when Harad still did reviews, of a new exhibition of scent and shape at the Pompidou Centre which had described, in Proustian detail, the texture and appear-ance of a pile of dog mess which lay outside on the pavement. The piece, and the dog mess, which had been stolen and then lovingly re-created many times since, had easily outshone and outlasted the exhibition inside.

It would have been easy to dismiss Harad Le Pape as a comic turn, or an expression of the bankruptcy of culture, and we did sometimes doubt and snigger, but never in Harad’s presence. For Harad had discovered Karl Nordinger, Harad had popularised Jane Affray, and if Harad was right, and culture really was bankrupt and there was nothing left worth believing in except the external manifestations of art itself, which in themselves were hollow, he or she was also our only salvation.

Harad’s response to the apparent pointlessness of art was to decide to cease to be a critic and then, after a suitably dramatic pause, to astound Paris by announcing that he’d—or she’d—decided to become an artist him or herself. Above us on the 6th floor, Harad was preparing an epoch-defining cultural statement. In a sense, there was little mystery about what this statement was, for Harad talked at length about this crucial work in progress, and had enlisted the contributions of many artists. It was certainly multi-sensory. And it had to be large. Huge action paintings, Renaissance ceilings and rare perfumes had all been absorbed into it, along with bones from Père Lachaise, streetsigns and the scrambled texts of great works of fiction. Would this piece, this construction, this world, floating just above us on the 6th floor redefine our perceptions and bring about a new sense of purpose? Would it be the last expression of the pointlessness of everything? Harad seemed to imply both of these things, and many others as well. Sometimes, the piece was pronounced to be near completion. Unveiling dates were even mooted. But many of these had come and gone long before I first became a visitor to the rue de Turenne.

Silence fell. So did the rain.

“Roushana. Tell me. Why are you studying music?”

“I…” It was a question I’d been asked many times. I had a dozen different answers, and not one of them mentioned Leo. “It seemed to be the only thing I was particularly good at.”

Harad harrumphed. “And you’re happy being
good
at something are you? If you’d have been good at bricklaying, would you have done that instead?”

“Of course. Well, perhaps.”

“Good—you don’t like the word, so why use it? And that performance you gave. That piece by Ibrahim. That was more than good.”

“Thank you.”

“It was terribly good.”

“And what,” I snarled, finally goaded, “does
that
mean?”

Even the rain seemed to pause in surprise at my small outburst.

“Well…” Imperturbable as ever, Harad pursed his or her small lips.

“About time, I think, that you left behind mere stupid facility. You musicians—the pompous fuss you make. Have you met Karl Nordinger?”

“No.”

“Well, don’t. I’ve had it with you musicians. Music alone is the sound of dead things rattling. No one gets it right. Apart perhaps from Claude Vaudin. It’s a dead area, and Claude’s the night-watchman. You should seek him out. You might learn something.”

The club, Le Chien Heureux, was the kind of place you’d go to if you wanted the latest drugs which were hard to get above ground even here in Paris—that, or wanted to watch people or animals having sex—but music was wafting enticingly from up the dank steps on that first night I went there. Someone, quite brilliantly, was playing the piano as I headed down into the fog and smell.

The ceiling dripped. People were swaying, sweating, clapping. On a small stage, a naked woman with tiger-striped flesh was dancing. Colours flared across the walls in response to her frenzied movements. But, despite everything she did, most of the attention was rooted on the man who was up there with her playing the piano. Tall, lithe and ebony-skinned, he was standing at the keyboard and dancing as well, shaking his head to the slanting rhythm he’d somehow shaped from his instrument.

The music went on—it poured out of him—as the crowd leapt and surged. Drinks were spilled. My ribs were bruised. My buttocks were felt. Then, finally, as the dancer’s sweat-flung hair glittered as she threw herself into a dervish state, the music slid to an end in a last, tantalising twinkle of notes. At first, the applause which followed was shocked and sporadic, then it grew raucous. Claude Vaudin nodded and smiled. He lifted the collapsed dancer in his arms, then stepped back and bowed as someone threw them towels. With animal grace, he leapt down from the stage and strode for the bar. Shrugging off clusters of admirers—who were mostly gay, female or transgenic—he headed towards me with a bottle of wine and two glasses expertly raised in one of his big hands.

“You’re that violinist, aren’t you?” he shouted in English as the PA began to announce the next attraction.

I tried not to look flattered. “And you’re that conductor.”

“Why weren’t you dancing?”

I had to lean close to hear what he was saying. “Why should I? I was listening!”

He put a hand just beneath my left breast. His face was shining. He smelled male and warm. “I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“You can’t be Roushana Maitland. Not if you weren’t dancing—not the way I’ve heard you play.” He gestured towards a table. “Let’s drink…”

I was pleasantly conscious of the shift of emphasis that Claude Vaudin’s singling me out had caused in this club. The tiger-striped woman—whose name, prosaically, was Jill, and who remained conspicuously under-dressed in that towel—trailed over and purred feline pleasantries at us from over her breasts. Claude was warm and polite and charming and flirtatious with her and all the other habitués who drifted towards us, although something about his manner signalled to them that he’d rather the two of us were left alone.

“This,” he told our latest visitant, slipping easily from lightly-East Coast accented English to entirely demotic French, those same fingers which wrought such magic from the piano now nestling on my neck and twisting casually amid my hair, “is the violinist Roushana Maitland. You haven’t heard of her? Well you have now, and you will, believe me…”

“I thought,” I countered when we were sitting alone again, “you said I couldn’t play or wasn’t listening or dancing or something.” Already, he’d signalled for more wine, and my head and my tongue were struggling to keep up.

“No no
no…
” He waved a waggish finger. “Roushana, you’re the best I’ve heard. And I don’t say that to all of them either.” A beautifully-timed glance and pause. “Or if I do, I certainly don’t mean it. But I think you should learn to dance.”

I smiled. I wasn’t exactly going to say no to Claude Vaudin, who looked and sounded just as elegant here in the flesh as he did in the many interviews and performances I’d already witnessed. His face was chiselled, his eyes were brown and dark. His chin was dimpled. His nose was both Negroid and aquiline.

He smiled back at me. His hand shifted from my neck. “You’re just humouring me, aren’t you?”

“No, no. Of course not. But—”

Then he drew me up. And we danced. Or rather, Claude danced, and I tried to follow him, which turned out to be impossible, although being here and being with him—and all the drink, which I wasn’t then used to, and the hallucinogenic smoke which wafted from many people’s lips, and the pheromones which pervaded the air—all certainly helped. The music, as I remember, was North African. It had a complex beat, shifting from 4/5 to 4/4, but flowing in a way which felt entirely right to the heart and the hips. But I suppose the fact that I was counting beats and thinking just how fine Claude looked as he moved showed just how far from throwing myself into the moment I still was.

But to be dancing with Claude Vaudin! Not that I hadn’t encountered the famous and the vain many times already, and not that I didn’t know what conductors, of all people, were generally like. But Claude wasn’t any of the things he should have been. For someone so mannish, his delicate grace, his lightless of tone, were extraordinarily feminine. He’s probably gay, I told myself; that would explain those meticulous good looks and the crowd him around him at the bar.

The evening passed. And yes, there were now animals on stage. There were men and women as well.

“You don’t mind this, do you?”

I shrugged and hiccupped. Everywhere, limbs were merging. I seemed to have a wineglass held in each of my four hands.

“Here. Have some more wine.”

“No—I’ve had enough.”

“You’re not much of a drinker, are you Roushana?”

“I’m a better dancer…”

“Well…It’s a close call.”

It was very late—even the adverts had deserted the skies—and very dark as we crossed the Canal St-Martin and headed through Saint Denis.

“Where do you live, Roushana?”

“I don’t have a home—that was what Harad Le Pape told me.” I gave a hiccup and a burp. “He or she was right. You’re gay, by the way, aren’t you?” Then my feet skidded from under me and I sprawled on the freezing pavement.