Song Of Time (29 page)

Karl Nordinger himself strolled down between the empty seats, acknowledged my presence with a rise of his silly cane, then sat some way off to listen. The orchestra were getting restless by the time I went down to join them for my contribution to the third movement. They’d never seen the need to have a soloist for such a few phrases, and they wanted their lunch. But I knew Claude well enough to understand that the timing was deliberate.
They play best when they’re annoyed and hungry
, he often used to joke. He smiled down at me now as I raised my bow over the strings of my Guarneri. That violin, more than any other I have ever played, has its moods, and it felt incompliant as the orchestra swelled and then fell into that hushed tremolo, and the phrases of the
Song of Time
came out angular and harsh. I played each note of that aching melody with an angry, near-screeching tone. It should have sounded ridiculous, yet it fitted perfectly, and we carried on playing, drawing on through the entire movement to its fading.

Claude looked down at me. I looked up at him.

“That doesn’t happen very often,” he said eventually. “Just play it like that on the night and we’ll bring the house down…”

With my part in the rehearsal finished, Karl Nordinger summoned one of his limousines to take us back to the atelier. The bustle of Paris seemed as remote as the movements of the denizens of some exotic fish tank as I sat with him in the car’s cool interior. It was already Thursday, just three days from Sunday’s election, and the last opinion polls had just been published, and were typically inconclusive. Claude was off to make another speech to another demonstration, but I felt as if there was nothing left I could do.

Opening windows, setting out bread and cheese and best English grapes whilst the fans of the air conditioners twittered in useless complaint, I told Karl about my trip of the week before to perform in a festival at Avignon. It wasn’t just Paris which smelled of burning. This summer’s forest fires in the south had been the worst in decades. Thousands had died already, whole towns had been consumed, and the fringes of Marseilles were being evacuated.

“It’s easier to understand once you leave Paris,” I said, “why people— rational people—pay attention to the likes of Christos.”

“Ah…” Karl smiled uncharacteristically broadly. “It’ll make no difference who gets elected on Sunday. You know that, don’t you? Boullard can’t make it rain. Irissou can’t make the wheat grow. Neither of them can combat cholera b. No wonder people look towards God, now they’ve realised just how useless the politicians are. They have to have someone to blame…”

“You can’t…” I put down a plate of olives.

“Can’t what?” Still smiling, he popped one of them in his mouth. “Give up hope? Let the baddies win? Give way to superstition? Loose faith in the betterment of humanity? Curl up and die? Something like that?” He extracted the stone from between his lips. “Isn’t that what Claude would say?”

Remembering once again why it was never a good idea to talk politics or philosophy with Karl Nordinger, I sat down and cut myself some bread and smoothed it with butter. He was so, so
negative
. And there had to be hope, didn’t there? If you didn’t believe in hope, and in love as well, what was the point of anything?

“At least Claude cares,” I said as I cut and stabbed a large slice of Brie. “At least he believes in something. So tell me what exactly do you believe in?”

“And you’re expecting me to say—nothing.”

“Karl, I’ve heard you say it often enough before.” I chewed angrily at my food.

“Not that it matters, I suppose…” He stood up and went over to the hi-fi screen and I watched, half-curious, as he accessed the database of his own symphony and paged down the floating menus, then set it to play. Cleverly rendered by a virtual orchestra, it sounded very different— like a photograph of a place rather than the real thing—but still moving and impressive. He remained staring at the unfolding score for a while, considering the recent changes it had made to itself. I studied his thin shoulders, the crescent of sweat which had formed across the back of his rumpled silk shirt. Dressed in the mock-formal manner he now affected, Karl Nordinger looked like some colonial civil servant from the days when Africa had been governed by Europe. You could imagine him scowling beneath a circling fan in some tropical office, surrounded by papers which meant nothing to him. A life of gin and easy boredom would have made a perfect match for his cynicism. Instead he’d been given the gift of making brilliant music, and it hadn’t made the slightest difference to him. “…I suppose you’ve heard enough of this,” he said as he sat down at the table again, although he’d left the symphony playing.

“I don’t think that will ever happen. By the way, is this it?”

“What?”

“The thing you believe in.”

He coughed on some crumbs. “That would be too easy, wouldn’t it?”

He pushed away his plate. “I’m just the conduit.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“You don’t understand. The music writes itself long before it gets to this stage. It doesn’t care about me and what I am—it just comes out of me—so why should I care about it?” In the background, both sombre and mocking, the big surge of the first movement’s finale was unfolding. “Listen. See the way the emphasis has changed on the horns even since the rehearsal this morning?”

I nodded. The effect was subtle but significant.

“And the whole movement would be different if we were to start it again. It’s changing at a huge rate. The bloody thing’s
alive
, Roushana. People say that, but they don’t understand what it means. It doesn’t need us now, and it doesn’t even need Claude’s performance. It’s simply there. It seeks immortality in its own way.”

The music crashed. Themes collided. When it faded into the second movement on the thin vein of a single note, I felt goosebumps rising across my arms.

“That’s not such a bad thing is it?” I said. “Doesn’t every artist want their work to be immortal?”

Karl Nordinger just gazed at me. There were butter stains on his expensive shirt. There was pain in his bloodshot eyes. All the success and the money only showed up the essential emptiness of his life more strongly. The world, like the music which was unrolling in the back-ground, seemed intent on playing some endless and inexplicable practical joke on him.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “Life’s been…distracting lately.”

“The way you played that theme this morning, Roushana. It was stunning.”

I almost blushed. I was used to praise by now—but not from Karl Nordinger. “But you didn’t think it was a little too harsh? I was taking—”

“It was
perfect
. Maybe you won’t play it that well in the performance or ever again. But when you do play it, I want you to remember whatever it was which made you play like this today. Will you do that?”

This was still so full on, so straight, that, from him of all people, I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it. “Yes—but who am I doing this for? For you, Karl, or for the symphony?”

He barely blinked. “You’re doing it for
yourself
, Roushana. You doing it for whatever it is that makes you do it. It’s not Claude, is it? It’s not even really the bloody, fucking music. It’s certainly not me.”

We looked at each other.

We’d both stopped eating now, yet we were still sitting at the table. Then I found that I was leaning towards him, and that he was leaning towards me, and then that we were kissing. Karl Nordinger tasted surprisingly sweet for someone so sour and sickly: of grapes and of olives. It was one of those moments when, even though our minds are slow to catch on, our bodies are reacting. Plates crashed and rolled across the floor as we shoved them aside. Olive pits dug into my thighs as I straddled the table. Nordinger’s silk shirt was a struggle—his arms were buried in sleeves we couldn’t seem to unbutton—then all the expensive hand-stitching gave way in a single cataclysmic tear, and his hands were on my breasts, then frenziedly helping to release me from the rest of my clothing. In the background, a counterpoint to the hot rumble of Paris and the squeak of the air conditioners and the creaking of the overbur-dened table, the second movement of the symphony had ended and the third had begun to seek its shivering resolution.

By any standards, it was a Karl Nordinger moment. That melody as counterpoint to our unspoken need, and the low comedy of two people attempting to have sex on a food-strewn table. But we remained in each other’s arms and swayed over to the bed, and laughed as we swiped the breadcrumbs and squashed grapes from each other’s bodies.The
Fourth Symphony
had just begun the long crescendo of its own climax when Karl Nordinger and I reached our own. As I fell back, and the music rose into its final hammerblows, then died in that resonant discord, it seemed to me that it had shaped itself around us and this large room. An odd sort of silence, almost a continuance of the symphony, took its place. The Paris traffic seemed to have stopped. Even the water vendors had ceased their cries.

“Listen….” Karl murmured.

“Yes…” Absolute quiet. “Strange, isn’t it?”

“
This
is what I want the symphony to become.”

The heat pressed down. We lay sweating, listening to our hearts and the changing of our breath. But, Karl being Karl, I knew the moment couldn’t last. For all his near-autistic outbursts, he wasn’t stupid and he knew that Claude and I were still a couple. So it was almost a relief when he broke the silence with a series of suppressed chuckles. He raised his hand to his mouth as if to stop the staccato bursts escaping. But they still did, and I rolled over to join in, smiling, and wondering when Claude would be back, and how quickly I might get these sheets cleaned. It was only then that I realised that Karl Nordinger was sobbing.

I found myself walking with Harad Le Pape in Père Lachaise on the last afternoon before the election. Since Mum had visited Paris and Claude had become so busy, I’d continued taking in all the sights I’d previously ignored, and he or she made an entertaining guide. Not that I was plan-ning on leaving Paris, but I already felt that this city wouldn’t be the same after the weekend. Even in the quiet of that huge cemetery in those days when the dead still didn’t trouble the living, you could feel the onrush of change.

“You have no idea, my darling Roushana, just how hard a life a critic has,” the famous, pompous figure said as he or she shuffled beneath a black parasol. “Compared with that, compared with the struggle and rejection and sheer incomprehension which the righteous critic must battle against every second of every day, the artist has it ridiculously easy. They merely have to
perform
. The poor critic has to
understand
and then
explain
.”

Here lay the graves of Marcel Proust and Jim Morrison, Frederick Chopin and Oscar Wilde, and the ashes of Isadora Duncan. Here, commemorated in far grander explosions of statuary, lay the remains of Paris’s rich bourgeoisie. Here—so, so typically French—was the tomb of the lion-tamer Jean Pezon, shown riding the lion which ate him. Harad, a walking encyclopaedia, led me along the highways and byways. Here was the grave of the man who had sold the land to build this fashionable cemetery, and then had had to pay more than that fee simply to buy his own burial plot. It was a charming, comforting place.

Harad had had the builders in at his or her apartment to provide proper access for the thousands of Parisians who would be certain to want to witness the masterpiece on the 6th floor. He or she complained at length about bad manners and plaster dust, but remained serenely coy about what would be revealed at the unveiling ceremony after Nordinger’s premiere. Paris was filled with speculation. It was said that it would be empty, or that someone had it on good authority—a friend of theirs had actually
seen
the building’s plans in the mayor’s office—that there was in fact no 6th floor. That, or that Harad would simply silence years of speculation by revealing whether he of she possessed a cunt or a cock. In those fevered last days before the election, the rest of France, let alone Europe or the world, barely seemed to exist.

“Perhaps Gog and Magog really will put in an appearance and draw Satan up from the fiery pit,” Harad sighed as I held the parasol against the white sunlight and we climbed the last rise of monuments. “The astronomers are still apparently searching the heavens for a comet…And Karl Nordinger seemed so miserably
jolly
when I saw him recently. I believe it was the first civil word he and I have exchanged since I said merely what needed to be said about the evil, rancid catastrophe—the sheer
lazy thinking
—of that disastrous abortion some people still insist on calling his Third Symphony. These are, indeed, strange, strange days…”

TO BEZANT BAY FOR A PICNIC. Adam carries the wicker basket which he’s bravely evicted of spiders, and which last saw use when the kids were so-high. Halfway down the steps to the shore, I’m already sore and dizzy. Adam helps, seemingly half-carries, me the rest of the way, whilst still managing to keep hold of the basket. I can’t believe his strength, nor how I got him up from here just a few days—exactly how many
was
it, now?—ago. Or perhaps it’s down to how much weaker I’ve become.

We catch our breath—well,
I
do—then we head off away from the boathouse across the pebbled shore. We’ve both reassured ourselves that Adam will be safe down here from the gaze of the waymarks, and even though its only a few hundred metres, the whole trip has the feel of an escape, an expedition. The sky’s trying to outbid the sea for the sheerness of its blue and there’s barely any wind. It’s almost unCornish, the weather’s so warm. Adam finds me a piece of driftwood to serve as a walking stick. I tell him about the famous writer who lived in Menabilly just up the hill. He listens and swings the picnic basket. It’s so nice to find things he still doesn’t know.

We sit down on the hot rocks beneath the ragged cliffs. I take off my shoes and re-balance the girlish straw hat I’m wearing, although this heat, this sun, seems weak and distant after the overwhelming fug of Paris.