Song Of Time (35 page)

“I have a request to make,” Adam says after he’s cleared lunch away. “Could you play some of the
Fourth Symphony
for me?”

“It’s hardly a solo piece. Anyway, the score isn’t here. That’s the whole point—there is no final score.”

“But you can play the melody from the third movement. What do you call it—the
Song of Time
?”

I grunt. “Even that would have changed.”

“But isn’t that what Leo always used to say—from one performance to the next, no piece of music ever stays the same.”

Submitting, levering myself up from the divan and shedding my blan-kets and shuffling across the strew of rugs and old scores and other memories, I open up the case. I shoulder the Guarneri. I lay my fingers on the strings.
Song of Time…
Was that name Karl’s idea? Perhaps Harad’s, or Claude’s? I can’t remember now when or where it came. Just one of those titles which a piece seems to attract from nowhere. Like Beethoven’s
Emperor
, or Wagner’s
Lay of Sorrows…
I take a breath. Concentrate, Roushana, concentrate…I visualise my hands’ and then the music’s shape, which is immortal, yet never ceases to change. I raise my bow. Everything blends. A slow beat. A tremble of strings. One and two and—

The moment shatters, my betrayed fingers skid, and the Guarneri clatters and erupts from my useless hands with an agonised shriek.

I CAN’T HELP IT—I’M SOBBING. My sight is blurred and my ears are roaring as, carefully, respectfully, Adam prises the useless instrument from my numb hands and places it back inside its case. Then he helps me back over to the red divan, and eases me down, plumping cushions and then—I’m still gasping, shivering— he covers me with the same blankets with which I covered him just a few days before. I lie there with my face aching and the room spinning. For all that I’ve been dreading this moment, I realise now that I never believed it would come. Not really—not like this. And now that it has, nothing will ever be the same. The thing which defined my life has been taken from me.
It’s down to you now Sis…
What Leo always wanted me to understand was that the music—lovely, organised sound which is gone too quickly to ever really be properly understood or analysed—was all that ever mattered, and that everything else is distraction, noise, empty static…

Adam draws the chair over from the desk and settles himself beside me. His fingers smooth the brittle hair away from my wet and withered face. “It’s nothing. Just give it another chance…”

I shake my head.

“What can I do?”

“Just being here…”

“I won’t go away.”

The room pulses. Empty silence rings.

“Life’s been so quick, you know.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“But it
has
. It’s a like a fairground ride. One minute, you can’t wait for it to start, you’re queuing to get on. And the next…”

He takes my hands in his own. “Tell me more about Paris, Roushana. Tell me what happened after Yellowstone…”

I swallow, lick my salt lips. “Claude and I left soon after—it was just as the first of the long snows came. Oh, it wasn’t a conscious decision to begin with. We still returned when the transport would let us, and we kept our atelier…”

“But what about the people?”

A whispery chuckle. “You should see Harad Le Pape now!”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s nothing—Harad returned to journalism, and his or her views lost their urgency, although I believe he or she grew enormously rich. And the others, well they headed for greater fame or lesser obscurity, or they gave up entirely in the way that many artists do. You probably know that Jane Affray committed suicide in that bizarre way. Others succumbed to drink, drugs, starvation, that flu epidemic, or to their own self-importance. Of course, Mathilde Irissou did win the election, although most of the promised reforms broke on the rocks of national hardship. I mean, who remembers her now? I suppose there’s that ridiculous theme park of lakes and offices—a counterpoint to La Defense, another monument to presidential impotence and vanity—although I doubt if either are still occupied…

“And Karl Nordinger…Karl retreated into the wealth that his music and programme-writing had created for him. There was talk over the years that he was working on some great oratorio, song-cycle, opera or symphony, or a new piece of software, but none of it ever emerged. The
Fourth Symphony
has remained his last, defining, work—the symbol of that changed era—and Claude’s disastrous first performance on the night of Yellowstone is simply another part of its story. If you’re wondering, Adam, Karl and I never did keep in touch. But then, Karl didn’t keep in touch with anyone. There were just those odd sightings— one year seemingly bedraggled, long-haired, the next apparently swish and prospering. Knowing Karl, or at least having once nearly-known him, I always suspected that he sometimes paid others to imitate him and lived quietly somewhere in smug misery. I missed him, you know— of all the people in Paris…But, knowing what you do, I suppose you’re not surprised…And Karl’s work has remained, and that was all that most people had ever wanted of him, and I, too, have contented myself with re-visiting that great symphony. It was probably the best of him. It’s always remained new and surprising. Yes—even now, even today…”

Claude and I, we travelled this newly damaged world seemingly endlessly. We were itinerant musicians, but on a global scale. We gave speeches. We organised festivals. We performed in the refugee camps in Georgia and Florida. People wanted the comforts of music in those times, and we were so much in demand that our public life, the inter-views and the rehearsals and performances and those endless journeys and freezing, stinking encampments and ramshackle hotels, often seemed all that there was. The world barely noticed when we got married on that rainy day in Santiago, for it had long been assumed that we already were. Claude Vaudin and Roushana Maitland. I can remem-ber the disappointment which crossed people’s faces if they thought they might not be getting us both. But we
were
a great double act. We knew it as well.

Oh, I could go on about the festival in Prague, or Claude at Bayreuth, or our long residency in Florence, but the recordings and the newscasts are all there already for anyone who cares to access them, and the programmes and posters cover these music room walls. The public life, the life of being who we wanted the world to think we were, absorbed us both in those years, and the private side, the few breaks we ever took and the house we bought in Beijing and the other one Claude insisted on keeping in the new dominion of Washington as a kind of memorial to his dead parents—all of those things seemed pale in comparison. We made music, and the world wanted to listen, and that, in the best of times, seemed like enough. Standing with Claude onstage, performing alone, or sitting marvelling as he manipulated some recalcitrant orchestra to new heights—all these many moments are filled in my memory with such a glow that it’s hard to look clearly at them now, they all blur into one, and it’s harder still to understand them. Was I really so absorbed, so uncaring, so dedicated to making sounds with my violin and bow whilst the world starved and suffered? Did Claude allow himself to become so much the great interpreter that that was even how he saw his own image in the mirror? But Leo, as always, was right. The music’s there, and then it’s gone. It’s all beyond analysis. And, now that final silence seems to have overtaken me, I feel that that’s how I should leave it.

Despite all the risks she took with her health, Mum survived and thrived in Gujarat long after the global crisis of Yellowstone. But, since that time she visited Paris, she became more distant. When she called me, I knew without asking that she would be seeking some kind of impersonal favour. A new endorsement, the grant of rights of performance, a word in the ear of someone she thought I might be meeting, another charity concert or mediashoot. Just as Claude and I were, Mum seemed in those post-Yellowstone years to have become absorbed by the external personality projected to the world. On the occasions I visited her in Gujarat Two, she seemed to be so preoccupied that she barely had time to talk, whilst I, perhaps, might have seemed the same to her, with my endless calls and crises about the next hotel and the next concert. Then, ten almost unbelievably quick years after Yellowstone and Paris, and passing the time before a performance by flicking through the datas-tream in a hotel in Mexico City, I learned by chance from a stray news item that she was dying.

I couldn’t get through when I tried calling her. But that was nothing unusual, and in any case the facts were all there, and repeated every quarter of an hour on the screens. The “Famous Champion of India’s Poor” had lymphatic cancer. Treatment was certainly possible, but the best she could hope for was a couple of extra years in weakening health, and at a cost which would provide food and healthcare to thousands of the neediest Indians instead. What I felt as I sat down alone in that anonymous hotel was a mixture of irritation and sorrow. My mother had decided to do what she always did with everything, and turn her death into a fundraising event. She gave interviews, she published the scans and prognoses. She kept an online diary of her symptoms. Pointedly, publicly and repeatedly, she refused any kind of treatment. People, complete strangers, would come up to me after performances to give me the latest news on her slow public decline as she gave whispering inter-views to the world’s media which, just as she surmised, remained more interested in portraying an individual’s story than it was in the suffering of millions.

I went back to India in her last days, and Claude came with me as well. Plane travel was common for us, but for most people, this distant view of the earth had become a memory, and I often wondered if they realised just how much had changed. The seas seemed so much wilder and darker now, and it wasn’t uncommon as you looked down to glimpse the cresting backs of whales. And the land, the land was always different, although perhaps we also saw it differently by then, admiring but no longer trusting our planet, looking at it in all its continuing beauty as one might the jewelled flesh of some dangerous snake. Nowhere but in India, as we flew long and low across its western reaches, did that metaphor seem more appropriate. The towns and cities were no longer cubist paintings in terracotta and stucco, and the fields, fishing beds and cattle enclosures had lost their neat boundaries. Everywhere, sprawling and irregularly beautiful, there were shimmering profusions of blues and greens. The people who looked up and waved at us as the shadow of our hopper passed over them seemed rare and solitary. Somehow, you could tell that they no longer tended the herds of white and brown cattle you saw tumbling their backs across the wide and open landscapes. This world of ours was turning beautifully wild, and the smells of India which you inhaled when you stepped out into the delicious heat of the old Blue Sector runway were no longer soured by dust, excrement and rotting meat. It was like inhaling an exquisite perfume. Everywhere, there were flowers.

The Blue Zone itself had crumbled, its wires were down, and the old UUN tanks and transporters had also been transformed by vegetation into giant, bizarre potholders, nests for enamel-bright lizards, birds and snakes, although the same hotel where Mum and I had stayed on my first visit was still struggling on in a make-do-and-mend way I’d come to recognise by now in other parts of the world, but which I still thought of as characteristically Indian. As I looked up at the jumbled edifice, part marble, part concrete, part stacked Portacabin, above which a neon sign poked and still seemed to be glowing in the vivid morning light, I was reminded of the great buildings of Washington which Claude and I had recently driven past on the way to perform a concert at the refurbished National Cathedral from which the lemurs from the nearby zoo had been evicted. So much about the rest of the world was changing. Only India seemed to me to have become more and more of what it had always been.

Inside, the hotel was more like an office. Screens bloomed ever-changing colours. Everywhere, there were desks and the murmur of meetings. Up many stairs—inevitably, the lift wasn’t working—and along several corridors, Claude and I, dressed in our smart western clothes, were confronted by a brisk selection of ladies, all of whom gave a bow and a melting smile once they realised that I was the famous Sadhu-lady’s daughter. More than ever, seeing my own mother felt like seeking an audience. A final doorway, a hurried discussion, and then Claude and I were admitted into what had once been a hotel bedroom but which, with all the tributes and statuettes of Hindu gods which had been provided by well-wishers, looked more like a temple. Soft music played. Incense smoked. Flags and silks plumed from the ceiling. At the centre of it, smiling her benediction at the departing team of journalists from the German Republics, and almost too small to be believed, sat the tiny husk of a woman.

I wasn’t surprised by Mum’s appearance—I’d grown used to seeing her dying image on the newscasts—but it still felt odd to be here with her, and I held back, standing at the far end of the giant pillowed bed whilst Claude, who’d always enjoyed the company of my mother, leaned over and kissed her hand. Mum’s eyes and cheekbones stretched as she gave a thin smile. She was so pale now she resembled the dalits of Ahmedabad One, but she radiated a hot energy which still fuelled everything else which was going on in this hotel. Her eyes flickered away from Claude. Not towards me, but to the sensory tripods which corralled this crowded room. They were the centre of everything, through which Mum relayed her and India’s plight to the world. Despite the ten years which had passed, the progress of technology had slowed in the wake of Yellow-stone, and they were almost identical to those which had once surrounded the lost figure of Christos in that tobacco warehouse in Paris.

“Come Roushana,” Mum whispered in faltering and heavily-accented English, “I want you beside us.”

Still, I hung back. Even as Mum murmured to Claude about our journey, I could tell that she was thinking of the fine contrast they both made for the sensors as he leaned beside her, the black conductor come to visit the Sadhu-lady, and how much finer still a triptych we would make when I, the concert-violinist daughter, had joined them. She and Claude weren’t so very different. I loved them both but, even as Claude held Mum’s hand, I could see his other hand tapping a beat on the red silk coverlet whilst his gaze wandered in that way it always did when he was considering how to resolve some musical problem. You could spend a whole life trying to break through into whatever lay in their hearts without ever really succeeding.