Song Of Time (37 page)

My ears boomed. My eyes itched. My fingers and brain were numb. All I could see was Day-Glo dinosaurs. All I could hear was
bumpity-bump
and the twittering thump of my exhausted heart, when what I longed for was the cool, clear certainties of Mozart and Bach. God, how I miss those times. God, how I hated not being the person I’d always thought I was. Doling out pap in the ruckus of our steamy little kitchen—the cramped hub of our house with the Aga dead or roaring and paper and toys everywhere—because Claude was doing the
Ring
in Cape Town and the kids and I were alone. That fucking, fucking, useless Aga. I’d never felt so tired, or so needed, or so happy.

ADAM IS STILL SITTING BESIDE ME. Softly defining the frail hollow of my temple with his fingers, he asks, “Do you want to finish now?”

I know it’s getting late. Outside, the weather is brewing some-thing foul and harsh—I can feel it in my Cornish bones. It’ll be one of those nights when the windows rattle and you sleep with the storm within you. White, flying clouds tear at your dreams. I can feel the sea gnawing at the land. One night long after this, and far beyond my caring, Morryn itself will be consumed. But I feel no sadness at the thought of these old walls and all my lost possessions tumbling through the shrieking arms of the wind. My memories, all that I am, will outlast any stone.

I shake my head. “There’s really not that much left to tell.”

“If you’re sure? I mean, there are so many years.”

“It isn’t the
years
that matter, Adam. Time doesn’t run that way. Life’s quick and then it’s slow and then there are grey spaces where it really doesn’t seem to run at all.”

He’s studying me warily. I guess that it’s a trick I’ve learned to use against him—saying things about time and memory to which he can’t possibly reply.

“I’m sorry…” I sigh.

“Why be sorry?”

“I wish I could make better sense. Life isn’t just one thing. As you get older, especially—and I don’t mean old as I am now—nothing just has one story, one truth. If I said I’d never been happier that I was when the kids were young, I wouldn’t be lying. But if I told you that I hated them, and thought of this house as a prison, that would be close to the truth as well.”

“Children create complex emotions,” he agrees. “I understand that much.”

“But what I think about them, what I remember, it really doesn’t matter…” I pause, wondering at the odd echo of my words. “My kids are still out there, living and alive. Oh, I could tell you more about them. I could bore you with their studies and bits of old drawing and endless family albums. There are whole sheaves of the stuff Maria used to do, charcoals like autumn smoke, collages like old stained glass, somewhere over there in that corner. I could go on about the happy times down on Bezant’s Bay, but I’ve done that already, I suppose…? The thing is, Adam, they’re not dead, and they can speak for themselves, and they have their own memories and their own opinions. They don’t need me to be their scribe. And when I’m…” Untangling my hands from the blan-kets, I make a small gesture. “When I’ve passed, we can still talk. In fact, we’ll talk even more. I’ll be gone from here, but they’ll remain. Just as you will. Had you thought of that, Adam? That you’re as much a part of what I am now as…” I hesitate. “Anyone. But you’re
here
. You don’t need this thing in my skull to make you real.”

Adam nods. He’s looking down at me oddly again. “But you said,” he says so lightly that I barely hear, “that you didn’t want to stop…”

CLAUDE POSSESSED THINGS. Never just one place or enthusiasm or project, but several. Always, always moving on. If he were here now, if he were doing what I’m doing, it would be amid a blizzard of information, friends, enthusiasms, theories, performances. Instead of Morryn being empty, he’d have had another of his famous parties, which went on for days with bodies sleeping or doing other things in surprising corners. He’d have seen dying as another big performance, just as he saw everything…

Of course, there was the DB, which spent many years dismantled into endless pieces and looking even less like a car than it had on the day it arrived. Like those party guests, odd-shaped bits of oily metal, new tools, precious sheets of glass and containers of paints and dangerous substances made their way into Morryn’s cupboards and hallways. I’d complain about the mess and the dangers when the kids were young, but the kids never minded—the kids liked the mess. I even think that Maria gained the sense of structure which she displays in her best buildings from the long afternoons she’d spend simply staring at some oddly shaped engine part which Claude had left out in the kitchen. For them, it was all just a part of what Dad was, and thus of our lives.

Did I come to hate the DB? Of course I bloody did—who wouldn’t? But the thing you have to understand is that, just as I sometimes loathed and hated Claude, I also loved him deeply, and I loved that car as well. The time he finally got the engine turning, or the summer’s day when we found that lost carburettor in a Truro scrapyard: times such as those weren’t good just because Claude was happy.
I
was happy as well. Of course, sometimes I’d just have to laugh out loud to think that we felt the way we did over a ridiculous agglomeration of metal, but it was a red-letter day above all others when, and after many false dawns and false starts, the DB was finally finished—although it never really was—but at least was in a state when it could be driven out from the garage and along these Cornish lanes.

The kids came home specially. Edward from his work in London bearing that raffish air which then seemed to work so well with the girls, and Maria recovering from the first of what turned out to be many short but powerful relationships with other women, this one in a charitable project in the shanties of New York. The DB gleamed now. It was a car again. It smelled deliciously of clean-cut metal and new oil. We all walked around it, truly amazed. Standing proudly at the bonnet, Claude uncorked the champagne and tipped some over the silver paintwork before he poured us each a glass. We were all laughing, even Maria, getting tipsy on nothing but our all being here, then smilingly serious, as we each proposed our own toast to this marvellous car.

Time to open the doors and slide into the give of the seats and fresh aromas of walnut and hide. Maria and I crowded into the doggy seat at the back like giggling debutants, and the two men, in this timelessly old-fashioned car, sat mannishly in the front. But getting the garage doors open turned out to be a far bigger performance than anyone could have imagined, seeing as they’d never been fully opened before in all those years since the DB had first arrived. It nearly scuppered everything, until, with a creative use of one of his best wrenches, Claude finally broke and lifted one whole side out of the way. Standing out there in the sunlight with the wrecked and fallen door beside him, and but for the gleams of grey in his hair, he looked just as tall and strong as he had on that first night when I saw him up on that stage in Paris. He waved his wrench like a baton and gave an elaborate mock-bow. It was a perfect moment.

The kids only managed to stay with us a couple of days, although they were some of the best days in all human history. Claude did most of the driving, but, naturally, we all took our turns. People stared at us as we throttled past. Literally, they’d never seen anything like the DB before. And the little cars, those horrible modern things which drive themselves like the one I’ll be taking to Bodmin tomorrow morning—they all stopped to cower on the verge at the first sight of the DB’s gleaming grin. We took it on picnics, or it took us. We urged the sun to stop shining simply so we could watch the wipers work. I suppose that the days weren’t quite like that, or didn’t come quite so easily, for the DB was never that reliable, and getting any kind of petrol was always a chore, but that’s how these days are in my memory, and that’s how I want them to stay.

Musically, for me, things were also going well again by then. Now that the kids were off living their own lives, I was able to return to playing. After those jelly baby years in the Rumpus Room, and the teenage tantrums and uncertainties, I found I actually enjoyed the travelling, and the hassles, and the hotels. The world seemed to be in resurgence and performing, the whole business of having people listening to the music I played, often felt like a prolonged holiday. Claude was busy by then with his own famous partnership with the LSO, so I often with worked with other accompanists, new conductors, and explored new works. I enjoyed all the different tensions which doing this brought out, and I enjoyed going back to play with Claude again all the more. We knew by then that we were the great couple—it wasn’t subject to doubt—and our playing reflected that fact, although I was famous by now in my own right, and had set aside the chilly pyrotechnics of my earlier persona as I performed with, as was often commented in the reviews, a new freshness and humanity around the world.

For Claude, these were the years of the big Mahler cycle he’d long been promising himself. As a solo pianist, he moved away from the percussive experiments. A Claude Vaudin recital of this time would most probably include works by…

“WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS, ROUSHANA?” Adam interrupts, standing up, circling the tension from his big arms as he prowls the music room.

“I know you think you care about music—I know you imagine you understand, but it was the most important part of our
lives
. Apart from the children, of course…”

“I
do
understand. Why shouldn’t I understand after all you’ve told me? That’s not what I mean.” He gestures at all the awards, and the books, and the recordings and other kinds of antique media which line these walls. “What do you think I’ve been doing this last week? I’ve
read
the interviews, Roushana. I’ve
listened
to you and Claude play. I
know
about the seasons, the key concerts, and where they took place. Good and bad, I’ve
seen
the reviews. There’s no point in you telling me any of this. It’s all been set down already. Your life, the public part of it, it’s already here.”

“In that case—” “In that case, you should tell the truth.”

“The truth isn’t—”

“The truth isn’t something you can play around and interpret. It’s not some performance!” Rain, it could almost be sleet, claws behind him at the windows and Adam seems lifted by the fury of the gale. “What exactly is it that you want to take with you, Roushana? Those glossy interviews—the fawning cover shots or the good performances, or the memorably bad ones, or perhaps all the many, many ones which you and the entire audience have long forgotten about. After all, music’s just entertainment, and playing some instrument is, when you come right down to it, just another kind of job. It’s like these books and pictures. It’s just another of your precious bloody
things
, Roushana. It’s just
sound
. It’s like this house, which, by the way, some-times smells of pee, or that car. The what—” he, the storm, shrieks and twirls “—the what is it, the right make and marque, the torque and the steel-framed aluminium bodywork? And, by the way, how did all four of you ever manage to climb into a two-seater? Still, I suppose if you love something that much, it ceases to become what it really was, which, if all the news reports I’ve read are remotely correct, is the vehicle that Claude died in. Or would you like to magic that away as well? Turn it into another of your precious things which you can mould into whatever shape you want?”

The lifting wind roars in Morryn’s chimneys. It keens a shriller note across its eaves.

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to tell me,” Adam murmurs on the breath of the storm, “what happened to Claude.”

IT WAS ALL BEETHOVEN’S FAULT. Before him, greats such as Bach and Handel led orchestras through their compositions seated modestly at their own instrument. Then along came Ludwig. Being clumsy, disorganised, prone to fits of rages and tears, as well as being famously deaf, it was plain that others did a better job than he did at organising the performance of his increasingly difficult compositions.

—No, I’m not going to launch into some lecture about the role of the conductor in classical music, but there’s something you need to understand if you want to know about Claude. Conductors were a product of the Romantic movement—the big gestures, the big egos, the big contracts, the big hair—and they somehow managed to cling on and remain at the centre of things and gesturing from the podium and being photographed with presidents when Romanticism faded to remind us of how important they were. But there aren’t many pieces apart from the wilfully complex ones written by the big Romantics, conductors to a man themselves, for which a conductor’s presence is essential. I’ve heard exquisite Bach, superb Messiaen and dazzling Nordinger played by orchestras without some man with a baton standing up in front of them. And it always
is
a man. For that’s what conductors are—they’re big, romantic, vain, and male. But understand, at the core of this great ego is the doubt, the worry, perhaps almost the certainty, that the music would continue without them.

Claude came late to this scene. There were so many role models, so many key performances, that it must have been hard to know where to go next. I think that explains something of his restlessness. No matter what he did, no matter how far he went, there was always some swallow-jacketed other figure who’d been there before him. So Claude decided that being black, being American, being socially-concerned and suavely handsome and speaking French and playing jazz and hanging out in low bars and living in Paris would be his trademark. Apart from the skin colour, which was no choice of his, none of this was particularly original, but Claude embraced it all as if it was uniquely him, and he was lucky to be there in Paris at the right time. Yellowstone changed everything, but for a few years, and amazing though it seems, classical music was in the kind of resurgence which will probably never be seen again. People had grown sick of big beats and clever virtualities, and they liked the idea of dressing up and going out for the evening to watch living people performing music which somehow sounded fresh and new despite its age. And there were the formers of taste like Harad, and all the other music-makers, most of whom are now forgotten, or remembered for their eccentricities and exploits rather than their work. But at least we had Nordinger, and one timeless genius is probably as much as any generation can expect.