An Equal Music Read online

  I shake my head. I was looking up at the ceiling, but now I close my eyes.

  "I will bite your shoulder."

  "Don't," I say. "I'll bite you harder, and it'll end very

  badly."

  Virginie bites my shoulder.

  "Stop it, Virginie," I say. "Just stop it, OK? It hurts, I'm not into it. No, don't pinch me either. And I'm not irritated, just tired. Your bedroom's too hot. We had a really long rehearsal today, and I just don't feel like seeing some late-night French movie on TV. Why don't you tape it?"

  Virginie sighs. "You're so boring. If you're so boring on Friday night, I can't imagine what you'll be like on Monday night."

  "Well, you won't need to know. We're going to Lewes on Monday and then to Brighton."

  "Quartet. Quartet. Phuh." Virginie kicks me.

  After a while, she says, rather reflectively: "I've never met your father. And you never want to meet mine, even when he's in London."

  "Oh, Virginie, please, I'm sleepy."

  "Doesn't your father ever come to London?"

  "No."

  "Then I will go with you to Rochdale. We'll go in my car to the English North."

  Virginie has a little Ford Ka in what she calls "pantherblack" metallic paint. We have made short forays with it to Oxford and Aldeburgh. When I'm driving, she insists

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  on saying, "Take that turn," when she means "this". This has led to many detours and altercations.

  Virginie is immensely proud of her car ("nippy, zippy, natty," is how she describes it). She hates all four-wheel drives with a passion, especially since the suspended spare tyre of one of them produced a little indentation on the bonnet of her parked Ka. She drives with the flair and imagination she usually withholds from her playing.

  "Somehow, I can't see you in Rochdale," I say a bit sadly, probably because I can hardly see myself there any

  more.

  "Oh, why?" she demands.

  "The shops are not elegant, Virginie. No nice scarves. You would be a gazelle in a cement factory."

  Virginie half rises from her pillow. Her panther-black eyes are smouldering and, with her black hair falling over her shoulders and down to her breasts, she looks delicious. I take her in my arms.

  "No," she says, resisting. "Don't be so condescendant. Do you think that I am interested only in shopping?"

  "No, not only in shopping," I say.

  "I thought you were sleepy," she says.

  "I am, but this is not. Anyway, what's ten minutes here or there?"

  I open the bedside drawer.

  "So practical you are, Michael."

  "Mm, yes ... no, no, Virginie, don't. Don't. Stop it. Just stop it."

  "Relax, relax," she says, laughing; "it only tickles if you're tense."

  "Tickles? Tickles? You're biting me and you think it tickles me?"

  Virginie is overcome with laughter. Instead of this distracting me, I get completely carried away.

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  After a hot shower in the pink bathroom, I set the alarm clock.

  "Why?" asks Virginie, sleepily. "It's Saturday tomorrow. We can wake up at noon. Or are you going to practise, to set for me a good example?"

  "Water Serpents."

  "Oh no," says Virginie in disgust. "In that filthy >reezing water. You English are mad."

  1-7

  I dress in the dark without waking Virginie, and let myself out. She lives on the south side of Hyde Park, I on the north. It was while walking from her house one freezing Friday morning that I noticed a couple of heads bobbing in the Serpentine. I asked the closer of the two heads what he thought he was up to.

  "What does it look like I'm up to?"

  "Swimming. But why?"

  "Why not? Join us. We've been swimming here since

  1860."

  "In that case you look young for your age."

  The swimmer laughed, emerged from the water and stood shivering on the bank: twentyish, about my height, but a bit more muscular. He was wearing a black Speedo swimsuit and a yellow cap.

  "Don't let me stop you," I said.

  "No, no, I was getting out anyway. Three or four minutes at this temperature is enough."

  He was hugging his body, which was completely red from the cold - lobster-red, as Virginie might have said. As he dried himself off, I looked at the murky shallows of the Serpentine.

  "I suppose it's treated?" I asked.

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  "Oh, no," said the cheerful young man. "They chlorinate it in the summer, but in winter there's nobody but us Water Serpents, and we had to fight the park authorities and the Department of Health and the council and God knows who else to retain our right to swim here. You have to be a member of the club and sign away your health rights, because of all the rat-piss and goose-turds, and then you can swim between six and nine in the morning any day of the year."

  "Sounds complicated. And unpleasant. All that in a stagnant pond."

  "Oh, no, no, no - it's not stagnant - it flows underground into the Thames. I wouldn't worry. We've all swallowed the occasional mouthful and no one's died yet. Just turn up tomorrow morning at eight. The whole gang will be here. On Saturdays we swim races. I swim on Fridays and Sundays too, but then I'm a bit weird. Oh, I'm Andy, by the way."

  "Michael." We shook hands.

  A couple of joggers stared at Andy incredulously and continued on their way.

  "Are you a professional swimmer?" I asked. "I mean, what's the general standard in the club?"

  "Oh, don't worry about that. A few of us have swum the Channel, but others can barely swim up to that yellow buoy there. I'm just a student. I'm studying law at University College. What do you do?"

  "I'm a musician."

  "Really? What do you play?"

  "The violin."

  "Excellent. Well, swimming's the best exercise for the arms. See you tomorrow then."

  "I'm not sure you'll see me tomorrow," I said.

  "Give it a try," said Andy. "Don't be scared. It's a great feeling."

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  I did turn up the next day. Though I'm not particularly athletic, I was tempted by the quirky luxury of swimming in the open air in the heart of London. It was a masochistic luxury for winter, but after a couple of weeks I actually began to enjoy it. The water jolted me more than fully awake and braced me for the day. The coffee and biscuits in the clubhouse afterwards, the mainly male comradeship, the discussion of Giles's whimsical handicapping of us in the race, the reminiscences of the oldtimers, the exchange of small talk in an amazingly wide variety of accents, all admitted me to a world outside Archangel Court and the Maggiore Quartet and Virginie's flat and the past and future and the ungiving pressure of my thoughts. . ,

  1.8

  As for my own accent: what has become of it? When I return to Rochdale I find myself donning, sometimes even affecting, what I once hid. From the start it was drummed into me by my mother that I should "talk proper". She felt there was nothing for me in the distressed and constrained town in which we lived. The way for her only child to escape was via a decent school - my comprehensive had been the old grammar school - and later, if possible, a university and the professions. My insistence on my vocation was met by both my parents with incomprehension, the withdrawal of support, and the repeatedly voiced sense that I had betrayed what had been for them real sacrifices. My father had a butcher's shop in a small street. No one in the family had ever dreamed of going to university. Now here was someone who had a chance of getting in, and who was refusing even to try.

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  "But, Dad, what's the point of filling out the forms? I don't want to go. What I want to do is to play music. There's a music college in Manchester -"

  "You want to be a violin pla
yer?" asked Dad slowly.

  "A violinist, Stanley," interposed my mother.

  He hit the roof. "It's the bloody fiddle, that's what it is, the bloody fiddle." He turned back to me. "How will you support your Mum with the bloody fiddle after I've gone?"

  "What about doing Music at university?" suggested my mother.

  "I can't do that, Mum. I'm not doing A levels in Music. Anyway, I just want to play."

  "Where's playing going to get you?" demanded Dad. "It won't get you a blooming pension." He tried to speak more calmly. "You've got to think ahead. Will you get a grant at this music college?"

  "Well, it's discretionary."

  "Discretionary!" he shouted. "Discretionary! And if you go to university, you get a mandatory grant. Don't think I don't know all that. Your head needs looking at. Look at what's happened to us and the shop this last year. Do you think we can support you when you're fiddling away?"

  "I'll get a job. I'll pay my own way," I said, not looking at either of them.

  "You'll have to return your violin to the school," said Dad. "Don't count on us to get you another."

  "Mrs Formby knows someone who can lend me one for a few months, at least."

  My father's eyes flashed fire and he went stomping off. When he returned a couple of hours later, he was less furious but even more bewildered and aggrieved.

  "I've been up to the school," he said slowly, looking

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  back and forth from Mum's face to mine, "and that Mr Cobb he told me, 'Your Michael's a very bright boy, very clever, he could try for languages or law or history. He'd get in and he could do it if he wanted.' So what is it? Why don't you want to do it? That's what I want to know. Your mother and me, we've worked and worked so that you could have a better future - and you'll end up playing in some pub or nightclub. What sort of future is

  that?"

  it took years and the intercession of others for us to be reconciled. One of them was his sister, Auntie Joan, a sort of irritant peacemaker, who ticked off both of us till we could hardly stand it any more.

  We came together for a while after Mum's death, but it was clear that Dad thought I had, by turning my back on her dreams, deprived her of a happiness she was due.

  Later, he attended my first recital in Manchester, but grudgingly and suspiciously. At the last moment he tried to rebel, and an elderly neighbour, Mrs Formby, had to virtually bundle him into her car. That evening he heard me receive the applause of an urbane world far outside his ken and, after a fashion, conceded that there might be something to my chosen line of work after all. He is proud of me now, and curiously uncritical.

  When I left for Vienna, Dad did not object. Auntie Joan too salved my conscience by insisting that one person was more than enough to look after him. Perhaps the shocks of life have, by breaking his spirit, made him milder. If there is something a bit unsettling about the way he concentrates his attentions on our cat Zsa-Zsa, at least there is little left in him of the old anger that once used to terrify me - and occasionally drew forth from me something similar, slow to enkindle and slow to disappear.

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  Returning ^Om my weekly swim, I'm humming something from Schubert as I enter Archangel Court. I have my little blîck electronic tab-key out, but I hear the click of the unlo^^ gjass doof eyen before j pass jt over the sensor.

  "Thank )ou, Rob."

  "Not at Ul, Mr Holme."

  Rob, ourso.caiieci neac| p0rter 5 but really our only one, sometimes caus me ^ my first name) and sometimes by my last narle? and tnere ^ nQ apparent: iOgic to this.

  "Miserable day " he says with some enthusiasm.

  u-y » T '

  ^ 1 es' l press the lift button.

  "You hayen't ijeen swimmmg again, have you?" he asks, noting my bedraggled hair and rolled-up towel.

  "Afraid so It's an a^ctiOTlf Talking of which, have you got yo.ir lottery tkket for today?,,

  No, no, we a|ways get ours in t]-ie afternoon. Mrs Owen and { discuss the numbers over iunch."

  -Any input from the kidg?,,

  "Oh, yes. By the way^ Mf Hoime) about the lift - it's due tor servicing Qn T-uesday morning, so you might want to make a note of that."

  nod. i{e j-£t growis down and stops. I take it up to my flat.

  o ten tl^jj.^ now iucjcy i am to have what many musicians dlo not _ a rQof aboye my head that T can call my own. iren j£ tj^e mortgage weighs on me, it is better th
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  above me, so I hear no stomping overhead, and at this height even the sound of traffic is muted.

  The building, despite its staid exterior of red brick, is various, even in some ways strange: custom-built, I think, in the thirties, it contains flats of very different sizes, from one bedroom to four, and, as a result, a diversity of residents: young professionals, single mothers, retired people, local shopkeepers, a couple of doctors, tourists who are sub-leasing, people who work in the City, which is an easy commute via the Central Line. Sometimes sounds penetrate my walls - a baby cries, a saxophone warps itself around "Strangers in the Night", a drill judders through; but for the most part, even outside my soundproof cell, it is quiet.

  A man who came to look at my TV told me that some of the residents have their sets connected to the security system so as to observe the goings-on of their neighbours as they enter and leave the building or stand in the lobby waiting for the lift. For the most part, if we meet at all, it is in the lift or the lobby. We smile, hold the door open for each other, and wish each other good day. Over us presides the benevolent Rob, skilfully balancing his multiple rôles of terminus manager, weather discussant, handyman and psychiatric counsellor.

  Back in my flat, I turn to the newspaper I bought on the way back, but cannot concentrate on the news. I have an odd sense of compulsion. There is something I must do, but I am not quite sure what it is. I try to think it through. Yes, I must call Dad. I haven't spoken to him for almost a month.

  The phone rings more than a dozen times before he answers. "Hello? Hello? Is that Joan?" He sounds cross.

  "Dad, it's Michael."

  "Who? Michael? Oh, hello, hello, how are you,

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  Michael? Is anything the matter? Are you all right? Is everything going well?"

  "Yes, Dad. I called to ask how you were."

  "Fine, fine, never been better. Thank you for calling. It's good to hear your voice."

  "I should call more often, but you know how it is, Dad. Suddenly I realise it's been a month. How's Auntie Joan?"

  "Not very well, you know, not very well at all. Between you and me, she's getting a bit soft in the head. Yesterday, she got a parking ticket because she couldn't remember where she'd left the car. To tell you the truth, with her arthritis she shouldn't be driving at all. She'll be sorry to have missed you. She's just gone down to the shops. I'll tell her you asked about her."

  "And Zsa-Zsa?"

  "Zsa-Zsa's in the dog-house." He chuckles.

  "Oh. Why?"

  "She scratched me two weeks ago. My hands. It took a good long time to clear up."

  "Did you bother her in some way?"

  "No. Joan had gone out. I was watching Inspector Morse with Zsa-Zsa on my lap, and the phone rang. I thought it was part of the programme, and then I realised it wasn't. So I jumped up to answer it, and she scratched me. But I got to the phone in time."

  "Oh?"

  "Oh, yes. I got there in time. Bloodstains on the receiver. The Inspector would have made something of it. When Joan got back she called the doctor. He bandaged me up. It could have got septic, you know. Joan took Zsa-Zsa's side, of course. Said I must have been
mithering her in some way."

  My father sounds frail.

  "Dad, I'll try to make it up north in a fortnight or so.

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  And if I can't, I'll definitely be there for Christmas. We aren't going on a tour or anything."

  "Oh? Oh, yes, good, it'll be very good to see you, Michael. Very good indeed."

  "We'll go to Owd Betts for lunch."

  "Yes, that'll be good." He sighs. "I dreamed of the carpark last night."

  "It's just a parking ticket, Dad."

  "No, the other carpark. Where the shop was."

  "Oh."

  "They ruined our life. They killed your mother."

  "Dad. Dad."

  "It's the truth."

  "I know, Dad, but it's, well, it's the past."

  "Yes. You're right." He pauses a second, then says, "You should settle down, son."

  "I am settled."

  "Well, there's settled and there's settled. Are you seeing any pretty girls these days or is it just your violin?"

  "I am seeing someone, Dad, but..." I trail off. "I'd better go, we've got a rehearsal this afternoon, and I haven't looked at the music properly. I'll call you soon. Don't let Zsa-Zsa and Auntie Joan gang up against you."

  My father chuckles again. "Last week, she delivered some fish to the door."

  "Who did?"

  "Neighbours were thawing it on the window ledge. Zsa-Zsa smelt it and brought it over, plastic package and all."

  I laugh. "How old is Zsa-Zsa now?"

  "Sixteen last August."

  "Getting on."

  "Yes." - ."•'• -: • : -

  "Well, bye, Dad." ' •

  "Bye, son." i >^

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  For a few minutes after the call I sit still, thinking of my father. When he came to London three years ago the lift went out of order for a couple of days. He insisted on climbing, in slow stages, to my eighth-floor flat. The next day I booked him into a small hotel nearby. But since his only reason for coming to London was to visit me, this somewhat defeated the purpose. He rarely leaves Rochdale now. Very occasionally he goes to Manchester. London makes him jittery. One of the many things he dislikes about it is that the water doesn't lather properly.

  After my mother died, he was adrift. His widowed sister believed he would not survive the loneliness, so she moved in with him and rented out her home. Zsa-Zsa, my parents' notoriously unsociable cat, then very young, took immediately to Auntie Joan. My father has coped. But he has never got over my mother's death.