The Virtuoso Read online

  Yes, everything changed for me after that night. My days suddenly filled with great purpose. I immersed myself in the musical world and acquainted myself with my new set of peers—musicians, conductors, composers—when they appeared in the paper or spoke on the wireless, following all they said and did. When all of London’s critics remarked on Noël’s tremendous concerto performance—his ‘engaging confidence’ and ‘virtue of honesty’—I agreed wholeheartedly, parroting each comment back to my father, swelling with these weighty adult words and opinions.

  The conductor Sir Henry Wood declared that Noël reminded him of all the great pianists of the past, and Beecham called Noël ‘the best talent I’ve discovered in the Empire for years’. Beecham had staked the flag: Noël was new musical territory—and I was part of the pioneering expedition. And so began the traversing, the mapping and the unearthing of Noël Mewton-Wood.

  If it wasn’t for the cultural blackout that hit London at the beginning of 1940, more would have been made of Noël’s arrival, yet his timing also made his appearance more auspicious. That this young boy with the ivory skin and the hands that played the sublime could rise when Britain was poised on the brink of possible invasion. In my mind he was a national hero, as potent as a front-line commander. But at the same time, he was entirely removed from the everyday of a war that trampled our days and blackened our nights. He became gloriously untouchable: a brilliant cumulus cloud floating over our cold and muddy lives.

  Like every household at the time, at six o’clock each evening, my father, my aunt and I would gather around the wireless to listen to the BBC broadcast—Blood for Britain, Road Safety in the Blackout or Eleven Hours in a Rubber Dinghy. There were news flashes of European towns captured, and stories of the unimaginable evils of the Huns, who tortured and ate their own children, murdered their neighbours and were marching left-right-left-right towards us that very minute. I accepted that I was to do my bit (‘This war is the people’s war!’) and listened eagerly, standing by for my instruction. ‘Preparation! If the invader comes…’ I waited, masking my excitement, in quiet hope of being given a chance to prove myself. I’d see the invader floating down from a parachute like a spider dangling from a thread, his body braced in attack position, his helmet, long boots and vest all charcoal black as if he’d just walked unscathed from a blaze. Do not give a German anything. Do not tell him anything. Hide your food and your bicycles. Hide your maps. Think of your country before you think of yourself. I readied myself for his imminent arrival, and at the end of each day leaned forward in my chair, listening with my father and aunt to the World Service broadcasts, awaiting further instruction and word from the front.

  And then: ‘Now continuing our evening special on our friends from across the Channel, tonight we look at the life of the French impressionist composer Claude Debussy. To begin the programme we’ll hear three of Debussy’s works for the pianoforte from Estampes—“Pagodes”, “Soirée dans Granade” and “Jardins sous la pluie”—performed by the young Australian pianist Noël Mewton-Wood.’

  The room would then fill with the most exquisite sounds: harmonies plucked from the ether by a composer who arrived on the heels of the nineteenth-century Germans—Wagner, Beethoven and Mahler—with their colossal sounds, their Faustian soul-struggles. Debussy presented the only possible passage forward: impressions of moonlight, footprints in the snow, spellbinding in their simplicity. As I sat in the living room, warming my hands by the fire, digesting battle calls, sirens and insistent broadcasts, the hacking machinery all miraculously subsided, evaporated into the passing of a cloud, drifted off in an ephemeral mist.

  I closed my eyes and imagined Noël playing, his raindrop touch, his intimate knowledge of worlds so beguiling. No one else could hear what I was hearing, really. They just heard sparkling virtuosity, a respite from the war. They couldn’t hear because he was playing for me, for the one person who knew and understood him.

  My desire to see him and hear him felt urgent, and I would remind myself that he was somewhere near me, breathing the same air into his lungs. I’d imagine him in the evenings, eating his meal and taking a cup of tea, gazing out the window and thinking about me.

  Noël was one of the up-and-coming musicians whom Myra Hess adored, and whose talents she fostered. (‘What on earth will the boy be like at forty?’ she once exclaimed on the radio.) So each week I’d look for his name in the National Gallery programme in the paper, and when I saw he was performing, even if my father insisted I go to school, I’d catch the midday bus to Trafalgar Square, indifferent to the trouble I’d get into if caught.

  As London headed into summer, the fences around the Gallery were removed, and guests and diners spilled out onto the lawn. Pulling out my lunch from its brown paper bag, I’d sit on the grass, sniffing the warm blossomy air, admiring the way the young girls lounged about, pulling up their skirts to sun their legs, bowing their heads coquettishly as they listened to tales from young soldiers who knelt down beside them.

  Then as the clock approached one, I’d pay my shilling and walk down the marble corridors towards the Barry Rooms, heading through the crowd towards the nearest empty cane-bottomed chair. Once seated with my satchel between my feet, I’d look up at the bevelled glass-panelled dome and Renaissance frieze with busts of painters gazing down upon me, and wait.

  From behind a red curtain, Noël would emerge onto the makeshift platform. A quiet nod to the audience, then he’d sit at the Steinway, and those gargantuan hands would concertina outward, arching up over the keys—and he would begin.

  Once, after a performance, I lingered around afterwards, hoping to see him, or for him to see me. He came out from behind the curtain with several men and stepped down from the stage. Waiting for him on the floor was a middle-aged woman with a girl several years older than myself. I couldn’t see the girl’s face properly from where I stood but could make out, from the tight clasp of her hands at the front of her coat, the importance of this meeting.

  Noël greeted the woman with a kiss on the cheek then glanced down at the girl, bent his knees a little and leaned over to say hello. I moved forward to listen.

  The woman was saying that young Margaret was one of her students and that she was born in Melbourne—‘just like you, Noël’—and came to watch him play as often as she could.

  ‘I’d give my right arm to play the Fantasy-impromptu,’ the girl broke in, gazing dreamily up at him.

  ‘Well, you’d have to follow that up with the Revolutionary étude, I suppose, if you only had your left hand remaining,’ Noël said, sending the girl into a fit of giggles.

  They spoke for a while, Noël showing no concern for all the men and women queuing to shake his hand. I couldn’t believe he was giving her so much attention; he asked her which pieces she was studying and questioned her about Melbourne—did she swim at St Kilda beach or Brighton? Had she ever been to Studley Park to row along the Yarra?

  ‘Please come back and see me again; I’d be most grateful if you did,’ he said. Then he kissed the woman once more and told her he’d send two tickets for his next concert, and Margaret began jiggling up and down on her toes as if she were about to spill over.

  The teacher held Margaret’s shoulders and started to edge backwards, as if suddenly recognising what an imposition she had made upon this famous musician, thanking and apologising all at once.

  ‘Make sure you come and say hello again,’ he repeated and then turned to join his friends on the other side of the stage.

  Margaret and her teacher walked past me towards the exit. Margaret clutched her small red handbag to her chest and her eyes drifted up to the ceiling where they floated about, bobbing like balloons. I have rarely felt so bitter as I did at that moment, standing fixed to the marble floor, glaring at the girl’s wobbly grin as she drifted towards the door.

  It was not until after the war, soon after Noël and I had first met, that I next thought of Margaret. Noël was doing a BBC broadcast for Australia Day that was t
o be heard in the faraway continent. He mentioned to me in passing that he once knew a lovely Australian girl called Margaret with dark, lonely eyes, who he’d often met for cups of tea and rock cakes at Fortnum and Mason’s. Her father had died at the start of the war and she’d later fallen in love with a soldier, but her mother made her return with her to Australia, and Noël had since lost contact with her. During the broadcast that evening, Noël introduced his programme—‘I’m going to start with Chopin’s Fantasy-impromptu and follow it with the Revolutionary étude.’ As I listened to his performance, the rumble of the Allegro agitato softening into the sonorous voice of the cantabile, my eyes filled with tears. And it wasn’t until well after the broadcast had finished that I could brush aside the image of the girl with the brown woollen coat and red handbag, who’d stood up on tiptoes to stretch a little closer to her idol.

  The Gallery concerts spanned the entire war. Every lunch hour, Londoners filed in under the dome to listen to Beethoven, Mozart and Bach. In the sanctum of the Barry Rooms, only a small note on the bottom of the programme—In case of Air Raid Warning, audiences will proceed downstairs where adequate protection is available— alluded to the world that existed outside the Gallery walls.

  Four weeks before the first anniversary of the concerts, on the seventh of September 1940, at five in the afternoon, the sound of air-raid sirens faded out into the buzz of aircraft engines. Above, in the grey skies, a squadron of fifty aircraft inched over us like migrating ducks, small flocks each in perfect diamond formation. They were low enough for us to see them rock from back to front in the wind, the sun glistening off their bellies as they opened their hatches and released their bombs, dropping them in clusters like handfuls of pebbles. My first thought before running to safety was that they seemed too meagre, those seed-like bombs that spiralled through the air, to cause that piercing whistle.

  We had been told on the wireless that the planes would be fired at, that we would be protected, but there was no defence, no retaliation. We just sat there while they bombed us, our shelters rocking like cradles. It sounded as if the whole city was being destroyed; it seemed impossible that we weren’t hit, that we could be still alive.

  The concerts continued without exception throughout the Blitz; air raids were viewed by the concert committee as mere inconveniences rather than threats. During the September daylight raids of the Battle of Britain, the concerts were moved downstairs, from the glass-roofed dome into the shelter-room, where they remained for the following nine months. Despite the suffocating stuffiness in there on warmer days, the pools of water that collected on the stone floor, and the icy draughts of winter (when I once saw a clarinettist warming her instrument over an oil-stove, trying to get it up to pitch), every day there they were, hundreds of people who’d made their way through glass-strewn streets and smouldering rubble to queue up for the concerts.

  One morning in mid-October, just after eleven o’clock, Myra apparently received a telephone call to say that a time bomb had fallen on the Gallery. When the audience started to arrive an hour later to see the Griller Quartet and Max Gilbert playing Mozart string quintets, a young boy standing at the front of the Gallery directed them across Trafalgar Square to the library at South Africa House, where the concert had been relocated.

  Several days later it was reported in the paper that a one-thousand-pound bomb had been discovered in the wrecked part of the Gallery, and that the concerts were to move to the furthermost room while the bomb-disposal squad disengaged the bomb. Days later, when the workmen were out at lunch and the Stratton Quartet was performing Beethoven’s F major Rasoumovsky quartet, the bomb went off right in the middle of the Scherzo. A loud explosion followed by a rain of shattering glass. The musicians continued without missing a beat.

  It seemed everyone in London attended the Gallery concerts: people who’d never before heard a classical note mingling with those who dedicated their lives to music. As a young teenager in my grey-and-maroon school uniform, I could slip in amongst it all, as eligible to attend as the Queen.

  When I remember those days I find myself having to admit that there is an aspect to the war that I still miss. It’s the incandescence of a person, of a city, only visible in its darkest times. I knew that any day the Fifth Army could come knocking on our door, or I might return from school to find my entire street ablaze. But then I only had to walk through those arched wooden doors of the Gallery and glance up at Noël as he stood on the edge of the stage, tall and still as an obelisk, and I would know at that moment there was nothing that I wasn’t able to endure.

  We met because we shared the same birthday—it was as simple as that. So many years passed, so many days and nights daydreaming at the piano, designing our first encounter (it was usually in the green room after one of his recitals or maybe after one of mine, he’d approach me like a friend, his arms out wide, throwing them around me, more a rugby tackle than a hug—Magnificent performance, truly astounding!), and in the midst of my whimsy, fate tripped and landed me blithering at his feet.

  Anton Steiner was my teacher at the Academy at the time. A student of the great Leschetizky, he was a bear of a man with a faded Bavarian accent that would sharpen like a whetted knife when he became excited about music. He’d chosen me as his student after my June audition: I’d only just looked up from the piano upon finishing the Chopin Third étude when he stormed up behind me, grabbed my shoulders and threatened, ‘I will make a pianist of you!’

  Anton—as he allowed me to call him—had given me Schumann’s Fantasiestücke to start on the previous week, and as I played the second piece—‘Aufschwung’—he sat there nodding his head, sucking his gums so that his white tobacco-stained moustache writhed like a caterpillar. He groaned a little as he did when he was thinking, then, scribbling away in my notepad, told me that the following Tuesday he was going to a birthday party for ‘your dear friend Noël’. Anton knew I was smitten with Noël, but so was half of London, and although he often quipped that he’d arrange for me to meet the pianist one day, his comments, tossed out like gratis concert tickets, seemed merely intended to encourage and inspire my practice. I never believed he’d really concern himself with anything as trivial as a schoolboy infatuation.

  ‘Tuesday is my birthday as well!’ I spun around from the piano, thrilled about Noël’s and my astrological connection, feeling that a part of the pianist’s brilliance had been endowed upon me.

  Anton let out a baritone laugh, then said he would ask if he could invite me along. He may have said more, I don’t recall; I sat gazing out the window at the alders and oaks of Regent’s Park, sparkling in the clear, still, nectar-coloured light, imagining myself in some opulent ballroom, stepping up to shake the hand of Noël Mewton-Wood.

  Anton leaned over, patted my shoulder and said, ‘Keep it up on the Schumann. And I’m sure it will be fine for you to come along this Tuesday.’

  It would be my seventeenth birthday, the twentieth of November 1945, and I’d been invited to the twenty-third birthday party of Noël Mewton-Wood. I ran home from the Academy that day, opened the Fantasiestücke at the piano and practised for hours, imagining myself as the seventeen-year-old pianist Clara Wieck, just arrived home in Leipzig after another long European tour and having received this manuscript from my secret admirer, Robert Schumann.

  On the Tuesday morning I slept until nine; I wanted to be well-rested in case the party ran late. But before I’d even swung my legs out of bed, the magnitude of the day landed upon me, an avalanche of anticipation and panic, as if I’d never truly believed this moment would arrive. I took my brolly and went for a walk around the lake at Regent’s Park, watching the swans and grebes gliding to and fro, carelessly at the mercy of the wind skimming them across the water. On the way home I bought the morning paper and some flowers. It was a preposterous idea—I wouldn’t even let myself admit it—but I did want my room to be looking presentable. I also bought fresh rolls and marmalade and imagined pouring him a cup of tea at my wooden
table by the window, the sun reflecting off his handsome face.

  I returned home, arranged the crocuses in a jar of water, put the kettle on the burner, then sat and opened the paper.

  So this was seventeen, I smiled, looking around my lodgings. There was my bed with its patchwork eiderdown, a wardrobe, my Bechstein upright surrounded by piles of music fanned out all over the floor, a sideboard for the wireless and gramophone and all my records, an old Persian carpet that had worn through in several places, two bookcases filled with my father’s collection of musical biographies, a green sofa and a round wooden table with four matching chairs near the window. Everything I needed was here, I thought; I felt quite grown up. Then I wondered how it would look to a visitor—my little room. The sofa cushions looked discarded, neglected; I jumped from my seat and puffed them, then angled them along the back crease. Then I noticed the downy grey of the floorboards—I rolled up the rug, grabbed the dustpan and brush and, on my hands and knees, began sweeping. Lastly, the piano: I polished its wooden surfaces, restacked my piles of music, putting the Romantics on top, and chose a couple of impressive pieces—the Hammerklavier and the Liszt B minor—to leave open at the piano.

  When I was finished I sat down again at the table, looked about, and felt as though I might be seeing my little grey-walled room, with its small patch of sun that floated aimlessly across the floorboards, for the last time. It seemed that everything was poised, ready to spring up and away. I looked at the crocuses and noticed a small ant crawling over the lilac lip of one of the petals to be confronted by the saffron flame within the bell. For a moment I imagined myself looking back on this morning and it all feeling very far away, and I sensed a faint, bleating nostalgia. I thought about everything that had brought me to this point, everything that had passed since then—March 1940 when my father had first taken me to see Noël perform at the Queen’s Hall—and it felt as though my seemingly endless longing for this day had sucked away, in an instant, the last five and a half years.