The View from Mount Dog (23 page)

‘Was she a pianist, too?’

‘A very good one. We played together for a short while before I had to stop for good: it was how we got to know each other, how we courted and how we first made love. In those days there were two pianos in here.’ Anthony Raffish stared reflectively up at the shadowed cliffs. ‘But it’s you I want to fix. Let me guess what I think is in your concerto repertoire and then you can tell me I’ve got second sight. Very slightly off-beat, some of them: Hummel’s A minor, Tchaikovsky number
two,
Schumann’s Introduction and Allegro, something glittery but not completely trashy like Scharwenka, a Prokofiev, a Bartók, and a neoclassical like von Einem. How am I doing? Then’, he said without a pause, ‘the standard solo stuff but with oddities thrown in such as Dussek, Moscheles, Alkan, a prelude and fugue by Alfred Lord Tennyson. That sort of thing.’

‘Tennyson?
Did he write one?’

‘Good Lord, no, dear boy, I don’t suppose so. But I detect an interest in the outré and the bizarre as well as in a personal interpretation of the standard repertoire. Not Tennyson, then; I was being facetious. Lord Berners, perhaps, if we stick to English peers. No doubt a short and merry piece like one of the “Trois Petites Marches funèbres”.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve never heard of him.’

‘Oh dear, really not?
The
Triumph
of
Neptune
– Diaghilev and Sitwell? No? I knew him well.
Such
a talent; even Stravinsky was impressed. Also a sense of humour. I can quote you exactly what Grove says about those particular pieces: “Of the three
funeral marches (for a statesman, a canary and a rich aunt) only that for the canary betrays any genuine feeling.” A splendid man. But I digress. Was I not correct in some of my guesses? I can see I was.’

The boy was clearly disconcerted. He was leaning forward, filling his saucer with cold coffee from a cup unwittingly held at an acute angle.

‘I don’t see how you could have guessed,’ he said. ‘We don’t know each other, Mr Raffish.’

‘Anthony. But we do; or at least I do. Let us proceed. The concertos I mentioned, have they not most of them been played here in London over the last six months?’

The boy straightened up, his face pale and anxious. ‘You’ve been following me.’

‘Not at all, I assure you. I have been following music: it is my profession. It just so happens you were also present on many occasions. I have not followed you, but whenever you were there I watched you, that I admit.’

‘What are you?’ Zebedee put the cup down and stood up. ‘I’m confused. You’re very kind to have invited me home and given me coffee, and I love your piano and everything, but I don’t know that anything you have told me about yourself is true.’

‘But you do know that everything I have said about
you
is. Very well, then. I am, if you will, a talent scout. I am always at concerts because they are my life-blood and because I am always on the lookout for a certain kind of person. Some months ago I spotted you and thought you were one and now tonight I know that you are. You’re not the only one,’ he added with maybe an edge of malice. ‘There are enough of the others to make me a very comfortable living, but not so many that I don’t count them as friends and value them as artists.’

‘You’re an agent.’

‘Yes,’ admitted Anthony Raffish, ‘I suppose I am. But an agent with a difference. I specialise in lost causes.’

‘You haven’t the right to say that.’ The voice came faintly from the bottom of the canyon as of one already resigned to being crushed.

‘Oh, but I have, my dear, I’ve a perfect right.’ He studied the boy calmly, seeing the angry rigidity of the head staring away upwards into the shadows, divining the involuntary flooding of the eyes, knowing the solitary, introspective work. My, but he was vain, this one. ‘Like you I am a musician. But, also like you,
I am a performer. We wish for reasons of whatever personal bent to take our private selves out on to a platform. Because I am so much older than you – and no doubt spurred by the bitterness of the performer forced to become a member of the audience – I am a very good judge of spectacle. Already, I suspect, you have a better musical intelligence than I; but I also know that your hoped-for career as a pianist is a lost cause unless….

Unless
what?
cried
the
boy
inaudibly

… unless Anthony Raffish takes you in hand. Antonin Raffawicz will listen to your music but it is Anthony Raffish who will lead you out to play. Now, you will have noticed I have asked nothing about your plans, what your teacher says, not even who he is. I have not enquired about the prizes you have carried off nor the competitions you may or may not have won.’

‘I presumed that was because you were too busy telling me how clever you were,’ said Zebedee.

‘That was to give you confidence. Since I could show you that, although we had never met I already knew a great deal about you just from watching you at some concerts, I imagined we could cut out all the nonsense and the delicacy and get down to helping you.’

‘I
like
delicacy…. And, anyway, if you’re offering to be my agent you’d be helping yourself as well.’

‘Granted. But it will be I who take the initial step to bring about the realisation of your fantasy.’

‘Fantasy? What fantasy? I have a perfectly realistic ambition to be a professional pianist, that’s all. I just want to make a living out of my music.’

‘Nonsense,’ contradicted Anthony Raffish complacently, ‘you want much more than that. You could achieve that by being a
répétiteur
with some teaching and sessions on the side. No, you are ambitious for the spotlight and that doesn’t make you any less of a musician. I said fantasy and I meant it. Admit it, now; this is your secret. You go to these concerts fully prepared. And why? Because it is your dream that the soloist will suddenly fall ill and lo! out of the audience steps the unknown Mr Hoyle in the nick of time, sits down among the startled orchestra, gives a nod of assurance to the bewildered conductor, and away goes Rachmaninov Two or Beethoven Five fit to electrify anyone. Especially the critics, hurrying home from the tumultuous applause to write glowing accounts of this new Wunderkind
who at only a few seconds’ notice was able to change for ever the way in which we look at Rachmaninov Two and Beethoven Five. The recording industry ignores him at their peril, the public to their loss, etcetera. And so a great career is launched. By a stroke of fortune a kitten on the keys becomes overnight a lion rampant on fields of ivory. Oh dear me, yes. And why not?’

There was a silence. Then, ‘You think you’ve seen through me, I suppose.’

‘Not at all. Your most private depths remain as opaque to me as to you. I merely understand a particular fantasy because it is all bound up with being unable to start your career properly. You’re not alone, of course.’

‘That’s not how it feels.’

‘Maybe, but the audiences in the concert-halls and recital-rooms of the world are full of frustrated talents who go mainly because they hope against hope that the million-to-one chance will be given them to step into the breach and shine more brilliantly than the star they’re replacing. That is what performers are driven to when they haven’t got careers.’

‘It’s ridiculous. I’m a pianist, an artist, not the sort of spectator who goes to a motor race secretly hoping for blood. I’m not so cold and malicious as to
want
people to fall ill suddenly or drop dead of a heart-attack.’

‘I’m sure you’re not. But there are only so many concert-halls, so many days in a year, so many occasions for a soloist. It’s a highly competitive business nowadays, not a bit unlike sport; and wherever there’s competitiveness there’s the wish to cut a competitor’s throat. In the case of a nice young man like yourself the suppressed wish is to have someone or something
else
do the cutting – luck, fate, circumstance, call it what you like.’

Zebedee had sat down at the piano. Suddenly he began playing Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s ‘Ich ruf’ zu dir’. The depressed magnificence of the music rose in the gloom and held everything securely in its place, for it was as if an avalanche had been about to rush down and engulf him utterly. Sustained and sustaining, some echo hung about the canyon’s ledges and sills long after the last sound had died. ‘I’m not a throat-cutter, it’s no good,’ he said finally.

‘Not even Lipatti played it better than that, dear boy…. Why should you be a throat-cutter? That’s what agents are for. You are a musician through and through. It is a great crime that the world is so constituted that people like us need to fight in
order to be heard. Or at least in order to make a living out of being heard.’

‘That’s what I tell my teacher. He’s always trying to get me to enter competitions. I’m always refusing. I tell him that if I were a poet I wouldn’t give readings of my work in pubs, either, not simply to gain an audience. I’m not beery. I’d rather starve than try to be hearty with people I secretly despise.’

‘Well, there we are. Nowadays, I’m afraid, one of the unexpected consequences of the television age is that the right kind of exposure can be critical to the success of a performing artist. If American presidents need to be sold on television like soap powder, can a mere instrumentalist hope for a hearing and fame without? It’s no good relying on the audience’s judgement: they simply don’t know enough. What they like is to be able to attach some sort of persona to the performer. You have to be both able and identifiable, and if you’re a bad self-publicist you need an agent who can market you in the right way. You need to be managed.’

‘Which is where you think you come in.’

‘My dear, I know I do. Your name, for a start. “Zeb Hoyle.” Whoever heard of a musician being called Zeb Hoyle? It’s inconceivable. You sound like a footballer. No, we’ll have to find you a stage name. Personally, I like initials; they always sound so distinguished. Either that or a single name like Solomon or Michelangeli, but that would be pretentious for somebody as young as you are. Now, what sort of a name? Nothing too English, I think, something which prompts the faintest of musical associations. Cramer? Yes, I quite like that. “Z. Cramer.” No, the “Z” is wrong because the Americans will pronounce it differently. What about “J. S. Cramer”?’

‘J. S. Cramer.’ Zebedee laughed.

‘Perfect,’ said Anthony Raffish, his head on one side. ‘I especially liked the way you threw back that glossy mane of yours. Looks are extremely important, of course. You’re lucky to be so personable. If you were very plain or even downright ugly, we might have had to make you demonic and tousled. As it is, you can be wayward, poetic and
geistig
as the Germans say.’

‘I can’t believe this,’ cried the boy, but there was new colour in his face. ‘You sit there and cynically
package
me?’

‘Why not? What’s wrong with cynicism? I’m not a bit cynical about your playing, which is what counts. As for packaging,
you’ll need it sooner or later if ever you’re going to get out of the dumps you’re in. Whatever you do, don’t pay any attention to established musicians saying that if you’re really worth listening to you’ll inevitably be heard. That is a pseudo-worldly vulgar ism. You’ll find that when people become famous they very much want to believe that all it took was their sheer, unvarnished talent, whereas … my dear, the stories I could tell about the wily moves, the astonishing flukes and – yes – the
beds
which have helped many a career on its way. It’s enough to make your hair curl.’

Perhaps it was true, thought Zebedee half an hour later on his way back across London to the drab rooms he rented near Archway. It was scarcely the first time he had heard such ideas; usually they made him despondent, even irritable, since he could never be quite sure if they were true and there seemed to be nobody who would give him an answer. The lessons, the regular exams, the years of practice stretched back to his earliest childhood so interwoven with anguish as much as with public praise and private pleasure that they had become the texture of his entire life. So much work and reflection had long since readied him for the public career he knew he had earned and yet now he was to believe he had done only half what was necessary. It was not enough to sell sounds; the marionette in tails who sat on a stool and made those sounds had also to be sold. Candlesticks? Sequins? Lace at the wrists? An eye-catching eccentricity like an inability to play without a glass of water on the piano?

Bitter impatience with such tomfoolery brought his heels hard down on the pavement. Get away from such ideas. Get away, too, from Anthony Raffish. Zebedee was unable to be precise about what he had most disliked in the arthritic musician. Perhaps it was having been at least partially seduced by the man, by the cultured clutter of his rooms, the piano whose tone he could still hear, the urbane bohemianism of the foreign background and cosmopolitan past. Also, of course, Raffish had for a short time enjoyed precisely the success which Zebedee now longed for. But under it all there ran a current of unease like a pool spreading from beneath a lavatory door, and he knew that no matter how much might evaporate in the early light of next morning the defect would still be there.

This turned out to be the case. ‘I met the most extraordinary man last night,’ he told Antoinette during their hour. Antoinette
from Basle had been coming to him for lessons for six months now and she was completely in love with him, which at some level he found quite understandable.

‘How extraordinary?’ So Zebedee told her. ‘I think maybe he is bogus,’ she said. ‘Watch out. Perhaps you should not see him again.’

But within a week Anthony Raffish lightly knuckled his arm on the way out of a Wigmore Hall recital.

‘I didn’t see you,’ said Zebedee.

‘Aha, we were late and crept in at the back at the end.’ He indicated a tall, earnest girl with scraped hair. ‘This is Sandra Padgett. Sandra, Zebedee. Sandra’s a remarkable clarinettist. From Harpenden, but quite brilliant. Come, we will take a taxi to Marble Arch and walk a short while in the Park.’