The Virtuoso (10 page)

I wanted to run but it was as if these cold, grey faces were interrogating me. I closed my eyes and all of a sudden I saw myself back at the Queen’s Hall ruins, walking up Langham Street on that Sunday morning in May 1941, the day after the Luftwaffe’s final fling.

We had spent that night hiding like mice while the sky was torn open by a harrowing roar, followed by the familiar sound of our city being destroyed. The next morning a dewy calm had spread over the smoking,
rubble-strewn streets. My father told me to fetch my coat then walked with me to the bus.

We didn’t speak as we made our way up from Oxford Circus, bowing our heads in the drizzle that had just started to fall. It had been a little over a year since Noël’s debut concert at the Queen’s Hall, yet in my mind the night had taken on such mythical proportions that those Venetian red seats had become plush velvet thrones, and the golden organ pipes reached miles up into the sky.

With my father walking silently by my side I looked westward along Langham Street and noticed that something was grossly different. A slice of the world had been removed, but it was too extraordinary to say precisely what it was. I kept staring towards where the crowd was gathered, towards where the Queen’s Hall had once stood, and then I noticed it: a great stretch of smoke-filled sky where before there’d been none.

We walked closer, arriving at the edge of the pit. The auditorium looked even larger than before, now that its roof had been ripped off and burnt down into this filthy black lake. People were standing around, whispering to each other or staring into the huge charred mine filled with water and burnt rubbish. I tried to reconstruct the hall in my mind, fill it with balconies, a stage, an orchestra, an audience. But all I could see was a monstrous gaping mouth exposing its macabre, torched innards.

A few thin plumes of smoke rose up from the still mass, sullying the sky. Down in the swampy base I
noticed a carpet of twisted vines, thousands of springs—all that remained of those Venetian red seats. I looked up the far end for those celestial pipes, glistening gold and majestic, and saw a tarnished mangle, a giant pile of black, slumbering snakes. We walked around the side, down Riding House Street, and I could just make out beyond the stage the sooty debris of musical instruments—cymbals, trombones, a harp with strings splayed out in the air, a cello rolled on its side and embedded in ash—like the scattered, broken remains from some Antediluvian civilisation.

We returned to the front and I peered down one last time on to the floor and the stage, and that’s when I saw, just distinguishable, staring out ghostlike from the cinderous remains, the disembodied head of Beethoven, his stony gaze fixed towards the sky.

I looked up at Beethoven’s granite bust now, years later, where it sat in the Academy corridor with the other heads salvaged from the ruins, Will’s haughty voice churning over in my mind. The sounds of the Academy foyer rose up around me—students heading off to lunch with their scores held to their chests; professors discussing lessons and upcoming concerts; the clanging and clattering of plates and cutlery in the cafeteria below. I turned and ran for the exit, almost toppling three women sauntering up the steps as I charged through the glass-panelled doors. I ran towards Regent’s Park, I ran past gentlemen swinging canes and secretaries perched on the benches eating sandwiches. I kept running, past the maples and the
sycamores, beds of gladioli and snapdragon, and an old man cooing to the pigeons. I felt that I couldn’t breathe, my throat a thin, claggy straw. I wasn’t even sure why I was running or where I was going, but I was scared of what might happen if I stopped. So I kept going, no longer able to feel my legs, just aware that a blur of colour was moving swiftly past me and there was something faintly beautiful about it all, as if I were seeing everything from very far away, as it really was, a large piece of elaborate scenery.

I don’t know where I ran to; I can barely remember a thing. I just know that when I finally staggered up the stairs to my digs, unlocked the door, collapsed on my bed and looked out the window, it was night and I was staring at a heavy bank of dark blue clouds and the dull and muffled glow of the moon.

In the late autumn of 1854, while in exile from his home in Germany, Richard Wagner wrote from Zurich to his dear friend Franz Liszt. Wagner was forty-one at the time, a well-regarded conductor and composer, having already written and performed
The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser
and
Lohengrin.
That day he wrote to Liszt in a considered but despondent tone that he had been reading Schopenhauer, finding consolation in the words of this philosopher who held that the final negation of life—death—was the only salvation possible. For Wagner, a man who lived with a perpetual
rumbling in his heart,
a genuine, ardent longing for death
, this idea came as a great relief. It allowed him to bide his time riding a torrent of sonorous melodies, in sober anticipation of that glorious final cadence. It allowed him to create.

I only play with art
, he wrote,
to pass the time.

His art at this time was a four-evening opera—The Ring Cycle.

He went on to say that as he had never in his life felt the real bliss of love, he must erect a monument to the most beautiful of all his dreams, in which, from beginning to end, love would be totally satiated. This opera sketch that he carried around in his head, this surrogate for a love he professed to know nothing about, was
Tristan and Isolde.

My father first told me this story when I was eleven. Perhaps I was too young to understand, but he had no one else who would listen. My aunt had little interest in music, and my father’s colleagues at the Home Office would have been horrified to hear of his love for Wagner, whose music was performed at Nazi party rallies and functions, and who had been officially condemned by the British government and recently banned from radio broadcast.

My father knew that I loved hearing his stories of Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, Schumann, Schubert and the other great German composers, and it is his storytelling I remember most vividly about him. Sitting in front of the fire after dinner while my aunt washed up and the last broadcast came to a crackling close,
he’d lift from his reverie, lean in towards me and start up—‘Did I ever tell you about the year Chopin travelled to Paris?’—as if he were recalling his own adolescence. He had told me every story a dozen or more times, but I always replied no, as it was the only time, other than when absorbed in his music, that I ever recall seeing my father truly happy or interested in anything or anyone at all. His bushy eyebrows would dance about his forehead, and he’d become so animated and carried away with his tale that his pipe, grafted into his palm the rest of the day, would be left to smoulder on the side table, releasing a fine stream of smoke like a fluttering veil up to the ceiling, which over the years formed a sepia cloud above where he sat, a mark that my aunt, with steel wool and curses, wasn’t ever able to remove.

These stories became the fabric of my relationship with my father. Each composer became a dear uncle, their legends both as fantastic and plausible as
The Jungle Book
or
Robinson Crusoe.
By the time I was old enough to ponder the meaning of any of these tales—to ask why a repeating melody drove Schumann to attempt suicide; what enabled Beethoven to rise above deafness and physical decline to compose the euphoric ‘Ode to Joy’; how Wagner substituted music for life and love—my father was already dead.

Unable to comprehend what really happened that day, the first of November 1944, in my mind the event soon morphed into a strip of black-and-white celluloid, inseparable from the newsreels shown at cinemas at
the time, complete with reassuring voice-over and triumphant orchestral score.

I could see him so clearly, sitting on a bus on Etherow Street in East Dulwich, humming Schumann’s
Fantasiestücke
, the manuscript of which he was on his way to purchase for my sixteenth birthday, oblivious to the silent V2 rocket—
Vergeltungswaffe
opus 2, as I called them—careering towards him. In the cyclonic explosion and vaporous silence that followed, I sat shuddering and alone with my one ghost-given birthday present, a giant jigsaw puzzle of Westminster Abbey, five thousand small pieces of coloured confetti, so dull and uninspiring on their own, but each integral to the creation of a magnificent musical tomb.

I was too young to know my father well, to understand what made him tick. Nowadays I barely remember the warmth of his hands, the sound of his laugh; I only remember missing him. In my mind I re-created, hundreds of times, that frosty morning when he walked to the bus headed for Boosey & Hawkes, pipe in hand, never to return to his olive-green armchair by the fire. Although now, ten years on, I’m not sure how much of that, and all else I recall, resembles anything that may have actually happened.

My aunt didn’t say much when she broke the news; she wasn’t crying. I came home from school and she told me to sit down; she then sat opposite me at the table. I remember that moment when I looked at her and around the living room—that very last moment
when for me he was still alive, but knowing from the thick, sour taste in the air that my understanding of the world was about to be betrayed. I looked at her impatiently and she seemed lost behind her eyes. ‘Your father went to heaven today,’ she said, followed by, ‘Things will have to change around here.’ Then her words began to dull and bleed into a liturgy of muted tones, a few words rising above to become audible as she looked down into her lap.

She stood up and made me a coffee, a beverage my father had recently started to drink. It had a bitter, burnt taste but I made myself swallow it sip by sip. She sat down again at the table, yet there seemed an interminable distance stretched out between us. I noticed myself watching her fiddling with her bracelet as if she were posing for a photograph, occasionally sniffing the air like a cat.

Then a strange thing happened: the room started to darken and I felt light all of a sudden, as though I might rise off my chair and float away. I felt very close to my father at that moment, as if the cells of my body were disintegrating and becoming the air around me and dissolving into his. It seemed almost possible that he might walk in the door and put his arm around my shoulder, something that he’d never done before but I could imagine him doing then. That seemed real and possible and I waited for it, each second that passed, thinking I could hear him approaching the front door and the rattling of the knob. But I didn’t wait for my aunt, who sat like a
stone sphinx, to come and put her arm around me, because I knew that would never happen.

I stare at the soggy red heels of my palms I’ve had planted in my eyes—I must have been crying for some time. It is only fitting, I suppose, that I should be thinking of my father right now. Though it does always surprise me how memories will creep up and ambush, without a moment’s warning. The older I get, the more I’m convinced that the mind really does function according to some elaborate plan to which the owner is rarely privy.

I can hear Martha, the housekeeper, downstairs, cleaning with the wireless on. I wonder if there’s been much talk about tonight’s concert. Not that I want to turn it on and find out. Couldn’t bear to hear them carrying on with their pompous twaddle: Noël this, Noël that, my dear friend Noël.

No, I don’t think I’ll even leave my room today—until I must.

So my father never met Noël, never saw me as his lover, never knew his son was queer. He would have adored Noël; what he would have thought of the two of us I’m not so certain. I like to believe he’d not have minded. After all, he didn’t seem so interested in women himself; as far as I know he never looked at a single female after my mother. He was far too busy with his
records, his scores, his pianos; even though he could barely play, I’d come home to find he’d replaced the Weinbach with a Bluthner, then the Bluthner with a Schimmel, the Schimmel with a Bechstein. Or else he’d be raving about propaganda and the bloody war effort, or threatening to throw himself under a train.

And then there was the v2.

I recently saw an article in the paper about von Braun. That blasted German rocket scientist who surrendered to the Americans at the end of the war. Apparently he now runs the US army’s ballistic-missile project in Alabama and is still harping on about space travel. Seeing his name there in print, reading about his recent book,
Conquest of the Moon
, a heady feeling came over me, and I only just managed to make it to the end of the article before I had to leave the table and take a lie-down.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking about von Braun, creator of the world’s first long-range ballistic missile, the v2 rocket. It started shortly after my father died; I was overcome by a strange desire to write to this notorious man and tell him about my father, who obsessed over Wagner, Beethoven and Strauss, and who promised to take me one day—‘once this damned war is over’—to von Braun’s homeland to visit the birthplaces of Bach, Handel, Schubert and Schumann. My father hated the war, but he never said a bad word about the Germans. My father would have said that von Braun was simply doing his job, just like him. My father, in fact, would have greatly admired
von Braun, seen him as a young man with worthy goals. But even he would have found it perverse that von Braun’s enamoured stargazing, his love of the fiction of Jules Verne, his longing to take humankind into the heavens, could have propelled him on a path of such prodigious destruction.

Noël, I recall, was also fascinated by rocket science. After reading Niels Bohr’s
Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature
he tried to explain to me how similar atomic principles govern the functions of rocket engineering and human physiology. He told me that all matter was made up of energy, and there was a virile potentiality stored inside everything—all of us were the prudent progeny of that great ball of flames that blazed in the centre of our orbit. All movement, all life, all evolution could be boiled down to the fusion and fission of particles moving from one state to another, and every change effected a potent release of that simmering energy. ‘Energy is not created,’ he said, his face excited like a child’s, ‘it is expressed. It is the music of matter!’