The Virtuoso (25 page)

I must have read the letter several times, unable to make any real sense of it at all. I just stood there reading it over and over, without actually registering the words, just looking at the lines, the swirls, the crosses, trying to untangle the shapes on the page. I started to feel angry and confused, as if I’d been the subject of some perverse joke. After that I can’t remember what happened. Gerald later told me that I started laughing and speaking absolute gibberish, then walked upstairs, went as white as a sheet and collapsed.

Some time that night, or perhaps early the following day, Gerald admitted me to Westminster Hospital.

I vaguely recall waking and finding myself lying in a large, white-walled room filled with beds of howling
patients and incessant traffic moving past. I remember a nurse with loose, puckered flesh and large, freckly arms that would hover over me holding a syringe—‘Just a little injection to help you sleep.’ The entire time, even though I had little sense of where I was or why, I felt a tremendous sense of calm. And that’s how I remained, drifting about in a soporific state from which I became irate if ever disturbed. I didn’t see Gerald—he told me afterwards that only family was allowed to visit—and the only company I enjoyed was that of a little red-haired child of a nurse who brought my meals—usually a tray of pills in a small kidney-shaped metal dish accompanied by a serving each of stew and jelly—and who I’d insisted call me Clara. She seemed, like me, oblivious to the blood-curdling screams and barking military commands that ricocheted about the brick walls and vinyl floors. Thinking she was doing the right thing, she told me that Noël Mewton-Wood (who I’d apparently called out for several times) had been an inmate in this very ward only two weeks earlier—he’d been an absolute gentleman, she said in her dreamy cockney voice.

I didn’t have the heart to tell the dear girl he was now gone.

I was only there for three days before Gerald convinced my doctor that I wasn’t about to kill myself, and that he would manage my medication and keep an eye on me. I don’t think the doctor would have needed much coercing—he clearly couldn’t wait to see the back of me. When Gerald arrived at my bed and
started packing my suitcase, repeating the conversation he’d had, I smiled wearily in agreement.

No, I wasn’t going to kill myself. Even in that respect I felt like a complete and utter failure.

‘I’ve spoken to Ma O’Grady,’ he started, once in the car. ‘Told her some story about a sick uncle in Bournemouth you’ve gone to visit; so I’ve packed up some of your things. Thought it best if you stayed at my place for a while. Mother’s in the country, so it’ll be nice and quiet.’

I only then noticed that the back seat was piled high with suitcases and boxes of my belongings.

‘Your work’s been ringing. Ma O’Grady said she’d pass on about your uncle if they rang again.’ He waited for me to reply; I said nothing. ‘We’ll probably have to do something about that.’

I was looking out on the street. Somehow it was even greyer than usual, a storm coming perhaps. There was a lady with a barking terrier at her feet, unsuccessfully trying to erect her umbrella with such a sour look on her face that no one bothered to help; two young secretaries with heads in the air carrying boxes of flowers (I guessed one had just got herself engaged); and a stocky, grey-haired man in an olive-coloured suit who, at first, I thought was Anton, my old teacher from the Academy. I felt entirely removed from it all—a bus could have run them all down that very second and I wouldn’t have flinched. I watched, simply because there was nothing else to do, and because there was
something strangely amusing about the way everything, so pointlessly, went on by.

‘There’s a gathering at Pat’s tomorrow.’

I didn’t respond.

‘Anyway, we can see how you pull up in the morning.’

I realised I ought to speak—that Gerald was trying—but there was really nothing I could think to say.

I didn’t go to Pat’s. I stayed in the room that Gerald had had made up for me with a four-poster and a desk with gramophone, wireless and typewriter, overlooking a grove of walnut and pear trees, all of which stood naked and shivering in the fog on the frosted grass. Martha had stacked the fireplace, and for lunch brought me up
The Times
, a tray with a plate of beef-hock stew and waxy potatoes, and a bottle of brandy. So after lunch I sat in the armchair by the fire, read some Genet and proceeded to get drunk.

The wireless played in the background and every hour my ears pricked up to hear the BBC news, each time feeling a sense of both betrayal and relief to hear no word of Noël. The only mention came in the afternoon when Neville Boucher spoke of a forthcoming performance of Alan Bush’s
Voices of the Prophets
, which, he added, was premiered last summer at the Festival Hall by Peter Pears and Noël Mewton-Wood, to whom Bush had dedicated the piece. ‘Mewton-Wood, of course, who sadly passed away last
weekend’. And in those few simple words, I thought, Noël had been swept from the world.

The papers had been conspicuously quiet. Bliss had written an obituary in
The Times
, and apparently Pat had been put in charge of the press, making sure no scandal erupted. There had only been oblique mention of the recent death of a
friend and associate
, which had caused the pianist
some distress.
They had also reported no suspicion of foul play. The death was believed to be due to poisoning,
while the balance of the mind was upset.

I’d always envied Noël’s robust and optimistic spirit, the apparent grace and ease with which he moved through the world. But as I remembered him perched on the edge of the sofa with that unflappable smile, handing me the
Davidsbündlertänze
, I had the terrible notion that perhaps there was far more to this thoughtful gift, and the dedication he made to me—Clara—over the radio the week before he died.

Shortly before Schumann had given Clara the dances, he’d made a confession to his fiancée about a
psychical malady
that he’d been burdened with for as long as he could remember: relentless cycles of suicidal despair and euphoria. He begged her not to worry, assuring her that she was capable of curing him entirely and making him completely happy.

Schumann thought of the two battling sides of his personality as characters, which he named
Florestan
, who was passionately enthusiastic, and
Eusebius
, who was lonely and introspective. I wondered what Clara thought, when, several weeks after confessing his
secret, Schumann presented her with the
Davidsbündlertänze—
the League of David Dances—each piece bearing an
F
or
E
, or both, at the beginning, and several of them titled with thoughts or gestures of the two contrasting personalities. Perhaps she had felt as we had when Noël walked out on stage to perform this extraordinary opus: awestruck by the man’s genius. Surely she could never have conceived how anyone capable of creating works as beautiful as these could one day simply lose the will to live.

I thought about how Schumann’s fits of depression were followed by periods of frenzied composition—the First symphony in B flat major only took four days to compose, as did the
Liederkreis
of twenty songs; and about the furious pace at which Noël would learn some horrendously difficult work like the Busoni concerto, sometimes in a matter of days. The more I thought about these remarkably similar men, the more convinced I became that neither had lost the will to live, or
lost
anything at all; but, rather, had simply just stopped—stood still. And let that thing—whatever it was—that had been chasing them, driving them on, finally just catch up.

London audiences had rarely heard the
Davidsbündlertänze
before Noël performed them. So satisfied, they were, with knowing all the great classical works, so resistant to hearing anything new. Yet, when Noël played these pieces, I’d look around the concert hall and see tears streaming down faces and smiles of recognition. Noël’s extraordinary
understanding
: that’s what we all talked about after he played, without giving a thought to what it meant—this
understanding.
None of us considered it as anything more than some supernatural gift that had landed in his lap, some astounding ability that he possessed—to be able to walk on stage and into the shoes of Schumann.

Gerald arrived home from Pat’s around ten, came to my room and asked me to join him for a drink in the library. He stood hunched over at my door, leaning all his weight on the knob as if it was the only thing holding him up. The few wrinkles around his brilliant brown-blue eyes were more prominently etched than usual, with fine layers of skin drooping over each line.

‘They all say it was guilt,’ he trailed off, swilling his brandy in its balloon and looking over towards the wall of books. ‘And grief, of course. Yes, most certainly grief.
Devastated
about Bill, naturally. But everyone was talking about how
happy
he’d been those last days—that he kept saying he felt he was getting over it all. He rang John Amis the night before and they spoke for
two hours.’

I wondered why Noël hadn’t tried ringing me. I felt a weary anger towards John, as if he’d misappropriated those precious two hours of Noël’s final night.

‘John says Noël was talking about the future, upcoming tours—terribly excited about the recordings he was going to be doing with Max Rostal.’ Gerald had his legs stretched out, crossed in front of him, and was
staring at his shoes, quite intently, as if some answer might lie there.

Martha carried in a basket of wood for the fire. She knelt down and started loading the blaze without glancing back at either of us, clearly aware we were in for a long night.

‘Earlier in the week,’ Gerald continued, ‘Pat and Noël drove down to Cambridge to visit Carl Winter at the Fitzwilliam Museum—he’d just opened an exhibition on eighteenth-century portrait mezzotints; Pat thought it’d be good to get Noël out of town. They’d only been there half an hour when Noël excused himself, said he wanted to drop in on a friend and that he’d be back in ten minutes. Several hours later he returned—quite cheerful, apparently—and had this small, dark brown bottle.’ Gerald paused and put his drink down on the desk beside him, looking at it quizzically. ‘Said something about the
damned rats
in his new house—that this friend of his in the Chemistry Department had given him some cyanide to get rid of them.’

Gerald continued relaying the tale, telling me about Pat and Noël’s drive back from Cambridge. I imagined Noël, sitting in the passenger seat of Pat’s Bentley as they drove through the countryside chatting about the portraits they’d just seen, aware, the entire time, of the cold glass bottle, heavy in his pocket. Over the next few days, Pat had said, Noël’s spirits seemed to lift. I imagined him each morning, chatting with Pat over breakfast, then heading off to Hillgate Place to
practise, whistling Gibbon’s
Fantasia
as he walked down Harley Street towards Notting Hill, this grave weight swinging pendulously in his jacket.

Gerald looked at me sternly. ‘Are you all right, ol’ chap? Would you like me to grab one of your pills?’

He stood and walked off towards the kitchen. I filled my balloon with brandy and tipped the contents down my throat, warmed by the feeling of my entire insides blazing alight.

As I lay in bed that night my mind roamed among a series of flickering images, eventually settling on one from almost eight years earlier: Noël standing in front of that large oil painting of a swirling cyanic sea at the gallery off Portland Place as he spoke to me about the production of prussic acid.

I never questioned Noël’s possession of such macabre knowledge—he subscribed to the
Lancet
and several science journals, and with little prompting would explain, in meticulous detail, processes such as plutonium fission inside a nuclear reactor or alcohol absorption inside the human body.

One day over in Hammersmith I was waiting for him in the living room while he took a call in the study, and started flicking through one of his American medical journals that was lying on the table. Inside was an article published by two ex-German Jews about the effects of cyanide poisoning on the human body. I’m not normally interested in such gloomy things but it was all so
hideously described I couldn’t take my eyes from the page. The cyanide, they wrote, attaches itself to the haemoglobin in the blood, making it unavailable for carrying oxygen (just as Noël had told me at the gallery—‘As if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the blood!’). Within seconds the cyanide is distributed around the body and the victim, starved of air, experiences dizziness, coughing, headaches and nausea. Then the most extraordinary thing happens: the oxygen-deprived central nervous system becomes frantically energised, causing hyperactivity and palpitations. As I read this, I recalled from school science classes that a dying plant, as if somehow aware of its fate, spontaneously flowers and seeds; I thought of Schumann and his burst of frenzied composing before sinking into a suicidal abyss; and of Beethoven, during one of the saddest periods of his life—almost completely deaf, unable to perform, surviving the deaths of family and close friends—composing his final symphony: an exultant ‘Ode to Joy’. One final desperate lunge towards life.

The body’s attempt to rise up above what is happening, to override the effects of the poisoning, is short-lived. The pulse slows down and weakens, breathing becomes laboured and stertorous, limbs tremble and convulse. Within minutes, gasping for air, the poisoned body becomes paralysed, comatose and, shortly after, dies.

Noël had been on the phone, laughing in the next room, while I was reading and thinking about all of
this, completely unaware (how could I have been otherwise?) of the awful irony of what would happen—that one day I would remember all that I’d read, and Noël’s waggish voice in the background, and the entire scene would take on an air of such grotesque horror.

When Noël didn’t arrive back at Pat’s house for dinner on the Saturday night, two weeks after Bill’s death, Pat and Raymond Russell set out into the fog towards Hillgate Place. When they arrived, the house was dark and quiet; there was no answer at the door. They rang the police from a neighbour’s house, then forced an entry. Once inside, they turned on the lights and could see, through the open door to the music room, the Steinway, with its lid open. There was music on the piano stand and scattered about on the floor.