The Secret Knowledge (3 page)

A knock on the dressing-room door, it’s the assistant, Tiff. Bubbly and petite, she has immaculately bobbed hair and the limitless enthusiasm of someone at the beginning of what she considers a career. When she introduced herself earlier in the day she said she would be “handling things”, and he said it would be a pleasure being handled by her. They both laughed.

Tiff has brought a few autograph hunters; two elderly ladies are shown in, enveloped in floral perfume and dressed smartly for their evening out. One has a limp and uses a walking stick, the taller is mannish with a wispy moustache. Both thank Conroy lavishly for his wonderful performance while he signs their programmes. “I particularly enjoyed the Beethoven,” says the limping one, with the confident benevolence of a parish organiser. “Though I wasn’t so keen on the modern piece.” She means a suite by Luigi Firelli composed more than half a century ago, Conroy has always liked to include some twentieth-century repertoire, especially if the composer is unknown. Schoenberg or Stockhausen will half box-office returns at a stroke; Firelli’s name is as obscure and innocuous as Conroy’s own.

“The Schumann was remarkably fast,” the taller woman announces, looking at her signed programme as though it were an application form. “He went mad, didn’t he?”

“Depression,” Conroy corrects.

“Obvious from the music that he must have been disturbed.”

The other interrupts to relate that she studied piano in her younger days, and on one occasion met Alfred Brendel, who was a family friend, and played Schubert for him, receiving great encouragement in return. So this is what she really came for, to share this piece of history that she can already see passing over the horizon of her existence. She wants the world to know that Alfred Brendel heard her play, liked it, and right now Conroy is the world. “Well done,” he says, an invitation to leave that both women accept.

At the open doorway Tiff stands with a pale, earnest-looking teenage boy, next in line, who comes and holds out a notebook open at a double-page, the left sheet bearing a bold illegible scrawl. He points to the empty right.

“Would you like a message, a dedication?” Conroy asks.

“Only a signature.”

It feels like checking in at the hotel earlier; Conroy wonders if the kid will want his car registration too. Just for the hell of it he tries making conversation. “I hope you enjoyed the music.” The boy says nothing, which Conroy takes as a no, so he tries a different line. “What are you studying at school?”

“I’m at university. Physics.”

“Really?” The surprise is that he’s old enough to vote, not that he should be studying a subject in which he need never talk to anyone. “Have you worked out what happened to Schrödinger’s cat?” This is pretty much the only problem of physics Conroy can think of, unless he asks if the kid knows how to fix fridges. He hands the book back.

“Schrödinger’s cat?” the boy says, almost scornfully, as if it were some elementary exam question. “I reckon we’re all inside the box.” He glances at the signature, closes the book and walks away.

That, thinks Conroy, is one reason why he was never cut out for this line of work – having to be nice to pricks just because they bought a ticket for the show. It looks like he’s already reached the limit of his fan base for the night but then Tiff reappears with a final visitor, a plump, balding man in his thirties, jacket and tie, polite handshake, the air of a scholar, and when he compliments Conroy on his rubato, the welcome voice of a genuine connoisseur. “I particularly enjoyed the Firelli,” he adds unexpectedly. “In fact it was why I came, I have a special interest in twentieth-century music, rather a large collection.”

“Of recordings?”

“Scores, first editions, some manuscripts.”

This is an agreeable surprise. Both of them, it transpires, are interested in “minor” composers, though it is a term neither of them cares to use, their interest being premised on the denial of such facile pigeonholing. They trade a few names; Timman’s
Rembrandt Sonata
is one the collector knows, in fact from Conroy’s own recording of it made fifteen years ago, likewise Hessel’s
Tapestry
, though DuFoy’s
Prolegomena
is as unfamiliar to him as Dagmann’s
Little Studies
. “How about Edith Sampson?” the collector counters, explaining she was a Manchester schoolteacher who produced as many as five hundred works including an opera and several symphonies, all unpublished and probably never performed, which he bought for fifty pounds from a junk shop, the price having mainly been for the trunk they were in. Conroy hasn’t heard of her, nor the next name he is offered, a fusion of French and German whose second half rhymes with flower: Pierre Klauer.

“You have his manuscripts too?”

“Only a piano work. Quite remarkable, I think. Perhaps it might interest you.”

Conroy detects that the collector is actually a dealer; their conversation is in danger of becoming a business transaction. “If you’re looking to sell it…”

“I could send you a photocopy, I’d value your opinion. I believe he died young.”

“How?”

“I’m still trying to find out. The piece is a mystery, too. I take it to be a sonata but on the title page it’s called
Le Savoir secret
.”

The Secret Knowledge
: an attractive name. For a moment Conroy fancifully imagines a come-back performance at the Wigmore Hall, a newspaper headline about a rediscovered masterpiece. “Do you have a card?”

The collector brings one from his wallet, bent and bruised from having been carried around too long. Conroy, lacking his reading glasses, holds it at a distance to see the name. “Claude Verrier. French? You don’t have an accent.”

“French descent but I pronounce my name the English way, it’s simpler.”

“Send me the Klauer sonata, I’d like to see it.” Conroy gives his address, then it’s time to say goodbye. Verrier leaves without an autograph.

At the restaurant it’s Conroy, Tiff and a couple of others, local arts bureaucrats of some sort; pleasant and friendly, well used to dining out on other people’s expenses. One is a charming self-described divorcee with a gleam in her eye that speaks of possibility, but she gets a call and has to leave. In the face of every diner Conroy sees the emptiness of pleasure and the inevitability of oblivion, and with each bottle of wine, flat-chested Tiff becomes more beautiful. Eventually they’re all leaving, the handshakes on the pavement are brief and cursory, there’s drizzle in the air and taxis have been spotted. Conroy says to Tiff, “Would you like to go for a drink?” She knows a good bar near his hotel, they talk there about music, the job market, basically nothing, and after a couple of whiskies he asks her to come back with him.

“I can’t,” she says simply, with the polite forcefulness of someone turning away a door-to-door salesman. He returns alone.

Lying clothed and shoeless on his mid-price bed sucking a miniature vodka from the minibar he feels glad she turned him down, regretful that he should have sunk so low. He’s never been unfaithful to Laura in the years they’ve been together. In fact he wonders if loyalty is all that’s left, dishonesty of a different kind.

He thinks of Edith Sampson and the trunk that must have been cleared out of her house by strangers after she died, the old lady’s kitchen smelling of cat pee, her bedroom thick with dust, cupboards overwhelmed by ancient newspapers. The certainty of decay and the defiant will to write five hundred pieces of music only God would ever hear: the unshakeable faith of an artist in her own vision. He tries to replace the image with a more comforting one of Tiff’s slender naked body but guesses she would have handled him in the same business-like way she settled the restaurant bill. For a young girl like her it’s all so pragmatic and clearly defined, the future offering strength, not sadness. What future did Pierre Klauer have? Conroy guesses possible endings: doomed consumptive, spurned lover, uniformed skeleton in a trench. He imagines him a blood-streaked newborn spat into a midwife’s hands, face pre-creased with inescapable fate.

He reaches to retrieve his phone from the pocket of his jacket, tossed on the chair beside the bed. It’s late but he wants to hear Laura’s voice, wants to say sorry for something, anything. He can’t remember if she’s meant to be back home by now or else still away on her assignment, some kind of environmental story she was investigating. Whenever she talks to him about practicalities and logistics he’s got into the habit of tuning out.

Her phone can’t be reached. Somewhere remote she was heading for, sheep and hills, poor signal. Probably sitting in front of a log fire in her B&B thinking what a shit he is. He’s too old and scared to envisage a life alone without her, too weak, but he thinks of it, wondering if it might be best for both of them.

Stupid to imagine there was any chance with Tiff, she must have done it with artists far more successful than David Conroy. Her world is an open-plan promise of infinite efficiency but around its upper balcony stand an exiled crowd refusing to be ignored: the old and dead and forgotten. From beyond the ceiling of the hotel room, Pierre Klauer, Jan Timman, George DuFoy and a thousand others look down, angels of lowest rank, proletarians of artistic heaven, bathed in transcendent, annihilating light. Conroy’s a minor pianist who had his chance but never hit the big time. That’s why he has such affection for the little guys. When the woman told him that story about Alfred Brendel he wanted to puke, knew that if Brendel ever heard it he’d laugh his head off, wouldn’t have a clue who she was. All of us, we’re just performers.

When Conroy was Tiff’s age he was being called one of Britain’s most promising talents, his Shostakovich was “remarkable”, he won a few prizes and thought, this is how it will always be, like this, forever, because this is what I deserve. Yet everything ends in a trunk on a skip, trash waiting to proclaim its true nature, yearning to liberate itself from illusion. His life’s work has been the memory of his hands but it’s the innate impulse of all things to be forgotten.

The Secret Knowledge
. Verrier did a good pitch, mystery and secrecy are more attractive than fact. He gets up and takes another miniature, brandy this time, then lies back on the bed, eyes closed, watched over by the towering ranks of the eternal dead where Pierre Klauer stands, sombre and aloof. We are the unknown, he says, and you will join us.

Ten days after Pierre’s funeral, Yvette and her mother receive a visit from his cousin Gilberte; small, dark-eyed, dressed in black yet radiant with loss, her pale sharp features are determined to resist grief with dignity. Yvette follows little of the conversation while the three of them sit sorrowfully together, then Madame Courvelles excuses herself, leaving Yvette and Gilberte alone.

“I bring remembrances of Pierre.” From her purse Gilberte extracts a small silver locket and a dried flower, the latter instantly comprehensible despite the wearying confusion of Yvette’s mind. Pierre was wearing it when he was shot.

“I can’t.”

“Please.”

Withered yet otherwise uncorrupted, the cattleya is like the remains of a saint; already, twirling it slowly in her fingers, Yvette envisages the jewelled reliquary that would be fit to house it. Before delivering the locket into Yvette’s other hand, Gilberte opens it to reveal an encased curl of coal-black hair, and it is as if Yvette is reading everything in a book, viewing it in a carefully staged photograph, or from a vast distance through a telescope. She is not really here and none of this is happening. It is a fantasy – almost.

“I never saw him.”

“I know that, Yvette.”

“They wouldn’t let me. Why wouldn’t they let me see him?”

“Better to remember him in life.”

“Not even in his coffin… Did you?”

“Let’s not speak of it.” Gilberte presses the locket into Yvette’s palm. “Keep this and treasure it.”

Yvette stares at the two lifeless souvenirs she holds, places them on the table beside her cooled teacup and asks again. “Did you see Pierre’s body?”

“Yvette, you’re only upsetting both of us.”

“But did you?”

“No.” Gilberte’s porcelain face is impassive, her voice like the funeral oration Yvette hazily recalls that extolled with stoic finality Pierre’s genius as musician and beauty as a man. “It was his parents’ wish, you know that.”

“A cruel wish.”

She bristles. “Were it not for your mental condition I would find that remark inexcusable. Is your grief greater than theirs?”

“I only want to know why they hid him.”

Gilberte, her errand already discharged, is like an actress impatient to reach the end of the scene when her role will be terminated and she can depart the theatre. “It’s obvious why, Yvette, stop hurting yourself and others.”

“They should have let me see him!”

So much weeping recently; Gilberte has become immune to it. “Control yourself and think what it must be like for them. You were spared and now you blame them for it.”

“If I could have seen his face.”

“He had no face!” Gilberte’s outburst is like the gunshot itself. “Forgive me,” she says softly.

Impervious to further hurt, her world having ended two weeks ago, Yvette remains numb. “I know how terrible he must have looked. But I should have been with him as he died, holding him in my arms. The crowd, the confusion, everyone saying different things…”

“You did nothing wrong.”

“Or if they made a mistake. How can they be so sure it was Pierre?”

“You make it harder for yourself, Yvette.”

“No,” she says with sudden firmness, as if startled out of a daydream. “I’ve had enough of everyone trying to spare my feelings, treating me like a child. We were going to be married, he chose me as his wife.”

“So you say…”

“It’s true, Gilberte, and in my mind I’m his widow.”

“In mind but not in fact.” Gilberte’s voice hardens with determination, the solidarity of a family that has resolved to close itself against disaster, intrusion, scandal. “His parents’ wishes are final. I came in kindness to bring you these gifts from them, but what you say makes me doubt your gratitude. They have no obligation to you.”