The start of the evening was unpleasant enough to make you wish you hadn’t come. And the haddock. And the woodwind tuning up.
Nor could he really believe they would be given what they were promised, not even when the first item, printed clearly in the programme as ‘Overture to the Magic Flute’, did in fact turn out to be
The Magic Flute.
Under the spell of scepticism, he skipped the artist’s photograph, unwilling to discover which persona they might expect: whether the Pamina of his tenderest longings, some vindictive Queen of the Night, or worst of all, the complete Stranger; though from what she had told the radio it would most likely be Little Kathy Volkov from Paddo. ‘I am so happy to be back—so very happy—in Australia . . . No. There is no one. I haven’t any thought of marriage. Not for the moment. Music is my life . . . I have so much to learn . . . Oh yes, truthfully
(giggle)
. . . Australia is so wonderful. So
warm
—except when it blows stone cold on you
(giggle giggle).
But I love it . . . Well, yes, it is short, but I have other engagements . . . Yes, London next, then New York . . . But I adore Australia . . . No. No thought for the moment. Of course, in time. It’s only natural . . . I’d love to have a baby by an Australian . . .’
(Rhoda reported Mrs Volkov had been most provoked by that bit; perhaps understandably, because it hadn’t been for want of trying on the part of Paddo’s Little Kathy.)
‘. . . I adore the sunshine . . . the gum-trees . . .
(Had she seen one?)
. . . the A.B.C. for giving me such a wonderful start in my musical career . . . So you see, my heart can belong only to Australia . . .’
Little did they know Her Heart Belonged to Daddy, and that she was capable of breaking into a tap routine, a chewed pink bow going flop flop at the end of her floppy plait, in front of the desolated piano.
He shuddered to find somebody walking over his grave.
The orchestra was playing a work by a contemporary. Imprisoned between walls of Mozart, the subscribers were prevented from stampeding out. He wished he could have supported the despised composer, but his hands had been made feeble by the collapse of faith in his ability to sway himself, let alone others. The scattered applause sounded like an old Venetian blind stirred by a feeble breeze.
The trial was imminent. The conductor, a Dutchman, was disappearing, his buttocks too casual for the circumstances, to drag the prisoner from her mahogany cell.
At once it became obvious that precautionary measures were unnecessary: she made her entrance with an eagerness almost too pronounced. Where Kathy had once edged tortuously through the field of musicians, Volkov arrived at the front of the podium with steely, though graceful, skill. Very briefly her fingertips touched those of the conductor, who hadn’t after all led her out: he had been led. She seemed all matt white, of skin, and black, of watered taffeta, an explosion of diamonds on one shoulder. She was wearing her hair in a dangerously heavy, though expert coil, resting in the nape of her proud neck.
She wheeled so smoothly, that, in her faultless, white back reminded of the Königliche Reitschule; so far in her
haute école
she hadn’t put a hoof wrong.
But as soon as she was seated he recognized the concealed panic which rose in him daily at first touch of the whip. He could almost hear her knuckles cracking as she kneaded them; he could hear her stiff, watered skirt seething with black nerves.
Not for long: she was required to intrude indecently soon; but the violins inclined towards her, in courtship, and the too suave (elderly) Dutch conductor. Then they were all united in the noble charges and intensified caracollings of the music: he too, when at last able to free his throat his locked hand hypnotized by the point of a black silken elbow the throat pulsating white the white the whitest turbulence of bosom as this nameless artist humbly lowered her eyelids at what she had seen reflected in the mirror of perfection.
There were, on the other hand, the moments, the unaccompanied ones, when the unnecessary orchestra of husbands and housewives and raw boys and tired spinsters sat clasping their instruments, while his mistress Katherine Volkov played to delight her lover in a room empty except for themselves; or when his darling Kathy called in her brood, and the golden chicken-notes, in danger of scattering too far, scuttled fluttering for protection under the flounce of her swelling black.
Oh God he was in love with music. He raised his head to it: his Adam’s apple must have stuck out inordinately. He wouldn’t have dared look at Rhoda, whom he had forgotten anyway. He did glance once at Mrs Volkov, who might have been having her child again, there in the Town Hall.
He wondered what part the Russian had played in the making of Katusha, beyond planting his seed in a granite crevice. Perhaps a soul had sensed the rebirth of its own tormented glories, and defected. He had a vision of the recalcitrant creator standing in the middle of a gibber plain tufted with saltbush, dangling a grimy calico bagful of uncut opals. The crumpet-coloured, crumpet-textured face didn’t reveal: but here was Katya in the Andantino polishing the crude stones into an opalescence of music.
He recognized the milky texture, the spurts of black fires as theirs: dark tragedies hinted at resolved themselves in limpid strength. The tragedy was Mrs Volkov’s. And Rhoda’s, from the look of her: she was rocking on her little dried-up-peanut buttocks; though her eyes were closed, her smile exposed her shockingly.
An ambulance clanging down George Street entered through closed doors and reopened a dream he had been hoping healed.
Along the rows the intellectual public servants and unassimilated Europeans were sitting tensed by the Andantino. Lady ffolliott Morgan in pink ostrich feather
curyette
and enough jewellry to stock a shop (perhaps it did) promised to lay her chin on her navel. The ladies from the right suburbs loved to doze, but only to the right accompaniment. (That
Schönberg,
that
Webern!
Oh, Sir
Charles! No,
Sir Charles!) For the time being at least, the waves on which they were rising and falling wouldn’t suck them down into some horrid abyss, or so they believed; they were riding safe in their own opalescent radiance.
The finale almost woke them up: too brisk. The Volkova might have liked to shed her sleeves, but settled down to business. In the middle she looked up, as though remembering her neglected lover, and began to cosset him back, into the curves of her white flesh, and more intricate spirals of pink shells, only to cast him up again, at the fussy business of life which she couldn’t ignore: after all, she took such pleasure in it.
There she was, standing in front of the piano. The public servants, the awakened ladies, the displaced Europeans, all were clapping. And clapping. While the artist kissed the tips of her fingers. She shook a firm hand with the conductor, a limper one with the leader; she nursed the cellophane bundle of flowers as though they were the baby she wanted to have by an Australian. No practical situation would ever find her at a loss. If she had appeared possessed only a few moments before, the spirit had withdrawn from her. There remained the swathe of watered silk, the explosion of diamonds: also perhaps a trace of diffidence towards the one by whom she had been consummated and her achievement made possible.
Seeing it, he rejoiced in the vision of pure joy they had shared, both then, and tonight. It seemed as though the heart were a cupboard one simply had to open: innocence hides nothing; and perfection bears looking at.
So he sat sunken, misted up, and because he was less than innocent, wondering how he could hide his shame; while Rhoda had started a dry cough, and was rattling a dented
bon-bonnière
with half-a-dozen lozenges in it, one of which she began to devour, then almost at once another, apparently having no faith in the first.
‘Why’—beating her flat chest—‘does music always make me—
cough?
’
The audience was going out for the interval. Eyes suggested theirs had been the subtlest experience, though in some cases, the unsavoury-looking pair of eccentrics in their midst spoiled the pleasures of self-congratulation; to rub up against anything so deplorable might have haunted them for ever after.
The Mozart still inside him would have curdled if Rhoda hadn’t twitched round suddenly and hissed in liquorice gusts: ‘I didn’t tell you, but Mrs Volkov expects us to look in at the artists’ room. She expects
you,
that is. Naturally the poor woman is out of her water.’
‘What a relief—for everybody!’ He laughed heartlessly, and kept it up.
‘Out of her depth, I mean.’ Rhoda blushed and frowned. ‘What I mean to say is,’ she battered away, ‘it’s rather a burden for Mrs Volkov, and she’d like some friend of a different level to help her out.’
The prospect hardly appealed; but he saw that he was commandeered. ‘I thought of slipping away. Don’t feel like any more,’ he was muttering pitifully while keeping the top of Rhoda’s head in sight.
A more studiously charitable crowd parted to allow a hunchback to pass, and they entered the mahogany canyon at the end of which was the artists’ room. A guard in mufti hovered round the open door. Inside, Katherine Volkov, looking pale, stood glancing out spasmodically through a cluster of admirers.
Seated in a far corner, smiling her stroked smile, the mother mumbled and beckoned. The new arrivals were admitted.
While haunting the outskirts of the carpet, he thought he recognized the one-f-ed physiologist inside the tom-cat cheeks which come with regular steak and bed. Plastered against him was a young woman of delicate bones and enormous pregnancy possessive enough to be a wife. Ignored by the object of their visit, the couple was staring in sulky admiration at the signs of her achievement.
Lady ffolliott Morgan and a trio of satellites were congratulating Katherine Volkov on her dress.
‘By a little person in Vienna. I shan’t tell you her name, because she’s nameless.’ The Volkova remained silent a moment while admiring the fall of her own watered skirt. ‘Of course I
influenced
her!’
The ladies all laughed in appreciation.
Accepting that her time was up, Lady ffolliott Morgan looked wistful as she asked. ‘We shall see you on Sunday?’ It was tentative, but hopeful.
‘I have it tattooed on my mind—a quarter to one, punctually.’
The ladies laughed again because she made it sound so amusing.
The Dutchman dug a forefinger into her shoulder where the skin took over from the taffeta. ‘Vee vill even so make sure: I vill bring you.’ Then he went off to conduct the Brahms.
At last Kathy was free to rub cheeks. ‘Clif! And this is Trish? When is it expected? Isn’t that beaut! I’m so happy for you.’ She glittered the more for her descent into suburbia.
‘And darling Miss Courtney!’ She descended lower still to embrace this quaint dwarf.
Her back bent, the Volkova might have been helping pull the go-cart full of stinking offal for cats. On straightening up, she drew a deep breath—the room was smelling of tuberoses enough to deaden a corpse—and gave Rhoda her healthiest smile. ‘I’m terribly grateful to you. Mum does depend on your support.’
Mrs Volkov nodded and prepared words which wouldn’t form.
Kathy all the while was flickering her eyelids in the right direction, just about to—she’d have to say something soon surely to God.
He couldn’t help trying to carve into the tended skin, through the technical smiles, to the vision they had created together; but instead of helping him revive it, she was growing hobbledehoy; she clasped her hands in a tight ball at her waist: there was nowhere about that severe dress in which to hide them.
What made the situation more embarrassing, Rhoda seemed to understand it; she whispered loudly: ‘Hurtle was tremendously impressed.’ (Her dolt brother.) ‘We must go now,’ she whispered louder still. ‘They make such demands on you.’
As he followed Rhoda out of the room Kathy blundered after them, and was apparently speaking to him. ‘Thank you for coming to hear me play.’ Her face was pursed up in a gross vegetable shape; she was so hesitant she almost tottered. ‘I do appreciate it,’ she managed to blurt before planting on his cheek a kiss which immediately bounced off: it was so clumsily done.
Ignoring Mrs Volkov, a grey blur waving vaguely from her mahogany corner, he ran snorting down the now deserted corridor to catch up with Rhoda. He hoped she hadn’t seen anything of what had just happened between Kathy and himself: the two geniuses.
Rhoda almost certainly hadn’t, because of an encounter which was putting her on her mettle. Without any difficulty, alas, he recognized Shuard.
Shuard didn’t age like other people: always only a little plumper than the time before, the steel wool only a shade more silvery, the whole man so smooth and preserved, no doubt at the expense of the several wives on whom he had battened. He was aided and abetted, of course, by the banality of his mind: nothing like an empty head for keeping the wrinkles at bay.
Rhoda was playing up to a man, who bent down in a caricature of gallantry.
‘Didn’t you enjoy it, Mr Shuard?’ She had launched into her best imitation of Maman. ‘Such a charming—an
exquisite
performance! ’
Because he couldn’t reach down as far as her elbow, Shuard tapped her on the shoulder, which made it look less gallant than he might have intended, but more in keeping with his patronizing nature.
‘Stylish, yes. But not Mozart. Not yet. Perhaps if she works at it. And Kathy is a determined young lady.’
Rhoda made the laughing sounds, half protest, half agreement, Maman would have made in the circumstances, but drier because of her own little wizened throat. She wasn’t exactly betraying Kathy, only obeying a convention.
‘You understand?’ Shuard gargled from behind his perfectly false teeth.
‘Oh, work—yes—I agree—so necessary—and rewarding!’ Rhoda gurgled.