The Virtuoso Read Online Free PDF Page B

lid of the piano, was all I could see. If he raised his head and looked forward, he would have been staring straight at me. He did, in fact, lift his head on several occasions, but each time he had that dreamy gaze of a child who’s just woken, oblivious to his environment. The rest of his face was expressionless. I felt a little self-conscious, sitting there staring at him, but was unable to avert my eyes. And no one else seemed to be taking any notice at all. Least of all Noël—his head tilted to the left, his eyes half closed, playing as if he were at home, quite alone.
    I looked about the room, recognising several notable faces that, ordinarily, would have filled me with nerves. But next to Noël, and the impassioned pleas of Schumann streaming out of the piano and rattling every ounce of my body, all the other guests appeared remarkably mundane. The composer Benjamin Britten was over near the gramophone, in a buttoned-up pinstriped suit, holding a beer. With his hair smoothlycombed in corrugated waves and his large eyes set too far apart, I couldn’t help thinking how comical he looked up close. Next to him, his musical and romantic partner, the tenor Peter Pears, was wearing a green cable-knit vest with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and stood with his chest pushed out as if he was about to break into an aria. There were others—the radio broadcaster John Amis; the Earl of Harewood; and the author A.P. Herbert, who, with his large rubbery nose and the small furry circumflexes that floated above his black-rimmed glasses, looked like he was wearing a children’s disguise. Some faces were so familiar I momentarily thought to nod to them. But, thankfully, just before humiliating myself entirely, their eyes brushed over me without a flicker of recognition and I politely looked away.
    I placed my champagne down beside me on the occasional table and noticed a pair of mother-of-pearl cufflinks lying on a crumpled bed of blue tissue paper, with a gold ribbon and card to the side— Dear Noël and a flouncing message and signature. I picked up the cufflinks, stroked their smooth, iridescent surfaces then closed my fingers, holding them like a beetle trapped in my hand, looking around the roomful of guests, challenging anyone to meet my gaze. Noël was deeply absorbed in his playing, staring dreamily at his hands; a sprightly old man with a white beard, who I could have sworn was Bernard Shaw, let out a high-pitched laugh on the other side of the room, but no one else stirred from conversation. From nearby I couldhear snippets of discussion on the libretto of Britten’s new opera Peter Grimes , and over the top, the strident voice of Walter, who stood only yards away, talking with a rake-like woman with a severe middle parting.
    ‘The secret of all the great artists is of pouring the infinite into the finite. And the task for us is to learn to discriminate, to acquire a fine spiritual palate so as to appreciate the true and beautiful, to find that every day is crowded with a thousand beauties…’
    I looked about at this new world in which I sat—a world of Bohemian crystal and Dora Carrington portraits. Listening to Walter’s words chime over me, I let the cufflinks tumble about in my sweaty palm before slipping my hand into my jacket and dropping the shimmering bugs into my pocket, thinking that no truer words had ever been spoken.
    Despite enjoying the view from the sofa, and the sweet musky smell of the champagne bubbles as I rolled the flute against my lips, I was aware of being the only person in the room, other than Noël, not engaged in conversation. Not wanting to be any sort of burden for Anton or the host, I leaned over to peruse the titles of the library, and my eyes fell immediately upon a book with a blue canvas spine and gold-embossed title— The Correspondence of Robert and Clara Schumann. I pulled it out and opened it on my lap. I’d read these letters a dozen times before; it was one of my