The Secret Knowledge

Chapter Three

Samuel Johnson said that if you want to be an artist then be a mediocre one, since the public for the most part have mediocre taste. Arriving home from his concert tour Conroy considers this observation as true nowadays as it was in the eighteenth century. The last of his three appearances was part of “Tune Inn”, a crassly named festival of music and fine food put together by some kind of local development agency in association with various media and sponsorship partners. Conroy never figured out the details and honestly didn’t care, he was there to give the same programme he’d offered at his other two engagements: Beethoven’s Opus 26, Firelli’s Dance Suite, some Chopin mazurkas, Schumann’s Kreisleriana. He got there and found he was up against Paul Morrow, they’d put the two pianists head to head, the timings overlapped so it was impossible for anyone with a genuine taste in art rather than salad dressings to attend both recitals. Morrow, half Conroy’s age, is the latest photogenic long-haired wunderkind, the press love how he plays in jeans and says he doesn’t mind if people talk during the performance, they do it at rock concerts after all, so why not classical ones? When Beethoven was debuting his own works, people would drink and talk.

Yes, thinks Conroy, and Beethoven fucking hated it. He unlocks his front door, deactivates the burglar alarm and sees the mail piled on the floor, he thought Laura would be back already but she must still be away on her assignment. He’s had no more texts, hasn’t been able to speak to her since that last argument. Among the junk mail there’s a large envelope with a handwritten address, he takes it to the kitchen and opens it after he’s put on the kettle. The collector he met at the second performance, Verrier, has sent a photocopy of the sonata he mentioned.

Conroy’s parched, makes some tea and sits at the kitchen table. Showed up at Tune Inn and the green room was a marquee with rugs and sofas, ethnic finger food, crew of enthusiastic helpers fresh out of university. One of them said come and meet Paul Morrow who was sitting holding court with a glass of white wine in his hand, Conroy couldn’t tell if the ongoing repartee was a press interview or regular conversation. Of course he didn’t want to come and meet bloody Paul Morrow.

He quickly looks at the Klauer score and reads the accompanying letter from Verrier who’s been doing some research and says the composer died from a gunshot wound in a Paris park in 1913, reported in the press as a tragic accident, probably a polite way of saying suicide. Klauer’s handwritten notation on the photocopied sheets is neat and readable, first movement looks interesting, perhaps a touch of Busoni about it. Again the tantalising vision of a come-back concert, media interest. Forget the music; the troubled young genius blew his brains out and the world unjustly forgot him, that’s a story.

Morrow, unshaven in baggy blue pullover, was telling his little entourage about his plan to do the complete Well-Tempered Clavier at Heathrow airport. “Like, you can buy your duty free, listen to some Bach, whatever.” The juvenile assistant with a Tune Inn tee-shirt did the introductions, Morrow didn’t bother getting up but stretched an arm in languorous handshake. He’d obviously never heard of Conroy, had no idea he might face any kind of competition for audience-share that afternoon, knew in any case it would be no contest. Wine-glass in hand, Morrow generously asked about Conroy’s programme, nodding with approval. “Great line-up, I’ve never heard of the Firelli, that sounds really cool. I’d love to hear your gig, man, it’s fucking nuts the way they scheduled it. Wonder if they could change the timings? And Kreisleriana, that’s wicked.”

The Tune Inn organisers hadn’t stopped to ask themselves how two guest artists might feel about being made to clash, they had thought only about abundance of consumer choice: a jazz quartet in a kitchenware promotion, Mongolian folksong next to a lecture on Italian wine, some Debussy for dessert; or if not that, then an entirely different permutation from the menu. Morrow was inter-changeable with a TV chef, Conroy with a jar of mustard. He asked Morrow, “Have you ever read Kreisleriana?”

A double-take, like it was some new kind of street-talk that needed decoding. “You mean played it?”

“It’s a book by E.T.A. Hoffmann.”

“No shit.”

Morrow looked genuinely interested to learn more but his female minder interrupted to say they needed to go outside for a photo shoot and that was the end of the conversation. Instead Conroy had to continue it inside his own head, telling the departed Morrow that the book features a musician completely opposed to false reputation, the shallowness of mass taste and received opinion; a person living for art in a world that recognises only commercial value, therefore considered mad.

Conroy sips his tea, thinks about unpacking. He used to keep a bag permanently ready for concert travel, these days he doesn’t need to. Eventually he lifts his case from the hall and takes it to the bedroom, some of the shirts have remained unworn and can be hung before he dumps the rest in the washing machine. He opens the wardrobe. Half the space inside is empty. Laura’s clothes are gone.

First thought that hits him: we’ve been burgled. Next: why did she take all her clothes for a trip of a few days? Then at last the truth, at least twenty minutes before he finally accepts it, once he’s established that she’s removed not only her clothes but every item she owns, every ornament and photo, cleared herself completely out of his house, his life, told him unarguably that it’s over. And he realises that it was already over when he left for the tour, finished even before then. It was over from the first moment they met. Their entire relationship was between two people destined to part.

Everything really happens long before it becomes fact; public knowledge is invariably the last to arise. How long was Laura planning her escape, when did she decide on the form of her exit? Conroy’s still asking himself the question hours later, the whisky bottle almost empty, something happening on television that he doesn’t feel the need to comprehend. This is how all things conclude: badly, without resolution. He knew it when he was stupidly trying to get off with that girl after his second recital, when he was lying on the hotel bed wondering what it would be like to be single again. He got his wish.

Conroy re-reads Verrier’s note in hope of distraction, or perhaps because a handwritten letter — so rare a thing nowadays — is a kind of human contact we’ve largely forgotten. Right now, Verrier is Conroy’s drinking buddy, a connoisseur, not fooled by charlatans like Paul Morrow, he can see through that sham, it was Conroy he paid to hear. The audience at Tune Inn: a few dozen too slow to make it to Morrow’s sell-out. The kind of man she’d probably prefer to be sleeping with, maybe is.

Art is human, it’s flawed. We make mistakes, hit wrong notes, and those great composers, they were human too, they wrote wrong notes, performers learn and repeat them. But there has to be the illusion of perfection, gleaming image of mass production and infinite reproducibility. His students at the college, he’s meant to get them to competition standard, meaning they should play like machines, he shows up at work next day having slept for two hours and he’s got to give lessons as usual, though all he wants is to tell them to go to hell.

When he gets a call on his office line he assumes it’s Laura, grabs the receiver, skull throbbing, but it’s Verrier. “Did you get the score?”

“I haven’t had time to play it.” Conroy’s hung-over, they aren’t buddies now, Verrier’s unwelcome urgency has too much salesmanship about it.

“I look forward to hearing your opinion.”

“I’ll let you know.”

Student he sees later in the week, kid called Harry, he could be the next Paul Morrow, the hair and attitude are spot-on and who gives a damn about expression? They’re doing Chopin Études; Harry attacks the ‘Winter Wind’ like he’s a psycho with a hunting knife, sawing his way through the right-hand sextuplets. This is competition style, all right. The two of them discuss interpretation and Harry uses the term “take-home message”. What else do you expect from a generation taught to equate education with financial investment and personal debt? Conroy nods off in the middle of the next piece but is woken by a fortissimo fit for the Wembley Arena.

“How was it?” Harry asks at the end, a puppy wanting a pat on the head.

“You’ve clearly been practising.” This is what every teacher at every level says to every student who’s just dished up for them a plateful of musical vomit.

“Thanks.”

Four days of a life without Laura that began years ago, her number comes up as not recognised, she’s ditched her mobile as well as her man, both equally outmoded. After Harry, Conroy has some free time and starts playing through the Klauer. This, too, he thinks, is a kind of farewell gesture, and like every artwork it’s a one-way message. Klauer bowed out and left no room for a response; all we’ve got is a half-empty wardrobe.

Klauer’s a chameleon, the first movement gives nothing away, there are possible references or allusions, but no sense of who exactly he was, this mysterious fellow with his secret knowledge. Nor did Conroy ever really know Laura; it’s only when they surprise you that you find out your ignorance. We expect continuity, not paradox.

The slow movement strikes him as more readily grasped, something operatic about it, though gradually Conroy understands what the peculiar scoring and implied colours really mean. This is an idea for a symphony; these are meant to be violins, horns, an oboe. The entire work is a skeleton, and it’s with this in mind that he repeats the movement, trying to guess which solo instrument is intended to be heard at the outset. In his mind a park, people in old-fashioned costume. A dull pop somewhere and a man falls to the ground. That’s all there is to it, the gap between life and death.

In the afternoon he has a new student to see, a late starter on the course, must have transferred from somewhere else. When he arrives at the room she’s already waiting for him, small girl, sweet smile but can’t have much strength in those limbs. She says she’s called Paige. He opens the sound-proof door, gestures her inside and asks, “How long have you been playing?”

“I started when I was four.”

“How long is that?”

“Sixteen years.”

She tells him a familiar story of lessons and grade exams, junior competitions and medals, a childhood dominated by a single lustrous project. Conroy always likes to know from the start what sort of influence the parents have had, he’s seen plenty of students glad to have escaped domestic domination and wanting to take it easy. But this girl seems motivated, managed to do well in her school subjects, had other options and chose music against her parents’ advice.

She offers him the Barcarolle, accomplished if a little stiff. Conroy finds himself trying to guess which edition she’s used: Chopin wrote two slightly different manuscript versions. A left-hand D sharp soon gives it away, he stops her not long after. Next it’s Beethoven, this sounds more promising, but while she plays and Conroy stares through the window at the trees and small park where a woman pushes a buggy he finds his mind drifting, the ‘Waldstein’ isn’t holding his attention. What did Adorno say it made him think of when he was a child? Knights in a forest. Conroy must still have the book, unless Laura took it, though she seems to have been meticulously selective, removing only what was unambiguously hers. Surprising, in the Venn diagram of their material possessions, how negligible the overlap.

In Paige’s performances Conroy detects a troubling insincerity, a desire to please out of a sense of duty. “Play me something you love,” he tells her, and she offers Janacek’s suite On An Overgrown Path. An intriguing choice; its demands are expressive rather than technical. Here, thinks Conroy, is someone genuinely more interested in art than showing off. The tone feels exactly right, her playing is sensitive but restrained, completely devoid of sentimentality. She conveys what for Conroy is the real essence of this piece: the loneliness of a bad relationship. She can’t possibly understand at her age, perhaps even Janacek didn’t know it when he wrote the music (though he would come to know it), but Conroy can hear it as he looks down on the muted street. Truth is not something we discover consciously; it discovers us.

He turns to watch, his view of her is from the side, her concentration appears total. She looks younger than twenty. If he’d ever had a child, he thinks, he would have wanted one like this. But it’s too late. It almost feels as if his life is already over.

Towards the end of the piece there’s a section marked ‘adagio dolcissimo’; a mysterious, floating passage that sounds like a memory, but a memory of what? If the whole piece is really about loneliness then this section is the dream of how things might otherwise have been, a false memory of happiness, a path denied. Yet this girl has so many possibilities in front of her, such potential — he hears it now — what can she know of suffering and disappointment? It moves him that she should be able to express so clearly a pain still to be felt. And this, he realises, must be the key to Pierre Klauer’s music. A life full of promise, haunted by its own doomed future.

He wonders about the other path she might have taken; after she’s finished he asks her what degree subject she gave up. Physics, she tells him. He’s surprised, and thinks of the gauche student at his recital recently, the one who said we’re all inside a box. What he meant is that we’re dead in our graves from the very first moment of existence; it just takes a while to figure it out. Yes, he’s sure she said physics.

Conroy decides they should spend more time on the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, he understands now that all the faults he heard before were those of her teachers, she needs to unlearn what was drilled into her. He sits at the neighbouring keyboard, demonstrating passages he wants her to try, pointing out where she was apt to shorten a note, blur a chord or misplace an emphasis. In every case she takes his suggestion and turns it into something new, never mimicking, always pushing herself to experiment. So many ways to play the same piece and none is definitive, there’s always room for variation. But Conroy’s job is to bring her to competition standard, he’s a quality-control inspector on a production line in an industry that demands consistency and predictability. He wonders if she’s just too good for the professional circuit, the world of crowd-pleasing monstrosities like Tune Inn with their banal maxim of inclusivity. Paige, he senses, is an individual, not an acrobat. Beethoven is what they ought to work on but Conroy wants to hear more of that depth of feeling Paige found in the Janacek; they should go off the familiar track.

He shows her the Klauer slow movement. She takes a moment to prepare then picks up the bare opening theme, more slowly than Conroy had played it, and as the full chords enter he senses a different orchestration from what he had previously imagined. Paige’s tone is warmer, the view less tragic. He can see the Paris park again, the strollers in their antiquated clothes, but now the same scene is reinterpreted and crucially altered: Klauer is a man filled with hope and optimism. Yet still he puts a gun to his head. Contradiction is the key.

“Stop there,” he tells her. “When do you think it was written?”

“Nineteen sixties?”

Conroy’s first impression had been that it was typical of its era; Paige sees it as a work ahead of its time. A further reconfiguration occurs in Conroy’s mind: it is not he who debuts the work, but Paige. He sets the slow movement as homework and keeps the remaining pages for himself. For the rest of the day he can’t stop thinking about her, this soft-spoken brown-haired girl.

At home with a new bottle of malt whisky to console him, he studies his bookshelf, finds the work by Theodor Adorno he had thought of, opens it and sees on the yellowed front page his own signature, twice as old as the venerable drink in his glass. He looks up the story he told Paige, about the ‘Waldstein’, flicks and finds it, and it occurs to him: this is what the rest of your life will be like until you die. An index of former experience.

He plays through the rest of the Klauer. It isn’t a lost masterpiece, such things don’t exist except in minds conditioned by the preformed categories of convention, where everything possesses a measure of greatness as inherent and inviolable as the weight of a stone. To be a masterpiece means to be perceived as one; the work that is lost is unperceived, when found it is open to any kind of perception. The music speaks to Conroy of the certainty of failure, not a take-home message the public would want to hear. It says, we are all fools.

When Verrier calls a few days later, Conroy tells him at once, “I’ve played it.”

“Splendid, I’m wondering if we could meet.” He’s in Conroy’s town on business; perhaps they could have lunch together? Conroy suggests a place; central, bright, reasonably priced, they fix a time. Conroy arrives early, can’t see anyone resembling his memory of Verrier, orders a mineral water and looks at the menu, nothing’s changed since he was here before, still as false. Eventually he hears a voice, looks up, Verrier in tweed jacket is standing with an old-fashioned brown briefcase hanging from one arm, like a doctor’s bag, and is extending the other across the table in greeting. He looks older than Conroy remembered, more confident now they’re meeting as equals. Verrier sits and after exchanging pleasantries Conroy asks, “What’s your business?”

“Property. Music’s a hobby, an expensive one.”

“Not if you can buy a life’s work for a few quid.” He’s thinking of Edith Sampson’s trunk.

“Sometimes you find a bargain.”

The waitress comes and takes their orders, after which Verrier asks Conroy about his forthcoming concerts, the assumption being that they already exist. Conroy evasively speaks of projects he’s considering, then says, “What do you think of Paul Morrow?”

“I heard his Rachmaninov recording. Do you know him?”

Conroy nods but says they’re not close, he invites Verrier to be completely honest.

“Then I’d say he’s still a bit raw but could well be a genius.”

“A genius or a fraud?”

Verrier smiles. “Excellent question. You’re not a businessman, are you? If you were, you’d appreciate how fine the dividing line can be.”

“Art and business don’t mix.”

“But everyone has to earn a living. And if art doesn’t pay, what then?”

“You mean we should all sell out, like Morrow?”

“Not his fault if he looks like a pop star. Got to make the most of the hand you’re dealt.”

The gambling metaphor is almost enough to put Conroy off the food that arrives soon afterwards. The waitress swiftly deposits their meals, asks automatically if they require anything else, and leaves with a swing of her hip.

“Well then, you like The Secret Knowledge?” Verrier enquires, bringing their meeting to its point.

“I asked one of my students when she thought it was composed…” Conroy sees a change in Verrier’s expression and realises he’s made an error of judgment, the work was given to him in confidence. “I showed her part of the slow movement.”

“And what did she think?” Verrier asks cautiously.

“She reckoned nineteen sixties.”

Now he looks indignant. “The paper and ink have been checked…”

“Of course, I’m not doubting the authenticity. And it was a stupid comment, really. But I know what she’s getting at. Klauer’s style is unusual, hard to pin down, not ahead of its time but outside it.”

“Is it a piece you’d want to perform publicly?”

“Yes,” Conroy says at once, pauses, then adds, “It’d require a lot of preparation.”

“Would you have any particular venue in mind?”

Verrier is speaking like a true entrepreneur, but once more the faltering state of Conroy’s career risks exposure. “Somewhere small and intimate would be best.”

“Yet it seems so grand. The first movement’s huge.”

“Not the last, though.”

Verrier nods. “I noticed that, a curious falling off. I even wondered if it might be unfinished.”

The possibility occurred to Conroy when he played it; the finale opens with a melody that could be the near relation of a popular song, the movement as a whole has an atmosphere of lightness bordering on triviality. “Think of Schubert,” he says. “The G major or D major sonatas, those final movements that don’t go at all the way we expect, none of that Beethovenian climax and culmination. Instead something far closer to life.” Klauer’s finale, Conroy explains, is a danse macabre, a black comedy. “That’s his point: things end badly.”

“A marvellous theory,” Verrier concedes. “And that gunshot in the park — what a superb joke!” He pushes his half-eaten salad aside and reaches down to the briefcase beside him, opening it to retrieve some pages, one of which he slides across the table to Conroy who brings his reading glasses from his pocket.

“This is the newspaper report I mentioned in my letter,” Verrier explains while Conroy’s eyes focus on small old print he supposes to have come from a web archive: French text announcing the tragic accident. Then a second sheet pushed beneath his view, another press extract, this time in English. Verrier points to the date in the corner, 1919, and a headline further down the page: “Agitation at public meeting.” Conroy scans it without comprehension; Verrier’s finger offers further assistance.

A Frenchman, M. Pierre Klauer, also took the floor, making inflammatory remarks about his countryman, the infamous revolutionary, Blanqui.

Verrier sits back with an air of triumph. “He dies in 1913 then reappears six years later.”

“A different man, his namesake.”

“What are the odds? Individually, the first and second names are common enough, not in combination.”

“Then he didn’t die? Or someone stole his identity?”

Verrier shrugs. “It’s a mystery, the secret of Pierre Klauer.”

“Genius or fraud,” Conroy says thoughtfully.

“Possibly both. We really should try to get to the bottom of this before you premiere the work.”

“None of it affects the quality of the music.”

Verrier laughs. “You think so? What about the finale with its black comedy; the last word from a condemned man, or a prankster’s up-yours? When Klauer wrote it, did he know he was going to fake his death and leave the country, was he already the political revolutionary he apparently turned into? Is that the secret knowledge? But leave it to me, David, I’ll do the digging, you study the music. Quite a find, eh?” Verrier looks at his watch and says he has to leave for another meeting, he insists on paying, the amount too negligible to merit discussion or gratitude. The newspaper items go back inside his briefcase, his closing handshake accompanied by a voice lowered in seriousness. “I trust you not to mention this to anyone else. As owner of the manuscript, I have to ask you to keep the information confidential and your copy secure.” Then he exits, leaving Conroy to ponder the enigma of Pierre Klauer, and the pages he gave his student. He phones her at once.

“Paige, it’s David Conroy. There’s something we need to discuss. Could we meet?”