The Music Read online

  Sayeeda on her splayed ankles couldn’t bring me coffee hot enough, thick enough, bitter enough. I cursed her puny brazier and cheeseparing ways, hurried off through the souk and via a succession of mewing and sullen cafés was fortified until my heart raced and ears sang. Normally I avoided Le P’tit Panthéon, that predictable outpost of fart-sniffers, but today it would serve me by having copies of all the major Paris newspapers, flown over from Marseilles in a rickety Latécoère which honked and wallowed outside the harbour twice a week like a tubercular goose. The papers were there. Three of them carried reports of the concert, one of the columns included a photograph of ‘the composer’. My hand was shaking too violently for his features to be legible so I dropped the paper on the table and stared. My usurper was shockingly young, which accorded with a description of him as twenty-one. This was awful. A sharply intelligent, good-looking – no, no, I was able to revise this as soon as it was thought. He reminded me – got it! – of the young Mendelssohn, a certain Hebraic cast … Flashy good looks, then, shall we allow? A drop of sweat fell from the tip of my impendent nose and obliterated this other René Martens with scribbles of reversed print bleeding through from the back of the page.

  What to do? We biders-in-the-wilderness have our resources. Over the years I had regularly practised callisthenics and to these exercises I turned now. With a vengeance, one might say. I had never allowed myself to fall into that trap of degeneracy which sucks at and claims so many artists. With flour paste I stuck the photograph of the toast of Paris to my chamber wall so he was forced to watch the ominous intent as I drove my body inexorably towards physical superiority.

  Meanwhile, of course, it wouldn’t have done to allow this fellow to get on top of me so I wrote him a perfectly graceful letter in which I enquired if he was aware that he had a rather older and better established namesake? He had only to ask around the Conservatoire and l’affaire Martens would assuredly be recalled, not least by Maître F— and Professeur de Faculté H. E., together with their testimonials to my singleminded career. (For never make the mistake of thinking that because one isn’t constantly there, impertinently beating on their gates, the figures of the establishment don’t know of one’s existence. They know, all right, just as the firelit circle of roistering tribesmen knows that at their backs, beyond the bonhomie and the furthest reach of the flickering light, prowls the lion.)

  In due time I received a reply: civil, though not – I thought – over-respectful, saying that he had of course no idea there was another René Martens who composed. (‘Who composed’ was cheeky. He made it sound like a hobby.) Further, he claimed, nobody at the Conservatoire whom he had asked could remember an affaire Martens, while F— and H. E. had both been dead for years. (It was an obvious pretence never to have heard of either of them.) However, he ended, he was sure there was room in the world for two composers named Martens, given that there were about thirty-three called Bach. In any case (oh, breezy and winsome puppy!) mightn’t we agree to turn the situation to our advantage? If ever we wrote something which displeased our respective publics we could always claim ‘that other fellow’ had written it … And so signed off with a flourish.

  The muezzin sang. There was not a moment to be lost. The muezzin sang again. All moments were equally lost and had been from the beginning. Better to beat out copper pots all day than attempt to make a new music, practise an old art. I forced myself back to my poor symphony. The score was dog-eared. The opening pages had a weary, travel-stained look to them. I’m not ashamed to say I wept at my table for many hours, re-living the sundry defeats and hardships of a life which had, after all, been undertaken for nothing but the greater glory of art, in celebration of beauty, without a thought for self-advancement. Could a man of my talents not have advanced himself had he chosen the easy road of wooing the public? Naturally he could. And why hadn’t he chosen that road? Because that sort of success was too easy, too flimsy. One had to work hard in order to be as unsuccessful with the public as I, a truly finished composer in private. So be it, then. I would at last begin my public career.

  Even I, in my distress and anxiety to hear my symphony, to promote its glories, could see that another First Symphony by a second René Martens (although of course really the first) would be a little hard for that public to take. When in tears a despairing father goes upstairs to remove his beloved infant’s life with a straight razor, he does so with no less murderous mercy than mine as I surgically extracted my symphony’s slow movement. I made a fair copy, added a title (‘Tone Poem: Nuits Mauresques’) and sent it to a good acquaintance in Berlin, Count Shuker d’Iffni, with the request that he place it as soon as possible with Peters or Breitkopf in Leipzig, or similar reputable house. This, I felt sure, would cook this little Hebrew’s goose for him. It is easy enough to be a big frog in the little pond that is French music, but German music is what counts, as everyone acknowledges.

  When these publishers rejected the work I was at first incredulous. On thinking about it further I assumed there might well be an angle to this which I, in my innocence, hadn’t considered. Despite the best efforts of Germany’s leaders at the time, members of this other Martens’ tribe still reached their tentacles into the most diverse concerns – the arts, sciences, banking – and music publishing was clearly no exception. I wrote again to the Count, warning him to consider this probability and to use his best offices to ensure my score reached only men of unimpeachable reliability, or else … Of course I never wrote ‘or else’; but there are ways and ways whereby someone who is light on his feet need not laboriously spell things out. This Count, this Shuker d’Iffni, was someone I had known here in Algiers. I believe his title was genuine enough, as, presumably, his fortune. He had lorded it in a huge crenellated villa in the hills – a lot of very young, willowy servants, a well-known enthusiasm for photography, need I say more? – and I felt sure his social status in Berlin, no matter how solid, would be considerably shaken if certain details of his garçonnière pursued him thither. Especially in such an unforgiving and puritanical climate.

  And yet even this attempt proved fruitless. Well, I thought, nil desperandum. More irons! More fires! I sent off Nuits Mauresques again, this time to Paris (sooner or later the nettle would have to be grasped) and at once saw my symphony’s ebullient Scherzo, too, might well stand alone. In fact, with its virtuoso brass writing in the Trio section it would do admirably as an orchestral bonne-bouche. Off it went, accordingly, entitled ‘Entr’acte’.

  I discovered I’d broken a lifetime’s habit and was taking a sudden interest in the newspapers these days. I can now see that like everyone else I was gripped by the hypnotic approach of war which we all sensed in 1937. Since it is as easy to take up a newspaper for one thing as for another, I found my self turning from the politics of the front pages to things of lesser note. The second time I saw the name of René Martens (a piano concerto) was awful. The third time (a Cantata Profana) worse. His impertinent face even began to rise up and interpose itself between the peacock feather and the sky, eclipsing both. Wherever I looked his presence obtruded as a dark cast compounded of his face and my name, like a blot on the retina which floats over every scene. In exasperation I wrote to him once more. Were we not both professionals? Surely there must be some sensible accommodation we could reach? This was a situation which could only harm us both … He never responded.

  René Martens, René Martens, René Martens. Have you, my reader, ever repeated your own name to yourself until you were no longer sure what it meant? Or thought its ownership might as well be in other hands? I had Sayeeda steam his face off the wall and for a month I exercised brutally, perdu. I was crouching to spring so I built up my springing muscles in private, even as my manuscripts were finding their way like time bombs into the hands of some of Europe’s most influential musicians: agents, conductors, fellow-composers. I had given this pretender more than enough warning. Yet one morning when I leaned my shaven skull against the wall, panting from an exacting set of
flexions, I glanced up to see his face still there. Evidently my stupid peasant’s steaming activity had somehow managed to transfer his image indelibly through the newsprint and on to the whitewash. Well, a few strokes of paint would soon deal with that, but for the moment there was work to do. I was even then finishing a fair copy of the symphony’s first movement. It was, as I had discovered, imbued with a feverish sense of expectation, almost of anxiety. This, of course, was entirely deliberate and the following three movements had been expressly calculated to satisfy this unfulfilment, those hopes so exquisitely raised. It was hardly my fault that the idiots would be getting arousal without resolution. Off it went to Adrian Boult in London as ‘Fantasy Overture: Le Désir’.

  And now came news of fresh impertinences. A René Martens string quartet was premièred in Antwerp, my own natal city. A ‘Jazz Concerto’ (inevitably, and for the usual modish collection of saxophones, percussion, ondes martenot and banjos) was ‘adored’ in Copenhagen. Here I found a tiny crumb of comfort. The rocket had surely peaked and any moment now would descend, a feebly glowing stick. No serious composer would waste his time on those ham-fisted Negro syncopations in order to be fashionably ‘in the swim’. But then after what was surely no time at all I read of the Paris première of his Second Symphony. Clearly, this was a vastly overblown affair – double orchestra, organ, double choir, everything but the kitchen sink – and had immediately become known by the title of Martens’ own poem, of which the last movement was the setting: ‘The Diaspora’.

  Does there not come a time, my friends, when from beneath the successive hammer-blows of injustice a man may no longer complain of injustice? To cry injustice predicates redress; and there is no redress possible for the theft of time, theft of one’s being. One day I was René Martens, lion-in-waiting, listener to an inner voice, attentive to every sound which life gave off. The next I was a nobody of the same name. One by one my teeth were pulled. Note by note the inner voice faded away, my only companion, my love. On the table where once my precious symphony had lain was nothing. A little dust. Stains of ink. It had flown, fatally dismembered, in stout yellow envelopes to all points in the musical world. And not an envelope alighted in some grand and distant city but the night before had seen one more triumphant concert in another René Martens’ career. Precisely thus had my own last movement (which I had wanted to call ‘The Sands of Time’ but which I’d consigned to the postal abyss as ‘Introduction and Allegro for Orchestra’) been overtaken, eclipsed, ruined by his Second Symphony. No, this was not mere injustice.

  But if not injustice, what? Anyone living in my alley would have known at once. Stupid old Sayeeda herself would have come up with an immediate reply. ‘Le destin, m’sieur.’ The Will of Allah. Karma. Kismet. Crap. In my little private chamber on the outskirts of nowhere I began to believe something far stranger. I won’t deny it took me many months to recover from my symphony’s death. Maybe I never really have, any more than I have got over the waning of an inspiration which once was so vivid and fertile. I would sit for hours, listening and listening to hear if this stranger’s attrition had left me anything I could call my own and found it hadn’t. I could hear only the café, the tinsmiths; only the children’s squeals as they played among the pigeons, the washing, the heaps of goat-fodder on nearby roofs. And the muezzin, remorselessly hitting E♭ and sending up his freshly minted platitudes punctually into the unheeding sky.

  It was when I realised that René Martens had stolen my soul that the strangeness occurred and I began to look at him differently. To my initial disbelief I found myself taking the beginnings of an interest in his career. To say I rejoiced in his successes would be pitching it a little strong – then, at least – though by the time war broke out the idea of his distinction had a certain pleasurableness attaching to it. I can’t put it better than that. Not a day went by on flashing wings, like the pigeons circling beyond my window, without my taking my usual walk at dusk (oh! those North African smells at dusk: dung fires, mint, olive oil, orange blossom, excrement), without my thinking of him, fondly almost, relieved nearly. For that was it. He had taken away from me a vast burden so that I could view his imaginary presence with something of the benign farewell one might bestow on a heavily laden caravan padding away as over a carpet spread towards sunset. Mauve distances. Somewhere else the hucksters and bazaars.

  Everyone knows of his tragically early death, of course. Or rather, of his arrest and disappearance when the Germans occupied Paris. The exact circumstances will remain forever unclear but it is known he ignored his friends’ urgings to flee to London or New York in order to finish rehearsing his Third Symphony. After that, who knows? An informer, a someone who wrote an anonymous letter? They were crazy and terrible times in which youth and promise – even genius, yes – were no protection. But no matter; his music is played today, which is what counts. Ever since the war my deafness has shut me off from that world entirely, but I gather that his Second Symphony, especially, is nowadays often played (I am writing in 1959.) The name René Martens is spoken of with pity, affection, reverence. In a sense I had always known it would be.

  Records

  THIS IS LESS a story than an account of Jonathan trying to blot out the sheer pleasure of being friends with David. Same school, same university; a shared flat in London while one became a civil servant and the other a barrister. Same tastes in music. Thousands of formative hours spent in each other’s company. Maybe Jon and Dave are also Sandra and Kate (or Naomi and Ruth) – it’s hard to tell from this side of the fathomless sexual divide. We must write about what we know.

  What we know is that for years Jonathan and David seldom did anything of much importance without the other, and never from choice. From their first meeting at school their friendship had the quality of pulling others into its gravitational field so that their respective families, too, met and liked one another enough to pool their resources for joint holidays. It is probable that one summer in the Dordogne when they were sixteen David was smitten by Jonathan’s sister Cathy and Jonathan equally taken by David’s sister Fisty (short for Felicity). A month’s sun-drenched chumminess fuelled by wine and proximity no doubt provoked adolescent dreams that in due course each couple would marry and raise a family in neighbouring houses. And their children, too, would grow up inextricably close and intermarry, and so on for ever. Perhaps it was the girls who never properly intuited this romantic plan; two years later Jonathan and David could be found trekking together across Turkey with not a sister in sight.

  ‘Anyway, from what I’ve heard the outback’s not exactly designed for women’s creature comforts,’ Jonathan had said.

  ‘Specially down towards Syria,’ David agreed. ‘If it’s not Kurdish rebels it’s Islamic diehards. They say only the toughest TV newshen survives. Still, I imagine we can do without girls for a couple of months if the rest of the experience is half as interesting as it’s cracked up to be.’

  ‘At a pinch.’

  ‘At a pinch.’

  They laughed. Had they been American college boys thirty years earlier they might have punched each other’s biceps. Being British they contented themselves with an easygoing joke or two about being able to save on weight by taking only one pack of condoms. The holiday turned out a great success, an adventure, with enough shared hardship and alarms to make friendship feel like comradeship as well. The condom pack remained unopened, becoming flatter and more dishevelled the further it worked its way towards the bottom of David’s rucksack. There were plenty of distractions other than sex and besides, they were not in each other’s company for more than twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four – sometimes less than that. They would split up for various chores. Jonathan would straighten up the tent and chip away at the frying pan while David practised his Turkish in the local village, buying lumps of salty cheese and lengths of fiery sausage. Now and then each would go for a judicious stroll while the other dozed or read or claimed to be finishing one of those increasingly crumpled letters w
hich are never finally posted.

  There were the usual disagreeable experiences involving stomach upsets, moonless nights, heavy rain and rags of wet newspaper. It was amazing, really, how intimate the pals could become while all the while preserving an almost clinical detachment, as when each inspected the other’s pubic hair for crab lice which turned out to be Turkish fleas. Jonathan was particularly scrupulous on this occasion, slightly louder in his jocular protestations that only the duress of foreign travel could reduce him to the simian level of body searches. Slightly louder, too, were his exclamations of disgust one night five minutes after they had doused the light. They had been obliged for once to camp in an official site on the outskirts of a town and had pitched their tent on an allotted rectangle of bald soil. In the darkness Jonathan unearthed between their sleeping bags the cold, leaking, ant-covered remains of somebody’s knotted condom. But then, of course, it was he who had to get up, wrap it in newspaper and wash his hands. It represented everything wrong with campsites and the two friends decided that in future they would stay in a town’s worst hotel rather than endure such squalor. David never remarked on (and nor did his friend explain) why he should have been digging around with his fingernails in the dark between them. It was just one of those memorable episodes to be retold as a traveller’s tale in a pub on their return.

  The barrister-to-be and the future Foreign Office functionary came home tired at night, generally contrived to eat together and then spent most evenings in their own rooms studying the sort of large, dreary books whose mastery in youth implies the promise of a generous salary in middle age. But at weekends there were films to be seen, pubs to be visited, launderettes to be sat in and, well, girls to be chatted up. Sometimes the girls became involved in these ordinary pursuits. They were mostly fellow students on the boys’ courses with well-bred faces and cars given them by their fathers. Jonathan’s girls – if one could generalise from only two examples – had horsy tendencies and were good sports. They knew a lot about things such as Stockholm tar, wind-sucking and what to do when your Land Rover conks out in a snowdrift in the Mendips. His mode with them was that of a slightly younger brother, proud but a bit passive, as if hoping they might pass on their sensible lore. One day it would come in handy on the estate he was bound to have.