Knobby hands on lap Mr Raffish sat and watched the student – assuredly a student? – throughout the overture with intentness. The boy sat out (that had to be the phrase) Mendelssohn’s ‘The Fair Melusine’ and, if the older man were right, it was nervousness rather than impatience with which he switched his gaze repeatedly from the auditorium’s ceiling to floor and stretched and stretched his fingers. The overture ended and stage-hands began opening the great Steinway which had stood like a gloss coffin beside the conductor’s podium. Now the boy was definitely nervous. He had brought out the score of the concerto and had it in readiness on his knees: not a pocket score but a soloist’s with the orchestral parts reduced for an accompanying pianist. He took out a white handkerchief, wiped his hands, glanced about him. The seats immediately on either side were empty, it being a thinnish night given the popularity of the programme and the soloist; probably it was on account of the unseasonably warm weather keeping those Londoners in the parks whom rain might otherwise have driven indoors in search of culture. As Mr Raffish watched the student their eyes met briefly, but when the boy broke contact it was surely not through shyness; the watcher understood this nervousness had another cause, a preoccupation to an unnatural degree.

The conductor returned followed by the pianist, dapper in tails. As the audience gradually fell silent the student sat in unbreathing anticipation, watching the conductor’s back and the soloist settling himself. Was he or wasn’t he? Mr Raffish wondered again. No stalking of a sexual prey could ever be so delicious as this inspirational guessing game.

The opening tutti began. On the platform the pianist, a celebrated Viennese, sat staring at the keys. Among the audience the student unconsciously adopted the same pose, looking not at the open score on his knees but at the edge of the seat-back in front of him. Then as the tutti drew to its close both soloist and student glanced up at the conductor at nearly the same moment. Raffish, himself affected by this little drama, watched the boy at the soloist’s entry as with mouth half-open, eyes fixed, he began to shake his head with a frown of disagreement. Good, thought the older man. Excellent, in fact. As the movement proceeded he relaxed his vigilance, half-concentrating on the music which was so painfully rooted in him, half-amused to see the boy as involved as if he were himself playing. Which in some sense he was, Raffish knew. The boy’s concentration had a certain latitude to it such as one reserved for things so familiar there was scant need to follow every note – which one could have written out from memory, anyhow. Moments of pleasure made the student nod and bounce his thick brown hair; passages he disliked brought back the frown, one of impatience rather than censure as if to say, Yes, I understand exactly why you’re doing it that way, it’s simply dull, let’s not have to sit through it.

Mr Raffish rose stiffly when the boy left his seat at the interval, score tucked under one arm, and was little surprised to see him leave the concert-hall entirely and walk away across the dark promenades. He hurried to catch him up, a short, awkward figure moving without fluency and urgent none the less. ‘Excuse me!’ The boy looked round. ‘I say!’ Both figures came into a douche of light shed by a street-lamp fitted with an imitation Edwardian globe.

‘Golly,’ said Mr Raffish, breathless, ‘I say, you walk too fast for a poor old gent like me.’

The boy said nothing but waited, hair shining in the lamplight, the pale green of his score leached of its colour and glaring beneath his arm. He noticed his pursuer had a suggestion of foreignness about him, though of accent or gesture he might not immediately have said.

‘Perhaps you saw me in there?’ went on the older man, not turning back to the concert-hall. ‘I noticed you, however, indeed I did. “Aha,” I thought, “there’s one if I’m not very mistaken. That one I must speak to.” So here I am.’

‘One what?’ asked the student. ‘Oh, let me guess. A shy, lonely young man….’

‘… having difficulty coming to terms with an aberrant sexuality? Oh, bravo!’ said Mr Raffish admiringly. ‘You’re quick; we’re going to get on, I can see that. Let me reassure you here and now that your sexuality – no matter how aberrant or prosaic – is something I have no interest in. None whatever. I don’t suppose it’s much more interesting than your digestive system. No. I’m fascinated by something completely different. Now, let me guess. You’re a student? Of music?’

The boy touched his score reflexively. ‘You wouldn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that.’

‘Indeed not, but bear with me further…. A pianist, and a good one. Good enough for a career. If only.’

‘If only what?’ The boy was suddenly anxious to hear. A certain pettishness of manner left him. His halo tilted as he leaned towards the shorter man.

‘Aha. Just that. If only. Now, you see, I’m not mistaken: I do know something about you. It’s your secret, isn’t it? But first forgive me, my dear fellow, how rude of me. Anthony Raffish.’ He extended his knobby hand.

‘I’m Zeb. That’s short for Zebedee’ – and it seemed to be a well-worn apologia. ‘My parents are from the sixties.’

‘My dear,’ said Anthony Raffish, ‘mine were from Poland. I was christened Antonin Raffawicz. We are both victims of circumstances beyond our control, or would be were it not for the wonderful British institution of Deed Poll. Zebedee what, though, I wonder?’

‘Hoyle.’ The young man shifted his balance awkwardly, and the lamplight cast a certain distinction across the planes of his face.

‘Zeb Hoyle. Zebedee Hoyle.’ Anthony Raffish tried the names, head on one side for a moment. ‘No,’ he said regretfully. ‘There’s no music there, is there? We’ll have to do better than that. Now, then. You’re not going to tell me you’ve got something important to do right this moment, because I wouldn’t quite believe you and, besides, we’re going to talk about your career and there’s nothing more important than that, is there? Not just at present’ – and he glanced shrewdly up into the boy’s face.

‘My career? But I….’

‘Don’t prevaricate, my dear, we’re too intelligent to have to go through all that. Yes, your career. Or, rather, its lack. You’re eaten up with worry about it, I know. You’re getting nowhere and it’s the only thing you want to do. You want to have your chance and so you shall because luckily Anthony Raffish is going to take you beneath his wing. Rather a crippled wing, I’m afraid, but one which still keeps many great talents aloft even if I do say so myself. Now, then, let us walk to my flat where I will ply you with coffee and intrigue you despite your momentary inclination to make a dash for the anonymous security of a Tube train or a hamburger bar.’ He came down sardonically on the two words as an expression in a foreign language and not in a self-conscious attempt at familiarity with the habits of a younger generation. ‘Come, come, my boy, I’m going to make you famous and we start tonight. Don’t hang about. But’ – he touched the unresisting Zebedee on one elbow and turned him towards Kensington – ‘my joints are rather a trial so you’ll have to moderate that aggressively youthful pace of yours.’

‘Perhaps you should take a taxi.’

‘No, walking’s good for me. If I didn’t walk, I should seize up altogether. It isn’t far. So how did you like his Beethoven Two? Not much, to judge from your expression in there.’

‘It was very beautiful. Very mellifluous.’

‘But very predictable. Exactly. Nothing jarred but neither did it excite. And the cadenza?’

‘I suppose you can’t go wrong with Beethoven’s own.’

‘And what would you have played?’

‘Something different. Anything different as long as it was not a vast piece of nineteenth-century pianism, for instance. You might stir up number three with that, but number two’s an eighteenth-century concerto. When my teacher was in Paris he met someone editing Saint-Saëns who had unearthed his unpublished cadenzas to all the Beethoven concertos. The one to the B flat is charming. I would have played that if only because nobody would have known it and perhaps they might have been jogged out of that fawning doze he makes all his audiences fall into.’

‘Bravo!’ said Anthony Raffish again, but this time thoughtfully enough to give the impression that he was commending himself for his own insight as much as Zebedee for his choice. ‘I should dearly like to hear it. You shall play to me when we get home.’

‘Are you a pianist yourself, Mr Raffish?’ asked the student.

‘Was, was.’ He hefted his arms like a pair of Indian clubs. ‘Rheumatoid arthritis. It began forty years ago when I was not much older than you are now. It was another age then, of course, another world, and I don’t just mean medically speaking. One went from one ruined city to another playing in the magnificent and unheated old concert-halls of Europe – those still standing, that is. Sometimes there would be great draperies of dust-sheets covering the bomb damage. But it didn’t matter; people didn’t mind such things then. They came only for the music because they had been so starved of it in the war. When one came out on to the platform they didn’t applaud very much by today’s standards, perhaps because they were so eager to hear the music they couldn’t bear to delay it. My God, how they listened! One night – I’m going to bore you with a reminiscence so you can’t say later I didn’t warn you – one night I was playing in Lübeck, 1946 it was. And when I went out there they all were still in their utility clothing looking half-starved but immensely serious and Hanseatic. I was going to start with something traditional – a Bach suite or a Haydn sonata, I forget what – but at the last moment I decided against it. Why? I can’t say. But I paused on the platform and announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, there is a slight change to the programme. I wish to start with something different.” Just like that. Then I sat down and played Mendelssohn’s “Variations sérieuses”. Do you know them? Of course you do; mavellous music. I didn’t say what it was, though, so some of them must have wondered what they were getting. But others knew. I could see people in the first few rows weeping.’

‘It’s a very grave theme. Plaintive and grave at the same time.’

‘Yes, but that wasn’t the reason at all. Nor was my exquisite or otherwise playing. No, it was because it was Mendelssohn. It was the first time many of them had heard Mendelssohn in nearly ten years.’ The older man might have sensed puzzlement. ‘The Nazis had decided Mendelssohn was Jewish music and shouldn’t be played, you see. Oh dear, how very young you are and how envious I am…. Quite, anyway. Be that as it may, some were meeting an old, long-lost friend again and so they wept. It was proof that civilisation was getting back to normal. And now here we are.’ He led the way into a solid Victorian block with a white-pillared portico which had been glassed in with peculiarly thick panes bound with hinges and mountings of brass. ‘Arabs,’ he said as if that explained everything. ‘I’ve been here since 1947 and never once in all that time did I find it necessary to cut the throat of a sheep in the hall. It never crossed my mind.’ He was clumsy with a bunch of keys. ‘It’s rather shocking, you know, being made to feel conventional after a lifetime’s worship of Dionysus. Now, then.’

He ushered Zebedee into a cavernous and slightly shabby suite of rooms. The drawing room felt much larger than it can have been, giving off the splendid gloom of a canyon: high cliffs of shelving on either side plunging towards one another at the bottom in screes of books, papers and music. On the narrow valley floor stood a grand piano.

‘Oh, a Bösendorfer.’

‘For that you may have not only milk but sugar in your coffee,’ said Anthony Raffish on his slow way out of the room. ‘Yes, Bösendorfer with the real Viennese sound. I dislike all that American horsepower Steinways are putting into their pianos nowadays. Kindly play me your cadenza while I make the coffee. I shall be listening, never fear. If you hear cries of anguish, it will probably not be your playing but my burning myself. I often do.’

‘But surely I could make it for you?’

‘Never offer to help a cripple, he might take you up on it. My job is to make clumsy coffee and yours is to play – beautifully, mind.’

Left alone the boy sat gingerly down at the piano and gazed up at the rough slopes of bound paper which rose on either hand. Wild horses might not have dragged from him the admission that he had had some idea of going to a hamburger bar but he would readily have owned to being nervous, embarrassed, intrigued. Tentatively he played a few bars of the concerto’s orchestral opening and then, made confident by the instrument’s curious timbre, essayed the soloist’s entry which his teacher always referred to as one of the most difficult to bring off in all piano literature. Not the notes, of course; but the stress, the emphasis, the articulation, the dynamics – all were crucial and crucially exposed. He quickly became involved in the music, playing against the concert performance as if setting to rights something improperly done, whole passages followed by lightly sketched-in pages until he reached the cadenza, which turned out well.

‘Oh, yes,’ said his host, who appeared with a tray at the end. ‘Oh, yes, indeed. My dear boy, a little career, I think, should be opened unto you. How very much you disliked tonight’s performance. I do like your cadenza, incidentally.’

‘Well, not mine. Saint-Saëns’.’

‘Was it? Was it really?’ the murmur implied disbelief; the boy blushed. ‘Now, come and have your coffee and we’ll talk business.’

‘Business?’ said his guest warily. ‘I thought we were going to talk about music.’

‘We are, we are. That is our business. Come, we’ll talk about you and thus make it easy to forgive what you might think is a certain flirtatiousness and self-congratulation in my manner. There. Sugar and milk. My dear wife used to make proper coffee – she was Hungarian, by the way – but sadly she died not long ago.’

‘Was she a pianist, too?’

‘A very good one. We played together for a short while before I had to stop for good: it was how we got to know each other, how we courted and how we first made love. In those days there were two pianos in here.’ Anthony Raffish stared reflectively up at the shadowed cliffs. ‘But it’s you I want to fix. Let me guess what I think is in your concerto repertoire and then you can tell me I’ve got second sight. Very slightly off-beat, some of them: Hummel’s A minor, Tchaikovsky number two, Schumann’s Introduction and Allegro, something glittery but not completely trashy like Scharwenka, a Prokofiev, a Bartók, and a neoclassical like von Einem. How am I doing? Then’, he said without a pause, ‘the standard solo stuff but with oddities thrown in such as Dussek, Moscheles, Alkan, a prelude and fugue by Alfred Lord Tennyson. That sort of thing.’

‘Tennyson? Did he write one?’

‘Good Lord, no, dear boy, I don’t suppose so. But I detect an interest in the outré and the bizarre as well as in a personal interpretation of the standard repertoire. Not Tennyson, then; I was being facetious. Lord Berners, perhaps, if we stick to English peers. No doubt a short and merry piece like one of the “Trois Petites Marches funèbres”.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve never heard of him.’

‘Oh dear, really not? The Triumph of Neptune – Diaghilev and Sitwell? No? I knew him well. Such a talent; even Stravinsky was impressed. Also a sense of humour. I can quote you exactly what Grove says about those particular pieces: “Of the three funeral marches (for a statesman, a canary and a rich aunt) only that for the canary betrays any genuine feeling.” A splendid man. But I digress. Was I not correct in some of my guesses? I can see I was.’

The boy was clearly disconcerted. He was leaning forward, filling his saucer with cold coffee from a cup unwittingly held at an acute angle.

‘I don’t see how you could have guessed,’ he said. ‘We don’t know each other, Mr Raffish.’

‘Anthony. But we do; or at least I do. Let us proceed. The concertos I mentioned, have they not most of them been played here in London over the last six months?’

The boy straightened up, his face pale and anxious. ‘You’ve been following me.’

‘Not at all, I assure you. I have been following music: it is my profession. It just so happens you were also present on many occasions. I have not followed you, but whenever you were there I watched you, that I admit.’

‘What are you?’ Zebedee put the cup down and stood up. ‘I’m confused. You’re very kind to have invited me home and given me coffee, and I love your piano and everything, but I don’t know that anything you have told me about yourself is true.’

‘But you do know that everything I have said about you is. Very well, then. I am, if you will, a talent scout. I am always at concerts because they are my life-blood and because I am always on the lookout for a certain kind of person. Some months ago I spotted you and thought you were one and now tonight I know that you are. You’re not the only one,’ he added with maybe an edge of malice. ‘There are enough of the others to make me a very comfortable living, but not so many that I don’t count them as friends and value them as artists.’

‘You’re an agent.’

‘Yes,’ admitted Anthony Raffish, ‘I suppose I am. But an agent with a difference. I specialise in lost causes.’

‘You haven’t the right to say that.’ The voice came faintly from the bottom of the canyon as of one already resigned to being crushed.

‘Oh, but I have, my dear, I’ve a perfect right.’ He studied the boy calmly, seeing the angry rigidity of the head staring away upwards into the shadows, divining the involuntary flooding of the eyes, knowing the solitary, introspective work. My, but he was vain, this one. ‘Like you I am a musician. But, also like you, I am a performer. We wish for reasons of whatever personal bent to take our private selves out on to a platform. Because I am so much older than you – and no doubt spurred by the bitterness of the performer forced to become a member of the audience – I am a very good judge of spectacle. Already, I suspect, you have a better musical intelligence than I; but I also know that your hoped-for career as a pianist is a lost cause unless….

Unless what? cried the boy inaudibly

… unless Anthony Raffish takes you in hand. Antonin Raffawicz will listen to your music but it is Anthony Raffish who will lead you out to play. Now, you will have noticed I have asked nothing about your plans, what your teacher says, not even who he is. I have not enquired about the prizes you have carried off nor the competitions you may or may not have won.’

‘I presumed that was because you were too busy telling me how clever you were,’ said Zebedee.

‘That was to give you confidence. Since I could show you that, although we had never met I already knew a great deal about you just from watching you at some concerts, I imagined we could cut out all the nonsense and the delicacy and get down to helping you.’

‘I like delicacy…. And, anyway, if you’re offering to be my agent you’d be helping yourself as well.’

‘Granted. But it will be I who take the initial step to bring about the realisation of your fantasy.’

‘Fantasy? What fantasy? I have a perfectly realistic ambition to be a professional pianist, that’s all. I just want to make a living out of my music.’

‘Nonsense,’ contradicted Anthony Raffish complacently, ‘you want much more than that. You could achieve that by being a répétiteur with some teaching and sessions on the side. No, you are ambitious for the spotlight and that doesn’t make you any less of a musician. I said fantasy and I meant it. Admit it, now; this is your secret. You go to these concerts fully prepared. And why? Because it is your dream that the soloist will suddenly fall ill and lo! out of the audience steps the unknown Mr Hoyle in the nick of time, sits down among the startled orchestra, gives a nod of assurance to the bewildered conductor, and away goes Rachmaninov Two or Beethoven Five fit to electrify anyone. Especially the critics, hurrying home from the tumultuous applause to write glowing accounts of this new Wunderkind who at only a few seconds’ notice was able to change for ever the way in which we look at Rachmaninov Two and Beethoven Five. The recording industry ignores him at their peril, the public to their loss, etcetera. And so a great career is launched. By a stroke of fortune a kitten on the keys becomes overnight a lion rampant on fields of ivory. Oh dear me, yes. And why not?’

There was a silence. Then, ‘You think you’ve seen through me, I suppose.’

‘Not at all. Your most private depths remain as opaque to me as to you. I merely understand a particular fantasy because it is all bound up with being unable to start your career properly. You’re not alone, of course.’

‘That’s not how it feels.’

‘Maybe, but the audiences in the concert-halls and recital-rooms of the world are full of frustrated talents who go mainly because they hope against hope that the million-to-one chance will be given them to step into the breach and shine more brilliantly than the star they’re replacing. That is what performers are driven to when they haven’t got careers.’

‘It’s ridiculous. I’m a pianist, an artist, not the sort of spectator who goes to a motor race secretly hoping for blood. I’m not so cold and malicious as to want people to fall ill suddenly or drop dead of a heart-attack.’

‘I’m sure you’re not. But there are only so many concert-halls, so many days in a year, so many occasions for a soloist. It’s a highly competitive business nowadays, not a bit unlike sport; and wherever there’s competitiveness there’s the wish to cut a competitor’s throat. In the case of a nice young man like yourself the suppressed wish is to have someone or something else do the cutting – luck, fate, circumstance, call it what you like.’

Zebedee had sat down at the piano. Suddenly he began playing Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s ‘Ich ruf’ zu dir’. The depressed magnificence of the music rose in the gloom and held everything securely in its place, for it was as if an avalanche had been about to rush down and engulf him utterly. Sustained and sustaining, some echo hung about the canyon’s ledges and sills long after the last sound had died. ‘I’m not a throat-cutter, it’s no good,’ he said finally.

‘Not even Lipatti played it better than that, dear boy…. Why should you be a throat-cutter? That’s what agents are for. You are a musician through and through. It is a great crime that the world is so constituted that people like us need to fight in order to be heard. Or at least in order to make a living out of being heard.’

‘That’s what I tell my teacher. He’s always trying to get me to enter competitions. I’m always refusing. I tell him that if I were a poet I wouldn’t give readings of my work in pubs, either, not simply to gain an audience. I’m not beery. I’d rather starve than try to be hearty with people I secretly despise.’

‘Well, there we are. Nowadays, I’m afraid, one of the unexpected consequences of the television age is that the right kind of exposure can be critical to the success of a performing artist. If American presidents need to be sold on television like soap powder, can a mere instrumentalist hope for a hearing and fame without? It’s no good relying on the audience’s judgement: they simply don’t know enough. What they like is to be able to attach some sort of persona to the performer. You have to be both able and identifiable, and if you’re a bad self-publicist you need an agent who can market you in the right way. You need to be managed.’

‘Which is where you think you come in.’

‘My dear, I know I do. Your name, for a start. “Zeb Hoyle.” Whoever heard of a musician being called Zeb Hoyle? It’s inconceivable. You sound like a footballer. No, we’ll have to find you a stage name. Personally, I like initials; they always sound so distinguished. Either that or a single name like Solomon or Michelangeli, but that would be pretentious for somebody as young as you are. Now, what sort of a name? Nothing too English, I think, something which prompts the faintest of musical associations. Cramer? Yes, I quite like that. “Z. Cramer.” No, the “Z” is wrong because the Americans will pronounce it differently. What about “J. S. Cramer”?’

‘J. S. Cramer.’ Zebedee laughed.

‘Perfect,’ said Anthony Raffish, his head on one side. ‘I especially liked the way you threw back that glossy mane of yours. Looks are extremely important, of course. You’re lucky to be so personable. If you were very plain or even downright ugly, we might have had to make you demonic and tousled. As it is, you can be wayward, poetic and geistig as the Germans say.’

‘I can’t believe this,’ cried the boy, but there was new colour in his face. ‘You sit there and cynically package me?’

‘Why not? What’s wrong with cynicism? I’m not a bit cynical about your playing, which is what counts. As for packaging, you’ll need it sooner or later if ever you’re going to get out of the dumps you’re in. Whatever you do, don’t pay any attention to established musicians saying that if you’re really worth listening to you’ll inevitably be heard. That is a pseudo-worldly vulgar ism. You’ll find that when people become famous they very much want to believe that all it took was their sheer, unvarnished talent, whereas … my dear, the stories I could tell about the wily moves, the astonishing flukes and – yes – the beds which have helped many a career on its way. It’s enough to make your hair curl.’

Perhaps it was true, thought Zebedee half an hour later on his way back across London to the drab rooms he rented near Archway. It was scarcely the first time he had heard such ideas; usually they made him despondent, even irritable, since he could never be quite sure if they were true and there seemed to be nobody who would give him an answer. The lessons, the regular exams, the years of practice stretched back to his earliest childhood so interwoven with anguish as much as with public praise and private pleasure that they had become the texture of his entire life. So much work and reflection had long since readied him for the public career he knew he had earned and yet now he was to believe he had done only half what was necessary. It was not enough to sell sounds; the marionette in tails who sat on a stool and made those sounds had also to be sold. Candlesticks? Sequins? Lace at the wrists? An eye-catching eccentricity like an inability to play without a glass of water on the piano?

Bitter impatience with such tomfoolery brought his heels hard down on the pavement. Get away from such ideas. Get away, too, from Anthony Raffish. Zebedee was unable to be precise about what he had most disliked in the arthritic musician. Perhaps it was having been at least partially seduced by the man, by the cultured clutter of his rooms, the piano whose tone he could still hear, the urbane bohemianism of the foreign background and cosmopolitan past. Also, of course, Raffish had for a short time enjoyed precisely the success which Zebedee now longed for. But under it all there ran a current of unease like a pool spreading from beneath a lavatory door, and he knew that no matter how much might evaporate in the early light of next morning the defect would still be there.

This turned out to be the case. ‘I met the most extraordinary man last night,’ he told Antoinette during their hour. Antoinette from Basle had been coming to him for lessons for six months now and she was completely in love with him, which at some level he found quite understandable.

‘How extraordinary?’ So Zebedee told her. ‘I think maybe he is bogus,’ she said. ‘Watch out. Perhaps you should not see him again.’

But within a week Anthony Raffish lightly knuckled his arm on the way out of a Wigmore Hall recital.

‘I didn’t see you,’ said Zebedee.

‘Aha, we were late and crept in at the back at the end.’ He indicated a tall, earnest girl with scraped hair. ‘This is Sandra Padgett. Sandra, Zebedee. Sandra’s a remarkable clarinettist. From Harpenden, but quite brilliant. Come, we will take a taxi to Marble Arch and walk a short while in the Park.’

Zebedee found himself borne along, not quite cursing himself for weakness. Whatever current it had been, sinister or otherwise, it seemed sponged away now by that immediately familiar, open-handed assertiveness.

‘We shall talk about musical lost causes,’ said the old pianist once they were sauntering across the balding grass, and he spoke irrepressibly of a nineteenth-century Italian named Pietro Raimondi who had written extraordinary works such as three separate oratorios which could be sung one after the other and then combined and sung all three at once. ‘A prodigious contrapuntal feat, my dears, but nowadays who can find three orchestras and three choirs for a single performance? A very strange man, quite forgotten, although I seem to remember he composed more than fifty operas. He once wrote a fugue for sixteen four-part choirs, that I do remember. Imagine, a sixty-four-voice fugue. There’s a glorious madness there.’

Zebedee glanced from time to time at Sandra, but her eyes were fixed on Anthony Raffish’s animated face. The little man made stiff, right-angled gestures to add force to what he was saying.

‘There’s something very grand about artists, often first-rate artists, with at best a minority appeal utterly refusing to compromise and make their work accessible, isn’t there? Or it may be a radical incapacity. Years ago I became friendly with a most strange old half-Indian named Sorabji, a quite astonishing pianist and an even more astonishing composer. He never wrote very much, I don’t think, but it’s hard to tell because he would allow practically none of it ever to be published or performed. I remember Alfred Cortot telling me how highly he rated one of Sorabji’s piano concertos he was allowed to see. A fascinating man; I suppose somewhere must be all those manuscripts of his which I used to beg him to let me see but to no avail. There is one work of his in print which I think Zebedee here might be interested in since it would satisfy any pianist’s desire for the outré. It’s called “Opus clavicembalisticum” and it goes on for hours and it’s so preposterously difficult it makes Busoni look like Grade Five. Now, there’s a composer who ought to be disinterred, or at least properly examined before being reinterred. But probably a lost cause after all as no doubt he himself wished. One can’t help admiring the ferocious pride or stubbornness of people who go to such lengths to scupper all chance of worldly success in order to remain true to their private vision….’

And so he talked and toddled, and so Zebedee’s gloom returned at the seeping glitter of menace and corruption he thought to detect somewhere beneath. Was he being warned? ‘This young man needs watching.’ That was what a reviewer had written about his Wigmore Hall début after first conceding that anyone who includes ‘Gaspard’ and ‘Islamey’ in a first recital and plays them with complete technical mastery would merit watching anyway, even were it not for the thoughtfulness of his late Beethoven. Needs watching. And what since then? Nothing. No offers, no records, no engagement, nobody watching at all. Happy the man whose private vision can pay the rent.

Abruptly he turned to walk back to Speaker’s Corner and catch the Tube. He couldn’t think what the purpose of this stroll, this conversation was, but hardly doubted there was one.

‘You will give me your address,’ said Anthony Raffish. He produced an envelope and held a pen in his bunched fingers. ‘Yes?’ And Zebedee found himself surrendering that part of his life which was comprehended by Archway. As he watched Raffish’s painful scrawling he glanced up and found the tall girl’s eyes fixed on him with an expression he could not read.

Three days later he received a plain white postcard. My dear J.S., tomorrow night’s Festival Hall concert will, I venture, contain something of interest to you. I think you should be there. Yours ever, A. Zebedee looked up the programme and failed to see anything immediately suggestive. Among other things a Weber clarinet concerto and – horrors! – a symphony by Ives in the second half. Rather even Burl than Charles, he told himself, but none the less went.

The clarinettist billed to end the first half was a staunch old virtuoso now moving in stately fashion towards the end of his much-acclaimed career. Indeed, there had been rumours that this might be his last public appearance in England and it was presumably this which accounted for the televising of the first half. As Zebedee watched him come on to an immense ovation he thought he looked ripe for intensive care, let alone retirement. A grey, pained face beneath a strange grey toque of hair, a weird busby which in its way was almost as renowned as the playing of the man beneath it. The concerto started, and Zebedee found his attention wandering. Why was he here? What was the significance of the occasion? In all those serried tiers of seats he failed to spot Anthony Raffish or, indeed, anyone he knew.

A murmur in the audience brought his attention sharply back. Up on the platform something was wrong. The orchestra were nearing the end of a passage which led into a sequence of athletic arpeggios for the soloist, but his clarinet was hanging slackly by his side, held like a stick in its middle while the high grey nest was bending forward as if gravely acknowledging premature applause. His other hand rose to meet it as sudden folds appeared at the knees of his dress trousers. A Second Violin with presence of mind quickly left his desk and moved forward to take the man’s elbow and help him backstage. Perhaps mindful of the cameras, which ought at this moment to be switching viewers’ attention to a close-up of a cellist’s bow or a female horn’s décolletage, the conductor kept the orchestra together in a way which suggested that like all performers they knew the show must go on. It was all happening so quickly, in any case, that the wobbly virtuoso with his bent back to the podium had only taken a few escorted steps towards the wings when the music reached the soloist’s entry. And suddenly, right on cue and from low down in the auditorium, it came.

A tall girl in a long black dress was standing in the aisle between the front rows of seats, clarinet to her mouth. The conductor turned round to face this unexpected source of music, and the girl gave him a visible nod of encouragement. She walked as she played, slowly, statuesquely, down to the edge of the platform and stood to one side of the podium, half-turning to face the audience and the conductor at the same time. And still the dazzling passagework glittered off the little silver keys of her instrument. Coming so soon after the old virtuoso’s last notes the comparison was cruelly easy to make. Even the more unmusical among the audience could detect the edged difference in tone the girl produced; instead of the mellow, rounded sounds of the concerto’s opening were now an almost nasal brightness and clarity whose excitement gripped players and listeners alike.

It had taken Zebedee several astonished seconds to recognise the girl as the one in whose company he had so recently strolled. He was not particularly startled by her virtuosity, but her punctuality was another matter. He wondered how she had managed to tune up beforehand, let alone keep the reed warm while sitting in the audience. Had she hidden her clarinet under her dress? After an astonishing cadenza the movement ended and spontaneously the audience broke into a great torrent of applause for her impromptu courage, her femaleness, her preparedness, in recognition of her having provided them with a real-live televised event and – who knew? – even for her playing, in the middle of which the conductor reached down a brilliant black arm with a white cuff to help her on to the stage. A cheer went up. And it was not until then that certain things began to trouble Zebedee very much indeed. There was something not at all right about this sleighted piece of drama; but time and again he came up against the impossibility of believing it could be the ‘something of interest to you’ which Anthony Raffish had predicted. How could he have foretold an illness so sudden as to attack a soloist in mid-movement? It was uncanny. But there seemed nothing else suggestive or apposite in the rest of the programme. The concerto itself ended with a standing ovation for the girl whose serious expression unexpectedly yielded to a concerned smile before she handed her instrument to the conductor, exited quickly and, as the cheering continued, re-entered and came to the front of the platform where she raised both hands, very white in the television lights, for silence.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ came her small unamplified voice. ‘To set your minds at rest I’m sure you’d all like to know that Julius de Kooning is not seriously ill but is just suffering from sudden faintness brought on by an exhausting schedule. He would like to apologise to us all and promises an entire concerto next time. I’m sure we wish him a speedy recovery. Thank you.’

The applause broke out anew, respectful at first as if for an absent friend and mixed with some relieved laughter, but becoming more frenzied as the unknown girl’s interrupted ovation resumed. It seemed to Zebedee quite endless and the next morning he found she was rather famous under the name of ‘Alicia Cazenove’. Sandra Padgett had presumably been left in Harpenden, the split chrysalis from which a higher imago had finally emerged to dry her magnificent wings in the springtime heat of the television lights.

Zebedee could predict only too easily the sort of inferences Anthony Raffish might draw for him from this astonishing example of a career taking off and decided to boycott concerts where they might run into one another. He was unable to avoid his own, however, such as the one at the Royal College a week later when he was accompanying a violinist as well as playing some solo works.

‘I did enjoy that,’ said the familiar voice at his elbow as he left the building afterwards. ‘How very well you play Fauré; not many Englishmen can, I find. He demands real subtlety of tone. How right you are not to make his sonorities sentimental as if he were a French Elgar.’

‘I don’t find Elgar sentimental,’ said Zebedee abruptly.

‘Quite right, too,’ came the imperturbable voice. ‘But the English can read sentimentality into anything once they set their minds to it. They treat Elgar like he treated dogs. Now, do I detect nettlement in your tone?’

‘I’ve no idea. Not intentionally, perhaps. I shall go home now: I’m giving a lesson later.’

‘So busy. What a pity. Oh, J.S., J.S., don’t you sometimes feel it all slipping away?’

‘I don’t quite know what you mean, I’m afraid.’

‘You’re a silly boy, Zeb,’ said Mr Raffish with a glint in his voice, ‘and you’re much too brilliant to let the silly boy win. Don’t worry, I do understand about what happened at the Festival Hall the other night. You’re puzzled and faintly alarmed – anyone would be. “How could he have known?” you ask yourself. “Is there something sinister about this arthritic little poseur – for I only have his word for it that he could ever play a note himself?”’

This was so precisely the rhetoric with which Zebedee had compulsively been addressing lamp-posts, plates of chips, the bathroom mirror, that he started with a kind of guilt. ‘You’re unfair, Anthony,’ he said; and there was suddenly something so doleful in the ageing face looking up sideways into his through the mauve electric wash of a street-lamp he added, ‘But I admit to moments of scepticism. I get those all the time, especially about myself.’

This seemed to defuse things, for when Raffish spoke he was once more all charm and coercion. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘we shall take a taxi and I will prove something to you. And if you’re worried about your pupil’ – again it was like a foreign expression – ‘you can ring her from my flat and tell her you will be an hour or so late. This is important to you since it concerns your future. All is not yet lost.’

How Zebedee could once more find himself standing at the bottom of that canyon with the landslides of culture held magically from rushing down and swamping him, he hardly knew. He had willingly come quite against his will, as if to be scrupulously fair to a lover he had already decided to reject. He watched as the older man fumbled in one geological corner of the room and excavated the top of an old radiogram. He switched the machine on with a pop, and the hum of valves warming came from somewhere halfway up the cliffs. He coaxed a record out of its cover and put it on. Out of a crackle of surface noise the two arresting chords of Chopin’s B minor Scherzo struck, followed by such a breathtakingly clear torrent that Zebedee was momentarily chilled before undergoing the sensation of being picked up bodily and carried off. In the calm of the central section he was able to cross the room and find the record sleeve. On the front was a black and white photo of a very young man, practically a boy, in that classic musician’s dated pose of dreaming face propped on folded hands. The dreaming face was undoubtedly that of the elderly cripple lost somewhere in the shadows of this cavernous room. Zebedee turned the cover over.

All should be forgiven, thought Zebedee as the Scherzo ended. As was intended, added a cynical observer buried inside him, as was intended.

‘Well, enough of that,’ broke in Anthony Raffish, taking the record off with a harsh scrape. His eyes glistened in the semi dark. ‘All very long ago now. I sometimes wonder myself who he was and what became of him. Such promise, and all that.’

‘It was wonderful playing,’ Zebedee told him truthfully. ‘I’ve never heard it played like that.’

‘Do better yourself, then.’ The words were brusquer than the tone. ‘Only do it, Zebedee. You can now; don’t wait until the misery of isolation takes your edge off.’

‘But what do you want me to do, damn you?’ cried the boy passionately. ‘You keep grabbing my arm, tugging my sleeve, saying, “Get on, do it now, don’t hang about, it’s later than you think,” but you don’t seem to realise that I know all that already. I worry myself ill about it, my father worries about it, my teacher worries but pretends it doesn’t matter being a slow starter. So I hardly need you to tell me what the matter is if you won’t also tell me what to do about it. And you can’t; getting on is obviously just a matter of dumb luck. Dumb fucking luck.’ Disastrously, the adjective came out as youthfully flung in the face of an outmoded and genteel knowledge of the world. Anthony Raffish seemed not to notice.

‘My dear, so change your luck; don’t just sit there being petulant. I’ve told you before, you need an agent. I have heard you play many times here and there, you know; I told you I was a talent scout. Well, then. I believe in you and I think you have it in you to be a great pianist. Look here. See this?’ He pushed a programme into Zebedee’s hands. ‘See that name? Who do you think is his agent? Or hers?’ He found another programme lying about in the general confusion. ‘Or his, or his? Or this one? Oh, yes, him, too.’ Zebedee’s lap flowed over with sheets, playbills, posters, photographs, name after famous name.

‘All yours?’ he asked at length.

‘Mine,’ said the old agent. ‘Every one of them. Go on, look at them. Him, for example. You don’t think that’s his original name, do you? Terence Abbott, he used to be, from Sidcup or somewhere. Terry, the south London equivalent of Ovid J. Finkelmeyer. So tell me, does that name go with a black tie and a Guarnerius? And’ – some more paper fell to the floor – ‘what about her?’

Her was an internationally celebrated contralto pictured in an advertisement torn from Time. She was standing holding a sheet of music in one hand (the grey blur of the page could, Zebedee found, be resolved by a musician into – bafflingly – an easy piano version of ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’) while her other hand rested on a slab of mirror-like black wood, presumably the top of a piano. A gold watch was casually obtrusive. Zebedee glanced at the text. ‘Dame Celia finds her DateMatic® an essential part of the hectic, globe-trotting life of a virtuoso. I’m afraid I find the jet-lag beginning to catch up towards the end of the season, she admits. I catch myself thinking that if it’s Thursday it must be Puccini but thank goodness I have my DateMatic® to remind me that it’s only Wednesday so it must be Meyerbeer….’

‘It stinks, doesn’t it?’ Anthony Raffish was watching him sagely. ‘But out of the stink comes forth sweetness and that’s what counts. It’s up to you to change your prejudices, I’m afraid. You may think it’s something exclusive to the age we live in, but you’d be quite wrong. You don’t like the idea of music competitions, either, do you? But they’ve been around for centuries.’

‘Prizes, yes, and contests between famous players; but not those sports events you see on television. Knock-out competitions between wretched children who have been pushed and groomed into empty virtuosity. Half of them haven’t an ounce of musicianship in them but it’s funny how often the little girls who win seem to have long blonde hair and get all that close camera-work on their lips stretched around their embouchures.’

‘Bravo!’ said Anthony in delight. ‘Quite right, of course; it’s a mixture of Young Gymnast of the Year and what I believe they call soft porn. But for the winners it’s the chance of a career.’

‘Yes, and how many of those go on to make one? It’s usually the real musicians who come third or who don’t get placed at all, and what happens to them? How can anyone begin a career with a nationally viewed public failure into which he was urged for the greater glory of parents or teacher? The whole thing’s rotten.’ To his embarrassment Zebedee found himself on the edge of tears.

‘It’s a murky old world,’ conceded the agent complacently. ‘It’s actually rather jolly sniffing out ways of making ends meet. Personally, I never asked to stop creating sounds; but since the matter was decided for me by inscrutable fate I now take the greatest of pleasure in creating careers instead. My only stipulation is that the people I represent are not the products of what Madison Avenue used to call “hype”; they must be genuinely good. You are one such. You want to force me to be specific? Very well, then. In exchange for your signing a contract with me I will undertake to provide you with an opportunity such as you saw young Sandra – or should we say Alicia? – grasp with both hands the other night on nationwide TV.’

There was a long silence. Zebedee was more shocked than he could ever remember. Not even the mawkish pleadings of a schoolteacher years ago had filled him with such a sense of being intolerably presumed upon.

‘I can’t believe that you can admit to such a thing,’ he said at last.

‘My dear, I’ve admitted to nothing. I’m offering you a properly organised career.’

‘You’ve as good as told me you arranged to have Julius de Kooning fall ill the other night. What did you do? Put laxative in his dressing-room coffee?’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Mr Raffish sharply. ‘I won’t have you say such things. That’s criminal.’

‘I imagine that’s what anybody else would say. A newspaper, for instance.’

‘My dear Mr Hoyle.’ Gone now was the expansiveness of the voice and in its place a glacial remoteness. ‘It would be the height of folly to throw up all hope of a career in your chosen profession at the very same moment as becoming embroiled in a nasty and extremely expensive lawsuit.’

A terrifying sense of things having got far out of hand gripped Zebedee. How had they elided so quickly from Chopin to this bristled menace? Was everything really so thin? ‘I’m leaving,’ was all he could say helplessly. ‘You’ve upset me and I don’t quite … I’m not sure of anything.’

The bray of laughter from the shadows was one of mockery he had not had directed at him since school.

‘You poor little boy. Upset, are we? Deary me, as the English say, we have had a sheltered life, practising our scales and keeping our pretty nose clean. The world is too much with us, is that it? Better avoid it altogether while admiring yourself for being uncontaminated? Fine. So when even your precious world of music is revealed as being rather worldly, oh, the hands daintily lifted in horror and, oh, how the first suspicions must be schoolboy ones of skulduggery! The far more likely explanation wouldn’t have occurred to you, which is that successful performers like de Kooning get booked solid three years in advance by hard-nosed little agents like me: concerts here, recitals there, recording studios everywhere, aeroplanes, taxis, hotels hotels hotels, and when they reach his age they get tired and maybe even a bit stale and so when that agent comes up to them in private and offers to make a certain arrangement – something non-taxable, let us say, in return for the momentary embarrassment of a public retreat to the dressing room – don’t you think they mightn’t be glad of a week off? And if the net result of that well-earned little rest taken at no risk whatever to an established career is to give some younger musician a chance are you going to tell me a great moral crime has been committed? Well, are you? So go away, young Mr Hoyle; go away and do some growing up instead of haunting the concert-halls with your scores and your fantasies. I promise you, you’ll one day play all the better for acquainting yourself with the world; the great composers were not angels. Go away and swindle somebody or betray someone you love. Yourself, for example. Go and give yourself clap.’

*

Years later Zebedee never recalled this episode without once more experiencing its vivid shock. Never in all his life had he occasioned such an outburst as this, and at the time he but dimly grasped how it could have happened. In his mind’s ear he could still hear the bitter tone but never the words themselves. On the other hand he found it easy to recall a conversation some months afterwards with a fellow-musician, an oboist with whom desultory chat before a recital had revealed they had an acquaintance in common.

‘You’re not with him, are you?’ the oboist asked when Anthony’s name had cropped up. ‘Are you with Raffish?’

‘Absolutely not.’ Zebedee must have betrayed a vehemence which the other picked up at once.

‘Ah, you went through that mill, did you? No doubt a brilliant man but a nasty little queen for all that.’ Then, catching the blank look on Zebedee’s face, ‘You don’t mean he didn’t make a pass at you?’

‘Good heavens, no,’ said Zebedee, but with more assurance than he felt.

‘Surely you didn’t believe all that crap about his wife?’

‘The Hungarian pianist?’

The oboist laughed. ‘Hungarian pianist, was she? French oboist, the night he met me. For my money she never existed at all; she was a useful fiction. I admit I never liked him so I was glad he lost all interest in me when he discovered I already had an agent. In fact I gather he’s first-rate. He certainly knows how to spot talent. He goes to every concert that ever is, knows all the managements intimately. He’s got a sort of carte blanche to wander around the dressing rooms and hobnob with people. There was a time when I couldn’t play anywhere without him popping up from behind box offices and stage doors. I suppose that’s what you have to do, just know everybody, and it seems to have paid off in his case. There are lots of famous names with Anthony Raffish and there’s apparently nothing he won’t do for his musicians. But watch out if you cross him – they do say he can be pretty catty and spiteful, although I’ve no intention of finding out.’

About eight months after that Zebedee was approached by an American recording company, one of whose talent scouts had been impressed by a recital he had given in London. He had been flown to Pasadena and there had recorded a programme of piano music by Gottschalk which, coming as it did at a time of increasing interest in nineteenth-century American music, had a considerable success. This led to a contract to record a MacDowell concerto, and suddenly he was being billed as an up-and-coming exponent of American music, living in America for months at a stretch, travelling about that continent from hall to hall and from studio to studio. On his twenty-eighth birthday Zebedee found himself, with some degree of irony, signing a contract to record Ives’s ‘Concord’ sonata. How differently things had turned out, he wryly thought, from what he had once imagined or even wanted. Not ‘J. S. Cramer’ playing limpid Viennese classics but Zeb Hoyle playing Ives and being paid handsomely to do so.

Shortly after that he crossed the Atlantic for one of his rare visits to Europe to fulfil an engagement at a Promenade Concert where he was booked to play Rachmaninov Two. His appearances in England were now infrequent enough for it to be a real pleasure to return. In the earlier part of his transatlantic exile he had commuted a good deal between Boston and Basle, for the young wife he had taken with him to America had failed to adjust to life there and by the time she came to deliver their child Antoinette had gone home to her parents. It often struck Zebedee how odd it was to have a Swiss son; but then, that whole episode of marrying and parenting now seemed part of a previous period in his life, even to belong to a person who no longer quite existed, someone who had once been deeply unhappy in north London.

In fact he found the pleasure of being back in London undercut more than expected by the memories it evoked. How pungently it returned, that atmosphere of despondency and dreaming; of endless hours at the keyboard in rented rooms, of lonely walks to all-night fast-food bars, of concerts and recitals from which he had gone home rancorous with envy. A particular stench of memory still clung around that brief episode with Anthony Raffish, he admitted. How did those few meetings of a long time ago still retain the power to make him feel awkward, even guilty? He had of course been very young then…. Had he betrayed himself in some way? He could no longer quite remember. Anyway, it hardly mattered now as he sat in his dressing room, clearing his mind in a professional manner of all but the music itself.

For almost an hour he sat in stiff collar and shirtsleeves quietly reading the score and sipping black coffee until the bell went. The walk onstage afforded him considerable pleasure: it was only the second time he had played in the Albert Hall, and it was still something of a novelty to view the scene of his former yearning pilgrimages from the performer’s side of the platform. With a sense now of pleasurably relaxed homecoming he softly began the first of the eight chords which opened the concerto.

Rachmaninov’s Second is a busy work for the soloist. In the first movement, at any rate, there are few of those moments common in concertos of a century earlier when he can sit back from time to time and let the orchestra introduce or develop its own material. Thus it was that Zebedee was too occupied to notice that all was not well with him until a good way into the first movement. The pain suddenly became acute enough to force itself on his attention and in so doing reminded him that it had been there in his stomach practically since the moment he had come onstage. He noticed the conductor watching him with concern; the keyboard became slippery. More and more his mind was diverted into holding himself together until the movement’s end while his fingers mechanically, professionally, played the notes. At last they were into the accelerando of the coda whose increasing pace and excitement made it easier for him to disguise and appease the pain by swaying his body, shifting position.

Zebedee came to his feet almost as he played the final chord. On his hurried way across the platform to the exit he was conscious of little but gesturing vaguely to the conductor as he left, half-seeing on the other side the white fields of upturned faces like a hillside of moonflowers. Outside a St John’s Ambulance Brigade volunteer sat dozing on a canvas chair. Zebedee passed him at a run.

Inside the lavatory and in something like blessed relief he let himself lean panting against one wall with his eyes shut while the external world came filtering back. There was a soft knock on the door and a man’s voice – the ambulanceman? – asked discreetly if he were all right.

‘I’m OK,’ Zebedee told the back of the door weakly. ‘I can’t go on again but I’m OK. Something I ate. You’d better tell someone.’

He listened to the man’s footsteps recede. From his stomach and spreading to the rest of his body the pain of disappointment suffused him. The triumphant return was spoilt. He had played less than a quarter of the time spent beforehand reading the score in anticipation and so sudden and confusing had been the sickness it was difficult to believe that for him, at least, tonight’s concert was already over. Then almost immediately there came the distant sound of the concerto’s slightly delayed second movement starting. As he sat letting the anguish drain slowly out of him he wondered whom they had found as an understudy at such short notice. The movement was half over before Zebedee could slip out, a handkerchief pressed to his face.

On the way to his dressing room he could not resist peeping in through the curtained entry on to the platform. There at the piano in the glare of the light sat a blond young man of melting good looks, albeit of a rather dated and foppish kind. He was in jeans and a sweater and was contriving to wring the music of its last romantic drops. These spattered his rapt audience as refreshing spring rain, but for Zebedee behind his curtain they flowed together into a certain once-familiar runnel of unease.

At the sudden touch on his arm and the whisper he turned abruptly. But it was only the ambulanceman asking if he were all right.

‘Where did that boy come from?’

‘Lord knows, sir. Just popped up out of nowhere. Stepped into the breach in the nick of time, though, didn’t he?’

And as Zebedee lay showered and weak on the settee in his dressing room the distant surf which was the sound of someone else’s wild applause oozed through the walls.