Wally dressed for the evening. Black tie. A black suit with satin lapels and the obligatory ribbon down the seam of the trousers. The suit had been made for someone bigger and fatter than him, but Wally wore it as he wore his white gloves, without self-consciousness. Before the war everyone would have dressed for a concert at the Wigmore Hall. Even now about half the audience had. Troy was not one of them. It had not even occurred to him.
“My cousin Casimir,” Wally said. “Killed by a V1 whilst out walking the dog in ’44. I was his only relative and hence his heir. He left me the rooming house in Marshall Street, the contents of his bank account, which were not insubstantial, and this suit. Since when, although the logic of the phrase eludes me, I have, as you say, been ‘sitting pretty.’ The rooming house is a gold mine, I could let every room twice over. And the pleasure I got from putting the Cockney nose out of joint when I let to West Indians last week is pure schadenfreude. If you had met me in the early years of the war you would have thought I was a penniless bum. Now, if clothes rationing ever stops, I have every intention of getting a tailor of my own.”
Wally was fastidious. Troy would have to get used to that.
Rosen had given him two seats in the third row of the stalls—Wally dusted his before he sat down—slightly left of centre with a good view of the keyboard—Troy liked to see a pianist’s hands while he played. They were first-rate seats.
The violinist and the cellist took the stage to a round of applause.
Troy glanced at his programme:
Rhian Davies was in her early twenties, tall, dark, and Welsh. She had come to prominence as a child prodigy ’round about 1939. Troy recalled that she had played all the Bach suites for solo violin over an entire week as part of the National Gallery’s lunchtime “we can take it” concerts during the Blitz. He’d managed to catch precisely one day of this.
Méret Voytek had appeared out of nowhere in the summer of 1946. She had taken London by storm, also by performing an entire Bach work, the solo suites for cello, in this very hall. Troy had caught none of it. He wished he had. The newspapers had praised her to the skies afterwards, “The Left-handed Wonder” “The Viennese Wunderkind.” He’d settled for buying the records. He wasn’t at all sure whether he’d met her until she took the stage. He’d met a lot of Viktor’s pupils and entourage but Viktor was never one for effecting introductions—he’d find himself turning up for a lesson in Cheyne Walk just as someone else was leaving and then shaking hands with someone who’s name he hadn’t quite grasped and who he was damn certain he’d never meet again. But when Méret Voytek took the stage he knew her at once. It had been just before Christmas 1946. And she had indeed been simply a handshake and one of Viktor’s mumbles as she left and Troy arrived in the dimness of Viktor’s hallway.
She was slight, even slighter stood next to Rhian Davies, nearer thirty than twenty—striking rather than pretty or beautiful, with dyed blonde hair that served to make her dark eyebrows seem faintly sinister by making the dark eyes inescapably haunting. Despite the odd-sounding name, she was from Vienna, that much he did know, and the profiles in the newspapers said she was a survivor of Auschwitz, but Viktor had never mentioned this—but then Troy could not recall that, one brief meeting excepted, he had ever mentioned Méret Voytek.
Rosen took the stage, the volume of the applause soared. A single bow to his audience, then straight to the piano, a nod to his musicians—Rhian standing far right, Méret seated in the curve of the Bechstein—and for the next forty minutes he held a couple of hundred people in rapture.
Troy had seen plenty of cellists over the years—face-pullers, grimacers, eye-closers, dreamers who swayed, rockers who shifted their weight constantly between one foot and the other, one buttock and the other. Méret Voytek was perhaps the calmest he’d ever seen. The emotion was in the music, not in her face—it was a little like watching someone play behind a glass wall.
When they returned from the interval the piano was gone, pushed to the back of the stage.
Troy consulted his programme again:
Troy turned to Wally.
“I don’t get it.”
“What’s to get? Have you never heard the Schubert Octet before? It’s one of the oddest lineups in nineteenth century music. Two violins, viola, cello, double bass . . . coupled to woodwind—clarinet, bassoon, horn—there’s no piano. Huge for chamber music, about right for a jazz band.”
“No piano? But all these people have paid to hear Viktor.”
“No, Troy. I think they will still hear Viktor. They will hear him through the work of his protégés, for that is surely Herr Rosen’s intention. To give us a work in which he has schooled them all. He is in effect the conductor, but one conspicuously offstage. Roll with it. It is bliss. And as you are an Octet virgin, double bliss. You will not go home disappointed.”
Wally was right. It was an introduction to something Troy wished he’d known about years ago. He’d always found string quartets a bit harsh—crudely put, they could be “scrapey.” The woodwind softened the whole effect—the French horn, the dreamiest of brass, burnished, it and the addition of a double bass gave it a bottom end quartets could only dream of, but probably didn’t.
Rosen joined his players for bows and when the cry of “encore” went up it required neither ego nor modesty to know they were calling for him, not the seven young women and one young man who had played the Octet. The piano was pushed centre stage once more.
Rosen sat down, pushed up his jacket sleeves, and turned to the audience.
“I had had it in mind to devote an entire evening to Schubert, but I find Massenet at the tips of my fingers like static electricity. So I play Massenet, an elegy composed I know not when.”
He placed both hands on the keyboard, then removed them, turning to the audience once more, much in the frustrating manner of Victor Borge. “I forgot to say, Massenet elegy in F minor, in an arrangement by the American pianist Art Tatum.”
Someone in the audience laughed. Rosen shot him a look, saying, “You think I’m joking? Stick with me, kid.”
Then the whole audience laughed and Rosen let rip with Tatum’s arpeggio-laden Massenet.
It was the version Troy had played for him a couple of years ago, only to be greeted with withering disdain. Perhaps it was how badly Troy had played it that been the problem. Clearly, Rosen had sought out the original. Troy could not imagine any pianist holding out against Tatum for long. The sheer skill of the man was all but overwhelming. Perhaps three minutes of Tatum was quite enough for anyone new to him, and three minutes twenty-eight seconds was all they got.
Afterwards Troy would have slipped away quietly but Wally wanted to meet Rosen, and as Troy could oblige, he did.
Wally bagged Rosen readily by recalling to him a recital of Chopin he had given in Warsaw in 1929 to a thunderously patriotic reception, and the two of them vanished into a Mitteleuropean world—Wally seeming as fluent in German as he was in English—that left Troy shaking hands, saying thank you to the other musicians—polite English reserve from the woodwind, not quite knowing how to take a compliment; a bone-crunching grip from Rhian Davies; a limp, unengaged one from Méret Voytek and dark dungeons of eyes that would not meet his.
Walking home to Marshall Street Wally said, “What was the question?”
“You said you hadn’t ever mentioned Skolnik to Charlie Walsh. Did anyone in the Branch ever mention him to you?”
“No.”
“Did you deal with the spooks only through Charlie or did you meet them personally?”
“I met them.”
“And you said nothing to them, either?”
“No, and for the same reason I gave you. Troy, where is this leading?”
“I think I need to talk to someone in MI5, someone in the right department. Can you find me someone?”
“Of course . . . but you are well-enough connected, surely . . . ?”
“I’d rather it wasn’t someone I know. I don’t want to be seen to call in any favours and I don’t want it common knowledge in Scotland Yard that I’m doing this. I want it kept well away from the Yard. Just find me a spook . . . I hesitate to say this . . . a spook I can trust.”
“Consider it done,” said Wally.