”She was a pint-sized redhead about his own age. She was looking at him intensely through round spectacles rimmed with pink plastic.
He found himself staring.
“You’re staring,” she said.
“Well,” he said lamely. “Pink specs . . .”
“All the better to see you with. And to be precise, Mr. Troy, National Health pink specs.”
“The NHS supplies pink specs? What happened to the endless shades of grey we’ve been hearing about since nineteen forty-five?”
“For children, Mr. Troy, for children. But if the specs fit . . . now, are we going to discuss my false teeth and my truss, too, or are we going to listen to Debussy?”
Troy said nothing. She turned her back, led off and he followed, through corridors measureless to man, down to a sunless office a couple of storeys below ground level—an office stuffed with electrical equipment.
“You’re in luck. The Concertgebouw recital was recorded on one of the new Ampexs we bought from the States. Brand spanking new. Amsterdam was its first outing. Thousands of pounds of license payers’ money. Fifteen inches per second. Sixty-decibel dynamic range. Fifty-to ten-thousand-kilohertz frequency response. Synchronous motors for minimal wow and flutter.”
Troy found himself looking at a large grey box with reels of tape a foot across and more knobs and levers than there were on the dashboard of his car.
“I didn’t understand a word of that.”
“Nor me. It’s what it says in the manual. All I can say for certain is it’s a damn sight better than anything else I’ve ever used. Now, I’ve set up the Debussy. We’ll have to change reels after the sonata. The concert doesn’t fit on one tape.”
“Oh. How do you manage the broadcast?”
“By having two machines synch-locked to one another just like projectors in a cinema. Or did you think Gone with the Wind fitted onto one reel?”
Troy had never seen Gone with the Wind. He might be the only person in the country who hadn’t, but he’d also never given a second’s thought to how any film reached the screen, or how any music reached the airwaves.
He took out his score and his pencil and tried not to look ignorant.
She worked the myriad knobs and levers, clunks and clicks louder than any note Rosen played—Debussy overheard on the factory floor—and he asked her to stop, rewind, and play back when he was certain he’d found a variation. He’d confirmed about a dozen, when she said, “You’ve missed one.”
“I have?”
“A mistake. You’re transcribing their mistakes, aren’t you?”
Troy would have had no problem lying to her but before he could, she said, “What am I saying? God, I’m such a clot. Viktor Rosen doesn’t make mistakes. Walter Gieseking might, but not Viktor Rosen. You’re not noting their mistakes . . . you’re noting . . .”
“What did you think they were doing? Improvising on Debussy? Poetic licence? It’s not jazz.”
“I didn’t follow the performance with a score. I had my wows and flutters to think about. But . . . I had thought the interpretation a little soft. A little florid . . . and truth to tell, until you forced me to consider the absurdity of it, I had assumed a few mistakes.”
“Sharps instead of naturals? A note too far? A chord instead of a single note?”
“I had noticed, yes.”
“Who else would have noticed?”
“Dunno . . . I’ll tell you that when the letters start arriving from the sad shires. Mr. Troy, I don’t know what’s going on here, but shall we do it together? I’m probably a damn sight quicker at it than you.”
He spread the score out so they could both follow it. It took two and a half hours to pinpoint every change, and when they had finished the sonata, they listened twice to Viktor playing solo the four pieces that made up Suite Bergamesque—but found nothing more.
Anthea said, “All duets are, as it were, a dialogue, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Troy? The cello talks to the piano and the piano talks back. We, as the audience, are privy to this, we partake vicariously of the emotion of the music. Savage beast, soothe . . . and all that jazz. In this instance, they are both talking to a third party, through the score and beyond the score, and we are not privy. You think you’ve found a code, don’t you?”
“Yes. And I don’t have a clue what it means. Do you?”
She shook her head, worked her specs loose, shoved them back with one finger on the bridge.
“Not the foggiest. This isn’t music anymore, this is maths.”
As he was packing the score back into his music case, she said, “It’s all jolly exciting, but I suppose you’re now going to tell me it’s a secret aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And when Tone Deaf of Tunbridge Wells writes in to complain?”
“Then, Mr. Rosen was perhaps having an off night. A little too much poetic license. A little too much Armagnac . . . whatever. He can hardly suffer for his reputation now, can he?”
She said what Rod had said, almost word for word.
“And the girl? Mademoiselle Voytek?”
“Quite,” said Troy. “You see my problem.”
“Is there nothing I can do? This is the most fun thing to come my way since VE night. All been a bit ‘back in my box’ since then.”
“You could stop the BBC from broadcasting the concert again.”
They said good-bye on the doorstep of Broadcasting House, beneath Eric Gill’s reliefs—a rare example of what Troy always thought of as British Soviet Realism. He had got as far as Great Titchfield Street when she came hurtling after him.
“God, I’m so scatty. I should have thought of this at once. Shostakovich!”
She was hopping from one foot to the other, almost dancing with excitement. Thirty become thirteen once more.
“Shostakovich?”
“Well, you recall he was declared an enemy of the state about ten years ago?”
Loosely, Troy did. Somebody had mentioned this to him at some point. Probably his father.
“He had to scrap a ballet he was working on and come up with something that pleased the commissars.”
“His Fifth Symphony.”
“Quite. Hardly journeyman stuff, is it? I rather think it’s his masterpiece . . . anyway . . . he sticks his tongue in his cheek, if not actually straight out at the thought police . . . he works in D, E-flat, C, B as a motif . . . and, of course, if you know the Russian alphabet . . . you could read it as . . .”
“D, D+, S, V . . . Dimitri Dimitri+yevich ShostakoVich. Although SH is a single letter in Russian. ”
“Quite. Does this help?”
Troy told her that it did, but he knew damn well that Viktor and Voytek were far from sticking their tongues out at the thought police, or from signalling themselves quite so obviously. At most, they might have got the idea from Shostakovich’s prank—but this wasn’t a prank. She had been right the first time. It was mathematics—now he needed a mathematician.