The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [107]
They had decided before the concert that they would do without an interval, so after the Schubert Gerald stood up and said in his genial, penetrating tone, the tone of a commander among friends, that they would go straight into the final item, Beethoven's "Farewell" Sonata, and then they could all have more to drink and some rather good salmon—an idea that was greeted with applause all of its own. Nina came back in looking slighted and doubly determined, Nick clapped her very vigorously, and when she played the first three descending notes, "Le-be-wohl," a shiver ran up his back. The man beside him looked at him suspiciously. But for Nick, to listen to music, to great music, which was all necessity, and here in the house, where the floor trembled to the sudden resolve of the Allegro, and the piano shook on its locked brass wheels—well, it was a startling experience. He felt shaken and reassured all at once—the music expressed life and explained it and left you having to ask again. If he believed anything he believed that. Not everyone here, of course, felt the same: Lady Kimbolton, there, the tireless party fund-raiser, kept a careful frown as she looked discreetly through her appointments diary, then shook the bangles down her arm as she came to attention again—the grey attention, mere good behaviour, of the governing class; she might have been in church, at the memorial service of some unloved colleague, in a world of unmeant expressions, the opposite of Beethoven. Gerald, at the other end of Nick's row, loved music, and was nodding now and then, just off the beat, like someone catching on to an idea, but afterwards Nick knew he would say it had all been either "glorious" or "great fun"—even Parsifal he had described as "great fun," when "glorious" had seemed the more likely option. Others were clearly touched by what they heard: it was Beethoven, after all, and the piece told a story, of departure, absence and return, which no one could fail to follow or to feel.
It was the absence that was best, and little Nina, whom it was hard to think of without her "little," seemed almost visibly to grow up as she played it. It was a proper andante espressivo, it moved and it moved along, she didn't ham up the emotion, in fact you saw her curbing some keen emotion of her own to the wisdom of Beethoven, so that the numbness of absence, the wistful solitude, the stifled climaxes of longing, came luminously through. Nick searched out Wani again, the sliver of profile, the dark curls crowding behind his ear—and wondered if he was touched, and if so in what way. He was watching his ear but he couldn't tell what he heard. In Wani, it was hard to distinguish complete attention from complete abstraction. Nick focused on him, so that everything else swam and Wani alone, or the bit of him he could see, throbbed minutely against the glossy double curve of the piano lid. He felt he floated forwards into another place, beautiful, speculative, even dangerous, a place created and held open by the music, but separate from it. It had the mood of a troubling dream, where nothing could be known for certain or offer a solid foothold to memory after one had woken. What really was his understanding with Wani? The pursuit of love seemed to need the cultivation of indifference. The deep connection between them was so secret that at times it was hard to believe it existed. He wondered if anyone knew—had even a flicker of a guess, an intuition blinked away by its own absurdity. How could anyone tell? He felt there must always be hints of a secret affair, some involuntary tenderness or respect, a particular way of not noticing each other . . . He wondered if it ever would be known, or if they would take the secret to the grave. For a minute he felt unable to move, as if he were hypnotized by