Amy Bird - Hide And Seek (Part 2)

Arrête, Sophie – tu te rends folle . And I don’t want to drive myself mad. Madness would not be helpful. Madness doesn’t get you an income. Marking that little bitch Emilie Beaumont’s work would get me an income. Shut off the pain, the guilt, the feeling, like before. When you allowed yourself back into music again. Not to play professionally any more, not like when I met Max. My violin is well and truly shelved. Smashed, in fact. It had seemed like a good idea, at the time. I couldn’t sit in an orchestra again, hear that build-up of sound, the passion that went with it. Max’s piano would always have been centre-stage, in my mind. Like the first time, when I was part of the orchestra that recorded the first concerto. We’d joked, when he’d started his next piece (a quirky piano-only concerto), that he’d only written his earlier concerto with orchestra so that he could snare the first violinist. Now he had one, he could move on to solo work. Not that I was his first violinist. His piano had built up its share of notches.

I toss Emilie’s composition book to one side. It isn’t happening. I’m having a Max moment. If I can just engage in that, maybe I’ll finally get closure, put it all to one side. So, let’s psychoanalyse: did I feel rejected that he didn’t want my violin accompaniment, in that second concerto? Maybe. Maybe that’s why we argued in the run-up to that second recording. Or maybe it was still because of Guillaume, the distance I felt since he was born. Not just from Max, but from everything. The distance I tried to close by shouting. By throwing plates, sometimes. And, yes, make yourself confront it – other things. I would quite literally give anything for us not to have argued that evening. Had I known what the consequences would be.

So yes, maybe that’s why I put the violin to a violent rest. Pursued teaching, the ‘easier’ option. But then, of course, came the impact of the staves. The horror of those notes, their little black heads against the white and black background! How could they be innocently suggesting a tune? How could they not represent Max, lying on that black and white chequered floor? Follow the head, they seemed to be saying, follow the head as it moves about. Hit that note, get it just right, position it evenly on the line, strike it through. And worse, far worse, sometimes the heads had little tools next to them, the sharps, so shaped that they looked like –

No! It had been too much. And so I’d told all my students to do composition on blue staves in pencil. Found a little cheap supplier of poor quality composition books, whose staves had meant to be black but had turned out blue. Bought them from my own salary. Told the pupils that is how real composers work. They believed me; and their parents did too. They are professionals, not artists, those parents. What does a doctor or a lawyer know about music? I could almost hear them ignorantly boasting to their friends about the authentic musical education their talentless children were getting. Shame they also chose to talk about it to the Head of Music. He called me in to see him. He said he’d surveyed many composers and none of them had heard of my theories. Idiot . He didn’t know any real composers. Not composers like Max. Max didn’t care whether he wrote in pen, or pencil, or blood, on black staves or blue, or even any staves at all. He just created and played. But I couldn’t say that, could I? Couldn’t let on, about Max. It had been a risk, even putting my connections with that orchestra on my CV, even though I knew I needed to, to get the job, to validate myself. Didn’t mention Max’s name though. Just said I had led the strings section in the works of ‘various contemporary composers’. I’m sorry, Max. Again.

And now, there it is. The reason I don’t indulge in this. There is the familiar welling of sorrow. It will drag me down, down to Bois de Boulogne. And I can’t go that way again. Won’t. I’ve worked so hard to rescue myself. And besides, it wouldn’t even give me safety there, now. I’m not so young. Maybe I wouldn’t be at risk of rape. But now that I’m ‘older’ – I never was older, with Max, him being five years my senior – they would probably see an old lady, mug me. Take my bag, sell my identity, before I could buy a new temporary one from them and shoot it up into my veins.

So, instead, now, let us see what mes enfants terribles have concocted for me. Has little Emilie made any sense of my instructions? I wonder if when they compose, these children, they become the awful anti-social ogres that Max used to become. They certainly do not have the excuse of genius. I tut, crossing out a stray sharp that had found its way into C Major. I tell them C Major is the learning key. They don’t need to trouble themselves with sharps. Or worse, flats, with that great curved weight on the end of them, sitting right next to the note head. So many of them, ironically, in Max’s first concerto, written in B-flat Minor. If he’d chosen that key deliberately to court comparisons with Tchaikovsky it had certainly paid off: reviewers claimed he was as ‘bold’, ‘heroic’, ‘fierce’ and ‘eerie’ as the great Russian, ‘taking listeners to the same depths of melancholy and heights of passion’. None of that, in the year I teach. We play it safe in C Major. Although there is a danger, doing everything in the relative key to Max’s second concerto. A Minor. Just as haunting as his first. Perhaps even more so. For how it ended. Perhaps I’ve spent these teaching years intentionally skirting dangerously close to his memory – keeping him near but far enough away not to trouble me. But I don’t teach them about relative scales here. They can learn all that when they get to lycée . Until the Head of Music finds out, and quibbles it.

Yes, genius had been Max’s every excuse. For his hours of silence, his refusal to co-operate in household chores, his dreadful failure to acknowledge Guillaume when the boy wanted to play. His excuse for everything. Not that he even needed an excuse when we first started going out. I just enjoyed watching his genius. It was like he was making love to the piano. It was the same face when he was striving to orgasm. The same lifting up and down of his hips at the piano as he reached the climax. Except later on he saved the intensity for the piano. Apart from when Guillaume was conceived. He gave a virtuosic performance then, when it mattered.

So, yes. At least his excuse was valid: genius. The question is – was mine?

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