Andrew Crumey: The Secret Knowledge

She offers a piece from Janacek’s suite On An Overgrown Path . It will always be connected in her mind with the cabbage stalk, the woman at the hospital, the smell of the corridors. In the whole of her body she can feel the meaning of the music, he lets her play to the end and she expects him to pass judgment but instead after a pause he says, “Did you say you studied physics?”

“No, English.”

“I was sure you said physics.”

It’s as if he wasn’t listening. She wonders if he’s making some kind of point.

He tells her, “I met a physics student the other day and asked him about Schrödinger’s cat. You know, the thing that’s neither dead nor alive, or both at once. The student said, maybe we’re all inside the box. What do you think he meant?’

“I’ve no idea.”

“Probably nothing. Why did you choose the Janacek?”

“Because I love it. That’s what you asked for.”

“You played well.”

She hopes he’ll elaborate but instead he wants to go back to the ‘Waldstein’, there are passages he asks to hear again, he makes her play them repeatedly, demonstrating at his own keyboard what he wants her to do. Imagine you’re singing, he tells her, think where you would take a breath, what the words might be, which syllables you would stress. Think of the audience who need to feel as if all of this is coming into being right now, in this exact moment. Trying to follow his instructions, struggling against the differing will of her own fingers, she wonders if there will ever be an audience. For half an hour they work on a single short section until Conroy says he can see she’s tired, they should finish with something else. From his pile of scores he lifts some loose sheets and passes them to her, photocopied pages of handwritten music. The notes are small but neatly formed, the tempo heading is ‘grave’.

“Try this.”

“What is it?”

“A slow movement by someone you’ve never heard of. Take a minute then start whenever you’re ready.” He gets up and returns to the window, looking out while she picks up the single line of the opening, and she wonders if his point now is to make her think about that first instant when everything is unknown and genuinely new, a moment always about to be lost. It’s a peculiar melody, a sinuous curve in the right hand, punctuated by unexpected angles. She supposes it to be a theme that will be developed or varied, but the following full chords introduce a new, unrelated idea. The harmonies feel wrong, she’s sure she must be making mistakes, misreading the tiny accidentals; she constantly expects to be told to stop, but he lets her continue. He said it took only a few seconds before the ‘Waldstein’ made sense to his childhood ear, but this piece is different, an object on which she can’t sustain any view, its shape constantly altering. She passes through flashes of beauty, transitory episodes of rich sonority, but set among formless progressions of bewildering complexity. And then the single line reappears, only this time it’s different, the corners have moved.

“Stop there,” he says gently. “What’s your opinion?”

“I couldn’t get it. I’d need to play it a few times.”

“When do you think it was written?”

There was something in it that reminded her of Messiaen. “Nineteen sixties?”

“Go back fifty years. Pierre Klauer was a student at the Paris Conservatory with a great future ahead of him. Shortly after writing this he shot himself.”

“I sensed a strangeness in the music.”

“A man who’s talented, confident, yet he’s about to commit suicide. A contradiction.” He shows her another of the photocopied sheets. “You see what he called it? The Secret Knowledge .”

“The secret is why he killed himself.”

“The secret is the music. I want you to learn the whole of the movement for next time. And I want you to keep hold of the confusion, don’t try to resolve it, because I can tell you now, there won’t be an answer, there never is. Art is always inconsistent.”

She came to this first lesson with the hope of being praised and complimented; instead she leaves still wondering if Mr Conroy thinks she has any talent at all. When she goes downstairs she sees that the dropped sheet has been removed, a different crowd of people fills the lobby, the protesters have gone for lunch. But on her way home, the bird is still there, exactly where it lay.

Her flat is on the first floor, she splits the rent with Nathalie who works shifts as a nurse and is mostly at her boyfriend’s; the couple below leave early for work every morning and make no noise. Paige might as well be living alone, though she still chooses the further isolation of headphones while practising. The Klauer piece will be a chore to learn, she’s not sure whether Mr Conroy will expect her to play it from memory. She wonders if he’ll ever make a pass at her, and how she’d feel about it.

In a couple of days it’s coming together, she knows the movement’s shape, even if she still doesn’t understand it. There are two main themes, she realises, presented alternately in different ways, together with other material that seems more random. Does she like the piece? The question is irrelevant: it’s simply there, and she has to learn it.

She meets her friend Ella for coffee and tells her about the college. Ella wants to know if there are any good-looking boys on the course. They’re in Starbucks, a new branch only recently opened, Paige wonders what the place used to be, how long it will survive in this latest incarnation, thinking it while Ella talks about something else, her freshly dyed red hair making her pretty face look even paler than usual, energised with transitory importance. Paige gets a call on her phone, looks at the screen and doesn’t recognise the number, puts the phone to her ear and Ella falls silent.

“Paige, it’s David Conroy.”

At first she can’t connect the name with any person, she’s so surprised to be called by her tutor.

“There’s something we need to discuss. Could we meet?”

Her confusion must be visible to Ella, who can hear it’s a man at the other end.

“I have to ask you to return the score I gave you. I’ll explain when I see you. Things are stranger than I thought.”

John Quinn waits at the gate of Russell Engineering on a dark January evening as the workers emerge, caps pulled low, coats buttoned against the frigid air. “ Advance , one penny!” Quinn shouts, brandishing a bundle of printed pages in his upheld hand. “Support the campaign for a forty-hour week.” Most ignore him as they pass, too tired to comment. A few tell him to be off; their union, like most in Scotland, has already voted against — why should they heed this lad or his newspaper? But one man stops.

“I’ll buy a copy.” The accent is foreign.

“A penny.”

He searches his pocket. “ Merde . Only three farthings.”

“Have it for two.”

“You should come on Friday when we have our pay packets.” He takes the paper, pays his coins and reads the masthead. “ Advance . I like that. I’m a believer in progress.”

Quinn barely notices the last of the men trudging indolently behind the stranger, his features strikingly shadowed in the lamplight. “You’re French?”

“I was.”

“How do you come to be here?”

“Events occurred.” The newspaper consists of a single spread the Frenchman opens and quickly peruses. “You have written this?”

“There’s a group of us.”

“Communists?”

“Socialists.”

He nods pensively. “I should like to meet your group.”

Quinn is delighted. “You’re most welcome…”