Andrew Crumey: The Secret Knowledge

“French descent but I pronounce my name the English way, it’s simpler.”

“Send me the Klauer sonata, I’d like to see it.” Conroy gives his address, then it’s time to say goodbye. Verrier leaves without an autograph.

At the restaurant it’s Conroy, Tiff and a couple of others, local arts bureaucrats of some sort; pleasant and friendly, well used to dining out on other people’s expenses. One is a charming self-described divorcee with a gleam in her eye that speaks of possibility, but she gets a call and has to leave. In the face of every diner Conroy sees the emptiness of pleasure and the inevitability of oblivion, and with each bottle of wine, flat-chested Tiff becomes more beautiful. Eventually they’re all leaving, the handshakes on the pavement are brief and cursory, there’s drizzle in the air and taxis have been spotted. Conroy says to Tiff, “Would you like to go for a drink?” She knows a good bar near his hotel, they talk there about music, the job market, basically nothing, and after a couple of whiskies he asks her to come back with him.

“I can’t,” she says simply, with the polite forcefulness of someone turning away a door-to-door salesman. He returns alone.

Lying clothed and shoeless on his mid-price bed sucking a miniature vodka from the minibar he feels glad she turned him down, regretful that he should have sunk so low. He’s never been unfaithful to Laura in the years they’ve been together. In fact he wonders if loyalty is all that’s left, dishonesty of a different kind.

He thinks of Edith Sampson and the trunk that must have been cleared out of her house by strangers after she died, the old lady’s kitchen smelling of cat pee, her bedroom thick with dust, cupboards overwhelmed by ancient newspapers. The certainty of decay and the defiant will to write five hundred pieces of music only God would ever hear: the unshakeable faith of an artist in her own vision. He tries to replace the image with a more comforting one of Tiff’s slender naked body but guesses she would have handled him in the same business-like way she settled the restaurant bill. For a young girl like her it’s all so pragmatic and clearly defined, the future offering strength, not sadness. What future did Pierre Klauer have? Conroy guesses possible endings: doomed consumptive, spurned lover, uniformed skeleton in a trench. He imagines him a blood-streaked newborn spat into a midwife’s hands, face pre-creased with inescapable fate.

He reaches to retrieve his phone from the pocket of his jacket, tossed on the chair beside the bed. It’s late but he wants to hear Laura’s voice, wants to say sorry for something, anything. He can’t remember if she’s meant to be back home by now or else still away on her assignment, some kind of environmental story she was investigating. Whenever she talks to him about practicalities and logistics he’s got into the habit of tuning out.

Her phone can’t be reached. Somewhere remote she was heading for, sheep and hills, poor signal. Probably sitting in front of a log fire in her B&B thinking what a shit he is. He’s too old and scared to envisage a life alone without her, too weak, but he thinks of it, wondering if it might be best for both of them.

Stupid to imagine there was any chance with Tiff, she must have done it with artists far more successful than David Conroy. Her world is an open-plan promise of infinite efficiency but around its upper balcony stand an exiled crowd refusing to be ignored: the old and dead and forgotten. From beyond the ceiling of the hotel room, Pierre Klauer, Jan Timman, George DuFoy and a thousand others look down, angels of lowest rank, proletarians of artistic heaven, bathed in transcendent, annihilating light. Conroy’s a minor pianist who had his chance but never hit the big time. That’s why he has such affection for the little guys. When the woman told him that story about Alfred Brendel he wanted to puke, knew that if Brendel ever heard it he’d laugh his head off, wouldn’t have a clue who she was. All of us, we’re just performers.

When Conroy was Tiff’s age he was being called one of Britain’s most promising talents, his Shostakovich was “remarkable”, he won a few prizes and thought, this is how it will always be, like this, forever, because this is what I deserve. Yet everything ends in a trunk on a skip, trash waiting to proclaim its true nature, yearning to liberate itself from illusion. His life’s work has been the memory of his hands but it’s the innate impulse of all things to be forgotten.

The Secret Knowledge . Verrier did a good pitch, mystery and secrecy are more attractive than fact. He gets up and takes another miniature, brandy this time, then lies back on the bed, eyes closed, watched over by the towering ranks of the eternal dead where Pierre Klauer stands, sombre and aloof. We are the unknown, he says, and you will join us.

Ten days after Pierre’s funeral, Yvette and her mother receive a visit from his cousin Gilberte; small, dark-eyed, dressed in black yet radiant with loss, her pale sharp features are determined to resist grief with dignity. Yvette follows little of the conversation while the three of them sit sorrowfully together, then Madame Courvelles excuses herself, leaving Yvette and Gilberte alone.

“I bring remembrances of Pierre.” From her purse Gilberte extracts a small silver locket and a dried flower, the latter instantly comprehensible despite the wearying confusion of Yvette’s mind. Pierre was wearing it when he was shot.

“I can’t.”

“Please.”

Withered yet otherwise uncorrupted, the cattleya is like the remains of a saint; already, twirling it slowly in her fingers, Yvette envisages the jewelled reliquary that would be fit to house it. Before delivering the locket into Yvette’s other hand, Gilberte opens it to reveal an encased curl of coal-black hair, and it is as if Yvette is reading everything in a book, viewing it in a carefully staged photograph, or from a vast distance through a telescope. She is not really here and none of this is happening. It is a fantasy — almost.

“I never saw him.”

“I know that, Yvette.”

“They wouldn’t let me. Why wouldn’t they let me see him?”

“Better to remember him in life.”

“Not even in his coffin… Did you?”

“Let’s not speak of it.” Gilberte presses the locket into Yvette’s palm. “Keep this and treasure it.”

Yvette stares at the two lifeless souvenirs she holds, places them on the table beside her cooled teacup and asks again. “Did you see Pierre’s body?”

“Yvette, you’re only upsetting both of us.”

“But did you?”

“No.” Gilberte’s porcelain face is impassive, her voice like the funeral oration Yvette hazily recalls that extolled with stoic finality Pierre’s genius as musician and beauty as a man. “It was his parents’ wish, you know that.”

“A cruel wish.”

She bristles. “Were it not for your mental condition I would find that remark inexcusable. Is your grief greater than theirs?”

“I only want to know why they hid him.”

Gilberte, her errand already discharged, is like an actress impatient to reach the end of the scene when her role will be terminated and she can depart the theatre. “It’s obvious why, Yvette, stop hurting yourself and others.”

“They should have let me see him!”

So much weeping recently; Gilberte has become immune to it. “Control yourself and think what it must be like for them. You were spared and now you blame them for it.”

“If I could have seen his face.”

“He had no face!” Gilberte’s outburst is like the gunshot itself. “Forgive me,” she says softly.

Impervious to further hurt, her world having ended two weeks ago, Yvette remains numb. “I know how terrible he must have looked. But I should have been with him as he died, holding him in my arms. The crowd, the confusion, everyone saying different things…”