The Secret Knowledge (Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback) Read online

  She offers him the Barcarolle, accomplished if a little stiff. Conroy finds himself trying to guess which edition she’s used: Chopin wrote two slightly different manuscript versions. A left-hand D sharp soon gives it away, he stops her not long after. Next it’s Beethoven, this sounds more promising, but while she plays and Conroy stares through the window at the trees and small park where a woman pushes a buggy he finds his mind drifting, the ‘Waldstein’ isn’t holding his attention. What did Adorno say it made him think of when he was a child? Knights in a forest. Conroy must still have the book, unless Laura took it, though she seems to have been meticulously selective, removing only what was unambiguously hers. Surprising, in the Venn diagram of their material possessions, how negligible the overlap.

  In Paige’s performances Conroy detects a troubling insincerity, a desire to please out of a sense of duty. “Play me something you love,” he tells her, and she offers Janacek’s suite On An Overgrown Path. An intriguing choice; its demands are expressive rather than technical. Here, thinks Conroy, is someone genuinely more interested in art than showing off. The tone feels exactly right, her playing is sensitive but restrained, completely devoid of sentimentality. She conveys what for Conroy is the real essence of this piece: the loneliness of a bad relationship. She can’t possibly understand at her age, perhaps even Janacek didn’t know it when he wrote the music (though he would come to know it), but Conroy can hear it as he looks down on the muted street. Truth is not something we discover consciously; it discovers us.

  He turns to watch, his view of her is from the side, her concentration appears total. She looks younger than twenty. If he’d ever had a child, he thinks, he would have wanted one like this. But it’s too late. It almost feels as if his life is already over.

  Towards the end of the piece there’s a section marked ‘adagio dolcissimo’; a mysterious, floating passage that sounds like a memory, but a memory of what? If the whole piece is really about loneliness then this section is the dream of how things might otherwise have been, a false memory of happiness, a path denied. Yet this girl has so many possibilities in front of her, such potential – he hears it now – what can she know of suffering and disappointment? It moves him that she should be able to express so clearly a pain still to be felt. And this, he realises, must be the key to Pierre Klauer’s music. A life full of promise, haunted by its own doomed future.

  He wonders about the other path she might have taken; after she’s finished he asks her what degree subject she gave up. Physics, she tells him. He’s surprised, and thinks of the gauche student at his recital recently, the one who said we’re all inside a box. What he meant is that we’re dead in our graves from the very first moment of existence; it just takes a while to figure it out. Yes, he’s sure she said physics.

  Conroy decides they should spend more time on the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, he understands now that all the faults he heard before were those of her teachers, she needs to unlearn what was drilled into her. He sits at the neighbouring keyboard, demonstrating passages he wants her to try, pointing out where she was apt to shorten a note, blur a chord or misplace an emphasis. In every case she takes his suggestion and turns it into something new, never mimicking, always pushing herself to experiment. So many ways to play the same piece and none is definitive, there’s always room for variation. But Conroy’s job is to bring her to competition standard, he’s a quality-control inspector on a production line in an industry that demands consistency and predictability. He wonders if she’s just too good for the professional circuit, the world of crowd-pleasing monstrosities like Tune Inn with their banal maxim of inclusivity. Paige, he senses, is an individual, not an acrobat. Beethoven is what they ought to work on but Conroy wants to hear more of that depth of feeling Paige found in the Janacek; they should go off the familiar track.

  He shows her the Klauer slow movement. She takes a moment to prepare then picks up the bare opening theme, more slowly than Conroy had played it, and as the full chords enter he senses a different orchestration from what he had previously imagined. Paige’s tone is warmer, the view less tragic. He can see the Paris park again, the strollers in their antiquated clothes, but now the same scene is reinterpreted and crucially altered: Klauer is a man filled with hope and optimism. Yet still he puts a gun to his head. Contradiction is the key.

  “Stop there,” he tells her. “When do you think it was written?”

  “Nineteen sixties?”

  Conroy’s first impression had been that it was typical of its era; Paige sees it as a work ahead of its time. A further reconfiguration occurs in Conroy’s mind: it is not he who debuts the work, but Paige. He sets the slow movement as homework and keeps the remaining pages for himself. For the rest of the day he can’t stop thinking about her, this soft-spoken brown-haired girl.

  At home with a new bottle of malt whisky to console him, he studies his bookshelf, finds the work by Theodor Adorno he had thought of, opens it and sees on the yellowed front page his own signature, twice as old as the venerable drink in his glass. He looks up the story he told Paige, about the ‘Waldstein’, flicks and finds it, and it occurs to him: this is what the rest of your life will be like until you die. An index of former experience.

  He plays through the rest of the Klauer. It isn’t a lost masterpiece, such things don’t exist except in minds conditioned by the preformed categories of convention, where everything possesses a measure of greatness as inherent and inviolable as the weight of a stone. To be a masterpiece means to be perceived as one; the work that is lost is unperceived, when found it is open to any kind of perception. The music speaks to Conroy of the certainty of failure, not a take-home message the public would want to hear. It says, we are all fools.

  When Verrier calls a few days later, Conroy tells him at once, “I’ve played it.”

  “Splendid, I’m wondering if we could meet.” He’s in Conroy’s town on business; perhaps they could have lunch together? Conroy suggests a place; central, bright, reasonably priced, they fix a time. Conroy arrives early, can’t see anyone resembling his memory of Verrier, orders a mineral water and looks at the menu, nothing’s changed since he was here before, still as false. Eventually he hears a voice, looks up, Verrier in tweed jacket is standing with an old-fashioned brown briefcase hanging from one arm, like a doctor’s bag, and is extending the other across the table in greeting. He looks older than Conroy remembered, more confident now they’re meeting as equals. Verrier sits and after exchanging pleasantries Conroy asks, “What’s your business?”

  “Property. Music’s a hobby, an expensive one.”

  “Not if you can buy a life’s work for a few quid.” He’s thinking of Edith Sampson’s trunk.

  “Sometimes you find a bargain.”

  The waitress comes and takes their orders, after which Verrier asks Conroy about his forthcoming concerts, the assumption being that they already exist. Conroy evasively speaks of projects he’s considering, then says, “What do you think of Paul Morrow?”

  “I heard his Rachmaninov recording. Do you know him?”

  Conroy nods but says they’re not close, he invites Verrier to be completely honest.

  “Then I’d say he’s still a bit raw but could well be a genius.”

  “A genius or a fraud?”

  Verrier smiles. “Excellent question. You’re not a businessman, are you? If you were, you’d appreciate how fine the dividing line can be.”

  “Art and business don’t mix.”

  “But everyone has to earn a living. And if art doesn’t pay, what then?”

  “You mean we should all sell out, like Morrow?”

  “Not his fault if he looks like a pop star. Got to make the most of the hand you’re dealt.”

  The gambling metaphor is almost enough to put Conroy off the food that arrives soon afterwards. The waitress swiftly deposits their meals, asks automatically if they require anything else, and leaves with a swing of her hip.

  “Well then, you like The Secret Know
ledge?” Verrier enquires, bringing their meeting to its point.

  “I asked one of my students when she thought it was composed…” Conroy sees a change in Verrier’s expression and realises he’s made an error of judgment, the work was given to him in confidence. “I showed her part of the slow movement.”

  “And what did she think?” Verrier asks cautiously.

  “She reckoned nineteen sixties.”

  Now he looks indignant. “The paper and ink have been checked…”

  “Of course, I’m not doubting the authenticity. And it was a stupid comment, really. But I know what she’s getting at. Klauer’s style is unusual, hard to pin down, not ahead of its time but outside it.”

  “Is it a piece you’d want to perform publicly?”

  “Yes,” Conroy says at once, pauses, then adds, “It’d require a lot of preparation.”

  “Would you have any particular venue in mind?”

  Verrier is speaking like a true entrepreneur, but once more the faltering state of Conroy’s career risks exposure. “Somewhere small and intimate would be best.”

  “Yet it seems so grand. The first movement’s huge.”

  “Not the last, though.”

  Verrier nods. “I noticed that, a curious falling off. I even wondered if it might be unfinished.”

  The possibility occurred to Conroy when he played it; the finale opens with a melody that could be the near relation of a popular song, the movement as a whole has an atmosphere of lightness bordering on triviality. “Think of Schubert,” he says. “The G major or D major sonatas, those final movements that don’t go at all the way we expect, none of that Beethovenian climax and culmination. Instead something far closer to life.” Klauer’s finale, Conroy explains, is a danse macabre, a black comedy. “That’s his point: things end badly.”

  “A marvellous theory,” Verrier concedes. “And that gunshot in the park – what a superb joke!” He pushes his half-eaten salad aside and reaches down to the briefcase beside him, opening it to retrieve some pages, one of which he slides across the table to Conroy who brings his reading glasses from his pocket.

  “This is the newspaper report I mentioned in my letter,” Verrier explains while Conroy’s eyes focus on small old print he supposes to have come from a web archive: French text announcing the tragic accident. Then a second sheet pushed beneath his view, another press extract, this time in English. Verrier points to the date in the corner, 1919, and a headline further down the page: “Agitation at public meeting.” Conroy scans it without comprehension; Verrier’s finger offers further assistance.

  A Frenchman, M. Pierre Klauer, also took the floor, making inflammatory remarks about his countryman, the infamous revolutionary, Blanqui.

  Verrier sits back with an air of triumph. “He dies in 1913 then reappears six years later.”

  “A different man, his namesake.”

  “What are the odds? Individually, the first and second names are common enough, not in combination.”

  “Then he didn’t die? Or someone stole his identity?”

  Verrier shrugs. “It’s a mystery, the secret of Pierre Klauer.”

  “Genius or fraud,” Conroy says thoughtfully.

  “Possibly both. We really should try to get to the bottom of this before you premiere the work.”

  “None of it affects the quality of the music.”

  Verrier laughs. “You think so? What about the finale with its black comedy; the last word from a condemned man, or a prankster’s up-yours? When Klauer wrote it, did he know he was going to fake his death and leave the country, was he already the political revolutionary he apparently turned into? Is that the secret knowledge? But leave it to me, David, I’ll do the digging, you study the music. Quite a find, eh?” Verrier looks at his watch and says he has to leave for another meeting, he insists on paying, the amount too negligible to merit discussion or gratitude. The newspaper items go back inside his briefcase, his closing handshake accompanied by a voice lowered in seriousness. “I trust you not to mention this to anyone else. As owner of the manuscript, I have to ask you to keep the information confidential and your copy secure.” Then he exits, leaving Conroy to ponder the enigma of Pierre Klauer, and the pages he gave his student. He phones her at once.

  “Paige, it’s David Conroy. There’s something we need to discuss. Could we meet?”

  1919

  It’s the evening of the meeting and the hall is full. On the platform, behind a long table, sit the committee whose nomenclature has, as Joe Baxter promised, gone unremarked, since the men and women crowding every available chair have more important concerns than spelling. John Quinn and Pierre Klauer sit side by side, Quinn rustling and reordering his scribbled notes while Klauer looks at the audience in front of him, the ranks of faces tired, determined, hopeful. He sees Jessie sitting near the front.

  Quinn calls the meeting to order, his voice unsteady. He has never addressed a gathering as large as this, never seen so many hostile eyes. He quickly hands over to the regional head of one of the mining unions who outlines the case for reform, a man past fifty but still strong in appearance, his arguments clear, precise, and no different from what Quinn has been saying in print. Next is a representative of the Clyde Workers Committee who insists the campaign is not about undermining the existing order, only an attempt to create fairer working conditions and stave off the threat of mass unemployment. During the previous years there has been a working week of fifty-four hours or more, made necessary by warfare’s insatiable appetite, and some groups have profited from it: the manufacturers, landlords, speculators. But war has also raised the consciousness of the workers, not afraid to strike even when the government, under the false pretence of patriotism and national unity, made striking illegal. So we must again defend ourselves, the speaker says. We must look after our own folk.

  Then Pierre Klauer gets to his feet. He has no script, no notes, and for a moment appears unsure what to say, though there is no trace of nervousness or reluctance in his manner, only a calm indifference to his surroundings, as if speaking to two or three people instead of as many hundred.

  “I work at the Russell factory, like many of you. And you can tell that I am a Frenchman. So I cannot say much about the history of your country but instead will say something about my own. Half a century ago, the Prussians reached the outskirts of Paris and laid siege. The people ran out of meat and had to kill dogs and cats and horses. Zoo elephants were slaughtered and served to restaurant diners. The poor ate rats, until even the rats were gone. The government in Versailles capitulated, but not the people of Paris. Governments are often less patriotic than those they claim to represent. So while it suited Thiers and his cronies to make peace with German industrialists, the workers thought otherwise, and declared Paris a socialist republic, a commune that would fight on.

  “The communards imprisoned various members of the ruling class; Thiers demanded their release. And the communards told him, we will free everyone if you in turn release, out of all the many political prisoners you hold, just one, the man we have chosen to be our president. Thiers said no. He signed a humiliating peace treaty with Prussia, and the commune was suppressed. Thousands of innocent men, women and children were slaughtered; shot or bayoneted as they tried to flee, lined against walls in summary executions until the streets of Paris were washed with proletarian blood.

  “Who was the man Thiers feared so much that he would allow the deaths of all these people, and the hostages too, rather than free him to join the insurrection? His name was Louis-Auguste Blanqui. He had wielded a musket when Charles the Tenth was overthrown, was on the streets in 1848, and had suffered for it, kept in solitary confinement at Mont Saint-Michel in conditions that would have driven many men insane. At Belle Ile he grew so sick he was released in order to die – but instead this man with an iron constitution recovered and continued the struggle, until the grimy Fortress of Taureau became his final home.

  “Blanqui was a small, wiry man, not at al
l handsome, prematurely aged by incarceration, white-haired by his forties, his face hollow, his clothes shabby. One day when he was in prison they told him his wife had died; he had barely seen her, or their son. He gave his life to the cause of revolution, renounced all human pleasure, all comfort, expected nothing except hardship. To someone like Thiers, feasting in Versailles with German bankers while the whole of Paris starved, this was incomprehensible. How can any man value justice more than money? How can anyone love freedom so much that he is prepared to spend three-quarters of his life in prison? You see, my friends, to the capitalist mentality, self-sacrifice is a mystery greater than the transubstantiation of the Host. A man who will not give a coin to a beggar will never understand someone willing to give his life for a stranger he calls comrade.”

  John Quinn isn’t watching the speaker beside him, only the audience, puzzled at first, but gradually warming to Klauer’s theme of brotherhood. The Frenchman quotes Robert Burns, hums Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’, cracks a joke that raises a laugh. Men and women gaze with growing admiration, charmed by Klauer’s foreign manner, flattered by his praise of their country’s liberal traditions, stirred by vivid tales of struggle.

  “So you see, my friends, if justice is on our side then it doesn’t matter how few we might be in number, because numbers can grow. We have heard how the forty-hour week will mean there will be enough work for everyone. We have heard that the employers, too, must sacrifice a modest portion of their profits to the common good. What does this small gesture count for, against the blood of our own loved ones, spilled in the trenches? Do we not owe it to them, and to the ones who survive? Are we like the speculators of Versailles, who knew the value of nothing except money? Or are we communards, patriots, workers united?”

  Applause breaks out, there are shouts as people rise to their feet.

  “Workers united!”

  “We’ll show them!”

  The plan was for questions and answers, instead there is confusion, a babble John Quinn is unable to suppress when he calls for order, and nor can the union man, who reminds everyone that the Trades Council has yet to pass a motion on the issue and action must not be taken until then. Pierre, smiling at what he has achieved, makes no effort to quieten the room where everyone has now risen; instead he goes down from the podium and joins the crowd, greeted by a few handshakes and backslaps and then by Jessie, her face illuminated with wonder, her remark to him inaudible, lost in the general mood of congratulation, so that he draws closer and asks her to say it in his ear, puts his arm round her while she tells him he was superb.