‘A masterpiece . . . as clear, lovely and civilised as a Schubert quartet ’ Daily Mail

An Equal Music

VIKRAM SETH

PENGUIN BOOKS

A N E QUA L M U S I C Vikram Seth is the acclaimed author of three novels: The Golden Gate, An Equal Music and A Suitable Boy, one of the most beloved and widely read books of recent times. He has also written five books of poetry, an opera libretto, a book of other libretti, and two highly regarded works of non-fiction, From Heaven Lake and Two Lives. He is at present at work on A Suitable Girl.

By the same author FICTION A Suitable Boy POETRY The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse Mappings The Humble Administrator’s Garden All You Who Sleep Tonight Three Chinese Poets (translations) Beastly Tales from Here and There (fables) Arion and the Dolphin (libretto) The Rivered Earth (libretti) NON-FICTION From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet Two Lives

PENGUIN BOOKS USA Canada UK Ireland Australia New Zealand India South Africa China Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com Published by Penguin Random House India Pvt. Ltd 4th Floor, Capital Tower 1, MG Road, Gurugram 122 002, Haryana, India

First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 1999 Published in Penguin Books 2000 This edition published 2015 Copyright © Vikram Seth 1999 All rights reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. ISBN 9780143420248 For sale in Indian Subcontinent only Typeset in Dante MT Std by Eleven Arts, Delhi Printed at Repro India Limited

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. www.penguin.co.in

For Philippe Honoré Perhaps this could have stayed unstated. Had our words turned to other things In the grey park, the rain abated, Life would have quickened other strings. I list your gifts in this creation: Pen, paper, ink and inspiration, Peace to the heart with touch or word, Ease to the soul with note and chord. How did that walk, those winter hours, Occasion this? No lightning came; Nor did I sense, when touched by flame, Our story lit with borrowed powers— Rather, by what our spirits burned, Embered in words, to us returned.

And into that gate they shall enter, and in that house they shall dwell, where there shall be no cloud nor sun, no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light, no noise nor silence, but one equal music, no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession, no foes nor friends, but one equal communion and identity, no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity. John Donne

Part One

1.1 The branches are bare, the sky tonight a milky violet. It is not quiet here, but it is peaceful. The wind ruffles the black water towards me. There is no one about. The birds are still. The traffic slashes through Hyde Park. It comes to my ears as white noise. I test the bench but do not sit down. As yesterday, as the day before, I stand until I have lost my thoughts. I look at the water of the Serpentine. 

Yesterday as I walked back across the park I paused at a fork in the footpath. I had the sense that someone had paused behind me. I walked on. The sound of footsteps followed along the gravel. They were unhurried; they appeared to keep pace with me. Then they suddenly made up their mind, speeded up, and overtook me. They belonged to a man in a thick black overcoat, quite tall—about my height—a young man from his gait and attitude, though I did not see his face. His sense of hurry was now evident. After a while, unwilling so soon to cross the blinding Bayswater Road, I paused again, this time by the bridle path. Now I heard the faint sound of hooves. This 3

4

Vikram Seth

time, however, they were not embodied. I looked to left, to right. There was nothing. 

As I approach Archangel Court I am conscious of being watched. I enter the hallway. There are flowers here, a concoction of gerberas and general foliage. A camera surveys the hall. A watched building is a secure building, a secure building a happy one. A few days ago I was told I was happy by the young woman behind the counter at Etienne’s. I ordered seven croissants. As she gave me my change she said: ‘You are a happy man.’ I stared at her with such incredulity that she looked down. ‘You’re always humming,’ she said in a much quieter voice, feeling perhaps that she had to explain. ‘It’s my work,’ I said, ashamed of my bitterness. Another customer entered the shop, and I left. As I put my week’s croissants—all except one—in the freezer, I noticed I was humming the same half-tuneless tune of one of Schubert’s last songs: I see a man who stares upwards And wrings his hands from the force of his pain. I shudder when I see his face. The moon reveals myself to me. I put the water on for coffee, and look out of the window. From the eighth floor I can see as far as St Paul’s, Croydon, Highgate. I can look across the brown-branched park to spires and towers and chimneys beyond. London unsettles me—even from such a height there is no clear countryside to view.



A n E q u a l M u s i c 5

But it is not Vienna. It is not Venice. It is not, for that matter, my hometown in the North, in clear reach of the moors. 

It wasn’t my work, though, that made me hum that song. I have not played Schubert for more than a month. My violin misses him more than I do. I tune it, and we enter my soundproof cell. No light, no sound comes in from the world. Electrons along copper, horsehair across acrylic create my impressions of sense. I will play nothing of what we have played in our quartet, nothing that reminds me of my recent music-making with any human being. I will play his songs. The Tononi seems to purr at the suggestion. Something happy, something happy, surely: In a clear brook With joyful haste The whimsical trout Shot past me like an arrow. I play the line of the song. I play the leaps and plunges of the right hand of the piano, I am the trout, the angler, the brook, the observer. I sing the words, bobbing my constricted chin. The Tononi does not object; it resounds. I play it in B, in A, in E-flat. Schubert does not object. I am not transposing his string quartets. Where a piano note is too low for the violin, it leaps into a higher octave. As it is, it is playing the songline an octave above its script. Now, if it were a viola . . . but it has been years since I played the viola. The last time was when I was a student in Vienna ten years ago. I return there again and again and think: was I in error? Was

6

Vikram Seth

I unseeing? Where was the balance of pain between the two of us? What I lost there I have never come near to retrieving. What happened to me so many years ago? Love or no love, I could not continue in that city. I stumbled, my mind jammed, I felt the pressure of every breath. I told her I was going, and went. For two months I could do nothing, not even write to her. I came to London. The smog dispersed but too late. Where are you now, Julia, and am I not forgiven?

1.2 Virginie will not practise, yet demands these lessons. I have worse students—more cavalier, that is—but none so frustrating. I walk across the park to her flat. It is over-heated and there is a great deal of pink. This used not to unnerve me. Now when I step into the bathroom I recoil. Pink bath, pink basin, pink toilet, pink bidet, pink tiles, pink wallpaper, pink rug. Brushes, soap, toothbrush, silk flowers, toilet paper: all pink. Even the little foot-operated waste bin is pale pink. I know this little waste bin well. Every time I sleep here I wonder what I am doing with my time and hers. She is sixteen years younger than I am. She is not the woman with whom I want to share my life. But, having begun, what we have continues. She wants it to, and I go along with it, through lust and loneliness, I suppose; and laziness, and lack of focus. Our lessons are a clear space. Today it is a partita by Bach: the E major. I ask her to play it all the way through, but after the Gavotte I tell her to stop. ‘Don’t you want to know how it ends?’ she asks cheerfully. ‘You haven’t practised much.’



A n E q u a l M u s i c 7

She achieves an expression of guilt. ‘Go back to the beginning,’ I suggest. ‘Of the Gavotte?’ ‘Of the Prelude.’ ‘You mean bar seventeen? I know, I know, I should use always my wrist for the E string.’ ‘I mean bar one.’ Virginie looks sulky. She sets her bow down on a pale pink silk cushion. ‘Virginie, it’s not that you can’t do it, it’s just that you aren’t doing it.’ ‘Doing what?’ ‘Thinking about the music. Sing the first phrase, just sing it.’ She picks up the bow. ‘I meant, with your voice.’ Virginie sighs. In tune, and with exactitude, she goes: ‘Mi-remi si sol si mi-fa-mi-re-mi . . .’ ‘Can’t you ever sing without those nonsense syllables?’ ‘That’s how I was taught.’ Her eyes flash. Virginie comes from Nyons, about which I know nothing other than that it is somewhere near Avignon. She asked me twice to go there with her, then stopped asking. ‘Virginie, it’s not just one damn note after another. That second mi­-re-mi should carry some memory of the first. Like this.’ I pick up my fiddle and demonstrate. ‘Or like this. Or in some way of your own.’ She plays it again and plays it well, and goes on. I close my eyes. A huge bowl of potpourri assails my senses. It is getting dark. Winter is upon us. How young she is, how little she works. She is only twenty-one. My mind wanders to another city, to the memory of another woman, who was as young then. ‘Should I go on?’

‘Seth gives the fullest account I have ever read in fiction of a musician’s relationship to his music . . . a brilliant novel’ Daily Telegraph Michael Holme is part of a successful quartet and has a beautiful girlfriend but he cannot let go of the past—especially of Julia, a pianist he loved and left ten years ago. Now Julia, married and the mother of a small child, unexpectedly re-enters his life and their romance lights up once again. Against the backdrop of Venice and Vienna, the two confront the truth about their feelings, about the music that both unites and divides them, and about a devastating secret that Julia must finally reveal. An intense, lyrical, deeply stirring love story, this is one of the great novels on music.

‘One of the most moving love stories you will ever read’ Khushwant Singh, Hindustan Times ‘It’s got sparse prose, delicate poetic touches, witty turns of phrase . . . Seth can write readable prose in his sleep’ Githa Hariharan, India Today ‘A wonder-work: irresistible, tense, deeply moving’ Sunday Times

Fiction

Cover photograph by Sonja Burgess Cover design by Bhavi Mehta

MRP `550 (incl. of all taxes)

www.penguin.co.in For sale in the Indian Subcontinent only