Nick went on, ‘He’s an interesting character. Probably the most knowledgeable authority on baroque and classical that I know.’
‘I’m looking forward to meeting everyone,’ Ben said. It wasn’t strictly true. He would have preferred to spend the time alone with Nick, the two of them catching up in private as reunited friends should. But you couldn’t have everything.
They got off the bus on Banbury Road and walked the rest of the way. Nick lived in a quiet leafy street where imposing old three- and four-storey Victorian townhouses stood behind fancy black and gilt wrought-iron terrace railings. The Aston Martin, covered in pigeon droppings, was parked on the street outside a house with a black door with a lion’s head brass knocker. The buzzer panel discreetly mounted to the side with three name labels on it aside from Nick’s. ‘I’m on the top floor,’ he explained to Ben as he opened the door and led the way inside the hall.
In fact, as Ben soon understood as they reached the top of the house, Nick’s apartment comprised the entire upper floor. From the tall window outside his door there was a view of the University Parks woodland, cricket pavilion and the River Cherwell beyond.
‘I bid you welcome to my humble abode,’ Nick said, showing Ben into the apartment. The inside was modern compared to the exterior, airy and surprisingly large. The walls of the main living space were adorned with expensive-looking artwork and even more expensive-looking oriental rugs covered sections of the gleaming hardwood floors. But what instantly drew the eye more than anything else was the sunlit bay near the window, dominated by a shining ebony-black grand piano and a contrastingly ancient-looking, highly decorated keyboard instrument that Ben guessed was either a harpsichord or a clavichord. He was a little hazy on the difference. Whatever it was, it and the grand piano nestled together facing in opposite directions, the new and the old like two halves of a yin-yang symbol. They were the focal point of the room.
‘You have a very nice place,’ Ben said.
Nick grinned. ‘How about a coffee for the hero of the buses?’
‘Please, don’t start that again.’
‘Okay. I’m sorry. Then how about a coffee for a very old friend that I’m extremely happy to have met up with again?’
‘Sounds better,’ Ben said. ‘Me too.’
‘A deal’s a deal,’ Nick said. ‘And I don’t think my coffee will disappoint.’
Nick disappeared down a hallway that led to the kitchen, whistling some bright little tune as he got busy. Ben heard cupboard doors banging, cups and saucers clinking. In his host’s absence, Ben walked over to admire the piano. The gothic-script lettering above the keyboard and on its side said BOSENDÖRFER. It was quite a beast.
Ben liked music a lot, some kinds more than others, and often wished he’d taken up an instrument in his life. If he had, it would most likely have been the tenor sax, inspired by his favourite jazz players. Like Bird, of course, and Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon and a host of others. He enjoyed listening to a good pianist, too, even though he wasn’t as much of a fan.
Nick’s piano was a beautiful object, no doubt about it. Neither it nor its antique counterpart showed a speck of dust and they both screamed loving maintenance in sharp contrast to the neglected state of the car in the street outside. It was pretty clear where Nick’s priorities lay.
Moving away from the instruments, Ben gazed at a couple of the portraits on the walls, both very obviously dating back to bygone centuries. One was of a man with a lean, gently thoughtful face, silky frills at his neck and cuff, a powdered wig like a judge’s on his head. The name plaque on the gilt frame said JOSEPH HAYDN. The other picture showed a heavier, more austere-looking jowly fellow with thick lips, a wedge of double chin, a frock coat and a slightly different kind of white wig, proffering in his one visible hand a small sheet of musical notation as if to say, ‘Here’s a little ditty I just wrote, especially for you. And you’d better like it.’
Ben peered closer and saw that this was the famous Johann Sebastian Bach, whose organ music he would be hearing Nick play that evening.
He found a different likeness of J.S. Bach elsewhere in the room, in the shape of a small alabaster bust resting on the glass shelf of a corner display cabinet. This Bach didn’t look very pleased at all, wearing an intense, challenging scowl that followed you wherever you went. He was just one of a number of collectables on display in the cabinet, mostly music related: other composer busts of all the usual suspects, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and some that Ben knew less well such as Berlioz and Messiaen; then there was a metronome inlaid with mother of pearl, a violin bow, an ivory piano key, a framed lock of hair purporting to have belonged to Frederick Chopin.
On the middle shelf, propped up on a little stand, was an old handwritten music manuscript that resembled the one in the Bach wall portrait, though it was proportionally a shade larger and consisted of several sheets bound together with wax, instead of just one.
Ben moved close to the cabinet to peer at the manuscript. The paper was splotched, faded and yellowed with age but the handwritten musical notation was almost entirely legible, apart from a curiously shaped, russety-coloured stain that covered part of the right bottom corner and obscured some of the last stave and a few notes. Written music notation was double-Dutch to Ben at the best of times, and this looked like a scrawl. The only part of it he could make out was the composer’s signature at the top of the front page, which made his eyebrows rise.
J.S. Bach
‘Like a moth to the flame,’ Nick’s voice said behind him. Ben turned. Nick was returning with the coffee. The rich scent of some serious dark roast was already filling the room.
‘Everyone goes straight to that manuscript,’ Nick said, carrying the tray to a coffee table. ‘And they all ask me the same thing. What must it be worth, and aren’t I taking a massive risk not keeping such an obviously priceless relic locked up in a vault?’
‘So what’s it worth?’ Ben asked.
Nick chuckled. After a dramatic pause he replied, ‘It’s worth precisely zero. Zilch. Don’t be taken in. It’s a fake.’
Chapter 7
‘You could have fooled me,’ Ben said. ‘It looks real enough. But then, I’m hardly an expert.’
Nick laughed as he set the things down on the coffee table and took a seat in a nearby armchair. ‘Join the club. I’m just a humble instrumentalist, not exactly one of your hardcore scholars or collectors who scour the earth ready to part with eye-wateringly vast sums for original manuscripts. I picked that up as a novelty for a few pennies in a crumbly old backstreet music shop in Prague when I was there for a concert last October. Believe me, if it was the genuine item, it’d probably be worth as much as this apartment and everything in it, plus that daft car outside. But it looks the part and is a great conversation piece among my musician pals. We’re a dull lot, I’m afraid.’
Ben peered back through the glass at the manuscript. ‘I suppose that stain on it would lower its value, though. If it was the real thing, I mean.’
‘I amuse myself by telling gullible souls that Bach spilled coffee on the paper while he was composing. You should see their faces at the idea that the great man would actually do such a thing as sit at the keyboard with a steaming mug next to him, like any other human being.’
‘Is that what the stain is, coffee?’ Ben asked, peering at it. Through the glass, it was hard to tell.
‘That’s what it looks like to me,’ Nick said. ‘One thing I do know, old Johann Sebastian was nutty about the stuff. Of course, coffee was very much the craze across Europe at that time. He loved it so much that he even wrote a piece of music as a homage to it, a mini comic opera called the “Coffee Cantata”.’