Paige wants to ask Mrs White about Verrine, has she heard of him? She says nothing.
“We’re not going down that road,” Mrs White says with maternal firmness. “We do things the right way, college concerts and competitions, no jumping the queue.”
The teacher offers more tea and biscuits for consolation but what Paige reads in Mrs White’s words is a simple message: you’re not good enough. She asks, “Did Mr Conroy say anything about me?”
“David and I have never had much to say to each other about anything.”
“You don’t get on?”
“We all have our own kinds of artistic temperament. Put it this way, the reason why David never did chamber performances was that he couldn’t find players who’d put up with him. A soloist in everything.”
“I heard that his wife left him.”
Mrs White looks surprised. “Wife? He’s never been married.”
“Or his partner. He said she walked out on him. Not long before I started.”
“He’s always lived alone.”
“But he said it.”
“It simply isn’t true.”
“Then he lied to me?”
Mrs White sighs. “He has quite serious mental issues, you realise.”
“Delusions?”
“That’s what it sounds like. He’s always been very private but one thing I can say for certain is that no woman would ever have been able to live with David Conroy.”
Paige is stunned. She mentally replays her encounters with Conroy, instantly reinterprets them, knowing that nothing he said can be trusted. Her star quality is no longer definite, there is only roughness around the edges. She’s gripped by a sickening dizziness. What about Julian Verrine, has he also been deceived by Conroy’s fantasies? Paige wants to tell Mrs White but it’s too late, the teacher is looking at the clock, lifting the biscuit plate, smiling to indicate that time’s up and she has another appointment. With rising nausea Paige goes out and along the corridor, pushing between other students to reach the staircase, hurrying as she goes down to the entrance hall, her throat dry as stone, tears gathering. She’s beside the glass case with its celebration of the famous and the dead, the remembered few, the ones of whom it’s been decided that they mattered after all. She wants to smash the bloody thing.
She tries calling Ella but it goes onto voicemail and Paige hangs up, she starts texting then quickly deletes it. Who gives a shit what Conroy did or didn’t say, or what Mrs White thinks? You’ve got to believe in yourself as an artist, this is what Paige tells herself, though the voice she hears isn’t really hers, it’s the voice of someone she’d rather be, someone who could genuinely believe. The louder voice, her own, is saying: you’ve fucked it up, you should have listened to your parents. You’re good but not great. Do you really want to earn a living playing cocktail bars and wedding receptions?
She needs air and daylight, goes through the revolving door onto the steps and stands feeling the breeze, breathing deeply until the sickness leaves her. The sound of traffic calms her, movement of distant pedestrians, spectacle of life’s insignificance.
“Hey, Paige.”
She turns and sees in his regular spot the skinny protester with his placard on a pole. Only him today. No hat this time, his brown hair is untidy and he needs a shave but the look suits him. Still can’t remember his name.
“You OK?” he asks.
“Where are the others?”
“Didn’t show.”
She goes over to him, looks at the placard with its painted slogan. “Why do you do this?”
“Because I want change.”
“And you think this can make a difference? Doesn’t change happen anyway?”
He starts telling her the kind of idealistic stuff he must say to everyone, she zones out and watches his teeth, sees a tiny white spot of saliva find its way onto his lip and stay there like a pearl, wonders what it would be like to be kissed by him. Eventually she interrupts. “Aren’t there better places to make a protest than outside a music college?”
“Sure, but I don’t want to miss lectures.”
“Revolution has its limits, right?”
He laughs, she joins in.
“Better go.”
“Bye, Paige.”
The conversation has lifted her mood, she walks home thinking about her meeting, it’ll probably go nowhere but you never know. It isn’t down to Conroy or Mrs White or her mum and dad: it’s about people like Julian Verrine. Again she plays the fantasy of Sean opening the newspaper, a photograph of her at the keyboard.
Next day she arrives promptly at the restaurant, a place she’s never been in, popular with media types by the look of it, stylishly minimalist like a picture in a magazine. The waiter sees her lingering at the entrance and comes to attend; she gives Verrine’s name and is taken to a table already occupied by a slim man in his thirties wearing a light grey suit. He stands and greets her warmly.
“Paige, great to meet you, so glad you could come.”
He has a firm handshake, deep suntan, finely trimmed beard and an expensive looking watch. Later, when Paige tries to describe him, she’ll find that this is all she can say about Julian Verrine.
“How’s the piano playing?” he asks brashly, she tells him she’s studying Chopin and he nods approvingly. “Can’t do better than that. David’s never been too much of a fan, though.” Immediately they have alighted on the subject of their common acquaintance. “Heard anything?”
“My new teacher worries he might have harmed himself.”
“Let’s hope not,” Verrine says earnestly. “It would be so out of character.”
The waiter brings water and offers them a selection of bread rolls, a piece of theatre that puts her in mind of Mrs White’s comments about show business. It occurs to Paige that as a pianist she’s training to be a kind of retail assistant, serving up musical morsels with a flourish. Verrine orders a glass of red wine, Paige sticks to water. She asks him how exactly he knows Conroy.
“We go back a long way.”
“You’re his agent?”
“I’ve helped set up quite a few of his performances. Not an impresario as such, but I have contacts. That’s what it’s all about, you know. Contacts.” His moisturised skin creases easily into a smile as he raises his glass to toast their new partnership. “Now, tell me about Klauer.”
The sudden change of topic takes her aback. “What about him?”
“You still have the piece?”
“I gave my copy back to Mr Conroy. He told you about it?”
Verrine cuts into his roll, disembowels it and pushes some of the white fluff into his mouth, scrutinising Paige who for a moment sees his eyes flick to her breasts before he takes a sip from his glass to wash down the bread. “Did you play all of it?”
“Only the slow movement.”
“Odd case from what I hear. Shot himself and survived, something like that.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
The waiter comes again, the next stage of the performance, inviting them to order. They haven’t looked at their menus; Verrine glances at his and opts for steak, Paige finds her attention falling more on the prices than the elaborate descriptions, hopes she hasn’t misinterpreted the arrangement, and orders a risotto involving morel mushrooms and pine kernels. She has no idea where such things come from or how they’re harvested, they seem to exist only for places like this.
“Chopin, eh?” Verrine resumes. “Poor fellow’s buried all over the place, heart’s in Warsaw and the rest of him’s in Paris, though it’s what he wanted, apparently. Know about his eyes?”
“Where are they buried?”
“Paris, I presume. But no one knows what colour they were. Liszt wrote that they were blue, others swore they were brown, some say hazel. Rotted away to dust now, so we’ll never find out.” It’s a sad and distasteful image but Verrine doesn’t notice Paige’s reaction or else doesn’t care, instead he pursues the thought. “So many things we can never know, because they make no difference. The colour of a man’s eyes, even if he’s alive or dead.”