Madame, his wife, was more romantic. She took an opportunity of talking to me alone.
“So you love him?” she said. “You love him enough to marry him?”
I said fervently that I loved him completely.
“Wait a while. You have suffered a great shock. You should have time to think. Do you understand what this could mean to your career?”
“What should it mean? It will be good for it. Two musicians together.”
“Such a musician,” she reminded me. “He is like all artists. Greedy. I know him well. He is a very great artist. Maestro believes it is a genius we have there. Your career, my dear, would have to take second place to his, and it is dangerous for an artist to settle for second place. If you marry him you may well be just a good pianist…a very good one without doubt. But perhaps it is goodbye to dreams of the big success, to fame and fortune. Have you thought of this?”
I didn’t believe her. I was young and in love. It might be difficult for two ambitious people to live together in harmony; but we would succeed where others had failed.
Pietro laughed when I told him of Madame’s warning and I laughed with him. Life was going to be wonderful, he assured me. “We’ll work together, Caro, for the rest of our lives.”
So I married Pietro and quickly learned that Madame’s advice should not have been dismissed so lightly. I didn’t care. My ambition had changed. I no longer felt the deep urge to succeed. All I wanted was for Pietro to do so; and for a few months I was certain that I had achieved my purpose in life which was to be with Pietro, to work with Pietro, to live for Pietro. But how could I have been so foolish as to imagine life could be so simply docketed, like papers that were safely filed away under the heading “Married and Lived Happily Ever After”?
Pietro’s first concert decided his future; he was acclaimed; and those were wonderful days of achievement, when he went from success to success, but he did not become easier to live with because of this. He demanded service; he was the artist, and I was musician enough to be told of his plans, to listen to his renderings. He had success beyond even his grandiose dreams. I can see now that he was too young to cope with the attention which came his way. It was inevitable that there should be those who smothered him with adulation…women, beautiful and rich. But he always wanted me there in the background, the one to whom he could always return, the one who was a near artist herself, who understood the constant demands of the artistic ego. No one could be as close to him as I was. Besides, in his way he loved me.
Had I been of a different temperament we might have managed. But meekness was a quality I had never possessed. I was not slave material, I pointed out to him, and I was soon bitterly regretting my folly in jettisoning my own career. I was practicing again. Pietro laughed at me. Did I think one could dismiss the Muse and then summon her back when one felt like seeing her again? How right he was. I had had my chance, thrown it away and now would never be anything but a competent pianist.
We quarreled constantly. I told him I would not stay with him. I contemplated leaving him, all the time knowing I never would; and maddeningly so did he. I was anxious for his health because he was squandering it recklessly and I had discovered that he was not strong. I had noticed a certain breathlessness which alarmed me, but when I mentioned this he shrugged it aside.
Pietro was giving concerts in Vienna and Rome as well as in London and Paris and was beginning to be spoken of as one of the greatest pianists of the day. He took all the praise as natural and inevitable; he grew more arrogant; he gloated over everything that was written of him. He liked to see me pasting the cuttings into a book. This was my rightful place in his life—his devoted minion who had thrown aside her own career to further his. But like everything else the book was a mixed blessing, for the mildest criticism could throw him into a fury which would make the veins stand out at his temples and take his breath away.
He was working hard and celebrating the success of his concerts far into the night, and then he would be up early for his hours of practice. He was surrounded by sycophants. It was as though he needed them to keep alive his belief in himself. I was critical, not realizing then how young he was and that it is often more of a tragedy than a blessing when success of this magnitude comes too early. It was an unnatural life…an uneasy life; and during it I learned that I could never be happy with Pietro, yet could not face a life without him.
We came to London for a series of concerts and I had an opportunity of seeing Roma. She had taken rooms near the British Museum where she now worked in between digs.
She was her old self, sturdy, full of common sense, jangling her weird prehistoric bracelets, a chain of uneven rather cloudy-looking cornelians about her neck. She referred to our parents in a sad though rather brisk way, and asked after my own affairs, but of course I did not tell her very much. I could see that she thought it was rather strange of me to have given up a career after having spent so much time and energy on it—and all for the sake of marriage. But Roma had never been one to criticize. She was one of the most sane and tolerant people I had ever known.
“I’m glad I was here when you came. A week later I should have been away. Going to a place called Lovat Mill.”
“A mill?”
“That’s merely the name of the place. On the Kent coast…not all that far from Caesar’s Camp, so it’s not surprising really. We discovered the amphitheater and I’m certain that there’s more to be found because as you know these amphitheaters were invariably found outside the cities.”
I didn’t know but I refrained from remarking on this.
Roma went on. “It means excavating on the local nabob’s land. It was quite a bit of trouble getting his permission.”
“Really?”
“This Sir William Stacy owns most of the land round about…a difficult gentleman, I do assure you. He made a fuss about his pheasants and his trees. I saw him personally. ‘You cannot think your pheasants and trees are more important than history?’ I demanded. And in the end I wore him down. He’s given his consent for us to excavate on his land. It’s a really ancient house…more like a castle. He has plenty of land to spare. So he can allow us this little bit.”
I wasn’t paying much attention because I was hearing the second movement of the Beethoven No. 4 Piano Concerto, which was what Pietro would be playing that night, and I was asking myself whether or not I should go to the concert. I suffered agonies when he was on a platform, playing each note with him in my mind, terrified that he would stumble. As if he ever would. His only fear would be that he would give something less than his best performance.
“Interesting old place,” Roma was saying. “I think Sir William is secretly hoping we may find something of importance on his estate.”
She went on talking about the site and what she hoped to do there, now and then throwing in an observation about the people in the big house nearby; and I didn’t listen. How was I to know that this was to be Roma’s last dig, and that it was imperative to learn all I could about the place.
Death! How it hovers over us when we least suspect it. I have noticed how it will strike in the same direction in quick succession. My parents had died unexpectedly and before that I never gave a thought to death.
Pietro and I left London for Paris. Nothing unusual happened that day, there was no premonition to warn me. Pietro was to play some Hungarian dances and the Rhapsody No. 2. He was strung up—but he always was before a performance. I sat in the front row of the stalls and he was very much aware of me there. I sometimes had the impression that he played for me, as though to say, “You see, you could never have readied this standard. You were only the performer of gymnastics on the piano.” And that was how it was that night.