The Virtuoso Read Online Free Page A

than a hug— Magnificent performance, truly astounding! ), and in themidst of my whimsy, fate tripped and landed me blithering at his feet.
    Anton Steiner was my teacher at the Academy at the time. A student of the great Leschetizky, he was a bear of a man with a faded Bavarian accent that would sharpen like a whetted knife when he became excited about music. He’d chosen me as his student after my June audition: I’d only just looked up from the piano upon finishing the Chopin Third étude when he stormed up behind me, grabbed my shoulders and threatened, ‘I will make a pianist of you!’
    Anton—as he allowed me to call him—had given me Schumann’s Fantasiestücke to start on the previous week, and as I played the second piece—‘ Aufschwung ’—he sat there nodding his head, sucking his gums so that his white tobacco-stained moustache writhed like a caterpillar. He groaned a little as he did when he was thinking, then, scribbling away in my notepad, told me that the following Tuesday he was going to a birthday party for ‘your dear friend Noël’. Anton knew I was smitten with Noël, but so was half of London, and although he often quipped that he’d arrange for me to meet the pianist one day, his comments, tossed out like gratis concert tickets, seemed merely intended to encourage and inspire my practice. I never believed he’d really concern himself with anything as trivial as a schoolboy infatuation.
    ‘Tuesday is my birthday as well!’ I spun around from the piano, thrilled about Noël’s and my astrologicalconnection, feeling that a part of the pianist’s brilliance had been endowed upon me.
    Anton let out a baritone laugh, then said he would ask if he could invite me along. He may have said more, I don’t recall; I sat gazing out the window at the alders and oaks of Regent’s Park, sparkling in the clear, still, nectar-coloured light, imagining myself in some opulent ballroom, stepping up to shake the hand of Noël Mewton-Wood.
    Anton leaned over, patted my shoulder and said, ‘Keep it up on the Schumann. And I’m sure it will be fine for you to come along this Tuesday.’
    It would be my seventeenth birthday, the twentieth of November 1945, and I’d been invited to the twenty-third birthday party of Noël Mewton-Wood. I ran home from the Academy that day, opened the Fantasiestücke at the piano and practised for hours, imagining myself as the seventeen-year-old pianist Clara Wieck, just arrived home in Leipzig after another long European tour and having received this manuscript from my secret admirer, Robert Schumann.
    On the Tuesday morning I slept until nine; I wanted to be well-rested in case the party ran late. But before I’d even swung my legs out of bed, the magnitude of the day landed upon me, an avalanche of anticipation and panic, as if I’d never truly believed this moment would arrive. I took my brolly and went for a walk around the lake at Regent’s Park, watching the swans and grebes gliding to and fro, carelessly at the mercy of the windskimming them across the water. On the way home I bought the morning paper and some flowers. It was a preposterous idea—I wouldn’t even let myself admit it—but I did want my room to be looking presentable. I also bought fresh rolls and marmalade and imagined pouring him a cup of tea at my wooden table by the window, the sun reflecting off his handsome face.
    I returned home, arranged the crocuses in a jar of water, put the kettle on the burner, then sat and opened the paper.
    So this was seventeen, I smiled, looking around my lodgings. There was my bed with its patchwork eiderdown, a wardrobe, my Bechstein upright surrounded by piles of music fanned out all over the floor, a sideboard for the wireless and gramophone and all my records, an old Persian carpet that had worn through in several places, two bookcases filled with my father’s collection of musical biographies, a green sofa and a round wooden table with four matching chairs