He was dropped right by the terminal building. As he was getting out of the back seat and saying his goodbyes, he noticed that the policeman in the driver’s seat was the very man he had picked out of the line the second time. But neither Clive nor the driver found it necessary to comment on the fact as they shook hands.

4

The flight was two hours late into Schiphol airport. Clive took the train to Centraal Station and from there set off on foot for his hotel in the soft gray afternoon light. While he was crossing his first bridge, it came back to him what a calm and civilized city Amsterdam was. He took a wide detour westward in order to stroll along Brouwersgracht. His suitcase, after all, was very light. So consoling, to have a body of water down the middle of a street. Such a tolerant, openminded, grown-up sort of place: the beautiful brick and carved timber warehouses converted into tasteful apartments, the modest Van Gogh bridges, the understated street furniture, the intelligent, unstuffy-looking Dutch on their bikes with their level-headed children sitting behind. Even the shopkeepers looked like professors, the street sweepers like jazz musicians. There was never a city more rationally ordered. As he walked along, he thought about Vernon, and the symphony. Was the work ruined, or simply flawed? Perhaps not flawed so much as sullied, and in ways that only he could understand. Ruinously cheated of its greatest moment. He dreaded the premiere. He could tell himself now, in all tortuous sincerity, that in making his various arrangements on Vernon’s behalf, he, Clive, was doing no more than honoring his word. That Vernon should want a reconciliation and should therefore want to come to Amsterdam was surely more than a coincidence or a neat convenience. Somewhere in his blackened, unbalanced heart he had accepted his fate. He was delivering himself up to Clive.

These reflections brought Clive at last to his hotel, where he learned that the reception tonight would be at seven-thirty. From his room he called his contact, the good doctor, to discuss arrangements and, for one last time, the symptoms: unpredictable, bizarre, and extremely antisocial behavior, a complete loss of reason. Destructive tendencies, delusions of omnipotence. A disintegrated personality. The matter of premedication was discussed. How should it be administered? A glass of champagne was suggested, which seemed to Clive to strike the appropriate festive note.

There were still two hours of rehearsal, so, having left the money in an envelope at reception, Clive had the doorman wave down a taxi for him outside the hotel and within a few minutes was at the artists’ entrance round the side of the Concertgebouw. As he passed the porter and pushed open the swinging doors that led to the stairs, the sound of the orchestra reached him. The final movement. It was bound to be. As he went up, he was already correcting the passage; it was the french horns we should have been hearing now, not the clarinets, and the tympani markings were piano. This is my music. It was as though hunting horns were calling him, calling him back to himself. How could he have forgotten? He quickened his stride. He could hear what he had written. He was walking toward a representation of himself. All those nights alone. The hateful press. Alien Crags. Why had he been wasting time all afternoon, why had he been delaying the moment? It was an effort to stop himself running down the curving corridor that led around the auditorium. He pushed open a door and paused.

He had arrived, as he had intended, in the stalls above and behind the orchestra, behind the percussionists, in fact. The musicians could not see him, but he was right in view of the conductor. Giulio Bo’s eyes, however, were closed. He was standing on tiptoe, craning forward, his left arm extended toward the orchestra, and with splayed, trembling fingers was gently lifting into being the muted trombone that now delivered, sweetly, wisely, conspiratorially, the first full statement of the melody, the “Nessun dorma” of the century’s end, the melody Clive had hummed to the detectives yesterday and for which he had been prepared to sacrifice an anonymous rambler. And rightly. As the notes swelled, as the whole string section positioned their bows to breathe the first sustaining whispers of their sinuous sliding harmonies, Clive slipped quietly into a seat and felt himself tumbling into a kind of swoon. Now the textures were multiplying as more instruments were drawn into the trombone’s conspiracy, and dissonance was spreading like a contagion, and little hard splinters, the variations that would lead nowhere, were tossed up like sparks, which sometimes collided to produce the earliest intimations of the racing wall of sound, the tsunami, that now began to rise up and soon would obliterate everything in its path before destroying itself on the bedrock of the tonic key. But before this could happen the conductor rapped his baton on his desk, and the orchestra raggedly and reluctantly subsided. Bo waited for the very last instrument to fall silent; then he lifted both hands in dive’s direction and called.

“Maestro, welcome!”

The head of every member of the British Symphony Orchestra turned as Clive got to his feet. As he descended to the stage there was a clatter of bows against music stands. A trumpet sounded a witty four—note quotation from the D major concerto—Clive’s, not Haydn’s. Ah, to be in continental Europe and be maestro! What balm. He embraced Giulio, shook the hand of the concertmaster, acknowledged the musicians with a smile, a little bow, and hands half raised in modest surrender, then turned back to the conductor to murmur in his ear. Clive wouldn’t address the orchestra today about the piece. He would do it in the morning, when everyone was fresh. For the moment he was happy to sit back and listen. He added his note about the clarinet and french horns and the tympani’s piano. “Yes, yes,” Giulio said quickly. “I’ve seen it.” As Clive returned to his seat, he noticed how solemn the faces of the musicians were. They had been working hard all day. The reception at the hotel would surely lift their spirits. The rehearsal continued, with Bo refining the passage he had just heard, listening to different sections of the orchestra independently and asking for adjustments in, among other things, the legato markings. From where he sat, Clive tried to prevent his attention from being drawn into technical detail. For now, it was the music, the wondrous transformation of thought into sound. He hunched forward, eyes closed, concentrating on each fragment that Bo permitted. Sometimes Clive worked so hard on a piece that he could lose sight of his ultimate purpose—to create this pleasure at once so sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating air this nonlanguage whose meanings were forever just beyond reach, suspended tantalizingly at a point where emotion and intellect fused. Certain sequences of notes reminded him of nothing more than the recent effort to write them. Bo was now working on the next passage, not quite a diminuendo so much as a shrinking away, and the music conjured for Clive the disorder of his studio in the dawn light and the suspicions he had had about himself and hardly dared frame. Greatness. Was he an idiot to have thought this way? Surely there had to be one first single moment of self-recognition, and surely it would always seem absurd.

Now it was the trombone again and a tangled, half-suppressed crescendo that erupted at last into the melody’s final statement, a blaring, carnivalesque turn. But fatally unvaried. Clive put his face into his hands. He was right to have worried. It was ruined goods. Before he had left for Manchester, he had let the pages go as they were. There was no choice. Now he could not remember the exquisite change he had been about to make. This should have been the symphony’s moment of triumphant assertion, the gathering up of ail that was joyously human before the destruction to come. But presented like this, as a simple fortissimo repetition, it was literal-minded bombast, it was bathos; less than that, it was a void: one that only revenge could fill.