The Protégé Read online

  I have places I need to be but I can’t leave her. Beyond all musical considerations, why is a girl of seven or eight standing on a busy London street playing for money? It’s not safe. She’s so small that anyone could snatch her up and disappear with her, and that instrument looks like it could be tempting to a thief with a knowledgeable eye.

  I go over and kneel down in front of her so that my face is on a level with hers. “Hello.” She raises her eyes and they’re a beautiful shade of jewel green, thickly outlined with dark auburn lashes. “What’s your name?”

  The bow twists in her fingers. “Mrs. Davis says we’re not supposed to talk to strangers.”

  “Who’s Mrs. Davis?”

  “My teacher.”

  Cello teacher? No, more likely a school teacher. Where are her parents? Why aren’t they impressing on her that she shouldn’t talk to strangers? She’s so small and slight that she could be picked up like so much fluff and spirited away. Whoever has her in their charge is neglecting their duty of care and I find myself growing angry with this unknown person.

  Swallowing that down, I hold out my hand to her, and after switching her bow into her left she puts her small one into mine. Her fingers are freezing. I wonder how she can she possibly play with fingers so cold. “My name is Laszlo Valmary. Pleased to meet you.”

  Solemnly, she shakes my hand. “Isabeau Laurent. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Valmary.”

  I smile. Isabeau. A beautiful name for a beautiful girl, and her manners are as lovely as her playing. “That’s a nice cello.”

  “It was my mother’s.”

  Ah. That explains why it’s too big for her. “Where is she?”

  “She’s dead.”

  My lips compress with sympathy. “And your father?”

  Isabeau chews the corner her lip. She doesn’t want to answer. I examine her shabby coat with a button missing; the twenty coins or so of change that have accumulated in her cello case. She’s probably not getting the lessons she needs to develop her talent. She doesn’t even seem to be getting the basic care she needs. “Do you like playing the cello, Isabeau?”

  She holds the instrument closer to her body as if I’m going to take it away from her and stares at the ground, defiant. “Yes. I like it a lot.”

  Sweet girl, you needn’t be defensive about your love of that beautiful instrument to me. I understand perfectly.

  I tilt my head down a few inches and catch her eye. “Is your father at home? Will you take me to meet him?”

  “Why?”

  I open my leather music case and pull out the newspaper article. She reads the headline and looks at the picture that accompanies the story. “That’s me, Isabeau. I have an orchestra filled with musicians like you. Only the very best people, and I think one day you might be one of those people.”

  Isabeau takes the newsprint from my hands and studies the picture and then my face, comparing my features carefully. She passes the page back and packs her instrument away, scooping the few coins from her cello case into her pocket. Then she looks up at me, her face a serious oval. “Yes please, Laszlo.”

  I know then that Isabeau Laurent is going to be very, very important to me. She’s going to be my protégé.

  She lugs her cello case two-handed down the street, her feet moving in an awkward one-two, one-two fashion. I hold out my hand for it. “Let me carry that for you.”

  Isabeau lets go with reluctance, and as we walk she keeps her eyes fixed on the instrument as if she daren’t let it out of her sight. Her house is two streets away and as we walk I feel my apprehension grow. This is one of the more unpleasant areas of London but I try not to allow my North London privilege make assumptions about Isabeau’s home life.

  When we get to what I assume is her front door Isabeau lets herself in with a key. It’s a two-story Victorian terrace with grubby windows and a front door that looks like it’s had one lock broken and another badly fitted. I follow her inside and she takes her cello from me and disappears upstairs with it, taking pains not to let the instrument bang on the steps as she goes.

  The rooms on the ground floor smell sour and there’s a man with a thin face lying in the front room on a mattress, asleep. He seems to be using the lounge as a bedroom as there are discarded t-shirts and jeans lying across an armchair.

  “Mr. Laurent?”

  The man opens his eyes and fixes me with a look of blurry surprise. “Huh? Who are you?”

  I don’t answer right away, letting my eyes travel around the room and then back up the stairs. “I found your daughter playing her cello on the high street.”

  The man grunts and hauls himself to his feet, using the back of the sofa for support. This takes effort, as if he’s in pain. So that’s why he’s sleeping down here. When he pushes past me on the way to the kitchen he notices the way I’m looking at his uneven gait.

  “Broken back,” he grunts.

  Mr. Laurent finds what he was looking for, his cigarettes, and sits down heavily at the kitchen table. There are the remains of someone’s breakfast. Isabeau’s presumably. Toast crusts and marmite. There’s a chair in front of the toaster, so that a child might reach up onto the high counter.

  I examine Mr. Laurent in the light from the window. He’s not much older than I am but his face has been lined with pain. Or at least I think it’s pain. He starts to cough, and what begins harmlessly enough turns into his thin frame being wracked with wheezing and spluttering.

  Going to the cupboard I find a clean mug and fill it with water. As I do my eyes fall on a half-open drawer and I see a battered spoon with scorch marks on the underside. A couple of hypodermics. A tourniquet made from a leather handbag strap. A small plastic bag partly filled with a white substance. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m looking at.

  Heroin. In the same house as a child. As Isabeau.

  Mr. Laurent has stopped coughing and has noticed what I’m staring at. He looks at me with pathetic neediness in his eyes. “I’m in pain. They stopped my meds.”

  My empathy is at war with my revulsion. The chronic pain of spinal damage must be a terrible thing. He was probably prescribed painkillers at first but then they were taken away, leaving him with an addiction.

  “Don’t call the cops. I’ll go to jail.”

  Anger rises in my chest. Not I’ll lose Isabeau but I’ll go to jail. He’ll be cut off from his supply. He should be thinking how this is affecting her, not himself.

  I’ve never been a patient man. I’ve never liked waiting for what I want, or for what I think is right. I start speaking in a low voice without even knowing what I intend to say. “I’m not interested in you or what you do. I’m here about Isabeau. She displays a talent for playing the cello that is rare for one so young. Rare for anyone. She needs proper training.” I look around at the squalor, remember her averted eyes when she asked about her father. I meant to offer to pay for her tutelage but that’s not going to be enough. If she stays here I’ll never forgive myself if something happens to her.

  “She needs to get out of this place. I’m leaving, and I’m taking Isabeau with me.”

  I have no right to do any such thing. Removing her from her father’s care is not only immoral, it’s illegal, but when I think of the care she’s not getting and the way she held her cello tightly as if someone might take it from her I know I can’t leave her here. She’s so slight, so defenseless. I feel a surge of protectiveness for the girl. How long until she gets hurt by someone? How long until he sells her cello for drug money? When you love music more than anything else in the world losing your instrument is not the same as losing a possession. It’s like having part of your soul ripped away.

  Mr. Laurent is so blindsided by my words that his cigarette is burning away to ash, unsmoked. “No you’re fucking not.”

  “Yes, I am. I can give her what she needs.”

  “You’re a fucking pervert.”

  “If I was a pervert I wouldn’t have brought her back here. I would have just taken her
. She was out there alone, unprotected, and I brought her home.” I look at the needles in the drawer and my lip curls. “To this. But I’m not going to leave her here. She’s coming to live with me and I’m going to give her the training she needs to become one of the best cellists in the world.”

  Mr. Laurent is still looking at me as if he doesn’t understand what I’m doing here or what I’m saying, but cellist seems to stir something in him. “Her mum was good. Said Isabeau was good and all.”

  “She’s more than good. She’s a natural, and perhaps she’ll even be famous one day. But more important than being famous, she’s going to be happy and safe, two things she isn’t while she lives here.”

  We watch each other in silence, my gaze angry and his filled with guilt and suspicion. I pull out a chair and sit down.

  “This is how it’s going to work, Mr. Laurent. I think you’ll find you want to agree to my terms.”

  Chapter Four

  Isabeau

  Then

  I half-listen to Laszlo talking to Dad downstairs. I can’t hear the words, only the rise and fall of their voices. Mostly it’s Laszlo talking.

  He wants to teach me to play the cello. No one’s taught me since Mum died a year ago in the car accident. Since then no one’s even wanted to listen to me play. Dad doesn’t like music in the house so I don’t play inside very often. When I do I make sure it’s after he’s taken the medicine for his back. It makes him so sleepy that he doesn’t hear the notes.

  Laszlo is coming up the stairs and sit up expectantly. He’s smiling, but there’s a funny look on his face like he’s not certain about something.

  “There’s been a change of plan, sweetheart.”

  Hope flickers out. So it was too good to be true, that this strange man who appeared like a fairy king out of a hillside would help me to learn to play. He’s as handsome as a fairy king, too, with the loveliest greeny-brown eyes and too-long hair; the sort of fairy king who would ride a stag or some fantastical golden creature. I turn away to my cello, running my fingers over the instrument case. He’s going back to those people who’ve asked him to help them with their music. An orchestra, he called it. I had hoped I’d get to meet them but I guess I won’t.

  “How would you like to come and live with me?”

  He keeps talking, something about a house on the other side of London and a room to play music in but relief and happiness is singing too loudly in my ears. It’s not just lessons he’s going to give me, but a whole world of music, like those people in the orchestra have.

  “Will you still teach me how to play? Properly play?”

  He looks at me for a long time, as if he’s trying to decide something. I try and look like a person who really, really wants to learn how to play the cello.

  “Of course.”

  He helps me pack up a few of my things into my school bag and a holdall and we take them downstairs. Dad’s at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette. I hesitate, looking into the kitchen. Then I go through and stand in front of him. I don’t know him very well lately. He sleeps a lot, and is sick and in pain a lot. I wonder if Mum would have known how to make him better. I wish I knew.

  “Dad, I’m going to learn how to play the cello, like Mum could.”

  He seems to sort of nod but he doesn’t look at me, and so I turn and go to Laszlo, who’s standing by the front door with his hand on the top of my cello case and my holdall and his music bag in his other hand.

  I leave the front door key on the hall table, and I close the door behind me.

  I’ve never ridden in a black cab before and it’s so big in the back that there’s room for a cello case. There’s room for three, even. Laszlo’s on his phone, changing the times of meetings I think, and I watch London slip by with my nose pressed against the glass until he taps me on the shoulder and tells me to put my seatbelt on. The cab goes over the river and past the palace where the Queen lives and I see the gleam of the big golden statue out front. We keep driving past a park and onto streets lined with redbrick houses. There’s another park, a big one, with people walking spotty dogs and skinny dogs and hairy dogs. Hampstead Heath, reads a sign. The road goes up and down and winds about and everything’s so pretty and green. A few minutes later the cab slides to a halt in front of a red brick house. It has a shiny black front door. Laszlo pays the cab driver and takes me inside.

  His home is a very beautiful house with shiny surfaces and music things everywhere. There are photographs of musicians on the walls, sheet music in neat stacks, funny old instruments displayed on side tables and in glass cases. I don’t even recognize some of the things but I know they’ve got something to do with music. He shows me all over the house, ending in a music room that he calls a rehearsal studio, a large airy space with a great big shiny black piano on one side.

  “Do you feel like playing your cello?” he asks me.

  I always feel like playing my cello. I get it out and launch into a piece and he listens, hands clasped behind his back, head bent. It’s funny to be listened to for minutes and minutes at a time. I try a few new things out and some of them don’t work and sound horribly squeaky, but his face doesn’t change. When I finish he asks me if I want to play some more, but holding my bow and my cello a slightly different way. I do, and the things I tried before don’t get squeaky.

  After, he goes through his shelves and gathers an armload of books and we go down to the sofas. He gives me the books to look at while he cooks dinner. Some are about reading music and I’m astonished that you’re supposed to read these black squiggles like words, and I start learning how. Other books are stories about famous cello players, and I look at pictures of them with their instruments. Every one of them loves their cello. I can see it in their hands.

  Laszlo puts the stereo on while he’s cooking and hums to the music. Not the melody, the other harmonies that I barely even notice are there at first. Occasionally he stops to think or take a phone call and I see his long fingers moving on the counter, sometimes not even to the notes. Sometimes to the spaces between the notes as if he hears those, too. He does even the most ordinary things while moving through the music, though not like a dancer moves to a song, using it to make something else. A conductor, that newspaper piece called him. I wonder if this is what a conductor is, someone who stands at the very center of all these sounds and silences and hears every one of them.

  After we eat and I tell Laszlo about what I’ve read, I read for a bit longer and then go to bed in a large, plain room. It’s the guest room, he says, but it’s going to be my room if I want and I can change how it looks. My cello is beside my bed and he says I can play it whenever I like, even in the middle of the night, so I don’t know what else I could need.

  Except when I close my eyes in the darkness I can’t sleep.

  Sometime later I get out of bed and go downstairs. Laszlo’s reading on the sofa and he looks up in surprise when he hears me come in. Something’s wrong. I look around the room, trying to figure out what it is, but it’s not the room.

  Laszlo watches me, a finger in the closed pages of his book. “Is everything all right, Isabeau? Do you miss your father?”

  I go to the window and peer through the glass, looking into the dark garden. I open the casement and lean out into the chilly night air, listening as hard as I can.

  Laszlo has come up behind me. “If you’re ever unhappy here I want you to tell me. You can go home whenever you want.”

  I turn to him, finally figuring out what’s wrong. In my part of London there are always noises. The neighbors arguing. Pounding electronic music. Cars going past at all hours. “It’s too quiet here.”

  Laszlo looks out the darkened window, and then goes and switches on the stereo. After perusing the CDs for a moment he selects one and presses play. Music expands throughout the room in a soft cloud and I immediately feel better. I go and sit on the sofa and Laszlo sits beside me, and we just listen.

  “This piece is called Dream 13,” he says finally,
and sketches his finger back and forth in the air like a bow. “That’s the cello. Do you hear it?”

  I do hear it, and put my head down on the cushion and close my eyes, letting the music cocoon me. There’s a cello, and a piano too. The piano sounds like watching rain fall on leaves through shiny clean glass. The cello is a sigh first thing in the morning after a long sleep. “It’s so pretty,” I whisper.

  “If you want, I can start to teach you how to play some of this piece tomorrow.”

  Just like that, as if it’s nothing to take a piece of music and make it your own for a while. To have a thousand such pieces sitting waiting in CD cases and written out on sheet music that you carry can around. A whole room for making music in. I never knew that people like Laszlo existed.

  I open my eyes and look at him. “Who will play the other part?”

  “The piano? I will.”

  “Are you good at playing the piano?”

  He smiles. “I get by.”

  “Yes, please, Laszlo. I want play this.” Sitting here with him in this magical house of music I feel brave enough to tell him a secret that I’ve never told anyone before. “I want to play everything.”

  He doesn’t tell me it’s silly to want to play everything. Everything including the whistling of the kettle? The bins being collected? Every song on the radio and every sound from the stereo? Maybe I do mean everything. And why not? I’ve heard all sorts of things in my cello and I want to know how to find them again.

  Laszlo nods. “Then you shall.”

  I listen to the music, feeling sleepy but with lots of thoughts and questions buzzing around in my head. I wonder if Laszlo just gets by on the piano, or if he’s actually very good. I wonder if Laszlo is married. I wonder if one day he might marry me. I would like that, and then we could play music together, always.