Chapter Text
Sunday evening: sospirando
It’s a very good thing this intense week has ended with two nights that have changed my life. It’s a very bad thing that Sherlock is on a plane for Moscow.
If my life were a rom-com, I could go after him; as it isn’t, I’m slammed for the next two weeks at least. After that, though, and before the next project, I’ll have nine days free—but I’ve masses of music to learn and mark up. I can’t go haring off to London after him. Can I? If he’ll even be in London.
But if he is. I could study on the long flights there and back. I could study while he’s rehearsing, or practicing. It needn’t be time lost. And Molly and I could work by phone or skype, couldn’t we?
If Sherlock asks me.
Or I could stay in Ilford: my parents would be delighted, have been hinting a visit was long overdue.
And if I had a love interest they’d be over the moon.
“Bring us home a nice lass, Johnny boy. Or lad. We don’t want to see you working so hard you can’t have a personal life.”
This from my dad, who’s never completely reconciled to my dating men, even though he gallantly tries to hide it.
“What if she’s an American?”
At that prospect he reared back a bit, asked what ever happened to “that nice lad from Slough you were seeing last year.”
Which bodes well for Sherlock. I could introduce him as my not-American boyfriend.
At this point my not-American boyfriend somehow manages to text. Is he still not on that flight?
— I don’t think this is going to work. SH
“My heart sank” is, it turns out, a physical, literal phenomenon. The thudding feels like a heart attack, the pain is medical, not metaphorical.
If he’s having second thoughts, I wish he’d had them before the second night. I’d have felt only half this bad. Maybe.
— There’s no way I can play in Moscow with most of me left behind in your pocket. SH
Oddly enough, relief feels just as horrible, physically at least. I’m going to have to have words with—or maybe not. Maybe his first text was no worse than my cryptic “You’re neurodiverse.”
— My pockets feel empty. Which bits do you think you left there?
— All the ones that matter. There’s nothing in this plane but an empty shell carrying a violin. SH
My heart cracks a bit more for him, a lot more for me.
— We’ll get through it. We’ll be together again. Why are you texting on the plane?
— Awaiting clearance for takeoff. You’ll wait for me? SH
— Count on it.
Damn thing must have finally taken off, because there are no more messages this evening.
February 2011: meditando
In the months that followed, though, there were thousands of them.
It’s odd now to look back at the year that followed our first meeting, our first collaboration, our first 36 hours as a couple. Because we neither of us ever doubted that’s what we were, almost from before we were free of my self-imposed restrictions on getting serious. (“Getting serious” is a poor euphemism, though, we’ve been giddy from that first night.) We never had to discuss it, and we’ve never met any real rough water as our ships passed in the night—literally, one night we had barely the time for one very public kiss in Heathrow, to scattered applause and a hooted cheer or two.
We only knew we wanted to be together every minute we could, and be in touch at least every day we were apart. Sherlock being a fast and inveterate texting fiend, it’s been a lot more than once every day.
But the first few weeks of separation were tough. I suppose that technically Adam and Eve were in the earthly paradise for less time than Sherlock and I were, those first two nights, but it felt obscenely short. I tried to fill my off hours learning about him off the stage, instead of mooning about him. At first it felt a bit louche, but when I confessed that I was stalking him online, he sent me a few links so it felt more above-board.
I met versions of him that our week together hadn’t brought out.
I made the acquaintance of Sherlock the intellectual, at a round table in Paris. He was… formidable. I’m glad I didn’t see that side of him until after we met, or I’d have been intimidated into silence.
He was holding his own at a group discussion at a conference on music, and aesthetics more broadly. That his fellow discussants were the crème de la crème was obvious from the airs they gave themselves, their self-congratulatory solemnity. They kept marvelling at him, clearly expecting an inarticulate practitioner rather than an analytical philosopher. In fact, the actual philosopher at the table was making frenetic notes, while Sherlock talked without them. He says he doesn’t make notes of words; his memory’s just that good. Even improvising, he was as formal and eloquent as the email he wrote me about his childhood.
What he said about music and emotion, for example.
“The simplest-seeming things are the most layered and complex. Just as the most wildly irregular verbs are the ones we use all day long. Those verbs have resisted the entropy of linguistic simplification, regularisation, homogenisation. Their complexity is protected—fixed—by repetition, naturalisation.”
His interlocutors spent some time picking the analogy apart before the chair brought them back to the larger question of music and affect. Sherlock returned to things we’d talked about when we were together.
“I cannot explain, nor can anyone else, the emotional dimension of music, in either the performer or the audience. I see my job as being a conduit between a listener and the music. And that means getting out of the way.
“A player’s nerves get in the way. Ego and flamboyance get in the way. Fatigue, hunger, ill humour, get in the way. And fatally, boredom—familiarity—gets in the way. This last I’ve experienced increasingly over the past years. I cannot conscientiously continue to mine a vein simply because it is profitable, when I'm growing numb to the beauty that people are seeking, and to the catharsis they need. I must change course, or do a grave disservice to the music and to the audience I to play it for.”
More clucking and nitpicking from the assembled brain trust, and a few very good questions, along with a few very uninformed ones.
“I’m not clairvoyant, I don’t know what my life will look like in the future. I only know that in the next few years, it will be time for a fresh challenge.
“Being a soloist at this level of intensity and visibility is not a job, it’s a whole life. It’s a tangle of commitments and foci, of legal constraints and contractual commitments, of future recordings of past programmes, of cultivating young musicians into a career that may not exist for them in the future. Perhaps my life has begun to suffer from the mission sprawl more than be defined by music. I only know that I’m no longer able to reconcile all of it.”
The talk veered off into the stratosphere of abstraction and I honestly lost interest. Sherlock had too—that was obvious from his impassive and polite expression, as he listened to the intellectual wankery that shed little light on anything but the speaker (the wanker?).
After I watched that video, we texted about it.
— So you came out and said it, about your change of course
— It’s been over twenty years. I’ve been driven and successful, and I’m bored, and I don’t want to live like this forever. SH
— I want to have empty days to fill. I want to live in my flat, not just sleep there. SH
— I want to travel for pleasure, and stay home when I feel like it. I want to never have to play when I don’t want to. SH
— What about meaningful work?
— I can think of a dozen things a retired soloist with connections can do to promote music without bashing it to death with my bow. SH
— Fair enough. But what about an unretired conductor?
— You don’t need to work. SH
— You can stop right there. I won’t be a kept man, and I LOVE this job
— We’ll work it out. SH
— Nah. You’ll get over me
— You said you don’t hit on guest artists, ever. Well, I don’t hit on anyone, ever. I’m a solitary man. I can be happy with part time if you can. SH
— I can, I’m solitary too
— You’re not. You’re gregarious. SH
— I may give that impression. My address book will tell you different
— Besides, the work you’ve done in Hollywood has hardly gone unnoticed. You would get a conducting job in London if you applied. Or a teaching position. No question. SH
He’s referring to the reflected glory of Portman’s Academy Award nomination for the Vivaldi score. Well, that might win her a second Oscar, but I walked away with the real prize: the soloist.
— Sure, if the great Sherlock Holmes recommended me. I’d be a permanent fixture at the Proms
— And I at Wigmore Hall. SH
Maybe there are more possibilities than I’ve been considering.
February 2012: sperando
I watch his live interview on Gwen Stanley’s morning show, Britain All Over. She starts by asking about his instruments, as Sherlock had asked her to. He has a plan, and she’s there to assist.
“I had a fine instrument as a child, far above my abilities. But it formed me as much as my teachers did. Its capacities shaped more than my hands and ears and taste; they shaped my brain. A Suzuki violin would not, I am convinced, have had the same influence or outcome.”
She’s nodding, serious. “Where is it now?”
“I still have it. I mean to auction it, to raise money for a pet project. Or donate it to that project, for use in early instruction.”
“You’ll certainly find some fan of means eager to pay a lot for it. People spend huge sums for cricket bats and football jerseys used by famous players, after all.”
He looks revolted, which is adorable, and she turns to a less revolting subject. “So what do you play on when you travel?”
“For earlier repertoire I travel with my favourite violin, not an especially valuable one in commercial terms. It’s a 17th-century instrument by a nameless maker from Cremona: I don’t need to know its maker, only its qualities.”
“But don’t you own a Stradivarius? I’m always hearing about it.”
“I do, but I can’t travel with it—it’s practically uninsurable on the road. I can barely take it out of the flat. People fetishise the name Stradivarius, but really I prefer an Amati or even a Guarneri.”
I laugh out loud; his lordship will stoop to play a Guarneri, what greater proof of his extreme flexibility? If he knew how endearing this is, he’d do that sea-urchin thing where he withdraws his hopeful tentacles and sulks without appearing to.
“So why do you keep it?”
“Gratitude, mostly. It was the bequest of a late and generous donor; I know who it was, as the candidate pool for such ownership is minuscule, but I respect their wish to remain anonymous.”
“Do you have to keep it in a safe?”
“Yes, and even then the insurance is astronomical. Really it’s as far beyond my financial means now, as my first violin was beyond my abilities then. It’s tempting to sell it on, in fact, perhaps to a museum, to subsidise my pet project.”
She’s been primed to prompt him to elaborate, and she obliges.
“I want to support a music school. As anyone can attest who’s done a master-class with me, I’m honestly not a good teacher. But others are. And I want to support a music outreach programme for neurodiverse children, especially ones whose parents haven’t thought of setting them to learning music at all, or can’t afford to. Let alone facing the notorious cacophony of beginning violin.”
Stanley laughs, then sobers. “Giving back, in other words.”
“Giving back.”
She segues to announcing that Sherlock’s adopted a small conservatory in a post-industrial town in northern England, a town even I’ve barely heard of. He’s endowed the outreach programme with seed money by banking his concert fees for the past year. It’s the teaching staff that caught his attention; when he talks about the place he breaks out his rare smile more often than I’ve seen since… maybe since he left LA in 2010.
The interview concludes with a quartet of the school’s students, playing their hearts out (very well, too) while the crawl displays the web site for donations.
I hate that the arts always have to beg for their bread when most people can’t live a single day without music, or film, or fiction, or visual art. But it is what it is, and someone has to ruthlessly pick pockets for a summer violin course here, a study tour there, instruments for a school yonder. Sherlock knows what the needs are, where the soft spots are, how to appeal to a donor’s benevolence and vanity at the same time. I look forward to helping him do it.
January 2013: nostalgico
Sherlock’s been ensconced in 221B Baker Street for almost two years when I finally join him there for good. He’s had the attic bedroom soundproofed for a practice space, but he’s also had an excellent Murphy bed installed there for whenever Mrs H is in residence, in case we’re a bit … vocal. Not a genius for nothing.
He’s travelled for the best part of two days to get home for the anniversary of the day we met, and he’s dead tired, but he was determined we’d be together for it.
We spend the evening revisiting that first meeting: our unpromising clash, our subsequent bickering and unexpected complicity.
“Of course I had to meet you in La Stravaganza,” he murmurs drowsily.
“What—why? Extravagance doesn’t exactly describe me. You, maybe.”
He wakes up a bit to answer. “I know you bothered to find out what it really means. La Stravaganza describes the compositional style: eccentricity, or detour, or wandering, or deviation.”
“Funny, I’d call it the most rule-governed writing I ever heard.” It’s the kind of jab that wakes him up instantly.
“Within the rules, though, startling departures. Like your rules of conducting.”
“Principles. They’re principles.”
“My point stands. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed, I’ve seen you conduct the Stravaganza. I’ve seen how you build up to the ‘outlandish modulations,’ the anomalous melodic intervals, the ‘uncommonly abrasive’ bits, the ‘startling enharmonic change’, the ‘harmonic boldness’ that break the rules. Wandering without pattern is mere anarchy; anomaly within a paradigm, is art.”
He’s right, of course, I just like to hear him expound and quote musicology, like at the Paris round table. He’s so drained, though, he drifts off.
I think of the past three years, the long dry spells, the texts and calls and emails, the reunions and the surprise visits, the goodbyes and the partings. We’ll be together a lot more now, though he’ll never stop travelling for concerts altogether, and with my new gig I might have to start. But we got here, together.
I mutter into his hair, “You see, you could do it, after all.”
Three years with him have taught me that he literally never forgets anything verbal, especially anything having to do with us. And even exhausted and mostly asleep, he gets the reference.
“Well, it didn’t get easier after that first night. Harder, if anything.”
I breathe him in and smooth away the tension that’s suddenly stiffened his neck and shoulders.
“I know. Missing you was worse every time. But finding you again got better and better, to make up for it.”
I feel his smile more than see it.
“To almost make up for it.”
“Well, thank God you’re not the level of famous that brings out the paparazzi and the obsessives and the sadists, that could’ve been a nightmare.”
“We’re not. You’re more visible than you realise.”
“Only because I’m with you. You’re the star.”
There’d been worldwide indignation on his behalf when Portman’s score hadn’t won the Oscar, but he’d been indifferent; he’d picked up a Grammy instead, to which he was equally indifferent.
Now he huffs and snorts at the same time, no easy feat; but when we’re alone he’s spontaneous, expressive, emphatic. And sometimes the reaction-wires get crossed.
“John. I’ve been awake for forty-eight hours, stop talking nonsense and let me sleep. Stay here, don’t dare leave.”
“Never. I never will.”
The sounds of the city, muted and muffled, drift in and mingle with those of Sherlock’s deep and motionless sleep.
