Pennington's Heir by K M Peyton

Author:K M Peyton [K M Peyton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Children's UK
Published: 2013-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

PAT COULDN’T GET the page of the sonata out of his mind, where he had faltered. The feeling of his fingers actually stopping, the numbness of his mind, not actually forgetting—which would have been forgivable—but seeing the notes in his mind and somehow not being able to make them happen. It was inexplicable, a kind of spastic refusal of the nerves to work the fingers. It appalled him. Just to recall the moment made him come out in a cold sweat. It had been a great weariness, as if, when it got very difficult, he just hadn’t the pure energy of spirit to see it through. Trying to think of it logically, he supposed it was in fact caused by fatigue, by the day’s frustrations, the lateness, the lack of opportunity to concentrate beforehand. And yet he had been so sure that he was professional enough now to surmount those sort of obstacles—not play well, perhaps, under adverse circumstances, but at least to see it through in such a way that an undemanding audience would accept it as a reasonable performance. But he hadn’t. Even a moronic audience could not have failed to see that something had gone wrong, that he wasn’t capable. The fact that he had played well afterwards, which he knew he had, and given a stunning performance of a taxing Chopin étude for an encore—to prove to himself, not only to them, that he was good, in spite of such a bungle—could not erase the awfulness of the moment. He needed confidence, he needed to know that he was good, to make all the incredible difficulties of the whole business worth persevering with. And to do this—fall flat on your face in public—was enough to undermine anybody’s ego, let alone as nervous a one as his.

He wasn’t in a state of mind to accept it and forget it, as in normal circumstances—with Ruth and his friends to reassure him and a good stiff whisky to drown his sorrows in, he would have managed. By the time he got home, having walked from the garage up a cold, midnight Finchley Road clutching his useless music, he felt abandoned, gibbering, suicidal. He knew he ought to be thinking about Ruth, but all he could think about was the damned music. He felt that Ruth had left him just when he most needed her, and in fact from henceforth would be taken up with the wretched brat that he had no money to support. The cheque in his pocket would just about pay last week’s rent, next week’s rent, and buy the list of baby equipment that he could put off no longer, and then they were back to normal—penniless. And if he made another mistake like the one he had made tonight, there wouldn’t be any more cheques to come either.

He now felt very restless, not at all tired. Walking up the road, some drunken youths jeered at him and his evening clothes, and he could easily have waded in and banged their heads together.

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