The Protege

“Remember all those times you’ve talked about being a soloist?” he asks.

I start chewing again, thinking. “Well, yes. I want that too, but I just love playing with you so much. I’ll still have to play with an orchestra behind me a lot of time as a soloist, so why not yours?”

I remember what he said to me all those years ago when I debuted at the Mayhew with his orchestra. Solo pieces are a collaboration between the soloist and the conductor. You bring your own vision for the piece and I interpret it for the rest of the orchestra. I love that sense of collaboration between us. He knows me better than anyone. I don’t want any conductor but him.

Laszlo nods. “And you will, but you’ll be so famous that I’ll have to beg you to come back and play a show or two at the Mayhew with my orchestra. I want it to be that way, even though I…” He trails off and goes back to chopping.

I feel bereft at the thought of all the performances he’s imagining for me that aren’t with him.

“What about Jacqueline du Pré and Daniel Barenboim?” I ask. “They were always together. Why can’t we be like them?” Du Pré was a famous cello soloist in the sixties and Barenboim was a conductor and her husband. Everyone wanted to see them perform together with his orchestra until her career was cut savagely, painfully short by multiple sclerosis. Her biography was one of the books that Laszlo gave me to read when I first came to live with him and I’ve never forgotten her. I’ve reopened that book many times over the years and run my fingers over the many glossy pictures of them smiling at each other, working alongside each other. They’re perfect together. Cellists and conductors were meant to be.

Laszlo slices a chili in half. “Not always together and du Pré was famous in her own right before she met Barenboim.” He looks up at me. “You’re going to make a name for yourself, Isabeau, without my help.”

Laszlo wants to be sure this is what I want, and that people will value me for me and not because of his reputation. He wants me to stand on my own two feet.

Fine. I can do that. I will do that. When I’ve graduated I’ll be such a famous soloist that Laszlo will ask me again and again to play with his orchestra.

I bite savagely into a sugar snap pea, thinking of the eight cellists in his ensemble who sit close by him night after night, and I’m green with envy.

“If one of your cellists is sick and it’s the weekend or I’m on holidays can I please, please fill in for them? I’ll jump on that train the second I get your call. You know I can play anything.”

He thinks about it, turning up the heat on the wok. “All right. If you’re not busy with your studies and you feel confident about the piece we’re performing then of course you can. You’d be very welcome.” Laszlo smiles at me, though it’s not a smile that reaches his eyes.

I watch him as he cooks, and think of how he hasn’t hugged me for such a long time. The smiles that slide off his face too quickly. Is he sad? Because of all this talk of me going away?

I say in a husky whisper, “I’m going to miss you so much.”

Laszlo stills, and when he looks up at me I see my own pain in his expression. He reaches out and strokes the backs of his fingers my cheek, his eyes running over my face. “I’m going to miss you, too, sweetheart. I won’t know myself without you.”

We just look at each other and my eyes grow blurry with tears. Ten years. More than half my life, but it’s gone past in the blink of an eye. I’ve been so happy with Laszlo and once I leave this house I don’t know how I’m going to be happy without him.

Unless…whispers a little voice from deep within my heart. Unless we become lovers on one of my trips home.

It could happen so easily. A late night together, hands drifting closer in the back of a cab, or walking on the heath, so close that we’re touching. A late night supper in Covent Garden after a performance, tucked away in a little candlelit booth. I imagine standing together in the wings at the Mayhew, him kissing me slowly, wonderingly, because he’s seeing me with new eyes. It might even happen the night of the Summer Concert. There’s no reason why not. I’ll be eighteen.

Laszlo looks down at the counter as if he’s trying to remember where he was with our dinner. “So, The Swan. The harp and strings arrangement? Make your conductor proud and the audience cry again?”