"Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer."
— Willa Cather
The email arrived at eleven forty-seven the previous night. Bob had been sitting in the study -- the small room at the end of the hall that had become, by the slow accretion of his retreat from the rest of the house, his room -- and his phone had lit up on the desk beside the violin case, and the subject line read: Final Assessment Report -- Instrument Ref. ABS-2023-0914, and he had known before he opened it what it would say.
The language was cautious. Hedged with qualifications, each sentence buttressed by conditional clauses and references to methodology. But the conclusion was unmistakable. The dendrochronology was consistent. The spruce of the top plate had been felled between 1695 and 1710. The arching profile, the geometry of the f-holes, the scroll carving, and the varnish composition were consistent with the highest tier of Alpine school construction, specifically the workshop tradition of Jakob Stainer of Absam, or -- less probably but not excludably -- the early Cremonese school. Conservative valuation: fifteen to twenty million US dollars.
Bob read the email three times. He set the phone down. He looked at the violin case -- the battered black case with its broken latch that he had carried home from Absam two years ago. Inside it was an object worth more than every other thing he owned combined. More to the point: worth more than the fund's total deficit. If he sold it -- if he declared it, if he sat down with a lawyer and said, Here is an asset I purchased with fund money, and here is its value, and here is what I owe -- the fund would be made whole. Every investor repaid.
But. The violin had been purchased with fund money. Ten thousand euros diverted from the operational account. Declaring the violin meant declaring the purchase. Declaring the purchase meant admitting the fund was already insolvent when he spent the money. The instrument that could redeem him was also the instrument that convicted him. The paradox sat in his chest like a stone, and it had been sitting there for two years, and tonight it was heavier, because now the stone had a price, and the price was the price of his freedom, and the freedom was unreachable.
He did not think about the money for long. He thought about the Chaconne.
He woke at four and did not try to go back to sleep. Through the study window, the ocean was a black sheet under a sky just beginning to lighten along its eastern edge. He rose from the narrow daybed and stood at the window and watched the water lighten from black to charcoal to pewter.
He opened the violin case. The instrument lay in its blue velvet lining, the varnish catching the first grey light -- a deep reddish-orange, the colour of something that had been alive and was now something better than alive: preserved, transformed, carrying within its grain the accumulated resonance of three centuries. He touched the strings. They were cold. He rosined the bow -- three long strokes, the rosin's faint sweet smell rising in the dark room.
He picked up the violin. Tucked it under his chin. Drew a breath.
He played the opening chord of the Chaconne.
D, A, D, F-sharp. Quietly. The four notes breaking across the strings, and the sound was not a chord in any ordinary sense. It was a door opening. The door that had been sealed shut for twenty-seven years and that he had broken open with his hands and his hours.
He played through the piece. Not performing -- practising. Running the passages that still troubled him: the high-position work where his intonation wavered, the arpeggios where his bow arm tended to tighten, the transition into D major. He played the D major section slowly, listening to the sound the instrument made at dawn -- the warmth of it, the way it seemed to amplify not just volume but intention. Katarina had told him last week that this section was where his playing was strongest. The simplicity suits you, Robert. Your tone here has a quality I cannot teach, because it comes from somewhere I cannot reach. She had said this without sentiment, as a technical observation, and it was the highest praise she had ever given him.
He played the bariolage. His bow arm ached. He played the final bars. Silence.
He stood in the study as the sky turned from grey to pink. The pines along the esplanade stood black against the brightening sky. The grass below the house was still in shadow, damp with dew, and his eyes travelled down it to the water's edge, the way his eyes always travelled when he stood at this window.
Today he would play this piece for his family. For the people who had known him for decades and had never known him at all. He would stand in front of them and play the only true thing he had ever done, and they would hear him -- really hear him -- for the first time.
This was what he told himself. Whether it was courage or delusion, the morning did not say.
Jeannie was in her element. She had been planning this party for two months, and the planning engaged the deepest competencies of her personality -- the management of logistics, the curation of experience, the creation of a social environment so precisely calibrated that every guest would feel, simultaneously, welcomed and impressed and slightly inadequate. This was her art form.
The caterers arrived at eight. A florist arranged native arrangements in galvanised tubs along the lawn -- banksias, kangaroo paw, proteas, the burnt orange and deep red of the West Australian bush rendered decorative. The marquee -- white, open-sided, positioned on the upper terrace so the view of the ocean was framed but not obstructed -- had been erected the day before.
Jeannie moved through the preparations with focused composure. She was wearing linen pants and a silk blouse, her hair pulled back, her face bare, and in the morning light she looked beautiful. The novel notes this without irony. Jeannie was beautiful. Her beauty was real. It was the one thing about her that was not performed, and it was the thing she trusted least, because beauty without an audience was beauty wasted, and Jeannie could not conceive of a self that existed outside the gaze of others.
She checked the guest list: eighty-three confirmed. She paused. She had not included Katarina Nemcova. Bob had asked, yesterday, that she be invited. "She's my violin teacher. I'd like her to be there." Jeannie's expression had been the one she deployed when something was not worth fighting about: a micro-tightening of the jaw, then a smile. "Fine. One more won't matter." But the request had stayed with her. It had the quality of requests that mattered -- the slight hesitation before he said it, the way his eyes had not met hers.
There had been a rumour. Sandra Kemp had mentioned it three weeks ago, over lunch, in the oblique way Sandra delivered intelligence: Someone said Bob's been seeing someone in his office. A woman. Every week. For over a year. Jeannie had laughed. "That's his violin teacher." She had said it lightly, the way you dismiss a rumour you intend to bury. But the words had settled into the substrate of her awareness like a seed in soil.
Chase arrived at four. Chinos, white linen shirt, RM Williams boots. His girlfriend -- a girl called Maddie or Mollie, pleasant and interchangeable with the last -- was with him. He greeted his mother with a kiss and his father with a handshake. "Fifty, old man. How's it feel?"
"Like forty-nine with worse knees."
Shanel was already there. She emerged at five in a pale blue dress Jeannie had chosen for her -- simple, appropriate. The dress was perfect. It was not hers.
She came downstairs, and as she passed the dining table she saw the violin case. It sat on the polished surface like an object from another world -- black, battered, its latches worn. She knew the general fact of her father's playing. She had heard him once, through a wall -- a slow melody, repeated, the patient work of a man teaching his hands to do something they had forgotten. She had listened and had not mentioned it, because mentioning it would mean acknowledging a part of her father that the family's grammar did not include.
She touched the case with one finger. Ran it along the edge, from handle to latch. She moved on.
Jim and Wendy arrived at five. Jim got out of the passenger side slowly. He was wearing the charcoal two-piece from the tailor in the Terrace Arcade. The suit hung on him now, the shoulders sloping, the collar standing away from a neck that had thinned with age. He had lost weight -- the flesh falling away from the bones, leaving the essential structure visible: the jaw, the cheekbones, the heavy brow that Bob had inherited.
Jim gripped a walking stick. Wendy took his arm. Bob came down and opened the door, and Jim looked at his son and for a moment neither spoke.
Jim took Bob's hand. The grip was too tight and held too long. "Happy birthday, son." His voice carried a tenderness that embarrassed them both.
"Thanks, Dad."
Guests began arriving at five-thirty. The scene became panoramic: cars lining the street, the sound of heels on limestone, the clink of glasses. The DJ started at six -- Fleetwood Mac, yacht rock, the Bee Gees. The gaggle arrived together, four women dressed with competitive precision, and they descended on Jeannie with choreographed enthusiasm.
The terrace filled. The sun dropped toward the ocean. The sky shifted from blue to gold, and the light that fell across the party was the particular light of Perth in late afternoon -- warm, slanting, forgiving, the light that made everything look as if it had been photographed and filtered and approved.
Katarina arrived alone. She came through the garden gate -- dark jeans, a blouse of muted blue, no jewellery, flat shoes. She did not look like the other women at this party. She looked like what she was: a European musician at an Australian garden party, slightly out of place and entirely self-possessed. She found Bob near the edge of the terrace, where he was standing with a beer he had not drunk. They exchanged a look. She nodded. He nodded. Nothing was said that anyone could have interpreted. But the quality of the exchange -- its brevity, its weight -- was visible to anyone watching.
Someone was watching. One of the gaggle, near the marquee with her champagne. She noted the look, and filed it.
The sun was fifteen minutes from the horizon. The party was at full pitch. Jeannie stood near the glass doors with her third glass of sauvignon blanc and surveyed her creation and found it good.
Bob went inside. He walked to the dining table and opened the violin case. The instrument lay in its velvet, the spruce top glowing in the last daylight, the varnish that seemed to glow from within. He picked it up. Rosined the bow. Tuned by ear.
He caught his reflection in the glass doors: a man in a good suit holding a violin, backlit by a sunset. He did not recognise himself. Or he recognised, for the first time, the person he had been supposed to be.
Katarina appeared in the doorway. She took out her phone and pressed record.
"You don't need to do that," Bob said.
"Yes I do." And then, quieter: "Play it the way you played it this morning. Do not perform. Just play."
He walked back out onto the terrace, carrying the violin in his left hand and the bow in his right. The guests nearest the doors noticed first. Conversations thinned. Faces turned. Jeannie saw him from across the terrace and the smile on her face flickered and went still, replaced by confusion shading toward apprehension -- a woman watching a variable she had not accounted for enter her controlled environment.
Bob stood at the edge of the terrace. The ocean was behind him. The sun was going down. The violin was in his hand. Eighty faces, turning toward him one by one, like a wave.
The moment before.