The Tooth Tattoo(65)

‘That said a lot.’

‘Actually, no. Not a damn word.’

He smiled. ‘So if Mari had come to see you, she’d have had to travel to Tokyo. That’s not a vast distance from Yokohama.’

‘I’ll take your word for that. Geography passed me by when I was in school. Let me tell you something about quartet playing. You have the score on a stand in front of you with a little light over it. If you look up and you can see anything at all above the light, it’s rows of identical heads looking faintly like the beads on an abacus. You don’t recognise people.’

‘Thanks for explaining,’ Diamond said, genuinely pleased she was speaking more freely than she had at the start. ‘Let’s talk about the quartet. You were one of the founders, right?’

‘With Ivan, yes. Back in the last century, that was, when I was young and easy, as the poet said. To be truthful, I wasn’t easy, I was bloody difficult. Always have been. I’m surprised Ivan ever asked me to join, but the time was right and I jumped at the chance.’

‘You were a soloist before?’

‘Going right back, I was one of those child monsters, an infant prodigy. We’re Liverpool Irish, the Kinsellas, and my dad played the fiddle around the pubs. My mum was red-hot on the squeezebox. They got me started early and pushed me hard. Recorder, flute, piano, violin. I can knock out a tune on almost anything. Don’t ask me why, but I was drawn to the cello. There are all kinds of Freudian theories I draw the line at discussing in polite company, or police company, come to that. I started to play when I was nine and must have looked ridiculous wrestling with it. You need to be an athlete. It’s easy for a cellist to get musclebound. But I adored it – the sound, the sweet, rich voice was all that I wanted. So at a young age I got through the drudgery of mastering the thing and won a scholarship to music school in Manchester. You must have heard of Chetham’s.’

Diamond tried to look as if he had.

Cat was into her story anyway. ‘They worked wonders with me and put me in for Young Musician of the Year. Didn’t win, but made the final and got noticed. I must tell you – and you won’t believe this – in those days I was thin enough to slot into a toaster. Long, blonde hair that I wore in a pigtail. Anyway I learned the repertoire and at fourteen had the cheek to play the Dvorák with a youth orchestra and overnight I was touted as the next Jacqueline du Pré. They wanted me to loosen my hair and record the Elgar looking all frail and angelic. That’s what she made her debut with and is mainly remembered for, but of course she could play anything. She was the real deal. Did you see the movie?’

‘Somehow it passed me by,’ Diamond said.

‘Far better to watch some footage of Jackie herself. There’s a lovely video of her with Barbirolli. And to think that they wanted me to ape her just to get famous. Catriona Kinsella, aged fourteen and a half, dug her heels in and said she wanted to be herself. Sucks to the Elgar and sucks to wearing a long white dress. It was a teenage rebellion in a music context. Everyone, my parents, the school, the marketing people, bore down on me and said I was flushing a brilliant career down the toilet. The battle went on for almost a year. I started eating, seriously stuffing myself with chocolate, fried foods, pastry, the lot. In a matter of weeks it started showing and in a year I was the lump of lard I am today.’

‘Your way of taking control of your life?’

She raised her right thumb. ‘Tell that to Weightwatchers. I shaved my head as well in case anyone missed the point. I continued to play, of course. The joy has never gone away. I’ve played as a soloist with some of the great orchestras. Vivaldi wrote twenty-seven concertos and I’ve learned almost all of them. What I absolutely refused to do was put myself in the clutches of the popular classical music merchants. If you follow music at all you’ll know the process. They take second-rate artists with pretty faces, groom them, call them the voice or the player of the century and turn them into stars, whether they’re singers, violinists, pianists. The quality of the sound is crap, they’re off-key, and the great gullible public doesn’t seem to notice. I could find you literally hundreds of finer voices and better players completely overlooked.’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘I’ve lost my thread, haven’t I? This is one of my pet beefs.’

‘You saw off the vultures.’

A broad smile. ‘That sums it up. I might have made millions, but as a musician I’d have been dead meat. When all is said and done, you keep your musical integrity. These second-rate performers know they cashed theirs in. So I scraped away in an orchestra making real music and no money. Gave lessons, did some work on film scores and TV commercials. That’s allowed in my scheme of things. I wasn’t cheating anyone. This went on for a few years until I met Ivan and he told me he was thinking of forming a string quartet. Ask any string player and they’ll tell you that’s their dream, to play in a high quality quartet.’