Mooching

• An Equal Music by Vikram Seth
  Phoenix House, 381 pp, £16.99, April 1999, ISBN 1 86159 117 9

I met Vikram Seth by chance, he met me by mistake. He sat down next to me at an occasion he had never meant to attend. It was 6.45 p.m. on Thursday 25 March at the Royal Society of Literature in Bayswater. Seth had come to hear a friend of his read. I had come to hear the Minister for the Arts describe the Government’s support for literature. At 7 p.m., as the Minister began to speak, Seth looked nonplussed and started for the door. It was too late, he was trapped.

I knew it was Vikram Seth because I had studied his face on the jacket of An Equal Music. The night before, I had dreamt about him. He was on my mind. Vikram Seth did not know it was me. I wondered if I should tell him. He might find it interesting. This would depend on whether he’d had Nicholas Spice in mind when he invented Nicholas Spare, an odious music critic whom the nice characters in An Equal Music loathe. I decided to avoid the subject of Nicholas Spare. Instead we talked about poetry, and then about Vikram Seth and then about Haydn. How remarkable that Haydn had been a choirboy at the funeral of Vivaldi and yet had outlived Mozart, said Seth. Murmuring assent, I cast about for ways of developing this elegant theme, but the Minister had risen to speak, so I trailed off into silence and, with a polite smile at Seth, I retreated to my thoughts.

I felt sure that I had made Vikram Seth appear by thinking about him. Michael Holme, the narrator of An Equal Music, makes the love of his life appear by thinking about her. He’s sitting on a bus in Oxford Street when another bus draws alongside, and there she is: Julia McNicholl, or Julia Hansen as she now is, though Michael doesn’t know this yet. It’s taken Michael ten years to summon up Julia, so when the two buses move out of synch and he loses her again, he’s forgivably upset. His recourse to lame poetic pastiche – ‘Under the arrow of Eros I sit down and weep’ – is less forgivable.

The encounter furnishes Michael with a painfully apt image for his romantic predicament: ‘She was no further from me than the seats on the other side of the aisle, but she could have been in Vienna ... The two layers of glass between us, like a prison visit by a loved one after many years.’ When he meets her again, Michael will find that Julia is married to a decent, if rather boring American banker, and that she has a six-year-old child called Luke. Ten years before, when Michael and Julia were music students at the Vienna Hochschule, the layers of glass had been less substantial. Julia couldn’t see them, and Michael was never able satisfactorily to point them out. He is said to have abandoned Julia and fled back to London because of a breakdown in his relations with his violin teacher. But this doesn’t add up – his music teacher is nasty to him so he leaves his girlfriend? Nor is it clear why, when he realised his mistake, he didn’t get on the next train back to Vienna, instead of relying on despairing letters which Julia was too hurt to open.