expressions like that.
Handshakes, blether blether, yakkety yak, delighted to meet you, how fascinating, will you be at the concert, all the expected chit-chat. Ben smiled and nodded his way through the intros and gleaned that Graves was Nick’s former professor and a renowned musicologist and expert in ancient something-or-other, now semi-retired. Graves had brought along his wife, whose name was Cressida, or maybe Cynthia, or Camilla – three passes of small talk and boom, it was gone from Ben’s memory. He studiously avoided saying anything at all about himself, and trusted Nick to keep what little he knew under his hat. Which limited Ben’s options for interactivity even more than his painfully obvious lack of involvement with the local music scene.
As more people turned up and the buzz of chatter stepped up a notch, Ben retreated to the edge of the crowd on the pretext of grabbing a second glass of red wine and another tuna sandwich. He resolved to drink his drink and be on his way.
Being on the sidelines was more interesting to him. Ben was no psychologist, but he’d been engaged to one long enough to pick up a few pointers. Brooke believed that you could learn a huge amount about a person’s inner state of mind just by observing them, listening to their talk, noting the dynamics of their behaviour with others. Ben agreed with that idea. All his life he’d had an eye for noticing the small things that most people didn’t. And he’d noticed something about Professor Adrian Graves the instant they’d been introduced.
Now Ben filled his last moments before leaving by watching him at a distance. What he saw confirmed his first impressions.
Something seemed to be gnawing at Graves. He was restless, clearly preoccupied, his face busy, eyes darting here and there as he took frequent sips of wine and stood around looking edgy. As Nick went off to greet the latest arrivals Graves was left talking with his wife. Whatever she was saying to him, he didn’t seem to like it. His anxious face now flushed with irritation, he said something snappy to her that Ben didn’t catch over the ambient noise, banged his empty wine glass down on a sideboard and stalked pointedly away from her. The way stressed-out people do in uncomfortable social situations, he hovered about the periphery of the room alone, pretending to be engrossed in the paintings, peering at the instruments. In psychology terms, Brooke would have described Graves’ behaviour as a kind of displacement activity. Like yawning or fidgeting or developing a sudden fascination for a blank space on the wall when you’d much rather be somewhere else.
As Ben watched, Graves wandered over to the display cabinet, where he spent a long time staring at Nick’s fake Bach manuscript as though completely captivated by the sight of it, coffee stain and all.
Ben wondered what was up with the guy. It was mildly interesting to watch him. But not interesting enough to warrant sticking around to see more. If Ben and Brooke had still been together, she could happily have spent the rest of the afternoon speculating about what sort of Freudian malaise was at the root of Graves’ behaviour. Left to his own devices, Ben personally didn’t care all that much. He drained the last of his wine and then threaded his way through the crowd to where Nick was deep in animated conversation with a tall woman who looked like a skeleton in a black dress, a single olive on the plate in her hand.
‘Listen, Nick, I have to make a move,’ Ben said, gently interrupting.
‘So soon?’
‘Hope to catch you later, at the concert,’ Ben said. ‘But just in case we don’t get a chance to talk, here’s my card. I wrote my mobile number on the back.’
Nick took the card, looking disappointed that Ben was going. They said their goodbyes. Ben wished him good luck for tonight. ‘Not that you need it.’ Then smiled at the skeleton lady, said a few nice-to-have-met-yous on his way out, and left the apartment.
Out in the quiet, empty street, Ben breathed a sigh of relief as the claustrophobia of the noisy party quickly wore off. ‘Freedom at last,’ he muttered to himself. He stood for a moment, savouring the stillness and space around him.
Maybe he’d been living in the countryside too long, he thought. ‘What do you think?’ he said to a pigeon that was perched on Nick’s Aston Martin.
The pigeon stared at him, crapped on the car and then flew off.
Long ago
Sometimes it seemed to them as though the whole world was made up of nothing but words. Words, words, every day a storm of words, coming at you so hard and fast from all directions that you could barely digest the information in time for the next torrent. Lecture after lecture, until the voices appeared to merge into a babble of confusion that echoed around your head, enough to drive you crazy. Book after book, until the dots on the pages became meaningless and floated in front of your eyes and remained hovering there even in your dreams.
Which was what made these moments all the sweeter and more magical. Moments of pure stillness, where you could just drift awhile, and share a silence with someone so close to you, and simply be.
The wine they’d drunk earlier was cheap and rough, but neither of them cared. The night was warm, just the merest kiss of a gentle breeze through the dark cloister. She rested against his body with her arms wrapped around him, saying nothing, gazing into the deep black shadows, imagining that the glow of his cigarette was an orange star billions of light years away in a galaxy nobody knew about. Nobody but them.
She could feel the tightness of his muscles, and knew that such moments were the closest he could come to being relaxed, like a compressed spring that was never fully unwound. Ben never spoke about the bad things in his life, but Michaela sometimes saw the pain that seared his blue eyes like lightning in a summer sky. Things she was too young to understand, even though she was only eleven months younger than he was. Hers had been a sheltered life, up until now. His had not. That was all she knew, but she wanted to make him happy because she loved him with every molecule of her being, more than she could ever have imagined it was possible to love anyone.
Some days, it seemed he could never be happy. Tonight, she thought he could.
No words. Just being. Listening. Enjoying. The voice of the organ drifted down from the cathedral tower and echoed through the darkness of the cloister, mingling with the night air. In those hours when the college slept, nobody minded. Nick could play until dawn if he wanted to, because as organ scholar he had the keys to the ancient studded oak door in the far corner of the cloister, which led up the narrow staircase to the hidden chamber where the heart of the instrument lay.
He’d started his practice after midnight. Just messing around at first: the opening Hammond organ riff from the rock classic ‘Smoke on the Water’ by Deep Purple had made Michaela chuckle. Jon Lord was one of Nick’s organ heroes he often raved about. Johann Sebastian Bach was the other; and now the organ was filling the sweet night air with the haunting, cascading music of a minor-key fugue, its lines intertwining and swooping and soaring like the flight of birds – or so she pictured it. The music seemed to pulse with its own life, making her think about the new life that pulsed inside her, so fragile, so tiny, yet growing imperceptibly each day.
Michaela hadn’t told him yet. She hadn’t told anyone. She was still waiting for the right moment, afraid of what Ben’s reaction might be. Terrified, too, of what her parents would say when she broke the news to them. She was only eighteen. So many plans had been made for her future. Now,
