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were doing just
seemed perverse and anachronistic. But tonight it goes down a treat. Great
rhythm section: I think the drummer used to work with Benjamin in a bank or
something, that’s how the whole thing got started. Anyway, he knows what he’s
doing, and so does the bass player: and over this solid foundation Benjamin and the
guitarist and the sax player weave sweet, slightly wistful melodies (Benjamin’s
touch there, I reckon) and improvise cleanly and cleverly: no over-indulgent solos,
no blowing endlessly over the same two chords while the audience gives up and
drifts back to the bar. After the first two or three numbers, in fact, people have
stopped tapping their toes self-consciously and jiggling up and down on the spot.
They’re dancing! Actually dancing! Even Philip, who may be a beacon of niceness
and decency in some ways but is certainly no Travolta in the moves department.
Emily’s really going for it, too. She’s surprisingly nifty on her feet. Really getting
down and enjoying herself. She seems to have come along with a whole crowd of
friends (“church people,” Phil tells me) and in the middle of one piece, after it’s
reached its first climax and gone quiet again and there’s already a smattering of
applause and cheering, she turns to one of these people—a tall, narrow-hipped,
good-looking guy—and he leans down towards her and puts his hand on her shoulders and she shouts, “I told you they were good, didn’t I? I told you they’d be
brilliant.”
    She looks so happy.
    Me, I can’t quite bring myself to join in. I don’t know why. Maybe because
the last few days have been so strange and the last few months have taken me on
such a long and tiring emotional journey and tonight I can feel the whole weight
of that pressing down on me. Anyway. Nothing, nothing on earth is going to get
me on to that dance floor. I stand on the edge of the crowd and lean against the
wall watching, and after a while I go to the bar and buy myself a pack of Marlboro
lights. That shows how bad things are. I haven’t had a cigarette for weeks: only
took up smoking again when the Stefano business started to get me down, as
well—before that I’d been clean for about four or five years. I’m not ready to
light one up just yet, but it’s nice to have the feel of the pack in my pocket, nice
to know it’s there. Sooner or later I’m going to want one. I can feel the need
coming on.
    About half an hour later, the atmosphere changes, and that’s when I know it’s
time to go.
    It happens like this. A bright, up-tempo song finishes with a flourish of cymbals and a crashing major chord, and then three of the band members put their
instruments down and withdraw to the back of the stage. There are just two of
them left—Benjamin and the guitarist—and the guitarist announces the next
piece which he says is going to be a duet. He says that it’s written by Benjamin and
it’s called
Seascape No. 4
. Then the two of them start playing and the mood
changes completely. It’s a delicate, sad little tune—almost dangerously fragile—
and Benjamin’s whole face is transformed when he starts playing it. He’s looking
down at his keyboard, hunched over it suddenly, tense and introverted, and his eyes
are half closed. Although the piece is quite complicated, he doesn’t have to concentrate hard on his fingering because you can tell he knows these chords, these patterns, off by heart—they’re stamped on his memory like the contours of a love
a fair that you never forget—so he’s free to think about other things, free to fix his
gaze somewhere else: backwards, back in time, back to the experience that inspired
this heartbroken music, whatever it was. And of course, some of us in this room
know what inspired it.
Who
inspired it, rather. And realizing this, I glance across
at Emily to see how