Chapter 43
FORTY-THREE
LAUREL
The last few notes of music fell like raindrops into complete silence, and I realised I was holding my breath.
I had been sitting dead still in my seat for the past two and a half hours, not even getting up to queue for the toilet in the interval: from the moment the conductor stepped out to rapturous applause and the lights in the concert hall dimmed, I’d been utterly captivated.
I had never experienced anything like it before. Everything about the evening – the eager buzz of anticipation as the audience filed in, the glow of the instruments beneath the lights, the intent faces of the musicians and the precise movements of their hands – had held me in a kind of spell.
All that, and the music itself. The way it swelled from near silence into something so powerful I felt as if I was being pressed back into my seat. The way some bits made me smile and others brought tears to my eyes. The total precision of it all – like surgery, only using sound.
Since reading the article about Joel Chamberlain, I’d been besieged by doubt: should I contact him?
Could I? What possible justification could I have for getting in touch with a man on the basis of such a bizarre and tenuous link?
Hi, you don’t know me but you’ve got my ex-lover’s kidney?
He’d think I was mad, and perhaps he’d be right.
And Gray? Was I being horribly disloyal to him?
Perhaps meeting him would prove disappointing. Perhaps all the interviews with him I’d read online over the past couple of weeks had been misleading – suck-up journalists looking to give a good impression of a man who was arrogant or rude or just a diva.
So I’d settled for seeing him – and hearing him, in a context where thousands of other people were doing exactly the same, after googling his name and learning that he was playing in a concert at the Royal Albert Hall.
I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this – this power, this magic.
I had no way of knowing whether Gray had been aware, when he had made the sacrifice that had saved Joel Chamberlain’s life, that his decision would make this possible.
The silence broke as the hall erupted into ecstatic applause.
Around me, the audience rose to their feet in unison, clapping and whooping like they’d been listening to One Direction instead of Mozart.
I stood too, almost toppling over in my heels, stiff after sitting motionless for so long.
I was in the same black dress I’d worn to dinner with Gray on Valentine’s Day, and had realised as soon as I arrived that I was overdressed, but now it felt appropriate to be in something glamorous, the crystals Gray had given me sparkling as brightly as tears in my earlobes.
‘Magnificent,’ the woman next to me was saying. ‘Chamberlain was phenomenal.’
‘As always,’ her companion said. ‘What a talent!’
I realised I had been so busy listening I’d almost forgotten why I had come to the Royal Albert Hall on this Wednesday night, spending what had felt like a crazy sum of money on a last-minute ticket.
It had taken me a while to spot Joel Chamberlain on stage, and longer still to identify the sound of his violin among the other instruments, and even once I had, he’d become just a part of the glorious machine of the orchestra.
Now, though, my sense of purpose returned.
I let myself be swept along with the crowd, reluctantly joined the queue for the ladies’, then emerged into the chilly, drizzly night.
But I didn’t follow the stream of people heading towards the Tube station.
I made my way around the building, looking for what Google had promised I’d find.
And there it was, a cluster of people waiting there with phones and programmes in their hands, huddled against the cold beneath a sign that said ‘Stage Door’. Hanging back slightly, I waited too.
It was more than twenty minutes before the door opened and one of the musicians emerged, her instrument case in one hand and a bouquet of yellow roses in the other.
She was a young Black woman, who I remembered seeing on the right of the stage, her fingers moving almost tenderly over the keys of her instrument.
My programme had informed me that it was called an oboe, and that she was called Maria Dlamini.
Within seconds, she was mobbed by a cluster of about a dozen people, holding out their programmes for her to sign and posing for selfies with her.
She signed and smiled and dished out flowers from her bouquet to the delight of her fans, then thanked everyone and said goodnight.
I watched her walk off in the direction of the station, now looking like just another normal woman on her way home, all the stardust that had illuminated her in the footlights dimmed.
The conductor came out next and was similarly surrounded, but his signing and smiling session took a bit longer because there were more people after his autograph, and people seemed to want to ask him questions about his interpretation of the pieces we’d heard.
Neither they nor his answers meant anything to me, and I found myself beginning to worry that Joel Chamberlain had already left by another exit, or that he’d somehow slip past me in the crowd.
But just as the conductor was hailing a black cab and getting in, the stage door opened once again and Joel came out.
In the flesh, he was just as good-looking as his photograph.
Not as tall as I’d expected, but broad shouldered and lean, and with a quality the camera hadn’t been able to capture – a kind of radiance, as if he had been lit somehow from within by the music he’d been playing, and the glow had yet to subside.
Or perhaps it was something more commonplace than that – just the star quality that would have made him a brilliant performer where other people were just brilliant musicians.
I had no way of knowing and wasn’t inclined to analyse – all I knew was that the people crowding round him for autographs and selfies were mostly women, and they all looked as smitten as if they were teenagers after a James Bay gig.
And I could kind of see where they were coming from.
It felt like a long time before he’d scrawled his signature for the last time and smiled up into a camera lens for a final selfie and there was no one else waiting to speak to him.
As I watched, his shoulders seemed to relax, whatever light had been shining from him dimmed and he turned to walk away in the same direction Maria Dlamini had.
It was now or never. I stepped forward, about to call out his name.
But before I could, I heard someone say mine.
‘Laurel? What are you doing here?’
It was Anna. Her face was flushed – I wondered fleetingly whether she too had been moved to tears by the music.
But it wasn’t the concert she wanted to discuss with me.
‘Do you realise what’s happened to my daughter?
’ she demanded. ‘If I hadn’t agreed to let her meet you – if you hadn’t given her the chance to go off with that boy – she’d still be safe.
And now you’re here. Like what you did with my husband wasn’t enough.
Like helping my daughter sneak around behind my back wasn’t enough – now you’re prying into Gray’s past, aren’t you?
He’s dead. Lulu’s had her heart broken. Isn’t that enough for you to finally leave my family alone? ’
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Joel Chamberlain getting into a taxi, apparently oblivious to Anna and me. But I couldn’t think about him right now – Anna’s fury was overwhelming, and my instinct was only to defend myself.
‘What are you talking about?’ I heard my own voice rising.
‘I was only trying to help with Lulu. I told you when she didn’t come and meet me, because I was worried about her.
So you could keep her safe. And if you’re so concerned about her, why aren’t you with her now?
You’re here for the same reason I am, aren’t you? ’
I noticed curious eyes turning to watch us as the last of the concertgoers left the hall to make their way home. But Anna, who I imagined would normally be far more conscious of the disapproval of strangers than I was, didn’t seem to care.
‘You ruined my marriage,’ she exploded. ‘I can’t even mourn my husband properly because of you. You took that away from me. And now – my daughter…’
No one slaps the faces of hysterical women any more, thank God. No one even uses that unscientific, misogynistic word. But if it had been fifty years ago, I had to admit I’d have been sorely tempted to do both.
Instead, I reached out my arms to her. ‘Come on, Anna. Calm down. Why don’t we have a drink, and you can tell me all about it?’
Then she fell into my arms, sobbing helplessly.