Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #21
Oh fuck off, Derek, she thinks as she grabs the handrail to climb the stairs to the green room, suddenly weary.
Sometimes she lies in her narrow single bed in her single cabin and thinks about Toni asking her to come with them.
We’ll get a small flat, pool our money, teach and record.
We’ll stop touring forever, we’re all getting too old for it.
She thinks about packing up her cabin and walking off the Grub at Liverpool Street again, maybe Marylebone, wherever they’d have wanted.
Walking out into the train station, ignoring the way all the other passengers’ eyes slide off the iron of the Grub lingering on the platform, pretending she can’t see it either as she walks away into a – another – new life.
She thinks about having her father’s piano delivered, sitting at it each morning – See if you can breathe the notes in through your eyes, Jeanie – having Sam round each Sunday to feed him, listen to him play, hear stories about what he’s been up to.
As she touches the door handle of the musician’s green room it twists under her hands and opens. Michael is standing on the other side, his satchel over one shoulder and his jumper baggy around his chest. She feels that twinge of pity that the sorry sight of him always provokes in her these days.
‘Did you know there’s phone signal today?
’ Jean says. She tells him more to be polite than anything else.
Like everyone else, she struggles to know what to say to Michael since Evelyn left.
The miasma of misery that floats around him almost stinks of something rotting, and although she wants to be kind it’s been months now, and still he goes around with those plugs in his ears for whatever the Crow’s doing to him, and still his second act solo is making the tannoys weep, and still she has not seen him smile, not even once.
He looks back at her blankly. ‘Yes. I know that.’
He pauses on the threshold of the doorway before he passes her, his face in shadow.
‘How’s your dad?’
A flicker of the old Michael, the gently charming young man who strung his heart with his violin.
‘He’s well, thank you. Quite lucid today, actually.’
And Michael nods, pleased to hear it and strides past Jean towards the stage. On the tannoy she can hear Cecile clapping her hands. ‘Alors, mesdames et messieurs!’ she cries. ‘Break time is over!’
Wilf, Steve and Jasper are playing cards in a corner and give Jean a cheery wave as she passes them. She nods a brisk hello to Henry the second violin, but he ignores her the way he ignores everyone, and she sits in an armchair to pull her phone from her pocket.
Henry’s practising a small section of the Red Suitor’s solo, playing the same couple of bars over and over again, but he’s getting it wrong each time with a discordant note in the middle of the phrase that he can’t seem to hear to correct.
She types: How lovely to hear from you. We are stopped in a graveyard – yes, I know it’s All Souls’, you know what the Grub is like with a metaphor—
She stops. Henry plays that discordant note and makes a growl of frustration. She deletes the message. She types: I have been thinking of you both endlessly. I am heartsick and soulsore and no one cares because Michael goes about like he’s condemned—
She can hear where he’s going wrong. She should tell him, she can’t bear to listen to this all afternoon but really it’s Lance’s job to make sure everyone’s score is correct.
And what has Michael been doing, sitting in front of him night after night while he gets this bit wrong?
She deletes the last sentence. I have been thinking of you both endlessly.
Spoke to my father and Sam today, they’re both all right—
She stops. She puts her phone in her lap and sighs.
‘It’s F sharp,’ Jean says quietly.
‘Sorry?’ Henry startles.
‘It goes, da da di da da di da F sharp.’
He looks at the score in front of him. ‘It says E in here.’
Jean shrugs. ‘It’s F sharp.’
He frowns, pulls his violin to his chin and plays the bars again. The notes trip perfectly from his beautiful instrument. ‘Of course.’ He murmurs. ‘I remember now.’
And there is such a curious look of longing in Henry’s face as he plays that phrase properly that Jean cannot breathe for a moment.
Her heart caught in her mouth, she has a bright flash of understanding.
Henry’s fixed gaze on Michael each night as AJ comes into the pit; the way you hardly see Michael without this handsome face hovering somewhere nearby; the way Henry has refused all other overtures.
There’s something charmingly old-fashioned about his constancy.
She doesn’t know when or how it started or if Michael has ever given him any reason to hope, but the sadness of it all swamps her as Henry plays the Red Suitor’s melody with his eyes half shut.
Words rise desperately in her throat: You know, I also love someone – two someones – who don’t love me back.
I am also paralysed by grief, I am also leaden with a useless secret, I am also stuck here without any hope of loving anyone else ever again.
On the tannoy, Cecile calls, ‘Tonight’s cast of the hunting dance, s’il vous pla?t!’ and the toilet flushes next door and Sandra comes into the room, phone squeezed between her ear and her shoulder, wiping her hands on her jumper. Jean smiles at her and she mimes hello back.
She wants to grab Michael’s face and squeeze his grey cheeks between her palms and snarl, Listen!
Everything you think you know about love is wrong.
You think you would have loved Evelyn forever the way you did these past months but you’re full of shit and she knew it.
It always falls apart, like everything, like the whole damn universe will if you leave it spinning for long enough.
Your love will tear over the tiny sleeping bodies of your babies, the piled-up bills, the exhaustion, the endless conversations about plumbing.
And then you’ll look at each other and you’ll just see someone that you used to love, someone you know better than anything by now but maybe you don’t even like anymore and it’ll be like being inside your own head, itchy, annoying, you’ll do anything to get out of there.
So she left you to keep you loving her and you’re too stupid to see it.
But what right has she got to lecture anyone on real love?
She, with a few sterile relationships in her twenties, a failed marriage to an idiot, almost two decades of resigned celibacy before a late, glorious flush of passion refracted like a rainbow through two bodies, abandoned because…
well, she’s still not sure why it ended, and isn’t that what hurts the most?
She, who sits here typing and deleting and typing and deleting a message to the women she loves, unable even to say she loves them, even to herself?
Jean picks up her phone again as Henry starts the Red Suitor’s solo from the top.
She types: How lovely to hear from you both.
Hope you’re well and thriving in the real world.
We are stopped in a graveyard, which is slightly obvious of the Grub but you know what it’s like.
All fine here, you know how it is. Thinking of you both.
And she presses send before she can change her mind.
She puts the phone at the very bottom of her handbag and pulls out her laptop.
While it whirrs itself into sentience, she opens the lid of her oboe case again and rummages for her glasses.
She logs into her bank account, sends Sam some money, pays the other three invoices.
She looks at the photo of her cousin’s grandchild; there is something of Sam as an infant about the little one’s chubby face and she starts to type an email to her cousin to tell her so when her phone buzzes at the bottom of her handbag.
She shuts her eyes. She’ll look at the message, of course she will but first she’ll sit here for a moment, wallowing in the beauty of that message’s boundless possibilities because before she swipes her thumb across the screen and sees its words it could say anything, anything at all.
We’ve got a place by the sea, we want you to come and live with us.
Or, we are very happy, we are living with a lovely young lady called Veronica and she does us the power of good.
Or, fuck the money, we’ll help you, you’re ours.
She told the Crow she wouldn’t break her pledge and she meant it but how will she stay here for another two and a half months if they’re calling her, how will she open her oboe case each morning knowing that they are waiting for her, how will she deal with the danger in the auditorium each night knowing that there are those who love her out there in the world?
She opens her eyes, closes her laptop and reaches into her bag.
* * *
In the stage right wing, Bella is lying under the props table with her foot stretched over her head, listening to the piano gurgle the tune of the third act hunting dance. She’s using the underside of the table as an anchor for her foot and sewing a ribbon onto the heel of a brand new pointe shoe.
The piano stops mid-phrase – there’s been a lot of that – and Cecile shouts at Luke, who has become redder and redder each time she’s stopped him. Now he looks like a tomato about to go splat under a heel.
‘Non!’ She claps her hands and the piano stops mid-bar. ‘I said the arms go through la seconde on the way to the fifth, I need accuracy! Again!’