A Fair Hearing

For six weeks the chair was hers, and the letter said the man who shared her desk would write down, in ink, exactly how well she had sat in it.

Kath's office smelled of pencil shavings and the one-bar heater, which was glowing orange under the desk at a quarter past nine as if it had been there since the autumn and saw no reason to stop. Tendai sat in the visitor's chair that did not tip, because she had sat in the other one in 2019 and remembered, and held the letter flat on her knee so it would not curl.

"Read it properly, love," Kath said, from behind a mug. "I'll know if you skim."

She read it properly. Trial Period: Sub-Principal Cello. Six weeks, Monday 4 January to Friday 12 February 2027. Three written assessments, at the end of weeks two, four and six — Friday 15 January, Friday 29 January, Friday 12 February — each to be completed and signed by the section principal and placed on the candidate's file. The candidate would be given a copy of each assessment on the day it was signed. No offer of contract would be made before the conclusion of the sixth week.

"No contract until the sixth," Kath said, as though Tendai might have missed it, and drank her tea.

"I can read."

"I know you can. I've had you on my list nine years. I'm saying it because people read that line and hear probably. It doesn't say probably."

Tendai turned the page. The second sheet was the procedure, and in the procedure, in the third paragraph, the section principal was not called the section principal any more. He was called the assessor. The assessor will observe the candidate at all services. The assessor may request a meeting with the chief executive at any point. The candidate may respond in writing to any assessment within five working days; the response will be placed on file alongside it.

She looked at the word for a while. It was a perfectly ordinary word. It was the sort of word a form used because a form could not use a person's name, and it sat on the page like a man standing just behind her chair.

"He knows he's called that, does he?"

"He's read it." Kath took the biro from behind her ear, looked at it, and put it back. "He reads everything. You'll find that out."

Tendai folded both sheets along the creases they had come with and put them in the inside pocket of her coat, against the black jumper she would play in. Nine years of letters from fixers, and every one of them had said a date, a fee, a seat and a call time, and had ended on the Saturday. This one ended on a Friday six weeks off and then did not say what happened. She had expected that to feel like more than she'd ever had. It felt, at a quarter past nine on a Monday, mainly like a page of rules written about her by people who had already met.

"Where's Marguerite's heating?" Kath said.

"Cupboard on the landing. I found it at midnight."

"She should have left you a note."

"She left me eleven notes. None of them were about the heating." Tendai stood up, and took the cello case by its handle from where it leaned against the steel shelving, between a brown folder labelled BRAHMS PC2 — VC and one labelled SCHUMANN 3 — VC in Dymo tape. Weeks ahead, already sitting there with her name not yet on them. "Is there anything else I should know?"

Kath considered her over the mug with the expression she kept for questions she was going to answer.

"Your stand's on the right of the podium, inside. He's usually in by half nine. The soup's leek and potato till Friday whatever the board says." She uncapped the biro in her fist. "And you've earned the chair, Tendai. Go and sit in it."

He was already on the platform when she came up from the corridor, sitting on the outside of the front desk with a cello between his knees and his reading glasses pushed up into his hair, talking to a bass player about Leeds United's defence in the tone of a man reading out a diagnosis. The hall had its house lights two notches up, which made it look like what it was: eleven hundred seats in faded red, gilt gone brown on the balcony fronts, and a stain on the ceiling that somebody at the October audition had told her dated from the roof in 2011, as if she might want to hold the hall to account for it.

Tuan Dinh saw her and stopped talking about the defence.

"Tendai," he said, and stood up properly, which most principals did not bother to do for a sub on a Monday. He was taller standing than she had pictured him behind the audition screen — six foot or near it, lean through the middle and broad at the shoulder, with a long neck and very short black hair kept close enough to the head that the curl in it only showed at the nape. His skin was a light golden brown under the stage working lights. He held out his hand and she shook it, and his grip was dry and brief and exactly firm enough. "Welcome. You found the stage door."

"Ray pointed."

"He does that. He pointed at me for two years after I'd started. I think he does it to everybody until he's decided you're staying." He sat down again and moved his case flat with his foot to make room for hers. "Have you been up to the canteen?"

"Not yet."

"Don't. It's leek and potato. It's leek and potato until the second week of February every year; I think it's a clause in somebody's contract. Last January Prisha sent an email to all staff about morale and the canteen sent back a tureen." He said it perfectly straight, setting his music in order on the stand as he talked: Sibelius on the left, Mozart under it, the bowings Kath had sent on Saturday folded open on the top. "My sister's kids came to the family concert at Christmas and the youngest asked me if I was allowed to eat anywhere else. I said I was a grown man and could eat where I liked. She asked why I didn't, then."

Tendai laughed before she meant to. He looked pleased about it in a small, unbothered way, as though he had placed a note where he wanted it and was moving on.

She sat down on the inside chair and opened her case. The cello came out into the warm platform air smelling of its own varnish and the inside of the case, and she took her time over the strings, the endpin, the rosin, because the time was hers and she had learned at twenty-five that whatever you did at a strange desk in the first ten minutes was what the section decided you were. She had done this in Bournemouth and in Cardiff and in Manchester and in a converted church in Hertfordshire with the heating off, nine years of strange desks. She knew precisely how she came across in the first ten minutes: ready. Readier than anyone else in the row. It was the only thing a deputy owned.

He pulled his glasses down out of his hair and put them on to look at the part, and she noticed that the moment the glasses were on he stopped talking.

Minjae Sohn came on at one minute past ten, compact and grey-shirted, with the single grey streak at his temple catching the working lights, and said "Morning. Sibelius. Second movement first, because I want to hear the bottom of the orchestra before anybody's warm enough to lie," in a flat Manchester voice that did not wait for an answer.

The A went round. The second movement opened the way it always did, on the timpani's held roll and then the long pizzicato line walking up out of the basses, and the cellos joining it, a slow procession of plucked notes in the dark, every one of which had to land on the floor in exactly the same place as the one before. It was the oldest test in the repertoire. Anyone could pluck a string; very few people could pluck forty of them in a row at the same walking pace while the woodwind made long sad shapes overhead and pretended not to be listening.

Tendai played it well. She knew she was playing it well. The line sat under her right hand like something she'd carried before and could carry blind, and beside her she felt rather than saw that Tuan's hand was doing the same work at the same weight, and that the two of them were landing together, and the sound of the front desk was one sound. It was a pleasure so clean and so professional that she would not have known how to explain it to anyone outside a section.

Minjae let them get to the bassoons and stopped them, and said something to the horns about breathing in the wrong bar, and said "Again from the top," and they did it again. It was better again. Then he took them on into the movement, through the storm in the middle of it, where the strings went at each other and the brass came over the top, and she put her bow into it, and it was good. She could hear it was good. She had been the best-prepared person in rooms like this for as long as she had been in them, and she was the best-prepared person in this one.

At the bar before the long rest, where Minjae turned to the woodwind and the cellos had a page to themselves to count, Tuan leaned the half inch towards her that the desk allowed.

"When the pizzicato comes back," he said, very quietly, not looking at her, looking at the stand, "you're going to rush it."

She turned her head.

He had not changed his face. He had two fingertips pressed to his temple just above the arm of his glasses, as though he were holding a thought in place there. "You'll come out of the storm still carrying the tempo you had in it," he said. "Everybody does. Your arm hasn't come down yet. Let it come down before you play."

Then the woodwind finished, and his hand came off his temple and went back to the strings, and he did not say anything else.

She sat with her bow across her knee and felt the heat come up her neck, and she would have given a great deal for it not to. She had not rushed it. She had not even arrived at it. He was talking about something she had not yet done, as though it had already been done and written down, and she found that she minded that much more than if she had played the whole movement badly and he had told her so afterwards. She had played it well. She had played the first statement perfectly, with him, beside him, and he had sat there listening to her arm.

Everybody does. As though she were everybody.

The storm ended. The orchestra came down out of it in the long held chord, and the timpani rolled again, and the basses began to walk.

She came in exactly where she meant to, and she meant to come in steady, measured, so dead in time that he would hear it and have to put his glasses back up into his hair and think about whether he'd been right. She placed the first note. She placed the second. She was listening so closely to herself not rushing that she had stopped listening to the basses at all, and somewhere around the sixth note she understood, with a drop in her stomach like missing a stair, that her right hand was half a hair ahead of the floor. Not much. Nobody in the hall would have heard it. Minjae did not stop them. The line went on walking and she pulled herself back onto it in the space of two notes, cleanly, as she had pulled herself back onto a hundred lines in a hundred strange halls.

Beside her, Tuan played on as if nothing had happened. He did not look at her. He did not have to. He'd told her the bar and the reason and the cure, and she had done it anyway, out of nothing better than wanting to prove that she would not, and the two of them knew it as surely as if he'd marked it in pencil.

She kept her eyes on the part and played the rest of the movement correctly, and she felt each correct note as a small public apology.

Minjae stopped them before the end and went back forty bars and rehearsed the brass for a quarter of an hour, and the cellos sat. Tendai took the chance to do what she always did in a pause at a strange desk, which was to listen to the section behind her without turning round: four more desks of it, eight players, a slow shuffle of feet and endpins and someone at the back eating a mint as quietly as a mint can be eaten.

When he brought the strings back in it was at the bar before the pizzicato returned, to give the basses a run at it, and he said, "Cellos, with the basses, please, this is all one instrument," and lifted his hands.

She was ready. She had been ready for a quarter of an hour, and this time her arm had come down; she had felt it come down, and she was not going to be early. She breathed with Minjae's hands, as she would have done in any hall in the country, as every deputy is trained to do: watch the stick, take the stick's breath, land on the stick.

And she was alone.

Not wrong. Not by much. But the eight players behind her had not taken Minjae's breath. They had taken a fractionally later one, and they had all taken the same one, and the note they placed was a hair after hers in a way that made hers sound, for the length of that single pluck, like a woman who'd walked into a room before she was asked. By the second note she was with them. By the third the section was one sound again, walking.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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