Four Bars In

Ifeoma had been praised for the wrong thing since she was sixteen, and in a fortnight a panel of four in London would have thirty minutes to find it. Before that there was the visiting soloist, who for the next two weeks would sit on a stool in Wray Hall taking other people's playing apart in front of a paying audience, and who would hear what he heard in her whether she wanted him to or not.

She came in out of a corridor that smelled of wet wool and put the cello case down flat rather than leaning it, because Auld had told her in her first term that a case left standing against a wall is a case on the floor in ten minutes, and four years later she still could not lean one anywhere. His room was on the ground floor at the river end, and the radiator under the window had two settings, off and August.

"Sit down," Auld said. "You're not playing. I've got Sillitoe at half nine and he's going to make me want to open a window."

She sat. He had cycled in from Bramhope again, which she knew because the high colour was still in his face and there were two dark commas of rain on the shoulders of his jumper, and because his overtrousers were hung over the back of the second chair, dripping companionably onto the parquet. Through the window behind him the Aire went past the colour of strong tea, and on the far bank the brown back of Ashgrove Hall stood up out of the wet with its fire escape zigzagged down it, and somebody's van was unloading timpani cases into the yard at eight twenty in the morning, which meant the orchestra was doing something big that week and somebody over there had been up since six.

"A fortnight," Auld said.

"Fourteen days."

"Fourteen days, then, if you're going to be exact about it, which you are." He turned his mug round on the desk without drinking from it. "Monday the twenty-sixth. Wigmore Hall, a panel of four, thirty minutes of music you've had in your hands for two years, and a man from the scheme who will decide about you in the first page and spend the rest of it checking whether he was right."

"I know."

"You know. Good." He looked at the list on his desk, which was the residency list, nine names printed on a sheet with times beside them, and a photocopied photograph of a man in an open-necked shirt in the top corner. "So. Lazaro."

"Tuesday. Ten o'clock."

"Tuesday, ten o'clock, and twelve hundred people will have walked past the poster in the foyer by then." He said it without any particular bitterness, the way he said most things, as a man reporting the weather in a country he had lived in a long time. "Right. This is the bit where I give you advice you've already decided not to take, so let me at least get it said in the right order."

Ifeoma kept her face where it was. Her mouth had a habit of moving before she had decided to let it, and she had spent fourteen years putting a hand on the back of its neck.

"Play him the Kodály," Auld said. "Play it the way we built it. You and I have had that first movement apart on this floor twice and put it back together twice, and the version you've got now is the version that's going to London. He will say something. He is a soloist and he is being paid to say something, and there will be a hall full of people who have each handed over five pounds specifically to hear a visiting name say something, and he knows that better than anybody in the building. Let him say it. Nod. Thank him. And then come back on Wednesday unaltered."

"Unaltered," she said.

"Unaltered." He picked up a pencil and put it down again. "Ifeoma, I have seen this twice. Not with you. In 'ninety-eight a man came through here for ten days and told a violinist of mine her left hand was lazy, and he was not wrong, and she went away and rebuilt it, and she was eleven months getting back to where she'd been the morning he said it. Eleven months. Which would have been a fine investment if she hadn't had an audition in March."

"What happened in March?"

"She came fourth," Auld said. "Out of four. She teaches in Harrogate now and she's perfectly happy and that is not the point I'm making."

The radiator knocked twice and settled. Ifeoma looked at her hands, which were large, and which had been described to her at eleven as an advantage by a woman in Peckham who had put a cello in front of her and told her to stand up out of the floor and not to sit into it, and she thought that what Auld was saying was sensible, and kind, and that a good teacher would say it, and that he was tired in a specific way she had learned to recognise in the fourth year — the tiredness of a man protecting a department against an entire profession that keeps flying in.

"He's good, though," she said.

"He's very good. That's the trouble. If he were a fraud I'd send you in with a book." Auld leaned back and the chair complained. "Nobody's asking you to close your ears. Go to all nine of them, sit at the back, take whatever you like out of what he says to other people. That's free. That costs you nothing." He tapped the desk twice with one freckled finger, on costs and on nothing. "What isn't free is having a stranger put his hands in your bow arm thirteen days before a panel. He'll be at an airport on the twenty-fourth. You'll be on a platform on the twenty-sixth. One of those two people has to live in the consequences and it isn't him."

She said, "I understand."

"You've said I know and I understand and neither of them is yes."

"No," she agreed.

Auld laughed, which he did rarely and all at once, and reached for the mug at last. "Go on. Get a seat at the back before Dunsmore's lot take the whole row. And, Ifeoma — the Kodály's ready. Whatever else is true, it's ready. That's not me being kind, I haven't got the time."

She said thank you and picked the case up off the floor by the neck strap, and got as far as the door, and the thing she had come in wanting to say sat in her chest where it had been sitting since the list went up in December, unformed and with no first word to it, and she went out without saying it because there was nothing to say. She wanted something from the fortnight. She could not have written down what it was.

Wray Hall held two hundred and forty in raked rows, in the fake-Georgian plasterwork that a wool family had paid for in 1887 to prove something to Bradford, and this morning it held maybe a hundred and eighty of them and every one of those was looking at a bare platform with two chairs on it, a stand, a piano, and a strip of gaffer tape marking where the cello spike was to go so that it did not go through the boards. Ifeoma took the aisle seat four rows from the back. Second-years filled the middle in a block, with the bright pink-cheeked girl from Carlisle on the end of the row with her phone already face up on her knee, because everyone had a phone face up on their knee, and behind the second-years a row of people in coats who were not students at all: two women with programme sheets from the box office, an old man with a stick, somebody's mother. Five pounds. It was on the poster.

Lazaro came out at four minutes past ten from the door at the side of the platform, which no soloist used, carrying his own stool and talking.

He was shorter than the photocopy, broader, with heavy forearms under rolled sleeves and black hair that had been cut by somebody without a mirror, and his skin was a good deal warmer and browner than the publicity shot allowed, and he was talking to the boy following him out with the Brahms — talking about the weather at Manchester airport, then about a hire car, then about the fact that somewhere in the building there was a machine that made three different coffees all of which tasted like the same coffee — and he went on talking while he put his stool down, while the boy tuned, while the pianist found the page, while a hundred and eighty people sat there in their coats waiting to be impressed. It was genial. It was completely without ceremony. Ifeoma watched it and thought, without approving of the thought, that a man could get all the way through a career on a voice like that and never be asked a question.

Then the boy lifted the bow, and Lazaro stopped.

Not paused. Stopped, entirely, with his mouth closed and his hands flat on his thighs and his eyes somewhere near the bridge of the instrument rather than the player's face, and the change came off the platform and over the rows like a window being opened in a hot room. Ifeoma felt the back of her own neck cool. The second-years put their phones down. Nobody had asked them to.

The Brahms began, the E minor, the long climbing first subject that everybody's second year has in their hands by Christmas, and the boy played it well and carefully and slightly loudly, and got eleven or twelve bars in, and Lazaro said, "Stop there, please. Do the first three again and don't let me hear the bow change."

He did the first three again.

"Once more, and this time I'll tell you where it is." Lazaro leaned forward with his forearms on his knees. "There. Just before the change, you lift. Half an inch, maybe less, and you do it because you're being careful, and the lift takes the weight off the string and so the note has to be started again instead of continuing. You can hear it as a little shine on the front of the note. Put your arm down and let it stay down and the phrase will go over the change without you doing anything at all."

The boy tried it, and it worked, and the room heard it work.

"Yes," Lazaro said. "That's the whole of it. Again from the top and be boring about it."

It took three minutes. Ifeoma sat four rows from the back with her hands quiet in her lap and her heart going quite hard, for no reason she could have explained to Auld or to anybody else, because nothing had happened to her.

She stayed for the other two, walked home over the bridge in horizontal rain with the case on her back, ate a bowl of rice and stew standing up at the counter, and took the cello out at half past four in the front room of the flat in Burley with the curtains open onto the street.

She did not practise the passage that needed practising. She practised the one she was proudest of: the descent from bar forty-three, the place where the movement finally gets off the leash — Kodály's bottom two strings wound down a semitone to B and F sharp so that the whole instrument sits lower and darker under her hands than an instrument should, and the line comes down through it like water finding the fastest way off a hill. She had been playing it this way since she was sixteen — since the afternoon in Birmingham when a man on the panel had used the word electrifying about a Haydn in front of her mother, and she had understood something then, quickly and privately and without putting any words to it: that if you go fast enough the sound arrives before the question does, and that it works on everything, and that nobody ever asks. She had never said it out loud. Not to Auld in four years, not to the two teachers before him, not to her mother on the phone on a Sunday, not to the girls she had shared a kitchen with for three years at nineteen.

She played it eleven times. It was very fast and it was very clean and by the last one her right shoulder was up around her ear where it had lived since she was sixteen, and the sound was loud and bright and going past her like a train through a station, and she put the bow down in the dark with the streetlight coming in orange across the floor and thought, in the same flat voice she used for tuning: a fortnight. Fourteen days. Come back unaltered.

She went to bed at one and sleep was a while coming, and what kept her awake was not the audition. It was a man on a platform closing his mouth.

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

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