The Half-Second Before

Amara had come tonight to sit inside the building before it decided about her. That was the one reason, and she was not going to say it out loud to anybody.

She had found the place on the map three weeks ago — the bar under Ashgrove Hall, called the Undercroft because somebody in 1968 had thought that was funny, and it had the ceiling to prove it: brick barrel vaults so low that the tall lamps had been abandoned in favour of candles in jars, and a smell of cold stone and spilled bitter that no amount of Tuesday cleaning had ever got out.

She had a half of something dark that she was not drinking, and the corner table with her back to the brick, and her case on the bench beside her like a person she had brought. Above her head, somewhere past a metre of Victorian masonry, was the stage. She had walked past the stage door twice on her way in and had not gone through it, because the sign said Artists and Staff, and she was neither, and she had spent four years learning exactly how far into a room she was allowed to go.

She had practised for five hours that afternoon in a rehearsal room off Kirkgate that cost eleven pounds an hour, which was robbery, and she had run the Strauss twice more than she needed and the Beethoven scherzo until her right arm had started making decisions without her. She knew all the excerpts. She had known all the excerpts for eleven days. Over-preparation was not a virtue and she had long since stopped pretending it was; it was just what she did with the hours instead of thinking about how many auditions this made.

Her mother had rung at six, from the kitchen in Handsworth, with the extractor fan going.

And this one is where?

Leeds, Mum.

And it's a proper job? A salary job, with the pension and everything?

It's a chair. It's a permanent chair.

A pause with frying in it. Her mother had never once said the thing directly. She had a repertoire of adjacent questions instead — and how many people are going for it, and your cousin Kwabena has bought a flat, and are you eating — and Amara had answered all of them in the voice she used for it, which was cheerful and about four per cent thinner than her real one. A diary and a suitcase. Deputy work, cover work, a fortnight with the BBC Phil when somebody's wrist went, three months on a cruise contract in her twenties that her father still brought up at Christmas as though it had been a scandal. Her family did not think she had failed. That was the difficult part. They thought she was doing an unusual and impressive thing and they wanted, gently and continuously, to know when it was going to turn into an ordinary one.

At twenty past nine a man came down the stairs from the street, not the stage door, and stood at the bar and did not look around the room the way men did when they came into a bar alone. He looked at the taps. He said something short to the barman, got a small glass of red, and took the table one along from hers, which was the wrong table — the room was two-thirds empty, and there were six better ones — and sat down and did not take his phone out.

That was the thing she noticed. Nobody sat still any more.

He was compact and unhurried, mid-thirties or a bit past, with black hair going grey at one temple in a single streak, and he sat the way people sit when they have been told all their lives that they fidget: entirely, deliberately still, both forearms on the table. He looked, briefly, at her case.

"That's a viola," he said.

"It is."

"You can tell from the shape of the case. Everyone thinks you can't."

"Everyone thinks it's a small cello."

"Everyone is a fool," he said, without any warmth in it at all, and drank some of his wine, and went back to looking at nothing.

She waited for the next line, because there was always a next line, and it was always some version of so are you playing here, which was a question with a trapdoor under it. She had four different answers ready depending on how much she wanted the conversation to continue.

He didn't ask. After nearly a minute he said, "What can't you listen to?"

Amara turned her head.

"Sorry?"

"There's a piece you can't listen to." He said it as a statement of ordinary fact, the way you would say her coat was wet. "Everybody who carries one of those has one. I'm not being clever. I'm asking because it's more interesting than what you do."

She should have deflected. She had four years of muscle for it — the pleasant sideways answer, the small self-deprecating thing that made the other person feel witty, thank you so much for the feedback, that's really helpful, I'll take that away. She could feel the shape of it in her mouth.

"Britten," she said instead. "Lachrymae."

Something in his face went absolutely blank. She had time to think that she had bored him, and then she understood that it wasn't that at all; it was the face of a man listening so hard that he had stopped spending anything on his expression.

"Say why," he said.

"Because he gives you the tune last."

"Yes."

"Twenty-odd minutes of variations on a song, and you don't get the song." She heard her own voice doing something it had not done in months, which was speeding up. "You get scraps of it. You get the bones of it in the bass, you get one phrase upside down, you get that awful bit where the whole thing goes flat on its face — and the audience is sitting there being told, over and over, there is a beautiful thing and it is not for you yet — and then at the very end he lets it arrive, whole, in D major, and everyone weeps, and I want to put my bow through the stand."

"Because they didn't earn it."

"Because he didn't make them wait for a reason. He made them wait because waiting is the piece." She stopped. "That's not fair. It is a reason."

"It's the best reason there is," the man said. "It's also cruel. Those aren't opposites."

She looked at him properly for the first time. Light-brown skin, a working man's short nails, a very good and very plain grey shirt, no ring, no watch, no anything. He had not smiled once.

"All right," she said. "Yours."

"The same piece."

"You're taking mine."

"I'm not taking anything, it's a coincidence and it's an unlikely one, and I'd rather say it than pretend to like something else to be polite." He turned the glass a quarter-turn on the table and left it there. "There was a player I knew who played it very well. I told her the truth about how she was playing the sixth variation."

"And?"

"And I was right," he said. "She stopped playing it. Not that week. Over about two years." He looked up. "So now when I hear the tune arrive at the end I think about the fact that being right isn't the same as being any use to anybody, and it takes me the rest of the evening to get over it."

Amara sat back against the cold brick.

"That's a horrible story."

"It's an accurate one."

"Did you apologise?"

"I did. She said there was nothing to apologise for, which was worse." He almost, very slightly, moved his mouth. "You asked."

"I did ask."

He moved his glass to her table, which he did without asking and without any performance about it, simply picking it up and setting it down in front of the empty chair as though the two tables had been a clerical error. Then he sat, and said, "Go on about the sixth variation. You have a view."

She had a view. She had, it turned out, four hours of views.

They did the sixth variation, and then whether the Dowland ought to be audible in the second one or whether audible ruined it, and whether the piece was better with piano or with the strings, and he was wrong about that, obviously and completely wrong, and said so at length in a flat unbothered voice that made her laugh out loud for the first time in about a fortnight. They did tempo. They did a violist she admired and a violist he thought was overrated, and when she defended the second one he did not concede, he simply said, "Then play me the phrase you mean," and she sang it at him, badly, in a bar, with two of the barman's mates looking over, and he listened to eight bars of her tuneless singing with total attention and then said, "All right. I hear it. I still think she rushes, but I hear it."

All right, I hear it. Four years of rooms, and she could not remember the last time somebody had done that.

At some point the candles got shorter. At some point the barman put a bowl of chips down between them that neither of them had ordered, and they ate them, and the conversation went sideways into his mother's restaurant in Manchester and the word hobby, said the way parents say it, and Amara said, "Mine says and is it a proper job," and he said, "Mine said and after this you'll get a real one, and then she came to a thing I did and cried in the car park and never said it again, so it worked out, but it took eleven years," and she said, "Eleven," and he said, "It's not a competition," and she said, "It's four for me and it's absolutely a competition," and he laughed — once, low, genuinely caught out — and she felt it land somewhere structural.

He did not ask what she did. She noticed him not doing it, the way you notice a step that isn't there. Twice the conversation went right up to the edge of it and both times he turned it somewhere else, and by the second time she understood that he had decided something about the evening too, and had decided it early.

She gave him nothing. No surname. No orchestra, no agency, no actually I'm here for — and the thing that astonished her, sitting on a cold bench under a hall she wanted more than she wanted to admit, was how much lighter she was without it. Every room for four years had been an assessment. Every conversation had been an audition running quietly underneath the words: is she good, is she easy, is she going to be difficult, would she fit. And here was a man with an infuriating opinion about the piano version who had no idea whether she was any good at all, and no way of finding out, and was arguing with her anyway.

Nobody in this conversation was deciding anything about her.

At ten past one the barman began stacking chairs with the special loudness of a man who wants his bed, and they came up the stairs into a Leeds September that smelled of rain on warm pavement, and stood on the corner by the stage door under the sign that said Artists and Staff.

"I'm going that way," he said, and nodded north. "I'd like you to come with me. I'd rather say that than stand here doing the other thing."

She thought about tomorrow. Tomorrow was a curtain and a number and a piece of carpet laid over the boards so that nobody could hear whose shoes were whose, and she had known all the excerpts for eleven days, and there was nothing left in the world she could usefully do to it between now and then.

"No names," she said.

He considered that for about two seconds, which was, she thought, exactly two seconds longer than most men would have needed to say yes to anything.

"No names," he agreed, and put his hand out, palm up, and waited to be met rather than reaching, and she looked at it for a moment and then put her hand in it, and they went north.

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

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