The Inside Chair

The phone went at twenty past eight on Sunday evening, which meant it was work, and the work turned out to be a man she had never met asking for her by name. Nobody Marcia loved rang after eight on a Sunday; her mother rang at four, after chapel and dinner, and her brother texted, and everybody else had learned years ago that a freelance diary did not take kindly to being surprised.

She was at the kitchen table with a pupil's Grade Six scales book open and a pencil through her fingers, marking the arpeggios the girl kept rushing. The viola was on the sofa in its open case, loosened, because she had played for two hours after lunch and it deserved an evening off even if she did not. The radiator under the window knocked twice, the way it did when the boiler thought about its life choices. Outside, the street was wet and orange and entirely quiet.

The screen said Kath — Ashgrove.

Marcia looked at it for one ring. She had done two dates for the Ashgrove in four years, both at the back of the section, both a Mahler where they needed ten and had nine, and Kath had been efficient and warm and had called her "love" in a way that did not require anything of her. It was not a number that rang on a Sunday.

"Marcia Linton."

"Marcia, love, it's Kath at the Ashgrove. I know what time it is. Have you got your diary in front of you?"

"It's in my bag."

"Get it out. I'll wait. I'd rather you looked than told me."

That was a good sign or a bad one, and Marcia could not yet tell which. She put the pencil down on the scales book, crossed to the hook by the door where her bag hung and took out the diary: A5, black, week-to-a-view, the same make she had bought every December for eight years from the same stationer on Bridlesmith Gate. People laughed at it. People also double-booked themselves and lost clients, and she never had.

"Go on."

"This coming week. Monday to Saturday. Rehearsals ten till one every day, sectionals Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons, general on the Saturday afternoon and the concert Saturday night. It's a live broadcast. Radio Three."

Marcia opened the diary at the week. Monday was blank, because Monday was her practice day and she guarded it more fiercely than any paid thing. Tuesday: Hollis ×3, 4–6.30. Wednesday: Hollis ×2, 4–5.30. Priya 6. Thursday: Clifton Qt coaching 7–9. Friday blank. Saturday blank. Sunday, in pencil, Mum?

"What's the programme?"

"First half's a Haydn and the Walton. Second half's Don Quixote."

Marcia closed her eyes briefly. She had heard Don Quixote perhaps forty times and played it never. It was one of those pieces a violist could go a whole career without being in the right chair for, because the solo cello was the knight and the solo viola was his squire, and when an orchestra did it they did it with their own principal and their own principal's desk partner and did not ring anybody on a Sunday.

"Which chair?"

"That's why I'm ringing you and not the list." Kath let a breath out down the line, the sound of a woman who had been in a building since seven in the morning and was now, presumably, at her own kitchen table. "Fenella's off. First leave she's taken in nineteen years, and she's taking the whole week, and nobody in this building would have dared suggest she didn't. So we've a guest principal in. Rotterdam. He does the Sancho Panza. And he's asked for you, by name, to sit inside him on the front desk."

The radiator knocked again. Marcia found she had put one finger flat on the page of the diary, on Tuesday, as though the week might slide off the table if she let go of it.

"Who is he?"

"Chew Wen Kai. Principal in Rotterdam, nine years. Very good, by all accounts. Minjae wanted him and got him." A pause, and the sound of paper. "He sent me your name in an email on Thursday. Marcia Linton, viola, Nottingham. I had to go and look up which Marcia Linton, and there's only you."

"I've never met him."

"He didn't say you had. He just said he wanted you beside him for the week and asked if I could find you."

Marcia said nothing. She was aware of the kitchen around her as a set of facts: the tap that dripped unless you turned it past where it wanted to stop, the scales book, the fruit bowl with two lemons and a key in it, the viola lying in green velvet with its strings slack. Eight years ago she had stood in a principal's office in another city and been told, very kindly, that she was moving back two desks for the season because the section needed her steadiness further back, and she had understood in that moment that she would spend the rest of her working life being put where she was useful by people who had not asked her. She had resigned the following March. She had not been placed anywhere since. She took the dates she chose and sat where the booking said and went home, and the booking was a thing she had said yes to, which made all the difference.

This was the best week anyone had offered her in a year. It was also, before she had said a word, already arranged.

"Tell me the rest," she said. "You've got the voice."

"I have got the voice." Kath sounded almost pleased to be caught. "All right. You'll want it straight, so here it is straight. Fenella being off, the section expected to move up. Cerys Vaughan's on the second desk and she's been there a long time, and everybody assumed she'd go inside the guest for the week and everybody behind her would shuffle forward a chair, and we'd book a deputy for the back. That's how it would normally go."

"And instead you booked a deputy for the front."

"Instead the guest asked for you, and it's a broadcast week, and a guest principal who's asked for one specific thing in a broadcast week is a hard man to say no to. I'll be honest with you, I didn't try very hard. It was one extra viola either way. Either I'm paying a deputy at the back or I'm paying you at the front. Same money. Same number of chairs." Another pause. "The section won't see it like that."

"No."

"Cerys won't say anything. She's not like that. But other people will say it for her, and you'll feel it on Monday. I'd sooner you heard it from me tonight than worked it out at ten o'clock with the oboe giving the A."

Marcia looked at the diary. She liked Kath for that more than she had expected to. Most fixers told you the fee and the call time and let you find the weather for yourself.

"Why me?" she said. "Did he say?"

"He said he'd heard you. I didn't ask where. I've got forty-one players to confirm for Monday and I'm not in the habit of asking a guest to explain himself."

Heard her where? Marcia ran through it in the time it took Kath to breathe. The Ashgrove Mahlers, from the back, where nobody heard anything individual and that was rather the point. A Handel in Derby. The Lichfield festival two summers ago, a chamber orchestra, second desk, a hall with a dead acoustic and forty people in it. None of those would put a name into the head of a principal in Rotterdam. None of those would make a man send an email to a fixer he had never met asking for one violist out of however many hundred there were in the north of England.

"Fee?" she said, because it was the next question, and asking it bought her a moment.

Kath told her. It was the section rate for the No. 2 chair plus the broadcast fee, and it was more than she would make in a month of Tuesday and Wednesday teaching at Hollis. "And I've a flat for you. Quebec Street, city centre, five minutes' walk from the hall. It's a let I use for guests when the hotel's full. It's clean. It's got a kettle that works and a bed that doesn't, but you'll be tired enough by Wednesday not to care."

"That's generous."

"It's cheaper than you driving up and down the M1 for six days and turning up grey. I've done the sums, love. I'm not being kind."

Marcia almost laughed. She took the pencil back up off the scales book and held it over Tuesday.

This was the part she had built her life around: the minute in which she decided. Not the offer, which came from outside; not the music, which was the music; but the minute between being asked and saying yes, which belonged to her and which nobody else had ever again been permitted to spend on her behalf. She had had eight years of those minutes. She was aware of wanting to hold this one for longer than it needed, and aware that the wanting was mostly pride.

"I've got teaching Tuesday and Wednesday," she said. "And a quartet I coach on Thursday nights. I'll move them."

"Do you want me to—"

"No. They're mine. I'll ring round tonight."

She rubbed out Hollis ×3 and wrote it on the Monday of the following week, small, with a question mark, because the head of music there was a reasonable woman who would take a Monday instead if she was asked nicely before breakfast. She rubbed out Hollis ×2 and Priya 6 and wrote them on the Tuesday after. The Clifton quartet she moved to the Sunday afternoon; four sixth-formers would complain about losing a Sunday and then turn up early, because they always did. The rubbings-out gathered in grey curls on the page. She blew them off onto the floor.

Then she wrote across the whole week, Monday to Saturday, in capitals: ASHGROVE — D.Q. — No. 2.

"I'll do it," she said. "On two conditions."

"Go on."

"The contract comes from you. Not from him, not through him. You booked me. If anyone in that section asks how I came to be sitting there, the answer is the fixer rang a deputy and the deputy said yes, because that is what happened."

"That is what happened," Kath agreed. "Fine. And?"

"And if at any point this week anybody wants me somewhere other than the chair you've just offered me — him, the conductor, the committee, anybody — I'm told first. By you. Before it's decided. Not after, and not by finding the stand's been moved."

There was a small silence on the line. Marcia heard, very faintly, a television in Kath's house, and a man's voice asking something, and Kath's hand going over the phone to say In a minute.

"That's fair," Kath said, when she came back. "I'll put it in the email, if you like, so you've got it."

"I'd like."

"Done. I'll send the parts tonight. It's Fenella's copy of the Strauss scanned, so her pencil's all over it, which is either a blessing or a warning. The bowings are hers. You'll be turning for him through the solos, so you'll want to know where the turns fall before you're doing them live with the red light on. Monday, ten o'clock, stage door's round the back on the yard. Ray's on. Tell him who you are and he'll call you love and let you in."

"Everybody calls me love in Leeds."

"Everybody calls everybody love in Leeds. Don't take it personally." A beat. "Marcia. For what it's worth. I looked you up, after his email. You're very good. I'd have booked you for something eventually without anybody asking."

"But not the front desk."

"Probably not the front desk," said Kath, who did not tell lies when a shorter truth would do. "Goodnight, love. Get some sleep."

The line went. Marcia sat with the phone face-down on the diary and looked at the week she had just written in capitals.

She rang Hollis's head of music and got voicemail and left a message she made sound easy. She texted Priya's mother. She messaged the Clifton quartet's group chat and watched three thumbs-up arrive inside a minute and the fourth, from the cellist, arrive as a single violin, which was as near as his keyboard came to a cello and which she chose to take as a yes. Then she put the pupil's scales book away, because she was not going to do that tonight after all, and went to the sofa and tightened the bow and brought the viola up to pitch, very quietly, the A first and the rest down from it.

She did not play the Strauss. She did not have it yet, and she would not learn a piece from memory of recordings; that way lay other people's phrasing in your hands. She played slow scales in thirds instead, in the tuning she had been taught at eleven by a woman in a cold church hall in Sneinton who smelled of peppermints, and let the flat settle round the sound. Her mother had bought the first viola from a catalogue because it was cheaper than a violin, and her father had driven her to lessons in the car on his day off, and neither of them had ever once told her where to sit in a room. It had not occurred to her until much later that this was unusual.

At eleven she loosened the bow again and closed the case.

The email came at five to midnight while she was brushing her teeth. Three attachments, and a paragraph from Kath that said, in plain words, Contract via Ashgrove Symphony, fixer: K. and Any change to your seating this week will be put to you by me before it is made. Marcia read it twice and felt something in her shoulders let go that she had not known was held.

She opened the first attachment on her phone in bed. Fenella's viola part: a grey scan, the notes slightly skewed, and everywhere, in a small decisive hand, the pencil. Bowings. Fingerings. A circled pp with REALLY written under it. At one of the long solo passages, in the principal's line, the word Sancho and nothing else, and a bar later, in the lower margin, where the inside player would see it with the page in her hand, TURN EARLY.

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

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