What He Heard

Noelle had asked for the back desk of the seconds because nobody ever looks at the back desk.

The last splint of the day was a mallet finger on a roofer from Garforth, and it went on at a quarter to six.

"Don't take it off," Noelle said. "Not to wash, not to sleep, not to show your brother-in-law. If you take it off and that fingertip drops, even once, we start the six weeks again from today."

"Even once?"

"Even once." She pressed the edge of the thermoplastic down along the back of his middle phalanx while it was still soft enough to take the shape, held it, and felt it go from warm to set under her thumb. "Take it off for one look, put it back on, and you'll have to come back and look at my face for another six weeks. Nobody wants that."

He laughed, which was what she had been after, because a man who laughed held still. She trimmed the strap, rounded the corner so it would not catch on his sleeve, and wrote the date on the card in capitals so his wife could read it. When he had gone she wiped down the bench, emptied the water bath, wound the lead of the heat gun the way the unit liked it wound, and went to the sink.

She scrubbed for longer than she needed to. She always did, at the end of a clinic. The hospital soap smelled of nothing pretending to be lemons, and the water ran hot over the backs of her hands and the webs between her fingers, and she watched her left hand under it the way she would have watched anyone's: the long flexors standing up along the forearm when she made a fist, the clean short nails, the pad of the third finger, which looked exactly like the pads of the others and was not.

She dried her hands, took her hair down out of its clinic knot, and put it straight back up again into a lower one for the evening, because the evening was going to want her neck clear of it.

The violin was in the boot of the car. It had been in the boot since seven that morning, which she knew was bad for it, and she had parked in the shade of the multi-storey's concrete on purpose and checked twice at lunchtime that the shade was still there. Eighteen months it had lived on the chair in her back bedroom in Chapeltown, coming out of its case for forty minutes a day under a protocol she had written herself and kept in a ring binder, with a mirror on the wardrobe door and a mute on the bridge so that next door would not have to know. It had not been in a car since 2017. It had certainly not been in a car on its way to be played in front of other violinists.

It was four minutes from the LGI to Portland Street, and she took twelve, because she went round the loop twice.

The stage door was where she remembered it, under a sign that said Artists and Staff and a ledge with a pigeon on it, the pigeon very possibly the same one. The yard smelled of bins and frying. Somebody had chained a bicycle to the drainpipe with a lock that cost more than the bicycle.

Inside, behind a desk with a crossword on it and a little television showing the regional news with the sound off, a white-haired man looked up at her case before he looked up at her.

"All right, love."

"Noelle Allardyce. I'm in the memorial. Seconds."

He did not look at any list. He lifted the biro he had been holding over seven across and pointed it down the corridor to his left, and then, when she did not move quickly enough, made a small turning motion with it at the end, like a man showing someone the route to a car park. "Players' room. Doors with the hole in. Kath's about."

"Thank you."

"Ray," he said, to the crossword.

The corridor was painted the yellowish cream of every institution she had ever worked in, with a scarred board running along both walls at the height where cases knocked, and it smelled of radiators and rosin and, faintly, of the yard. She heard the room before she reached it. A tuning A, given and taken up and argued with. Somebody's laugh that she knew, and could not put a name to, and then could: a cellist from the year above, a big man who had laughed exactly like that in the canteen at the Calverley when he was nineteen. Her stomach did something she would have charted, on a patient, as a sympathetic response.

She put her shoulder to the double doors and went in.

The fixer found her before anyone else did, which was presumably what fixers were for. Late fifties, a fleece with a lanyard over it, a spare biro tucked behind one ear and a working one in her hand, and a pile of black folders under her arm with white Dymo strips on their spines.

"You're Noelle." It was not a question. "Kath. We've been emailing. You're the one wanted the back."

"I am."

"You're the only one who did, love. I've had forty people tell me where they sat in 2015 and why they ought to be nearer the front now, and one person ask to go further back." Kath sorted the folders by touch and pulled one without looking at its label, and held it out. The strip on the spine said 2ND VLN — DESK 7. "Seventh desk, outside. You're on your own till Thursday, your partner's in Manchester. Bowings are in. They're Hilary's, mostly. Some of them are from about 1990 and you'll know which."

Noelle took the folder. The weight of it in her hand was the weight of every folder she had ever been given at the start of a term, and that was not something she had prepared for, so she looked at the label instead.

"Thank you for this."

"Don't thank me, I've only put you where you asked." Kath was already looking past her at somebody coming in with a double bass and no idea where to go. "Plan's on the board. Tea's in the urn on the left. The one on the right's been broken since before my time, there's a card on it, don't believe the card." And she was gone, with a hand up and a "Not there, love, you'll have the door off" for the bass.

The plan was on the noticeboard between a curling union poster and a photograph of an orchestra in 1998, everybody in it squinting. Somebody had ruled it by hand in pencil on a sheet of A3 with a steel rule, and filled it in with names in black biro in square, unhurried capitals: the firsts in their desks, the seconds behind them, the violas, the cellos, the basses along the back. Noelle found herself at the bottom of the seconds, ALLARDYCE, on her own. She found the leader, a name she half knew from a radio broadcast. She found the cellist with the laugh.

At the top of the sheet, in the middle, where the podium was, there was a small rectangle with a name in it, and the name was K. TAKEDA.

Kath's email had said conductor TBC. Noelle had read TBC and thought about it for exactly as long as it took to decide that it would be some kind, grey man from the Calverley staff who had known Hilary for forty years, and that she would not have to look at him much from the back. She had read it twice since. She had not once let it be anything else.

She stood and looked at the rectangle as if it were a scan, and it said what it said.

The room went on around her. The urn on the left sighed. A woman behind her said, "I'm sorry, are you—? It's Noelle, isn't it?" and Noelle turned with her face already arranged.

It was a violist she had shared a stand with in a second-year orchestral project, now with reading glasses pushed up on her head and a baby photograph for a phone screen, which she showed Noelle within half a minute, as though it settled something. "We all wondered where you went," the woman said. "You just—" and she made a small gesture with her free hand, a flat little opening of the fingers, gone, and laughed, kindly, and did not ask.

Nobody asked. That was the remarkable thing, over the next ten minutes. Three more of them came over — a horn player, a girl from the firsts who was now a woman from the firsts with a London accent she had not had at the Calverley, the cellist with the laugh, who hugged her without asking and smelled of rain and cigarettes he had certainly given up — and every one of them wore the same expression, a sort of delighted astonishment with a polite space in the middle of it where the question went. Noelle! God. What are you doing now? Hand therapy, at the LGI. No! That's amazing. Do you still play? A bit. Well, obviously, you're here. They were glad to see her. She could tell they were glad. They had simply arrived, separately and without discussing it, at the conclusion that whatever had happened in the spring of 2017 was hers and not theirs, and the courtesy of it went through her like a draught.

She said the right things. She heard herself say them in the voice she used for patients' relatives in the corridor.

It was ten to seven by the clock over the pigeonholes.

There was a door behind her, and a corridor beyond it, and Ray at the end of the corridor with his biro, and Portland Street, and her car in the multi-storey four minutes away. She could be on the Chapeltown Road by seven. Kath would ring, and she would tell Kath something true and brief — that she was not well, which would be true in the way it was always true, near enough — and Kath would find somebody for the back desk of the seconds by Thursday, because Kath had the face of a woman who could find somebody for anything by Thursday. Nobody had seen her face when she read the plan. The violist with the baby would tell someone, and they would all have another small polite space where a question went, and it would close over in a week.

She knew exactly how it was done. She had done it once before, and it had taken one afternoon, and it had lasted ten years.

She found she had her left thumb on the pad of her third finger and was rubbing it, slow circles, the way she had been told by three separate people over a decade that she did when she was thinking. She made herself stop. She looked at the folder in her right hand, at DESK 7, at the white strip and the black capitals punched into it one letter at a time by a woman who did not have time to do it and had done it anyway.

She had not come for him. She had come to find out whether the hand would hold with seventy other people playing round it and no mirror on a wardrobe door, which was a question about load and nothing else, and to sit at the back of a hall while people said Hilary Sackville's name out loud, and see what she felt, and write it down. Neither of those questions had a name at the top of a seating plan in them.

The pad of her third finger was warm where she had been rubbing it. She put the folder under her arm, and went and got her violin.

The stage was bigger than she remembered and shabbier, house lights up a couple of notches so the eleven hundred seats in the stalls showed their faded red, and the balcony fronts had the brownish gilt of something that had been grand once and was now merely used. The air was warmer than the corridor. Chairs and stands stood in their curves under the lights, and players were coming up into them in ones and twos with the self-conscious bustle of people who had not sat in an orchestra together for years and were trying to remember how.

The seventh desk of the seconds was at the very back of the section, on the outside, nearest the wing, with nobody behind it but the timpani and nobody in front who would turn round. It was perfect. It was exactly what she had asked for, and from it she could see the podium straight down the middle of the stage, over twelve heads, with nothing at all in the way.

She sat. She opened the case on her knees and took the violin out and put the case under her chair, and tightened the bow, and rosined it with three strokes because three was what she did. She put the folder on the stand and opened it to the Beethoven, because she was not ready to read the Mendelssohn, and saw Hilary's pencil all over the first page: the old fat bowing marks, an up-bow with a little hook on it that was Hilary's alone and that nobody had used since, a circled pp with NOT YET written beside it. Noelle looked at the NOT YET for long enough that the oboe gave the A before she was ready for it.

She tuned. She did it the way she had for eighteen months in the back bedroom: the A first, quietly, then the D against it, the open fifth settling until the beats went out of it and it hung there in the middle of the stage noise, clean. Her left hand lay along the neck, not working, waiting. Under the scroll, where nobody could see, her thumb found her third fingertip again and went round it, and this time she let it.

The noise on the stage changed. It did not drop; it altered, the way a room does when the person it has been talking about walks into it.

He came on from the opposite wing with a score under his arm and no hurry in him at all. He was taller than she had kept him, and narrower, in a dark shirt with the sleeves turned back once at the wrist, and his hair was longer than it had been at twenty-four — straight and black and down to his collar — and as he stepped up on to the podium it fell forward across his forehead, and he put the score on the desk and pushed the hair back behind one ear with two fingers, without thinking about it, the way he had always done it with a pencil still in his hand.

He did not look at the leader. He did not look at the firsts, or at the cellist with the laugh, or at the seventy people who had all turned their faces up to him like an audience.

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

Get the e-book