The Dwarves of Death

Theme One

Why do I dislike the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber so much? I suppose for the same reason that I dislike London: because everybody else flocks to it as if it were the only thing worth experiencing on earth. Take that night at Phantom of the Opera. It was a Thursday evening, more than two weeks before the events which I’ve just described. I hadn’t seen Madeline for days and I was really looking forward to being with her again. We should have been having fun; instead it was a disaster. And it was all that bastard’s fault.

Oh, there were some OK moments, I suppose. A nice cadence in ‘Think of Me’ which sounded remarkably like Puccini’s ‘O Mio Bambino Caro’, and a recurring phrase which made me think insistently, for some reason, of Prokofiev’s Cinderella. But I couldn’t stand the way he jumbled it all together with no concern for style, for period, for genre — bits of pastiche operetta leading into passages of lumpen rock music, and endless chromatic scales on a Gothic-sounding organ which would still have seemed like a cliché forty years ago if you’d heard them on the soundtrack to a Universal B-movie. And yet the audience lapped it up. They couldn’t get enough of it. I just cannot understand this phenomenon.

And what a hassle, what a ridiculous, exhausting palaver I’d had to go through just to listen to that load of old nonsense. Have you any idea how hard it is to get tickets to that show? Did Madeline have any idea when she suggested it, I wondered? After endless enquiries at the box office, I was told that my best bet was to come along on the day itself, early. So I joined the queue at five o’clock in the morning — five o’clock, do you hear me — behind a bunch of Japanese businessmen, and I stayed until nearly half past ten (which made me two hours late for work) only to see the last set of tickets go to some people five places ahead of me in the queue. So then I phoned some agency in my lunch hour, and they said they did have some tickets — returns or something — but I could only have them if I came over and paid for them in person, and then they fished these things from under the counter and I ended up shelling out ninety pounds (I feel ill just thinking about it) for two seats. So you can imagine what sort of mood I was in by the time I met Madeline at the theatre, and things didn’t improve when we took our seats — which were quite good ones, actually — and just as the show was about to start, this six-foot monster came and sat right in front of me, so that for the whole evening all I had a view of was the back of his neck. I couldn’t see a damn thing. I might just as well have stayed at home and listened to the record.

Not that I paid much attention to the music anyway, to be honest. A date with Madeline was always a special occasion, and most of the time I was thinking about what we would do afterwards, whether we would go for a drink, what I’d say to her, whether she would let me kiss her. I’m sure that better composers than Andrew Lloyd Webber have suffered from the fact that shows and concerts are ten per cent works of art, and ninety per cent stopping-off points in a mating ritual. It’s funny to think of someone like Debussy agonizing over the orchestration of some bar or other of Pelléas et Mélisande, not realizing that most of the men in the audience would be too busy wondering whether they could get away with putting a hand on their girlfriend’s knee to even bother listening to the music. You can’t help it, it’s natural. Every move she made, every little unconscious gesture was more interesting to me than anything that was happening on the stage (not that I could see any of it). That bit, for instance, which is supposed to have everybody gasping, when the chandelier suddenly comes right down from the top of the theatre — there was a time when Madeline scratched her cheek which was far more exciting than that. I was conscious of every little change in the distance between us. Every time she leaned towards me my heart beat faster. At one point she bent over, close to my side, and I thought, my God, she’s actually going to touch me. But her shoe had come off, and she was just putting it on again.

Three long hours later, we were outside, out in the middle of a wet, cold and noisy London night. Taxis and buses dawdled past, their tyres splashing and hissing, their headlamps reflecting on the surface of the road.

I thought, what the hell, and slid my arm beneath Madeline’s. As usual, she offered neither resistance nor encouragement. She merely let it stay there, and I didn’t have the nerve to follow it up by taking her hand. We had been going out for nearly six months.

‘Well …’ I said at last, as we began strolling, for no particular reason, towards Piccadilly Circus.

‘Did you enjoy that?’ she asked.

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. I really enjoyed it. I thought it was wonderful.’

I squeezed her arm.

‘You’ve got a good sense of humour,’ I said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘It’s one of the things I like about you. Your sense of humour. I mean, we can laugh together. You say something ironic, and I know exactly what you mean.’

‘I wasn’t being ironic. I really did enjoy it.’

‘There you go again. Double irony: I love it. You know, it’s a great thing when two people share a sense of humour, it really… shows something about them.’

‘William, I’m not being ironic. I enjoyed myself tonight. It was a good show. You understand?’

We had stopped walking. We had pulled apart and were facing one another.

‘Are you serious? You liked it?’

‘Yes, didn’t you? What was wrong with it?’

We started walking again. Apart, this time.

‘The music was facile and unmemorable. It was harmonically primitive and melodically derivative. The plot relied on cheap emotional effects and crude pathos. The staging was showy, manipulative and deeply reactionary.’

‘You mean you didn’t enjoy it?’

For a second I was looking straight into her sad grey eyes. But I still shook my head.

‘No.’ We walked on in silence. ‘I mean, what did you like about it?’

‘I don’t know. Why do you always have to analyse things? It was… it was good.’

‘Terrific. I see. Tell me, what did you do about that invitation to appear on Critics’ Forum? Did you ever answer that?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t been invited anywhere.’

‘Can’t you tell when I’m being ironic?’

‘No.’

We had nearly arrived at Piccadilly Circus. We stopped outside Pizzaland. I could see that I had upset her, but couldn’t find it in me to do anything about it.

‘What do you want to do now?’ I asked.

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Do you want to go for a drink?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Come on.’ I took her arm again and began leading her towards Soho. ‘You know, it would be nice if you expressed an opinion sometimes. It would make life easier. Instead of leaving all the decisions to me.’

‘I just expressed an opinion, and you made fun of me. Where are we going, anyway?’

‘I thought we’d go to Samson’s. Is that OK?’

‘Fine. You want to listen to your friend again, do you?’

‘He might be there tonight, I don’t know.’ In fact Tony had phoned me only the day before. I knew full well he was going to be playing there that evening. ‘Do you have to call him “my friend”? You know his name, don’t you?’

I was so much in love with Madeline that sometimes, at work, I would begin to shiver just thinking about her: I would shake with panic and pleasure, and end up dropping piles of records and stacks of tapes all over the place. For this reason it didn’t use to matter to me that we never got on particularly well. Bickering with Madeline was more desirable to me than making love to any other woman in the world. The idea of us being happy together — lying in the same bed, say, silent and half-asleep — seemed so beautiful that I couldn’t even begin to visualize it. In my heart I was sure it would never happen, and meanwhile to exchange grumpy remarks with her on a cold winter’s evening in the nastier end of Soho seemed privilege enough. I doubt if she felt the same way; but then how exactly did she feel?

She always was an enigma to me, and I’m not going to make out some perverse theory that this was part of the attraction. It used to piss me off no end. All the time I knew Madeline, there was always the sense that she didn’t fit — with me, with London, with the rest of the world. I noticed it the first time I saw her: she looked so out of place, in that gloomy bar where I was playing the piano. I’d been in London for nearly a year, and I’d thought that this might turn out to be my first break. A place in some side street just off the Fulham Road that had a clapped-out baby grand and called itself a ‘jazz club’: I saw an advert they had placed in The Stage and they offered me twenty pounds cash and three non-alcoholic cocktails of my choice to play there on a Wednesday night. I turned up at six, scared out of my mind, knowing that I had to play for five hours with a repertoire of six standards and a few pieces of my own — about fifty minutes’ worth of material. I needn’t have worried, because there was only one customer all evening. She came in at eight and stayed till the end. It was Madeline.

I couldn’t believe that a woman so well dressed and so pretty could be sitting on her own in a place like that all night. Maybe if there had been other customers they would have tried to chat her up. In fact I’m sure they would. She was always getting chatted up. That night there was only me, and even I tried to chat her up, and I’d never done anything like that in my life before. But when you’ve been playing your own music for nearly an hour to an audience of one, and they’ve been clapping at the end of every number and smiling at you and even once saying, ‘I liked that one’, then you feel entitled. It would have seemed rude not to. So when the time came to take another break I got my drink from the bar and went over to her table, and said: ‘Do you mind if I join you?’

‘No. Please do.’

‘Can I buy you something?’

‘No thanks, I’m all right for the moment.’

She was drinking dry white wine. I sat down on a stool opposite her, not wanting to appear too forward.

‘Is it always this quiet in here?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. I’ve never been here before.’

‘It’s a bit tacky, isn’t it? For the area, I mean.’

‘It’s only just opened. It’ll probably take a while to get off the ground.’

She was so lovely. She had short blonde hair and a grey fitted jacket, a woollen skirt that came just above the knee and black silk stockings — nothing provocative, you understand, just tasteful. She had little gold studded earrings and lipstick which probably only seemed such a dark red because her complexion was so pale. I noticed right away that her mouth could go in an instant from the roundest and happiest of smiles to this more habitual, downward, melancholy look. Her voice was high and musical and her pronunciation — like everything else about her — showed that she was from some high-powered background. Her hands were small and white, and she didn’t paint her fingernails.

‘I like the way you play the piano,’ she said. ‘Are you going to play here every week?’

‘I don’t know. It depends.’ (I never did play there again, as it turned out.) ‘Are you… are you waiting for someone? Or are you just here on your own?’

‘I often go to places on my own,’ she said, but added: ‘Actually I was supposed to be seeing someone tonight, we were supposed to be going out for a meal. But then he phoned up and cancelled, and I’d already got myself ready, so I didn’t feel like staying in. I thought I’d come and see what this place is like.’

‘That was inconsiderate of him.’

‘He’s an old friend. I don’t mind.’

‘You live near here?’

‘Yes, not far. South Kensington. What about you?’

‘Oh, it’s like another world to me, an area like this. I live in South East London. On a council estate.’

After a pause, she said: ‘Do you mind if I ask you for something? A request, I mean. A piece of music.’

I felt a sudden tight grip of anxiety. You see, the reason I never made it as a cocktail bar pianist was that my repertoire was never wide enough, and I was hopeless at playing by ear. Customers are always asking pianists to play things and the only way I could have covered myself against situations like this was by learning every standard in the book. That would have taken months. It usually took me a few hours to get a piece into shape, sometimes more. Take ‘My Funny Valentine’, for instance. It’s not a difficult tune, yet something about the middle eight had been defeating me and it had just taken me two days to get it sounding exactly how I wanted. I’d been listening to some of the most famous records, seeing how the masters had handled it and working out what I thought were some pretty neat substitutions of my own. I could play it well, now, I thought, but that had been the result of two days’ hard work, and anything she was to ask for, even if I knew roughly how the tune went, was bound to come out sounding amateurish and embarrassing.

‘Well… try me,’ I still said, for some reason.

‘Do you know “My Funny Valentine"?’

I frowned. ‘Well… the title’s familiar. I’m not very quick at picking things up, though. Can you remind me how it goes?’

Wouldn’t anybody have done the same thing?

I think that was the best version I’ve ever played. I’ve never topped it since: it was a real heart-breaker. The copy gives G7 as the chord in the second bar, but most times — and in the tenth bar, too ― I was substituting a D minor seven with a flattened fifth, only I was playing the second inversion, with an A flat in the root. You should try it. It really darkens the tune up. Then in the middle eight, instead of those augmented B flats, I was putting straight A flat major sevens — and once I even tried a minor ninth, which I hadn’t even thought of before then (fortunately I was able to communicate the news to my right hand just in time). I stretched it for six choruses, playing quiet to start with but really hitting the keys, really thickening the chords by the end. For the final chord I went down to C minor, and my last note — I can remember it now — was an A natural, right at the top. I’ve tried it since, and it didn’t sound as good. It sounded just right at the time.

There was silence at first, then she started clapping, and then she came over to the piano. I turned around and faced her. We were both smiling.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That was beautiful. I’ve never heard it played like that before.’

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘My father used to love that tune,’ she continued. ‘He used to have a record of it. I used to listen to it a lot, but… you played it very differently. And you’d really never played it before?’

I laughed modestly. ‘Well, it’s amazing what you can do. When the inspiration’s right.’

She blushed.

After a couple more numbers the manager came over and told me that I might as well go home. Nothing was said about coming back to play the next week. He gave me my cash and then went over to start closing up the bar.

‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘I enjoyed it. So would a lot more people if they’d been here.’

I finished packing my music away into a plastic bag and said: ‘Do you mind if I walk you home?’ She looked hesitant. ‘I don’t mean anything funny. I only mean as far as your door.’

‘All right, that’s very kind. Thank you.’

And so that was as far as I got that evening — to her door. It turned out to be quite a door, all the same. About twice my height, at a modest estimate. It seemed to lead into some kind of mansion: one of those impossibly massive and gorgeous-looking Georgian houses you find in Onslow Square and those sorts of areas.

‘You live here?’ I said, craning my neck to look up at the top storey.

‘Yes.’

‘On your own?’

‘No, I share it with another person.’

I tutted. ‘That must be awfully cramped.’

‘I don’t own it or anything,’ she said, laughing.

‘You rent it? Really? How much a week? — Round it down to the nearest thousand if you like.’

‘I work here,’ she said. ‘It belongs to this old lady. I look after her.’

It was a warm early summer’s evening. We were standing on the pavement opposite the house. Behind us was a tall laurel hedge, and behind that, a small private park. Above us was the silver light of a street lamp. I leant against the lamp post and she stood quite close beside me.

‘She’s just a frail old lady. Most of the day she sleeps. Twice a day I have to take her up a meal — I don’t have to cook it, there’s a cook to do that. I can’t cook. I have to get her out of bed in the morning, and get her into bed at night. In the afternoon I have to take her up a cup of tea and some biscuits and cakes, but sometimes she doesn’t wake up for long enough to have them. I have to do her shopping for her, and go to the bank, and things like that.’

‘And what do you get for doing all this?’

‘I get some money, and I get some rooms of my own. There, those are my rooms.’ She pointed up at two enormous windows on the second floor. ‘Most of the time I don’t have to do anything. I just sit up there, all day sometimes.’

‘Don’t you get lonely?’

‘There’s a telephone, and a television.’

I shook my head. ‘It sounds, well, very different to the life I lead. Very different.’

‘You must tell me about it.’

‘Yes, I must. Perhaps,’ I ventured, ‘perhaps some other time?’

‘I have to go inside now,’ she said, and she crossed the road hurriedly.

I followed her and she unlocked the front door with a Yale key which looked absurdly small and puny for the task. There were three steps up to the door: I was standing on the second, and she was on the third, which made her seem quite a lot taller than me. When the door opened, I glimpsed a dark hallway. Madeline disappeared for a moment — I could hear the click of her heels on what seemed to be a marble floor — and then the light was switched on.

‘Jesus Christ…’ I said.

While I was peering in, not even bothering to hide my awe and astonishment, she was picking up an envelope which must have been posted by hand through the letterbox. She opened it and read the letter.

‘It’s a note from Piers,’ she said. ‘He came round after all. How stupid of him.’

I was standing there like some idiot, not saying anything.

‘Well,’ said Madeline, ‘this is as far as you go.’ She started to turn away. ‘Good night.’

‘Look — ’ Forgetting myself, I had laid my hand on her arm. Her grey eyes looked at me, questioning. ‘I’d like to see you again.’

‘Do you have a pen?’

I had a cheap plastic biro in my jacket pocket. She took it and wrote down a telephone number on the front of the envelope, beneath the word ‘Madeline’ which had been put there by her friend. Then she handed it to me.

‘Here. You can phone me. Any time you like — day or night. I don’t mind.’

And after saying that, she closed the door gently in my face.

*

Samson’s wasn’t very crowded — the weather must have been keeping people away — and we had the choice of whether to sit in the eating part or the drinking part.

‘Are you hungry?’ I asked. ‘Or do you just want to drink?’

‘I don’t mind.’

I sighed.

‘Well, have you eaten tonight?’

‘No.’

‘Then you must be hungry.’

‘Not really. Don’t you want to sit next to your friend?’

The piano was in the drinking area, but it was close to the open door of the restaurant, so that diners could still listen to the music. Tony was playing with his back to us and hadn’t noticed our arrival yet.

‘It doesn’t matter where we sit,’ I said.

‘I thought that was the whole point of us coming.’

‘We came because it’s a nice place to come to. I didn’t even know if he was going to be here.’

I must have raised my voice, because Tony heard me, turned round and waved with his left hand, while the other hand kept an attractive little arpeggio going on F sharp minor.

‘Let’s go through,’ I said, indicating the restaurant.

‘I don’t want to sit and watch you eat,’ said Madeline.

‘You don’t want anything?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Well why didn’t you say so? Fine, OK, we’ll just have a drink.’

‘But you’re hungry.’

‘For Christ’s sake.’

I sat down at the nearest table and began looking through the wine list.

She sat beside me and said as she slid out of her coat, ‘You are difficult, William.’

A tune went through my mind:

There were times when I could have murdered her But I would hate anything to happen to her… I know, I know, it’s serious

‘Hello, young lovers,’ said Tony.

We had started on the wine, a nice cold bottle of Frascati, and now he was standing over us, beaming down, waiting for an invitation.

‘Got a few minutes to spare?’ I asked, waving him to a seat.

‘Thanks.’

We asked for a third glass.

‘Nice version,’ I said.

‘You mean the Cole Porter? Yes, I thought I’d try it in a different key. Never done it in A before. It makes it sound sunnier, somehow. So,’ he poured himself a generous glassful, ‘how’s everything going?’

I’d hoped he might begin by talking to Madeline, but his question was obviously directed at me, and I could tell that we were going to embark on a conversation about music from which she would be excluded.

‘Well, we haven’t rehearsed much recently,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow will be the first time in over a week. We’ve been recovering from the last gig. It was a bit rough.’

‘Yes, you mentioned something about that.’

‘I had a word with Chester about it. He was very apologetic, said he wouldn’t book us into a place like that again.’

‘So how’s Martin? Have the bandages come off yet?’

‘Yes, a couple of days ago, apparently. He can nearly hold his guitar again now.’

‘Nasty.’

‘Well, you know, you learn by experience. Now we know never to play at a place where the wine waiter has got “Love” and “Hate” tattooed on his knuckles.’

Tony smiled an accusing smile, as though at the scoring of yet another point in a long-running argument.

‘Well, that’s rock music for you, isn’t it? Nothing like that has ever happened at a gig I’ve played at. And have you managed to practise any real music in the meantime?’

‘I’ve been having a go at some of the ones you wrote out for me. I was meaning to ask you — I think you made a copying mistake somewhere. Three bars from the end of “All the Things You Are” — you meant B flat minor, didn’t you, not major?’

‘That’s right. It’s just a straight two-five-one. Why, did I write major?’

Madeline got up and said, ‘Will you excuse me a moment? The ladies’ is downstairs, isn’t it?’

‘Sure.’

Tony and I sat in a rather embarrassed silence for a while.

‘I think she feels left out, when we start talking about music,’ I explained. ‘Perhaps we should try to keep the conversation more general.’

‘Isn’t it a problem?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean going out with someone who isn’t interested in what you do.’

‘She’s interested. Madeline enjoys music, all sorts of music. Like, she listens to church music a lot, especially.’

‘Well, she would.’ Tony poured me some more wine. ‘So you’re still getting on OK, are you, you two?’

Perhaps I should explain at this point that I’d known Tony for several years. In fact he was my first ever piano teacher. When I was back up in Leeds, doing the chemistry degree that I dropped out of, he was doing his PhD and earning some extra money by giving jazz piano classes. He had a small family to support even then: his wife, Judith, and their little son Ben, who was only five at the time. I got to meet them both soon enough, because I started going back for private lessons. They had a small terraced house in the Roundhay area, a really nice place with a piano and a garden and even a bit of a view towards the country, so that half the pleasure of going there used to be to see the family and maybe join in with their supper afterwards. Judith seemed to like having me as a guest, I could never quite fathom why. For some reason I never took to student life — all those sad men cooking up Pot Noodles for themselves in shabby communal kitchens, taking them back to their rooms and eating them in front of Dr Who on a portable black and white TV — and I used to relish these quiet family evenings round at Tony’s, with their good food and bottles of red wine, and Monk or Ben Webster or Mingus or someone playing away in the background.

That only lasted for my first year, anyway. Judith wanted to come to London where there was more chance of getting a full-time job, so the whole family moved down to Shadwell, taking Tony’s unfinished thesis with them. Fortunately, through his involvement with the scene in Leeds, he had got to know some musicians here and soon found himself in demand as a teacher and performer. And it meant that when I (in my wisdom) decided that London was the only place for aspiring musicians to be, and gave up the losing battle with my degree, at least there was someone for me to anchor myself to. They had been very helpful. I owed a lot to them. It turned out that Judith’s sister Tina was looking for someone to share her flat: she had this council flat in Bermondsey, a two-bedroomed place. I moved in there almost at once, and I suppose by and large the arrangement worked out — but I can talk about Tina later, because she was involved with what happened, too.

Neither Judith nor Tony hated London as much as I hated London, but he still hated it more than she did. Temperamentally he had always been dour and down to earth, with a tendency to look on the dark side and a genuine dislike of pretentiousness and affectation. He had a short well-trimmed black beard and darting intelligent eyes. He enjoyed making fun of people without their noticing, a form of humour I’Ve never understood, and I was always slightly nervous about introducing him to people because the fact that they were friends of mine was no guarantee that he’d be polite to them. I’d begun to suspect that he didn’t like Madeline very much. Not that he would ever have said so — not to me, at any rate — but I could detect this tiny antagonism. They had very little in common, you see, and there was also a certain simplicity about Madeline, a certain naivety, which I think Tony found grating. Perhaps he thought she was putting it on. This was behind his crack about her liking religious music: he was very suspicious about that side of her, he wouldn’t buy it, whereas as far as I was concerned, it was one of the most attractive things about her. It was an unobtrusive, good-natured sort of religion, which showed itself in a general willingness to be kind and to think the best of people (not that much of this ever came my way). I remembered the last time we had come to Samson’s, and Tony was talking about his father who had died a couple of years ago.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Madeline had said. ‘How awful, to lose a parent like that, so early.’

‘It doesn’t make much sense, does it? The randomness of it.’

‘But you know — ’ and here she had actually touched his hand, while I looked on admiringly ‘ — the important thing is to die with dignity. Death can be gentle, and calm, and even beautiful. And if we leave this life with dignity, what is there to regret?’

‘That’s very true,’ said Tony.

‘How did your father die?’

‘Gangrene of the scrotum.’

So Tony wasn’t the best person to confide in about my relationship with Madeline, but then who else did I have? When it came to their emotional politics, the other members of the band were — and this is putting it kindly — unsophisticated. And after well over a year in London, I’d made hardly any other friends. Doesn’t that speak volumes about this city? I lived in embarrassing physical proximity to my neighbours on the estate; I could hear them through the walls, throwing crockery around and beating each other up, but I never got to know their names. I could stand with my body pressed up against another man’s on a crowded tube, and our eyes would never meet. I could go into the same grocer’s three times a week and never have a proper conversation with the girl on the till. What a stupid place. But I mustn’t lose the point. The point is that I was glad of Tony’s question, glad of the chance to talk about Madeline while she was away.

‘Yes, we’re still getting on OK,’ I said. ‘No worse than usual, anyway.’

‘Have you slept with her yet?’

It was no real business of his, of course, but I didn’t resent the question.

‘We think it’s important not to rush things.’

‘Well, nobody could accuse you of doing that. I should try and catch her before the menopause, all the same.’

‘Anyway, you know, she has this Catholic thing…’

‘Don’t you find it frustrating?’

‘I try to work it out in other ways. I think I’m using music as a substitute for sex.’

‘Really? Well that’s the last time you play my piano without washing your hands. Have you spoken to her about it? Do you talk about these things?’

‘I’m waiting for the right moment to come up.’

‘But it’s been six months, William. And it can’t be cheap, dating a girl like Madeline. Where did you take her tonight?’

I told him.

‘You did what’

‘It was her idea. She’s been wanting to see it for ages.’

‘How much did you pay for the tickets?’

I told him.

‘You paid what? William, you can’t afford to do things like that.’

‘I’ve been working lots of overtime. I can afford it, just, once in a while. Anyway, I’ve written to some magazines, and I think… I think it’s only a matter of time before one of them gives me some work. I sent some sample reviews, and a CV. I spoke to this guy on the telephone, and he sounded quite encouraging.’

‘Journalists are full of shit. How many times do I have to tell you that? I mean, maybe, maybe you’ll be lucky but you can’t rely on any of these people.’

‘Well, sooner or later I’ve got to get some kind of career for myself or I think I’m going to go nuts. I can’t work in that shop for much longer.’

‘William, you’re young. Relax, carry on as you are, get plenty of practice in. You’re a gifted performer, I’ve told you that, there’s no saying what kind of break may come your way if you just stick at it. There’s no reason on earth why you need to think in terms of a career at the moment.’

‘Well, supposing I wanted to get married.’

‘Married, at your age? You’re kidding. Who would you marry?’

I raised my eyebrows and poured some more wine. Tony shook his head.

‘I’m sorry, William, I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

‘You like being married, don’t you? Having a home, and a kid and all that.’

‘Yes, but you have to be ready for it. For God’s sake, you’ve already been engaged once, and what are you — twenty-three? Cool off a bit. Just because you like seeing a woman now and again, it doesn’t mean you have to spend the rest of your life with her. Think casual.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got to start playing again, I’ve had my twenty minutes.’

‘Fine. We’ll stay around and listen for a while.’

‘Look, you’ve reminded me about something — could you do me a favour?’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s about Ben. I was wondering if you were doing anything on the eleventh. A fortnight on Sunday.’

‘I doubt it. Why?’

‘Judith’s boss has asked her up to some lunch party in Cambridge and she wants me to go along with her, but it’s not really the kind of thing we can take Ben to. I was wondering if you’d mind sitting with him for the day. I’m sure we’ll be back before the evening.’

‘Sounds fine.’

I liked the idea of a day round at Tony’s house: it would give me the chance to use his piano.

‘Keep it free, then, will you? I appreciate it.’ Tony stood up and stretched his fingers. ‘Any requests?’

In the distance on the other side of the room I could see Madeline returning from the ladies’.

‘How about “I Got it Bad and That Ain’t Good"?’

He followed my gaze and smiled.

‘Coming up.’

What did Madeline and I talk about for the rest of that evening? As I look back on the times we spent together, I find it almost impossible to remember the substance of our conversations. The awful suspicion raises itself that we spent most of the time in silence, or in conversation so banal that I have purposely blotted it from my memory. I know we didn’t argue again that night, and I know that we didn’t talk about the show. Perhaps we really didn’t hang around for any longer than it took to finish off the remains of the wine. The next thing I can remember for sure is that we were standing in the depths of Tottenham Court Road tube, at the point where the paths to our different lines diverged, and I was holding her and stretching up to kiss her forehead.

‘Well, good night,’ I said.

‘Thanks for taking me. I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it more.’

I shrugged, and asked, ‘When can I see you again?’ Suddenly the pain of being away from her was imminent, and as raw as it had ever been.

She shrugged too.

‘How about…’ I chose a day at random, at what seemed like a reasonable distance ‘… Tuesday?’

‘Fine.’

(She would have said the same if I had suggested meeting tomorrow or in six months’ time.)

We fixed up a time and place, and then kissed good night. It wasn’t a bad kiss. It lasted about four or five seconds, and our lips were slightly parted. It surpassed my expectations, in fact.

I wasn’t exactly elated as I rode home, though. I took a Northern Line train down to Embankment and then joined the Circle Line eastbound to Tower Hill. It was the last train, I think. It was certainly well after midnight as I came out into the open air and began the thirty-minute walk back to the flat. The man on the ticket barrier recognized me and nodded tiredly and didn’t ask to see my ticket. I turned up at this station and at this time so regularly that he probably thought I worked on a late shift somewhere. Tower Hill. It suddenly struck me as an appropriate title for a piano piece I was in the process of writing. It was meant to have a weary and melancholy feel to it — like you feel at the end of a long day, with maybe the vague hope of better to come. The first couple of phrases had emerged quite spontaneously in the course of an improvisation, and I’d been doodling with it for more than a week now, trying to put a structure on it. Perhaps having a title would help.

When I got back to the flat I went straight into my bedroom, switched on the keyboard and the amp and played what I’d written so far:

That was as far as I’d got. I’d had some ideas for the middle section but wasn’t in a position to start working on them yet. What should come next? The C seven implied an F minor, that was easy enough; and suddenly, with a stronger idea in my mind of the mood I was striving for, I wrote the next four bars straight off:

I played all eight bars through, several times, and felt pleased with them; but still I couldn’t think of a way to get the middle eight started. I tried thirteen different chords and none of them sounded right, so I gave up. I went into the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea instead.