The Dwarves of Death

Solo

It had been a fine feeling to wake up on Tuesday morning and know that I didn’t have to go into work. Even though we had to be at the studio for ten o’clock, this still meant an extra hour in bed. There was no sound from Tina’s room. This was a relief, too. For the last few nights, strange noises had been emerging from behind her door: muffled cries and grunts, suggestive of physical exertions which I preferred not to speculate about. The toilet kept flushing as well. But I had been lying awake when she came back in from work the night before, and it had sounded as though she was on her own.

There were no notes for me in the kitchen. I took my toast into the sitting-room, watched Breakfast Time with the sound turned down and decided to catch up on the latest messages on the answering machine. I had come back quite late myself last night and hadn’t got around to listening to them yet.

There were four messages. One of them was from Madeline: she said that she couldn’t see me tonight after all and could we make it Thursday instead? I was disappointed, of course, and also a little puzzled. She was always telling me that she had no social life apart from her evenings with me. Perhaps she was ill or something.

The other three messages were all from Pedro. They had each been left at different stages of the evening and together they made up quite a little narrative. The first one was relatively coherent and the only thing you could hear on it was his voice. He must have been calling from his flat.

‘Hello, Tina, my little breast of chicken, my little piece of fur. Listen, I will be a bit later than my usual this evening because I am taking the night off and going with some friends to paint the town. But I will still come and see you because I couldn’t do without you for a single night of my life. Expect to feel my key in your lock before dawn, then, my love. Adios.’

For the next message he was speaking from a call-box: he was slightly louder and there were some voices and some music in the background. His speech was starting to sound slurred.

‘Hi, Teeny-babes, we’re having a great time here, and I’m just ringing to say… Hope I can make it tonight… I still want to come… Maybe I’ll be pretty late but I hope you’ll still be wearing something nice like that thing I bought you. You know, that cost me a lot of money and it’s not every shop that will sell you something like that, and I’m sure if you had another go at it you could fit — ’

The pips went and the message ended.

The last one seemed to have been left a few hours later. This time the voices in the background were both male and female, and the music, although it was louder, was now slow and sensual.

‘Hi, Tina, we’re having quite a time here, we’re all higher than a kite and it would be just great if you could come over and join us because we have some great people here, all really good friends of mine, and we could do some great things here if we had a girl like you here, so please come over and bring some things over with you because I…’

This time his voice was just cut off without any explanation, and the tape stopped with a click. He hadn’t left an address for Tina to go and find him. Her door remained ominously shut.

*

Vincent was in a particularly cheerful mood when we arrived at the studio that morning. His favourite customers were using one of the rehearsal rooms: not us, of course, but an all-female band called The Vicious Circles. He was, I need hardly tell you, one of those typical music-business technicians who specialize in making the lives of female musicians a misery. When I arrived, one of The Vicious Circles was standing at his desk complaining that she couldn’t get her amplifier to work.

‘Do you think you could come and look at it?’ she was saying.

‘Look at it? I’ll do more than come and look at it for you, darling. I’ll bring my plug along and stick it in, if you like.’

He was wearing a T-shirt on which a picture of an enormous red rooster was accompanied by the words, ‘Nothing like a nice big cock to wake you up in the morning’.

‘Look, I’m only asking you to come and give me a hand.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind giving you a hand, darling. A hand’ll do nicely to start with. Har, har, har!’

‘I’ll go and do it myself,’ she said, turning.

‘Anything else wrong, is there, darling? You wouldn’t like me to have a look at your fuzz box, would you? Har, har, har!’

She was about to go back downstairs, when two small children suddenly appeared through the front door, wearing matching anoraks. Immediately, all Vincent’s joviality evaporated and he stared at them in horror and fury. For several seconds he was speechless; then he exploded.

‘Kids! What the fucking hell are two bloody kids doing in here? Get them out! Go on, piss off!’

The woman ran over to her children and gathered them in her arms reproachfully.

‘Look, I thought I told you to stay in the car.’

‘It’s boring,’ said the eldest.

‘Are these yours?’ Vincent asked.

‘Yes.’

‘This isn’t a fucking kindergarten, you know. Who said you could bring your kids here?’

‘Well what else am I supposed to do with them while we practise? I can’t afford a minder.’

‘Get those kids out of here and lock them in your fucking car, and don’t bring them in here again.’

‘Come on,’ she said, taking them both by the hand. ‘Back to the car. I’ll keep coming out and seeing you, and I’ll bring you some sweets.’

Vincent turned to me after they’d gone, apparently expecting to find me in sympathy with him.

‘Women with kids should stay at home and look after the little fuckers,’ he said. ‘They don’t know a tit from a tweeter anyway, this lot. Totally clueless.’

‘How’s Studio B coming along?’ I asked, anxious to change the subject.

‘Oh, you know, a bit of work still to do. You’ll be the first to know when it’s ready.’

‘How long’s it been out of action, now? Quite a few months, isn’t it?’

‘No, no, a few weeks, that’s all.’

‘That’s funny, because whenever I talk to the other bands who use this place, none of them have ever been in there, either. It seems to have been shut for as long as we can remember.’

He put his face uncomfortably near mine and looked me squarely in the eye.

‘Do you mind if I give you some advice, Bilbo?’ he said. ‘Don’t ask so many questions. All right?’

I nodded.

‘Come on then, we’ve got work to do.’

Jake and Harry were already waiting for us in the studio; Martin presumably knew that we wouldn’t be needing him until later. Once inside the studio Vincent became quiet and efficient and began checking the mikes set up around the drum kit. Jake was looking nervous: he knew that his part was the first to be recorded, and that he’d have to get it right early on in the session. It wasn’t a particularly complex drum part, though, and besides having a click track to keep him in time, I was going to provide a basic keyboard part so that he’d know where he was in the song.

As soon as he started playing, though, I could tell that he hadn’t learnt the song properly. He had no real idea where the transitions were meant to come, and he was far too tentative about putting in fills. And, in spite of my pleas to the contrary, the pattern he was playing was a none-too-distant cousin of:

After six or seven takes he was basically no better, just a little more polished and relaxed, so I thought we might as well cut our losses. As Jake sweated his way through the fade-out, I gave a thumbs-up to Vincent on the other side of the glass, and Harry was sent through to put down the bass line.

We got an excellent take from Harry on his second go, by which time Martin had arrived. There followed a prolonged interval for re-stringing and tuning. Vincent gave him a brief lecture about the folly of putting new strings on just before a recording session, and I felt, for once, slightly grateful to the bad-tempered old bastard. Martin scowled and dithered over whether to use a thick or a thin plectrum. At first when he started playing, his chords seemed to bear no relation to the bass line: it transpired that he was playing them three frets too high. There was a minor seven which he kept playing as a major until it practically drove me mad with frustration. He attempted impossibly ambitious arpeggios where the song called for simple power chords. His B string kept going out of tune. By the time we had even a half-way decent take, it was getting on for one o’clock.

‘We’ll have to finish this this afternoon,’ said Vincent, gleefully. ‘It’ll cost you double, of course.’

‘You’ll have to speak to Chester about that,’ I said. Chester paid all our rehearsal and recording bills.

We went to the pub across the road, a square, detached, concrete building calculated to depress the most flighty of spirits. Martin bought a round and we sat drinking it in morose silence, conscious that the morning had gone just as badly as we had all expected.

‘Catchy tune, that,’ said Jake eventually, having hummed a few bars of ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’.

‘Yeah,’ said Harry. ‘It’s a nice one.’

I resented these limp attempts to cheer me up.

‘Perhaps we should have recorded something a bit simpler,’ I said.

‘No, this is a good one to do,’ said Harry. ‘It’s direct, it’s tuneful.’

‘Not exactly chart material, though, is it?’ said Martin, sipping his beer and glowering. ‘It’s not what you’d call commercial.’

‘That’s such a bloody old-fashioned thing to say,’ said Jake. ‘That distinction just doesn’t exist any more. Anything can get into the charts these days, absolutely anything, as long as it’s properly marketed. That’s why they’re so full of shit.’ He took a mouthful of Guinness and closed his eyes. ‘God, I wish we were back in seventy-six.’

‘Why, what happened in seventy-six?’ asked Martin.

Jake eyed him up to see if he was being serious.

‘You’ve heard of punk, have you?’

‘Punk? That was never twelve years ago, was it?’

‘It bloody was,’ said Harry. ‘Twelve years almost exactly. “Anarchy in the UK", released November the twenty-sixth, nineteen seventy-six. What a band, eh? What a band.’

‘The Damned, “New Rose". That came out then, too.’

‘No, that was earlier, about a month earlier.’

‘If you two are off wandering down Memory Lane again,’ I said, ‘I’m going to go for a walk or something.’

They ignored me. Once they got going on this subject, Jake and Harry (who had both been in their teens during the late seventies) were unstoppable.

‘What about The Vibrators, eh? “We Vibrate".’

‘The Jam. The Buzzcocks. The Adverts. Siouxsie.’

‘May the seventh, nineteen seventy-seven. The London Rainbow. I was there. What a fucking brilliant night that was. The Clash, The Slits, The Jam and Subway Sect.’

‘X-Ray Spex, “Oh Bondage Up Yours". Great single.’

‘"Spiral Scratch".’

‘"Pretty Vacant".’

‘"Right to Work".’

‘"Get a Grip".’

‘Do you remember The Rezillos?’

‘Do you remember Alternative TV?’

‘Stiff Little Fingers.’

‘The Desperate Bicycles.’

‘XTC.’

‘999.’

‘Slaughter and the Dogs.’

‘What about The Dwarves of Death?’

The flood of reminiscence stopped and Jake stared at Harry in surprise.

‘Who?’

‘The Dwarves of Death — they did that single, what was it called… “Black and Blue”.’

‘You’re making this up.’

‘No, you remember them, surely? I mean, it didn’t chart or anything, but they were a real cult band.’

‘I think you’re pulling my leg.’

‘No I’m not. They did two singles — “Black and Blue", and then another one, I can’t remember the name.’

‘Look, I was around at the time, right? I can remember the name of every band from the punk era. Stop taking the piss.’

‘I’m not. Honest. You must remember. There were four of them — they had this amazing girl singer with a really unpleasant voice — made Poly Styrene sound like Kiri Te Kanawa — and they had this guitarist and this bass player who were both dwarves. Brothers. That’s where they got the name.’

‘That’s only three,’ I pointed out.

‘Well, there was some other guy. The drummer or something.’

‘Sorry, Harry, I’m not buying it.’

‘Are you calling me a liar?’

‘I just don’t believe you, that’s all.’

‘Look, why don’t we ask Vincent?’ I said, thinking that we already had enough trouble on our hands without falling out over a stupid argument like this. ‘He’s always going on about how he was right there in the thick of it when punk happened. Ask him, he’d remember.’

And so it was Vincent who settled the argument, after a fashion, with a curt ‘Nope, never heard of them’, when we got back into the studio. Harry began to sulk and Jake grinned in triumph. Then shordy afterwards, he and Martin left: their jobs were done and there was little point in them hanging around to watch the tedious process of me and Harry finishing the song off.

We had recorded the drums in stereo, so now, with the drums and bass guitar all laid down, we only had four tracks left to complete the recording. We decided to put the vocal line down on one track and leave the other three free for keyboards. The real hook of the song was a recurring figure which should really have been played on the saxophone, but we didn’t know any saxophone players so we had to make do with a fairly convincing sample which Vincent had found for us. I recorded that, and a piano part, and added some strings, and then Harry had a go at the vocals:

Now and then

I wonder if I should have come here

Real men

Who’s going to ask me what I’ve done here?

I search for buried treasure

Precious gifts from out of Araby

I know it’s now or never

And when I’m down, will you carry me?

I shook my head sadly as he sang these lines. I’ve always found it hard to write lyrics, and as Harry struggled to get the top B at the beginning of each phrase, these ones sounded more lame than ever. Then there was the chorus:

And then I went away

And I left behind the times

And the place where she stayed

Often lingers in my mind

Wish I knew what you planned

Feel your fingers in my hand

I just hope I can stand –

Stranger in a foreign land

By five o’clock the recording was finished. We took an hour off to have some tea, then came back to do the mix-down. We listened to the finished version a couple of times and tried to feel good about it.

‘There you are, boys,’ said Vincent, presenting us with a reel of one-inch tape in a white cardboard box. ‘Your passport to success.’

‘Sarcastic bastard,’ said Harry, when he’d gone out of the room. He opened the box and looked at the tape. ‘I suppose we’d better get a few cassettes and make some copies of this, had we?’

‘Perhaps we’d better leave it a few days,’ I said, ‘and listen to it again.’

Harry must have sensed the pessimism that this implied. He nodded understandingly.

‘I believe you,’ I added. ‘About that band.’

He shrugged.

‘Doesn’t matter really, does it?’

‘Look, I’ve got this friend, back in Sheffield. He knows everything about music. He’s a walking encyclopaedia. I’ll write and ask him — he’ll know.’

‘It’s no big deal. Really.’

But I could see that it mattered to him, and I decided to do something about it that evening. Besides, I had been out of touch with Derek for far too long.

*

The tune of ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’ was still dancing around my head as I waited for Madeline outside the Swiss Centre in Leicester Square on Thursday evening. I suppose when I wrote those words, ‘Wish I knew what you planned, Feel your fingers in my hand’, she had been at the back of my mind — where she always was, when she wasn’t at the front. The chords I had used were meant to have a bitter-sweet feel — alternating minor sevenths, a whole tone apart, a favourite mannerism of mine — but on the whole the piece was designed to sound optimistic and forward-looking, which was still how I tried to feel about the relationship: in the face, it has to be said, of much discouraging evidence.

And that evening, the evidence started to pile up. It started with her being late. This in itself was unusual: she had never kept me waiting for more than about five minutes before, but this time she was more than half an hour late, and it was past nine o’clock by the time I spotted her threading through the crowds from Piccadilly Circus.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘My watch must be slow.’

‘You aren’t wearing a watch,’ I pointed out.

Madeline pulled her coat tightly around herself.

‘Don’t snap at me when I’ve just arrived,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do, anyway?’

‘I thought we could go to a film, but it’s too late now, they’ve all started.’ I expected her to apologize again at this point, but she didn’t. ‘So, I don’t know… I suppose we might as well get something to eat.’

‘Don’t sound so enthusiastic.’

‘It’s just that I’ve hardly got any money.’

The sheer predictability of my feelings for Madeline never ceased to surprise me. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow. In her absence, a simple longing; as soon as we were together again, irritation, petulance, angry devotion. Whenever I saw her I was immediately struck by how beautiful she was, and then immediately devastated by the thought that I had known her for six months and still not even come close to making love to her. And yet, just when I was dying to give vent to my emotion, I was expected to be cool and level-headed, to look around me and to choose, from the hundreds of restaurants on offer in the Leicester Square area, the one where we were to go and have dinner. French? Italian? Greek? Indian? Chinese? Thai? Vietnamese? Indonesian? Malaysian? Vegetarian? Nepalese?

‘How about going to McDonald’s?’ I said.

‘Fine,’ she said.

We went to the one on the Haymarket, and sat upstairs. I had a quarterpounder with cheese, regular fries and a large coke. All Madeline would have was a cheeseburger. We ate in silence for a while. She was clearly depressed about something and her moroseness didn’t take long to spread in my direction. I thought of all the evenings we had spent together in the last six months, all the hope and excitement I had felt at the start of the relationship, and it seemed cruel and pathetic that we should be sitting there, not even talking, just picking at junk food in these bland surroundings on a freezing winter’s night. When I finally dared to speak, it seemed to require enormous effort.

‘So,’ I said, ‘what have you been up to, the last few days?’

‘Nothing much. You know me.’

I pointed at her cheeseburger.

‘Is that all you’re going to eat?’

‘I’m not very hungry. Anyway, I hate this food.’

I must have made some gesture of frustration, because she took pity and said: ‘I’m sorry, William. We’re both in a bad mood, that’s all.’

I could have pointed out that I hadn’t been in a bad mood, until she kept me waiting for half an hour, but it seemed more constructive to take her up on her attempt at friendliness.

‘We recorded a new song on Tuesday,’ I said.

‘Oh?’ Naturally, she sounded bored.

‘Took us all day, in fact. Six hours’ studio time.’

‘This is turning into quite an expensive hobby, isn’t it?’

‘You know perfectly well it isn’t a hobby.’

She took one of my fries and said, absently, ‘You still think you’re going to make a career out of this, do you?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t think of it in those terms.’

‘Why do you do it then, this music? What’s the point?’

‘I do it because I have to.’

Her stare was blank, uncomprehending.

‘I do it because I’ve got all this music, locked up inside me, and I have to let it out. It’s… what I do. It’s what I’ve always done.’

‘Sounds most inconvenient: like a bowel problem or something. I’m glad I don’t have it.’

‘No, it’s not like that at all. It’s a gift. It’s a way of expressing feelings — putting them into permanent form — preserving them. Feelings which would otherwise just be dead and forgotten.’

‘What sort of feelings?’

Bravely, I said: ‘Feelings about you, for instance.’

‘You’ve written songs about me?’

‘Yes.’

‘How embarrassing.’

There was a short silence, during which I wondered whether she realized how wounding this had sounded. Then I said, ‘Thanks.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked — picking up on my sarcasm, for once.

‘You know something that really pisses me off?’

‘If you’re just going to be rude to me tonight,’ she said, ‘I don’t have to sit here and listen.’

‘I’ll tell you what pisses me off. It’s how nice you are.’

‘What?’

‘How nice you are to everybody but me. God, you’re so polite, and gentle, and considerate, and generous, you’re so brimming over with good feelings for everyone: and not a scrap of it comes my way. Not a bloody trickle.’

‘I think you’re being unfair. Very unfair.’

‘No I’m not. Why should you treat me differently from anyone else? Just because I’m your boyfriend, that doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to a bit of courtesy now and again. Jesus, you keep me waiting for half an hour, you’re sulky, you won’t talk to me. You won’t even tell me what’s wrong.’

‘There’s nothing wrong.’

I took hold of her chin and forced her to look at me.

‘Yes there is. Isn’t there?’

She looked away.

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

My fingers had been covered with pickle and tomato sauce. She took one of the paper serviettes and wiped her face clean.

I sighed. ‘Tell me, will you? You owe it to me.’

She tried to meet my gaze but had to look away as she said, brokenly, ‘I want… a change.’

‘A change?’

‘In this relationship.’

I frowned.

‘What sort of change?’

‘You know what sort,’ she said, looking up again.

‘No I don’t.’

For several seconds we stared at each other, two pairs of eyes in angry, hopeless deadlock, straining to communicate and yet straining to block each other out. Finally Madeline broke away.

‘God, you’re stupid,’ she said. ‘I’ve never known anyone as stupid as you, William.’ She stood up and put her bag over her shoulder. ‘I’m going.’

‘Going where?’

‘Home.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘I’m not being silly. I’ve had enough and I’m going home.’

‘I’ll come with you to the bus-stop.’

‘Forget it. I don’t want you to. I’d rather go on my own.’

I stood up, too.

‘Will you stop messing around? Are we going to talk about this properly, like two — ’

She pushed me back down into my seat.

‘Shut up and finish that cheeseburger.’

And before I had time to stop her, she was off, running down the staircase and disappearing from view. I sat there, baffled. In front of me was a plastic carton containing a half-eaten cheeseburger: a potent symbol of a failed relationship if ever I saw one. After a few moments I pushed it into the waste-bin and left the restaurant myself.

There was no sign of Madeline out in the street. I knew which bus-stop she would be walking to, but there seemed no point in following her: better to let this mood subside, and maybe call her tomorrow. The evening was turning colder, and there was a damp mist in the air. I buttoned up my thin old raincoat, thrust my hands deep into the pockets, started to wander aimlessly up the street and then struck out in the direction of Samson’s.

It was a long shot, but it paid off: Tony was there. I didn’t want to speak to him right away, though, so I sat at a table in the corner and ordered a bottle of wine, which I began to drink on my own, slowly and methodically. The next thing I knew, it was three-quarters empty. The place was practically deserted, so there wasn’t much in the way of distractions — conversation, clinking glasses, the scraping of chairs — to prevent me from listening to his piano-playing. We had ‘Night and Day’, ‘Some Other Time’, ‘Blue in Green’ and, finally, ‘My Funny Valentine’. Though I say it myself, it wasn’t as good as the version I had played for Madeline that night. It was more polished, but less emotional. It got to me, all the same, prompting me to wander over to the piano, before Tony had a chance to start his next number.

‘Hi.’ He seemed genuinely pleased to see me. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘When’s your break?’ I asked.

‘Well, I could take one now.’

‘Come and have a drink, then.’

We ordered another bottle of wine, even though he didn’t seem to drink much of it, and I filled him in on the argument with Madeline. I don’t know what I expected to gain from confiding in him in this way. Men don’t tend to be a great deal of use to each other at times of emotional crisis, and I found myself wishing that there was some woman I could have gone to, someone who wouldn’t have felt embarrassed about hugging me, to start with, and then discussing the whole thing openly. Tony, I could see, was also suffering from the temptation to say something along the lines of ‘I told you so’. I wasn’t going to let him do that.

‘Well, I might as well try to forget it,’ I said eventually.

‘I think that’s a good idea.’

‘I’ve got other things to think about. Lots to get on with.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Besides, I can phone her in the morning.’

He looked at me, smiled and shook his head.

‘You don’t think you should leave it a bit longer than that?’

It occurred to me that what he was saying was something in the nature of a final break: a prospect which, as soon as I contemplated it, plunged me into fear and panic. I had a momentary sensation of falling and weightlessness, like you get in a lift when it descends too quickly. I shivered.

‘We’ll see. I’ll think about it’. To avoid discussing the matter further, I said: ‘I’ve written a new piano piece.’

‘Really?’ said Tony. ‘How does it go?’

I had indeed completed ‘Tower Hill’ only the previous evening. The last four bars of the middle eight had turned out to be rather complicated, involving further modulations and a more elaborate approach to the melody, but I liked them and felt that they fitted. I had got, you may remember, as far as an F major seven, held for a whole bar. Well, for the second half of that bar I had now added an F sharp diminished, with a little linking figure on top which went like this:

This now led into a G minor (picking up on the one two bars earlier), an unexpected B flat minor, and then on to a strong A flat major from which, by descending thirds, I quickly progressed to a D flat. From there an E flat seven was the obvious way to get back to the beginning of the piece, although it seemed to need a little help by having some extra harmony voiced in the right hand:

I liked the patterns of thirds in the penultimate bar of this section, and I liked the momentary sense of fullness in the fourth, as you poised on that last chord before returning to the main tune. But naturally, now that the piece was finished, it was open to interpretation in all sorts of different ways, and a performer was under no particular obligation to follow my voicings. I was already keen to hear what another pianist would make of it.

‘Do you have any paper with you?’ I asked Tony.

‘Sure.’

He always carried a slim leather briefcase with him, full of song-copies. From this he now produced a sheet of blank manuscript paper which he handed to me, along with a pen. Within a few minutes I had written it out. I pushed it back across the table towards him and his dark, intelligent eyes scanned it keenly, picking out the highlights and constructing, in his mind, a sound-picture of the total effect.

‘Very interesting,’ he said. ‘Quite nicely done, that.’

He tried to return it to me but I stopped him.

‘Will you play it?’

‘What, now?’

‘Yes. I’d like to hear it.’

He considered it; and then handed me back the paper.

‘No. You play it.’

If I hadn’t been slightly drunk, and if the place hadn’t been so empty, I would never have had the nerve. Apart from anything else, I’d never even played it on a piano before, only on an electric keyboard, which isn’t the same thing at all. Be that as it may, I found myself walking over to the piano, sitting down on the stool, and trying to prepare myself by breathing deeply. A couple of seconds later I had hit the first chord.

Some musicians will tell you that alcohol can improve your playing by helping you to relax. This is not true. The only real relaxation comes from feeling confident about your material. The sort of relaxation offered by alcohol is nothing but a blurring of perception, which means that faults in your performance never distract you because you don’t even notice them. I was too drunk, that evening, to play a respectable version of ‘Tower Hill’. Exactly how it would have sounded to an objective listener I don’t know: all Tony would tell me afterwards was that I had made some mistakes. At least, that’s what he told me about the first half of what I played. The rest could perhaps best be described as an excursion into free improvisation.

The fact is that after a few minutes I lost all concentration on the music and became absorbed, instead, in the associations which it brought to mind. My fingers played on, quite independent, while I thought of all those long, tired walks home from the tube station; how hopeful I’d felt, at first; how dogged and blind I had been more recently. I couldn’t find it in me to be bitter, though. My mind went back more and more to those early evenings with Madeline: the fun of going to new places together and the easy flow of our conversation; the sight of her looking out for me at some meeting-point, the way her face would light up at the first glimpse of my approach. Meanwhile, on the keyboard, I must have been going through impossible key changes and dissonances, and I didn’t come back to my senses until a familiar phrase struck my ear and I realized that, for some reason or other, I was playing (albeit softly and out of time) the plangent theme from ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’.

I stopped in mid-flight; and there was a deadly hush, all around me, as the customers — none of whom were talking, any more, but all looking in my direction — stared, puzzled and hostile, wondering who I was and why they were no longer listening to their regular pianist.

Hastily I got up, pushed through the tables and rejoined Tony in the corner of the room.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I must be drunk or something.’

He nodded, and looked at me with worried eyes.

‘Will you be OK?’ he said. ‘Getting back, I mean? Do you want me to come with you?’

‘I’ll be OK.’

‘All right then.’ Just as I was leaving, he added: ‘Oh, and don’t forget about Sunday.’

‘Sunday?’

‘Not this one, the week after. You’re supposed to be looking after Ben for us. Yes?’

‘Oh, sure. Next Sunday. Fine.’

I staggered out, and the next thing I can remember, I was standing by the ticket barrier at Leicester Square station. I don’t know whether it was by mistake or half-formed design, but instead of getting a train to Embankment, I found myself travelling north. I got out at Euston and stood on the platform long after the other passengers had left it. I needed to talk to someone. There was someone I very badly wanted to see, and this was why I had taken the northbound train. Who was it? I couldn’t concentrate. What was I supposed to do next — turn around and go back home? Karla. I wanted to see Karla. What for? Was I going to tell her about this evening, about the argument, about Madeline? What time was it. Quarter past eleven. The White Goat would be closed by the time I got there. Closed, but not deserted. She would still be inside, cleaning the tables, washing the glasses, locking up. I crossed over to the City Branch platform and took a train to the Angel. I would knock on the door. She would come to the door, open it, see my face, let me in without a word. Without a word. She would be expecting me, almost. Without a word.

‘Can I help you in any way, sir?’

My fist was sore and I was looking into the face of a gigantic policeman. I was standing in a back street and everything was very quiet, now that I had stopped hammering on the door of the pub.

‘The pubs close at eleven o’clock, sir,’ said the policeman. This was an accusation, not a helpful statement of fact, and he wielded the word ‘sir’ like a blunt instrument.

‘I think I must have left something in there,’ I stammered. ‘My wallet.’

‘I see, sir. Well, you’ll have to wait until the morning to get it back.’

He was about forty, with a moustache, and didn’t seem too threatening. I murmured something by way of thanks and started to back away. ‘Have you got enough money to get home, sir?’ he asked.

‘Yes, it’s all right. I’ve got a card.’

‘Good night, sir.’

He watched me as I turned the corner. Five minutes later, when I came back round the corner, he was gone. The pub was dark, the door was bolted. I leant against it, my legs gave way, and I slid to the floor.

Probably I wasn’t asleep for very long. I woke up shivering, but it wasn’t cold that woke me. It was a sound. The street, as I have said, was quiet. I mean quiet, and not silent, because London is never silent. You don’t realize this at the time, while you’re living there: lying awake at four in the morning you might mistake what you are listening to for silence, but you’d be wrong. You only have to go somewhere else, out into the country, even to another town, to realize that in London there is always a hum, a rumble, a buried murmur of restless, indefinable activity. It was against this backdrop, this perpetually tense atmosphere of distant noise, that I could hear something distinct and surprising. It was a voice: a high, clear, woman’s voice, singing a tune so strong and lovely that it already sounded familar, even though I knew I had never heard it before. The voice was coming from above my head, from the sky, like an angel’s.

No it wasn’t. I looked up and saw, above the row of shops on the opposite side of the road, an open window. One of those shops had a sign which said ‘Videos — For Sale Or For Hire’. A memory clicked into place and I rose quickly to my feet: Karla. Of course. This tune was Scottish, you could tell that just by listening to it, and the words, although I couldn’t understand them, sounded as though they might have been Gaelic. Many months later, in fact, I discovered the words to this song, which is called ‘The Sailor’s Longing’. They included these lines:

Nuair chì mi eun a’falbh air sgiath,

Bu mhiann leam bhith ’na chuideachd:

Gu’n deanainn cùrs’ air tìr mo rùin,

Far bheil an sluagh ri fuireach.

Translating them into English would give you something like this:

When I see a bird taking to wing,

I long to fly off with it:

I’d set my course to the land I love,

The land my people dwell in.

I stood and listened to her voice for I don’t know how long. It seemed the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. The tune spoke of such certainty and fitness, the voice was so pure, that I forgot, in a moment, everything. I even forgot that I was drunk. It spoke to me, and what it told me was exactly what I had wanted to hear. And when it was over, leaving nothing but that strange busy stillness, I no longer wanted or needed to speak to Karla. Not then. Not now.

I had heard her sing.