Romance in A minor: A musical romance (4 page)

"Thank you. The garden needs a bit of work I'm afraid."

She hadn't told him about Tom. Dumb. Because he might not have invited her if he knew that she was engaged. She hoped not, because she didn't want that kind of trouble.

He opened the door further. "Come in, come in. Let's go to the studio. It's a bit hard to play out here."

"Yeah, sure." Her voice sounded too high.

She heaved the cello case on her shoulder and went past him into a dark hallway with doors on both sides.

The door shut with a click of finality. This was her new life. Going back to playing some music. Not professionally, but for fun. And going to concerts. Alone, or with friends, if Tom didn't want to come. He would have to accept that. And in case Tom asked, she really wasn't interested in Darren in that way, and he was not interested in her. Really not.

Darren preceded her to the back of the house, where walls had been taken out to create an open living area that included the kitchen and that had ceiling to floor windows along the entire back of the house. On the timber floor stood a couch and mismatched chairs covered in throw rugs. A music stand stood in the corner, next to a narrow set of shelves that contained untidy stacks of sheet music. Darren's flute sat on the stand on top of a cabinet against the side wall. Most of the wall was covered in various art prints and photos. One of them she thought was Darren while playing with an orchestra.

A set of double doors opened into a tiny courtyard with potted plants. There were also statues of frogs.

There was also, she noticed, no one else at home, and it occurred to her that she'd been a bit rash to come over to a strange man's house before checking on his living conditions. She didn't know him all that well.

"Do you want coffee?" he asked.

"Yes, please." She hugged her cello case.

Darren went to the kitchen bench where he messed about with the coffeemaker. There were a couple of used plates and cups on the bench, as well as a tottering pile of cook books.

"Do you cook?" she said into the uneasy silence.

"A bit. Trevor is a much better cook than I am, but I can hold my ground."

Justine laughed. Of course he was gay. There was a joke that male flute players were always gay. She should have remembered. Well, there was that problem solved.

While the coffee machine did its thing, Darren went to a side room and came back with a second music stand.

"This room is so cute." So different from the sterile cleanliness of her own apartment. Tom couldn't stand mess, of course. Everything had to be packed away or thrown out. There would be no messy shelves with books spilling out. No wayward pot plants trying to take over the table with a cascade of leaves and fronds.

Justine dumped her cello case next to a music stand. The white cat came out from between a huge pile of multi-coloured cushions on the couch and scurried into the hallway.

Justine laughed. "There are so many cushions, you can hardly see the couch."

"This is my sacred cushion collection."

"Sacred?"

His face was dead serious. "Whenever I go on a trip, I buy a cushion for my couch."

"Wow, you've been on a lot of trips then."

"Last one I got was from Japan." He dug through the pile and held up a cream silk cushion with a painting of a tree and blossoms in broad brush strokes. "This one."

"Very pretty."

"It was an awesome trip. I saw Hiroshi Hideka play while I was there. Do you remember him?"

"I do. I'm jealous that you got to see him. I played with him, once."

"Wait—that was you?" His eyes were wide.

She nodded, slowly, disturbed by the look of shock on his face.

"And you work for an insurance company?"

She nodded again. He sounded so incredulous that she barely dared admit it.

"Answering phones and stuff?"

She nodded again.

"Solving people's stupid problems." He put on a high voice. "I want you to fix my car. The police said it was my fault that I crashed into that old bomb, but I was only putting on lipstick. I was watching at the same time. Why won't you give me any money?"

"Pretty much." She looked down.

"What the
hell
, Justine. I heard you play. Anyone who can play like that does
not
work in an insurance office! What happened?"

She missed out on some scholarships she really wanted. She lost confidence, didn't enjoy playing anymore, she became depressed.

Justine's knees, the carpet and cushions blurred before her eyes. The white cat stalked to her, swishing the tip of its tail. Justine stroked its soft back, fighting back tears. "I...sort of lost confidence," she said softly. "My mother never wanted me to play. I had a friend who played in an orchestra and she did a bit of teaching. Then she had a baby and it wasn't practical to continue, and I started thinking about how much point there was for me continue—"

"You are not someone else. You are the talented Justine Feldman."

"Not anymore."

A long-fingered hand came into her field of vision. Darren pushed her chin up until she looked him in the eye. His brown eyes were clear and concerned. "Hey. Whatever happened that made you quit doesn't matter. It's over. That said, we are going to get you back to playing." He clapped his hands, and the cat scurried away with the sudden noise. "Come. Open that case, and let's see if we can get the fire burning again."

"I don't know if I'm still any good."

"You'll be out of practice, but who ever put it in your head that you're no good deserves to have his arse kicked."

It wasn't any one person. It was a whole lot of little things. The thought that there was actually something wrong with her hadn't occurred to her until much later.

He went and got a chair from the table, and his flute from the stand on top of the cabinet against the wall. The white cat came back and inspected Justine's cello case, shrinking back as she opened it.

"Cute kitty. What's its name?"

"Beethoven."

She laughed. "That figures. Does it like music?"

"It's a he-cat. Or should I say an ex-he-cat. He's quite old and quite deaf."

Justine laughed. "That's where Beethoven comes in, right?"

"You got it."

She lifted the cello out of the case and screwed the stand into the base with a feeling of comforting familiarity. She took out the little stand, placed the spike into it and leaned the instrument against the side of her leg and shoulder. The smell of it unlocked many years of memories. Why had she allowed herself to forget that so many of them were good memories?

She played an A to tune to Darren's flute and quickly tuned the other strings.

Darren was watching her. "Either you have been playing recently or you have the ability to remember how to do things perfectly."

"What do you think? That I'd turn up here with an instrument I haven't touched for years?"

He grinned.

He had chosen a piece that she hadn't played before, but was not particularly hard.

As soon as the bow hit the strings and the lovely warm sound of the cello filled the room, she felt at home. Her playing was stiff and she missed a good number of notes but the warm tones of his flute made up for her fumbling.

It didn't seem that much later when Justine looked at the clock. "Gosh, is that the time? I should go home." She might not even make it back before Tom did, and would have to answer questions about what she'd been doing.

"Will you come again?" His expression was friendly, genuine.

"Yes, I will. I enjoyed that."

Only when she was in the street did she remember that she was supposed to prepare a wedding and move to Singapore.

O
n the crowded bus home, holding her cello between her legs, Justine could still hear the music in her mind.

What would her life have been like had she continued with music? Would she live in a trendy, slightly run-down house with a room mate or two, a white deaf cat named Beethoven, stacks of pillows and frog statues?

It was later than she had planned to come back and she hurried upstairs. Fortunately, Tom wasn't home yet, so she went into the exercise room and put the cello back in the corner. She hadn't had the time to go to the gym, but she could say that she came back from work later than planned. While her heart calmed, she went into the kitchen and started  to cut everything ready to prepare dinner. With that done and Tom still not home, she turned on the tv. She already heard Tom's voice
Why do you watch that rubbish?

She didn’t know. Tom didn't watch tv much. Did Darren even have a tv? She hadn't seen one.

And this show really was rubbish. She turned off the tv, listening to the sounds of the neighbours talking in their kitchen.

All she wanted was to go back into the spare room and pick up her cello again, but she didn't want Tom walking in on her playing without explaining it to him first.

It felt like betrayal. It was Tom who had picked her up off the floor after she'd realised that she would never be a musician.

They'd met at a bar where she had gone with a few friends. Someone had accidentally pushed her, and she'd tripped, spilling red wine all over a young man's shirt. She'd been so embarrassed and fragile that she had dissolved in an incoherent blubbering mess.

The young man had taken her to the café nextdoor where he had bought her coffee, refusing all her attempts to pay for it, or even to give him some money to have his shirt cleaned. Away from her music friends who tried to persuade her to stay, she'd blurted out her entire story. How stressed she was, how she felt that other people were always getting the best opportunities, how she could see that one by one the girls who graduated dropped out of the music scene when they married and had children. How she wanted a family, and how that seemed like a waste to her, because, once she took a break, she would never get back in. Certainly not in the big orchestras that paid a decent salary.

The man, of course, was Tom, and after she had poured her heart out, he had asked her to dinner the next night. The rest was history.

Why he'd done this, she had never been sure. Oh, he loved her, and he'd probably been lonely, having been without a girlfriend for some time. He was into fitness. Walking, riding bikes, skiing in Canada when it was stinking hot at home. Things like that. His life style had been an eye-opener to her. She enjoyed it.

But that didn't mean that
her
lifestyle and interests were worth nothing.

Although she couldn't see him sitting still for long enough to attend a concert. He'd probably find the music boring. And if they ever had a cat it would certainly be not a white-haired one, because it spread hair all over the black couch! And they would call it Turbo or something, not Beethoven.

She looked out the window. From the living room she could see the cars in the street. The pedestrian traffic light had just turned green and people streamed across the road into the supermarket at the building's ground floor. Wow. Tom was really late today.

This was nonsense. She was a grown up woman. Why should she have to hide her desire to listen to and play music from him? If he wanted to marry her, then she should be allowed to do this. There was no reason. She was putting things in her head again. She had convinced
herself
that she was no good, and now she was trying to convince herself that Tom wouldn't allow her to play when in reality, the subject had simply never come up because she had never raised it.

She went to the bedroom and extricated her music stand from the back of the wardrobe.

There was no room to set it up in the exercise room, so she dumped the clothes that were on the chair in the bedroom onto the bed, and put the music stand under the window. The light was nice here.

With the modern furnishings and the bed in the room, the acoustic wasn't half as good as in Darren's living room. But the book of warm-up exercises was just as painful as she remembered it being, with the added bonus that she hadn't played for so long and her fingers were still sore from the afternoon. But it felt good. Of course she wouldn't go back to the Conservatorium, but playing for fun or the occasional paid gig, or even teaching a few kids, that would be nice.

The front door thudded shut.

Justine gasped and lifted the bow off the strings.

A moment later, Tom stuck his head into the room. "What are you doing?"

"Playing the cello." She guessed that would have been pretty obvious.

He gave her that unnerving intense look. He'd obviously been to the pool, because his hair was still wet and he wore his tracksuit. He said nothing and he looked so... disappointed almost.

She felt the need to explain herself to him. "I was wondering if I still could play. There's a new girl at work and she was talking about going to concerts and stuff, and I wondered... I thought playing music would be a romantic thing to do."

"Yeah." His face relaxed. "Yes. I guess so. I'll go and open a bottle of wine while you cook then."

Justine put the cello back in the case. Of course. She was meant to have dinner ready.

She followed him into the living room and started cooking. "I would have started earlier but I had no idea when you were coming."

"I'm sorry I would have come home earlier, but work was absolute hell." Tom flicked through the channels on the tv, and settled on watching some reality fitness show, while commenting that the show was rubbish.

"Why don't you watch the news instead?"

He looked at her, frowning. "The news?"

"Yes, well, if that show is as much rubbish as you say, I wonder why you keep watching it."

He turned the tv off. The sudden silence fell over her like a suffocating blanket.

"Is anything wrong?" he asked.

"No. Why?"

"You seem... cranky."

"I'm not."

Another one of those intense looks. "Why are you suddenly playing music?"

"I told you. I wondered if I still could."

"I thought you didn't enjoy it anymore."

"I didn't, for a while, but it's different if you're not doing it for a job. I don't want to do it for a job. I want to do it for fun. I'm thinking about finding an amateur orchestra to play with."