The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me (14 page)

Then I stopped and almost gasped. What was wrong with him? He was the widowed one! My insides turned over. He had probably been sitting amid the candles, talking to his dead wife.

A terrible, selfish disappointment gripped me. I liked Julian Bell. I was sitting close to him in a candlelit room and if I could have fast-forwarded the tape by a couple of hours I knew I would want to kiss him. I’d never felt that about anyone I’d just met.

But there was no place for me in the life of a grieving man.

I tried to backtrack twenty minutes to a time when Julian Bell was not in my life, but I couldn’t. Already he’d claimed a seat at my table.

‘What the hell is going on in there?’ Julian was watching me intently. ‘You look like you’ve gone into psychosis.’

I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Are you the widowed one?’ I blurted.

If the question bothered him, it didn’t show. ‘Yep.’

I hated myself. Big, insensitive fool.

But, to my surprise, he was smiling again. ‘You think I was sitting here communing with the dead, don’t you?’ He laughed.

‘Perhaps.’

‘Ha-ha! I was finishing my editorial for my magazine. We’ve got a power outage and my laptop’s running out of juice. That’s why I’m not with the others. Yet.’

‘Oh.’ I didn’t believe him and continued to hate myself. Had I not had sufficient training with bereavement?
We carry on as if nothing’s happened
, Mum hissed.
No fuss of any sort
.

‘Well, Sally, I
was
widowed, and it was more than five years ago. I always meet up with the boys on the anniversary, because my mom expects me to have a breakdown and so do my friends, so they get together and fix it so that I’m not on my own. They think I don’t know what they’re doing. If I’m honest, I just do it for their sakes. I’m fine.’

I wanted desperately to believe him. ‘It’s true.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course I feel sad. Devastated, at times. Of course I wish she hadn’t had to die. But it’s not the biggest thing in my life any more.’

There was a long silence. ‘That’s pretty cool, actually,’ he reflected, pleased. ‘Go, me!’ He took off his glasses and cleaned them on the corner of my cardigan.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said eventually. ‘It’s absolutely none of my business and you shouldn’t have to explain it to me. I’m just a weirdo who turned up at your front door. I should go. I’m sorry.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Or you could stop having this little drama and we could have some more wine and hang out.’ His eyes were mischievous. ‘What’s it to be?’

Finally, gloriously, I relaxed.

‘Wine,’ I said definitively. I sat down on a big hessian pouffe in the window and smiled. ‘Let’s get mildly drunk!’

He bounded off to the kitchen. ‘Although, if you prefer,’ he called, ‘I can sit here wailing out love songs into the sea of candles.’

When he came back with the wine bottle, he was pointing at me. ‘Lift up your index finger,’ he instructed. I did so. Julian pushed the tip of his index finger against mine as if pressing a button.

‘Reset,’ he explained. ‘Awkward widower-talk over. Start again.’

I liked it. ‘We’re reset,’ I confirmed.

He topped up our glasses and sat down next to me again. The upper windows were still open and a freshening breeze prickled delicately at my shoulders.

We talked to the end of our glasses and agreed, reluctantly, that we should go and join the others in the poetry café. I didn’t want this to end. I could tell Julian Bell didn’t want it to end. But the need to be there for Fiona had become immutable.

‘I’ll go and change quickly,’ I told him. ‘Thank you for the wine!’

Julian stood up too. He was close to me. ‘Thank Raúl,’ he said. ‘I stole it.’ We both grinned.

Then he just stepped forward and, in a really matter-of-fact way, kissed me on the lips. I let him, because I wanted him to kiss me on the lips. He moved back, watching my face, and I wished he’d stayed for more.

‘I don’t normally behave like this,’ he said. His voice was quieter. ‘Was that too much?’

‘No. I enjoyed it.’ An irrepressible smile was erupting out of me.

He was blowing out candles as I left to go and change.

The venue for the poetry slam was on an unprepossessing street on the edge of the East Village. ‘This is Alphabet City,’ Julian announced. ‘There’s quite a lot of assholes in this part of town, people who like to call themselves activists and creatives but who really just like themselves a bit too much.’

‘Sounds like Williamsburg.’

He sniggered. ‘Right.’

‘Actually, I’m quite an activist,’ I told him. ‘I like protests and movements and things.’

‘No, you’re not,’ Julian said firmly.

‘What?’ I tried to sound outraged.

‘You’re about as much of an activist as Pam the dog, Sally.’

‘Who says?’

‘You gave yourself away as soon as you opened your mouth.’ He giggled and I giggled too. I couldn’t stop myself. Everything about this man, from his fluffy hair to his odd brown trainers, was funny. ‘You said, “I’m quite an activist.” Nobody is “quite” an activist, you mad little hamster!’ He giggled even harder. I giggled even harder. I liked being called a mad little hamster.

We were approaching the entrance to the poetry-slam venue, an unobtrusive glass porch leading into what looked like a dismal little building. It was called the Nuyorican Poets’ Café. I braced myself.

‘And you can stop that right now,’ he said, even though I hadn’t said anything. ‘It’s a really special place. Me and Raúl used to come here as students.’

‘Right you are,’ I said bravely.

Julian burst out laughing again. ‘Oh,
look
at you! Ha-haaa! The hat. The outfit. And your little face, looking so appalled that I go to poetry slams. The whole thing is just … awesome. I like you.’

On the L train, while he was telling me about the magazine he owned and edited – a properly funny-sounding weekly called the
Brooklyn Beaver
– he’d caught me covertly sniffing my still-dirty hair. So when we’d got off at First Avenue he’d bought me a beanie from a little corner store. ‘To stop the hair-sniffing,’ he explained. I was touched and had put it on without hesitation, even though the All-Saints dress I had shoved on before we left was not its ideal partner.

Julian Bell was still laughing. ‘Sally Howlett, you look like a proper Alphabet City beat-poet grassroots-activist patchouli-loving student,’ he said. ‘And I like it.’

I had no idea what most of this meant but I embraced it. ‘Lead me to the creativity,’ I ordered.

The poets’ café was not so much a café but a proper little performance venue, with a stage, a large wooden floor and a balcony. A small bar ran along the wall from the entrance and – to my great surprise – the place was
overflowing. Fiona, Raúl, Barry, Bea, Bea’s Brazilian masseur and a few other men I identified as Raúl and Julian’s friends were sitting halfway back, bottles of wine and beer already littering their table. Julian and I had obviously entered during some sort of hiatus but the crowd was already settling down for the next poet. Fiona looked flushed and excitable. ‘This is actually really good!’ she whispered. And then: ‘WHO THE HELL IS THAT?’

I shrugged, and chose not to explain that he was the widowed bloke who, in the last hour, I’d met, kissed and slightly fallen for. Even Fi, with her wild imagination, would have struggled with that.

Raúl and the other boys sniggered in Julian’s direction. ‘Fast work, bro,’ Raúl said, with an impressed nod.

I didn’t mind. I sat down, marvelling at how normal it felt to be at a poetry slam with a widowed journalist, a rock star and an assortment of other crazies. Although, I realized, scanning the venue, they actually weren’t crazies. They all looked quite normal. Even Bea didn’t look out of place, although in fairness she had declined to wear her customary spike heels.

The next poet took to the microphone.

He was a slight, nervous-looking man who called himself ‘Elf, from the Bronx’, and he was dwarfed by his oversized suit. I felt my skin crawl with vicarious embarrassment, knowing that a man so uncomfortable in his own skin was quite unlikely to have poetry inside him.

How wrong I was.

I’d never heard performance poetry before – I hadn’t wanted to – but I wanted that man to talk into the microphone all night. His poem was called ‘Double Life’ and it
was all about the way he edited himself so that nobody could see who he really was. It was brutal and yet there was not so much as a whiff of self-pity. In fact, he was often so funny that Barry fell under the table laughing, although this was something Barry quite enjoyed doing.

When Elf finished I made myself hoarse cheering. He’d just told my story.

The night wore on and eventually ended, but Raúl was good friends with the owner of the café and got us locked in. I couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of Beatriz Maria Stefanini taking part in a lock-in after a poetry slam, but she was in her element.

I took a mental snapshot of the place, knowing that whatever happened next between me and Julian Bell – even if it was nothing – I wanted to remember tonight for ever.

Heavy drinking ensued. Julian was next to me all night and I stopped thinking he was great and started thinking he was stupendous. He was generous with drinks, warm towards me, kind to his friends and consistently amusing: he called Fiona a wazzock – which nobody else would have attempted – and he and Raúl had us all in stitches with their banter. And yet he said to me, as I came back from the bar with a round of drinks, ‘You crack me up, Sally Howlett. Why are you walking sideways to hide your bottom? It’s magnificent!’

I blushed and demurred. ‘You are extremely funny,’ he informed me. ‘Especially when you’re not trying to be.’

He was definitely laughing at me, but I was definitely laughing at him. His hair escaped the products he’d shoved on hurriedly before we’d left, and started to fluff as the
night got later and the mood wilder. He caught me looking at it, howled loudly and stole my new beanie.

‘SO,’ Fiona broke in, ‘what do you think of our Sally? GORGEOUS, isn’t she?’ Fiona was very noisy tonight. And … weird. Something about her unsettled me. She spent quite a lot of time talking right in Raúl’s face, then Julian’s face, then my face, and kept starting pointless debates about things she lost interest in two seconds later. She was also, I noticed, with a twinge of fear, being difficult with Raúl. Clingy, then rude, then mad.

Julian began to compose a reply when Fiona interrupted, ‘
Everyone
loves Sally! Sally’s the real star at our work, not me. She’s like a sister to me, Julian, so if you mess with Sally, you mess with me –’

‘Oi,’ I cut in. ‘Shut it.’

Fiona was so surprised she did. ‘OK!’ she squeaked, bounding off to tell Barry the news that I’d just told her to shut it.

‘Is she normally like that?’ Julian asked, looking curiously across at her.

I was torn between maternal defensiveness and the strong urge I felt to tell him the truth about everything. ‘Yes and no,’ I said slowly. ‘She’s difficult. But there’s something particularly weird tonight …’

‘I think she’s high,’ Julian said.

I went pale. ‘No!’

He continued to watch her. ‘Does she have a problem?’

‘No! I mean … Well, I did catch her doing some coke in June, but she said she could take or leave it. She said she’d stopped.’

Julian nodded. ‘Hmm.’

‘I believe her, though. She stopped drinking too. She said she’d sorted herself out.’

‘They always say that.’

‘They?’

‘Drug users.’

My stomach knotted. ‘She’s not a cokehead. She told me she’d given up. Completely. And she stopped drinking too. And she’s been great! Much more reliable and … and she’s FINE!’

Julian slid a hand over mine. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I could be wrong.’

I stared at him, clutches of panic in my abdomen. ‘Um, how come you know so much about drug users, Julian?’

He grinned. ‘Fancy a line?’

‘What?’

Then he laughed. ‘I’m JOKING!’

Seeing me waver, he squeezed my hand. ‘I was one hundred per cent joking,’ he said quietly. ‘I am not a cokehead. And I’m sure your cousin isn’t either. I don’t know what I’m on about.’

I nodded. ‘OK …’

‘I’m having a lovely night,’ he said simply. His eyes were so close to mine. ‘This is all pretty mad, isn’t it?’

Everything faded to quiet. Fiona, the fear, the constant worry. I took a deep breath. ‘Mad but good.’

Very briefly, before Raúl and the others had time to notice, Julian kissed me lightly on the lips. ‘I like you even more than I did when I said it earlier.’ He got up to go to the bar, the label of his still inside-out T-shirt flapping around under that mad hair.

Much later – by which time I had probably at least a couple of bottles of wine in me and was mumbling things like ‘I NEEDA GO HOME BUT I’M TOO DRUNKA MOOOOVE’ – someone started playing the piano. Bea, yes, that was who. Bea had a baby grand in her five-bedroom flat in Marylebone and knocking out Haydn sonatas was just another part of her repertoire.

‘I still don’t unnerstand why she works,’ I confided in Julian. ‘I mean, she’s, like, thaaaaaaat rich. She could buy Barack Obama’s house …’

Julian raised an eyebrow. ‘The White House? Wow.’

‘And DONALTRUM’S HOUSE! DONALTUMP’S HOUSE! I mean TRUMP’S HOUSE. No! I don’t mean TRUMP, I mean DONALD –’

‘Oh, my God, seriously, stop talking.’ Julian was wetting himself. ‘You told me you were a good drinker!’

‘I lied,’ I confirmed happily. ‘I’m terrible. TRUMP! TRUMPY DONALT —’

We were interrupted. One of the other boys staying in Raúl’s flat – an artist the shape and size of a large tank – came over and pretty much picked Julian up. ‘Come and sing,’ he instructed.

‘Oh, dude, no …’ Julian protested. ‘I don’t want to, I’m talking to my fine lady here, she’s –’

‘Come and sing,’ the guy repeated. ‘Jorge asked for you. He’s been serving us beers way past his home time,’ he added. Jorge was the owner and apparently a friend of this group of bohemian nutters.

‘OK, OK! Let go of me, you douche.’ Julian went off to the piano.

Bea looked up from the keyboard and shrieked
delightedly. ‘They tell me you are a great singer,’ she purred. ‘Come and sit next to Beatriz …’

As soon as he was gone, Fiona closed in on me. ‘What the
fuck
?’ she hissed. ‘Did you two have
sex
or something? You’re like electricity!’

I did a double-take. Sometime during the evening, Fiona had started drinking. I hadn’t noticed: perhaps because I was hammered, perhaps because I was so used to the sight of her with a smudged wine glass slopping around in her hand. But she was drunk. Her eyes were yellowy and unfocused and she was right up in my face. I could smell the booze on her breath. Maybe something else. Sharp, chemical.

Let it go
, I told myself. I was drunk too. Bollocksed. Everyone was allowed a night off the wagon once in a while, weren’t they?

I tried to smile what I thought to be a secretive, enigmatic sort of smile, but it turned into a moronic leer. ‘Julian’s
lovely
,’ was all I could manage. ‘
Luvverly
.’

‘Well, one of us should be happy,’ Fiona replied. ‘I mean, I’m never going to be promoted at work and I’m getting all fat and I’ll probably fuck up with Raúl, but you might as well be happy. Go for it, I say.’

I sighed despairingly, and started to compose a reply, but Fiona giggled naughtily. ‘I’m
joking
!’ she said, punching my arm.

But then I stopped hearing her voice. Suddenly, the room was slowing down and there was a sound that filled me with the purest, not-drink-related joy. Bea was playing the duet in
La Bohème
where Rodolfo and Mimi first meet in his freezing garret in the Latin Quarter, where they fall
in love on the spot. The tune poured into me and the hairs on the back of my neck, drunk and disorderly as they were, stood up. Oh, God, it broke my heart, this music. It killed me. It was
beautiful
.

Fiona had stopped talking to me and was staring dreamily at the piano. Someone had started singing Rodolfo’s part very well.
Julian Bell
, I realized, had started singing Rodolfo’s part. He clearly wasn’t a proper singer or anything, but he was singing it very nicely indeed. Softly, perfectly pitched, and with an impressive sensitivity for someone who had drunk a good few buckets of wine.

Bea threw in Mimi’s lines in her crow’s shriek, which made everyone laugh.

‘This is, like, a fraction of what he can do,’ the tank man told us proudly. I didn’t believe him, because if Julian could sing any better than that he’d have been a singer. But I felt myself taking in Tank Man’s infectious pride.
You’re amazing
, I thought dazedly, watching Julian sing.
Really amazing
. Briefly I remembered having thought only a few weeks ago that amazing men were way out of my league, never interested in someone like me.

‘This is your favourite, this duet, isn’t it?’ Fi whispered.

I nodded, and even though Bea was screeching horribly through Mimi’s part, I had tears in my eyes. I felt so happy, watching the brilliant man who kept kissing me, surrounded by people I loved, that to hear my most precious, favourite piece of music in candlelight was almost too much.

Fiona put an arm round my shoulders and kissed the side of my face. ‘I love you so much, Sal,’ she whispered, sweaty and close. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re my world.’

I allowed the tears – some happy, some despairing – to fall.

Julian and Bea carried on but as the higher, louder notes approached, Bea stopped playing. ‘I cannot do this!’ she shrieked. ‘Someone sing Mimi, please!’

And without hesitation, without
thinking
about it, I just got up, walked over to the piano where I stood in front of Julian, looked him in the eye and started singing.

After it was over I became aware of a lot of noise. It was Bea, shrieking again. She wasn’t singing this time, she was screaming at me. ‘You sing? You SING?
DIO MIO
, SALLY, MY DARLING, THAT WAS BEAUTIFUL!’ Fi was jumping all over me and all of the others were clapping and whistling. I looked around wild-eyed. I’d sung?

Finally, I looked at Julian, who was staring at me like I was on fire. He shook his head and whispered something. In spite of the racket I heard it clearly: ‘Shit. You were
incredible
. What was that about?’