The band hit the last note of “Some Enchanted Evening” more or less together and Resnick clapped, startling a few dazed pigeons. An elderly lady wheeled her shopping trolley across in front of the stage and dropped a coin into the bass-drum case that was collecting puddles and contributions towards the band’s winter tour of Germany and the conductor announced the final number. Time to go, Resnick thought, but he stayed on as the two beginners lifted their instruments towards their lips. The conductor waved a hand encouragingly in their direction, the wind lifted their sheet music from its stand and their chance was lost. Without hesitation, the boy retrieved it and Resnick watched the girl’s pinched serious face as, biting the inside of her mouth, she struggled to find her place in time for the next chorus. Only when they had played their sixteen bars and sat back, did Resnick turn away, tears, daft sod, pricking at his eyes.
Carew had taken his time over showering and now he sat in his room with the gas fire turned high, just blue-and-white striped boxers and a lambswool V-neck, eating a second apple and glancing through the review section of The Times. So many sections, it was getting difficult to tell Saturdays from Sundays. At hand but unopened, a book on neurosurgery that needed returning to the library, notes for an essay that should have been submitted the week before and for which he had every intention of applying for a further extension.
He refolded the paper and dropped it to the floor, walked on bare feet to the window. The car was back again, square to the end of the street, he could see the dark-haired silhouette clearly enough but not the face. Well, fuck her! He pulled on faded jeans, clean from the launderette, replaced his sweater with a white shirt. His black leather jacket was hanging behind the door. The door at the side of the kitchen led past an outside toilet, now disused, across a small flagged yard to a narrow entry. Half way along, Carew let himself through someone’s rear gate and slipped through the side passage into the adjacent road.
He wondered if she’d still be sitting there when he got back, or whether her patience would have run out. On the whole, Carew thought with a smile, he preferred the former. Maybe then he would make a show of walking past, returning when she didn’t even know he’d left, give her something to think about. Or simply go back in the way he’d come out, leaving her none the wiser. Either had its advantages.
And which one Carew chose, what would that depend on? Whim, mood, or how he got on where he was going?
Lynn Kellogg shifted her position behind the wheel yet again, stretching her legs as best she could before beginning another set of exercises to keep the circulation flowing, raising and lowering first her toes, then all of the foot, circling and lifting, pressing down. Ankling, her former cyclist boyfriend had called it, one of the few techniques he could be relied upon to demonstrate successfully, those times she caught him flat on his back on their bed. She told herself not to check her watch but, of course, she did. She tried to clear her mind and concentrate, not wanting to think about the state of her bladder, how many more Sundays she could go without driving home to Norfolk, exactly what Resnick would say if ever she had to explain what she was doing.
Twenty-nine
Cheryl Falmer looked at her watch for the second time in as many minutes and walked across to the desk to check that it was correct. She had arranged to meet Amanda on court at four and there she was, changed and ready, twenty past four and no Amanda. She was beginning to feel stupid, standing in the sports-center foyer in that skirt, pretending not to notice the rugby players staring at her legs as they came in from training.
“It is four o’clock?” she asked the woman at reception. “Badminton. Booked in the name of Hooson.”
“That’s right. Not turned up?”
“No.”
“Maybe she’s forgotten.”
Cheryl moved away, shaking her head. Amanda wasn’t the kind to forget. Not anything. Every week they’d been playing, through the last two terms of the previous year and carrying on in this. She knew that Amanda marked it down in the little diary she always carded. Green dot with a four alongside it: badminton. Blue dots for essays in. Yellow for tutorials, red for you know what. Unlike a lot of her group, Amanda was serious, organized; not a stick-in-the-mud, not po-faced like the few feminist-Leninists or whatever they were, always scowling from behind their hand-knitted sweaters and hand-rolled cigarettes; a little older, more mature, she had chosen social sciences with a purpose, not fallen into it as an easy option or an academic back door.
Even so: nearly twenty-five past and no sign.
If it had been squash, it would have been worth going on to the court by herself and thwacking the ball against the wall for half an hour. But the prospect of lofting shuttles high above the net, practicing her serve, didn’t appeal. She would go back into the changing room and get into her Simple Minds sweatshirt, her denim jacket and jeans. If she cut across between the practice pitches, it was easy enough to call by Amanda’s hall of residence and find out what had happened, what had gone wrong.
Jazz Record Requests was just finishing as Resnick entered the house. Hearing the signature tune, he assumed that Ed Silver had switched the radio on and left it playing, hardly expected him still to be there. But he was at the kitchen table, so intent upon Resnick’s battered copy of The Horn that he scarcely looked up. Miles, who had been spread the width of Silver’s bony knees, leapt off at Resnick’s approach and ran towards his bowl.
“Thought you couldn’t stand cats,” Resnick said.
“I can’t,” not looking round.
Resnick shrugged off his damp coat and leaned his plastic bag of shopping against the fridge. The other cats were there now, all save Dizzy, and Resnick ministered to them before grinding coffee for himself.
“Cup?” he asked Silver.
Silver didn’t answer.
The legs of Resnick’s trousers were wet through from the knees down, his brown leather shoes stained nearly black and he knew that when he took them off his socks would be ringed with dye and all but soaked through.
“This book,” Silver said, eyes not leaving the page, “bloke who wrote it, wouldn’t know a real musician if one jumped up and bit him in the arse.”
A novel about drugs and jazz in New York, Resnick remembered it as being romanticized but readable; at least it wasn’t Young Man with a Horn.
“This, f’r’instance. Listen to this.”
But Resnick wasn’t in the mood to be read to. He left Ed Silver competing with Radio Three and went into the bathroom. Clothes off and dumped in a corner he considered playing truth with the scales, but decided he wasn’t up to that either. In his experience, gray days such as this only got grayer. One hand holding in his paunch, he stepped under the shower. Having failed to sell the house he would have to get the bathroom retiled, cream wallpaper beginning to darken and buckle where it was exposed to the water.
“Persistent, isn’t she?”
Opening his eyes, Resnick realized that Silver was standing just beyond the open doorway, book by his side.
“Who?”
“I don’t know, do I? Same one as called before, I s’pose.”
“You suppose?”
“Sounded the same to me.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Asked her if she wanted to meet me later, buy me a drink.”
Silver’s silhouette was fading behind a shimmer of plastic and steam. “What did she say?” Resnick asked.
“Unprintable.” He flapped the paperback against his leg. “Even in crap like this.”
“Did she leave a name?”
“No.”
“Number?”
“Too busy hanging up.”
Resnick tilted his face towards the stream of water and soaped his belly, buttocks, beneath his arms. He thought Silver had walked away, but when Silver spoke again, the voice was as close.