‘We’re just having… some music,’ said Paul tactfully, with a hesitation of his own.
‘Ah!’ No, this man was about fifty, but with something boyish in his wide bony face as he turned his head and listened. Paul looked at the tufts of badly cut hair, thick and greying around a sun-blistered bald patch. ‘Well, yes indeed,’ he said, ‘and Senta’s… Ballad, always her favourite.’ They heard the music grow very emphatic and loud, Paul pictured Mrs Keeping shaking herself to pieces, and then at once there was applause. He thought someone else might come out and help.
‘Will you…?’ – he gestured into the hall.
‘Yes – thank you.’ Now they could talk normally. ‘Hello, Barbara!’ said the man. One of the women had come out from the kitchen.
‘Hello, Wilfrid,’ she said. ‘You’ve missed your dinner.’
‘That – doesn’t matter,’ said the man, again with his air of monkish simplicity and tiny hesitation.
‘We weren’t sure we’d be seeing you,’ said Barbara, with the same odd lack of respect. ‘Mrs K’s got a concert on so you’ll have to be quiet.’
‘I know – I know,’ said Wilfrid, frowning a little at Barbara’s tone.
‘Would you like to go in?’ said Paul. He watched the man watching the people inside, one or two faces turned, while Mrs Keeping was announcing the next item. His brown suit must once have been someone else’s, all three buttons done up, the sleeves short, and the trousers too, and a sense of large square objects trapped in tight pockets. Paul wondered if the other guests knew him and a scene was about to occur that he would be blamed for.
‘Is she going on long?’ said Wilfrid, pleasantly but as if out of earshot. There were one or two more curious glances.
‘I don’t really know…’ said Paul, detaching himself.
‘Have you had something to eat?’ said Barbara, softening a little. ‘Or do you want to come into the kitchen?’
‘I think perhaps…’ – Wilfrid gazed at her and flinched. ‘Is it an awful bore?’
‘Ah, that’s all right.’
‘I got a lift into Stanford, and then the bus, then I walked up.’
‘Well, you must be hungry,’ said Paul, adopting the condescending tone. He could hear Peter saying something, in his Oxford voice, making them laugh, and he realized that something had happened, and the voice was now a trigger to jolts of excitement and anxiety that ran through him and made him half-unaware of anything else that was going on. The music began. Wilfrid followed Barbara, but turned in the doorway, came back to the hall table, took a small parcel in shiny red paper out of his pocket and added it to the base of the pile. When he had gone, Paul looked at the labeclass="underline" ‘Happy Birthday Mummy, Love Wilfrid.’
The little puzzle of this didn’t hold him long. He leant in the doorway to listen, or at least to watch Peter play. This must be the Mozart, surely. He thought there was something daft but also impressive and mysterious about big clever Peter stooped over this dainty but tedious piece of music and giving it his fullest attention. The large hands that had recently stroked his knee under the table were now hopping and pecking around on the deep end of the keyboard, in a remarkable show of fake solemnity. Mrs Keeping was having more fun up at the other end, making Peter look like an anxious but courtly attendant; her nods and grimaces now seemed like slightly impatient instructions to him, or tight-lipped confirmation that he had or hadn’t got something right. And turning the page was a bit of a worry, with both players busy at once. After a minute Paul noticed that Peter did any pedalling that was called for, and got interested in his legs as much as his hands. Mrs Keeping’s legs jumped as she played, and Peter’s occasional toeing of a pedal was like a courteous version of the footsie he’d just been playing with him under the table. Paul was warmed by this secret, and admiring of Peter, and jealous that he couldn’t play with him himself. At the end he applauded loudly, and made a point of making the very last clap, as they used to at school.
After this there was a very odd piece, which Paul thought from the awful grin on Peter’s face must be someone’s idea of a joke. The time after the concert, and all the momentous things that were waiting to happen then, weighed so heavily on Paul that he couldn’t concentrate. He sensed Peter’s own little knack for being embarrassing and hoped he wasn’t making a fool of himself now. And in a moment it was all over, and they were standing up and bowing, the applause now full of laughter, warm-hearted but with something provisional in it too, so perhaps the joke still needed to be explained to them as well. Peter’s gaze swept across the room and he seemed almost to lick Paul with his conceited smile, nodding, chuckling, tongue on lip.
This still wasn’t the end, of course, and Paul hardly knew if he was happy or relieved when Corinna sat down again at the piano, Peter withdrew to the front row and Sue Jacobs came forward, with a rather furious expression, to sing ‘The Hammock’ by Bliss. It was strange knowing the words so well, and he tried to follow them against what seemed to him the quite pointless interference of the music. The peculiar things a singer did with words, the vowels that turned into other vowels under the strain of a high note, made it all harder and weirder. Picturing the poem, somehow written across the air, was also an escape from watching Sue herself, her bared teeth and humorous roving glare at one person after another in the audience. ‘And every sleeping garden flower, Immortal in this mortal hour.’ All Paul knew about Bliss was that he was the Master of the Queen’s Music, but he found it hard to imagine Her Majesty enjoying this particular offering. At the end Mrs Jacobs got up and kissed them both, and clapped in the air to reignite the general applause. She appeared to be moved, but Paul thought he saw that under the general requirement to be so she was finding it rather a strain.
As people started talking and stood up, Paul caught Peter’s eye and comic grimace, and grinned back as if to say how marvellous he’d been. What he was actually going to say he had no idea – he dodged out to the kitchen to get a glass. When he came back and joined the group round Mrs Jacobs he hardly dared look at him, distracted with nerves and longing and a sense of unshirkable duty about what he imagined was going to happen next.
A few minutes later they were crossing the garden, bumping lightly as they made way for each other between the tables where candles were still burning in jars; some had guttered, there was a veil of mystery, of concealed identity, over the guests who had come back out and were drinking and chatting under the stars. A cake had been cut up and was being taken round, with paper napkins. ‘I thought you were going to talk to the old girl all night,’ said Peter.
‘Sorry!’ – Paul reaching for but not touching his arm.
‘Now let’s see. The garden’s quite big, isn’t it.’
‘Oh, it is,’ said Paul. ‘There’s a part at the back I think we really must explore.’ He felt he’d never been so witty or so terrified.
‘We loved what you played!’ said a woman passing them on her way back to the house.
‘Oh, thank you…!’ – the skein of celebrity made their little sortie more conspicuous and perhaps odd. Away from the lights now, Peter appeared both intimate and alien, a figure sensed by touch more than sight. Someone had put a Glenn Miller record on the stereogram, and the music filtered out among the trees with a tenuous air of romance. They passed the weeping beech – ‘Hmm, not here, I think,’ said Peter, with his air, reassuring and fateful, of having a fairly clear plan.
‘I think this part of the garden is most attractive.’ Paul kept up the game, turning warily in the dark under the rose arch into the unkempt corner where the shed and compost were. He was speaking too as if he knew what he was doing, or was going to do. Surely it was time just to seize Peter but something about the dark kept them apart as naturally as it promised to bring them together.