Unbidden Melody

by Mary Burchell

“And why shouldn’t you be expected too, if you’re my companion for the evening? Unless we chose to go out on our own, of course.”

  “It never entered my head.” Mary managed to look all surprised innocence. “I mean—it’s marvellous of you to have let me have one of your tickets, and I’m enjoying the concert more than I can say. But I wouldn’t even want to go to that sort of party. I’d be quite out of my element. And certainly the Warrenders wouldn’t expect me there. I doubt if Mr. Warrender even knows who I am.”

  “There are such things as introductions.” She was as­tounded and dismayed at the unmistakable shade of anger that came over his expressive face. “You introduced me to your friends. Why shouldn’t I introduce you to mine?”

  “But it’s different” whispered Mary beseechingly, as the leader of the orchestra entered to the sound of ap­plause. “Please don’t be angry. I thought I—I was ar­ranging everything for the best.”

  “Then you were mistaken,” he replied coldly. And he turned from her and directed the whole of his attention on Warrender, who was now making his way past the first violins to the conductor’s desk.

  She tried to say something else. But not only had the conductor now picked up his baton. Nicholas Brenner seemed in some strange way completely and utterly re­moved from her. It was not just that he would not look at her. After all, one hardly expected to exchange significant glances during a serious concert. But there was a sense of absolute withdrawal, something intangible but so final that she felt sick and chilled with dismay.

  Through the silent hall there came the first delicate opening phrases, but Mary was entirely oblivious of them. Never in her life had she felt more miserable and re­buffed. She didn’t care about Bruckner or anyone else. She only wanted to be friends with Nicholas Brenner again.

  She turned her head slightly and tried to will him to glance at her. But he looked steadfastly ahead, grave and unsmiling. She told herself angrily that he was just “play­ing the melancholy Slav” again. But there was nothing in that phrase now that would make them laugh together. She doubted if they would ever laugh about anything to­gether again. Their friendship had been a precious but fragile thing. And now, with her stupid self-consciousness about doing the right thing in unfamiliar circumstances, she had spoiled everything.

  Presently she accepted the rebuff of his absolute indif­ference and stared down at her programme, trying to con­trol the slight trembling of her hands.

  The moment she noted that they were trembling she felt an increased nervous tension. She could not stop that absurd quiver. She could only watch, fascinated, while it grew slightly more pronounced. And at the same time she was aware of a tightening of her throat muscles and a stinging in her eyes.

  “Stop it!” she admonished herself silently. “You can control yourself if you have to. It’s no worse than trying to stop a cough in a pianissimo passage!”

  But it proved just as difficult. And only by continuing to keep her head bent could she give any semblance of composure. That was why, as she stared down at her un­steady hands, she saw immediately when his strong, well-shaped hand came over hers and held it still.

  She was so grateful, so relieved at this sign of renewed friendliness, that she would have liked to look up and smile. She blinked her lashes, to clear any absurd moisture from her eyes. And as she did so, one large, ridiculous, unmistakable tear fell on the back of his hand.

  There was no possibility of his being unaware of it. His grip tightened for a moment. And, under cover of a useful passage from the French horns, he said softly, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too,” she whispered.

  And, incredible though it seemed, she and Nicholas Brenner continued to sit there more or less hand-in-hand for the first movement of the Bruckner. And Bruckner’s first movements can be pretty long.

  In the few moments of pause between the first and second movements he released her hand and, while people stirred, coughed or murmured a word or two to each other, he said quietly, “You can go out with Barry, of course, if you want to. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “And I didn’t mean to be interfering,” she told him. “Only I thought you would certainly want to go out with your friends, and I didn’t want to complicate things by—”

  “Ssh!” said someone behind, rather officiously, con­sidering that the music had not yet started again. But Mary accepted the hint and tried no more explanations. She just sat there thinking how wonderful and upsetting and bewildering the evening had been, and how, in a strange way, it would be something of a relief just to go out with the blessedly ordinary Barry afterwards.

  It did not strike her as epoch-making that Barry, of all people, should seem blessedly ordinary in contrast to some of her recent experiences. Barry! who had once been the disturbing centre of her existence.

  At the end of the concert, when at last the waves of applause had subsided, Nicholas Brenner held Mary’s coat for her and said, “You don’t even want to come round backstage?”

  “Not tonight, if you don’t mind. This is a good mo­ment for us to separate. It’s natural for you to go round there—with Anthea Warrender and—and Miss Thomas and the others. I’ll slip off and join Barry. We go the same way home anyway. But I can’t thank you enough for hav­ing brought me here. It’s been a wonderful evening.”

  “In spite of-?”

  “Are you corning backstage, Nick?” enquired Suzanne Thomas’s voice rather imperiously at that moment. And he bade Mary good night and went off in the wake of the black velvet and sables.

  Hardly knowing if she were disappointed or relieved, Mary made her way to the bottom of the main staircase, where Barry was waiting to take her off to a favourite coffee bar. It was obvious that his curiosity was greatly tickled and that he felt entitled to ask some questions by now.

  “Why did you need to give Brenner the brush-off?” he wanted to know. “Had he been getting fresh or some­thing?”

  “Not at all!” she was rather indignant. “But there was a supper party for some of the stars afterwards—Oscar Warrender and his wife were giving it—and I didn’t want Mr. Brenner to think I expected him to drag me along to it too.”

  “But he wouldn’t have thought that, surely, just be­cause you happened to be sitting beside him?” Barry seemed to think she was making rather heavy weather of the incident. And she was not at all sure that he wasn’t right.

  “Actually he had got the ticket for me,” she explained airily. “They were almost impossible to get, you know. And so I was in the awkward position of being with him and yet not with him, if you know what I mean. The last thing I wanted was for him to feel reluctantly compelled to look after me when the concert was over. Your turning up like that was absolutely providential.”

  Barry said he was only too glad to be the instrument of Providence in this particular case. Then he teased her a bit about what he called her conquest, and warned her that tenors often liked to fancy themselves as lady-killers.

  “I’m safe enough,” Mary declared with a laugh. “I don’t know that I shall even see him again. Except from the gallery on Wednesday. Are you coming to the first-night ‘Carmen’?”

  “No. The second one.”

  “I might be there then too,” Mary said carelessly, hav­ing no intention whatever of missing any of them. “From what I saw and heard at rehearsal, I should think Suzanne Thomas is a terrific Carmen.”

  “Was she the rather sultry-looking piece in black velvet and sables?” Barry wanted to know. And Mary said she certainly was, and managed to laugh instead of wincing as she recalled the unfair and humiliating things Suzanne had said of her.

  In spite of telling Barry that she hardly expected to see Nicholas Brenner again before the first night—and then only from afar—this was not quite how Mary really ex­pected events to work out. But they did. She heard noth­ing. Not so much as a phone call. And as she was kept busy at the office on the day of the dress rehearsal she had no opportunity of attending that
either.

  Her employer “looked in for Act Two” as he put it and reported favourably.

  “Brenner is in great form. I never remember hearing him better. It’s as though—” he stopped and then added with apparent irrelevance, “Sad about Monica, of course. But she had him on a pretty tight rein during that last year. I suppose there’s a sort of relief in being footloose again. Are you going to the first night?”

  Mary said she was. That she had a good seat in what is now rather snobbishly called “the rear amphi”, but which still remains the gallery to all true devotees.

  “Well, I suppose it’s often more fun up there than downstairs,” Dermot Deane remarked indulgently. “What it is to be young and limber!”

  Mary laughed and agreed. And on the night of the per­formance she was happy indeed to be back in her familiar haunts, in company with friends with whom she had shared so many operatic thrills in the past. Outwardly she was just the same girl, enjoying vicariously the emotions which a great performance can provide. But inwardly she had never before been so deeply and personally involved. The anguish of Don Jose was the anguish of Nicholas Brenner; and to a degree she would never have believed possible, Mary found herself sharing this with him.

  In real life she liked Suzanne Thomas little enough, but she admitted freely to herself that here was the finest Carmen she was ever likely to see or hear. And as she watched these two great artists moving inevitably towards the destruction of each other, it seemed to her that she was witnessing something more than a stage performance.

  At the end there was that rarest of all tributes—a deathly hush, succeeded by storms of applause.

  “On, it was wonderful!—wonderful!” declared Mary’s neighbour, in absolute ecstasy. “What a pair! How gor­geous they look together.”

  Mary regarded them through her opera glasses, and thought reluctantly that they did look gorgeous together.

  “Is he mad about her in real life too?” Mary’s neigh­bour wanted to know. “He looks it.”

  “How should I know?” asked Mary crossly.

  “Well, Jennifer said you know him. Don’t you?”

  “A little—yes,” Mary conceded. “But he hasn’t got round to telling me about his love-life yet.”

  Her neighbour laughed appreciatively, and then returned to the willing exertion of clapping her hands until they hurt. On and on the applause went, and it was a long time before they reluctantly rose from their seats and straggled down the stairs into Floral Street, still arguing and enthusing about the performance.

  Here they split up—still reluctantly—into those who had to hurry off for trains or buses and those who could linger for the final indulgence of standing round the stage-door for a last glimpse of their favourites, when they emerged in their real identity.

  To this last group Mary attached herself, though she stayed somewhat in the background, not quite sure if she hoped to be noticed or overlooked. It was quite a long, cold wait. Then the Warrenders came out together, in company with the rather dashing baritone. Smiles and a few autographs were dispensed, though Warrender cut the business rather short and hustled his wife out of the cold into a waiting car. Then there was a concerted mur­mur of “Here she comes!” and the heroine of the evening stood in the doorway, with the tall figure of Nicholas Brenner behind her.

  Somehow, Mary had not expected that they would come together, and she drew back hastily into the shad­ows, certainly not wishing to be noticed now. Meanwhile, Suzanne—radiant, lovely and triumphant—borrowed a pen from Brenner and stood there scribbling her name on programmes for the eager autograph-hunters.

  He watched her with an indulgent smile, Mary noticed from her place at the back of the crowd, and something about that gave her a slight but disagreeable shock.

  Then suddenly Suzanne cried good-humouredly, “En­ough, enough!” and she made for her car, which was parked on the other side of the street Brenner paused a minute longer to satisfy two final requests. Then he turned to follow her and in that moment the crowd parted unexpectedly, in the way crowds do when the principal attraction is on the move, and he came face to face with Mary.

  “Why, hello I” he stopped immediately. “Where were you tonight?”

  “Up in the gallery, cheering for you. And Miss Thomas too, of course,” Mary added as an afterthought.

  “Then why didn’t you come round afterwards?”

  “I—I didn’t think I was expected,” Mary said.

  “Well, you were.” But he smiled full at her, this time without a trace of reproof for her having guessed wrong about what she should do. “Are you coming to any of the other performances?”

  “Yes, of course. All of them.”

  He laughed at that, rather delightedly.

  “Then come round on Friday.—Coming, coming,” he called to Suzanne, who had sent a long, musical, “Ni-ick—” from the car. And he actually touched Mary’s cheek lightly before he left her and went off across Floral Street.

  “What did he want?” One of Mary’s friends came up to her and ran a mockingly awed hand down her coat-sleeve. “I’m just seeing if a bit of the Stardust will rub off on me.”

  “He said I could go round to his dressing-room on Friday,” Mary said, still a little dazed. And then she had to run for her train, and as she ran she wondered if Su­zanne had noticed with whom he had exchanged those few words at the stage-door, and, still more, if she had noticed the gesture which accompanied those words.

  No Thursday had ever been so long as the one which divided the Wednesday of the first “Carmen” from the Friday of the second one. Mary was afraid of every tiny mishap which might conceivably come between her and the promised visit backstage. And Barry’s rating (though fortunately he was unaware of this) dropped almost to the level of a nuisance when she thought how it might be difficult to detach herself from him after the performance and go round to Nicholas Brenner’s dressing-room on her own.

  In spite of all her fears, however, everything worked out quite simply in the end. Barry was sitting downstairs that evening. She saw him, from her rather lofty perch, as he strolled out in the interval in company with an ex­tremely well-dressed blonde. There had been a time when this sight would have brought a sobering chill to her spirits. But tonight she merely reflected thankfully that he was unlikely to be looking round for herself after the performance.

  Once more the masterpiece and its splendid exponents worked the familiar magic. Once more the expert hand of Oscar Warrender guided the performance to a triumph­ant conclusion. And when it was all over Mary made her way down to the street and along to the stage door, feeling very faintly sick with mingled excitement and nervous­ness.

  At the stage door she hesitated instinctively, for there is a wide, though subtle, gap between those who stand around the stage door and those who GO IN. Until then Mary’s place had been unmistakably outside. Now she felt something of a gate-crasher as she finally pushed her way past the crowd and presented herself before the searching glance of the stage-doorkeeper.

  “May I go up and see Mr. Brenner, please?” she said as boldly as she could. “He is expecting me.”

  Perhaps she only imagined the faint pause, or perhaps her inner sense of insecurity made her think she had not made good her case. At any rate, with what she felt was brilliant inspiration, she added firmly, “I’m from Mr. Dermot Deane.”

  “That’s all right.” The doorkeeper waved her on im­mediately. “Do you know the way? Turn right and then left and up the stairs. Mr. Brenner’s in Room Two.”

  Mary followed the directions, pausing for only a mo­ment to give a nervous glance at her reflection in the big mirror outside the chorus room as she passed. Then, with her breath coming a little unevenly, she mounted the stone steps to the next floor.

  In the narrow corridor at the top there were already several people waiting, some of them outside Room Two and some outside a room from which Mary easily identi­fied the sound of Suzanne Thomas’s voice raised in gay excit
ement. She stood irresolutely by the wall, trying not to look as out of her element as she felt, and watched while the favoured ones went in and out. Each time the door of Room Two opened she tried to decide whether or not this were the right moment to enter. But each time her courage failed her, and she pressed her back against the wall again, seeking some sort of support.

  It looked as though she were going to be the very last one. But then who was she to push in before these other confident, elegant, self-assured people? As the last group came out of Nicholas Brenner’s room she moved forward with a little spurt of confidence. But his dresser looked out and said briskly, “You’ll have to wait a few minutes. He’s changing now.”

  Feeling almost as though she had made an improper advance, Mary retreated to the wall again, sorely tempted now to slip off without making any further attempt to see him. But to have come so far and then not to have even a word with him was not to be endured. She would just wait until he came out and then—

  And at that moment, Suzanne came out of her room accompanied by two or three people in evening dress. She allowed her glance to travel over Mary with the blankness of deliberate non-recognition. Then she rapped smartly on Brenner’s door, put her head round and called out clearly, “Good night, Nick.”

  “Good night,” he called out in return.

  Suzanne withdrew her head, glanced at Mary again and then, still in that clear tone and speaking through the half-open door, she added, “Here’s your most persistent fan hanging about outside. Haven’t you got a word to say to her, you hard-hearted man?”

  The gay mockery of her tone made almost a joke of these shaming words, and her companions laughed in in­dulgent chorus as they glanced passingly at Mary. Stripped of every vestige of dignity or significance, Mary felt the colour rush into her cheeks and then away again with a force that almost turned her dizzy.

  Then Nicholas Brenner’s voice said, “Who?” and he pulled open the door and stood there shrugging on his coat.

  Perhaps it was because he too, in his time, had been subtly humiliated by a few laughing words that he took in the scene and its implications instantaneously. He knew that rescue must be total or not at all.