The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me

by Lucy Robinson

  ‘EVERYTHING WENT WRONG BECAUSE OF YOU!’ I cried. ‘You ruined my life! You ruined Fiona’s life! And all the while you were pretending to be someone else!’

  Julian stared at me, hopeless. I could still read him just by being near him: he was absolutely devastated.

  My anger dissipated. It was pointless. Everything was pointless.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I repeated tiredly. ‘Just leave me alone, Julian whatever-your-surname-is. I don’t want to be part of any in-jokes. The biscuits. The chat about your dad’s farm. I want to be just another student.’

  He was silent.

  ‘Julian? Did you hear me? I asked you to leave me alone. Do you understand? You’ve done enough damage. I can’t take any more now. I can’t.’

  Julian let his hands swing uselessly against his leg. ‘Fine,’ he said flatly. ‘I’ll respect your wishes.’

  I took a deep breath, pulled what was left of me together and walked past him, round the corner towards the staircase.

  ‘Sally?’ He was still standing behind me. I stopped walking.

  ‘I – I’ll leave you alone. But I just wanted to pass on my mom’s best wishes. She was so unbelievably happy you took this course …’

  I walked on, squaring my shoulders against his words. Another punch to the face. I’d loved Julian’s mum. She’d written to me twice in the past year but I hadn’t been able to face anything from her. The letters had been returned, unopened, and I was no more ready to hear from her now than I had been then.

  I heard Julian’s strange leather shoes click off, defeated. LA, LA LA LA LAAAA, I sang in my head, terrified even of my own thoughts.

  I floated in an uneasy, dreamlike state. Students moved past me; a tiny wisp of a guy with a huge double bass and a stool struggled by. He seemed no more substantial than a shadow.

  ‘Sally,’ said a man’s voice. I looked up, squinting at the face that was coming into focus in front of me. It was Jan Borsos. He was grinning, in his peculiarly furious way.

  ‘I wish to take you out for dinner,’ he said.

  I stared vaguely at him, not really sure what he’d said.

  ‘You come for dinner with me?’ he pushed. ‘Tomorrow? Yes? Yes! We are in an agreement!’ And off he strode, a little king of a man.

  Just as I drew level with Room 304, he called my name again from down the corridor.

  ‘Sally! I take you for dinner! But you have to pay! I do not have my scholarship for one more week!’

  Scene Nine

  ‘Well done,’ Brian said quietly, as I entered the room.

  ‘What?’ I blinked at him. I was still miles away, my head back in New York.

  ‘Well done for coming back,’ he said, giving me a chair. ‘That took guts.’

  I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. I didn’t want to upset Brian by being mad. He was such a lovely egg of a man, and if I had any strength left in me, I would give him the nicest farewell speech anyone had ever heard.

  He sat quietly, letting me compose myself.

  Eventually I looked up, pushed my shire horse’s tail out of my face and smiled. ‘I’m not staying,’ I said eventually. ‘I’m so sorry, Brian, but I don’t want to do even a lesson. It’s not just about the fear, there’s other things too. I –’

  ‘OK,’ Brian said softly. ‘God knows this breaks my heart, Sally. But if you don’t want to stay, you don’t want to stay. I can’t make you.’

  During the silence that followed we turned to look out of the window. The sun had shifted and was now pouring fatly through the windows. Outside the day was gaining momentum. A bird sang, out of view, and a car stereo blasted out McFly.

  It was time to go. ‘Thanks,’ I said to Brian, standing up. ‘For everything.’

  He shrugged, smiling at me over his glasses. ‘Stay in touch,’ he said. ‘And take good care of yourself, Sally.’

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak without crying, and turned to go.

  Then I stopped.

  There was a big wardrobe in the corner. A big wardrobe that hadn’t been there when I’d left an hour ago.

  Brian came over and stood next to me, hands in pockets. ‘That was for you.’ He sighed. ‘It was Julian Jefferson’s idea. He said you like singing in wardrobes.’

  I looked at him, amazed. Brian smiled. ‘I asked the stage manager from the Britten Theatre to run it up for us and I thought – ah, well. Never mind.’

  I tried to thank him but couldn’t speak. I just sort of honked sadly.

  Then, without warning, Brian marched into the wardrobe and shut the door.

  He started singing Papageno and Pamina’s duet from The Magic Flute. For a moment I remained frozen but then – in spite of the mad hurricane in my head – I started to laugh. I laughed at the absurdity of my singing teacher chirping away to himself inside a wardrobe (he was singing the woman’s part in a bad falsetto) and I laughed at the memory of him mincing around with a moustache on his crotch during the same duet in the Royal Opera House’s production of The Magic Flute all those years ago. I laughed because everything about my life, at that moment, was so tragic as to be really quite funny. Who cared?

  Before I knew it, I’d put my bag on the floor, opened the door and hopped into the wardrobe with him, just in time to take over Pamina’s part.

  Through the chink of light coming in I could see Brian grinning from ear to ear. We rattled along to the end of the duet and I didn’t even think about what I was doing. At the end, Brian slid out of the wardrobe, leaving the door slightly ajar, and took a seat at the piano, muttering, ‘Fantastic! Fantastic! Let’s begin!’

  The pain and the panic had slid sideways, somehow, giving me space to breathe for a little while. Sure, I’d leave college today. But the feeling that was pounding through me right now was too big to squash down. Fatherly support and a wardrobe to sing in? This was all I’d ever wanted!

  ‘You’re warmed up, I presume?’ Brian called.

  ‘Um, no?’

  ‘Really? OK, well, then, I suppose let’s start with some ascending Es.’ He played a chord on the piano.

  I did nothing.

  ‘Sally? Can you hear the piano in there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Great! Let’s start off with some ascending Es.’ He played the chord again, making it into a little introduction. But when the bit came where I could tell that I should start, I still hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was meant to be doing.

  ‘Um …’ Brian got up and crossed to the wardrobe. ‘Sally, do you know how to warm up your voice?’ He looked a bit nervous.

  I smiled at him through the chink. I was safe in that wardrobe: I could tell him anything. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Never had a singing lesson in my life! You know that!’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Right,’ Brian said carefully. ‘So you’ve never warmed up before singing?’

  ‘Correct,’ I said from the wardrobe. ‘Or, at least, not in a formal way.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ he said, momentarily stunned. ‘I mean, I suppose I knew but … How on earth did you audition so well if you hadn’t warmed up? I’m at a loss, Sally.’

  I poked the door open a little wider. ‘See? It would have been a nightmare having me at college! A singer who doesn’t even know how to warm up!’

  ‘Now stop it,’ Brian said. ‘We can teach you to warm up. We can teach you music theory, Italian, German, whatever. Good heavens above, if you can’t learn those things here you can’t learn them anywhere.’

  ‘But I’m leaving,’ I reminded him. ‘Although I don’t mind doing one lesson. In the wardrobe. In fact, I’d like to!’ I was impatient to get going. I wanted to open up my lungs and SING. Here in the wardrobe I was safe, and when I was safe I loved to sing more than any other activity. Even eating. ‘LalalaLAlalala!’ I sang under my breath.

  Brian yelled excitedly that what I had just sung was an arpeggio and so began our warm-up. Brian led me through all sorts o
f strange sounds, teaching me how to open up my soft palate – it was sort of like imagining someone had shoved a big hot potato into the roof of my mouth – and almost passed out with excitement when I sang an effortless top C sharp.

  ‘Is a top C sharp good, then?’ I called from the wardrobe. God, this lesson felt fantastic! I was zinging!

  Brian stopped playing. ‘WHAT?’ He put his head into his hands.

  I watched him through the crack, confused. ‘Brian?’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ he murmured. ‘You can’t read music, can you?’

  ‘Of course not!’ I said cheerfully.

  Brian started to laugh. ‘Christ on a bike.’ He sighed. ‘But … how did you get through the auditions? We test your musicianship during the master’s auditions!’

  ‘They stopped me halfway through and told me I was so good I had to come back and audition for the opera school instead,’ I reminded him. ‘I only got halfway through my second aria.’

  Brian laughed even harder.

  I started to laugh too. ‘Told you,’ I called. ‘It would have been well crap for you trying to be my singing teacher.’

  We started off by working on ‘L’ho perduta’, which was one of the simplest arias in the soprano’s repertoire and something I’d been singing since I was eight. It was also the aria that I’d tried to sing at primary school, somehow managing instead to wet myself onstage and receive a lifetime ban from singing, courtesy of Mum.

  I’d had little enthusiasm for it since then. But the joy of singing it again, somewhere I couldn’t be seen, where Mum and Dad’s suffocating anxiety couldn’t reach me, was monumental. It was like someone had turned on a brilliant white light in my chest.

  Brian picked it apart with me, laughing despairingly when he realized that I hadn’t a word of Italian, and therefore only knew the gist of what Barbarina was singing. He translated it for me word by word. Barbarina was singing the aria because she had lost a very important pin, on which quite a lot depended, and she was feeling a bit scared. She sang a whole aria to express this.

  ‘Opera’s ridiculous,’ I shouted from inside the wardrobe. ‘They take about eight pages of music to express one emotion. Over and over again.’

  Brian chuckled. ‘That’s the aria for you. But it’s the music, no? Doesn’t that bring it all to life?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed, sighing. I couldn’t deny it. Opera was ridiculous, in so many ways, but it was also the best thing in the world. If I possessed the pumping strength that opera gave me on a day-to-day basis, I’d be able to get through anything. Anything!

  Rather stupidly, I said this to Brian.

  ‘Exactly,’ he roared, throwing open the wardrobe door.

  I blinked at him. ‘Go away.’

  ‘I’m your singing teacher. You don’t get to tell me to go away.’

  ‘You’re not my singing teacher. I’m about to leave the course. You’re my friend.’ And practically my dad, I wanted to add.

  ‘Oh, Sally, you infuriating … moron,’ Brian exploded.

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘Steady on, Brian …’

  He started laughing. ‘Look at you! Look how confident you are right now. Can you imagine saying, “Steady on, Brian,” half an hour ago? And listen to what you just said! You could get through anything if you felt like you did when you sang opera. THAT’S THE POINT!’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said, pulling the door shut. ‘Don’t think you’re going to trick me into coming back. I’m OK here, in a wardrobe with the door shut. I couldn’t get out there and sing in the real world.’

  Brian put his hands into his pockets, shaking his head.

  ‘I can see you shaking your head,’ I called.

  Brian chuckled. ‘Oh, Sally. Just try it. Just try a month. Think about how you feel, right here and now, in the wardrobe, singing. You feel fantastic. You’re alive. Tell me you don’t want more of that.’

  A complex battle was playing out inside me. Part of me shut down, discounting any possibility of staying on. Staying would mean exposure, daily terror and probably deep humiliation. Not to mention Julian and his stupid posh suits and weird hair. But staying here would also mean freedom, happiness and daily exhilaration. The feeling I had right now was like nothing else I knew. It was powerfully, viscerally liberating. Maybe he was right. Maybe I could actually get through it if I had singing as my medicine.

  But how could singing be the cure when it was the problem?

  I went round and round in circles, sitting in the wardrobe. Brian stood there, hands in pockets, waiting quietly for my response. And when I spoke, he looked like he might actually cry.

  Because I’d said yes. Yes, I would give it a go. For a month.

  ‘Chicken, that is amazing,’ Barry enthused later on. ‘You bangin’ little beaver!’

  I looked up from my bangers and mash. ‘Um, beaver?’

  Barry frowned. ‘Fair enough,’ he conceded. ‘That was not my best use of imagery. But you know beavers, they’re fearless little buggers, industrious an’ stuff … They gnaw down trees and build big complex homes an’ the like …’ He trailed off and stuck his leg out to the side, as he often did when he had become aware that what he was saying was a bit strange.

  ‘I think beaver is an excellent word,’ I told him, shovelling in another delicious mountain of buttery mash. I would need a lot of comfort food over the next four weeks. ‘But if you don’t mind I’d rather stick with Chicken. Beaver reminds me of … of …’

  ‘Of the Brooklyn Beaver,’ Barry finished, his face going pale. ‘Oh, Chicken, I’m sorry. As if you don’t have enough cause to be thinking of that arse-twat Julian.’

  He sat down next to me and sawed off a slice of my sausage. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked. ‘This ain’t an easy time.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m just trying to keep my promise to Fi,’ I said quietly. ‘But, yeah, it’s hard. The wardrobe was Julian’s idea. I can’t stand him trying to win me over with random acts of kindness. It’s just so … shameless. AND he brought up his mum earlier.’

  ‘Oooh, he’s a bloody devil,’ Barry agreed angrily. ‘But he can’t go buyin’ his way out of what he did by bein’ all nice. Too bloody late, Chicken.’

  There was a depressed silence. ‘Anyway. I’m seizing the day, Bazzer. Just like I promised I would. I’m going to stay at college for a month.’

  Barry licked his lips. ‘And have you, um, told Fiona?’

  I concentrated on my dinner, noticing how Barry’s tone had gone a bit too casual for my liking. ‘Yep,’ I replied briefly. ‘I told her earlier.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she was really pleased.’

  I could feel Barry nodding uneasily. I wished he wasn’t so weird about me talking to Fiona. Yes, she had put us through all manner of shit in the last year. But what did he want me to do? Abandon her? Just dump her in New York and never talk to her again?

  ‘So, I’m going for dinner with a guy on my course,’ I said brightly.

  ‘GET AWAY. Who? Where? When?’

  ‘His name’s Jan Borsos. He’s the mad Hungarian one I told you about. Who was divorced by the age of eighteen and walked across Europe to get here.’

  Barry stared at me incredulously. ‘But, Chicken, didn’t you say he’s about fifteen?’

  ‘Ah, well, there is that. He’s twenty-three. Quite barmy, too, as it goes. There’s something oddly handsome about him, though …’

  Barry roared with laughter. ‘Oh, my days, Chicken. You’ve lost it.’

  ACT THREE

  Scene Six

  An apartment in Brooklyn, September 2011

  I stood in the apartment of candles and realized I had no idea what to do next. The banter at the front door had stopped and in its place was a noisy silence. Who even was this Julian Bell?

  The answer was that he was a complete stranger, a man with whom I was suddenly, shockingly, alone.

  Julian was leaning against the wall – half confident, half curious – watching my face as he straightened out h
is T-shirt. He seemed unaware of the fact that it was back to front and inside out.

  ‘So, um, sorry again for trying to steal your candle,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Sally.’

  I grinned, hearing him saying my name. His accent was absolutely amazing. I told him so.

  He looked sceptical. ‘Sally, I think you just told a lie. You think my accent is completely stupid. You’ve done almost nothing to hide that fact.’

  ‘Maybe. Mine’s no better, though!’

  Julian smiled. ‘You’re damn right it’s no better. Can I fix you a drink?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said decisively. ‘I’d like a bourbon.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think so.’ He crossed over to a kitchen area. ‘What would you like?’

  I grinned. ‘I’d actually like some white wine, please.’

  At this he laughed out loud. ‘I say things like that.’ He chuckled. ‘ “I want a bourbon” when actually I just want a nice cup of tea.’ He paused, smiling at me. ‘You’re funny.’

  The idea of him finding me funny was strangely appealing. I watched him as he got a bottle of wine out of the fridge, somewhat confused by what was happening. Here in my skin was a confident girl who just marched into the flats of handsome strangers and asked for bourbon, then wine, and didn’t care if she looked stupid. Who was she?

  ‘Is this Raúl’s wine?’ I asked. It smelt zesty and crisp, and the glass was already misting. As Julian handed it to me I had an inexplicable urge to cancel everything and just stand in the vast kitchen space drinking cold, heady wine with the man in front of me, who was pouring a glass for himself with a concentration I found endearing. He was nice and broad across the shoulders, I noticed. I liked a man whose shoulders were broader than my backside.

  Careful, Sally.