The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me

by Lucy Robinson

  And with the same speed that I’d stopped crying, I started laughing. Jan Borsos, I was coming to realize, was very good at snapping me out of spiralling negativity. The fact of the matter was that I was going to be paid three thousand pounds to advertise sanitary towels. Nobody would see my face: I just had to record an aria I loved in a wardrobe-like environment and then I’d be done. Really, it was me who was having the last laugh. I wiped my eyes and smiled. ‘Thank you, Jan Borsos,’ I said gratefully, drying my eyes. We started walking up towards the canteen. ‘I’d lost my sense of humour there.’

  ‘I am seeing this. Tell me, Sally, why are you so afraid of singing?’

  I shrugged. ‘Not sure. Bad childhood experience? I tried to sing at a school concert and got stage fright and … well, it went a bit wrong.’

  ‘But why? Why were you having the stage fright?’

  I paused. ‘I honestly don’t know,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘But if I work it out, Jan Borsos, I’ll be sure to tell you.’

  Jan Borsos offered me his elbow. I had to bend down slightly to link my arm through it. ‘I am liking you call me Jan Borsos,’ he said. ‘Jan is not enough. Jan gives me the feeling that I am a short man. Jan Borsos gives me the feeling that I am a big man from Hungary with the voice of a large bear.’

  I laughed and laughed. I was looking forward to our dinner very much.

  Scene Eleven

  Ten minutes after the start of my first movement class I was hauled out to meet Lord Peter Ingle, the very kind – and presumably very rich – man who was paying one of my scholarships. Although I would have liked more time to prepare to meet a lord I was certainly glad to have got out of movement class. There had been a lot of explanatory stuff about how we needed to learn to ‘embrace the physicality’ of whatever character we were playing, while ‘supporting our breath’, all of which had sounded a bit too drama school to me.

  And on top of all of these issues I was deeply hungover after my dinner with Jan Borsos.

  The class had started better than I’d expected because today we were just doing aerobics, a proper cheesy nineties workout. Initially I’d been quite pleased, especially given that it might reduce my massive arse. But then I’d discovered that the space in which we were working out was fully viewable from a mezzanine corridor that ran along two sides of the room. Helen, doing ungainly squats next to me, had suddenly hissed that I shouldn’t look up at the balcony if I knew what was good for me. Obviously, I looked, mid-squat – as if I were settling in for a good long poo – and there above me was Julian. He walked along the corridor quickly, his eyes straight ahead, but I knew what he looked like when he was trying not to explode with laughter. He must have seen me.

  ‘I told you not to look, you fool,’ Helen said, shaking her head. She handed me a KitKat finger and we both got told off for eating chocolate during workout.

  My upbraiding was interrupted by one of the administrators, Sandra, who fished me out to meet Lord Peter Ingle. ‘Without him you wouldn’t be here,’ she reminded me. ‘He’s been so generous!’

  I was given no time to change, let alone prepare. He was literally outside the door. He, too, had probably seen me poo-squatting.

  ‘Sally Howlett,’ said Lord Peter Ingle, tall and confident in those strange mustard-coloured cords that only the aristocracy wear. (Why? Why did they do that? What was it about money and status, conferred on you at birth, that meant you were predisposed to mustard or ruby slacks?) He smiled very warmly and I shook his hand, wincing at the sweatiness of my palms. Sandra from the office showed us into the empty Britten Theatre and we drifted down to the stage making small talk. A brief spasm of fear gripped me: he surely wouldn’t expect me to sing something for him, would he?

  I calmed down. He would not. He gestured to the first row of purple chairs in the auditorium and we sat down. I noticed that he had monumentally big ears. ‘I came in to talk through some stuff,’ he said – I nodded knowingly – ‘and thought, what the hell, I’d see if you were around for a quick hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ I offered quickly.

  ‘Hello,’ he replied.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Thank you so very much for the scholarship, Lord Ingle. I cannot tell you how much it means to me – studying here is my absolute dream.’

  Lord Ingle narrowed his eyes. ‘Ha! Bollocks.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Bollocks, Sally. I know you don’t want to be here.’ He roared with laughter.

  I started gabbling. ‘Oh, but I do, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime –’

  Lord Ingle held a hand up. ‘Bollocks,’ he repeated. Then he laughed again. His ears jiggled. He was like the BFG. ‘Brian’s an old friend of mine,’ he said. ‘It was he who persuaded me to offer a scholarship to this place. I came to see him here in his graduation show, what, forty years ago? Christ, we’re old bastards …’ He drifted momentarily into a happy reverie and I realized I should probably contradict him.

  ‘Not old!’ I blustered.

  Lord Ingle said, ‘Bollocks,’ again, and I decided it was best if I didn’t talk for a while.

  ‘Brian and I were roommates at Oxford,’ he explained. ‘I loved him from the start. Such a breath of fresh air at that bloody place.’ He crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair, smiling. ‘Brian knocked a lot of shit out of me. I’d been to Eton, obviously’ (obviously! I loved it) ‘and he’d been to some God-awful secondary modern and yet he taught me more about life in that year than I’d learned in the previous eighteen.’

  I smiled. Brian really was a very special man. To have come from where he had and now be a renowned baritone, so brilliant that he’d been able to retire from performance when he fancied and take up a job at one of the world’s best conservatoires, well, it was pretty cool.

  ‘Anyway, I lost a few hundred thousand last year investing in some bad stocks, and when I told Brian, he just said, “Peter, stop throwing your money around and put it into a good cause, man!” So I did. You’re my first scholar!’ he exclaimed, beaming.

  ‘Great,’ I said woodenly.

  ‘I hear you’re of Brian’s sort of upbringing,’ he said, with the unperturbed confidence of those at the very top of the food chain. ‘Which is cracking. Places like this should be all about talent, not money.’

  I relaxed a little.

  Lord Ingle smiled warmly. ‘I do find it rather splendid that you’d rather gouge your own eyeballs out than be here.’

  I blushed guiltily.

  ‘Brian told me all about you,’ he went on. ‘He told me you kept trying to leave and that he eventually had to throw you into a wardrobe.’

  ‘Brian’s been very understanding,’ I mumbled. I didn’t think that Lord Peter Ingle was trying to embarrass me, but he was doing a fairly reasonable job.

  ‘I’m sure he has. Excellent fellow.’ He drummed his fingers on the seat, then looked at me. ‘But, Sally, I do rather hope that you might be able to get out of the wardrobe and start singing to actual people. Soon.’

  I shuddered. Apparently scholarship students often had to ‘thank’ their benefactors by singing at dinners or private concerts: I would rather pay back every penny of Lord Ingle’s scholarship than do that. The very thought of all those privileged eyes trained on me, the smell of roasted game and tawny port from their tables … Urgh. No. Never.

  ‘Fortunately,’ Lord Ingle continued, as if reading my mind, ‘I don’t want you to come and sing at my Christmas ball. Or at my summer shooting party. Ha, I’m not even joking. I really do those things. Awful, eh?’

  I raised a sort-of smile.

  ‘No, Sally, I think my assignment for you will be a little more to your liking. I want to give something back to the community.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said nervously. ‘Tell me more, Lord Ingle.’

  ‘PETER!’ he cried, appalled. ‘Lord Ingle? My God!’

  ‘Peter,’ I mumbled. The man was like an elephant. Although a charming one with big flappy ears that you’d want to stroke. I didn’t
dislike him in the slightest.

  ‘What I didn’t mention is that I also live in the southernmost reaches of the Black Country,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a lovely estate hidden in the middle of some God-awful hellholes. Miles and miles of beautiful parkland and then, boom, there’s another monstrous factory or a shitty town. My ancestors sold out to the industrial revolution and lost thousands of acres in the process. Terrible error.’

  I smiled inwardly. That sounded like my neck of the woods, all right. ‘Anyway, we were saved from an arson attack a few years ago by some local chap who noticed a gang of hoodies climbing over one of the estate walls. He was just an ordinary bloke on his way back from a shift at Hall’s – the clothing factory where I believe your parents worked?’ I nodded, impressed. ‘And he took them on. All of them. The bleeding little scrotes gave him a beating but he got the police to us just in time.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said, genuinely surprised. It sure as hell wouldn’t have been Dad who’d rescued Peter’s estate. Dad wouldn’t even take on his own wife.

  ‘Anyway. We realized we’d been living there all these years, my family and I, and had never taken any notice of the locals. Decided we wanted to give something back to the people, you know?’

  I didn’t know but I nodded politely. I strongly suspected that my ‘people’ were about to be patronized.

  ‘We opened our house to the public a few years ago, so everyone can have a good nose around, but apart from the National Trust anoraks, nobody ever comes. The locals avoid us like the plague. We’ve held fêtes, concerts, all sorts, but they just aren’t interested.’

  ‘Are you surprised?’ I heard myself snort.

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said lamely. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just – well – I can’t see my parents ever wanting to go to a, um, a fête.’

  Peter slapped his leg. ‘Of bloody course they don’t! Why the bloody hell would anyone on a council estate want to visit some toff’s country estate for a cup of overpriced tea served in a room full of gilt-framed photos of my ancestors? Dear Christ!’

  I laughed.

  ‘It was my wife’s idea,’ he said regretfully. ‘She knows even less about real life than I do. But I had a chat with Brian about it, just in passing, and he came up with a cracking little plan.’

  I waited.

  ‘What Brian and I want to do is to start some outreach work. In schools.’

  Outreach? I wasn’t even sure what that meant.

  ‘I had a chat with a few head teachers recently,’ he said. ‘They were telling me that they have almost no provision for the arts. They’re badly stretched trying to provide the very basics so they seldom find themselves with money for decent creative extra-curriculars. I wanted to send you in, you and my other scholar, to do some singing with them. You can tell me what you think best – put on a musical, an opera, a concert? Give them lessons? Something like that?’

  I was lost. Peter had obviously assumed that, as a working-class girl now studying at a big posh college, I held the creative solution to social deprivation. ‘Er …’

  He watched me keenly, but then his face fell. ‘Ah, you haven’t any idea either,’ he said sadly. ‘Well, please at least think about it, Sally. I spoke to the headmaster from your old secondary school, and he was really very keen, you know. He remembered you.’

  I softened, thinking fondly of my mild-mannered head. ‘Oh, well, I’m sure I can think of something,’ I heard myself saying. ‘A workshop, maybe?’

  And that was that.

  Almost. Just before Peter left, pumping my still-sweaty hand enthusiastically, inviting me for tea at his country house, I remembered something. ‘By the way, you said you had two students on scholarships here,’ I said. We were now standing in the foyer. Outside it was fresh and sharp as a needle after a night of thunderstorms.

  ‘Yes, yes! I have two of you. Must arrange to meet the other one – he sounds like a fine little chap.’

  ‘Who is he?’ I asked, a sinking feeling in my gut.

  Peter scratched his head, trying to remember the name, and then his face cleared. ‘Jan!’ he exclaimed. ‘Jan Borsos! Do you know him? Will you be happy to work with him? A great young talent, by all accounts.’

  I nodded feebly. ‘I know Jan,’ I said, with as straight a face as I could muster. ‘We’ll be great together. See you soon, Peter!’

  I was sunk.

  The problem wasn’t that Jan would be hideously incongruous at a school like Stourbridge Grange, or that he would steal the show with his passion for performance being ten times greater than mine. It was that Jan and I had had our dinner last night and, even though he was seven years younger than me, a good three inches shorter and madder than a box of Hungarian frogs, I had spent most of that morning having sex with him.

  Scene Twelve

  The night before

  It had started well. My intentions involved only friendship.

  I hadn’t even been sure I should go for dinner, in case he saw it as a date, but Fiona had insisted. ‘Meet him,’ she said. ‘It’s time you knew how beautiful you are to men. Those lovely big soft eyes of yours, all that thick, luxuriant hair. You’re way funnier than you realize and you’re so bloody modest. The perfect package, Sally Howlett! Go and have some fun.’

  Fiona had become quite a cheerleader for my self-esteem since she’d gone to New York.

  Jan, whose college halls were in Shepherd’s Bush, had chosen the Havelock, a nearby pub that I’d been to a few times. It was a nice place and, more importantly, it did yummy food. It was also close to absolutely nothing else so there was no danger of me getting drunk and agreeing to ‘go on somewhere’ for a late drink. I would have dinner, learn some more about my new friend, then take the magic overground train back to Islington where I would have a good long night’s sleep and prepare for my movement class the next morning.

  Jan had no classes in the afternoon so was already there when I arrived, sitting at a small table by the bread servery. He had changed. He was wearing a suit and tie. No, he was – Oh, God, Jan was sitting in a relaxed gastropub wearing a full tuxedo. With a bow tie!

  I stopped in the doorway, panicking, then pinched myself and walked over to his table. Why shouldn’t he wear a tux to his local? He was Jan Borsos. A human anomaly. And, really, I would get nowhere in life if I expected everyone to hide from attention as dementedly as I did.

  He actually looked incredibly dashing, sitting there amid a sea of trendy rolled trousers and low-key media cashmeres. He also looked ridiculous, of course, but I rather admired him. ‘I am wanting to wear something smart,’ he said simply. ‘This is all I have.’ Which was fair enough. The man had walked across Europe for his place at the Royal College of Music.

  I sat down opposite him, taking in the busy clatter and chatter of a pub doing brisk business, and inhaled smells of roasting goat’s cheese, cooking lamb and fresh bread. Jan had already bought me a large glass of red wine, which was exactly what I’d wanted, and as I chinked his glass, I realized that I was ready to enjoy the evening. God only knew I needed to. The torture of having to see Julian every day was brutal. And for that evil scumbag to have stood there congratulating me for getting a gig on a ‘sanitary napkin’ advert … It was an insult of agonizing proportions. I deserved a good night out.

  After my first glass of wine I grasped that I was trying to persuade myself to fancy Jan Borsos. This was, first, because he had made it clear that he liked me: ‘You are the variety of woman I want to marry with,’ he announced casually, as my steak frites arrived. Second, it was because he was very funny. During a pleasant gossip about our coursemates he had written Violet off as ‘a vagina with legs. She wants the attention only. She is an embarrassing to herself.’

  And third, I had begun to think, with the classic egalitarianism of the drunk, that height and age did not matter a jot. Jan Borsos had a very wild, romantic sort of face, and even though he always looked furious I knew now that he was ne
ver furious. Or negative in any way. He’d had a tough old life for his mere twenty-three years and yet he was a through-and-through trouper. A pocket rocket. A mad, sweet, funny man, whose use of the English language was divine.

  After my second glass of wine I stopped trying to persuade myself to fancy Jan Borsos because it was becoming increasingly probable that I actually did.

  We had been talking for a while about our families. His were all dead, save for an angry aunt who lived in a town of many syllables somewhere in rural Hungary. He had been telling me about his father, who had died in the same car crash that killed his mother: ‘He was a man of great rudity.’

  ‘Rudeness?’

  ‘Yes. Rudeness.’ Jan broke off to scribble this in his little notebook. ‘When people were saying hello to him in the streets, he was saying, “Fuck off.” It was very effective. Everybody was not saying hello to him eventually.’

  ‘Why did he tell everyone to fuck off?’

  ‘Because he liked animals more better than he was liking people.’ Jan Borsos shrugged. ‘He had a pig. He liked his pig. He liked his wife.’

  I roared with laughter. ‘I don’t believe you! He did not own a pig! You said you were from a town, not a farm!’

  ‘My father owned a pig,’ he said. ‘You are thinking he was a peasantry. He was not a peasantry. He had plenty of money. But he liked pigs.’

  ‘It’s peasant, not peasantry,’ I said. ‘Peasantry is the collective noun. Either way, I didn’t assume he was a peasant. Trust me, Jan, I’m assuming nothing about you. You defy expectation. I just thought … Well, it’s funny. A man who hates people but loves his pig.’

  Jan laughed, his face still in its customary furiousness. ‘YES! That is my father. He hates people, he loves his pig.’ His face fell. ‘Him and my mother. They tell me I can do anything. “Anything you want to do, Jan, you can achieving it,” they told me. I miss them.’

  I paused. I simply could not imagine parents who said things to me like ‘You can do anything!’ And that felt shocking and sad. ‘I’m so sorry you lost your parents,’ I said eventually. ‘I sort of know how you feel.’