The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me

by Lucy Robinson

  ‘With Jan?’

  ‘With Jan. I have to give him a chance, Helen. I really like him, in spite of everything. He made me laugh when no one else could.’

  Helen nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘And Julian seems to think that that’s what I should be doing too. Staying with Jan. Laughing.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure he was saying that, exactly.’

  ‘I’m going to try to make it work with Jan,’ I said determinedly. ‘And I’m going to go and sing my arse off at Lord Ingle’s concert tonight. And then in January I’m going to concentrate on being the best Mimi I can possibly be, and audition for the British Youth Opera. That’s what my new life is going to look like.’

  ‘Right you are,’ Helen said, after a long pause. She linked my arm and we walked off down the corridor. This time Julian and I really were over.

  Scene Twenty-eight

  ‘Happy Christmas, you morons!’ Helen pulled a party-popper and whooped. Her fiancé, Phil, handed glasses of champagne to Jan and me.

  ‘Happy Christmas, yourself,’ I said, hugging her.

  ‘You’re spilling champagne down my back, you clumsy oaf! Do you think we’re made of money, Sally?’

  I was very grateful for Helen Quinn and her hospitality that day. Even though Mum and I had actually had a couple of phone calls in the last couple of weeks – tense, awkward ones, but phone calls all the same – there had been no invitation to join them for Christmas. Jan and I were festive refugees.

  ‘Thank you so much for having us over,’ I said, taking in her lovely warm kitchen. There were fairy lights all over the place, not trendy white blobs but multicoloured chaotic strings draped from haphazard nails banged into the walls. Half-chopped vegetables were all over the surfaces, fighting with packets of stuffing, half-drunk bottles of wine and big overgrown pots of herbs. ‘Have some mulled wine!’ Helen said merrily, dunking a mug into a pan. ‘And do you want a brandy or something?’

  ‘Calm down, H,’ Phil said mildly. ‘The poor girl’s trying to drink her champagne.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Helen poured the mug’s contents back into the pan, then filled it straight back up when Jan announced that he had no problem taking champagne and mulled wine together. ‘I suppose I’m probably just trying to get you drunk, Sally,’ she admitted, as the boys wandered off to look at Phil’s enormous new Canon camera. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘What do you mean, are you OK in that tone?’ I grinned.

  ‘I mean, your family are still being dickheads and the love of your life has gone back to America.’

  ‘Helen, shut up.’

  ‘Very well. But only because it’s Christmas and we’re meant to be BFFs.’ She handed me a turkey baster. ‘Any idea what I’m supposed to do with this?’

  I giggled. ‘Yes. You just use it like a giant pipette, getting the fat out from under the turkey, then pouring it over the top so it goes all crispy.’

  I caught a fleeting memory of Mum teaching me to do the very same thing on Christmas Day when I was ten. Fiona had been sulking in her tiny bedroom under the stairs because of something to do with presents and I’d ached with guilt at being in the kitchen with everyone else. ‘Ignore her,’ Mum had advised.

  ‘Stop it,’ I said to myself, as the same old resentment came thundering in. ‘Let it go.’ And suddenly I was OK again. Who knew?

  ‘Oh dear,’ Helen said, peering at me. ‘Are you mad, sad or drunk?’

  ‘Sad, I suppose. I’m so happy to be here but I just … I dunno. Why didn’t they invite me home?’

  ‘Families are fucked up,’ Helen said, handing me some parsnips to peel. ‘And yours sound like they’re special contenders. But, here’s a question – did you mention Christmas to them?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, did you ask if you could come? Or were you just waiting for them not to invite you, thereby proving they don’t care about you?’

  I stared at her. ‘What?’

  Helen looked worried. ‘Twat,’ she said, slapping her head. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. Just that I have a habit of doing things like that. You know, testing people. Waiting for them to prove they don’t love me. I discovered it in therapy. Along with a whole load of other shit I wish I’d never dug up. Ignore me.’

  I got on with the parsnips, but I didn’t really hear anything else she said. All I could think about was her question because it was a very, very good one.

  After a stupendous Christmas lunch we piled on coats and went for a walk in Brockwell Park before the light faded. If we ignored the tower blocks behind us, we could have been in frosty fields deep in the heart of the country. Across the park’s small valley a little church poked up out of the trees, like a pastoral village scene – Tulse Hill, Helen informed me, whose connection with villages was only the presence of several Chicken Cottages – and the silver-tipped grass beneath our feet crunched like cornflakes.

  Phil and Jan were walking ahead, Phil chuckling at whatever Jan was saying. I smiled, feeling big swathes of warmth for my little pocket-rocket Borsos. There was not a day when he didn’t make me smile, or laugh, or do something silly that a year ago would have been inconceivable.

  Helen was watching me. ‘Smiling at Jan?’

  We were walking slowly down the hill towards Brixton City Farm and the dying rays of the afternoon sun had painted Helen a beautiful sepia.

  ‘Yes. He’s good news, you know.’

  ‘He is?’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  I stopped walking. ‘Stop acting like Jan’s just a rehearsal for the main event. He’s my boyfriend. Not a practice.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Helen!’

  ‘Look, Sally, I adore your boyfriend too. Jan Borsos is one of the most awesome people I’ve ever met. But I don’t need to have sex with him ten times a day – or however often he makes you do it – to prove that I love him. He’s twenty-three, for God’s sake!’

  ‘And Phil’s forty-one. Age gaps are fine.’

  ‘Not your way round they’re not,’ Helen said firmly. ‘You should give him up so someone his own age can enjoy him.’

  ‘Gah, you’re annoying. Can’t I just have fun?’

  ‘Are you going to marry him one day?’ she asked.

  ‘What? Jesus, Helen, I don’t know. Who cares?’

  ‘If someone had asked you if you’d marry Julian when you were with him, what would you have said?’

  I sighed. I wished she wouldn’t do this. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Bollocks. You’d have said, “YES OF COURSE I’D MARRY JULIAN. HE IS THE MOST AMAZING MAN ON EARTH.” ’

  ‘Stop it.’ I jammed my hands into my pockets. ‘Julian’s in New York and I’m here. And we’ve started new lives.’

  ‘Meh.’

  ‘Don’t do that, Helen. It’s working for me, this new life. I’m actually happy.’

  Helen squeezed my arm. ‘Sorry. I can see that, really I can. And I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. I just … I just wish everything was different. Julian’s so amazing it’s beyond a joke. And yet he’s still humble and nice and bumbly. Oh, God, maybe I’m in love with him. Phil? Phil, sweetheart, could you come and snog my face off?’

  ‘No,’ Phil shouted back. ‘Jan and I are looking for moles.’

  Helen sighed. ‘No, I do love Phil, not Julian. But I wish you could just get back together with him.’

  ‘Well, I can’t. Poor old Violet would probably kill me, apart from anything else!’

  Helen smiled briefly. ‘Yes. Poor old Violet. She didn’t take it too well, did she?’

  ‘No. And I feel really, really guilty about that. She hasn’t the faintest idea.’ Violet had not come to college on the final day, and her bum chums, Sophie and Summer, had reported in the canteen that she was devastated. Not knowing what to do I’d sent her a lame text message, to which I’d received a feature-length reply about how TOTALLY FINE she was about it.

  ‘Stop blaming yo
urself,’ Helen instructed. ‘Your behaviour was exemplary and her broken heart is not your problem. Plus she’s Violet Elphinstone. She’ll probably be engaged to David Cameron by the time the spring term starts. Well, maybe not him. But someone influential.’

  Eventually Helen sidled off to persuade Phil to give her that kiss and Jan threw me over his shoulder and made me kiss him upside down. I laughed until I cried, especially when he dropped me on my head, then wondered how it was that I could be so happy with one man while being unable to completely forget about another.

  I hung back as the group made their way down the hill towards the Lido and Helen’s flat. It was four o’clock, and in the twilight hundreds of windows were illuminated. I imagined the board games, post-binge slumbers, fractious children and drunken Wham! singing, and, in spite of my resolve not to think about them, pictured the scene at my parents’ house. Dad would be asleep, quietly and tidily, with his pipe lying along the arm of his chair, and Mum would be in the kitchen tidying up because she never really sat down. Lisa and Dennis would be smoking and eating chocolate, sorting out punch-ups and tantrums among their children, and Mum’s ancient aunt, Gloria, would be watching EastEnders with her dog that looked like a rat. The picture was so clear, the smells so vivid, the overheated fug so familiar that I felt a pain in my chest. I should be there, I thought sadly. I should be part of that.

  I had no idea what the truth was any more. Whether my family blamed me, disliked me or indeed had any feelings towards me at all. Very little had been said in the conversations we’d had since my visit to Stourbridge, and the telling silence at the end of the last call, when Mum didn’t ask what my Christmas plans were, spoke volumes.

  But a small seed of doubt had been niggling away at me since that conversation with Helen earlier: could I be wrong?

  I’d been confused ever since I’d seen Mum telling me, in genuine shock and distress, that she didn’t blame me for Fiona’s death, then her hand manically waving us off that night, such a contrast with her stooped, sad body that I’d had to wonder if it was a code – an unspoken communication; a sign that she cared but had no idea how to say so.

  Could I be wrong? Did Mum actually care? And Dad, too, behind all those pipes and copies of the Sun?

  Then there was my conversation with Stevie in the canteen recently when she’d told me she’d sent Julian away because she was frightened for him and didn’t know what else to do. Did it mean she didn’t care about him? Of course not. She had cried every day and was clearly still blaming herself two decades later.

  Could that have been what Mum was doing for Fiona in sending her to ballet school? Could she have made the decision because she was scared witless about how her little niece was turning out – and had no idea what to do with her?

  The likelihood that she’d just wanted to get rid of her seemed far greater, given that she’d repeatedly tried to stop me getting too close to Fiona, but maybe that was part of it too. Maybe she was trying to protect me. Maybe she felt history repeating itself and didn’t want me to experience what she’d gone through with Aunty Mandy.

  I called Barry. ‘Christmas fuckin’ GREETIN’S to you, Chicken,’ he shouted. ‘Are you havin’ a crisis?’

  ‘Ha! Happy Christmas to you too. Not a crisis, just wondering if I should call my family to say hi … And I can’t make up my mind … And I’d ask Helen but she’s busy trying to stop Jan breaking into the Lido cos he wants to take a skinny dip.’

  ‘Oh, my days.’ He sighed. ‘Of course you should call them, Chicken. I know they’re crazy ogres but you love them, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, surprised.

  And so it was settled. Helen bundled Jan inside and I sat at a frosty table outside the Prince Regent and called home. And although all we said was ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘What did you eat?’ and ‘It’s really cold, isn’t it?’ I finished the call with a new glow. ‘You take care,’ Dad mumbled. ‘All the best.’ Rather than hearing ‘all the best’ and feeling angry and upset that Dad was speaking to me as if I were a distant colleague, I instead heard the ‘You take care.’

  There was still a lot to wade through, and a lot that I didn’t think I could ever forgive. But I was willing to try.

  Scene Twenty-nine

  ‘Why not? Sally, this is an act of love!’

  Jan Borsos was trying to persuade me to let him throw doughnuts at my breasts, like erotic hoopla.

  ‘I’m too cold to get my boobs out!’

  Jan grumbled, putting the doughnuts away. ‘But you will have nipples enough big for hoops in this cold weather,’ he protested.

  I pulled Jan’s frilly duvet over me, giggling. We were in his single bed in halls after a long and lovely day sledging in the Surrey hills. The south-east was six inches deep in snow and, of course, Jan had chosen that day to demand a trip into the English countryside. Tomorrow was our first day back at college and I’d come to Jan’s in the hope of a longer sleep and a shorter journey to South Kensington.

  He went off to the loo, muttering darkly that he’d had enough of this stupid British winter: it meant that I spent most of my time covered up in fleecy pyjamas and onesies, which meant reduced access to my body.

  I fiddled idly with my diamante ring, wondering what the term would bring.

  What would it be like at college without Julian? It’ll be good. I can really knuckle down with my training and La Bohème. Julian’s definitely done me a favour!

  The ring got stuck on my knuckle and, for the thousandth time, I thought about taking the bloody thing off and throwing it away. It really was a monstrosity and it was always catching on my clothes. But I couldn’t. Not yet. It was right, not talking to Fiona any more, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw it away. It was like the last piece of her that I had, the last scrap of our time in New York together.

  The ring stayed.

  Jan appeared in the bathroom doorway. With a snaking hip movement he threw off his towel and leapfrogged into the bed. ‘Will we have sexual intercourses?’ he asked me sweetly.

  I could wallow around in the past or I could enjoy the present. What was it to be?

  ‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘Yes, we will.’

  Term started, bringing with it a tranche of rehearsal schedules, instrument-wielding music students and icy gusts of wind.

  Rehearsals began in the second week of term, a short but nonetheless agonizing wait. But I stayed afloat. I didn’t give in to the terror. I’d sung rather brilliantly at Peter Ingle’s Christmas concert and was determined to stay on an upward trajectory.

  It wasn’t so much that my fear of singing had vanished but that I now found myself with the tools to fight it. Every time I felt myself panic at the thought of singing Mimi I remembered one of the things Brian had taught me or I simply relived the night Julian had helped me out of my wardrobe for good. And that same sense of quiet strength filled me once more.

  Most days I listened to La Bohème, barely able to believe that I would sing those lines in front of an audience of several hundred people. It was almost laughable. I had been out of my wardrobe a mere three months!

  But sing them I would, Brian told me, in our first singing lesson of the New Year. ‘I’ll be with you every step of the way,’ he promised.

  ‘A big pouffff breath,’ he cried, from the piano, a few minutes later. ‘I want you to fully engage!’ And I’d smiled, because now I knew exactly what he was talking about. I knew what to do when he told me to inhabit my body, or to open up my folds. I sang a top C sharp without great difficulty and could sustain decent volume on a low E. I could make jokes using Italian music terms.

  ‘It was all there already,’ Brian said merrily, handing me Tatyana’s aria from Eugene Onegin. ‘You had done such fantastic work with your video tapes, Sally, you just needed to learn the nuts and bolts. But now we’re really under the bonnet, fine-tuning.’

  ‘I love it,’ I admitted. ‘I really love it.’

  ‘And so you should, my girl! You s
ound sensational. And you should know that we singing teachers never say things like that. We’re tough.’

  I smiled. ‘It’s your brilliant teaching.’

  Brian shook his head. ‘No, my dear. It’s all you. I’m so proud of you. Prouder than I can say.’

  And then, of course, I started crying, and even Brian got a little misty-eyed, and we had to stop for a glass of water and a little hug. ‘I’m a battleaxe with all of my other students,’ he claimed. ‘This won’t do!’

  In the canteen I found myself to have become more sociable, and marvelled as I watched myself as if in the third person, an integral member of a family of singers drifting in and out of the Singers’ Table.

  I needn’t have worried about Violet. She was a lot more subdued than normal in the first few weeks, but she was still Violet Elphinstone, still pretending to be my friend while hating me, and still the most attractive woman in England. Rumours were already circulating (at her instigation) about her friendship with a silver-medal-winning Olympic rower.

  The second week brought the start of our music calls for La Bohème with Colin, the opera’s conductor.

  I walked into the rehearsal room on our first day, desperately proud of myself for doing so without dying, and found Jan standing in the middle of the room, his eyes like saucers. He was staring at the répétiteur, a rather passionate-looking girl with long raven hair and blood-red lips. She was smiling at him coquettishly. ‘Hello, baby,’ she said, in a Russian accent.

  Jan seemed to be at risk of a seizure so I pulled out a chair for him. ‘Jan?’

  He continued to stare at the girl sitting by the piano.

  I looked at her, then at Jan, and sensed a great bolt of energy passing between them.

  ‘Dima?’ Jan croaked. ‘It is you?’

  I took Jan’s chair and sat on it myself. Jan’s ex-wife was our répétiteur.

  Excellent.

  Helen, who walked in a minute or two later, worked it out in less than five seconds. I knew this because she looked at me sharply and mouthed, ‘ARE YOU OK?’ in full view of Dima and Jan. Which was fine because they were still staring at each other.