Nocturnes_ Five Stories of Music and Nightfall - Kazuo Ishiguro [30]
The evening was pleasantly warm, and Sarah Vaughan and her band came drifting out onto the terrace. The stars were brighter than before, and the lights of the neighbourhood were still twinkling like an extension of the night sky.
“I love this song,” Emily said. “I suppose you’ve forgotten this one too. But even if you’ve forgotten it, you can dance to it, can’t you?”
“Yes. I suppose I can.”
“We could be like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.”
“Yes, we could.”
We placed our wine glasses on the stone table and began to dance. We didn’t dance especially well—we kept bumping our knees—but I held Emily close to me, and my senses filled with the texture of her clothes, her hair, her skin. Holding her like this, it occurred to me again how much weight she’d put on.
“You’re right, Raymond,” she said, quietly in my ear. “Charlie’s all right. We should sort ourselves out.”
“Yes. You should.”
“You’re a good friend, Raymond. What would we do without you?”
“If I’m a good friend, I’m glad. Because I’m not much good at anything else. In fact, I’m pretty useless, really.”
I felt a sharp tug on my shoulder.
“Don’t say that,” she whispered. “Don’t talk like that.” Then a moment later, she said again: “You’re such a good friend, Raymond.”
This was Sarah Vaughan’s 1954 version of “April in Paris,” with Clifford Brown on trumpet. So I knew it was a long track, at least eight minutes. I felt pleased about that, because I knew after the song ended, we wouldn’t dance any more, but go in and eat the casserole. And for all I knew, Emily would re-consider what I’d done to her diary, and decide this time it wasn’t such a trivial offence. What did I know? But for another few minutes at least, we were safe, and we kept dancing under the starlit sky.
MALVERN HILLS
I’D SPENT THE SPRING in London, and all in all, even if I hadn’t achieved everything I’d set out to, it had been an exciting interlude. But with the weeks slipping by and summer getting closer, the old restlessness had started to return. For one thing, I was getting vaguely paranoid about running into any more of my former university friends. Wandering around Camden Town, or going through CDs I couldn’t afford in West End megastores, I’d already had too many of them come up to me, asking how I was getting on since leaving the course to “seek fame and fortune.” It’s not that I was embarrassed to tell them what I’d been up to. It was just that—with a very few exceptions—none of them was capable of grasping what was or wasn’t, for me at this particular point, a “successful” few months.
As I’ve said, I hadn’t achieved every goal I’d set my sights on, but then those goals had always been more like long-term targets. And all those auditions, even the really dreary ones, had been an invaluable experience. In almost every case, I’d taken something away with me, something I’d learned about the scene in London, or else about the music business in general.
Some of these auditions had been pretty professional affairs. You’d find yourself in a warehouse, or a converted garage block, and there’d be a manager, or maybe the girlfriend of a band member, taking your name, asking you to wait, offering you tea, while the sounds of the band, stopping and starting, thundered out from the adjoining space. But the majority of auditions happened at a much more shambolic level. In fact, when you saw the way most bands went about things, it was no mystery why the whole scene in London was dying on its feet. Time and again, I’d walk past rows of anonymous suburban terraces on the city outskirts, carry my acoustic guitar up a staircase, and enter a stale-smelling flat with mattresses and sleeping bags all over the floor, and band members who mumbled and barely looked you in the eye. I’d sing and