Nocturnes_ Five Stories of Music and Nightfall - Kazuo Ishiguro [43]
“I’ll go back to London and form a band. These songs need just the right band or they won’t work.”
“How exciting. I do wish you luck.”
After a moment, I said, quite quietly: “Then again, I may not bother. It’s not so easy, you know.”
She didn’t reply, and it occurred to me she hadn’t heard, because she’d turned away again, to look towards Tilo.
“You know,” she said eventually, “when I was younger, nothing could make me angry. But now I get angry at many things. I don’t know how I have become this way. It is not good. Well, I do not think Tilo is coming back here. I will return to the hotel and wait for him.” She got to her feet, her gaze still fixed on his distant figure.
“It’s a shame,” I said, also getting up, “you having a row on your holiday. And yesterday, when I was playing to you, you seemed so happy together.”
“Yes, that was a good moment. Thank you for that.” Suddenly, she held out her hand to me, smiling warmly. “It has been so nice to meet you.”
We shook hands, in the slightly limp way you do with women. She started to walk away, then stopped and looked at me.
“If Tilo were here,” she said, “he would say to you, never be discouraged. He would say, of course, you must go to London and try and form your band. Of course you will be successful. That is what Tilo would say to you. Because that is his way.”
“And what would you say?”
“I would like to say the same. Because you are young and talented. But I am not so certain. As it is, life will bring enough disappointments. If on top, you have such dreams as this …” She smiled again and shrugged. “But I should not say these things. I am not a good example to you. Besides, I can see you are much more like Tilo. If disappointments do come, you will carry on still. You will say, just as he does, I am so lucky.” For a few seconds, she went on gazing at me, like she was memorising the way I looked. The breeze was blowing her hair about, making her seem older than she usually did. “I wish you much luck,” she said finally.
“Good luck yourself,” I said. “And I hope you two make it up okay.”
She waved a last time, then went off down the path out of my view.
I took the guitar from its case and sat back on the bench. I didn’t play anything for a while though, because I was looking into the distance, towards Worcestershire Beacon, and Tilo’s tiny figure up on the incline. Maybe it was to do with the way the sun was hitting that part of the hill, but I could see him much more clearly now than before, even though he’d got further away. He’d paused for a moment on the path, and seemed to be looking about him at the surrounding hills, almost like he was trying to reappraise them. Then his figure started to move again.
I worked on my song for a few minutes, but kept losing concentration, mainly because I was thinking about the way Hag Fraser’s face must have looked as Sonja laid into her that morning. Then I gazed at the clouds, and at the sweep of land below me, and I made myself think again about my song, and the bridge passage I still hadn’t got right.
NOCTURNE
UNTIL TWO DAYS AGO, Lindy Gardner was my next-door neighbour. Okay, you’re thinking, if Lindy Gardner was my neighbour, that probably means I live in Beverly Hills; a movie producer, maybe, or an actor or a musician. Well, I’m a musician all right. But though I’ve played behind one or two performers you’ll have heard of, I’m not what you’d call big-league. My manager, Bradley Stevenson, who in his way has been a good friend over the years, maintains I have it in me to be big-league. Not just big-league session player, but big-league headliner. It’s not true saxophonists don’t become headliners any more, he says, and repeats his list of names. Marcus Lightfoot. Silvio Tarrentini. They’re all jazz players, I point out. “What are you, if you’re not a jazz player?” he says. But only in my innermost dreams am I still a jazz player. In the real world—when I don’t have my face entirely wrapped in bandages the way I do now