Nocturnes_ Five Stories of Music and Nightfall - Kazuo Ishiguro [71]
AS THE SUMMER WENT ON, they began to prolong their conversations by coming over to the cafe together after their sessions, and she’d buy him coffees, cakes, sometimes a sandwich. Now their talk was no longer just about music—though everything always seemed to come back to it. For instance, she might question him about the German girl he’d been close to in Vienna.
“But you must understand, she was never my girlfriend,” he would tell her. “We were never like that.”
“You mean you never became physically intimate? That doesn’t mean you weren’t in love with her.”
“No, Miss Eloise, that is incorrect. I was fond of her, certainly. But we were not in love.”
“But when you played me the Rachmaninov yesterday, you were remembering an emotion. It was love, romantic love.”
“No, that is absurd. She was a good friend, but we did not love.”
“But you play that passage like it’s the memory of love. You’re so young, and yet you know desertion, abandonment. That’s why you play that third movement the way you do. Most cellists, they play it with joy. But for you, it’s not about joy, it’s about the memory of a joyful time that’s gone for ever.”
They had conversations like this, and he was often tempted to question her in return. But just as he’d never dared ask Petrovic a personal question in the whole time he’d studied under him, he now felt unable to ask anything of substance about her. Instead, he dwelt on the little things she let fall—how she now lived in Portland, Oregon, how she’d moved there from Boston three years ago, how she disliked Paris “because of its sad associations”—but drew back from asking her to expand.
She would laugh much more easily now than in the first days of their friendship, and she developed the habit, when they stepped out of the Excelsior and crossed the piazza, of linking her arm through his. This was the point at which we first started noticing them, a curious couple, he looking so much younger than he actually was, she looking in some ways motherly, in other ways “like a flirty actress,” as Ernesto put it. In the days before we got to talking with Tibor, we used to waste a lot of idle chat on them, the way men in a band do. If they strolled past us, arm in arm, we’d look at each other and say: “What do you think? They’ve been at it, yes?” But having enjoyed the speculation, we’d then shrug and admit it was unlikely: they just didn’t have the atmosphere of lovers. And once we came to know Tibor, and he began telling us about those afternoons in her suite, none of us thought to tease him or make any funny suggestions.
Then one afternoon when they were sitting in the square with coffee and cakes, she began to talk about a man who wanted to marry her. His name was Peter Henderson and he ran a successful business in Oregon selling golfing equipment. He was smart, kind, well respected in the community. He was six years older than Eloise, but that was hardly old. There were two young children from his first marriage, but things had been settled amicably.
“So now you know what I’m doing here,” she said with a nervous laugh he’d never heard from her before. “I’m hiding out. Peter has no idea where I am. I guess it’s cruel of me. I called him last Tuesday, told him I was in Italy, but I didn’t say which city. He was mad at me and I guess he’s entitled to be.”
“So,” said Tibor. “You are spending the summer contemplating your future.”
“Not really. I’m just hiding.”
“You do not love this Peter?”
She shrugged. “He’s a nice man. And I don’t have a lot of other offers on the table.”
“This Peter. He is a music lover?”
“Oh … Where I live now, he would certainly count as one. After all, he goes to concerts. And afterwards, in the restaurant, he says a lot of nice things