Shadow Music

by Elisabeth Rose

  “What’s up? Is it Gordon?” Lucy’s voice dropped in sympathy. Nina snatched the unexpected escape route.

  “We’ve split up.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe I should come over. Bring some comfort food. I wondered why I hadn’t seen you for so long. It’s almost six weeks, more, since you came round.”

  Six weeks since she’d found that music. Amazing. She’d had no idea it was that long. A sudden rush of affection toward her sister was tempered immediately by the thought of the music waiting for her in the spare room.

  “It’s okay Luce, but thanks. I’m over him, really. We didn’t have much in common. That was the problem.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes, thanks for calling. Promise I’ll call Jason. I had a message from Mum and Dad, they’re having a great time.”

  “I know. I’ve spoken to them a couple of times.” The reprimand wasn’t subtle.

  “Well, I’ve got a few things to do. I’d better go.”

  “All right then. See you.”

  Nina bit at her lip. Lucy and she were very close. They’d shared everything growing up and had lived in this house together for eighteen months before Lucy married. She’d cut the conversation short and fobbed Lucy off with Gordon whom she hadn’t given a second thought since he left her. Why hadn’t she told Lucy, of all people, the truth? If she could tell anybody, Lucy was the one.

  She went to practise.

  ****

  Despite her secret addiction Nina had managed to control it enough to keep her work life unaffected, much the way she knew some heroin and cocaine addicts did. If she lost her job she’d lose any semblance of normality and it was the ferry ride each day that enabled her to reset her mind between her two lives.

  The weather turned hot and humid. Sydney sweltered in the early onset of summer weather even though November was technically still spring. Nina enjoyed the early morning ferry ride even more in summer. The harbour sparkled, the sea breeze fresh and salty as they chugged across to the northern shore. The trip in the evening was just as pleasant, relaxing and refreshing after the grime and fumes of the crowded streets.

  The music store, cool and inviting, attracted extra people in off the hot streets and Nina and Rolly in the upstairs section were constantly being asked to play samples tracks for people who they were sure just wanted to sit down and rest in the air-conditioning. Trade picked up at this time of the year, anyway, as Christmas approached and Tien told them not to spend too much time with obvious time wasters, those noncustomers who wanted to listen to track after track in a supposed effort to make up their minds.

  Casually they began to hazard guesses at people as they came up the stairs, tossing the cryptic “TW?” accompanied by a raised eyebrow at each other and then typically, Rolly expanded this to other initials denoting personal characteristics in a childish game similar to “I spy.”

  “OHLL,” he murmured to Nina as she passed him at the counter. Nina glanced up and saw the person, an overweight young woman with a red perspiring face, standing at the top of the stairs.

  “Something something lady,” she murmured back as she searched the catalogue for a customer.

  “Overheated large lady.”

  “That’s one word not two,” she said indignantly after she’d finished her search and dealt with the customer.

  People appeared in a constant stream causing Tien to come out of his office and help serve for most of the afternoon.

  There was a lull just before closing. With twenty minutes to go Nina couldn’t wait to get home. Her feet ached and she’d had enough of dealing politely with hot and sometimes obnoxious customers. Rolly’s silly game, which had helped relieve tension but which Tien’s presence had scuppered, started up again but Nina couldn’t concentrate and fidgeted about looking at the clock every few minutes.

  “Is that clock working?” she asked Rolly.

  “Yes,” he said absently looking up from the list of figures he was studying. His eye fell on the customer who had just appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Here’s a good one,” he said quietly. “DRTDH.”

  Nina glanced across. The man was staring about the floor as if searching for someone amongst the four or five people browsing at the bins. He spied Nina and walked purposefully toward her. She took in his long, unkempt, curly hair, creased blue shirt and jeans, the leather jacket slung over his arm and the battered suitcase he carried.

  “TW,” she whispered to Rolly, playing the game. But there was something about him, something unsettling about the way he focussed on her, something almost familiar.

  “Dirty and rumpled but tall, dark, and handsome,” he whispered back.

  With a shock of recognition she realised Rolly’s words echoed Serena’s. Thirtyish, certainly tall and his hair was dark brown. Handsome? Maybe. A gaunt face and too thin but there was something extremely attractive about him despite his dishevelled appearance.

  He walked straight to the counter and put his suitcase down. Then he looked directly at Nina, right into her eyes, and began humming a melody. The melody. Nina froze, rigid with shock. Rolly laughed.

  “Nice tune,” he said. “Recognise it, Nina?”

  Nina couldn’t tear her eyes from the stranger’s. He stopped humming and said softly, tentatively, as if confirming something, “Nina?”

  Rolly’s astonished gaze flicked from one to the another like someone watching tennis.

  “Do you know each other?”

  Nina found her voice. “No.”

  “No,” said the man.

  “Excuse me folks but…what’s happening here?” Rolly asked plaintively.

  “I don’t know. It’s that tune. I know the tune,” Nina gabbled, dropping her gaze to the counter top and then just as quickly back to the stranger’s face.

  “What is it?” asked Rolly. “I’ve never heard it before.”

  “I think it’s an original composition,” the man said. “Nina is the first person I’ve met who recognised it.”

  “Am I?” Something else registered through the shock waves. “You’re English.”

  “Yes, I arrived in Sydney yesterday.”

  “A traveller.” Her voice came out in a whisper. Her knuckles shone white as she gripped the edge of the counter.

  He lifted an eyebrow slightly. “Yes.”

  Tien came out of the back room. “Closing time. I’m sorry, sir. I’ll have to ask you to leave. We open at nine in the morning.”

  The man nodded briefly to Tien. He held Nina’s gaze. “I’ll wait outside for you.”

  After he had picked up his suitcase and disappeared down the stairs, Rolly said, “Tell me you’re not going to meet him.”

  “I am.” Nothing was more certain in her life.

  “Want me to come with you?”

  Nina flashed him a grateful smile. “No, thanks Rolly. I’ll be all right. I’ve been waiting for him, I think.”

  Rolly shook his head, frowning. “But you don’t know him, you said so.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Nina said in a voice that meant no more argument.

  He was waiting outside the front door. Nina came out the side entrance and walked around the corner, studying him as she came closer. His shoulders sagged in the heat, standing there with his jacket and suitcase. He looked exhausted, vulnerable, and fragile, and above all, lonely. She quickened her step and he turned.

  Face to face. His eyes shone with wonder and excitement, transcending the tiredness of his body. Hers would be the same. Who was he? How had found her and how did he know that melody?

  “We need to talk, don’t we?” he said.

  “Yes.” Nina led him down toward the harbour where the fresh cool evening breeze came in off the ocean. They sat on a bench along from the wharf where her ferry came in.

  “My name is Martin Leigh,” he said stretching out his long legs. “I’m English, from London. Arrived yesterday.” He wiped his face with his hand. “God, it’s hot here. It’s freezing at home
.”

  “How did you find me? How did you know about me?” Nina wondered suddenly, hysterically, whether Serena had set her up, sent along a tall, dark, handsome foreigner…with the same surname, Lee, too. But Serena didn’t know the melody.

  “It’s a very long story. I’d need to start right at the beginning. It’s complicated.” Martin seemed to wave that away. He stared at her intently. “Nina, do you have the violin part?”

  “Yes, I do.” It didn’t occur to her to lie or prevaricate. “Why? What do you have? Are there more parts?”

  A relieved, satisfied expression smoothed some of the tiredness from his face. “Yes. I’ve got the flute part and a cello part. I’m a flautist, a professional flautist. Do you play it, the music? Of course you must or you wouldn’t know the melody.”

  “I can’t stop playing it,” said Nina softly and saw her own desperation reflected in his eyes. “But I’m not good enough. I can’t get it right and he, it, makes me…keep practising.”

  “It’s an obsession. It’s like being an alcoholic, I imagine. You tell yourself no more but the next day you think one more won’t hurt.”

  “Yes. It’s exactly like that. Well, the warning is there, isn’t it?” Nina laughed mirthlessly. “Fat lot of good it does.”

  “Warning? I don’t have a warning on mine. What does it say?”

  “I looked it up. It’s Shakespeare. From King Lear. It’s handwritten across the top in a scrawl. Different writing to the manuscript. It says ‘this way madness.’ ”

  “O, that way madness lies; let me shun that,” quoted Martin.

  Nina raised her eyebrows, impressed. “You know it?”

  He laughed. “Did it at school. And Macbeth. I love Shakespeare. He’s so…relevant to lots of things and he puts it so well. Succinctly.”

  “Well he got that right.”

  Nina stared out across the darkening harbour at the twinkling lights of the Bridge.

  “Are we mad?” she said without turning her eyes from the view.

  “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t,” he said softly.

  “King Lear?”

  “Yes. He had a lot to say on the subject.”

  His words comforted her. Martin wasn’t crazy. He was obsessed too but he was approaching it rationally and clearly like a scientist. He had a method of sorts and he would help her. He’d come half way around the world to find her and, incredibly, had succeeded.

  “Follow your heart and be brave,” Serena had told her as she left. Her heart told her to trust him and what choice was there?

  “Come home with me, Martin.” She stood up.

  Chapter Four

  “You know, I used to be quite normal and respectable. Well, fairly respectable anyway, as much as any musician can be.”

  Martin gave a short laugh as he said this and looked at Nina. She stared back with that perfect, expressionless, exotically beautiful face of hers—unblinking dark eyes, smooth, rounded cheeks, impossible to tell what she was thinking. “I play the flute, sorry, you know that.”

  He laughed again, nervous for some reason, sitting here in her tidy, cosy little terrace house. After all the travelling and searching and madness, he’d found her and wanted to make her understand, didn’t want her to think he was some loony, eccentric English crackpot, hearing voices. But she wouldn’t think that because she’d heard them too…still, a knot of nerves twisted in his belly. “I was a student at the Royal Academy. In London. It’s a very famous music school.” He paused.

  Nina said quietly, “I know.”

  “Sorry, of course you do, would—know, I mean.” He took a desperate sip of coffee and carefully replaced the mug, pleased not to have spilled anything down his shirt although the state it was in, no one would notice. And it smelled bad too. She hadn’t commented though, despite sitting next to him on the ferry and sharing pizza for dinner in a restaurant at the local shopping centre. She’d been assessing him, he was sure. Making certain she wasn’t inviting danger into her home. “Sorry,” he said again. “It’s just that no one’s listened to me before who really understood. You can’t tell anyone, can you? About this?”

  Nina returned his gaze, unblinking, then looked away and shook her head slowly.

  “Gordon thinks I’m crazy. He was my boyfriend.”

  His eyes met hers again for an instant but hers skated away, embarrassed. Shy? Not frightened, please not frightened. No, she wouldn’t have met him after work, wouldn’t have invited him into her home. It was the obsession. She had it too.

  “My girlfriend thought I was mad,” he said. “And left. Can’t blame her.”

  Nina nodded but said nothing. She was extraordinarily beautiful. He hadn’t been prepared for that. She’d taken his breath away when he saw her standing there in that shop. Not just because he’d come around the world on a seemingly insane venture to find her and had succeeded, but because when he laid eyes on her something had clicked into place.

  He realised she was waiting patiently for him to continue.

  “After I graduated I freelanced and then I got a job in an orchestra. Did well, had a decent apartment, girlfriend but then this…music thing happened. I lost my job and had to move to a tiny basement flat. Just a bedroom, living room, gas cooker and sink behind a curtain in the corner and a bathroom of sorts. It’s always damp, even in summer it smells mouldy. Of course summer there is nothing like summer here. Or what I imagine summer will be like…”

  Martin’s voice trailed off. He was babbling, his eyelids suddenly leaden. Jet lag catching up with him, like hitting a wall. He took another sip of coffee hoping it would stave off sleep for a while longer. She made good coffee, plunger coffee with freshly ground beans. He concentrated.

  “I had to teach when I lost my orchestral position. Musicians usually do teach despite their best intentions but I got work occasionally, mainly subbing when someone got sick and the odd session gig. I had enough saved up to fund this trip.”

  He stopped abruptly. Raving again, didn’t seem to be able to stop talking, pouring out all sorts of information she wouldn’t be the slightest bit interested in. It must be the relief of having found her. That combined with exhaustion. And her stunningly beautiful face. The less she said the more he raved. He had to stick to the relevant details or she’d throw him out…or call the police.

  “I took up yoga years ago. That’s where I learnt to meditate. Trying to stop myself worrying.” He glanced at Nina and she gave the barest glimmer of a smile. Her lovely dark eyes gave nothing away.

  “I found a very experienced teacher. I was lucky really. There are so many fakes around, people who’ll take your money and don’t know much more than you could read in a book. Charlatans. I practised with her for nearly eight years up until very recently, then she moved, went to India and she never contacted me. I think she became a recluse in a retreat somewhere.”

  “That’s a pity.”

  Martin cleared his throat. “Nina…she left after…after…I played for her. She was frightened. She said I shouldn’t become involved with it…with them.”

  That caught her attention. She shifted, tensed. “Could she hear them, too?”

  “I’m not sure. She wouldn’t say. She must have. Otherwise why leave so suddenly? She was very angry with me. It was extraordinary. Such rage. Against all her teachings and everything I’d learnt from her.”

  The shock of seeing her usually placid countenance contorted almost out of recognition by fear and horror was as vivid now as when it occurred. “She wouldn’t tell me what happened. She virtually threw me out. It was horrible, really horrible. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Perhaps she wasn’t as good as I’d thought.”

  “Had to go to India to recharge, maybe?” Nina said.

  Lost in the memory as he was, her cynical, flippant comment was like a splash of cold water. But a tiny smile played on her lips. She was trying to reassure him, play down the fear. He obliged as well as he could with a small grimace.
/>   “Go on,” she said and tucked her legs under her, settling in for the evening.

  “Before that, long before, about eight months maybe, I was poking around in a secondhand music shop. You can often pick up bargains and unusual works, things that are out of print. I was after a copy of the Poulenc Flute Sonata. I’d lent mine to one of my students and of course, never got it back. Stupid. Actually it wasn’t his fault. Someone nicked his music case on the tube. He never got around to buying me another copy. If he had I never would have found the piece and this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “To you.”

  “You think it would have happened anyway? To someone else?”

  “Don’t you?”

  He thought about it. “I suppose so. It had already happened to other people before and there’s nothing special about me.”

  Nina relaxed into the cushions and rested her glossy black head on the crocheted rug spread on the back of the sofa. Her gaze never left his face. She appeared calm but he knew she must be as excited as he was. Her eyes glittered in the lamp light. She hadn’t been able to share what she knew until now, either. Not fully.

  “The Poulenc was there in a pile of music. Ruth, she ran the place, told me it had come in recently from a deceased estate. I bought a few other things, too. When I got home I started to run through the Sonata and that’s when I found the piece. It was in between the first and second movements. Handwritten but without the other thing, the warning. It looked pretty easy and I started to doodle through the opening bars to see what it was like. That melody…it seemed to leap off the page.”

  Nina sat forward now, untucked her legs, listening intently, eyes fixed on his face.

  “It was mesmerising. I had to keep playing, I literally could not stop. The second part is harder and there were a few passages I stumbled on the first time. The force or compulsion or whatever it is, weakened when I made mistakes and I was able to tear my flute away from my lips and stop. I wasn’t game to play the first bit again. I put my hand out to move the page off the music stand and when I touched it, it actually tingled under my fingers. I swear I could feel it like an electric shock, mild but definitely real. It was as though it was alive. I was terrified.”