The Well of Saint Nobody by Neil Jordan

Author:Neil Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781804549797
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

16

She didn’t come for three weeks. He allowed the dishes to pile in the sink, while he tried to enjoy the unfamiliar silence, practised scales relentlessly, as if afraid that any relaxation of his schedule would bring the affliction back. But it didn’t. His skin remained supple and uncracked, his fingers stretched with a fluidity that would have amazed a younger player. He wandered out every third night and pulled fistfuls of moss from the dripping walls of the well. Sometimes there was a moon. He imagined the hare observing him, and once or twice whirled round as if to catch it in its act of moonlit dancing, but there was never anything there.

Perhaps it followed her, he began to think, and with the same thought came another, that he missed her. He walked back inside and began to clean the sink, using that eco-detergent that she had bought. For times like this, he wondered, when she wouldn’t be around?

His anger had subsided. Though whether he or she had more right to such an emotion was a moot point. He could remember the piano competition dimly, the flight to Dublin, the taxi drive underneath that oppressive bridge, the hotel near the government buildings, and even the name, Buswells. He could remember the dusty hall, the table behind which he sat with the music professor from Trinity and the portly local version of Rubenstein, but nothing else. Nothing of the participants and definitely nothing of their hands. The Wigmore Hall in London became his local refuge from the grind of touring, he must have played there twice, three times a year over three decades, how many flutes of champagne had he shared with ardent fans, and how many had he slept with, all of them forgotten.

But she had told him it hadn’t happened there.

He remembered his battle with the Shostakovich preludes in the Brighton Dome only because he lost it. Too austere for that middlebrow audience, a bad choice anyway, Tchaikovsky might have brought them huzzawing to their feet. He could only remember that nobody noticed his failure, the applause was polite and respectable. Of the woman he had met later in the Grand Hotel bar, he could piece together nothing. Oh, he could force some memory out of a few random encounters. How many had there been, in how many hotel rooms, some of them no doubt in Brighton, and he was a touring musician after all. She had noticed he played badly, she said. The only discerning one amongst that audience, so he should have remembered. But did she tell him that then? No, she told him that later. Three weeks ago, to be exact.

So he remembered nothing of her then, but he remembered everything of her now. And it was odd, the emptiness it caused. He was used to emptiness of course, isolation, a transient life, he had long steeled himself against a certain kind of need. Loneliness is how you perceive it, he had long told himself, trained himself to enjoy his own company, his own habits.

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