And people were looking at her, too. They could see her, pale and shaking. They knew he hadn’t told her about this.
How dare he put me in this position?
Milan watched Lord Davenport amble off, then tossed his hair and grinned broadly.
“So good to be back,” he said. “Look at your faces!”
He laughed, a kind of manic, jagged sound that owed little to genuine mirth.
“What’s going on?” The question came from Leonard, but articulated what every member of the group was thinking.
He hasn’t even looked at me yet. He hasn’t even looked at Evgeny’s old spot. Everybody else has. But he hasn’t.
“What’s going on? What do you think? They ask me back. I say no. They make me an offer I can’t refuse. I say yes.”
He shrugged and tapped his baton on the music stand.
“So now, hey, let’s play some music.”
A rumble of dissent arose from the two-thirds of the orchestra who hadn’t been members of Milan’s inner circle, but Milan spoke over it.
“If you love this orchestra, you will do this. It don’t matter what you think of me. You think of the orchestra. You do what is best for the orchestra. Right?”
The mutterings died down.
“We start with some Vaughan Williams. Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. I’m sorry, brass, woodwind, percussion—you sit this one out. Maybe go to the canteen for half an hour, yes? I see you here later for Mars from The Planets, okay?”
The musicians didn’t need telling twice. Desperate to huddle up for some gossip, they grabbed their bags and headed for the doors.
He still hadn’t looked at Lydia. Leonard handed out the scores while Milan fielded more questions from the cellists. The trustees had gone into a tailspin of anxiety when Milan had resigned. They had offered him money, but the only thing he’d wanted was the conductor role. It had taken two days of negotiation for them to crumble. Lydia was pretty sure they had offered him the post in the face of everybody’s better judgement.
“Sorry about your mother,” a viola player said.
Milan looked down for a moment.
“Thanks,” he said. “So. The music. I know this piece needs a secondary string section, but we will get some extra players when the time is nearer. For now I will ask the back row of each section to be our secondary section, right? And also we need a string quartet. So I want Camilla on cello, Brendan on viola, and, for violins, Leonard and Lydia.”
He had to look at her now. He had spoken her name. Her heart was a shrivelled, smouldering mess and her hands wouldn’t keep still—surely he had to look?
He raised his eyes, so very briefly, in her direction.
She tried to hold them but they slid away. There had been nothing in the look, just pure flatness.
“So,” he resumed, “we won’t yet have the depth of sound we need, but we must imagine it is there.” He spoke at length about his vision for the piece, never again looking over at Lydia. As his explanation continued, Lydia came to realise that this wasn’t the Milan they had known. The glitter and flourish was forced, where it had been so effortless before. He didn’t look at any of them properly—the eyes that had bored into souls now just lurked inside heavy lids, opaque and distant.
Her shock and anger at his sudden reappearance melted into compassion and love. Of course he was depressed. Given what he had been through, it wouldn’t be surprising if he was close to breakdown. After all, she knew he handled guilt badly—and now he had so much more of it to contend with. Most likely, it was only the music keeping him sane.
She took her bow and wrapped her fist around it tightly, willing herself to stop shaking, looking only at the music score and nowhere else.
By the time everyone had positioned their instruments and poised their bows, she was halfway to composure. Halfway was going to have to be near enough.
She turned her head the same way as everyone else’s, towards Milan. He looked over them, at some fixed point on the wall behind, holding his hands ready to signal the opening note.
Lydia worked hard at concentrating only on the notes in front of her and Milan’s hands, but the sweeping majesty of the music had its inevitable effect on her. She tried to quash the emotion, but the strange distance of Milan’s expression disturbed her too much. Her memory defeated her, calling to mind the image of him on Charles
Bridge in Prague, when they had talked of a future together.
As the chords swelled and the melody soared, Lydia clung to her self-control with every fibre of her body. A lump grew and hardened in her throat while her head ached with longing and loss. As for her heart, it was too full to bear.