‘And we had some fun dragging it up the stairs, I can tell you,’ Nick said. ‘You want to hear something?’
‘You don’t have to play for me.’
‘My pleasure.’
Nick switched seats to the piano stool. With his back to the window, framed in the sunlight, he laid his hands on the keyboard and the room filled with the rich resonance of the grand piano. He played for a minute or so, while Ben watched and listened. The piece was slow and melancholic, yet majestic and powerful. The deep tones of the Bosendörfer projected a weight of emotion that throbbed through the soundspace around them and transported Nick off to another world as he sat there, swaying and rocking soulfully to the music he was playing.
Ben said nothing until Nick stopped and sat back, smiling at him. ‘What was that?’ Ben asked.
‘“Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesus Christ”,’ Nick said in faultless German. ‘“I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ”. It’s a chorale prelude. Originally an organ piece, of course. They didn’t have pianos like this back when it was composed.’
‘Didn’t sound that old to me.’
‘Amazingly timeless, isn’t it? That’s what you get from the grand master. He was way ahead of his time.’ Nick nodded up at the portrait Ben had been looking at before.
‘Bach?’ Ben was surprised.
‘Johann Sebastian himself. Some of the real purists would say it was heresy even to play Bach on a modern-day piano, let alone commit sacrileges like use the sustain pedal with these old pieces.’ Nick shrugged. ‘I say, if it sounds good, why not?’
‘It did,’ Ben said. ‘Thank you for letting me hear it.’
Nick came away from the piano and returned to his armchair to pour them some more coffee. It was only now that Ben noticed that he was wearing copper bracelets on both wrists. Nick sipped his coffee and then leaned back in the armchair, rubbing his hands as if they were hurting him. He caught Ben looking. ‘Spot of the old arthritis,’ Nick admitted. ‘Sign of the years creeping up on me, I suppose. Last thing a keyboard player needs is the curse of stiff fingers. Not so bad, now that spring is here.’
‘Does the copper help?’
‘A bit. But not as much as the special medication I use. The best in the world.’ Nick winked. Ben didn’t press him for details.
They chatted for a while longer, mostly about classical music and current affairs, of both of which Ben had little more than a passing knowledge. As midday approached, Nick frowned at his watch and said he ought to start getting things ready for the lunchtime buffet. Ben was ready to help out. A deal was a deal.
While Nick busied himself gathering up the coffee dishes, he motioned in the vague direction of the kitchen and asked if Ben could start getting the food out of the fridge and laying it out on the side. Ben obligingly headed up the passage to find himself faced with four identical white doors, any of which could have been the kitchen. He tried one, but it was locked.
‘That’s the spare bedroom,’ Nick said, coming up behind him with the coffee tray. ‘Kitchen’s at the end.’
‘You keep your spare bedroom locked?’ Ben mused.
‘That’s where I keep my terrorist cache of explosives and weaponry,’ Nick said casually. ‘You’d never guess I was plotting the overthrow of western civilisation, would you?’
‘Your secret’s safe with me,’ Ben replied with a smile.
The kitchen was spacious, airy and well organised, with faux-marble worktops, a solid oak dining table and matching bespoke wall units. The two friends worked quietly and efficiently, to the strains of soft choral music playing from Nick’s hi-fi system. Male bonding had never been so gently domesticated as this. For Ben, it beat erecting an improvised jungle camp or circling the wagons in readiness for an enemy assault any day.
As Nick washed up the coffee cups, Ben took the platters of food from the tall American-style fridge and set it on the side to peel off the cling film wrap. The sandwiches were exactingly cut into little triangles, crusts trimmed away, colour-segregated into white bread and wholemeal; one third tuna and mayonnaise, one third ham and pickle, and one third some sort of anaemic-looking paste. For the vegetarians, Nick explained. Ben pulled a face.
Next they had to transfer tubs of stuffed olives, hummus and other dainty finger food from the delicatessen into bowls, which Ben found neatly stacked in a cupboard. Then came the drinks: wine glasses and a selection of reds and whites, some nice barrel tumblers and carafes of pressed fruit juice and lemoned mineral water for the non-drinkers. Ben didn’t think Nick had got in enough bottles of wine, but he made no comment. The whole thing was a little too precious for his tastes: he said nothing about that either.
After that, the oak dining table had to be moved from the kitchen into the main room, and everything laid out nicely. Napkins, knives, forks, paper plates, and some straw coasters judiciously provided in case anyone did anything as horrible as set a glass down on top of one of the fine keyboard instruments. Most members of his social circle were far too cultivated to commit such a ghastly act, Nick explained, but you never knew. He told a horror story about some clumsy oaf who once elbowed a whole pitcher of Coke into the works of someone’s Steinway baby grand. Needless to say, that person was not invited today.
‘Dear me,’ Ben said, tutting. He had himself once broken into a music museum in Milan and there personally, deliberately, smashed the leg off a priceless historic pianoforte. A painful tale that he chose not to share with his friend at this moment, or any other. Ben had had his reasons for what he’d done, but something told him Nick might not understand.
Soon afterwards the first of the guests began to arrive, and not long after that, the place was filling with the buzz of polite chatter and laughter. Nick had selected a different CD from the collection that filled an entire bookcase, and the choral music had given way to some kind of lively baroque stuff with booming cellos and crisp harpsichords.
For Nick, completely in his element, the proceedings were just getting underway. For Ben, though, his visit to his friend’s apartment felt as though it was coming to an end. Even as the first introductions were being made, he was getting itchy feet to make his excuses and leave. But he didn’t want to appear rude. He’d stay just long enough to drink no more than two glasses of wine, munch a couple of sandwiches, pay his social dues, before telling Nick he had to make tracks.
Everyone he spoke to was part of the Oxford classical music scene, in one way or another. Ben was introduced to an organ restorer, to the manager of the Holywell Music Room where Ben had once attended a Bartók string quartet recital, and to a bunch of others whose names and occupations escaped his mind seconds after he’d met them. One of the guests was a tall, slightly stooped, grey-haired university academic in a beige suit with a yellow bow tie, whom Nick greeted like a long-lost friend. ‘Ben, I’d like you to meet Adrian Graves. Adrian, this is Benedict Hope, an old chum from the House. He’s here for the reunion.’
An old chum. The Nick Ben had known back then would never have used expressions like that.
Handshakes, blether blether, yakkety yak, delighted to meet you, how fascinating, will you be at the concert, all the expected chit-chat. Ben smiled and nodded his way through the intros and gleaned that Graves was Nick’s former professor and a renowned musicologist and expert in ancient something-or-other, now semi-retired. Graves had brought along his wife, whose name was Cressida, or maybe Cynthia, or Camilla – three passes of small talk and boom, it was gone from Ben’s memory. He studiously avoided saying anything at all about himself, and trusted Nick to keep what little he knew under his hat. Which limited Ben’s options for interactivity even more than his painfully obvious lack of involvement with the local music scene.
As more people turned up and the buzz of chatter stepped up a notch, Ben retreated to the edge of the crowd on