The Other Side of the Door, Nicci French [new reading .TXT] 📗

and places to get to. The sun had sunk beneath the horizon and in the mysterious half-light it was cool. I shivered in my thin jacket. Summer was disappearing; soon it would be autumn.

How much can a person change? How much can you trust them to change? How much should you be ruled by the head, and how much by the heart? If you want so very, very badly to feel someone’s arms around you again, to feel their breath in your hair and hear their voice whispering your name, is it wrong to give in to it?

Each step I took towards Hayden was taking me nearer a decision. For a moment I came to a halt, standing under a knobbled plane tree. To love and be loved, desire and be desired—but to be weak and in someone’s power, to be hurt again, betrayed again, left again.

After

Obviously we musicians didn’t get to go to the wedding itself. Thank the Lord. While Danielle and Jed were making their sacred vows in a church in the Strand in front of their nearest and dearest, we were carrying our equipment down into the basement of a hotel in Holborn while other people hauled tables and carried piles of plates and arranged vases of flowers.

We weren’t the merriest of bands. A couple of days earlier, late in the evening, I had heard a sound at my door that was barely even a knock. It sounded more as if someone was desperately fumbling and clawing at the door. I’d opened it to find Amos in tears. ‘Sonia’s left me,’ he said.

I led him inside and sat him on the sofa and put a tumbler of whisky into his trembling hands. He gulped at it as if he was desperately thirsty. He spoke in a series of sobs. ‘She left me, just like that,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘She’s moving on,’ he said. ‘Literally moving on. She’s leaving town, leaving her job. She’s going to get a job somewhere else. She wouldn’t even tell me where she was going.’ He rubbed his eyes with his hands. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said, with rare truthfulness.

‘Did you know about this?’ he said. ‘Did you know she was going to throw everything away, leave everything?’

But it was really a rhetorical question because for an hour or more Amos talked and cried and talked more. I wanted to tell him to stop. I wanted to say that I wasn’t the person he should be saying these things to. I could have asked him why he was so eager to demonstrate to me the strength of his feelings for another woman but, for what it was worth, I think I knew the answer to that. Amos liked to be in control and this had just happened. It hadn’t been part of his master plan. I couldn’t think of the right question to ask and I didn’t care that much. There was nothing Amos could tell me, so in the end it was easier just to sit back and look sympathetic and keep him topped up with whisky and let him talk.

Finally, when he stood up, a bit unsteadily, to go, he said, ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’

‘What?’

‘We can’t play now.’

I told him very firmly that we had promised to play. I was going through with it and so was he. When the rest of the band were told about Sonia, they reacted more calmly. Guy started to say something sarcastic and bitter but the different events and conflicts had knocked the fight out of him and he muttered something about how he’d do his best and try not to let me down. Joakim barely shrugged. ‘I guess why she’s done this isn’t any of my business,’ he said.

‘It sort of is,’ I said, ‘because, without Sonia, you and I are going to have to do most of the singing.’

So the two of us got together and sorted out the vocals in a quick session. Joakim had a wispy, indie-band voice but it would probably appeal to any teenage girls at the wedding. I wasn’t sure about my own. I wasn’t exactly Bessie Smith, who I wanted to be in all sorts of ways, but I could hold a note and I was used to singing in front of classes to demonstrate how things should go.

When I told Neal, he seemed worried at first and then suspicious. ‘Is she losing it?’ he said. ‘Is she suddenly going to make a confession to clear her conscience?’

‘Definitely not,’ I said. ‘She’s not like that.’

Neal looked thoughtful. ‘Is there something I should know?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said, again truthfully. There were things he didn’t know, and nothing he should know. But I felt I couldn’t leave it at that. ‘It was probably inevitable. I don’t think we could stay together with something like that hanging over us. It’s probably good that she moved—she’ll be with new people in a new job.’

‘But she left Amos,’ said Neal.

‘It’s probably a lucky escape for both of them,’ I said.

‘That’s a bit harsh.’

‘Allow me some bitterness,’ I said.

A hotel official directed us to a makeshift stage at the end of the hall. As we set up, I felt we were like people on the morning after a night where we had got terribly drunk and said too much to each other and done things, some of which we couldn’t quite remember and others of which we were ashamed. And now, after it all, we were a bit hung-over, a bit the worse for wear, and we didn’t quite want to catch each other’s eye. Oh, and we were nervous about performing in front of a crowd of strangers.

Gradually people began to drift in from the ceremony and look for their places on the tables. I thought they’d be curious about us but they scarcely noticed us. I had a sense of what it was like to be one