“Isabel!”
She continued to walk, but he grabbed the sleeve of her coat and pulled her towards him. The strength of his tug almost made her trip, but she righted herself.
“Please leave me.”
“No. I won’t. What’s wrong?”
She drew in her breath. “Leave me, you have to go and meet Nick Smart.”
He stared at her in astonishment. “Who?”
“Nick. That composer. The one we met at the Queen’s Hall.”
He frowned. “But I’m not. I’m meant to be seeing Tom Martin. He’s got the music for a recording we’re doing for Paul Baxter. Delphian Records. You’ve met him.”
She tried to remember what Nick had said.
She turned to him. Jamie was looking at her with a puzzled, almost hurt expression, and she knew at once that she had made a mistake.
“I’m sorry—” she began.
But he interrupted her. “Why did you think I was going to meet Nick? What gave you that idea?”
She realised that there was an implicit accusation in what she had said; an accusation that could be devastating.
“He spoke to me before the curtain went up,” she said. “He said he’d be seeing you later.”
He said nothing for a moment. He had been carrying his bassoon case, but had put it down when he had seized her. Now he picked it up with one hand and linked his other arm through hers.
“Let’s walk.”
She pointed at the case. “You can’t carry that all the way across the Meadows.”
“I can.”
“I’ll help you.”
They walked past the entrance to the Faculty of Music. A light was burning inside, in a high window; a practice room perhaps.
“If Nick said that he was seeing me later,” Jamie said, “he didn’t mean tonight. He meant some other time.”
Isabel affected nonchalance. “Oh, I see.”
Jamie looked at her enquiringly. “You don’t like him, do you?”
She hesitated. “I wouldn’t choose him as a friend.”
“For me or for you? A friend for me or for you?”
She had to be careful. “I wouldn’t want to choose your friends for you. They’re your business, not mine.”
He took a few moments to ponder this. “Nick may not be easy,” he said. “But I don’t want to be unkind to him. And he’s helping me with something.”
She waited for him to continue.
“You know I’m a hopeless composer,” he said. “I’ve studied composition, of course. We all had to. But it’s just not something that I’ve ever really had a talent for. And so I asked him to help me with something that I’d been working on for months, but getting nowhere with. And he did. He’s been knocking it into shape for me.”
She glanced at him. He was transferring the bassoon case from one hand to the other. “Let me carry it just for a little while.”
He rejected her help with a shake of the head. “It could be worse,” he said. “It could be the contra.”
She felt relieved by what he had said about Nick, but her curiosity was still nagging away at her. She had once heard something that he had written, a small bassoon solo, and she had liked it. But it had had no end, and he had explained that he could not think of how to resolve it. “There are rules for resolution,” he said. “But they don’t seem to be working.”
“What are you writing?” she asked. She tried to make the question sound casual.
Jamie sighed. “I didn’t want to tell you. But I think that since you appear to be…well, a little bit jealous, I suppose I should.”
“I’m not jealous.” It sounded unconvincing, and that, she decided, was because she was jealous. “Well, I am, actually.”
He smiled. “And do you know something? I’m glad that you’re jealous. I’m glad that you resent my spending time with other people. It’s nice to be…to be wanted like that.”
She was surprised. She had imagined that he would resent possessiveness on her part; instead, it seemed that he was flattered by it. She had misread everything—again. She had imagined that Nick Smart had some sort of appeal for him, but it was just Jamie’s kindness, that was all. Then she had been so careful, all along, right from the beginning of their relationship, not to appear as if she wanted to monopolise him, and now he said that he rather liked the idea of her wanting him all to herself. One can be wrong, she thought. One can be wrong about so much.
