Three months before the wedding.
I KNEW I’D promised Justin I wouldn’t busk any more, but I had to. Not for the money, but because playing the violin was the only time when I really felt like me nowadays.
Planning the wedding was filling all of my time, so I’d had to turn down quite a few offers of session work, some of them jobs I would have killed to do. The awful thing was that even with all the extra time on my hands, I wasn’t doing a very good job of getting the wedding sorted. Everything I picked or booked often needed to be tweaked or changed completely, and I’d begun to second-guess every decision I made.
Last night Justin had sat me down and had a talk to me about my attitude. He knew I was finding it stressful, but it wasn’t fair if I was moody and tense with him if he tried to make suggestions on how I could do things better.
I couldn’t deny it. Iwasstressed. Which is why I needed to play, why Ineededto busk. We were only a couple of months away from getting married, so I was proving my commitment to him. Surely he’d be more secure about the whole thing now? Besides, if I slipped away quickly and was only out for an hour or two, he’d never know.
It was a bright, chilly November day, so I dressed up warmly, adding a crocheted scarf my nan had made me. I’d hidden it underneath some other things in the dressing room, so Justin didn’t find it and chuck it away. As I left the flat, I felt buoyant but also jittery, as if I was doing something vaguely illegal.
Initially, I headed west towards High St Ken Tube station, but when I was standing in front of it, looking at the large blue-and-white sign, I reconsidered. I’d told Justin I wouldn’t busk, so maybe I shouldn’t. But he’d never said anything about playing outside, not for money or practice, but just for fun. It was a technicality, I knew, but I was prepared to run with it.
Instead of descending into the dusty depths of London’s Underground, I turned and headed back the way I’d come, towards Kensington Gardens.
Once inside the park gates, I headed away from the palace and formal gardens, choosing one of the broad wide paths. On a hot summer’s day, the park would be packed, but at this time of year, there were only a few lone souls strolling along, eclipsed every now and then by the occasional runner, puffing small, hot clouds as they passed.
I ended up on a broad expanse of lawn not far from one of the park’s lakes. Right there, I saw the perfect spot to play. An old-fashioned bandstand with delicate iron struts holding up the onion-shaped roof. Nobody was about, so I ran up the steps to the small raised platform, pulled Octavia out of her case and began to play.
At first, I gravitated towards the old favourites from my busking days, familiarising myself with the feeling of the instrument in my hands, but, eventually, I moved onto pieces that spoke to me,that required me to reach into my soul and pull something out of it to make the music come alive. I closed my eyes and totally lost myself.
I had no idea how long I’d been playing when I came to the end of a piece and heard a smattering of applause. I opened my eyes to see a mum with two designer-clad children, an elderly gentleman and a female runner standing there. I coloured, taken aback by their presence, but managed to smile and give a small bow.
‘Play something else,’ the little boy said. ‘It makes me feel tingly inside.’
How could you resist a request like that, even if it did mean I was performing to a very small audience? But there wasn’t a man of datable age in the vicinity, so no one to gawp or ogle. ‘Okay,’ I said, and I began a couple of pieces fromPeter and the Wolf,ending with the swan’s melody. I kept my eyes open as I played this time, enjoying their smiles. I didn’t feel like my audience had teeth and fangs, that they were an enemy to be faced.
It made me realise that not much in my life felt simple any more, and I wasn’t sure why. When had things got so complicated? At the Conservatory? Afterwards? I thought things had become more straightforward for a while when I’d first got together with Justin, but now everything felt … tangled.
And I supposed I might have to get used to the fact that, as much as I loved him, Justin was not a simple man. Maybe that’swhyI loved him. But his darker moods were becoming more and more frequent, and sometimes I felt exhausted from constantly walking on eggshells around him.
He said the same of me, of course – that I was oversensitive, that I took the littlest thing he said or did out of context or made a big deal about it. I suppose I did. Sometimes.
It was the stupid wedding that was making us both tense. My parents had been wonderful about the venue, but I could tell it had hurt their feelings, which had taken some of the excitement about getting married at the castle away from me. I was tempted to suggest jetting off somewhere warm and getting married on a beach, just the two of us, but Justin was far too invested in the wedding we’d already planned for that. Besides, he’d lose loads of money if we backed out now.
My audience soon drifted away, off to resume their busy lives, and I played for a while more, standing in the middle of the bandstand, enjoying hearing the notes soar out and across the lake and into the frosty autumn air. It was like I drifted into a different zone where it was just me and the music. Time stopped. And when I checked the time on my phone, I realised more than a couple of hours had slipped by. I quickly packed up my violin and headed back to the flat.
When I went to hang my coat up and saw Justin’s back in the hall cupboard, I grimaced to myself. This was going to be awkward.
‘Where have you been?’ he said when I found him searching for something in one of the kitchen drawers, his brows drawn, mouth a thin line. I tried to come up with an answer, but there were literally no words inside my head. He stopped what he was doing and came to stand right in front of me. He didn’t shout.Instead, his voice got smooth and low, a tone I’d come to recognise as my least favourite of his. ‘Sorry for surprising you, Angel. It’s clear you weren’t expecting to see me here.’
I stared back at him, unable to disagree.
He looked down at the violin case in my hand. ‘You’ve been busking, haven’t you?’
I swallowed. ‘No. Not exactly.’
‘Did you take your violin outside and play it? Did people watch?’
‘I didn’t do it to get any money! I just wanted to play, so I went to the park.’
‘What’s wrong with playing in the flat? There was no need to go out. You know I’d rather you didn’t. And you agreed not to, Angel.’
‘I know … I just …’ How could I tell him that the reason I couldn’t play here was that I’d needed to go somewhere I could be myself, and it was becoming harder and harder to feel that way inside this flat. He would only think I was blaming him.
‘I’m really disappointed with you, my darling. I thought we loved each other. I thought wetrustedeach other. And yet here you are, disrespecting me, sneaking around behind my back.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ I mumbled.
