Making Music Read online

  Making Music

  by Maria Ling

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2011 Maria Ling

  Cover photo copyright Coka - Fotolia.com

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ***

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jen stared at her friend in frank amazement.

  "You want me to do what?" she asked, her voice actually shaking with emotion.

  Her friend rolled her eyes.

  "Oh, come on, Jen," she said. "It's for charity. And I'm not asking you to be nice to him. You won't even have to see him. I'll book time at the recording studio for you separately. You come in and do your stuff, and then forget about it."

  "No."

  "But you're perfect together."

  "No!"

  Karen Thomas sighed. She had known this would be difficult. Given how Jen felt about Stuart Markham, it would be nothing short of a miracle if she agreed to record a song with him.

  "I know you're still upset about everything that happened between the two of you," she said carefully. "And I understand that you want nothing to do with him. But you're both so good -- and it's for charity, Jen. Everyone else has agreed. Peter will be on it, and Sue, and Rhoda -- "

  "I thought she was in America?" Jen interrupted, frowning.

  "She's flying over just for this. And she asked if you'd be on it as well."

  "Well, I won't."

  Jen picked at her food. She had looked forward to this meal with Karen. They had known each other for years, shared flats and debts and tears and laughter. Recently they had seen too little of each other, and she had thought this evening would be a nice cosy girly chat over a plateful of pasta and a bottle of red wine. Just like old times.

  That was how it had started. And then, halfway through the meal, Karen had sprung this on her.

  It wasn't fair. She had done her best to forget Stuart, a hard thing to do when his career had taken off the way it had. It seemed she could not open a newspaper without seeing his name, or switch on the radio without hearing his voice. Suddenly his face seemed to be on every magazine cover, the brilliant blue eyes and tousled dark hair and confident laid-back smile following her wherever she went, reminding her inexorably of the time when they had belonged together.

  Now, just as she thought she was succeeding in blotting him out of her life, Karen wanted to bring him right back into it.

  "No way," she said stubbornly, meeting Karen's kind brown eyes. "I'm not doing it. I'm sorry -- I know it's annoying for you -- but I'm not doing it."

  "It's not annoying." Karen smiled reassuringly. "I just wish you would, that's all. Can't you at least think about it? You don't have to give a definite answer right now. Think about it, and let me know. As I said, I can book you in separately -- you won't even have to see him."

  I will have to hear him, though, Jen reflected, but she kept quiet lest Karen should offer to record her first and bring Stuart in afterwards. The truth was, she did not want to be associated with him in any way.

  "All right, I'll think about it."

  "Good. That's all I wanted to hear. Now tell me about that dishy man you've been touring with."

  "Dominic?" Jen smiled at hearing him so described. "He's not exactly dishy."

  "Oh, but he is! I saw a picture of the two of you -- where was it now? -- I can't just remember, but he was dead good-looking, I thought."

  "He's just a friend. And a good guitar-player, which is more to the point."

  "You've been doing the pub circuit?"

  Jen nodded.

  "Pubs, bars, student unions -- you know, the usual. It's been great, actually: getting back to real music. I think I was starting to sound over-produced. But with just the two of us on guitars, and me singing, it was much more…authentic, I suppose."

  Karen nodded vigorously.

  "I know what you mean. I don't actually think you were sounding over-produced -- I loved Imagination. But I do know what you mean."

  Jen smiled, and shook her head.

  "Nothing could ruin your voice," she said truthfully. Karen had a rich, smoky alto that could not be disguised. "I'm glad you liked the album, though. It was scary, after the first one went so well."

  "And now it's ‘the difficult third album', I suppose?"

  That phrase had a lot of truth in it, Jen reflected. The first album was the real thing, music in the raw. The second, hopefully, was a bit more polished, a bit more complete. But the third was the crunch: would there be anything left to say?

  "I don't really know -- I haven't thought that far," she said, moderately truthful. She had thought about it, but only with a kind of cold dread, a feeling that she would never be able to equal her first effort. Imagination had been good -- it ought to be, she had worked hard on it - but True to Life had been better. She knew why, of course. It had a magic ingredient that was missing from its successor: it had Stuart on lead guitar.

  "What have you been doing?" she asked, trying to divert the conversation away from herself, and away from Stuart. "I never heard any more after Rhoda got that contract in America. What's been happening?"

  "Oh, not much really," Karen said, taking a sip of her wine. "I'm ticking over. A lot of backing vocals for various people - session work, you know - and of course I sang at the Cambridge Folk Festival with Peter's new band."

  "Did you?" Jen exclaimed delightedly. "Good for you! Was it fun?"

  "It was great. You know what the atmosphere is like there -- open and friendly and relaxed. The weather was perfect, too, so it was all families sitting on the grass, children running around -- the lot. There couldn't be a better crowd. We'd wander around and listen to the other acts, and then go on and do our bit, maybe improvise something as well. We just had a really good time together."

  "Why didn't you tell me?" Jen asked reproachfully. "I'd have come to see you if I'd known."

  Karen put her glass down.

  "Well, to be honest, I was a bit shy about it," she said. "I mean, you and Rhoda were both doing so well, and so was -- "

  She broke off just in time. Stuart hung unspoken in the air between them.

  "What I mean is, I was trying to find my own feet, and I wanted a bit of space for myself. It's not that I'm not thrilled for both of you -- of course I am. But -- well -- you know how it is."

  "Oh, Karen!" Jen felt horribly ashamed. "You're amazingly good -- you know you are!"

  "You're a darling." Karen leaned forward impulsively and patted her cheek. "You always have been. It's sweet of you to say that, and I suppose there are days when I agree with you -- days when it all just seems to come together, and it works -- but then other days it's so different, and sometimes I can't help thinking: why am I doing this?"

  Jen bit her lip. It had never occurred to her that Karen could doubt her own talent -- Karen, with a voice she herself would kill for.

  "But anyway -- " Karen recovered her poise quickly, and smiled again -- "Cambridge was just great. So now I'm going on tour with Peter, starting next month. It's small scale, just the usual folk venues, but I'm looking forward to it."

  "That's wonderful!" Jen enthused, truthfully. "I'm ever so pleased for you. What's his new band like? I don't think I've heard about it -- I suppose I just haven't been paying enough attention. Who's in it?"

  "No one you know, I think. There's a violinist -- John, his n
ame is, he's a sweet man, you'd like him -- and a girl on flute, and Peter on guitar of course, and now me singing. The girl's lovely, her name's Cathy and she's classically trained -- she's got her Grade 8's and her teaching certificate and everything -- and she's so good -- you just want to hate her, but you can't. Well, at least I can't."

  Jen laughed. This was the Karen she remembered.

  "They call themselves -- you'll love this -- The Renegades! Isn't that awful?"

  "What's the reference?" Jen asked, twirling some pasta onto her fork, and manoeuvring it into her mouth.

  "I've no idea. Peter's choice, of course. He's always been the literary type."

  Jen nodded: that much was true. Tall, slim, sandy-haired and bespectacled, Peter always had the air of a university student. Add to that the fact that he usually carried a fearsomely serious-looking book around with him, and you got the idea that he had somehow missed his calling in life.

  "What's he reading at the moment?" she asked, swallowing the last strand of pasta.

  "Something about -- " Karen frowned, staring into space as she tried to recall the title -- "Roman history, I think."

  "Good grief!"

  "I know. What I can't understand is where he finds the time -- or the energy. But he says it helps him relax. Plus he's always had a bit of a problem with stage fright, and he says reading something he has to concentrate on takes his mind off it."

  "I suppose that makes sense."

  "Ye-es." Karen hesitated slightly. "It's a bit off-putting though, when you're hanging around backstage waiting to go on, and everyone is all fired up and ready, and he's just sitting there with his nose in a book. It makes me nervous. I haven't the heart to tell him, though."

  "Better not to," Jen agreed.

  Karen sipped her wine again.

  "I like what you've done to this place," she said reflectively, looking around her over the rim of the glass. "It's a lot brighter than I remember it, from when you first moved in."

  "I've repainted it," Jen confirmed, "and had a new carpet put down. The old one was simply impossible. Of course," she added, smiling, "the nice thing about a postage-stamp-size flat is that it doesn't take much to make a difference."

  Karen laughed. She was eyeing the coriander yellow walls and maroon carpet admiringly. Jen had good taste, she reflected. Always had done. Jen was by nature one of those people whose aesthetic instinct never failed. She could go on a trawl through the most unpromising market stalls and come out with things that looked perfect together.

  She looked good, too. Sleek, glossy brown hair, soft flawless skin, wide clear hazel eyes; and in addition there was something else: a warmth, a sense of aliveness, that seemed to illuminate her from within. Jen, Karen thought half-enviously, could look beautiful even in an old faded T-shirt and jeans. At the moment she looked simply divine in a dark green silk slip dress, with her hair pulled up into a loose knot.

  At twenty-seven years of age, with two moderately successful albums behind her and a promising career ahead, Jennifer Hayton was a beautiful, self-possessed woman -- and Stuart Markham, as Karen had often told herself, was nothing short of an idiot.

  "So tell me about Dominic," she persisted.

  Now it was Jen's turn to roll her eyes.

  "I told you -- he's just a friend."

  "Nothing more?" Karen asked relentlessly.

  "Absolutely nothing more."

  "Anyone else? Come on, Jen, out with it!"

  Jen laughed and shook her head.

  "I'm telling you, there isn't anyone. I haven't the time."

  There was an element of truth in that, although it was not the whole story. The simple fact of the matter was that there had not been anyone since Stuart -- and, if she were completely honest with herself, no one worth mentioning before. She had been through her share of innocent romances, with young men as inexperienced as herself, but no one who could be mentioned in the same breath as Stuart -- no one.

  That was why his betrayal had hurt her so horribly. He had been unlike any man she had ever met, and she had felt something she had never felt for anyone else before or since, and yet to him it had obviously meant nothing at all.

  Karen knew, of course. Karen was Jen's best friend, and at the time had been her flatmate too, and she had sat patiently listening to all her outpourings, from the tentative hopefulness of the first meeting, through the breathless exhilaration of the blossoming romance, to the tearful bitterness of the catastrophic ending.

  "I can understand that," Karen conceded. Nothing in her face or voice indicated that she had been thinking along similar lines.

  "What about you?" Jen asked.

  "Boyfriend-wise? Not one. Like you, I don't have the time."

  There was also the problem, although neither of them mentioned it, that a musician's life was hard on relationships. Few partners were prepared to put up with the long hours, the constant travelling, the close-knit community of which they were not themselves a member. Those who did were likely to be in the trade themselves, which meant they had their own equally demanding commitments. It was almost impossible to reconcile two such schedules, and extract some precious time together. Plus there was the distinct disadvantage, as Jen had found to her cost, that if things went badly wrong it was hard to avoid the constant pain of seeing and hearing of each other. The music world was surprisingly small. Everyone knew everyone else.

  "Have you finished?" Jen asked, indicating Karen's empty plate.

  "I have -- and that was delicious, Jen, thank you. I'm impressed. You've turned into a really good cook."

  "Better than when you first knew me, anyway," Jen admitted, clearing away the dishes.

  Karen giggled. When they had moved into their first flat together, they had agreed on a rota for cooking and cleaning. Since the sum total of Jen's cooking knowledge was zero, they had subsisted on boiled eggs and tinned baked beans on toast for the best part of a month, before Karen had decided to take unilateral action.

  "I'll never forget the time when you sat me down and said: Jen, you are going to learn how to cook if it's the last thing you do."

  "It was self-defence!" Karen protested. "I could see you reaching for another blasted tin of beans, and I just knew only one of us was going to walk out of that kitchen alive."

  "It wasn't me who dropped the kettle on the floor and melted the linoleum, though," Jen retorted triumphantly.

  "No, but it was you who put a red dress into the washing machine along with the whites, and ended up turning all our sheets pink."

  "Yes, but at least I didn't lean on the towel rail while cleaning the bathtub, and pull it right out of the wall."

  Karen gasped.

  "Oh, I did, didn't I! I'd forgotten all about that. And then I tried to glue it back in -- "

  " -- and the next time I put a towel on it, it crashed onto my feet!" Jen supplied.

  Karen shrieked with laughter.

  "I remember! I thought the roof was falling in."

  "I thought the roof was falling in!"

  "Oh, good grief…" Karen steadied herself with another sip of wine. "Didn't we have some times!"

  "Do you remember Mrs Timms in the downstairs flat?"

  "The Ogre! Of course I remember her. She used to stand on the staircase and just wait for us to come out, so she could snap at us."

  "Poor old lady," Jen said, conscience-stricken. "It can't have been that much fun for her, having two rioters like us on the floor above."

  Karen sniffed contemptuously.

  "Poor old lady indeed. Her with the radio turned up full blast every Sunday morning."

  "She was listening to the service, Karen."

  "No -- we were listening to it. She was just inflicting it."

  Jen shook her head, smiling. Karen had been singing every night at the time, getting home at two in the morning, and working as a cleaner during the day, starting at seven, to make ends meet. She had been lucky to get four hours of sleep a night, weekdays. No wonder she relied on her Sun
day morning lie-in.

  "Oh, well." Karen shrugged, consigning Mrs Timms to the annals of ancient history. "We had a lot of fun, though." She pushed her chair away from the table. "I'll help you with the washing-up."

  They giggled their way through the clearing-up process -- Do you remember that horrible soup terrine your mum gave us, which we just prayed would have an accident? Do you remember when you smashed my best plate, and hid it at the back of the cupboard so I wouldn't notice? -- and then curled up in each corner of the sofa, with the remaining half-bottle of wine within reach, and talked well into the night.

  Jen smiled at the memory as, two days later, she stood in a small bookshop, idly browsing through the cookery section. She had remembered that Karen's birthday was coming up soon. Usually they only gave each other a card -- in past hard-up times that was all they could afford, and the habit stuck -- but a cookery book from her, of all people, would make Karen laugh.

  This was the one, she thought. Pasta for Beginners. A small, slimline volume, nice pictures, reasonable price. She did not want Karen to feel embarrassed by the gift.

  "Can I have it wrapped, please?" she asked the shop assistant, smiling. "It's a present for a friend."

  "Is she leaving home?" the assistant asked. A nice, middle-aged lady with a motherly smile. "I bought this one myself last year, when my daughter went off to university. It's very good, she says."

  "No." Jen blushed slightly. She was not sure whether the question was intended as a compliment or not. Did she really look young enough to have a friend who was only just moving away from home? "She has her own flat."

  "But she doesn't know how to cook." The assistant nodded sympathetically. "It's a great shame that home economics isn't taught in schools any more. So many young girls don't know the first thing about how to manage a home."

  "That's very true," Jen said. She took the beautifully wrapped parcel gratefully. "Thank you."

  Once she was back in the street, she reflected that she was not far from Karen's flat now. She had intended to deliver the present on the day, but surely it would do no harm to be a little early. She counted in her head -- only four days. That would be all right. Then she grimaced. She ought to have bought a card at the same time as the book. Oh, well, she could pop into a stationer's on the way -- there was one just around the corner.