A Promise

The promise had been made in a car park in the rain, which is where most of the important things in that family were said. Freya was eleven, she had just played third clarinet in a school concert, and she had been told by somebody that she was too slow with her fingers to go on.

Hugh, who was not good at comfort, said the only thing he could think of: that she should carry on if she liked it, and that wherever she ended up playing, he would come. Then he started the engine and they talked about something else.

Twenty years later she plays second clarinet in an amateur orchestra two hundred miles away, on Thursdays, in a town he has driven through twice. She does not talk about it much. It was mentioned in April, in a message that ended with the date and no invitation.

Hugh dislikes travelling. He dislikes it in the specific way of a man who has always been the one collecting other people from stations, and who is unsure what to do with his hands when somebody else is driving. He booked the ticket anyway, on a Tuesday, without telling her.

The journey took five and a half hours and included a connection that was held for nine minutes by a guard who seemed personally invested in the matter. Hugh spent most of it looking out of the window and rehearsing what he would say afterwards, none of which he used.

The hall was a church with the pews taken out. He bought a programme for two pounds and found her name halfway down a list, spelled correctly, between a name he could not pronounce and a man called Podmore. Reading it there did something to him that he chose not to examine.

He sat in the second-to-last row on the aisle. The audience was thin and mostly related to somebody on the platform. The conductor apologised in advance for the second piece, which had been rehearsed only twice, and got the laugh he was after.

She was not the best player on the platform and she was not trying to be. What Hugh noticed, from thirty feet away, was that she counted the empty bars with her chin very slightly moving, exactly as she had done at eleven, and that she came in cleanly every time.

During the interval he stayed where he was while people queued for tea in paper cups. He heard somebody behind him complaining about a reed and somebody else saying that the first half had gone better than expected, which was, in fairness, true.

He left before the end. He told himself afterwards that it was the last train, and the last train was indeed at half past nine, but he had also seen that she would be surrounded at the door, and he had not worked out what his face was supposed to do.

Had he stayed another twenty minutes, had he waited by the porch with everybody else, the evening would have been an entirely different one and probably a better story. Instead he walked to the station through a town he did not know, with the applause still going on somewhere behind him.

On the train he wrote four lines on the back of the programme, put it in an envelope at the station at home, and posted it before he could decide that it was sentimental. It said that he had been in the second-to-last row, that the slow movement was the good one, and that he had promised.

She rang on the Sunday and they talked for eleven minutes about a broken door handle. The envelope was not mentioned by either of them, which he took to be a good sign. Whether she has kept it is not the kind of thing he would ever ask.