Stiff Lips

'Maybe,' said Sophie. She didn't sound too convinced.

'A girl doesn't know who she really is until she's lived on her own,' I said. Which made me the world expert on self-awareness.

I blame Schubert. If Schubert hadn't been such a gloomy bastard, I might never have wanted to change the record and none of this might have happened.

Then again, it might not have made the slightest bit of difference. It would still have happened, but in a different chronological order. It's like Miles once said: you can screw about with the schedules, but they're still made up of the same old programmes.

Dirk and Lemmy had taken Sunday off, but they'd finished the living-room at last.

'That didn't take so long,' I observed to Sophie.

'They were at it all night,' she said. 'I think they were on some sort of speed. And they were sloppy. Look here…' She pointed to a section of the wall where the nicotine stains were seeping through the white-with-a-soupcon-of-pistachio.

'It just needs another coat,' I said.

'They should have scrubbed before they started.'

Stains or no stains, the room looked wonderful now, as vast and airy as a ballet studio, and I told her so. It seemed to cheer her up a bit.

There were a couple of dozen tea-chests lined up against one of the walls. I couldn't wait to get stuck in and check out some more of Sophie's labels.

'Where can I start?' I asked.

Sophie rooted around in the nearest chest. 'Kitchen stuff,' she said. She tugged at it, but it wouldn't budge.

'How did you get them all the way up here?' I asked.

'Grenville and one of his friends,' said Sophie. 'I asked them to leave this one in the kitchen, but I guess we'll just have to unpack it here.'

I pried a lumpy package out of the box and peeled off layers of newspaper. Nestling in the middle was a plain white teacup. I turned it this way and that — it couldn't have been plainer or more perfect — and carefully placed it where it wasn't going to be stepped on. Being around Sophie's crockery made me paranoid. She had been collecting it for years, scouring the shops along Westbourne Grove and Portobello Road or, when she got tired of slumming it, going into Selfridges or Harrods and splashing out on some ordinary-looking piece of Minton or Royal Doulton or Clarice Cliff or Ming the Merciless which would cost more than most people's entire dinner services.

'Let's set up the stereo,' she suggested. 'Let's have music while we work.'

'Miles let you bring the sound system?'

'Everything except the CD player.'

'You mean he fobbed you off with the LPs? Sophie, nobody plays records any more.'

Sophie shrugged. 'Who needs CDs?'

Sophie pretended not to know what plugged in where, so I hooked up the stereo for her. She disliked portable phones and digital watches and just about anything that bleeped or flashed, though her technophobia appeared to be selective since as far as I know she had never had problems with her Moulinex.

'So where are the records?' I asked. Sophie pointed to a series of large carrier bags propped up against the wall. She extracted a record and placed it on the turntable.

I'd been expecting to groove on down, but I should have known better. The record turned out to be a bloke singing in German to gloomy piano accompaniment. It was the sort of thing you might play at a funeral if you wanted mourners to throw themselves into the open grave and sprawl sobbing on top of the coffin.

'Jesus,' I said. 'Couldn't we have something a little more cheerful?'

Sophie had a long-suffering look about her, and it occurred to me that I must have been sounding exactly like Miles. 'There's nothing wrong with Schubert,' she said.

'I wasn't suggesting there was. I just thought the unpacking might go with more of a swing if we had something a bit… bouncier.'

Sophie relaxed slightly. 'Put something else on, if you want, I don't care. Anything but Dvorak.'

I crouched down by the bags and began to flip through the contents of the first one. The records had been packed, with Sophie's customary fastidiousness, in alphabetical order. Some of the albums were so ancient they were mono. Perhaps she'd inherited them from Hamish. Perhaps that was why she was so reluctant to swap them for compact discs.

I recited the names as I went. 'Albinoni, Allegri, Auric. Who are all these guys? When are you going to join the rest of us in the twentieth century?'

'Auric is twentieth century,' Sophie said.

I kept stopping to marvel. The sleeves were fabulous: simple arrangements of classic typography, or glowing colour portraits of the musicians with spray-on Fifties hairdos. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. But it wasn't the sort of stuff I wanted to hear.

Then I reached a sparkling little oasis in the middle of the dry classical desert.

'Now we're talking,' I said. 'This is more like it.'

Sophie didn't respond. She was busy unwrapping a primitive terracotta salad bowl which had probably been handwoven and spat upon by toothless Calabrian peasant women.

I said, 'I didn't know you were a closet Hendrix fan.'

That gave her a jolt. She looked up, and said, 'What?'

'Are You Experienced?'

'At what?'

'That's the title. Are You Experienced? by Jimi Hendrix.'

'What instrument does he play?'

She had to be doing it on purpose. Even I had heard of Jimi Hendrix. 'Dead hippy chap who played guitar with his teeth,' I reminded her. 'Purple Haze.'

'Oh, yes,' she said, looking blank. 'It must be one of Miles's. I must've brought it along by mistake.'

I carried on flipping, and the further I flipped, the more obvious it became that these were not Sophie's records at all. For a start, they weren't in alphabetical order: Jefferson Airplane, Electric Prunes, Captain Beefheart, Pink Floyd… Some of the names rang bells, but not all. This was way before my time.

'Looks like you walked off with a bunch of them.'

'I don't see how,' said Sophie. Carefully she placed a small milk jug on top of one of the crates, and came over to conduct a closer examination.

'Look at that,' I said. I'd reached an album by a band so obscure its name failed even to pass the distant tinkle test.

Sophie crouched next to me. 'These are not my records.'

'The covers are really tatty,' I said. 'Miles must have played them to death.' The fact that they could only belong to Miles made me all the more fascinated by them. He was about eight years older than me and Sophie, but I'd had no idea his musical tastes were so incredibly retro.

Sophie relieved me of the album I was holding, slid the disc half-way out and tutted. 'No inner sleeve. Look at all these scratches.'

She resheathed the record. I took it back from her to examine the psychedelic cover design, which looked as though it had been screen-printed in someone's kitchen. The colour scheme — shocking pink and electric purple and a lime green so acidic it etched itself on to the retinas — was so garish that my eyes picked up shimmering after-images when I moved my head. I found that if I stared hard enough, I could almost see faces. The lettering was a cream-puff approximation of an Art Nouveau typeface and almost illegible.

'The Drunken Boots,' read Sophie.

'Boats,' I corrected her. 'The Drunken Boats.'

'They're a pop group?'

'It would seem so,' I said. 'But I've never even heard of them.' I tried to unscramble the sleeve notes. 'Jeremy Idlewild, vocals. Hugo Baudelaire, vocals and lead guitar…'

Sophie started to laugh. 'Come on,' she spluttered. 'Hugo Baudelaire?'