‘As I say, I’ve barely even scratched the surface,’ he says to Benjamin. ‘It’s hard to find the time. You know how it is.’
Benjamin inclines his head again, smiling.
‘Well, here goes,’ Thomas says.
For an instant his mind is filled with the white light of performance, the strange featureless lucidity left behind by the knowledge that he mustn’t think, that his brain must be vacated, that instead he must act; and the next time he checks, he sees that he is already halfway down the first page, and the thinking makes him falter so he quickly vacates his brain again and returns to his hands. There is an awful passage that is like inching along a narrow ledge, and then a period when he seems to be safe in miles of firm level ground; then suddenly it is a cataract, a rushing to the edge, to disaster, and over he goes, swept down through the complexity and out the other side, where there is stillness and daylight and the untidy room with Benjamin sitting in his chair.
‘Bravo!’ Benjamin says, very flushed and astonished-looking.
The bedroom door flies open. It is Ignatius, as ruddy and squat and prodigiously hairy as Benjamin is slender and marmoreal. He stands in the doorway, applauding and exclaiming loudly, in his plush American that makes everything sound pleasanter and less sincere than usual. Then he advances into the room, cheerful and cocky-looking in his tight T-shirt, chest hair foaming at his throat, trousers straining around his haunches, a little reddish-blond tuft of beard sprouting from his chin. Benjamin is looking slightly pinched around the mouth.
‘That adagio is just divine — I had no idea you’d got so important! I had my ear to the door, thinking who can that possibly be in there?’
‘I can’t play the other movements,’ Thomas says apologetically, though his face is red with pleasure. Ignatius is a real pianist, not a teacher but a performer, whose name can be seen on flyers for lunchtime recitals at the Wigmore Hall. He is ashamed of his disloyalty to Benjamin: vaguely he understands that it is their intimacy that causes him to feel ashamed. Usually, only Tonie can constrain him in this way, web him finely with the knowledge of herself, so that he feels clumsy, tearing the gossamer threads.
‘Well, it’s hardly surprising,’ Benjamin says. His voice is a little terse. ‘It’s only been a few months.’
Thomas turns the pages with their ferocious black peaks and chasms of semiquavers, their turbulent, chord-filled bass clefs. He doesn’t fully understand why he can’t play them. He has learned the adagio, yet the allegro molto e con brio and the grave remain as encrypted to his eyes as ancient Greek. Ignatius looks over his shoulder at the music.
‘Lord, who can?’ he says, sotto voce, as though this heresy were in danger of being overheard by the Bengali family who live upstairs and complain constantly to the Environmental Health department about the intolerable levels of noise in the basement. ‘I say go for the big tunes, the big sensations, the highs. I just live for it — I live for that adagio! I’m all over gooseflesh.’ He holds out his thick forearm. ‘Am I flushing?’ he asks Benjamin.
‘Slightly,’ Benjamin says stiffly. ‘Your neck looks a bit red.’
Ignatius tugs at his collar, feeling around his neck. ‘I have a weak skin,’ he says. ‘I am a litmus paper of emotion. Once it gets a hold, it’s all over me. Rashing, blotches, hives — I can feel it spreading insidiously all through those defenceless cells and corpuscles. My mother used to say it was God’s way of making sure I never told a lie.’
‘When it was quite obviously a vitamin deficiency,’ Benjamin says, apparently in spite of himself.
Ignatius tuts. ‘Admittedly I am one hundred per cent trailer trash,’ he says, to Thomas. ‘In our house, the Pop-Tart was considered a health food. That darling faux-fruit centre — it makes my teeth ache just thinking about it.’
‘It ought to be regarded as a form of cruelty,’ Benjamin says. He stands and repositions his chair beside Thomas at the piano. Ignatius looks at him with fond vexation.
‘Benjamin’s just marbled with vitamins. Look at that hair!’
Benjamin blushes, touching his glossy dark hair. ‘We ate a normal balanced diet, that’s all. Just normal English food.’
‘Shepherd’s pie,’ Ignatius says dreamily. ‘I adore your mother’s shepherd’s pie. I would have followed her around all day like a puppy, hoping she’d drop some of that pie in my mouth. Or one of those tiny potatoes, all crunchy with goose fat.’
‘It wasn’t perfect, you know,’ Benjamin says. ‘There are other things children need besides food. I’m simply saying that it was normal.’
Thomas feels the current of the men’s relationship flowing treacherously around him. It has never occurred to him that two men would make of love something that so resembles its heterosexual equivalent. He wonders whether love is a form, like music, that takes what has no name or being of its own and shapes it.
‘I was perfectly well fed,’ he says. ‘But now I think I’d have preferred to have piano lessons.’
They both look at him inquisitively: a newcomer in their home town. All at once he feels his grasp of music ebbing inexorably away from him, as people forget whole languages in which once they were able to express their feelings. The adagio has become ancient Greek again. If they were to ask him to play it now, he wouldn’t be able to.
‘Was there no music in your house?’ Benjamin asks, as though he considers this, too, to be a form of cruelty. ‘That’s quite unusual, I have to say.’
‘Oh, my dear!’ Ignatius flaps his hands in the air, distressed. ‘That is just pure, pure fantasy! I hate to disabuse you, but in the world beyond that delicious place where you grew up, music is strictly, strictly for sissies.’
‘East Sheen,’ Benjamin says, with dignity. He folds his arms obstinately. ‘I’m afraid I don’t agree with you,’ he adds, in a peevish, quavering voice, as though disagreeing with Ignatius was itself sissyish and hence something in which Benjamin compels himself to take a perverse kind of pride.
‘Believe me,’ Ignatius says, ‘where I come from, any boy who asked for piano lessons was a certified fruit.’
Benjamin instantly reddens.
‘That was a terrible place. That place ought to be destroyed.’
‘How old were you when you learnt to play?’ Thomas asks, a frail little hope fluttering in his chest.