Audrey savoured Ben’s confidence, wondering what it was that made someone like him able to pull a disparate group of people into a choir in such a short space of time. He had an infectious, boyish enthusiasm that made you want to succeed, not just for yourself but for him too. She thought back to the first time she’d met him at the audition just over six weeks before, how relaxed he had made her feel in spite of her nerves. It was as though he looked past the surface to something underneath, something hidden, that you hadn’t yet discovered yourself.
‘So far we’ve been focused on getting you to sing in unison – we wanted you to start feeling like a group, like a choir. Now the hard work begins. Today we’re going to start singing in harmony. Don’t look so worried – I know most of you have never done that before and I promise we’re going to take it one step at a time. If I’m totally honest, I suspect there’ll be moments over the next few weeks when it feels like this thing is never going to come together. But I want you to trust that it will. Because, believe me, I wouldn’t have started it if I didn’t think we could pull it off. So let’s get going, shall we?’
As Ben began dividing them into sopranos, altos, tenors and basses – Phoebe to sopranos and Audrey to altos – Audrey glanced around the room, smiling at some of her fellow choir members as she caught their eye: Isabel, thirty-eight, recently separated from her alcoholic husband and locked in a custody battle over their two young children; Binti, twenty-four, the daughter of Somali immigrants who fled the civil war twenty-five years previously; Tim, forty-six, whose story of his fourteen-year-old daughter having recently entered remission after two years’ battling leukaemia had reduced Audrey to tears. As she looked around the room, she realised that many of the people she’d got to know over the past few weeks had some painful truth from which they were escaping, some demons they were laying to rest, or perhaps some unfulfilled dream they were trying, in some small way, to achieve.
‘OK, as you know, we’ll be singing just one song in the concert, so we need to make sure it has real impact. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it should be and I hope you’re going to approve of my choice. It’s Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”. Caitlin’s handing round song sheets now, but I expect most of you know it anyway. If you read through the lyrics, I hope you’ll agree they’re pretty fitting for this concert.’
Audrey smiled as she remembered the first time she’d heard the song, sitting on the mustard-yellow rug in Sandra Bailey’s front room nearly fifty years before, Sandra’s eyes luminous with anticipation: Just you wait, Auds. Just you wait till you hear this album. You’ve never heard anything like it. Sandra pulling the vinyl from its paper sleeve and lowering it onto the record player as carefully as a mother placing her baby in a crib. Lifting the stylus, balancing it delicately on her forefinger, gliding it through the air and lowering the needle into one of the shiny grooves. The familiar crackle of static, the expectant whirring of near-silence before it began: that mournfully optimistic piano introduction, just the lightest accompaniment of brushes from the drums before the decisive finger-clicking. And then the voice, Nina’s voice, inviting you in to a musical world of hope and regret, longing and ambition. The lyrics touching Audrey in a way no song ever had before, with its impassioned advocacy of freedom, opportunity, choice. There being a feeling of certainty in that moment, a feeling that anything was possible. And when Nina’s voice had faded away, Audrey and Sandra had turned to one another and, without either of them speaking, Sandra had lifted the record player’s arm and moved it back half an inch, setting it down at the beginning of the song. And the two of them had listened again. They had listened in silence, five, six, seven times, until Sandra’s mum had burst through the living-room door and told them to turn the record off before they wore it out.
Audrey had only been fifteen, but she had known songs like that were rare: songs that made you understand something you couldn’t otherwise articulate, something you could only feel and were a better person for having felt it.
Now, almost five decades later, Audrey heard that piano introduction again, and as her diaphragm expanded and she joined in with the opening line, she felt the physical pleasure of singing with nearly a hundred other voices. As they sang through the whole song Audrey wondered why on earth she had left it so long to do something that gave her such joy.
They reached the end and Ben grabbed at the air with his fist, ninety-three voices coming to a standstill, only the echo of the final note hovering in the air as though it wasn’t quite ready to leave. ‘Wow, guys, that was really good. A genuinely impressive start. Keep that up and you’re going to be great.’
Audrey turned to smile at Phoebe, grateful to be spending this precious time with her granddaughters – at choir rehearsals and art classes – that might never have happened had she not known she was ill.
‘Right, given you’ve made such a fantastic start today, there’s something I want to tell you all. I was going to wait until the end of the rehearsal, but I figure you’d probably like to hear it now. I had a call from the organisers of the concert last night. It looks like you lot are going to be on TV.’
A wave of excitement rippled around the room as Ben filled in the details: plans for the concert to be broadcast live on BBC 2 and about a telethon being organised to boost the money raised from ticket sales. But, hard as Audrey tried to concentrate on them, Ben’s words were hazy in her ears.
A mental calendar flipped through the weeks in her head. Seven weeks until the concert. That was all she had to manage, just seven weeks. And if the consultant was right, she should still have at least three months ahead of her. As Ben returned to the piano and started to play through the various harmonies he’d arranged, Audrey tried to reassure herself that it was going to be OK. She’d have to be horribly unlucky not to make it.
Chapter 23
Lily
Lily glanced around her boss’s office. The desk was empty except for a laptop and a pair of mobile phones side by side. The glass wall had a more expansive view of the Thames than Lily’s office, and the shelf of industry awards held more than Lily’s but only two more: Lily had counted.
She looked down at her phone and put it on silent just as Nisha came back into the room.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting. And I’m sorry to drag you into the office on a Saturday afternoon. I hope I haven’t disrupted too many plans.’
Lily crossed her legs and shook her head, thinking of the empty house she’d left behind. An image flashed in her mind of Daniel strolling through Central Park, takeout coffee in one hand and phone in the other, reading her latest email and not finding time to respond.
‘It’s fine. I need to do some work on the strategy paper this weekend anyway, so I might as well do it here.’ She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, could feel it trying to edge loose again.
‘So, the reason I wanted to have a quick chat, face-to-face, is to give you a heads-up. The US office is planning to make some changes – streamlining operations, merging some roles – all part of the drive to make the company more efficient. It’s likely that marketing is going to be one of the affected departments. They’re keen to centralise it in the States, which doesn’t mean there won’t be any department here in London, but they’re looking to keep a skeleton staff, possibly just junior roles. Nothing’s fixed in stone yet so there’s always room for discussion, but obviously I wanted to let you know before the announcement. There’s going to be an all-staff conference call with the US office on Monday afternoon.’
A heavy silence slipped into Lily’s ears, and she felt untethered, as though she might tip forward out of her chair onto the grey-carpeted floor. She was aware of a need to fill the silence, aware that it was her turn to speak, but she couldn’t grab hold of the words spiralling in her head, couldn’t navigate them towards her mouth and out through her lips.