‘And I say again, so what? If she played like that, she’d absolutely get through to the next round,’ said Hu. ‘I’d put her through for sure. You would too. I know you would.’
‘Maybe, but I don’t think it would get her through the second round. There was something almost – don’t take this the wrong way, Clementine – but there was something almost robotic about it.’
Hu said, ‘How can she not take that the wrong way?’
‘We’re here to be honest,’ said Ainsley. ‘Not kind.’ Then she’d looked at Clementine and said suddenly, ‘Are you sure you still want it? After … everything?’
‘Of course she still wants it,’ said Hu. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
Then their house phone had rung and Clementine had never got to answer what should have been a straightforward question.
‘How are Ainsley and Hu?’ asked Sam. She could see the strain it cost him just to ask an ordinary civil question. It was like watching him do a chin-up. ‘I haven’t seen them for a while.’
But he was trying, so she’d try too.
‘Good. They’re good. Hey, I was telling Hu how you got me to run on the spot before practising my excerpts and he said he had a teacher who made him do that!’ Sam looked at her dully. You would think it had been somebody else who’d pinned the bedsheet to the ceiling all those weeks ago, who’d yelled, ‘Run, soldier, run!’ She ploughed on. ‘His teacher also used to tell him to wake up and practise in the middle of the night, when he was still half-asleep, and to play after he’d had a few drinks, speaking of which – oh, good, here comes somebody.’
A young waiter approached their table and stood just a little too far back. ‘Would you like me to go through today’s specials?’ He squared his shoulders in the heroic manner of someone volunteering to do something perilous.
‘Yes, but we’re actually wondering about our drinks. We ordered two glasses of wine … um, a while ago.’ A million years ago.
Clementine tried to soften her words with a smile. The waiter was painfully young and sort of famished-looking. He’d be perfectly cast as a street urchin in Les Misérables.
‘You haven’t got your drinks yet?’ The waiter looked alarmed, as if he’d never heard of such a thing.
Clementine gestured at their table to indicate: No drinks. Just their two mobile phones placed at precise angles in front of them, ready to be snatched up in case of crisis, because that’s how they lived now, in readiness for crisis.
‘Maybe they’ve been forgotten,’ suggested Clementine.
‘Maybe,’ said the waiter. He glanced fearfully over his shoulder at the restaurant bar where a pretty waitress dreamily polished wineglasses.
‘You could check on them?’ said Clementine. For the love of God. Why was this swanky restaurant employing children? Starving children? Feed him and send him home.
‘Of course, right, it was two glasses of the …’
‘The Pepper Tree shiraz,’ said Clementine.
She could hear a fish-wifey, high-pitched note in her voice.
‘Right. Um. Shall I just go through the specials first?’
‘No,’ said Clementine at the same time as Sam said, ‘Sure, mate.’ He smiled up at the waiter. ‘Let’s hear the specials.’
He always snatched the Good Cop role for himself.
The waiter took a deep breath, clasped his hands choir-boy style and recited, ‘For an entrée we have a confit of salmon cooked in coriander, orange and mint.’
He stopped. His lips moved silently. Clementine pressed her fingertip against her phone. It lit up. No calls. Everything was fine.
Sam shifted in his chair, and gave the waiter a tiny ‘you can do it’ nod of encouragement, as though he were an affectionate parent in the audience at a poetry recital.
Watching her husband – the exasperating humanity of the man – Clementine felt an unexpected jolt of love, like one perfect, pure note. A velvety E-flat. But as soon as she registered the feeling, it was gone, and she felt nothing but itchy irritability as the waiter haltingly made his way through the longest list of specials in the history of fine dining.
‘A prosciutto and pepperoni, no wait, not pepperoni, a prosciutto and, um, a prosciutto and …’ He rocked forward and studied his shoes, lips compressed. Clementine met Sam’s gaze. Once Clementine would only have needed to fractionally widen her eyes to make Sam lose his composure, and in his desperation not to hurt the waiter’s feelings his face would have turned red while his eyes filled with tears of mirth.