Nadya remembered what a beautiful expression – pleading, guilty, gentle – Gorny wore whenever anyone discussed music with him and what efforts it cost him to keep a ring of enthusiasm out of his voice. In a society where coolness, hauteur and nonchalance are judged signs of breeding and good manners, one must hide one’s passions.
ANTON CHEKHOV, ‘After the Theatre’
I was leaving hospital with my baby daughter. Her father came to pick us up and we walked gingerly to the lift, carrying this child towards the world. The doors opened on the ground floor and there was Daniel, on his way up to see me. He had made a card, a delicate print of a flower, roots and all, with the date of her birth stamped on the back. It reminded me of the forget-me-nots, or whatever they had been, that I’d once given him.
We stepped out into the street – me, my baby, her father and Daniel. It did not seem strange. Daniel had introduced us; they once lived in the same house. It was late autumn, chill and at five o’clock, already dark. I pulled my daughter’s shawl more tightly round her face and hurried to the car. Daniel followed and then waited.
‘Would you like a lift?’ It was all I could think of to say.
‘Yes. Thanks.’
The child seat was in the back and somehow Daniel ended up sitting next to the baby while I got in the front. As we drove off, I turned round to look at her. Was she really here?
Daniel leaned forward, ‘Actually, something awful’s just happened.’
‘Oh no!’ I had been staring at my baby, trying to grasp the fact of her.
He continued: ‘I was on my way to see you and I had this case of records with me, some of my best stuff. I had to change trains at Embankment and when I’d got off I realised I’d left the bloody case behind!’
‘Oh no!’ I said again.
‘Yeah, I ran back but the doors were shut and I swear I saw this man pick the case up. He might even have smiled.’
Next to him, my daughter’s soft and serious presence glowed. When did I last think about anything other than the baby?
Only I couldn’t resist. ‘So what was in the case?’
‘For one thing my Public Image bootleg and that’s incredibly rare …’
‘You mean the French import?’
‘Exactly. And then there was Charlie Parker live at Birdland 1949, which took me years to hunt down.’
‘And what about your Billie Holiday, the one where she turns up at that Armstrong gig and sings “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans”, and she’s really ill and no one recognises her but then they hear her and they do and they go wild, you didn’t lose that did you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I love that.’
‘And I had this single in there, the first pressing of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Electricity” …’
‘The unfinished black-card cover black-embossed? That was only available for about a week. I’ve got that.’
‘Yes. Well.’
‘And Can?’
‘Tago Mago was in there, I’m sure.’
And so we talked our way across the city until we reached a point at which it seemed sensible to drop Daniel off. My daughter, who in these first seven days of her life had been fractious and colicky, was out for the count. We’d sung her to sleep.