The Jazz Lecture (Part 2)

They put posters in the library, in the window of the cafe on Peel Street, and in the doctor's waiting room, which Claire thought was clever until Brian pointed out that people there had other things on their minds.

Brian wrote the lecture by hand. Claire came round on the Sunday and found eleven pages spread across the table: New Orleans first, then Chicago, then a man called Louis Armstrong who changed what a solo could be. He had underlined some things twice. Beside the pages was a small pile of CDs, stacked in the order he meant to play them.

“It's an hour,” he said. “Fifty minutes, if they ask questions.”

“They'll ask questions.”

The piano was tuned on the Wednesday. On Thursday at seven, Claire put out thirty chairs.

Four people came. A woman in her seventies who had known Brian's wife. A man who was waiting for his daughter's class to finish downstairs and stayed because it was raining. Two students from the college, who left at the break.

Brian gave the whole lecture anyway. He gave it exactly as he had written it, to four chairs and then to two, and when he played the Armstrong track he turned the volume up and stood by the window while it ran, and for three minutes nobody in the room said anything at all.

Afterwards Claire stacked the chairs and Brian sat down on the piano stool.

“That was good,” she said. And it had been. She wasn't being kind.

“I used to do three sets a night,” Brian said, “and walk home after.”

“You did an hour.”

“I know what I did.” He wasn't upset, which was somehow worse. He was stating a fact, in the same voice he used for facts about 1927. “Same time next week?”

“Same time.”

They were locking the door when they heard someone coming up the stairs — a boy, sixteen at most, wet through, carrying a case that was too big for him.

“Is this the jazz thing?” he said. “I got the day wrong.”