The Jazz Lecture (Part 4)

They put out sixty chairs for the open evening, and by ten past seven people were standing at the back.

Claire had planned to speak for two minutes and say the useful things: the numbers, the eleven bookings in the year before, the forty-one since. She said them. Nobody was really listening, because Brian had put the boy on first.

He played a slow one. He had been playing it in that room for a month, and he still looked at the floor between phrases, and it was, Claire thought, the best thing anyone had done in that building for years. Halfway through, the woman who hadn't opened her case in thirty years came in quietly underneath him, and the boy didn't stop.

The council people stayed until the end, which Claire had not expected. They asked what it cost to run. It cost nothing except the room, the heating and a tuning twice a year, and one of them wrote that down twice.

The letter came in November. The music room would stay open, the council would pay for the heating and the tuning, and the Thursday workshop was named in the second paragraph, which meant that it existed now in the way that things exist once they are written down.

Brian read the letter standing up. Then he sat down.

“I'll do the history,” he said. “Once a month. An hour, sitting.”

“And the rest of it?”

“He can teach the rest. He's better than me at half of it already, and he'll be better than me at all of it by spring.”

On the first Thursday in December, Brian came in through the front door with everybody else, ten minutes early, and took a chair in the second row. Claire sat down next to him. At the front, the boy was setting out music stands, getting the angles wrong and moving them again.

“Straighten those,” Brian called.

“You straighten them,” the boy said, without looking up, and carried on.