The first solo

Text 1: Four Bars, by Nadia Querol

An original novel extract.

From the wings the hall looked like the inside of a mouth: dark, warm, full of a low, wet murmur. Rows and rows of faces, pale smudges in the half-light, and somewhere among them her parents, and her grandmother, who had come on two buses.

Anya’s hands were cold. She had run them under the hot tap in the toilets for five minutes and they were still cold, white at the fingertips, as though they belonged to somebody else and had been lent to her for the evening without instructions.

“You’ll be brilliant,” whispered Mr Kassam, and touched her shoulder, and then she was walking.

The stage was enormous. In rehearsal it had been a few planks and a piano. Now it went on for ever, and the light came down on her from above, hot and white, and turned the audience into a single dark shape, breathing. She found the chair. She sat. She lifted the violin and settled it under her chin, and the wood was warm, at least, warm and familiar and smelling faintly of rosin, the one thing on that stage that knew her.

The piano played the four bars of introduction. She had heard those bars a thousand times. Tonight they went past like a train she was supposed to catch.

The first note came out thin and shaking, a thread of a sound, and she heard it go out into the hall and thought, quite calmly, that is a terrible note. Somebody coughed. Her bow arm trembled. For a moment she considered stopping, standing up, walking off the stage and out of the side door and home, and never touching a violin again.

Then the second note came. Then the third. And somewhere around the fourth bar something happened which she could never afterwards explain: her fingers stopped belonging to somebody else. They went to the strings by themselves, the way feet find stairs in the dark. The sound thickened. It filled. It went up into the high roof of the hall and hung there, and Anya, inside it, forgot the faces altogether.

She did not hear the applause at first. She was still in the music, in the last long note, holding it, letting it go. Then the noise came at her like rain on a roof, and she looked up, blinking, into the light, and saw, in the third row, her grandmother standing up, alone, clapping with her hands high above her head.

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