Marking Time Read online

MARKING TIME

  By

  Sven Svenson

  Marking Time

  Copyright Sven Svenson 2013

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  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  Phil, though student-poor, by a trick of math could afford the best seats in the house, and thus he scored a pair of season tickets in the second row. The Royal Scottish National Orchestra stopped in his university town as the final beat of its three-city rhythm. Thanks to Her Majesty’s government and its subsidies for the arts, combined with Phil’s 50% student discount, he and Maggie both could get in for the price of one mere standing-room slot in the upper balcony for the Philadelphia Orchestra. Here they rented the right to take the long, long stroll, all the way down to the front, every fourth Friday evening at 7:30.

  A night on the town! Phil would head into the center, instead of away from it, hopping the bus to Union Street, or walking on the nights it wasn’t wet, to wait on the southeast corner. There he would pace up one street, back to the corner, down one half block, to the bakery and back, never losing sight of the corner where Maggie’s bus was to appear. At last the x and y axes crossed and discharged Maggie, feet first, heartbreaker concert night black hose over office girl sneakers, then the down coat over a shirt and sweater, then that Maggie smile.

  A night on the town! We’re in the big city, so let’s head over to the Chinese place and then triangulate on to the concert hall! They make a dive through the Highland rain – always dropping at a sharper slant than seemed natural to New Worlders, and cold, cold, as it dripped down the neck, falling as if the higher attitude skewed the angle. Into the doorway and, shaking the umbrellas, up the narrow stairs to the oriental palace on the “1st floor”. Back down another set of stairs to the basement level to the respective restrooms to try and dry the chilly wet heads with paper towels, to polish the eyeglasses with waxy toilet paper, then back to the table where jasmine tea waits steaming in its faux oriental pot.

  Phil usually started first, his day’s events harder to transform into drama. Sometimes it was a new datum that had swum close the surface to give a tug on the line; some days a page or two written in the dissertation; at other times just another slow turn of the crank on the machine that would one day yield everlasting academic glory.

  Maggie was animated, that musical treasure already humming a few blocks from here. Eat up, we have concert tickets! Her story was closely-grained, and fire sparkles from a clutch of the details. The nerve of that snotty girl from accounts! The stories of after the office Christmas party! The new filing system that’s not even alphabetical!

  Then back out and through the geometrically improbable rainbeat to the concert hall. The Queen’s Theatre being closed for extensive renovations, that year’s offerings were held at the huge lecture hall of Caledonia College. Across the shining wet streets, the little men of the crossings going green yellow red and green again. Some crosswalks straddle Y’s in the city streets and require that two or three green men in staggered rhythm cross the concert goers over to the entrance.

  In the ante-room that served as a makeshift foyer, Phil and Maggie squeezed cold hands and split off again to the loos: Phil to clean the steam off the glasses spotted with droplets, and Maggie to switch back into her office heels. With clean lenses, Maggie was clearer and even a little taller as they link arms to head in. The narrow doorway into the hall seemed always to be occupied by two matrons talking in loud Home County accents – though they never appeared to be the same two, and sometimes there was a man. With British politeness the concert goers would stand and fidget before the impediment, which the proffered sing-song “sorry” or “please” allowed a few to pass – a regular discharge of human bodies, angled shoulder-first and sidling through the blocked passage.

  It’s a long glorious walk down to the best seats in the house! Like the parents of the bride Phil and Maggie sailed down the gentle slope, waving and smiling at their wealthier yet somehow unfortunate comrades, who had paid the honest amount just to sit so far back from the action.

  Second row, since the first is not for sale, seats 5 and 6, past the two lucky couples who, incredibly, must have beaten Phil to the window the morning the symphony tickets went on sale. Into the metal chairs that must suffice while the velvet ones of Queen’s are being restuffed for posteriors to come.

  The program was a mixed bag. First up was Scotland’s own contemporary composer, Michael St. Vincent-Andrews. He was surprisingly young, yet clean-shaven and neatly turned-out in his tuxedo. Not the sort of man you’d expect to be living in some remote Shetland village, recording and transcribing the local Celtic rhythms in order to lend his works a genuine folk touch. Yet once a year he turned out an exuberant yelp of brass and strings and kettle drums that drew a harrumph from the public but applause from the university dons.

  That night St. Vincent-Andrews would premier his new piece, “A Caledonian Solstice.” Phil and Maggie snuggle closer – to think, right up front, and a premier! They would see the solstice just a split second before their less-favored friends!

  The printed program was not a luxury this night. What was needed was a “torch” in the dimmed hall:

  A Caledonian Solstice

  I. The village dawn - 3 am

  II. Hot life under the Arctic Circle

  a. The pub

  b. Summer ceilidh

  c. Post-midnight sun

  Finally the piece crashed to an end. St. Vincent-Andrews modestly turned to receive his applause, perfunctory, but flavored by the fact that he was one of us, and he was after all preserving the real Scottish folk culture for the world.

  Predictably unpredictable, thought Phil. That’s the phrase I’ll use during the intermission: predictably unpredictable. Maybe for an adolescent it would be a laugh to see the first violinist making his instrument bark like a dog, or the tuba be a horse, but one got past this. It gives a person something to be smug about at the coffee shop on Monday.

  One of the advantages of the wondrous seats was that people knew where to locate one. The interim brought Phil and Maggie’s friends moving forward to the gravity well of the second row, the same pattern as at every concert: two men, then a couple, then a professor and his wife.

  The lights blinked and the friends retreated to their poor neighborhoods for the second half. Phil always found the evening a little long, and would gladly have paid the same low amount to hear less music. But, what’s this! Some squatter has made himself at home in the illicit front row, his long legs stretched out, waiting for the Brahms. It registered for Phil all at once that the man wore a black tux, and that he’d been watching this same back of the head for the last 45 minutes. He was here, right in front of them, to listen to the rest of the concert! No going to the pub, no horsing around with the third and fourth percussionists that Brahms would never require – St. Vincent-Andrews was planning on attending the remainder of the concert, just like everyone else.

  Phil thought of tapping the arm that stretched out just inches away, to say hello or to introduce himself. But then he thought better of it; he really had nothing to tell him. He couldn’t honestly call himself a fan, and he wasn’t especially
moved by the clash-boom of the solstice thunderstorm. “Thank you for coming” would have been about right, but it seemed hardly worth distracting the man to hand him faint praise. Plus, Phil had always felt protective of the famous, of whom he had met one or two. After all, the man had just worked very hard: he had every right to enjoy the show undisturbed.

  The Brahms was his Symphony No. 1 in C minor. It was technically about average, nothing particularly special, but after the St. Vincent-Andrews it went down easily. It was a favorite of Maggie’s anyway, Phil knew, although he didn’t recognize the title until it started up. Of course, it had that lovely andante right in the middle, that piece that the BBC used to announce it’s evening reflection just before sign off. It did not soar, yet the strings swept the melody as if from a human choir, the wordless tune telling a clear story if only you strained to hear its heartbeat.

  Phil like watching while he listened – the women in the woodwind section were uniformly mousy, but that redhead cellist was fetching, and Phil could almost imagine as her arm sawed back and forth that she knew the plot of this song, and would tell it if he asked. But there was more to see than most nights. A slight movement in the foreground. Don’t stare directly, he told himself; when it’s dark you can see better with the peripheral. He moved his gaze to the back of the stage, a little higher than eye-level, then let it slide forward, past the drums, the bass player, between the first violinist on the left and the regular conductor on the right – and then to be sure in the foreground there was a definite movement in coal gray on coal black, a heart beating out the Brahms. It took a second to realize that it was tapped out by an index finger on the back of a metal chair, that the hand really was connected by an indiscernible arm to the composer himself, that in fact his head was gently making the same time as his forefinger, moving his white collar in time with his white finger, and all in step with Brahms. This man of such buffoonery and war whoops sat alone in the dark, nursing his thoughts that the piece was pretty and pleasing.

  When the lights came up – revealing that the celebrated man had made his exit near the end of the final movement – Phil no longer had the heart to join in the mockery of “Caledonia Solstice,” nor to toss in his thoughts about the “fair” execution of the Brahms or the comparisons between 19th and 20th century composers. He waited in the warm press of bodies, standing on one foot then on another, already in his thoughts riding the bus out to the flat in their village-cum-suburb, but first to seek out the wash of the icy rain that drummed at its preternatural angle.