It was sent away to be repaired, but when it returned it was not the same. The strings were higher, harder to pluck, the new bridge seemed to have been installed at the wrong angle. There was, even to my untutored ear, a change in the timbre. I had not taken care of her; she would no longer take care of me.
When, the following year, I changed schools, I did not continue with the double bass. The thought of changing to a new instrument seemed vaguely disloyal, while the dusty black bass that sat in a cupboard in my new school’s music rooms seemed to have taken a dislike to me. I was marked another’s. And I was tall enough now that there would be nothing incongruous about my standing behind the double bass.
And, soon enough, I knew, there would be girls.
To begin at the end: I arranged the thin slice of pickled ginger, pink and translucent, on top of the pale yellowtail flesh, and dipped the whole arrangement-ginger, fish, and vinegared rice-into the soy sauce, flesh-side down; then I devoured it in a couple of bites.
“I think we ought to go to the police,” I said.
“And tell them what, exactly?” asked Jane.
“Well, we could file a missing persons report, or something. I don’t know.”
“And where did you last see the young lady?” asked Jonathan, in his most policemanlike tones. “Ah, I see. Did you know that wasting police time is normally considered an offense, sir?”
“But the whole circus…”
“These are transient persons, sir, of legal age. They come and go. If you have their names, I suppose I can take a report…”
I gloomily ate a salmon skin roll. “Well, then,” I said, “why don’t we go to the papers?”
“Brilliant idea,” said Jonathan, in the sort of tone of voice which indicates that the person talking doesn’t think it’s a brilliant idea at all.
“Jonathan’s right,” said Jane. “They won’t listen to us.”
“Why wouldn’t they believe us? We’re reliable. Honest citizens. All that.”
“You’re a fantasy writer,” she said. “You make up stuff like this for a living. No one’s going to believe you.”
“But you two saw it all as well. You’d back me up.”
“Jonathan’s got a new series on cult horror movies coming out in the autumn. They’ll say he’s just trying to get cheap publicity for the show. And I’ve got another book coming out. Same thing.”
“So you’re saying that we can’t tell anyone?” I sipped my green tea.
“No,” Jane said, reasonably, “we can tell anyone we want. It’s making them believe us that’s problematic. Or, if you ask me, impossible.”
The pickled ginger was sharp on my tongue. “You may be right,” I said. “And Miss Finch is probably much happier wherever she is right now than she would be here.”
“But her name isn’t Miss Finch,” said Jane, “it’s-” and she said our former companion’s real name.
“I know. But it’s what I thought when I first saw her,” I explained. “Like in one of those movies. You know. When they take off their glasses and put down their hair. ‘Why, Miss Finch. You’re beautiful.’”
“She certainly was that,” said Jonathan, “in the end, anyway.” And he shivered at the memory.
There. So now you know: that’s how it all ended, and how the three of us left it, several years ago. All that remains is the beginning, and the details.
For the record, I don’t expect you to believe any of this. Not really. I’m a liar by trade, after all; albeit, I like to think, an honest liar. If I belonged to a gentlemen’s club I’d recount it over a glass or two of port late in the evening as the fire burned low, but I am a member of no such club, and I’ll write it better than ever I’d tell it. So here you will learn of Miss Finch (whose name, as you already know, was not Finch, nor anything like it, since I’m changing names here to disguise the guilty) and how it came about that she was unable to join us for sushi. Believe it or not, just as you wish. I am not even certain that I believe it anymore. It all seems such a long way away.
I could find a dozen beginnings. Perhaps it might be best to begin in a hotel room, in London, a few years ago. It was 11:00 AM. The phone began to ring, which surprised me. I hurried over to answer it.
“Hello?” It was too early in the morning for anyone in America to be phoning me, and there was no one in England who was meant to know that I was even in the country.
“Hi,” said a familiar voice, adopting an American accent of monumentally unconvincing proportions. “This is Hiram P. Muzzle-dexter of Colossal Pictures. We’re working on a film that’s a remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark but instead of Nazis it has women with enormous knockers in it. We’ve heard that you were astonishingly well supplied in the trouser department and might be willing to take on the part of our male lead, Minnesota Jones…”
“Jonathan?” I said. “How on earth did you find me here?”
“You knew it was me,” he said, aggrieved, his voice losing all trace of the improbable accent and returning to his native London.
“Well, it sounded like you,” I pointed out. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my question. No one’s meant to know that I was here.”
“I have my ways,” he said, not very mysteriously. “Listen, if Jane and I were to offer to feed you sushi-something I recall you eating in quantities that put me in mind of feeding time at London Zoo’s Walrus House-and if we offered to take you to the theater before we fed you, what would you say?”
“Not sure. I’d say ‘Yes’ I suppose. Or ‘What’s the catch?’ I might say that.”
“Not exactly a catch,” said Jonathan. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a catch. Not a real catch. Not really.”
“You’re lying, aren’t you?”
Somebody said something near the phone, and then Jonathan said, “Hang on, Jane wants a word.” Jane is Jonathan’s wife.
“How are you?” she said.
“Fine, thanks.”
“Look,” she said, “you’d be doing us a tremendous favor-not that we wouldn’t love to see you, because we would, but you see, there’s someone…”
“She’s your friend,” said Jonathan, in the background.
“She’s not my friend. I hardly know her,” she said, away from the phone, and then, to me, “Um, look, there’s someone we’re sort of lumbered with. She’s not in the country for very long, and I wound up agreeing to entertain her and look after her tomorrow night. She’s pretty frightful, actually. And Jonathan heard that you were in town from someone at your film company, and we thought you might be perfect to make it all less awful, so please say yes.”
So I said yes.
In retrospect, I think the whole thing might have been the fault of the late Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. I had read an article the previous month, in which Ian Fleming had advised any would-be writer who had a book to get done that wasn’t getting written to go to a hotel to write it. I had, not a novel, but a film script that wasn’t getting written; so I bought a plane ticket to London, promised the film company that they’d have a finished script in three weeks’ time, and took a room in an eccentric hotel in Little Venice.
I told no one in England that I was there. Had people known, my days and nights would have been spent seeing them, not staring at a computer screen and, sometimes, writing.
Truth to tell, I was bored half out of my mind and ready to welcome any interruption.
Early the next evening I arrived at Jonathan and Jane’s house, which was more or less in Hampstead. There was a small green sports car parked outside. Up the stairs, and I knocked at the door. Jonathan answered it; he wore an impressive suit. His light brown hair was longer than I remembered it from the last time I had seen him, in life or on television.
“Hello,” said Jonathan. “The show we were going to take you to has been canceled. But we can go to something else, if that’s okay with you.”