Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,92

around at the concert hall. And a few have gone shopping.’

I looked at my new watch. It read eleven thirty. Six-hour time difference, so it was five thirty in the afternoon. ‘What time is the performance?’ I asked.

‘Seven thirty,’ she said. ‘But I have to be back, changed and ready by six forty-five and the hall is a five-minute taxi ride away.’

We had an hour and ten minutes. Was she thinking what I was thinking?

‘Let’s go to bed for an hour,’ she said.

Obviously, she was.

*

I managed to stay awake for the whole concert. I remembered my father seriously advising me when I was aged about eight or nine, that you never ever clap at a concert unless others did so first. He didn’t tell me, but there must have been an embarrassing moment in his life when he had burst into applause, isolated and alone, during the silent pause between orchestral movements. I sat on my hands to prevent a repeat.

Caroline had worked a miracle to find me a seat. A single ‘house’ seat in the centre of the eighth row. It was an excellent position, only ruined by the fact that the conductor, a big man with annoyingly broad shoulders, stood between me and Caroline, and I couldn’t see her.

Even though I wouldn’t have admitted so to Caroline, I wouldn’t have known which piece was by whom without the programme telling me that it was all Elgar before the interval and Sibelius after. But I did recognize some of it, especially Nimrod from the Enigma Variations. Listening to it reminded me so much of my father’s funeral. My mother had chosen Nimrod to be played at the conclusion of the service, as my father, in his simple oak coffin, was solemnly carried out of East Hendred Church to the graveyard for burial, an image that was so sharp and vivid in my memory that it could have happened yesterday. Caroline had told me how powerful music could be and, now, I felt its force.

For the first time, I cried for my dead father. I sat in the Chicago Orchestra Hall surrounded by more than two thousand others and wept in my personal private grief for a man who had been dead for thirteen years, a condition unexpectedly brought on in me by the music of a man who had been dead for more than seventy. I cried for my own loss, and my mother’s loss too, and I cried because I so longed to tell him about my Caroline and my happiness. What would we give to spend just one hour more with our much loved and departed parents?

By the time the interval came I felt completely drained. I was sure that those alongside me had no idea of what had taken place right next to them. And that was as it should be, I thought. Grief is a solitary experience and the presence of others can lead to discomfiture and embarrassment for all parties.

Caroline had told me that she wouldn’t be able to get out to see me during the interval as the directors frowned upon such behaviour and she wasn’t in the mood for crossing them at the moment, not after missing the original flight. It was probably a good thing, I thought. Even though we had met only last week, Caroline knew me all too well already, and I didn’t yet feel comfortable with every one of my innermost thoughts and emotions being open to her scrutiny. So I remained in my seat and decided against buying a cardboard pot of ice cream to eat with a miniature plastic shovel, as everyone around me seemed to be doing.

The second half of the concert was the Sibelius symphony and I didn’t find it so dark and gloomy as Caroline had warned me to expect. In fact, I loved it. Somehow, as I sat there absorbing the music, I felt released from the past and fully alive for the future. I had no house, no car and precious few belongings to worry about. I was about to embark on two new and exciting journeys, one with a new London restaurant and the other with a new companion whom I adored. And someone was trying to kill me, either for what I knew or for what I had said, neither of which seemed that important to me. I had run away to America and was now enjoying the heady excitement of having left my troubles behind. The troubles in