Funeral Music by Morag Joss Read Free Book Online

meeting Sue’s eye, knowing that to do so would have reduced them both to cackling wrecks.
    Apparently stunned into a show of good manners, the audience did actually applaud, albeit thinly. How British that is, Sara thought. If you are roundly insulted by your speaker you must still of course clap, but you clap a little
less
. In a surprisingly muted hum of conversation the delegates moved gratefully to the buffet tables set out at the west end under the long colonnade of columns and pilasters, anxious to blot out the whole ghastly, misjudged episode with solid platefuls of samosas and salad. The squad of chefs and servers behind the tables was trying to impose some system against the tide of people, among whom were Cecily and Sue, pushing in staunchly with their empty plates.
    ‘Get me a roll, could you?’
    ‘Want some of this rice?’
    ‘What’s that, quiche? Yeah, a little bit. I’ve got feta, okay?’
    Evidently the joint witnessing of a blatant act of self-destruction had been a deeply bonding experience. Turning smiling from the tables, Sara caught sight of Olivia at the far side of the room. She was standing with Matthew Sawyer beside a small side table and they were engaged in a tense-looking conversation. Sawyer looked rather angry, standing tall over her with his head bent stiffly towards her and his jaw ugly and tight. But it was Olivia who was doing most of the talking and, despite her size, looked much the more formidable of the two. She must be giving him hell for that speech, Sara thought. Wiser not to interrupt. Just then Olivia turned and marched towards the door at the far end, leaving Matthew Sawyer to gather up the two or three papers on the table and stare crossly after her. Sara decided not to go in pursuit of Olivia, and went to the Pump Room alone.
    JAMES HAD gone early to the Pump Room to warm up on the piano before any of the audience arrived. Sara could hear him on the Steinway as she came in by the Stall Street entrance to the new, functional side of the building. She paused in the small circular lobby and moved up against the wall so as not to be in the way of the traffic of caterers. Several halls and passages led into this lobby: one from the Pump Room itself, one from the offices and stores, and another which led from the modern stairs bringing visitors back up from the Roman Baths and into the Pump Room via the museum shop. From yet another passage came the smells, clatters and voices of the kitchens, and a procession of waiters and chefs who crossed the lobby every few seconds, bearing piles of plates and huge trays of food for the warming ovens of the Pump Room servery. The race was on to produce a four-course dinner for three hundred people, as well as to convert the demure teatime Pump Room into a dining room full of large circular tables set with candles, polished glasses, generous arrangements of flowers and fruit and burnished silver chafing-dishes. And they had less than two hours in which to do it.
    James was so good. Sara listened in admiration to the flow of his playing, as he played through the accompaniment to the first piece they would be performing, Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words in D. As a very young man he had won several of the major international prizes for accompanists and Sara thought it a slight pity that he now did so much broadcasting, fronting the big televised music competitions and hosting radio programmes, rather than playing. But he was so good at that too: engaging, witty and articulate, and immensely knowledgeable without ever being intimidating. He was small, very dark and good-looking, with ears that stuck out noticeably and attractively. In all that he did and, indeed, all that he was, James seemed incapable of inelegance. He and Tom were by now an old married couple and lived partly in London, where Tom was based as an EU lawyer and had kept his house, and partly in Bath, which they both preferred. Tom’s necessarily frequent spells in Brussels