The blonde woman led the applause, but they all clapped, even, with a strange expression on his face, the deputy head of music.
“I didn’t know it was such a versatile instrument,” said the headmaster. “Very lovely piece. Modern, yet classical. Very fine. Bravo.” And then he shepherded the four of them from the room, and I sat there, utterly drained, the fingers of my left hand stroking the neck of the bass, the fingers of my right caressing her strings.
Like any true story, the end of the affair is messy and unsatisfactory: the following day, carrying the huge instrument across the courtyard to the school chapel, for orchestra practice, in a light rain, I slipped on the wet bricks and fell forward. The wooden bridge of the bass was smashed, and the front was cracked.
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.
THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE DEPARTURE OF MISS FINCH
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.