All the time I knew Madeline, there was always the sense that she didn't fit - with me, with
London, with the test of the world. I noticed it the first time I saw her: she looked so out of place, in that gloomy bar where I was playing the piano. I'd been in London for nearly a year, and I'd thought that this might turn out to be my first break. A place in some side street just off the Fulham Road that had a clapped-out baby grand1 and called itself a "jazz club": I saw an advert they had placed in The Stage and they offered me twenty pounds cash and three nonalcoholic cocktails of my choice to play there on a Wednesday night. I turned up at six, scared out of my mind, knowing that I had to play for five hours with a repertoire of six standards and a few pieces of my own - about fifty minutes' worth of material. I needn't have worried, because there was only one customer all evening. She came in at eight and stayed till the end. It was
Madeline.
I couldn't believe that a woman so well dressed and so pretty could be sitting on her own in a place like that all night. Maybe if there had been other customers they would have tried to chat her up. In fact I'm sure they would. She was always getting chatted up. That night there was only me, and even I tried to chat her up, and I'd never done anything like that in my life before.
But when you've been playing your own music for nearly an hour to an audience of one, and they've been clapping at the end of every number and smiling at you and even once saying, "I liked that one", then you feel entitled. It would have seemed rude not to. So when the time came to take another break I got my drink from the bar and went over to her table, and said:
"Do you mind if I join you?"
"No. Please do."
"Can I buy you something."
"No thanks, I'm all right for the moment."
She was drinking dry white wine. I sat down on a stool opposite her, not wanting to appear too forward. "Is it always this quiet in here?" I