All Who Stayed Quiet

Chapter One: The Borrowed Cello

The cello was not his. Stephen Naysmith had been reminding himself of that fact for two hundred miles, every time the case knocked against his knee on the bus, every time the bow tube rolled off the seat and he had to bend into the aisle to fetch it back.

It belonged to Netherdale Primary, which had inherited it from the parish hall, which had bought it in 1961 from a shop in Galashiels that no longer existed. There was a crack in the lower bout, repaired twice, the second time badly. Mrs. Craik had signed it out to him on a form she had typed herself, because the school had no form for lending a cello to a boy for four years.

"Bring it back when you've got a better one," she had said, and then, because she could not help herself, "and mind the seam in damp weather."

Edinburgh received him in a fine grey rain. He came up out of the bus station into a city built of soot and money, all those windows above him, all those staircases going up into lives he could not imagine. He got lost twice. The second time, a woman walking a wet terrier pointed him toward the Lansbury Conservatory, and he came around a corner and there it was: a long Georgian frontage on a private square, three storeys of glass and stone, the door painted a black so deep it looked wet. Above it, carved into the lintel, the year 1848.

Stephen stood in the rain and did not go in for a full minute.

He was nineteen. His father built fences and fitted kitchens. His mother worked the till at the agricultural supply and had cried in the kitchen when the letter came, then apologised for crying. Nobody in his family had ever attended any institution of higher learning, and here he was on a full scholarship, holding an instrument with a bad seam, with a letter of recommendation from a rural music teacher folded in his jacket pocket because he had not been able to bring himself to leave it in his bag.

Inside, the entrance hall smelled of beeswax and radiator dust and, faintly, of rosin. Somewhere above him a soprano was running the same four notes over and over, each time a little higher, like someone testing stairs. A woman at a desk took his name, found it on a list, and handed him a key and a folder.

"Naysmith. Practice room allocation comes Thursday. Try not to book the good rooms, everyone hates you if you book the good rooms."

"Which are the good rooms?"

"You'll find out," she said, not unkindly, "and then you'll want them."

His residence was three streets away, a converted townhouse with a stairwell that smelled of frying and bleach. His room was on the top floor, at the back, with a window that looked out on slate roofs and a chimney with a bird's nest wedged in it. There was a bed, a desk, a wardrobe, and a chair. He put the cello case against the wall the way you would seat a guest, and he sat on the bed with his hands on his knees and thought: this is it, then. This is the beginning of the rest of it.

The knock came ten minutes later.

"You're the cellist," said the boy in the doorway. He was tall and slightly stooped, with the kind of curly hair that gives up on order early in life, wearing a cardigan that had been mended at the elbow with wool of the wrong colour. "I heard the case on the stairs. Case that size, it's cello or it's a body. Henry Poole. Literature, over the way. We share a kitchen and a bathroom, so we're going to become intimate whether we like it or not."

"Stephen."

"Stephen. Good. Solid." Henry came in without being invited and sat backwards on the chair. "Where are you from?"

"Netherdale. Borders. You won't know it."

"I won't," Henry agreed cheerfully. "Scholarship?"

Stephen felt his neck go warm. "Aye."

"Thought so. You've got the look. Underfed and grateful." Henry held up a hand. "Not an insult. I'm on a bursary myself, my father's a schoolteacher in Fife, which in this postcode is roughly equivalent to being raised by wolves. I only mention it because you'll want to know the geography of the place, and nobody tells you."

"The geography."

"The social geography." Henry counted on his fingers. "There are two conservatories inside that building. The first one is full of people like you. They practise until their fingers split, they eat once a day, they lie awake calculating whether an orchestral audition in Manchester is worth the train fare. For them, music is a rope out of a hole. Do you follow?"

"I follow."

"The second conservatory is full of people whose families have owned pianos for four generations. Music isn't a rope for them, it's an inheritance. They're not less talented, that's the maddening part. Some of them are frighteningly good. But they'll never once in their lives feel what you'll feel on the morning of an audition, and they'll never understand why you're being so intense about everything." Henry shrugged. "The two groups are perfectly polite to each other. That's the worst of it. You'll find yourself grateful for the politeness."

Stephen looked at the cello case. "You've been here a year."

"Two. I'm a slow learner and a fast talker." Henry stood. "Come down at seven, I'll make you something with pasta in it that isn't good but is hot. And don't put that against the outside wall, it'll damp."

Stephen moved the cello.

---

He did not sleep much that first night. The city made noise until two and started again at five, gulls and delivery lorries and a man singing somewhere below with no accompaniment and no shame. He lay listening and let himself want things.

What he wanted was not fame. He had thought about it honestly, on the bus, and decided that what he wanted was to be inside music the way you are inside a house. He had felt it exactly four times in nineteen years: once at eleven, playing a scale in an empty gym hall and hearing the room answer him; once at fourteen, in a recording of the Elgar concerto that Mrs. Craik played him on a Tuesday afternoon while the rain hit the windows; twice since. Four times, and every hour of practice since had been an attempt to get back in.

He understood already, without being told, that the Lansbury Conservatory would not care about that. It would care about intonation and repertoire and audition lists. And that was fine. He would give it what it wanted. He had a plan, which he had written on the inside cover of a notebook: four hours of scales and studies a day, five hours of repertoire, no exceptions, no self-pity.

He was to keep to that plan for nineteen days.