Vivaldi in the Dark Box Set

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Jayden could hear the music from the lobby door: the ebb and swell of a string orchestra in full voice. It was only three-fifty-five, but he couldn’t recognise the piece to tell if they were nearly done yet.

It was a sweltering day, and the auditorium door had been wedged open with a chair. The orchestra teacher (tutor? Conductor? Maestro?) clearly had no appreciation for actually using a theatre, and had the standard lights up, so Jayden could hover in the doorway and watch as the piece crashed and roared into a violent crescendo. There must have been thirty boys in the tidily assembled seats, and Jayden couldn’t pick Darren out, even after he managed to pick apart a cluster of violinists from the rest.

Something tugged at the back of his mind. Stars never used music in their plays.

The baton flashed in the light as it came down, and the strings died away in a long, soft warble that was almost tragic. It floated on the air for a long minute after the bows had all been lifted, and the deep voice of the tutor (conductor? Maestro? Teacher?) rang out in a strange harmony with the dying music.

“Pathetic.”

Jayden was startled.

“I put in all this work, and for what? For boys with no understanding of the beauty and power of the heavens! Holst’s greatest work, and you play with the same bored expressions on your pretty little faces as you tune your strings! I wash my hands of you! If I see a single one of you on Tuesday, it will be too soon!”

The enraged man swept down off the stage and snatched up his bags like a woman flouncing out of a bad date. Despite his vehemence and his authority, he was a short, chubby little man with heavyset jowls and a gut threatening the integrity of his suit. He stalked past Jayden apparently without even seeing him, and Jayden stared after him incredulously. That was criticising the orchestra?

He made his way to the front. The orchestra were packing up and chatting, apparently wholly unperturbed by the conductor’s outburst. Darren was evident at twenty metres, as he had remained seated and placed his violin aside to rummage through his bag. As Jayden hopped up onto the boards, more sheets were produced from the bag and arranged neatly on the stand.

“Here.” Jayden thrust the espresso towards him.

Darren stared.

“You said I could get it next time,” Jayden reminded him, biting his lip. Was that a bit weird? He’d only met him once, after all, but Darren had been so…so…not nice, exactly, but so…different that he’d gone straight to Costa and gotten their orders before even coming here. It had felt right.

Darren took the cup. “Thanks,” he said, and it seemed genuine enough. Jayden forced himself to relax. “Pull up a chair. I have to do some retuning, I was completely off-key in the last movement.”

“I can’t believe he said it was awful,” Jayden admitted, pulling up an abandoned chair. The others were filtering out in small clusters, the noise beginning to die down.

“He always says that,” Darren shrugged, plucking the strings with his index finger. He held the violin in his lap, the coffee cup sitting by his right foot. “Mr. Weber’s a bit temperamental.”

“A bit?”

“Very,” Darren confirmed. “In my second year, he told Mother my piano skills were ‘adequate.’ He then suggested I study music at university. He doesn’t do praise.”

“So what’s criticism?”

“Lots of angry German words,” Darren said and grinned. He had a very crooked grin, and Jayden felt his breath catch a little at the oddly perfect imperfection. And then his breath caught again at his own observation. “I learned my business German from Frau Reiswitz, and my angry German from Herr Weber.”

“Was it Vivaldi today?”

“Holst.”

Jayden blinked.

“The Planets?” Darren prompted, never lifting his head (or his full attention) from tuning the violin. He seemed to have found the string to blame. “You’ve probably heard Jupiter. Weber’s trying to convert them into strings-only. He’s lining up a recital at end of next year, but…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Some of the pieces can be done in strings—I quite like Venus on strings, actually—but others…today was Mars. It sounds weird. Too high, too…trivial. It doesn’t have the weight to it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jayden blurted out. “I mean, I’m sure you’re right, I’ve just…”

Darren rolled his eyes, smirking as he set aside the violin and picked up the coffee cup. “Are you always this nervous?” he asked.

Jayden felt the colour flooding his face again. No, he wanted to say. It’s just you. But why? Okay, so he didn’t know Darren, like, at all, and he had that cool, sardonic, don’t-give-a-s**t attitude down so effortlessly and it made him a little bit intimidating, but it wasn’t like Jayden hadn’t met intimidating people before. Darren was just a boy.

Just an attractive boy, that sarcastic little voice in the back of his head piped up, and he bit his lip to shut it up.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Darren mused, almost inhaling a mouthful of coffee. “God, I needed that. I hate Thursdays.”

“Why?” Jayden asked thickly.

“Double English, double biology. Followed up by Weber being a queen. I hate Thursdays.”

“I still have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jayden confessed and bit down on the impulse to dig himself a verbal grave. Darren smirked again. Maybe it was just the way he smiled. “You, um. You don’t like English?”

“Nope.”

Jayden twisted his fingers around his own cup. “I do,” he confessed. “I write the plays for Mum’s group.”

Darren raised his eyebrows. “You write plays?”

“Yeah. I mean, they’re not great, but, you know, practice, and…”

“Back up,” Darren waved a hand. “You write plays—and they can’t be s**t if they actually get performed in here—but you go to Woodbourne?”

“I’m actually not thick,” Jayden said defensively.

“You don’t have to be thick to end up thick, not at the comps round here.”

Jayden flushed. Darren’s dismissive tone was…well, he should have expected it. Darren went to St. John’s. St. John’s was where Jayden longed to be: the sprawling boy’s boarding school at the very northern edge of the town. It was the kind of school that produced bestselling authors and West End stars. It was the kind of school that got its kids into Oxford and Cambridge effortlessly. It was the kind of school that cost nine thousand a term for a day student.

It was the school Jayden intended on securing a scholarship for at the end of this year, and this violinist was sitting there bold as brass in the uniform Jayden would have killed to wear.

“You are so lucky,” he said.

Darren quirked an eyebrow.

“To get to go St. John’s instead of Woodbourne.”

“Eh.”

“So, um, where are you from? If you…”

“Oh, I don’t board there. Day student.” Darren shook his head. “I live on the Beauchamp estate.”

Jayden felt profoundly jealous. Beauchamp was one step down from leaving the town entirely and going and living in one of the villages—Crossley or Heath Field or Ashington. Darren’s family must have been loaded.

“It’s not a haven,” Darren said. “It’s not a comprehensive, but it’s not a haven.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean private school has bullies too.”

Jayden flinched. The word was like a barb under his skin. He wasn’t bullied. He wasn’t. He just…didn’t have an easy time at school. He wasn’t…

“A victim.”

“Sorry?”

“I’m not a victim,” Jayden mumbled, but he could hear himself and how he sounded. “I mean…it’s not that bad. I’m not, you know…”

“Jayden. I asked if you were gay. You reacted like I’d got out a penknife and expressed my intention to carve ‘Oscar Wilde’s b***h’ into your chest.”

Jayden clenched his jaw and stared intently at Darren’s violin on the floor.

“That kid on Tuesday…”

“Canning.”

“Whatever. He the only one?”

“No.”

“What do they do?”

Jayden snorted. “Call me names, mostly. I mean, it’s not fun, you know, I don’t like it, but it is mostly just name-calling. Since we got mixed up into the GCSE classes, I don’t share lessons with most of them anymore. And when I do…you know, they write on my things, they rip up my work. They’ve stolen my blazer a few times. It’s, you know, little stuff. It’s not that bad. Really, it’s not.”

“So why do you sound like you’re trying to convince yourself, not me?”

“Let’s not talk about this,” Jayden pleaded. He sounded pathetic and he knew it, but he didn’t want to talk about this. He didn’t want to tell Darren what it was like—Darren, who probably didn’t have the first idea about…about being gay at a school like Woodbourne. Darren wasn’t even gay—or probably wasn’t, and if he was, anyway, surely he would have said something on Tuesday? So he wasn’t. So he had no idea.

“You don’t know what it’s like. Everyone at school knows I’m gay.”

“It is kind of hard to miss.”

“How?”

Darren shrugged. “I don’t know. It just is. You just…I don’t know. You style your hair, for one, and I mean you obviously spent a good half hour getting it right. I barely comb mine. You talk with your hands too much. It’s a little girly, I have to say it. You’re too put-together. I wouldn’t say you’re effeminate, exactly, but it’s only just. You just really don’t look like the type who’d like to get to know that barista in Costa.”

Jayden snorted with a sudden wave of laughter, but he heard the tinge to it. He felt the tinge to it. There was a burning in his throat, and he was close to tears, but he was not going to do it. He wasn’t going to go and cry all over Darren. Not when Darren was giving him that almost-sympathetic face and coaxing the details out of him and pitying him.

“Hey.” Darren leaned over and squeezed his knee, peering up at Jayden’s face. His eyes, Jayden noticed again, were simply stunning. “It’s just a bunch of idiots whose lives are too pathetic to be bothered with, so they go bothering yours. And eventually this Canning guy will find an equally skanky girl and they’ll settle down for about a year and half and have a baby—maybe two, if he’s quick enough with his d**k—and a pit bull terrier, and then he’ll spent the rest of his life unemployed and bouncing from slag to slag until he drinks himself to death on the floor of a crappy pub in a crappy town centre somewhere. Probably here. And you’ll be off writing plays and being stupidly successful or whatever it is you people who like English do.”

Jayden took a deep, shaking breath, and squeezed Darren’s wrist. “Thanks,” he croaked. Darren’s hand was warm through his school trousers, and Jayden frowned down at it without really seeing it for a brief second before it clicked. “Oh, my God, you have really big hands.”

Darren rolled his eyes and withdrew it. “I’m trying to be supportive here, and you insult my hands?”

“I didn’t insult them, I just…they’re really big!” They were. Darren’s middle finger must have been a good inch longer than Jayden’s, and his palm could actually form a cup around his kneecap.

“Not the only thing I have a big pair of,” Darren said, draining his cup and almost rolling up out of the chair to throw it away, grace in every inch of him. Jayden went magenta at the words—and the implication—and he bit down his lip to silence that voice in his head again when it decided to notice just how fluidly Darren could move.

“Umm…” Jayden tried.

“I meant my feet,” Darren threw over his shoulder, tossing the cup into the bin by stage left. “Perv,” he added.

Jayden thought his face was going to spontaneously combust. “Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I’m checking you out,” he managed by the time Darren returned to his chair. He tried for cool and condescending, but it came out as more of a squeak.

“Shame,” Darren said. “Flirting aside, I do have to finish this composition. You’re welcome to hang around while I bore myself to death with the same four notes over and over again.”

“Why only four?”

“That’s the assignment.” Darren shrugged.

“Okay.” Jayden managed to calm his heartbeat and his flushed face, gathering his abandoned bag and half-finished Costa cup and retreat to the first row of seats. “I’ll just be a tiny audience over here. Sketching out the third act while you bore yourself.”

“Sounds good to me.”

And to you, the helpful voice in Jayden’s head supplied, and he ignored it. Or, at least, he tried.

* * * *