AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She couldn’t respond, could only wait while he spoke to the others, reassuring them, encouraging them. He looked impeccable in white tie and tails, but she could see the tension in him in every line of his slight body. She could hear the audience starting to applaud and the tuning up of the players in the orchestra die away as Max, their conductor for the evening, took the podium.
She tried to breathe, but couldn’t. She wanted to die. Anything—anything at all to avoid having to do what she was going to have to do. What she had been preparing for all her life. What she had worked for in every waking second, allowing nothing else to lay claim to an instant of her time, a moment of her concentration.
Least of all the man who had done what he had to her. Least of all him. The man who was despicable beyond all men, thinking what he had of her, judging and condemning her as he had, while all the while...all the while...
He made love to me and thought me nothing better than a cheap little gold-digger. Right from the start—from the very moment he laid eyes on me. Everything was a lie—everything! Every moment I spent with him was a lie. And he knew it the whole time!
No, she had not allowed such vicious, agonizing thoughts into her head. Not one. She’d kept them all at bay—along with all those unbearable texts and voicemails that she’d deleted without reading or listening to. Deleted and destroyed, telling him to go to hell and stay there. Never, ever to get in touch again.
Because all there was in her life now was her voice—her voice and her work. She had worked like a demon, like one possessed, and blocked out everything else in the universe. And now this moment, right now, had come. And she wanted to die.
Dear God, please let me do OK. Please let me get it right—for me, for all of us. Please.
Then the small chorus was filing out on to the stage, and a moment later she heard Max start the brief overture. She felt faint with nerves. As they took their places the familiar music, every note of which she knew in every cell of her body, started to wind its way through the synapses of her stricken brain. The curtain rose, revealing the cavern of the auditorium beyond, and now the chorus was starting their low, haunting chant—their invocation to vanishing peace as the storm clouds of war gathered.
She felt her legs tremble, turning to jelly. Her voice had gone. Completely gone. Vanished into the ether. There was nothing—nothing in her but silence...
She saw the glare of the stage lights, the dimness of the auditorium beyond, and on his podium Max, lifting his baton for her entrance cue. She fixed her eyes on him, took a breath.
And her voice came.
High and pure and true. And nothing else in the universe existed any more except her voice.
* * *
Unseen, high above in the gods, Bastiaan sat motionless and heard her sing.
The knife in his guts twisted with every note she sang.
For the whole duration of the opera, as it wound to its sombre conclusion, Bastiaan could not move a muscle, his whole being riveted on the slender figure on the stage. Only once did he stir, his expression changing. During the heartrending aria of grief for her young husband’s death, with the agony of loss in every note. His eyes shadowed. The poignancy of the music, of her high, keening voice, struck deep within him.
Then the drama moved on to its final scene, to her song to the unborn child she carried, destined to be another soldier, in yet another war. And she, the War Bride, would become in her turn the Soldier’s Mother, destined to bury her son, comfort his widow—the next War Bride, carrying the next unborn soldier...
As her voice faded the light on the stage faded too, until there was only a single narrow spot upon her. And then that, too, faded, leaving only the unseen chorus to close the timeless tragedy with a chorale of mourning for lives yet to be lost in future conflicts. Until silence and darkness fell completely.
For a palpable moment there was complete stillness in the house—and then the applause started. And it did not stop. Did not stop as the stage lights came up and the cast were there, Sarah, and the other soloists stepping forward. The applause intensified and the audience were rising to their feet as Max walked out on to the stage with Anton at his side, and then both of them were taking Sarah by the hand, leading her forward to a crescendo of applause.
Bastiaan’s palms were stinging, but still the applause continued, and still his eyes were only for her—for Sarah—now dropping hands with Max, calling her tenor forward, and the other soloists too, to take their share of the ovation, breaking the line to let the chorus take theirs, and then all the cast joined in with applause for the orchestra taking their bows.
He could see her expression—beatific, transfigured.
He could stay still no longer. He rose from his seat, jolted down the staircase to the ground floor, out into the fresh night air. His heart was pounding, but not from exertion. Walking swiftly, purposefully, he pushed open the stage door, walked up to the concierge’s booth.
‘This is for Max Defarge. See that he gets it this evening.’ He placed the long white envelope he’d taken from his inside jacket pocket into his hand, along with a hundred-euro note to ensure his instruction was fulfilled. Then he walked away.
He couldn’t do this. What the hell had he been thinking? That he could just swan into her dressing room the way he had that first night he’d seen her sing?
Seen Sabine sing—not Sarah!
But the woman he’d heard tonight had not been Sabine—had been as distant from Sabine as he was from the stars in the sky. That knife twisted in his guts again, the irony like acid in his veins. That he should now crave only the woman he had thrown away....distrusted and destroyed.
His mobile phone vibrated. Absently he took it out—it was a text from Philip.
Bast, you missed a sensation! Sarah was brilliant and the audience is going wild! Gutted you aren’t here. Am staying for the after-party soon as the audience clears. Can’t wait to hug her!
He didn’t answer, just slid the phone away. His heart as heavy as lead.
CHAPTER TWELVE
