their standard uniform of oxford shirt and chinos, complete with tired sags in the fabric after a long shift. I was a nursing student, there for the free sandwiches and glass of warm white wine. His dark sandy hair fell over his forehead rakishly, and he had a lovely symmetrical, fine-featured face that was handsome in an old-fashioned way. His eyes were a piercing blue, intense and captivating. Ben was lucky enough to inherit those eyes.
Our first conversation was about music, and on that evening, when I was tired of socialising and a little tired of life, it was a tonic. John spoke in a way that was earnest, but gentle too. He asked me if I knew that Bristol had one of the finest concert halls in the country. It was small, he said, in a beautiful neo-classical nineteenth-century church building, and the acoustics were spectacularly good.
He had a lack of pretension when he spoke that I liked instantly. His inbuilt, unquestioning respect for culture transported me back to conversations overheard at my Aunt Esther’s cottage, the place I grew up in, and suddenly I felt as if my life had been drifting for too long, and that it was time to stop.
A week later, we sat in St George’s concert hall, waiting for the concert to begin. It’s a fine, elegant building, built on the side of lovely, leafy Brandon Hill, just a stone’s throw from the shops on Park Street. It’s opposite the Georgian House, which Ben has since visited on a school trip, but at the time I hadn’t known either place existed.
It was a full house. Tickets had been hard to come by. John was animated, full of information. He pointed out the place where a German firebomb fell through the roof one night in 1942, when the building was still in use as a church, and landed on the altar unexploded.
He talked about himself too. He told me that he used to play the violin, that his mother had been a concert-class performer, and his home had been full of music as a child. He told me that work was going well, and that he’d just decided to specialise in general paediatric surgery. I got a sense that his interest in all things was intense, thoughtful and absorbing, whether it was music, architecture, or the small bodies and lives of his patients. He had a rare sensitivity.
The concert began. A violinist, dressed in black, stood centre stage and, with utmost care, he freed the first few notes from his instrument, and they hung crisply in the air around us. He played with an elegance that captivated and seduced, and I felt John relax beside me. When his hand brushed mine and he didn’t move it away, it seemed to give me balance. When he gently held my fingers in his, it felt like a counterpoint to the emotional intensity of the music, and also an encouragement to let myself feel it, become absorbed by it.
This memory: the music, the feelings, flashed through my mind in the car. It was as if I wanted to rewind my life back to that point, and start it over again, to hold on to that perfect moment, so that what came afterwards wouldn’t turn to crap, wouldn’t lead us to now. Which was impossible, of course, because the memory was gone as soon as it arrived. The reality was that instead of comforting me, the cold grip of John’s fingers felt desperate and futile, just as mine must have done to him.
The traffic stayed slow as we travelled through the city centre: taillights and signposts, concrete shapes and scud clouds under a granite sky. The River Avon disappeared and then reappeared on the other side of the road, brown and choppy still, a shopping trolley abandoned on the far bank. I kept my eye on the water, tracking its progress into the city, because I couldn’t stand to look at the people outside the car, all the people who were having an ordinary Monday at the start of an ordinary week, the people who knew where their children were.
The police station was a large concrete cuboid building, Brutalist in style. It was three storeys high, with tall
Our first conversation was about music, and on that evening, when I was tired of socialising and a little tired of life, it was a tonic. John spoke in a way that was earnest, but gentle too. He asked me if I knew that Bristol had one of the finest concert halls in the country. It was small, he said, in a beautiful neo-classical nineteenth-century church building, and the acoustics were spectacularly good.
He had a lack of pretension when he spoke that I liked instantly. His inbuilt, unquestioning respect for culture transported me back to conversations overheard at my Aunt Esther’s cottage, the place I grew up in, and suddenly I felt as if my life had been drifting for too long, and that it was time to stop.
A week later, we sat in St George’s concert hall, waiting for the concert to begin. It’s a fine, elegant building, built on the side of lovely, leafy Brandon Hill, just a stone’s throw from the shops on Park Street. It’s opposite the Georgian House, which Ben has since visited on a school trip, but at the time I hadn’t known either place existed.
It was a full house. Tickets had been hard to come by. John was animated, full of information. He pointed out the place where a German firebomb fell through the roof one night in 1942, when the building was still in use as a church, and landed on the altar unexploded.
He talked about himself too. He told me that he used to play the violin, that his mother had been a concert-class performer, and his home had been full of music as a child. He told me that work was going well, and that he’d just decided to specialise in general paediatric surgery. I got a sense that his interest in all things was intense, thoughtful and absorbing, whether it was music, architecture, or the small bodies and lives of his patients. He had a rare sensitivity.
The concert began. A violinist, dressed in black, stood centre stage and, with utmost care, he freed the first few notes from his instrument, and they hung crisply in the air around us. He played with an elegance that captivated and seduced, and I felt John relax beside me. When his hand brushed mine and he didn’t move it away, it seemed to give me balance. When he gently held my fingers in his, it felt like a counterpoint to the emotional intensity of the music, and also an encouragement to let myself feel it, become absorbed by it.
This memory: the music, the feelings, flashed through my mind in the car. It was as if I wanted to rewind my life back to that point, and start it over again, to hold on to that perfect moment, so that what came afterwards wouldn’t turn to crap, wouldn’t lead us to now. Which was impossible, of course, because the memory was gone as soon as it arrived. The reality was that instead of comforting me, the cold grip of John’s fingers felt desperate and futile, just as mine must have done to him.
The traffic stayed slow as we travelled through the city centre: taillights and signposts, concrete shapes and scud clouds under a granite sky. The River Avon disappeared and then reappeared on the other side of the road, brown and choppy still, a shopping trolley abandoned on the far bank. I kept my eye on the water, tracking its progress into the city, because I couldn’t stand to look at the people outside the car, all the people who were having an ordinary Monday at the start of an ordinary week, the people who knew where their children were.
The police station was a large concrete cuboid building, Brutalist in style. It was three storeys high, with tall
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