Devotion. Louisa Young

he watched her, and a smile lingered, at her square shoulders, her gentleness, her courtesy and quiet enthusiasms.

      ‘Your voice hasn’t changed at all,’ he said. ‘It’s no more English. Does it still get more American when you’ve relaxed?’

      ‘Uh huh,’ she said. ‘Or excited.’

      ‘Or on stage?’

      She smiled.

      Then he bought all the records she had shown him, and took her to the Gay Hussar for the fastest goulash ever known. She told him not to come back with her, but he was waiting outside at five thirty, and only by agreeing to his coming along that evening could she get rid of him for a couple of hours before she started work.

      Mabel was living in two rooms at the top of a narrow rickety Georgian house in Lexington Street, Soho. All afternoon she had been thinking, and she was thinking now, heading over there, and indeed she had been thinking for twelve years. But now a great big snake had been slid down, and she had to make her decisions. She had a half-formed song in her mind, and as was her habit she was working through it as she walked, because Lord knows when she’d be able to sit down at a piano and finish it. The melody was bluesy but pure, E minor, and the lyric was a Bible verse: Take ye heed, watch and pray, for ye know not when the hour is … She’d assumed it was about death, and maybe it was, but yeah, it could be about anything. Ye know not when the hour is.

      The tall black door was open onto the pavement and Reginald, the Jamaican trombone player who lived below her, greeted her as she slid past him into the shaded hall. She smiled, and gave thanks that she was no longer provoked into hunger and envy by the frying smells dripping down the stairs from his room. The goulash had been huge – and they had been sitting in a dark corner, so when Peter had left the table she had shamelessly taken the larger pieces of meat from her bowl, wrapped them in her smooth white napkin, and stuffed the package, fraught with the potential to leak gravy, into her bag. She didn’t really need to do that sort of thing any more, but she couldn’t abide waste. She was sorry if the loss of the napkin would cause trouble for any of the staff. She would bring it back. The meat she knew did not count as theft, as it was Peter’s gift. He would, she thought – would he?