Her Name Is Rose Read Online Free PDF

the recital hall. Roger returns five minutes before the master class and just nods to her as if nothing has happened. He doesn’t offer any explanation or apology. She opens her case and gets ready. She’s up first. Bowen before Ferguson and Kowowski. She steps to the stage in a sort of half dream. Dust motes swirl in the glare of the stage lights. She doesn’t look out at the audience of fifty or so. She doesn’t want to see the gathered students and their parents and the other professors come to assess the best of the academy’s talent. She settles her chin and begins. She plays her heart out. She keeps the melodic contours without losing the balance. Her phrasing is intense but elegant. She is playing it beautifully.
    But she is wrong.
    â€œWrong. Wrong. Wrong,” Roger Ballantyne says, taking center stage. “Stop moving, Rose. You look like you’re trying to draw pictures with your scroll.” He looks to the audience, as if he’s said something clever. “You are playing too fast between the sections. Wait … until … the sound … comes out and we can hear the change of colors.”
    She continues. Louder. But over her playing, he is calling, “Don’t be so polite. It’s Gypsy music! Play it like it was written.”
    She plays. He is strutting on the stage. “Your vibrato is exaggerated.”
    She tries to exaggerate less.
    â€œIt sounds like you are ironing the strings. Rose!” There’s an actual murmur from the audience. Stifled laughter? “Make them sing like a song. Let them breaaaaathe.”
    Roger crosses the stage and picks up his violin. “How you manage to make Bach sound sterile, I don’t know.” Rose stops as Roger starts into the fugue, to demonstrate. He’s superb, of course, and when his attention is focused on the audience, lost in his own magnificence, Rose grabs her case, violin, and bow and walks out. She doesn’t look back and she squeezes her tears. She hopes for one moment Roger will call after her, she hopes he will stop performing and call her back, that he will feel her humiliation. But he doesn’t. Murmuring from the audience doesn’t stop him. It’s all about him. He has his audience, and plays on.
    The next moment Rose is into the cool corridor. She kneels down and puts her violin in the case, then gets up and keeps walking, pushing out the front doors until she is out onto the rainy, steamy street. Too wet to walk back to Camden.
    *   *   *
    Five o’clock and the mood of the crowds on the busy night on Baker Street is a clash-and-bang cacophony. Rose jostles her way to the tube platform, barely conscious of where she is. She stands, hollow and waiting. When her train comes she steps inside just as the doors close. They catch her violin case. She tugs it free and loses her balance. A man beside steadies her. Collapsing into a seat, she hoists the case onto her lap and stares at the black mirror of reflected faces and lights as the train whirs through the tunnel. At King’s Cross she gets out to change to the Northern Line. Up the escalator, a hundred bodies judder as one, except for Rose Bowen, who stands immobilized, apart, void of thought or emotion. Euston. Mornington Crescent. Rose gets out at Camden. As the train pulls away, she stands on the platform and looks back into the carriage. The doors close and when the train shudders into motion, she watches her violin topple from where she has left it leaning against the window. It slides down onto the seat. Then off it heads. Chalk Farm, Belsize Park, Hampstead, Golders Green, Brent Cross, Hendon, Colindale, Burnt Oak, Edgware.
    Gone.

 
    Three
    It had been Luke who’d decided what they should name their baby. When Iris suggested Poppy he’d turned his eyes upward.
    â€œNo, Iris, be serious! Poppy? Come on. Her name should be Rose.”
    After four years of waiting, Iris would