disappear into the dark, then next thing, Mr. Gardner was pushing a lot of notes into my hand. I told him it was way too much, that anyway it was a huge honour for me, but he wouldn’t hear of taking any of it back.
“No, no,” he said, waving his hand in front of his face, like he wanted to be done, not just with the money, but with me, the evening, maybe this whole section of his life. He started to walk off towards his palazzo, but after a few paces, he stopped and turned back to look at me. The little street we were in, the canal, everything was silent now except for the distant sound of a television.
“You played well tonight, my friend,” he said. “You have a nice touch.”
“Thank you, Mr. Gardner. And you sang great. As great as ever.”
“Maybe I’ll come by the square again before we leave. Listen to you playing with your crew.”
“I hope so, Mr. Gardner.”
But I never saw him again. I heard a few months later, in the autumn, that Mr. and Mrs. Gardner got their divorce—one of the waiters at the Florian read it somewhere and told me. It all came back to me then about that evening, and it made me feel a little sad thinking about it again. Because Mr. Gardner had seemed a pretty decent guy, and whichever way you look at it, comeback or no comeback, he’ll always be one of the greats.
COME RAIN OR COME SHINE
L IKE ME, EMILY LOVED old American popular songs. She’d go more for the up-tempo numbers, like Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” and Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” while I’d lean towards the bitter-sweet ballads—“Here’s That Rainy Day” or “It Never Entered My Mind.” But there was a big overlap, and anyway, back then, on a university campus in the south of England, it was a near-miracle to find anyone else who shared such passions. Today, a young person’s likely to listen to any sort of music. My nephew, who starts university this autumn, is going through his Argentinian tango phase. He also likes Edith Piaf as well as any number of the latest indie bands. But in our day tastes weren’t nearly so diverse. My fellow students fell into two broad camps: the hippie types with their long hair and flowing garments who liked “progressive rock,” and the neat, tweedy ones who considered anything other than classical music a horrible din. Occasionally you’d bump into someone who professed to be into jazz, but this would always turn out to be of the so-called crossover kind—endless improvisations with no respect for the beautifully crafted songs used as their starting points.
So it was a relief to discover someone else, and a girl at that, who appreciated the Great American Songbook. Like me, Emily collected LPs with sensitive, straightforward vocal interpretations of the standards—you could often find such records going cheap in junk shops, discarded by our parents’ generation. She favoured Sarah Vaughan and Chet Baker. I preferred Julie London and Peggy Lee. Neither of us was big on Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald.
In that first year, Emily lived in college, and she had in her room a portable record player, a type that was quite common then. It looked like a large hat box, with pale-blue leatherette surfaces and a single built-in speaker. Only when you raised its lid would you see the turntable sitting inside. It gave out a pretty primitive sound by today’s standards, but I remember us crouching around it happily for hours, taking off one track, carefully lowering the needle down onto another. We loved playing different versions of the same song, then arguing about the lyrics, or about the singers’ interpretations. Was that line really supposed to be sung so ironically? Was it better to sing “Georgia on My Mind” as though Georgia was a woman or the place in America? We were especially pleased when we found a recording—like Ray Charles singing “Come Rain or Come Shine”—where the words themselves were happy, but the interpretation was pure
London Casey, Karolyn James