He held his hands in place for a moment or two longer than necessary, the contact caressing and reassuring. Then he removed them.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
“I know. What a hoard!”
The room was packed from floor to ceiling with antique percussion instruments, most of them in perfect condition, if a little neglected.
Vanessa twisted her neck to look up at Ben, standing behind her.
“Must be worth a bit of money,” he said. “But look at these cowbells. I reckon they date back to the first performance of Mahler’s Sixth.”
He put out a hand and rang one of the rusting instruments. Its slightly off-key clangour reverberated around the room.
“My God, this drum!” Vanessa knelt reverently before a hundred-year-old kettledrum, tracing patterns in the dust that lay on its calfskin drumhead. “What a beautiful thing. Just beautiful.”
“I stumbled across this room the other day,” said Ben softly. “I thought you’d like it.”
She looked back at him. It was if the tension rods around the drum’s surface were stretching the air, too. His face was taut and his eyes burned.
“You were right,” she said. “Thank you for showing me. I want to buy this drum. I wonder if there’s a way. Who can we ask?”
“I don’t know,” said Ben. “There are timpani sticks over here—every kind you can possibly imagine. Do you want to give it a bash?”
“Ben! You don’t give an instrument like this a bash! You treat it like the precious thing it is.”
But she went to select a few from the vast variety of sticks—some wrapped in felt, some in cork, others in leather, even a couple in expensive chamois.
She bounced them off the drum, gingerly at first, then with a little more confidence.
“Can you hear that timbre?” she called to Ben, drumming away, swapping sticks every so often. “Just sensational.”
“Yeah,” he echoed gently. “Sensational.”
She stopped playing and turned to face him. There was no mistaking the expression on his face. No mistaking it at all.
She felt absurdly nervous, tapping the head of the drumstick into her palm.
They seemed to have fallen into an extended game of Who Will Crack and Break the Silence?
He lost.
“When I came up for my audition,” he said, “and watched the orchestra in rehearsal, you were playing just like that.”
“You remember?”
“I’ll always remember. It was Borodin, Polovtsian Dances. You looked like the spirit of that music, so strong and driven and passionate. I thought, ‘Now that’s a real woman. A woman I can work with.’ I was right.”
“Work with?” Vanessa could barely whisper the words.
“Or…you know…” He leant forward. The dust motes in the air between them shimmered. His skin, up this close, was so young and smooth it was almost like wax. How did it feel?
She put her hand on his cheek.
“Not just work with. I mean…”
He gave up the awkward romance talk and shut his eyes, nuzzling his head into her palm as if in ecstasy. Then he opened them, wide and bright, put a hand behind Vanessa’s neck and pulled her straight into a kiss.
She wondered for a moment if she ought to put up token resistance. Maybe she should pull away, look shocked, splutter ‘Young man!’ But that would mean losing precious seconds of this glorious re-initiation into experiences she had thought never to repeat. A kiss, so simple and yet so devastating. She should have missed kissing more.