Chapter 299
“Well, you’re here, aren’t you?”
Jayden smiled. “Okay, I get it. Still,” he squeezed Darren’s elbow, “I’m glad you could do this. You’ve liked it, haven’t you? Being able to play something again?”
Darren shrugged. “Yeah, guess so.”
The church door boomed open, and Paul appeared. “Oi!” he called up. “You ready? We’ve said people can go in and get seated to the music.”
Darren gave him a thumbs-up and seated himself. Jayden stooped to kiss him once more, at the very corner of his mouth, before darting away to the main door and back out into the sunlight.
“He ready?” Paul asked as a couple of testing, tentative notes started up inside. They faded away again quickly.
“Yeah,” Jayden said, and Paul cupped his hands around his mouth.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” he bellowed, and half of London heard him. Jayden grimaced. “If you could please go in and take your seats, the soon-to-be Mrs. Summerskill will be arriving soon and we want everyone INSIDE before she gets here! Move, people!”
A few laughed; an elderly lady, possibly a grandmother of someone, looked sour, and Paul beamed cheerfully at her. The piano started up in earnest as the doors opened, but it was nothing Darren had composed: Jayden vaguely recognised it as the piano version of Clocks. It bounced cheerily around the eaves and exposed rafters, rattled off the glass saints and wooden Jesus, and weaved between the pews as the guests picked their sides and seats and the noise began to quiet under the airy, casual might of the piano.
Jayden was shown to a seat only two rows behind Ethan’s family, and with a perfect view of that piano and its player. Darren ignored them all, his focus on the keys and the music, his beauty tempered by the ease and grace in his huge hands and the gentle sway of his upper body with the music.
Jayden had simply forgotten what it was like to watch him play.
When the piano died away, Darren left it briefly to approach Ethan, in place at the front of the church as the vicar arranged his books and notes, and clasped his hand, whispering some luck or congratulations in low tones. Ethan looked sick with fear, but gripped Darren’s hand back, and even gave in to a brief hug. Jayden simply smiled, and waved Darren back to the piano when he received a glance.
“Good luck,” he mouthed, and Darren grinned. The grin that Jayden remembered from The Brightside, all those years ago with that long-lost violin. The self-assured, cocky, confident grin. The mime on the stage for a mad character; the living prop. Darren at his best and brightest.
And most beautiful. He, and that play, had been the best idea that Jayden had ever had in hislife
The church quieted as a car pulled up outside, and the flash of photography punched sporadically through the doors. The vicar raised a hand to someone just beyond the doors and nodded to Darren. Ethan looked like he was going to hurl.
And Darren began to play.
Jayden caught his breath as the first strains of a light and beautiful composition, entirely original he was sure, floated from the piano as softly and gracefully as a breath of summer. It curled around the flowers and the vicar’s ankles like a friendly cat; it drifted into the air like smoke from a wood-burner, gentle and near-invisible. It was the slow burn of a lively spring into a heady summer; it was the wash and ebb of a still sea on a lonely shore. It was the stars coming out, one by one, and the silent reminder that they were there at all, unobtrusive and patient. It swelled in the middle, and thinned at the edges, like a universe of its own, and as the hushed murmurs and brilliant smiles followed the bride down the aisle, the music rose up to meet her, the edges of power curling around the sides of the beauty and shoring them up, like a ship sailing out for the horizon, or a shuttle coming in to land: unstoppable and enormous in itself, and yet silent and beautiful to the observer.
Lillian reached the altar, and the music died away in the faint shimmers and twinkles, like the dying sun after a long and brilliant dusk. It is said that every bride looks beautiful on her wedding day, but Jayden didn’t even see her in the church that day.
He watched Darren, for the entire ceremony, and was aware of nothing else. As though it had never happened before, and even more strongly than the first time, Jayden Phillips fell in love. All over again.
* * * *
29
Paul’s best man speech brought the house down.