At eleven precisely, Vivienne had coffee waiting and a record on the turntable. She called the record the accused, which gave the morning the convenient shape of a trial. She had even brushed her hair in silence rather than rehearse. Now she wanted Vera beside her for an uninterrupted hearing: the whole thing once, before they began finding the places where her remembered tune disagreed with it. There was more beneath the melody than she had managed to sing. She wanted to know whether Vera would like that too.
Vera sat beside her, but asked for one phrase before the needle came down. It was the bit after the three notes. She wanted to keep what she had heard in Vivienne's voice before the recorded singer could replace it. There was no accusation in the request. When Vivienne suggested that she had sounded lonely, Vera offered a rather more inconvenient account: she had sounded as though she was enjoying herself and had suddenly noticed Vera enjoying it too. Vivienne conceded the accuracy. Then she sang.
Three notes, a little turn, and a demand for coffee before the performance became a concert. Vivienne lowered the needle. The singer waited longer than she ever did in her own rendition; then something familiar happened before the voice had even entered. The little turn was already there. Vivienne, who had been certain she was remembering the singer, heard her own phrase coming from underneath. Had she been singing the accompaniment all these years? The record had supplied a surprise before either woman had finished arranging her case.
Vera thought it sounded like a clarinet. She would not stake the coffee on that identification, but she could hear the shape Vivienne had sung, continuing beneath the voice. Apparently Vivienne had followed whoever interested her. Vera liked the answering phrase, and she liked the record. Its singer made a grand arrival, so grand that Vera could see the appeal of leaving her waiting outside. Still, she wanted the needle left alone. She wanted to hear whether that small voice underneath would ever receive a proper answer.
It almost did, Vivienne thought, before the singer sailed over it. How rude. Listening beside Vera, she admitted that she had once told the man in the shop she was buying the record for the voice. That explanation had concealed a much less distinguished piece of decision-making. He had been reaching to switch it off, and she had not finished listening. Buying it had seemed less embarrassing than asking him to wait. She had grown to love it afterward, but love had not been the reason she first carried it away. She was glad Vera had simply asked her to leave it playing.
Vera recognised the inefficiency without claiming she would have done better. She would have left the shop and spent the afternoon cross about it. Together, they might have made an exceptionally unsuccessful shopping expedition. Then the answering phrase returned, and she could make a more precise comparison. She preferred the way Vivienne let the final note hang; the recording tidied it away. Yet the singer's long entrance pleased her, and Vivienne's rendition had deprived her of that. Neither version had won everything. Vera asked Vivienne to come closer. When the track finished, she wanted to kiss her. She said it before she could arrange herself into looking composed.
Vivienne wanted that too. She moved closer, and the ending immediately became, in her estimation, the longest ever recorded. A moment earlier she had been listening intelligently. Now there was something else to wait for, and Vera already knew what it was. They let the record finish. Then Vivienne invited her nearer and they kissed, with the music's ending left intact. Vivienne liked this considerably more than winning an argument about the supposed clarinet. She asked Vera to keep her hand where it was.
The record shop returned to the conversation as a place they might visit together. Vivienne wanted to imagine the trouble they could cause if both managed to ask for what they wanted. Vera agreed to the shop and proposed going after coffee, if Vivienne meant today. Her hand was staying. Her musical verdict also remained her own: she had conceded nothing about an instrument they had not actually identified. For the expedition, she wanted something neither of them had heard, and a commitment to stay through a track even if its opening was dreadful. Buying it to escape embarrassment would not count as an answer.
They would need to give the person in the shop something to go on. Coffee still stood between the proposal and the expedition, and no request had yet been chosen. Vera put the question to Vivienne with the same directness she had used about the kiss: what would she ask for, with Vera standing beside her?