Free All Names Have Been Changed by Claire Kilroy Page B

concert hall was to be their first night out in some time.
    The pair arrived early and purchased interval drinks – one glass of white wine, a gin and tonic – before taking their seats up on the yellow balcony. The seats were excellent, commanding an impressive view, having been booked well in advance under the guidance of the nice man in the ticket office, who advised them to sit slightly to the left if they wanted to see the pianist’s hands (they had nodded their heads: yes please! ). The old ladies looked around to see who else was in, and were pleased to recognise more than a few faces, who recognised them in turn. Yes, it was splendid. The world had not changed as much as they’d feared. However – and there was always a ‘However’ in Faye’s work – as the two-minute curtain call sounded, another couple, a middle-aged man and his wife, arrived and hovered unhappily over the little old ladies, who smiled sweetly up at them, wondering if they were acquainted. Their faces didn’t ring a bell.
    The couple looked at their tickets, then down at the little old ladies, then back at their tickets again. There were no empty seats left in the row. The man cleared his throat and mentioned that the two ladies were occupying his seats. The little old ladies blinked. How papery their powdered skin looked under the auditorium lights. Faye deployed a deft simile to capture their fright, though the phrasing escapes me now. Much bluster was to follow. The couple showed the old ladies their tickets, and, sure enough, this second set also read Row J, Seats 15 and 16. The old ladies declined to move. The middle-aged couple continued to unhappily hover. A hush fell over the rows behind. Two tickets for the same seat had been printed by accident, and the concert was a sell-out. What would happen next?
    The middle-aged couple summoned the usher, a smart young woman, who, after a brisk examination of both sets of tickets, pointed out as tactfully as she was able that the old ladies’ concert wasn’t until the following evening. The little old ladies had to hurriedly collect their belongings and vacate the seats, as the recital was already late in commencing.
    Faye’s evocation of their humiliation as they were escorted to the back of the hall was as masterful as it was poignant. Applause met their exit as the soloist appeared on stage (a violinist! – how had they missed the absence of a grand piano on stage?). It wasn’t until the two were travelling home in silence on the lower deck of the bus that they realised they’d forgotten their interval drinks. Each lady arrived at this discovery independently, but both made the decision not to mention it to the other. It was as complete an exposition of disappointment as I had ever read.
    ‘Would it not be better,’ Glynn suggested after some moments consideration, ‘if the usher pointed out that the two tickets were for yesterday instead? In your version, the two little old ladies get a second chance, because they get to do it all over again the following evening.’
    There was a sort of collective aha in the room, causing our chairs to creak beneath us. Aha, of course, perfect. That was the difference between Glynn and an ordinary writer, that ability to locate tragedy in the inappreciable details. Faye pencilled in his recommendation.
    Guinevere then read an extract from Hartman, the novel she’d been working on for some months, the eponymous protagonist of which was an ageing American insurance broker with a cardiac complaint,failed husband twice over and parent to three outstandingly disaffected grown-up children, none of them his own.
    This willingness to explore a complete stranger’s messy and largely self-inflicted personal setbacks seemed less to me at the time an audacious act of imagining on Guinevere’s part – a young Irishwoman narrating the inner life of a decrepit Bostonian about whom she could have known next to nothing: Guinevere hadn’t even been to the