Nocturne with Bonus Material

NOCTURNE
With Bonus Material

A Short Story

Deborah Crombie

Bestselling Author of
No Mark Upon Her

Contents

Nocturne
A Short Story

“Tell me about the piano.” Kit McClellan sat in the chair nearest the gas fire in his friend Erika Rosenthal's red-walled sitting room, cradling a cup of hot cocoa. Erika always insisted on serving their drinks in her best gold-rimmed porcelain—she said there was no point in having nice things if you didn't use them. The elegant china suited Erika, tiny as a bird, with her snow-white hair and sparkling dark eyes, but the delicate cup looked fragile in Kit's hands.

“You're going to have your father's hands, I think,” said Erika, as if she, too, had noticed the contrast. At fourteen, Kit's hands and feet seemed to be growing faster than the rest of him, but he was shooting up in height as well.

Since Kit's daily route from his school to his home near the top of Notting Hill took him along Ladbroke Grove, Erika's flat in Arundel Gardens made a perfect stop along the way—and then there was the lure of the German brownsugar cookies that Erika made especially for him. The cocoa, Erika had assured him, was just the thing for this cold October afternoon, and he hadn't protested when she'd added shavings of the bittersweet German chocolate she loved.

Now that Gemma was home during the day, looking after little Charlotte until she was ready to start nursery school, Kit didn't need to hurry back to mind his six-year-old step-brother, Toby.

Gemma and his dad, Toby and Charlotte, and him. They were what the magazines called a “blended” family now, he supposed, as if someone had given them a whir in a kitchen mixer. A bit weird, but he was okay with it. And Erika had been an unexpected bonus.

Erika had been Gemma's friend first—they'd met when Gemma was investigating a case--but now Kit couldn't imagine a time when she hadn't been in his life. There wasn't any reason for him to hide his afternoon visits, except he found he liked having a bit of a secret. And God forbid if it somehow got round school that he chose to spend his time with an old lady.

Just exactly how old, Erika never said. But Kit knew she'd been just out of her teens, newly married, when she'd escaped from Berlin in 1939, and he could do the maths. She'd only been a few years older than he was now, he suddenly realized, and he tried to imagine himself doing what she had done.

“You've heard about the piano a dozen times,” said Erika when he'd finished his cookie. She set her cup—the chocolate barely tasted, he noticed—in its saucer with a precise little clink.

“All you've told me is that you found it during the war.” Kit settled more comfortably in his chair, stretching his long legs until the tip of his shoe just touched the leg of the grand piano that took pride of place in the sitting room. “You said it was in 1944, and it was right here in Notting Hill. You were living in this house.”

Erika nodded. “We were housed in this flat, yes, by one of the Jewish refugee committees. We were fortunate to get it.” She had long since bought the entire house but lived in the basement flat and let the upper floors as separate apartments. “I volunteered as an air raid warden. At first, the others were unfriendly because I was German. But there were other Jews here, some German, some Polish, some Czech, and after a while people got used to us.

“And then, when the bombing escalated, it didn't matter any longer. We all did what we could.” She fell silent for a moment, toying with the handle of her cup, then looked up at him with a twinkle in her eyes. “Every night, the people from the upper flats would come down with their mattresses and their thermos flasks, because this flat was the safest. Sometimes a little whisky was passed round, but mostly we were lucky to have tea. It was quite jolly when the bombs weren't falling.”

Kit grinned. “A sleepover.”

“Exactly. And then during the day we went about our business as if we were only casual acquaintances, which could be a little awkward if you knew that Mrs. Simmons snored, or Mr. Evans never washed his socks.”

“Ugh.”

“Well, in his defense, washing powder was hard to come by.”

“The piano,” Kit prompted, tapping the piano leg gently with his toe. Unlike Gemma's baby grand, with its mirror-polished finish that was black as the void, Erika's piano was a warm mahogany color.

“Ah, yes. The piano.” Erika's gaze grew distant. “It was in 1944, in August. The twenty-first, in fact, in the middle of the afternoon. I wasn't on air raid duty that day. I'd walked up to the shops in Holland Park Road to try to find something for tea when we heard it coming. They made the most distinctive sound, you know, the Doodlebugs. A sort of thrum-thrum. But there was never enough warning. This one sounded as if it would go right over, but then suddenly it was on top of us. Everyone dived for cover. I ended up under the counter at the greengrocer's.”

“Did it hit you?” Kit straightened up in the chair. The story had become uncomfortably real.

“Near enough to blow out all the glass in the shop windows along Holland Park Road. But it was a house on Aubrey Road that took the direct hit.”

Frowning, Kit drew the map in his mind. He knew Aubrey Road, a steep, leafy street that climbed Camden Hill on the south side of Holland Park Road. It was only a few minutes' walk from his house. “Just up from Holland Park Tube?” he asked.

Erika nodded. “We all ran and began digging through the rubble, although we hadn't much hope that anyone in the house would have survived. The place had collapsed in on itself as if it were made of cards.”

“But you didn't find anyone?”

“No. Nor did the ambulance men or the fire brigade when they arrived.”

“Except you found the piano?” said Kit, anticipating this part.

“Ah, yes. The piano. It had apparently been blown right into the front garden. And it was undamaged, except for one leg. None of the neighbors knew who lived in the house or where the owners might be, and no one wanted to take responsibility for the piano.”

“So you took it home.”

“I had no business taking it.” Erika shook her head, as if still surprised at her behavior. “But it was coming on to rain, and I couldn't let it be ruined. The greengrocer and some of the other men put it in the greengrocer's van and drove it down the hill. They had the devil of a time getting it through the front door.” She smiled at the memory. “I left my name and address with the neighbors and with all the shopkeepers along the road, and for months I waited, expecting the owner to ring the bell and claim it. After a while, I dared to hope that no one would.”

“Like finding a lost dog and hoping the owner won't collect it,” said Kit, thinking of his little terrier, Tess, found behind the supermarket near his grandparents' house in Reading.

“Exactly. At first, I wouldn't even allow myself to touch it. Then, as the weeks went by and no one came, I cleaned and polished it. I stabilized the broken leg with a stack of books. And then...” Erika closed her eyes and said softly, “I began to play. It was...magical.” When she looked at Kit again her dark eyes were bright with tears. “My mother played. I lost her when I was quite young, well before the war. It brought everything back. The pieces she'd taught me, the smell of her perfume when she sat beside me on the bench. I began to think that perhaps I would survive the war and that it was still possible to find joy in the world.”

Kit was silent, thinking of his own mother, wondering what he would give to feel so close to her again. Raising his cup to his lips he drank what remained of his cocoa even though it was cold. Searching for a change of subject, he put down his cup and asked, “What about the leg, then?”

“One of our neighbors was a carpenter. He mended it for me, in honor of VE Day, the following May. If you look closely, you can see the join.”

Following her glance, Kit studied the piano's right front leg. There was a very slight difference in the color of the wood about halfway down. He knelt and ran his fingers over the join. It was seamless. “He did a good job, your friend.”

“Saul. I remember he said there were some odd carvings underneath the piano, but he couldn't make anything of them.”

“Carvings?” Curious, Kit pushed the bench out of the way and slid on his back under the piano. He lay looking up, the way Toby and Charlotte liked to do when Gemma played the piano at home. But instead of feeling the vibration of the notes, he saw only a few cobwebs in the dark recesses of the baby grand. “I don't—Wait. There is something. On the right of the panel behind the back leg. And—” He scooted to the left. “And on this side, in the same spot. They look like clusters of leaves with loops in the center. Are they the maker's marks?”

“Saul knew pianos, and he said he'd never seen anything like them. Here,” said Erika, getting up, “let me fetch a torch.”

The room was growing dark, and even though Erika had switched on another lamp, it was still shadowy in the recesses beneath the piano. Kit reached up and touched the carving inset on the left. It was smooth to the touch, the detailing intricate.

When Erika returned with the torch she kept in the hall, he switched it on and illuminated first one carving, then the other. “Identical, as far as I can tell,” he said, frowning as he peered at the impressions. “But those aren't loops in the center, they're initials. A double C, I think. And the leaves— they're ivy, I'm certain.” Kit was interested in botany, and had become quite accomplished at botanical sketching. “Where have I seen—Oh.”

Kit scooted out from beneath the piano so fast he bumped his head on the bench. “Erika, you said Aubrey Road?”

“Yes, but—”

“That's not far from Lansdowne House. The old studios.”

“No, but I don't see—”

“I just did a paper on Lansdowne House for school.” Since he'd moved from Grantchester to Notting Hill to live with his dad and Gemma, he'd been fascinated by the old artists' studios a few streets from their house. Unlike most of the Victorian terraced houses in their part of Notting Hill, Lansdowne House, built in 1901, stood alone, a square block of a building with round portholes tucked among the many-paned studio windows and with an oddly crenellated roof. “One of the artists who had a studio there was named Charles Cayley.”

“I've heard of Cayley.” Erika stood and went to one of the bookcases on the far side of the sitting room. “He did beautiful decorative work, didn't he? Very influenced by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, although he was a generation younger.”

“He used the same motif somewhere in all his works, apparently. A double C with twining ivy. Those aren't the piano maker's marks on the piano,” Kit added with conviction. “They're Charles Cayley's signature.”

“But why would Cayley's signature be on my piano? He wasn't a musician. And didn't he die during the war?”

“He was presumed missing.” Kit frowned, trying to remember the details he'd read while researching his paper. “Cayley's studio was left intact for several years. His family believed he'd been killed in a bombing raid and not identified.”

“Well, he wasn't killed by the bomb that fell in Aubrey Road. I'm certain there were no casualties.”

“Except the piano.”

Nodding, Erika scanned a section of art books, running her finger along the spines. She slid out an oversized book and opened it as she returned to her chair. It was called, Kit saw from the cover,
Twentieth Century Artists in Notting Hill
.

“Ah,” she said as she found the page she wanted. “Charles Jeremiah Cayley. He was primarily a painter, but he occasionally worked in wood. He did several commissions for decorative carvings in churches.”

Looking at the photos over Erika's shoulder, Kit took in the vibrant colors of the paintings, most of which were portraits or interiors in a style that made him think of the work he'd seen by Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister, on a recent school trip to the National Portrait Gallery.

He leaned closer, gazing at a portrait of a woman in a brilliant blue dress. She sat on a bench, her body turned slightly away from the viewer. The angle accentuated her delicate profile and the ripple of her dark hair down her back, while the rich blue of the dress made the perfect foil for her striking coloring.

And there, in the bottom right hand corner of the portrait, was a tiny symbol. A double C, surrounded by twining ivy. “That's it,” Kit said, pointing excitedly. “That's exactly like your carvings. Wicked! But why put it beneath a piano?”

Erika slipped on her gold framed reading glasses and studied the book. “It says that Cayley was quite respectable, considering the Bohemian circles in which he moved. He married young, to the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and had four children. His wife's money allowed him the freedom to pursue his art, but her social connections never took his painting seriously.” Frowning, she settled her glasses more firmly on her nose and examined the photo more closely.

“I know that face,” she said, her voice soft with wonder. “The woman in this portrait. She was a celebrated pianist. She shopped at Whiteley's during the early days of the war, before the store was bombed.

“I'd got a job there as a sales clerk in the millinery department when we first settled in London. Most of the staff bowed and scraped a bit when she came in, but she was always quite kind to me, even though I was German. What was—” Erika's eyes grew wide as she traced the name under the portrait. “Ivy. Her name was Ivy Reinhardt.” She looked up at Kit. “You don't suppose—”

“You said she was a pianist. What if it was her piano? And Aubrey Road is a stone's throw from Lansdowne House. They could have known one another.”

“She would have played for Cayley's social set,” mused Erika. “I remember she gave concerts at churches and halls in the West End, and she played for private salons. It's certainly possible that they were acquainted.”