The Piano Maker (13 page)

“Yes, he did tell me.”

“Day after day in that ice hole. I still don’t know how many days. Fifteen, twenty. Piano pedals were never a problem, but it took me a long time to learn to walk normally again. And when I am upset I still limp. A bit. Thank you for these good shoes, Mr. Chandler.”

EARLY IN THE SUMMER OF
1920 she received a letter from Canada House in London. It said that the Canadian High Commission was holding a reception for a visiting minister, and she was invited to try out for the evening’s recital. The note gave a day and a time for her audition.

She went there by taxi and paid with the chit they’d sent in the envelope. By then she had not seen Nathan in months, not since the tea shop, and she was surprised to find him in the waiting room. He put down the newspaper he was reading and stood up and grinned at her.

“Helen. It’s nice to see you again. I gave them your name, and I hope you don’t mind. I know the commissioner, and when I heard about the recital, it was just too good an opportunity for you to miss. These government things pay really well. I’ll just introduce you and then I’ll leave. How are you?”

“Fine, mostly. No, I don’t mind. Thank you.”

There was an awkward pause. They were the only people in the room. Nothing but empty wooden chairs on a bare floor, a picture of King George on the wall, and a closed window onto Trafalgar Square. Faint voices through the connecting door.

“I hope you’ve forgiven me by now,” he said. “Having to be the messenger of such bad news. It must have been quite a shock.”

“It was.”

“Of course. How is Claire?”

“She’s doing well. She’s settling in better than I am. And you?”

“Fine. I’m just back from Cairo. Marseille went all right, but it would have gone better with you there. And you’d have made very good money.”

“Marseille? Oh. Yes.”

“Do you want to know how much money you’d have made?”

“Not really.”

“As much as two hundred pounds, Helen.”

She stared at him. “What would I have had to do for that?”

“Not much. Be there with me as my associate. Smile and speak your best pointy-mouth French.”

“Saying what?”

“Nothing specific. Just to put them at ease and let them see that you trust me.”

“Trust you? With what?”

He shook his head. “Never mind that now. It’s too late, anyway. But in future, Helen. If ever I can help, remember that.”

Later she would sometimes feel that there had been something odd about that short conversation; maybe the mention of so much money, or something left unsaid, or perhaps just something about the mood. But at the time she didn’t see it. At the time she was more concerned with protecting her inner calm for the audition and with keeping her hands warm.

Minutes later she played for the deputy commissioner and the cultural attaché, and they stopped her halfway through some piece by Cécile Chaminade and hired her.

She decided she’d bring Claire along to turn pages, and the next day she bought evening dresses and shoes for herself and Claire at a second-hand store used by Polish and Russian émigrés. The store was called Verushka’s Closet. She spent almost four pounds there, but she knew by then that she’d be getting fully eighteen pounds plus the taxi fare for the evening.

The performance went well, and afterward the minister and the commissioner came up to them where they stood with Nathan and a new girlfriend of his, an English girl, young as well, with blond, curly hair and a pretty face and a good figure. Nathan made the introductions. The minister repeated Hélène’s name and asked if she and Claire spoke French.

The next morning a messenger came to the apartment with a request for her to attend another meeting at the High Commission, and just one week later she and Claire were on a special train with the minister and his entourage, visiting European capitals to promote Canada and bring settlers to the prairies.

The minister’s name was Monsieur Émile de Fougère. He said he was from Montreal, pronouncing it the French way,
Mon-réal
. He had a full head of white hair and a kind face. He would smile at Claire and call her
Mademoiselle
. When he spoke he sounded the way Xavier had sounded, and both she and Claire liked him all the more for that.

On the train, he would leave his assistants and the newspaper people behind and visit her and Claire in their private compartment; his deputy would knock and ask if it was convenient, and then the minister would enter and sit in the corner place by the window in his vested suit and bow tie and pearl-grey spats.

He carried an old-fashioned monocle in his top pocket, and he would take it out and look over the devastated landscape and shake his head. Hélène told him that her husband, Claire’s father, had fallen in the first few weeks. Claire told him about the piano factory and what had happened to it.

“My sympathy, Mademoiselle,” he said to Claire. “I lost my older son in the war, in Flanders. He was twenty-eight. He was a captain, but already in command of a company. Usually that takes a major.”

“
A captain
,” said Claire. “We met a French-Canadian captain. He stayed with us. He was very nice. He showed me how to make animals with my hands. I’d need a light for it.” She held up both hands and made a dog’s head with one and a chicken with the other.

“A shadow game,” said Monsieur de Fougère. He was smiling. “It is called
Tous mes animaux
. My children learned that too. What was your captain’s name and unit?”

“We don’t know the unit,” said Hélène. “His name was Xavier Boucher and he commanded a battery there. In the field beside the factory.”

“And he was from Montreal,” said Claire.

The minister turned to her. “Would you like me to try and find him, Mademoiselle? Officers can be found. Demobilized soldiers are more difficult, but officers tend to lead more structured lives. I’ll see what I can do.”

On another visit to their compartment, when they were just an hour from Brussels, he said to Hélène, “I don’t know if you are aware of it, Madame, but the war has been disastrous for my country as well. Not only did we lose more than sixty thousand dead and a few hundred thousand wounded, but it has also caused great strife between Quebec and the rest of the Dominion.”

“Strife about what? You were helping France.”

“True, but that is not how French Canadians saw it. They had no wish to sacrifice their men and their horses for the British Empire, and now they cannot forgive us
for passing laws that forced them into it. But once we have full employment again, things will calm down.”

In Brussels a great circus tent had been put up on a sports field, with areas dedicated to different provinces. Large canvases had been painted with prairie themes and Rocky Mountain views. In a saloon where people could taste smoked salmon and air-dried venison, a man in a leather shirt played a tinny-sounding piano.

The greatest success was the wilderness area, where people could pet a young moose and have their picture taken dressed as Indians and trappers. When the minister discovered how popular the moose was, he had the area where new settlers signed up combined with the wilderness area. From then on, the moose, leggy and much adored, stalked among the people and nibbled at their clothes while a civil servant at a podium assigned 160-acre plots of land on survey maps for less money than she had paid for their second-hand clothes. To the right and left of the platform, farmers stood marvelling at sheaves of wheat with ears of grain bigger and more golden than anyone had ever seen.

At the end of that day there was a reception at the British Embassy. She and Claire, in their finery, gave a recital, and guests in black tie and floor-length evening gowns sat on dainty chairs and sipped champagne.

They travelled on, city after city, collecting immigrants, most of them cast adrift by the war and the end of the Habsburg Empire.

On the way back to the coast, the moose was presented to the Amsterdam zoo as a gift from His Royal Majesty, King George V.

“A successful trip,” said the minister to her on the train. “We’ve been doing this for some time now, bringing them in by the boatload. We lose many in the first year, you see. The land is vast and empty. Thousands of miles from coast to coast. And those prairie provinces, Madame. Nothing but grass and constant wind. After the first winter, many settlers simply disappear, or they die on us. The weak ones do. The strong ones survive and buy out the weak ones for a few cents.”

“I so admire your relationship with your daughter,” the minister said a few days later, back in London. “Or
envy
, I should say. I did not do as well with my own children. My younger son from my second marriage won’t speak to me, and the older one, as I told you, died in Flanders.”

This was at his farewell reception, once again at Canada House. It was late September; a warm evening with acacia and maple trees out the windows and fine old buildings golden in the light. Claire had passed her eleven-plus and begun grammar school. That evening, even though she liked Monsieur de Fougère, she had decided not to come along because she had homework to do.

“Madame,” said the minister. “You did well for us on this campaign. You and your daughter helped us present cultural
and social aspects of French Canada that we did not bring out in the past. I know that you are not from there, but – you understand what I mean. And I’ve been thinking. Have you ever been to Montreal?”

She shook her head. No, she had not, but she would like to see it someday.

“A fine city,” he said. “Considering how new it is. In terms of culture and civilized living, it’s by far the best city in the Dominion. Come and visit sometime. I could arrange a concert tour for you and make you and your daughter honorary French Canadians.
Post factum
, as it were. I’ll look into it, and I’ll cable the High Commission here. I will also be sending a note to the right places to try and locate your captain. Would that interest you, Madame?”

Six weeks later, again at Canada House, the deputy commissioner waved her into his office. He said there had been a communiqué from Monsieur de Fougère’s office in Ottawa. The minister had fallen ill, but he had forwarded her name to the Office for Education and Culture, and that office would be pleased to arrange a concert tour for her.

“Cheer them up,” said the deputy. “Someone from the motherland coming to their towns. But, the thing is, the flu epidemic was even worse in Canada. I mean, worse than here, for some reason. And it’s not over yet. In any case, you’ll want to wait a bit. We’ll let you know when it’s safe to go.”

He sat frowning at a thought.

“Hmm,” he said then. “There was something else. A message also forwarded by Mr. Fougère.”

He searched among the papers on his desk and found it and held it out for her to take. He watched her as she read.

“I’m sorry about the captain,” he said then. “The military has taken over an entire hospital in Montreal for those cases. I believe it’s called the Sainte Mère de Dieu. Something like that. And some of them do get better.”

“
SHE
’
LL HANG
,” Lady Ashley said to anyone who would listen. “Best not get too close to her. She killed a man, can you imagine? Lived in a
cave
with him and one day just murdered him. All of you best stay away from her.”

Mildred told her that. Mildred’s friendship had been unwavering since that funeral mass for the fishermen when Hélène had improvised the Navy Hymn into a ballad that froze them in their seats and made some of them weep. It turned out that Mildred had lost her father and brother that same all-too-common way, a ship getting swamped in a storm and breaking up in minutes.

She’d asked Mildred if she would please bake a cake for a tea she was planning, and the next day Mildred brought one still warm in a Bundt pan. She also brought a platter to put it on. She put the platter on the kitchen table and turned the form over and tapped it with a knife handle all around.

The cake was perfect: yellow with saffron and dark brown, and glistening with cocoa marbling.

“Just for you and Claire to try out,” said Mildred. “And it’s real cocoa, too. Madame Breton, that’s the bank manager’s wife, you’ve seen her at your rehearsals, she gave me almost half a pound of it. If you like it, we’ll make another one in time for your tea. Who’s coming? Can I ask?”

“A few people, I hope. Including you.”

“Oh good. And might David be coming? Is he making shoes for you?”

“Yes, he is. He made these already.” She put a foot forward and moved it proudly this way and that.

“Very nice. A good man, that. Was married once, to a local girl. She died with the flu, same week as my husband. No children either, but he has a sister in California.”

“Yes, he told me. How old would he be?”

“Hard to say. In his late fifties, but he’s a strong man still. Lives in a house that was part of the English fort. The province owns it, and they offered it to him on a long-term lease because of the renovations he’s doing, and because a house lived in is better than a house empty.”

“I suppose it is. What else did Lady Ashley say?”

“Oh. Don’t worry about her. She’s just jealous and angry. She had someone in the city look up the old newspapers.”

But at the next choir meeting, four of the women and three of the men were absent. She asked Mildred to remind them, and when they did not show for the next practice she wrote out a notice that she would be holding auditions for male and female voices and pinned it to the board.

So many came from up and down the French Shore that she had to make a first cut and a second, and then a third. She kept some for back-up and harmony, and she found a few good voices. The soprano she chose to replace Lady Ashley was the girl with the misshapen cheek from the foundry office. She would need coaching, but she had great promise. By that Sunday the choir was complete again, and because copies of the sheet music for “Morning Has Broken” had arrived, that was the first piece they worked on. One week later she had arranged a solo part and given it to the foundry girl. Her name was Mona.