Upright Piano Player (25 page)

“You know who I am, don’t you?”

It had been done on impulse. Seeing her, it had seemed the right thing to do. He had wanted to get rid of the damn things and she should know the kind of man she was protecting.

She had nodded.

“These were put through my letterbox a few weeks ago. Don’t open them here. No one else has seen them.”

He had put the envelope on the counter.

“I’m sorry. I really am.”

On the street, he had felt elated. The thing was over, done with. He was leaving London and if the girl had any sense she would leave Colin whatever-his-name-was and get her life back to normal. The sooner he put the Chelsea house on the market the better. He would see to it after the weekend.

Now he was here in the clean, wholesome air of Norfolk. He walked down the grassy slope towards the house.

Nessa’s trunks had been meticulously organized. There was an index of the contents in each trunk and each item—be it diary, file, script, photograph album, or tape—had been individually labeled.

He looked at the tapes first. In her films she had always been the on-camera interviewer. It had been one of her strengths. Each documentary had been a personal testament. It was her voice you heard, her face you saw, and her truth that filled each frame.

In 1980, she had been allowed into a woman’s prison and
The Girls Inside
had chronicled the lives of the inmates of Cell Block C over a period of three years. It was the series that had made her name. Nessa had persuaded the commissioning editor to let her shoot the films in black and white, using 16-millimeter film. This was considered quite a coup, for film was no longer the format of choice at the BBC. Tape was cheaper and more versatile, but Nessa had wanted film for its extra quality and had fought, charmed, and cajoled to get it.

She had been honest in her portrayal of prison life and much of the footage had been bleak, but by using extreme close-ups and long takes, she had created a visual style that raised the films above conventional fly-on-the-wall reportage.

Many of the inmates had been young and Nessa had captured their vulnerability. One story line had followed a woman who had given birth in the prison, her confinement being all the more moving for being literal. The tone of the films had been established early with the opening titles. They were played against shots of the exercise yard at dawn. Nessa had scattered birdseed on the ground and on the sills of the barred windows. As the prisoners slept in their cells, birds were seen flying in and out of the yard at will. It had been an obvious piece of imagery, but she had been lucky, for the night before the filming it had started to snow and the flakes were still falling
as the camera turned. She had removed the lens hood and allowed the snow to gradually blur the glass, like a curtain of tears.

Henry had suggested that she use a track of Bill Evans playing “Danny Boy” as background music to the title sequence. The piece had been recorded in April 1962, the first time Evans had been near a piano for nine months. He had been mourning the death in a road accident of Scott La Faro, the bass player in the first Bill Evans trio. The April recording had been planned as an introduction to the trio’s enforced new lineup, but this particular track turned out to be about the past. It was plainly a lament for Scott.

In the recording you can feel the grief as Evans slowly introduces the familiar melody. So halting is his progress, you wonder if he is going to make it. Time after time, you feel he has held back the note far too long, and then—and then—just as you know for certain he has lost all continuity, the note falls, as right and as wanted as the delayed thrust in lovemaking.

The mix had been perfect and Nessa had fought hard to extend the opening sequence so that it could end on a natural break for the music. The sequence ran for two minutes and thirty-four seconds, an indulgence, but the softly falling snow and the music had moved in unison and the effect had been heartbreaking. He watched the films for three hours, fast-forwarding to the sections where Nessa appeared on screen. At 2:00 he got a sandwich from the kitchen and went out into the garden. Swallows swooped in and out of the barns.

In the afternoon he started on the home movies. They were as polished as her documentaries, expertly edited with sync sound and full effects. Watching them, he had felt like a man locked out of his own house. Every frame had hurt. One beach sequence of Hal attempting cartwheels to the corny drum roll of the circus tent had sent him out into the garden for air.

He was still outside when Tom and Hal arrived.

“Can I leave him with you for an hour? He’s been nagging me about coming over all morning.”

“Of course, I could use a bit of company, especially Hal’s.”

They went into the front room. The tape was still running and the boy quickly squatted down in front of the television set. Henry, in his ignorance, was worried that he was sitting too close to the screen but said nothing.

“Do you remember that holiday?”

“Oh, yes.”

When it was over, Hal had pleaded to watch one more tape. Henry chose one of the Norfolk series, a film of a boat trip to watch the seals basking out on Blakeney Point. Hal had cried out with pleasure when Tom had taken over the camera and filmed Nessa taking off her Wellington boots. She had solemnly turned them upside down. There must have been two liters of North Sea in each boot.

Afterwards, Hal and Henry had sat on the high bank in the garden, sharing a plate of jam sandwiches. They were still there, talking, when Tom arrived to take Hal home.

In the days that followed, Hal resumed the walks with his father. He did not know why he felt happier, he just did.

Eileen took her time leaving Colin. For three weeks she lived with him as though nothing had happened. She never mentioned the Polaroids and tried to keep out of his way. She volunteered to work three Sundays in a row.

“Two of the girls are sick,” she told him.

He walked away.

“They asked if I could help out,” she said.

After that, he had been silent for days, coming out of his darkroom only to eat or use the loo.

She had been dreading sex, but it had been surprisingly easy to avoid. He hadn’t shown any interest, and when he finally did come near her, she said she was not in the mood and he backed off. Despite herself, she felt annoyed that he had not put up more of a fight.

She had told them at work that she was having trouble with an ex-boyfriend who had turned into a bit of a stalker and they had agreed to transfer her to a branch in North London.

“If a man comes in asking for me, you know nothing, right?”

She had found a flat share through a friend. It was in Highbury, a short bus ride from the new shop and far away from Ebury Street.

She phoned her mum and said that Colin had become weird and moody and she was leaving him.

“If he gets in touch, tell him you don’t know where I am.”

“Well, I don’t, do I? Where are you?”

“With a friend—I’m all right—don’t worry.”

It was done. She was all set, ready to go.

Twenty-four days after Henry had walked into Body Shop, Eileen walked out on Colin. She left an envelope on the table containing the three Polaroids cut up into small pieces.

Colin would twig where the photographs had come from, but so what? She wanted him to know why she had left. The pictures were meant to be private. Just for them, he had said. When the bloke from Chelsea had come into the shop he had seemed quite nice, but later she had noticed the thumbprints all over the pictures. What did that make her? She was not some low-life porn queen. She didn’t give a fuck what happened to him—or Colin. She was out of it—she was gone.

As it turned out, covering her tracks proved to be unnecessary. Colin never tried to find her. True, she might have made him some money, but she was never going to be big-time and, anyhow, his anger was directed elsewhere. He was surprised that Henry had given Eileen the Polaroids. It had served no purpose other than malice. Not a nice thing to do. Not a nice thing at all.

That evening, he put the envelope with the torn pictures into a drawer and cleaned the flat. He put fresh sheets on the bed and opened the windows. Eileen, for all her looks, had been a bit of a slut in the homemaking department. Running his finger around the plughole of the bathroom sink he had pulled out a coil of her hair, gritty now with a residue of soap and toothpaste. He dropped it into the loo before washing his hands. In the bathroom cabinet, he found a pile of used cotton buds. He picked them up with a tissue.

When night came he slept diagonally in his bed for the first time in a year. He relished the space, the absence of her.

Three weeks later he was feeling less calm. His redundancy money was running out and as he had feared, there were no scaffolding jobs on offer. Morris had indeed put the word out. At Metro, one of the bigger companies, where Colin had worked in the past, the boss had made it personal.

“I couldn’t hire you, Colin, could I? See, I’m a bit of an animal lover. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, well thanks for nothing.”

“I’d be thinking about a change of career, if I were you.”

With nothing to do, Colin walked the streets with his camera. He had made money in the past selling London scenes to the picture libraries. It was a hit-and-miss business, but sometimes you got lucky.

On the third morning he was sitting in a Starbucks on the
Brompton Road. Through the window he was watching two young women at an outside table. One of the girls was talking. She was a wispy thing, long in the face with a bad complexion. He was not tempted to take her picture; the girl was worse than ordinary, a complete zero. That is, until she stopped talking. Even before her friend had uttered a word, the weedy girl had prepared her face for listening, opening her mouth wide in astonishment. She had held the pose as if for a dentist, her mouth a gaping hole as large as a lemon. Colin had time to shoot off a roll of film before she closed it. He knew that he had something. The girl’s freaky eagerness to please would be there in the photographs for all to see. He left, impatient to be in his darkroom.