Upright Piano Player (4 page)

Two young women came out of the pub arm in arm, their high heels barely coping with the slick cobbles as, bent double, they hurried to get out of the rain. Reaching the darkened car they stopped for breath or support—he wasn’t sure which—their breasts flattened against the windows, their arms flung over the roof. They were celebrating an escape.

“Well, I don’t have to put my tongue down his throat, just to say hello.”

He lowered the passenger window and the car was suddenly full of curves and the smell of wet wool.

“What the fuck?”

They were startled, but when they saw him in the driver’s seat they ran off laughing.

He started the car and drove home, saddened by the empty seat beside him.

He lived just off the Fulham Road in a two-story, double-fronted house that the local estate agent had sold him as “a country cottage in London.” The house was larger than it looked, and in one of the three reception rooms there had been space to tuck his piano against the wall. He had taken lessons until the age of fifteen when hormones had directed his energies elsewhere. But on the death of his parents, he had claimed the piano and it had gone with him from flat to flat and house to house. It was the only remnant he had of his childhood, its tone a song line to his past. He played it late at night—hushed, tentative jazz—the chords barely reaching the walls.

His friends thought his house somewhat modest, considering his success, but Henry and Nessa had bought it for the gardens.

In the front they had planted four standard holly trees, each in a square bed of lavender edged with box. In the beds below the windows, catmint and ladies mantle were ground cover for Queen of the Night tulips in the spring and Japanese anemones in the autumn. The whole front of the house hosted a magnificent
Rosa banksiae
“Lutea”—small round buds appearing in late April, bright green and tipped with the yellow of the rose to come.

In the back garden, a formal pond took center stage in a lawn framed by a mossy brick path. Behind this lawn, up two gentle steps and concealed for the most part by yew hedging, was a raised parterre and a small pavilion. Enclosing everything were walls of London brick topped with lengths of trellis that buckled under the weight of ramblers. In summer,
the serenity of the center seemed always under threat from the chaos of the edge.

There were no lights on in the house when he arrived. He turned off the alarm and went into the kitchen. The morning’s post was on the table, most of it junk. He sat down to open the rest, too tired to take off his overcoat. He had won £50 on his Premium Bonds. There was a brochure from a wine merchant, several bills, and a letter erroneously addressed to Sir Henry Cage. He studied the envelope. The address had been typed on a computer, the label perfect—a secretary’s mistake rather than a cynical ploy, he thought.

Having read the letter, he was not so sure. It was from someone he had met only once and instantly disliked. It appeared the man was now the chairman of an appeal fund for a government-backed business school. They had been awarded £30 million by the Lottery for a new building and needed to match that with a similar sum from the private sector. The letter said they were looking for fifteen key individuals who had an interest in business. In return for their £2 million they could have a scholarship or one of the lecture halls named after them. It was a crass letter, so inept that perhaps a title had been dangled, after all. He would not reply. He put the bills and the check aside and scooped up the rest for the bin. As he did so, he saw that he had missed one letter, a blue airmail envelope, the handwriting unmistakably Nessa’s. He left it unopened on the table. He had not heard from her in five years. One more night would not make any difference.

In the village, they are known as part-time traders. In summer, when the weather is warm, they close the bookshop at lunchtime and cycle to the beach. In winter, they wait eagerly for the chill north wind that keeps people off the streets. On such days they bolt the door and retreat upstairs, consciences clear. From their bed of wrought iron and brass (restored for next to nothing by the book-loving blacksmith on a nearby estate) they watch the black clouds roll in from the North Sea. The clouds carry the rain south—south over their tiny roof, south over Garlic Wood and the cold Norfolk fields. The boy Hal lies snug in the big bed with them. They have been married for five years and despite some shadows in their lives, they have never been happier.

They are not as dilettante as the villagers imagine. Most of their business comes from their website and the catalogs they send out each quarter to a list of clients which steadily grows. They specialize in twentieth-century first editions, in particular, British and American fiction and poetry, an enthusiasm that Tom has inherited from his father. Summer visitors to the shop are dismayed by the metropolitan prices and
the absence of beach books. More often than not, they leave empty-handed—a fact much discussed in the adjacent businesses. It is generally predicted that
Cage & Cage Booksellers
will not survive. A video rental store is what most villagers would like to see as a replacement.

Large, serious, gray eyes gaze steadily at Tom.

“I need a bit of cold pillow, Daddy,” he says moving his head onto a cool, unrumpled area. Tom is in thrall to his son, who is nearly four. Working from home, Tom has rarely been apart from him, so that now, when Hal goes three mornings a week to the village play group, Tom feels a lover’s sense of separation. The boy is suddenly quiet—sleep coming with comic-book alacrity.

“Has he settled?” Jane says downstairs.

“Out for the count.”

“You’re going to miss him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he’ll probably be asleep for ten hours.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“I didn’t say it was bad.”

Later, she looks up from the book she is reading, the new novel from a prize-winning writer they both admire.

“It’s here. Page thirty-two—vertical sex—this time against a tree.”

It was a game Jane played, spotting the sexual motifs in an author’s work. Most writers of literary novels, she had found, repeated themselves; Updike was perhaps the most
obvious exception, though latterly, even he had become predictable. She was not surprised by this erotic continuity. It is notoriously difficult to write convincing sex scenes and if a writer manages to pen one that does not provoke ridicule the temptation to use it again, with slight variations, must be immense.

“In his first book it was in a lift, in his second against a car, and now it’s upright in a forest—there’s lichen on her thighs.” She paused. “You know, I met him once.”

“Oh? Where?”

“At a book signing in Norwich. Sadly, he was sitting down.”

He grins. They were at a stage in their marriage when jealousy was not simply absent, but inconceivable. They still flirted with others at parties out of habit, but retreated if the returning banter was more than superficial. The child had made them inviolate. When Princess Diana complained that there were three people in her marriage, Jane had cooed to Hal, “And what’s wrong with that?”

They had bought the shop with money left to Jane by her grandfather. What funds remained were for books, not builders, so they had fixed the place up themselves. The shelving was not always true and there were imprints of their sneakers, like faint fossils, on the hastily painted floors. Sometimes as they worked she would look at Tom. What she saw was Tom repairing a door but, in fact, she knew that the work was repairing him. His parents’ divorce had almost destroyed him. Now she, the bookshop, and Hal were slowly putting him back together again.

Tom is nine in the Polaroid, smiling by the pool in the Beverly Hills Hilton. He watches the print come to life, his skin darken to a tan. His father, holding the photograph, says, “I want you to look at this carefully, Tom.” The boy leans closer, familiar with the magic of instant pictures, but happy to indulge his father with a show of wonder at the density of color and the accuracy of the flesh tones. But his father does not want to talk about photography; instead he says, “I want you to take a good look at this because I never want to see you this fat again.” Tom jumps back into the pool where the water will hide his tears. Does his father notice that he spends the rest of the holiday wrapped in a towel?

“Daddy, the soap doesn’t work.”

It is his twelfth birthday and he is getting washed and dressed, impatient to get down to his cards and presents. Henry walks into the bathroom.

“What do you mean it doesn’t work?”

“There’s no lather?”

“Oh, come on, Tom, you’ve just got to rub harder.”

“I’ve tried, really I have. I’ve tried for ages.”

Henry comes to the sink. He takes the white bar and holds it to his nose. “This doesn’t smell like soap, it smells like … like potato. You’ve been trying to wash with a potato, Tom.”

He is chuckling and a slow grin breaks over Tom’s face. It was a trick. His father had carved a fake bar of soap out of a potato and smeared it with lather. A joke before breakfast—was there ever a better way to start a birthday?

Fatherhood has made Tom uncertain. He can no longer ignore Henry’s existence. Hal’s childhood unfolding in front of him revives memories of his own. And recollection blunts his anger. He is determined to be a father as unlike Henry as possible; calm where Henry was irritable; present where Henry was for the most part absent; tolerant where Henry was very often a nitpicking perfectionist. But then, somehow, the list breaks down. He cannot pretend that Henry had not been loving in the past. There had been happy times. He remembered a rented house on the six-mile beach at Hilton Head, South Carolina. The dawn walks—Henry, Nessa, and Tom, arms intertwined, lurching in and out of the surf, sandpipers darting between their careless feet.

Memory makes him lenient. One day (but not yet) he will tell Henry that he has a grandson.