Upright Piano Player (7 page)

For Nessa, the developer’s plans had been invigorating. The ficus trees had been plucked out and were replaced by date palms, more in keeping with the Spanish colonial style the architects now desired. The flat gray roof tiles had been supplanted by tiles of chunky terracotta, ribbed and undulating. The plain walls were adorned with fake arches and capped with deep architraves.

Each morning at breakfast, Nessa watched the reconstruction work from one of Jack’s tables now shaded only by the green parasols he had been forced to buy. The work was surprisingly simple; what appeared to be stucco on brick or concrete was, in fact, paint on polystyrene. Blocks of it, two feet wide and six feet long, were cut and molded and then pinned to the walls. Two coats of acrylic wall texture, the first in gray and then in sand, completed the illusion. The Plaza might now have all the integrity of a Hollywood film set, but new leases were being taken up and Phil, the drugstore owner, was coming back.

Jack welcomed this new vitality, but he mourned his trees. He had even considered selling up and going back to New York, but the life here was too comfortable to leave. He played tennis most mornings and in the warm Florida climate his sixty-year-old body got down to low balls on forty-year-old knees. For that alone, you stayed.

“You all right there, hon, you want a refill on that coffee?”

Arlene, the waitress with boyfriend troubles, sashayed round Jack and Nessa as they talked.

“So, when is he coming?”

“He’s thinking about it. But he’ll come—I don’t think he’s got much else to do.”

“Does he know the way things are with you?”

“No, I’ll tell him when he’s here.”

She stood up. “See you tomorrow, Jack.”

He watched her go. They were both unattached and had become friendly when she had returned from England. With a little encouragement, he could have loved her, but she had
sweetly deflected his advances and he had settled for what was on offer. They were best friends and dancing partners, nothing more, but that did not stop his pulse quickening every time he saw her.

Her house had been her mother’s, the holiday home of Nessa’s childhood. It was now the last modest dwelling on the Boulevard, a single-story anachronism among the new-money mansions. From the road, it hunkered down in a hollow, so that only the green-tiled roof was visible from the gated entrance. At the back, a wooden deck faced due east. From the deck, a narrow lawn sloped down to the seawall and the beach. Steps had been set into the wall and Nessa walked to the water’s edge. Above her, cormorants cruised the shoreline. At her feet, sandpipers busily chased false leads. She had come here after the divorce and the ocean and the house had kept her sane.

She sat on the beach, her legs stretched out in front of her. She was proud of her legs; even now she had escaped the river delta veining and cellulite of so many of her friends. Idly, she prodded the skin on her thigh. Scores of tight, parallel wrinkles appeared. Irrelevant though it was, it seemed she was just a finger-prod away from old age, her skin already half a size too large for her body. “Goddamn it,” she cried and went back into the house, slamming the door so hard that the gulls decamped to a spot twenty yards down the beach.

She had been unlucky. Cancer of the womb is not uncommon and curable if caught early. The cancer usually begins in the lining of the uterus, the endometrium, and more often
than not, it announces its presence, the most common symptoms being bleeding after menopause or irregular or heavy bleeding during menopause. For Nessa, young at fifty to get this form of cancer, there had been no obvious warning, no red flag of danger. Other symptoms—the abdominal pains and the tightening of her waistband—she had not thought to be significant. Aware that her stomach was distended, she had put it down to aging and overeating. For a year she fought her tumor with low-calorie brownies, a story she told later with dry amusement.

The cancer had been high grade and aggressive and during Nessa’s diet it moved deep into the wall of muscle around the uterus, then into the cervix and the lymph nodes in the pelvis, then on to the cavity of the abdomen before moving north for the lungs. She had endured surgery and regular bouts of chemotherapy, but three years later she knew she was not going to survive. She was out of remission. Her oncologist thought she might live for six months, a year at most.

Tom and Jane knew of her cancer from the beginning. She had sent a cheery, casual letter; it was a nuisance, she wrote, like an arm in plaster, inconvenient, but in time the body would mend itself and soon she would be as right as ever. Jane had replied: “It will be easier if we’re honest, won’t it?” and they had been.

Her cancer and her grandson had announced themselves at roughly the same time and Hal had always been her best kind of therapy. From the start they had been close. So confident and breezy with adults, she spoke at first only in whispers to Hal.

“Everything they have is straight from the store,” she
had said to Tom. “It’s all unused, hearing and eyesight 100 percent—we grown-ups should keep the volume turned down.” She was one of those people who instinctively squat down to talk to small children and there was in her face a regularity they trusted.

Tom and Jane came for a month each spring and for another three weeks every other Christmas. In the summer she would visit Norfolk, staying for the whole of June. The generous month, she called it. A late spring and she was in time to see the froth of cow parsley in the lanes, while early warmth meant the old roses would be blooming in the grand gardens they visited. Whatever the prelude, in June the Norfolk countryside is rich with compensation. She loved this soft bounty and thought often of the garden she and Henry had created in London—apart from Tom, their most successful joint venture.

In Florida, it’s different. What the English call gardening they call maintenance and the less there is of it the better. There are no flowers in Nessa’s garden—she hated the gaudy colors of the busy Lizzies that line every driveway on the Boulevard. Instead, her garden is laid to grass, the tough, springy ryegrass that can survive both sun and salt spray. She had worked hard to preserve the thirty inherited coconut palms that cluster around the house.

These trees used to be common in Florida, but they were
almost wiped out by blight in the seventies. At one point, there were only 16,000 of them left in the state, down from 70,000 in the 1930s. Nessa’s trees, like most of the cocoa palms in West Palm Beach, are given regular injections. The trees are still infected and if left untreated their fronds would turn yellow and die back, so every three months Nessa pays a man to give her palms their fix.

“I live in a place,” she tells Tom, “where even the bloody trees are kept alive by injections.”

The girl in the brasserie was having a row with the young man facing her. Henry could see only the back of the man, but he appeared the calmer of the two. She was angry, voicing loud words softly, denying them the volume they normally warrant—anxious not to attract attention. She was surprisingly beautiful.

In Henry’s experience, rage is rarely an adornment. It might add color to the cheeks and luster to the eye, but these benefits are generally offset by the jutting of the jaw and an ugly twisting of the mouth. However, in this case, fury had done nothing to mar the picture. The girl looked magnificent.

A sudden movement interrupted his thoughts, chairs were being pushed back, the couple were on their feet; he realized with a sense of danger that they were changing places. The young man gave him a look before sitting down. There was something familiar about him, but there was no time to study the face. Henry had lowered his gaze and turned a page of his book, aware that he had been careless. Since New Year’s Eve, he had been finding it difficult to concentrate. Even reading
had failed to engage him. At weekends, he had become a regular visitor to the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, but he had been dismayed when the model boat enthusiasts had started greeting him like a long lost friend. He thought of them as nerds, forever pulling their boats in and out of the water, adjusting the rigging, dickering with the control boxes. Their diligence seemed laughable. Did he really look as though he were ready to join them?

He knew he needed another holiday. His nose had healed, but he was sleeping badly. The random violence on Westminster Bridge had changed him. He had become a victim, and like all victims, expected to be a victim again. Walking the streets, he was often fearful, slipping his watch into a pocket when faced by crowds. Once he had taken an unwanted bus journey, simply to avoid a bullet-headed youth approaching him on the pavement.

Perhaps, he thought, he should accept Nessa’s invitation and escape to Florida, but that would mean letting Nessa back into his life and that required a magnanimity he did not yet feel.

It had not been difficult to trail Nessa. She had been researching a television documentary about the American space program and usually worked in her study in the morning. After lunch she would leave the house and return at about six. In the evenings, if they were not going out, she worked, taking advantage of the time difference to talk to Americans in their offices. Henry never asked her how she spent the afternoons.

Occasionally, there would be shopping bags in the hall or she would mention a friend’s name or a film she had seen. It was true, too, that when he had been at the office he had rarely given her a second thought. They were not a couple who rang each other every day.

What had made him follow her? It had been so simple, so unlucky. From the back of a taxi, on his way home early from a client meeting, he had seen her walking in Walton Street. The traffic had slowed almost to a stop and Henry had his hand on the cab window, ready to open it and shout out, when he saw that she was smiling, looking straight ahead, walking and smiling.

That first afternoon, the first afternoon he had followed her, she walked from the house to an Edwardian block of flats overlooking playing fields, south of the King’s Road. She turned into one of the doorways marked
FLATS 36–49
. He waited a few moments and crossed over to the door, hoping to find a reassuring name next to a doorbell—Gilly Webb, Amanda Norton, or the Mammets, afternoon friends she had sometimes mentioned. The entrance, however, could not have been more discreet. There were no bells or nameplate. Through the glass inner door, he could just make out a porter fussily squaring off a pile of magazines on a polished table. He retreated to a bench on the edge of the playing fields where he had a good view of the front door.