The Upright Piano Player Page 3

  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.

  It is one of those mornings when global warming seems more seductive than catastrophic. It is mild enough for a walk on the beach before lunch at Jane’s parents’ house. They drive to Holkham, rehearsing the carols that Hal is learning for the play group’s Christmas concert. He is insistent that alternate lines are sung “loud and soft” as Miss Martha wants. Nestling in the dunes, after the long walk out to the incoming waves and the seemingly longer walk back, Hal gets no further than “Twinkle, twinkle, little …” before he is asleep in Jane’s arms.

  Jane is twenty-eight, a tall, slightly stooping girl, sometimes beautiful, with hazel eyes and blond hair. She listens with her body leaning forward. Her teeth are small and give her face an appealing (and deceptive) innocence. She is one of four daughters born to a Norfolk vet and his wife, and though she herself has no love for animals (the childhood rivals for her father’s time and attention) she has found her lame dog in Tom.

  She stands as he comes over the dune, hands full of shells for Hal.

  “I didn’t want to spoil your day,” she says, handing him an envelope.

  “There was a letter this morning, from Nessa. I’m afraid she’s getting worse.”

  3

  His paper knife had been a parting gift from a grateful client. On the silver blade was the inscription “May I open naught but good news.” Contrarily, Henry used the knife only when he anticipated trouble. He used it on all envelopes with clear windows; on everything from the Inland Revenue; on the stiff white envelopes that came from his lawyer, and, now, on this unexpected letter from his ex-wife.

  Nessa’s handwriting, like everything else about her, was enthusiastic. Bold and inky, it whooshed across the page, letters almost tumbling over themselves in their haste to get the job done. This ebullience allowed her fewer words to the page, so she wrote as others telephoned—with economy. Henry once had been delighted to get a note from her at a dreary overseas conference they were attending together. “My door is ajar, and so am I,” she had written. This letter, if less seductive, showed no change of style.

  Dearest Henry,

  I read that you have quit at fifty-eight. I’m surprised. I had you down for a lifer. Come and see me in Florida—in April—stay for as long as you like. I want to talk to you.

  Love, Nessa

  The letter irritated Henry—its brisk tone adding insult to the injury he still felt. He resented Nessa’s assumption that they were on visiting terms. He replied curtly that he was not sure of his plans and coul
d make no commitment and signed it “Regards, Henry.” (Having rejected “Love.”) Petty, he knew.

  In fact, Henry had no plans at all. He had arrived at Gate Retirement without itinerary, ticket, or passport. In the days that followed, he would flit from book to piano, from piano to window. He could not concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes. When Mrs. Abraham was in the house, he went for walks—walks that only increased his sense of dislocation.

  “Hey, what you up to?”

  He would turn to find someone at his heels on a mobile phone. London was full of people not wasting a moment and most of them, it seemed, had something to say. Everywhere, young people with big hearts and clipboards were waiting to accost him on behalf of cancer research, Alzheimer’s, or starving babies. They placed themselves at twenty-yard intervals on busy streets and Henry found it impossible to run their gauntlet of goodness. Signing up, he felt anything but charitable. A mugging in a good cause still felt like a mugging.

  If it wasn’t charities, it was time-shares or the Big Issue or a petition or a fake Gucci bag. He was living in a city of outstretched arms.

  One morning, rounding a bend in Grosvenor Crescent he had found himself standing next to a motorcycle ablaze at the curb—tidily parked, but shockingly alight, like a Tibetan suicide. He looked over his shoulder. The burning bike was outside the headquarters of the British Red Cross, but no one had come out with aid. He went in and found a security man, who eventually emerged with a fire extinguisher. There was just enough of the bike left to identify it as a Honda.

  “What do you think happened?” Henry said.

  “It’s London, isn’t it? Bloody madhouse.”

  Most afternoons, Henry was content to stay at home. Over the years, in addition to his photographs, he had built up a collection of twentieth-century British art, without ever owning a single first-rate painting. He had bought the works of Meninsky, Shephard, and the like, artists with talent, but no great originality—painters who had needed to teach to pay the rent.

  Henry was moved by their work. He admired their tenacity and was comfortable with their status. He viewed his walls with constant pleasure. He often said that he was surrounded by paintings that looked like the work of gifted relatives. He would have been uneasy living with art that was too obviously expensive. A Lucien Freud or Francis Bacon would have been impossible—like hanging your bank balance on the wall. In the same way, he could drive a Mercedes, but not a Bentley—live in Chelsea, but not Belgravia.

  There were those who saw Henry’s gradations as insincere, but his old friends were less cynical. Walter, his solicitor, and Oliver, a friend since Cambridge, knew that Henry’s dislike of pomp went back a long way. For the past thirty years, they had met every few weeks for dinner at a small Greek restaurant in Marylebone to discuss books, life, and in season, cricket. They had seen Henry poor and they had seen Henry rich, but they had never seen Henry overt.

  After their most recent get-together, Walter had called him to check that he was all right.

  “You seemed a bit down,” he said.

  Henry told himself he was wistful rather than sad. He listened to rainy afternoon jazz and the slow movements of symphonies. The empty days felt like the end of a love affair.

  In quiet desperation he turned to old routines. Even when he was married, Henry would eat breakfast out of the house, stopping off at a brasserie on his way to work. Though he no longer had an office to go to, he decided to follow the same early morning schedule. His breakfast companion had always been a book and for the most part he did read—though he also used the book as camouflage, turning the unread pages at suitable intervals as he listened in to neighboring tables. (He had known for some time that a middle-aged man sitting alone with a book is virtually invisible.)

  Most mornings he went to the brasserie in Sloane Square, which opened at 8:30 a.m. He usually arrived early and loitered in the entrance of the nearby tube station rather than join the queue and be marked out as lonely, unemployed, or divorced. Though, as he ruefully admitted to himself, he was all three.

  With time to spare, he had found himself lingering over breakfast—sometimes staying for an hour or more. He was aware that he was no longer just listening to the other customers, but often staring, too. Invariably, at women. He would, if challenged, have said that his observations were innocent enough—anthropological rather than predatory. For example, he had noticed that women on greeting each other always found something to admire in the other’s appearance. “Oh that …” pointing to a necklace with a crude wooden daisy as its centerpiece—“that is adorable.” In return, the daisy lady would find the scarf that her friend was wearing “divine, a fantastic color.”

  Were they sincere? It seemed unlikely, though Henry was sure they were genuine in their wish to find something to like. Would the scarf lady have been pleased if her companion had removed the daisy necklace and offered it as a gift? He did not think so. Henry was confident that she did not actually like it. He had seen her reading a newspaper as she waited for her friend and it was clear that she still had 20/20 vision.

  On the walk back to his house, the signs of Christmas were a daily depressant. For him it was a season of greater isolation and now, deprived of even office jollity, he felt a complete outsider. Five days before Christmas, according to plan, he fled. Since the divorce, Henry had spent the holiday in Barbados. He went back to the same suite, in the same hotel, year after year, flying in and leaving one week later. He knew nothing of the island apart from what could be glimpsed from the windows of the chilled car that took him from the airport to the hotel and back again.

  His suitcase held few clothes, but was heavy with books. His great fear was of being stranded with nothing to read, so along with recent novels, he took bankers—books he knew he would enjoy reading again should the new titles disappoint. Light Years by James Salter always traveled with him and he invariably packed The Chateau by William Maxwell. Thus insured, even Christmas could be endured.

  On the big night itself, he ordered room service and avoided the paper hats and festivities in the terraced restaurant. His suite had a wraparound veranda with shade and a view. It was on the top floor of a low-built plantation house that looked over the swimming pool. He was awake at 6:00 and would watch out for the early morning swimmers and then shortly afterwards the chair-baggers with their territorial towels and paperbacks. In earlier, less affluent times, he would have been one of them, but now he was, quite literally, above such stratagems. He stayed on his deck all day, going down only for meals.

  Guests were assigned tables on the terrace for the length of their stay. The positions, once negotiated, were guaranteed. The terrace, as is the way of these things, had its own Siberia and Golden Mile. In general, the tables around the dance floor were considered prime, under cover but close to the water. Henry, who preferred to sit at the back, had been greeted like a man who wants to pay full price at a clearance sale and had been escorted with much ceremony to a despised table. From there, he could watch his fellow guests, even if he could not always hear the quiet crooning of the nightly cabaret turn.

  One night, Ken and Daphne, an English couple, paused at Henry’s table to exchange greetings. Their recap of the day’s weather had hardly started, before it was cut short. Henry followed their gaze across the floor and saw that their usual front-row table had been given to newcomers.

  “Oh dear,” Daphne said. “We’d better see if we can sort it out.”

  He watched them go off to do battle at the captain’s desk. Ken had twisted his ankle playing tennis and arrived at the desk, like a late-comer at an accident, envious of those that had been there from the start.

  An inquest was in progress, apologies, a mistake had been made. The captain and four Barbadian waiters clustered around the couple. And then, above the chatter of the diners, above the soft lilt of the bandstand vocalist, came the echo of an older order, the voice of less egalitarian times, the throwback tones of Ken—“Then why the fu
ck did you give the table away?”

  “Ken, that’s enough. Stop it, stop it, now!”

  Daphne grabbed Ken’s arm and pulled him off to an available table, one row back.

  The singer went on singing, the waiters dispersed, no obvious signs of agitation, but harm had been done. Not to the waiters, whose calm indifference remained intact, but the rumpus had damaged Daphne. Her standing in the dining room had been undermined by Ken’s tantrum. A recent graduate from the school of humiliation himself, Henry admired her courage as she smiled and nodded at her new neighbors in the second row, but when the sommelier was dismissed by Ken with a sulky “Same as usual”—it was one misdeed too many and she picked up her bag and left the room.

  Henry recalled an airport, long ago. They had been returning from a holiday in Portugal and Nessa and Tom had been assigned seats twenty rows behind him. He had kicked up and made the girl at the check-in cry. Finally, they had been offered three seats together, but Nessa had refused to accept them. She had sat in the back of the plane with a baffled Tom.

  He returned from Barbados on Thursday, the day before New Year’s Eve. He had been asked to the big thrash at the Dome, but had made his excuses. Two of his clients were major sponsors and before his retirement he had sat in on many planning meetings. He had not found them stimulating. The project had needed a presiding genius, a dictator. As it was, there were too many bosses, too many scared people running around trying not to give offense. Instead of the trip to Greenwich, he intended to spend the evening watching television and to be in bed by 11:00. He had long since stopped staying up to hear the chimes at midnight. Those nights were in the past: raucous evenings with friends in small Italian restaurants, bread rolls hurled from table to table, the wet kisses of unknown women as the clock struck midnight. And then out into the streets, Nessa, standing on the bonnet of a slow-moving car in the Kings Road and mouthing words of love over the heads of the crowd.