The Upright Piano Player Page 5

  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.”

  5

  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.

  Nessa came out two hours later. Henry waited fifteen minutes and walked home. She was already there. Along the way she had managed to acquire a shopping bag from Gap.

  “I was looking for something for Amanda’s baby. Takes so long to find anything decent.”

  He followed her again the next afternoon. She was on autopilot: the same leisurely walk to the same destination. This time, Henry had brought a book, but had read only a few pages, when she came out, not alone. The man was tall, his dark hair cut short, almost shaven, and from the bounce of his walk, quite young. Henry followed them on to the King’s Road. The man took Nessa’s arm to steer her through the crowds. They were talking and the man inclined his head to catch her words. Henry was destroyed by their gravity.

  Even before they got there, he knew they were going to the Chelsea Cinema. There is only one screen, so he could see on the board outside that the film ended at 6:10. At 6:30, he heard Nessa’s key in the door.

  “I thought we might see a film,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “There’s a new Woody Allen on at the Chelsea—we could just catch the 6:45 performance—do you fancy it?”

  “Why not?” Nessa said, her coat half off, slowly backtracking.

  Henry did not follow her again. There was nothing new to discover. It was just a matter of waiting. A week later as he was leaving for the office, Nessa opened her study door.

  “Can we have a cup of coffee before you go?”

  They sat at the kitchen table. She was calm and prepared.

  “I saw you last week. Your book had a red cover and it caught my eye as we came out of the flat. I knew you had followed us to the cinema.”

  Henry grimaced.

  “I’m sorry about that. It was cruel. The film wasn’t good enough to see twice.”

  She looked up. “Do you think I saw it either time?”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “He’s an actor, he did a commentary for me. I’ve been sleeping with him for three—no, it must be four months.”

  Her precision, her belated need for honesty, undid him. Head bowed, he held back the tears.

  “Oh, come on Henry, don’t get upset. It can stop. It doesn’t mean very much. I don’t really like him. It’s not the end of us. Don’t you want to know why I’ve been seeing him?”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  She left the room on tiptoe, as if in the presence of the sick. She closed the door quietly behind her and he heard the clatter of her accelerated feet on the staircase. She could not wait to be gone. The real nastiness came later.

  6

  For a few days Henry stayed away from the brasserie. He went instead to a new coffee bar on the King’s Road, one of a chain much lauded by Tony Blair as an example of new-style enterprise. To Henry, familiar with the coffee bar boom of the sixties, there was little new about it, apart from the queues.

  It seemed to him that the bar had been deliberately designed to encourage delays. It was created for a generation that needs the endorsement of the herd—the familiar logo on the polo shirt, trainers with the right tick, nightclubs with reassuring lines. How else could you explain the faulty logistics of the place?

  The design was too inefficient to be accidental. To screw up on this scale takes planning. Why else the single serving station and solitary checkout? Why else the cluttered mix of eat-in and takeaway? Why the eclectic list of coffee options? (Guaranteed to cause dithering.) Why the novice on the till at the busiest times?

  It was the formula of a genius. How long before a newly elevated Lord Coffee was summoned to Westminster to head up the prime minister’s latest task force on youth-focused enterprise?

  Henry decided to breakfast again at the brasserie, but to go half an ho
ur later. There would be a different crowd at 9:00 and by then the angry girl and her boyfriend should have left. The new routine had started well. Leaving the house he had met the postman at the gate. It seemed a good omen. Simply by starting half an hour later he had already changed the shape of his day. He had his letters in his hand hours before he normally saw them. Perhaps he would have been happier as a late starter. If he had found time to have breakfast at home with Nessa, maybe he would not be divorced and worrying about a girl he had stared at in the brasserie.

  She was there with her boyfriend at a corner table, both amicable today. It was busy and he had trouble finding somewhere to sit. He had seen them in one of the mirrors and hoped that they had not seen him. He found a table at the rear of the room and ordered a coffee and croissant.

  One of his letters was from Simon Alders, a publishing friend, who wanted Henry to write a short ABC of management, the more personal the better. It was for a series that Henry was familiar with and he was surprised by the invitation. He had known Simon for years. As young men they had worked together as embarrassed trainees in the circulation department of a woman’s weekly. Henry had left to go into business and Simon to write a novel. His book, which had appeared two years later, had been a high-minded story about old age called Remaindered. Sadly, the title had proved prophetic and Simon had gone back into publishing.

  Henry read the letter again. He wasn’t at all sure that there were twenty-six meaningful things to say about management and he certainly was not going to prove it. He had always been wary of business books and their familiar lexicon of warrior virtues. At best, they take a normal business career with its usual mixture of talent, stupidity, and luck and impose on it the neatness of post-rationalization. The story is invariably one of unrelenting brilliance. At worst, the “wonderful me” quota is so generous that the books belong on the fiction shelves. He decided to send Simon a gracious letter and excuse himself.

  A young woman had stopped at his table. Henry looked up to ask for the bill, but realized that she wasn’t a waitress.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you. I’m Christine. I’m the manager—may I sit down?”

  Instinctively, Henry reached to shake her hand. It felt cold.

  “Look, I’m really sorry, but a customer has been complaining about you. He says you have been staring at his girlfriend—repeatedly—on several occasions.”

  Henry felt himself blushing.

  “Is it true?”

  “Yes, no … not really. If it’s the person I think, I did look for too long about a week ago, I was thinking about something else and I just, you know … it was rude.”

  “He says you were staring at her this morning, using the mirrors.”

  “That’s not true. I caught a glimpse of her in the mirror when I came in, that’s all. That’s why I came up this end of the room.”

  He looked down at the paper tablecloth, minutely aware of its coarse weave.

  “There’s no charge for your breakfast today—but it might be better if you went somewhere else in future.”

  “That hardly seems fair.”

  “I have noticed you before. Staring seems to be rather a habit.”

  Henry stood up and took his coat from the hook. He had stuck his scarf in one arm and could not get the coat on. She tried to help him, but he shrugged her off. “I’m all right, thank you.” He gathered up his things from the table and rushed out, the hem of his coat trailing on the floor, an empty sleeve waving to the room. At the door he was delayed by a flurry of people coming in. He stood to one side and looking back into the room saw the couple watching him, the man throwing his head back in laughter. Henry knew then where he had seen him before—the man’s moving head a chilling action replay. He was the man who had head-butted him on New Year’s Eve.

  On the last Friday in January, Mrs. Abraham resigned.

  Henry had stopped going out for breakfast and was often still in bed when she arrived. She was an orderly woman and her schedules did not allow for Henry’s mid-morning presence in bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. Several times he had made her late for her afternoon job.

  “To be honest, Mr. Cage, it’s not right—you moping around the house like this.”

  He had promised to be out of the house before she arrived and to stay out until late morning—sometimes for longer. She had seemed unsure and before he knew it he had said, “Oh, and I’ll be in America in April.”

  Mrs. Abraham smiled. She routinely read the letters that Henry carelessly filed in the kitchen toast rack and had been waiting to learn the outcome of Nessa’s invitation.

  “All right, we’ll give it another go, shall we?”

  7

  It had taken Maude Singer six months and three interviews to get a job at Henry Cage & Partners and eight weeks to decide that it was not for her. Aged thirty, she had been the oldest person in that year’s graduate intake, and that was the sole reason (though she did not know it) why she had been selected. It was Henry, a year earlier, who had begged that at least one of the next batch of trainees should have seen some life other than school, college, and a gap year in Goa.

  “Who do we get each year?” he had asked. “More of the same—it’s a very clever same, I grant you, they’re smart and they do their homework. To be frank, they frighten me. They know more about our company than I do. What ever happened to careless youth? Where are the misfits, the scratchy bastards who are going to make us feel uncomfortable? Surely, we can take just one risk each year?”

  And so Maude Singer, who had been a ballet dancer until a knee injury had sent her home to Bristol and a belated History of Art degree, had been the company’s one and only wild card in 1999. Why had she applied? She was not particularly interested in business, but she was intelligent, shrewd, and tired of being hard up. She wanted a fast track to her own flat, a car, and money in the bank. Despite sending her C.V. to all eighty-four organizations identified by the Appointments Board at Bristol, only Henry Cage & Partners had been interested in a thirty-year-old with no commercial experience and a forty-page thesis on “The Sculpture of Frank Dobson.”

  There had been one other interview. A young banker languidly looking down her C.V. had stopped at the mention of her thesis. “Where on earth does he find the time?” he had asked. She realized he was thinking of a contemporary Frank Dobson, at that time the Health Minister in Mr. Blair’s docile cabinet. She had answered leaning slightly forward in her chair, careful not to smile, “There’s always a mallet and chisel in one of his document boxes. He does it whenever he can.” The banker had apparently been satisfied with her explanation.

  And now she had resigned. They had, of course, not let her go without the semblance of a fight.

  “So tell me, Maude, what is this all about? We don’t usually lose people this early in their career.”

  Ed Needy, director of personnel, was in his thirties. He was well built with a shaven head. His eyes were blue and gave a misleading impression of candor. He inclined his head a carefully calculated fifteen degrees off the perpendicular and gave her a steady look. A girlfriend had once told him that this sideways glance made her feel that he was looking into the wings of her soul and he now believed it a crucial part of his persona. Maude, thinking that perhaps he had dropped his napkin, looked down at the carpet.

  “Don’t be embarrassed.”

  “I’m not. I thought you’d dropped something.”

  He had taken her to the Connaught Grill and they were sitting at his regular table in the window alcove. A trainee did not normally rate the £35 set lunch, but she was pretty and he feared that her departure would unsettle the other trainees.

  “It just seems hasty, you know. It’s always confusing when you’re shadowing other people. Why not give it another six months? If you still don’t like it, well, that’s the time to leave.”

  “I don’t think I can do that.”

  He hesitated. “There’s nothing I should know, is there? No unpleasantness, nobody making you
r life a misery?”

  “No, there’s nothing. Everyone is sweet. There’s a great atmosphere, you should be proud. I just don’t like the work.”

  He was tempted to ask her why she had applied in the first place and then remembered that he knew already. There were two envelopes in his pocket. One contained her P45 and a check for three months’ salary. He had decided not to let her work out her notice. (Why advertise the fact that his recruiting system was fallible?) In the other envelope was her initial letter to the company. He had intended to use it against her, but when he read it in the car on the way to the restaurant he saw that she had never been a gushing applicant. She had written that she had a good brain and that her career as a dancer had taught her discipline. She was eager to find out if these qualities would enable her to prosper as a management consultant.

  He looked up from his grilled sole. “You’ve been working on the market appraisal for our French friends, haven’t you? They want to get a foothold over here?”

  “Yes, lights and fittings; mostly lightbulbs, as far as I’ve been concerned. Lots of focus groups.”

  “Ah, I understand.” His head had tilted once more. “You shouldn’t judge us on those—how tedious they are—those front rooms in far-flung Basildon or Epsom—no one telling the truth, perfectly dreadful, I know. But that’s not the job, when these six months are over you need never go to another focus group in your life.” It was all he could do not to lay his hand on hers and give it a reassuring caress.

  “I know that.”

  She felt herself leaning to the side, mirroring his movements as some people unconsciously adopt a companion’s accent.

  “It’s not the mechanics that are the problem; my unease is more fundamental. You see, I’ve discovered I don’t care how many lightbulbs the average householder buys each month and I’m sure I’d be the same with pension policies or water softeners. They’re not things I want to worry about; I don’t want them filling the space in my head. I don’t want my highs and lows to be dependent on a Monday morning printout from a supermarket.”