The Upright Piano Player Page 6

  She smiled at him. “I didn’t know that before I started, but I do now. I’m sorry.”

  He had given her the check and told her that he wanted her to clear her desk that afternoon. He said it was company policy. But he had been nice and wished her luck.

  “What will you do now?”

  “Get a job, I don’t know, wait table, see what happens.”

  She lived in a rented flat in north London in a street where every Edwardian house had been converted. The developers had found a way of turning wine into water, transforming large, elegant rooms into minuscule flats. What was once an impressive drawing room or master bedroom became a living area with kitchenette, bedroom, and a shower/loo. That the bedroom lacked a window, that the dividing walls were so flimsy you could hear ice cubes tumble into a glass in the next room, none of that seemed to matter. The flats were sold or rented as soon as they became available. The road could no longer cope with the influx of more cars and residents. The bin men came twice a week, but there were always people who missed the collection and put their rubbish out late. Maude’s street had become an all-night diner for stray dogs and urban foxes. The postmen had learned to deliver eyes-down, watchful for dog shit and plastic bags leaking trash. Double parking had become endemic and the hooting of trapped motorists a familiar refrain.

  Maude had an attic conversion and counted herself lucky. There was a small sitting room with a galley kitchen, a bathroom, and best of all, a bedroom in the roof with a large skylight. She had placed a mattress on the floor directly under the skylight and on cloudless nights she lay there bathed in moonlight.

  She had painted the walls and ceiling to resemble a woodland bower, treating the trees in the manner of Mary Adshead, a noted muralist in the 1930s. Maude’s degree in art history had refined her eye, but not her hand and her rag-rolled foliage had turned out more brassica than arboreal.

  The only man who had stayed the night had laughed out loud on waking.

  “I hope you didn’t pay for that rag-rolling,” he had said looking up.

  “I did it myself.”

  “Look, I’ll show you. Keep the movements tight and disciplined, see. Remember, always keep your circles small.”

  He was naked, bouncing unattractively on the mattress, using his scrunched up socks to demonstrate the correct technique. Maude had decided to follow his advice and ten minutes later had made her circle smaller by a factor of one.

  8

  It was Roy Greening who spotted Henry’s letter in the Times. He read it with disbelief and ran chortling into the next office.

  “Look at this, Henry has finally flipped.”

  Charles England looked up from his desk. “Read it to me. You look as though you’d enjoy a rerun.”

  “You’ll enjoy it, too. Listen.”

  Dear Sir,

  Like most Englishmen I am interested in the weather and am a regular viewer of the BBC national weather forecasts. Am I alone in noticing that in a typical two-minute bulletin a disproportionate amount of time is allocated to Scottish weather? Understandably, Mr. Fish and his colleagues are weather enthusiasts, and no doubt Scottish weather is richly varied and often more dramatic than ours, but that should not influence the shape of the bulletin. To devote half a forecast to weather of interest only to three shepherds and five fishermen (I exaggerate) while ten million of us in London are lumped together with the southeast and given a very few seconds is, I suggest, lopsided. True, we do have our own regional forecast, but, presumably, so too do the Scots. My question is: should not the weather that affects the most people be given the most airtime?

  Henry Cage

  London SW7

  “I rather think he’s got a point,” Charles said.

  “Yes, but this is Henry Cage, ex–corporate guru—what’s he doing prattling on about the weather? It’s so … it’s so lightweight, don’t you think?”

  Charles continued to be tolerant.

  “He’s bored probably—and unhappy, too, I would guess. Have you seen him since he left?”

  “Afraid not—miserable people make me miserable, too, so I avoid them.”

  “Maybe we should arrange a lunch?”

  “He’d tell us to fuck off. Why should he forgive us? We took away his company.”

  Henry’s removal from the business had been handled with firmness, if not with finesse. His partners had secured the votes of the two non-executive directors and had the support of the bank and key clients. It was suggested to Henry that he had lost his appetite for commerce and that some of his recent pronouncements at conferences and in the press (not to mention the annual reports) had been eccentrically antibusiness and, frankly, unhelpful.

  Charles had even tried to be philosophical.

  “You, we, started this company because you believed there was a better way of doing business. And no one can say you didn’t practice what you preached. Most of the people in this building are sitting on comfortable nest eggs, solely because the partners distributed the equity so widely in the early days, though I admit there were some of us who, if allowed, would have kept more for ourselves.” His attempt at humor was greeted with silence—his self-deprecation too obviously emollient.

  “But times have changed. If I may say so, Henry, the kind of sixties liberalism that you believe in now feels antique. Legislation has made liberals of us all—minimum wage, equal pay, maternity, even paternity leave, the stake-holding society. The war is won Henry, and yet you go on as though we were still at the barricades.”

  At this point Charles had abandoned any attempt at graciousness. “This has become tiresome, to me personally—and counterproductive to the company commercially. For example, why shouldn’t this company work for British American Tobacco? If we can help them diversify, make them less dependent on tobacco income, isn’t that a good thing, not only for our shareholders but also for society?”

  Henry had stopped listening. They were now on charted territory, the subject of countless board meetings. He knew that Charles would repeat the litany of business opportunities that he, Henry, had forced the company to forgo. It was true; in the short term, his righteousness had sometimes hurt the bottom line, but he had always been willing to play the long game. They, it seemed, were not.

  They had offered him a more than generous severance package, contingent on his going peaceably. He was at an age when he could retire without suspicion, they said. God knows, he had earned a few years in the sun. The minutes of the meeting would record only his decision to retire—irregular no doubt, but in a situation like this, the least his friends could do.

  Henry had responded with a calm he did not feel.

  “I accept, naturally, your invitation to leave. I regret that I no longer hold enough equity to influence that decision, but perhaps, even if I did, I would choose not to. You are right: I no longer belong here. I have never been more certain of it.” He had paused and looked round the table. Only Charles met his eye.

  “When the time comes, you can be assured that I will play my part in any sentimental leaving ceremonies you wish to organize.”

  He had stood up and left the room, his board file left open on the table. The silence was eventually broken by Roy Greening. “Well, he didn’t seem to take it too badly.”

  Downstairs in the fifth floor loo Henry was vomiting into a toilet bowl.

  In fact, Roy had been wrong about Henry’s letter. It had sparked off an exchange of views that had enlivened the letters page of the Times for three weeks. Nor had Henry been without support, the letters running 60/40 in his favor.

  The BBC had defended the bulletins. The time allotted to each region, they wrote, was dictated solely by the complexity of the weather conditions in that particular region on that particular day or hour. They did not monitor the amount of airtime allocated to each region, but they expected that if they did so, over the year, there would not be wide variances. They estimated that the extra staff hours involved in such a procedure would cost £20,000 a year, and as
ked was this really how Mr. Cage wanted them to spend the license money?

  A stuffy response, Henry had thought and had said so when invited to debate the matter on Newsnight. He had been up against two defenders of the forecasts: a Scottish Nationalist MP who had thought the letter racist and a geek from the weather bureau who had trotted out the official BBC line. They had both been achingly serious. Henry had been rather flippant and he had left the studio in high spirits, pleased to be back in the limelight.

  The euphoria lasted for two days. Friends had been on the phone congratulating him on his performance, even Mrs. Abraham had been impressed to see him on the telly again. “Like old times, Mr. Cage, and nice to see you spouting on about something that wasn’t just business, if you know what I mean.”

  On the evening of the third day, as he was watching television with a supper tray on his lap, a brick was thrown through his drawing room window. He cried out as the brick skidded across a table sending the framed photographs crashing to the floor. There was glass everywhere. His strangled cry became a bout of coughing, so it was a minute or so before he got to the door. Across the road, old Mr. Pendry was out on his driveway.

  “I heard the crash, saw a van driving away—sorry, didn’t get the number, though—not with my old eyes. Play it pretty rough those weather boys.” He closed his door, chuckling.

  The police were sympathetic and gave Henry the number of someone who would board up his window. They were honest enough to admit that the chances of identifying the culprit were zero, unless he or she did it again and got careless. They promised to make sure a police car patroled the street for the next few evenings. “Chances are it was a random piece of hooliganism. It could just as easily have been the house next door.”

  It was not, however, the house next door that had dog turds posted through the letter box that weekend and it was not next door’s front garden that was doused with industrial bleach the following Tuesday night. The police conceded that the vandalism was targeted and extended the evening patrols, but short of mounting a twenty-four-hour guard outside Henry’s house (not possible with their reduced resources) there was little else they could do. It was suggested that Henry might like to hire a private security firm—the implication being that he could afford it.

  “Saw you on the box the other night, sir. Nice suit.”

  So far, life had never given Henry the chance to find out if he was brave. He had been a child during World War Two and had kept his satchel on long enough to escape National Service and the skirmishes of the fifties. At school he had avoided violence, was always adept at talking his way out of trouble. He was nervous of heights, but that did not necessarily make him a coward, though he suspected that he might be. When the runaway horse threatens to flatten the child, would he spring forward and scoop the infant up in his arms, or would he be transfixed, too petrified to act? Why does one man’s adrenaline go to his legs and another’s to his fists? Faced with danger, would he be a runner or a fighter?

  Once, at Cambridge, Henry had been involved in a nocturnal prank when, for a bet, he and a group of friends had climbed into a neighboring college to steal their first eight’s oars from the Porter’s Lodge. They had been blacked up, and tanked up, too, but they did manage to remove the oars, and later deliver a juvenile ransom note to the Warden. But what Henry remembered most clearly of that night had happened earlier.

  They had been crossing the main quad, commando-style, running low, one at a time, across the lawn into the safe shadows of the cloister. The last of them had just made his ground when a triangle of light spilt out onto the grass—a porter had come out of one of the staircases for a smoke. Henry had hidden behind a pillar, his heavy torch poised to hit the porter if necessary. It would have been a gross overreaction. Even now he shuddered to think what might have happened had he felled the poor man. Henry would certainly have been sent down; he might well have gone to prison. Yet in the heat of the moment, he had been tempted. It would not have been courageous. The porter had been armed only with a Woodbine and Henry had been in no danger. What would he do now if confronted by the vandal? He had no idea.

  The night after the police stopped their patrols Henry’s car was vandalized. A can of white paint had been emptied onto the bonnet of his Mercedes. It made no sense. A few days later, Henry received a letter. Inside the envelope on a single sheet of paper someone had scrawled the letter P with a blue felt-tip pen. The postmark showed that the letter had been posted in Clerkenwell. The following day another envelope came, postmarked S.E.3, with the letter E inside. By the third day and the arrival of the letter R (posted in Hampstead) Henry had a good idea where the correspondence was heading. The next letter, again posted in a different part of London, confirmed his suspicion; someone not short of first-class stamps was calling him a pervert.

  “I’ve found with this kind of muck, sir, the victim often has an idea who might be sending it; I mean, pervert is a pretty specific kind of insult—you know, there’s usually some incident that gives us a lead. You’re sure you can’t remember any sort of unpleasantness?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  Henry had never been a convincing liar and the detective sergeant did little to disguise his skepticism.

  “See, my theory is: someone saw you on the television and was able to put a name to your face and then track you down.”

  “I’m ex-directory.”

  “But Henry Cage & Partners isn’t, is it? I rang them—pretended to be a friend from New York who wanted to send you a book. They gave me your home address right off. And I don’t even have a good American accent.”

  Henry had not wanted to tell him about the head-butting and the incident in the brasserie. He sensed that the detective already half believed that the letters must have been justified. No one is called a pervert without reason. It’s not like “Rich bastard” or “Wog.” It’s not just a piece of name-calling, there’s a narrative attached to it, there’s a story there somewhere.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t think of anything. I’ll ring you if I do.” Henry had wanted him out of the house.

  “You won’t do anything stupid? No go-it-alone stuff?”

  Henry played the innocent.

  “Since I don’t know who to go for, that would be difficult.”

  9

  The vandalism had made Mrs. Abraham bellicose and Henry had found her constant suggestions tiresome.

  “What about security lighting, Mr. Cage? They say it really cuts down crime. Floodlight the front of the house. That’s what I’d do if I had the money.”

  “Well, let’s see, shall we? Maybe whoever it was is finished now.”

  She sniffed. “Why should they stop? Nobody’s doing anything to make them stop.”

  Henry had noticed that she spent a lot of time cleaning the front windows or sweeping the front path. He suspected that she was checking all traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian.

  HOUSEKEEPER MAKES CITIZEN’S ARREST—he imagined the headline and a photograph of Mrs. Abraham at the front door, looking so very much at home.

  He had invited her to take two weeks off with pay until things got back to normal. He had said he thought he might go and stay with friends and get some sleep. She had accepted her unexpected break with grace, sensing the lie, but letting it pass without challenge.

  As soon as he had the house to himself, Henry became nocturnal. There had been no more letters and the past few nights had been uneventful, but he knew that it was not over—he felt sure there was more to come. He sat up all night in a drawing room chair pulled up to the window. There was no street lighting immediately outside his house, but he could see the gate and the white picket fence well enough and the road beyond.

  When he grew weary, he listened to the twenty-four-hour news on a radio small enough to nestle in the top pocket of his jacket. He had bought it to take to cricket matches, but for the past year had been taking it to bed. It was the only way he could get to sleep. He lay on his right side, an ear
piece in his left ear, and he would drift off as reports came in of rogue kangaroos terrorizing a small outpost in Northern Australia or of a totally tattooed man in Alabama. There is not enough real news to fill twenty-four hours and by 4:00 in the morning trivia is rampant. It is easy for the brain to close down in self-defense, but now the same banality and repetition had to keep him awake.

  He had a large thermos of black coffee beside him and sandwiches bought earlier in the day. Anxious not to reveal his presence at the window, he had removed the sandwich wrappings in the kitchen to keep the noise down. He was aware that he was being ridiculous.

  The first night he had managed to stay awake. He had even enjoyed the experience. His street had once been a rat-run connecting the Fulham and Brompton roads, but pressure from the influential residents’ association had persuaded the authorities to make the street one-way and now it was of interest only to residents, tradesmen, the relevant utilities—and (at least) one vandal.

  By midnight the social comings and goings were over, the Wilkinsons a conspicuous exception. They had arrived home at 1:30 a.m. in their Lexus 400, a car shaped much like themselves—too heavy in the front to be graceful. They had slammed the car doors with tipsy abandon and then with fingers to their lips had hushed each other to their front door.

  At 2:55, the clouds had parted and moonlight glossed the roof tiles of the houses opposite. Mr. Pendry had paid a visit to the bathroom at 4:15 and a black cat had daintily walked the length of Henry’s garden fence shortly before 6:00, when The Today Programme had rescued him from the inanities of all-night news. He had gone to bed at 7:00 but found it impossible to sleep. Daylight seeped in through the curtains and he was conscious of the sounds of the day beginning: the rattle of the letter box as the newspapers arrived, the bleep of a reversing garbage truck, the squeak of next-door’s gate. After an hour, he went downstairs and retrieved his radio, finally falling asleep to the estuary tones of a phone-in.