The Concert Pianist

by Conrad Williams

  His anticipation peaked at exactly four-thirty and remained on a high for around ten minutes. He was primed for the door bell to ring, ready and expectant, his sociability raised and on call as though he knew how easily conversation would flow between them, an effortless duet just like the first effects of champagne. By a quarter to five he was glancing at his watch and worrying about the traffic. By five he was a little let down, his excitement diffusing. He supposed she had forgotten or written down the wrong day, or got stuck at the office with something more urgent. He tried to call her mobile, switched off; checked his own for messages. It was a little inconsiderate of Ursula to be running this late, to keep him waiting - though what did she know of his light heart and the spring in his step? He wandered around like a visitor in his own home, still tidying things, keeping up the vigil, but with a sinking feeling. His earlier eagerness seemed foolish now. He was setting store by things that could not come to much. He even wondered whether Ursula had taken fright. The rendezvous was a little staged and self-conscious, perhaps. Philip sat down in the armchair, his big hands locked together. The room had grown dull in the overcast afternoon light. A few minutes later he stood in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil. He watched the squirrels on the fence outside and the thrushes darting from twig to birdbath.

  It was so much harder, these days, to brush off disappointment.

  She arrived on the dot of five-thirty. He found himself greeting her with an almost theatrical aplomb, raising her knuckles to his lips and guiding her shawl as she revolved. She wore silk and devore, a gold necklace. Her hair was lively, brushed up, a chaotic halo of corkscrew; her lips and eyes were subtly intensified by make-up. She came through the hallway in a great surge of feminine arrival, glancing through doorways and up staircases as he led her to the kitchen.

  ‘Nice kitchen!’

  ‘Wine?’

  Ursula seemed to think she was dead on time.

  ‘Can I drink while you play? Surely not.’

  ‘You’ve come all this way. Your every need must be answered. Wine, gateau, cup of tea?’

  ‘Gateau!’

  ‘Take a look.’ He cracked open the fridge.

  She was aghast.

  The gateau sat in buxom resplendency on the lower shelf.

  ‘Oh, wow!’

  She was looking her absolute best.

  Philip wore a black cotton suit, a black shirt underneath: casual, relaxed, elegant - or so he hoped. He was quick with the wine bottle, adept with the corkscrew.

  ‘How’s the office?’

  ‘You don’t want to know. Pressure, chaos, computer mayhem. We’ll cope. We always do. You’re looking smart!’

  He smiled.

  ‘I really do like this kitchen.’

  ‘Sit down and enjoy it.’

  ‘Are these Amtico tiles?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  She sat down, leggily arranging herself around the chair, propping an elbow on the table top.

  He joined her with bottle and glasses and they talked about where she lived, life at the agency, a recent trip to Barcelona, and he was reminded of how familiar she seemed. Ursula’s type of beauty was so benign, based around laughter and smiles, lively, quite unselfconscious. Here was a woman ready to do business with the world. A long future lay before her, and its recipe was new and different to what women of his generation had known: the sense of entitlement, of emotional self-determination, of certain pleasures being recruited as part of a necessary mastery over good fortune. She had the centred look of someone with an accrued inner life, which she valued and held to herself as an asset to be shared - eventually - with the right man. They talked about her job a little. She loved music and was devoted to the cause and appreciated the concerts deeply, but she belonged to other parts of life as well. It was the social exposure to men and women of passionate interest she found most rewarding.

  ‘Um, we’ve forgotten the cake,’ he said.

  ‘What about some music?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘What are you going to play me?’

  He was happy here in the kitchen, sitting and talking.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘You bet. Might just pop to your bathroom.’

  He rose, taking a bottle of wine in hand. ‘Upstairs.’

  He wandered through to the piano room. It seemed almost a shame to break the flow of conversation and become the performer again. He sat on the stool and pressed his hands together and considered what to play. If he was going to play, he had better get on with it. He could serenade her in the loo. He gazed at the keys, waiting for a prompt, and then it came, perfect, the G major Prelude by Rachmaninov, pure and spring-like, left hand first, evenly undulating, a liquid current, bright, clear, sweet, ringing, and then the right-hand melody, calm, upwardly arching with birdlike trills and flutters, extending the radiance of the key across the whole soundboard and filling the room with a fresh lustre that greeted her as she came through the door and made her way to the back of an armchair.

  She stood there motionlessly. He could barely detect her in the corner of his eye, but her attention was keen, and it felt good to have a listener attached to every phrase and every shift of pedal and the sound washes his playing manipulated; and when he ended the prelude he waited barely a second before securing her attention with the first note of another piece, Chopin’s Aeolian Harp Etude, the swells and hues of which filled the room more copiously than the Prelude, as though he were bringing the Steinway’s declaratory beauty of tone to life in levels of growing intensity; and when the last surge of arpeggios had risen and fallen like the foamy wake of a water nymph, dispersing into an aqueous shimmer, an afterhaze of tone, his head fell to one side, almost out of modesty.

  ‘Beautiful, Philip. Please, more!’

  It came to him as a swelling, a physical knowledge. He needed to know, of course he needed to know, and now was the moment, and so he said ‘Ursula’ as he rose, fastening her interest with what sounded like a question, and making his way towards her casually, an easy stroll, which somehow enabled him to glide into her arms before she realised what had happened, and kiss her.

  She looked back in amazement, and he kissed her again. For a moment she was frozen and held his eye, before he kissed her a third time.

  ‘Philip!’

  He kissed her yet again, and this time she had to go through with it. She yielded a bit, lips breaking their seal, softening, head moving in some sort of response, hand opening against his jacket.

  He followed the kiss with an embrace, gently supporting the small of her back. His heart was hammering with excitement.

  They turned a little, away from the armchair, and she saw the edge of the recamier coming up, and looked at him again in confusion as the two of them subsided on to the long seat, Philip placing her against the deep cushions, she settling under him in a twisted position, which she corrected rather awkwardly with a heave of her backside. Her eyes caught the window-light as she stared back at him and for a moment they both adjusted to the unscheduled amorousness of this new position, and the new relation he had forced on her. She looked a bit strange now. She was recovering from an unopposable physical declaration.

  When, in this new arrangement, he leant forward to kiss her, she was more nourishing, and he could sort of tell from the way she regarded him that she was able to commit to the experiment, for the moment at least.

  He placed a hand on the side of her face, fingertips immersed in her hair. The face that gazed at him could not know how beautiful it was, how haunting. And now she shifted, getting more comfortable. Perhaps in her imagination, she had prepared for this scene.

  He had no voice, no words. Speaking was unmanageable. He held her face and wondered if her silence was an obstacle or an invitation. She was resolved perhaps that he should get on with it, tunnel through the strangeness.

  His breath, did it smell?

  Her youth was what he was stealing, he thought, as he ran fingers inside h
er blouse. She lay tensely waiting, almost daring him to get on with it. He had been far too sudden to expect help from her. The pleasurable present hovered on the moment as his long fingers slowly found the fastener between her shoulder blades, a tricky twist, requiring a moment of real effort before the bra came loose. She followed his eyes as he gazed at her. Her stare was brave.

  He hesitated. Ursula seemed to exhibit a kind of defiant beauty. She knew very well the value of the spectacle before him, her eyes enormous, her areolae an echo of those eyes, two of everything. Would Philip now strip off or was there more fondling in store? Was she going to lie there getting all cool and goosebumpy as he stared at her? Perhaps he needed something more from her: permission, reassurance, touch? Her look seemed to ask all these questions whilst trapping amazement. This was a decorum buster.

  John, for one, would not be amused.

  He put his hand on her breast experimentally, contact in that place, to which she responded by compressing his hand slightly with her own - asensuous granting.

  He was so uncertain. He could see the worn, grey back of his hand on white bosom, and feel the furrows in his brow, and as he drew off his spectacles and put them on the table, the moisture around his eyes; and it daunted him, the unbattered fairness of her neck and shoulders, the intrepid clarity of her eyes; because one never knew, these days, what kind of lover you were, what sort of figure one cut, and whether his vintage of concupiscence would be edifying or not - which made this trance of gentle contact the more important, for what it implied, for what it tacitly conceded.

  She stared at him, her breathing even, her head easily settled on the cushion as he dusted her cheek with his knuckles. A human being was a continent of accessible life and history when one got into this position.

  ‘Come on top of me,’ she said.

  She seemed so familiar, even sexually familiar. All that pleasing line and contour, the rise and fall, the darkness of hair found an exact reception within him. They were part and parcel of each other. In which case his desire to touch mapped her need to be touched.

  There was more kissing suddenly and it came about quickly that her blouse and bra were on the floor and Philip was deliciously engrossed in the festival of her breasts and mouth.

  He felt his cock snagging on his Y-fronts.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Just a minute.’

  ‘What’s . . .’

  ‘Hang on.’

  He supported his weight on an elbow and shucked off his trousers. She allowed him to ease her skirt, knickers and tights down. The recamier creaked alarmingly. Soon there was an equality of nudity, a meeting of the old and the new. Ursula was unbashful and he found he didn’t care, was eager to press on with what they had started and was relieved at how easily he got inside her, and how right it felt to be in possession of this tensile creature with her arched back and twirling hair. She was thriving under him, as if coupling a man twice her age was the easiest thing in the world.

  There was a certain stop and start to proceedings, the awkward preliminaries of concerted copulation. They both had to struggle with the hard base of the recamier and the plethora of cushions in the way, sliding off, burying Ursula’s face, and yet there was a corner of compromise between her lithe length and this rigid piece of furniture, and when they found it, he was alarmed by the sudden anguish of her pleasure. Her shoulder blades rose as she moved into the animal position. This effortful connection was part of what the body did well. It fuelled him: the line of her ducking back, the wobbly tense thigh of a leg braced against the floor, the hair cloud crashed into cushions and upholstery, the sheen of skin, making it so crucial to climax.

  His orgasm rose up forcefully and was almost painful, a wake-up call to the parts, a cobweb-clearer, leaving him with gritted teeth and a toppling wooziness; and gradually they subsided on to the recamier, Ursula crumpling under a wounded man, her cheek smudging against the edge of a cushion, arm arcing up balletically.

  They lay still and naked, the familiar returning gradually. He was slowly aware of cold semen between his belly and her back, and the near end of the piano, and the roofline of houses across the street.

  He adjusted his weight so she could turn and look at the ceiling mouldings or into his eyes if she wanted. Her hair was in disarray, her chest rosy. She gazed at him flatly. Ursula was somewhere else for the moment, in the middle of her own version of what they had just been through. Absently, she reached up to his face and rasped the silky ball of her thumb against his stubble.

  He had made himself known to her of course, biblically, and in other respects.

  ‘I thought you were going to play the piano,’ she said softly.

  He smiled. ‘That was the plan.’

  ‘Gateau, white wine, a little Chopin.’

  ‘The offer of cake stands.’

  Ursula seemed less familiar now.

  ‘Drop of Chablis?’

  She bit her finger.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She sat up a little as he poured the wine.

  ‘Philip!’ She almost laughed. This was nervousness, self-consciousness.

  ‘I surprised you?’

  Ursula looked to one side.

  He took her hand, clasping it as he kissed it.

  She regarded him with wary admiration. ‘I think you were inspired.’

  ‘I was!’

  ‘It’s quite interesting to be . . . surprised.’

  ‘You weren’t . . .’

  She put her hand on his knee, gave him an even glance. ‘Not really. I mean, it was maybe in the air.’

  He smiled at her.

  She pulled him towards her and kissed him on the mouth.

  Her eyes were about two inches away. The pupils seemed enormous. Bits of light were reflected in the irises.

  He was pulling in his stomach a little, but generally he felt comfortable with his nakedness. What Ursula saw in him was never any kind of physical beauty, he knew that, but the calibre of an older man’s appreciation. She had wanted him to be stirred, to be forced into the open from behind the shield of his experience, where she could manage him as an equal. Now, as he looked at her, he felt her maturity and innocence so oddly mixed and entwined. She was young, all right, the far side of that mid-life hilltop that he had rolled over, but her poise was incredible. He had absolutely surprised her. She still was at the dress-rehearsal stage of ideas about him when he struck; and here she was, regarding him half humorously, half in shock, because Ursula had no idea what to expect from this pianist character.

  ‘I fancy some of that gateau,’ he remarked.

  ‘Cake and Chablis. Do I just lie here?’

  ‘You’re on odalisque duty.’

  ‘The Sultan has spoken.’

  ‘Here.’ He cast his shirt over her.

  ‘Perhaps I should get dressed.’

  ‘Don’t do that! Madness!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’ll flick on the central heating.’

  Ursula laughed. ‘Romantic.’

  He stood tall and naked. ‘I’m doing my best.’

  ‘You’re doing wonderfully.’

  ‘I could light a fire. There are candles somewhere.’

  ‘Get the cake first.’

  In the kitchen he was merry and fleet of foot. Out came the gateau, plates and spoons, a tray. Doubtless the neighbours could see him through the conservatory glass, bollock-naked. Bully for them. All in all, a very smart kitchen. Good old Laura, he thought. She had given him a bloody hard time, and a first-class kitchen. He was longing to be back in the living room at the scene of a miracle. He zoomed back, tray on high, like a Grand Hotel waiter in the buff.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  She was laughing.

  ‘No half measures.’

  ‘I don’t believe this is happening.’ She covered her face with her hand. Her smile was lovely.

  Philip got the cake on the coffee table and was soon sectioning it and serving it up on side plates.


  Ursula munched and licked fingers, making a mouthy meal of the creamy treat. ‘Hmmm. Heavenly.’

  She put a plate down and sipped at her Chablis and basked in luxury.

  Rich creamy foods were not recommended at the moment. Nor was wine. He ate with a reckless sense of triumph.

  ‘Tea at Philip’s,’ she declared.

  ‘Only for very special people.’

  ‘The gateau, or the sex?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘Well, I know I’m not really supposed to have sex with my agent.’

  ‘Oh don’t!’ She frowned. ‘God, what would . . .’

  What would John think, but this begged too many questions. She was silent for a moment, calculating something, consequences, how things would look.

  Philip was concerned. The setting had plenty of charm, but Ursula was at the beginning of complications if this went any further, and as he came across and sat next to her he was determined that it should go further.

  ‘Ay-yi-yi! Talk about unprofessional!’

  ‘You are hardly to blame,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all your fault, Philip.’

  ‘Tell John I ravished you.’

  She was nearly pained by this, then horribly amused.

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Listen, I . . .’

  ‘It will be a mess.’

  ‘Don’t . . .’ He wanted to give her a way out, just as a matter of chivalry. He touched her to dispel John, the office. ‘Don’t let it be a mess. This is all a bit crazy.’

  ‘It is crazy.’

  ‘I’m ancient.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  He smiled at her emphatic tone. ‘You’re so ridiculously young.’

  ‘It’s a scandal, all right!’

  ‘It is a scandal.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Have I shown much sign of minding?’

  ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you did.’

  ‘I don’t care about all that.’

  He stared at her seriously.