Lover

by Anna Raverat

  54

  Peter put a sign up outside his shop: EVERYTHING MUST GO.

  “Where are you going?” I asked. “Are you retiring?”

  “No, darling—it’s not true, it’s just to get the punters in.”

  “Oh, I see. Is it working?”

  Peter shrugged. “Not really.”

  * * *

  When Gérard handed in his notice, Trish had security escort him to the door. Sam and I managed to locate his Perspex-framed photograph, which I now knew wasn’t of him and his cousin but of him and his partner who’d died.

  * * *

  Consultants from PricewaterhouseCoopers worked out an algorithm that told us how many times and in how many places and how many sizes we should place the brand so that it entered the guests’ subconscious. They told us that a couple of the brands were tired. Don and Trish decided that the hotels needed a makeover, and at huge expense Pallazio hotels were given a youthful upbeat feel by adding accents of key-lime green and bubblegum pink to the decor. It was similarly decided to position the newly acquired Ambassade chain as a high-end choice and to refresh the brand through a new logo with curlicue lettering and a color scheme of burgundy and gold, the same colors as a European passport.

  The plans sounded fine on paper but there were problems and the main one was that the Ambassade hotels weren’t living up to their current five stars, never mind the new six-star standards Trish set them. The Ambassade Central Park West in New York was the biggest concern. Regularly slated on TripAdvisor, this one hotel risked the reputation of the whole estate.

  * * *

  Trish announced a Guest Experience conference to be held in the New Year, mainly for the brand and marketing teams, but HR and legal were also to be invited—she and Don had put the targets up again; they needed enforcers. The conference would be held at the Ambassade Central Park West.

  “We need to check up on that hotel anyway—we can kill two birds with one stone,” said Trish.

  Don and Trish persisted in making poor business decisions. They formulated a plan to buy disused hospitals and turn them into hotels, starting with the former tuberculosis hospital in Johannesburg known as “The Hamlet”—TB or not TB—an abandoned hospital in Beirut and a derelict sanatorium in Lima, Ohio. This, it was felt, was a very bad idea: making a hotel out of an old monastery where guests imbibe some of the peacefulness ingrained in the building is one thing, but hotel guests sleeping in the same place as people who couldn’t breathe, where patients lay sick and dying, is quite another. But Don and Trish didn’t care about that; they just wanted bodies in beds.

  55

  The Lost Rivers of London told me that part of my daily commute followed the course of the Fleet, the largest and most important of the forgotten rivers. When I traveled that section I thought of the Fleet: trampled on and ignored until it shrank almost out of existence.

  One day I sat next to a girl and her grandmother on the Tube. The girl, who can’t have been more than five years old, knelt up on the carpeted seat next to me and tapped her finger against the window, saying, “No, you can’t. No, you can’t. No, you can’t,” to her own reflection, over and over again. I was quite disturbed by this; her grandmother didn’t appear to notice. The girl kept looking at me, perhaps because she knew she had won my attention. After a few minutes of this, I looked her straight in the eye and said, “Yes, you can.” She started to cry and I realized I had been a little too vehement. The grandmother glared at me so I got off at the next stop.

  * * *

  Being kicked out of the office without having to serve his notice meant Gérard could fly to Australia sooner than expected, which he did, and another thing that was unexpected was that David flew with him—I knew David had taken Gérard’s number at my birthday meal but I hadn’t known they’d started seeing each other until they announced their departure date. Every so often they sent Snapchats—Sydney Opera House, Melbourne, Adelaide—but I didn’t see the sights, all I saw was their burgeoning romance and I wished I had one.

  * * *

  Getting Gérard’s piano proved more complicated than I could have imagined. I used a local firm, recommended by the nice woman in the bookshop, and had a series of conversations with the owner, Stephan, who asked questions about the size of the piano, door widths, how many steps up to the front door, access through windows. The phone calls were always in the evening, since I couldn’t easily call from work anymore, and I could hear domestic noises churning in the background—a washing machine spinning, a television, a child playing. Stephan was very patient—I hardly ever knew the answers and had to wait for Gérard’s replies from Western Australia.

  When all the details were collected, Stephan said, “This isn’t very straightforward, I’m afraid. To get a piano that size out of that flat we’ll have to use the window or take the doors off, but either way it’s going to take four men, and since the flat is in Kilburn that’s going to be expensive. I’ve had a better idea—I have a piano in storage just down the road, you can have that. You’ll have to pay delivery but that’ll only be about thirty quid and I’ll give you the piano.”

  “You’ll give me the piano?”

  “Yes, why not? It’s just sitting there.”

  I emailed Gérard to say I didn’t need his piano any-more and received two replies.

  Gérard: Ask to see his piano before you accept.

  David: A man is giving you a piano and you haven’t even met? Very romantic.

  56

  I took the girls to Spain for the last week of the school summer holiday. Milla decided she didn’t want a tan and applied sunblock meticulously to every centimeter of her skinny seven-year-old body, whereas Hester writhed to get away from it.

  On the beach, Hester bounded up with a perfectly round, brown stone.

  “Look, Mummy, I found a stone like a burger—it’s the same size and it has those kind of lines on it that burgers have.”

  “Flame-grilled,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It’s what they do to burgers that make those lines.”

  “I’m going to give it to Dad to keep on his desk.”

  “As a paperweight?”

  “No, just as a burger.”

  One morning I was drinking coffee on the balcony outside our room, enjoying the sun on my face. Hester came to keep me company.

  “Mum, have you got your booby-tucker on?”

  “Not yet, I’m still in my pajamas. I’ll get dressed soon.”

  “Can I see your boobies?” She pulled open my pajama top and peered down.

  “Where are they? Where are they? I can’t see them!”

  “They’re in there somewhere,” I said. She looked again.

  “Oh, yeah! Mine are even tinier,” she said, lifting up her T-shirt. I hugged her.

  “Mummy, I love you more than this bench.”

  * * *

  After a week in the sun, my shoulders were like brown speckled eggs. When we got back home, Adam came to collect the girls.

  “All your freckles have come out,” he said.

  “I think they’re age spots,” I said. It had been years since I’d tanned.

  “No, they’re not, they’re freckles. You’ve always been freckly—like your mum.”

  You’ve always been freckly: just a little comment, but it pierced. All the sadness came rushing in. He knew my skin. He knew my body. He’d been there when I gave birth, seen things about how my body worked that even I hadn’t; knew its quirks and imperfections, how I felt about my own lumpy bits; knew me, intimately. And he did it anyway. Hester came down the stairs with the burger-stone, which allowed me to escape to the kitchen to stop up my tears and drink some water to wash over the question lodged in my throat. When was it, how was it, that I became so unprecious?

  57

  I read The Lost Rivers of London as if it were a guide to the lost rivers of my life, and in a sense it was. I had favorites. There was the Ravensbourne, rising at a well in Keston, flowing thro
ugh Bromley, Lewisham, and Greenwich, joined by several tributaries, among which was the Quaggy; and the Falcon, which burst out of the pavement in a street in Clapham Junction during national floods—the road is named after it. I felt sorry when I read the fate of Stamford Brook, once the confluence of three smaller streams, covered by 1900, now a sewer; and poor Peck, springing in East Dulwich, running through Peckham, enclosed in 1823. Enclosed, covered, diverted, polluted; how could a city do that to its rivers? Yet there was hope: a campaign to unearth the Effra; commuters sometimes see Counter’s Creek from the westbound platform of West Brompton Tube station; and the Peck still flows, much diminished, on the west side of Peckham Rye Park.

  One weekend in September, with nothing much else to do, I packed a lunch and kitted out the girls in wellington boots to go river-spotting. It had been raining heavily for two days; conditions were perfect.

  In retrospect, it was bound to fail: I had spoken about the rivers as if they were tigers or snow leopards or some other endangered species, so when I knelt down at a grating to hear the flow of the Fleet the girls were not impressed, and when I stopped in the middle of Charterhouse Street to peer down a grid where we could actually see water, they protested loudly.

  “Mummy, we’re children—we shouldn’t be stopping in the middle of a road, we might get run over!” said Hester.

  “We aren’t even on a crossing!” said Milla. “Bad parenting, Mum.”

  “This is the most boring trip you’ve ever taken us on,” Hester said, and she was right. I thought it would be like a special day out I had with Adam, years ago, when we crossed all the bridges over the Thames in one day on the Ducati. It doesn’t sound very exciting, but we were close then; everything was fun.

  To make up for the most boring outing ever I bought the girls two bags of crisps and a bottle of apple juice each. They tried to negotiate an upgrade to Coca-Cola and a third bag, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

  On the way home, they sat apart from me on the Tube, trading crisp flavors, legs stuck straight out in front. I thought about the pieces of jewelry I had dropped down various grids and gratings around London and whether, after a heavy rain or at high tide, they had reached the underground rivers and been carried along to the Thames, eventually released into the sea.

  * * *

  When we got off the Tube, I realized there was a conspiracy.

  “Mum, we really, really want another bag of crisps,” said Hester.

  “We think you should. We nearly got run over!” said Milla.

  “We didn’t, actually,” I said, “but if you really, really want another bag, then OK.”

  “Thanks, Mum!” said Hester.

  “You are actually a good parent,” said Milla.

  The trip ended happily after all from their point of view, but I saw, again, how difficult it was for me to hold a line. Milla’s comments on my parenting made me wonder if she had been studying the child-rearing manuals that sat in squat piles under my bed along with the other self-help books, unopened except when delivered—I saw the Amazon guy at least as much as I visited the bookshop, though he was no rival to Ben. When new books arrived I flicked through them before placing them under the bed as though all of the advice and help they contained would rise up through the bed slats and mattress and get into me by osmosis. The real books, the ones from the bookshop, were stacked in a much taller pile beside my bed; I wasn’t reading those either, except for Lost Rivers, which I didn’t so much read as consume.

  58

  Aged forty-seven, Trish was prescribed glasses. The optician told her that after forty-five it was just a matter of time, and that’s for everyone. She reported this lightly, but I could see it had wounded her—not so much having to wear glasses as being lumped in with everyone else. Perhaps Sam, in making the appointment, had neglected to mention Trish’s power and influence or maybe the optician simply didn’t care, but in any case, that somebody hadn’t recognized her position seemed to have slightly weakened it. Her spectacles had slim designer frames of very pale tortoiseshell, a tiny gold insignia on the side. She carried them folded close to her chest, her thin wrist curling around, the glasses touching her sternum like a fan yet to be unfurled. She reminded me of Marie Antoinette, or a bird with a broken wing.

  * * *

  The shareholders were leaning hard on Don, breathing down his neck. They didn’t give a shit about mitigating circumstances, they didn’t care about the world’s problems, they saw only the unbanked money, and insisted that Don did too—see it, find it, bank it.

  Don grew leaner and meaner. He was first in and last out, paced the eleven floors like a man who could get no rest. A rumor started that the office was haunted, though it was most likely sightings of Don, eyes sunk deep in his skull, striding up and down the escalator at strange hours, talking to himself. The nightwatchman—Harman from Sierra Leone—and two of the office cleaners—Filipe and Ana, a Portuguese married couple who came at 5:00 every weekday morning—spoke barely any English, but they managed to communicate something to the daytime security guard—Brian from Liverpool—who passed it on to Ian the receptionist, and Ian told everyone who walked in the front door. Rumor also had it that Don had started shouting at people who weren’t there.

  “He sees the ghost,” Sam said.

  “No, no—he is the ghost,” I said.

  “What do you mean? Don’s not a ghost,” she said.

  “I know—there is no ghost.”

  “But there is—Ian told me that Harman actually saw it.”

  “That was probably Don, though,” I said.

  59

  When I next went down the alley, Peter was nowhere to be seen. Ronnie was astride a gleaming red mobility scooter, L-plates stuck on the front and back.

  “Had a stroke, didn’t I? My wife didn’t think it was too clever when I fell down the stairs with it, cracked a couple of teeth out—” He grinned to show the gaps. “The old lady never called an ambulance, though, did she? Guess who she did call? Peter. He came so quick, it was like he flew there—now that’s a real friend—he helped me up, he called the ambulance. She was just wailing in the background, the old girl was—useless! Now I’m on one of these things—” He slapped the side of his scooter as if it were a horse’s neck. “And I’ve got the L-plates, see? Sixty-seven, sweetheart, and still a learner—I don’t mind, I still come here every day, for the company. And the drink.”

  Ronnie was minding the shop because Peter was at the local police station.

  “But don’t worry, sweetheart, he’ll be back.”

  Toto had been shouting profanities through the window and passersby assumed it was Peter yelling abuse.

  * * *

  At last I arranged to view the piano, which was stashed in a warehouse at the back of a cage alongside a quantity of sealed boxes. It was a very old, black upright with candleholders either side of where the music sits, so you could play by candlelight. I thought it was lovely. We went in Stephan’s car. He told me about his divorce and his daughter, who lived with him because the ex-wife kept going on retreats. On the way back he asked me out for dinner, very casually, in such a way that it didn’t sound like a date, just meeting up with a potential new friend, and proceeded to give me instructions about what to do with the piano when it arrived.

  “Now when you first get it delivered, it’s going to sound a bit tinny because it’s been sitting in storage. You’ll need to get it tuned—here’s a number.”

  I booked the tuner to come the same day as the delivery, took a day off work to receive the piano, and by the time the girls were home from school it was all set up. Hester picked out “Three Blind Mice” with one finger, and Milla played “Jingle Bells,” which she was learning on the recorder, and then they fought over whose turn it was.

  * * *

  Yvette taught the girls to play “Chopsticks,” which my mother had banned in our house when we were growing up. Yvette was still visiting often, more than she ever used to. I began to w
onder if we were her refuge, a bolt-hole from her own marriage, which didn’t seem very happy. One weekend I took the girls to Brighton and the tension was so bad that Milla whispered, “Are Saul and Yvette going to get divorced?”

  Later Yvette said, “It will get better. I just have to hang on and hope.”

  * * *

  The girls played “Chopsticks” incessantly. They played it on the top notes, they played it on the bottom notes, they played it as a duet with both parts the same, they played it slowly, they played it fast, they played it in a combination of fast and slow, but mostly they played it very, very loudly.

  “‘Piano’ means soft, you know!” I shouted.

  * * *

  We’d been separated for nearly a year but were still in a kind of marital limbo so I told Adam that I was going to have dinner with Stephan at which news he shrugged bad-temperedly.

  “Have you been seeing anyone?” I asked.

  “No, not at all,” he said.

  “Online?”

  “No, Kate—I don’t do that anymore. I’m waiting for you, and you know that. I’ve been living like a monk.”

  “Monks don’t have a consistent reputation throughout history,” I said.

  “Don’t be pedantic, you know what I mean.”

  * * *

  I needn’t have worried. The dinner was fine but it was clear by the time the main course arrived that this was going to be a one-off. Points of connection were few. Perhaps because of this, Stephan drank three large glasses of red wine. Over dessert he criticized his ex-wife in detail. By coffee the conversation had moved on to the incredible usefulness of microwaves to the single parent. Nevertheless I was very grateful to Stephan for the piano despite the dreaded “Chopsticks,” which I banned.

  * * *

  I found a piano teacher through the mums at school. Linda arrived with an armful of music and more in a bag, to find out what we wanted to play. The girls started on their favorite nursery rhymes and simplified pop songs. When it came to my lesson, I hadn’t given a moment’s thought to what I might like to play.