Goodbye, Paris

by Anstey Harris

  Nikolai Dernov was the last person I played in front of. He would wholly approve of my terror at playing for an audience, any audience. In my darkest dreams on the loneliest of nights, I still hear the rasp of him clearing his throat in disgust.

   Chapter Three

  When Nadia has gone, I sit at the kitchen table with my laptop and try to work out how long David will have to be away. Maybe it’s all blown over and he can come home.

  No such luck. The story has made it to the UK. The same banner headline, this time in English, runs across the screen: Who was he? Paris Mystery Superhero. Online news sites are making much of the girl’s Islamic clothing, tying the lack of rescue into the rise of neo-fascist groups across Europe. It’s nonsense. I would love to be able to call the reporters and say, “You weren’t there. You don’t know how it felt, how the slow motion played out and how we were all rooted to the spot.”

  I want to shake the orange-faced newsreader and scream at him that David jumped first because he’s that kind of guy. That everyone there wanted to help, just as I did, but that not everyone there was David.

  When I navigate my way to a French website, a bilingual news channel, there are calls for the mystery man to be honored, for his gallantry to be recognized by the government. For the first time, there is a clip from the camera in the front of the train, the same chilling view that the driver had. It is worse even than I remember.

  I wonder if David has seen it. He is in Spain trying to avoid exactly that. His teenagers have been unplugged from the internet and the whole family is being distracted from the TV. I wince at the thought of their togetherness and wonder whether it includes the children’s mother.

  Last year Nadia set up a Twitter account for the shop; she is in charge of it and tweets pictures of interesting instruments or links to music she’s found online. The account is permanently logged in on my laptop and I open it up.

  David is an actual hashtag. I don’t know how I feel about that. I’m certainly surprised and—at first—amused. His reaction to #hérosmystère is going to be very different. This is exactly what he was worried about. And then I see what has happened. There was a silly, made-up day being celebrated on Twitter. It called for everyone to #BeaSuperhero and, from all over the world, people have put up examples of how they joined in, of what they did. David jumped onto a train track and saved a woman’s life. It couldn’t be worse timing. I hover the mouse over the words and click on the hashtag. #hérosmystère is trending. It is the main topic of conversation in places as far-flung as Canada, Belgium, and Vietnam. David will be mortified.

  The last few days have heaped event on top of event and I am exhausted. My bedtime ritual is the same whenever David and I are apart, but now I carry it out with even more rigor. I check my mobile for messages, in the unlikely event that the sound was turned off. I check the house phone and its answering machine and dial through to the shop and check that one. I tell myself that I’m keeping up with business, making sure I haven’t missed anything while I’ve been out, but even I know that’s a lie.

  There are no messages from David.

  * * *

  In the morning I drive over to my shop. I could have walked, but the whole incident with Nadia has left me weak, shaken. The car smells of quality leather and its dashboard is softly backlit, subtle. David chose this car, although I insisted on paying for it. We pored over car magazines and websites, for all the world like any other couple, discussing and comparing. We thought of all the things we might need to put in the car: double basses, dusty tools, and cobwebbed wood. We squeezed each other’s hands at the page in the catalog that mentioned car seats and dog guards; things that will, one day, decorate our lives together.

  Every time we drive this car anywhere, it paints a vivid picture of the normality that will be ours. It helps. Even driving it by myself reminds me of him. This car has far more class than one I would have chosen.

  This small town is chocolate-box pretty, its heart is old—surrounding a market square that, when I was a child, still had cattle pens and auctions in it—and it spirals out to green fields and ancient hedges. Nowadays, the town is tidier and more genteel than it was. There are a lot of older people here; partly because it’s so quiet and partly because the rising market has priced out younger families. I’ve been here—on and off—for most of my life and I like the quietness. Most of the people my parents knew have, like them, died by now. People I grew up with who are still here—and there aren’t many of them—don’t really bother with me, much as they didn’t at school. I spent too much time with my cello and not enough time socializing. I didn’t think I needed too many friends, and that has never really changed. Around when I thought I might leave for good I met David, and stayed because it’s near the Eurostar terminal.

  * * *

  I love my shop. It is a long way from the direction I had planned to take, the one I worked towards my whole life. But it is all my own work. Every day I open the door with a sense of my own achievement. I inhale the smells of varnish and wood shavings and I am strong and capable.

  The shop is quaint. It is essential to my trade that it is like stepping back in time, that customers feel connected to history. The carpet is a nostalgic shade of country-house red and the expensive lighting run was designed, specifically, to give all the benefits of high-tech reproduced daylight.

  The shop counter is a long glass cabinet, at least a hundred years old. It must once have stood in a tailor’s or a dressmaker’s shop. The front and sides are clear glass and the top red leather, complete with the nicks and tears of its story.

  Nadia is good at keeping the shop counter clear. She will, with just a little reminding or—sometimes—cajoling, clean the instruments, dust the shelves. She leaves the backside of the counter, below the glass and behind the bow cases where the customers can’t see, absolutely filthy. I pick up a handful of drying orange peels and go to throw them away.

  The work computer is on the counter above the bin. I tell myself I am going to check the work emails, look at the accounts.

  It takes seconds to check the email and then Twitter distracts me from the accounts I was never really going to open. #hérosmystère is worse than it was; it’s #mysterysuperhero now too and the UK is chattering with it. This must be tearing him apart.

  I am constantly aware of the burden David carries in order to juggle these lives without hurting anyone, but there is nothing I can do to help. I leave him in Spain, dealing with it methodically and in his own calm way. It takes a lot to spook David.

  I relax my eyes and blank out the computer screen; its content goes hazy, harmless when it has no decipherable words. The walls of the shop, lined with violins, come into focus around it. I force my thoughts away from the internet, away from David splashing around the pool at a Spanish villa, laughing and playing with his children.

  The parade of violas, hanging by their scrolls, segues without incident into the violins. The violins are mainly full-size. There are forty-three at the moment and they move through an autumn of colors: reds, burnt ochre, gold-toned browns, and dark maroons that make customers think of chestnuts and old polished furniture.

  There are eight three-quarter-size violins, just a little smaller than the others. These are for children or very small players but they are antiques, valuable instruments for children too talented to play on something of a lesser quality.

  Nadia was once one of these children and that’s how we first met. I struck up a surface-level friendship with Nadia’s mother back when they started coming into the shop, back when everyone was just beginning to understand the breadth and depth of Nadia’s talent.

  We chatted, her mother and I; we dug into the unseen parts of each other’s lives, at least as much as is polite. I don’t think it was long before she began to suspect that my boyfriend might be someone else’s husband and that, really, was that.

  Nadia’s mother and I dance around each other but nothing ever develops. We exchange Christmas cards and a b
ottle of wine. The invitations to come for supper dried up long ago. I am not one of those single women whom people seek to heal anymore.

  I went on a girls’ night out with Nadia’s mum and her friends once. I hadn’t anticipated the straightness of them, the conformity, the soul-destroying responsibility they felt towards their children’s success and the smooth running of their homes. It exhausted me just to talk about it. In response, I had a little too much to drink and was perhaps not as careful as I normally am when I outline the peculiar paradigm that exists between David and me. They didn’t invite me again.

  I like the children who come in for the tiny, but expensive, instruments. They are bright and able and have parents who tune their own lives out in favor of the needs of their little prodigies. These children are always nicely dressed and, for the most part, faintly eccentric, a little off-the-wall. These are the kind of children I would like to have. My parents and I were so different, almost apologetic, when we went into a music shop. My parents worked hard to get me the lessons and the instrument I wanted, but they never belonged in that world, it was always alien to them. A little bit of that has rubbed off on me. My train of thought slams abruptly back to David, back to the #hérosmystère. Children are the real crux of this matter; his children, our children. If his family are forced into a corner by this publicity, David and I will be denied the civilized space we had dreamed of—a peaceful time where he appears to live alone after leaving their mother and then, after a tasteful pause, meets the English lady, the violin maker. If that can’t happen, his children may even hate me. My own overly cosseted childhood hasn’t prepared me to deal with angry teenagers, injured children.

  I was shy to the point of disability as a child. I wore my cello like armor, hid behind its shield and let it speak for me. I kept myself busy practicing and poured all my anxiety into my music instead of working on human relationships. Not much has changed.

  In the shop, the cellos lean against a wall. The display is the same as for the other instruments; they start full-size, the same height and width as mine, and they teeter down to children’s instruments.

  They come in the same multilayered tones of tilled earth. The cellos go down to tiny sizes, taller sometimes than the children who will play them.

  In the workshop behind my beautiful shop front, there is the beginning of a tiny cello, a 32nd size. It is smaller than an instrument a two- or three-year-old might play. This is a cello for an infant.

  This is a cello for someone who is born to be a musician, given an instrument to lean on, roll around, pluck at, and explore until it moves into their consciousness and becomes an extension of their own limbs. I didn’t start playing until I was eight, too old really. The extra edge I would have had if I’d started before I could talk, learned to read those spidery dots before I learned to read words, that extra edge would have made everything different.

  It isn’t finished, this little cello. It is still a set of ribs, thin strips of pale wood bent into classic curves around a bending iron. The minuscule scroll, a Fibonacci curve of wood no bigger than a baby’s hand, sits on a shelf in my workshop. These pieces are hidden behind dusty cardboard boxes. What is in the boxes isn’t important, what’s important is that they hide the bits of that tiny instrument.

  I started to make the cello eight years ago. I made it for a baby who didn’t live, who was never born. I have never had the heart to finish it.

  * * *

  I know that today is going to be busy and that I will jump every time the door goes, imagining the gutter press on the doorstep, paparazzi in my shop. Most of my customers make appointments before they come, although a few drop by on spec. They know that if they want my undivided attention and a good chunk of my time, they have to book ahead.

  I have arranged to see Mr. Williams today—he is one of my favorite customers, Nadia’s, too. He isn’t a great player, although he’s a good one, but he’s erudite and interesting and there’s something delightfully anachronistic about his perfect suits and silk cravats. The other thing that draws me to Mr. Williams is that I know loneliness when I see it.

  I am in the workshop at the back when the doorbell rings. It is early. Mr. Williams is never anything but on time.

  When I go through to the front it’s Nadia who stands, petulantly, with her finger on the bell.

  “Stop it,” I say, but it’s a mock scold. “I heard you the first time.”

  She doesn’t apologize for the racket, just walks past me into the shop.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask her. “It’s a school day.”

  “I’m a big girl, Grace. We keep our own hours in sixth form.” She looks at her feet. “A bit, anyway.”

  I don’t comment.

  “I’m on my way there and I called in to see you. All right?”

  “Yes. Of course it’s all right, but I’m working. You’ll have to come through to the back.”

  Nadia stands behind me while I work. She is silent—unusual for her. I can hear her shiftiness behind me.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Nothing.” She moves around the workshop picking up tools and weighing them in her hands. She knows better than to touch the instruments in pieces on the bench.

  “Stop it,” I say without looking behind me.

  “Stop what?”

  “Nadia.” I turn around and look at her. “What do you want?”

  She looks slightly sideways, as if my shoulder is talking to her rather than my face. I peer at her, but she won’t make eye contact. “I was thinking about the other day.”

  I grit my teeth and push my lips together.

  I can hear the grating of the knife in my hand as it pushes through the ebony of the cello peg I’m working on. The workshop clock ticks loudly. My cheeks are warm and flushed.

  “I was thinking about the other day too. What were you doing at my house when you knew I was in France?”

  “Watering the cat?”

  “Were you going to have a party?” Nadia has a spare key for my house; I pay her to cut the grass in the summer if I’m going to be away for more than a week.

  “Fuck, no. Anything but,” she says. She throws her schoolbag on the workshop floor, kicks it out of the way. “Actually, I was going to sit and listen to some music. Maybe watch the telly.”

  I’m not sure I believe her. “Have you got no home to go to?”

  Nadia just looks at me, her nose wrinkled in distaste. “Anyway, about your playing.”

  The weight settles deep in my stomach, my palms heat up around the handle of the knife and I rest it on the bench. “You can’t just let yourself into my house. That’s—I don’t know—weird. I think it’s weird.”

  She sits down on the workshop stool. “Soz.” Her shrug is defensive. “I won’t do it again. I just needed to get away.”

  I put the peg down and look at her. “What from?”

  “Shit,” she says, and makes it clear that this part of the conversation is over.

  “I’m going to coach you,” she says. With other people, there might be a gentle warm-up to this. It might be a question rather than a statement or an offer couched and hidden in less controversial things. Nadia is her mother’s daughter—although she’d kill me for saying it.

  “Nadia, thank you. It’s sweet of you. Really it is. But it’s been twenty-one years; I don’t want to play in public.”

  Nadia can’t see the images that flash into my brain, the number of times I’ve tried to play for David; the times it’s nearly worked. She could never know how much it would mean to me—let alone to him—to share my passion. I attempt to smile at her, to cover my sadness in nonchalance, but my face doesn’t obey the command and my mouth twists into a lopsided grimace. I have, as my late mother would have said, got my knickers in a right twist.

  “I don’t want you to play in public.”

  I breathe a little more easily.

  “I want you to play with me,” she says. “I’d be so sad if I couldn’t play in a group,
with other people. So I’ve been reading my psychology textbooks. Looking at how things like this work, how they happen.”

  I steady my hands and remember that this is a kind gesture, an attempt to help. I try to be rational.

  “Nadia.” I wish she would stop talking about it.

  She runs her finger through the fine black sawdust at the edge of my bench. “I can help you.”

  “Why now, Nad? What do you think is going to make a difference?”

  Nadia turns and stares at the stand in the corner of the workshop. I follow her gaze even though I could draw every detail of what she’s looking at with my eyes shut.

  Nadia points to the cello I’ve been making, slowly and surely and with a rigid concentration, for the last year and a half.

  This cello is special. Its varnish is smooth and flawless; it looks as though it has been dipped in a huge vat of molten barley sugar and come out with a fairy-tale coating of orange glass. It is my entry for the world’s most important instrument-making competition.

  I am not a naturally competitive person, but I try, really hard, to be the best at everything I do. Being sent away from music college before I’d even finished my first year broke my heart. If I were to win the Triennale in Cremona, Stradivari’s own hometown, I know I could lay some of my ghosts to rest. I’d actually feel like a success, like I’d achieved the thing I set out to do, and that would change my life.

  “The Triennale cello,” Nadia says. “You need to get the sound moving. It can’t go to the competition without being played in. We could do it together.”

  I’ve stopped working on the cello peg in my hand and I’m concentrating on my breathing, trying to swallow the rising fear, trying to cool the sweats. “Nad, I’ve tried. I swear. Counseling, therapy. I’ve tried everything.”

  She picks up her bag and swings it over her shoulder. She looks back at me as she walks out of the workshop and off to her untroubled school day. “You’re already doing it, Grace. All the time.”