The Upright Piano Player

by David Abbott

  That afternoon he walked to the Conran Shop to buy a torch. He had once sat next to a woman at the Royal Opera House who had the score of Tosca opened on her lap. Before the performance began she had turned to him. “I have this torch that doesn’t spill light. I don’t think it will bother you.” She had been right, and now he thought such a torch would be useful; he could read or write without revealing his presence in the window. Better still, there would be no need to turn on his radio.

  He took up his position in the window shortly after midnight. He had watched television most of the evening in his study at the back of the house. He had received one phone call. Detective Sergeant Cummings rang to see if there had been any developments.

  “No, everything’s been pretty quiet.”

  “No more letters?”

  “Not from him.”

  “Oh, so you think it’s a man, do you? Any reason for that?”

  Henry had recovered, not well, but quickly.

  “Sorry, I’m of that generation that automatically thinks all doctors, judges, and taxi drivers are male. Criminals, too.”

  The detective had paused before replying.

  “All right, Mr. Cage, let me know if anything happens.”

  If anything had happened that night Henry would not have been awake to see it. He had drifted off shortly before 1:00. Waking at 7:00 he had gone outside to check the front of the house. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Inside, he inspected every room, opening wardrobes and cupboards, needing to know that he was safe. It reminded him of a ritual that had marked him out at boarding school. A homesick eight-year-old, he would not get into bed without patting the bedspread first to make sure that no upturned dagger awaited him. In the ruthless community of the dormitory he had been subjected to nightly ridicule, each boy elaborately patting beds, curtains, floorboards, and chairs in search of hidden danger. The ragging had gone on for weeks, until one night, exhausted by a cross-country run, Henry had fallen straight into bed, too tired to be timid. He had never patted the bed again and yet even in adulthood some residual anxiety remained. Nessa had teased him about keeping a baseball bat in the bedroom and here he was fearfully opening cupboards in a locked and alarmed house.

  The following day had been like a day of jet lag. In the morning, he had mooned about the house, watchful and weary. He needed regular hours. He wanted to sleep in the dark and wake with the light. He decided to sit up for just one more night. By the afternoon, fatigue had blunted his instincts and he allowed himself to believe his troubles were over, that he had been mistaken, that the malice had been haphazard and would pass on. Sitting in the window that night he became almost lighthearted with relief. Listening to the radio, he dispensed with the earpieces and curled up in the chair, his head cushioned on the soft and ample arm. It was a position, he knew, likely to send him to sleep, but so what?

  He awoke to the sound of the newspapers being delivered. But was it not too early? There was something wrong. His watch had twisted around on his wrist and he was confused and looked for it in the folds of the chair. It was barely light outside and someone was knocking on the window. Henry could see white knuckles rapping on the glass and the cuff of a black leather coat. When he stood up his knee locked and by the time he got to the window he saw only the gate swinging back into place. He sat back on the chair and took a sip of coffee straight from the flask, scalding the roof of his mouth. Why had he come—what had he done? The click of the letter box replayed in Henry’s ear. The bastard had put something through the door.

  In the hall he expected to see more dog shit, a firework, or worse, but on the mat there was a plain buff-colored envelope. He picked it up and carried it into the kitchen. The envelope was about five by seven inches and felt light. It could not contain more than a few sheets of paper. He tried to recall what he had read about letter bombs. He thought they had to be bulkier than this, more like a package. He took a knife from the dresser drawer and opened the envelope. Inside, a sheet of paper was folded around three Polaroid photographs, all variations on a single theme. He recognized the girl immediately: she was the head-butter’s girlfriend, naked on a bed, smiling into the lens, knees spread, her hands easing back the lips of her vagina. Two of the pictures were close-ups.

  10

  Tom watched her plunge the massed tulips straight into the vase, never doubting that they would assume the right collective shape. As she leaned forward, the corn of her hair mingled with the tight green sheaths. It seemed to him that she was incapable of acting without grace.

  “I’m thinking of getting in touch with my father.”

  She stood back from the table, looking at the flowers.

  “Does Nessa want you to?”

  “She’s invited him to Florida—when we’re there.”

  “Then, I guess she does.”

  At lunchtime he collected Hal from school. They walked home on the marsh path behind the cottages that line the narrow main street. If they looked to the left they saw the backs of the houses—sheds and outbuildings bundled close to the back walls for comfort. On this coastline the wind blows uninterrupted from the Arctic Circle and smacks hard into the shore. Dotted here and there are hidden yards, revealed only by the high cab of a truck or the mast of a dinghy protruding above the brick and flint walls. Closest to the path are the garden allotments. Some of them still offered up cabbages, but most of the soil was tilled and tidied for the winter.

  Turning to the sea, they lowered their heads, for the gale blowing across the marshes was too raw to look into. Heads down, they raced each other home, Tom careful to let Hal win, but only just.

  In the afternoon, Jane took Hal to her parents’ house. Her father had been given permission to fell a strand of poplars on his land. Years ago the trees had been a cash crop, Bryant & May, eager buyers of the timber for matches. Now that trade had gone and the wood was used only to make pallets. An inglorious end, in Jane’s opinion, for such wonderful trees. There was a time as a young girl when she had started each day by calling out a greeting to the poplars from her bedroom window. In spring, the leaves are barely green and delicate enough to catch the lightest breeze. At twelve, she had described them in her diary as waving to her from across the fields. When her father had told her it was time for the poplars to come down her eyes had filled with tears and they had argued. Now, she had taken an excited Hal to watch the trees fall. Was it to please her son or to placate her father?

  Tom knew it was neither. She was there for the same reason she would get up at 5:00 in the morning to see a friend off at the airport. She believed in leave-takings—in saying goodbye in person.

  With the house to himself, Tom went down and closed the shop. It was too bleak a day for customers. In the back office, books were stacked on the table awaiting dispatch. He was tempted to spend the afternoon with brown paper, bubble-wrap, and tape—anything to put off writing to his father. He tried to map out a letter in his mind, a chronological survey of their estrangement, but it seemed stale news, so long ago.

  His mother’s lover had been famous: the male lead in a television soap opera, playing a charismatic, but chancy womanizer. When the actor’s life coalesced with that of his character, the tabloids couldn’t resist. TERRY STEALS TOFF’S WIFE was the front-page headline in one of them. Below was a picture of a harassed Henry outside his house. Photographers had camped by the garden gate for days. Who had tipped off the press? Tom remembered that his father had suspected the actor himself and later events had, perhaps, proved him right.

  Three months later the affair was over and Hugh, alias Terry, had moved on to the young blond presenter of a regional breakfast show. The newspapers had been merciless. A week later Nessa had been photographed in her local supermarket buying what the caption gleefully described as “dinner for one.” That morning she had rung Henry wanting to return, but he had refused to take her back.

  “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “Fuck it, Dad, she needs you—she’s falling apart.
What’s the point of being so bleeding saintly at work and a bastard at home? For God’s sake, help her.”

  Tom’s voice had tailed off, so he was never sure if his father had heard his final coda, “Help me.”

  This Court of Appeal had been held in Henry’s office. He had been determined not to let the newspapers disturb the workings of Henry Cage & Partners and had arrived at his usual hour. The photograph, cruel as it was for Nessa, was for him only the latest in a long series of public humiliations. The loss of wife had been a one-off misfortune; the loss of face seemed to be never-ending.

  The post room had not circulated the red-top papers that morning, but by 10:00, even those locked in early morning meetings had seen the picture of the boss’s wife getting hers at the chilled foods cabinet.

  “I can’t do it, Tom. I’m sorry.”

  He had picked up the telephone on his desk and started talking to his secretary in the outer office.

  Tom had gone back to Norwich, taking Nessa with him. He was in his last year at university and sharing a flat with Jane. He knew that Nessa should not be alone. Of the two rejections it had been Henry’s that had inflicted the most damage. She was still Nessa, gamely talking of a new life and no regrets, but her body gave the lie. She had lost eighteen pounds and her limbs were never at rest, her legs jigging constantly as she lay on the sofa.

  Tom and Jane were in the middle of exams and out for most of the day at the university campus. When they returned in the evening, Nessa was invariably stretched out on the sofa, often asleep, a book—and sometimes a bottle—open on the floor beside her.

  One night Jane had found her sitting up at 3:00, ankle-deep in family photographs. Her legs were twitching so violently that the prints would not stay on her lap.

  “Shit, I can’t seem to keep my legs still. You don’t have any diver’s boots, do you?”

  “Hey, it’s all right.”

  They had clung together.

  “What a mess. I miss him so much.”

  Jane held her hand, waiting for the sobs to end.

  “You know, when I was with him, I often wished he were different. Now I just wish he were here.”

  “How do you mean, different?”

  Nessa took a handful of tissues from the pocket of her dressing gown and pressed them to her eyes.

  “More careless, I suppose. Someone who wasn’t always quoting the latest health scare in the newspapers; I longed for some loose and cheery man who didn’t ever so slightly narrow his eyes when I reached for a third glass of wine or ordered chocolate dessert in a restaurant.”

  She returned to the sofa.

  “Henry was never much good at enjoying himself. He was always giving things up—wine, sugar, caffeine … and finally little old me.”

  “You did give him some encouragement,” Jane said.

  “That’s true.” Nessa turned her face into the cushions. Soon she was breathing heavily, even in sleep her legs moving to the miserable beat of her heart.

  She had stayed with them for a month. Finding herself unrecognized, she had started going out. First, just on errands, but then for long walks through Norwich. She put on weight and gradually regained control of her body. When the exams were over they rented a car and drove north each day to the coast and it was there, lying in the sand dunes under a wide blue sky, that she had told them of her decision to return to the house in Florida.

  Dear Dad,

  He touched the return key eight times and cleared the screen. He had always called his father “Dad”—but now it felt too affectionate, too forgiving. He started again. He had decided to be brisk.

  Dear Henry,

  I read of your retirement—congratulations, if they’re in order. I can’t imagine how you spend your days without the office, though I understand you’re going to be spending some of them with Nessa—which is why I’m writing. We are likely to be there at the same time and I thought it would be less awkward for Nessa if we had at least met before then. Would you come to lunch one weekend? If you would like to, please get in touch.

  He had printed it out on bookshop notepaper and signed it simply “Tom.” It was already dark when he went out to post the letter. On her way home, Jane had caught him in her headlights, his giant shadow thrown onto the side of a house like some proletarian hero in a Soviet mural. A man, letter in hand, heroically confronting the future.

  11

  With Mrs. Abraham away for another week it was safe to keep the Polaroids close to hand, tucked amongst the bills in the toast rack. He looked at them three or four times a day. He knew they had been delivered to taunt him, gloating proof of the young man’s access to flesh he imagined coveted by Henry. The head-butter’s youthful assumption was trite, but understandable.

  It had been a summer’s day in 1959. He had been standing in the middle of the Goldhawk Road, his arm around a girlfriend’s waist, when a dark green Jaguar XK150 convertible had stopped beside them. The driver was waiting in a line of traffic before turning left into Lime Grove, at the time the London home of BBC Television.

  The car’s top was down and he had recognized the driver, a veteran journalist who had found fame as the presenter of a current affairs program. Henry was admiring the car when he noticed that “Mr. TV” was checking out a different kind of bodywork. His interest in Henry’s girlfriend had been so brazen, that Henry had called out, “Forget it—you’re way too old.”

  His spite had been lost in the traffic’s din. The presenter had proceeded serenely to the studio where Henry had imagined him joking with the makeup girl about the joys of summer, the flimsy frocks, and the cracker he had just seen crossing the road.

  Oh yes, Henry understood the head-butter’s disgust well enough, but in this case it was unjustified. Henry did not see himself as some sad, old lecher. It had been the girl’s suppressed rage that had first attracted his attention, not her body, though it was obvious from the photographs that her body was gorgeous.

  The day before Mrs. Abraham’s return, Henry went to the glass-fronted bookcase in the drawing room and slipped the Polaroids between the pages of a book. He decided to keep the volume on the top shelf and had put it there with all the circumspection of a law-abiding newsagent.

  The next morning he was out early before Mrs. Abraham arrived. He had decided to do what he should have done a long time ago—sit down and talk to the head-butter, man to man.

  Henry was not used to people disliking him. He had sauntered through life in the glow of easy approval. The incident on Westminster Bridge had not only been an affray, it had been an affront. The instant aggression and then the viciousness of the subsequent persecution had perplexed him. He worried that luck was deserting him. First, there had been the split with Nessa and Tom, then the loss of the company, and now this. Well, this, at least, he could deal with.

  Confronting the head-butter meant going again to Sloane Square for breakfast. He was gambling that the manageress would not be there. She might even have moved on, the staff were always changing. He did not believe that she would have issued an alert about him. It had been, after all, a minor matter, not really an offense at all.

  He was on the doorstep at 8:27, perfect timing to get one of the two window tables in the nonsmoking section. A quick look round revealed that neither of his antagonists were there. He ordered a coffee and croissant and opened his book, prepared to wait.

  Someone was standing by the seat opposite to him. Without lifting his head he was aware of the black waistcoat and white apron of one of the waitresses. Oh God, he was going to be asked to leave. His description was probably pinned on the staff notice board: “Public Pervert No.1. Well-dressed man (suit) in his fifties, dark hair, tall—usually operates with a book as camouflage.”

  “It is you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.” He closed his book. “Don’t worry, I’m just going.”

  He was not sure if free breakfasts were standard with every eviction and not wishing to appear presumptuous, he added
, “I’ll need a bill, if you don’t mind.”

  “You are Henry Cage, aren’t you?” The voice was friendly. “You don’t remember me?”

  He looked at her for the first time. Short dark hair, lively eyes, a nose without a trace of pertness. She could have been a refugee from one of his Lartigue photographs, a Bibi or a Renée. On the slopes at Megève or through the windscreen of a Bugatti, he surely would have recognized her, but here …

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I worked at your company. We met in the lift on your last day. I was one of the new graduate trainees. Maude Singer.”

  She held out her hand. He shook it with a smile of relief.

  “As I remember, I was rather tongue-tied.”

  “No, I was gushing. Silence was the most appropriate reaction.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “About to get fired if I don’t get back to work—and no, I didn’t get the sack from Henry Cage & Partners—I left of my own accord.”

  “I’d like to hear why.”

  She shrugged and was gone. Henry eked out his coffee for another twenty minutes but there was no sign of the head-butter. He paid the bill and left. At the door, he looked for Maude but did not see her.

  On his way to breakfast the next morning, Henry found himself humming. It was like rediscovering a former, happier self. In the office, in the good old days, he had often startled colleagues by humming to himself in meetings. He hummed as others might pull reflectively on an earlobe.

  Once, while making love to Nessa, he had inadvertently hummed a few stanzas from “Waltz for Debby,” an old Bill Evans piano piece that they both liked. Not surprisingly, she had pitched him off the bed. Later, she had said she might have stayed put for the whole track, it was after all a nice slow beat, but she had known that Evans had dedicated the work to his three-year-old niece.