Upright Piano Player (19 page)

“Order Rum Runners and conch fritters and you won’t go far wrong,” he had said. “And no second rum for whoever’s doing the driving.”

He was only kidding about the second drink, he said, but they all knew he wasn’t.

The food was good and by the time they had finished eating, the waiters had lit the candles on the tables.

“It’s beautiful here. It feels wrong to be happy—but here, right now, with you, I am.”

Her eyes were full of tears.

“I brought her a cup of coffee yesterday and I was almost on her before she saw me.”

“I know; but she’s peaceful, don’t you think? Tying up all the loose ends, righting all the wrongs. Dad is here—it’s all she wanted.”

“It’s too late—why didn’t he forgive her years ago?”

“It was just so public—if it hadn’t been in the newspapers, he wouldn’t have minded so much.”

“Yes, but.”

“I guess if you spend your life shaping other people’s reputations, it’s easy to end up caring too much about your own.”

Tom had shrugged, the little-boy shrug that had been passed down from Henry to Tom and that was now hardwired into Hal. No DNA confirmation needed for these three, Jane thought—the lineage is there for all to see. Hal is a diminutive Henry in more than name.

“I do like your father, you know,” she said.

“I know you do.”

“Did you hear him reading to Hal last night? He must have gone through
Little Red Train to the Rescue
at least six times.”

Tom laughed.

“Hal told me. He said Henry does all the sound effects. It appears his engine puffs are better than mine.”

In the parking lot, they stopped in the shadows and kissed. She pulled him close.

“Promise me we’ll never be like Nessa and Henry,” she said.

When they got to the Impala, it would not start. Tom went back into the restaurant and rang Jack at the house.

“Stay by the car and don’t let anyone touch anything. I’ll come in your rental and you can drive it back. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Don’t try the ignition again. Don’t drain the battery. Do nothing. It can’t be anything serious.”

“How was he?” Jane asked on Tom’s return.

“He thinks we’ve destroyed his car.”

Henry walked with his head lowered, watching his feet move across the sand. He was pleased to see that they still fell pointing straight ahead. A young woman bustled past him. As she moved away he noticed that despite a trim figure she was condemned by the splaying of her feet to walk the walk of the overweight. Her left foot landed at ten to the hour and her right at ten past. Such is the randomness of grace, he thought.

It was 8:00 in the morning. Calm weather—the sea as flat as a blue patch on a paint chart.

Henry looked at Nessa. “No sign of Hal?” Their grandson was a boy who woke and left his bed in one single motion and he would usually accompany them on their early morning stroll.

“If he wakes, he’ll know where to find us.”

“You’re weaker than yesterday?”

“Yes, a bad night.”

She adjusted her step. The ocean had coughed up a jellyfish on the sand.

“Do you remember when you refused to have me back and
I went to Tom and Jane in Norwich? Do you know where I went after that?”

“Here, I thought.”

Her breathing quickened and the grip on his arm tightened.

“I’m tired, let’s sit for a while.”

He led her to the low wall that fronted the next house on this stretch of the beach. It was as far as she ever walked now—no more than two hundred yards each way. They sat with their backs against the rendered concrete. Even at this hour the wall had stored heat from the sun and Nessa was reminded of the kitchen garden at Holkham in Norfolk where espaliered apple trees basked on red brick walls. She had liked the way they had spread their limbs to receive the sun and now she stretched her own arms in homage.

He waited for her to resume the conversation. She had closed her eyes and he searched for her hand.

“No, I didn’t come back here right away. I rented a cottage up on the coast at Wells-next-the-Sea. I was there for a month. The cottage was not normally rented out, so it was full of stuff. Lots of paintings and books. In the living room the mantelpiece was crammed with old toys: cast-iron piggy banks, a sailor, a hen, and a monkey. And I remember there were toy cars from the thirties and the wooden spoons and eggs for races. And, oh yes, there was a wooden pig that walked down an incline; but the thing that became important to me was a sort of Victorian building set. It was made up of little wooden tablets that had fingers on each end that interlocked. The tablets had letters on them
and the owner had built a pyramid that read from the top down:

W

ILL

NOT

FALL

APART

She spelled out the letters for him.

“Later, I found a box in a cupboard and that was the name of the set—WILL NOT FALL APART.”

Henry looked at her. “And you didn’t?”

“It became my mantra. When I was alone on the beach and howling with grief, I would repeat it: will not fall apart … will not fall apart … will not fall apart … They were the worst days of my life and no, I didn’t fall apart. So I won’t now. That is, if you’ll help me?”

“Of course.”

The talking had tired her. She needed to gather her strength for this final request. Just before Christmas she had been experiencing double vision and a scan had confirmed that the cancer had spread to her brain. They had put her on a course of radiation and chemotherapy and for a few weeks her sight had improved, but last night she had told Henry that her vision was once more deteriorating. She was finding it difficult to move her left eye.

“I want you all to go back to England. I don’t want Hal to see me when this all happens. He’s too young—and besides, he shouldn’t miss any more school.”

“I don’t have a school to go to.”

She shifted her weight and rested her head on his shoulder.

“Henry Cage, I love you so much I could die. But that doesn’t mean, my darling, that I want you here to watch. It could take weeks, months—who knows? Come back to say goodbye. Jack will call if I can’t.”

In three days they were gone. In their luggage, Nessa had hidden letters to each of the adults and there was one for Hal, to be given to him when Tom and Jane thought fit.

A week later, wearing a jaunty black eye-patch, she took up residence in the palliative care unit of a hospital in West Palm Beach. She took with her one small suitcase and arrived in an old Impala station wagon.

Mrs. Abraham folded her newspaper.

“I’m sorry. I’ll get back to the laundry. I’m just upset, that’s all.”

Yesterday morning, she had been surprised to see him in the house. He had not slept on the overnight flight and wanted to get to bed, but had waited to talk to her before going upstairs. He had explained the situation and she had listened in silence.

“It is what she wanted, Mrs. Abraham. To go into the hospice and for us to come back for a while. Oh, and she gave me this letter for you.”

He handed over the sealed blue envelope, addressed to “Peggy.”

Mrs. Abraham had put it into her handbag. She would read it later at home, she said—not on the bus; it was bound to make her sad and it would not do to let go in public.

The next morning, she had busied herself in the laundry
room until her coffee break. Then she went upstairs and read Henry the letter.

“How could you, Mr. Cage, not be out there with her? I don’t care what she said. You can take it from me she didn’t mean it. Only thinking of you, she was.”

The possibility that Mrs. Abraham might be right did not occur to Henry.

Nessa had always been a straight talker. If she had wanted him to stay she would have said so.

“It’s what Nessa wanted, Mrs. Abraham. That’s all I can tell you.”

“But didn’t
you
want to stay, Mr. Cage? Didn’t you want to be with her for every single minute she had left?”

“I wanted what she wanted.”

She looked bewildered, shaking her head, before going downstairs.

Sometimes when privacy was required Ed Needy would meet interviewees outside the office. This was normally the case when the company was trying to lure a star from a rival firm. These high flyers were nervous about meeting on the premises and usually suggested a drink after work or, increasingly nowadays, breakfast. Which is why Ed was sitting at a table in the Sloane Square brasserie waiting to meet a young woman who was terminally disenchanted with her current employer and, most recently, her New Year bonus.

A chat with Ed was the last act of the hiring drama. He handled the discussions about salaries, expenses, cars, and occasionally even stock options—what footballers and their agents now call personal terms. He was good at it. His first aim was to secure the services of the person in question, but if he could save a couple of thousand on his given budget—and he usually did—he knew it would be noted on the top floor. He had recently been promoted to Head of Human Resources for all of Europe and his ambitions did not stop there. Still only thirty-five, he thought himself well positioned to be running the whole company one day.

After all, in an industry where the inventory goes down in the lift each night, who better than a “people person” to run things? That he knew the nature of the skeletons in the management cupboards he also counted an asset. He was a patient man and had kept his ambition well hidden.

Henry had been one of the few who distrusted him.

“There’s something creepy about him, don’t you think? That silly way he holds himself when he talks; always fifteen degrees off the perpendicular. He doesn’t even look straight.”

He was chatting with Charles before a board meeting where Ed Needy had been asked to present the costs of a staff audit. The audit had been Henry’s idea.

“Why don’t we find out what the staff really thinks of us? We’ll get an outside research company to interview everyone not on the board—anonymity guaranteed—and then we’ll present the findings at a staff meeting. I’m sure we’ll learn a great deal, good and bad.”

Ed had been given the task of putting some numbers to the proposal. He had briefed a research company whose fee would be £30,000. The interviews would take a month and the report a further fortnight. At the meeting Henry had argued that they should go ahead, but had discovered that he was in a minority.

Roy had been emphatically against.

“It is far too much money and it will just stir things up. It will be a lightning rod for all the discontent in the company.”

“If there is discontent in the company, don’t you think we should know about it?” Henry inquired mildly.

“Of course we should, of course.” Charles leaned back in his chair.

“But there are other ways of finding out. We’re all pretty good at reading the company temperature—you, Henry, best of all—and my own opinion is that there’s not much wrong with morale that a few chats with department heads would not ferret out. And £30,000 plus is a lot to pay for letting off a little steam. I suspect the staff would rather have it added to their next Christmas bonus. What do you think, Ed?”

Henry had waited for Needy to make his usual anodyne reply. His standard technique was to restate the options with all their advantages and drawbacks, but never to take a position himself. But this time he had surprised Henry.

“I’m inclined to agree with you, Charles. Personally, I don’t think morale’s much of a problem at the moment. Sure, there are growing pains and perhaps a little stocktaking is a good idea, but I think we should keep it in-house. I suggest we talk to the department heads, as you said, Charles, and then I could conduct, say, twenty-five random interviews myself. We’d end up in the same place having saved ourselves thirty grand on the trip.”

“And do you think the staff would talk openly to you? Do you think they would believe your promise of anonymity? Do you think we’d get at the truth if you did the interviewing?”

“Yes, I do.”

In answering Henry’s question, Ed had looked not at him, but at Charles.

Henry realized there been some pre-meeting collusion; Ed had been too pat with the details of his in-house scheme, but at the time he had failed to recognize the full significance of Ed’s new independence. Two weeks later, Henry had been ousted and everything was clear. Ed would have been part of
the prior discussions of Henry’s compensation package. At the board meeting, he had known that Henry was no longer a player—he had become a man of no account.

Now, six months later, the new Head of Human Resources was growing impatient. The bloody woman was late, not a good omen, but Roy had been adamant that this one must not get away.

Rosemary Middleton had made her name in North America helping a former monopoly telco hang on to more than its fair share of a newly democratized market. The tactic had been to offer the public a raft of special offers and new rates and then rely on confusion and inertia. Faced with a complex choice, the majority of people had done nothing. The new telephone companies, despite their lower prices, were for the most part spurned. The free marketeers who had championed the breaking of the monopoly could do nothing. In an open market, it is not illegal to bewitch the public.