Upright Piano Player (21 page)

As he left the yard, it had started raining and the pavements were suddenly slick. He felt conspicuous without a coat. A
police car eased out of a side street about a hundred yards ahead of him and turned in his direction. He reached into his pocket for the remaining nails and, without breaking step, let them fall to the ground. The police car had stopped—the ignition turned off, whoever was in it obscured by rivulets of rain on the windscreen. An innocent man walking past would be curious and glance into the car, so that’s what Colin did, stooping slightly as he passed. He heard the engine start up and the car pull away from the curb. He did not look back.

He was still half an hour from Ebury Street. He slowed his pace. He wanted time to think things through. He could try another scaffolding firm, but he knew it would be useless. Morris and the boys would put the mark on him. If you were a known diver nobody wanted you up there with them. You were bad luck. They would use his arm as an excuse to keep him out and there was nothing he could do about it. Which only left Eileen. He would have to be nice to her for a while.

She was asleep when he got in. He did not wake her up.

In his earpiece Henry heard familiar folk tunes segue in and out of “Rule Britannia.” He recognized the music as the rousing compilation that starts the day on Radio Four, a kind of last night at the Proms early in the morning. Only at this early hour could the BBC get away with such a regular display of flag waving. For Henry, the music meant the official end of night and was greeted with the relief that all bad sleepers feel when they know it’s finally okay to get up. But this morning, still thick with sleep, he thought he heard something different. What was it? He must have forgotten to put the lock on the frequency for the medley was being challenged by percussive interference from a neighboring channel. He would have to retune the bloody thing. From the depth of the pillow he raised his head and realized that the phone was ringing.

“Hello?” His voice was cracked, not fully awake.

“Henry, it’s Jack—I’m afraid there’s been a turn for the worse. I think you should get the first flight out.”

“Well, what—what happened?”

“Just before midnight—she had a stroke. She’s in and out
of consciousness—and her breathing’s bad. They say it could be days, but …”

“I’ll come as soon as I can. I’ll tell Tom.”

He sat on the side of the bed as fear took control of his body. He was familiar with the notion of shaking with fright. It was part of his vocabulary, used without examination. Now as the tremors racked him he understood that it was not merely a figure of speech. He was in the grip of an epileptic fear. For twenty minutes his apprehension was tangible—convulsive shivers and chattering teeth seemingly a biological necessity. When they passed he lay on the bed and fell asleep, waking half an hour later. He rang Tom, feeling guilty not to have done it immediately.

Arrangements were soon made. Henry booked the flight tickets on his credit card, grateful for its twenty-four-hour travel service. Tom and Jane were to fly from Norwich by way of Amsterdam. The Burnhams were driving over to pick up Hal.

There were no seats available on any direct flights out of London, but Henry could fly to New York and make a connection to West Palm Beach. It meant a transfer from JFK to La Guardia by cab, but there was a three-hour window and the man at Amex had been confident it could be done.

In the club lounge, waiting for the flight to be called, Henry studied his fellow travelers. They were for the most part businesspeople, identified as such not by their clothes—for neither gender wore business suits these days. Instead they dressed in baggy jeans or jogging suits; clothes for the journey not the destination. No, what gave them away was their collective
need to be productive. All around him, the laptops were out and the mobiles busy.

“Tell him I’ll e-mail him from the plane.”

“Judy, I’m in the lounge, could you get Simon Clark’s girl to wire the bank’s proposal to my hotel in New York?”

“Donald? It’s Philip—I should be with you by three. They’ll be calling the flight in fifteen minutes.”

Henry closed his eyes and thought of Nessa.

He had once taken a photograph of her as she slept in front of the television. There had been a lamp on a small chest by the arm of her chair and in its light she had looked flawless, like a young girl. He had sat watching her for a long time. It had been a few days after he had followed her to the flat of her lover and before she had confessed. He had felt a great tenderness for her. He had gone into his study for his camera. He had worried that the flash would wake her, but she did not move. When the film was developed the flash had bleached out the charitable lighting and also his forgiveness. He had destroyed the photograph, but not, apparently, the memory.

On the plane he sat next to a young man who had quickly assembled a makeshift office on his tray. When he stood up to take off his sweater, Henry saw from the legend on the back of the T-shirt that he worked for Lehman Brothers and in 1998 had played golf in Hawaii. Henry opened his book and angled his body away from his neighbor. Only once in forty years of business travel had he allowed himself to be drawn into a conversation with the person sitting next to him. On that occasion he had found himself beside an attractive young woman on an overnight flight back from Los Angeles. They
had talked for hours before getting some sleep. The woman’s husband had met her in the arrivals lounge and she had introduced him to Henry.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve just spent the night sleeping with your wife,” Henry had quipped.

The man had been frosty.

“What did you expect?”

Henry had been surprised at Nessa’s reaction when he had told her—“Oh come on, it was just a joke.”

“Or a wish,” she had said.

Jack sat by Nessa’s bed hoping for company.

Henry had called three hours ago on his way to La Guardia. It would be at least another hour before he’d get to the hospital. Tom and Jane had just landed in Miami. It would take them forty-five minutes to clear the airport and then a good hour’s drive. He was worried that none of them would arrive in time.

Nessa lay on her back, her head supported by two firm pillows. It was cool in the room and a light thermal blanket covered her body, but she was far from peaceful and had worked the blanket loose, so that Jack could see the flat planes of her body beneath the gown. Her limbs twitched and jerked. Even more unsettling, the steady rattle of her breathing was regularly punctuated by a guttural cry. Jack was concerned that she was in pain and had called the nurse.

“It’s nothing, Jack—it’s only the body shutting down. She doesn’t feel anything—the brain’s doing just enough to keep her breathing. It’s pushing the blood around, but nothing more. There’s no pain now.”

That must be true. They had taken her off the morphine drip yesterday. Didn’t want to waste it, he supposed.

“Is it true that hearing is the last thing to go?”

“I don’t know, Jack, but you talk to her if you want. She was the nicest lady, always liked to talk.”

He noticed the use of the past tense.

She fixed the blanket and told him to call her if there was any change in Nessa’s breathing.

And so Jack began an impromptu performance for an audience of one. He would receive no notices and would never talk of it, though over the years, in the presence of Henry, he was often tempted.

At first he talked about her house. He’d been over there that morning. Everything was fine, he said. He had put flowers in the kitchen. There was food in the refrigerator for Tom and Jane. They would be here soon. And he had swept the deck, because he knew she didn’t like sand in the living room.

“And the ocean, Nessa—you should see the ocean today. It’s beautiful, so peaceful.”

He walked to the window. Two nurses were standing in the deep shade of a paradise tree. The tips of their cigarettes glowed in the shadows. One of them threw her stub onto the worn grass. They were young with slender arms. He opened and quickly closed the window as the sound of their laughter drifted in on the tepid air.

“You know something? I never saw the ocean until I was eighteen. We lived in Richmond, Indiana—a long way from the coast, and my father wasn’t a curious man.”

He tried to recall his father’s face. He could see the thin
mustache and the high forehead, but everything in between was blurred.

“The truth is, getting cancer was the most adventurous thing my Dad ever did. He would drive in the middle of the day with his headlights on. I don’t think he had ever thought of going to the ocean. ‘Why?’ he would have said.”

“The summer he died, I hitched to L.A. My first beach was Santa Monica. Not a bad start, wouldn’t you say?”

He turned back from the window and saw that Nessa had worked one arm free from the blanket. She was fretful, her breathing even more agitated. He hurried over and held her hand.

“It’s all right, Nessa darling. It’s Henry, I’m here now.”

He stopped.

He had surprised himself. It had been instinctive, this playing to the audience, this desire to give the audience what it wanted. Without thinking he had adopted Henry’s accent and cadence. It was yet another voice-over against the clock; something he had spent twenty years perfecting.

Nessa’s arm relaxed, but she did not let go of Jack’s hand. She was peaceful. His instinct had been right; she had been hanging on for Henry.

“I love you, Nessa.”

There was no reaction.

“I always have.”

He could not quite bring himself to give Henry a clear run.

“Even if I didn’t always let you know.”

He wanted to work in something about the last few weeks—how special they had been, how he regretted that
he had not been more of a dancer, that he had wasted so much time—all the things he imagined Henry would say. He wanted it to be the authentic, regretful Henry, but Jack couldn’t bring himself to utter the words. He had grown to like Henry, but this was a time for love, not penitence. He disliked the kind of self-regarding, miserable guilt that Henry carried around with him. Fuck Henry, why isn’t he here now to make his own sweet speeches?

He could mimic Henry’s voice, but he couldn’t
be
Henry; he could never do Henry’s cool.

From the reams of dialogue in his actor’s memory came a line. Not the best line, not nearly the best, but the only one that surfaced. It had a kind of legitimacy, he thought. When Henry came over, had he not met Nessa on the beach? Wasn’t that where their reconciliation had begun?

He spoke softly, close to her ear.

“You know, I used to live like Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked among eight million people. Then, one day I saw a footprint in the sand—and there you were.”

Had he gone too far? He looked anxiously at Nessa’s face, fearing a slight curl of the lips or a narrowing of the eyes. There was nothing. In her prime she would have snorted with disdain.

She would probably have recognized the line. It was from the film
The Apartment
, where Jack Lemmon has just dished up spaghetti on a tennis racket to Shirley MacLaine.

He dropped the accent. “Nessa, I’m so sorry.”

He felt ashamed. He bent down to kiss her cheek but found her lips instead. He was close enough to hear the silence when she stopped breathing.

When Henry rang, Mrs. Abraham had been sitting on the stairs, recovering from a near mishap. She had been changing a lightbulb in one of the wall lights on the half landing. A tricky job, because even with a stepladder, she could not actually see the socket and had to guide the bulb in by feel. She had leaned a little too far over and the ladder had wobbled. She had steadied it, but the incident had unnerved her and she had climbed down from the ladder leaving the bulb still loose in the lamp bowl. I’ll do it later, she thought.

On the phone, Henry had been direct.

“I’m sorry to tell you, Peggy, that Nessa died yesterday afternoon.”

He had never called her Peggy before and his familiarity stunned her as much as did his news. She could not think of what to say and waited for him to continue.