Upright Piano Player (22 page)

“I missed her.”

“Of course you do. I will, too.”

“By about an hour—I missed being there by about an hour.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Jack was there. He said she never came out of the coma—just slipped away.”

Mrs. Abraham had been merciful.

“Well, you couldn’t have got there any quicker, Mr. Cage.”

“No, I suppose not.”

There was a pause while both of them remembered their disagreement about Henry’s premature return to London.

When he spoke again, he was brisker.

“Tom and Jane are coming back on Thursday after the cremation, but I’ll stay on for a week or two to sort things out. I’ll let you know my plans. Everything all right there?”

“Oh yes, Mr. Cage, everything’s normal here.”

But it did not feel normal. Mrs. Abraham, never a shirker, knew that the day’s work was over.

She wandered into the dining room. How many times had she helped Nessa get this room ready for a dinner party? Always fun it was. The dining table was painted light gray with a dark gray edging. It was Swedish, from a shop on the King’s Road.

“Henry would have preferred something more formal, but I can’t abide brown wood,” she had said to Peggy when the table was delivered. They had laughed together at the foolish notions of men. (Though Mrs. Abraham’s chuckles had been diplomatic. In the front room at home, she had a mahogany dining table—paid for over three years on the never-never and much cherished.)

On feast days, and when needed, she would help Nessa bring down two extra leaves from the loft and the painted table could seat eighteen with plenty of room for elbows.

In Mrs. Abraham’s last job they would bring out the best candlesticks and napkin rings and the silver birds from Aspreys. But that was never Nessa’s style.

“It’s not a state banquet, is it, Peggy? Just friends for supper—let’s have some fun.”

At one summer party, she had put twelve jugs of sweet peas on the table, interspersed with tall honey-colored candles. Mrs. Abraham had helped serve that night and she would never forget the warm, perfumed air.

When Tom was very little that’s what Nessa had called him, she remembered. “How is my sweet pea, then?” she would trill as she bent over the cot.

Taking her time, Mrs. Abraham went from room to room. It was still Nessa’s house; that’s what was nice. There had been no division of the spoils at the time of the divorce. Nessa had taken nothing and Henry had been content to leave things as they were. Nessa might be dead in Florida, but she lived on here in this house in Chelsea.

Cheered by the memory of good times, she went back downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. She would think of Nessa not as dead, but still in Florida, no different really to the last few years. Now, if Mr. Cage were to bring a new lady into the house, a lady who doubtless would want to make changes, well then, things would be different. She would have to consider her position, but until then, no need to do anything drastic.

She was halfway through her
Daily Mail
when the doorbell rang. She had been reading her horoscope and the forecast of the loss of a loved one had made her cry.

“Who is it?” she asked on the intercom.

“It’s Detective Sergeant Cummings and a colleague.”

“Mr. Cage is away.”

“It’s you we’d like to see, Mrs. Abraham, if you have a minute?”

Mrs. Abraham remembered the policeman. Old school, she had thought with approval; a solid man with shoulders that filled his jacket, and a nice, straightforward way about him.

“Give me a moment.”

Before she went to the door she dried her eyes, put her cup and saucer into the back sink, and tucked the
Daily Mail
into the linen drawer. Through the peephole she saw the detective with a uniformed policewoman.

“I don’t know how I can help, but come in—we can talk in the kitchen.”

They sat around the table. Mrs. Abraham offered them coffee, but they said they’d just had some.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Abraham? You look as though you’ve been crying.”

“It’s Mrs. Cage—she died yesterday in Florida. Mr. Cage just rang to tell me. She had cancer. Oh …”

The policewoman got her a glass of water.

“I’m sorry to hear that. We won’t keep you long.” Cummings was soothing. He must be used to bad news, she thought.

“I think we may have a lead on Mr. Cage’s vandal. Nothing we can act on yet, but I was hoping you could help us with an identification.”

He unzipped his document case and laid a photograph on the table.

It was in black and white and larger than the holiday
snaps that Mr. Abraham took on their annual trip to Mijas. She thought that she had come out better than usual. True, her eyes were wide open with surprise and her mouth was forming a perfect O, but it was a more becoming look than the frozen smile her husband invariably captured after his careful posing and painstaking wait for the light. She could not help thinking that she looked like the lady of the house, just leaving for a spot of lunch.

“As soon as I saw it, I thought, that’s Mr. Cage’s house and that’s Mrs. Abraham at the door. Do you remember it being taken?”

“Yes, I do. I was just leaving—about lunchtime it was—and as I opened the door they were taking pictures. Two of them—it was the girl who had the camera; she said she liked the garden.”

Remembering the Polaroids she heard herself adding, “Pretty little thing.”

“Yes, we’ve met the girl.”

He took another photograph from the case, smaller than the first.

“Was this the man she was with?”

This time it was a more official-looking picture. One of the ones you see pulled out of filing cabinets in police series on the telly. Or these days, clicked up on a screen. It was a man’s face against a plain background.

“That’s him, but he’s older now.”

She struggled to remember. There was something else about him that day—what was it?

“Oh, that day, in the garden, one of his arms was in plaster, in a sling.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Abraham, that was helpful.”

She was still examining the photograph, reluctant to hand it back.

“How did you get it?”

“We came across it by accident. We went to see a man about a dog and there it was.”

Mrs. Abraham smiled at a sudden memory. “My father used to say that when he didn’t want to let on. Well, I understand—policemen need to guard their secrets.”

“Not only policemen, Mrs. Abraham.”

He said it evenly, but her knowledge of the Polaroids gave it the force of an accusation that needed to be batted away.

“That’s a truth, if ever there was one.”

Cummings stood up. “Tell Mr. Cage to get in touch when he comes back. And please tell him I’m sorry for his loss.”

Henry was surprised how easy it had been to arrange a nonreligious ceremony. In England, he was sure there would have been pressure to include a few prayers, but here the strictures were more temporal. A notice on the door of the crematorium requested visitors not to wear shorts or sleeveless T-shirts.

The funeral director had officiated and there had been readings from Henry, Jane, and Tom. Jack had not wanted to read, but he had made himself responsible for the music. In the hospice, he and Nessa had chosen the tracks and the running order.

The service had been, in effect, a concert with readings. For the committal of the coffin, Nessa had selected “Waltz for Debby” by Bill Evans. Henry had suppressed a chortle, but not well enough to escape the notice of Nessa’s cousin from Baltimore, who forever more would think of him as a heartless bastard.

When the will was read the next day, it had been straight forward.

Nessa had left the house with all its furnishings to Tom,
with the hope that he and Jane would continue to use it as a holiday home. She had set up a fund to pay for its maintenance and another for her grandchildren’s education, confident that Hal would soon have company. She had given her jewelry to Jane.

To “Dear Jack, my friend and carer,” she left $50,000, exclusively for the care, protection, and eventual replacement of his Impala station wagon.

To Henry, she left all her letters, diaries, scripts, tapes, gardening books, and photograph albums. She had packed them into three of her mother’s old steamer trunks.

When Tom and Jane returned to England, Henry spent most of his time at Nessa’s house. The trunks were lined up in the study. He circled them for days, nervous of what he would find inside. He assumed some of her diaries would be painful, and he knew there would be photographs, not only of the life they had enjoyed together, but also of the life he had rejected: pictures of the infant Hal, of Tom and Jane’s wedding, and of Nessa in the summer gardens of Norfolk. A week after the cremation, the trunks still unopened, he decided to send them to White Horse Farm in Norfolk. He would ask Jack to arrange it.

Undressing that night, he saw that a rash had covered his neck, chest, and arms. In the morning, the red blotches had colonized most of his body, even his eyelids and penis. He rang the concierge for an appointment with a doctor. It seemed that there were two options. The hotel had an arrangement with a service providing house calls. The doctors were based in Miami and the visit would cost $450. The earliest they
could send anyone to see him was 5:30 that evening. On the other hand there was a walk-in clinic in Lake Worth, just a twenty-minute drive from the hotel.

Laura on the desk recommended the clinic.

“If you go now, they shouldn’t be too busy. They open at 9:00.”

The clinic was in a modern brick building set back from the road in a nondescript area of gas stations and junior malls. He walked into an open plan space with a waiting area to the left of the door. A woman with red hair was at the reception desk working on a computer. She asked Henry to sign in. It was 9:15 and already there was a depressing amount of ink on the form.

“Take a seat, we’ll call you.”

There were about a dozen people waiting. They looked at him as he sat down and he realized that his reason for being there was self-evident.

“It’s not catching,” he said.

The man next to him got up and moved to another seat.

Henry opened his book.

“Looks like a heat rash to me.”

He looked up. A woman was smiling at him. She was middle-aged in a track-suit top and khaki shorts. Her legs were plump and he saw that one of her knees was pleasantly dimpled. The other was encased in protective padding. A pair of crutches leaned against the back of her chair.

“I’m here about my daughter.”

“Oh, I see.”

A girl was perched on the seat next to her. Henry guessed
she was about fifteen. She was wearing a dancer’s black body suit with flesh-colored tights over which she wore gray leg warmers. Her hair was scraped back from her forehead in the classical manner. She sat straight-backed on the chair, not pretty, but correct. Every so often, she drew her legs up to her chest and then released them.

The mother shifted in her seat and talked across the room to the receptionist.

“I just want to be sure, hon. Yesterday, she couldn’t walk—now, today she wants to go to an audition. I don’t want to risk her whole career—there may be a hairline fracture.”

In a few moments they are called to the doctor’s office. The dancer walks with a wonderful, erect glide and the mother swings along behind on her crutches.

As they leave for the consulting rooms, a stocky man signs in. He is wearing shorts, T-shirt, striped ankle socks, and sneakers—the regulation toddler’s kit that elderly men revert to in Florida.

He says something to the receptionist about the death of a local stock car driver. She clucks in sympathy.

“My husband worshipped the man. I have a shrine to the guy in my living room.”

Twenty minutes later, Henry is called in to see the doctor, a balding, soft-eyed man with an incongruous mustache. He reminds Henry of William Elgar, but his name is Dr. Fernando Valdes. He asks Henry to loosen his belt, remove his shirt, and lie on the bed. The examination is cordial and efficient.

“Are you on any medication?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s anything serious. It’s an allergy of some kind. We can run some tests, but as you’re probably not here for long, there’s not much point. I can give you something for the itchiness. The rash should go in two or three days.”

He sat at his computer and tapped out a prescription.

“You here on vacation?”

“No, I came over for a funeral.”

“Well, these things can be triggered by stress. Maybe you’re allergic to death.”

“My wife used to say I was allergic to life.”

“I see no evidence of that.”

The kindliness of his reply caught Henry off guard. He had not cried since Nessa’s death, but now the tears came. He sat on the edge of the examining table and fumbled with his shirt buttons. His fingers were wet and his vision blurred and he could not get the buttons into the holes. The doctor placed the prescription and a box of tissues beside him.

“Take your time.”

Henry heard the door close.

When he left five minutes later, the doctor was nowhere to be seen. His bill was for $88.

“What, they just turned up and rang the doorbell?”

“I told you. I thought you’d forgotten your key. How was I supposed to know?”

“Two of them?”

“A detective and a policewoman—they showed their IDs and asked for you.”

“Why did you let them in?”

“They said they were making inquiries about an incident at the yard. I thought you were hurt. I was frightened.”

He would not let it go. They’d been over it a hundred times.

“And they asked where I’d been the night before?”

She sighed. “I told them you were here with me—I’m not stupid. All evening and all night, that’s what I said.”

“And they believed you?”

“I don’t know, do I? You tell me what it’s about—you’re the one that knows.”

He had not told her there was a photograph missing from the darkroom. One of them must have asked for the toilet and
nosed around. Still, no crime being a garden photographer. Shouldn’t have done the dog, though. Morris isn’t stupid. He’d have put them straight on to me. But so what? They couldn’t prove anything. The missing photograph worried him more.