Upright Piano Player (23 page)

The next day, he decided to take a look at the house in Chelsea. He had been wondering what Henry had done with the Polaroids. If he had handed them over to the police there was a chance that one of the coppers might have recognized Eileen, but it was a long shot. The pictures had not exactly concentrated on her face. The old perv wouldn’t have turned them in, anyhow. More likely, he was still jerking off to them.

He walked without urgency through Sloane Square and up to South Kensington station, where he bought a
Daily Telegraph
. He had been an
Independent
reader once. When they first started, they had given a lot of space to photography; big pictures, across two pages, but like everything else, it had not lasted. When the paper lost its photographic nerve, he had switched to the
Telegraph
. At the yard they called him a Tory wanker, but the truth was, politics didn’t come into it. He simply liked a big paper and he’d found there was too much foreign stuff in the
Guardian
and the
Times
.

He took his paper into Dino’s next to the station and ordered a coffee and two rounds of buttered toast, well done. He read the sports section first and then the main paper from the back, working up to page three. There were no tit shots in the
Telegraph
, but there was usually a sexy story on page three, in surprising detail for a posh paper. While thumbing through he was stopped by a picture of a pretty woman on the obituaries page. It was not the death of the day, but a smaller,
squat space at the bottom of the page. She was laughing, her dark hair windswept and tousled. It looked like she was on a mountain somewhere. Yes, that’s what the caption said, “ ‘Nessa’ Cage on location for
Ladies Above the Timber Line
, her award-winning film about the early women mountaineers. He looked at the headline, VANESSA CAGE—DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER. He wondered if there was a connection; it was not a common name, after all. He paused and concentrated on the remaining triangle of toast, burned almost black, as he liked it, and smeared with butter.

Mrs. Abraham saw him from Henry’s bedroom. She had opened the window that morning to air the room and was just closing up before leaving. He had a newspaper. She noticed he carried it like a gentleman, not rolled up, but folded in half. He had glanced over at the house but had not stopped. She hurried downstairs and rang Cummings at the police station.

“He didn’t do anything, just walked by and looked over—but I thought you’d like to know.”

“Quite right, Mrs. Abraham, thank you for calling. You won’t forget to give my message to Mr. Cage, will you?”

His dismissive reply puzzled her. She buttoned her raincoat, aware that there was much in the world that escaped her—and happy, for the most part, that it did.

As she locked the front door it crossed her mind that the young man might be hanging around, so she was not entirely surprised to see him as she turned the corner, though she had not expected to see him flat on his back. Her first thought was that he had slipped, her second that he had been mugged for
as she drew closer she saw that his hands were up, shielding his eyes.

“Are you all right?”

As he turned his head, she saw that he was holding a small camera.

“Oh, it’s you. I’m fine, just trying to get a shot of these blossoms. Always got my camera with me, just in case.”

She looked up and saw the white blossom against the blue of the sky. It was like one of the covers of the
Country Life
magazine that Mr. Cage got every week.

“It looks lovely,” she said.

“That should do it.”

He stood up and she saw that he had been lying on his newspaper—the pages spread out like a sheet.

“About all they’re good for,” he said as he gathered up the pages. “Nothing but bad news, is there?”

His jacket had been folded neatly on a low garden wall and before he put it on, he looked it over carefully. There was some brick dust on a sleeve and he gave the jacket a gentle shake. He decided to take a chance.

“Talking of which, I was sorry to read about Mrs. Cage. Have you seen the obituary?” He offered her a page of his newspaper.

She was startled. “Yes, I have, thank you.”

“Well then, I’ll find a bin for this lot and I’ll be off.”

She watched him slip the camera into his pocket and walk up to the Fulham Road. He raised his arm in farewell as he turned the corner. She sat down on the wall, feeling faint. She wanted a cigarette though she had not smoked for seven
years. In her handbag she found a cough sweet and sucking it brought the saliva back to her mouth. The young man’s recklessness had frightened her. He should not have mentioned Mrs. Cage; he was meant to be a stranger who liked gardens.

Ed Needy was in Maude’s bed. He was worrying about the company’s share price.

“Yesterday, it was down another eight pence.”

Maude lay on her back looking up at the skylight. It was dawn and rain was washing the grime from the glass. I can postpone the window cleaner for another couple of weeks, she thought, before answering.

“Is that significant?”

“Who knows?”

Ed was not yet a rich man. He had arrived at Henry Cage & Partners too late for the initial division of equity and although he had accumulated share options, presently valued at £315,000, he still had almost a year to wait until he could cash in the first tranche. If the share price continued to fall, his money could disappear. He had hoped that with the ousting of Henry, business would boom, but, if anything, the opposite had happened.

Charles had urged patience.

“A company’s image is nearly always three years behind the reality,” he had said. “We’re not suddenly going to
get a Toys ‘R’ Us or a tobacco company at our door, simply because we will now do business with them. It doesn’t work like that. Some of them will want to punish us for Henry’s fastidiousness and keep us waiting; others are happy where they are—and most of them haven’t even heard of us. It will take time, but word will get around, aided and abetted by some strategically placed PR.”

He had smiled—“Not in a hurry, are you, Ed?”

It was easy for him to be sanguine. Over the past ten years of a rising market, the partners had sold off blocks of shares at regular intervals and put the money into bonds or houses in Regency crescents and fashionable shires. It was all right for them—they were home and dry; the company could go belly-up and they would still go on enjoying their safe, platinum lives.

He sighed, looking at the rain.

“Why don’t they just give me socking great cash bonuses like Goldman Sachs?”

“I guess they want you to feel involved with the company. You know—ownership, the family, belonging.”

She was parroting something she had heard Henry say, but it did not console him.

“I’m not temperamentally suited to option schemes. I worry. I call up the share price on my screen twenty times a day. It’s a nightmare.”

She saw him look at his watch. Any moment now, he would swing out of bed and claim first use of the bathroom. He would be in there for twenty-five minutes, leaving all the towels folded and all the surfaces wiped down. If he had used
the loo, the end of the toilet paper would be folded to form an arrowhead. She had never been to his flat, but she imagined it to be a temple to prissiness.

He slept with her once a week on Tuesday nights (Wednesday being the only day when he did not have a 6:30 a.m. session at the gym). He was not married, had no regular girlfriend, and they were both discreet and undemanding. It was a relationship devoid of drama. He was courteous and considerate, but he obviously did not adore her. It was like living at home, with the bonus of weekly sex. She was surprised to find herself happy with the arrangement. For the moment.

“See you later,” he said on his way out.

She went to the window and watched him cross the road. Luckily, his car had not been blocked in.

Ed was on the sixth floor with Charles when she arrived at the office. She made herself a coffee and went into his private meeting room, where the newspapers had been left on the table. First thing every morning, she went through the papers for him, highlighting with a yellow marker any items that mentioned the company, their clients, the clients’ industries, or the competition. She also flagged all relevant personnel moves. It was a task that Maude enjoyed and over the weeks she had broadened the range of his reading, marking out social trends, significant awards, deaths and marriages, even the odd bit of gossip about people he might know. He had been appreciative.

The tabloids had not detained her for long that morning and she picked up the
Times
hoping for richer pickings. On the obituaries page she saw a photograph of Henry with his arm around the shoulder of a laughing, dark-haired woman. So that was Nessa; she looked too nice to kick out. Poor Henry. She read the obituary and gave it a yellow frame.

On the plane Henry tried to read, but he found he could not concentrate. He put down his book and picked up the in-flight magazine. On the cover was a photograph of Venice. He heard a small bleat of distress and looked around before realizing that the sound had come from his own throat. There were only four other passengers in the cabin and they were all sleeping. Nobody had heard his involuntary cry. He looked again at the cover. It was essentially a photograph of a sunset, but in the shadows of the foreground he had recognized a familiar restaurant with its few tables set by the water’s edge.

It was a restaurant that he and Nessa had loved. It was the best place in all of Venice to watch the sun go down. Sometimes, while they dined, a cruise ship would glide by, obscuring even the lofty warehouses on the opposite bank of the Giudecca canal. The passengers had a grandstand view of the city and they lined every deck, some of them waving to the diners below. Nessa would always wave in return, but only once had she been able to persuade Henry to respond. He had raised his arm as though he were catching a ball. He
remembered her laughter. She had called it a greeting without feeling—no better than a gloved handshake.

The restaurant was owned by a young married couple. She cooked and he took care of the front of the house. The food they served was sublime. At midday, a fisherman docked his small boat just yards from the restaurant’s front door and the couple came out to the quay and chose the fish for dinner that night. The menu was handwritten and forever changing. They served either what was fresh from the sea or irresistible in the market.

Henry had once built a business lecture around the restaurant. It had been on one of his favorite themes. He believed that good businesses are an act of will and that the desire to be great has to be constant. Companies do not lose their energy and integrity overnight. They fade by degrees. A small cut here, a compromise there, and before you know it you are running an ordinary outfit.

Quality in any enterprise is always under attack and particularly so during periods of growth. In the lecture, he had shown the restaurant as it was and had then outlined how easily it could have lost its way by making a series of what appeared to be rational management decisions. He had taken his audience through these hypothetical changes—all of them logical, all of them deadly.

Happily, in real life, the restaurant had not changed. It had remained enchanting and unique.

He thought of the last time he and Nessa had been there
together. The sky had been heavy with cloud, a storm predicted around midnight. They had the place to themselves and had chosen a table well back from the anticipated turbulence of the water. They had not been seated long before a priest had joined them on the terrace, an elderly man, balding and slim, in dog collar and black suit and clutching a copy of the
New Yorker
. Henry had been intrigued.

When the waiter arrived, it was obvious that the priest was a regular. He was shown to the table next to them.

“He’s wearing white socks—how sweet,” Nessa had said.

The priest had ordered his dinner in Italian, switching to English in mid-sentence. The owner had called him Padre.