Upright Piano Player (5 page)

It is one of those mornings when global warming seems more seductive than catastrophic. It is mild enough for a walk on the beach before lunch at Jane’s parents’ house. They drive to Holkham, rehearsing the carols that Hal is learning for the play group’s Christmas concert. He is insistent that alternate lines are sung “loud and soft” as Miss Martha wants. Nestling in the dunes, after the long walk out to the incoming waves and the seemingly longer walk back, Hal gets no further than “Twinkle, twinkle, little …” before he is asleep in Jane’s arms.

Jane is twenty-eight, a tall, slightly stooping girl, sometimes beautiful, with hazel eyes and blond hair. She listens with her body leaning forward. Her teeth are small and give
her face an appealing (and deceptive) innocence. She is one of four daughters born to a Norfolk vet and his wife, and though she herself has no love for animals (the childhood rivals for her father’s time and attention) she has found her lame dog in Tom.

She stands as he comes over the dune, hands full of shells for Hal.

“I didn’t want to spoil your day,” she says, handing him an envelope.

“There was a letter this morning, from Nessa. I’m afraid she’s getting worse.”

His paper knife had been a parting gift from a grateful client. On the silver blade was the inscription “May I open naught but good news.” Contrarily, Henry used the knife only when he anticipated trouble. He used it on all envelopes with clear windows; on everything from the Inland Revenue; on the stiff white envelopes that came from his lawyer, and, now, on this unexpected letter from his ex-wife.

Nessa’s handwriting, like everything else about her, was enthusiastic. Bold and inky, it whooshed across the page, letters almost tumbling over themselves in their haste to get the job done. This ebullience allowed her fewer words to the page, so she wrote as others telephoned—with economy. Henry once had been delighted to get a note from her at a dreary overseas conference they were attending together. “My door is ajar, and so am I,” she had written. This letter, if less seductive, showed no change of style.

The letter irritated Henry—its brisk tone adding insult to the injury he still felt. He resented Nessa’s assumption that they were on visiting terms. He replied curtly that he was not sure of his plans and could make no commitment and signed it “Regards, Henry.” (Having rejected “Love.”) Petty, he knew.

In fact, Henry had no plans at all. He had arrived at Gate Retirement without itinerary, ticket, or passport. In the days that followed, he would flit from book to piano, from piano to window. He could not concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes. When Mrs. Abraham was in the house, he went for walks—walks that only increased his sense of dislocation.

“Hey, what you up to?”

He would turn to find someone at his heels on a mobile phone. London was full of people not wasting a moment and most of them, it seemed, had something to say. Everywhere, young people with big hearts and clipboards were waiting to accost him on behalf of cancer research, Alzheimer’s, or starving babies. They placed themselves at twenty-yard intervals on busy streets and Henry found it impossible to run their gauntlet of goodness. Signing up, he felt anything but charitable. A mugging in a good cause still felt like a mugging.

If it wasn’t charities, it was time-shares or the Big Issue or a petition or a fake Gucci bag. He was living in a city of outstretched arms.

One morning, rounding a bend in Grosvenor Crescent he had found himself standing next to a motorcycle ablaze at the curb—tidily parked, but shockingly alight, like a Tibetan suicide. He looked over his shoulder. The burning bike was outside the headquarters of the British Red Cross, but no one had come out with aid. He went in and found a security man, who eventually emerged with a fire extinguisher. There was just enough of the bike left to identify it as a Honda.

“What do you think happened?” Henry said.

“It’s London, isn’t it? Bloody madhouse.”

Most afternoons, Henry was content to stay at home. Over the years, in addition to his photographs, he had built up a collection of twentieth-century British art, without ever owning a single first-rate painting. He had bought the works of Meninsky, Shephard, and the like, artists with talent, but no great originality—painters who had needed to teach to pay the rent.

Henry was moved by their work. He admired their tenacity and was comfortable with their status. He viewed his walls with constant pleasure. He often said that he was surrounded by paintings that looked like the work of gifted relatives. He would have been uneasy living with art that was too obviously expensive. A Lucien Freud or Francis Bacon would have been impossible—like hanging your bank balance on the wall. In
the same way, he could drive a Mercedes, but not a Bentley—live in Chelsea, but not Belgravia.

There were those who saw Henry’s gradations as insincere, but his old friends were less cynical. Walter, his solicitor, and Oliver, a friend since Cambridge, knew that Henry’s dislike of pomp went back a long way. For the past thirty years, they had met every few weeks for dinner at a small Greek restaurant in Marylebone to discuss books, life, and in season, cricket. They had seen Henry poor and they had seen Henry rich, but they had never seen Henry overt.

After their most recent get-together, Walter had called him to check that he was all right.

“You seemed a bit down,” he said.

Henry told himself he was wistful rather than sad. He listened to rainy afternoon jazz and the slow movements of symphonies. The empty days felt like the end of a love affair.

In quiet desperation he turned to old routines. Even when he was married, Henry would eat breakfast out of the house, stopping off at a brasserie on his way to work. Though he no longer had an office to go to, he decided to follow the same early morning schedule. His breakfast companion had always been a book and for the most part he did read—though he also used the book as camouflage, turning the unread pages at suitable intervals as he listened in to neighboring tables. (He had known for some time that a middle-aged man sitting alone with a book is virtually invisible.)

Most mornings he went to the brasserie in Sloane Square, which opened at 8:30 a.m. He usually arrived early and loitered in the entrance of the nearby tube station rather than
join the queue and be marked out as lonely, unemployed, or divorced. Though, as he ruefully admitted to himself, he was all three.

With time to spare, he had found himself lingering over breakfast—sometimes staying for an hour or more. He was aware that he was no longer just listening to the other customers, but often staring, too. Invariably, at women. He would, if challenged, have said that his observations were innocent enough—anthropological rather than predatory. For example, he had noticed that women on greeting each other always found something to admire in the other’s appearance. “Oh that …” pointing to a necklace with a crude wooden daisy as its centerpiece—“that is adorable.” In return, the daisy lady would find the scarf that her friend was wearing “divine, a fantastic color.”

Were they sincere? It seemed unlikely, though Henry was sure they were genuine in their wish to find something to like. Would the scarf lady have been pleased if her companion had removed the daisy necklace and offered it as a gift? He did not think so. Henry was confident that she did not actually like it. He had seen her reading a newspaper as she waited for her friend and it was clear that she still had 20/20 vision.

On the walk back to his house, the signs of Christmas were a daily depressant. For him it was a season of greater isolation and now, deprived of even office jollity, he felt a complete outsider. Five days before Christmas, according to plan, he fled. Since the divorce, Henry had spent the holiday in Barbados. He went back to the same suite, in the same hotel, year after year, flying in and leaving one week later. He knew nothing
of the island apart from what could be glimpsed from the windows of the chilled car that took him from the airport to the hotel and back again.

His suitcase held few clothes, but was heavy with books. His great fear was of being stranded with nothing to read, so along with recent novels, he took bankers—books he knew he would enjoy reading again should the new titles disappoint.
Light Years
by James Salter always traveled with him and he invariably packed
The Chateau
by William Maxwell. Thus insured, even Christmas could be endured.

On the big night itself, he ordered room service and avoided the paper hats and festivities in the terraced restaurant. His suite had a wraparound veranda with shade and a view. It was on the top floor of a low-built plantation house that looked over the swimming pool. He was awake at 6:00 and would watch out for the early morning swimmers and then shortly afterwards the chair-baggers with their territorial towels and paperbacks. In earlier, less affluent times, he would have been one of them, but now he was, quite literally, above such stratagems. He stayed on his deck all day, going down only for meals.

Guests were assigned tables on the terrace for the length of their stay. The positions, once negotiated, were guaranteed. The terrace, as is the way of these things, had its own Siberia and Golden Mile. In general, the tables around the dance floor were considered prime, under cover but close to the water. Henry, who preferred to sit at the back, had been greeted like a man who wants to pay full price at a clearance sale and had been escorted with much ceremony to a despised
table. From there, he could watch his fellow guests, even if he could not always hear the quiet crooning of the nightly cabaret turn.

One night, Ken and Daphne, an English couple, paused at Henry’s table to exchange greetings. Their recap of the day’s weather had hardly started, before it was cut short. Henry followed their gaze across the floor and saw that their usual front-row table had been given to newcomers.

“Oh dear,” Daphne said. “We’d better see if we can sort it out.”

He watched them go off to do battle at the captain’s desk. Ken had twisted his ankle playing tennis and arrived at the desk, like a late-comer at an accident, envious of those that had been there from the start.

An inquest was in progress, apologies, a mistake had been made. The captain and four Barbadian waiters clustered around the couple. And then, above the chatter of the diners, above the soft lilt of the bandstand vocalist, came the echo of an older order, the voice of less egalitarian times, the throwback tones of Ken—“Then why the fuck did you give the table away?”

“Ken, that’s enough. Stop it, stop it, now!”

Daphne grabbed Ken’s arm and pulled him off to an available table, one row back.

The singer went on singing, the waiters dispersed, no obvious signs of agitation, but harm had been done. Not to the waiters, whose calm indifference remained intact, but the rumpus had damaged Daphne. Her standing in the dining room had been undermined by Ken’s tantrum. A recent graduate
from the school of humiliation himself, Henry admired her courage as she smiled and nodded at her new neighbors in the second row, but when the sommelier was dismissed by Ken with a sulky “Same as usual”—it was one misdeed too many and she picked up her bag and left the room.