by Minnie Darke
Hold the thought of Richard, going home to Lenka. Hold him the way he held her in their kitchen, while her sobs shook every square inch of her body.
Ten days later they sat – Arie and Belinda, Richard and Lenka – in a room made soft by gentle light coming through arched windows. There was a powerful scent of lily of the valley; at the front of the gathering there was no casket, only a large portrait of Diana. Belinda held Arie’s arm so tightly that it might have hurt had he been able to feel bodily pain above the other ache, the one that racked up almost past endurance when the first of the hymns came to an end, and the congregation sang, ‘Amen’.
She was Diana Clare, concert pianist and beloved of Arie Johnson, and the writer of a love song that she would never, now, play for him.
AS BENE ROMERO stepped off a plane at Heathrow, he shrugged on a coat over the top of the thin jumper that had been all very well for Singapore, but was a long way from sensible in the January chill of London. He made his way through the terminal building to the baggage claim area where he dodged an overloaded trolley being pushed by a man too tired to be polite, and watched with amusement as a plane-load of irritable passengers jostled for position at a luggage carousel that had not even begun to move.
Bene adjusted his watch to London time, 5.30 am, aware of a pressure mounting in his chest. He didn’t want to be standing here, stalled and waiting for his suitcase. He wanted already to be speeding home towards Winchmore Hill, and Beatrix. As the frustrating minutes passed, Bene became gradually aware that the people around him were no longer so fixated on elbowing their way to the front of the suitcase collection scrum. Instead, they were drifting towards various pillars in the baggage hall, looking up at the mounted television screens that were mutely broadcasting the news channel, the words of the announcers converted to auto-text.
Unconfirmed reports, Bene read, as he joined the rear of the nearest pack, of a ghost flight over central Europe. Moving closer to the screen, he read the words Paris-bound and military escort. There was some stock footage of an Air Pleiades jet on a runway, but the visuals were otherwise limited to the serious faces of the news anchors and that of the bow-tied former aviation engineer who was being beamed in from Seattle with a picture of Lake Washington as his backdrop.
On the faces of the people around him, Bene could see shock and disbelief, morbid curiosity, and something else, too. Relief. Yes, relief, because every passenger in the baggage hall, including Bene himself, had just now participated in the commonplace miracle of being scooped up from one point on the globe and set down only hours later in another place, far, far away.
‘There but for the grace of God,’ murmured a woman beside him.
Out of the airport at last, Bene found his Uber – a small hatchback whose silent driver wore a black hoodie that made him almost indistinguishable from his seat. It was not yet dawn, and as the car transported him through the winter streets, Bene had a sense of the city as a vast honeycomb in which, behind the closed doors and glowing curtained windows, people’s dreams were giving way to the reality of their days.
From the radio came news of the first official confirmation that a passenger plane had crashed in the Atlantic Ocean west of France, and Bene – thinking of all those people in the world who were right now finding out that their lives had swerved catastrophically off-course – wanted even more acutely to be home with his daughter. Although he was sitting in the back of the car, he felt his right foot press down on an imaginary accelerator, as if this might somehow speed him to his destination.
Bene had been in Singapore for work, his boss at the boutique London public relations firm having sent him to meet with a key client. Bene was not entirely proud to say that the company he worked for had found its niche specialising in the green-washing of companies with less than enviable environmental credentials, but he could not deny taking pleasure in the fact that his boss was now increasingly trusting him, with his affable personality and talent for closing deals without ever becoming openly confrontational, to represent the firm in Asia.
He’d been away for only three days, but each of the days had been long because he’d been unable to contact Beatrix. This, of course, had been his own fault.
‘Speak to me like that one more time, and you can hand over your phone,’ he’d said, in the heat of an argument that inconveniently exploded right before he was about to leave.
Even as the words came out of his mouth, Bene knew that the chances of this tactic bringing Beatrix to heel were nil. She was, after all, his daughter.
‘Confiscate my phone? Oh my God. You’re so obvious.’ Beatrix was fourteen. ‘Can’t you think of anything more original?’
Bene Romero, professional negotiator, cool-headed closer. That was him. Until he was in a power struggle with a teenage girl who could break his heart with one flex of her little finger.
‘Well, I could confiscate your phone and your laptop.’
Beatrix yawned ostentatiously, and at that point the red cloud of Bene’s anger rose up to obscure the trivial nature of the original disagreement. (He’d asked Beatrix to stack the dishwasher; she’d said she’d do it after she’d watched a movie; he’d said she needed to learn to delay gratification, so suggested she stack the dishwasher first and watch the movie second; she’d said, ‘Juanita will be here in a minute’; and he’d said that was hardly the point, he wasn’t having her grow up into an entitled little shit who expected other people to do her dirty work; and Beatrix, who actually wasn’t spoiled – not right through to the core – said, ‘All right, all right, I’ll do it later’; and Bene had said, ‘But when you say you’ll do it later, you forget, so do it now’; she’d said, ‘Just get off my case, will you?’; he’d said, ‘If I’m not on your case, you’ll spend the whole night like a lobotomised sloth’, and for good measure, he’d followed up with a mime of her staring vacantly at a screen; she’d said, ‘Go die in a fucking hole.’)
‘Right,’ Bene said. ‘That’s it. Phone and laptop. Hand them over. Right now, Bea.’
She rolled her eyes, which didn’t go down well, and by the time Bene set off for the airport, his carry-on bag held Beatrix’s phone, Beatrix’s laptop and the power cord to the desktop computer, plus the house modem, just for good measure. That would teach her, Bene thought, and all the way to Heathrow he felt righteous and powerful. It wasn’t long, though – he got as far as his airline club lounge – before it all seemed embarrassingly petty.
In the time it took to knock back a few whiskies, Bene’s remorse blossomed into full-scale guilt. He wanted to apologise, to mend the rift, but he couldn’t call Beatrix because he’d taken her phone. And he couldn’t email her because he’d taken her laptop. And he’d disabled the desktop and removed every means in the house of accessing wi-fi. Now, because of his own pig-headed thoroughness, his only conduit to Beatrix was Juanita.
Once, Juanita had been Beatrix’s babysitter, but when Beatrix turned thirteen she insisted that she no longer needed such a thing.
‘What if we just made up another name for it?’ Juanita had cleverly suggested. ‘You know, like a euphemism.’
‘What’s a euphemism?’ Beatrix had asked.
‘It’s like a substitute word or phrase. Like “pre-loved” for “second-hand”.’
‘Okay then. It’s perfect.’
‘What is?’ Juanita was befuddled.
‘Euphemism. This is Juanita, my friendly euphemism.’
They had laughed, and the term had stuck.
Before Bene stepped onto the Singapore-bound plane he called Juanita’s phone.
‘Euphemism speaking.’
‘Hey. Can I talk to Bea?’
‘Why don’t you call her phone?’ Juanita asked, deadpan.
‘Ah, not funny. Not right now.’
‘You can’t talk to her. She’s asleep.’
‘Is she really?’
‘I don’t know, Bene. She says she’s asleep, okay?’
‘Shit. Well . . . can you just tel
l her I’m sorry?’
‘What did you do, hm? Were you a bit of an . . . arsehole?’
Bene felt weak. Being the one to ring up and beg for forgiveness made him feel like he was capitulating to a terrorist, and Juanita wasn’t helping. But greater than his fear of weakness was his fear of Beatrix going to sleep with their argument unresolved. When Tess had been alive, it had been their unbroken rule to sort themselves out before they went to sleep. That meant there had been nights – oh, the sheer number of nights – when he and Tess had sat up until dawn going around and around in a labyrinth of accusation and recrimination, until they at last emerged into a clearing in which apologies were possible. And sex. That too.
From him and Tess had come Beatrix. And what had he expected, with the combination of their genes? A placid, even-tempered, agreeable child who stacked the dishwasher, peaceably, the moment she was asked? Bene knew that without a mother to see her through these turbulent years, Beatrix had no choice but to pile a double helping of attitude onto his plate. He also knew that he needed to do better, be calmer, control the fear that rose each time he sensed her hurtling away from him into a future that he wasn’t yet ready to face.
Bene called again the following day from the hallway outside a meeting room in his Singapore hotel.
‘She’s gone out for a run,’ Juanita told him.
‘Beatrix doesn’t run. You run.’
‘We switched hobbies for the day. I’m just sitting here plotting ways to piss off my father.’
He called again the next day.
‘She’s around at Jamie’s,’ Juanita said.
‘You let her go to Jamie’s?’
‘Chill, will you, Daddy Bear? Jamie’s mother is at home. I made certain of this fact. And I will have you know that she has six thousand pounds’ worth of surveillance equipment trained on the interior of Jamie’s bedroom.’
Single father to a fourteen-year-old girl. It was a position that felt, to Bene, way above his pay grade. It wasn’t just the weirdness, when in Tesco, of popping a packet of tampons into his shopping basket along with the milk and the digestive biscuits. Or the discomfort of standing outside a Topshop changing room, feeling like a perv with his armful of rejected B-cup bras. It was also the feeling that he’d been left with the monumental task of loving Beatrix enough for two parents, when he could only ever be one, and when he was fucking up even his part of it, royally, every second day of the week.
After another attempt at calling Beatrix in the early evening, London time (‘She’s got a face mask on. She doesn’t want to smudge it,’ Juanita had told him), Bene went to the cocktail lounge. It was late, well past midnight, but a decent number of folks were there, lounging on the rattan sofas with their drinks and their on-holiday bonhomie. Bene ordered a whisky, ignored a meaningful glance from a woman sitting alone with a complicated cocktail, and sat down to think about Beatrix.
Once, his daughter had been so small that she’d been able to sleep on her stomach while stretched along the length of his upturned forearm, her tiny skull cradled in his palm. Later, he’d been able to easily swing her off her feet, settle her onto his shoulders and walk with her that way for hours. Now, she was almost as tall as he was, and sometime in the last few years without him noticing precisely when, she had acquired a kind of solidity in her body that made him feel that she was – physically at least – fully grown.
Emotionally, he felt her pulling away from him, like a tethered boat in a storm. The ropes were creaking, and there were days when the idea of letting go of her was so tempting, to the point that it sometimes even seemed like the right thing to do. But then he would look more closely at the horizon of that particular storm and know that he had to hold on, no matter what – even if she slammed against him with all her power, even if she broke him apart.
By the time Bene realised he was listening to piano music, it seemed so much like the soundtrack to his thoughts that it took him a moment to realise that it was coming not from inside him, but from the balcony above the lounge. He tuned in to the melody, and for a time he tried to listen to it over the conversations of the people gathered nearby. Then, drawn by the song and wanting to hear it at closer range, he made his way up a flight of curving stairs.
The musician was a woman with long, pale ginger hair twisted into a single fraying braid that fell over one shoulder, and Bene saw immediately that she was no ordinary player. Her eyes were closed as her hands moved over the keys, and the expression on her face was such that Bene believed he’d have known she was playing a love song even if his ears were stopped with wax against the sound.
Behind and just to one side of her, Bene leaned against the balcony railing, cradling his whisky glass, and listened. When the woman reached the song’s end, she lifted her hands and left them there, suspended above the keys, waiting for the final chord to dissolve into silence as the piano’s strings returned to stillness.
She nodded, and smiled. Pleased with her song, Bene supposed. But also, he suspected, with something beyond it.
Bene held his breath, half expecting her to turn and see him, her audience of one. If she did so, he decided, he would applaud. But she didn’t. Instead, she started the song again, from the beginning. The woman played the piece through several times, as if trying to perfect it, and for some time after Bene was back in his room, the song played on in his head.
The next morning, Bene checked out of the hotel, left his luggage in storage and spent a few hours shopping: new earphones for Beatrix, and a sequinned T-shirt he hoped she wouldn’t consider a fashion disaster.
Returning to the hotel in the early afternoon, with hours still to kill before he needed to go to the airport, Bene found himself drawn back to the piano on the balcony. With studied nonchalance, he moved a silver bollard aside and sat before the keys. From downstairs came the hiss of a coffee machine, the squeal of cutlery on crockery, chatter, a baby crying.
In the daylight, the marks of fingertips were visible in the faint covering of dust that lay on the instrument’s gleaming black case. Although Bene had played since he was a boy, he was nowhere near the league of the woman who’d sat at this piano the night before. Not wanting to disturb those enjoying their meals downstairs, he allowed his fingers to roam over the keys without pressing down, producing a rendition of ‘Für Elise’ that – by virtue of being silent – was as perfect as could be imagined. He thought of the ginger-haired pianist, and wondered whether or not there was a match between the music she could hear in her head and the degree of accomplishment she could produce with her hands.
Probably, he thought, a little enviously.
Then he saw it. A notebook. It was on top of the piano, its black leather cover blending almost entirely into the background. Slightly smaller than A4 size, it had sepia-toned pages printed with blank musical staves, and a length of narrow scarlet ribbon for a place-keeper. On the inside cover of the book was an address. Australia, he noted.
The first few pages of the book were taken up with the notation for various complicated fingering exercises. But then, on the pages that followed, he found it. The song. Until he saw it there on the page in front of him, its pencilled notes darker and crisper in some places than others, he hadn’t known precisely how much he’d wanted to hear it again. Gently, quietly, a little haltingly, he played. The song began in the key of A, but as it transitioned beautifully through a sequence of other keys, Bene felt the melody swell inside him, resonating with his homesickness and his remorse.
Then, unexpectedly, the notation petered out. The beautiful ending that Bene had heard the pianist play the night before . . . it wasn’t on the page. He concentrated, trying to remember both the sound and the feeling of the way the woman had brought her song to a close. He tried a few pathways, and a few more, until at last his fingers found the right one. It took him to an E chord, and from there to an A chord to finish.
‘Yes,’ he murmured with satisfaction, as the remains of the music hovered in the air around his ear
s.
When at last Bene closed the notebook and took it down from the piano’s music desk, there was a tug-of-war going on inside him. He had a strong desire to keep the book for himself, but an equally strong desire to do the right thing. In the end, his sense of obligation sent him to the hotel’s concierge desk.
‘I’d like to get a message to one of your guests,’ Bene told the immaculate young man behind the counter. ‘She has ginger hair, very long. I think she might be Australian? Do you know who I mean?’
The young man nodded apologetically, and told Bene that the lady in question had checked out earlier in the day. Bene thought. He rationalised that if he left the music book at the hotel, and even if the staff promised to return it to its owner, it would most likely end up languishing in a lost property box. Whereas if he were to take it home himself, he could be sure to post it back to her. Tightening his grip on the notebook, he affected a crestfallen look and said to the concierge, ‘Well, thank you all the same.’
On the flight back to London, Bene played the song’s notes on the imaginary keyboard of his tray table. Using a purloined hotel-issue pen, he wrote the last few bars of the song onto the blank staves of the pianist’s notebook. It would be like a message – of admiration, of understanding – from him to her. He was playing the song again now, in the Uber, forming the final perfect cadence with his fingers on his knee as the small black car cruised up the street where he lived.
‘Anywhere here, thanks,’ Bene told the driver.
At his doorway, Bene took a deep breath and remembered all his resolutions about Beatrix. He would be a better father. Pick his battles more carefully. Be wiser. Calmer. More loving. Steadier. And no matter what, he would hold on. Perhaps he would make Beatrix pancakes for breakfast. Or maybe he could give her a morning off school and take her out somewhere nice. Just the two of them.
