The Last Day I Saw Her

by Lucy Lawrie

  There was a hint of warning in his voice. The unspoken message was all too clear. Because Gretel can be very, very difficult indeed.

  25

  Janey

  Hattie was late. Pip had found a way to amuse himself by climbing up and down the front steps, and peering down through the railings into the little basement yard below, which was half in sunshine and half in shadow. The windows were dark, grimy on the outside, impenetrable.

  ‘You’ll get your head stuck, silly.’ I gently pulled him back so his head was clear, but he clung to the railings and swung back on his heels, letting his hands take the weight of his body.

  With a clatter of heels, Hattie appeared.

  ‘Hello! Is this Pip? I didn’t know you’d be bringing him!’ She bent down and held out a hand to shake his. He glanced up at me, unsure what to do.

  I ruffled his hair, and stroked it back into place. ‘Pip, this is Mummy’s friend, Hattie.’

  Pip turned and buried his face in my skirt.

  ‘Right!’ she said, with a mischievous flick of an eyebrow. ‘Here goes. Are you up for this, Janey? Ready to confront the dark side?’ She turned the key in the lock of the big black door.

  I lifted Pip and held him close to my chest as Hattie opened the door. There was a sweeping sound as a pile of letters and junk mail was pushed aside. The air smelled of damp stone.

  ‘So far, so gooooood,’ said Hattie, her voice sliding up as she unlocked the inner glass door.

  We walked through the vestibule into the main hall, our boots mussing the fine film of dust on the chessboard tiles. To the left, doors opened onto vast, half-remembered formal rooms. To the right was the staircase, its ornate black banister coiling up to the first floor landing, and then on up to the second, far above. The cupola stared down like a great eye.

  ‘Shall we go downstairs?’ The basement kitchen had always been the least daunting room, with its worn wooden table, and the toasty smell of laundry warming on the Aga.

  ‘Brrr,’ said Hattie. ‘I’ll need to get that thing fired up if I’m going to move in. It’s Baltic in here.’

  Pip clutched at my coat as I carried him across the room and scrambled his feet against me as I tried to set him down.

  ‘It’s okay, Pippy-pips,’ I whispered, stroking a strand of hair back from his forehead.

  ‘Tea?’ said Hattie.

  She filled the kettle while I rinsed dust off a couple of mugs and unpacked the Sainsbury’s bag I’d brought with me, containing tea bags, sugar, a small carton of milk and some biscuits, and a small Tupperware box of cars for Pip to play with.

  ‘Custard creams, Janey? Very 1980s.’

  They were the biscuits Miss Fortune had always had, of course. I’d bought them as a tentative joke, wondering whether Hattie would pick up the reference.

  We’d sat down at the table, with Pip playing on the rug with his cars, when I decided to take the plunge.

  ‘What do you really think happened, back then? All those strange things.’

  She didn’t stiffen exactly, but there was a tiny pause in her stirring of the tea, a silence before the chink of the spoon against the mug resumed.

  ‘Oh crikey, Janey. What a pair we were!’ she smiled, chin pointed downwards, looking at me through her lashes. ‘What was it, some malarkey about my music case?’

  Some malarkey?

  ‘And the falling woman.’

  ‘Just a ruse to wind up my mother, wasn’t it? I didn’t want to get packed off to boarding school, wasn’t that it?’ She shrugged prettily. ‘Anyway, we should take a look around upstairs. Mum wants me to make a note of anything that needs touched up while the decorators are here.’

  She brought out a notepad, which sent a twinge through me. She and I, creeping around the house, making notes of the manifestations, crouching at a certain bend in the stairs, creeping behind the piano, our ears pressed to the wood to listen for scratchings (mice?), creaking or, once – we’d been convinced – a sigh that sounded like it was coming from the depths of the wood itself.

  ‘Do you get any sort of feeling being back here?’

  ‘Feeling? Oh come on, Janey, you’re trying to wind me up and it won’t work! What do you think we should do, go round the house with this notebook, and make notes of anything strange? Draw pictures of the little black marks on the skirting board, perhaps?’

  So she did remember.

  ‘Hey, Toots, what’s up?’

  Pip had stopped playing and was staring past us – through us – over towards the window, eyes fixed on something, something at his level, or just a bit higher. A smile on his face, totally unselfconscious, caught in a moment of surprised pleasure.

  ‘What’s up, darling?’

  ‘Dend,’ said Pip, turning his smile onto me. He raised a stubby finger and pointed towards the window.

  Hattie rubbed her forehead, briskly, with the back of her hand.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Headache,’ she said. ‘Come on, shall we do the upstairs quickly and then get moving?’

  But by the time we were halfway up the basement stairs, she seemed to have changed her mind about seeing the rest of the house. I could sense it in her, a trajectory of intention towards the front door.

  ‘You’re right, I’ll come back and do the rest another day,’ she said, once we were at the top, seeming to agree to a suggestion I hadn’t made.

  ‘Yes, best get home if you’ve got a bad headache.’

  Pip twisted round in my arms and looked up the stairs. He pointed, kicking me in the groin with a hard little boot. ‘Don’t my dend?’

  ‘Not today, my love,’ I soothed.

  ‘Right,’ said Hattie after we’d exited. ‘So lovely to see you again. Let’s do coffee some time!’ She blew an air kiss that reminded me of my mother and off she went, heels echoing down the empty street.

  26

  Janey

  When term started again in January, I went back to Miss Fortune.

  1990. Every time I wrote it down it looked wrong. A stark, blank new year to be faced without Hattie, or so it seemed now; something had prevented her from getting in touch with her new address. Nevertheless, I felt it was important to carry on as normal, to keep compiling evidence. It was what she’d have wanted.

  I’d telephoned Regent’s Crescent every day since the carol service, in case they’d decided not to move at the last minute. I knew, deep down, that there’d be no answer, that there would be nobody there to hear the ringing echoing up the empty stairwell. But for those few moments each day, standing in Granny’s sitting room, twisting the curly telephone cord round my fingers, I let myself imagine a house full of noise and homework and the smell of Findus Crispy Pancakes cooking.

  I held my breath as I rang Miss Fortune’s buzzer. It was a bitter afternoon with snow in the air, the cold catching at the back of my throat. I wondered whether she’d answer – it seemed quite possible she’d have vanished off the face of the earth too.

  For once, she opened the door before she’d stuck the smile on her face. There was a drawn-out moment before it appeared, in which the flesh-coloured splint on her hand seemed the main thing about her, grubby against the vibrant green and pink of her floral dress.

  ‘Well well, it’s you!’ This was delivered in a gust of spearmint, with undertones of raw meat.

  I breathed out and smiled back. It wasn’t so bad, after all. This was a teacher, not a monster, and I could do this. The thing was to keep on the right side of her. If I practised hard and listened intently, if I accepted the custard creams and orange squash with due reverence, then everything would be fine.

  It was almost as though Hattie could sense my resolve. I could feel her there with me, in the lesson, doing the ‘thumbs up, thumbs down’ signals in my peripheral vision, trying to make me laugh.

  ‘So it’s just you and me now, my dear,’ she said as she motioned to me to sit down at the piano. ‘And I want to talk to you about something important.’

 
My heart thudded.

  ‘The dimensions of music. The melody is the horizontal dimension: it moves forward in time, can only be expressed in time and through time. Harmony is the vertical dimension. The sounds, the chords, underneath the melody. Supporting the melody. But do you know what a counterpoint melody is?’

  ‘Another tune happening at the same time?’

  ‘Yes. Two or more independent melodies that overlap. I was going to let you hear one of the Bach prelude and fugues.’ She looked at me and wrinkled her nose. ‘But just for fun, how about an example from popular music? This might get the point across.’

  She went over to the bookcase that held her record collection and leaned far down, looking for something on the lowest shelf. Her flower-upholstered bottom bobbed and swayed in the air for a full minute.

  ‘Here, then: “Je t’aime”, sung by Jane Birkin et Serge Gainsbourg. Listen for the melody of the strings in the chorus. Let them transport you.’

  The song sounded okay at first, but the woman’s whispery voice grew breathier and breathier, until I was barely able to follow any of the melodies, contrapuntral or otherwise, for the increasingly frequent sighs and gasps. This could barely even be described as a song: it was clearly two people having sex.

  Horrified, I fixed my eyes on the keyboard and didn’t look up again even when the music had stopped.

  ‘In counterpoint, the melodies are independent but they can form a temporary vertical effect: filling in the harmonies for the other melody, and then moving away to become separate again.’ She sighed, and I looked up, fearing that I didn’t appear sufficiently transported. But she was staring out of the window, looking dreamy. ‘And sometimes there’s darkness, dissonance in there, and it shouldn’t work, but it does; it’s beautiful, for reasons nobody in this world could ever explain. Each melody brings out the gorgeousness in the other, in ways you couldn’t imagine till it happens, till they come together. Rather like lovers, in fact, which makes that example very illustrative.’ She smiled, and kinked an eyebrow at me.

  I could feel the red rising up my chest and face. I’d have to throw my beetroot-coloured self onto the mercies of Bach. ‘Do you know, I’ve always wanted to hear a prelude and fugue?’

  On the walk home I imagined Hattie so hard that I could almost hear her laughing: ‘The having-sex song was bad enough, but did you see, she hasn’t trimmed her nose hair for at least three weeks!’

  ‘Come on,’ I whispered. ‘She wasn’t that bad. I thought she was going to make me play the fugue thing when I pretended to be so interested in it.’ But my words disappeared into the cold empty air and when I listened for her again she was gone.

  *

  As the weeks went on, I began to dread my lessons less and found that I no longer felt sick with nerves on the long walk up the hill from school. I caught myself looking forward to the moment when I’d turn on to her street and see the music room window up ahead, glowing amber in the grey chill of the afternoon.

  She always gave me a few minutes to warm my hands by the hissing gas fire.

  ‘No point trying to play until the blood’s flowing properly,’ she’d say. ‘And what about gloves, child? Where are your gloves?’ She’d shake her head and tut, lamenting, as my grandmother sometimes did, the careless ways of young people.

  Then she’d give me a creamy blob of Vaseline Intensive Care to work into my chapped fingers. And the air would grow rich with the smell of it, and it made me think of mothers, somehow, and I’d almost not mind about the ordeal to come. The critique of my playing was always delivered in bright tones, always with a Cheshire cat smile, always devastating.

  ‘I’m in a sentimental old mood today,’ she said one day. ‘A nostalgic mood. Shall we do listening? Yes, I think so. Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor. We’ll be wicked things and skip to the second movement.’

  There was a faint thud and a squeak. It sounded as though someone was moving furniture in the back room.

  Miss Fortune paused on her way over to the shelf where the records were kept and closed the door firmly. Then she gestured, in exaggerated hopelessness, at the ceiling.

  ‘Those wretched students. Forever making a racket. I’ll turn it up extra loud. See how they like it.’ She chuckled as she wheeshed the record out of its sleeve and placed it on the turntable.

  The Grieg was relaxing. Relieved of the prospect of having to play my difficult sonatina, I started thinking about the end-of-term play I was going to be in. I was only a non-speaking servant called Clara, but at least I was a female this year. I began to drift: costumes, the smell of thick pan-stick make-up, the after-show party, Mrs Williamson . . .

  Suddenly a voice boomed through my imaginings: ‘Argenteuil seen from the small arm of the Seine!’

  I jerked awake. Oh God, what was this now?

  She was standing in front of me, one foot stretched out in front, an arm pointing to the picture that hung over the fireplace.

  ‘Monet. A man gave me this print a long time ago. He was the love of my life. We were at the Conservatoire together . . . Paris.’

  My heart sank. Was she going to play ‘Je t’aime’ again?

  ‘You know what happened in Paris, yes? The accident?’

  I did know, because Hattie had told me. Did Miss Fortune know that we’d compared notes about her? I glanced across at the metronome eye and suppressed a shudder.

  ‘But before that, it was a precious, precious time,’ she went on, still gazing at the picture. ‘It shines in my memory, Janey. Shines! A career as a concert pianist still seemed very much within my reach. We used to dream together, to walk, some weekends, by a tiny village on the Seine, not far from Giverny.’

  The spider eyes shot round at me. I nodded earnestly, and sat straighter in my chair.

  ‘I was beautiful then,’ she added, in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Oh no! What was I supposed to say? That she was beautiful now, too? It would hardly be true. I frowned at the painting, pretending to be so absorbed in it I hadn’t heard the comment.

  ‘Blossom, my dear. By a river. A riot of light, and springtime and sheer joy. That’s what this slow movement says to me. What does it say to you?’

  I thought quickly. Grieg was Norwegian, wasn’t he?

  ‘Er . . . Fjords?’ I said, instantly regretting the question mark in my voice.

  Her upper lip kinked momentarily, but then she put back on her enthusiastic, Julie Andrews face.

  ‘It could be somewhere in Scotland, Edinburgh even,’ she offered. ‘It also makes me think of the pond at Inverleith.’

  A giggle caught at the base of my throat.

  ‘Yes,’ she insisted. ‘In springtime, too. Cherry blossom. Ducklings. Where I used to walk on Sunday afternoons with the other love of my life.’

  I was still trying to think of other Norwegian things.

  Vikings?

  *

  Time passed; even without Hattie, time passed. And without quite knowing why, I was practising the piano at every opportunity, squirrelling myself away in the smallest, furthest-away music room every break time, and for hours after school. Perhaps, to begin with, it was a way of avoiding the girls in the playground, in their tightly closed groups, or delaying my return to the dark, cabbage-smelling house in Trinity. But as time went on I found that, through music, I could wrap myself in something that felt like love.

  I began practising a Chopin nocturne; someone had left photocopied sheets on top of the music room piano one day, with fingering instructions marked on in fierce red pen. It was too difficult for me, and I invariably fluffed the notes. But I’d seized on it when I’d recognised it as one my grandpa had used to listen to. Once it had come on his transistor radio as he’d been watering his tomatoes, and he’d stopped and closed his eyes.

  And something about the piece let my sadness out. The longing for him, so tightly furled in my chest, my shoulders and my neck, would loosen and flow down my arms, my fingers, onto the keys. And afterwards I’d go back to clas
s with my arms warm and shaky, my vision swimming.

  One day, months later, I told Miss Fortune, in a tiny voice, that I’d brought a piece I’d been practising, and that I wanted to play it for her.

  She sat still through my performance. If she noticed the too-difficult bars that I skipped over, or the chords I’d thinned out in places, she never said anything.

  ‘It’s unusual, Janey, especially in the case of such a young player, for a piece to channel emotion like that. It’s a gift, in its own way. I’ve known professional pianists who’d be able to fly in the air sooner than they could convey those depths of emotion. But technically, you’ve a long way to go. Such a long way to go, with your execution.’

  My execution?

  ‘Until what comes out of those fingers matches what’s in your head.’

  ‘Oh. Should I stop practising it, then?’

  I was rushing to please her, anticipating her response. But why did I say such a thing? To give up the nocturne would be like packing Grandpa into his cold, dark grave all over again.

  She gave me a strange look, filled with something like longing.

  ‘If you feel that way about a piece, I don’t think you could stop practising it, dear. I’ll give you some more finger-strengthening exercises, though. And we can go over the fingering together.’

  ‘That’s brilliant, thank—’

  ‘Oh, but that sounds like hard work,’ she said throatily. ‘Let’s do it next time.’

  I nodded.

  ‘How about a spot of Rachmaninov, for the last ten minutes? I treated myself to a new recording of the second symphony.’

  27

  Janey

  Hattie surprised me by phoning the following week, just as I’d got in from the nursery with Pip.

  ‘Well, I’ve moved all my stuff in to the House of Hell.’ She sounded breathless, as though she was climbing stairs. I pictured the staircase at Regent’s Crescent, banisters twisting up like a great wrought-iron centipede.

  ‘So you’re staying there tonight?’

  ‘I am. Would you like to come over for dinner? A little house-warming? Nothing elaborate, mind. But I can knock up a mean spaghetti arrabiata.’