Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  On Flint Road I saw them coming towards me, the daughters. Russian farmers’ wives. They had been off shopping at the Somerfield in Alburgh. I raised my hand in greeting. They didn’t reply, their arms were hung heavily with carrier bags. I had greeted them too early, too many meters had to be covered with eyes averted. It took a long time for us to reach each other. I said, ‘Hello, how are you this morning?’

  They said, ‘Oh, fine, thank you,’ and asked whether I was coming from Catherine’s. I said I was. We walked on. Fifty meters further I looked back and saw them scraping down the road, shoulder to shoulder. Sometimes a gap arose in the phalanx as they skirted a pothole.

  I went down the hill and passed Joanna’s house in the curve, the house Warren had built. Like last night, no-one seemed to be at home. Warren’s land extended all the way to the bottom of the hill, to the parking lot by the pier. I wondered whether Joanna would be at the funeral, whether the war between Catherine and her would be called off for the duration of the ceremony, a fragile truce.

  I had taken a room at the Whaler. Catherine had offered me a bed; I thanked her but said no. Too many women, too much mourning.

  Behind the taps in the Schooner bar I saw a familiar face: Mike Leland. We had played rugby together, he had been our second-team captain. He grinned broadly.

  ‘So it’s the piano man, well well!’

  He stuck his big hand out across the bar and pumped my arm back and forth. Mike Leland had been working as a waiter at the Whaler before I left Alburgh. I had played the piano, afternoons in the lounge and evenings in the bar – I could still remember the expression on his face when he heard how much I earned.

  ‘I work,’ he had said in aggravation, ‘and you . . . you play.’

  He had worked his way up to manager, but looked as misplaced as ever with his number eight’s body in a barman’s uniform. He still played rugby, of course, these days as weight-bearing wall for the front five. Mike put a half-pint down in front of me and asked what had brought me to Alburgh.

  ‘The old Knut,’ he said then. ‘The folks up there won’t have long to go now. How long you staying?’

  I told him I didn’t know, no fixed plans, but that I enjoyed seeing the hill and the village again. He frowned.

  ‘Not married are you, Ludwig?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Children, regular job?’

  When I kept shaking my head he whistled softly through his teeth. Went on rinsing glasses mechanically.

  ‘Not married, no regular job. What on earth has become of you, piano man?’

  ‘Just the piano, that’s all. It’s a useful trick.’

  Mike shook his head and laughed, a bit in spite of himself.

  ‘Still not an honest day’s work in your life. I must be doing something wrong.’

  My room looked out on the little market square. On a pedestal in the middle of it was a WWII mine, painted fire-engine red, with a slot in it for contributions to the families of sailors lost at sea. I recalled the quote from the Book of Jeremiah that was engraved on the mine – There is sorrow on the sea.

  My cell phone showed two missed calls.

  *

  ‘Hey, Liberace, where are you? The bar’s full. We’re waiting for you.’

  ‘I asked nicely if you’d let us know where you are. At the desk they said you’d checked out. Christ, Unger, answer your phone. Stop acting like some kind of prima donna, goddamn it.’

  There were a few battery stripes left. I dug around in my suitcase looking for the charger, and carefully lifted the urn in its plastic packing, until I saw before me the image of a wall socket. My battery charger was still in the Pulitzer Hotel, which I’d left the day before.

  I kicked off my shoes, rolled myself up in the counterpane and, without a further thought, fell asleep.

  It was early in the evening when I awoke. At the Readers’ Room, along the esplanade, I looked at old photographs of seamen from Alburgh – captains in the merchant marine, sailors on wartime frigates, herring fishers casting their nets at the Dogger Bank. By the glow of the opaline-glass reading lights I looked at ships that had run aground or been blown in half by dastardly submarines. The display cases contained clay pipes and braided epaulettes.

  Some devout Christian had left money in his will to the Readers’ Room, to ensure that seamen would waste their time not in cafés but under the reading lamps. I had never seen a seaman in there. In fact, it was even doubtful whether there were any seamen left in Alburgh. A fisherman or sailor would have seemed as quaint there as a thatcher at a county fair. Yet the Readers’ Room still stood, and someone came every day to open it and close it again around eleven each night. That weird space, a mini-museum and public library rolled into one, had in some mysterious way escaped the ravages of time.

  At the Lighthouse Inn I asked the waiter to take away the little bowl of chips. There are moments when I cannot bear the sight of chips. It has something to do with the ecstasy of loneliness. Years ago, whenever I felt that way, I would fill my pockets with pebbles to keep myself from blowing away. That lightness still took hold of me at times, when I had been alone and out of contact with people for a long time. I scraped off the cod’s silver-gray skin and paid no more attention to my freischwebende condition. I knew it wouldn’t be long before an end came to that weightlessness.

  Later that evening Mike Leland asked me again how long I was planning to stay, and then, upon the incessant vagueness of my replies, he cast his nets.

  ‘Wouldn’t feel like playing here a bit, would you, when you’ve got the time? That’s what that thing’s there for.’

  That thing: a Brinsmead grand I had played before, now as false as a compliment to your mother-in-law.

  ‘It needs tuning,’ I said.

  ‘I could have someone come in tomorrow, it’ll be fixed in a jiffy.’

  He was drawing in his nets.

  ‘Last summer we had a fellow here by the name of John Whittaker,’ he said. ‘Used to play on the Queen Mary. I heard he’s dead. Found him in his room, at the Seagull in Lowestoft.’

  ‘The way of all lounge pianists,’ I mumbled.

  ‘It’s a service we’d be pleased to offer our guests,’ Leland said, as though he’d just come back from a marketing course. ‘And of course it doesn’t have to be an act of charity, does it, Prince Charming?’

  He was referring to my former hourly wage of twenty-five quid, as established by Julie Henry, the manager at the time. She’d had a weak spot for me, there was no denying that. The affrontery of twenty-five pounds an hour was etched in Leland’s memory. Perhaps he still figured there was some corrupt connection between the level of my wages and Julie Henry’s smiles whenever she walked past the piano in her barmaid’s uniform, which I believe she ordered to fit as tightly as possible. Sometimes she would run her hand slowly across the lacquered frame.

  We agreed to thirty-five pounds an hour, Leland and I did, and dinner beforehand. In twelve years’ time my value had risen by an additional ten pounds an hour. During the first week I could stay at the hotel for free, after that I would have to find lodgings elsewhere; a room was too much to ask.

  And so within the first twenty-four hours I, who had come to town for a funeral, had found work, food and a place to stay.

  When I came downstairs the next morning, there was a piano tuner at work.

  ‘An old workhorse it is, guv,’ the man said. ‘All those children’s hands.’

  I came closer and peered into the cabinet.

  ‘First they look at it for a little while,’ I said. ‘Then, carefully, they try out a key. When no-one comes over to yell at them, they try the next one. There’s a magic idea in their head that says they can suddenly play the piano, just like that, a miracle. I remember the days when I stood in front of the piano and thought I had Beethoven in my back pocket, that all I had to do was hit the keys.’

  ‘If you ask me, they just like to bang on the thing as hard as possible,’ the piano tuner said.
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  ‘Will you be able to get it back into shape?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yeah. You the new pianist?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’ll fix it for you as well as I can, but the pads are pretty worn. I can’t do anything about that right now.’

  ‘Probably doesn’t matter too much for “My Way”,’ I said.

  The palm trees in the gardens had been bound up for the winter. I shook off that night’s dream, about a woman from long ago. Early in the afternoon I went into a shop and bought a bottle of whiskey. The beach cabins on the parking lot by the pier breathed dull endurance. They were, like me, built for a different season. I walked up the hill. Warren had put up signs. Private. Authorised vehicles only. Please keep gateway clear. For years this was the road taken by trucks loaded with sand, clay and rubble for Warren’s infamous ‘soft seawall’. Through the streets of Alburgh they had thundered down to the sea front, past the pier and then up Kings Ness. The road was reinforced with debris and concrete plates, and in clouds of dust they raced uphill, downhill. Every day Warren had stood, clipboard in hand, counting the trucks, listing their cargo in code and mumbling things like ‘glorious clay’. When it was raining he would sit in his Land Rover, wipers on, clipboard on his lap. There was something cheerful about him, about the way he would say ‘it’s all a game’, or smile knowingly at adversities and call them ‘a new challenge to dialectical thinking’.

  For a long time, Warren had worked for a company that made water-purification systems. After a traffic accident he was forced to convalesce for a year, and when he was finally able to work again there was no position for him. He was almost sixty at the time, he received financial compensation, and so he dedicated himself to the preservation of the cliff and the houses he still owned.

  A few mornings a week a retired crane operator from Kessingland would park his moped at Joanna’s house. Then he would walk up to the dragline parked on Warren’s supply route. From our house we could hear the engine fire up, and often I saw the black smoke pressed from the pipe atop the cabin, the deep shudder that ran through the machine. I always thought that pieces of it would start to fall off. He would remain there like that for a while, letting the thing idle. It seemed as though the motor were mustering the strength to leave its spot, after which it started to move, slow and cold as a reptile. He moved the loads the trucks had dumped, bringing them to the far end of the seawall. In that way the barrier shifted further and further along the cliff. But for us it was already too late.

  Warren would not be buried until Monday, three days from now. The smell coming from the study reminded me of my mother’s death.

  Not all of the daughters were there. One was sitting at the table with Catherine, another was making her presence known by the sound of clattering dishes in the adjoining kitchen. Catherine smiled in the unbearable way of women who are keeping their heads up. I sat down at the table and proffered the bottle of Tullamore Dew I had bought that afternoon.

  ‘Irish whiskey,’ I said. ‘I hope it’s the right one.’

  ‘That’s sweet of you. Mary, fetch glasses, would you?’

  The daughter stood up and set out on her slow course into the kitchen. I wondered how Catherine, dainty and light of frame herself, could have produced these.

  ‘Maureen and Mary are the only ones who could stay. Kathleen and Jane had to get back. Maureen’s staying another week. After that I’ll be on my own. I came to England for Warren. I don’t like England. But I never regretted it a day in my life, following him. Now there’s nothing for me here anymore. Only his grave. They’ – here she nodded towards the kitchen – ‘say I should come back. But that’s exactly what I ask myself, boy: should you stay where your love is buried, is that where your home is? Or is it with your children?’

  Mary came out of the kitchen with glasses and put them down carefully, as though they were eggs that could roll off the tabletop. I jiggled my shoulders, made nervous by the question.

  ‘I don’t know, Catherine. Since this thing here, since the house disappeared, I’m not sure anymore about places. I don’t think I’m the right person to ask. My tendency would be to . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was thinking about people whose days are like grass, like a flower of the field and the wind passes over it and no-one knows where it stood.’

  ‘Isn’t that a psalm?’ Mary asked.

  I nodded and screwed the cap off the bottle.

  Catherine said, ‘Say that again.’

  ‘That’s all I know, just those lines.’

  ‘So recite them again.’

  I smiled and shook my head. It was a psalm that had been read at my mother’s cremation, I had felt the meaning of every single word, the grass, the flowers, the wind. All of it so fleeting, so fragile. Above her glass, Mary’s eyes flashed back and forth between her mother and me. She was not going to break the crystal of silence.

  ‘Marthe,’ Catherine asked me then, ‘was she cremated?’

  ‘Ashes. What she really wanted was to be burned beside the Ganges.’

  A searing trail down my gullet.

  ‘But Winschoten was good enough in the end.’

  ‘Mother,’ Mary said, ‘without Warren this house won’t be here in a few years. In ten years everything will be gone. Are you going to wait for that to happen?’

  Catherine didn’t respond. She stared into space, her gnarled, weathered hands around the glass, as though warming herself at the fire inside it. The second hand on the plastic clock thumped like a pile-driver. We sat there and breathed.

  When I sang ‘Summertime’ in the bar that evening, it made me feel more melancholy than bright and breezy. ‘Your daddy’s rich, and your mamma’s good lookin’, so hush little baby, don’t you cry . . .’ Summer and youth overlapped in the lullaby, as they did in so many people’s memories. But it wasn’t the right moment for ‘Summertime’, the bar was in a relieved, Friday-evening mood. Leland worked the beer pumps as though racing a handcar down the tracks, you could tell he was born for the publican’s life.

  I kicked in to ‘Candle in the Wind’, which has always made the English go all melty ever since Elton John transposed it from Marilyn Monroe to Lady Di. ‘Goodbye England’s rose, may you ever grow in our hearts’ – by that time the average Brit has already traded in his solid matter for something more liquid.

  I peeked out of the corner of my eye and saw a woman at one of the tables. She wore a black turtleneck beneath her fitted jacket. Her head seemed somehow to float independently of her body. I studied her pale, sensitive face, the portrait of a Catalan princess. She let the fluid in her glass rock like an ocean swell. Round eyes, cornflower blue like a baby doll’s, with those heavy eyelids that open and shut when you shake her. She was the girl who is left, of her own choosing, once all the other girls have been taken home. She says, ‘It doesn’t matter. You get used to it.’

  When she comes, she weeps. Not out loud, but when your fingers touch her face in the darkness you feel the tears on her cheeks.

  When at last I picked up on the lively buzz coming from the other side of the piano, it gradually lifted me from my low spirits. Leland grinned at me as I kicked in to ‘Take Five’. My presence was his gain. I played the little tune of gratitude as easily as I did the ‘Radetzky March’.

  The evening slipped away, and I took two short breaks. Around eleven I finished my final set with ‘As Time Goes By’, something people had been humming along with for ages. ‘A kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh . . .’

  I got up and walked to the bar. The woman put down her glass and nodded at me. From behind the tap, Leland was gesturing to me. What he really wanted to do was yell, like in the rugby club on a Saturday morning after the match. He put a pint down in front of me.

  ‘Good job, Ludwig. Spot on for an evening like this.’

  ‘It was okay, I figured.’

  ‘They were over the moon. What you do is pure cinema, man. With someone like you in the place they t
hink they’re on the Titanic, or in a bar in Casablanca.’

  The beer sang its way through my body. Maybe I’d hang around here for a while, wait for spring to come, at home and away from home, a little cloud of dust that settles.

  I ran into her the next day on the esplanade, the woman from the bar. Her name was Linny Wallace. She said I’d played nicely last night.

  ‘Particularly Gershwin, you put a lot of feeling into that.’

  I told her I liked Gershwin, his lightness, which seemed American to me.

  ‘I’ve never seen you around before,’ she said.

  ‘Just got into town on Wednesday.’

  She worked as an estate agent in Reading. On the beach, in the distance, people were walking their dogs. I told her I had come for a funeral, but had stumbled on this job while I was waiting. That it was, after a fashion, a homecoming, because my mother and I used to live up there on the cliff. We had left this place twelve years ago. Maybe I would stick around for a couple of months, springtime was lovely here.

  ‘And after that, what will you do then?’ she asked.

  ‘After that I don’t know. I’m a grasshopper, I play music while the sun shines.’

  ‘But you cadge firewood from the ant when you get cold,’ said Linny Wallace.

  We followed the walkway south; in the distance you could clearly see the outlines of the reactor at Sizewell – its dome gleamed in the sun.

  ‘I figured you more for someone who belongs on the boulevard at Cannes,’ she said.

  When she laughed, you could see that she was older than me. On Avondale Street we stood and watched an old man and his dog. The animal sat on its backside and used its front legs to pull itself across the pavement, to scratch its itching anus.