by Claire King
Amandine, sheltering under a dove-grey umbrella, smiled like an old friend. She shook off her umbrella and stepped in. I held out my hand to her, but she was already inside, leaning forwards as though to kiss my cheek. She wasn’t keen on formalities. As she leant towards me my hand brushed against her waist and I stepped back quickly. ‘Sorry,’ I said, flustered.
Amandine regarded me coolly, then straightened up and offered her own hand. When I took it she held my eye, tightening her fingers around my own then retracting her hand, the brief pressure leaving an evaporating warmth. ‘You’d think by now we’d at least have that sorted,’ she said with a wry smile.
Deepening my breaths in an attempt to slow my speeding heart, I stepped aside to let her pass. ‘Come through,’ I said. ‘I was about to make peppermint tea if you’d like some? It’s fresh cut.’ The rain had set my mint growing so enthusiastically that I couldn’t use it fast enough.
Amandine slipped off her wet coat and hung it up, making herself at home. Underneath her raincoat she wore a dress the colour of a moth in a soft fabric that moved around her like a breeze. I watched her as she backed carefully down the four wooden steps into the cabin.
‘Peppermint tea,’ she said. ‘Hmm.’
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing, it’s just been years since I drank mint tea. It reminds me of someone.’
While I boiled the water she stood at the breakfast bar that divided the galley from the sitting room. She held the mint, still wet with rain, up to her face and breathed in its scent. ‘You grow your own herbs?’ she said, looking around the small sparse galley. ‘Do you cook?’
‘I don’t cook, but my mother insists everyone should know how to garden,’ I said. I took the mint from her fingers and tore the leaves into our cups. ‘I’m quite good with herbs.’
‘I can’t keep houseplants alive longer than a few weeks,’ Amandine said. ‘I’d be terrible let loose on a garden.’
‘I’ve killed off lots of plants in my time too. But it was my own fault. Every spring I would buy the ones I liked the look of most and put them out on deck any old how, wherever I thought they looked good. I watered them if and when I remembered and still managed to be surprised when I had to buy new ones every year. Eventually my mother took me in hand.’
‘What’s her secret?’
‘She says it starts with choosing the right plants for the garden you have. No matter how much you like the look or the scent of something, if your garden is too exposed or doesn’t catch enough light then no matter how carefully you look after them, they’ll soon perish. The other thing is intimacy. She spends a little time every day just seeing how they are doing. She treats every plant differently. A little effort every day and knowing what your plants need to flourish, she says, is paid back many times over.’ I carried our tea through and placed the two cups on the chest. Amandine took the Louis XV as usual.
‘She sounds wise,’ Amandine said. ‘Does she live nearby?’
I checked myself. The opening pleasantries of Amandine’s visits could go too far if I let them run too long. It was easy to be seduced by the amiable conversation but too many times already she had managed to turn the discussion around to me. She did it so naturally I almost admired her ruse, but it wasn’t helping me to help her. ‘Just a few stops on the train. I visit them on Sundays,’ I said. ‘How about you, where do your parents live?’
‘Oh, they live in Paris,’ she said. ‘I rarely see them. My mother isn’t a gardener though. They’ve lived in a city apartment their entire lives.’ She gave a slight shrug and crossed her legs. ‘Like me, I suppose.’
I looked at her carefully. There was something pointed in her voice, a thread to pull. I waited to see if she would continue. When she didn’t go on I shifted slightly on the couch and reached for my drink. Outside the rain fell and fell. Leaning back against the chair, Amandine now looked as relaxed as if she had simply popped in for tea. I watched as she lifted the cup towards her face, staring into its steaming surface, black and glossy with the oil from the mint. Again conflict flashed in her eyes.
‘What is it the tea reminds you of?’ I said. ‘Tell me.’
‘It reminds me of how I used to be,’ she said. ‘Of a younger version of myself. It’s strange how just the smell of it now can make me feel so much. Nostalgia, but more than that.’
Finally, something. I put my own tea back down. It was still too hot to drink. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Describe it to me.’
‘It was a long time ago. In Morocco.’ She looked over at me, as though appraising my interest. ‘I had just left home, taken myself to Africa to find myself.’ She laughed. ‘I drank mint tea every day there, but much sweeter than this. They served it in scratched glass beakers on low tables. I would sit on the edge of the square watching life happen around me, the sun already hot and the whole day stretching ahead like an adventure. The colours were so much more vibrant there, scarlets and golds everywhere, not to mention all the colours of the stories woven into the carpets in the souks. And along with the smell of mint would be scents of leather and cooking spices. I walked endlessly around those winding streets. I felt intensely alive, alert to everything. Even the dust on my feet felt good, and washing it away at night in cold water felt even better.’
She looked down at her shoes and then used her toes to push them off, heels first. They were not green that day, but the same dusky colour as her dress. She slipped one shoe off and rubbed the bridge of her foot against the calf of the other leg, pressed her toes to the floor and arched her foot upwards, her dress slipping off her knee slightly as it rose. A long scar, pink and white, ran across the surface of her foot, and her toenails were tiny oyster shells visible through pale, sheer fabric. I caught myself and looked back to her face, to find her regarding me with amusement.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘one night an old man stopped me in the souk and asked if he could put kohl on my eyes. When I asked him why, he said, “Because it would suit you.” I let him do it. If that were me now I’d …’ She made a brushing away movement with her hand. ‘I wouldn’t want to be touched by a stranger. I wouldn’t want to be bothered when I was alone. But back then I felt like someone else. Or perhaps I felt like myself after a long time trying to be someone else. And then –’ her gaze drifted out past me towards the drenched towpath – ‘then I met someone who changed my life.’
I held still, afraid to move, as though a wild creature were tentatively approaching me.
‘I can see myself as though I’m an observer,’ Amandine said, ‘as though it were a dream. I am riding a grey horse along a beach, the wind on my shoulders and the pink sky turning to dusk. His horse is darker, he is keeping it perfectly alongside my own even though the horses are starting to race each other along the shoreline.’ Then something snapped in her. She looked at me directly and just for an instant her mouth hardened into a tight line. ‘I thought I was in love then,’ she said. ‘I was naïve, of course. Happy because I didn’t know any better.’
The rain drummed its long fingers. Amandine’s eyes left mine. I watched as she looked around the room once more, her gaze settling on the piano and at the score covered in my corrections in pencil. ‘What were you playing as I arrived?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t recognise it.’
‘Just something new I’m trying,’ I said.
‘You write music?’
‘Sometimes.’ She was changing the subject. It was fine. We could come back to this.
‘I was wondering the other day,’ she said, ‘how you got your piano on board? The windows are tiny and there’s no way it could have come down those steps.’
‘I had Candice cut open,’ I said.
She raised her chin. ‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m not.’
She wasn’t sure. ‘Like a caesarean in reverse?’ she asked.
‘With Oscar as the midwife,’ I said, although the image disturbed me.
‘Oscar?’
‘It’s a long story. He had Candic
e before me.’
‘That piano must be really important to you.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So, Amandine …’
‘Would you play for me now?’
‘If you want a piano recital I suggest a concert ticket would be better value.’
Amandine met my eye, looking amused. ‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘I’d love to hear you play.’ She motioned to the violin case in the corner. ‘Do you play that too?’
‘No.’
‘Is it broken?’
‘No.’
A shadow of uncertainty clouded her face. ‘So who does play it?’
I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck. ‘No one,’ I said. ‘Do you play an instrument, Amandine?’
‘You know, it’s sometimes impossible to get a straight answer out of you, Baptiste.’
‘Because I want to talk about you.’
‘And I like that,’ Amandine said, ‘don’t get me wrong. But it can feel a bit much sometimes.’ Alarm bells rang. In my experience, when people stopped wanting to talk about themselves it was because I had put my finger on the one thing they needed to talk about. ‘And you have to admit it’s curious to own a violin which you do not play. Which no one plays,’ she said.
Torn between pressing her to pick up the thread of her young love with the risk of pushing her too hard too soon, I decided to let her run with her interest in my violin. We all make mistakes. ‘Why?’
Amandine thought for a moment and straightened her shoulders. ‘It’s a question of possession. You don’t strike me as a man who is interested in possessions. So why would you, as a musician, possess something as beautiful as a violin, only to keep it in a corner like an ornament?’ She threw the question down like a gauntlet. ‘What does that say about you?’
It had become darker in the room, the entire sky thickening with cloud. I reached for the switch on the standard lamp, which cast us both in a pool of amber light while the violin crouched in the shadow of the piano. I felt its presence more keenly than usual, as though it too were waiting for my response. It’s about Amandine, I reminded myself. Keep it about her. ‘Is that a metaphor?’ I said.
She raised her eyebrows in amusement. ‘Or a cliché?’ she said. ‘No, Baptiste, it’s just a question.’
The rain on the roof was starting to get on my nerves, making it hard to concentrate. I couldn’t shake off the sense that I was missing something hidden in plain sight. People pay me to listen. They want to be understood. But Amandine was making a game out of it. She constantly deflected that kind of intimacy and yet physically she was completely at ease. I looked over at the two instruments, side by side, chalk and cheese. What did I have to lose? I rose from the sofa and crossed to the piano. ‘Come here,’ I said.
Without hesitation, Amandine did as I asked, moving to my side in front of the piano, reaching out a delicate finger to stroke one of the deep scratches in its side. ‘What’s this?’ As she breathed her chest rose and fell lightly, her dress shifting and sighing.
Beyond the window the raindrops spun ripples on the water, the canal stretching away like a thread. ‘War wound,’ I said. ‘Take the stool.’ I pulled it out for her and she sat askew, her body turned towards me, her legs crossed at the ankles. I unfolded the desk chair and sat down beside her. ‘You’re right, this piano is important to me. I spend a lot of time talking, but words can make it hard to think. They get in the way. On the piano I can express powerful, subtle, complex emotions without saying a word.’ I leaned across her, running my fingers from the low, dark notes to those so high they barely resonated. Chords and arpeggios, majors and minors, muted and sustained. ‘Down here you have anger, sadness, grief and power,’ I told her. ‘And up here’s where I find happiness, joy and delight.’
Amandine was still as my fingers moved across the keys. Watching my hands. Sizing me up. When I stepped back, putting space between us again, there was a glint in her eye. ‘Are your parents tall?’ she said.
‘I want you to try it,’ I said. ‘Express yourself.’
Amandine reached tentatively towards the keys. ‘I don’t play,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t matter at all. Go ahead. Shut your eyes if it helps.’
Her fingers explored the keys, testing out scales, finding discordant groups of notes, reaching for the lower octaves and then up again to high bright notes. Eventually she settled on middle C, and played a scale. Do, Ré, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si. I waited. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘That’s how I feel.’ She played it again: Do, Ré, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si. Seven notes, one of each, an unfinished octave. I fought an extraordinary desire to press down on the final key.
Amandine laid her hands in her lap, a challenge in her eyes. ‘Did I express myself well enough?’
‘You feel unfinished?’
She shrugged, but her cheeks were slightly flushed. ‘Not unfinished,’ she said. ‘Unresolved.’ She looked down at the violin. ‘And you still haven’t answered my question.’
I sighed. ‘It’s a long story.’
‘I like stories.’
There was so little between us at that moment, the smallest of spaces and the thinnest of fabrics, the spark of a shared awareness. I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to take her face in my hands and kiss her. The only way I can explain what happened next is that I was so thrown by that unexpected desire that I would have accepted the first available distraction.
‘I inherited it,’ I said.
‘But never learned to play it?’ Her voice was almost a whisper. She was leaning towards me slightly. She had sensed my discomfort.
‘I never wanted to. I like to understand how things work and I’ll never understand the violin.’
‘Why?’ she said. ‘What’s the difference between that and the piano? Surely music is music?’
‘How many notes on a piano?’ I said.
Amandine scanned the keyboard, counted the keys. ‘Eighty-eight.’
‘And on a violin?’
She thought for a moment and frowned. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, in theory there are infinite notes on a violin,’ I said. ‘That’s my problem.’
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘Show me.’
I lifted the piano lid. I was trapping myself. Why was I doing this? Amandine rose on to her toes to look down inside the box and I felt a pang of déjà vu. ‘Eighty-eight notes, eighty-eight strings,’ I said. ‘A piano is tuned so that each key has its own note. You press the key and inside the box the hammer hits the string, the vibration makes the note. Nothing ambiguous about it at all.’
‘And a violin has only four strings,’ Amandine said. ‘And they’re all there on the outside. Even simpler, surely?’
‘Just because you can see it doesn’t mean you can understand it,’ I said.
Amandine frowned. ‘Show me,’ she said again. A surge of panic rose within me. That violin had not been played for forty years or more. I could feel the woman on the train, my other mother, right there in the room with us, holding her breath, waiting for something. Amandine regarded me carefully. She too seemed suddenly, uncharacteristically, on edge.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing.’
The fasteners on the case were tight and stiff. When they gave with a snap I opened the case and breathed in the musty odour as I reached for the violin. On the periphery of my vision the rain traced glittering paths down the windowpane. ‘Here,’ I told her, ‘take it.’ I felt as though I were handing her a vital organ of mine that had somehow been extracted and kept aside. Amandine’s fingers closed around its neck and her face stilled.
‘It’s light,’ she said. She was holding it like a newborn. A knot lodged in my throat, but I had no one to blame but myself.
I reached for the piano and played a middle C. ‘So here is where you started, at C,’ I said, as the piano gave up the note. ‘We can go up the white keys as you did, or we can include the black semi-tones too, taking us all the way to B, where we have to stop, leavi
ng you unresolved.’ I left my little finger hovering over the last note of the octave, the final C. ‘But on the violin, between that last B and the C that you need, there are other notes, other tones, each taking you a fraction closer towards resolution but never quite getting you there.’
‘How can there be other notes?’
‘How can there not be? As you slide your fingers down the strings, theoretically you can change the tone in infinite fractions as you go.’
‘How can there be infinite possibilities on a finite length of string?’ Amandine said. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Try it and see,’ I said. Try it and see. And of course she did. Taking one last look at me, Amandine pressed the instrument under her chin and brought up the bow. I could barely breathe. Then she slid the bow over the string in one smooth, unhesitating stroke. The instrument let out an ugly wail and I closed my eyes against the miserable sound. When I opened them again I found Amandine looking back up at me, crestfallen. She shook her head and held the violin back out to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘There’s a reason you don’t play this violin and it’s got nothing to do with music, has it?’
I sighed. I may as well have been standing naked in front of her.
‘It’s OK, you don’t have to tell me,’ she said, patting my knee. ‘Game over. I’m sorry.’
I was coming undone. ‘If I hadn’t wanted you to play it I wouldn’t have offered,’ I said.
‘You didn’t offer, I pushed you,’ she said. Her voice had changed, softened. ‘You don’t want to go on, do you?’
I was falling back into an old daydream. In my heart the notes were soaring, a crescendo of strings. My violin safely cupped under the chin of a woman I had imagined into life. The woman on the train. My mother. Her arm guiding the bow, her dark hair framing her face, her feet bare on the floorboards. Not a wail from its strings in my dream, but an ecstasy. And Amandine couldn’t hear it. ‘No,’ I said at last.
