by Polly Samson
‘So would you press the red button then?’ A handsome young dandy who’d been brought along, a friend of a friend. He was wearing a waistcoat that looked like it was made out of gold foil, and eyeing her suggestively as he took a swig from the neck of his beer. He said he wanted to know if she’d push a hypothetical red button that would make all her dreams come true if it meant exterminating an anonymous Chinaman in the process.
‘No one would know you’d done it,’ he said, now quite openly flirting, running his knuckles along her arm. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone.’
‘But all my dreams have already come true,’ said Celia, laughing, pulling her arm away to gesture up at her house standing tall and creamily-stuccoed above the beach like a lone tooth.
A woman in tight jeans scrunched towards them across the stones, talking to Graham. Bright lipstick, shoes too high for the beach but rather than take them off like everyone else she had to keep hanging off Graham to steady herself.
‘This way for cold beer,’ he said, introducing the bucket of ice and Celia in one wave of his arm. ‘Or maybe champagne, thanks to my beautiful wife.’
‘Beautiful wife’ – he always knew when to reassure her. ‘This is Celia,’ he said. ‘And this, Rachel. You may have met before.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Celia. ‘But maybe.’ The flirtatious man with the hypothetical red button offered to open some champagne to wash down the oysters.
‘I’m not sure we’ve met before either, but I did set eyes on your gorgeous daughter yesterday morning,’ said Rachel, claiming her attention. There was lipstick on two of her incisors. ‘What a sweetie! Watching her in her Connaught House uniform! So little with that great big satchel! Bobbing up and down on the end of Graham’s arm.’
‘What?’ said Celia, about to laugh. The man in the foil waistcoat was being comically inept with the champagne bottle. He had it wedged between his knees.
‘Yes, I stopped at the crossing. I hadn’t realised that you had one so young.’
Graham had gone puce.
‘Our daughter goes to school down the road from here, not London,’ said Celia. ‘She goes on the bus.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ he said.
‘Oh yes, you were wearing your long dark green coat, and …’
Celia stared at him. He was like a beetroot beneath the cream panama; a proper Borsalino it was, they’d bought it together in Milan at Easter. She would never find him handsome in a panama again.
‘Don’t you remember? I waved,’ Rachel continued, as though now she’d started she couldn’t stop. She seemed to have become swept up, for she couldn’t have missed the tempest in Celia’s blue eyes. It takes just one thing: a freak in the weather; a bit of a rage; a tsunami snatching people up from the shore like jacks in its giant fist; a thermal maelstrom; the wrong sneeze; the bad geography where tectonic plates rub themselves into a frenzy; or a Rachel at a party who can casually shatter a perfect life with a few words.
‘Hey, Mum.’ Ed came into the kitchen and stood with her at the window. A man in a tracksuit was at the railings swinging several dog leads. The man in the chair had been wheeled away.
‘He’s got really shitty dogs,’ Ed said knowledgeably, yawning, scratching under his T-shirt.
‘What are you doing out of bed this early?’ Celia reached up to feel his forehead, to get a breath of him. Ed at seventeen, his father’s smile: out in the open, just happy, not in brackets. Hair unbrushed, sticking up all over, stripy pyjama bottoms with the T-shirt, making him look like her little boy all over again.
‘Laura and I were planning to bring you and Dad breakfast in bed,’ he said, wagging his finger. ‘But you always get up so early, so it’ll just be Dad.’ He scowled at the door. ‘But Laura’s still not awake.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve told her it’s Father’s Day three times already. I’ll have to go and pour water into her ear.’
Celia took the second pot off the tray and poured herself another cup; so what if she started to shake.
‘What have you done?’ Celia masking her scream while that Rachel woman prattled on. Her own voice a hiss and the horrible silence when Graham didn’t answer. The Rachel in her tight jeans looking from one to the other, still confused, stupid woman, and then looking swiftly away. Little Ed and littler Laura running along the groynes to join the party. Laura’s blonde hair flying behind her, Ed punching the air, leaping, glad to be at the sea on a summer’s evening, stones flying up as they ran, the pair of them as joyous and sleek as porpoises in bright water.
Ed clattered back into the kitchen, followed by Laura in her unflattering pyjamas; still her same darling porpoises but bigger. Impossibly bigger: Ed’s rugby physique; Laura’s milkmaid beauty of the kind that makes you expect to see laced corsets and dimples. Out of the window the sun hit the waves, blades of steel flashing and slicing and the daredevil kitesurfers still going strong. Celia turned from the view, away from the sad tidings and the hum of the pavement sweeper along the promenade. She could feel the twitch start up beneath her eye as Ed and Laura started the noisy business of making smoothies, the buzz saw of the blender and asking her how many minutes to set the timer so they’d be soft: eggs for their father, though Celia wished they wouldn’t, reaching to the shelf for a pill, always bird-like between her two children, sharper than she thought she should be. But what big frames teenagers all had these days. Probably the good nutrition. Even the girls: it wasn’t unusual for them to have size eleven feet. Something of the dairy about the lot of them, especially the noise a whole herd could make clonking around the place like heifers.
The letter box rattled. ‘The newspaper.’ Ed scraped back his stool.
‘No, let me,’ Celia pushed past him, ‘I’ll get it.’ What if there were to be another egg? And another? A dozen? She rested a hand on the door jamb to steady herself.
On the beach, the children told to stay inside, all the guests gone. Ed and Laura’s little faces peaky at the high window like workhouse orphans. In the morning nothing left of the party but ragged remnants of the white sheets obscenely strewn like old shrouds on to the shingle, still attached to the snapped windbreak poles. Nothing left of the flowers or the cake or the dressed crabs that she’d smashed into the seething foam. Everything gone, most of it snatched by a sea that grew hungrier and wilder until it roared hard enough to drown out his voice. Everything gone except the rented tables and chairs but by morning they had gone too, stolen by two men with a trailer.
They’d seen the men drive off. Silently sitting side by side on the balcony, watching the tide melt away, the empty beach, a slight pinkening at the edge of the sky.
‘I will stay with you if you promise to never see that child again.’ Celia watching the wind pull at a scrap of fabric, bits of white sheet flapping up and down like the wing of a dying bird.
‘If you do see it, I will divorce you. I mean it.’ Both apple and snake in one hiss.
The surprising thing to Celia was that she did mean it and she meant it again and again as her rage was brought back to her by tides that came bearing cruel souvenirs from that night. Once Celia found a birthday candle still attached to its cup washed up on the stones. The plastic holder had been worn white but the candle was still partly golden.
It was only the newspaper and not another egg waiting for her by the front door. She inhaled deeply but the long sigh that was to follow stalled in her throat. She heard the rattle of the tray, Ed’s voice. Ed and Laura started up the stairs ahead of her. ‘Coming, Mum?’
‘In a minute.’
She went back to the kitchen and looked out at the beach. A girl was standing alone holding the rails, looking out to sea, her long fair hair blown in ribbons about her head. Celia thought again of the flirtatious young man in his fabulous foil waistcoat, his fingers on her arm: ‘Go on, push it. You know you want to.’
She looked back to the girl, hair whipping out, jeans and grey sweatshirt, no coat. About the right age. She imagined the girl turning around. A face she might kn
ow in an instant if she opened the door. Would she open the door?
‘Would you press the red button?’ His hand on her arm. He’d had the most bewitching smile, very bright teeth. Would she? She swallowed hard, waiting for a while, almost willing the girl to be the one and then, picking up the newspaper, wondered if she wouldn’t welcome the intrusion.
BARCAROLLE
Richard lowered the lid of his piano as gently as a man closing a coffin and lingered for a moment, his fingers resting on the polished wood and a slight stoop to his back that was almost a bow. Lunch took him a couple of minutes: two slices of watery ham laid to rest between two of bread and butter and a tall glass of water from the tap, before shrugging himself into the dark blue waterproof that he refused to think of as an anorak. He pulled its collar to the wind and loped down his front steps sideways, keeping his back to the weather.
The black Mini, neatly parked at the kerb, made an unlikely partner for such a long-striding man. Behind the wheel he was cramped like something about to hatch. He had to force himself to scrabble his fingers into the disgusting ashtray for parking change. He’d almost kicked the smoking again. It helped that he’d never mastered the art of playing the piano and smoking at the same time. Cigarettes and driving, though, that was different: he could satisfy his nicotine cravings with ease so his car smelled, as usual, like a sticky Sunday morning hangover. It was all part of the punishment, that bad atmosphere, like keeping the change in the ashtray. He never really had passengers so there was no one else to care.
Nothing but coppers and old fag ash in there. He cursed as he got out of the car and the gulls swore back at him. The wind brought salt to his lips and he wound a thick scarf around his neck. It was a good warm scarf, a recent present to himself, with wide stripes of yellow and black, almost like the one he’d worn all through college. He should walk. Really, it would do him good. He checked the car door by rattling its handle a couple of times and ambled downhill along the cracked kerb, reciting quietly to himself the names of the people he had promised to visit that afternoon: ‘Hammonds at Marine Parade, then Anna Something-or-other, 29 Evrika Street, and then,’ he managed a smile at the last, ‘five o’clock, the Idlewilds.’
A vision of the Idlewild family, all four glossy heads bent like new conkers around their golden and glowing grand piano came floating into his head. It was a Bösendorfer concert piano of such perfection that the mere thought of it stopped him feeling quite so grumpy at having to leave the flat and his own dear piano and, in particular, the Chopin Barcarolle that had held him within its bittersweet embrace for the last week and four days and four nights.
Chopin’s late-flowering masterpiece. His step lightened as he embellished the already sublime image of the Idlewilds and their heavenly piano with a vision of himself, at its keys, sleeves of his black polo neck thrust to his elbows, head thrown back, not only confident but magnificent, playing for them and them alone Chopin’s one and only Barcarolle.
He crossed Crescent Place, letting his eyes stretch beyond the estate agents and the carpet shop and down the street to the esplanade with its bright green railings and the churning dirtier green of the sea beyond. He was well prepared, as it happened. His performance of the lovely piece was almost as perfect as it would ever be: practically concert standard.
He kept heading seawards, Chopin keeping time with his step and the architecture becoming grander: creamy plasterwork more ornate, curlicues and pillars, houses like wedding cakes looming six storeys, some more.
Tuning pianos took him more often than not to this more decorative part of town. Fancy iron balconies and lofty views out to sea. It was almost high tide. He saw the rescue boat being launched, bellying into the waves in pursuit of some fool or other.
It was the extra humidity that did for pianos, and one as grand as the Idlewilds’ Bösendorfer must never be allowed to fall out of tune. Richard made it his duty to attend to it often. The thought of it shimmering, toned and tuned to perfection, upped the tempo of his step still more and he swung the leather case of tuning tools as he carried on along the promenade, now no more or less happy than anyone else he passed.
The Barcarolle that had been occupying him was playing out in the peaks and troughs and in the trilling ripples of the waves: Chopin’s ornamental genius in full bloom; grace notes aplenty. Though this Barcarolle had been the despair of many an artist, Richard hadn’t expected to find it quite so frustrating to master himself. Twenty-odd years ago it had seemed effortless for some exam or other.
He reached 7 Marine Parade where Mrs Hammond, or Morganna, as she had insisted early on in his tender relationship with her family’s piano he was to call her, was waiting for him at the shiny black door, a slinky Burmese cat snaking around her bare legs. Morganna: eyes ringed dramatically with kohl, like a slightly raddled Cleopatra. Always a bit too much of an eyeful. ‘Grotrian Steinweg,’ he reminded himself as she shut the door, bracelets jingling. ‘Glossy black lacquered case, in need of toning.’
‘Oh, you look freezing, are you sure you won’t have a cup of tea?’ Morganna asked, hugging herself and shivering slightly, breasts pointy through her sweater, as though she were the one who’d just come in from the cold.
Morganna’s piano was imprisoned in a shockingly purple room that she referred to, with a self-deprecating snort, as ‘the library’. It had many more random objects lying about than actual books: an elaborate and dusty music stand, an equally dusty cello, a rather panicked-looking rocking horse. Opposite the piano a collection of marionettes were hanging from the gallows of a hat stand, a captive audience in various states of strangulation; and a parrot, a large green one with ketchup-coloured markings, who screamed mutinous threats at such pitch whenever Richard came to tune the piano that he had finally spoken up and asked Morganna to remove it. It threw sunflower seeds at him as he passed.
‘I’ve got psittacosis, I’ve got psittacosis,’ squawked Morganna in a horribly accurate approximation of the parrot and it clung furiously to the bars as she picked up its cage. It turned its head at an acutely ugly angle, appraising him from beneath its red eyelids, not liking what it saw, then started to hiss, not quite imperceptibly, which Richard found almost worse than its shrieking.
‘He never speaks at all when you’re here,’ Morganna said, pouting a little, and she swung from the room to make the cup of tea that he didn’t really want with the cat at her heels, the brass cage hanging from her arm and the parrot’s pitch and volume so piercing that it made his ears hurt.
Before he could get to work, however, he still had many twisty candelabra and silver-framed family photographs to deal with. He started evicting them from the top of the piano, piling Morganna and Co. face down on to an armchair with all the tenderness of a man stacking bricks. If this piano were his he’d rather die than cover it in such detritus. Whatever would he put there anyway? Not pictures of his family – he shuddered slightly at the thought – and certainly not the school portraits they displayed with the bone-china shepherdesses on a table at home, so prominently that anyone would think they were still proud of him. Those un-modest moments caught against the sky-blue backdrop, the smart parting (he could still feel the tooth of the headmistress’s comb along a line of his scalp), the blinding flash of the photographer’s bulb and him always pulling the same expression: lips turned down in an effort not to brag but eyes telling a different story as he cradled the silver cup. Same photo year after year until they decided to let some whiney girl and her violin win.
He glared at a picture of Morganna, smiling up at him, her head wreathed in jasmine. What a prize she’d been. ‘What do you think it is, a sideboard?’ he muttered to the freshly-sprigged bride. There was no point getting so annoyed. Morganna’s teeth looked like a toothpaste commercial; her hair sleek as liquorice on her wedding day.
As if the full weight of the family’s most photogenic moments were not enough, the piano was covered by a piece of tapestry with annoying tassels that swung like sheep’s daggl
es as he pulled it away to throw over the pictures. Only then could he lift the lid and fit the prop stick into place.
The golden strings shone inside like a harp and he hoped that there’d be a little stolen time after the tuning to let it sing with his Barcarolle. He laid out his tool roll, the bits and pieces side by side; like a child again, sharpening pencils before an exam, hammers and wrenches all within reach – and then, just as Morganna and her amorous cat appeared with his tea, he noticed the damage: a nasty gash right on the shiny black front of the piano. His heart missed a beat. It was a wishbone-sized injury, where the cheek met the lid, and deep enough to be down to the palest wood at the centre.
‘Ahh.’ Morganna reappeared, saw him with his finger fixed to the wound, as though attempting to stem its bleeding. A small splutter, she clearly hadn’t meant to laugh; he looked round and saw her bite her lip.
‘Lola, last night. Total temper tantrum, I’m afraid. Threw a candlestick … don’t think she meant to hit the piano, at least I hope she didn’t …’ Her voice faltered when he didn’t speak.
The wood felt rough and splintery. This Grotrian, he now remembered, had a particularly lustrous top end.
‘… All I’d asked her to do was ten minutes’ practice on her lovely Nocturne …’ Ten minutes, he thought, what’s the point of that?
He tapped his tuning fork on his knee and clenched it between his teeth, making his head buzz; he pressed middle A on the piano; listened for the synchronisation of the beats; dismissed her. Well flat.
