Perfect Lives

by Polly Samson

  ‘I always tell them how much they’ll regret giving up. I know I did,’ said Morganna to the cat. ‘Ten minutes’ practice a day, that’s all I’ve ever asked of them.’

  Luckily Morganna didn’t seem to need a response because the lawful wedded cat was purring so loudly that he knew he’d have to wait for them to leave before he could start the tuning proper.

  Again he tapped the tuning fork – ten minutes’ practice a day – and held it vibrating in his teeth. His own father threatened to dock his pocket money if he didn’t stop practising – ‘Out you go, make some friends. For Christ’s sake go tickle something other than the ivories’ – always insisting that he took the dog, a foul-breathed cocker spaniel called Jasper, for walks. The thing he really couldn’t stand about Jasper was that when Jasper shook his head his stinky drool flew everywhere.

  His father, always hinting at a world beyond the piano. That time after his performance at the Wigmore Hall: ‘Don’t you think it’s time you went out and got yourself laid?’ So vulgar; as though getting laid would have done a thing to prevent the shaking of his hands; as though getting laid would have helped him become reattached to the pair of pale flounders which had just slithered their way over the keys of the Wigmore Hall’s Steinway, leaving him flummoxed and drowning. Fish-fingered. Useless hands floundered.

  He pleated a strip of green felt between the central section of strings and tried not to dwell. His father’s face so hideous whenever he talked about sex: ‘Don’t you think it’s time you got yourself laid?’ Lips too wet. Another occasion so inappropriately remarking on the breasts of Aurelia Lieberman, and licking his lips in a way that brought Jasper the dog to mind. After that he’d felt slightly sick every time he sat a masterclass with Aurelia Lieberman in the tight pearl-grey jumper that she wore.

  It took Richard just over an hour to reach the pragmatic compromise that equal temperament tuning demanded. Even if the gods were not happy, Morganna and her family should be, and he let loose with a flourish of chromatics. Perfectly spaced semitones rang out across the shambled room: crystalline, clean as peppermint. The piano was wasted on this family. He’d make time to loosen things up with the Chopin, if Morganna would only leave him alone, and then it’d be just the unknown piano in Evrika Street to get out of the way before he could throw himself before the majesty of that Bösendorfer. He straightened up for a moment to relieve the ringing in his ears and was irritated to hear a squawk from the parrot.

  It had been the tightly-sweatered Ms Lieberman who had recommended him for the Haydn recital at the Wigmore Hall but she hadn’t turned up to meet him on the day, like she said she would. Hours before concert time, his palms sweating; wiping them on the pocket lining of the tails that his father had just shelled out for.

  Then, too close to the start, his father in his dressing room: ‘So, where’s Aurelia, then?’ As though she was somehow part of the deal, and his mother standing behind looking too bright-eyed in a new turquoise dress that didn’t suit her, and for the second time his father’s sleazy baritone: ‘Is Aurelia coming, or not?’ Don’t lick your lips like that. Dirty dog. Please don’t lick your lips. He wasn’t sure he hadn’t said it aloud: Don’t lick your lips like that, Dogface. His pockets were wringing wet. He was shaking his head like a madman, trying to expel the image of his father’s slobbery maw when he took to the stage, tails of the new jacket flying.

  He must have spent longer at the Grotrian than he’d intended. The light was already burnishing the waves when he left Morganna’s. He checked his watch: this next piano could take an age and he didn’t want to be late for the Idlewilds. The woman, Anna, hadn’t seemed too certain about anything much when she called, except to say that it was an upright. Sometimes he wished he’d never taken out the advert that gave every Tom, Dick and Anna his phone number. Her house at 29 Evrika Street was a walk into wind away from Marine Parade but at least it took him east, which was the right direction for that Bösendorfer.

  He had been tuning the Idlewilds’ piano for over a decade. It was about as perfect as such an old and well attended to friend could be: twenty tons of exquisite tension, he quickened his step at the thought of it, held like a drawn bow inside gleaming rosewood. From the first moment he had touched a note, that heavenly piano had resonated in a very tender part of his heart. Angels sang there. 1920s Vienna had indeed been a golden age for pianos. The first time he’d laid his fingers on its keys its gracious harmonics rang out, a full dozen tones, suspended in the air at his will.

  But first Evrika Street. He turned into Anna’s road with the wind gusting at his back.

  She ushered him out of the cold afternoon, chattering: ‘It was my brother Leo who was the musical one. When he gave up the piano my parents let it go to my cousins’, and into the steam of her kitchen, in time to whip a huge rattling saucepan off the cooker. This Anna’s kitchen was ablaze with colour but it was her hands that he noticed first, hands that moved with a quick grace among the reds and yellows and oranges and bright blues. She looked slightly windswept, breathless, hair falling around her face, pushing it back with long fingers, ink-stained at their tips so he found himself staring, explaining that she’d only recently got the piano so it wasn’t because she was stupid that she hadn’t been able to answer all of his technical questions about it on the telephone. Smiling ruefully as she said: ‘I wouldn’t know what a fixed soundboard was if you hit me over the head with it,’ and reaching for some large wooden tongs to fish about in the steaming aluminium pan, she swirled fabric around in bubbling purple dye that looked like a sorcerer’s brew, still talking.

  ‘But it has crossed an ocean, so I thought I should find the best tuner I could and your name came up. Sorry about this,’ she said, gesturing at the pan and pouring a fountain of salt from a paper bag into the potion. ‘I’ll be able to leave it to do its thing in a minute,’ she continued; glancing up at him through the steam. He watched her long arms, pointed elbows showing beneath her baggy sleeves. Tall, but slight, she was what he supposed people meant by gamine. He liked her fleeting smile, the uncertainty of it, the way that it still managed to light her whole face. He didn’t mind standing there looking at her at all.

  ‘I do textiles,’ she said, fixing a lid to the saucepan and sweeping an arm to introduce the swathes and bolts of bright fabrics that until then he’d only peripherally taken in. ‘I’m constantly dyeing.’ Colours swagged and stretched and hung like flags over the backs of the chairs, looping across the cupboards in dazzling blues and oranges like the sails of some fabulous boat.

  ‘I like to wash my hands before a tuning,’ he said, turning them palms up. A little of the dye had splashed above her top lip, leaving two small purple freckles that he longed to wipe away with the tip of his finger. She opened a door off the hall and he saw it was regatta time in there, too. Strips and streamers in storm-blues and mauves hung in clumps like particularly beautiful seaweed from a Sheila Maid hitched over the bath. As their shoulders touched at the narrow door the bulb blew with such a sudden ping that they both jumped.

  She was up on the chair changing the bulb. She was balancing with one leg bent, the other foot resting along her shin. She put him in mind of an Anglepoise lamp. Or a flamingo. Her jumper was pink. It lifted as she raised her arm to remove the shade. He saw the disconcerting curve of her waist and the small muscles moving along the bottom of her spine as she pressed her long bare foot back to the seat of the chair to balance.

  ‘I really resented not being the musical one learning the piano,’ she said, screwing in the new bulb. Her skin was smooth, polished walnut. There was something about the unexpected sight of her backbone that reminded him of dampers along strings and he was relieved when the bulb was in place and she lowered her arm so the jumper settled back at the waistband of her jeans. She jumped down and switched on the light. A noisy fan that compensated for the lack of window started to whirr. He cleared his throat.

  ‘It wasn’t so easy being the musical one, actually,’ he sai
d, pausing with the soap in his hands. ‘The day some music teacher told my parents that I had perfect pitch it was like they’d won the pools,’ and his words, in her small bathroom, hit his own ears, whether through the distortion of the fan or the strangeness of having such a conversation, like he was listening to someone else on the radio.

  ‘I couldn’t understand what was going on when I got home from school. Big pat on the back, as though I’d scored a goal. Champagne, even. What on earth did they think was going to happen next?’

  He started flicking water from his fingers into the basin and Anna handed him a towel. ‘Later on I had to look up the word “prodigy” in the dictionary and it frightened the life out of me,’ he said, drying his hands.

  Anna leaned against the towel rail, again that smile. ‘Prodigy,’ she said, brushing her fringe from her eyes, ‘how wonderful’, and blood rushed to his cheeks.

  ‘The thing is there’s always someone more gifted,’ he said in a fluster, the fan still whirring. ‘It doesn’t matter how hard you work, there’s always someone who can do it better with less effort. There was this guy, Leszek, at college with me. Ahh …’ His voice really did seem to have taken on a life of its own. It went stumbling on.

  ‘… I would sweat over a piece for weeks and then this Leszek would saunter over to the practice room and wouldn’t be able to help himself but sit down and play my piece quite effortlessly, whatever it happened to be.’ Leszek Smolsky had also owned a strangely boxy and black Russian camera, another thing. ‘He could do whatever he turned his mind to.’ His grainy low-lit photographs were moody like stills from French films.

  ‘What a show-off,’ said Anna. Her eyes were greyish and her gaze direct when she used her forearm to hold the hair back from her face. The purple freckles were delicate; they looked like beauty spots.

  ‘The thing is, he came from Poland and no one could even hate him for being so bloody good because he’d been taken away from his family at the age of five and plonked in an academy where he played for a minimum of eight hours every day, birthdays included, for the next twenty years before finding his way to the Guild.’ Leszek’s relentless charisma: his black and white portraits of some of the college’s female students made it appear that their fortunes lay not in their musicality but in their physiques. ‘Everyone felt sorry for him,’ Richard said, though that wasn’t strictly true. ‘Apart from me, that is: I’d have loved his life.’ Anna laughed and he found himself flexing his fingers over an imaginary keyboard and taking a modest bow.

  ‘Born in the wrong country, wrong regime, Comrade,’ she said, smiling at him again. ‘Poor you, though it could’ve been worse, you could have been born in the wrong family, like me. I screamed when the piano was taken away but no one took a blind bit of notice because I wasn’t the “musical one”.’ She looked down at her interlaced inky fingers then stretched them, still linked, over her head. She pulled a comic face, lips in a downward clown, that didn’t really convince.

  ‘You were the “artistic one”, then, were you?’ He gestured to the great loops and ribbons twirling from the ceiling.

  ‘No, that was my sister Tilda.’ She laughed again. ‘And my other brother was the “clever one”. I was the “kind one”.’ Her voice was kind, come to think of it, and it had a lovely sad lilt to it. He wondered where she was from. ‘Sounds like a consolation prize, doesn’t it?’ Behind her the colourful streamers danced to the beat of the fan.

  ‘Shall I show you the piano?’ she said, softly breaking the spell.

  He could tell with one glance that Anna’s piano was a lost cause. It stood against the wall of a small sitting room like an old bore. There were velvet armchairs and a fat sofa but Richard’s eyes were immediately drawn to the floor, where a last stripe of light from the window was falling on to a glorious and intricate rug that seemed to ripple against the boards. It was blazing, iridescent: all the colours of sunset and sea.

  ‘That’s a beauty,’ he said, at the same time as she opened the lid of her piano. Seeing her face light up he realised that she might think he was talking about the piano, which was anything but a beauty.

  ‘The rug is beautiful,’ he said, and felt mean watching the sunshine slip from her face.

  It was going to be very awkward. The piano, a dark mahogany beast with plenty of brass fittings, looked like it might once have graced the saloon of the Old Bull and Bush. Its music stand was intricately carved in imitation of a more ecclesiastical era. Dear God, he thought as he looked with dismay first at the piano and then a much scribbled-on piece of sheet music for Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer, in an arrangement that any simpleton should be able to play.

  There were many underlinings and bossy pencilled marks: ‘Don’t forget to lift’ and ‘Staccato!’ He could almost picture this Anna’s grave face, hair scrunched back and serious grey eyes as she tried to make the jumps, how often she’d have to go back to the beginning to start again; she’d probably curse a bit, get sore shoulders, tendon pains that would shoot from her knuckles to her wrists. She hadn’t played as a child. She could bash away for hours but the neural pathways would never really clear. She could ‘lift’ and ‘staccato’ to her heart’s content but it would never sound right, not even to her untrained ears, he had no doubt about that.

  Anna covered the keys with her fingers. She didn’t play anything out loud but for a moment it looked as though she could hear the notes in her head. He noticed her earlobe as her hair dropped forward, the neatness of it, and touchingly unpierced.

  ‘I had bad dreams after the removers came,’ she said, standing from the piano stool, her fingers still spread out over the keys. ‘I had to watch it being taken away because there wasn’t school that day. I think my mother got rid of it because she wanted the room for a telly.’

  He flipped open the top and forced himself to look into the miserable guts of her piano. He stared at the bar that showed it was over-damped, at the great lump of iron, at the rust and the cobwebs that shouldn’t have been there, and then through the broken back panel he saw a dirty great crack in the soundboard.

  ‘All the piano factories that made this sort of English piano went out of business when people got television.’ He was stalling, wondering what sort of cruel person would sell her this horrible piano. ‘That’s why they stopped making them.’ She seemed to be waiting for him to say something nice about it, but he knew that however much care he took it was always going to be unstable: this piano was always going to sound crap. It was inside a piano like this one that he once found a dead mouse.

  It was straight into wind as he strode away from Evrika Street. His hair whipped his face, making his eyes sting. He was running a passage of the Chopin through his head as the starlings came into view, gathering in dark clouds around the pier. They swooped in formation, plumes and swathes, fluttering like black silk, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make them fit the Barcarolle.

  Anna had told him about her recurring dream, she didn’t seem to want to hear what he had to say about her piano: she was diving in slow motion through the ocean with the piano slowly spinning away from her; she was trying to reach it. ‘My hands shake and my legs are so hopeless and weak that I can’t kick myself deeper as the piano sinks into the murk.’ She said it was a nightmare, night after night: ‘Stuck unable to scream as the falling piano gets smaller and smaller until I can’t see it at all.’

  She was twisting the neck of her jumper as she spoke: ‘It always gives me a really horrible feeling when I wake up’, and when she released it, the ribbing was so stretched that it flopped down over her shoulder, revealing a collarbone as shapely as a bow.

  He shook his head free of the thought of it. He ought to hurry to the Idlewilds. He pulled his scarf up, covering most of his face as he strode on.

  The Idlewilds’ Bösendorfer had, apparently, once belonged to a high-ranking SS officer but that off-putting provenance had been hushed up when the piano appeared in England. What on earth had made him think
of that? It was Celia Idlewild herself who had once told him but he hadn’t given it a thought since. Now, as he drew nearer, he couldn’t stop himself from wondering, gloomily, about the SS officer and the Bösendorfer. Goebbels? Mengele? Whose fingerprints stained the ivory keys? His mind grew savage with possibilities: it was from Himmler’s secret hideaway outside Salzburg; the Führer himself had taken solace in its silken voice, had worked himself into a frenzy as the Meistersinger Prelude reached its climax like the sound of a hundred crashing trombones heralding the Holocaust.

  The waves had got wilder, crashing and folding and throwing stones on to the beach in sequences more fitting to those mighty Wagnerian crescendos than the gentle ripples of his journey to Anna of Evrika Street, when it had seemed as though the sea was playing along with the lilting possibilities of his afternoon.

  It was a relief to be inside the Idlewilds’ house. All was warmth and calm and fancy cornicing after the punishing wind and waves. He could hear the Bösendorfer already, not badly out of tune as it happened, its shimmering tones and the adagio from Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata getting closer as he followed the neatly packaged figure of Celia Idlewild up the stairs.

  Laura Idlewild was seated at the keys. ‘Grade seven, next week,’ Celia whispered, stopping at the door. Laura hadn’t noticed them. She played on.

  There it was, the piano of his dreams; wide open and welcoming, its lid curved like a giant wing, the shine of its warm-treacle wood reflecting the chandeliers and inviting him closer.

  Laura was at that age where she looked different every time he saw her. She had grown much plumper, not unpleasantly so, and appeared to be wearing a ball gown of blue tulle that had been hacked off mid-thigh. She wasn’t playing too incompetently either. He turned away to the big bay windows that faced straight out to sea and as he looked out at the waves smashing on to the shore, the heavy door that led to the balcony started to bang.