G = chapter six

The Piano Teacher
by Kim West

chapter six

The story of Edward's sudden retirement from the public arena was never
told. Denise never asked and he never alluded to this dark episode. Yet
still in his dreams he would revisit those times, perpetually yearning
for a release. Amongst his possessions had been a stack of unsent
letters in his own spidery hand, destroyed by the malevolent
housekeeper, Eartha Dublaine. Amongst them had been this account of
that terrible night when her child died:

" My dear Denise,

You came into my life and surprised me. There is something that I want
you to know, yet I cannot seem to tell you. I feel that you miss
something in this unquestioning warmth towards me. Your company is
indeed a treasure to me. Yet I am underneath it all, a cold man and
there is a tragedy which lies at the heart of this. You see, I have to
tell you that I have killed. I killed a child. It was accident but her
memory will surely hunt me to the end of time.

That is why I left my performing career. After the accident, I was
numb. A Grand Tour had started and we should be heading for Frankfurt,
Lucerne, Geneva and New York. But it would not do. That night
everything ground to a terrible halt. When I left that stage for the
last time, it was with an enduring sense of coldness and
finality.

We had been rehearsing the Beethoven. I was pleased to be on my way
back to the flat. I was tired yet I felt elevated. I had a tape of the
last movement playing. I hummed to myself and thought of my supper.
Then, out of the blue, the child was under my wheels and the haunting
began.

Now, when I am sitting in my garden, a vivid flashback can be triggered
by someone calling a child in the distance. It may come in slow motion.
The flashback camera swings in from a high angle to catch me as I turn
to snatch up my other glove from the passenger seat. Thud! The child is
down and under my wheels. As if to clarify, the scene replays from
another angle to catch the child running through the rain with her hood
up. She has not heard the car. She appears to be in a great hurry as
she dashes straight out into the road. My old Rover turns into the
street and the child is crumpled.

You know Denise, I can then remember strangely taking the time to
rehearse with myself versions that I might be able to cope with. It was
a dog. It was a cat or an urban fox. It was a dustbin or a bollard. It
wasn't a person. It just couldn't be that.

I had no sight of her until I could tear my way out of my car door.
Then there was the wretched vision of her twitching and whimpering.
Suddenly I was running through those most sombre of wet streets. One
minute I was desperately clawing at the door of the telephone box and
then dialling that tombstone number "999". With a blink I was back at
her side. No death scene. She did not open her eyes. She called for no
one. She convulsed and choked and I stroked her forehead, as if she
were a cat. I heard myself repeating over and over, louder and louder,
eventually building to a pitiful wail:

"I wish this hadn't happened."

When the ambulance arrived, they pulled me away from her and wrapped me
in a blanket to nurse my own twitching, whimpering, broken world.

The lights and sirens of the emergency services hit upon the scene of
my tragedy like an alien invasion. From Hopper-like dankness, the
street was harshly transformed by into a miasma of light, sound,
movement and shouting, as they tried to revive the waif-like form of
the crushed child. I felt a such a chill lodge itself in my heart, as
the ambulance drove away bearing that poor child to intensive yet
hopeless care.

Images from that night are always there at the back of things, Denise.
Tucked away behind the facade, ready to haunt me and to limit any
future sense of pleasure, flashbacks always catch me unawares. They
take away my breath, as when I may be cleaning my windows and the
squeak of a cloth can trigger recurring footage of the ambulance
pulling away in a vortex. Cinematically, the flashback pans in on my
ashen face as I stumble towards a police car under escort, to be
breathalized and later make my sad statement at the police
station.

Through these visions, I have been constantly reminded, so that in my
solitude the only thing that helped has been to hold onto the coldness.
I taught myself to be thus constrained.

In my performances, I had, of course become accustomed to baring my
heart to all. So that had to stop now I had met this darker part of
myself. A week later I found that I couldn't tolerate a staring,
anticipative audience, hushed and waiting.

" Yes it is the man who crushed a child under his car," they seemed to
whisper in consensus. I looked out at that sea of accusers.

"Yes that's me and I'm going to play some Mozart" my defiant
response.

I strode to my stool. I boldly lifted the lid. I paused. Then I gently
closed it again, to a gasp from the stalls. I looked out at them, bowed
my head and muttered to myself.

"No, I'm damned well not, actually."

I, Edward Stenton, stepped back, turned around and walked off, barely
registering my furiously puffing agent and out of the stage door. I
went home on a bus, packed a case, caught a train to the sea and spent
the next six months walking from sunrise to sunset along the coastline.
Six months without touching a piano. My agent was bereft. When I
returned to London it was to sell up and swiftly I moved here to my
village refuge.
Dearest Denise, you may never read this, yet I do hope one day that I
shall have the courage to give it to you.

Yours affectionately,

Edward Stenton."

Eartha Dublaine tossed this letter and many others of a more intimate
nature into the grate and relished the hiss and crackle of their ascent
up the chimney in smoke and dust.

"He plays to me from his old concert repertoire. I am mesmerised and I
am transported, as he plays for me a favourite Faure or a Bach English
Suite or one of the "Songs without Words" or the Chopin. It is all for
my delight and for my learning, and I am learning. I am hushed to utter
stillness, as I stand slightly to one side, in order to turn his pages,
or, if he plays without the music, I can follow the score by myself. I
will sit in the window seat and follow the notes, turning the pages of
this precious music entrusted to my hands with the utmost care.
I think of his hours and hours of relentless practice and of the
ruthless self-denial required to perform to this degree. I reflect that
it is now many years ago that he was upon the stage, but his fingers
still twinkle with the memory, as they cascade through the arpeggios of
the "Waldstein". He has played me many of the sonatas and revealed to
me Beethoven, the gruff piano destroyer, his extremes of passionate
romance, or in an earlier sonata his mastery, delicacy and classical
restraint."