E = Chapter four

The Piano Teacher

Chapter four

Each time that she returned to his house after his death, she hoped in
some vague way that the experience would settle her feelings. So
through this visit to his niece today, Denise had desperately hoped she
would be helped to make a start on laying his memory to rest.
The front door stood ajar and she could see that Edward's house was
feeling ashamed of itself, with coatings of dust and disarray. The
puppy children rushed out and grabbed her hands.

They led her inside, prancing noisily around her, and then vanishing
upstairs. Denise gulped to see Edward's piano lid shut and piles of car
magazines on top of it. She was finding this extremely difficult. His
music books and scores lingered in boxes. His metronome lay on its side
in a corner. He was gone but she knew that his spirit would linger in
his sadness at such an invasion. Actually, she wouldn't have been
surprised to see him materialise from the corner and pick up that
precious rosewood metronome. It seemed to her that this niece was not
making a good job of it. The house was a mess. Denise found her in the
kitchen, smoking and sorting through old paper work. The niece smiled
as she wandered in and said, somewhat to her surprise,

"You're Denise, aren't you? I'm glad you have come. Maybe you can help
me with a couple of things."

Denise pulled up a chair, feeling awkward and distant.

"I've got to get all this stuff cleared up for when Harry arrives next
week. He'll be stripping it all down for the builders. We're knocking
the downstairs into one room and we'll be extending the kitchen."

The niece chattered on about the plans that she and her husband had to
make it a "real family home", as she rustled up the obligatory cup of
tea. Denise noticed a large pile of sheet music teetering on the
fridge.

"The Debussy must be in there," she mused, as the back door crashed
open suddenly and the two children tore through the kitchen
squealing.

"The garden's great fun for them, you know. Harry says he can make them
a tree house in that big old willow."

This was a blow. Denise shuddered. She had imagined the family taking
on Edward's house and maintaining its character in some from of tribute
to their kindly old benefactor. She hadn't envisioned major surgery to
the fabric of the place. Again, she could feel her old companion's
presence and half expected to hear the piano lid lift and the familiar
Czerny Studies commence in the next room. Edward had taught her the
value of such studies.
All that afternoon, Denise was pressed to help the niece, Steph, to
sort papers. Quite why this woman thought that she might know all the
ins and outs of Edward's financial arrangements, Denise could not
fathom. Steph seemed a careless and over-friendly type. Edward had
received cards and letters from this niece, telling him of their lives
and he displayed all of these cards on his mantelpiece proudly, but
there was never actually mention of a visit. In fact, Denise presumed
that she was just about his only visitor ever and now that she had met
the niece, she wondered if Edward had ever actually met her. Would he
really have been so pleased to hand over his house to this family? She
felt herself to be starchy and interfering with these thoughts and
ticked herself off for being so, but the notion that Edward would not
want a tree house in his willow, lurked. In his legacy to them he would
be obliterated, as walls fell and music was dispelled. She caught the
scent of his pipe for a moment and half expected to turn and greet him.
Steph was fumbling through old photographs, muttering:

"These are great! I can get these framed. God knows who they are, but
it's like owning one's history isn't it?"

Denise nodded, acquiescent, but she would have grabbed these photos if
she had been left alone for one minute. She had not been party to this
private part of Edward's life. This was not what their relationship had
been about. Unravelling the contents of these old photographs seemed to
her to be family business. Yet she could not escape the notion that it
was the niece who seemed to be an interloper in Edward's house.

Denise, ever the listener, sat through the trials and tribulations of
selling up and moving down to Devon, while Harry completed his contract
in Essex. She sat, pre-occupied, through the birth of children and
childhood illnesses, always with half an eye out for the pile of music
on the fridge and half a thought for the fate of that metronome on the
floor.

"Oh look! Here's one of mother with Uncle Edward." Steph handed a tiny
square of black and white with the image of two children hand in hand
on the beach printed upon it. Denise smiled and passed it back.

She found that it was getting impossible to tear herself away from the
place. She had been here hours. Oh to be here alone. She fleetingly
imagined herself the host, inviting this niece to tea. That idea
tortured her. Dismissing it, she found herself thinking that if they
were going to strip this lovely old house should she not focus on
rescuing his treasures? Several more times the children surged through,
ruffling that music pile, until Denise could bear it no more.

"Could I, I mean, would it be possible for me to offer you something
for that pile of music, Steph? Amongst it are pieces that I used to
study with him," she blurted out.

This was really why she had come, wasn't it? To take away trophies. To
steal his things from his family.

"Oh sure. That's fine. You take the pile. We're not musical ourselves
and it will be nice to think of you playing his music."

So that's how she came to own treasure. Steph told her to help herself
to any other music scores from the boxes. So Denise phoned her father
and asked him to collect her and then gathered every piece of music she
could see, whilst Steph was still ploughing through her own treasure
trove of photos. She also took the metronome, although she didn't
mention that to Steph. Edward's old coat still hung in the hallway. She
had brushed lingeringly past it with boxes in her arms. Maybe she could
burgle the house to retrieve this later. Steph made her promise to call
again and waved her a cheery good-bye.
Throughout the whole visit, neither she nor Steph had alluded in any
way to Edward's murder. Each of them seemed have been defying the other
to raise this ugliness, each shutting it away for others to fathom.
Denise had tried hard to obliterate her own memories of the murderous
housekeeper, preferring to recall intact those days before the arrival
of that beast. Steph, presumably because her children might overhear
something, was not going dip her toe into the nastiness. So there was
an unwritten pact for that day between them to avoid the issue.

Later that evening, in reflective mood, Denise unpacked her hoard. Her
room at home had always been sparsely decorated. Now she could display
his music and also the books that she had slipped underneath, when
Steph was not looking. She placed his beautiful rosewood metronome in
pride of place on her dressing table and the sheet music to the "Sunken
Cathedral" propped up behind it. Then she lay on her bed and began to
cry. She realised that she had never felt lonelier than now. The
reality of his absence was so clear, otherwise how could these
treasures be in her house?

Her crying went on through the night. She awoke sometime in the early
hours with a sodden pillow and tears still pouring down her face. The
coldness of it all. Since they had met, Edward Stenton had always
seemed to Denise to be the only important person in the world. She
shivered and turned her pillow over. In the half-light and through the
blur of her tears, she gazed at the cover of the music for the "Sunken
Cathedral" and imagined his hand opening the page for her. The musical
notation danced off the page and sounds of a piano playing came to her,
as if from another room. She stood and pressed her face against the
window, hoping to see him waiting in the street below.

"I've saved the Debussy," she would call, "and your rosewood metronome
is here too."

A plain and single young woman, living with her quiet and emotionally
narrow older parents, she knew that she was now destined to be their
carer. She could project through those years of caring "wear and tear",
feeling with some certainty that she herself would be destined to end
her own days alone. Not for her the loving offspring from a devoted, or
even an undevoted partner in life. Sometimes with angelic sighs she
relished the idea of this penance because it was her homage to Edward.
At other times these ideas filled her with a bitter loneliness. For
thirteen years the company of this piano teacher had filled her life
with a quality of transcendence which had transfixed her. His loving
ghost would haunt her forever.

"Edward is teaching me to listen. He says that I must learn to locate
all the inner parts of the music and sing them in turn as I play. My
concentration reaches new depths. It is almost like a trance as we sit
together and hum the alto and tenor parts. We make charming discoveries
of hidden melodies, sometimes preferring them to the more obvious
soprano. Always this in an enriching experience for the music. Now I
find myself able to believe how Mozart could hold those whole
symphonies in his head. Now I feel that I can begin to grasp at this
concept of the "whole piece" in my own tiny un-Mozart head. Edward
Stenton is a wonderful teacher. I leave his house each week filled with
such huge ideas and all week I can feel them there unravelling as they
fade away. Each week I return thirsty for more. I am so insatiable. How
did I live before? Was I a ghost? Why could I not see for myself any of
these magical facets to the music that I had played like an automaton?
Why did I have to wait so very long to meet him?"