O = chapter fifteen

The Piano Teacher

by Kim West

chapter 15

Edward Stenton's spirit watched and waited. He was always in the
shadows. It seemed that his disquietude prevented him from a gentle
decline into the dust of oblivion. It seemed that because Denise
yearned so much for his presence, she had conjured a sense of
enchantment. Loving, yet insubstantial, Edward now visited her bed each
night to comfort her and her sleep became purer and deeper than she had
known since childhood. She awoke and stretched free and felt a great
secret happiness settle upon her. Her vivid dreams were ethereal
musical reveries. She could float over telegraph wires and up and away
to the sea to the accompaniment of "Gymnopedies". She could skim over
fields and through magical forests to Lizt and Chopin.

Denise found that days whizzed by. Her days at work barely registered
with her, as she yearned for those nights in the arms of her ghostly
lover. What did drudgery matter, if she could sustain this world of
imagination? What did she care, if all else fell apart?

"The world away
and this one.
Two kites flying,"

she would whisper.

No one would suspect her of stepping away from reality, because hardly
anyone knew her in any depth. Pale and nondescript, she was simply
thought of as a quiet young woman still living at home. She really had
no social links. Her parents only knew that she looked happier since
the party and were pleased that all appeared to have gone well.

In her quest to cast this new enchantment further, Denise began to make
plans to move out of her parents' house. What she thought she would
like would be somewhere small and cosy, where she could have a piano to
play, so she started to browse through estate agents' windows. When the
house next to Edward's house became vacant, after Elsie's death, she
found herself pre-occupied and obsessed with the idea that she could
recreate his old ways of living in that twin house. It was ideal for
her, but completely out of her reach financially. Despite this, a
compulsion grew in her to visit the house, and so she collected a key
from the estate agent and spent an afternoon there, wandering around.
Yes, it was very similar. There had been no up dating of this property.
The d?cor was however, exceedingly kitsch, with flock wallpaper and
fussy fittings. Multicoloured carpets were left to swirl across the
floor and bright orange, blue and green cushioned lino glared from the
kitchen. The downstairs rooms therefore had no peace in them. Denise
wandered upstairs musing. Three bedrooms were stripped bare to the
floorboards with ancient net curtains wisping at the windows. She began
to muse on the detail of these unknown peoples lives, as she stood
staring through the nets into Edward's beloved garden, now transformed
into a children's bash around playground. A gentle breeze blew through
a crack in the pane, causing the nets to billow slightly.
Suddenly there was a voice:

"Hello Denise."

She spun around. Alarmingly, it was a vision of Elsie, luminous and
naked.

"We never really met dear did we?"

Pole-axed with fear, Denise stepped quickly away from the window and
sidled towards the door.

"Don't be afraid love. I'm sorry about the state of me. It's not what I
would have chosen my dear. So you're thinking of settling down are you?
Well it'd be lovely to have you here."

Elsie was chattering on as if she and Denise had regular acquaintances,
not creatures from different spheres of consciousness. Elsie looked
pitiful. She was the colour of children's paper glue and the
consistency of a Jelly Baby, but despite her revulsion, Elsie that
annoying gossipy creature, thus hideously reduced, struck a deep vein
of sympathy in Denise.

"Elsie, what on earth has happened to you?" she stammered, looking
closer at her, but under this sort of scrutiny the ghost, obeying some
obscure celestial ruling suddenly slumped and faded into a wall and the
room again lay empty and desolate.

Denise quickly left the house. She could not however, on reflection,
fail to be enthused by her experience with Elsie's encouraging ghost.
Denise began to talk about buying the house with her father that night.
Lagging many light years behind his daughter, he was of course, shocked
by the firmness of her ideas. She was not, after all in the habit of
communicating her thoughts to her parents. He tried to explain that no
matter how much he could dream of helping his beloved daughter to buy a
place, it was beyond his capacity. He tried to stem what he found to be
her alarmingly intense flow, by reminding Denise that only through a
lifetime of very careful planning and saving were they enabled to have
their treasured three week holiday once a year at Southend and the
security of a small pension. They had no savings. It was all very hand
to mouth. However, as he felt his grasp on this conversation slipping
away, his daughter uncharacteristically became more strenuous in her
outlandish request.

"Dad, surely there is some way of helping me. Can't you and mum come
and live with me?"
These were simple folk. They nested in little rooms with fifty's
furniture. Any thought of living above their station would horrify
them. It couldn't be. It just couldn't be. Let others have dreams and
reach for the stars, but for them life needed to be predictable.
Denise's father poked his ear vigorously.

"Don't be silly Denise, what would your mother do with all that space?"
he said.

"But it's not that much bigger, dad. Think about it, it's got a really
nice garden and a shed." She was eagerly leaning forward wide-eyed, and
holding his hands in the manner of a child begging for sweeties. Her
father still poked deep into his ear, causing it to sting.

"Denise, there is no way your mother can be persuaded to up and leave
her home and live in someone else's. She's happy here. Why would she
want to go elsewhere?" he spluttered awkwardly, as he stood to leave
the room.

"This is important to me," screamed Denise, in a great wave of
fierceness that was much too vehement for her poor father. He was
toppled by this sudden escalation of emotional excess. Now he tried to
run from the room.

"Denise!" he shouted, as she grabbed his leg. His voice cracked in
surprise.

"Control yourself!" He had never ever shouted at his daughter. He was
terribly agitated. With a necessary measure of brute force, he shook
his leg free, kicking her accidentally in the stomach in the process
and leaving the room. His daughter quickly jumped up, nursing her
stomach and went to stare out of the window. Her heart pounding. She
could hear muffled conversation in the kitchen. Now she realised firmly
that she cared much more about owning Elsie's house than she did about
her parent's feelings. She was beginning to see that she was trapped by
their sheer ordinariness. Something inside was really shifting her
equilibrium. Pandora's Box had just creaked itself open and revealed to
her a world of possibilities. She sat for hours in the front room. She
wanted that "world away" so much and she sat still and quiet as she
pondered this. A faint smile on her lips. From time to time one or
other of her parents would cross the kitchen doorway and notice
her.

Their earnest conversation over her demands had soon fizzled. (As mum
poured tea and cut fruit cake, they re-read the papers and the radio
backdrop resumed and life settled back down.)

Early evening came and Denise slid past them and up to her room and
that is where she stayed.

Eventually a doctor was called and diagnosed "Reactive Depression", as
not a word could be drawn from her. She was becoming a storehouse for
mysterious secrets that no one could understand. What would be the
point of talking? So Denise had stopped.
In his desperate need to rationalise it all, her father blamed her
withdrawal on his outburst and consequently became terribly preoccupied
himself. Time and again he would knock at her door and beg her
forgiveness, but no response came. He would sigh, shake his head and
stuff his hands deep into his home-knit cardigan and shuffle dejectedly
out to his potting shed, muttering

"I'll try again later."

The distress of his daughter weighed heavily on him, especially as she
was also not eating. Her poor mother fussed around preparing favourite
foods and wept when the tray was left untouched. One day she burst into
her daughter's room.

"Denise!" she shook with a passion she had never known she
possessed.

"Denise your father's going to die if you don't speak to him." She
slammed the door and rushed down stairs weeping loudly.

That night, Denise did come down to tea, but nothing was said. No one
broke the silence. After tea she went back upstairs to lie down and as
she lay there a huge wave of grief rippled from her toes and up her
body. At last she cried aloud. It filled the house. This outpouring of
her grief had taken well over a year to arrive. Her startled parents
raced up the stairs and stood framed in her doorway.

"Dad, please go away", she implored, as her father stepped resolutely
into the room.

"Denise, this won't do dear, I'm not leaving you in here alone like
this. I can't do that. Your boss rang again yesterday and we told him
you'd be back next week. Now please come back down and watch a bit of
telly with your mother and me."

"Dad, I'm not interested. I just want to stay here quietly. Please go
dad. Please leave me alone." She was pulling huge breaths in to get a
grip of her emotion.

"Denise, I can't do that. I can't leave you. It's been weeks. Weeks!"
her father said, looking sad.

"Dad, I don't need all this fuss. I'm OK. Really!" she managed with her
chest heaving. In the next few days, out of anxiety for her parents,
Denise did reappear and start to eat again, albeit like a
sparrow.

The suffering of his daughter made her father ache. A sick feeling of
rage that his lovely daughter should now be so thin and withdrawn would
sometimes overwhelm him. He would take the car out on some premise of
an errand and park it by the common and weep. His wife's way was to
keep busy. Already a busy bee, this would make her nearly frenetic at
times as the housework became her round of fastidious compulsion. Not a
speck of dust lay undiscovered as she cleaned and recleaned. Their
ordinary lives cruelly jerked out of alignment.

As for herself, Denise had sunk deeper and deeper into her other world,
where nightly her lover would caress her in his most gentle way. All
those intimacies which would have been impossible in the previous
formality of their relationship could now be revelled in.