R = chapters nineteen to twenty one

The Piano Teacher

by

Kim West

chapters 19-21

So, later that week when Joan Toggle sat in her bed with eyes wide and
mouth set, Katherine Mansfield drooped in her hands, eventually
tumbling to the floor with a dull thud. Joan's brow creased as hot
little-girl tears sprung from her eyes and she pouted.
"He's not back yet. It's the middle of the night. Where is he?" she
muttered to the wallpaper roses. She knew what loneliness looked like.
She had only to flip a coin and she was back there, single, dull and
un-loved. This was the third night. He had broken his routine
completely. He had become distant and distracted in his work. He wasn't
communicating. He hadn't shaved. She hadn't bothered to feed him
because she knew. She knew instantly that he was lost to her.

On the second night, he had come to her damp and wild and she had
thrown herself onto him. Trying to reach him in what she thought of as
a wild gypsy like union. He had muttered, " No Joan" and gently pushed
her away. Bitter and embarrassingly thus discarded, she had turned off
her light and fallen into an angry sleep. She hadn't asked for this. He
used, after all, to be a tramp. He had come to her and it was because
of her that he had transformed. All those longing glances across the
counter had held such promise.

The next morning she had looked around her bedroom with its pure white
woodwork and deep pink frills. Her crystal collection glinted in a
trickle of morning sunshine, from its pretty cabinet by the door. She
had swung her legs out onto her fluffy cream carpet, finding her
sheepskin moccasins. The door had opened and there he was in his old
underpants, incongruent and strange to her. She knew she had been
cuckolded.

Now this third night of absence confirmed his treachery to her. He did
not come in until just before dawn. She heard him potter around in the
kitchen and then his footsteps on the stairs. She quickly turned off
her light and lay down. He came in so quietly that she wasn't sure if
he was actually in the room. Then she saw him standing by the window
staring out. He must have stood there for the rest of the night,
because eventually she dozed off in exhaustion and when she woke her
was still there and it was morning.

"Morning Ronnie," she said briskly, as she stomped gloomily into the
bathroom.

Looking at her face in the bathroom mirror, she noted her flushed
expression. She found his razor annoying. She threw it to the floor.
Above all she felt foolish. She was a plump, foolish older woman, who'd
had her fling and lost her man. Of that there was no doubt. When she
came out of the bathroom, he had disappeared. He didn't come to work
that day or the next. In fact, he stopped coming altogether.

How could she have been so stupid? She could see her customers'
curiosity building.

"No Mr. French today, Joan?"

"No, not today."

"Mr. French ill, is he?"

"No, he's just not here."

She knew that wouldn't satisfy them. This went on for days.

"Morning Joan. Still no Mr.French?"

"No. He's not here."

"Is he away then?"

"No. Just not here."

This teasing was crazing her, as she could sense the pleasure that folk
had in making these persistent enquiries. Like naughty children
knocking at your door and running away.

"Ah. I see Mr. French isn't back the?"

"No, he isn't back."

"Any idea when he will be?"

"No."

A public humiliation was building.

"Morning Joan. How's Mr. French?"

No one had approved of this liaison in the first place. Their smirks
and knowing glances told her all too plainly. They'd seen the lights
back on in Ronnie's old house.

Soon a note went up in the post Office window:
"WANTED: SHOP ASSISTANT
RELIABLE PERSON REQUIRED URGENTLY TO
MANAGE GROCERY COUNTER.
APPLY WITHIN."

Next, Joan Toggle put Ronnie's few meagre belongings into a carrier bag
and marched down the street to his old house. She pounded at the front
door and threw them into his arms when he timidly opened it. Not a word
was spoken, but brief and very firm eye contact was established, before
she spun around and strode back down his path to kick his gate
viciously.

"Edward, who was that?" came a concerned voice from inside. He closed
the door.

Denise and Ronnie soon found themselves huddled together to the side of
the window, out of sight, as missiles began to land on the windowpane.
Stones, sticks, some old shoes, and some rotten apples.

"You bastard!" she was screaming.

"You've ruined me!" The squishing of a huge bramley apple on the glass
muffled Joan Toggle's cries.

"You're just a filthy old tramp. I know what you are." Finally at the
sound of a large pebble from the rockery breaking glass she ran off
down the drive once again and hurried home.

Ronnie held Denise tightly in his arms.

"Oh Edward. Edward. What's going on?"

"Hush. Hush now." He entreated her with immense tenderness.

Ronnie ached with his new-found love. This fragile little bird he held
in his arms gave him such pain. He was enacting her ghostly lover. He
was become Ghostly Edward Stenton, but in enacting this role, he now
had a grim sense of blasphemy which in itself caused him no joy. It
was, rather, an agony. Actually, it was terrifying. What a balancing
act. What a fine line he drew. This beautiful child-like woman was so
helpless and so loving and he knew that he was to be such an outrageous
creature. Yet her sanity was very frail. Her well being was now his
primary concern and her own tenderness quite unbelievable. He was lost
and drowned in this predicament.
"I'm going now Edward. So I'll try to speak to Steph about the piano."
She said that day as she left. His blood ran cold. The piano. How could
he bluff that one? Things were taking a desperate turn.

Really desperate.

chapter 20
Joan Toggle was now very angry. Angry beyond belief. Her humiliation at
Ronnie's hands had made her the laughing stock of the village. She
didn't know how to handle this. She wanted revenge and she wanted
escape. She packed and un-packed her suitcases. She closed the Post
Office. This was unheard of. There were serious phone calls and furious
residents. The postal service must go on. She opened the Post Office
again. She was constantly hungry. She nibbled chocolates from the shop,
as she stamped receipts in her post office booth. She turned the
vegetable van away and left week old cauliflowers to rot on the
shelves. She started to whistle incessantly. Customers complained to
one another about this and about her unkempt appearance. Letters were
late. The postman was embarrassed.

Then one morning, she had simply vanished. She left no forwarding
address. She had cleared her quarters and gone. Someone mentioned
hearing a van arrive in the night. People thought it might be a
relative. The shop and post office and her tiny living quarters were
abandoned. She had been confidante to many before her fall a veritable
heartbeat of the village gossip network. A solid and dependable member
of the church and keen amateur line dancer, Joan Toggle was never the
less, when it came down to it, not related to anyone in the village.
When she left, her vacuum was soon filled with the gas and air of an
extremely robust and hearty new postmistress from a nearby village
where the post office had been axed. This lady was delighted to take up
the reigns and soon resurrected the sense of security that villagers
had in Post Office chat.

Joan Toggle meanwhile was never heard of again. In her disgrace, she
had left with her brother in the night and gone to run a bed and
breakfast with him in faraway Grimsby.

chapter 21
Ronnie grew to feel like a prisoner in the persona of Edward Stenton.
He had lost the drift of his own life entirely. He remembered how he
had admired that old piano teacher and the beautiful sound of his music
wafting though windows into his life. This had been a great privilege
to him. But now here he was trapped, hunted down and cornered. He wept
and wept, as he recalled the hideous end that Mr. Stenton had come to,
remembering that tragic ashen face as he had lifted the old dead man
onto his sofa. Ronnie felt that little by little, he had been woven
into the tapestry of these events. Now he had been licked and squeezed
and poked through the eye of Denise's needle and drawn tightly into the
fabric, as an autumnal hue. He lay there, stretched and suffocated and
she lay there by his side, listening to his slow, anxious breath. The
breath of an old man. Her fantastical companion was now bound to her
with the sage green and amber threads of his clothing and she was
weaving him closer and closer, as he was sinking deeper and deeper into
oblivion. The unearthly passion drained him, as he submitted to that
other world. There were times now when he no longer knew whether he was
Edward Stenton or Ronnie French.

Death and loss infused his house with their sombre presence, as he
became haunted by recall of his own wife's shocked exit. Ronnie felt
unbearably depressed. There was no comfort in this house, only the
electricity supply and water from the taps. He dared not go out, for
fear of being attacked by Joan Toggle. He did not eat. He was becoming
very gaunt. He tried to make an effort to shake himself free of the
gloom by conjuring a life for him and for his little bride, but all the
furniture had gone in house clearance. There was not even a table to
lay food on and no bed for them to sleep in. Nothing.

At night, she would come back and they would huddle under Edward
Stenton's coat.
Next door, Steph was unable to grasp the meaning of this situation. She
became the watcher as in the past poor old Elsie had been. Peeking at
windows, listening with a glass at the wall. She heard Ronnie weeping
in the garden one afternoon.

"Ronnie. What's the matter?" she called over her fence, but there was
no reply. All went silent. Later that day she put a Dundee cake and
some windfall apples into a cloth and left them by his back door. The
next day, she ordered extra milk from the milkman and put it there with
some slices of ham and a loaf of bread. and later that afternoon a
bunch of pale windswept roses appeared by her back door.

The effect of the food lifted Ronnie's spirits. He would tell Denise
the truth. Then he could begin to make some sort of plan about how they
might live in the house together. That afternoon he dug the back garden
over and, finding seeds in a dusty corner of his shed, planted parsnips
and broad beans. Then he gathered more roses and placed them in jam
jars around the house. He boiled water and washed himself. As the light
faded, he waited. As night fell, he waited. As the world outside
settled, he waited. As an owl in the woods screeched, he waited. As the
lights went off in houses all down the street, he waited. As his
anxiety returned and rose to a lump in his throat, he waited. It seemed
that she might never return. As the coldness of the night set him
shivering, he waited. As his eyelids stung, he waited. As the birds
began to stir again in his hedge, he fell asleep.

Alone, cold and frightened.