The dealer played three notes on the piano, lifted the lid and looked inside. I watched his face with the anxious pride of a mother who had brought a child to be examined and forgotten every defect except the possibility of being judged for it.
“It has been kept dry,” he said.
“Always.”
“Some work wanted.”
“It hasn’t been tuned lately.”
“No.”
He did not make lately into a question. He put down the lid, inspected the legs, and wrote something in a small book.
Mr Clayton had been recommended by Mrs Norridge. He was neither unkind nor particularly interested in me. I found his disinterest a relief until he gave a price for the piano, when I wanted him to know exactly how it had been bought and who had sat beside it.
“Four pounds ten. I would arrange the removal.”
“It cost much more.”
“I expect so.”
He had not contradicted me. There was nowhere to put the hurt.
He looked at the new chairs, then at the little glazed cabinet beside the door. I told him which things were available and which were not. He asked about Nell’s chair, standing for the moment in the dining room while Arthur found somewhere to keep it. I said that belonged to my daughter. He drew a line through something in his book and went on.
Eight of the new chairs, the cabinet, a plated dish I used at Christmas, the piano. We went through them without making an inventory of my life. Some things were no more valuable because I had inherited them; another, which I had thought insignificant, was well made and worth keeping rather than accepting what he could offer.
“It depends what you need,” he said.
“Money.”
He nodded. “Then I’ll write the separate amounts. You can choose. I shan’t be offended if you ask another man.”
When he left I stood in front of the cabinet. The glass had a small flaw near one corner which made every cup behind it look as though it were leaning. I had dusted it for years without noticing whether I liked it. Losing it was easy enough. The piano was not.
Thomas had come home with the news on a wet Wednesday. A man he knew was leaving London and wanted the instrument taken off his hands. We could pay in instalments. There would be music, Thomas said; I used to play, didn’t I? He had remembered a thing I had mentioned without expecting him to listen, and for a week I forgave the enormous inconvenience before it arrived.
Then there were lessons to arrange, money which went elsewhere, Nell’s little hands on the keys. She used to sit on my lap while I played the few tunes I could still manage. Later she preferred to stand beside me and improve them. When Thomas was ill, neither of us touched it. After he died I found its presence comforting because it proved there had been a time when we meant to do more than survive the next quarter.
I lifted the lid. The same uncertain notes were waiting. I played a tune very slowly, taking the easier way around the worst part. At the door Mrs Keene stood listening.
“It sounds better when you don’t hurry.”
“Everything does, apparently.”
She came in. I asked whether she minded the cabinet going; she kept a spare little vase in it because her own room was crowded.
“I can take it upstairs.”
“The piano too.”
She looked at me. “I heard.”
“Mr Clayton?”
“No. The way you’re playing it.”
I shut the lid. She sat on one of the new chairs and folded her hands in her lap. I expected her to say I could keep it, sell something else, wait. She had lived long enough to know the cruelty of easy alternatives.
“Will you miss it?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then play it while it’s here.”
She went upstairs for the vase. I lifted the lid again.
I wrote to Mr Clayton accepting the prices on the next morning. The money would not clear all I owed Nell, but it would return most of it. I made no claim to have found a remedy which spared me anything. I wrote the date of collection, then took another sheet and asked Mrs Wetherby to call before then.
She came on Friday with Edith. It was the day after the second talk, which had brought fewer single visitors but all the women who were expected. Ruth had used her second ticket and gone home carrying the name of a book she meant to ask for. Joan Hesketh had left a little pile of notes for the third evening, and I had put her remaining fee where it could not be mistaken for anything else.
Mrs Wetherby heard about the piano and sat down on the stool.
“You needn’t play,” I said. “I only wanted to ask about the half-crown.”
“I remember my half-crown.”
“It was for the piano.”
“It was.”
“I ought to return it.”
She laid her walking stick across her knees. “You could. Or you could buy a book for the room and write that I gave it. I should like to be recalled when someone disagrees with a sentence.”
I laughed for the first time that day. Edith smiled too, and began looking through the music stacked beside the piano.
“Do you want one last assault?” Mrs Wetherby asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Please.”
She put the stick against the wall, moved her skirts and began the music-hall tune from census night. It sounded no better than before. I knew more of the words now. Edith sang softly, then more loudly when her aunt did, and Mrs Keene came downstairs to discover whether there was a gathering she had not been told about.
We sat through two songs and a little piece Edith played from memory. I had never heard her play. Her aunt had, of course, but listened with an attention which allowed the rest of us to find out for ourselves.
Nell came in while Edith was at the keyboard. She stopped in the doorway, holding a parcel, and remained there until the music ended. Then she put the parcel down and came to sit beside me.
“I hadn’t heard that for years,” she said.
“You used to dance to it.”
“You used to tell me to stop before I wore through the carpet.”
Mrs Wetherby struck the first notes again. Nell looked at me, a quick, involuntary look of invitation, then seemed to remember why we were sitting so carefully apart. I got up before I could ask her to make the moment kind. I took the teacups from the cabinet while Mrs Keene fetched the pot.
The piano went on Monday. Two men brought blankets and discussed the stairs as if we had built them deliberately to make the removal difficult. I stood clear of their path. At the door one asked whether I wanted to see it into the cart. I said no, then went to the window and watched anyway.
The room was larger when I turned round. I could see the old mark on the wall, the place where the paper had not been renewed because the piano hid it. There was room now for another row of chairs. I had to make myself stop measuring it that way.
Mr Clayton paid as agreed. I took the money to Nell’s room before I did anything else with it. She was at the little table Arthur had not yet moved, writing to someone who had been invited to the wedding.
I laid the envelope beside her hand.
“For what I owe. The separate amounts are there.”
She opened it. Seven pounds nineteen shillings, making the unpaid remainder one pound eighteen. I looked at the window instead of watching her count. Downstairs the men were putting the last chair into the cart.
“I didn’t ask you to sell the piano,” she said.
“I know.”
“Don’t make it something I have done.”
I turned back. “I sold it because I needed to return your money. It was mine to sell.”
She held my eyes for a moment. Then she nodded and wrote a receipt. We were still two women completing an exchange, but this time I had brought something real rather than another promise.
I went downstairs. In the sitting room I moved a chair into the space where the piano had been and sat in it without fetching any work. A pale rectangle of afternoon light lay on the floor. I let it move slowly away from my feet.