Lessons Read online

  He also knew what right angles were. Tenses, angles, how to spell continuous. These were elements of the real world his father had sent him 2,000 miles away from his mother to learn. There were matters of adult concern, millions of them, that one by one would be his. When he arrived from the Latin lesson, breathless and on time, the piano teacher interrogated him about his week of practice. He lied to her. Then she sat close again. She wrapped her perfume around him. The mark she had made on his leg last week had faded and his memory of what happened was uncertain. But if she tried to hurt him again he would run from the room without pausing. It was a kind of strength, a murmur of excitement in his chest, to pretend to her that he had practised for three hours during the week. The truth was zero, not even three minutes. He had never deceived a woman before. He had lied to his father, whom he feared, to get out of trouble, but he had always told his mother the truth.

  The teacher softly cleared her throat, which indicated that she believed him. Or perhaps it didn’t.

  She whispered, “Good. Off you go.”

  The large thin book of easy pieces for beginners was open at the centre. For the first time he noticed the three staples in the crease that held the book together. These did not have to be played—the stupid thought almost made him smile. The stern upright loop of the treble clef, the bass clef coiled like the foetus of a rabbit in his biology book, the black notes, the clear white ones you held for longer, this grubby dog-eared double page that was his own special punishment. None of it now looked familiar or even unfriendly.

  When he started, his first note was twice the volume of the second. He moved warily to the third note and the fourth and gathered speed. It was caution, and then it felt like stealth. Not practising had set him free. He obeyed the notes, left hand with right and ignored the pencilled fingerings. He had nothing to remember but to press the keys in the correct order. The bad place was suddenly on him but his left thumb forgot to go down and then it was too late, he was already clear, on the other side, moving smoothly across the level ground above the forest where the light and space were cleaner, and for a stretch he thought he could discern the hint of a melody suspended like a joke above his steady march of sounds.

  Following instructions, two, perhaps three, every second needed all his concentration. He forgot himself, and even forgot her. Time and place dissolved. The piano vanished along with existence itself. It was as if he were waking from a night’s sleep when he found himself at the end, playing with two hands an easy open chord. But he didn’t take his hands away as the breve on the page told him he should. The chord resounded and diminished in the bare little room.

  He didn’t let go when he felt her hand on his head, even when she pressed down hard to rotate his face in her direction. Nothing in her expression told him what would happen next.

  She said quietly, “You…”

  That was when he lifted his hands from the keys.

  “You little…”

  In a complicated movement, she lowered and inclined her head, so that her face approached his in a swooping arc that ended in a kiss, her lips full on his, a soft prolonged kiss. He neither resisted nor engaged. It happened and he let it happen and felt nothing while it lasted. Only in retrospect, when he lived and relived and animated the moment in solitude, did he get the measure of its importance. While it lasted, her lips were on his and he numbly waited for the moment to pass. Then there was a sudden distraction and it ended. A flash of a passing shadow or movement had fallen across the high window. She pulled away and turned to look, as he did. They had both seen or sensed it at the same time, on the edge of vision. Was it a face, a disapproving face and shoulder? But the small square window showed them only ragged cloud and scraps of pale winter blue. He knew that from the outside the window was too high for even the tallest adult to reach. It was a bird, probably a pigeon from the dovecote in the old stable block. But teacher and pupil had separated guiltily and though he understood little, he knew that they were now united by a secret. The empty window had rudely invoked the world of people outside. He also understood how impolite it would have been to raise a hand to his mouth to relieve the prickling sensation of drying moisture.

  She turned back to him and in a steady calming voice that suggested she had no concern for the prying world, looked deep into his eyes as she spoke, this time in a kindly voice in the future tense, which she used to make the present seem reasonable. And now it was. But he had never heard her say so much.

  “Roland, in two weeks there’s a half-day holiday. It falls on a Friday. I want you to listen carefully. You’ll come on your bike to my village. Erwarton. Coming from Holbrook, it’s after the pub, on the right, with a green door. You’re going to come in time for lunch. Do you understand?”

  He nodded, understanding nothing. That he should cycle across the peninsula by narrow lanes and farm tracks to her village for lunch when he could eat at school baffled him. Everything did. At the same time, despite his confusion, or because of it, he longed to be alone to feel and think about the kiss.

  “I’ll send you a card to remind you. From now on you’ll have your lessons with Mr. Clare. Not me. I’ll tell him you’re making excellent progress. So, young man, we are going to do major and minor scales with two sharps.”

  * * *

  Easier to ask where than why. Where did she go? Four hours passed before he reported Alissa’s note and disappearance to the police. His friends thought that even two hours was too long. Phone them now! He resisted, he held out. It was not only that he preferred to think she could return at any minute. He did not want a stranger reading her note or her absence officially confirmed. To his surprise someone came round the day after his call. He was a local police constable and seemed hard-pressed. He took a few details, glanced at Alissa’s note and said that he would report back. Nothing happened for a week and in that time her four postcards arrived. The specialist came unannounced in the early morning in a tiny patrol car which he parked illegally outside the house. It had been raining heavily but he was oblivious to the trail his shoes left across the hallway floor. Detective Inspector Douglas Browne, the flesh of whose cheeks hung in swags, had the friendly aspect of a large brown-eyed dog. He sat hunched at the kitchen table across from Roland. By the detective’s immense hands, their knuckles matted with dark hair, were his own notebook, the postcards and the pillow note. A thick overcoat, which he did not remove, added to his bulk and enhanced the canine effect. Around both men was a litter of dirty plates and cups, junk mail, bills, a near-empty feeding bottle and the smeared leftovers of Lawrence’s breakfast and his bib. These were what one of Roland’s male friends called the slime years. Lawrence was in his high chair, unusually silent, gazing in awe at this hulk of a man and his outsized shoulders. At no point during the meeting did Browne acknowledge the baby’s existence. Roland felt faintly offended on his son’s behalf. Irrelevant. The officer’s soft brown eyes were on the father alone and Roland was obliged to answer routine questions. The marriage was not in difficulty—he said this louder than he intended. No money had been removed from the joint account. It was still the holidays, so the school where she worked wouldn’t know she had left. She had taken a small black suitcase. Her coat was green. Here were some photographs, her date of birth, her parents’ names and address in Germany. She might have worn a beret.

  The detective was interested in the most recent card, from Munich. Roland didn’t think she knew anyone there. Berlin yes, and Hanover and Hamburg. She was a woman of the Lutheran north. When Browne raised an eyebrow, Roland told him that Munich was in the south. Perhaps it was the name of Luther he should have explained. But the detective looked down at his notebook and asked another question. No, Roland said, she had never done anything like this before. No, he didn’t have a copy of her passport details. No, she had not seemed depressed lately. Her parents lived near Nienburg, a small town, also in north Germany. When he had phoned them about another matter,
it became clear she hadn’t been there. He had told them nothing. Her mother, afflicted by chronic resentments, would have erupted at this news of her only child. Desertion. How dare she! Mother and daughter habitually squabbled. But his parents-in-law and his own parents would have to be told. Alissa’s first three postcards, from Dover, Paris then Strasbourg, had come in four days. The fourth, the Munich card, came two days later. Since then, nothing.

  Detective Inspector Browne studied the postcards again. Each one the same. All fine. Don’t worry. Kiss Larry for me. xx Alissa. The invariance seemed deranged or hostile, as did the loveless sign-off. A plea for help or a form of insult. Same blue felt-tipped pen, no dates, illegible postmarks, Dover apart, the same bland city view of bridges over the Seine, the Rhine, the Isar. Mighty rivers. She was drifting eastwards, ever further from home. The night before, on the edge of sleep, Roland summoned her as Millais’s drowned Ophelia, bobbing on the Isar’s smooth clean waters past Pupplinger Au with its naked bathers sprawled on the grassy shores like beached seals; on her back, head first, floating downstream, unseen and silent through Munich, past the English Garden to the Danube confluence, then unremarked through Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade, through ten nations and their savage histories, along the borders of the Roman Empire, to the white skies and boundless delta marshes of the Black Sea, where he and she once made love in the lee of an old mill in Letea and saw near Isaccea a flock of rowdy pelicans. Only two years ago. Purple herons, glossy ibis, a greylag goose. Until then he had never cared about birds. That evening before sleep, he had drifted away with her to a locus of wild happiness, a source. Lately, it was an effort of concentration to remain long in the present. The past was often a conduit from memory to restless fantasising. He put it down to tiredness, hangover, confusion.

  Douglas Browne was saying consolingly as he bent to his notebook, “When my wife had had enough, she chucked me out.”

  Roland started to speak but Lawrence cut in with a squawk. A demand to be included. Roland stood to unstrap him from his chair and settled him on his lap. A new angle, face to face, on the giant stranger silenced the baby again. He gazed fiercely, open-mouthed and dribbling. No one could know what passed through the mind of a seven-month-old. A shaded emptiness, a grey winter sky against which impressions—sounds, sights, touch—burst like fireworks in arcs and cones of primary colour, instantly forgotten, instantly replaced and forgotten again. Or a deep pool into which everything fell and disappeared but remained, irretrievably present, dark shapes in deep water exercising their gravitational pull even eighty years later, on deathbeds, in last confessions, in final cries for lost love.

  After Alissa left he had watched his son for signs of sorrow or damage and found them at every turn. A baby must miss its mother, but how if not in memory? Sometimes Lawrence was silent for too long. Shocked, numbed, scar tissue forming within hours in the lower regions of the unconscious, if such a place or process existed? Last night he had screamed too hard. Enraged by what he couldn’t have, even as he forgot what it was. Not the breast. He was bottle-fed from the start at his mother’s insistence. Part of her plan, Roland thought in bad moments.

  The detective inspector finished with his notebook. “You understand that if we find Alissa, we can’t tell you where she is without her permission.”

  “You can tell me if she’s alive.”

  He nodded and thought for a moment. “Generally, when a missing wife’s dead it’s the husband that’s killed her.”

  “Then let’s hope she’s alive.”

  Browne straightened and rocked back just a little in his chair, miming surprise. For the first time he smiled. He seemed friendly. “It often goes like this. So. He does her in, disposes of the body, down in the New Forest say, lonely spot, shallow grave, reports her missing, then what?”

  “What?”

  “Then it starts. Suddenly he realises, she was adorable. They loved each other. He misses her and he begins to believe his own story. She’s done a runner. Or a psychopath has done her in. He’s tearful, depressed, then he’s furious. He’s not a murderer, he’s not lying, not as he sees it now. She’s gone and he really feels it. And to the rest of us it looks real. It looks honest. Hard to crack, those ones.”

  Lawrence’s head lolled against his father’s chest, and he began to doze. Roland didn’t want the detective to leave just yet. When he did it would be time to clean up the kitchen. Sort out the bedrooms, the laundry, the dirty trail in the hall. Make a list for the shops. All he wanted was to sleep.

  He said, “I’m still at the missing her stage.”

  “Early days, sir.”

  At that, both men began to laugh quietly. As if it was fun and they were old friends. Roland was well disposed towards the collapsed face, its soft hangdog look of infinite wear and tear. He respected the detective’s impulse to sudden confidences.

  After a silence Roland said, “Why did she throw you out?”

  “Worked too hard, drank too much, late every night. Ignored her, ignored the kids, three lovely boys, had a lady on the side which someone told her about.”

  “Well shot of you then.”

  “That’s what I thought. I was about to become one of those blokes with two households. You hear about them. The old doesn’t know about the new, the new is jealous of the old and you’re running between them with a white-hot poker up your arse.”

  “Now you’re with the new.”

  Browne sighed loudly through his nostrils as he looked away and scratched his neck. The self-made hell was an interesting construct. Nobody escaped making one, at least one, in a lifetime. Some lives were nothing but. It was a tautology that self-inflicted misery was an extension of character. But Roland often thought about it. You built a torture machine and climbed inside. Perfect fit, with a range of pain on offer: from certain jobs, or a taste for drink, drugs, from crime coupled with a knack of getting caught. Austere religion was another choice. An entire political system could opt for self-imposed distress—he had once spent some time in East Berlin. Marriage, a machine for two, presented king-sized possibilities, all variants of the folie à deux. Everyone knew some examples and Roland’s was a crafty construction. His good friend, Daphne, had laid it out for him one evening, long before Alissa left, when he confessed to months of feeling low. “You did brilliantly at the evening classes, Roland. All those subjects! But everything else you tried, you wanted to be the best in the world. Piano, tennis, journalism, now poetry. And these are only the ones I happen to know about. As soon as you discover you’re not the best, you throw it in and hate yourself. Same with relationships. You want too much and move on. Or she can’t stand the pursuit of perfection and chucks you out.”

  Into the detective’s silence Roland rephrased his question. “So, new lady or old, what is it you really want?”

  Soundlessly, Lawrence was crapping in his sleep. The odour wasn’t so bad. One of the discoveries of middle life—how soon you came to tolerate the shit of the one you loved. A general rule.

  Browne gave the question serious thought. His gaze moved distractedly around the room. He saw chaotic bookshelves, magazine piles, a broken kite on top of a cupboard. Now, with elbows on the table and head lowered, he stared down into the grain of the pine while he massaged the back of his neck with both hands. Finally, he straightened.

  “What I really want is a sample of your handwriting. Anything. A shopping list will do.”

  Roland let a wavelet of nausea rise and fall. “You think I wrote these messages?”

  A mistake, after a heavy night, to have skipped breakfast. No slice of buttery toast and honey to set against hypoglycaemia. Too busy dealing with Lawrence. Then tremulous hands made the coffee come out triple strength.

  “A note to the milkman would be fine.”

  From the pocket of his coat Browne brought out a boxy leather object on a strap. With grunts and a sigh of exasperation, he freed a camera f
rom its worn case, a task which involved turning a silver screw too small for his fat fingers. It was an old Leica, 35 millimetre, silver and black with dents in its body. He kept his eyes on Roland and made a purse-lipped smile as he unclipped the lens cap.

  He stood. With pedantic attention he arranged the four cards and the note in a row. When all had been snapped, both sides, and the camera was back in his pocket, he said, “Marvellous, this new fast film. Go anywhere. Interested?”

  “I used to be keen.” Then Roland added, accusingly, “As a kid.”

  Browne took from the other pocket of his coat a sheaf of plastic. One by one, he picked up the postcards by a corner, and slid them into four transparent envelopes, which he sealed with a pinch. Into the fifth he put the pillow note. It’s not your fault. He sat down and made a neat pile, squaring it off with his big hands.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll take these along with me.”

  Roland’s heart was beating so hard that he was beginning to feel refreshed. “I do mind.”

  “Fingerprints. Very important. You’ll get them back.”

  “They say things get lost in police stations.”

  Browne smiled. “Let’s take a tour of the house. So, we need your handwriting, item of her clothing, something with just her prints on it and uh, what was it? A sample of her writing.”

  “You already have it.”

  “Something historic.”

  Roland stood with Lawrence in his arms. “Perhaps it was a mistake getting you involved in a personal matter.”

  The detective was already leading the way towards the stairs. “Perhaps it was.”