The Pianist

It was 2.40 on a weekday in July when Margo Barling decided to give up. Picture her there at the kitchen sink, folded over somewhat, Heberden fingers pressing the handheld to her cheek. The traffic outside Margo’s house had cleared. There’d been some road rage between two dads on the school run about twenty minutes earlier, each trying to get as close as possible to the prep school down the road. But now Margo watched the empty street, tinny music from down the phone gone cold in the sweat of the scarp of her cheek. She’d been on hold for those twenty minutes when the music stopped at last, and a voice said:

“Hello”

“Hello”, she replied.

“Thank you for contacting us. Our helpline is experiencing a high volume of calls. Please, stay on the line.”

Margo hung up after this, and turned to tidy the old bowl of soup that had been left on the kitchen table. As the thin liquid poured down the drain, she put the landline to one side. Her fingers ached and she turned her attention to the chatter of daytime television. Michael put the TV on before he left for the office that morning and as she listened to the adverts, it felt as if they were in another language. When Margo looked up to the grainy screen, she watched the figures undulate. They spoke about PPI, thrush and cremation plans; then there was a flicker of a child on screen, ugly with fear, red letters flashing ‘millions are dying.’ The tune of a talk-show played, and Margo looked down to the sink once again. Scrubbing the faux china bowl with the back of a sponge, she thought how her husband would say the past was a foreign country: he was wrong. Once the bowl was clean, she wiped it down with a damask tea towel then put it back on the side by a spoon and the phone, set for her meals for the next day and the ones after.

Now Margo had no intention of calling again, it was 2.44, and she had better things to do besides talking with an automated voice down a hope-line. She inhaled and stepped away from the sink. She took the phone then and made her way to the other side of the room, putting the device back on its sticky plastic base with a click. As she straightened herself up from the counter, she felt the pain was worse than usual, encasing her hips and hands like cement. She knew she had taken her pills that morning, Michael had checked she was up to date; she’d done everything right and yet the pain persisted. She chewed at the side of her cheek as she filled the kettle and listened to the TV again, pretended she was a girl, bouncing every word from English to German back to English; back when she came to London and would stumble over the wills and wants, the wenns oder was und weiter und weiter. Then the kettle clicked, and she filled the cup with an English remedy of tannin and limescale. As she sat at the kitchen table, she held the mug with her palms, curling her fingers little by little as the warmth thawed through her bones. She didn’t move for a while and, looking at the window, consoled herself with the hope of what would come later that day; that she would be reunited with Nancy Fielder.

It was moments like these where Michael, were he there, would see his mother’s sadness. He would find her staring into empty space, with that same misery that lingered in the grout and damp carpet of the house like a rotten memory. Michael had supposed it was loneliness that troubled Margo, and so he came to her once a week with a Tesco bouquet and some canned soup for two. The dyed daises still wrapped in their crinkled plastic lay on the opposite end of the table from Margo, untouched since her son’s departure; it wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate them, but more that every time she looked their way, she was reminded of the cruel irony of her position, of those last weeks of condolences in cards and flowers, the whispers in practice rooms of all she could have been besides some arthritic pianist forced to retire at 40. She could remember practising Shostakovich, having to stop every four bars when her hands would seize and stiffen. She could remember when Nancy came and sat beside her on the piano stool, putting a hand on hers and telling her to take the time she needed. The conductor, however, wasn’t so patient in those last years and dismissed her one rehearsal, moving the next piano wonderchild into her place like clockwork. Ten years had passed since Margo left the London Philharmonic. Her husband had moved them to his dead parents’ house in Streatham, it was closer to his work. He had meant for them to spend more time together, only for him to fall sick, leaving Margo a widow with a crippling mortgage and a house rancid with a nostalgia that wasn’t her own.

Yes, Margo the 50-year-old widow, sat at the table as a woman far beyond her years might: disillusioned with the world with a despair that buzzed like the strip of fluorescent kitchen lightbulbs, giving anyone a migraine and sense of outliving themselves. She was miserable, but at the request of her GP and Michael, had begun attending an art class once a week. It was those lessons and the walks she would take along the embankment that kept her going. She always hoped to see Nancy on those walks: she never did.

And she hadn’t seen Nancy for ten years, until, last week when the woman had come along to her art class like a spectre. Margo sat beside Nancy, ignoring the twitches in her fingers as she sketched and spoke with her old friend. Margo studied her profile and thought she was more beautiful than she had remembered; she looked away. She listened as the instructor set a task for the students to do at home: to render a piece from their emotion. Once they were dismissed, Margo and Nancy walked together to the station, Nancy would stop every now and then to ask Margo if she needed to slow down. Margo asked Nancy what she planned to do for the work set by their instructor. Nancy said she would paint from her rage. Before the warm brick of a corner shop, they stood still; Margo looked up at Nancy in the watery sunlight, saw how the underground sign crested about her as if she were a saint. The road fell quiet, and as Margo looked in the eyes of the woman at her side, she muttered “I will-”. She had meant “I want”, but the moment passed, and Nancy smiled and left, waving her goodbyes as she ran for the night tube at Balham station.

           The drink in Margo’s hands had gone cold by now, and the ache of her bones gnawed at her hope like some old dog. It was 3.00 and Margo had 2 hours before her art class. She would take a bath before she left in order to ease the pain of her joints, then she would manage to get to the lesson, to see Nancy again. After placing the mug down on the table, Margo pushed herself up with some difficulty. She made her way down the carpeted hall and began to run the bath as she undressed. She laid a skirt and blouse on the bed, alongside a handbag with all her sketches and art she had done the past week. Making her way into the bathroom, she gave up trying to tie her hair and closed the bathroom door, muffling the sound of the TV and the humming hallway lights. The taste of iron crept in her mouth as she attempted the gruelling task of stepping one foot after another over the rim and into the bathtub. She turned off the taps as she stood to her shins in the water then bent down ever so slowly, easing herself down and down until she was sat against the back of the bath, her legs extended. As she lay down, she sighed as the sting of joints sluggishly eased to an ache. She closed her eyes as she lay back, rising in the water as she inhaled, sinking as she exhaled.

           As Margo’s pain subsided so too did her despair. She thought of seeing Nancy at her art class. She imagined showing her the work that now lay on her bed, that portrait in her image that she’d crafted from oil pastels and paints. Nancy would smile as Margo said she’d felt no pain, explain how the lilac of crow’s feet, the curve of the shade of her jaw had let her forget the tragedy as she worked. She’d reach out her hand, intertwine with the pianist’s fingers in cadences of trembling tenderness that she’d practised for so long. Either side of her hipbones, Margo tapped against the base of the bathtub, let the memory of every etude and nocturne tumble out in slow eddies about her knotted hands. It took some time for Margo to feel how the water about her had turned cold. When a chill shuddered through her, she sat up slowly, up one elbow after the other, her spine sore. She plucked the stop from the drain and put her hands over the edges of the bathtub. She would get dressed next, get ready to leave, see Nancy. She pulled herself upward, the palms of her hands firm on the rim, but she found then she hadn’t the strength to stand.

She tried once more but fell back.

She tried again; she fell again.

She tried and fell to the point where the pain was all-encompassing.

It was 4.00 when Margo gave up her trying.  

After a concert that afternoon, Nancy went to Waterloo. She met her husband at the station, and they took the train together, walking hand in hand from Balham to the art studio. When the instructor came around the class Nancy dug a small piece of paper from the bottom of her backpack. It was a frustrated sketch she explained, to which her husband and the instructor hummed knowingly. As the lesson began, she put a bag on the seat beside her when she remembered Margo might come. The place was filled later on by a stranger. That evening as she made her way home, Nancy walked at her husband’s side. The night was growing cold, and she thought perhaps Margo was as ill as she had been all those years ago.

“Your friend wasn’t there”

Nancy nodded and looked his way, “I’ll send her some flowers.”