The music lifts and soars, dips and soars, until the piano is in the forest and the forest is white with snow. Still the pianist’s fingers stroke and press, stroke and press. He tilts his head back, eyes closed, mouth open to release the song or catch the snow so the notes of his melody mingle with the snowfall. They freeze into Jack Frost patterns that crackle in the air until they splinter and plummet. The rise and fall of the piano’s song accompanies the tinkling of glass as the frozen notes break into a thousand tiny fragments and become a part of the glittering snow. The pianist plays on.
*
Far away, the same pianist smooths the polished walnut of the wood with gnarled, arthritic fingers, whispers something to the closed fallboard, and with a final, painful pat, turns and leaves the room, his body slow and twisted.
*
In the forest the melody is softer, warmer, dancing amongst fresh new buds that promise spring. The snow thaws until a bubbling stream tumbles around the pianist’s ankles. He lifts a foot to the pedal. Water runs from his shoes. The stream flows away until it becomes a waterfall and the piano a walnut-wooded boat. The pianist bobs alongside, perched on his velvet-seated stool, hands still tripping side to side, rise and fall, rise and fall, across the keys.
*
Outside the white-walled, wide-windowed conservatory room where the dust-shrouded piano lies closed and untouched, a vine tip-taps against an imperceptible crack where the edges of a window frame are shedding a fine layer of decades-old paint. The vine nudges and pushes, fumbles and gropes. Days or months later, the vine curls around the feet of the piano stool, creeping, crawling, climbing, inch by inch, day by day until it pushes open the red velvet seat cushion and spreads searching fronds across the sheet music laid inside.
*
The piano that is a boat tumbles into the raging, racing currents of a churning white river, rising and falling, rising and falling. The pianist, hunched on his stool, plays on.
*
In April, when the vine blooms and the gaps in the window frame have widened, a realtor throws open the conservatory door. The long-unused doorframe creaks in pleasure or surprise. Dust motes dance on the draught. Shafts of sunlight bounce across the parquet, up the solid flank of the forgotten piano. The viewers’ gasps echo around the inside-outside wildness of this abandoned room.
The rest of the house is not in equal disrepair; the seams are tighter, newer, firmer in other rooms, and the roof is solid and dependable. It is only here, in this bright-walled, generously-windowed conservatory, that the neglect and emptiness are apparent. The woman steps into a sunbeam, turns her face to soak its warmth. The man stoops to gather the pages of scattered music. He sifts through the sheaves, packs them into a neat pile, and lays them on the piano-top. His wife spreads her arms, as if to clasp the sunbeam, then swings around to shine at her husband with her own sunny light. He meets her with his arms open and a question in his eyes. She nods. Once, twice, three times, her smile widening with each beat.
“It’s perfect.”
The estate agent is smiling too. “It’s special, isn’t it?” She doesn’t expect them to answer; their response hangs there already in the ethereal space in which they stand. The woman walks to the window, twists a vine tendril around her finger.
“It’s perfect,” she says again. “Exactly what we’ve been searching for.”
Back in the realtor’s office, the paperwork is begun. They are the first buyers to make a serious offer; it’s accepted without question. The first to see past the rewilding of the piano room, the first to not be deterred by warnings that the long-abandoned house may be a project, a millstone, a money pit. “It won’t be,” the man says, “It’s only that back room; the rest is sound enough.”
They arrange the survey with a tiny flutter of trepidation, in case they are wrong.
The surveyor is assuring and confident. “It’s only the back room. New gutters around its roof, fix those windows, replace the floor where the elements have warped it. You’ll check the electrics, of course, in case damp came in with the plant life, but all your problems are contained to that room, and even there, there’s nothing major.”
The rest of the house needs a lick of paint, a dose of woodworm treatment—“Nothing to worry about; nip it in the bud though, yeah?”—, and a new heating system, but the intrusion of the outside has not stretched beyond the conservatory.
It’s July when they wave away the last of the builders, the electricians, the plumbers. They unpack the first of the boxes—the kettle, their favourite mugs, the teabags—and wander the floors of their new home, steaming mugs in hands, happiness shining from their faces. The woman’s contentment spills from her in a patchwork of laughs as they enter first one room, then the next. Her husband catches her joy and his smile breaks his face in half. He brushes away a tear, and slips his arm around her waist.
They’ve had the whole house painted. Old Linen, the paint tin proclaimed, and that’s exactly how it looks. Even on this dull July day, with a summer storm threatening and growling in the distance, the rooms are bright and welcoming.
They haven’t replaced the parquet floor. It’s only a little warped, and she likes the character, the stories it hides, the proof of lives lived here before. The restoration of the floor is easy to justify—she will spend much time in this room. The extravagance was in restoring the piano. “We don’t even play,” the man had mock-grumbled, knowing protest was futile. He’d agreed, anyway—The room needed the piano and the piano was part of the fabric of the house.
“Easier than moving it, anyway, the weight of these things,” the restorer says, as he sets to work. “Which of you plays?” The couple exchange a secret smile above him as he bends to peer into the piano’s bowels.
“Neither. We need to learn.” Even with his head buried into the piano, the restorer won’t miss the smile in the woman’s voice. “I always wanted to.” Her self-conscious shrug doesn’t conceal her longing. “It’s fate, it being here.”
The restorer pulls his head from the depths of the piano, stretches, and nods. “Yeah, lucky for this old girl, too. Most people would’ve turned her to firewood in a flash. Lucky twist for her, finding you. She’s not in bad condition, considering.” He closes the top lid, the soft thunk reverberating through the hidden strings, and flips up the fallboard to reveal the keys. The first awakening notes ease into the room as he tests the sound with a row of scales. The woman closes her eyes, watching the snaking, dancing vines that are no longer there.
*
The boat that was a piano swirls in the current until it butts gently against the riverbank. Overhead, vines hang low, swooping velvet-green tendrils into the water: stirring, rippling. Beyond the edges of the river, the forest darkens and sighs. The pianist hunkers over the keyboard, the sound a jaunty eight-beat rhythm played with the dexterity and delicacy of a spider spinning a web.
*
Summer peaks with a scorching August, which mellows to an orange-hued autumn, which darkens towards short winter days. The couple settle into the house, call it home. The garden, long-neglected, emerges steadily over long evenings of hoeing and pruning and hacking. They’ve laid a patio of reclaimed flagstones to wrap around the piano room, along the back of the kitchen. The sandy slabs remind them of sunshine and holidays and the Mediterranean. They found a darling little wrought iron dining set to place beyond the new French windows, perfectly situated to catch the afternoon sun.
Inside, the piano is tucked further back into the room than when they had found it, and their old pine dining table sits centre stage, encircled by six matching wheel-back chairs and one mis-matched dark-wood Captain’s chair. The woman drags her work here in the evenings, spreads her laptop, papers, piles of files, across the worn table top and lets the late evening sun warm her back as she pores over deadlines. Piano lessons remain something to do when the other work is done, when the house just-so, perhaps in winter when they haven’t daylight enough to work in the garden.
Winter passes, damp and dull. The house breathes around them as they fill their evenings with decorating each room. Wallpapering—bluebirds for their bedroom, floral for the living room, regency stripes in the hallways—and choosing accent colours from oddly-named paint-chart swatches for skirting boards and window frames. They spend hours debating fabrics before settling on a cheery yellow for the room that will become the nursery. The new ginger kitten takes to sleeping on the red velvet piano stool, soaking in the gentle thrum of the room’s silence. The dining room/conservatory becomes less used in favour of hurried snacks grabbed in the kitchen. The husband takes on a new job: temporary, better paid to accommodate growing costs of expecting a family, but an hour further away. The woman swells and tires, swells and tires.
She’ll learn piano when the sickness passes.
She’ll learn piano when the baby’s here.
She’ll learn piano when he’s old enough to give her time to herself again.
*
The boat stills in a swollen side pool, away from the rushing rapids. The pianist slows his tune. Flowers in the forest bloom and die, bloom and die.
*
The child grows. His brother arrives. The orange cat lies on the red velvet, basking in the golden sun rays, in a room the children are barred from. The garden blooms and fades, blooms and fades.
The woman shoves aside a cluster of toys abandoned in the hallway, pushes the conservatory door with her foot. She sets a mug of tea on the table, drops an armload of paperwork beside it. She reclaims the tea, steps to the French doors, sighs, sips, smiles, sips, savouring the silence. The doorbell rings. She drains the mug and sets it down.
The piano teacher pulls the Captain’s chair alongside the red velvet-covered stool. Her student lifts the fallboard, strokes a tiny cobweb from the corner of the keys with her forefinger, casts a low, guilty sound between a giggle and an apology towards the piano and wipes the cobweb on the leg of her jeans. She caresses the black and white stripes, turns to the teacher and grins.
“Ready?” the older woman asks.
“I’ve been ready since we lived here,” the younger woman smiles, “but fate had other plans. Time wasn’t ready for me.”
The teacher shows her how to place her hands, how to locate middle C, how to move her fingers, one at a time, then together, over and over, over and over. The woman shivers as the first strains of music run through her.
“You’re a natural,” the teacher encourages, “Are you sure you’ve never done this before?”
“You think so?” The woman glances up in surprise, her fingers still moving, the music coming from some instinctive place deep within her.
*
In another place, an old piano is consumed by cobwebs, hung with curtains of vines. Spiders weave webs amongst the strings, lizards dart across the lid. The wood is damp, the veneer peeling. A stool lies broken-legged, on its side at the foot of the piano, the red velvet shredded and lost.
The pianist is gone.
*
Music permeates the room, joyful and pure. The woman’s hands pick out notes with a surety she didn’t expect on her first lesson. The teacher creeps unnoticed from the pianist’s home, her work done.
