Upright Piano Player (9 page)

“I know that.”

She felt herself leaning to the side, mirroring his movements as some people unconsciously adopt a companion’s accent.

“It’s not the mechanics that are the problem; my unease is more fundamental. You see, I’ve discovered I don’t care how many lightbulbs the average householder buys each month and I’m sure I’d be the same with pension policies or water softeners. They’re not things I want to worry about; I don’t want them filling the space in my head. I don’t want my highs and lows to be dependent on a Monday morning printout from a supermarket.”

She smiled at him. “I didn’t know that before I started, but I do now. I’m sorry.”

He had given her the check and told her that he wanted her to clear her desk that afternoon. He said it was company policy. But he had been nice and wished her luck.

“What will you do now?”

“Get a job, I don’t know, wait table, see what happens.”

She lived in a rented flat in north London in a street where every Edwardian house had been converted. The developers had found a way of turning wine into water, transforming large, elegant rooms into minuscule flats. What was once an impressive drawing room or master bedroom became a living area with kitchenette, bedroom, and a shower/loo. That the bedroom lacked a window, that the dividing walls were so flimsy you could hear ice cubes tumble into a glass in the next room, none of that seemed to matter. The flats were sold or rented as soon as they became available. The road could no longer cope with the influx of more cars and residents. The bin men came twice a week, but there were always people who missed the collection and put their rubbish out late. Maude’s street had become an all-night diner for stray dogs and urban foxes. The postmen had learned to deliver eyes-down, watchful for dog shit and plastic bags leaking trash. Double parking had become endemic and the hooting of trapped motorists a familiar refrain.

Maude had an attic conversion and counted herself lucky. There was a small sitting room with a galley kitchen, a bathroom, and best of all, a bedroom in the roof with a large skylight. She had placed a mattress on the floor directly under the skylight and on cloudless nights she lay there bathed in moonlight.

She had painted the walls and ceiling to resemble a
woodland bower, treating the trees in the manner of Mary Adshead, a noted muralist in the 1930s. Maude’s degree in art history had refined her eye, but not her hand and her rag-rolled foliage had turned out more brassica than arboreal.

The only man who had stayed the night had laughed out loud on waking.

“I hope you didn’t pay for that rag-rolling,” he had said looking up.

“I did it myself.”

“Look, I’ll show you. Keep the movements tight and disciplined, see. Remember, always keep your circles small.”

He was naked, bouncing unattractively on the mattress, using his scrunched up socks to demonstrate the correct technique. Maude had decided to follow his advice and ten minutes later had made her circle smaller by a factor of one.

It was Roy Greening who spotted Henry’s letter in the
Times
. He read it with disbelief and ran chortling into the next office.

“Look at this, Henry has finally flipped.”

Charles England looked up from his desk. “Read it to me. You look as though you’d enjoy a rerun.”

“You’ll enjoy it, too. Listen.”

“I rather think he’s got a point,” Charles said.

“Yes, but this is Henry Cage, ex–corporate guru—what’s he doing prattling on about the weather? It’s so … it’s so lightweight, don’t you think?”

Charles continued to be tolerant.

“He’s bored probably—and unhappy, too, I would guess. Have you seen him since he left?”

“Afraid not—miserable people make me miserable, too, so I avoid them.”

“Maybe we should arrange a lunch?”

“He’d tell us to fuck off. Why should he forgive us? We took away his company.”

Henry’s removal from the business had been handled with firmness, if not with finesse. His partners had secured the votes of the two non-executive directors and had the support of the bank and key clients. It was suggested to Henry that he had lost his appetite for commerce and that some of his recent pronouncements at conferences and in the press (not to mention the annual reports) had been eccentrically antibusiness and, frankly, unhelpful.

Charles had even tried to be philosophical.

“You, we, started this company because you believed there was a better way of doing business. And no one can say you didn’t practice what you preached. Most of the people in this building are sitting on comfortable nest eggs, solely because the partners distributed the equity so widely in the early days, though I admit there were some of us who, if allowed, would have kept more for ourselves.” His attempt at humor was greeted with silence—his self-deprecation too obviously emollient.

“But times have changed. If I may say so, Henry, the kind of sixties liberalism that you believe in now feels antique. Legislation has made liberals of us all—minimum wage, equal pay, maternity, even paternity leave, the stake-holding society. The war is won Henry, and yet you go on as though we were still at the barricades.”

At this point Charles had abandoned any attempt at graciousness. “This has become tiresome, to me personally—and counterproductive to the company commercially. For example, why shouldn’t this company work for British American Tobacco? If we can help them diversify, make them less dependent on tobacco income, isn’t that a good thing, not only for our shareholders but also for society?”

Henry had stopped listening. They were now on charted territory, the subject of countless board meetings. He knew that Charles would repeat the litany of business opportunities that he, Henry, had forced the company to forgo. It was true; in the short term, his righteousness had sometimes hurt the bottom line, but he had always been willing to play the long game. They, it seemed, were not.

They had offered him a more than generous severance package, contingent on his going peaceably. He was at an age when he could retire without suspicion, they said. God knows, he had earned a few years in the sun. The minutes of the meeting would record only his decision to retire—irregular no doubt, but in a situation like this, the least his friends could do.

Henry had responded with a calm he did not feel.

“I accept, naturally, your invitation to leave. I regret that I no longer hold enough equity to influence that decision, but perhaps, even if I did, I would choose not to. You are right: I no longer belong here. I have never been more certain of it.” He had paused and looked round the table. Only Charles met his eye.

“When the time comes, you can be assured that I will play my part in any sentimental leaving ceremonies you wish to organize.”

He had stood up and left the room, his board file left open on the table. The silence was eventually broken by Roy Greening. “Well, he didn’t seem to take it too badly.”

Downstairs in the fifth floor loo Henry was vomiting into a toilet bowl.

In fact, Roy had been wrong about Henry’s letter. It had sparked off an exchange of views that had enlivened the letters page of the
Times
for three weeks. Nor had Henry been without support, the letters running 60/40 in his favor.

The BBC had defended the bulletins. The time allotted to
each region, they wrote, was dictated solely by the complexity of the weather conditions in that particular region on that particular day or hour. They did not monitor the amount of airtime allocated to each region, but they expected that if they did so, over the year, there would not be wide variances. They estimated that the extra staff hours involved in such a procedure would cost £20,000 a year, and asked was this really how Mr. Cage wanted them to spend the license money?

A stuffy response, Henry had thought and had said so when invited to debate the matter on
Newsnight
. He had been up against two defenders of the forecasts: a Scottish Nationalist MP who had thought the letter racist and a geek from the weather bureau who had trotted out the official BBC line. They had both been achingly serious. Henry had been rather flippant and he had left the studio in high spirits, pleased to be back in the limelight.

The euphoria lasted for two days. Friends had been on the phone congratulating him on his performance, even Mrs. Abraham had been impressed to see him on the telly again. “Like old times, Mr. Cage, and nice to see you spouting on about something that wasn’t just business, if you know what I mean.”

On the evening of the third day, as he was watching television with a supper tray on his lap, a brick was thrown through his drawing room window. He cried out as the brick skidded across a table sending the framed photographs crashing to the floor. There was glass everywhere. His strangled cry became a bout of coughing, so it was a minute or so before he got to the door. Across the road, old Mr. Pendry was out on his driveway.

“I heard the crash, saw a van driving away—sorry, didn’t get the number, though—not with my old eyes. Play it pretty rough those weather boys.” He closed his door, chuckling.

The police were sympathetic and gave Henry the number of someone who would board up his window. They were honest enough to admit that the chances of identifying the culprit were zero, unless he or she did it again and got careless. They promised to make sure a police car patroled the street for the next few evenings. “Chances are it was a random piece of hooliganism. It could just as easily have been the house next door.”

It was not, however, the house next door that had dog turds posted through the letter box that weekend and it was not next door’s front garden that was doused with industrial bleach the following Tuesday night. The police conceded that the vandalism was targeted and extended the evening patrols, but short of mounting a twenty-four-hour guard outside Henry’s house (not possible with their reduced resources) there was little else they could do. It was suggested that Henry might like to hire a private security firm—the implication being that he could afford it.

“Saw you on the box the other night, sir. Nice suit.”

So far, life had never given Henry the chance to find out if he was brave. He had been a child during World War Two and had kept his satchel on long enough to escape National Service and the skirmishes of the fifties. At school he had avoided violence, was always adept at talking his way out of trouble. He
was nervous of heights, but that did not necessarily make him a coward, though he suspected that he might be. When the runaway horse threatens to flatten the child, would he spring forward and scoop the infant up in his arms, or would he be transfixed, too petrified to act? Why does one man’s adrenaline go to his legs and another’s to his fists? Faced with danger, would he be a runner or a fighter?