The brass catch on the piano lid had stuck, the way it had every winter since Nora was ten, and she had her thumb wedged under the lip of the walnut to lever it up. She needed the serial number off the iron frame before four o'clock. If the photographs reached the auction house by four, the valuer would put the upright on Friday's van, the removal men would clear the rest by Saturday noon, and she could be on the half-four train to King's Cross with her headphones on before the March light went out of the sky.
The catch gave with a dry click. A puff of dust rose into the pale strip of sun from the tall windows, smelling of mothballs, beeswax and the lemon-verbena hand cream her grandmother bought in fat aluminium tubes from a chemist in Lisbon.
Behind her, the radiator under the window gave three sharp clanks, as if someone in the cellar were hitting the pipes with a spanner, then settled into its hiss. Four storeys down, the trees along the Meadows were black with rain.
Nora switched on her phone's torch and leaned over the open top to find the number stamped into the gilt iron. The beam missed the plate and caught the bare spruce of the wrest plank instead, just above the rows of tuning pins.
Someone had been writing on the wood.
Not a maker's mark. Two neat columns of pencil ran rightward from the middle of the keyboard towards the treble, each line dated in small, square numerals.
14.III.15. A437, pulled to 439.5. Damp in the floorboards. Left the radiator valve on three.
Beneath it, in the same upright hand:
18.IX.15. A440 holds. Third G damper felts moth-bitten, replaced two. She gave me quince paste on cheddar. Shouldn't work. Does.
Nora unlatched the whole upper front board, lifted it clear by its brass handles and leaned it against the floral armchair. Then she pushed the stool aside and sat cross-legged on the rug, level with the hammers.
Up close, the inside of the upright looked like the ribs of an old boat. The cream felt of the hammers was grooved from decades of striking steel, and the baize at the top had faded to the colour of weak tea. Above the pins, the pencil went down the wood for eleven years, two entries a year, March and September, regular as the equinox.
11.III.16. A439.8. Sticky jack on the E above middle C, eased with chalk. She played the Chopin waltz in A minor before I'd packed the bag. Missed every F-sharp in the middle section. Played it too fast. Happy, she says.
Nora knew that waltz. Inês had learned it at fifteen in Coimbra from a nun with a ruler and spent the next sixty-nine years taking it at the pace of a runaway butcher's cart whenever she had good news: a letter from home, a win on the horses.
22.IX.16. A440 holds. Soundboard swelling with the rain. She asked if I knew a girl called Nora. Said her granddaughter has a fourth finger that could lift a latch by itself.
The radiator ticked three times.
In September of sixteen Nora had been twenty-three, living in a box room in Camberwell, practising seven hours a day and screening her grandmother's calls, because Inês always asked when she was coming north and Nora never had the train fare or two spare days away from the practice rooms.
16.III.17. A440. B-flat bridle tape snapped, spliced a new one. She says N. is in the final of the Kingsley International in the autumn. Made me drink white port at eleven in the morning to toast it. Good port.
28.IX.17. A440 holds. N. plays in Leeds next month. She can't sit still. Played the waltz twice, both too fast.
15.III.18. A439.5, pulled to 440. Quiet today. No waltz. She says N. has gone into radio. Says the BBC is lucky to get her ears. Kept the green programme on the music desk.
Nora's throat closed so hard it hurt her jaw.
There had been no green programme on the music desk when she let herself in on Tuesday with the solicitor's keys. She hadn't opened the bench: it was full of Czerny books with broken spines and Portuguese songbooks with purple swallows on the covers. She didn't get up to look now. She moved the torch down an inch at a time.
20.IX.18. A440 holds. She asked if a piano minds not being played properly. Told her it minds not being played.
12.III.19. A440 holds. She says N. mixed a play on Radio 4 last night. Made me sit and listen to a cassette she'd taped off the wireless. Mostly seagulls and a man shouting on a pier. Very clean seagulls.
A laugh came out of Nora's nose, wet and ugly, and she wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. Four days in a basement layering herring gulls over shingle because the director said the silence sounded too studio. She hadn't known Inês even knew which station it was on. When Nora rang that Sunday to do her dutiful ten minutes, Inês had complained about the council changing the bin days and asked if she was eating greens.
19.IX.19. A439.7. Set the top D pin deeper. She says N. plays better than anyone she's heard. She says it like a dare.
The second column began an inch to the right, where the grain curved round a small, tight knot.
14.III.22. A440 holds. Her left wrist is stiff in the wet. Eased the key dip in the bass so the octaves cost her less. Didn't tell her. She'd have argued.
15.IX.23. A439.9. Three hours, because we talked about figs. The ones in Scotland taste of wet flannel, she says.
19.IX.25. A440 holds. She didn't play today. Made me play the waltz while she sat by the window. Told me I play it like a Presbyterian.
Below that, a gap of half an inch. The last line was darker than the rest, the graphite fresh enough to catch the torchlight with a dull silver sheen.
22.I.26. Tuned it anyway. Mrs MacLeod downstairs let me in. She asked me from the hospice to keep it ready for N. A440 holds.
Six weeks ago.
Inês had gone into the hospice on the nineteenth of January. Nora came up on the sleeper, sat by the high white bed while her grandmother slept with her small spotted hands outside the covers, and went back to London on the Sunday because Inês had woken, looked at Nora's grey face, and told her she had no plans to die before spring and couldn't abide being stared at like a joint of beef in an oven.
She hadn't mentioned the tuner. She'd rung him from her bed while Nora was buying a sandwich in the cafeteria, or standing on the platform at Waverley, and paid him to climb four flights of stone stairs and tune a piano in an empty flat for a granddaughter who hadn't touched a key since October 2017.
Nora stood up so fast she cracked her shin on the stool.
She dragged the music out of the bench in two armfuls and dumped it on the rug. At the bottom, flat on the bare mahogany, lay a stiff green booklet with gold lettering: The Kingsley International Piano Competition. Final. Leeds Town Hall. Inside the cover, tucked under the staple, was a newspaper cutting of the finalists' names. Nora Feld (24, Edinburgh/London), underlined twice in red.
Beside it was a brown envelope of carbon receipts held with a brass clip. The top one was dated 22 January 2026. E. Marr, Piano Tuner & Technician. Fine tuning, upright. £75. Paid with thanks. Underneath, in the hand from the wood: Next visit Thursday 5 March, 10 a.m. Prepaid, per Mrs Feld.
Tomorrow was Thursday the fifth.
It was ten past four. She had missed the auction house anyway. She dialled the mobile number on the slip and walked to the window while it rang. Across the street a boy in a yellow waterproof was walking a wet lurcher between the bare elms.
Six rings, then a recorded voice, low and unhurried. "You've reached Elias Marr. I'm likely elbows-deep in a piano and can't hear the phone. Leave a message and I'll get back to you."
The beep.
Nora opened her mouth to say: Don't come. She died on Monday. The piano's going to auction.
Across the room the upright stood with its front off, the row of pale hammers lined up in the grey light, the two dark columns above the pins. She asked me from the hospice to keep it ready for N.
She ended the call without a word and put the phone face down on the radiator cover.
* * *
At two minutes to ten the next morning the entry buzzer went. Not a polite dab: a firm two-second press from someone who knew the bell in the hall only rang if you leaned on it.
Nora, who had been rinsing an already clean mug since twenty to ten, pressed the release and opened the flat door onto the top landing.
The stairwell had a cupola four floors up that let down a cold, greenish light, and sound carried up the stone like a church nave. Boots on the first turn, steady. The clink of tools in a leather bag. By the third floor, breathing, deep and even: someone used to carrying weight up Edinburgh tenements.
He came round the last bend with his head down, watching the worn stone. Tall, broad in a dark wool coat damp at the cuffs, dark hair going silver at the temples, an old Gladstone bag in his left hand. Halfway up the final flight he looked up, expecting a woman of eighty-four with a filigree brooch at her throat.
He stopped two steps from the top. His eyes were grey-green and very clear in the skylight, and as he took in Nora's black jumper and the way she was holding the door, he tilted his head slightly to the right, as if her silence were a note he needed to catch more cleanly.
"You're Nora," he said.
"Mr Marr?"
"Elias." He climbed onto the mat but made no move towards the door. "Is she back from the..." He looked past her into the hall, at the empty brass hook where Inês's sheepskin coat should have been, at the flattened boxes against the skirting board.
The colour went out of his face slowly.
"When?" he asked.
"Monday evening. About six."
He didn't say he was sorry for her loss, or any of the smooth, worn things the women from the parish had said on the doorstep. He set the bag down by the umbrella stand and sat on the top step of the stairs, elbows on his knees, looking down the stairwell between the iron balusters.
In the flat behind her, the clock she'd forgotten to wind stood silent.
"Did she have to wait long?" he asked the stairwell. "At the end."
"No." Her voice came out thin, and she cleared her throat, an engineer's habit, checking the level. "She went to sleep on Sunday afternoon after the priest came and didn't wake up. The nurses said it was easy."
He nodded once. "In January, when I went in to see her, she had me smuggle in two salt cod fritters from the Portuguese place. Greaseproof paper in my coat pocket. The whole room smelled of frying for an hour. Matron came in looking for a chip pan."
"She hated hospital food," Nora said. "When she broke her hip she made me bring cold roast pork in a hollowed-out loaf so the ward sister wouldn't see."
The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, just the muscle remembering how.
"I rang you yesterday," Nora said. "To save you the walk. I hung up on your machine."
"I saw. London number. I wondered." He stood, slapped the grit off the back of his coat and picked up the bag. "I'll get out of your road. I'll put the seventy-five pounds through the letterbox."
"Don't be daft. You've hauled that up four flights, and the front's already off it." She stepped back onto the hall runner. "You might as well, since it's paid for."
He studied her face for a moment, measuring whether she meant it or was just too tired to argue. Whatever he saw satisfied him. He bent to unlace his wet boots on the mat before she could tell him not to bother.
In the sitting room he stopped. His eyes went from the emptied bench to the bare spruce of the wrest plank, then to Nora, standing by the sideboard with her arms folded.
A slow flush climbed out of his collar.
"You had a torch," he said.
"I was looking for the serial number. You have very neat handwriting, Mr Marr."
"Elias." He was still looking at the plank as if he'd like to plane a millimetre off it. "They're bench notes. You write the pitch and what you've replaced, so the next man who opens the box in twenty years knows whether the pin block's holding."
"And the quince paste?"
He set the bag down and unbuckled it. "The next man might be hungry."
"And the bits about me?"
He straightened with a long tuning lever in one hand and a strip of red felt in the other, and didn't look away from her, even with the colour still high in his face.
"You were what she talked about," he said. "Every March and every September. The first years, what you were playing at the college. After the autumn of seventeen, what you were doing in London with the microphones. After half an hour with your grandmother it all went in the same place in my head as the humidity and whether the radiator needed bleeding."
He turned to the piano and tucked the felt between the strings of the middle octave with quick fingers, muting each note down to its centre string.
"Are you selling it?" he asked, with his back to her.
"The flat goes on the market in April. Mine in Camberwell has a turn at the foot of the stairs. You'd never get an upright round it."
"You can take the keyboard out of a Knight in twenty minutes," he said mildly. "Four bolts under the keybed."
He struck the A above middle C, touched a tuning fork to his knee and pressed its base to the bone behind his right ear, eyes half shut.
Ping. One muted string, thin and lonely without its companions. His hand moved on the lever by a fraction of a millimetre, not turning so much as leaning his weight into the pin to settle it in the wood.
"She told you about Leeds," Nora said.
"She told me you went." He freed the next string. "And that you decided you preferred the other side of the glass."
Nora let out a short breath. "Is that what she called it?"
He struck the A again. Two strings now, slightly out of true, and the sound pulsed in the room, wah, wah, wah, two frequencies arguing in the air. He leaned on the lever. The pulse slowed, stretched, and vanished into one flat, steady line of sound that hung under the high ceiling without a tremor.
"She didn't say much else about it," he said. "Once, five years back, on a day like this, she said people who don't play think music is something you do with your hands, when really it's mostly nerve. Like walking along the top of a dyke in a gale. Look down at your boots once and you're in the nettles."
Nora crossed the rug and sat on the arm of the floral chair, three feet from his elbow. His coat smelled of wet wool and the cedar shavings he kept in the bottom of his bag.
"I didn't look at my boots," she said. "It was the fourth ballade. F minor. I'd played it six times that month without dropping a note. Then I got to the quiet chords before the coda, the ones that sound like an organ in an empty church, and my hands came off the keys for the rest, and I couldn't remember the first note of the right hand. Not the fingering. Not the pitch. Not which end of the keyboard it lived on. Just white noise."
He didn't strike the key while she spoke. He kept his hand on the lever, waiting.
"Twelve hundred people in the Town Hall, and microphones hanging from the ceiling for the broadcast." She looked at her thumbs. "I sat there for eleven seconds. I know it was eleven, because six months later, on my first traineeship, I went down to the archive at midnight, pulled the master and timed it. Eleven seconds of twelve hundred people coughing in Yorkshire. Then the stool creaking. Then my heels, twenty-two steps across the stage to the door."
She stopped. She had never told anyone about the archive tape. Not the boyfriend in Clapham who thought it was romantic that she used to be a concert pianist, until he noticed she left the room whenever a concerto came on the television. Not her mother. Certainly not Inês.
Elias pulled the wedge out and struck the A three times, hard, testing whether the pin would slip under the blow. The note held, perfectly still.
"Did they wipe the tape?" he asked.
"The BBC keeps everything."
"Good," he said, moving to the B above. "Be a shame to lose most of a Chopin ballade just because the ending was quiet."
She looked up sharply, expecting him to be pleased with himself, or to be offering the warm, terrible sympathy people gave you when they'd decided you were a tragedy. He wasn't looking at her at all. He was listening to a fifth beating between two notes, eyes on the window sash, a smudge of graphite on the side of his middle finger.
"Hold this down for me a second, would you?" He nodded at the keyboard. "The F below middle C. The damper's catching, and I need both hands to bend the wire back."
Nora stood.
The keys weren't plastic. They were old ivory, yellowed at the front where the summer sun from the Meadows reached them, and cool as cellar flagstones.
She put her right index finger on the F.
The key went down with its familiar heavy two-stage dip: the first half-inch taking up the slack, the last eighth lifting the damper off the thick copper-wound strings.
Bong. The note came up through the pad of her finger into the small bones of her wrist.
Elias leaned in until his forehead was six inches from the wood, reaching into the dark behind the hammers with a long cranked wire. His shoulder brushed her arm. He was warm and solid as a doorframe.
"Again," he said quietly. "Let it up slow, then down."
She let it rise. The damper fell back against the strings with a soft thrum that cut the sound clean off. She pressed again.
"Once more."
She pressed harder, the way you'd play an F at the bottom of a chord that had to reach the back of the gallery. The soundboard answered with a deep, woody hum she felt through the soles of her feet.
"There." He drew the wire out but didn't step back straight away. He was looking at her hand, still resting on the keys, three fingers curved naturally over G, A and B-flat: the wide, flat span her grandmother had bragged about on the wood ten years ago.
Nora lifted her finger off the ivory as if it had grown hot and pushed both hands into her cardigan pockets.
"She told me you were deaf in one ear," she said, because the silence after the F was too big for the room. "When I was twenty-two. She said she had a new tuner who was only twenty-five and listened like a thrush on a lawn."
His mouth twitched into a real smile, small and crooked, two creases beside his right eye and only one beside his left.
"Measles when I was seven," he said, going back to the lever. "Left side's got nothing much above four hundred hertz. Useful on the bus. Less useful in the pub if someone sits on my wrong side."
"How do you tune the bass, then?"
"You don't tune the bass by the bottom note on a short upright anyway. The strings are too stiff. You listen to the partials beating up round middle C." He glanced down at her boots on the rug. "And you feel the rest through your feet. Same as you were doing a minute ago."
She looked away, towards the window. The rain had started again, small drops running together into crooked tracks.
"Did she really miss every F-sharp?"
"Every one. Her thumb always landed on the G because her knuckle wouldn't bend far enough under. Made the middle section sound like a sea shanty. I offered to pencil in the naturals so it would at least match, and she threatened me with a fish slice."
"The brass one with the slots?"
"That's the one. Said if Monsieur Chopin wanted all the notes in the right order, he shouldn't have died before she was born to argue with him."
He played a chord in the middle of the keyboard, spreading it upward to check the octaves.
It didn't sound like the concert grand in the Town Hall, or the immaculate studio piano at Broadcasting House. The top was a little woody, like small dry apples dropping onto grass, and the bass had the warm, slightly woollen tubbiness of an upright built in the fifties. It sounded like every Christmas morning of Nora's childhood, like toast eaten on this rug while the drizzle came off the Forth, like an eighty-four-year-old woman banging out three-four time with a heavy left foot while the tea went cold under its cosy.
He worked another twenty minutes on the treble and the low notes, and they didn't talk. The room filled with the patient rhythm of it, strike, strike, lean, strike, hold, until every wavering beat had been ironed into clean unison. When he was done he wiped his marks off the pins and the fronts of the keys with a chamois, though he left the spruce alone. He didn't put the front board back.
"I'll leave that off," he said, buckling his bag. "In case the auction man still needs the frame number."
She walked him out. He sat on the top step to lace his boots, dark head bent under the green light. When he stood he was four inches taller than her.
"Thank you," she said. "For going to the hospice. I didn't know she'd asked you."
He looked at her for a moment, at the hollows under her eyes and her hands still curled in her pockets as if she were keeping them out of a draught.
"She was very fond of you, Nora," he said. "Not the way old women are fond of a photograph on the mantelpiece. She liked the way your head worked. Even the years you didn't come up."
He didn't offer his hand, which she was grateful for, because if he'd touched her she might have made an idiot of herself on the stairhead. He nodded, lifted the bag and went down into the well of the tenement, his boots steady on the turns until the street door closed four floors below with a hollow thud.
* * *
She spent the afternoon packing the kitchen into tea chests: the blue-and-white soup plates in newspaper, the brass fish slice in a pair of oven gloves. At six she ate toast standing at the sink with the shipping forecast on the little radio by the bread bin. Rain or showers. Good, occasionally moderate.
At nine, when the street had gone quiet but for tyres hissing on Melville Drive, she went in to turn off the lamp and put the front board back, so she wouldn't have to look at the hammers in the morning.
As she bent to check the dowels, she saw the pencil: a flat red carpenter's pencil, shaved to a chisel point, lying across the keyblock beside the low A.
She looked up at the bottom of the second column.
Beneath 22.I.26, in the last half-inch of pale wood before the frame, there was a new line. He must have written it while she was in the kitchen with the kettle.
5.III.26. A440. Tuned for N. The rest is up to you.
Nora stood very still. The radiator gave its three iron clanks and settled.
Half under the fringe of the armchair, where she'd dumped the music that morning, lay a thin grey booklet of Chopin waltzes, its spine held together with yellowed tape gone brittle as onion skin. She set it on the rail above the keys. She didn't fetch the stool; she sat on the edge of the open bench with the hinge digging into the backs of her thighs and took her hands out of her pockets.
They looked older than the last time she'd seen them over a keyboard. A small white scar across her left thumb knuckle from a splicing blade in her first year at the BBC. Nails short and square. None of the hard pads she used to keep from four hours of scales before breakfast.
She put her left little finger on the low A and her right thumb on the E above middle C.
For four seconds nothing happened. The white silence from the Town Hall was still there, right behind her shoulder blades, waiting to see if she'd look down at her boots.
Then she looked up past the music at the bare spruce, at Played it too fast. Happy, she says, and dropped her left hand into the opening chord.
It was terrible.
Her fourth finger was weak on the grace note in the second bar and smudged the turn, and her left hand jumped too far on the first stride and caught a G-sharp alongside the A, a sour clang that rang off the cornices.
Nora flinched, shoulders up round her ears, hands frozen half an inch above the keys.
Nobody coughed. No microphones hung from the ceiling. There was only the hiss of the radiator and the smell of lemon-verbena rising off the warm ivory.
She put her hands back down at bar three and kept going.
In the middle section, where the right hand climbs, her thumb went straight onto the G instead of the F-sharp, exactly where Inês's stiff knuckle had always put it.
A small, fierce sound came out of Nora's throat, half sob and half laugh. She didn't go back to correct it. She hit the next bar harder, leaning her weight into the keys the way Elias had leaned into the lever, feeling the old soundboard wake and push back against her socks.
At the bottom of the second page she didn't stop. She went back to the double bar and played it again, finding the F-sharp now as the old muscle came up through the rust, her left hand swinging between bass and chords like a pendulum finding its plumb line.
Then she played it a third time, faster than Chopin marked it, faster than any examiner would have allowed, taking the little chromatic run near the end at a rattle that set the brass handles on the case buzzing, until she landed on the last A-minor chord and held the pedal down until the final overtone died into the wood.
Her heart was knocking against her ribs. Her palms were damp on the keys.
She reached over and picked up the red pencil, turning it between her fingers.
* * *
At quarter past nine on Friday, Nora rang the auction house and told the girl on the desk to take the piano off the afternoon van. They could still have the dining table, the four chairs and the wardrobe, if the driver didn't mind three pieces instead of four.
At twenty past, she dialled the number on the receipt.
He answered on the second ring, over a diesel engine idling at lights. "Elias Marr."
"It's Nora Feld. Warrender Park Terrace."
A pause. The engine noise dropped to the quieter hum of a side street; an indicator ticked; tyres crunched against a kerb.
"Is everything all right?"
"I think the A has slipped," she said.
Silence from the van. Five seconds of it, clean and unhurried, a gull crying somewhere near the canal.
"The middle A?" His voice was entirely level.
"Yes." Across the room, the A sat in its row of yellowed ivory, as solid at four-forty as the Castle Rock. "I played it last night after you left, and I think the pin's dropped a fraction. I'd want it right before I go back on Sunday. If you were passing this side of the Meadows."
Two more seconds. She could almost see his head tilt inside the cab, listening to the space behind her words.
"I've a grand at a school in Morningside until half three," he said. "I can come down the hill at four."
"Four's fine. I've still got the kettle out of the boxes."
By four the rain had stopped, and the sky over the Meadows was the pale colour of an oyster shell, with a thin line of yellow low over the Pentlands.
When the buzzer went, one long press, she didn't make him wait. She had the door open while he was still on the third-floor turn, and when he came up the last flight she was leaning on the frame with her sleeves pushed to the elbow.
He had the Gladstone bag. When he'd taken off his boots, he left it by the umbrella stand.
Nora looked at the bag on the mat, then at him. "You don't need the lever?"
"The pin hasn't slipped, Nora," he said mildly. "That's a 1956 Alfred Knight. You could drop it out the window onto the pavement and the A would still be sitting at four-forty when the dust cleared."
"Then why did you drive down from Morningside at four on a Friday?"
He went into the sitting room and stopped by the armchair, looking at the waltzes open on the rail, the brittle tape shining in the low light.
"Because you played it last night," he said. "And nobody sits in an empty flat playing an A-minor waltz to the wallpaper, with a train ticket for Sunday, unless they want somebody in the room to hear whether the walls are still standing."
He sat in the floral armchair and rested his big hands on its worn arms.
"Go on, then," he said quietly. "Let's hear if the A's flat."
Nora's mouth went dry.
She sat down on the bench.
Her hands were shaking before she lifted them, a fine, quick tremor in the tendons at the backs of her wrists that she remembered from the green room in Leeds, when a stage manager in a dinner jacket had knocked and said, Miss Feld, five minutes.
She glanced at Elias. He wasn't watching her hands. He had leaned his head back against the chair and turned his face towards the window, giving her his good ear, looking out at the bare elms against the pale sky: exactly the way he'd listened to the beat between two strings settle.
Nora put her fingers on the keys and began.
The tremor made the first bars uneven, the melody wobbling over the three-four of the bass like someone stepping onto a plank over running water. At bar eight her breath caught high in her chest, her fourth finger hesitated before the turn, and the old white blankness rose behind her eyes, cold and familiar, telling her to take her hands off and close the lid before she embarrassed them both.
Elias didn't move. He didn't nod in time or smile encouragingly. He sat in the window light and listened as if the sound coming out of the old upright were weather on the other side of the glass, something he had no wish to change or judge, only to hear clearly while it lasted.
Nora played through the turn.
She grazed the A beside the G-sharp on the landing note and went straight into the next phrase without breaking stride.
By the middle section the shaking had left her wrists and moved into her chest, where it felt less like fear and more like the floor under her feet when she'd held down the F for him. She hit every F-sharp clean, her thumb tucking smoothly under, though on the repeat she clipped the last one onto the G, just once, the way Inês always had, like tipping your hat to someone at the corner of the street.
Across the room, the corner of his mouth moved.
She took the last sixteen bars fast, not runaway, not careless, just with the bright lift on every third beat that makes a waltz a dance instead of an exercise, and brought both hands down on the final chord and held it into the felt until the soundboard stopped humming against her knees.
She left her hands where they were.
For a long while Elias said nothing. Down in the street a car door shut, and a blackbird started up in a rowan in the back green, the clear, liquid phrase they only sing in the last half-hour before dusk in early spring.
He stood and came the three steps to the piano, resting his hand on the walnut cheek of the case where the grain curved down towards the keys.
"She didn't exaggerate," he said.
Nora looked up at him. Her throat was tight again, but it didn't hurt this time. "I missed the G-sharp in bar nine. And my left hand was heavy on the third beat all through the first page."
"I heard," he said. "It's still the best noise I've heard in this building in eleven years."
Nora stood.
The bench was close to the case, so standing brought her within four inches of his jumper, inside the small quiet space between the open piano and the arm of the chair. The silver at his temple curled from the damp. There was still graphite in the crease of his knuckle.
She touched the side of his wrist, just above the cuff, where the tendon ran down to his thumb. His skin was warm, rough at the edge of the palm from years on the handle of a lever.
He looked down at her hand, then at her face.
He didn't hurry. He set his palm along her jaw, thumb resting below her cheekbone, and waited a moment, long enough that if she'd wanted to step back towards the window or make a dry remark about the kettle, she had all the room in the world.
Nora didn't step back. She leaned her forehead against his collarbone for a breath, wet wool and cedar, then tipped her chin up.
He bent his head and kissed her.
His mouth was warm and unhurried and tasted faintly of the strong tea he drank from a flask in the van, and his hand at her jaw stayed steady without gripping, the same exact, quiet weight he used to coax a pin into the wood so it would hold its pitch through a winter. Her fingers found the rib of his jumper and curled into it. When he shifted, his hip brushed the bench and her sleeve pressed a key in the bass halfway down, not enough to strike, just enough to lift the damper, and the strings hummed faintly with nothing but their breath.
When they parted he didn't take his hand away at once. He brushed his thumb across the corner of her mouth, that crooked crease beside his right eye.
"When's your train on Sunday?"
"Half four," Nora said. "Though I've two weeks' leave owing from Christmas. And the solicitor says probate won't clear before Easter."
"The damp's bad in these top flats if you leave them empty in March," Elias said. "And I've a square piano in the workshop in Dalry with half its tapes rotted through. Takes two pairs of hands to thread new ones without dropping the jacks."
"I'm very good at small fiddly things," Nora said. "I have a fourth finger that could lift a latch by itself."
"So I was told." The smile reached both sides of his face this time. "Eleven tomorrow? There's a bakery two doors down does decent bridies, if you don't mind eating them standing by the stove."
"I'll bring the quince paste," she said. "There's half a tin left."
* * *
After the street door closed behind him, Nora didn't go back to the tea chests.
She stood at the window until his van pulled out from under the trees on Melville Drive and its tail-lights blinked once at the corner and were gone. Then she turned back to the piano.
The red pencil lay on the keyblock where she had left it. She tested the lead against the ball of her thumb and stepped up onto the rail of the bench so she could reach the spruce above the treble pins.
The last of the low sun came straight across the Meadows between the chimney pots and lit the grain of the wood, the rows of steel pins, the felt along the tops of the hammers.
Under 5.III.26. A440. Tuned for N. The rest is up to you, there was just enough clean wood for one more line.
Nora steadied her left hand on the case, pressed the point into the spruce, and wrote in her own small, slanted hand:
6.III.26. Played it too fast. Happy.
She stepped down, laid the pencil on the music rail beside the open waltz, and left the lid wide to the darkening room while the blackbird finished its song in the wet rowan outside.