Hemlock and Roses

Chapter6 Nocturne

Fourteen months. More than a year of Tuesdays. More than a year of a person's life, a person's hands, a person's voice saying her name. She tried to find it. She reached back into the place where she was nineteen and twenty, and she found lectures, and practice rooms, and her mother's kitchen, and Sunday dinners, and long blurred stretches of nothing, like a book with whole chapters cut neatly out, and the binding glued shut so that you would never notice unless you went looking.

She had never gone looking.

"I don't remember you," she said, and her voice cracked down the middle. "Elias, I don't remember any of it."

"I know."

"How do you know?"

"Because you looked at me through that glass on Saturday night," he said, "the way you'd look at a stranger."

She remembered it. His eyes lifting to the mirror, settling precisely where she stood. She had thought he could hear her breathing. She understood now that he had simply known she would be there. That he had been sitting in that room for four hours, waiting for the one person in the world he'd been afraid to see walk through the door, and then she had walked through it and introduced herself.

My name is Iris Hale.

She put a hand over her mouth.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she whispered. "In the interview room. Any of the times. Why didn't you just say it?"

"And say what?" he asked gently. "Professor, you don't know me, but you loved me once? To a woman questioning me about a murder?" He shook his head slightly. "You'd have thought I was mad. Or that I was trying to use you. Either way, you'd have stopped listening to anything else I said."

He was right. She hated that he was right.

"Then why now?"

He looked at the programme in her hand. "Because you found that. And you asked. And I don't lie to you, Iris. I never have."

She looked down at the card. One day I'll play it properly, just for you. That's a promise.

"How did it end?"

The question came out before she could decide whether she wanted to know.

The silence that followed was a different silence from all the others. It wasn't a door being closed. It was a man standing very still while something passed through him that he had felt many times before and had never got used to.

"You ended it," he said. "Three days after the fire."

"Why?"

"You came to my flat. You stood in the doorway. You didn't take your coat off." He was looking at the window now, at the grey river, not at her. "You said you'd never loved me. You said I'd been a hobby, something to do on Tuesdays, and you'd got bored. You said I should stop calling, because you'd changed your number, and if I came to your parents' house your father would call the police."

Each sentence was quiet, and even, and laid down carefully, like stones on a grave.

Iris felt every one of them land.

"I said that," she whispered. "To you. Three days after your brother-"

"Yes."

"Elias."

"It's all right."

"It is not all right." Her eyes were burning. Her voice rose and she didn't stop it. "How can you stand there and say that's all right? I don't-I would never-" She stopped. She didn't know what she would never. She didn't know anything about the woman who had stood in that doorway. "Did I mean it?"

He turned his head and looked at her then. Fully, in the grey light, for the first time since she'd lifted the dust cover.

"No," he said.

"How can you possibly know that?"

"Because I knew you."

It was such a small sentence. Four words. He said it without any weight at all, the way you would say it's raining, or the sky is grey. A plain fact, observed over fourteen months of Tuesdays and never once doubted, not even after the door had closed and the number had changed and seven years had gone by.

Something in Iris's chest, something that had been held very tight for a very long time, without her ever knowing it was there, came quietly apart.

She turned away from him so that he wouldn't see her face. She found herself looking at the piano. The old ivory keys. The fallboard she had lifted.

She sat down on the stool.

She didn't decide to. Her body simply did it, the way a body walks home by a route the mind has forgotten. Her hands came to rest above the keys. They hovered there, an inch above the ivory, trembling slightly.

She hadn't played in seven years. She had told everyone it was because she'd lost interest. That philosophy had taken over. That she'd simply grown up. She had told herself the same thing so many times that it had worn smooth, like the initials on a tuning fork.

She didn't know what her hands were going to do until they did it.

C-sharp. G-sharp. C-sharp. E.

Four notes, rising.

A pause, like a held breath.

And then the long, slow falling line, the left hand answering the right.

The Nocturne in C-sharp minor. Chopin wrote it for his sister, people said, and it was never published in his lifetime. It began like someone speaking very quietly in an empty room, and grew, and broke, and became something else entirely in the middle, a bright, unlikely rush of light, before it fell back into the dark and ended on a single chord that sounded like the hand of a friend on your shoulder.

She played it from beginning to end. She did not remember learning it. She did not need to. Her fingers knew every note, every place where the phrase leaned and caught its breath, every place where the old piano's action was slightly heavy under the fourth finger, as if it had been regulated for her hand and no one else's.

It had been regulated for her hand. She knew it the moment she felt it. Someone had spent hours making these keys sit exactly right under her fingers. Someone had kept them that way for seven years, for a woman who was never coming back to play them.

She played the last chord and held it, and let it ring out into the long grey room until it was gone.

Then she sat very still with her hands in her lap.

She was crying. She hadn't noticed when she started. The tears ran down her face and dripped off her chin onto her coat and she didn't wipe them away.

When she finally turned around, he was standing at the window with his back to her, one hand flat against the glass, as if to hold himself up. His head was bowed. He did not make a sound. But she could see his shoulders, and she could see what they were doing.

It was the only time she would ever see Elias Vane cry, and he made sure, even then, that she couldn't see his face.

They stayed like that for a long time, the piano between them, the river darkening beyond the glass.

"It's still in tune," Iris said at last. Her voice was not steady. "After seven years."

"I tune it every Tuesday."

She closed her eyes.

Every Tuesday. For seven years. For a promise written in blue ink by a girl who had walked into his doorway three days after his brother died, and told him he'd been a hobby.

"Why?" she asked. It came out barely above a whisper. "Why would you do that?"

He didn't turn around.

"Ask me something else," he said.

He walked her down the four flights of iron stairs to her car. Neither of them spoke. At the bottom, in the rain, he held the door for her the way he had held it at the top, and she stood beside it, and didn't get in.

"Did you love me?" she asked.

She had promised herself on the stairs that she wouldn't ask. She asked anyway.

"Yes," he said.

"Do you still-"

He put his hand on the top of the car door, very lightly, not touching her.

"Get some sleep, Iris," he said. "Please."

She didn't remember driving home.

That wasn't strange, she told herself. Everyone had drives like that, where you arrived and couldn't recall a single traffic light. She remembered the bridge. She remembered the wipers. She remembered thinking, fourteen months, over and over, like a heartbeat.

She remembered standing in her bathroom with a face she didn't quite recognise, swollen and blotched from crying, and thinking that she looked exactly like a woman who had just found out that half her life was missing.

She remembered lying down.

She woke standing up.

She was in her kitchen. The light was off. The digital clock on the oven said 2:31, in green numbers that hung in the dark like something underwater.

The kettle was clicking as it cooled. Steam was rising from its spout in a thin grey thread.

There was a cup in her right hand. White porcelain, a thin gold rim. It was warm. It was almost empty.