Hemlock and Roses

Chapter7 Iris Isn't Here

Iris put her free hand flat on the kitchen counter. The granite was very cold.

"That isn't what he said."

"I don't imagine it is." Gently. Almost pityingly. "Iris, he's a man accused of murder. He's spent seven years believing someone set that fire and killed his brother. And now, the one person in the world who's in a position to help him, is you. Do you not think he'd tell you whatever story would make you want to?"

She closed her eyes.

She saw a long grey room. Old ivory keys. A man standing at a window with his back to her and his hand flat against the glass, his shoulders shaking, making no sound at all.

Because I knew you.

"Go back to bed, darling," her father said. "Pour the rest of that tea down the sink if you don't want it. And Iris?"

"Yes."

"Stay away from that workshop. Please. For me." A pause, and then, very softly: "I've already lost your mother. I couldn't bear it."

She didn't pour the tea down the sink.

She stood for a long time looking at the inch of amber liquid at the bottom of the cup. Then she took a clean freezer bag from the drawer, tipped the tea into it, sealed it, and wrote the date and time on it in black marker. She put the cup into a second bag and sealed that too.

She did it all very calmly, the way she would have handled evidence at a crime scene. It was only when she had finished, and set both bags side by side on the counter, that she realised what she had just done.

She had treated her own kitchen as a crime scene.

She had treated herself as a crime scene.

She sat down on the cold tiles with her back against the cupboard, pulled her knees to her chest, and stayed there, very still, until the window began to go grey.

ELIAS

He did not sleep either.

After her car had gone, he climbed the four flights of iron stairs again, slowly, one hand on the cold rail. He let himself back into the workshop and did not turn on the lights. He crossed the long room in the dark by memory, past the gutted pianos with their ribs bared to the ceiling, and sat down on the stool in front of the old upright.

The keys were still warm.

He didn't touch them. He sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the place where her hands had been.

Seven years. He had imagined it so many times that the imagining had worn a groove in him, like water on stone. In the beginning, he had imagined her coming back to apologise. Then, to explain. Later, when he understood that she was never coming back at all, he had imagined only that she would play it, once, somewhere, and that some part of her would know who it was for.

He had never imagined that she would sit down at his piano and play it from beginning to end with tears running down her face, and still not know his name.

Elias put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and stayed like that for a long time.

The first Tuesday, she had been late.

He remembered it with the kind of exactness that hurts. The way she'd come through the stage door at a run, shaking rain out of her hair, a stack of sheet music clutched to her chest and an apple in her teeth. The way she'd stopped dead at the sight of him crouched under the piano with his toolbox, taken the apple out of her mouth, and said, "Oh, God, you're not the ghost, are you? Someone told me Linden had a ghost."

He'd said, "No."

She'd waited. When nothing more came, she'd put her head on one side, the way a bird does, and studied him with frank, delighted curiosity.

"That's it? No? You don't want to elaborate? Tell me about your tragic backstory? Your unfinished business?"

"I'm fixing the E-flat."

"Fascinating." She'd sat down cross-legged on the stage beside him, apple in one hand, and spent the next forty minutes telling him about Kant, and her piano teacher's moustache, and a dream she'd had about a goose. He had said perhaps eleven words. When he finally stood up and packed his tools, she'd stood too, brushed off her skirt, and announced, quite seriously: "You're the least talkative person I've ever met. I consider it a personal challenge."

The fourth Tuesday, she had told him a joke about Descartes walking into a bar, and he had laughed before he could stop it, a short, startled sound like something breaking loose, and she'd thrown both arms up in the air like she'd won a race.

"Four," she'd said. "Four Tuesdays. I'm putting that on my CV."

He had loved her from that moment. He was quite certain of it. He had loved her before he had any right to, and long after he'd been told to stop.

He did not let himself think about the night of the fire. He never did. There was a door in him behind which that night lived, and he had learned, over seven years, to walk past it without looking.

There were things he had seen at 11:47 that he had never told anyone. Not the police, not the inquiry, not the grief counsellor his mother had begged him to see before she, too, was gone. He had carried them alone for so long that they had become part of the architecture of him, a load-bearing wall. If he took them out, he wasn't sure what would still be standing.

But he let himself think about the doorway.

Three days after. He had not slept. He had not eaten. His left hand was bandaged to the wrist, and every time he moved his fingers it felt like the fire was still inside them. When the knock came, he had gone to the door thinking it would be the police again, or the undertaker about Daniel.

It was her.

He remembered the flood of relief, so violent that he'd had to put his good hand on the frame. He remembered saying her name. He remembered reaching for her.

And he remembered that she had stepped back.

Not far. Half a pace. Just enough that his hand closed on air. It was such a small thing. But in fourteen months, Iris Hale had never once stepped away from him. She was a person who leaned in. Who touched your arm when she laughed, and talked with her hands, and sat too close on benches, and had never in her life stood still in a doorway with her coat buttoned to the throat, as if she were afraid of catching something.

She had looked at him with eyes that were exactly the right colour, in a face that was exactly the right face, and her voice, when she spoke, had been half a tone too low.

He was a piano tuner. Half a tone was not a small thing to him. Half a tone was the difference between a chord and a wound.

"Mr. Vane," she'd said.

She had never once, in fourteen months, called him Mr. Vane.

And then she had told him, in that calm, low, half-a-tone-too-flat voice, that she had never loved him. That he'd been a hobby. That she was bored. That he should stop calling. She said it all without moving her hands. She stood with her weight on her left foot, very straight, very still, the way he had seen exactly one other person stand: the tall, silver-haired man who had sat in the front row at Linden every time she played, and clapped slowly, and never once smiled.

"Iris," he'd said. "Iris, look at me."

And she had looked at him, and something had moved in her face, quick and cold, like the shadow of a bird crossing a window.

"Iris isn't here," she said.

Then she had turned and walked down the stairs, and he had stood in the doorway long after the street door had banged shut below, with his burned hand throbbing in its bandage and those three words going round and round in his head like a phrase of music that refused to resolve.

Iris isn't here.

He hadn't understood it. He'd thought grief had made him strange. He'd thought perhaps he had imagined the whole thing.

But he had known, from the first word she spoke, the way he knew when a string was out of true. Whoever had stood in his doorway that day, wearing her face and her coat and speaking in her voice, half a tone too low, it was not the girl who had sat cross-legged on the stage at Linden with an apple in her hand, telling him about a goose.

He had believed that for seven years. He had believed it when the inquiry read out her statement saying he had been drunk and unstable on the night of the fire, and everyone in the room had turned to look at him. He had believed it when her number stayed disconnected and her letters came back unopened. He had believed it three years later, when he saw her across a café on the high street, laughing with a colleague, her hands flying as she talked, so exactly herself that he forgot to breathe, and her eyes had passed over him without stopping, the way your eyes pass over a lamppost.

That was when he'd understood that she didn't remember.