Nell put the new score on the piano and covered the old one with it.
“We have forty minutes,” Ada said.
Her sister nodded. She had taken off her wet coat, but a drop still travelled down her forehead. She wiped it with the cuff of her good blouse. Then she opened her notebook.
This is what I want to play.
“I’ve printed Mother’s name on two hundred programmes.”
My name is on them too.
It was, in smaller letters. Nell Wren, piano. Ada had chosen the size herself.
Out in the hall, the caretaker was unfolding chairs. Every fourth chair squealed. They were holding the concert in the room where their mother had taught most of the town’s children to play, including several who had begged for other instruments and been told a piano was what they had.
Ada picked up Nell’s score. The title was The Back Door. Beneath it, in her sister’s small round handwriting: For two hands, unequally occupied.
“It sounds like a joke.”
Nell took the notebook back.
Some of it is.
Nell did not speak. She hadn’t spoken through Ada’s adult life, and she did not discuss the reasons with people who expected a good enough explanation to make her start. She wrote, signed with friends who signed, and occasionally sent Ada a photograph of an object that answered a question more sharply than a sentence. Last month, when Ada had asked whether she owned suitable concert shoes, Nell had sent a picture of her bare feet beside a rent demand.
Ada had bought the shoes. Nell was wearing them now. They looked painful.
“Just play the opening,” Ada said. “I need to know what we’re asking people to sit through.”
Nell moved the bench back. She laid two fingers on the keys and played the little falling phrase their mother had used to summon pupils from the waiting room. Then came an abrupt bass chord, three quick notes, and a rest so long that Ada thought she’d stopped.
“Is that the end?”
Nell shook her head. The high notes came again, farther apart, over a patient tapping in the left hand. Ada saw a kitchen spoon striking the rim of a chipped cup.
She knew those notes.
When they were children, their mother practised downstairs while the sisters invented signals upstairs. One strike on the little brass bed bell meant come here. Two meant go away. Three meant open the back door. When their mother confiscated the bell, they played the signals on the piano. For a question they added one low note and waited for an answer.
Nell had put their old question into her composition. Three notes. One low note. Silence.
“You could have written it in the notebook,” Ada said.
Her sister looked at her until she understood that she hadn’t yet been asked anything in words.
“Open the back door?”
Nell nodded, then played what followed. The summoning phrase pressed harder. The three high notes broke apart beneath it. A run went up the keyboard, came back down, and failed to reach the low note.
Ada stood up.
“You want to play that here?”
Nell closed the piano lid gently. This time she wrote for a while.
I want to play my piece. You asked for a piece about her. This is one. I don’t want to stand up and tell the room what happened. I am asking you something else.
Ada read it twice.
Their mother had died in January. Since then Ada had organised a sale, a scholarship fund, this concert, and three neatly worded accounts of the kind of teacher she had been. Nell had come to none of the meetings. She had sent money she couldn’t afford and a score Ada hadn’t opened until now.
At the far end of the room, the caretaker checked the clock.
“Doors in half an hour,” he said.
“We’ll be ready.”
Ada took her handbag and went outside. Nell did not follow.
Their old house was two streets away. It was empty now except for the furniture nobody had collected and the things Ada hadn’t found a buyer for. The back door stuck at the bottom. She had meant to fix it before the viewing tomorrow.
She unlocked the front and walked through the cold kitchen. In the drawer beside the cooker she found the tin of household keys. Beneath it lay the brass bell, its loop bent sideways. Their mother had kept it after all.
Ada sat on the bottom stair.
Nell had been seventeen on the night she’d left. She’d packed a bag and arranged to stay with a friend. Their mother had bolted the back door, taken the key, and pulled a chair into the front passage to wait for her. She told Ada that Nell was being dramatic. Ada, nineteen and living away at college, had come home to settle things. She’d thought herself wonderfully useful.
Nell had played three high notes from the sitting room, then the questioning low one. Ada had heard. She’d also heard her mother moving in the kitchen.
She had stayed upstairs.
In the morning, when their mother was asleep, Nell had gone through the front door. That was the version Ada told: Nell walked out. It left out a night in which she had wanted to leave without another confrontation in the passage, and an older sister who could have opened the other way.
The bell wasn’t a key to a hidden memory. Ada had always remembered. Nell’s music had made it impossible to keep remembering only the morning.
Ada rang the caretaker from the kitchen.
“We’re changing the second half,” she said. “Can you put a notice beside the programmes? The pianist will perform her own composition.”
“Title?”
She gave it to him.
“People are already coming in.”
“Then I’ll tell them myself.”
On the way back, she rehearsed an introduction that mentioned complexity and difficult times. She discarded it before she reached the hall.
Nell was sitting in the passage outside the room, shoes off, one foot resting on the other. Ada sat beside her. Through the wall they heard a pupil attempting the first movement of their mother’s suite. He hesitated at exactly the place Ada used to hesitate.
“You asked whether I’d open it,” Ada said.
Nell nodded.
“I heard you that night. I knew what you wanted. I was afraid that helping you leave would make her turn on me.”
Her sister’s foot stopped moving.
“I kept saying you chose to walk out. That’s true of the morning. It isn’t true of the night.”
Nell wrote with the notebook on her knee.
I know you heard.
Ada looked at the words until Nell turned the page.
You don’t have to tell the room. Tell me.
“I should have opened the door.”
Nell put the notebook away. She leaned down to work her feet back into the shoes. Ada offered a hand; Nell used the bench instead.
“Would you like me to return those?”
Her sister’s smile was small and sudden. She nodded vigorously.
The pupil finished to generous applause. Ada went in and announced the change. She gave the title and Nell’s name, this time without a comparison to their mother. A woman in the front row looked annoyed. Ada knew she had driven a long way to hear the suite. The disappointment was real; it would not be cured by an explanation of someone else’s family.
Nell sat at the piano. She adjusted the bench without looking towards Ada.
The new piece began with the familiar call. A few listeners smiled. Then the left hand became busy with something that refused to follow the right, and the smiles changed into attention.
Ada heard the three notes, the question, the waiting. Everyone else heard whatever those sounds gave them. Nobody needed to be handed their childhood’s private dictionary.
This time the run reached its low note. It did not turn into a triumphant chord. The right hand went on alone for a while, quick and untidy, enjoying more of the keyboard than Ada had expected.
When Nell finished, the woman in the front row did not clap at once. Then she did.
Nell bowed, picked up her own score, and came off the platform. In the passage she slipped out of the shoes again.
Ada opened the outer door. Nell went through it carrying them in one hand.
Loading comments…