We agreed to thirty-five pounds an hour, Leland and I did, and dinner beforehand. In twelve years’ time my value had risen by an additional ten pounds an hour. During the first week I could stay at the hotel for free, after that I would have to find lodgings elsewhere; a room was too much to ask.
And so within the first twenty-four hours I, who had come to town for a funeral, had found work, food and a place to stay.
When I came downstairs the next morning, there was a piano tuner at work.
‘An old workhorse it is, guv,’ the man said. ‘All those children’s hands.’
I came closer and peered into the cabinet.
‘First they look at it for a little while,’ I said. ‘Then, carefully, they try out a key. When no-one comes over to yell at them, they try the next one. There’s a magic idea in their head that says they can suddenly play the piano, just like that, a miracle. I remember the days when I stood in front of the piano and thought I had Beethoven in my back pocket, that all I had to do was hit the keys.’
‘If you ask me, they just like to bang on the thing as hard as possible,’ the piano tuner said.
‘Will you be able to get it back into shape?’ I asked.
‘Oh yeah. You the new pianist?’
I nodded.
‘I’ll fix it for you as well as I can, but the pads are pretty worn. I can’t do anything about that right now.’
‘Probably doesn’t matter too much for “My Way”,’ I said.
The palm trees in the gardens had been bound up for the winter. I shook off that night’s dream, about a woman from long ago. Early in the afternoon I went into a shop and bought a bottle of whiskey. The beach cabins on the parking lot by the pier breathed dull endurance. They were, like me, built for a different season. I walked up the hill. Warren had put up signs. Private. Authorised vehicles only. Please keep gateway clear. For years this was the road taken by trucks loaded with sand, clay and rubble for Warren’s infamous ‘soft seawall’. Through the streets of Alburgh they had thundered down to the sea front, past the pier and then up Kings Ness. The road was reinforced with debris and concrete plates, and in clouds of dust they raced uphill, downhill. Every day Warren had stood, clipboard in hand, counting the trucks, listing their cargo in code and mumbling things like ‘glorious clay’. When it was raining he would sit in his Land Rover, wipers on, clipboard on his lap. There was something cheerful about him, about the way he would say ‘it’s all a game’, or smile knowingly at adversities and call them ‘a new challenge to dialectical thinking’.
For a long time, Warren had worked for a company that made water-purification systems. After a traffic accident he was forced to convalesce for a year, and when he was finally able to work again there was no position for him. He was almost sixty at the time, he received financial compensation, and so he dedicated himself to the preservation of the cliff and the houses he still owned.
A few mornings a week a retired crane operator from Kessingland would park his moped at Joanna’s house. Then he would walk up to the dragline parked on Warren’s supply route. From our house we could hear the engine fire up, and often I saw the black smoke pressed from the pipe atop the cabin, the deep shudder that ran through the machine. I always thought that pieces of it would start to fall off. He would remain there like that for a while, letting the thing idle. It seemed as though the motor were mustering the strength to leave its spot, after which it started to move, slow and cold as a reptile. He moved the loads the trucks had dumped, bringing them to the far end of the seawall. In that way the barrier shifted further and further along the cliff. But for us it was already too late.
Warren would not be buried until Monday, three days from now. The smell coming from the study reminded me of my mother’s death.
Not all of the daughters were there. One was sitting at the table with Catherine, another was making her presence known by the sound of clattering dishes in the adjoining kitchen. Catherine smiled in the unbearable way of women who are keeping their heads up. I sat down at the table and proffered the bottle of Tullamore Dew I had bought that afternoon.
‘Irish whiskey,’ I said. ‘I hope it’s the right one.’
‘That’s sweet of you. Mary, fetch glasses, would you?’
The daughter stood up and set out on her slow course into the kitchen. I wondered how Catherine, dainty and light of frame herself, could have produced these.
‘Maureen and Mary are the only ones who could stay. Kathleen and Jane had to get back. Maureen’s staying another week. After that I’ll be on my own. I came to England for Warren. I don’t like England. But I never regretted it a day in my life, following him. Now there’s nothing for me here anymore. Only his grave. They’ — here she nodded towards the kitchen — ‘say I should come back. But that’s exactly what I ask myself, boy: should you stay where your love is buried, is that where your home is? Or is it with your children?’
Mary came out of the kitchen with glasses and put them down carefully, as though they were eggs that could roll off the tabletop. I jiggled my shoulders, made nervous by the question.
‘I don’t know, Catherine. Since this thing here, since the house disappeared, I’m not sure anymore about places. I don’t think I’m the right person to ask. My tendency would be to. .’
‘Go on.’
‘I was thinking about people whose days are like grass, like a flower of the field and the wind passes over it and no-one knows where it stood.’
‘Isn’t that a psalm?’ Mary asked.
I nodded and screwed the cap off the bottle.
Catherine said, ‘Say that again.’
‘That’s all I know, just those lines.’
‘So recite them again.’
I smiled and shook my head. It was a psalm that had been read at my mother’s cremation, I had felt the meaning of every single word, the grass, the flowers, the wind. All of it so fleeting, so fragile. Above her glass, Mary’s eyes flashed back and forth between her mother and me. She was not going to break the crystal of silence.
‘Marthe,’ Catherine asked me then, ‘was she cremated?’
‘Ashes. What she really wanted was to be burned beside the Ganges.’
A searing trail down my gullet.
‘But Winschoten was good enough in the end.’
‘Mother,’ Mary said, ‘without Warren this house won’t be here in a few years. In ten years everything will be gone. Are you going to wait for that to happen?’
Catherine didn’t respond. She stared into space, her gnarled, weathered hands around the glass, as though warming herself at the fire inside it. The second hand on the plastic clock thumped like a pile-driver. We sat there and breathed.
When I sang ‘Summertime’ in the bar that evening, it made me feel more melancholy than bright and breezy. ‘Your daddy’s rich, and your mamma’s good lookin’, so hush little baby, don’t you cry. .’ Summer and youth overlapped in the lullaby, as they did in so many people’s memories. But it wasn’t the right moment for ‘Summertime’, the bar was in a relieved, Friday-evening mood. Leland worked the beer pumps as though racing a handcar down the tracks, you could tell he was born for the publican’s life.
I kicked in to ‘Candle in the Wind’, which has always made the English go all melty ever since Elton John transposed it from Marilyn Monroe to Lady Di. ‘Goodbye England’s rose, may you ever grow in our hearts’ — by that time the average Brit has already traded in his solid matter for something more liquid.