Chapter 1: First Tuning, Standing Too Close

Fifty-one days until Edmund’s recital.

That was the first thing I thought when I woke, because Edmund had written it in fountain pen on the kitchen calendar in August and circled it twice, and a circle in Edmund’s hand has a way of sitting on a house like weather. The second thing I thought was that the man from Brennan & Son was due at ten, and that I had nothing to wear for a piano tuner, which was a ridiculous thing to think at all.

The lake was pewter. Mist lay on it in a flat sheet, and the far shore was only a rumour. I dabbed bergamot on my wrists and the hollow of my throat and chose a camel cashmere wrap dress, soft and forgiving, because it was cold and because it tied at the hip and I liked the small decision of the knot. Plain black cotton underneath. Bare feet on the warm oak.

I didn’t look in a mirror. I caught myself instead, the way I always did, in the black lacquer of the Steinway’s fallboard as I passed: a long auburn blur with one silver streak at the left temple I’d stopped dyeing in the spring, freckled shoulders, grey-green eyes, a full figure the cashmere was kind to. The belly I’d made peace with. Hands that used to be a cellist’s.

I was forty-eight years old. Twenty of those years married to Edmund Hale, who at fifty-seven still stood as straight as a metronome and loved his piano with a devotion I could only admire from the kitchen.

It was his piano. Everyone understood that. A Steinway Model B, seven feet of ebony gloss with its tail to the courtyard, set in the double-height music room, which runs open into the kitchen without a single door between them, and the whole lake behind it through the glass. It was his recital, every November, forty guests and champagne. And it was his Thursday. Thursdays he worked from the old stone boathouse he’d converted across the gravel, his blinds up or down according to the market, and from his desk he could see straight into the music room if he chose to look.

He rarely chose to look.

Three years since he’d touched me. I knew the date because I’m precise about things. He hadn’t noticed the date, because he isn’t precise about me. He kisses my cheek at breakfast. He calls me darling in the tone he uses for his tailor. He asks me to be a love and ring someone.