Chapter 4: A Kiss Behind the Raised Lid

Thirty days. A month, near enough, and the rain had set in as if it meant to stay for all of it.

At six in the morning, standing in the dressing room with the lake still dark behind the blind, I made a decision I’d have laughed at in September. I took down a jersey wrap dress the colour of red wine, soft, heavy, clinging where it touched, and I put it on over nothing at all. No bra. No knickers. I tied the knot at my hip and stood very still and felt the jersey move against my bare skin when I breathed.

Nobody would know. That was what I told myself. It was true, and it was not the point.

Ilse was in the kitchen when I came down, wiping the marble.

“Next Thursday I cannot come, Mrs. Hale. The dentist. They move me.” She said dentist as if it were a regime she’d lived under.

“That’s fine, Ilse. We’ll survive.”

She looked at the wine-coloured dress for a moment, then at my face, then went back to the marble.

Ansel came at ten. Rain streamed off his jacket onto the doormat and he shook his hair out of his eyes, and I held out the tuning fork on my open palm before he’d even got his tool roll down.

“You left this.”

He looked at it. Then at me. He didn’t take it.

“Keep it,” he said.

I closed my hand. The steel was warm from my pocket. I didn’t ask him whether he knew what I’d done with it. I think he’d known the moment he decided to leave it.

The blinds across the courtyard were up, but the rain was coming down so thickly now that the boathouse was only a lit shape swimming behind grey water. Edmund was a smudge. I could have been anyone. Ansel propped the lid high on the long stick, and the bench end of the Steinway vanished from the world.

At half past ten Ilse took the ironing up to the laundry room at the far end of the bedroom corridor, out of sight of the gallery, and I heard her humming start there, faint through two walls, Lehár again.