Chapter 6: Naked Cello, Then the Music-Room Rug

Seventeen days. Edmund’s taxi left for Manchester Airport at six in the morning, its headlights sliding across the ceiling, and I lay in bed listening to the gravel go quiet and thought: I have twenty-seven hours.

Ilse wasn’t due. The house was mine in a way it hadn’t been in years. I spent the whole day not getting dressed, in the end, in the sense that mattered. I bathed. I oiled my skin with something that smelled of bergamot and fig. At four, with rain beginning again on the black water, I went into the dressing room and knelt at the back of the closet and opened the cello case.

I’d opened that lid every week since October for the lever, eyes averted, fingers in and out like a thief. I had never once let myself lift her out, or breathe in. Now I did.

The smell hit me before anything else. Rosin dust and old varnish and the velvet lining, and under it something I can only call my own twenties. Practice rooms. Trains to competitions. A woman of twenty-seven who thought she knew exactly what she was going to be.

The T-handle lever lay in the string pocket where it lived now. I moved it aside and lifted her out.

At seven the estate car pulled in. Humidity check, it said in Edmund’s diary, where I’d written it myself in my neatest hand.

I’d left the front door on the latch. I was in the music room with the lamps low and the lake invisible beyond the glass, sitting on the edge of the velvet chaise with the cello’s endpin dug into the worn Persian rug and the instrument held between my thighs, the way I’d sat ten thousand times.

I was naked. Nothing but the cello.

It frightened me more than anything that came after. Not the nakedness itself, though there was that: the heavy breasts, the soft belly I’d made peace with in private and never tested in lamplight in front of a man of twenty-five. It was the playing. Twenty years of rust on my left hand, and a listener with perfect pitch.

I heard him stop in the doorway. I didn’t look up. I couldn’t have, or I’d have lost my nerve. I’d taken off my ring to play, the way I always used to, and it lay on the Steinway’s music desk, a small gold circle on black.

I drew the bow.

Bach. The Prelude from the first suite, the piece every cellist has in her hands before she has anything else. It came out rusty. My left hand had forgotten its shapes; the calluses were twenty years gone and the steel strings bit into my fingertips. I stumbled in the fourth bar, then in the ninth, and stopped, my face burning, the cello’s back cold against my breastbone and my nipples tight against the varnish.

“Again,” he said quietly, from somewhere behind the piano. “You stopped breathing in bar nine.”

“I stopped breathing twenty years ago.”

“Then start in bar one.”

I started again.

It was better. It was still wrong in places, but the arpeggios began to roll the way they’re meant to, rising and turning like water, and I felt the old thing happen in my chest, the thing I’d put in a box with the cello and closed the lid on. Rosin dust rose off the strings into the lamplight. The wood warmed against my skin until I couldn’t tell where it stopped. The bow wanted to go. I let it.

The C string’s hum went into the base of my spine. And on the long pedal A near the end, the note came up through the body of the cello into my ribs and my thighs and the soft insides of my knees where the lower bouts pressed, and into my clit. I felt it there, plainly, a low sweet buzz in the one place I’d been trying not to think about, and I leaned into it with my whole body and my eyes shut.