Chapter 7: Bent Over the Steinway, Blinds Up

Sixteen days, and I was sore.

Sore in the deep, tender, wonderful way I’d forgotten existed, the kind you feel when you cross your legs, when you climb stairs, when you sit down at breakfast opposite your husband and he tells you about the Zurich hotel’s inadequate pillows. Edmund’s taxi had brought him back from the airport at nine, grey with the early flight. I’d made him eggs.

A blue cotton shirt-dress, buttoned to the throat, sensible as a nurse. Under it, plain white cotton knickers. Innocent. I chose them precisely because they were innocent, and because I wanted to see what would happen to them.

Last night had proved I was wanted. Today I wanted to prove something else, and I wasn’t sure whether the word for it was brave or insane. I had never been the kind of woman who did this. I wanted, very badly, to find out whether I could be.

Edmund went straight to the boathouse after breakfast, too wrecked from the six a.m. flight to sleep and too proud to admit it. The blinds were up. He sat at his desk rubbing his eyes, facing the house.

Ilse was upstairs. It was her Thursday, and she was changing the beds; the vacuum droned along the gallery landing, the one that runs across the top of the music room behind a glass balustrade, so that anyone up there can look straight down onto the Steinway. I’d never thought about that before either. There seemed to be no end to the things about my own house I’d never thought about.

Ansel came at ten. He looked at me once in the hall, a long look that went down the buttons of the shirt-dress and back up, and I felt my face go hot and my knees go weak and neither of us said a word about last night.

He raised the lid. It hid the bench end from the courtyard, from the waist down. Anything higher than that, Edmund could see. From above, from the gallery, nothing hid anything at all.

“Low,” Ansel said quietly, reading the room the way he read a string. “We stay low.”

He tuned for twenty minutes. I couldn’t bear it. When the last unison went pure I stood up from the bench, turned, and closed the fallboard over the keys, and bent forward over it with my forearms on the smooth black wood, bending low, well below the lid line. My feet were planted either side of the bench. My cheek was inches from the lacquer.

I looked back at him over my shoulder.

He didn’t need to be asked.

He lifted my dress over my hips and rucked the blue cotton up to my waist, and I felt the air of the room on the backs of my thighs and my bare bottom. His fingers hooked into the white cotton at my hips and drew it down, taking his time, not all the way, just to my knees, where it stretched taut between them like a band and held my legs together. I tried to widen my stance and couldn’t. That was the point. I understood it the moment he did.

I heard him undo his jeans. The vacuum droned overhead. Across the courtyard, at the edge of my sight, Edmund had swung round to his second screen with the phone at his ear, his back half to the house. Ansel folded himself down over me, his chest to my spine, his head bowed beside mine, both of us well under the line of the lid. His knees were bent. It was an awkward, crouched, animal way to be held, nothing like last night on the rug, and I loved it.