A Note Held Open

The first thing I put in the notebook was: Piano haunted?

Below it, after twenty minutes: No.

Below that: Biscuits in second cupboard.

These were the most useful findings of the evening.

I had gone into the hall because the door was open and somebody was playing the same note over and over. Through the high windows came the last thin light. Seventeen chairs faced a piano with its front removed. On the noticeboard, a missing cat shared space with a lecture on drainage and a photograph of the choir looking startled by sunshine.

The note swelled and faded, swelled and faded. Not the ordinary dying away of a struck string: a little regular breathing inside it.

A woman crouched beside the open piano, with a wedge of felt between her fingers.

“Do you need the room?” she asked.

“No. I heard something.”

“So did I. That's why they pay me.”

Her name was Nora. She tuned the piano twice a year and had been asked to look at it before rehearsal. I remained by the door until she waved me towards a chair.

“Just don't lean on anything expensive.”

I surveyed the room.

“The kettle?”

“Especially the kettle.”

She played the note again. I could hear two strings together, almost agreeing. Nora silenced one with the felt. The pulse disappeared. She moved the wedge; the other string rang alone, equally steady.

Together, they breathed.

I knew what I was hearing now. Two nearby frequencies, slipping into and out of step. When their sound waves reinforced each other the note grew louder; when they opposed each other it softened. Neither string had to be wobbling on its own.

I crossed out haunted before Nora could see it.

A man arrived carrying three folders and a shopping bag. He stopped behind my chair, listened, then looked towards the radiator.

“Pump's going again.”

“Not this time,” Nora said.

He introduced himself as Len, put the folders down and took a chair from the stack. His choir badge was pinned upside down.

I nearly mentioned it. Then he turned it over, revealing TURN OVER on the back.

“Reminder,” he said.

“Does it work?”

“Sometimes.”

He sat beside me. Nora made a small adjustment and struck the key. The pulses slowed.

“How many times a second is that?” Len asked.

“Hard to count now,” I said. “If one sound were four hundred and forty vibrations a second and the other four hundred and forty-two, you'd hear two pulses a second. Bring them closer and the pulses slow down.”

“Like that?”

“Like that.”

Nora played the pair again and let the sound last. We waited through the widening spaces between its swells. Len began lifting one finger whenever he heard a pulse. I found myself doing the same.

“Keep listening,” she said.

Then somebody wheeled a trolley of cups through the door, and our experiment became less delicate.

By the time Nora had finished, people were arriving in ones and twos, comparing bus journeys and asking who had taken the blue folder. A woman named Ruth stood at the front with a pencil behind her ear. She counted us, then counted the chairs, then moved one.

“You joining?”

“I was listening.”

“You can do both.”

She handed me a spare score. I considered explaining that I might not be here next week, that my journeys were difficult to describe, that a rehearsal implied commitments beyond an open door.

“One evening?” I asked.

“One evening is what we've got.”

I took the score.

Len showed me the line. Pencil markings crowded his copy: breaths, entrances, a warning about a page turn. Beside one difficult passage he had written DON'T CHASE JOAN.

“Who's Joan?”

He pointed at a woman who was already singing while searching her handbag.

“She gets enthusiastic.”

So did I, it turned out.

There was a held note near the beginning. I arrived on it with rather too much confidence and found myself conspicuously alone. The sound hung in the room. Several faces turned, none unkind.

“After the rest,” Ruth said.

“Of course.”

I looked down. There it was: a perfectly legible instruction to do nothing.

We began again.

On the second attempt I waited. The note rose around me, ordinary voices finding enough agreement to stay together. Len's was rougher than I had expected, with a warmth I liked. Joan entered exactly where she should.

For several bars I forgot to observe anything.

Then Len stopped singing. He kept his finger on the line and came back in at the next phrase. At the break, he rubbed his throat and folded the score shut.

“Would you like some water?” I asked.

“In a minute.”

I left it there.

He reopened the folder. “First time back for a while. Used to know this without looking.”

I could have offered a grand comparison. Instead I asked which passage he wanted to try again.

He showed me. We sang it quietly, sitting down. I missed the rest once more.

Len tapped the paper.

“It's still there.”

“Persistent little bastard.”

He laughed, coughed, and reached for his water.

We tried again. This time we both made it through.

After rehearsal I helped put away the chairs. Nora returned for the tool she had left beneath the piano. Ruth found the blue folder inside the shopping bag; it had been keeping the biscuits flat.

I ate two while Len searched for his scarf. There was talk of next week's programme, a birthday and whether the heating ever came on before everyone had gone home. I stayed beside the cupboard longer than the biscuits required.

Len asked if I would come again.

“I don't know,” I said. “I enjoyed this.”

“Good. Door's usually open.”

Outside, I could still feel the held note in my chest. I tried it softly while walking, then stopped when a cyclist looked round.

In the notebook I added one more line.

Count the bloody rests.