Upright Piano Player Read Online Free Page A

building and needed to match that with a similar sum from the private sector. The letter said they were looking for fifteen key individuals who had an interest in business. In return for their £2 million they could have a scholarship or one of the lecture halls named after them. It was a crass letter, so inept that perhaps a title had been dangled, after all. He would not reply. He put the bills and the check aside and scooped up the rest for the bin. As he did so, he saw that he had missed one letter, a blue airmail envelope, the handwriting unmistakably Nessa’s. He left it unopened on the table. He had not heard from her in five years. One more night would not make any difference.

2
    In the village, they are known as part-time traders. In summer, when the weather is warm, they close the bookshop at lunchtime and cycle to the beach. In winter, they wait eagerly for the chill north wind that keeps people off the streets. On such days they bolt the door and retreat upstairs, consciences clear. From their bed of wrought iron and brass (restored for next to nothing by the book-loving blacksmith on a nearby estate) they watch the black clouds roll in from the North Sea. The clouds carry the rain south—south over their tiny roof, south over Garlic Wood and the cold Norfolk fields. The boy Hal lies snug in the big bed with them. They have been married for five years and despite some shadows in their lives, they have never been happier.
    They are not as dilettante as the villagers imagine. Most of their business comes from their website and the catalogs they send out each quarter to a list of clients which steadily grows. They specialize in twentieth-century first editions, in particular, British and American fiction and poetry, an enthusiasm that Tom has inherited from his father. Summer visitors to the shop are dismayed by the metropolitan prices andthe absence of beach books. More often than not, they leave empty-handed—a fact much discussed in the adjacent businesses. It is generally predicted that
Cage & Cage Booksellers
will not survive. A video rental store is what most villagers would like to see as a replacement.

    Large, serious, gray eyes gaze steadily at Tom.
    “I need a bit of cold pillow, Daddy,” he says moving his head onto a cool, unrumpled area. Tom is in thrall to his son, who is nearly four. Working from home, Tom has rarely been apart from him, so that now, when Hal goes three mornings a week to the village play group, Tom feels a lover’s sense of separation. The boy is suddenly quiet—sleep coming with comic-book alacrity.
    “Has he settled?” Jane says downstairs.
    “Out for the count.”
    “You’re going to miss him.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, he’ll probably be asleep for ten hours.”
    “I’m not that bad.”
    “I didn’t say it was bad.”
    Later, she looks up from the book she is reading, the new novel from a prize-winning writer they both admire.
    “It’s here. Page thirty-two—vertical sex—this time against a tree.”
    It was a game Jane played, spotting the sexual motifs in an author’s work. Most writers of literary novels, she had found, repeated themselves; Updike was perhaps the mostobvious exception, though latterly, even he had become predictable. She was not surprised by this erotic continuity. It is notoriously difficult to write convincing sex scenes and if a writer manages to pen one that does not provoke ridicule the temptation to use it again, with slight variations, must be immense.
    “In his first book it was in a lift, in his second against a car, and now it’s upright in a forest—there’s lichen on her thighs.” She paused. “You know, I met him once.”
    “Oh? Where?”
    “At a book signing in Norwich. Sadly, he was sitting down.”
    He grins. They were at a stage in their marriage when jealousy was not simply absent, but inconceivable. They still flirted with others at parties out of habit, but retreated if the returning banter was more