Upright Piano Player Read Online Free Page B

than superficial. The child had made them inviolate. When Princess Diana complained that there were three people in her marriage, Jane had cooed to Hal, “And what’s wrong with that?”
    They had bought the shop with money left to Jane by her grandfather. What funds remained were for books, not builders, so they had fixed the place up themselves. The shelving was not always true and there were imprints of their sneakers, like faint fossils, on the hastily painted floors. Sometimes as they worked she would look at Tom. What she saw was Tom repairing a door but, in fact, she knew that the work was repairing him. His parents’ divorce had almost destroyed him. Now she, the bookshop, and Hal were slowly putting him back together again.

    Tom is nine in the Polaroid, smiling by the pool in the Beverly Hills Hilton. He watches the print come to life, his skin darken to a tan. His father, holding the photograph, says, “I want you to look at this carefully, Tom.” The boy leans closer, familiar with the magic of instant pictures, but happy to indulge his father with a show of wonder at the density of color and the accuracy of the flesh tones. But his father does not want to talk about photography; instead he says, “I want you to take a good look at this because I never want to see you this fat again.” Tom jumps back into the pool where the water will hide his tears. Does his father notice that he spends the rest of the holiday wrapped in a towel?

    “Daddy, the soap doesn’t work.”
    It is his twelfth birthday and he is getting washed and dressed, impatient to get down to his cards and presents. Henry walks into the bathroom.
    “What do you mean it doesn’t work?”
    “There’s no lather?”
    “Oh, come on, Tom, you’ve just got to rub harder.”
    “I’ve tried, really I have. I’ve tried for ages.”
    Henry comes to the sink. He takes the white bar and holds it to his nose. “This doesn’t smell like soap, it smells like … like potato. You’ve been trying to wash with a potato, Tom.”
    He is chuckling and a slow grin breaks over Tom’s face. It was a trick. His father had carved a fake bar of soap out of a potato and smeared it with lather. A joke before breakfast—was there ever a better way to start a birthday?

    Fatherhood has made Tom uncertain. He can no longer ignore Henry’s existence. Hal’s childhood unfolding in front of him revives memories of his own. And recollection blunts his anger. He is determined to be a father as unlike Henry as possible; calm where Henry was irritable; present where Henry was for the most part absent; tolerant where Henry was very often a nitpicking perfectionist. But then, somehow, the list breaks down. He cannot pretend that Henry had not been loving in the past. There had been happy times. He remembered a rented house on the six-mile beach at Hilton Head, South Carolina. The dawn walks—Henry, Nessa, and Tom, arms intertwined, lurching in and out of the surf, sandpipers darting between their careless feet.
    Memory makes him lenient. One day (but not yet) he will tell Henry that he has a grandson.

    It is one of those mornings when global warming seems more seductive than catastrophic. It is mild enough for a walk on the beach before lunch at Jane’s parents’ house. They drive to Holkham, rehearsing the carols that Hal is learning for the play group’s Christmas concert. He is insistent that alternate lines are sung “loud and soft” as Miss Martha wants. Nestling in the dunes, after the long walk out to the incoming waves and the seemingly longer walk back, Hal gets no further than “Twinkle, twinkle, little …” before he is asleep in Jane’s arms.
    Jane is twenty-eight, a tall, slightly stooping girl, sometimes beautiful, with hazel eyes and blond hair. She listens with her body leaning forward. Her teeth are small and giveher face an appealing (and deceptive) innocence. She is one of four daughters born to a Norfolk vet and his wife, and though