The Piano Maker (10 page)

She walked back into the kitchen, where she was keeping warm some seafood bisque of Mildred’s in case Claire was hungry. She added a little water and stirred and put the lid back on and returned to the window. Around ten she lay down on the sofa to close her eyes for a moment, and she woke nearly an hour later to sounds in the street. From the window she saw the car and Claire talking through the half-open door and then closing it. Hélène hurried down the stairs to meet her.

“Claire, sweetheart. You must be tired. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m keeping something warm for you to eat, if you want it.”

Claire looked at the steep stairs going up. “Mom,” she said, “right now I’m past being hungry, and I’m so tired I can’t even talk properly. I just wanted to come in and hug you. Mr. Chandler is waiting in the car.”

“Of course. I understand. I booked you a room at the hotel, like we said. But after tomorrow I want you to sleep here. Take the bed and I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

“Sure. Or the other way round. I’ll see you in the morning. I’m glad I’m here too, Mom.”

Hélène lay awake until past two in the morning, then she got up and heated some milk. She held the mug with both hands and stood once again at the window. She could not see the hotel, but it would be over that way, to the right. Darkness out there. Silence. More snow.

By the time Pierre was dead, all activity at the factory had already ceased. In the crating room pianos stood ready for shipment, but transport for anything other than war essentials was no longer available. Half the men in her workforce had been drafted, and she’d taken all the business money and her own out of the bank and paid them off generously. The others she tried to keep on, but in the end she paid them off too and gave them a bonus and sent them home. Monsieur Bendix Raoul received one full year’s extra pay. On the day he came to say goodbye, she did not recognize him at first. He wore an old black suit and a white shirt, and he stood in the main hall with his hands hanging idle and a cardboard suitcase at his feet. He looked around and took his time, and he nodded slowly as though this were the way it was all meant to be. He turned to her and said, “Madame …” but then words failed him, and she went up to him and took his hand. Minutes later he was gone. The man-door to the hall stood open to a bright fall day, and all the factory was silent.

For the rest of 1914 and 1915 the area was occupied by the French with artillery positions and supply and hospital services. Later that year came the British, and the war went on and on. In January of 1916 the Germans broke through and came very close; there was fierce fighting before they were driven back again. During that time the factory suffered serious damage when shells burst nearby and shattered one wall and parts of the roof. And always soldiers from one army or another took shelter or were being officially housed there. They made fires for light and heat in the scrap bins, and they used kiln wood and crating wood for fuel. When that ran out they broke up piano cabinet pieces ready for assembly.

She’d spoken to the first few officers about that, and they always promised to talk to the men, but if they did, it never made any difference. Often she could see smoke rising from the factory windows. She did not go down any more.

Fortunately the best and most expensive wood was stored in the loft of the barn, hidden under straw, and somehow that wood survived: rare winter oak and English walnut and precious Scandinavian clear spruce for soundboards, and the remaining rolls of fruit-tree veneer from the orchard across the river.

The main house was occupied by a succession of officers who permitted her and Claire to stay in two rooms on the top floor. Juliette hardly ever came to the house any more: the squire’s lodge was close to the church, and she had begun to cook for the priest and eat her meals at the manse.

In the salon at the main house there was a grand piano, and in return for their protection and for food from the field kitchen, Hélène played for the officers. Most often the food was some kind of one-pot meal, often horsemeat and root vegetables boiled together. Sometimes potato or beet pancakes or some kind of noodle dish. At first she’d been able to catch a trout or two on a line from the mill walk. But then soldiers killed all the fish with grenades and netted them, and that was the end of that.

The officers, whether they were French or British, were usually well-bred young men. They washed and even dressed for dinner and then pretended life was normal as they sat on the blue sofa or on a stuffed chair and listened to her playing the piano.

There was one young man, Captain Francis Huxtable from Kent, who wept when she played some late Brahms. She caught him wiping his eyes. Two days later he was dead, replaced already by another young captain, who was himself dead within the week. It was as though there were an endless supply of young men lining up for the slaughter and dropping dead only to make room for a new eager head to show itself above the corpses.

One day in the autumn of 1916, when the British were holding the ground, Nathan Homewood appeared. He came in a Morris field car, wearing a uniform. He said he’d learned only a month ago that Pierre had been killed early
in the war; if he’d known, he would have come sooner.

He told her he’d been too old to be drafted in the first round for active service, but because of his experience he’d been enlisted as a logistics officer in the Canadian transport corps.

“How can I help?” he said. “Please allow me, Helen. What can I do?”

He unpacked bread and cheese and tinned food and two bottles of wine and even chocolate. They fetched Juliette from the squire’s lodge and then they had a feast by candlelight because most of the electricity no longer worked. They sat around the bed in the upstairs room, eating from the bedcover like at a picnic.

She was glad to see him and feel his energy and the ray of hope he brought. That night she gave up her room for him, and as she said good night he gave her a questioning look but she pretended not to notice and closed the door.

In the morning he inspected the factory, and when he came back upstairs he shook his head. “My God,” he said. “I can see why you don’t want to go down any more. It would break your heart. From what I’ve seen there is no longer any reason for you to wait out the war here. There’s nothing left to guard, and England or Canada would be much safer for you now. Do you have any money?”

“Not much any more.”

“I see. You’d need money, Helen. Is there anything you can sell?”

“Sell? Where?”

“Not here, obviously. In England, or in America. I’m there every other month.”

“Well, I still have my mother’s placement sketches for the different models. Sketches in great detail, like an engineer’s drawings. You saw how exacting she was. They are of no use to me now, but they might be worth something to another piano company. And there’s the wood.”

“What wood?”

That night she took him to the barn and showed him where the ladder was hidden and how to reach the upper level. She held the flashlight while he scooped away straw and ran his hand over the exquisite wood.

“Fantastic,” he said. “How much of it is there?”

“A lot. A hundred thousand francs of it. Maybe more. What’s that in dollars? Ten, twenty thousand? It’s pure gold to an instrument maker. No knots, no cracks, nothing warped. If we could sell it, the money would keep Claire and me safe for years. Here in this barn all it would take is one fool to make a fire like they did in the factory.”

“Exactly. I think I know where there might be a market. How much is there in volume? Or how much weight?”

She did not know. They looked down the hatch to make sure that no one had followed them and then he spent another ten minutes measuring the stacks by pacing them off and using an improvised yardstick for height and width.

“There’s maybe as much as eight or nine hundred cubic feet,” he said then. “It’s amazing. We’ll need more than one truck.”

He climbed down first and held the ladder for her.

They could make some sort of deal, she said. Perhaps one-third for him, would that be fair? Or even one-half, if he managed to get a good price.

“We’ll see. Helen …” He stopped and stood looking at her. He seemed shy suddenly, and he opened his mouth to continue but then he turned away. The next day he left again.

In January 1917 she played for an army surgeon from Metz, a major in his late thirties. He wanted to practise a four-handed Czerny with her, and he was good, with a promising touch on the keys. She taught him to lengthen his hand and to slow down, and when practising to concentrate on each single note, since each note was the only one that mattered.

When he was not playing he sat on the blue sofa smoking Balkan Sobranje cigarettes and sipping Calvados. She watched him lighting his cigarettes at the top of the lamp funnel, and as he did so the flame from below made his face hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed, a death mask already. He lasted not quite five weeks and died from blood poisoning after a patient struggled during an amputation and some instrument slipped and tore his hand.

All the time under the French, the factory served as a field hospital. It overflowed quickly and then the yard too filled with stretchers. When the ground was frozen, the
dead were carted away a distance but not quite out of sight from her bedroom window. They were stacked like cordwood under the willows, row after row in torn, bloody uniforms or stained white shifts that stirred in the breeze. Crows came in vast flocks, a glistening, swarming carpet of them, and they shrieked and hacked at the corpses. At night dogs came and snarled and fought over the remains.

In the spring of 1917 the ground thawed and so did the dead by the willows. A tank with a trench blade ripped up the earth, and then a dozen soldiers dragged the bodies one by one to the hole and laid them down. Lime was poured on them and it drifted in white clouds, and then the tank pushed the earth back over the dead. A French chaplain in uniform with a purple stole around his neck waited upwind from it all, and when it was done he made the sign of the cross in the air.

In the summer the Canadians rotated through the sector, and during that time she housed a young battery commander from Montreal, a blond, wavy-haired captain named Xavier Boucher. He was the first of the officers she found attractive as a man. What she also liked about him was the effect he had on Claire. Claire was nine, and the years since her father’s death had changed her from a spunky tomboy turning cartwheels into a sad child who’d forgotten how to smile or play. But Xavier had a youthful sense of humour, and despite the horrors he could make her and Claire laugh. He played ball with Claire in the salon because they could not go down into the yard, and
in the light from the oil lamp against the wall he showed her how to make shadow animals with her hands: a rabbit, a cow, a goat, a chicken; a farmyard full of animals, and a barking dog to guard them.

For him too, Hélène played in the evening. One night she played the “Moonlight Sonata” and “Für Elise,” and later when Claire was long in bed in the upstairs room she allowed him the first intimacies. The next night she let him make love to her because she wanted the comfort and sweetness as much as he.

They lay in the dark on her mother’s blue sofa and distant explosions painted the window cross onto the ceiling. When he was asleep in that shifting light, she kept watch over him, and she could see his face, tired and surely a bit younger than she but already in command of a company of men who would look to him for courage and leadership in the pointless horrors of battle.

Less than four weeks later he told them that his unit was being broken up and repositioned. He did not know where to. He said so over dinner and, when she heard that, Claire put down her fork and looked at him round-eyed.

In the early morning he left and the door closed behind him. His batman came and packed his bag. Later they could hear commands and she and Claire watched from a window, the men forming ranks, engines pulling field pieces, and they could see him on a chestnut horse at the point of a column, far away, perhaps a hundred and fifty yards in the field. He raised an arm and put his horse forward.