The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [138]
He finished as fast as he could, and listened—awful to pull the great clanking flush during Mrs. Keeping’s opening bars. But no, they were still laughing. They must all be as drunk as he was by now. He hung about in the shadow of the door from the hall, there were two empty seats, but in the middle of rows, there was a burst of laughter which he thought for a mad second was aimed at him, and he slipped in pink-faced at the side of the room and stood against the wall, behind a row of dining chairs. Here he could see everything—but so too could everyone see him. There were two or three others standing, and at the back of the room the french windows were still open, with further guests gathered outside in what already looked like darkness. Mrs. Keeping was erect in front of the piano, hands clasped, in the posture of a child reciting. He didn’t take in what she was saying. Peter was at the end of the front row, smiling at his hands, or at the floor; Mrs. Jacobs in the middle of the row, the place of honour, sipping at her drink and blinking up at her daughter with delighted reproach as the surprise got under way. Paul smiled anxiously himself, and when everyone laughed he laughed too. “Now Mother is awfully fond of music,” Mrs. Keeping said, “so we thought we’d better humour her by playing some.” Laughter again—he looked at Mrs. Jacobs, enjoying the collective sense of treasuring and teasing her; a woman just behind her exclaimed, “Dear Daphne,” and people laughed at that too. Mrs. Keeping pulled her black wrap around her upper arms and pushed back her shoulders—“So, to start with, her favourite composer.”
“Aha …!” said Mrs. Jacobs, with an accepting smile, though perhaps a tiny uncertainty as to who that would turn out to be.
“Chopin?” said one old boy to the woman beside him.
“You’ll see soon enough!” said Mrs. Keeping. She sat down on the piano stool, and then looked round. “We can’t run to the original, I fear, so this is a paraphrase by Liszt.” There was a murmur of humorous apprehension. “It’s very hard!” She fixed the music on the stand with a furious glare, and then she was off.
She could really play, couldn’t she?—that was Paul’s first feeling. He looked around hastily at the others, with a bashful grin on his face. Was it Chopin? He saw them all deciding, staring at each other, frowning or nodding, some leaning to whisper. There was a noiseless sigh, a wave of collective recognition and relief that almost made the music itself unimportant: they’d got it. He didn’t want to show that he hadn’t. He had never seen anyone play the piano seriously and at close range, and it locked him into a state of mesmerized embarrassment, made worse by the desire to conceal it. There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had, and there was the sight of Mrs. Keeping in action, the plunges and stabs of her bare arms up and down the keyboard. She wasn’t a large woman—it was only her presence that was crushing. Her little hands looked brave and comical as they stretched and rumbled and tinkled. She rocked and jumped from one buttock to the other, in her stiff red dress, her black wrap slipping—it twitched and drooped behind her as she moved, with a worrying life of its own. The riveting, but almost unwatchable, thing was her profile, powdered and severe, shaken by twitches and nods, like tics only just kept under control. He stared, smiling tightly, and covering his mouth