Hemlock and Roses

ere below, a barge sounded its horn, long and low, an

rogramme in her hand

handwritin

r, he sai

t of spite until it became a habit." She heard her own voice going on, brisk and reasonable, the voice she used in l

quietly. "Nobo

tu

t to stay upright. The window was behind him. She couldn't see his face properly. She could see only the long, sti

said. "T

es

w each

es

years

es

estions, closed questions, each one a single step on a sta

w w

ooked down at his hand on the bench, and when he spoke, his voice

ticking E-flat in the upper register, and the board wouldn't pay to replace the action, so I fixed it every week." Something moved at the corne

shift, very slight

he said. "You kept count. You told me afterwar

ost hear herself saying it, and the fact that she couldn't remember sayi

d t

her." He said it simply

t into her li

She reached back into the place where she was nineteen and twenty, and she found lectures, and practice rooms, and her mother's kitchen, and Sunday dinners,

ever gone

er voice cracked straight down the midd

kno

o you

at glass on Saturday night," he said

d hear her breathing. She understood now that he had simply known she would be there. That he had sat in tha

it, and held out a paper cup o

is Iri

hand over

ed. "In the interview room. Any of th

an questioning me about a murder?" He shook his head slightly. "You'd have thought I was mad. O

She hated that

why

Because you found that. And you asked. An

ne day I'll play it properly,

did i

ore she could decide whe

or closing. It was a man standing very still while something passed through

e said. "Three da

hy

not at her. "You said you'd never loved me. You said I'd been a hobby, something to do on Tuesdays, and you'd got bored. You said I s

even and laid down with ca

very one of

pered. "To you. Three d

es

li

all

tand there and say that's all right? I don't- I would never-" She stopped. She didn't know what she

en. Fully, in the grey light, for the f

" he

u possibly

e I kne

's raining, or the sky is grey. A plain fact, observed over fourteen months of Tuesdays and never on

en held very tight for a very long time without

She found herself looking at the piano. The

down on

me by a route the mind has forgotten. Her hands came to rest above th

terest. That philosophy had taken over. That she'd grown up. She'd told herself th

er hands were going to

G-sharp.

otes,

like a he

falling line, the left h

eone speaking very softly in an empty room, and grew, and broke, and became something else entirely in the middle, a bright and unlikely

very note, every place where the phrase leaned and caught its breath, every place where the old piano's acti

spent hours making these keys sit exactly right beneath her fingers. Someone had kep

and let it ring out into the long grey

y still with her

ed. The tears ran down her face and dripped from he

e hand flat against the glass as if to hold himself up. His head was bowed. He didn't

see Elias Vane cry. And even then, h

ime, the piano between them and th

aid at last. Her voice wasn'

it every

osed h

, written by a girl who had stood in his doorway three da

out barely above a whisper

't turn

ething else

spoke. At the bottom, in the rain, he held the car door for her the way he ha

love me?"

n the stairs that she woul

" he

ou st

p of the car door, very l

p, Iris," he s

remember dr

nd couldn't recall a single set of traffic lights. She remembered the bridge. She remembe

recognise, swollen and blotched from crying, and thinking that she looked

mbered l

e stand

gital clock on the oven said 2:31, in green numbe

ooled. A thin grey thread of s

White porcelain, a thin gold rim.

as a taste

f her throat the way it always had, the way she had always hated, ever

l G

it and drunk almost all of it, and she did no

her left hand, pr

d of the line, slow and calm and familiar. And then she heard her father's voice, wa

girl, Rosie. That

idn't

now anyone c

re was a pause: a long, listening pause, as if the man a

in a completely different v

etheart? I