The Tuner

Pauline heard him before she saw him — a single note struck twice, then a third time with slightly more force, as if the piano were being asked a question it kept refusing to answer. She set down her tea and stood in the doorway of the front room.

He was older than she'd expected. The agency had sent someone young last time, a nervous lad who'd finished in forty minutes and left a receipt that smelled of cigarettes. This man was perhaps seventy, with a canvas bag that had seen considerable weather, and he moved around the upright Broadwood with a familiarity that suggested he wasn't so much working on it as reuniting with it.

"I'll stay out of your way," Pauline said.

"Please don't," he said, not looking up. "People who leave the room make me anxious. I start imagining things."

She wasn't sure if he was joking. She pulled the armchair a little further back and sat.

His name was Clifford. He'd mentioned it at the door with the mild resignation of someone who knew it would be promptly forgotten. He worked methodically — not slowly, but without hurry, which isn't the same thing. He had a tuning lever and a mute and a small leather roll of tools she couldn't identify, and he used them with the economy of long practice. Every so often he played a phrase, just four or five notes, to hear how they sat together.

The piano had been her mother's. Pauline could play a little — enough to embarrass herself at Christmas, she always said, though in truth she played most evenings, quietly, with the sustain pedal down so it blurred everything into something more forgiving. She had never been taught properly. Her mother hadn't seen the point of lessons for a girl who'd already shown she was better with numbers.

Clifford paused at the upper register and leaned in close, as though listening to the instrument breathe.

"This one," he said, touching a key near the top. "She's been cracked a while. You can hear it if you know to listen."

He pressed it: a faint doubling beneath the note, a ghost of itself.

"I thought it was me," Pauline said. "I thought I was hearing things."

"No. The hammer felt's split just at the strike point. Gives it that — " he searched for a word — "that uncertainty."

"Can you fix it?"

"Today, no. I haven't the felt. But I can order it. Fortnight, maybe less."

He moved on without making it a drama. That impressed her. The men she'd known in her life — her husband Keith included, God rest him — had rarely been able to pass a problem without turning it into a statement about the difficulty of problems.

She found herself telling him about her mother. Not a lot: just that the piano had come from her house in Weston-super-Mare after she died, and that the removal men had stood it in the wrong corner for two years before Pauline had figured out it wanted the light from the side window rather than direct sun.

"They always want the light," Clifford said, as if this were a known fact about pianos generally.

"Do you play?" she asked.

He paused, lever in hand, and something shifted in his expression — not pain exactly, but the memory of a decision. "I used to. Stopped when I started tuning. You can't do both. You start hearing everything differently and then you can't unhear it."

"That sounds lonely."

"It sounds lonely," he agreed. "But there's something else to it. You start to hear what's actually there instead of what you're trying to make."

Pauline thought about that while he worked. Outside, a bus changed gear going up the hill. Rothko — no, that wasn't right, that wasn't her cat, she didn't have a cat — a neighbour's tabby crossed the garden wall and paused, monumentally uninterested in everything.

Clifford finished. He played a slow chromatic run from bottom to top and the room filled with something that had been almost-present for years and now, suddenly, was.

"There she is," he said quietly.

It was such a plain thing to say. Pauline felt, for a reason she couldn't have defended to anyone, that she might cry — not from sadness, but from the mild shock of realising she'd been living with a slightly wrong version of something and hadn't known.

She wrote him a cheque. He tucked it away without looking at the amount.

"Fortnight," he said at the door.

"I'll be here," she said.

When she went back to the piano that evening, she played the same things she always played. But the cracked key sang its small uncertainty into every chord, and for the first time she heard it clearly, and was glad.

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