Justin Go - The Steady Running of the Hour

A large group has arranged itself around the upright piano. Climbers sit cross-legged on the floor, a few reclining, others sucking on glowing pipes. The aroma of cheap shag tobacco hangs low. A row of spectators is seated on chairs at the back, among these a few women. Ashley sees only the back of the piano player. A cream blouse, a long dark skirt. Her hands are fair. A silver band is around her wrist.

Ashley and Price stay in the door frame, watching. The piece returns to its theme again, a churning cascade of notes. The music slows, then ceases. The girl lifts her hands from the keys. There is cheering and applause.

— Encore, encore!

The girl swivels on the piano bench, startled by this enthusiasm. She is slender and her dark hair is tied up. There are faint freckles beneath her blue eyes.

— It wasn’t anything, she says.

— Marvelous, Price calls. Encore!

The girl smiles and bows her head a little. She flips through the songbook, but her two companions stand up, another dark-haired woman and a man in a motoring duster. The room goes on applauding as the girl stands and makes a shy bow. Clapping on, Price leans toward Ashley.

— She shan’t forget this hotel.

The girl and her companions walk out amid cheers. A young man with a pipe in his mouth pulls out the piano bench, starting a lively tune whose lyrics were worked out last night. The audience joins in the chorus. Price clasps Ashley on the shoulder.

— Look here Ashley, I’m only trying to set you on the right course. Plenty of climbers start as fire-eaters, forever biting what they aren’t fit to swallow. I daresay I’ve been as guilty as any fellow. But you must learn to profit from another man’s experience, otherwise you’re courting disaster. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are. I told you the safe route, and you went flailing over some mad path that dropped you.

— I caught myself—

— Barely. A true alpinist doesn’t depend on chance.

Price lifts his hand from Ashley’s shoulder.

— I’ve a question for you, Ashley. Which do you suppose takes a man furthest in life — talent, judgment or persistence?

Ashley considers.

— I’d say the salmon possesses all three. And after infinite labor comes to die in the same place he started.

— Be serious.

— Then I don’t know. Which is it?

Price takes the rope from Ashley and throws the coil over his shoulder. He starts toward the stairs, shaking his head.

— Which, indeed.

I come out of the building and walk south toward High Holborn, carrying a cardboard portfolio stamped Twyning & Hooper. Inside are the papers they’ve given me, the proof of what I’ve seen and heard: the solicitors exist. The fortune exists.

High Holborn is not a beautiful street. Buildings of glass and stone. Throngs of pale businessmen in dark suits, their garish neckties bound in thick Windsor knots. They know nothing about the fortune. A woman staring at her cell phone collides with me, knocking shoulders.

— I’m sorry, I say.

The woman walks past and turns into Holborn Station, not seeming to hear me. I drag my hand against the polished surface of a building to steady myself.

I’d wanted to go to London the moment Prichard suggested it. But I didn’t admit it over the phone. After that first call I spent the afternoon sitting in Dolores Park, watching the clouds close over the skyscrapers downtown. I thought about London and Rome and Paris, cities I’d read about that were still only names to me, dark spaces on a map. It was harder to think about the fortune and even harder to link it to my grandmother. The park turned windy and I walked back toward my apartment. Near the corner of 24th and Capp I passed another pay phone. I looked at it for a long time. Then I picked up the receiver and called Khan.

— I want to come to London. I just need to look for the papers first.

— Splendid, Khan said. Can you be here by Monday?

He forwarded the itinerary an hour later. I went to my father’s house and tore apart the garage looking for anything related to my grandmother. My mother’s things were all in cardboard boxes stored high under the rafters and I hadn’t looked at them since the funeral. I got a ladder and took them all down. Soon there were papers everywhere: bank statements and photographs and old letters. I sat on the oil-stained concrete floor looking through everything. In one box I found my mother’s high school yearbook from 1968 and I read some of the autographs in the back, but that only made me feel worse. I shut the yearbook and went through box after box of old linens and polyester clothes. Everything smelled like mothballs. None of it was my grandmother’s.

On the highest shelf in the garage I found the jewelry box my mother had once used. It was upholstered in silk and opened with ivory clasps shaped like small tusks. Inside there was antique jewelry that may have been my grandmother’s — ancient brooches, long strings of imitation pearls — but there was nothing else. There were no documents of any kind.

My father came into the garage. He looked at the mess on the floor and made a low whistle.

— Looking in your mom’s stuff?

I closed the jewelry box, but I didn’t answer.

— Listen, he said. I’m the one who put that stuff up there, I know what’s where. So what are you looking for?

— My grandmother’s stuff. Anything of hers. Do we have her birth certificate?

— Birth certificate? Christ, I doubt it. What for?

— I’m applying for this scholarship for grad school. You need British ancestry for it.

My father shook his head. — I’ve never seen any of Charlotte’s stuff around here. Not any papers anyway. She didn’t have much to do with us.

My father picked up one of the letters in the pile and looked at it. It was his handwriting on the envelope. He frowned and dropped it back in the pile.

— Why was that? I asked.

My father shrugged. — Would have been better to ask your mother. By the time I met her, she was one of those ladies who’ve been divorced for so long, they’re completely independent. She told her own daughter to call her Charlotte, which tells you something. I don’t think she cared for family obligations. Or any kind of obligation. Maybe in her own way she did love your mother. But they couldn’t stand to be around each other more than a few hours.

— Did she go to your wedding?

— She did. She flew out here alone. She wasn’t living in England at the time, somewhere else. Maybe Holland? We had some pretty good champagne at the reception and she drank quite a bit. It loosened her up. I remember her joking that the lapels on my tux were too wide. This was the seventies, you know, and she was from a very different generation.

— Do you remember anything else?

My father knelt beside the jewelry box. He opened the lid and looked at the pearls inside. He turned to me.

— At the reception, I danced with Charlotte after I’d danced with your mom. I guess she was surprised that I knew what I was doing. She told me, ‘You’re the second best of any man I’ve danced with.’ Naturally, I asked who was the best. But she didn’t answer. She just said I was a good dancer and she knew we’d have a long and happy marriage. ‘Americans don’t believe in sorrow,’ she said. ‘That’s what makes you so charming.’

— What does that mean?

He shrugged. — I don’t know. I guess she had a pretty hard life. She moved around a lot. The guy she really wanted to marry was killed in the war, somewhere in North Africa. So she married an American instead, but of course that didn’t last. You done with these boxes? None of this stuff is Charlotte’s, I can tell you that.