Tommy Wieringa: Little Caesar

On Flint Road I saw them coming towards me, the daughters. Russian farmers’ wives. They had been off shopping at the Somerfield in Alburgh. I raised my hand in greeting. They didn’t reply, their arms were hung heavily with carrier bags. I had greeted them too early, too many meters had to be covered with eyes averted. It took a long time for us to reach each other. I said, ‘Hello, how are you this morning?’

They said, ‘Oh, fine, thank you,’ and asked whether I was coming from Catherine’s. I said I was. We walked on. Fifty meters further I looked back and saw them scraping down the road, shoulder to shoulder. Sometimes a gap arose in the phalanx as they skirted a pothole.

I went down the hill and passed Joanna’s house in the curve, the house Warren had built. Like last night, no-one seemed to be at home. Warren’s land extended all the way to the bottom of the hill, to the parking lot by the pier. I wondered whether Joanna would be at the funeral, whether the war between Catherine and her would be called off for the duration of the ceremony, a fragile truce.

I had taken a room at the Whaler. Catherine had offered me a bed; I thanked her but said no. Too many women, too much mourning.

Behind the taps in the Schooner bar I saw a familiar face: Mike Leland. We had played rugby together, he had been our second-team captain. He grinned broadly.

‘So it’s the piano man, well well!’

He stuck his big hand out across the bar and pumped my arm back and forth. Mike Leland had been working as a waiter at the Whaler before I left Alburgh. I had played the piano, afternoons in the lounge and evenings in the bar — I could still remember the expression on his face when he heard how much I earned.

‘I work,’ he had said in aggravation, ‘and you. . you play.’

He had worked his way up to manager, but looked as misplaced as ever with his number eight’s body in a barman’s uniform. He still played rugby, of course, these days as weight-bearing wall for the front five. Mike put a half-pint down in front of me and asked what had brought me to Alburgh.

‘The old Knut,’ he said then. ‘The folks up there won’t have long to go now. How long you staying?’

I told him I didn’t know, no fixed plans, but that I enjoyed seeing the hill and the village again. He frowned.

‘Not married are you, Ludwig?’

I shook my head.

‘Children, regular job?’

When I kept shaking my head he whistled softly through his teeth. Went on rinsing glasses mechanically.

‘Not married, no regular job. What on earth has become of you, piano man?’

‘Just the piano, that’s all. It’s a useful trick.’

Mike shook his head and laughed, a bit in spite of himself.

‘Still not an honest day’s work in your life. I must be doing something wrong.’

My room looked out on the little market square. On a pedestal in the middle of it was a WWII mine, painted fire-engine red, with a slot in it for contributions to the families of sailors lost at sea. I recalled the quote from the Book of Jeremiah that was engraved on the mine — There is sorrow on the sea .

My cell phone showed two missed calls.

*

‘Hey, Liberace, where are you? The bar’s full. We’re waiting for you.’

‘I asked nicely if you’d let us know where you are. At the desk they said you’d checked out. Christ, Unger, answer your phone. Stop acting like some kind of prima donna, goddamn it.’

There were a few battery stripes left. I dug around in my suitcase looking for the charger, and carefully lifted the urn in its plastic packing, until I saw before me the image of a wall socket. My battery charger was still in the Pulitzer Hotel, which I’d left the day before.

I kicked off my shoes, rolled myself up in the counterpane and, without a further thought, fell asleep.

It was early in the evening when I awoke. At the Readers’ Room, along the esplanade, I looked at old photographs of seamen from Alburgh — captains in the merchant marine, sailors on wartime frigates, herring fishers casting their nets at the Dogger Bank. By the glow of the opaline-glass reading lights I looked at ships that had run aground or been blown in half by dastardly submarines. The display cases contained clay pipes and braided epaulettes.

Some devout Christian had left money in his will to the Readers’ Room, to ensure that seamen would waste their time not in cafés but under the reading lamps. I had never seen a seaman in there. In fact, it was even doubtful whether there were any seamen left in Alburgh. A fisherman or sailor would have seemed as quaint there as a thatcher at a county fair. Yet the Readers’ Room still stood, and someone came every day to open it and close it again around eleven each night. That weird space, a mini-museum and public library rolled into one, had in some mysterious way escaped the ravages of time.

At the Lighthouse Inn I asked the waiter to take away the little bowl of chips. There are moments when I cannot bear the sight of chips. It has something to do with the ecstasy of loneliness. Years ago, whenever I felt that way, I would fill my pockets with pebbles to keep myself from blowing away. That lightness still took hold of me at times, when I had been alone and out of contact with people for a long time. I scraped off the cod’s silver-gray skin and paid no more attention to my freischwebende condition. I knew it wouldn’t be long before an end came to that weightlessness.

Later that evening Mike Leland asked me again how long I was planning to stay, and then, upon the incessant vagueness of my replies, he cast his nets.

‘Wouldn’t feel like playing here a bit, would you, when you’ve got the time? That’s what that thing’s there for.’

That thing: a Brinsmead grand I had played before, now as false as a compliment to your mother-in-law.

‘It needs tuning,’ I said.

‘I could have someone come in tomorrow, it’ll be fixed in a jiffy.’

He was drawing in his nets.

‘Last summer we had a fellow here by the name of John Whittaker,’ he said. ‘Used to play on the Queen Mary . I heard he’s dead. Found him in his room, at the Seagull in Lowestoft.’

‘The way of all lounge pianists,’ I mumbled.

‘It’s a service we’d be pleased to offer our guests,’ Leland said, as though he’d just come back from a marketing course. ‘And of course it doesn’t have to be an act of charity, does it, Prince Charming?’

He was referring to my former hourly wage of twenty-five quid, as established by Julie Henry, the manager at the time. She’d had a weak spot for me, there was no denying that. The affrontery of twenty-five pounds an hour was etched in Leland’s memory. Perhaps he still figured there was some corrupt connection between the level of my wages and Julie Henry’s smiles whenever she walked past the piano in her barmaid’s uniform, which I believe she ordered to fit as tightly as possible. Sometimes she would run her hand slowly across the lacquered frame.

We agreed to thirty-five pounds an hour, Leland and I did, and dinner beforehand. In twelve years’ time my value had risen by an additional ten pounds an hour. During the first week I could stay at the hotel for free, after that I would have to find lodgings elsewhere; a room was too much to ask.

And so within the first twenty-four hours I, who had come to town for a funeral, had found work, food and a place to stay.

When I came downstairs the next morning, there was a piano tuner at work.

‘An old workhorse it is, guv,’ the man said. ‘All those children’s hands.’

I came closer and peered into the cabinet.

‘First they look at it for a little while,’ I said. ‘Then, carefully, they try out a key. When no-one comes over to yell at them, they try the next one. There’s a magic idea in their head that says they can suddenly play the piano, just like that, a miracle. I remember the days when I stood in front of the piano and thought I had Beethoven in my back pocket, that all I had to do was hit the keys.’