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that. Or she was thinking about something, on a larger scale perhaps. ‘What is it this time, an opera?’ he would say. ‘No, just a string quartet.’ ‘Ah, right. Of course. A string quartet.’ Laughing again, and kissing her.
    So …
    Life is long.
    There was the window. The little terrace.
    See?
    And then, lugging her bag, up the stairs, past the landing, past the kitchen, there was the sitting room, too, just as she had left it, with the grand piano still there – of course it would be. She went over and touched a key, middle C. Dusty to the touch but clear sounding. She ran up and down the scale a couple of times, then into D, and E, all the way through the octave, and then the bass hand. Out of tune by now, the piano would be, but not so bad. She sat down at the bench. She’d done so much of her early work on that piano, even now she thinks, lying up here in bed, how it seems to wait downstairs for her like a friend. Going through the scales again, C major, then D,then E, then F … And the piano responding to her touch, just as it always had. Then F sharp minor. And ouch. That note. In particular. It would take a lot of tuning after all to put that note straight again – but Elisabeth took off her coat even so and played a little Chopin Prelude, and it didn’t sound so terrible, did it? And after that a piece she’d written herself called ‘Circus Gardens’. She went to play it through but then, in the midst of the first passage, before she could finish, the feeling again, of the prick, the sting. And having to put her hand up to her mouth to press back the force of emotion.
Idiot. Idiot
. Circus Gardens. It was unlikely she was going to see Edward again.
    Edward
.
    His idea to get the piano in the first place. He always had the best ideas. It was Edward who said ‘Let’s buy it’ when they first saw the piano, the perfect size of it, in the saleroom. ‘You’ll play it but it’s for both of us,’ he’d said – because it was to be a kind of a prize, sort of, a reward. For the first piece she’d written that had been properly performed, for the novel he’d published. ‘We’re in this together,’ Edward had said. ‘Let’s get it. This can be the beginning.’
    Remember?
    ‘Of course I remember.’ She speaks the words out loud, to the window, to the blue sky. The piano is downstairs, quiet now, but waiting.
    ‘I remember it all.’
    She started to pick out another tune, something else from the same time, those early years when they’d onlyjust moved in here – but stopped. Really she should have arranged to have had the piano looked after. Alice was never going to do that. Alice wasn’t a musician, it wouldn’t occur to her to have it played regularly, properly tuned. Maybe they should have had someone else here who would have taken more care – but then, Elisabeth and Edward had never been the kind of couple who thought things through that way, they let things pass, let things go. And so it was years since Elisabeth herself had even played it, years and years, and she’d been young and well, in love and strong and all the future outside the window, part of the blue sky, like it might go on for ever. Like an octave you might spin out from under your fingers and it would go on and on up the scale, and on and up and never reach the end. All the notes of the keyboard and beyond, more, still there to play, the white notes, the black notes, whole notes, accidentals, on and on … As though playing all the way through time, Elisabeth thinks, and here she is now …
Here she is
… As though already the end is here but really it’s all part of the same octave, the end of the tune within the notes because there’s no beginning, lying here, and in the same way no end either, so that’s all right, then, close your eyes. The lovely past with its music all around you and the sun on the terrace and your legs bare and stretched out before you and the heat beating down on the top of your head,