I shrug. It would be easy to lie, but it falls out of me. ‘Bit of guitar, little bit of piano . . .’
‘Piano?’ Camille’s eyes widen.
Sarah, the sports teacher, in a capacious Welsh rugby shirt, points over to the corner of the room. ‘They’ve got a piano in here, you know. They let people play.’
I stare at the piano. I had been trying so hard to act like an ordinary mayfly that I hadn’t even noticed it when I’d walked in.
‘Oh yes, you can give it a tinkle,’ says the barman, a lanky twenty-something with a weak wispy beard, who is clearing our glasses away.
I begin to panic, the way anyone might panic when being offered a drug they had fought to give up. ‘No, I’m fine.’
Martin, sensing my awkwardness in front of Camille, pushes it a little further. ‘No, go on, Tom. I had a go last Thursday. Have a go.’
Camille looks at me sympathetically. ‘It isn’t compulsory. It’s not an initiation ritual. He doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to.’
‘Well,’ I find myself saying, ‘it’s been a while.’
I don’t want her to pity me, so maybe it is for that reason that I stand up and walk over to the scratched and well-worn upright piano, passing the only other customers in the place – three grey-haired friends staring in the timeless mute sorrow of old men at their half-drunk pints of bitter.
I sit down on the stool and the room falls quiet with expectation. Well, quiet, except for a little snorted giggle from Martin.
I stare down at the keys. I haven’t played the piano since Paris. Not properly. That was the best part of a century ago. There was something about the piano, compared to the guitar. It demanded more of you. It cost too much emotion.
I have no idea what to play.
I push up my sleeves.
I close my eyes.
Nothing.
I play the first thing that comes to mind.
‘Greensleeves’.
I am in a pub in East London and playing ‘Greensleeves’ on a piano. Martin’s laughter flaps into my head but I keep going. ‘Greensleeves’ blurs into ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, which makes me pine for Marion, and so I move on to a bit of Liszt’sLiebestraum No.3. And by the time that I reach Gershwin’s ‘The Man I Love’ Martin isn’t laughing and I am on my own inside the music. I feel exactly how I used to feel, playing in Paris at Ciro’s. I remember, in short, what the piano can do.
But then other memories rise up, and my head pounds as my mind goes into a kind of cramp of emotion.
When I eventually stop I turn to look at the group. Mouths are open. Camille leads a little round of applause. Even the three old men and bar staff join in.
Martin mumbles the word ‘Greensleeves’. Isham tells me: ‘That was epic!’ Sarah tells Martin: ‘You might be out of a job!’ Martin tells Sarah to fuck off.
I sit on my stool next to Camille.
‘When you played I really had that feeling again. Like I’d seen you playing before. It was like déjà vu or something.’
I just shrug. ‘Well, they say déjà vu is a real thing.’
‘A symptom of schizophrenia,’ says Martin.
‘But truly,’ Camille says, her hand touching the back of mine, then retreating before anyone sees. ‘That was amazing – si merveilleux.’
And I feel a brief but intense surge of desire. I haven’t truly lusted after another human being for centuries, but when I look at Camille, when I hear her kind, strong voice, when I see the delicate creases around her eyes, when I feel the skin of her hand against the skin of mine, when I look at her mouth, my mind switches to what it would be like to be with her, to lose my way with her, to whisper longings into her ear, to devour and be devoured. To wake up in the same bed and talk and laugh and be in comfortable silence with her. To give her breakfast. Toast. Blackcurrant jam. Pink grapefruit juice. Maybe some watermelon. Sliced. On a plate. She would smile, and I see it in my mind, the smile, and I would dare to feel happy with another human being.
This is what playing the piano does.
This is the danger of it.
