When she paused, I closed the door and walked in. She was startled. “You don’t mind me playing your piano, do you?”
“Mind?” I shook my head. “I love it. Please play it whenever you like. In fact I order you to play it! Don’t worry about disturbing me. I’m one of those weird people who only work in cafés. Mainly I just hang about and drink coffee and end up running into some loser and having an argument about the Coen brothers.”
Surreptitiously I put down the tube of silver polish, but she noticed straight away and determinedly shut the lid of the piano. “Good, you got the polish.”
“No, no! I want you to keep playing.”
She smiled and shook her head. “First I polish, then I play. John, I can’t play if things aren’t right, do you understand?”
It was revolutionary, to me, the whole concept of things needing to be right. It didn’t conform with the sort of view of the universe I’d built up over the years.
“What do you think of my piano?”
She caressed its black-shining flank, its gold-embossed letters. “I like it very much, but it needs tuning.” A little wrinkle played across her pale forehead, then, with great hesitation, she said: “If I pay for it, John, can we have it tuned?”
“But I had it tuned!”
“When?”
I ran my hand through my hair, trying to think. “Oh, about ten years ago.”
“Ten years ago?” She smiled, and put her hand on my arm. “You see? So it needs another tune.”
Once again I found myself in full retreat, like a splash of rancid milk running across a skewed floor. Finally, after much swallowing, I agreed. “Okay, you can have it tuned, but I will pay for it.”
“No, John, I will pay.”
“I said, I will pay!”
It was silly, really, the stand-off. She shrugged and didn’t say anything else, except that she knew someone in London who was a piano-tuner, and she’d give him a call.
A few hours later, coming home from the café, I was surprised to find a bearded and dandruff-spattered Russian with a spectacularly receding hairline already at work on the piano. Olga was sitting cross-legged in the sofa, like a lit candle, reading intently from a book. She closed it with a snap.
“Was I too fast?” she asked.
“Fast? No…”
“I just thought, why not take care of the problem?”
“That’s an angle, I guess.” I stuck a finger into my ear and started digging around, as if ear-wax might relieve my discomfort.
“I thought you’d be out working all day.”
I leaned back in the sofa and stared vacantly at the ceiling. “Olga, have you ever tried working all day in a café? It’s bloody impossible.”
She laughed. “Of course it is. Why don’t you stay here in your great apartment? All that money you’re wasting on coffee, John, you could buy the best Arabica beans and sit in your garden and get a lot done. Right?”
Before I knew it, Olga had paid the guy and was shaking his hand. As soon as he’d gone, she started practicing in earnest. She played for about an hour, filling the house with the same sequences played over and over again almost mechanically. It worried me. Scenes are never good if you rewrite them too many times.
I spent a few largely unproductive hours under the chestnut tree in the garden, sipping at some good strong Arabica coffee, as she’d advised. It seemed largely redundant, trying to flesh out the details of the ending of my fantasy thriller, the one where my main character learns that his body is diseased and filled with maggots.
I knew in my heart the film would never be made.
The wind ruffled the swaying crown of the horse-chestnut tree, and I concentrated on the sound of the piano being played inside, the harmonizing notes and scales. It stopped and the piano stool scraped against the floor. Olga stuck her head out of the garden door. “John, do you want to come for a walk?”
The first week passed in the wink of an eye, and before I knew it, one had turned into two, then three.
We’d get up and have a silent breakfast, usually with eggs and coffee and toast dripping with melted butter. I have a weird tendency to eat things like Stilton and avocado first thing in the morning, but Olga never commented. In fact she seemed utterly unconcerned, which I appreciated.
One thing she did in the mornings was to practice the piano on the table. Her fingers moved about, as if there was a keyboard there. Obviously there was no sound.
I decided I would not comment on her habits, just as she didn’t comment on mine.
There was a friendly, plausible atmosphere of mutual respect between us.
Sometimes Olga brought out a coffee into the garden where I was working. If I ever dared give her a compliment she’d reply ironically, like a sort of Winona Ryder character, then walk back inside slightly pissed with me. Another great thing about Olga was she loved fish fingers and Heinz baked beans. We took it in turn to shove the sods under the grille and eat them without any fuss. It saved a lot of cooking time. If one is unlucky enough to be alive in the twenty-first century, one might as well make the most of its conveniences.
Lunch was also usually silent, and I heartily approved of this. I can’t imagine Warren and Julie did much blabbering while he was figuring out the Shampoo storyline and doing his best to control Robert Towne’s excesses. I reckon Warren and Julie must have had a lot of intense, silent fucking, but apart from that they were probably just working their balls off.
Me and Olga, on the other hand, had a strange reluctance to cross into the land of the lucky. Occasionally we’d playfully entwine our fingers as we walked along, but that was it. I liked the way her steps more or less kept time with mine, so that sometimes we were like two soldiers marching along.
For the time being I was saving a fortune by my boycott of cappuccinos and ciabatta rolls, and this was good enough for me.
A few times when we had sunny days we climbed to the top of Primrose Hill and looked out over London from that spot where the gallows had once stood. Once people were strung up there, but now it’s a well-known meeting-place for lovers, who sit huddled together, admiring the sun going down over the city.
One evening the sun was making a masterpiece of the industrial smog suspended over Wembley to the west, and Olga sat there humming a sequence of notes from the Bartok number she was learning for the audition whilst practicing a complex sequence of finger movements in the grass. Without thinking too much about it I leaned forward and gave her a resounding kiss on the lips.
“What was that for?” she said, without taking her eyes off the grass.
“I just felt I should.”
The air between us was pregnant after that. When we got back to the flat, Olga disappeared into her room for a moment to change into a black, sheer dress and tied her hair back. There was a sort of vitality about her, like a bright green papaya tree rising out of the undergrowth.
She went into the kitchen to knock up a pudding, explaining that she needed some sugar. Without a word she handed me a plate of figs with flamed ginger, toasted panetone, and home-made vanilla sauce, possibly the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.
I ate, then broke the silence: “Olga, is there anything you can’t do?”
“There are two things I can’t do,” she replied in a no-nonsense voice. “I can’t play the piano as well as I’d like. And I can’t meet a man capable of loving me the way I want to be loved.”
Her words issued from her mouth like a mist. In the end I decided to fill in the missing words myself. “If you fell in love with me, Olga, I think you’d be satisfied.”
“I’m not so sure about that John. We all say things because they sound good, and we’d like them to be true.”
She stared hard at me, and I nervously retreated. “I’m being hypothetical anyway.”
“Hypothetical? I don’t even know what that means, but it sounds like bullshit.” She stood up and went to the bedroom, returning with her arms full of pillows, sheets and a duvet. These she arranged in front of the fire. I went and sat by her, then leaned forward and kissed her. She had a lovely, soft body. I had a feeling I shouldn’t touch her, but I couldn’t stop myself, nor did she stop me. Her breasts were very ripe for someone so young, and yet they had flattened slightly around the nipple as if once overfilled with milk and now ready to be filled again. Even this, the thought of her imminent pregnancy, enflamed me, and I had a sense that I would possess her womb fully and make her grow down there again and again, until we grew old and our children sat round us at the table.
At the base of her spine was a fleshy little fold of skin across the top of her buttocks. I ran my finger along it, imagining myself riding her.
Later, everything I had imagined happened exactly as I fantasized. It was as if I’d foreseen her gift for physical love. Whatever the soothsayers say about the dangers of physical attraction as a causal factor, I knew I was bound to her and powerless to resist, even if it meant dying, starving, being ripped to shreds between wild horses or cut into small pieces and lowered into boiling oil, then fed to wild pigs. My body impelled me, even as everything in the world warned me to beware of that message, that simple crude rallying call of her body lying stretched out before me like a landscape, a landscape in which I saw my children, and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren all laboring on the land, tilling it and brutalizing their oxen until the furrows were done, straight and narrow and filled with onion and beets and beans.
“Oh God, Olga, you make me so happy!” I groaned as I lunged into her and found her ready for me, in fact so wet that at first I was startled. When I put my finger in her mouth, she sucked on it so greedily that I thought I’d expire with joy, but then she brought the whole delight to a sort of purposeful resolution by declaring, in a vaguely amused tone, “Your fingers taste of garlic, John, when you wash them you must scrub your nails…” Which didn’t stop her carrying on sucking my fingers. Her vulva seemed so custom-made for me that my every lunge into her body produced an exquisite exhalation of air.
Afterwards we lay still for a while, holding our breaths, too happy to speak.
“Have you made love many times before?” I said.
“I’ve had many fucks, but lately they haven’t meant so very much to me.”
Strangely enough I believed her implicitly. Indeed, it seemed inconceivable that she had ever made love to anyone except me. Just the thought of it made me itchy. When it got very late, we gathered up the bedclothes and went to bed, sleeping very deeply until the alarm went off at about six in the morning and she got up and made her preparations for her audition.
Before she left she came to me and said: “I’d like to know something before I go. Is this real? Will you still be here this evening?”
“I’ll be here. I live here,” I said.
“But I don’t live here, do I? So the question is… what happens now?”
“Well, I’d like to see more of you,” I said ineptly. My words had a kind of natural resistance. They rolled across my tongue traitorously, as if harboring little daggers and sub-contractual exemptions and clauses, all later to be expounded by lawyers and learned cynics.
She stood in the door for a long, long time, a tiny wrinkle between her eyebrows growing and growing until it covered her entire face. “The trouble is I think you have a lot of shit in you.”
“I never said I didn’t, did I Olga?”
“Does that make it any better?”
I propped myself up on one elbow, frowning and vaguely overwhelmed. “Can’t we just take one day at a time?”
When she left the house, there was a finality to the way the door closed.
I threw on some clothes, opened the door and ran into the street to follow her, but I couldn’t see her anywhere.
I waited all day in a growing fever of anticipation for her to come home.
As evening set in, my misgivings grew. I telephoned Clarissa, who knew nothing, although she found it difficult to mask her delight at the sense that something had gone wrong. She offered me a bitter pastille with relish. “John, I haven’t heard from Olga for days, and I’ve been very busy myself. Maybe she met some students her own age at the college and went dancing. That’s what twenty-one-year-olds do. Had you forgotten?”
Darkness descended. It was a darkness I recognized, because I had been living in it all my life until the day Olga arrived.
My nerves were playing havoc with me. I went out and bought a packet of cigarettes, then sat smoking in the garden under the chestnut tree, talking to myself and growing frenzied as I once again relived last night. It struck me that if I could not see Olga again I would be indifferent to everything in life from this day on. I would happily step into the void and fall, whilst quietly smoking a pipe or reflectively turning the pages of a volume of poems, occasionally quoting a line from it until my body hit the ground with an incandescent, star-colliding impact.
Midnight struck and I knew everything was doomed. I opened a half-bottle of Bell’s and sat there smoking and drinking for hours, until I was suddenly overwhelmed by a violent fit of vomiting. Instinctively I knew that Olga was also vomiting somewhere at this very moment. I pined for her, I wanted to hold her and protect her.
Dawn broke.
Finally, at six in the morning, the key turned in the lock and Olga walked in. With a deep sigh that racked her whole body she sat down at the kitchen table, and stared gloomily at the floor.
“I failed my audition,” she said. “So I walked all night. I walked into the East End and met some boys and went to a party with them. College boys. They’d hired a place with a live band, and they had ice sculptures and you could drink shots of vodka from the tits of the female sculptures and the penises of the male sculptures.” She looked up, heartbroken. “I had many, many shots, John. Then I met a man who said he found me fascinating. He wanted to take me with him to India, leaving next week.”
I stood looking at her, felt the color draining from my face.
“Then I started dancing, and the drink was bubbling in my body, and I felt wild. I took off most of my clothes and danced on the table. I kept vomiting until another man came to help me. He cleaned me up. He was handsome and he seemed interested in me.”