Silent Notes

The boiler in Clara's building has been broken for eleven days.

She knows this the way she knows most things about her life... as a fact to be worked around, catalogued alongside the dripping tap she fixes with a folded cloth, the window that refuses to close properly, the single electric ring on which she heats soup and, occasionally, her hands. She is twenty-four years old and lives in two rooms above a dry cleaner's in Bethnal Green, and the smell of solvent has long since ceased to bother her. What bothers her, when she allows herself to be bothered, is the piano.

It is not her piano. She has never owned one. It belongs to the church hall three streets away, where she pays forty pounds a month for access on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings, when the building is otherwise empty and the heating is left on a timer that cuts out at nine. She arrives at half past six and plays until the cold forces her to stop, which is usually around ten, sometimes later, her breath clouding in the amber light above the keys.

Tonight is a Thursday in November, and she is playing Bach... the Chromatic Fantasy, that impossible, consuming piece, when she becomes suddenly aware that she is not alone.

She does not stop. Stopping would be an admission that she has noticed, and she has learnt, in small venues and practice rooms and echoing church halls across the city, that the best response to an unexpected audience is to pretend they do not exist. She continues, her fingers navigating the ferocious scales, and listens without appearing to listen.

One person. Standing somewhere near the back. Not moving.

She reaches the end of the introduction and pauses, as Bach himself seems to demand, with her hands resting lightly on the keys.

"Please don't stop on my account."

The voice is male. Quiet, but with a quality that carries. She turns on the bench.

He is standing at the rear of the hall, near the double doors, still wearing his long, dark coat, the kind that suggests both money and a certain indifference to fashion. He is perhaps fifteen years older than her, with the kind of face that has aged thoughtfully: angular, watchful, containing more than it gives away. He holds a folded umbrella in one hand and makes no move to come closer, as though he understands that proximity would be an intrusion.

"This is a private session," Clara says.

"I know. I'm sorry. The door wasn't latched." He glances behind him, at the doors. "I was passing. I heard you through the wall."

She considers this. The hall is on a quiet street. People do not generally pass it at this hour.

"The Chromatic Fantasy," he says. "Though I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that."

"No," she agrees. "I don't."

A pause settles between them. She expects him to leave. He does not.

"You're very good," he says, and there is something in his tone that separates this from the ordinary compliment. It's not condescension, not exactly, but a kind of authority, as though he has the right to form such a judgement and she should receive it accordingly.

"Thank you," she says, and turns back to the keys.

She does not play immediately. She sits for a moment, aware of him behind her, and then begins the arpeggios. Quieter, more searching, one extraordinary harmony after the other, and she does not look round again until she has finished.

When she does, he is gone.

---------

She finds out who he is the following week, through the particular alchemy of a name mentioned in passing and an internet search conducted on her phone in the dry cleaner's doorway. Edward Ashworth. Forty-one. His father made the money; Edward has spent twenty years doing something considered with it. He started a small foundation that funds musicians, a record label that releases things nobody else will touch, a reputation in certain circles for being both rigorous and generous, which is rarer than it ought to be.

She files this information away and does not think about it again until he appears at the church hall the following Thursday.

This time he sits down in one of the plastic chairs arranged along the side wall and he does no longer pretend he is merely passing. He has no umbrella. He has clearly come deliberately, which means he has spoken to someone, perhaps Father Brennan who manages the bookings, and established when she would be here.

She finds this both presumptuous and, against her better judgement, rather flattering.

She plays. She had intended to work through some Debussy, but instead she finds herself returning to Bach, as though she wants him to hear it properly this time, the whole breathtaking architecture of it. She plays for nearly an hour without acknowledging him. When she stops and turns, he is leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, watching her with an expression she cannot immediately categorise.

"Better than last week," he says.

She raises an eyebrow. "Better?"

"Freer. In the first part, particularly." He stands, slowly. "You were holding something back last week."

"I'd just realised I had an audience."

"Ah." Something shifts in his expression, not quite a smile. "And now?"

"Now I've had time to decide it doesn't matter."

He comes a little closer then, not all the way, stopping at the end of the front row of chairs. She notices his hands, still, unhurried, and the way he looks at the piano rather than at her, as though it is the more interesting subject.

"I'd like to hear you play something of your own choosing," he says. "Not Bach this time. Not anything in particular. Whatever you'd play if nobody was listening."

It is such an odd request, stated so plainly, that she doesn't know how to deflect it.

"Why?" she asks.

"Because I think it would tell me something."

She turns back to the keys. She sits for a moment, her hands in her lap. And then, slowly, she begins to play something she has never played for anyone, a piece she has been building for years in the margins of her practice sessions, something without a name, that moves from a simple three-note motif into something sprawling and unresolved and, she suspects, not entirely finished.

She plays it to its end and sits in the silence that follows.

"How long have you been working on that?" he asks.

"Since I was seventeen."

"It isn't finished."

"No."

Another pause. "Clara," he says, and she notices he knows her name, which means he has definitely spoken to Father Brennan, "I'd like to talk to you, if you're willing. About what you're doing. What you want to be doing."

She looks at him steadily. "You mean you'd like to offer me something."

"Perhaps." His expression remains even. "I'd like to know whether you'd be interested first."

---------

They meet for coffee the following week, in a place near Spitalfields that he chooses and that is considerably nicer than anywhere she would choose herself. He is already there when she arrives, with two cups on the table and a directness about him that she finds, again, simultaneously irritating and compelling.

He asks her questions. Real questions — not the polite ones she is used to at auditions and open evenings, but specific, technical, occasionally uncomfortable ones. What does she want to record, and why? What does she think of her own limitations? Does she think the unfinished piece will ever be finished, and if not, what does that mean?

She answers honestly, which is not something she always does in these conversations, and finds that honesty seems to be what he expects.

He tells her about the foundation. A residency programme. Six months, a stipend, access to a proper instrument and a recording space, at the end of which she would produce whatever she feels able to produce, with no predetermined outcome.

"And in exchange?" she asks.

"Nothing, formally. I'd want to attend some of your sessions. Hear how the work develops."

She looks at him across the table. "That's it?"

"That's it."

She doesn't believe him entirely. Not because she thinks he is dishonest, but because she understands that nothing is ever entirely without expectation, and she is not naïve about the dynamics at play when a man with money takes an interest in a woman without it. She tells him this, plainly, and watches his reaction.

He doesn't flinch. "That's a fair thing to say," he says. "I won't pretend the dynamic doesn't exist. I can only tell you that what interests me is what you do with that piano."

She takes a breath. "All right," she says. "When do we start?"

---------

The studio is in Clerkenwell, up three flights of stairs in a building that was once a warehouse and still has that quality about it with its exposed brick and high ceilings, light that arrives from unexpected angles. The piano is a Bösendorfer grand, the sort of instrument she has dreamt of her entire life but never touched, and the first time she sits down at it she simply runs her hands along the keys without pressing them, feeling the action, the slight resistance, the particular geography of it.

Edward watches from across the room, from a chair near the window with a notebook that he rarely opens. He has, she discovers over the following weeks, a way of being present that does not intrude. He is quiet, attentive, and occasionally says something that reorients her thinking without her being able to explain precisely how. She begins to look forward to these moments. She is not sure she should.

The sessions develop a rhythm. She arrives first, begins to play, and he arrives sometime in the first hour, always quietly, always taking the same chair. The city hums below them. The light changes. She plays until she is tired, and then they talk, and then she goes home on the overground with the music still moving through her in a way that has no satisfactory outlet.

It is during the fourth week that she begins to understand that something is shifting between them. Not dramatically, not in any way that could be pointed to and named, but perceptibly, the way winter changes the quality of afternoon light.

She is mid-phrase in the unfinished piece when she becomes aware of him standing behind her, closer than usual. He has left his chair... she doesn't know when... and is standing perhaps a metre from the piano, not looking at her but at his notebook, though she suspects he is not reading it. She continues playing. The phrase resolves, almost, into something that feels like a conclusion, and she stops.

"That's new," he says.

"Yes."

"Play it again."

She does. He comes closer, and then does something she does not expect: he sits down beside her on the bench. Not close... there is space between them... but beside her, so that he can see her hands on the keys.

"There," he says, when she reaches the same phrase. "You're rushing it. Just before the resolution. Do you hear it?"

She plays it again, more slowly, and hears what he means.

"Yes."

"You're nervous of the resolution. You've been avoiding it for seven years."

She stills her hands. The observation is so precise, so unexpectedly personal, that for a moment she doesn't have a response.

"It's not the musical resolution you're nervous of," he says quietly. "Is it."

She doesn't answer. She is acutely aware of the warmth of him beside her, the slight sound of his breathing, the way his hands rest on his knees with that characteristic stillness.

"Play it again," he says. "And don't rush."

She plays it. She does not rush. Her hands reach the phrase and she holds the tempo, lets the notes arrive without hurrying them towards something, and the resolution comes on its own terms. Not as a conclusion, but as a resting place. Somewhere to stop and breathe.

When the phrase ends, neither of them moves.

"There," he says. Very quietly.

She turns to look at him. He is already looking at her. This close, she can see that his eyes are a particular shade of grey-green, and that there is something in them that is careful and intent and has been careful and intent, she realises, for some time.

"Edward," she says.

"Clara."

The space between them is very small now. She doesn't know which of them has reduced it, or whether it has simply collapsed of its own accord, the way unresolved things eventually must. She thinks of her unfinished piece, of seven years spent approaching and retreating from the same four bars, and she thinks: not again.

She closes the distance herself.

The first kiss is brief and very still, a question rather than a statement. He answers it by bringing his hand to her face with such deliberate care that she feels something loosen in her chest, something she has been holding without knowing it.

The studio grows dark around them as they remain on the narrow bench, turned towards each other now, the piano forgotten. The city below continues its indifferent business. Somewhere, a siren rises and fades.

"I should tell you," she says, eventually, her forehead against his, "that I don't make a habit of this."

"No," he agrees. "Neither do I."

The next kiss deepens, and he tastes the chamomile on her tongue, that cheap tea she drinks to calm her nerves before performances. His hands slide from her jaw to her shoulders, the expensive wool of his suit scratching against her thin cotton dress. She doesn’t pull away. Instead, she turns towards him and her bottom finds the piano keys to produce a sound that some might consider avant-garde, then dissolves into a gasp when his mouth finds the pulse point beneath her ear. The studio is all shadows and dust motes dancing in the single shaft of streetlight through the window.

He lifts her onto the piano bench, the old wood groaning beneath their combined weight. Sheet music scatters across the floor, Bach's Well-Tempered Keyboard floating down like feathers. His fingers, usually so careful with priceless objects, fumble with the buttons of her dress, each one revealing pale skin dotted with freckles like constellations. She helps him, her shyness melting into something bolder, her nails scraping lightly against his scalp as she pulls him closer.

He lowers his head, his mouth finding the curve of her neck, tasting the salt of her skin. A soft gasp escapes her lips as he nips gently, his hands now sliding down her back to cup the roundness of her ass, pulling her firmly against the hard ridge in his trousers. She can feel the heat of him through the fabric, a promise of what’s to come. With a desperate tug, she manages to unbutton his shirt, her palms flattening against the coarse hair of his chest, feeling the steady, rapid beat of his heart.

He lifts her again, this time onto the polished ebony of the grand piano itself. The cool surface is a shock against her heated skin, and she shivers, her back arching. He hooks his fingers into the sides of her simple cotton panties and draws them down, the fabric whispering against her thighs before they’re discarded onto the floor with the forgotten music. He spreads her legs, his gaze intense as he looks his fill at her glistening sex, pink and swollen and ready for him.

Edward kneels, his breath warm against her tenderest skin. He doesn’t wait. His tongue laps a slow, deliberate stripe from her entrance to her clit, and a choked moan tears from Clara’s throat. He does it again, and again, building a rhythm that has her writhing on the piano, her fingers scrabbling for purchase on the slick surface. He focuses on her clit now, circling it with the tip of his tongue before sucking it gently into his mouth. The pleasure is sharp, overwhelming, a crescendo that steals the air from her lungs.

She’s so close, the tension coiling deep in her belly, when he pulls away. A whimper of protest dies on her lips as he stands and frees himself. His cock is thick and heavy, straining upwards, the tip already beaded with moisture. He positions himself at her entrance, his eyes locked on hers, and in one smooth, powerful thrust, he’s buried inside her to the hilt. Clara cries out, a sharp, beautiful sound that echoes in the high-ceilinged room. The stretch is exquisite, a fullness she’s never known, and she wraps her legs around his waist, urging him deeper.

He begins to move, his strokes long and deep, each withdrawal leaving her empty, each thrust filling her completely. The piano beneath them rocks gently, its strings humming a dissonant, erotic chord of their own. He’s watching her, his expression a mixture of awe and raw desire as he fucks her on his instrument. He reaches between them, his thumb finding her clit, rubbing it in time with his thrusts. That’s all it takes. The tension snaps, and her orgasm crashes over her, a violent, shuddering wave that makes her sever all ties with reality. Her inner muscles clench around him, and with a sharp groan, he follows her over the edge, his own release pulsing deep within her. They collapse together, a tangle of limbs and sweat on the piano, the only sound their ragged breaths and the faint, lingering hum of a chord struck by passion.

The silence that follows is heavy, punctuated only by the slowing rhythm of their breath. The cool air of the studio prickles the sweat on Clara’s skin, and she becomes acutely aware of every point of contact between them... the weight of Edward’s body on hers, the softening of him still inside her, the gentle tickle of his chest hair against her nipples. For a long moment, she doesn’t dare move, as if shifting would shatter the fragile, perfect reality of what had just happened.

Edward is the first to stir. He props himself up on his elbows, his hair falling across his forehead, and looks down at her. His eyes, usually so guarded and analytical, are soft, almost hazy. 

"Clara," he whispers, his voice trembling. "Are you... all right?"

She can only nod, her throat too tight for words. A single tear escapes the corner of her eye and traces a path through the dampness on her temple. He leans down and kisses it away, his lips surprisingly soft after the raw passion they've just shared.

Carefully, he withdraws from her, the loss leaving her feeling suddenly hollow and exposed. He stands up and retrieves his discarded shirt, then gently drapes it over her naked body, covering her with a quiet intimacy that's more profound than the act itself. He then helps her sit up, the piano's surface cold against her thighs. She clutches the shirt to her chest, the scent of him enveloping her.

He doesn't speak. Instead, he begins to pick up the scattered sheet music from the floor, smoothing out the crumpled pages of Bach with careful hands. He places them neatly back on the stand, the ordered rows of notes a stark contrast to the beautiful chaos they've just created. It's his way of regaining control, of putting the World back in its place, and she understands.

When he's done, he turns back to her. He doesn't offer false promises or declarations of undying love. He simply holds out his hand.

"Come," he says. "Let's get you cleaned up." And as she takes his hand, her small fingers disappearing into his large, warm palm, Clara knows that this is not an ending. It is the first, terrifying, exhilarating note of a completely new composition.