To Indigo by Tanith Lee (read along books txt) 📕

had been intended to be discreet. Besides he and his companion had been hemmed in. How had he seen the slight low glances I shot at him?

“I beg your pardon?” I asked mildly.

“Well maybe you should.”

I kept a blank face. I don’t like confrontations, and don’t often either invite or get snared in one.

“Well,” he said, “you could buy me a drink, then.”

His voice was not as I had imagined Vilmos voice to be. I suppose I heard Vilmos, in my inner ear, speaking a sort of cod Franco-Russian-Hungarian. Something like that.

I thought, Christ, he thinks I’m after him. Want to shag him. Now what do I do, for God’s sake?

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t quite…”

He sat down across from me. There was an empty chair there somehow left unfilled. He sprawled out his long legs. “I know you, don’t I?” he asked me.

For a queasy second I did think perhaps, despite all common sense, he truly was Vilmos. But I seized the one apparent saving chance.

“I thought I knew you a minute too. You’re very like my sister’s son.” I have no sister, and this non-existent She has no son. But would that sweep the problem up?

He said, “Oh really?”

He levelled his black brows. He had good teeth, and a slightly crooked nose. Vilmos? Why not. Perhaps in some fight… I tried to keep my wits.

“I haven’t seen him for a year,” I elaborated. A writer, or my kind of writer, can do such things extempore. “They’re in India, he and his girlfriend. So I was a bit surprised…”

“To see me here. Only I’m not, or he’s not.”

“No. I’m sorry if I stared. That was why.”

“It isn’t usually,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “have a good evening.” I rose. Thank Christ he stayed in the seat. From the bar, I noticed, his former associate had melted away.

“Cheers,” said Vilmos.

He had an actor’s accent. His voice seemed trained, expressive, but more lazy now.

He still didn’t get up and I wove through the pub crowd and got out on the scorched pavement. I was sweating. God, that had been – never mind. Forward march – my father again. Rise and shine, forward march, the touch of the Grim Reaper, easy come, easy go…

I was walking quickly towards Charing Cross. The best course however would be to go by and on to the Hay Market. I could look at the theatres, I could simply…

“I just thought,” said his unmistakable voice behind me. It came from higher in the air. I’m five ten, you may remember, and Vilmos about six three, “you might like to take this.”

Trepidatious to the point of agony I turned. He held before me a business card. The very last item I would guess my nerves expected.

I gazed at it. Joseph Traskul said the card in plain black Roman on plain dull white. Then an email address and telephone number.

“Er – why would I…?”

“Be a sport,” he answered with a menacing old-fashioned playfulness.

“Look, I’m really sorry…”

“I’ll bet you are, now.”

All around the crowd eddied. I knew that if he drew a knife and sliced off my ear, or kicked me in the groin, everybody else would merely fastidiously move round us, not to interrupt.

“All right. Thank you.”

“You think,” he said, “I’m a gay whore. Or maybe a bifunctional one. Look on the back of the card.”

I did so. Piano Tuner to the Bars it said.

He laughed then, now not like Vilmos, more gentle, and almost shy. “Had you going there. I thought you looked the type of guy might have a piano, or know someone. Work is scarce this spring. I’ll travel, just minimum expenses. The main rates are printed there, too. See you.” And he swung himself about, the mane of hair springing up and flopping down on his collar. He strode carelessly away through the splintered westering sun.

TWO

My father used to keep a piano, (I put the word “keep” advisedly) in the sitting-room. He could play quite well, if rather stiffly, a little Chopin or Schubert, and sometimes Victorian songs. I had piano lessons at the grammar school, which was one of the few still surviving locally in the ’60’s. Then I too could play a little, if like him without much magic and with less ability. I remember hot summer, cold dark winter evenings, practicing, and my mother putting her head round the door. “That’s nice, Roy.”

Maureen had a piano too, and she could play very well. She played the kind of thing I liked, unless I only really started to like it because she played it. Rachmaninov and Debussy were a couple of her choices, and Scott Joplin. She’d found him long before his return to the public ear.

Now of course my home premises were pianoless. I had sold it four years after I inherited the house.

It was nothing like Harris’s ‘place’, No 74, Old Church Lane. A long, sloping, winding street with some occasional careering oak trees, and semi-detached villas planted behind short front lawns. I’d grown up there, and later gone away, although only about an hour by train, to a succession of not very salubrious rooms. Gradually the street and the villas changed over the years, the former getting less cloistered and the pavement more worn, the trees being cut down or regularly pruned to stumps. The houses though perked up. They acquired bright red or blue front doors and new roofs, garages where side access had been, and ponds with water-lilies. “People value a house now,” my father had remarked. “Because it costs more, it means more.” I never really followed that. Houses had often cost a lot more than was affordable. I was more inclined to put the renovations down to the increasing frequency with which everyone else seemed to move out or in, tarting everything up for a quick sale or to please a mortgage company.

I assayed little improvement when I went back. My father had died, having a heart attack at the local, where he’d