Always this room feels dank with disappointment, sealed in by the dust creeping across antique woodgrain. Home recitals for his parents used to append weights to his arms; weights that would vanish the moment he entered an auditorium. Now at 46, his father recently gone, dread still crouches in his stomach.
In the car, he had played the new CD through. During the third movement, he’d detected a subtle shift of cadence. Not deliberate. He’d made the recording in the studio, after hours, and hadn’t noticed. Too late now. Perhaps it was the player. Dad had disliked him buying second-hand.
His mother sits upright in her yellow armchair, which is still angled towards his father’s leather chair and the window beyond. “Your left took a wrong turn there,” she would say. Or else, that his playing was ponderous, confused, monotonous. Her eyes sliding each time towards her husband; fingers steepled on his lap, elbows tucked into his narrowing torso. Silently appraising.
He kisses her forehead, “Afternoon, Mum.” She looks tired, although tidy. Her hair in a bun, which was once a handful, now barely a walnut.
“I expected you earlier,” she says, waving a mottled arm at a tray on the side table. The tea trickles black from the teapot. An untended rose branch picks at the open window.
He presses play and his mother leans back, her hands flexing rhythmically on the chair arms. They sit facing one another as the notes trapeze through delicacy and suspense. Her lips relax, the closest to a smile he’ll receive. The faulty passage approaches and he considers distracting her – dropping his cup, announcing a fake pregnancy (she’s always liked Sophie, unlike his dad who found her ungainly) – but no. She would get him to play it over. And here it is, worse even, in this quiet concentration, than he thought. Her eyes snap open, her fingers stiffen. He braces himself to not mind. To focus on what he has achieved, small victories any parent might be proud of.
She glances towards the empty chair. A breeze plays with the net curtain, dancing it to the piano’s rhythm. “I think perhaps that’s enough now, dear,” she says. He goes to stop the recording with faltering fingers, but his mother closes her eyes again and leans back. He realises it wasn’t him she was speaking to. He lets his music play on.
***
Linda Grierson-Irish’s short fiction has appeared in the Best Small Fictions anthology and elsewhere, been included in the BIFFY50 and received two honourable mentions for Best
Microfictions. She lives in Shropshire, UK.