The Piano Teacher

JANICE Y.K. LEE

The Piano Teacher

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Janice Y.K. Lee 2009

Janice Y.K. Lee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Source ISBN: 9780007286379

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2015 ISBN: 9780007380510

Version: 2015-03-23

Dedication

For my parents

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part I

May 1952

June 1941

June 1952

September 1941

September 1952

December 1941

November 1952

Part II

9 December 1941

15 December 1941

26 December 1941

4 January 1942

21 January 1942

Part III

2 May 1953

5 May 1953

7 May 1953

8 May 1953

12 May 1953

13 May 1953

20 May 1953

20 May 1953

10 April 1943

2 May 1943

27 May 1953

1943

10 May 1943

28 May 1953

2 June 1953

3 July 1953

5 July 1953

27 May 1953

April 1942

27 May 1953

5 July 1953

12 July 1953

1953

Epilogue

Behind the Scenes

Interpreting the Soul

The Last Word Lies with Judgement

Acknowledgements

Praise

About the Publisher

May 1952

It started as an accident. The small Herend rabbit had fallen into Claire’s handbag. It had been on the piano and she had been gathering up the sheet music at the end of the lesson when she knocked it off. It fell off the doily (a doily! On the Steinway!) and into her large leather bag. What had happened after that was perplexing, even to her. Locket had been staring down at the keyboard, and hadn’t noticed. And then, Claire had just … left. It wasn’t until she was downstairs and waiting for the bus that she grasped what she had done. And then it had been too late. She went home and buried the expensive porcelain figurine under her sweaters.

Claire and her husband had moved to Hong Kong nine months ago, transferred by the government, which had posted Martin in the Department of Water Services. Churchill had ended rationing and things were starting to return to normal when they had received news of the posting. She had never dreamed of leaving England before.

Martin was an engineer, overseeing the building of the Tai Lam Cheung reservoir, so that there wouldn’t need to be so much rationing when the rains ebbed, as they did every several years. It was to hold four and a half billion gallons of water when full. Claire almost couldn’t imagine such a number, but Martin said it was barely enough for the people of Hong Kong, and he was sure that by the time they had finished, they’d have to build another. ‘More work for me,’ he said cheerfully. He was analysing the topography of the hills so that they could install catch-drains for when the rain came. The English government did so much for the colonies, Claire knew. They made their lives much better, but the locals rarely appreciated it. Her mother had warned her about the Chinese before she left – an unscrupulous, conniving people, who would surely try to take advantage of her innocence and goodwill.

Coming over, she had noticed it for days, the increasing wetness in the air, even more than usual. The sea breezes were stronger and the sun’s rays more powerful when they broke through cloud. When the P&O Canton had finally pulled into Hong Kong harbour in August, she had really felt she was in the tropics, hair frizzing up in curls, face always slightly damp and oily, the constant moisture under her arms and behind her knees. When she had stepped out of her cabin, the heat had assailed her like a physical blow, until she managed to find shade and fan herself.

There had been seven stops along the month-long journey, but after a few grimy hours spent in Algiers and Port Said, Claire had decided to stay on board rather than encounter more frightening peoples and customs. She had never imagined such sights. In Algiers, she had seen a man kiss a donkey and she couldn’t discern whether the high odour was coming from one or the other, and in Egypt the markets were the very definition of unhygienic – a fishmonger gutting a fish had licked the knife clean with his tongue.

She had enquired as to whether the ship’s provisions were procured locally, at these markets, and the answer had been most unsatisfactory. An uncle had died from food poisoning in India, making her cautious. She kept to herself, and sustained herself mostly on the beef tea they dispensed in the late morning on the sun deck. The menus, which were distributed every day, were mundane: turnips, potatoes, things that could be stored in the hold, with meat and salads the first few days after port. Martin promenaded on the deck every morning for exercise, and tried to get her to join him, to no avail. She preferred to sit in a deck-chair, wearing a large-brimmed hat and wrap herself in one of the ship’s scratchy wool blankets, face shaded from the omnipresent sun.

There had been a scandal on the ship. A woman, going to meet her fiancé in Hong Kong, had spent one too many moonlit nights on the deck with another gentleman, and had disembarked in the Philippines with her new man, leaving only a letter for her intended. Liesl, the girlfriend to whom the woman had entrusted the letter, grew visibly more nervous as the date of arrival drew near. Men joked that she could take Sarah’s place, but she wasn’t having any of that. Liesl was a serious young woman, who was joining her sister and brother-in-law in Hong Kong, where she intended to educate Unfortunate Chinese Girls in Art: when she held forth about it, it was always with capital letters in Claire’s mind.

Before disembarking, Claire separated out all of her thin cotton dresses and skirts; she could tell that was all she would be wearing for a while. They had arrived to a big party on the dock, with paper streamers and shouting vendors selling fresh fruit juice and soy-milk drinks and garish flower arrangements to the people waiting. Groups of revellers had already opened champagne and were toasting the arrival of their friends and family.

‘We pop the corks as soon as we see the ship on the horizon,’ a man explained to his girl, as he escorted her away. ‘It’s a big party. We’ve been here for hours.’

Claire watched Liesl go down the gangplank, looking very nervous, and then she disappeared into the throng. Claire and Martin went down next, treading on the soft, humid wood, luggage behind them, carried by two scantily clad young Chinese boys who had materialized out of nowhere.

Martin had an old schoolfriend, John, who worked at Dodwell’s, one of the trading firms, and had promised to greet the ship. He came with two friends and offered the new arrivals freshly squeezed guava drinks. Claire pretended to sip hers as her mother had warned her about the cholera that was rampant in these parts. The men were bachelors and very pleasant. John, Nigel, Leslie. They explained they all lived together in a mess – there were many, known by their companies’ names, Dodwell’s Mess, Jardine’s Mess, et cetera, and they assured Claire and Martin that Dodwell’s threw the best parties around.

They accompanied them to the government-approved hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, where a Chinese man with a long queue, dirty white tunic and shockingly long fingernails showed them to their room. They made an arrangement to meet for tiffin the next day and the men departed, leaving Martin and Claire sitting on the bed, exhausted and staring at one another. They didn’t know each other very well. They had been married barely four months.

She had accepted Martin’s proposal to escape the dark interior of her house, her bitter mother railing against everything, getting worse, it seemed, with her advancing age, and an uninspiring job as a filing girl in an insurance company. Martin was older, in his forties, and had never had luck with women. The first time he had kissed her, she had had to stifle the urge to wipe her mouth. He was like a cow, slow and steady. And kind. She knew this. She was grateful for it.

She had not had many chances with men. Her parents stayed at home all the time, so she had as well. When she had started seeing Martin – he was the older brother of one of the girls at work – she had had dinner at restaurants, drunk a cocktail at a hotel bar, and seen other young women and men talking, laughing, with an assurance she could not fathom. They had opinions about politics; they had read books she had never heard of and seen foreign films and talked about them with such confidence. She was enthralled and not a little intimidated. And then Martin had come to her, serious: his job was taking him to the Orient, and would she come with him? She was not so attracted to him, but who was she to be choosy? she thought, hearing the voice of her mother. She let him kiss her and nodded yes.

Claire had started to draw a bath in their hotel room when another knock on the door revealed a small Chinese woman, an amah, she was called, who started to unpack their suitcases until Martin shooed her away.

And that was how they had arrived in Hong Kong, which was like nothing Claire had imagined. Apart from the usual colonial haunts – all hush and genteel, potted palms and polished wood in whitewashed buildings – it was loud and crowded and dirty and bustling. The buildings were right next to each other and often had clothing hung out to dry on bamboo poles. There were garish vertical signs hung on every one, advertising massage parlours, pubs and hair salons. Someone had told her that opium dens still existed in back alleys. There was often refuse on the street, sometimes even human filth, and there was a pungent, peppery odour that was oddly clingy, attaching itself to your very skin until you went home for a good scrub.

There were all sorts of people. The local women carried their babies in a sort of back sling. Sikhs served as uniformed security guards – you saw them dozing off on wooden stools outside the banks, turbaned heads hanging heavily above their chests, rifles held loosely between their knees. The Indians had been brought over by the British, of course. Pakistanis ran carpet stores, Portuguese were doctors and Jews ran the dairy farms and other large businesses. There were British businessmen and American bankers, White Russian aristocrats and Peruvian entrepreneurs – all peculiarly well-travelled and sophisticated – and, of course, there were the Chinese, quite different in Hong Kong from the ones in China, she was told.

To her surprise, she didn’t detest Hong Kong, as her mother had told her she would – she found the streets busy and distracting, so very different from Croydon, and filled with people and shops and goods she had never seen before. She liked to sample the local bakery goods, the pineapple buns and yellow egg tarts, and sometimes wandered outside Central, where she would quickly find herself in unfamiliar surroundings, where she might be the only non-Chinese around. The fruit stalls were heaped with not only oranges and bananas, still luxuries in post-war England, but spiky, strange-looking fruits she came to try and like: starfruit, durian, lychee. She would buy a dollar’s worth and be handed a small, waxy brown bag and she would eat the fruit slowly as she walked. There were small stalls made of crudely nailed wood and corrugated tin, which housed small speciality enterprises: this one sold chops, the stone stamps the Chinese used in place of signatures, this one made only keys, this one had a chair that was rented for half-days by a street dentist and a barber.

The locals ate on the street in tiny restaurants called daipaidong, and she had seen three workmen in dirty singlets and trousers crouched over a plate containing a whole fish, spitting out the bones at their feet. One had seen her watching them, and deliberately picked up the fish’s eyeball with his chopsticks, raised it up to her, smiling, before he ate it.

Claire hadn’t met many Chinese people before, but the ones she had seen in the big towns in England had been serving in restaurants or ironing clothes. There were many of those types in Hong Kong, of course, but what had been eye-opening was the sight of the affluent Chinese, the ones who seemed English in all but their skin colour. It had been quite something to see a Chinese step out of a Rolls-Royce, as she had one day when she was waiting on the steps of the Gloucester Hotel, or in business suits, having lunch with British men who talked to them as if they were the same. She hadn’t known that such a world existed. And then, with Locket, she was thrust into this world.

After a few months settling in, finding a flat and furnishing it, Claire had put the word out that she was looking for a job giving piano lessons, ‘as a lark’, was how she put it – something to fill the day, but the truth was, they could really use the extra money. She had played the piano most of her life and was primarily self-taught, but she didn’t think it would matter. Amelia, an acquaintance she had met at a sewing circle, said she would ask around.

She rang a few days later.

‘There’s a Chinese family, the Chens. They run everything in town. Apparently, they’re looking for a piano teacher for their daughter, and they’d prefer an Englishwoman. What do you think?’

‘A Chinese family?’ Claire said. ‘I hadn’t thought about that possibility. Aren’t there any English families looking?’

‘No,’ Amelia said. ‘Not that I’ve been able to ascertain.’

‘I just don’t know …’ Claire demurred. ‘Wouldn’t it be odd?’ She couldn’t imagine teaching a Chinese girl. ‘Does she speak English?’

‘Probably better than you or me,’ Amelia said impatiently. ‘They’re offering a very adequate fee.’ She named a large sum.

‘Well,’ Claire said slowly, ‘I suppose it couldn’t do any harm to meet them.’

Victor and Melody Chen lived in the Mid-Levels, in an enormous white two-storey house on May Road. There was a driveway with potted plants lining the sides. Inside, there was the quiet, efficient buzz of a household staffed with plentiful servants. Claire had taken a bus and when she arrived, she was perspiring after the walk from the road to the house.

The amah led her to a sitting room, where she found a fan blowing blessedly cool air. A houseboy adjusted the drapes so that she was properly shaded. Her blue linen skirt, just delivered from the tailor, was wrinkled and she had on a white voile blouse that was splotched with moisture. She hoped the Chens would allow her some time to compose herself. She shifted, feeling a drop of perspiration trickle down her thigh.

No such luck. Mrs Chen swooped through the door, a vision in cool pink, holding a tray of drinks. A small, exquisite woman, with hair cut just so, so that it swung in precise, geometric movements. Her shoulders were fragile and exposed in her sleeveless shift, her face a tiny oval.

‘Hello!’ she trilled. ‘Lovely to meet you. I’m Melody. Locket’s just on her way.’

‘Locket?’ Claire said, uncertain.

‘My daughter. She’s just back from school and getting changed into something more comfortable. Isn’t the heat dreadful?’ She set down the tray, which held long glasses of iced tea. ‘Have something cool, please.’

‘Your English is remarkably good,’ Claire said, as she took a glass.

‘Oh, is it?’ Melody said casually. ‘Four years at Wellesley will do that for you, I suppose.’

‘You were at university in America?’ Claire asked. She hadn’t known that Chinese went to university in America.

‘Loved every minute,’ she said. ‘Except for the horrible, horrible food. Americans think a grilled cheese sandwich is a meal! And, as you know, we Chinese take food very seriously.’

‘Is Locket going to be schooled in America?’

‘We haven’t decided but, really, I’d rather talk to you about your education,’ Mrs Chen said.

‘Oh.’ Claire was taken aback.

‘You know,’ she continued pleasantly, ‘where you studied music, and all that.’

Claire settled back in her seat. ‘I was a serious student for a number of years. I studied with Mrs Eloise Pollock and was about to apply for a position at the Royal Academy when my family situation changed.’

Mrs Chen sat, waiting, head tilted, with one bird-like ankle crossed over the other, her knees slanted to one side.

‘And so, I was unable to continue,’ Claire said. Was she supposed to explain it in detail to this stranger? Her father had been let go from the printing company and it had been a black couple of months before he had found a new job as an insurance salesman. His pay had been erratic at best – he was not a natural salesman – and luxuries like piano lessons were unthinkable. Mrs Pollock, a very kind woman, had offered to continue her instruction at a much-reduced fee, but her mother, sensitive and pointlessly proud, had refused to even entertain the idea.

‘And what level of studies did you achieve?’

‘I was studying for my Seventh Grade examinations.’

‘Locket is a beginning student but I want her to be taught seriously, by a serious musician,’ Mrs Chen said. ‘She should pass all her examinations with distinction.’

‘Well, I’m certainly serious about music and, as for passing with distinction, that will be up to Locket,’ Claire said. ‘I did very well in my examinations.’

Locket entered the room, or rather, she bumbled into it. Where her mother was small and fine, Locket was chubby, all rounded limbs and padded cheeks. Her glossy hair was tied in a thick ponytail.

‘Hallo,’ she said. She had a distinctly English accent.

‘Locket, this is Mrs Pendleton,’ Mrs Chen said, stroking her daughter’s cheek. ‘She’s come to see if she’ll be your piano teacher so you must be very polite.’

‘Do you like the piano, Locket?’ Claire said, too slowly, she realized, for a ten-year-old child. She had no experience with children.

‘I dunno,’ Locket said. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Locket!’ her mother cried. ‘You said you wanted to learn. That’s why we bought you the new Steinway.’

‘Locket’s a pretty name,’ Claire said. ‘How did you come about it?’

‘Dunno,’ said Locket again. She reached for a glass of iced tea and drank. A small trickle wended its way down her chin. Her mother took a napkin off the silver tray and dabbed it dry.

‘Will Mr Chen be arriving soon?’ Claire asked.

‘Oh, Victor!’ Mrs Chen laughed. ‘He’s far too busy for these household matters. He’s always working.’

‘I see,’ Claire said. She was uncertain as to what came next.

‘Would you play us something?’ Mrs Chen asked. ‘We just got the piano and it would be lovely to hear it played professionally.’

‘Of course,’ Claire said, because she didn’t know what else to say. She felt as if she were being made to perform like a common entertainer – there had been something in the woman’s tone – but she couldn’t think of a gracious way to refuse.

She played a simple étude, which Mrs Chen seemed to enjoy and Locket squirmed through.

‘I think this will be fine,’ Mrs Chen said. ‘Are you available on Thursdays?’

Claire hesitated. She didn’t know whether she was going to take the job.

‘It would have to be Thursdays because Locket has lessons the other days,’ Mrs Chen said.

‘Fine,’ said Claire. ‘I accept.’

Locket’s mother was of a Hong Kong type. Claire saw women like her lunching at Chez Henri, laughing and gossiping with each other. They were called taitais and you could spot them at the smart clothing boutiques, trying on the latest fashions or climbing into their chauffeur-driven cars. Sometimes Mrs Chen would come home and put a slim, perfumed hand on Locket’s shoulder and comment liltingly on the music. And then, Claire couldn’t help it, she really couldn’t, she would think to herself, You people drown your daughters! Her mother had told her about how the Chinese were just a little above animals and that they would drown their daughters because they preferred sons. Once, Mrs Chen had mentioned a function at the Jockey Club that she and her husband were going to. She had been dressed up in diamonds, a flowing black dress and red, red lipstick. She had not looked like an animal.

Bruce Comstock, the head of the water office, had taken Martin and Claire to the club once, with his wife, and they had drunk pink gin while watching the horse races, the stands filled with shouting gamblers.

The week before the figurine fell into Claire’s handbag, she had been leaving the lesson when Victor and Melody Chen came in. It had rung five on the ornate mahogany grandfather clock that had mother-of-pearl Chinese characters inlaid all down the front of it and she had been putting her things away when they walked into the room. They were a tiny couple and they looked like porcelain dolls, with their shiny skin and coal eyes. ‘Out the door already?’ Mr Chen said drily. He was dressed nattily in a navy-blue pinstriped suit with a burgundy handkerchief peeping out of his breast pocket just so. ‘It’s five on the dot!’ He spoke English with the faintest hint of a Chinese accent.

Claire flushed. ‘I was here early. Ten minutes before four, I believe,’ she said. She took pride in her punctuality.

‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ Mrs Chen said. ‘Victor is just teasing you. Stop it!’ She swatted her husband with her little hand.

‘The English are so serious all the time,’ he said.

‘Well,’ Claire said uncertainly. ‘Locket and I spent a productive hour together.’

Locket slipped off the piano bench and under her father’s arm. ‘Hello, Daddy,’ she said shyly. She looked younger than her ten years.

He patted her shoulder. ‘How’s my little Rachmaninoff?’ he said. Locket giggled delightedly.