Read an Excerpt
A fragile, dark-haired girl on the verge of womanhood sits motionless at the piano. She is no longer playing, yet her hands remain poised over the keyboard. She leans forward as if listening to sounds that have already died away. A mass of ebony hair cascades from her inclined head, obscuring her face and brushing the backs of her hands. A minute passes. Her position is unchanged. She seems frozen in time, the victim or beneficiary of some fairy-tale spell.
The room in which she sits is large and airy. A well-worn, well-polished parquet floor stretches beneath two comfortably upholstered armchairs and a sofa to a pair of sashed bay windows on the opposite wall. Spring sunlight splashes in, filtered through the many seven-leaved hands of a horse chestnut tree that reaches out from the street beside the house. The tree is in flower, decked with white, rose-flecked, pagoda-like blossoms. Bees and other pollinating insects are in eager attendance.
Still the girl does not move.
From elsewhere in the house occasional sounds reach the room: light metallic clatterings, ceramic scrapings, high-pitched whirrings. Vague, muffled fragments of conversation float through the open windows.
And now the girl awakens from her trance. In ultraslow-motion her head begins to rise, her arms spread horizontally and her spine arches backwards. She is an opening flower. Delicate features are revealed as the dark hair falls away. A sigh escapes her barely parted lips. Brown eyes gaze at the ceiling . . . until, at last, she re-coils her body and rises to step light-footed from the piano stool.
Moving across the room with the fluid, skittish grace of a somnambulist she comes to rest beside theright-hand bay window. Here she will stay for a while. In this room it is her other point of equilibrium, a point of vantage from where she surveys the well-kept lawn below her, the clustered rose bushes awaiting their cream and scarlet blooms, the clematis, pelargoniums, irises and now-fading tulips; and beyond the honeysuckle-covered red sandstone walls are other gardens, other houses, their roofs step-stoning to a horizon of gently sloping, interlocking hills.
She often stands here . . . and sometimes tears well into her eyes - though not today: a faint smile caresses her lips and there will be no tears - but sometimes she stands before this window gazing across the vastness outside her circumscribed world of reassuring familiarity, and she weeps soundlessly. Could this signify an awareness of her detachment, of her eternal loneliness? It seems unlikely. Has she then caught a glimpse of her own mortality? Presumably not . . . but who can tell? Her thoughts are an undisclosed secret.
Before long, she will return to the piano. She will set her hands above the keys and, when she is quite ready, will again begin to play.
