Four Hundred and Forty

Walter Ahern tuned pianos for forty-one years and in that time he was inside, by his own estimate, eleven thousand front rooms. He could tell you about the pianos. Uprights with the soundboard cracked from being pushed against a radiator. Baby grands bought as furniture and never opened, the hammers still bright as the day they left the factory. A Bechstein in a farmhouse in Shropshire with a mouse nest in the bass strings and the sweetest tone he ever heard once he'd cleared it out. But what Walter remembered was the tops of them. A piano top is where a family puts what it wants a visitor to see and what it doesn't know where else to put. Wedding photos. A school photo of a child who is now forty and in Adelaide. A bowl of keys. Exam certificates, Grade 3, Grade 5, never Grade 8, because by Grade 8 the child has stopped and the certificate has become a small monument to the stopping. He never commented. He'd move the photographs carefully to the sofa, in the order he found them, and put them back in the same order after. People noticed that. They didn't say so, but they noticed. The job itself he could do half-asleep. Strike the fork, A above middle C, four hundred and forty cycles a second. Set the temperament in the middle octave. Work outward. Listen for the beats, the slow wobble of two strings arguing, and turn the pin until the argument stops. Most people thought tuning was about hearing the right note. It wasn't. It was about hearing the wrong one and how wrong it was. The house in Ludlow was a Tuesday in his last year. A woman about his own age. A Broadwood upright, not tuned in a decade, she said, apologising. The top had one photo on it, a man in a garden, and a metronome, and nothing else. "He played," she said. "Not me." Walter nodded and moved the photo and the metronome to the sofa and opened the lid. The piano was a full semitone flat, which is what a decade does. He'd have to bring it up in stages or the strings would go.

She sat in the room while he worked. Most people left. She sat in the chair with her hands in her lap and listened to him hit the same note, over and over, turning the pin a hair at a time, the note sliding up out of its flatness toward where it was supposed to be. Beats slowing. Slower. Gone. "It's odd," she said, at some point, an hour in. "I haven't heard it make a sound since March." He kept working. You don't stop for that. Stopping makes it a thing. At the end, as he always did, he played something. Not much. He wasn't a pianist. A few bars of an old hymn, in the middle of the keyboard where it sounded best, to let the owner hear what they had. She didn't say anything. He closed the lid and put the photo back, and the metronome, in the places they'd been. At the door she paid him in cash from an envelope that had clearly been waiting on the hall table for a while, and she said, "Will you come next year?" "I'm retiring in April." "Oh." She looked at the piano through the doorway. "Then who will." He gave her the name of a younger man in Hereford who was good and who he trusted with the Broadwood. He did not tell her that the younger man would move the photograph without looking at it. That was a thing you learned or you didn't. Driving back, he found himself humming the hymn, and hearing in his head the beats slowing down, and stopping.