The Piano Teacher

September 1941

TRUDY IS DRESSING for dinner while he watches from the bed. She has finished with her mysterious bathing ritual with its oils and unguents and now she smells marvelous, like a valley in spring. She is sitting at her dressing table in a long peach satin robe, wrapped silkily around her waist, applying fragrant creams to her face.

“Do you like this one? ” She gets up and holds a long black dress in front of her.

“It’s fine.” He can’t concentrate on the clothes when her face is so vibrant above it.

“Or this one? ” A knee-length dress the color of orange sherbet.

“Fine.”

She pouts. Her skin gleams.

“You’re so unhelpful.”

She tells him Manley Haverford is having a party, an end-of-summer party, at his country house this weekend and that she wants to go. Manley is an old bigot who used to have a radio talk show before he married a rich but ugly Portuguese woman who conveniently died two years later, whereupon he retired to live the life of a country squire in Sai Kung.

“Desperately,” she says. “I want to go desperately.”

“You loathe Manley,” he says. “You told me so last week.”

“I know,” she says. “But his parties are fun and he’s very generous with the drinks. Let’s go and talk about how awful he is right in front of him. Can we go, can we? Can we? Can we? ” She wears him down. They will go.

So Friday, late afternoon, he plays hooky from work and they spend the twilight hours bathing in the ocean by Manley’s house. To get there, they drive narrow, winding roads carved right out of the green mountain, blue water on their right, verdant hillside on their left. His house is through a dilapidated wooden gate and at the end of a long driveway, and right by the sea, with a porch that juts out, and rough stone steps leading down to the beach. He’s had coolers filled with ice and drinks and sandwiches brought down to the sandy inlet. The still-hot sun and water make them ravenous and they eat and eat and eat and curse their host for not bringing enough.

“Me? ” Manley asks. “I assumed I had invited civilized people, who ate three meals a day.”

Victor and Melody Chen, Trudy’s cousins, wander down from the house, where they had been resting.

“What are we doing now?” Melody asks. Will likes her, thinks she’s nice, when she’s not around her husband.

A woman they have never met before, newly arrived from Singapore, suggests they play charades. They all moan but acquiesce.

Trudy is one team’s leader, the Singapore woman the other. The groups huddle together, write words on scraps of damp paper. They put them all in the empty sandwich basket.

Trudy goes first. She looks at her paper, dimples.

“Easy peasy,” she says encouragingly to her group. She makes the film sign, one hand rotating an imaginary camera lever.

“Film! ” shouts an American.

She puts up four fingers, then suddenly ducks her head, puts her arms in front of her, and whooshes through the air.

“Gone with the Wind,” Will says. Trudy curtsies.

“Unfair,” says someone from the other team. “Pet’s advantage.”

Trudy comes over and plants a kiss on his forehead.

“Clever boy,” she says, and sinks down next to him.

Singapore gets up.

“She’s your nemesis,” Will tells Trudy.

“Don’t worry,” Trudy says. “She’s idiotic.”

The afternoon passes pleasantly, with them shouting insults and drinking and generally being stupid. Some people talk about the government and how it’s organizing different Volunteer Corps.

“It’s not volunteering,” Will says. “It’s mandatory. It’s the Compulsory Service Act, for heaven’s sake. They’re quite opposite. Why don’t they just call a spade a spade? Dowbiggin is being ridiculous about it.”

“Don’t be such a grump,” Trudy says. “Do your duty.”

“I guess so,” he says. “Must fight the good fight, I suppose.” He thinks the organization is being handled in an absurd fashion.

“Is there one for cricketers?” someone asks, as if to prove his point.

“Why not? ” somebody else says. “You can make up one however you want.”

“I hardly think that’s true,” Manley says. “But I’m joining one that’s training out here on the weekends, on the club grounds. Policemen, I think, although I’d think they’d be rather busy if there was an attack.”

“Aren’t you too old, Manley? ” Trudy asks. “Old and decrepit? ”

“That’s the wonderful thing, Trudy,” he says, with a forced smile.

“You can’t fire a Volunteer. And at any rate, the one here at the club is convenient.”

“I’m sending Melody to America,” Victor Chen says suddenly. “I don’t want her to be in any danger.”

Melody smiles uneasily, doesn’t say anything.

“The government is preparing,” says Jamie Biggs. “They are storing food in warehouses in Tin Hau and securing British property.”

“Like the Crown Collection? ” Victor asks. “What are they going to do about that? That’s part of English heritage.”

“I’m sure all the arrangements have been made already,” says Biggs.

“The food will go bad before anyone gets it,” says another man.

“Cynic,” says Trudy.

She lifts up gracefully and goes toward the ocean. All this talk of war bores her. She thinks it will never happen. They all watch her, rapt, as she plunges into the sea and comes up sleek and dripping-her slim body a vertical rebuke to the flatness of the horizon between the sky and sea. She walks up and shakes her wet hair at Will. Drops of water fall and sparkle. Then someone asks where the tennis rackets are. The spell is broken.

Over dinner, Trudy declares that she is going to be in charge of uniforms for the Volunteers. “And Will will be the fit model,” she says. “Because he’s a perfect male specimen.”

John Thorpe, who heads up the American office of a large pharmaceutical company, looks doubtful. “Rather small and ugly, isn’t he? ” he says, although this is more a description of himself and not at all of Will.

“Will! ” Trudy cries. “You’ve been insulted! Defend your honor! ”

“I’ve better things to defend,” he says. And the table falls silent. He is always saying the wrong thing, popping the gaiety. “Er, sorry,” he says. But they are already on to the next thing.

Trudy is describing the tailor who is going to make the uniforms.

“He’s been our family tailor for ages and he can whip out a copy of a Paris dress in two days, one if you beg! ”

“What’s his name? ”

“Haven’t the slightest,” she says easily. “He’s The Tailor. But I know where the shop is, or my driver does, rather, and we’re the best of friends. Do you fellows prefer orange or a very bright pink as colors? ”

They decide on olive green with orange stripes (“So boring,” the women sigh and orange is given as a concession) and Trudy asks who is to measure the men.

They volunteer her.

She accepts (“Isn’t there something about dressing left? ” she asks innocently), then says Will will measure in her stead. Trudy’s frivolity, Will has noticed, has boundaries.

Sophie Biggs is trying to get everyone interested in moonlight picnics. “They’re ever so much fun,” she says. “We take a steamboat out, with rowboats, and when we reach the islands we row everyone ashore with the provisions and a guitar or an accordion or something.” Sophie is a large girl and Will wonders if she is a secret eater because she eats tiny portions when she is out. Right now, she is poking her spoon around the vichyssoise.

Trudy sighs. “It sounds like so much labor,” she says. “Wouldn’t it just be easier to have a picnic at Repulse Bay?”

Sophie looks at her reproachfully. “But it’s not the same,” she says. “It’s the journey.”

Sophie’s husband claims to be in shipping, but Will thinks he’s in Intelligence. When he tells Trudy this later she cries, “That big lout? He couldn’t detect his way out of a paper bag!” But Jamie Biggs is always listening, never talking, and he has a watchful air about him. If he’s that obvious, Will supposes he’s not very good. After Milton Pottinger left last year, someone had told Will that he was Intelligence. He hadn’t been able to believe it. Milton was a big, florid man who drank a lot and seemed the very soul of indiscretion.

Edwina Storch, a large Englishwoman who is the headmistress of the good school in town, has brought her constant companion, Mary Winkle, and they sit at the end of the table, eating quietly, talking to no one but each other. Will has seen them before. They are always around, but never say much.

Over dessert-trifle-Jamie says that all Japanese residents have been sent secret letters about what to do in case of an invasion, and that the Japanese barber chap in the Gloucester Hotel has been spying. The government is about to issue another edict that all wives and children are to be sent away without exception, but only the white British, those of pure European extraction, get passage on the ships. “Doesn’t affect me,” Trudy says, shrugging, although she holds a British passport. Will knows that if she wanted, she could get on the boat-her father always knows someone. “What would I do in Australia? ” she asks. “I don’t like anybody there. Besides, it’s only for pure English-have you ever heard of anything so offensive? ”

She changes the subject. “What would happen,” she asks, “if two guns were pointed at each other and then the triggers were pulled at the same time. Do you think the two people would get hurt or would the bullets destroy each other? ”

There is a lively discussion about this that Trudy becomes bored with very quickly. “For heaven’s sake!” she cries. “Isn’t there something else we can talk about?” The group, chastised, turns to yet other subjects. Trudy is a social dictator and not at all benevolent. She tells someone recently arrived from the Congo that she can’t imagine why anyone would go to godforsaken places like that when there are perfectly pleasant destinations like London and Rome. The traveler actually looks chagrined. She tells Sophie Biggs’s husband that he doesn’t appreciate his wife, and then she tells Manley she loathes trifle. Yet, no one takes offense; everyone agrees with her. She is the most amiable rude person ever. People bask in her attention.

At the end of dinner, after coffee and liqueur, Manley’s houseboy brings in a big bowl of nuts and raisins. Manley pours brandy over it with a flourish and Trudy lights a match and tosses it in. The bowl is ablaze instantly, all blue and white flame. They try to pick out the treats without burning their fingers, a game they call Snapdragon.

Going to the restroom later, Will glimpses Trudy and Victor talking heatedly in Cantonese in the drawing room. He hesitates, then continues on. When he returns, they are gone and Trudy is already back at the table, telling a bawdy joke.

After, they go to bed. Manley has given them a room next to his and they make love quietly. With Trudy, it is always as if she is drowning-she clutches at him and burrows her face into his shoulder with an intensity she would make fun of if she saw it. Sometimes, the shape of her fingers is etched into his skin for hours afterward. Later, Will wakes up to find Trudy whimpering, her face lumpy and alarming; he sees that her face is wet with tears.

“What’s wrong? ” he asks.

“Nothing.” A reflex.

“Victor upset you? ” he asks.

“No, no, he wants to…” She is blurry with sleep. “My father…” She goes back to sleep. When he throws the blanket over her, her shoulders are as cold and limp as water. In the morning, she remembers nothing, and mocks him for his concern.

In the following weeks, the war encroaches-wives and children, the ones who had ignored the previous evacuation, leave on ships bound for Australia, Singapore. Trudy is obliged to make an appearance at the hospitals to prove she is a nurse. She undergoes training, declares herself hopeless, and switches to supplies instead. She finds the stockpiling of goods too funny. “If I had to eat the food they’re storing, I’d shoot myself,” she says. “It’s all veggie tins and bully beef and awful things like that.”

The colony is filled with suddenly lonesome men without wives who gather at the Gripps, the Parisian Grill, clamor to be invited to dinner parties at the homes of those few whose wives remain. They form a club, the Bachelors’ Club (“Why do the British so love to form clubs and societies? ” Trudy asks. “No, wait, don’t say, it’s too grim”) and petition the governor to have their wives returned. Others, more intrepid, turn up suddenly with adopted Chinese “daughters” or “wards,” and they dine with them and drink champagne and get silly and flirtatious and then disappear into the night. Will finds it amusing, Trudy less so. “Wait until I get my hands on them,” she cries while Will amuses himself with teasing her about which Chinese hostess would soon get her claws into him.

“You’re like a leper, darling,” she counters. “You British men are going out of fashion. I might have to find myself a Japanese or German beau now.”

Will remembers this time well, how it was all so funny, how the war was so far away, yet talked about every day, how no one really thought about what might really happen.