Page 21 of Sunrise By the Sea

The terrible key change in the song was coming up and Marisa found all her nerves tightening in anticipation. There was an agonisingly long pause . . . and then a crash of harshly dissonant notes. She could make out the bass rumble of the man’s voice: it was soothing and encouraging. Perhaps he was deaf, she thought. That would make sense of the noise.

The student went at it again, and Marisa found herself completely wound up, like an overstrung instrument.

Dear Sir,

As your neighbour . . .

Okay, so that didn’t get round the neighbour problem.

Dear Sir,

As I am living next door to you and have to work from home I wonder if I could ask you to keep the music down? It is very loud at all hours of the day and particularly at night and it appears the walls are very thin. Thank you.

She was going to write her name and then at the last minute decided against it. He wouldn’t . . . I mean, he hadn’t seemed an aggressive person, but who knew? She was up here all alone; nobody had a clue where she was.

She chided herself. The piano teacher living next door was very unlikely to kill her. Surely.

Although from what she remembered, he was a verylargeperson. And, as she’d already seen, absolutely thoughtless.

No, that was madness.

And wasn’t Russia quite a violent place?

She was being ridiculous.

She heard his voice again, murmuring. The walls in here were terrible, she thought. If she got close enough she could almost . . .

I mean, she wouldn’t.

She shifted herself over towards the wall. After all, what if he was saying, ‘If you don’t play this properly I will kill you’?

As she got close to the wall, his low rumbling voice came through incredibly clearly.

‘. . . is just notes,’ he was saying. ‘You can learn to play notes. Notes can be wrong. Does not matter. But you must learn to trust heart. Celine, she say, heart go on. Do not hesitate. Go on.’

‘But I keep getting it wrong,’ came the querulous tones of the student. It was Mrs Baines, as it happened, one of Polly’s best clients, who had fallen in love with Mr Batbayar because she liked his dark flowing hair and was hoping that he would understand that when she played ‘My Heart Will Go On’ she was actually playing it to him.

Mr Batbayar did not understand this and thought that someone had sent this woman playing a terrible version of the worst song ever written in order to torture him for a sin he had committed in a past life and was wondering what it might be, and was regretting accidentally killing a spider the day before, which he had meant to pick up and free. His huge fingers on a keyboard were elegant and full of precision. When it came to being around the rest of the world, they were oversized and he had been unusually clumsy. This was spider karma, he had decided, and he was simply dealing with it as well as he could.

I love you, thought Mrs Baines next to him, who had mistaken his narrow brown eyes remembering a spider for fascination.

‘So?’ he said, returning to Mrs Baines, who was pink with effort. ‘Gettink wrong is our road to gettink right. Do not stop. But do be slower, yes? Fingers cannot run before head is ready. Try it slow slow slow, and put your heart in every note. It will find you.’

‘All right,’ said Mrs Baines timidly. ‘Could you show me again how to shape my hands?’

‘No! You know now! You can do it.’

Marisa frowned crossly. He didn’t sound remotely dangerous. And as Mrs Baines started, very slowly and not quite so falteringly, she irritatingly thought he was probably quite a good teacher. She googled ‘piano teacher murderer’ but it appeared to be a vanishingly rare set of circumstances.

She sighed and returned to the note. Still. She couldn’t live like this, she really couldn’t.

Chapter Seventeen

Marisa cautiously opened her door after Mrs Baines had left, with much cooing and chit-chat and cluttering of bags and purses as far as she could hear, and information being imparted about upcoming village events, of which there seemed to be an awful lot for a tiny village at the ends of the earth.

Next door, the man had gone back to playing something loud and threatening, occasionally interrupted by huge long runs at the top of the piano which were so unexpected and jarring she felt it get under her fingernails. She was so scared her teeth were nearly chattering.

She looked at the innocuous pale blue door next to her pale lemon one. Well, almost innocuous, apart from a missing step where, she was right, the piano had indeed broken it. She frowned. He should fix that. It pained her tidy heart.

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