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There's a pianist in The Dog and Turkey that afternoon, an elderly man faltering over half-forgotten tunes as the patrons nurse their drinks and mind their business. He picks out notes from decades past, presenting them to the room like a late Christmas present, an ugly jumper of a song knitted as much out of habit as love.
Totty learned to play the piano as a girl. Who hadn't, those days? Her fingers learned the scales by rote, never quite understanding how one could play them with feeling. No, not with feeling, but vith feelink, the words forever bound up in her mind with her teacher's creaking accent. Perhaps it was a mistake in translation, she can remember thinking, perhaps she wasn't really meant to perform the impossible, to voice emotion by hammering out notes.
Now, she thinks, at last old enough to know better, now she might understand. Of course, of course, she no longer has the skill to try.
If her hands were steadier. If she had practised more as a girl. If she had the time now, the energy to take it up again. She sounds like Hector, telling herself lies upon lies just to keep the coffin lid of truth from finally slamming down.
"Buy you a drink, miss?" The voice is young, and she knows without looking that it's one of Hector's boys. She does her best not to flinch at the interruption.
They all had charm, the self-centred charm of youth that sours into melancholy somewhere along the way to becoming sixty-seven and alone, but Hector's boys never lose it. They carry it with them, a scrap of knowledge that stays when all the facts she taught them are forgotten.
She's too old to be charmed, she thinks, but turns anyway, keeping back the waspish remark until she can identify which boy it is.
"Miss?"
"Akthar," she answers, not letting the query show in her tone. Say it firmly enough, and they'll half believe the mistake is on their part, not yours.
"Miss," he says again, smiling. The background music swells, then falters as the pianist misses a note. Totty doesn't recognise the tune. "I knew you'd remember me."
He's handsome now, the gawky, gangling youth that Hector -- and Irwin, little more than a boy himself -- found so appealing in them all now shed for something harder, something lived in. He's still young, though, face no more creased than a decade's worth of thought will do to one, and even in this dim afternoon light, his smile hurts her eyes.
There are stock responses to moments such as these. Every teacher learns them, and it's not lack of practice that makes her falter, a polite query on the state of his health discarded before it reaches her tongue.
"You're still young," she says, and chooses not to regret it.
"You're still sharp." His smile is brighter.
"Sharp," she repeats, thinking out loud. "Is that better or worse than 'old', I wonder?"
"At least it's not," he pauses, draws the words to himself, "magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life."
"Don't try that poetry shit with me," she says, and finds herself close to smiling back.
He's a teacher now, he tells her another drink and another dozen heart-breaking smiles into the conversation. Fast track promotion and career options are laid out before him with Oxbridge ease.
She tries not to be jealous.
"I kind of drifted into it," he says, disarmingly honest. "I like it, though. It's better than I thought it would be."
He sounds like Rudge. She smiles to herself, enjoying the thought. "I'm glad." Rather to her surprise, she finds she means it.
He starts to frown. Here it comes. "I'd really value your advice, miss," he says.
The name makes it easy to fall back into old rhythms, to nod more sincerely than she means, waiting for a question experience tells her she will have heard a thousand times before. Students are never as original as they think they are.
"I want the girls in my class to succeed." He says this as if it is new and daring. Heaven help the world if it is. "How can I teach them best?"
The glib answer is at her tongue almost before she can swallow it back. It's a new world, now.
She has another flash of memory, her piano teacher playing a piece for her, bringing his hands down on the keyboard with his whole body. It was hard to watch, sometimes, to see him ache with passion she still couldn't hear in the notes. He thought he could say with music what the language barrier prevented him saying with words.
Sometimes the glib answer is the right answer, and now she gives it anyway, suddenly tired. "At the risk of shocking you, I might dare to mention that women, like men, may prefer not to be seen as a separate, unknowable species."
He laughs, calls her "miss" once more in cheerful apology, and tries that poetry shit with her again.
Auden, of course. She waves it away, listening to the pianist pick out the notes to something by Sinatra and play them in almost the right order. When did this get old?
They drink.
"Do you remember Dakin, miss?"
It would be hard not to, but she thinks anyway. Does she remember him? He wasn't sad like Posner, nor witty like Scripps; he didn't bulldoze his way into her affections like Rudge or Akthar. He was the focal point, the centre for the action, but she thinks of him now in terms of the shadows he cast and the trouble he caused.
"Would you believe me if I said no?" she asks.
Akthar laughs, shaking his head. "No."
The ease with which he laughs hits her again. Was she ever that young? Was Hector? Was their glorious headmaster ever twenty-eight and happy, so sure that his life was worth waking up for?
"I remember all the boys in your set." She folds her hands across her lap, a remnant of the primness she's long since abandoned.
He looks at her. It's as if he's trying to read her mind, as if her heart weren't written deep in the lines on her face. "He cast a long shadow."
It sounds like a quotation, an echo of something more than her thoughts, but she can't place it. "Really?" she says, non-committal.
"Really," he says, then pauses. "Will you join me for another drink tonight, Mrs Lintott? The offer includes more."
Time moves on. She's not Hector; she doesn't have a line of poetry for when there is no other answer.
"It's funny," she says, "and by funny I mean Hector would not have laughed, it's funny how even now your Dakin leaves ripples in his wake."
"He's not my Dakin."
"Akthar, I'm old," she points out.
"Dorothy, I know."
It's the first time he's used her name, and it's not the shock she thought it would be. Young as he is, he's old enough to know better, old enough not to be so cruel.
She thinks for a moment before speaking, weighing her words against the memories of other boys, other people's tests. "This is not kind," she says. "I had expected better of you." With a shock, she realises this is true. She knew him as he was discovering his potential, learning how to be more than he was. An artefact of that is this: he's never disappointed her before.
"I have four sisters," he says. "Three aunts, two uncles and seven cousins in Sheffield, another aunt, uncle and five cousins in Birmingham. Maybe you don't remember, but there were always eight of us in the library. I got to Cambridge and got my own room and it was the second time ever I'd been alone."
She watches his mouth settle into a tight frown. It serves her right; so taken up in the meaninglessness of her own life, she forgets the world really does revolve around everyone else.
"The second time?" she prompts.
"The first time was in your class. Maybe you don't remember--"
"I do." She cuts him off this time, the flash of righteous anger stirring once again. History. What did men know about history?
"Maybe you don't," he presses. "History isn't just facts and figures and one thing after another. It's one person after another, having the same thoughts and making the same mistakes, because that's what people do."
In the background, someone smashes a glass. Mocking applause and good natured cheering drown out any mumbled apology. The music, she dimly notes, has stopped.
Akthar draws breath. "You taught me to make different mistakes."
She laughs, quick and sharp, while she tries to gather her thoughts. "Do you include this one in their number?" she asks, dry as she can.
"Yes."
He holds out a hand, smooth and carefree, and she, tired, wrinkled, out of practice, she takes it.
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End
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