The Piano Tuner’s Ear

The house is called Wynn's and the piano is a Bechstein and Desmond has been coming twice a year since 1999.

He lets himself in. He has always let himself in; the key is under the same stone it was under in 1999, which he has mentioned to the family four times and which he has stopped mentioning.

The house is empty on tuning days. That is the arrangement. It was the arrangement with the grandmother, and then with the daughter, and now presumably with whoever it is that pays the invoices, though he has not met them and the invoices are paid by standing order.

Twice a year for twenty-six years is fifty-two tunings.

He knows this piano better than he knows most people. He knows that the fourth octave goes flat faster than it should because of the radiator nobody will move. He knows there is a hairline crack in the soundboard, from 2007, that has not moved a millimetre since and that he checks every time anyway. He knows the middle C hammer has been reshaped twice, once by him, once — badly, in about 1990, before his time — by somebody who should not have been allowed near it.

He knows the piano is not played.

This is not a guess. A played piano moves. The unisons drift in a particular pattern; the hammers compact where the hands go; the pedal felt wears. This piano's pedal felt is the felt he fitted in 2011 and it is barely marked.

Fifty-two tunings. Nobody plays it.

He has never asked, because it is not his business, and because a man who tunes pianos for a living learns early that the question why do you keep this has answers you may not want to be holding.

Today the house is not empty.

There is a car in the drive and the front door is open and there is a woman of about fifty in the hall who says, "Oh — you must be Desmond," as though she has known his name for years, which she evidently has.

"I can come back."

"No. No, please." She is holding a mug with both hands. "We're — it's being sold. The house. I'm doing the last of it."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be, it's fine, it's been coming." She looks at the drawing room door. "Would you still—?"

"If you'd like it tuned, I'll tune it."

"I would like it tuned," she says, with slightly too much force, and then laughs at herself.

So he tunes it, and she stays, which nobody has ever done, and sits in the chair by the window with the mug going cold.

It takes him an hour and ten. She does not talk and he is grateful. At the end he does what he always does, which is play about thirty seconds of something to hear it in the room rather than under his hands — badly, because he is a tuner and not a pianist, and it does not matter.

When he stops she is crying, quite quietly, in the way of someone who has decided to allow it.

"Sorry," he says.

"No. God. No." She wipes her face with the heel of her hand. "That's the first time it's been played since my father died."

Desmond does the arithmetic before he can stop himself.

"I'm sorry," he says carefully. "When did—"

"Ninety-eight."

Twenty-six years. Fifty-two tunings. Twice a year, every year, on a standing order, on an instrument that nobody in the family has touched since the year before he started.

"Nobody plays," he says. It is not a question and it comes out more gently than he intended.

"None of us. Mum couldn't. I never learned properly. My brother's in Vancouver." She shrugs helplessly. "He'd have wanted it kept right. That was the whole — he was very particular. He used to say a piano going out of tune is the sound of a house not caring."

She looks at the Bechstein.

"So we kept it right," she says. "For twenty-six years. That's all it was. That's all any of it was."

Desmond stands in a drawing room he has stood in fifty-two times, and understands, finally, what he has been doing in it.

"It's in very good order," he says. "Whoever buys it — it's in very good order."

She nods, and cannot speak, and nods again.

He packs his tools. At the door he stops.

"The key," he says. "Under the stone. You'll want to move that, before the sale."

"Oh," she says. "That's where it is."