There Is a Piano in the Divorce

How it begins

The removal men said the piano had got bigger.

Nora knew this was impossible. She had tuned it twice a year for eighteen years and once, during a heatwave, taken the whole action out on the kitchen table. It was the doorway that had become smaller.

Simon said nobody had changed the doorway.

The senior removal man looked at the wall.

"Somebody has."

They stood in the hall: two men in gray shirts, one architect who disliked being wrong in front of strangers, and one piano tuner holding the invoice for her own departure.

Nora had packed everything else.

Books in the bedroom. Clothes beside the stairs. Three boxes marked FRAGILE, although only one contained anything that might break in a useful, visible way.

The piano waited in the sitting room, dark and enormous, as if it had been invited to witness the division of a country.

"We could take the frame off," Simon said.

"The door frame?"

The removal man looked relieved.

"The piano frame," Simon said.

Nora put down the invoice.

"No."

He gave her the look that had once meant she was being unreasonable about a very small thing.

She returned the look that had once meant he should already understand why it was not small.

The younger removal man checked his watch.

From downstairs came the smell of the bakery's first batch. Someone had opened the street door, and the flat briefly filled with warm bread and traffic.

Nora remembered the day they brought the piano in. Simon had borrowed a trolley. Their neighbor had held the door. There had been more space, then, or less furniture, or fewer reasons to notice a narrow passage.

The senior man tapped the plaster.

"False wall."

Simon went still.

Nora looked at him.

"What is behind it?"

He glanced toward the sitting room.

For the first time that morning, he did not offer a solution.