“Can’t afford that,” she said. “Show me something for about twenty.”
“There’s this one,” he said, rather contemptuously. “Good English make ... eighteen guineas ... cheapest we have in the shop. But, of course, you wouldn’t want one like that.”
She struck a few chords.
“I’ll take that ... and you can send it up and take the other away as soon as you like.”
“Very good, ma’am.”
When she returned she had a sudden fit of sentimentality as she looked at the Steinway grand. It was a beautiful instrument, black and glossy and wonderfully sleek, like a well-groomed horse. Its raised sound-board reflected her face like a mirror. She sat down on the stool in front of it and tried to play. But her right hand was woefully disorganized. She started a simple minuet of Beethoven, one that she had played as an encore to a Cambridge audience, but the pain in her right hand and arm was so great that she did not go further than the first few bars. Then she tried trick playing with her left hand alone, and when that became uninteresting there was nothing for her to do but to cry. So she cried....
When the furniture van had arrived and a couple of men had carried the beautiful piano into a dark cavity of straw and sackcloth, leaving behind them in exchange a mocking little upstart in streaky imitation fumed oak, not even the presence in her bureau drawer of sixty pounds in notes and gold could compensate her adequately. The new piano looked so cheap and tawdry amongst the surrounding furniture, and the space where the old one had been was drearily vacant and ever remindful of her loss.
The same day she wrote cheques to half a dozen tradesmen, and as she went out to post them, put fifty pounds into her cheque account at the bank. She felt that slowly, at any rate, she was winning in her contest with fortune.
§ 7
Unfortunately the avalanche of bills had not yet quite spent itself, and Madame Varegny suggested an interim payment of her account, amounting to thirty-two treatments at half a guinea each: total sixteen pounds sixteen.