William Boyd - Love is Blind

Brodie Moncur stood in the main window of Channon & Co. and looked out at the hurrying pedestrians, the cabs, carriages and labouring drays of George Street. It was raininga steady soft rain driven slant from time to time by the occasional fierce gust of windand, under the ponderous pewter light, the sooty facades of the buildings opposite had darkened with the water to a near-black. Like velvet, Brodie thought, or moleskin. He took off his spectacles and wiped the lenses clean on his handkerchief. Looking out of the window again, spectacle-less, he saw that rainy Edinburgh had now gone utterly aqueous. The buildings opposite were a cliff of black suede.

He replaced his spectacleshooking the wire sides behind his earsand the world returned to normal. He slipped his watch from his waistcoat pocket. Nearly nine oclockbetter start. He opened up the glossy new grand piano that was on the display dais, propping up the curved lid with its inlaid mirror (only for display purposeshis idea) the better to present the intricate machinerythe actioninside a Channon grand. He removed the fall from over the keys and undid the key-block screws. He checked that no hammers were up and then drew the whole action forward by the flange rail under the front. As it was a new piano it drew out perfectly. Already a passer-by had stopped and was peering in. Drawing out the action always compelled attention. Everyone had seen a grand piano with the lid up but having the action on display somehow altered every easy assumption. The piano no longer seemed familiar. Now all the moving parts were visible beyond the black and white keysthe hammers, the rockers, the jacks, the whippens, the dampersits innards were exposed like a clock with its back off or a railway engine dismantled in a repair shed. Mysteriesmusic, time, movementwere reduced to complex, elaborate mechanisms. People tended to be fascinated.

He untied his leather roll of tools, selected the tuning lever and pretended to tune the piano, tightening a few strings here and there, testing them and resetting them. The piano was perfectly tunedhe had tuned it himself when it had emerged, pristine, from the factory two weeks ago. He tuned F a modicum on the sharp side then knocked it inback into tunewith a few brisk taps on the key. He supported a hammer-head and needled-up the felt a little with his three-pronged voicing tool and returned it to its position. This pantomime of tuning a piano was meant to lure the customers in. He had suggested, at one of the rare staff meetings, that they should have someone actually playing the pianoan accomplished pianistas they did in showrooms in Germany, and as the Erard and Pleyel piano manufacturers had done in Paris in the 1830s and drawn huge crowds. It was hardly an innovationbut an impromptu recital in a shop window would surely be more enticing than listening to the mannered repetitions of a piano being tuned.