The Sound of a Door That Never Opens

# The Sound of a Door That Never Opens Margaret had been playing piano for sixty-three years, and in all that time, she had never once played the piece she was sitting down to play now. Not because it was difficult — it was, actually, quite simple — but because she had promised herself she would only play it when the door opened, and the door, in all those years, had never opened. She did not remember making the promise. She suspected she had made it in a state of grief so total that the memory of making it had been buried somewhere beneath the architecture of ordinary life, accessible only in certain slants of afternoon light and certain sequences of notes that caught the melody she had promised not to play. The piece was Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. She had loved it since she was seventeen, when her father had played it on a Sunday evening in the house they had lived in before the house they had lived in after, and when the piece ended, he had said nothing, and she had said nothing, and the silence had contained everything that either of them would ever manage to say to each other about loss. The piano was an upright, older than Margaret, inherited from a neighbour who had died in circumstances that were never fully explained and who had left the instrument to the building's tenants with the instruction that it should go to "the one who plays like someone is listening." Margaret had never learned who had decided that she was the one. The decision had simply arrived, with the piano, in a week when she had been too busy to protest, and the piano had stayed, and she had stayed, and the neighbour had died somewhere else, in a different room, without Margaret ever having spoken to them more than twice. ## The Door The door she meant was the door to the flat across the landing. For twenty years, it had been occupied by a man named David who had worked in insurance and who, for reasons Margaret had never understood, had been the only person in the building who could actually hear when she was playing. Not in the sense of being disturbed — he never complained — but in the sense of responding, physically, to the music, as if the sound were a language he understood more fluently than English. He would stand in his doorway when she played certain pieces, and she had the sense that he was standing in the doorway not to listen to the music but to listen for something specific in it, some note or phrase that meant something she did not know it meant. She had asked him once, after a particularly devastating performance of the Schubert, whether he wanted to come in. He had said no, but in a way that meant not yet. She had waited for not yet to arrive. It never did. David died on a Wednesday in March, quietly, in his sleep, and by the time Margaret knew about it, the flat had already been cleared and the door had been repainted and a new lock had been installed by a letting agent who had no idea that anything of significance had ever happened behind it. She had not played the Unfinished since. Not in any complete way. She played the first eight measures often, usually on weekday evenings when the light was doing something specific to the window frame, and then she stopped, because stopping at the same place was the only form of the promise she could remember keeping. ## The Music She Could Not Make The problem with the Schubert, as Margaret understood it, was not that it was sad. It was that it was unfinished — that Schubert had written only eight measures of the second movement before abandoning the piece entirely, and that those eight measures contained more implication than most composers manage in complete works. The music was asking a question it never answered. It was a door left deliberately open, or deliberately closed, depending on how you heard it. Margaret heard it as the door across the landing, the door that David had stood in, the door that would not open again because David was gone and the person who had replaced David was a young professional who worked remotely and wore headphones all day and almost certainly had no idea that an old woman on the other side of the wall had spent two decades communicating in music to someone who could not answer. She put her hands on the keys. She did not play. She sat instead in the particular silence of a musician who has spent sixty-three years learning to distinguish between the silence that is empty and the silence that is full, and she sat in the full silence, and she waited. She was not sure what she was waiting for. She was not sure the door had to open for the music to be complete. She was only sure that she had promised herself, on an evening she could no longer fully reconstruct, that she would only play the Unfinished when the door opened. And the door had not opened. And the promise, whatever it had meant, whatever it had been protecting her from, was still intact. She lifted her hands from the keys and closed the fallboard and sat in the silence that was neither empty nor full but simply waiting, the way the Schubert was waiting, the way David had been waiting, the way the door across the landing had been waiting for forty years without knowing it was waiting for anything at all. She stayed like that for a long time.