The Upright in My Mother's Front Room Was Always a Quarter Tone Flat

The Call Came Between Two Pianos

I was kneeling under a Yamaha in the school hall at Cambridge when my sister phoned. I tune pianos for a living, and have done for thirty-one years, so I know the feeling of a wrench in my hand and my ear pressed close to a string. I know the sound a note makes just before it settles. I did not know the sound my sister would make when she said Ma had gone in the night.

I finished the piano. People find that strange when I tell them, but I did. I had the A in my head and I could not leave it hanging. Then I packed my case, signed the bursar's book, walked out to my car in the car park and sat there with the engine off for a long time.

My mother was eighty-four. She lived alone in the same house in Fichardt Park where I grew up, with the same upright piano in the front room that nobody had played properly since my father died. I tuned it every Easter when I drove up. It was always a quarter tone flat by then. Old pianos sink, the way old people do, slowly and without complaint.

Being the Eldest Means Being the One Who Pays

There are four of us. I am the eldest, and in our family that has always meant something specific. When my father died it was me who sorted the bank, me who phoned the undertaker, me who stood at the front of the church. Nobody voted. It was simply understood.

My brother Willem is in Perth and has been for nineteen years. My sister Annatjie works at a pharmacy in Bloemfontein and has three children still at school. Our youngest, Riaan, has had a difficult few years, and I will leave it there. So when the undertaker in Bloemfontein gave Annatjie a figure over the phone, and she read it to me in a small voice, I already knew whose problem it was going to be.

The funeral policy my mother had paid into for years turned out to be smaller than any of us had thought. She had taken it out in the nineties and never increased it. It covered perhaps half. The rest had to be paid before they would release her, and there were the flights for Willem, who could not afford them, and the tea afterwards, and the small things that nobody tells you cost money until you are standing at a counter holding a pen.

Why I Could Not Sell the Car

A piano tuner without a car is a man with a very good ear and nothing to do with it. My work is not in one place. On a normal week I am at two schools in East London, a church in Gonubie, a music teacher in Beacon Bay, and three or four homes where someone has inherited a piano from a grandmother and wants to know if it is worth saving. Once a month I drive out to King William's Town and Stutterheim. My tools, my parts, the spare felts and pins and the little bottles of this and that all live in the boot.

The car is a 2016 Toyota Corolla with a dent in the back door from a hailstorm in Komga. It is paid off. It is the one thing I own outright apart from my tools. My wife Elsabé said, quietly, that we could sell it and buy something cheaper later. I knew she was right in a sense. I also knew that if I sold it I would lose a month of bookings, maybe two, and that the schools would find someone else, and the term would end without me.

I sat up that first night at the kitchen table doing sums on the back of an envelope, which is how my father did his sums. The numbers did not change no matter how neatly I wrote them.

A Young Man at a Church Organ

The next morning I had a booking at a church in Southernwood, a small pipe organ that needed attention to its reed stops. The organist there is a young man named Sipho who also does the books for the church and for his uncle's taxi business. While I worked, he sat in the front pew and asked how I was, and for some reason I told him.

He did not offer advice straight away. He asked questions. Was the car paid off? Did I need it every day? Then he told me his uncle had once been in a similar spot after a hijacking left him short, and had looked into what he called the option to pawn car for cash where you keep using the car while the loan runs. I said I had always thought pawning meant handing over the keys and walking home. He said that was how most people thought of it.

I want to be honest that I was suspicious. I am fifty-eight and I grew up hearing my father say that a man who borrows against what he owns is a man who will soon own less. But my father also never had to bury his mother on a pensioner's policy from 1994.

What I Read on My Phone in a Parking Bay

That afternoon I sat in the car outside a house in Vincent, early for my next client, and read about loans against your car on my phone with my reading glasses pushed up onto my forehead because the print was small and I kept losing my place. I read slowly. I read the terms the way I read the inside of a piano I have never opened before, looking for the thing that is going to cause trouble later.

I phoned Elsabé and read some of it to her. She asked the questions I had not thought of. What happened if I missed a month? How much would it cost us in total, not per month? Could we pay it off early if the December weddings came through, because every December somebody wants the old family piano tuned for a wedding?

I will not pretend I understood every line. I did understand that it was a loan, that it had a cost, and that the cost was real. I also understood that it would let me drive to Bloemfontein, bury my mother, and come back to my Monday at the Cambridge school without having to explain to the bursar why I had no transport.

Signing, and Then the Long Road North

I went in on a Thursday. I took the car, my papers, my ID, and a folder Elsabé had put together with tabs on it, because she knows me. They looked the car over, made a few notes about the hail dent, and asked me a lot of questions. It took longer than I expected and less time than I feared. I left with the money promised to my account and the car still mine to drive. I had read the phrase pawn car and still drive it so many times the night before that it had started to sound like a line from a hymn, and now here I was doing exactly that, turning out of the parking lot with my tuning case rattling in the boot.

On Saturday morning at four, Elsabé and I left East London for Bloemfontein. It is a long drive and I have done it maybe sixty times in my life. Through Queenstown, through Aliwal North, over the Orange, the land going flat and gold and enormous. We did not talk much. Somewhere past Jamestown she put her hand on my knee and left it there for an hour.

The Piano in the Front Room

The funeral was on the Tuesday, at the Dutch Reformed church where my parents married. Willem made it, just. Riaan came, in a borrowed jacket, and stood next to me, and I was more grateful for that than I can say.

Afterwards, when people had gone back to Annatjie's house for tea, I let myself into Ma's house alone. It smelled of her soap and of the old carpet. The upright piano was where it had always been, against the wall under the photograph of my father in his railway uniform. There were Ma's reading glasses on top of it, and a hymn book open at a page with a pencil mark in the margin.

I had brought my case in from the car without really deciding to. I opened the lid of the piano and took off the front board and looked at the hammers, which were grooved and old. I played an A. It was flat, of course. A quarter tone, maybe a little more.

I tuned it. All of it, every string, in the dark front room with the curtains drawn, while my family ate egg sandwiches across town. It took me three hours. When I was done I played the hymn from the open page, badly, because I am a tuner and not a pianist, and I cried the whole way through it in a way I had not managed at the graveside.

What I Think About Now

We drove home on the Thursday. The piano is going to Annatjie's eldest, who is twelve and has started lessons. I will tune it at Easter, the way I always have, only it will be in a different house.

I am paying the loan back. Some months are easier than others. The December weddings did come through, three of them, and I put almost all of it towards the balance. Elsabé keeps the folder with the tabs in the kitchen drawer and checks it more than I do.

I do not think my father would have approved. But I think my mother would have understood. She was always the practical one. She was the one who kept the house running on a railwayman's wage, who sewed our school clothes, who once sold her own mother's sewing machine to pay for my first set of tuning tools when I was twenty-seven and starting out. I did not know that until Annatjie told me at the funeral.

So the car is still in the driveway, with its dent from Komga. The tools are still in the boot. On Monday I was back under the Yamaha at Cambridge, and the A held true from the week before, and I sat there a moment longer than I needed to, just listening to it ring.