A ten-year-old girl came to my house for a piano lesson every Wednesday for fourteen weeks that nobody was paying for, and in all that time she never said one word about it.
I teach piano in my front room on Shawbury Crescent. Nineteen pupils, Monday to Thursday, four till eight.
My name is Henrietta Caldbeck-Nwachukwu. I am sixty-two and I have been doing this since my own children were small.
I charge eighteen dollars for half an hour. I have not put it up in four years because I cannot bring myself to.
Parents pay me in a block of six at the start of a half term, in an envelope, or by bank transfer if they are organised.
Her name is Marisela Quintrell-Boden and she started with me in the January when she was nine.
Wednesdays, ten past five. She is the fourth of six pupils that evening.
She is not a prodigy. I want to say that because people always assume there has to be a prodigy in this kind of story.
She is ordinary and she is diligent and she practises, which in nineteen pupils makes her roughly the second best I have got.
She walks. It is about two miles from the Grimsditch Road end and it takes her thirty-five to forty minutes and she has done it in all weathers since the first week.
Her father drops her sometimes in the winter. Dermot. Early forties, works in logistics, always in a hurry, perfectly pleasant, pays late but pays.
Here is the thing I did not notice for fourteen weeks, which in a woman who has run a small business out of her front room for twenty years is not a small admission.
I did not notice that the money had stopped.
I know exactly how that happened and it is not a good reason. It is a spiral-bound book with my pupils in it, and a bank account with my husband’s pension going in and out of it, and the fact that three other families pay me in cash and one of them pays me in a jar of money every half term like it is 1974.
So when an eighteen dollar slot stops arriving, you do not see it. I did not see it.
She came on the nineteenth of June, which was the last week of a paid block.
And then she came on the twenty-sixth. And the third of July. And all the way through the summer, because I teach six weeks of the holiday for the ones who want it.
And then into the autumn term, through September, through the half term, right up to the first of October.
Fourteen Wednesdays.
Here is what was different and here is what I noticed instead, which tells you something about me.
She got better. Noticeably. Suddenly. Over that summer she went from somebody who had done her practice to somebody who had clearly done a great deal more than her practice.
Scales she had been fumbling in May came out clean in July. She learned a piece in two weeks that I had budgeted five for.
I was delighted. I told her so. I told her she must be doing her twenty minutes and a bit more besides and she said yes.
Two other things I noticed and filed away as nothing.
She stopped taking the music home. From about the first week of July she would do the lesson and then put the book back on my piano instead of in her bag.
I assumed she had a copy. Everybody has a copy.
And she started arriving early. Not five minutes. Twenty-five, thirty minutes early, and sitting on the low wall at the end of my path until the pupil before her came out.
In the rain, twice, that I know about.
