Because, as she put it, and I am writing this down the way she said it: “If I didn’t say anything, nobody had to.”
Then the other things make sense and I wish they did not.
She stopped taking the music home in July because the piano had gone. It was sold on the fourth of July for two hundred and twenty dollars to a man with a van.
She left the books on my piano so that she would not have to explain, if anybody at home found them, what she still needed them for.
And the reason she got dramatically better over that summer, the thing I was so pleased about, the thing I congratulated her for on my own doorstep in August, is this.
She drew a keyboard.
On the back of a roll of wallpaper offcut, in pencil and biro, two octaves, with the black notes filled in, measured against the real one in my front room with her hands.
She rolled it out on her bedroom floor every evening and practised on it in silence for about forty minutes a night, fingering everything, hearing it in her head, because that was the only instrument in the house.
Twelve weeks of silent practice on a piece of wallpaper. That is where the improvement came from.
And she arrived half an hour early and sat on my garden wall in the rain because those thirty minutes on the wall, listening to the pupil before her through my front window, were the only time all week she heard a piano at all.
I did not handle the next part gracefully. I would like to say I did.
I told Dermot that the two hundred and fifty-two did not exist, that the lessons had been cancelled properly and the error was mine, and that nobody owed me anything. He argued. I won, because I have thirty years on him.
Then I said the Wednesday ten past five slot is hers for nothing until she tells me she does not want it, and he said no, absolutely not, and he meant it, and we stood on my path and had a short argument in front of his daughter about who was allowed to be proud.
We settled it, in the end, the way these things actually get settled, which is that it is not free and it is not eighteen dollars.
She comes at ten past five and at twenty to six she stays on and helps me with my two youngest, who are five and six and who do not sit still, and she is worth more to me than she costs me, and both of those things are true and neither of us says the word lesson.
The upright in my front room is a 1961 Zender that I have had since 1988 and it will not go in a car.
So she does her practice here now, on Saturday mornings, nine till eleven, and I go and do the shopping and leave her in the house on her own with a key, which my husband thinks is mad.
She passed her grade three in the February with a distinction. One hundred and forty-one out of a hundred and fifty.
The wallpaper keyboard is still in her bedroom. She would not let her father throw it out.
And I have moved PIANO ADMIN out of that folder and onto a piece of paper on the wall by the kettle, where I can see it, because the truth of this whole thing is very simple and it is not about a girl at all.
Two adults who both liked that child very much managed, between us, to not say one sentence out loud for fourteen weeks.
And she was nine, and she worked out that if she said nothing, neither of us would ever have to.
