The Half-Landing

by Gerard Hoffnung, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The firm of Pocock & Son, Removals and Light Haulage, consisted in the spring of 1957 of Mr Albert Pocock, who was eighty-one, Mr Leonard Pocock, who was fifty-four, a Bedford van with a split in the canvas tilt, and a boy called Stanley Hibbert, who was seventeen and had been taken on in March because Leonard's back had begun to make remarks.

It was Albert who was the Pocock. Leonard was the Son. This was painted on both doors of the van, and Leonard had long ago stopped minding it, in the way a man stops minding the weather in a country where the weather does not consult him.

Albert did not lift. He had not lifted since the old King died, which was not the present Queen's father but the one before. He directed. For this purpose he travelled with a folding chair of green canvas, which he set up wherever the work was going to be, and on which he sat in a dark overcoat and a bowler hat, with his hands crossed on the head of a walking stick, like a general who has outlived all his wars and has come to watch someone else's.

"Four hundred pianos," Albert would say, to clients, when the matter of the piano came up. "I have moved four hundred pianos."

"He has," said Leonard. "He has lifted none of them."

They said this every time. The clients always laughed, and Albert always waited for the laugh to finish before he took off his hat and said, "Madam," and put it back on. He had been doing this since before the first war, and the timing of it had become very good.

---

The job on the Thursday was a piano, from the ground floor of a house on the hill at Muswell Hill to the first floor of the same house. Leonard had written it in the book as Mrs Marcus, piano, front room to back bedroom, one flight, 15 shillings, and underlined the fifteen shillings, because a job inside one house is a job without petrol.

Mrs Marcus opened the door herself. She was a small woman of about fifty-five in a grey cardigan, with her hair pinned up very tidily, and she had a way of standing in her own doorway as if she had been asked to keep it for someone. She looked at Albert, who had already unfolded his chair on her front path, and at Leonard, and at Stanley, and at the webbing straps over Stanley's shoulder.

"There are only three of you," she said.

"There are two of us," said Leonard. "My father directs."

"Four hundred pianos, Madam," said Albert, and took off his hat.

Mrs Marcus did not laugh. She considered him for a moment, gravely, as one might consider an unfamiliar instrument, and said, "Then you will know what to do," and stood aside to let them in.

The front room had been cleared. That is to say, it had been half cleared, which is the condition in which every removal man finds every room: the carpet up and rolled along the skirting, the curtains down, the pictures off their hooks and leaning face-in against the wall, a bed in pieces, and in the middle of it all, on a square of drugget where the carpet had been, the piano.

It was an upright, of dark rosewood, with two brass candle-sconces folded back against its front and the name in gold across the fall: BLÜTHNER, and underneath it, smaller, LEIPZIG. It was not a large upright. It did not have to be. It had the look that some pianos have, and some sideboards, and nearly all grandfathers, of having stood in one place so long that the floor has grown up around it.

Leonard put his palm flat on its side, the way a farrier puts a hand on a horse, to let it know he was there.

"Iron frame," he said. "She'll be five hundredweight."

"Five and a half," said Albert, from the hall. He had brought the chair in and set it up at the foot of the stairs, facing upward, which was where the work was going to be.

"Who is coming into this room?" Stanley asked, because he was seventeen.

"A young man," said Mrs Marcus. "From Monday. A student. He will pay two pounds a week and his breakfast, and he needs a room on the ground floor because of his instrument, which I have not seen." She smoothed the cardigan down at the front. "The piano will go into my bedroom. There is room by the window. I have measured."

She had. She had written the measurements on the back of a gas bill, in a small upright hand with the sevens crossed, and she gave it to Leonard. The width of the bedroom door. The width of the space by the window. The height of the piano. The width of the stairs. Everything was there, in inches and also, in brackets, in centimetres, as if she had wanted to be sure in two languages.

Leonard looked at it for some time.

"You have measured everything," he said, "except the corner."

---

The stairs went up eight steps to a half-landing, turned at a right angle against the party wall, and went up six more. At the turn there was a newel post of varnished pine with a ball on top. Above the half-landing there was a small window of coloured glass, a tulip, red and green, through which the light came in at about eleven in the morning and lay on the stairs in a long lozenge, as if someone had dropped a stained-glass rug.

This, as it happens, was eleven in the morning.

They took the piano out of the front room on its castors, which squealed, and through the door with an inch to spare on each side, which Mrs Marcus had measured, and into the hall, which was narrow and had a barometer. Stanley took the barometer down without being asked. Albert noted this.

"The boy has a future," he said.

Then they turned the piano on its back on the hall floor, on two folded blankets, and the piano gave out, from somewhere inside itself, a long, low, unhappy chord, like a cathedral settling. Mrs Marcus, who was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, put one hand on the frame of the door.

"It does that," said Leonard. "It's only the strings, Madam."

"I know what it is," said Mrs Marcus.

They strapped it. Leonard took the top end, going up backwards, which is the end that takes the weight and requires the experience; Stanley took the bottom, which is the end that pushes and requires the youth. Albert, from his chair, said, "Steady," at intervals. These intervals had no apparent relation to anything that was happening on the stairs, but they were regular, and there was something in the regularity of them which was, in its way, a help.

The first eight steps went as eight steps go with a piano: slowly, one at a time, with breathing. At the fifth step Leonard said a word that he did not normally say in front of a client, and said, "Beg pardon." At the seventh, the light came through the tulip and fell across the underside of the piano, which had never been looked at in daylight in its life, and they saw that somebody had chalked a number there, a long time ago: H 4471, and beneath it, in a different chalk, Bremen.

Then they arrived at the half-landing, and the piano arrived at the corner.

---

There is a moment in the moving of a large object up a turning stair which every removal man knows, and which has no name, because it does not need one. It is the moment when the object, which has until then been going where it was carried, stops, and considers the corner, and declines.

The Blüthner declined.

They tried it flat. The top end went round as far as the party wall, and the bottom end remained on the seventh step with Stanley under it, and the whole instrument lay across the half-landing at an angle of forty degrees, with one brass sconce against the wall and the other against the newel post, and moved neither way.

"Up," said Albert. "Up on end, Leonard."

They brought it back. They stood it up on its end, on the half-landing itself, which took four minutes and a quantity of breath, and which produced from inside the piano a second chord, higher than the first and somehow more reproachful. Standing on its end it was a little under five feet tall and it went round the corner with ease, as far as the moment when its top touched the ceiling of the upper flight, which slopes, as the ceilings of upper flights always slope, at the precise angle required to touch the top of a piano standing on its end.

"Tilt her," said Albert.

They tilted her. The top came clear of the ceiling. The bottom came into contact with the newel post. There was a small sound of varnish.

"Mind the post," said Mrs Marcus, from the hall.

"Minding it, Madam," said Leonard, whose face was the colour of the red half of the tulip.

They took it back to where it had been, which was the half-landing, and set it down on its castors, the right way up, facing the window. Stanley sat on the bottom step of the upper flight with his elbows on his knees. Leonard leaned on the wall. Nobody said anything for a while. In the hall, Albert removed his bowler hat, looked inside it, as if the answer might have been left there by a previous owner, and put it back on.

"The banister," he said at last. "The post comes out. Two screws and a dowel. I have seen it done in Crouch End."

"No," said Mrs Marcus.

She said it quite quietly. Albert turned in his chair and looked at her, and she looked back, and Albert, who had been married for fifty-one years and widowed for six, recognised the particular quietness and did not say anything more about Crouch End.

"It is not my house," Mrs Marcus said. "I am the tenant. I have been the tenant for seventeen years. The post stays."

"Then the piano," said Leonard, carefully, "stays also, Madam. Where it is."

They all looked at it.

It stood on the half-landing with its back to the party wall, as if it had been there always. The tulip window was above it and a little to the left, so that the red and the green fell on the rosewood lid and on the gold letters. On either side of it there was about a foot to spare. A person going up to bed would have to turn sideways to get past, as one turns sideways past a stout acquaintance in a church porch.

"Well," said Albert. "It's off the ground floor."

---

There remained the question of the fee.

Leonard went down into the hall and got out the book and the pencil, and stood looking at front room to back bedroom, 15 shillings, as a man looks at the plan of a holiday after the holiday.

Mrs Marcus went into the kitchen to find her purse. She came back with it, and with a tray on which there were four cups of tea and a plate of a kind of biscuit, very thin and dark, that Stanley had not seen before and that tasted, he said afterwards, of Christmas and of pepper.

"Fifteen shillings," she said, and began to count it out.

"No," said Albert.

Leonard closed his eyes.

"Pocock and Son," Albert said, getting up from his chair, which he did in three stages, like a ship being launched, "charge for pianos delivered. That piano has not been delivered. That piano," and here he lifted his stick and pointed with it up the stairs, at the Blüthner on its landing in its coloured light, "has been postponed. We charge seven-and-six for a postponement."

Mrs Marcus stopped counting.

"There is no such thing," she said, "as a postponement."

"There is now, Madam," said Albert, "since about twenty past eleven."

She looked at him again for a long moment, and this time something happened at one corner of her mouth, and was put away again, quickly, as a person puts away a letter that has been left out on a table.

She paid seven-and-six. Leonard wrote it in the book, under the fifteen shillings, and did not cross out the fifteen shillings, because it was not his practice to cross things out. It was his practice to write the true thing underneath.

---

They drank the tea in the hall, because the front room had no chairs in it and the kitchen was very small. Stanley sat on the bottom stair. Albert sat in his green chair. Leonard stood, because his back had made it clear that it would not be sitting down again that day and then getting up. Mrs Marcus stood in the kitchen doorway with her cup and saucer held up near her chin.

"H four-four-seven-one," Stanley said. "What's that, then? Underneath."

Leonard looked at the boy in a way that the boy did not see.

"That was the lift van," said Mrs Marcus.

"The what?"

"The container. The big box. Everything from the flat went into it, in Berlin, and it went by train to Bremen and by ship to the London docks. In the summer of 1939." She took a sip of the tea. "A man from the customs office came and watched the packers and wrote down every item, every spoon. He wrote the piano down twice. Once as a piano, and once as a Blüthner. My father asked him why, and he said a Blüthner is not a piano, it is a Blüthner." She turned the cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. "He was quite correct. It was the only thing he said that day which was correct."

"Was your dad in the van too, then?" said Stanley. "With the furniture?"

"Stanley," said Leonard.

"No," said Mrs Marcus. "Only the furniture."

Nobody said anything. Albert set his cup down on the floor beside the leg of his chair, very precisely, so that the handle pointed towards the door.

"Who plays it?" said Albert.

Mrs Marcus looked up the stairs.

"My husband played it," she said. "He was not good. He was very loud. He played Schubert as if Schubert owed him money. He died in 1951." She put her cup down on the hall table, beside the barometer, which Stanley had laid there. "I played it before that. When I was a girl. I have not played it since."

"Since he passed on?"

"Since we left," she said.

---

When Leonard went up to put the castor-cups under the piano, so that it should not walk, he found he had to turn sideways to get by it, as predicted, and that when he did so his elbow struck the lid, and the lid made a hollow wooden sound, and down in the hall Albert said, "Steady," from long habit.

He put the castor-cups under. Then, because it was what he did with every piano when it had arrived wherever it was going, he lifted the fall and looked at the keys, to see that nothing had come loose on the stairs. Nothing had. The keys were yellow, as old ivory is. He shut the fall again. He came down.

"She'll want a tuner," he said. "After the stairs."

"She will want a great deal more than a tuner," said Mrs Marcus.

They put the young man's bed together after that. It had come in pieces from a shop in the Tottenham Court Road on the Tuesday and had lain on the front-room floor ever since, like the plan of a bed. Then they laid the carpet again, and hung the curtains, and turned the pictures round, and the barometer went back on its hook. Nothing wider than a man turned sideways could go upstairs now, and Mrs Marcus said that the space by her bedroom window, which she had measured, would have to remain measured. It was now ten past one, and the light had gone from the tulip and lay on the hall floor instead, smaller, in two colours.

Stanley was rolling the webbing straps when the music began.

It began with a single note, from the half-landing, a G, struck once, then struck again, as a person knocks a second time at a door they are not sure has been answered. Then a chord. Then a pause, quite a long one, in which Albert, who was folding his chair, stopped folding it and stood holding it half open, like a man holding an umbrella in a doubtful sky.

Then she played.

It was not very much. It was a slow piece, and not long, and she lost her way in the middle of it and stopped, and went back, and found it, and went on. The piano was out of tune from the stairs and the castors and the six years in which nobody had touched it, and some of the notes in the bass came out with a kind of buzz in them, like a bee in a jar. But it was the landing. The sound went up into the slope of the ceiling over the upper flight and down into the well of the stairs and along the hall, and arrived in the front room, and in the kitchen, and out through the open front door into the street, where a man delivering bread had stopped his van by the kerb and was not getting out of it. It was the best place in the house. Anyone could have told you so, who had ever practised anything on a staircase. You would not have chosen to put a piano there.

Albert finished folding the chair. He did it very slowly, so as not to make the canvas crack.

Leonard stood at the bottom of the stairs with the book in his hand, and after a while he opened it and looked again at what he had written, front room to back bedroom, and took out the pencil, and then put the pencil back, and closed the book.

Stanley said, very quietly, "What is it?"

"Schubert," said Albert, who did not know. Then, after a moment, because he was an honest man, "Something German."

The music stopped. On the half-landing, Mrs Marcus closed the fall over the yellow keys, and sat for a moment on the edge of the stair with both hands lying on the lid. Then she called down, in the voice of someone telling a tradesman where to put the coal, "It is very out of tune."

"Yes, Madam," said Leonard.

"I shall need the name of a tuner."

"Yes, Madam."

"One who can work standing up," said Mrs Marcus. "There is nowhere on this landing to put a stool."

---

They were loading the van when the young man arrived.

He came up the hill from the bus stop on foot, four days early, to see the room, he said; he hoped Mrs Marcus would not mind. He was a thin young man in a duffel coat with his hair falling into his eyes, and he had brought, by way of a first instalment, one item of luggage, because he wanted to see if it would go in.

It was a double bass, in a black canvas case.

He stood it upright on the pavement beside him. It was taller than he was. It leaned slightly towards the house, as double basses do, with the air of a large and reasonable person waiting to be shown upstairs.

Leonard, who had one foot on the tailboard, took the foot off again.

Stanley, who was holding the folded green chair, held it a little tighter.

Mrs Marcus came to the door, and looked at the young man, and at the instrument, and then, for a long moment, at Albert.

Albert Pocock, eighty-one, who had moved four hundred pianos, took the green chair gently out of Stanley's hands, and unfolded it, and set it down again on the front path, facing the house, and sat.

"Ground floor, Madam?" he said.

"Ground floor," said Mrs Marcus.

"Then we have a chance," said Albert, and took off his hat.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Īdūs Octōbrēs (11 October 2026), ā Gerardō Hoffnungō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Gerard Hoffnung, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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