Speaker 1: Us was to be hers the piano at dusk. Every evening,
at six o'clock, Lyra sat by the window and listened.
The piano music began without warning, as if some one
had simply opened a door and let the sound pour
out into the evening air. It came from the house
next door, the one with the dark green shutters and
the overgrown garden that spilled over the low stone wall.
The house had been there as long as Lyra could remember,
and the music had been there just as long. She
never saw the pianist. The curtains were always drawn, and
the front door was always closed, and the garden gate
was always latched. The house seemed to exist in a
state of permanent privacy, wrapped in its own quiet world
of shutters and stone walls and the slow, steady growth
of ivy along the eastern wall. But every evening, like clockwork,
the music came to night. It was Debussy, or something
that sounded like Debussy. The notes were soft and flowing
like water over smooth stones, and they rose and fell
in patterns that seemed to follow no rules except their own.
Lyra sat in the chair her husband bought her three
years ago, a wide wooden arm chair with a cushion
the color of sage green. She had placed it by
the window specifically for this purpose, and she had come
to think of it as her listening chair. The music shifted.
A new piece began, slower and more deliberate, with notes
that hung in the air like drops of rain suspended
in midfall. Lyra closed her eyes and let the sound
wash over her. She could feel the music in her chest,
a gentle vibration that matched the rhythm of her breathing.
The notes rose and fell, rose and fell, and with
each phrase, she felt herself settled deeper into the chair,
into the quiet of the evening, into the simple pleasure
of listening. She had moved to this house fifteen years
ago after her husband died. The move had been practical,
not emotional. She needed a smaller place, one she could
manage alone, and this cottage was perfect. Two bedrooms, a
garden that needed tending, a kitchen with good light, and
a window that faced west, catching the evening sun. She
had not known about the music when she bought the house.
That had been a gift, discovered on her first evening,
when she sat by the window watching the sky turned
gold and the first notes drifted through the open air.
That the music had become part of her routine, as
much a part of her day as the morning tea
or the evening walk. She planned her evenings around it.
At five thirty, she would finish her dinner, wash the dishes,
and settle into her listening chair. At six, the music
would begin, and she would listen until it stopped, sometimes
an hour later, sometimes two. The pianist never played the
same piece twice in the same week, and Lyra had
come to recognize the patterns of the playing, the way
certain composers appeared in clusters, the way the mood of
the music seemed to follow the weather, the way the
notes grew softer and more tentative on rainy evenings, and
bolder and more confident on clear nights. Tonight, the sky
was a deep blue, almost purple, and the first stars
were appearing along the eastern horizon. A light breeze moved
through the garden, carrying the scent of the roses she
had planted along the fence. The music continued, steady and unhurried,
and Lyra listened with her eyes closed and her hands
resting in her lap. She had tried once to find
out who lived in the house next door. She had
asked the postman, who knew everyone in the neighborhood, but
he only shrugged and said he had never seen any
one go in or out. She had asked the woman
at the flower shop, who delivered arrangements to the house
every week, but she said the orders were always left
on the porch with a check tucked under the pot.
No name, no note, no indication of who lived there
or why they kept so carefully hidden. Lyra had stopped
trying to find out. The mystery was part of the experience,
and she had come to accept it the way she
accepted the changing of the seasons or the passage of time.
Some things were better left unknown, Some pleasures were deeper
for being unexplained. The music tonight was chopin Now, a
nocturn that Lyra recognized from long ago when her husband
used to play records on Saturday evenings. She remembered the
way he would close his eyes when the music was
particularly beautiful, the way his foot would tap softly against
the floor in time with the riddom. He had never
learned to play the piano himself, but he had loved
the music, and he had passed that love to her
in the way that couples do through shared evenings and
quiet conversations and the slow accumulation of habits and preferences
that become a life to Nocturn ended and there was
a pause. Lara waited, her eyes still closed. The pause
was brief, only a few seconds, but it was long
enough for her to hear the sounds of the evening
that the music had been masking, the rustle of leaves
in the garden, the distant hum of traffic on the
main road, the soft chirping of crickets in the grass.
Then the music resumed, a new piece, something Lyra did
not recognize, something gentle and lilting that reminded her of
the way the wind sounds when it moves through tall grass.
She sat and listened as the sky darkened and the
stars appeared one by one. The music grew softer as
the evening deepened, the notes becoming more delicate, more precious,
as if the pianist was aware of the late hour
and was trying not to disturb the quiet of the neighborhood.
Lyra's breathing slowed to match the tempo of the music,
and she felt herself drifting into a state of peaceful
half sleep, the kind of rest that was not quite
sleep and not quite wakefulness, but something in between, something
warm and safe and perfectly balanced. When the music finally stopped,
the silence that followed was not empty, but full, filled
with the memory of the notes and the warmth of
the evening, and the knowledge that this same ritual would
happen again tomorrow, and the day after and the day
after that. Lyra opened her eyes and looked out the window.
The sky was dark, now thick with stars, and the
house next door was invisible in the darkness, except for
the faint glow of a single lamp behind the drawn curtains.
She rose from her chair and stretched, feeling the pleasant
ache of muscles that had been still for two long
She padded to the kitchen to put the kettle on,
knowing that the evening was not quite over, that there
was still time for a cup of tea and a
few pages of her book before bed. The kettle began
to hum, and Lyra smiled, listening to it the way
she had listened to the piano, with patience and pleasure
and a deep, abiding gratitude for the small, beautiful, things
that made each day worth living. Tomorrow, at six, the
music would begin again, and Lyra would be there by
the window in her listening chair, ready to receive it.