Short story · 4 min read ·
The Piano Tuner's Fifth
A piano tuner visiting the houses of Ostrova hears a single flat fifth in every instrument he works on, and the houses where he cannot quite fix it are the ones where someone has stopped speaking to someone else.
Harold Venn had tuned pianos for the houses of Ostrova for thirty-four years, and he prided himself on his ear. He could hear a string that had drifted a single cent. He could tell by the sound of a hammer whether the felt had been pressed too hard by some careless hand in an earlier decade. His customers called him the most honest man in the town, because he never claimed a fault he could not hear.
In March, he began to hear a fifth that did not belong.
It was in the middle register, between the tenor and the alto, a flat interval, a few cents under true, and it was there in every instrument he touched. The first time, he thought the piano was simply old. The second time, in a different house, he thought the damp had got into the soundboard. By the fifth house, he knew that the fault was not in the wood or the wire. It was in the room.
He did not notice where the fifth came from until he had been to the Dyers' house on Lantern Row, where a grand piano stood in the front parlour, unplayed since the son had gone away. The fifth was there, as flat and sour as ever. Harold tried to pull the string up to true, and it resisted, the pin turning under his key and then slipping back with a soft, sly give, as though something on the other side of the wall were holding it down.
Mrs. Dyer, who had been sitting in the corner with her knitting, looked up when he swore. She said her husband and her sister had not spoken since the funeral. She said the piano had been her sister's, and that her sister had played the fifth on it every evening for twenty years, a little sharp, to annoy her.
Harold went from house to house across the town that spring and found the same thing each time. The fifth was always there, in the instrument of a family where two people had quarrelled and not made it up. At the Hallams', a brother and sister who had not met in six years since their father's will. At the Kents', a father and son who shared a piano and a grudge. Harold could tune the strings to perfect pitch, and the fifth would come back the moment he took his tuning fork away, and when he asked the families about it, every one of them went quiet.
He began to keep a list. He wrote the addresses and the names of the feuding parties in a small notebook, and beside each, the date he had last heard the fifth. Then, one evening in May, he went to tune the old upright in the chapel vestry at Saint Verel's, and found that the fifth was not in the piano at all. It was in the choir.
The choir were rehearsing a psalm. The altos were flat by a fraction, and the tenors were a shade sharp, and the whole chapel rang with a soft, sour dissonance that Harold could feel in his teeth. He stood at the back with his tuning fork in his hand and listened. Then he saw that the two section leaders, a man and a woman, were standing at opposite ends of the front row, not looking at each other.
He tuned the vestry piano that night, and then he went home and wrote the names of the choir leaders in his notebook, with a question mark beside each. The next morning he went to the vicar and suggested, as tactfully as he could, that the choir might benefit from a reconciliation. The vicar smiled and said that was a very good idea, and that he had been thinking exactly the same thing himself.
Harold has not been able to tune the Dyers' piano since. Mrs. Dyer telephoned in the summer to say that the fifth had gone, and that the instrument was perfectly in tune for the first time in twenty years. Her sister had come round to the house with a plate of biscuits and sat at the keyboard for an hour, playing a slow, clear hymn. Harold does not go to Lantern Row any more. He listens for the fifth in the town instead, at dusk, through the open windows. It is harder to find now. But every so often, from some house where the lamps are still on, he hears it, a little flat and a little sharp, a note that belongs to two people who have not yet finished being angry.