Eleven years before the assessment, Tomas Reiner was nineteen years old and an apprentice in Dobson's piano workshop on Bell Yard, where he spent his days in the company of instruments in various stages of honesty. He could already tune by ear better than men three times his age — Dobson said so, grudgingly, the way master craftsmen say anything that costs them — but his hands were still learning the slower trades: regulating actions, voicing hammers, coaxing a hundred small mechanisms into agreeing with each other. He lived in two rooms above a bakery. He owned a bicycle with a buckled wheel. He was, by the standards of nineteen, content, and by the standards of anyone who knew him well, which was almost nobody, quietly and thoroughly lost.
His father had been dead four years. That was the shape of it, simply: a heart, a stairwell, a phone call to the workshop that Dobson himself had taken, standing with the receiver in one hand and his other hand raised, palm out, to stop the room. Tomas had gone on tuning that afternoon, because the piano in question was booked for a wedding, and because he did not know what else a person did. It was Dobson who had driven him home, and Dobson who had stood in the bakery doorway being mistaken, generously, for family.
Yusuf Adeyemi had not come to the funeral. This was known in the family the way weather is known — as a fact with grievances attached. He was Tomas's godfather, appointed in another country and another decade, a friend of his father's from the years when both men had been young and elsewhere; and then his father had died, and Adeyemi had sent a letter — one letter, formal and brief — and nothing else, for four years, while Tomas grew from fifteen to nineteen in the space where a godfather is supposed to be a kind of architecture.
So the knock, when it came, was not expected. It came on a Sunday in October, to the bakery door, at an hour when the shop below was dark and the ovens cold. Tomas opened it in his socks, holding a mug, and found a man in his early sixties standing in the yard with his hands empty at his sides, as if he had come a long way to be unarmed. He was tall, and still built with the dense, settled completeness of a man whose body had once been a famous instrument, though age had begun the slow work of making it ordinary. Tomas knew him from exactly two photographs.
"You are his son," Adeyemi said. It was not a greeting.
"Yes."
"You have his way of standing in doorways." A pause. "May I come up?"
He climbed the stairs slowly and without complaint, and in Tomas's front room he looked at everything once — the narrow bed, the tuning forks in their roll on the table, the books borrowed from the library and renewed beyond the library's patience — and accepted tea, and held the mug without drinking, and said, at last, "I should have come four years ago. I have no defence that would interest you, so I will not offer one. Your father was the best man I ever knew, and when he died I discovered I had a talent I had never suspected, which was for absence." He looked down at his hands. "I was a champion of the world at throwing men. I find I am a coward at telephones."
"What do you want?" Tomas asked. It was ruder than he had intended and exactly as rude as he felt.
"To correct an omission, if it is still correctable." Adeyemi set the mug down. "Your father asked me, once, to see that you were taught certain things. Not piano. Other things. I taught them for thirty years to strangers in halls full of flags, and I never taught them to the one boy I had promised." He rose — and it was only when he moved that Tomas understood, in his body rather than his mind, what the photographs had been showing him: the economy of it, the sense of a man arriving everywhere he went a moment before he got there. "There is a place. If you will come on Thursday, I will begin. If you will not, I will not ask twice, and I will not be offended. I have spent four years learning not to be offended on my own behalf."
"Taught what?" Tomas said.
"Come on Thursday," Adeyemi said, "and find out with your feet."