examiners, whenever you ask. I will not pretend the offer isn't partly for the academy's sake. A school that laughed at its own history's last student at the door needs to be re-taught from the door inward, and I am too old and too implicated to be the one who does the first hour of it. It has to be you. Or it has to be nobody, and I close the class for a year, which is my second choice and not a good one."
Outside, the rain made its ordinary music on the shop awning. Somewhere in the front of the shop a child was being allowed to try a piano and was doing it one finger at a time, with enormous concentration, and Tomas listened to it the way other men listen to weather.
"What happened to the scholarship?" he asked.
"Given," Antoniou said. "To the next name on the list — a lady of forty-six who cleans offices at night and has wanted to learn since she was a girl and could never once afford to. She starts next month. She cried at Hannah's desk, and Hannah pretended to look for a form until she was finished. The money is doing what money should do." He put his hat back on, in the manner of a man whose errand is complete either way. "Think about the class. Don't answer me today. A man who answers a thing like this too fast hasn't heard the question."
Tomas thought about it for nine days.
He thought about it over soundboards and under lids, in the houses of strangers, with his cheek against warm wood, listening for the false beats in a unison the way he had been taught at nineteen by an old man who had tuned pianos for money in the years when nobody was watching him be a legend. He thought about Yusuf's warehouse: the cold in winter, the mats like a patchwork sea, the hours of falling, and the way his teacher had begun every new student — and there had been so few, by the end, that each one mattered like an instrument — not with a technique, but with the floor. *First, the floor. The floor is honest. Everything else we negotiate.*
He thought about the doorway at Stonebridge, and the sound of three men being amused, and about the fact that what had stung — what stung still, in the small hours, more than he liked to admit — was not the laughter. It was that somewhere in that building there might be other people standing at other doors, deciding not to come in.
On the sixth day he drove out to the warehouse.
He had not been since the funeral. It was storage now — a self-storage company had taken the lease, painted the doors a municipal orange, and put a keypad on the gate — but the caretaker was an old man who had been there forever in the way of caretakers, and when Tomas said his name and the other name, the name that had once been over the door in no letters at all, the old man took a key off a board and walked him down the concrete corridor without charging him the visitor's fee.
Unit 9 was full of somebody's furniture under sheets, but the shape of the room had survived its contents: the long wall where the mats had lain, the high windows wired against balls and weather, the nail holes in a row at standing height where the coats had hung. Tomas stood in the doorway and did not go in, because there was nothing to go in for; the room was not haunted, and somehow that was the hardest version. The past did not live here. It lived in a box of notebooks in an office across town, and in one man's shoulders, and in the way that man still, at thirty, fell asleep some nights rehearsing falls.
"Kept himself to himself, your Mr Adeyemi," the caretaker said, behind him, not unkindly. "Paid on the nail, mind. Thirty years. Never knew what he did in there, tell you the truth. Classes, was it?"
"Classes," Tomas said. "Of a kind."
He thanked the man and drove home with the windows down, and the city going past in the rain-smell and the petrol-smell, and somewhere on that drive the thinking finished — not with a decision arriving, exactly, but with the question changing its shape. It was no longer *whether he was qualified to stand at the front of that room*. It was whether the room would be there, on a Thursday, with the door open, for the next person who almost didn't come in.