On her next visit, Merle brought a packet of McVitie’s Jaffa cakes and a chart depicting the human skeleton. She unrolled it on the table and secured the corners with salt and pepper cellars. Then she had Mevrouw Bonsma hold out her hands, as if she was addressing an invisible piano, and tapped off on them, with a knitting needle brought solely for that purpose, the phalanges, metacarpals and carpals, and, advancing the length of one arm, the radius and ulna, the humerus, the clavicula. I was able to chime in then with an apposite onions, as the handspring of lexical gymnastics is called — clavicle and clavichord, from the Latin clavis, key — and halt the pointer’s progress to other parts of our pianist’s anatomy. Not that there was anything unseemly in the display, but people may have jumped to the wrong conclusions.
Merle and Mevrouw Bonsma were old friends. They both lived in the Dorchester, at the bottom end of Twist Street, one of those establishments that housed whole floors of widows. Grannies a gogo, as Spilkin said. The two women had met up when Merle moved to the hotel after the death of her husband Douglas, but they had known one another for years. Mevrouw Bonsma, it turned out, had worked as a typist during the lean times when she could not find work as a musician, and was once employed by an insurance house where Merle kept the company library. She was the most elegant typist Merle had ever come across; her hands on the keyboard were almost lyrical.
It was Merle who showed me that there was more to Mevrouw Bonsma than met the ear.
‘If you think she’s “leaking indiscriminately”,’ said Merle, ‘you haven’t been listening properly, that’s all. She never plays anything without good reason. She’s like a weathervane, turning with the wind; open your ears and you’ll learn something about the air you’re breathing, the cross-currents you’re borne along by. She responds to the climate in a room, and she can change it too, as easily as opening a window.’
I had noticed from the very beginning a certain affinity between the music Mevrouw Bonsma played and the activities I was engaged in — the reliable rhythms of a waltz, for instance, suited lexical gymnastics down to a T — but Merle convinced me that such congruence was more than a happy accident. There was often a subtle interplay between the room and the music, as if Mevrouw Bonsma were a medium, communicating the moods of the patrons to the keyboard, turning them into music, and channelling them back, to bolster or subvert. When there was an argument brewing, voices raised, a fist thumping a table, she would find the dissonant chords to accompany it. And just as often, by a quiet counter-argument of interlinked melodies, she would smooth the ruffled feathers and cool the heated blood, and restore the company to an even temper.
Sometimes she seemed almost clairaudient. I made a note of the occasion when she began to play the uncharacteristically rowdy theme tune from Zorba the Greek. And who should come bounding through the door not a minute later but Mrs Mavrokordatos’s brother, who went by that name — or something very like it — and answered to that character. I had only seen him in the Café once, and it afterwards transpired that he had just stepped off an aeroplane from Athens after an absence of many months. Instead of greeting his sister with a conventional embrace, he began to kick up his heels to the music in a traditional dance of homecoming. He might have broken the crockery, if it wasn’t for the wall-to-wall carpeting.
Not all of Mevrouw Bonsma’s musical accompaniments were as dramatic as this. Often they were simply little chains of association, reminiscent, some of them, of an untaxing session of lexical fartlek. But even these connections were usually invisible to me, inaudible, below my threshold of hearing (not that there’s anything wrong with my ears). Merle, who was more educated than myself musically, made it all as clear as day, by an effortless and unassuming laying on of labels and drawing of distinctions.
I saw that I had misjudged Mevrouw Bonsma. She had a system, albeit one founded as much on intuition as on ratiocination; and there is nothing I admire more than a system. Enclosed in her hardy flesh was a sensitive, highly developed creature — and not struggling to get out, far from it, quite content to be there. Was refinement not precisely an appreciation of those qualities that were hard to see, that always lay hidden beneath the surface, where a superficial eye would fail to appreciate them? As usual the poor Americans had it all wrong; the real thing could not be grasped in a fist or quaffed in a few greedy gulps. It had to be found, more often than not, after vigorous effort. Under the benign influence of this understanding — which, I hardly need add, had an immediate appeal for a proofreader — the threat Mevrouw Bonsma had once posed was dispelled, and soon seemed inconceivable to me. Spilkin’s joke-telling subsided too, as suddenly as it had developed — an even more merciful reversal. So I finally accepted her into our company. When her shift was over, she would join us to talk or play games, and I came to enjoy her companionship almost as much as Spilkin’s and Merle’s. She seemed smaller, now that her contents were properly secured.
Merle, by contrast, was at home in our midst from the outset. Suddenly there were four of us. I have never been the most sociable of men, but I found her company unusually convivial. She was an organizer and perhaps we needed organizing, having nearly lost our sense of ourselves. She liked board games and cards, which neither Spilkin nor I had a taste for, but we played along because she was a good talker and had a quick mind. She tried to teach us bridge, and we bumbled through a few games of that. More often it was General Knowledge, always with a musical category for the benefit of Mevrouw Bonsma. Sometimes Merle insisted on giving her clues, humpty-dumpty-dum, so that she would not lag too far behind. Merle usually won. It was all in good spirit.
A month or two after the advent of Merle, influenza kept me abed for a few days. When I returned to the Café — to a salubrious air from ‘The Happy Huntsman’ — she said she was delighted to see me. ‘I wanted to come in search, because I thought you might be ill. But Myron wouldn’t tell me where you stayed. It wasn’t the same without you. We’ve become quite a little circle, haven’t we?’
‘Not that,’ Spilkin admonished her.
She was taken aback. ‘I’d call us a circle. Wouldn’t you, Aubrey?’
I wasn’t sure. Probably. But before I could make up my mind, Spilkin said: ‘It’s a question of arithmetic — or is it geometry? Two people cannot be a circle. Two is a couple, a pair, a brace. Three is a crowd only in idiom. Primarily three is a triangle. Four will always be a square — or two pairs.’ Was that a meaningful glance at Mevrouw Bonsma, who was pulling up her chair beside his? ‘But five …? Now my head and my heart tell me that five might be a circle. Only a specialist would see a pentagon. It’s a good thing there are just the four of us. A circle is a dangerous thing.’
‘Viz, it has no end,’ said the Bonsma cheesily.
‘What do you say, Tearle?’
‘I’m with you, Spilkin.’
He was right. Ever since Merle’s arrival, we had settled down very comfortably. The four of us made for solid geometry. We were bricks, regular good fellows. Four-square was the term that came to my mind. Four squares too, I’d no objection to that: four of a kind, four equals, coevals, discriminating human beings, adults with compatible systems of thought and feeling, gathered around a table to amuse themselves, to pass the time pleasantly in conversation, in listening to music, in reading and other pursuits that broadened the mind. I might have wished that the table itself was square rather than round, to underpin our quadrilaterality, our state of balance, but how could I have guessed what lay ahead when Spilkin and I first made the choice?